Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (42 page)

Kilts will never go out of style! With Damon at one of my McStagger haggis parties.

As Captain Belinda Blowhard on the set of the UK series
Starhyke

The
Playboy
image I used for the Internet dating site in London

Crying at my brother Patrick’s grave in Houston, Texas, 2008

Happy and healthy on my second trip to Tahiti

EPILOGUE

I was forty-four years old and doing an explicit sex scene for Adam Rifkin’s
LOOK
. It was six months after he’d called me, nine months since I’d been on The Sinclair Method. I had read the scripts for
LOOK
, and Adam was right—the part of Stella was absolutely hilarious—but I could see that it was going to be a demanding role. I got to do my own wardrobe for the part and had a chance to really build Stella from the outside in.

True to his calling as an experimental director, Adam made sure that the
LOOK
experience was unlike anything else I’d worked on, even the movie we did with Charlie Sheen’s freeform poetry. There was no traditional filmmaking; it was all flip cams, nanny cams, closed-circuit cameras, and webcams.
LOOK
was a comment on how many times we’re photographed and filmed every day without knowing it. It was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, run-around-Beverly-Hills-stealing-shots kind of production. I felt as I did back at the beginning, as an eighteen-year-old in Cannes stealing shots beside Clint Eastwood, a twenty-one-year-old taking revenge on her lover by filming in his house. It felt great. I was happy as a clam, except that it’s never easy shooting fully nude sex scenes in a stranger’s house, let alone at forty-four years of age. That makes for a long day.

We wrapped the last scene of the day, an argument in Stella’s kitchen. There was a bottle of wine on the counter. I thought it was a prop filled with water. My character was an alcoholic, so halfway through the scene I picked it up and took a swig.

Fuck! It’s real! I didn’t take my pill!

It was a scary moment. I couldn’t yell “Cut!” I was in the middle of a scene, and I couldn’t bring myself to spit out red wine all over the place that Adam had borrowed for filming. I wished Jesus were there to do the reverse of his water-to-wine trick, but he wasn’t, so I swallowed. I’d been so fastidious with The Sinclair Method, following the rules to the letter, but what happens now? Would I suddenly go bonkers and turn into my psycho character from
Hexed
? Would the monster leap out of its cave, right back into the driver’s seat? I dealt with the problem at hand first. I kept my cool and asked them to replace the wine with water on the next take.

I got in the car and drove home. I knew I wasn’t cured yet, that I was still working my way through this thing. I felt the urge to drink. I stopped at a store and bought a big bottle of fancy Belgian beer that I intended to share with David. I took my pill in the car on the way home. I was feeling better by the time I pulled into the driveway. I needed David, needed to tell him about how fate had just rolled me. I needed him to sympathize with the bad end to my day. But relationships by nature are unstable things. Sometimes you’re in perfect harmony; sometimes you’re coexisting in different dimensions.

The second I got through the door I started telling David about my day. I told the story chronologically and didn’t make it to the part about the mix-up with the wine. I’d forgotten that this was the first time he’d heard about the hard-core sex scenes. He went bananas. Fuck, I should have seen that coming, I should have played it smarter. But I’d lost perspective; the world was crumbling around me. I retreated into the bathroom and locked the door, the bottle of beer still in the plastic shopping bag in my hand. I could hear the monster laughing.

I knew we’d get back together. How did you ever think you could get by without me? We were made for each other.

She could talk all the trash she wanted, because I’d taken my pill. I was in a bad place, but once that beer was done it was done. It wasn’t going to lead to anything else, because I wasn’t back in the monster’s cave, just in the shadow-world transit lounge, just passing through.

It took me about a year to unlearn the behaviors associated with drinking. It takes that long to let go of the guilt and anger, to stop being so defensive. The Incident of the Belgian Beer & the Bathroom was a one-off, but it taught me an important lesson. The biological cure starts working straightaway, but the psychological cure takes longer. I mean, it’s all in
The Cure for Alcoholism
, and I had become friends with Drs. Sinclair and Eskapa, so I knew that I had to learn new behaviors with the help of the breathing space created by the naltrexone. But book smarts and street smarts are two different things. It takes a little longer to learn to literally change your mind.

At Christmas in 2010 I was back in Napa, back on a dusty street in a Sergio Leone Western where Claudia lives or dies depending on her ability to avoid the hail of emotional bullets. The family stands opposite me, they’re all armed, and they have twitchy trigger fingers.

But I’m on it. I’m Clint Eastwood in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. They’re shooting, but the bullets don’t hit home. I’m untouchable, and all the while I’m in the kitchen cooking food for thirteen people. I’m better than Clint Eastwood; I’m Superwoman.

And then one of my brothers said something that made David feel he had to defend me, and then my sister-in-law weighed in, and the next thing I knew I was screaming and pointing a spatula accusingly. They knew not to mess with me. The kitchen emptied, but it was too late. I realized I was already hit. I saw my kryptonite sitting on the counter right beside me: someone’s half-finished glass of wine. I threw it down my gullet without a second thought. I realized what I’d done, rushed to my handbag, and quickly took my pill. It had some effect, but I could feel the monster stirring.

That slip-up instigated a whole week in which I didn’t take the pill correctly, an hour before drinking. I started popping them after I’d already started drinking, which didn’t make any sense. I knew better, but the monster was still there, whispering in the background. It turned out that it still could subtly pull some strings from the back seat. You haven’t met a Stephen King monster as resilient as mine. Just when you think it’s dead and buried, back it comes, clawing its way up out of the grave.

I drank nonstop for a week. I hid booze and started lying to family and friends. But I didn’t throw up or get alcohol poisoning, and I could feel myself teetering on the edge of the slippery slope. I had learned my lesson and had an important realization. The pill isn’t a weapon. It isn’t something that lets you crush your addiction. The Sinclair Method is an ally, a partner. You have to work with it. After the Christmas fuck-up I took all of January off from drinking and cleaned out my system. I didn’t drink at all. I recreated the same physical and emotional environment as the first time I took naltrexone.

I was back on track and have stayed that way since.

I haven’t made that mistake again, and I’m back to where I was in my twenties in terms of my consumption.