Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (28 page)

I promised her that I’d think about it, but I never went back to the Church, except for Christmas and Easter with Dad and her. And faith? I poured my faith into all those beautiful liquor bottles that came in gem shades of green, amber, and blue like the stained-glass windows of St. Anne’s.

After listening to
The Many Moods of Liz
that night, I wasn’t ready to surrender completely to the notion of a God, and I hadn’t prayed in years, but I assumed my former altar-boy position at the foot of my bed and got down on my knees. I prayed to Liz as her twinkling lunette eyes stared back at me. I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed to her for help. I prayed for my life. Dave’s words bled into the page of my journal entry on November 1 about that moment: “As an old Catholic girl you must know that today is the Feast of All Saints. Perhaps you’ve found a saint to help take care of you.”

The next afternoon, when I returned from my successful negotiation with Coach on the baseball diamond, Liz’s photo over my bed had been framed with a rosary. My bottle of Wet, my personal lubricant of choice, had gone missing. Dave eventually confessed to hanging the rosary. The Katie Couric lover said he would swear on a case of Coors Light that he didn’t take my lube. Some things can’t be explained. I choose to believe that Liz took my Wet away.

The “wet” was gone, but the guilt and shame were like oil stains that continued to spread. Mama Jean couldn’t get over that I had tried to kill myself, and I hadn’t fully accepted that I actually did that. I wrote in my journal, “I know I did it, but I keep rationalizing it. I only did it because I was drunk.” With bloodred ink, Dave had underlined the last sentence and written in the margin, “I would rethink this.”

I took Dave’s advice and thought about Paul Rosenfield. And Genevieve. And then I thought about myself. I was glad to be alive, but my feelings vacillated from waking up filled with joy and enthusiasm—
I’m an alcoholic, and I’m sober!—
to being hopeless and fatalistic by nightfall—
I’ve squandered my passion, ambition, and thirst for life.

“Where is Susan Hayward from
I Want to Live!
when you need her?” I wrote in my journal. To which Dave shot back in red, “You’d better start channeling her.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Feelin’ Good

The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies
was something to live for. Located on the Walk of Stars strip, the show boasted “the world record for the oldest chorus line!”
Who’s tracking these figures?
“1940s Music, 1940s Cast!” It was made up of showgirls and boys old enough to have seen Ginger and Fred, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, and Cyd Charisse. Heaven.

Keith and I were strolling along the Walk of Stars slurping our Jamba Juice pomegranate smoothies one Saturday afternoon of town time when I stopped dead in my tracks on Liberace’s star to read the marquis announcing
GOGI GRANT: OUR FABULOUS GUEST STAR, OCT 31 TO DEC 31, 2006
.

“No!” I said to Keith, and pointed. “Gogi Grant. She can’t still be performing.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t know who Gogi Grant is?!” I said, sounding like Mama Jean and Dad.

“Jamie, I barely know who Debbie Reynolds is.” Keith pointed to her star beneath his feet.

“I have to investigate.” I walked up to the box-office window and left Keith behind, shaking his head as he stood on Debbie.

The lady behind the window was preserved in frost: frosted-blond helmet, frosted-pink lipstick, frosted-silver nails, frosted, snow-white dentures.

“Excuse me, but next month’s guest star: Is that
the
Gogi Grant? As in ‘The Wayward Wind’? Was the singing voice for tons of Hollywood stars? Dubbed Ann Blyth in
The Helen Morgan Story
?
That
Gogi Grant?”

She let out a Virginia Slims bronchial chuckle. “Only Gogi Grant I know of, hon.”

Back at the dude ranch I was on the pay phone to Michahaze. “I know what we’re doing when you come to visit. We’re seeing
The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies,
and Gogi Grant is the guest star!”

“Sounds wonderful,” Michahaze said with true enthusiasm. Then a beat. “Remind me. Who is Gogi Grant?”

I had accepted that Michahaze was coming for a conjoint.
Conjoint
is a bear of a rehab term. This term I looked up. It has multiple definitions. In recovery it means: “a type of therapy in which a therapist sees the two spouses, or parent and child, or ‘other partners,’ together in joint sessions.”

From the beginning Dave had been pushing for a conjoint with Michahaze. I agreed and he was on board, but I wasn’t completely. I subtly tried to deflect him from coming. “Don’t worry if you can’t get the time off or if airfares are too expensive. I’ll be back in New York soon enough.” Even though we spoke daily, I hadn’t shared many of the details of my therapy sessions, of my “recovery.” Kind of like I hid just how excessive my drinking was. I ruminated in my journal that I was unsure about how much I wanted to let him in on what I was going through. Dave’s red ink: “Translation—how much I need him.”

One of my care packages was a box of books from my boss, Debbie. I grabbed one of them as if it were a forgotten diary,
Exiles in America,
by Christopher Bram, about a gay couple in a long-term, sexless—and open—marriage. I put all of the recovery self-help books Dave had given me on the bottom shelf and dove into that book, hoping to find the answer about whether Michahaze and I should be together. It only brought up the same questions, and a few more, that I had already been asking:
Is companionship, deep friendship, a good home, and a little on the side enough?
Dave’s red ink posed one more question: “There is no answer because it is not an intellectual issue. The real question is ‘Is Michael my emotional home?’”

Michahaze showed up. After we hugged, he pulled back and looked at me. His blue-green eyes, with that beautiful circle of gold around his pupils that I’d noticed the night we first met, looked different. The look of fear and worry of the last few years had been replaced by relief. He looked at my no-longer-bloodshot eyes and said, “Do you know that in our sixteen years, this is the longest we’ve ever been apart?”

Sixteen years. Forget straight people. We’ve been together longer than most lesbians.
“I hadn’t realized that. Wow.” I hugged him again. Long and hard. “I’m so happy to see you.”

“I got the tickets to
The Palm Springs Follies,
and the Czechoslovakian bowl arrived last week. It’s beautiful. You’re right. It’s perfect in the apartment. It’s sitting on the dining-room table … waiting for you.”

The next day we saw the Sunday matinee of the follies. The poster for the show barked, “Every performer 53- to 83-years young!” When Michahaze and I stepped into the theater, I took a look at the audience with canes, walkers, scooters, and wheelchairs and said, “And the audience is
slightly
older.” I looked at the show’s poster and saw a one-word ringing endorsement of it from Katie Couric: “Wow!”
Wow, indeed.
I thought of Coors Light and turned to Michahaze. “I’m so glad that Gogi Grant
and
Katie Couric have been a part of my recovery.”

That night Michahaze got to go to a 12-step meeting with me. I gave him a primer of what to expect. “Now, if you don’t want to introduce yourself when they ask if there are any newcomers or visitors, you don’t have to. There will be a speaker who will tell his story about what a booze bag he was and how he got sober and how his life now is all singing birds and sweet-smelling farts. Then they open it up to shares from the room—”

“I understand.”

“This particular meeting is a round-robin, where they go around the table in order and everyone shares. You don’t have to share if you don’t want to, you can just pass. And you can share whatever you want to share—if you want to share—but I understand if you don’t want to—”

“
Okay
. I get it.”

He chose to share.

I cringed and held my breath as he told the roomful of strangers about coming home from work to find me passed out in our bed with an empty pill bottle and a glass with three fingers of melted ice on the nightstand. It was my first time hearing this and was typical of how we communicated. We left the big things unsaid until asked by an outsider, and then we’d share with the outsider in front of each other.

“I had a bad feeling all day,” he said to the room of strangers. “We speak several times a day, and all of the voice-mail messages I left were never returned. When I opened the door, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.”
Not good,
I thought. “And it wasn’t. I found my partner of sixteen years passed out in bed. I was able to wake him, and through slurred speech, he told me that he’d taken some pills. ‘How many?’ I asked. ‘How
many
?’ He couldn’t tell me. I called our friend Bunny, who is a nurse practitioner and lives nearby. He came over. By that time Jamie was in the kitchen pouring shots of gin. Bunny and I took him to the hospital as he begged us to stop at a bar along the way. It was the scariest day of my life.” Michahaze looked away from the table of anonymous faces looking at him tell his story. He turned back to them. “But now he’s here and I’m thankful that he’s going to be okay.”

He didn’t have to share
that
honestly.

The conjoint with Dave started to scrape away the layers of dirt that had hardened over the years and till the fertile soil that still lay beneath. We sat next to each other in Dave’s sun-drenched office, Michahaze in his white linen shirt and seersucker, striped trousers (the ones I had picked out for him). We stared intensely at Dave as if we were telling a doctor the symptoms of our illness and waiting for his remedy, which is exactly what we were doing. Michahaze made it abundantly clear that he loved me and would stand by me through everything. Then he expressed his concern over the hold Mama Jean continued to have on my life.

“From a thousand miles away Jean still has a vise grip on Jamie. Emotionally.” As he said this, I could feel him blocking from his peripheral vision any possible looks from me. “She continues to have this idealized view of Jamie, and I think he nearly kills himself to live up to that. Jean simply can’t accept any behavior that deviates from her norm.” Then he added with his trademark giggle, “She told me that she blames me for him becoming a Democrat.”

We all laughed.

In her eyes, my unacceptable behavior was always someone else’s fault. Some might say that she turned me into a drunk. The truth: no one turned me into a hydrophobic, liquor-swilling, sometime-cocaine-snorting, homosexual
Democrat
but me.

After the session, Michahaze and I sat by the pool and talked about what the future would look like.

“What are you concerned about most?” Michahaze asked.

Before I answered, I looked at the wavy double helixes of sunlight in the pool. I thought of a David Hockney pool painting in which a man is forever submerged at the deep end in midswim. He never has to emerge from the cocoon of that chlorinated womb. I turned back to Michahaze’s gold-rimmed pupils. “I’m afraid of leaving the safety of this place and not being able to handle it out there. Of picking up again.”

“You can do it. You can do anything.” He hugged me and I believed that he believed in me and loved me almost as much as Mama Jean did. And now I had to love him back just as much.

Of all the
conjoint
definitions I found, the first one listed is the simplest: “joined together; combined.” I shared this with Dave in my journal. Dave gave me the validation I needed: “Michael is a gem. So are you. Create a setting worthy of you both.”

*   *   *

“You know, I still can’t get over the fact that I tried to commit … that I tried to kill myself,” I told Dave at our next therapy session. “Hearing Michael tell that room about finding me … made it real.”

“It’s called shame, kiddo.” Dave stared at me over his reading glasses. “But you first have to accept that you did it before you can get over the shame and move on.”

“I see what you mean. But more than that, I can’t get over the fact that
Jean
can’t get over the fact that I … did that.”

“Maybe Jean can finally take you off of that gilded pedestal she erected and placed you on.”

“Funny. That’s what Mr. Parker said to me while I was in detox. I thought I had made a dent in gaining my independence when I shit in the nest last Thanksgiving, but I’ve thrown myself back in the crib. I’ll never be free of her obsessive love.”

“Do you feel that her obsession with you actually robbed you of being a child?”

“You think? I don’t know. Maybe. I spent so much energy being the adorable, happy, cheerful boy she needed me to be that there was no room for my feelings.” I shared with Dave a passage from a highbrow self-help book that I’d been reading,
The Drama of the Gifted Child
. The book’s premise—that the intelligent, sensitive, “gifted” child is essentially denied a self of its own, as the needs of the parent are always paramount—was pure catnip:

Children who are intelligent, alert, attentive, sensitive and completely attuned to their mother’s well-being are entirely at her disposal. Transparent, clear and reliable, they are easy to manipulate as long as their true self (their emotional world) remains in the cellar of the glass house in which they have to live—sometimes until puberty or until they come to therapy.

I pursed my lips and cocked my head as I let the words fill the room.

Dave broke the silence. “Time to smash the glass house. You need a daddy.”

“A daddy?!”

“Not
that
kind of daddy, Miss Lawson. A father.”

“Okay…?” I said, still not understanding.

“What about asking your father to visit and have a conjoint?”

“And not her? She’d never go for that—”

“She doesn’t have to—”

“Oh,
yes,
she does. She’s the one paying. There’s no way in hell she’s going to pay for Dad and not her to come see me.” My head went from left to right as I said with finality, “Will never happen. No, ma’am.”