Shockaholic Read online

  Back when Greg died, the first thing Billie said to her father was, “Now Mommy will be sad.” She didn’t express how having a dead friend of ours affected her directly. No, she immediately considered what his death would do to me, and perhaps secondarily how difficult, eventually over time, my grief and guilt would be for her. I tried really hard to make it not matter. Truly, I wanted so badly to be okay. Sure, yeah, for myself; but more than that for her. To protect her from the darker parts of me.

  But I failed. It’s difficult to put into compelling words the sort of toll it took on us both. I tried—I swear, I tried—to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get on with my life. But (a) I don’t wear boots (so pulling up their straps was out) and (b) I found I simply couldn’t.

  I tried to take a version of the AA wisdom to heart. “What others have done I can do.” I found myself watching documentaries of World War II veterans describing the horrors they’d barely survived, and their tragedies humbled and weirdly consoled me. My experience of Greg’s death, my blaming myself for his loss, or however you want to describe it, was a freckle on the esophagus of what these men had gone through. I figured that if these guys could get through that, then surely I could overcome my measly dark feelings. But, unfortunately, not without that detour through my dear old hunting grounds, dope. (And what a good word for it that is.)

  At some other point during my intermittently self-destructive existence, I heard someone’s counselor say, “If it wasn’t for drugs and alcohol, a lot of us would’ve killed ourselves.” I thought about that as I ingested my Oxy, abusing this insight as a justification for needing to mute the large sound of Greg’s fallen tree. Of course, I should have gone to a grief counselor and/or to meetings—both of which I eventually did—but first I bungled through this not-so-shortcut.

  No wonder I felt Greg’s ghost haunting me, right? I summoned the guy every time I took in the comfy poison that blurred him almost all away. So eventually—as it always, always does—it all caught up with me. Those around me began considering how and when best to intervene. Coincidentally, the moment they chose was the very day that I’d decided to turn myself quietly in to the authorities. But too late! Just as I was about to surrender to the psychopharmacologists, the addiction doctors, and the reliably saving grace of Twelve Steps, a few of my friends phoned Billie’s father and confirmed what he no doubt already suspected—that I was high, and as a result, my mothering skills were tragically very low.

  Boy, was I beyond pissed at them! Newly sober and righteously indignant (which puts the “duh” in redundant), I began referring to my intervenors as the heavy meddlers. Why hadn’t they called me before calling Bryan?! Blah, blah, blah . . . all of which I’m beyond ashamed of now, and which eventually resulted in my sitting down and writing more than a few amends letters, belatedly assuring them I understood they’d acted in my—but more to the point, in Billie’s—best interest. They’d done what they did out of love for me and concern for my daughter. But oh, the months it took to get me to the letter-writing place! You know the one, a few miles beyond all that indignant self-righteous narcissism. The time it took for me to come to my recently and all-too-willingly abandoned senses was a period I wouldn’t return to for the world. And the whole wide one at that.

  So, while I underwent that long demoralizing return trek to my version of normal, Billie went to live with her father, which was obviously the move that made the most sense, given that I was not only not any longer a person she could in almost any way rely on, but was also no longer anyone whose gestalt was anything predictable or reassuring. But simply because this was the most sensible solution under the circumstances didn’t do much to make my loss of her treasured company any easier to bear. For the first time in my life I really felt that I understood the word “heartbroken.” Which, of course, was made all the worse by knowing that I had brought all this breakage on myself. But she would remain safe and out of my potential harm’s way until I could turn my insensibly spinning life around.

  Having betrayed Billie’s trust, I had to find my way back to being someone she could once again believe in. I had to try to recover whatever I could of what I’d previously heard referred to as a “maternal instinct.” I had to prove—not only to my daughter but to anyone else who had managed to maintain some sort of closeness to me other than proximity—that the management (that is, the diminishment and rearrangement) of my selfishly precious fucking feelings was not the sole or all-too-primary purpose of my misguided life.

  I wish I could explain—and armed with that explanation, somehow excuse—the seemingly unending, ongoing, relentless, inordinately intense, pathetic fixation I have with my feelings. That wilderness lurking somewhere down south in my bi–solar plexus and, simultaneously, right there in back of my eyes, demanding my attention and eternally taking my emotional temperature. How do I feel? No, really how do I feel? How could I feel? Some other way, surely. By the end of this endless archeological self-examination, the observer part of your mind doesn’t know what it’s looking at anymore. Because being both archeologist and pit is, essentially . . . don’t make me say it . . . oh fuck. Okay . . . The pits.

  As luck wouldn’t have it, all this coincided with the exact moment that I was scheduled to take my show on the road. And that is not a euphemism for anything. Wishful Drinking was actually booked into the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for a two-month run in early 2008. And the only thought going through my head, pretty much 24-7 then, was, “My daughter hates me.” Well, that and, “I’m hungry for fattening food.”

  There I was getting up onstage every night, delighting people with my hilarious life story and sharing all this perspective and insight that I’d gained by circling the drain and such, and if people had known how I really felt, I’d have been nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress even though I wasn’t in a film or portraying a character other than my measly aging self. I don’t know how I got through it. Or maybe I didn’t get through it, but either way I was a mess.

  Offstage, I couldn’t put things into words, and that was the one thing I’d always been able to rely on. Putting my feelings into words and praying they wouldn’t be able to get out again. It had always been my salvation. If I could get it into words, I could escape the slow quicksand of almost any bad feeling, but now I’d lost my ability to even do that. I was in pain squared, pain cubed, pain to the nth power. And this wasn’t the more noble sort of pain—this was that embarrassing pain of self-pity because I truly believed that Billie would never be able to forgive me. And so naturally I would never be able to forgive myself. She hated me, and I just knew she hated me, because she had every right to hate me. I hated me. Join the crowd! It was a trend!

  I started seeing this child psychologist to help me help Billie through this, and one afternoon at the conclusion of our session, she studied me briefly and said something like, “You know, I hope you’re not considering some sort of self-harm or suicide, because that would be really bad for Billie.” So, see? She was helpful, because that would never have occurred to me.

  By then, it won’t stun you to learn, I was truly ready to try anything. Someone could even have recommended a therapy where you just climb into a big vat of dyslexic snakes, or a therapy where they cover you with orange sherbet and drizzle maple syrup on you—anything! But, no, what they suggested was electroconvulsive therapy, and I must have said, Why not?

  At that point I didn’t know anyone who’d ever undergone this treatment. Oh, sure I remembered hearing a woman talk about it in her clearly audible voice during her brief stay in a mental hospital back east. This pale, gaunt depressive told our little damaged group, “I was planning to kill myself, but then I thought, ‘Well, okay, I can always do that, I definitely have that option, but maybe first I’ll try this ECT thing. And then if that doesn’t work, then I can kill myself.’ ” It occurred to me that was its place in the pantheon of remedies—the last resort for those people whose only other options are the taste of a gun barrel, a long hard fall
, a carful of carbon monoxide, an overdose, or a noose.

  Happily, none of the stories I’d previously heard about ECT turned out to be true anymore. Spoiler alert: You’re given a short-acting anesthetic and a very effective anticonvulsant, you go to sleep for about ten minutes, and your big toe moves a bit, which is all that remains of the bone-snapping thrashing of old.

  I’ve found that people are especially curious about how I was convinced to submit to a treatment I’d spent my entire life regarding as tantamount to torture. What was said that enabled me to finally agree to let them put their little nicotine-patch-looking things on either side of my head? And the answer is, I don’t remember. I don’t. I’ve found that the truly negative side effect of ECT is that it’s incredibly hungry and the only thing it has a taste for is memory. I can’t begin to tell you how many friends have asked me what it felt like waiting for that first shock, and all I could answer was, “You know what? I seriously can’t remember a fucking thing. For all I know, they could have dressed me in a ball gown, surrounded me with dancing dolphins, and married me off to Rush Limbaugh.”

  But, after doing it a few dozen times, you gradually find yourself able to recall and even describe the experience. The nurses lay you gently down on a gurney. Then these attendants wheel you over next to a doctor standing in front of what essentially looks like a record player—something about the size of a small television. Then the doctor puts cute little sticky pieces of film that are attached to wires on each side of your forehead. And then, who should merrily materialize at your side but the trusty anesthesiologist, and as he starts the injection, he says something reassuring like, “Now dream a nice dream.”

  So I attempt to oblige him and maybe fifteen minutes later, I wake and trade in my backless gown for my street (Rodeo Drive) clothes and take the elevator back to the underground parking lot, where I get in my car and lie down in the back seat, and someone who hasn’t just had significant amounts of electricity sent howling through his head drives me home, where I sleep for the next three or four hours.

  And whereas before my brain had felt as though it was set in cement, leaving me . . . I don’t know . . . kind of stuck, the ECT blasted my Hoover Dam head wide open, moving the immoveable.

  In the beginning, they did it three times a week for three weeks. Eventually we settled into once every six weeks—which is where we’ve set down roots and stayed. And, over time, this fucking thing punched the dark lights out of my depression. It did for me what drugs had done for me. It was like a mute button muffling the noise of my shrieking feelings. Your whole life you hear about this terrifying treatment that turns you into a vegetable, only to finally find out that it had all the charming qualities of no big deal. Sort of like getting your nails done, if your nails were in your cerebral cortex.

  So here I am, on maintenance now, and for now, at least, here I intend to stay. I go in for a tune-up whenever I notice the onset of depression, which I frequently don’t recognize until it’s within earshot of too late. Sometimes a few weeks might pass until I say, “Oh, wait! Shit! I don’t think I’ve changed clothes in maybe five days.” Then I might start to feel like doing drugs would maybe be a sensible idea, and that right there is pretty much the clincher.

  But did I tell you that this thing is a bitch on memory? Probably, but it might be worth repeating. I mean, let’s say, I read an e-mail—“That was a fantastic dinner the other night. Thank you so much”—and I have absolutely no clue who wrote it, what we ate, or where we ate it. Anybody I’d met during that first intense blast of silent shock is gone. Everybody. In a way, you don’t tend to forget old memories so much as you lose the ability to generate new ones.

  What I’ve noticed recently is that ECT doesn’t remove entire chunks of memory so much as little bits of it. It’s sort of like, I don’t have too much trouble remembering events, but what I now lose are words, and sometimes they’re really basic ones, which can be pretty embarrassing, so I’m not really a big fan of that. And I’m not talking about obscure words here. These can be ones that you might really need a lot. You know, whereas before I might occasionally lose words that anybody might misplace—like “pastiche” or “schadenfreude” or “Luddite”—now I can even lose more practical words, and I lose them a lot. For example, “practical.” I can lose that word, and I’ll be fumbling, “Um, uh,” looking for it everywhere and I don’t even get close. So whoever I’m talking to might end up fumbling around with me, and chances are they’ll find the word a lot sooner than I will. And when they do, it turns out that I haven’t even gotten remotely near it. Sure, I know the feeling of the word and I might even be able to locate one with the same amount of letters or syllables, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to get near the fucker, because I’ve lost all the energy or enthusiasm for the hunt. It becomes not worth it. You know, how much rummaging around can you do to find this word you’re only going to use occasionally at best?

  The bottom line is that my vocabulary has taken a real hit, leaving me perhaps not that eloquent anymore. Then again, plenty of people probably thought I sounded more pretentious than eloquent anyway, right? Like a carhop who swallowed a dictionary. So see? There might be an upside to all this, like maybe now I’m more plainspoken. Or maybe I just sound more plainspoken (but I break just like a little, absentminded girl).

  But since I expect to have a bad memory now, I pay extra attention to things, as if there’s going to be a pop quiz about my life at the end of each day. What do I recall about what I did? So I try to make a point of remembering things while they’re happening.

  Of course my memory loss could as easily be caused by my drug intake over the decades that began with my late teens, or by aging, as by the electroconvulsive therapy (or a combination of all three—or as I’m fond of saying, LSD, AGE, & ECT). What I do know, though, is that my memory is a lot worse since the treatments. But, hey, it could just be that I’m remembering this whole thing wrong.

  Ultimately, though, who gives a shit why I can’t remember what I can’t remember when I feel so much better, right? I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been putting my purse in the refrigerator or anything. I mainly just forget people’s names, some of whom I’ve known most of my life. But this was something I was always capable of doing anyway, only now it’s worse. Hey, even if I can’t remember their names, I’m still mighty glad to see them! And if they appear to be in trouble I can always yell, “Hey! Look out!” And chances are, if they’re not deaf, they’ll move before that sinister clown stabs them or the piano falls on their head.

  Another thing is that I find myself forgetting movies and books, some of which I only recently enjoyed, which, if you think about it, is really not that bad, because now I can be entertained by them all over again. And grudges? How can you hold on to something you don’t remember having to begin with! All of which has the potential to make me a nicer, kinder, far less affected human being. Someone more equipped to live in the present, now that the past seems to be otherwise engaged.

  The prelude to all of this ECT business was to take pounds of medication, which aided me in my determined quest to gain tens of thousands of pounds of weight. So my medically induced mood improvement made me look fat and awful, which resulted in my getting depressed again. So who would you rather be with? Unplugged Carrie, fat and weeping torrents of medicated tears, or plugged-in Carrie, forgetful but fine-ish, and on the right side of plump? You choose. No, wait! It’s my life. I’ll choose. One could argue that, by having regular ECT treatments, I’m paying two—that’s right, two—electric bills. One for the house and one for the head.

  Ultimately, I think what all of these jolts of electricity are doing is helping to blast me to the end of any unhappiness that is not situational. I mean, really, what other explanation is there? You have to figure that there’s a limit to pretty much everything. With the possible exception of certain beyond-belief reality shows, how long can something go on, right?

  Wishful Shrinking

  You k
now the saying, “You’re your own worst enemy”? Well, thanks to the Internet, that’s no longer true. It turns out that total strangers can actually be meaner about you than you ever could amazingly be about yourself. Which is saying a huge amount with me, because I can really go to town hurting my own feelings. I know where they are.

  I Googled myself recently (without a lubricant, which I really don’t advise) and I came across this posting that said, “What ever happened to Carrie Fisher? She used to be so hot. Now she looks like Elton John.” Well, this actually did hurt my feelings—all seven of them—partly because I knew what this person meant. But as I’m fond of saying, “As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people sure don’t.”

  Yes, it’s true. All too true. I let myself go. And where did I go to? Where all fat, jowly, middle-aged women go—refrigerators and restaurants (both fine dining and drive-thru). To put it as simply as I possibly can and still be me: Wherever there was food I could be found lurking, enthusiastically eyeing the fried chicken and Chinese food and pasta. Not to mention the cupcakes and ice cream and pies, oh my!

  How could I have allowed this to happen? What was I thinking? More to the point, what was I eating? And having eaten it, why did I eat so much of it? And having eaten that much, why did I so assiduously avoid aerobics?

  I bravely mustered the long-overdue nerve to literally stand on a scale and while upright, albeit intimidated, confronted my actual unbelievable weight. Of late and for too long I had been making people—doctors, nurses, pimps, stylists, and such—keep my obese(ish) update from me for the better part of an otherwise pretty bad year. I’d been assuming that I was “only” forty pounds above my ideal weight, but it turns out that the actuality was tragically closer to sixty. Way closer. And when I say way, I mean weigh.