Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster (19 page)

Nurse Wretched turned around quickly and glared daggers at my vagina, which was at her eye level. I watched as her tiny eyes slowly traveled upward until they met mine. She squinted up at me warily.

“Wot.”

“Listen, I’m leaving today.”

Silence.

“And I just wanted to thank you, so much. For putting up with me, and especially that time you washed my hair and tucked me in. Other than my mom, nobody’s ever done that for me before and I—thank you. Really. It meant a lot. I’ll never forget you.”

She kept staring at me. Then, for the first time since we met almost two months before, Nurse Wretched smiled at me. I was floored. To be honest, I didn’t think her face could even
do
that. It didn’t matter that she was lacking a front tooth and quite a few bottoms, I thought it was one of the prettiest smiles I’d ever seen.

Then, just as fast as it appeared, it was gone so completely I wondered if I had imagined it. She abruptly turned and walked away, the weeper hot on her heels, begging for answers I knew she would never get.

I finished out the last few months of the play. I was terrifyingly skinny, very weak, and I almost fainted a few times on stage, but I finished it. I wore an “ostomy pouching system” underneath my wardrobe for most of it, but I finished it. I managed to visit a few different doctors, which kept me cushioned in a sea of Vicodin. And I still didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. Denial. My Kryptonite.

Then, about three weeks before my return to New York, I got Laura’s e-mail.

My face still burns with shame when I think of it. Laura is one of my oldest, closest friends. She’s a brilliant costume designer, and her two young kids are the kind you actually
want
to spend as much time with as possible. (If you ever want to know what kind of a person someone is, just look at their kids. Or their pets.)

A wee bit of backstory. Many years ago, in the fall of 2001, I was performing in
The Women
on Broadway. During this time, Laura, who had just given birth to her second child, had to have a bowel resection, which was a surgery similar to mine. She even had the tube of blech coming out of her nose. (And yet of course, it was completely different.) Hers was a horrible twist of fate, while mine was most definitely not.

I visited her in her private hospital suite at St. Luke’s on the Upper West Side almost every day before the show, and between shows on matinee days. I helped her to the bathroom, with the baby, and with whatever else she needed. Therefore, when almost the same thing happened to me (well, at least as far as
she
knew), I was stunned and deeply hurt that she had only called me
one
time, right after I got out of surgery. For two months I would e-mail her and leave her messages, and I’d never hear back. I couldn’t believe she could be so cruel. My hurt stewed and twisted and curdled as I lay there with nothing else to do. Every time I’d think of her, it would sting and I’d weep from the betrayal.

Finally, a few weeks after I was out of the hospital, I wrote her an angry, hurt, weepy e-mail. I was not at all prepared for the response. I know it was much longer, with lots of other stuff, but these are the sentences that are burned into my memory:

I sat on the edge of my bed, in my tiny flat on Cadogan Square, trembling, and felt myself disappear into a black hole of nothingness. My mask, ripped away. Laura tore it away. She’s a terrible person who hates me. How could she be so mean to me?
Oh my God.

A second wave of paranoia and panic slammed into me. My friends know? Who? Have they been idly trashing me behind my back?

Nonononononooooo.

White-faced, I just sat there and stared at my feet for hours. How on earth could I possibly tell all my friends, my mom, my sister, my brother? All the people I lied to, all the people who felt just awful that this terrible fate had befallen me? If I told them I didn’t exist, that the person they knew and loved was just a mirage, then would I just become. . . nothing?

If I don’t exist, who am I?

“No, no, no. Ignore it, it will all go away. Just keep pretending,” he said sternly.

Oh, thank God, Mr. M, where have you been?

“Right where I’ve always been. Right where I’ll always be.”

I took five Vicodin, and I immediately felt much better. Mr. M helped me come up with a brilliant plan.
I’ll just stop drinking or taking drugs, and when I get back, I’ll just ice them all out. Won’t they all feel fucking stupid when they see how wrong they were.

An English friend came to see the show that night. Afterward, we went to the Ivy, and despite my resolution of just a few hours before, I had three martinis, because that is what I’ve always done with a friend after a play. Always. I drank because I couldn’t fathom
not drinking.
My body wept in protest, my spirit crushed. But I drank anyway.

The next day I woke up, and I knew.

I WILL NEVER, EVER STOP. EVER. I WON’T “GROW OUT OF IT,” AND IT WON’T STOP ON ITS OWN. I WILL
DRINK AND USE DRUGS UNTIL I DIE. WHICH WILL BE VERY SOON.

(
Terrifying
).

I needed to talk to someone. I called Marci in New York.

“Marci, I’m worried about my drinking.”
Ooh! Maybe I can
just
be
an alcoholic?

“Well, why don’t you just go to rehab and get it dealt with?”

She said this in the same tone one would say, “You should put sunscreen on” or “Have you thought about putting that lamp over there?” Her simple, nondramatic answer piled on top of Laura’s bravery saved my life. Laura exposed the rot, and Marci made it sound like something solvable instead of impossible. They both, in their own ways, cajoled my illness from the deep cavern of shame and self-hatred it had been rotting in and brought it out into the open.

Yeah, why don’t I? People do it every day. Besides, my way isn’t exactly working out so good anymore.
Suddenly, I could almost picture myself clean and better and whole. Maybe I don’t have to live as if I’m already dead. Maybe I can live as if I’m alive. I could hear Mr. M shouting angrily, but his voice got weaker and weaker. I immediately called a few places and finally reached the Meadows, a facility in Arizona. Before I could talk myself out of it (or Mr. M got wind of it), I booked a bed for the week after I got home from London.

And that,
finally
, was the beginning of the end.

A confluence of four events that had built into a perfect storm. The hospital, my
Papillon
realization, the e-mail from Laura, and the phone call with Marci. If just one of those things hadn’t occurred, I’m certain I’d still be using (on the off chance I was still alive, that is). But the fact that each had transpired, one after another, in the order they did, is what saved me.

My last days in London were consumed by a coconutsize ball of fear that had formed in the pit of my ravaged guts. But instead of trying to kill it, I took that goddamn coconut and used it to begin to build my raft. A sorry, poorly made, leaky fucker that still somehow managed to sail me all the way to rehab.

I’m not going to go into minute detail about my experience in rehab, because really, haven’t we read enough books about that? However, if you are brave enough to go, I have just a few pieces of advice:
Shut the fuck up and listen for once in your life.
And even if your counselor has a dream catcher above her desk, I don’t care, listen anyway. Oh, and people who are your best friends in rehab will very likely ring your doorbell two months later with tiny coke rocks falling out of their noses, asking if they can crash on your pullout.

So go there to get better. Not to be adored by everyone. That one took me a while.

Last, if you’re scared to go, imagine walking into the cafeteria for your first shaky meal only to be greeted by the sounds of trays dropping and people freaking out as they recognize you (hey, rehab’s a fairly monotonous place). Imagine being treated to a lengthy, daily sermon from some bizarre alcoholic writer who claimed to be a fan (?) of
3rd Rock
and who felt he could improve upon story lines you now no longer even remember. Or imagine coming out of the shower on your first morning there only to be greeted by the vision of your roommate rifling through your luggage. Okay? So man up, get over yourself, and think,
If so-and-so could do this, so can I.
(My reference was Kate Moss.)

One life-changing thing happened to me while I was there. My counselor, Grace, was one tough-as-nails lady. She wasn’t charmed by me at all; in fact, she reminded me of a tiny British nurse I once knew. Someone who had taught me well the delicate art of navigating those who are both diminutive and rude. Therefore, around my second week there, I pulled Grace aside in the cafeteria and boldly said, “I think I’m trying to get you to like me.”

“Gee, ya think?” she said.

I was taken aback. “Is it
that
obvious?”

She then rolled her eyes (I swear) and said, “Kristen, why don’t you stop worrying about how everyone else feels about you and start concentrating on yourself? How do
you
feel about people? How do
you
feel about situations? Because right now all I see is someone who doesn’t have a clue as to who she really is or what she really wants.”

My face went hot. I was about to tell her she had her head up her ass, but I couldn’t. I knew she was right. Then she softened a bit and said, “Kristen, isn’t it time you learned how to see yourself through your
own
eyes, instead of everyone else’s?”

I looked at her, lost. Fragile. Empty. Speechless. For some reason, this made her happy. She grinned and said, “Well,
there
you are, Kristen. Welcome to rehab.”

I left Arizona dazed and confused, with nothing to show for my thirty days but my sobriety, a coin they give you to remember to
stay
sober (helpful!), and a bunch of shitty turquoise jewelry from the rehab store. Here’s another thing about rehab—it’s profoundly fucking boring. Thus, I became obsessed with purchasing anything I could get my hands on in the rehab store. These treasures included
IT WORKS IF YOU WORK IT SO WORK IT YOU’RE WORTH IT
key chains, kitchen magnets with sayings like “Don’t run so fast that your guardian angel can’t keep up!” and a couple hundred dollars’ worth of turquoise nonsense.

Maybe this’ll help you understand the depth of the boredom: Upon my mother’s arrival for “family week” (God bless her), she had in her purse some Juicy Fruit gum and a rolled-up copy of
More
magazine.
Contraband!
I grabbed them from her purse as fast as I could and threw them under my bed.

“Why did you just—”

“Nevermind, Ma.” My mother has never liked it when I broke rules. I distracted her with “I’m dying for you to meet my best friend here, he’s a sex- and crack-addicted pedophile. He’s a hoot, you’ll love him!”

Somehow I made it through family therapy, dinner, and our nightly group therapy session, and I was free. I ran as fast as I could to my dorm and plopped into my tiny bed and chewed through the whole pack of gum before my roommates got home. I was in heaven as I feverishly read “ten ways to stay cool during hot flashes” and a very in-depth article on Beverly D’Angelo. It was fantastic. For the first time in twenty-three days, I was
other
.

When I got home, so much was completely different, yet hauntingly familiar. It’s a bit like having déjá vu twenty-four hours a day.
Yes, that’s my coffee cup, my couch, my dogs,
you tell yourself. But they feel different, as if they’re props in some play. When almost every joyous, sad, upsetting, thrilling, boring, fun, angry, heartbreaking, stressful, celebratory moment since high school has been accompanied by alcohol and drugs, you have to learn how to deal with them all over again. And, at forty, that wasn’t easy. I’m still trying to figure them out.

I think that there are many different ways of getting and staying sober. Like religion, I just don’t think that one way is the only way. I always think of something said to me years and years ago. I was at a benefit and found myself seated next to an addiction therapist (I know, bummer, right?). I was pretending to be normal, nursing a single glass of shudder-inducing white wine. This was at a time in my life when I was starting to wonder if I might be on the autobahn to nowhere, which is what inspired me to casually clear my throat and say, “Excuse me, sir? I’m just curious. What do you think really keeps people sober?”

He gazed at me over his glasses, which made me think,
Uh-oh, he knows.

But he just smiled. “That’s a good question. And fairly impossible to answer.” Then he said something that has resonated with me ever since: “If pushing a peanut up a hill with your nose keeps you sober, well, then, just push a peanut up a hill with your nose.”