Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (31 page)

When I got back to my office, a text from my playmate said that he was sick and had to cancel. He was
so
sorry.

And I was
so
relieved.

I looked up at the office ceiling. It was an icky Styrofoam-esque drop ceiling like Manuel Antonio’s in Paterson, New Jersey. I thought of the orange-and-black bowl Michahaze had bought for me in Palm Springs. To the untrained eye the bowl was merely an exquisite example of Czechoslovakian art deco glass circa 1931. To the educated it was a beautiful reminder of my rehabilitation.

I realized that I had the choice of perception. I could either shrug off the cancellation and the aborted MoMA lunch as mere detours to my date with a drink, or I could see them as roadblocks and receive them as a sign. Still looking at the ugly drop ceiling and thinking of the beautiful bowl that sat on our dining table, I said out loud, “Uncle! I give up! I’ll take this as a sign.”
From God? My higher power? Mama Jean? What does it matter?
What mattered was that I took it as a sign.

The next day I went to a meeting and announced that I had two days sober and started working my way back to full-time sobriety.

*   *   *

“Call me as soon as you get this message,” my brother Jeffrey said on my voice mail. “She’s had another wreck in the Cadillac.” After financial difficulties of his own, Jeffrey had temporarily left New York and moved in with Mama Jean and Dad just before the Bridge Studio incident. Jeffrey had become her chauffeur to keep her from sitting in the driver’s seat as much as possible. But one day she wanted to go to the beauty parlor.
Immediately.
Jeffrey wasn’t ready and asked her to give him five minutes. She wouldn’t. She drove herself to the beauty parlor and backed into a light post. That wasn’t the worst part. She drove there sans pants.
Her priorities are still in order, but the execution is misfiring.

After Jeffrey finished telling me the story, he said, “You have no idea. I’ve watched her unravel day by day.” His voice cracked. “She can’t even dress herself. Something’s got to be done.” When she started screwing up her hair appointments and thought it was okay to show up in New York having done her own hair, we should have rushed her to the hospital. Everything at which she had been expert—cars, money, and hair—she could no longer handle.

Two months after the pantless drive to the beauty parlor, she went haywire. She saw intruders in the living room. Instead of calling the police, she faced them down and told them to get out. I knew this move. Once we were on a crowded subway in New York. When the train came to the next stop, two bruisers—black men in skullcaps—started to get on. She pointed her finger at them and shouted, “Y’all can’t get on here!” They didn’t. I can still see their shocked faces. I looked at her with bug-eyed reproach. She defended herself: “I didn’t say that because they’re black. I said that because there’s no room.” When the intruders in her house refused to obey her, she went into the other room and called the police. There were no intruders in the house.

By the time Dad and Jeffrey got home, she was seeing babies that didn’t exist, believing that her worst nightmares were true, talking to herself. Dad and Jeffrey had to hospitalize her in a geriatric-care unit in Houston so that doctors could try to figure out what the hell was going wrong.

As soon as I could, I jumped on a plane to Texas. This was my chance to come to her rescue. I flew down to visit on her Leo birthday, July 30. I didn’t bring an extravagant gift: just a card, a framed beefcake photo of Hugh Jackman, and my newly brightened, copper-red hair (thanks to an expensive visit to the colorist). I also brought seven months of sobriety.

However hard I tried to prepare for the worst, I kept harboring fantasies that I would somehow master the code and bring her back. Jeffrey warned me that she might not know me. I nodded yes, but part of me didn’t believe that was possible.

Dad made a great fanfare over my arrival when he brought me to her in the visiting room. She was having a gown day, as all of her days had been that month. My presence didn’t have the joyous effect for which Dad had hoped. There was no hug for dear life. No “I’ve missed you so much.” Or even “Where the
hell
have you been?” She had that lost look of which I had seen glimpses during her last visit to New York—the weekend of the celebratory brunch. Worse, she was totally out of it and hallucinating like someone tripping on acid. She wept when she saw Dad, telling him that she thought he’d been killed in a grisly car wreck.

And her hair … I don’t even want to talk about her hair. A drink was starting to look good. Scratch that. A drink was starting to feel necessary.
Who could blame me?

I’m not sure if Mama Jean even knew me. At one point she smiled and told me that with my pretty red hair I reminded her of … And then she trailed off. All that she said that day lacked the one thing she had never lacked: conviction.

Actually, not all that she said lacked conviction. As we said good-bye—a moment that will stay with me forever—her parting words chilled me with fear and warmed me with love, giving me a strength I didn’t know I had.

*   *   *

The following September (nine months sober; I’d passed the seven-month itch) I was in the passenger seat of Mama Jean’s red Cadillac. Jeffrey was in the driver’s seat. In the back sat Dad holding Mama Jean’s hand. We were on our way to see a neurologist in Houston whom Jeffrey had found, so we could finally get some answers.

By this time she had been moved from the geriatric-care unit to a traditional nursing home in Beaumont. The hallucinations and agitation had dissipated, but she was in partial shutdown with her eyes closed most of the time. When they were open, she’d respond to us with childlike giddiness. It wasn’t that she didn’t know us. She didn’t even
ask
who we were. If we were strangers to her, she didn’t bother to wonder why we were in her room.

But there were sparks of pure Mama Jean. While Jeffrey and I were feeding her (she now had to be fed with a bib around her neck, her meals pur
é
ed like baby food), two male staff members banged some trays outside. She had always been sensitive to loud noises, but she no longer knew how to shut out background noises. She turned away from Jeffrey and me and yelled out to the hall, “Hey, fellows! Y’all want a blow job?”

She turned back to us with a giggle and then back to the hall. “Well, you’re not getting one in here!” Then back to us: “Uh-
uh
! I’m not putting that thing in my mouth. No, ma’am!”

I brought a playlist of her music that included the Burt Bacharach songs she used to play on the hi-fi when she still sewed. The music brought her back to us in flashes. As “More,” her and Dad’s song, played, she’d sway and hum along, pointing in the direction of the speaker and saying, “Listen to that beat. I’m telling you, that’s
good
music.” Puccini’s
La Boh
è
me
: “Mimi’s aria has to be my favorite.” “High Flying, Adored” from
Evita
rekindled memories of seeing the show on Broadway with Dad when she lived in New York while she was training to be a stockbroker. “My Best Girl” from
Mame
was just for me.

On the drive to the neurologist’s appointment I played her music. You would never have known that the Cadillac had been driven through a wall. It had been expertly repaired and was as good as new.
Why can’t any of us repair Mama Jean?

She slept most of the way, but just as we were approaching the doctor’s office, the song “Jean” (from the movie
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
) filled the car:

Jean, Jean, you’re young and alive

Come out of your half-dreamed dream …

Mama Jean suddenly awoke and brightened as if a spotlight shone on her. “Jean!” She pointed to herself. “That’s me!” It made me think of the time when Hugh Jackman called her name from the stage, and like a schoolgirl she told me, “He called my
name
! He said, ‘Jean’!” I fought back tears.

She remained alert for the doctor’s visit. When the handsome neurologist hit her knee with a rubber hammer to check her reflexes, he discovered that her reflexes worked just fine. As she blurted, “God
damn
it!” she punched him in the stomach.

He reared back, blinked, and with with a nervous chuckle said, “Wow. I’ve never had a patient do that before.”

Dad replied with pride, “You’ve never met Jean Brickhouse.”

Diagnosis: not good. She had Lewy body dementia, or LBD. This type of dementia causes paranoia, agitation, and wild hallucinations.
Check
. Patients also often experience repeated falls.
Check
. Problems with spatial perception.
Check.
Fluctuating cognition with great variations in attention and alertness from day to day and hour to hour.
Check
. Visual hallucinations of people or animals.
Check
.

Like alcoholism, it is progressive. Unlike alcoholism, there is no way to arrest it. A person could live with it for five to seven years, each week, each day, getting just a little bit—
or a lot
—worse.

Her decline seemed to play out like a blossoming flower filmed in time-lapse photography. But in reverse. Michahaze went back to Beaumont with me for Thanksgiving. It was our first Beaumont Thanksgiving since the time I had “shit in the nest” when we went to Mexico instead. Michahaze barely recognized her. She sat slumped over in a wheelchair in a front window of the nursing home. Her hands were balled up in arthritic fists (the physical toll of LBD at work). Dad sat next to her with his ubiquitous pile of newspapers, looking up every now and then to rub her shoulder or pat her hand and read aloud the kind of item from the paper that used to spark her interest. “How are you, honey? Can I get you anything?” No response. This had become his morning routine, his life. Jeffrey would relieve him at noon to feed her lunch. Then one or both of them would be back at dinner. My brother Ronny rarely visited. Not because he didn’t care, but, as he said, “Man, I just can’t look at Mama that way.”

When Michahaze saw her, he looked stricken. Borrowing Dad’s signature look, I glanced at him with my brows raised and eyes popped.

Dad left and we wheeled her back to her room. I played music from her playlist. “Listen, Mom. It’s Hugh Jackman.” He was singing “I Go to Rio” from
The Boy from Oz
. Nothing. Her eyes remained firmly closed, as if she didn’t want to open them to the life she was living. Her hair had patches of gray and had been ineptly combed by Dad. Her beauty operator had offered to come to her and do her hair, but Dad refused, as he refused to let her friends visit. Echoing Ronny, he said, “I don’t want anyone to see her this way.”

Her food arrived. Michahaze and I looked at the pur
é
ed brown and orange sludge and screwed up our faces. Then I threw on a false expression of good cheer for her unseeing eyes. “Look, Mom! It’s lunch.” She refused the first few bites. (Dad and Jeffrey said that with each day it was increasingly difficult to get her to eat.) Suddenly she started taking bite after bite. I cheered her on. “Yes! You like that, don’t you? Doesn’t that taste good?”

Eyes still closed, she shook her head emphatically left to right, “Uh-uh. Uh-
uh
!” She’d always told me, “Never shit a shitter.”

When it was time to go, a nurse came in with a giant cherry picker to lift her dead weight out of the chair. When she hit the bed, her eyes popped open like a giant doll come to life. She looked at me, then Michahaze.

“Michael?”

“Hi, Jean.”

“Yes, Mom! It’s Michael. He came here just to see you.”

“Well, I’m impressed.” That’s what she’d told me after she first met Michahaze at the Royalton.

“Michael flew all the way from New York.”

“Why anyone would want to come to this godforsaken place is beyond me.”
Does she mean the nursing home or Beaumont?

During that Thanksgiving visit I paid back Dad the loan she had given Michahaze and me for the down payment on the apartment, in case he needed extra money for her care. How ironic that I was back home for Thanksgiving and had settled my debt, but she was oblivious to both. As I sat in the study contemplating this, Dad walked in carrying a bottle of wine. He stopped in front of me. “In the morning I pray to St. Mary. In the afternoon I pray to St. Anthony. And in the evening”—he held up the bottle and pointed to the brand name on the label—“I pray to St. Genevieve.”

I laughed, but thought of Genevieve the alcoholic.
That’s not a good omen.

He poured himself a glass and we sat in silence. After he finished it, he got up to leave the room, but stopped midway and gave me his signature look. After a beat he said, “I want my life back.”

It wasn’t a completely thankless Thanksgiving. As powerless as I felt to stop Mama Jean from disappearing, I didn’t indulge in a glass of Genevieve—saint or sinner—to try to escape that feeling. For that, and not much else, I was thankful.

THIRTY

Driver’s Seat (Reprise)

“Hi, Dave. It’s Miss Lawson.”

“Hey, kiddo. How are you doing?”

“Not good.”
There’s that deceptively understated term.
I was talking on my BlackBerry to Dave, my rehab counselor from Michael’s House, as I walked home from one of my weekly sessions with my analyst, Anthony. I needed to talk to Dave. I’d seen him the previous month when he was in town to visit family and friends. Dave, Michahaze, and I went to see Carrie Fisher’s
Wishful Drinking,
her one-woman Broadway show about growing up in Hollywood and her battles with drugs and alcohol. It was a perfect choice to see with my rehab case manager, a show by a woman in recovery who was also the daughter of the man who was the second person to call me an alcoholic, Eddie Fisher. I’d told Dave what was going on with Mama Jean, and he told me that his colon cancer had returned after being in remission for a couple of years. I confessed my relapses to him and that I was finally on my way to being sober a year. “Sounds like you’re the one in remission now,” he had said with a wink.