In Narcotics Anonymous, dating is not recommended for people who are in their first year off drugs. There’s no rule against it; it’s simply understood that a person in her first year clean is unable to distinguish her ass from her elbow, and therefore might make poor dating choices.
I sidestepped this logical suggestion by marrying my alcoholic boyfriend, Luigi, a few weeks after I quit drugs. Sure, I knew that before Luigi would give up booze, Rush Limbaugh would swallow another handful of OxyContin and finally confess his love for basketball star Dennis Rodman.
“Dennis’ cocaine use is no problem for us,” he would say on his right-wing radio show. “Too bad it doesn’t help him on the court like it does in the bedroom.”
The two lovers would then legally marry in an intimate ceremony at the old Limbaugh homestead in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Rush would blush prettily in a size twenty-six Vera Wang gown, while Dennis would sniff and wipe his ravaged nose.
I knew Luigi would never stop drinking, but it was a good fantasy, and I was in love. I accepted my family’s mystification about my love for Luigi. The way I saw it, they were misguided. Clearly, all the things they hated about him were really his best qualities. They unfairly judged his self-esteem as self-absorption. His dislike of small talk they wrongly saw as rudeness. His devotion to his guitar and dreams of greatness they misinterpreted as a refusal to grow up.
While I was earning my doctorate in opiates and hallucinogens, it did not enter my mind that my family might have a point. All I knew was Luigi’s smile went straight to my clitoris, and when we were loaded, we got along like a house on fire. (Our rented house actually did catch fire twice, but those were small, localized blazes.) Love itself is a blind drug addict, so it never occurred to us that our hearts might someday stop beating as one if I stopped using. Along we stumbled on our merry way to the Justice of the Peace.
After my many years of addiction, I was exhausted from its traditional gifts -- skin like elephant hide, an inability to hold down any food but plain M&Ms, and a tendency to sweat on mildewed mattresses while hallucinating conversations with my own rotting corpse. I was exhausted enough actually to listen to some of the suggestions I heard from people in N.A. That is why I had been clean for a year when Luigi left me.
“I miss getting drunk with you,” he explained while climbing into his girlfriend’s grimy minivan, two Liquor Barn shopping bags in each hand. “You’re just no fun anymore.”
He slammed the dented passenger door and Delight waved cheerfully to me as she drove off with my husband, weaving wildly in her traffic lane, her two young children giving me the finger out the back window.
Sobbing, I drove to an N.A. meeting, which was now my coping strategy whenever I stepped in mental dog shit. On the way, I called my friend Janice to ask her to meet me. I drew my latest tragedy for her in broad strokes.
As soon as I arrived in the dank Hollywood church basement, I threw myself into Janice’s ample, tattoo-covered arms.
“Delight’s younger than I am,” I cried, “and she has bigger tits!”
Janice, off drugs for ten years, did not bother to feign surprise that my marriage had fallen apart. She was not heartless, however. She handed me an undrinkable cup of coffee and a fistful of goldfish crackers.
“Don’t worry, the booze will age her early,” she said in her gravelly voice, lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one she’d been smoking. “A couple of years from now she’ll be able to Velcro two sponges to her nipples and mop the floors with those tits. She’ll change her name to Depressed.”
“I love you, Janice,” I said.
She nodded sympathetically, exhaling smoke directly into my face. “Kid, I feel the same way, but together we’d just be two hysterical bitches instead of one, with no cock anywhere in sight. What fun would that be?” She patted my cheek twice. “Go get us some seats. I gotta pee before the meeting starts.” She lumbered off toward the ladies room.
Janice and I went to a lot of meetings that year, and I managed to stay drug-free, even though Delight and I worked at the same high school. I taught English and she taught Spanish. She and Luigi had met at a holiday faculty party soon after our wedding. I’d caught her goosing him under the mistletoe, and when I’d confronted him about it, he’d asked in a hurt tone, “Is it MY fault she got too drunk at the party?” Stupidly, I’d let the matter go and had pretended not to mind when they’d become “buddies” who got together a couple of times a week to “jam on guitars.”
My current work situation was very distracting since there was no way to avoid Delight, and whenever I saw her, all I could do was think about how to kill her with whatever was handy. I pictured drowning her in an un-flushed faculty toilet. Pushing over those six-foot bookshelves not quite fastened to the wall as she sashayed by. Heaving a boiling teakettle at her as she retrieved her Slim Fast from the refrigerator. Once the principal was telling me something important and I couldn’t hear him. I caught sight of Delight, and my ears rang loudly as I pictured bludgeoning her with a three-hole punch.
When I whined to Janice about the situation, she said, “Hold your head up, kid. You’re not the one who’s behaving like an asshole, yet. Don’t do anything stupid, okay? I know that’s like asking the sun not to shine.” She smiled at me brightly, having finished applying her prune-colored lipstick.
“I know Luigi’s a cheater and a juicer,” I said, “but I miss him. I want him back.”
She waved this away as though waving away a fly. “That’s because you’re only playing the good tapes over and over again in your mind. You’re remembering the two times he went down on you, or the time he wrote you some cheesy three-chord song. Play the bad tapes. The next time you get starry-eyed remembering Luigi, make yourself think about how you had to hold back his hair extensions every morning while he rode the porcelain bus. Then remember that’s Delight’s job now.”
“Marry me,” I begged Janice. “We’ll work it out.”
She shook her head sadly. “My heart belongs to a dead junkie, and I’m not even talking about Jimi Hendrix.”
I knew she was talking about Sven, her husband, who had relapsed, overdosed and died nine months earlier.
“Let’s go to Tommy’s and get some chili fries,” I said, “my treat.”
I can’t speak for Janice, but for me, fat and carbohydrates provided little solace. Six months after Luigi left, I was still feeling lower than Barry White’s voice during a bout of bronchitis. Nothing could make me feel worse, I thought, until I made the mistake of answering the phone. My friend Kay-Kay from college, a pert little redhead around Delight’s age, wanted me to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. She was marrying one of our former professors, an anti-social, penniless man roughly thirty years her senior. Felicitations! No way to refuse without putting her wee nose out of joint, so I agreed.
The Pismo Beach ceremony was heart-warming, the groom managing to remain standing throughout. Kay-Kay had failed to mention that my bridesmaid’s duties would include chaperoning her mother, Big Kay. I figured mom had been nicknamed before her speed habit had reduced her to eighty-nine pounds. She had a weekend pass from rehab for the occasion. Her resolve impressed me -- she was able to pull off a rough approximation of motherhood for two whole hours by chain smoking, swilling Monster energy drinks and squeezing my hand so hard that my arm fell asleep. After the ceremony, the family packed Big Kay off in their limo and headed for the reception, leaving me temporarily deprived of her company.
The Protestant shindig was conveniently located in a rural area with no marked roads. Eventually I was forced to urinate on a dirt path near my parked car, narrowly missing my lampshade gown. Wiping with a service station receipt I found in my clutch purse, I gave myself a paper cut, and it wasn’t on my finger. A full hour later I found the spanking new housing development where one of Kay-Kay’s many relatives had purchased a McMansion. I walked through the open door and found the festivities in full swing. Most of the guests appeared tipsy, and all bets were off regarding Big Kay.
She was slurring as I walked in, glass raised high in a toast. “Am I the only one who remembers that JOSH GROBAN ROADIE who busted Kay-Kay’s CHERRY?!”
I caught one of her flailing elbows in a death grip and hauled her toward the bathroom. As we staggered by, I looked apologetically at Kay-Kay, who hissed, “Where WERE you?” My chance at an invitation to her firstborn’s christening seemed diminished.
Show me a McMansion and I’ll show you a well-stocked medicine cabinet. I rooted through this one and found Big Kay some Dilaudid. The bottle winked at me seductively, but to temptation I did not yield.
“Take this and shut your pie-hole,” I told Big Kay, “or I’ll put you in a cab.” She nodded and meekly swallowed the pill.
“Thanks,” she said, giving my cheek a gin and treyf kiss.
“No, thank you,” I replied, wiping off her slobber. “That’s more action than I’ve had in months.”
Big Kay went back to the party and promptly fell asleep on a sofa. I hoped she’d wake up again, but not anytime soon. Not in the mood to mingle, I went out to the yard and engaged the host’s two spunky German shepherds in a long game of fetch.
The day after returning home from the nuptials, I developed a raging case of poison oak. It was spreading up my legs, heading north toward my paper cut. My right arm looked leprous.
“How could this have happened?” I asked Dr. Rosen. “I was a Girl Scout! I know what poison oak looks like -- ‘Three leaves on a tree, let me be.’ I peed by the side of the road, but I know I didn’t squat in poison oak.”
“Pet any strange animals lately?” she asked.
Turns out that dogs can roll in poison oak with no trouble at all, then deliver the oil to anyone who pets them.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I asked, a note of hysteria edging into my voice, “that people all over L.A. are getting gonorrhea from hot, unprotected sex, and I got poison oak from petting some friendly German shepherds?”
Dr. Rosen peeled off her gloves and tossed them in the hazardous waste bin. “I’m sure a lot of the sex is less friendly than the dogs,” she said rationally. “This is a bad case. I’m going to have to give you a cortisone injection and steroid medication.”
Fortunately, I can blame what happened next on the ‘roids. They removed all my inhibitions while fueling me with homicidal rage. Where had they been all my life?
One scorching June morning, I donned a long-sleeved shirt and pants to cover my blight, then drove to work. I arrived early -- five a.m., in fact -- so that I could put up the dozen colorful posters I had stayed up all night making. These read: “DELIGHT BARRELLI IS AN INEBRIATED, HUSBAND-PURLOINING TROLLOP. FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL:” (with her home phone number). I reasoned that this would motivate even the laziest students to crack open a dictionary. It was a vocabulary-building exercise.
I believed Delight’s infamous behavior at several faculty holiday parties would make it difficult to say for sure who had put up the posters. I had not foreseen that during recess, the trollop herself would accost me in the hallway with torn poster pieces clutched in her turquoise-tipped claws.
She ran toward me wailing, “I can’t believe you did this!”
I charged her, snarling, rolling up my sleeve and waving my infectious arm at her. She turned and ran shrieking toward the principal’s office. I chased her. The ninth-graders observing this seemed entertained.
“Dude,” I heard one of my remedial students say to another, “it’s just like Night of the Living Dead!” I made a mental note to tell him he’d used a simile.
When called upon to explain my actions, I denied putting up the posters, but had to admit to ‘aggressively brandishing a scabrous appendage’ (as stated in the incident report).
“It’s the medication my doctor prescribed,” I said contritely, widening my eyes and trying to tear up a little. “It seems to be clouding my judgment.”
I was sent home on a one-week medical leave. I did not go home. I did not go to an N.A. meeting. I did not call Janice. I was on a roll.
I popped another ‘roid and drove to Delight’s house, knowing she wouldn’t be home because she was teaching eleventh-grade Spanish. Probably her spawn would also be in school.
I didn’t knock, preferring to stalk through the unlocked door bellowing, “WHERE ARE YOU, YOU SPINELESS, WHORING, WOP MUTHERFUCKER?!” Said SWWM was sitting on the couch drinking Stoli and watching an MTV eighties marathon. He was wearing a lacy pair of what I guessed were Delight’s panties. Good to know that fetish was still alive and well.
“Jesus, Hannah,” he said, “what happened to your arm?”
“Same thing that happened to my LEGS,” I said, dropping my pants.
He choked on his vodka and I leapt on him, locking him in a bear hug, rubbing his clammy skin with my weeping pustules. He wriggled loose and ran screaming toward the shower.
I shouted after him, “That’s nothing compared to what your new BITCH is going to spread all over your BALL SAC!” I pulled on my pants and slammed out.
I drove to Tommy’s and ate a large order of chili fries. I was feeling a lot better. I was just checking my wallet to see if I had enough cash to score some dope in Echo Park when my cell phone rang.
I saw the call was from Janice. I didn’t pick up, but I listened to her message.
“Hey, kid. I haven’t heard from you in a while, and I can feel you fucking up from here. Go for it if you have to. I understand. No one could ever talk me out of anything. Just remember I’m here for you when you’re trying to pull your filthy carcass out of the gutter again. If you survive.”
There was a pause. I heard the tiny sizzle of her cigarette as she took a drag.
“Okay, I used to be Catholic and I can’t resist, so here comes the guilt. Ready? Please don’t make me go to another funeral this year. I love you, Short Bus.”
I thought about calling her back and telling her I hated her and that our engagement was off. Then I had an epiphany! I was an idiot. I bought two more orders of fries and drove to Janice’s house.
During the next week she monitored me closely, doling out my medication only as prescribed. I called her Killjoy, but things were not completely bleak. My limbs began healing, and her small house was quite comfortable except for the elaborate, wall-sized macramé hangings in every room. I found them creepy. She credited macramé with keeping her clean for the first year.
“But after I macramed a jock strap for Sven,” she said, “I knew I’d have to find the strength to quit.”
She called one of her longtime friends, a man named Lloyd, and asked him to speak to Luigi on my behalf. Lloyd was African-American, six-foot-six, and muscle-bound. He looked like a taller Marvin Gaye, so I pictured him in white satin boxers, stretched out on a purple chaise lounge singing “Sexual Healing.” I had seen Gaye do this on his final tour, and I cherished the memory.
Since quitting PCP, Lloyd was a gentle person, but Luigi didn’t have to know that. In a single conversation, Lloyd was able to make him see the wisdom of forgiveness and of not prosecuting me. Probably it helped that Luigi hadn’t caught the poison oak.
By week’s end, my arm, legs, and paper cut had healed, and my heart threatened to follow. Lloyd asked me out, and I accepted. For the first time it seemed that maybe I could do better than Luigi. He picked me up and took me to Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, once a preferred destination of my hero, Raymond Chandler. Lloyd was so calm and sweet that it was hard to imagine him on angel dust, but a slight limp testified to his ill-fated attempt to fly across Topanga Canyon.
“I blame “Purple Haze,” he said, smiling at me with gold-flecked Marvin eyes. “’Excuse me while I kiss the sky.’ Now I can see what a cliché that whole night was, but it seemed profound at the time.”
“If anyone could have kissed the sky,” I blurted out, “you could have.” He had a gorgeous mouth.
Returning to work the next Monday, I heard that Delight had been fired for sneaking her own flask into the prom she was supposed to chaperone. Apparently she had also goosed the seventeen-year-old homecoming king. I was frankly, well, delighted, until one night she walked into my favorite N.A. meeting looking like Margot Kidder on a month-long bender. Janice was right; Delight’s tits had already lost some helium. I didn’t know she had a problem with drugs as well as booze, but it made sense. She spotted me and narrowed her bloodshot eyes.
“Shit,” I said to Janice, “there’s Delight.”
Janice whacked me on the back, sending a half-chewed ‘Nilla Wafer flying out of my mouth.
“Go talk to her!” she ordered. “Now is your chance to make amends.”
There’s this asinine practice in N.A. of taking responsibility when you’ve wronged someone. I sighed, not wanting to listen to Janice for the next hour if I declined. I tried an excuse.
“I would, but look what I’m wearing.” It was my new “ASK ME ABOUT MY EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA” t-shirt, a parting gift from the graduating class of 2002.
Janice snorted. “What’s the problem? She already knows you’re an asshole.”
I gave up and walked over to Delight.
“Hey,” I said.
She eyed me warily.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “my skin’s cleared up.” I forced my lips into a smile shape. She turned to go.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry about what I did to you at school, and about going to your house. I hated you because you stole my husband, but I don’t hate you anymore. I think maybe you did me a favor.” To my surprise, I found I meant what I said – the doing me a favor part more than the sorry part, but still.
Delight looked like she was about to boot. Maybe it was me, or maybe she was still de-toxing.
“Do you want to sit down?” I asked.
“I guess I have to,” she said. “These meetings are court-mandated. But I’m not sitting anywhere near you.” With that, she scuttled over to the other side of the room.
I told Janice what happened.
“Sure, she’s a little charmer,” said Janice, “almost as sweet as you were when you first came in here.”
Feeling this was out of bounds, I said, “Don’t you have something to macramé?”
She rummaged through her massive purse, pretending not to hear me. “Where is my lighter?”
Lloyd came over and sat next to me, squeezing my unblemished thigh with his big, warm hand. “Nice shirt,” he said.
In my head, Tammi Terrell and Marvin’s smash hit, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” began playing. Of course, Lloyd had once swan-dived off a mountain that was plenty high enough, but I let that go. I felt beautiful and sexy again, like a Semitic, thirty-ish version of Tammi. I hoped I wouldn’t get a brain tumor and collapse onstage in Lloyd’s arms.
Janice jostled my arm. “What are you daydreaming about?”
I said, “You don’t want to know.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “Hey, you’ve been clean almost two years, right?”
“Right.”
“Know what they say you can hear when you have two years clean?”
“No,” I said, filled with dread.
“You’ll hear a loud popping sound,” she said. “That will be the sound your head makes as it finally falls out of your ass.”
Lloyd laughed. I decided not to hold that against him; I was off ‘roids, and his pheromones filled me with good will. I raised my Styrofoam coffee cup to Janice. “Here’s hoping, Killjoy. Here’s hoping.”
