“DID HE CALL?” MOM ASKED, sounding worried. Dad had called her in Dayton (she was out there visiting her dad) from Toronto the night before, and he had sounded very upset. A movie project, The Illustrated George Carlin, that he’d already put too much time and money into had headed in a direction he hated. It just wasn’t what he had envisioned, and he didn’t know what to do. He cried to Mom over the phone, and told her that he would drive all night to Dayton and see her early in the morning. It was after noon now, and he wasn’t there.
“No. No, he hasn’t called,” I replied, holding back tears.
“I’m going to start calling hospitals,” Mom said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
She hung up. My stomach churned. It was as if I’d been put in a time machine, and it was 1974 all over again. Back then, my dad would disappear for days, no phone calls or warning, doing coke or LSD or God knows what with some group of bikers or fans or whatnot, and then suddenly he’d appear back at home acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary. But now, in 1981, things were supposed to be different. There’d been no disappearing or late-night arguing or major misbehavior for more than five years.
He finally called. He’d been at a hospital somewhere on the outskirts of Dayton. He explained that after stopping by the Toronto comedy club Yuk Yuk’s, to watch a few comics and smoke some weed, he’d headed to Dayton with a bunch of beer in the car. He drank the entire way. By the time he’d gotten to Dayton he was shit-faced and plowed his rental car into a ditch. A fire truck just happened to drive by and found him unconscious with his nose smashed up. The first cops that showed up wanted to plant drugs on him so they could bust him. But then a couple of others, who were big fans, came upon the scene and talked their fellow officers out of that idea. The incident was written up as an accident saving my dad from a DUI. Sometimes it pays off to be a counterculture god. When Dad got to the hospital, a plastic surgeon happened to be on duty in the emergency room and put his face back together almost as good as new.
He got lucky.
* * *
In the fall of 1981, at age eighteen, when most of my peers were energetically leaping from their families into the world of college and commerce, I needed a nap. After all the chaos in my life, I wasn’t up to anything too trying. I wanted some of that “Peaceful Easy Feeling” the Eagles were always singing about.
In high school I knew my job as a teenager was to graduate from high school—simple enough. But now, according to Life Plan 101, I was transitioning into adulthood, and my new job was either to “get a job” or go to college so that in four years I could “get a job.” I had only vague ideas about what that “job” would look like—something fun and easy in showbiz? Overwhelmed and clueless about my long-term future, I put off figuring it out. I went to college—UCLA.
My freshman orientation left me disoriented. It was like kindergarten all over again—I craved a lap to cling to and felt like I’d missed the day the “manuals” of life were handed out. As I roamed between seminars, information sessions, and booths from various departments, I looked at my peers and wondered: How do they have all this ambition, vision, and knowledge about their future? There were the premed and preengineering students who had known what they wanted to be since they were five. Then there were the kids who for years had been making films, or painting, or dancing, and couldn’t wait to immerse themselves even deeper into their artistic passions. And of course there was a good majority of students who just wanted to live three thousand miles away from their parents so they could drink and fuck their way through college.
I couldn’t relate to any of them.
* * *
The familiarity of the beginning of the school year, with the ritual buying of new clothes, textbooks, and school supplies did help things, but I was still anxious. Most of my friends had dispersed to Ivy League schools that I had applied to but didn’t get into (thanks to my fucked-up SAT scores), and with my parents away on a European vacation, I had to face those first few awkward and overwhelming weeks of school alone. Still, I was willing to give it the old college try.
The first few days I was proud of myself for sorting out my schedule and making my way through the maze of almost thirty thousand students on more than four hundred acres of campus with the help of the trusty map I’d glued to the back of my notebook. It wasn’t too bad after all. I focused on what I’d be learning, and that kept me excited. But on day four that all changed. When I walked into History 1A: Introduction to Western Civilization, I froze. More than three hundred students scrambled to take their seats. Crossroads barely had three hundred students in total. All these students were smiling and talking to one another. I couldn’t breathe. I felt very small, my heart began to race, and I thought I was going to die. I backed out of the class, sat outside for a few minutes to recover, and went home. When I got there I went straight to bed and didn’t emerge for a week. When my parents came home from Europe, I told them what had happened. I was sure I’d had a nervous breakdown. They weren’t so sure. Whatever “it” was, I knew it wasn’t the academics. It was the Okay-it’s-time-to-go-out-in-the-world-and-focus-and-figure-out-who-the-fuck-I-am part of it all. I just couldn’t cope. My parents didn’t seem to have much of an opinion about it.
Well, my mom did.
“You can’t just sleep all day,” she not-so-helpfully pointed out.
Dad, as always, came to my defense. “No one said she would. Clearly she’s been through a lot lately. Let’s give her some space. She just needs to find her center again.”
I was relieved. Yes, that was it. I just needed to find my center again. “Again”? Hmm—I don’t really remember having had one in the first place. In the end neither of them demanded that I return to school, and so I didn’t. I quit and did nothing, hoping my center would find me.
* * *
What did find me was Andrew Sutton, a twenty-nine-year-old car mechanic who worked at the Chevron station at the corner of Barrington and Wilshire. Technically, Terry, my ex, found him (yes, unbelievably, Terry and I were still hanging out) when he filled up the BMW 3.0 my dad had just given me. Andrew waltzed out to the car, handed Terry his card, and said, “If you ever need a repair, let me know. They’re my specialty.” Now, in October 1981, I was picking up the car from Andrew after he’d spent a week working on it. As I climbed into the car, he asked, “You wanna party sometime?”
I was a sucker for blue eyes and blond hair. Andrew had neither. But he did have big brown puppy-dog eyes, a confident swagger, and the purest cocaine I’d ever put up my nose. For our first “date,” we sat on his bed in his house and did rail after rail of coke. And as often happens when there is a pile of coke and hours of time to fill, much is said, insights are epic, and a cocoon of safety and purpose is created. We poured our hearts out to each other.
I shared with him the feelings I could never tell my parents—how I loved them but that I was really angry that their drug abuse had left me feeling broken inside. I revealed thoughts I could never tell my friends—the deep longing I had to understand life in a bigger way—Why are we here? What does it all mean? I confessed my dreams of wanting to be an actor or a director or a still photographer, but that I didn’t have any confidence even to try. I had never shared my inner life with a man in this way.
As the afternoon wore on, Andrew told me he’d felt like an outcast in his own family (he was the stepkid) and misunderstood in the world his whole life—at age nine he could build a TV but couldn’t sit down for five minutes to read a book. I felt his pain and loneliness. He explained to me that he was currently married, but that he was divorcing her because she’d cheated on him. My heart ached. I could relate to not being loved by the one you wanted. He said that he’d put a voice-activated tape recorder in her car to catch her cheating. My stomach turned, but I ignored it. He had been wronged, I told myself. He then told me that he and his wife, Stacey, had a son, Elliot, who was a bit of a handful but a real cute kid. He was three. He was born a blue baby, and six weeks later Stacey had taken a bunch of pills, trying to kill herself.
Wow, I thought, poor Elliot, abandoned so young! I was touched by how much both Andrew and Elliot had been through. But at the same time I was suddenly very wary of being in the house of a married man who had a kid, and felt myself quickly erect an emotional wall between Andrew and me. Sensing this, he quickly assured me that the marriage really was over. It was all just a formality. In a few months he was turning thirty and would be getting a trust from his grandmother that he was going to use to divorce his wife. That made sense to me. He had a good plan.
He explained that the reason he was a car mechanic, even though he grew up in Brentwood in a Hollywood family (his dad was a famous character actor, Bert Freed), was that he was on probation for another year for a federal weapons charge for designing and manufacturing silencers for AR-15s (the same guns they used in Vietnam). He immediately reassured me that it was really no big deal because, “I’d only sold them to Beverly Hills doctors and lawyers so they could play with their ‘toys’ in their own backyards. I like guns. I like to tinker.” I took this information in as if he’d told me he’d been volunteering at a soup kitchen, “Wow, that’s amazing.”
Within two months he was living with me in my bedroom at my parents’ house.
* * *
The first thing Andrew did when he moved in was chainsaw a hole in the wall of my bedroom.
“You should be able to lie in your bed and see outside,” he said while lying on my bed with an ashtray on his chest, acting like he owned the place. My room had an alcove in it where the bed was, so he made a hole in the wall so he could see outside.
While alarmed by his brashness, my dad also saw Andrew’s potential. Before I knew it Andrew was fixing all sorts of things for my dad around the house. Need a new fence around the trash cans? Andrew will do it. Need to set up the new satellite TV system? Andrew will do it. Need someone to teach your daughter how to have an orgasm? Andrew will do it. Okay, so Dad hadn’t requested that last one, but I must say, it was a real plus. I had been under the impression that the thing that had been happening when I’d had sex with Terry, Mark, and even Leif was an orgasm. I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong!
Even though I knew that Andrew was the most inappropriate boyfriend to have at this time (or any time) in my life that thought got hijacked by the excellent quality of orgasms and cocaine he was providing me. I went with the flow, as did my parents. Neither of them discussed or questioned Andrew’s increasing presence in my life. He folded oh-so-neatly into the Carlin familial enmeshment I was so used to.
I attached to him like a barnacle, avoiding the tiny voice within me that occasionally whispered, Save yourself. I allowed his adventurous momentum to lift me up and carry me toward whatever was important to him. I spent hours hanging out with him as he worked at the gas station. So many hours that he eventually bought me my own Chevron uniform shirt to wear. When I was bored, I’d jump up and pump gas and clean windshields. I got a strange kick out of being the rich Brentwood girl pumping gas. It felt almost punk rock to me.
When Andrew wasn’t at work, we drove his clients’ BMWs, Jensen Interceptors, and Jaguars around the city. He’d trained at Bob Bondurant school of racing and taught me how to drive like a racecar driver. He took me shopping for sexy clothes, took hundreds of photos of me, and told me what a fox I was. He introduced me to people he’d known in show business (he’d worked for a few years on film productions), hoping I’d catch a casting director’s eye. I knew he was showing me off like a trophy, but I didn’t care. He made me feel like the center of the universe for the first time in my life. I felt beautiful, talented, and loved.
Mostly though, we spent many, many hours holed up in my bedroom having sex and snorting coke. We had so much coke and it was so pure that we’d cut it with mannitol in mixing bowls. I wasn’t sure how or where he’d been getting all this high-quality coke on his mechanic’s paycheck until one day, when he took me to eat at a Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. I couldn’t figure out why he picked this place, when there were plenty of quality Mexican places closer to home. After we ate dinner we jumped into my 3.0 Beemer and headed back to my parents’ house. As we swung onto the southbound 405, Andrew had a sly grin on his face and said, “While we were eating, my client, Joe, put something in our trunk for safekeeping for a few days.”
Confused, I said, “Oh, really?”
“It’s a kilo of coke,” he replied nonchalantly.
My body stiffened. “What?” If I could have, I would have leaped out of that car and run as far away from it as I was able to, but we were going 50 mph on the freeway, so that wasn’t a real option. Instead, I asked, “What are you going to do with it?”
“Bury it.”
“Bury it? Where?” Thoughts of driving up into the hills of Topanga came to mind.
“Don’t worry. I would never think of burying it on your parents’ property. I would never risk that.” Now I was really worried. He continued, “I’ll bury it just off their property line. No one will ever know.”
So that’s how he got his coke—doing “favors” for his clients with the fancy cars. And that’s how a new lifestyle emerged for me—the binge. We’d go on two- or three-day binges, emerging from my bedroom only after my body demanded food. I couldn’t go much more than two days without food or sleep, but because Andrew had ADHD, he could eat and sleep after snorting any amount of cocaine. People with ADHD take stimulants to actually feel calmer. But once my body had reached its limit, I needed to refuel. I’d peek out of my bedroom door toward the kitchen, to see if the coast was clear, then I’d dash in to pop a Stouffer’s Macaroni & Cheese and Corn Soufflé into the oven, while grabbing a handful of Fig Newtons or Oreos to tide me over until the real food was done heating up.
Scurrying around the house became the norm. I avoided my mother because I didn’t want her to see me high, and I seemed to be furious with her all the time now. It had nothing to do with the present and everything to do with the past. All my anger about her alcoholism had finally floated to the surface, and the thought of being in the same room with her disgusted me. I went months speaking only a few sentences to her, and only when I had to. She kept her distance from me, intuiting my need to feel what I did. I avoided my dad because I knew I was out of control. I didn’t want him to be mad, or disappointed with me.
He’d gotten mad at me the year before for the first time in my life, and it had to do with drugs. Back in June, before I graduated from high school, my friends and I had bought some coke for the prom. While we were scoring, the dealer asked us if we wanted to freebase some. He cooked some up for us, and had us each take a hit, and then sit quietly. The rush took over my body, and it was the greatest thing I had ever felt. The euphoria expanded me to the edges of the universe. “Magnificent” is too ordinary a word to describe it. A few days later I shared the experience with my dad because it was one of the best moments of my life.
“Don’t you EVER FUCKING DO THAT AGAIN,” he quickly said. The full force of his rage landed hard upon me. My eyes stung with tears. He continued at full volume, “I want you to promise me you will never smoke that shit again. It is very, very dangerous.”
Fighting back a big bellow of tears caused by the shock, I mumbled, “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“No, promise me.”
Staring down at the ground afraid to look up at him: “I promise!”
He softened, “Okay. Good. Now give me a hug.”
We hugged.
“I love you,” he added.
“I love you, too,” I said through my tears.
Even though I wasn’t smoking coke now, I knew I was snorting way too much. I knew it was wrong, but I kept doing it. And hiding from my dad. I didn’t want him to find out. I was now the one making up my own version of that homespun Carlin logic I had been so used to: If I’m home doing drugs, then I’m safe doing drugs. And if they don’t see me doing drugs, they don’t know I’m doing drugs.