Lips Unsealed (30 page)

Then I saw the photos and they were beautiful—but it wasn’t me. The girls in the band thought they were great. My gay friends didn’t look—or they didn’t tell me—and my straight guy friends didn’t bring it up and I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask my family for their opinion either. I thought I’d leave that alone. However, a girlfriend of mine was looking through the magazine one day and let out an envious sigh that spun
me around.
What?
She pointed to a picture of me holding a parasol and looking over my shoulder and said, “I wish I had a butt like that.”

“I do, too,” I said. “Because the one you’re looking at isn’t mine.”

A month later, I was in Italy, finishing a late lunch with an Italian friend at my favorite little restaurant, when Morgan called my cell phone and informed me that America had been attacked. My voice resonated through the small restaurant as I shouted, “What?” He told me about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the people fleeing through the streets of New York City, and the chaos, concern, and uncertainty he was seeing and hearing on news reports.

I hung up and looked off in the distance, dazed. I filled my friend in on the details, at least what I knew, and paid the bill. I wanted to go home. On the way to the car, we stopped in a delicatessen for cheese and sausages. Then I was walking back to my parking space when an older Italian man approached me and asked, “Are you an American?”

“Yes,” I said.

He reached out, wrapped his arms around me, and squeezed. It was such a warm embrace I could almost feel his heartbeat. He let me go and looked in my eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for what happened to your great country today.”

Throughout that day and week, my European friends called and expressed their sorrow and condolences as if I knew the victims. What I realized when I woke up from the shock was that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t personally acquainted with the people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. In one way or another, we were all connected—and affected. I watched news reports nonstop that first day and night, but then turned the TV off after I realized it was making me sick.

In the months following that profoundly tragic and sorrow-filled time, I came down hard on myself. Why, I asked myself, was I such a mess when I had so much going for me? Why was I unable to get it together? Why were things such a struggle? Why did I feel full of gloom and despair?

Obviously I was an addict. But I wasn’t facing that reality, not when I relied on drugs and alcohol to take me away from my guilt, shame, and depression.

More conveniently, I assumed my problems stemmed from an inability to connect with the world and with life, not myself. I was so happy one day when I picked up the book
The Buddha in Your Mirror: Practical Buddhism and the Search for Self
. I had been reading various related books, but this one practically screamed at me to pick it up. It was about Nichiren Buddhism, the practice of chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” as a way of recharging physically, mentally, and spiritually, and also getting to enlightenment, or Buddhahood.

The book was clearly and simply written, the sentences acting like translators to make a complex idea accessible. I thought the idea of finding peace through this chant, which means “I devote myself to the mystic law of cause and effect through sound,” was a beautiful idea. The author recommended chanting with other people and finding them through local sects of Soka Gakkai International, Nichiren’s global organization. I learned there was a headquarters in Santa Monica and another in New York City. I contacted both, and a woman from the Santa Monica group called me back. Vera and I had an excellent, thoughtful talk, and the next time I was in Los Angeles, I met her at a morning meeting,
gongyo
, at her home in West Hollywood.

Gongyo
s were twice-daily services where people recited the Lotus Sutra, the highest teaching of Buddha. There were twenty of us at this first one I attended. We sat in front of a
gohonzon
, a large mandala, beside which were placed displays of water, plants, fruit, and incense. Once the group began to chant, the room took off. It filled with an energy that sent me flying through a different dimension. I had no idea what to expect; it turned out better than I could have imagined.

Back in France, I started chanting on my own to a
gongyo
tape, but it wasn’t the same. Through a French chapter of Soka Gakkai, I was referred to a woman in Valbonne who organized Soka Gakkai meetings at her house. She turned out to be from San Francisco. We bonded over the difficulty of practicing in French. Little by little, though, I proved myself adept enough to receive my own
gohonzon
.

Despite my twice-a-day chants, I ended up more torn apart than enlightened. All that time sitting still and thinking seemed to cause the shit in my head to line up like soldiers in front of a review panel. During chants, I asked to be freed from my obsession to use. I pleaded for guidance. I wanted answers. Most of all I wanted release and relief from the dark alleys and self-destructive corridors I walked day in and day out as if I was held captive in a maze.

At the end of the day, chanting forced me to sit with myself and face my feelings, my sense of failure and regrets, my guilt and shame, my fears and insecurity. None of the stuff that other people saw—the rock star, the lucky marriage, the exotic life in a foreign country—none of that mattered. None of it was even relevant when I sat face-to-face with myself. Never mind posing for
Playboy
. People talk about the naked truth. The person I saw when chanting was the real me, the naked truth. I was fucked-up, unhappy, and seriously depressed.

Maybe that
was
enlightenment.

If it was, I was in trouble.

DESPITE MY best efforts, the inside of my head was not a pretty place. Even while touring with the Go-Go’s in February and March, and then on my own after the group went on a yearlong hiatus as Kathy waited to give birth to her first child in October, I chanted twice a day and said my recitations, always with the same hope that such religious devotion to the mystic sound would free me of my addictions and deliver me into a normal life. It didn’t.

I was spiraling deeper into negativity when I met a drug dealer in a Belgian restaurant, a meeting that put my life in danger, though I didn’t know it at the time. I had made a brief trip to Belgium, and while lunching with a friend I asked if she knew where I could get drugs. She nodded toward a waiter, then got up from the table, walked across the room, and gave him a tap on the arm as she walked past. They met in the back by the bathrooms, spoke briefly, and she told me everything was taken care of.

After dinner, my friend and I walked to a nearby bar and a few minutes later the waiter came in and sat at our table. A few minutes after that, I had some coke and a new contact. I used him a number of times over the next few months. Then he started to blackmail me.

It was early summer 2003, and I was in Los Angeles, rehearsing for Go-Go’s dates in August, when I received a message from him. What drug dealers call their clients? It doesn’t work that way. I listened to the message and turned ice cold. He wanted money from me, a pretty good sum, and he threatened to go public with my drug use if I didn’t give him what he wanted.

Obviously something was going on with him. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to be able to get rid of this problem. But I didn’t know how. I had no idea what to do.

I thought about telling Morgan, but I chickened out after considering all of the confessions I would have to make and the repercussions. Instead I did nothing. I appeared on
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
and the British version of
Hell’s Kitchen
(the show’s star, chef Gordon Ramsay, made me mop the floor), and then I returned to France until I had to go on the road with the Go-Go’s.

Once the monthlong tour began at the end of July in Redding, California, I immediately slipped into that place I got to only on the road, when I could drink and use and isolate myself from the responsibilities and concerns of real life, including the drug dealer trying to extort money from me, which I thought about from time to time. It always upset me. It was one more secret I kept that weighed me down.

In mid-August, the Go-Go’s played the Summer Sonic Festival in Tokyo, and I was boozing and using heavily. We opened for Green Day, and thanks to our friendship with Billie Joe Armstrong, who had cowritten “Unforgiven” on
God Bless the Go-Go’s
, they rolled out the red carpet for us. Literally. They had a red carpet to the side of the stage, with our own little tent stocked with coolers of booze and beer. A sign said
GO
-
GO’S ONLY
. And I took full advantage of it.

The Green Day guys had us over to their hotel several times for champagne and caviar. We ended our nights drinking at two or three in the morning. One night they took us to the hippest rock-and-roll bar in Osaka and I ended up dancing on top of the bar to “Immigrant Song.” The next night, Green Day performed the Led Zeppelin classic onstage and dedicated it to me.

I went out drinking afterward with the guys and followed Tré Cool, Mike Dirnt, and a couple of Green Day roadies back to Tré’s hotel room for more of the same. From what I heard through the grapevine later on, they told people they were amazed the Go-Go’s could outdrink them.
I saw them a couple years later, after I had been sober for a while, and they said, “You look really good. And different.”

“I got some sleep,” I said.

They thought I was a badass, hard-partying rocker, which they said was even cooler since I was a chick. They had no idea I was an addict whose life was out of control.

I had left home in bad shape, and I returned in worse. Worn-out and drugged out, I was in a depression that had me feeling empty, worthless, hopeless, and like I had nothing: no energy, no thoughts, no anything. I thought about taking my life. It seemed like a solution, even a resolution to many problems. I had hurt too many people. I thought things might be better for me and everyone else if I wasn’t around.

I considered various ways, some painless, some inexplicably gruesome, like taking a handful of pills or veering my car off one of the steep mountain roads. I figured Morgan might be able to deal with it, but each time I was stopped when I thought of the pain I would cause my son. Even in the depths of my sickness, I couldn’t be
that
selfish and heartless.

I was stuck in that state of mind until September, when Morgan had enough of the depression and drama. One day after Duke, now twelve and old enough to know what was what, went to school, Morgan confronted me, insisting I tell him what was going on. He was angry and scared—angry at whatever I was doing and the life I was wasting, and scared that he and Duke might lose me.

That was the trigger. I couldn’t pretend or hide any longer. Nor did I want to. Crying, I told him everything. I was mortified, ashamed, and sorry. I wished that I had told him sooner. I wished that none of it had ever happened.

I asked Morgan to hold me. I needed to feel safe and protected. If he had said no, I don’t know what I would have done next. But Morgan took me in his arms and held me for a long, long time. Only God knows why, but he had an amazing ability to love me.

“This is all drugs and alcohol,” he said. “It’s not the real you. You have a problem. You need treatment. And if you don’t deal with it, I’m going to tell you this right now, our marriage isn’t going to survive.”

I understood the next move was up to me. And I understood I had to get help or Morgan was going to let go of me for the sake of his sanity. But once again I refused to admit the truth to myself, even when I saw it clearly. Instead of saying yes, I have a drug problem and need help, I told myself that my problems stemmed from my depression and that if I checked into a hospital for a while, I would come out better. It was a perfect example of the way addicts will lie—even, or especially, to themselves.

I went to London and met with a doctor from the Priory, the city’s leading private mental-health hospital. I told him everything—from my drug and alcohol addiction to the lies I had told Morgan for years to my struggle with depression.

At the conclusion, I expected him to check me into the fifty-six-bed facility for a much-needed cooling-off period. Instead, he said, “You’re not depressed. You’re a drug addict and an alcoholic, and you need to check into rehab for at least thirty-six days.”

What?

That’s not what I had wanted to hear, and I was furious. I wanted my depression treated, not my drug addiction. I tried to change his mind, but he refused to budge and I found the truth too much to handle. I returned to my hotel thinking, The hell with him, and that night I bought coke and partied myself into oblivion at Stringfellows, a high-end lap-dancing club.

It was the start of a two-day binge, as well as more lies and more problems.

A FEW WEEKS later, aware that I needed to do
something
to convince Morgan I was making an effort, I made an appointment with a therapist in France whose name I had gotten from a friend. The therapist was a Dutch-Indonesian woman. She spoke perfect English with an accent that made each sentence seem like a song. If she hadn’t been my shrink, I would have wanted her to be my friend. I was telling her a story one day and she put her hand up.

“Stop,” she said.

“What?”

“Are you serious? Is what you’re telling me real?”

It was some story about craziness on the road with the Go-Go’s.

I nodded, and she burst out laughing.

“Are you supposed to laugh?” I asked.

“Why not?” she said. “The story you just told me is funny—almost unbelievable.”

When I told her more of my antics with the Go-Go’s, she reacted as any sane person would, by asking, “Are you nuts?” I laughingly said, “Isn’t that why I’m here?” After hearing about my frustration with the doctor in London who wouldn’t admit me to the psychiatric hospital, she stared at me until I felt uncomfortable.