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Childhood Memories … Lessons from Europe

2010-02-18T10:00:00.006-05:00

"Dr. Beauregard, let's go."

It is dark, the middle of the night. There I stand, the frightened little girl in red-patent-leather clogs, hiding in the corner, clutching Chopin, her sonatas. Dad has had the scores sent from a music store in Manhattan. It is my Christmas present.

No way. Not this time. I am not leaving without Chopin. My dearest Chopin.

Shuffling. Scurrying. Hushed whispers. I sit down huddled in the corner while my quietly weeping mother grabs our things. Finally the guy in the gray slacks with the gun says we are outta there.

Now.

The guy in the grey slacks with the gun shuffles out past us -- three bleary-eyed kids, a weeping wife and my tortured, stressed-out father.

The Perfect Family.

We pile into the limo and speed into the night. There is a boat, I remember. We get on it. We land on Gibraltar. Oh, that's where we’d been.

I never knew where Dad had worked. I thought he'd been writing that novel. That's why when we lived on Crete -- Dad worked on Cypress. That's why when we lived on the Costa Del Sol -- Dad worked on Gibraltar. We always lived close by, he explained, but not anywhere that was dangerous.

Dad's best friend was called Alec Tumayan, a Frenchman, who was one of Nixon's finest interpreters. He spoke 13 languages. He also lived in the house right next door to our house at the beach. Alec and Michelin had four sons. They taught us French. Nick and I taught them to fight. I remember sitting on Dad's lap one day in June. It was chilly. He and Alec were talking about the President.

"God, Alec, what a mess," said my father one afternoon as he snuggled me in a big fuzzy towel. The ocean was turning rough. The weather was nasty. "What a mess..."

"Charlie," replied Alec, "You can't imagine."

I asked them how the President could be in a mess?

I mean after all – he was the President. They shrugged.

I realize now, they knew.

More and more men in suits poured into the villa.

"Where's your little girl?" said the guy with the gun.

"Jesus, Mary, where's RecoveryGirl?" Dad had his arms full of papers and floppy discs, looking around, looking around for me.

My mother emerged from the bedroom to answer. Her eyes swept the room: "Check the corners. I'm sure you'll find her hiding in one of them."

Suddenly the man with the gun spots me. He scoops me up into his arms and carries me down the stone steps to the limo. That's when I lost one of my red, patent-leather clogs. I watch it bounce off the steps, roll down the cliff, and sink into the sea. We are leaving southern Spain, you see. The guy with the gun tells me Dad has finished his job. We were moving to Greece, he says. It is sunny there.

Why, I ask do we always have to leave in the middle of the night? Why don’t’ the airplanes have any windows?

The man with the gun pauses. He stares into my frightened, hazel eyes. He gingerly places me onto the back seat of the limo. He kisses me on the forehead and tells me not to cry. Funny, I wasn't crying. This had happened before. That's why Nick and I never got to be friends with anyone -- we never knew when we'd have to leave.

This time, though, I was sad. I'd miss the Colonel. And I didn't even get a chance to say good-bye. I thought about him holding fourth at Cafe Pinata at noon the following day, devising a speech to scold me for being late, not knowing I wouldn't even show.

It was then that I began to cry. The guy in the gray slacks stuffed the gun under his belt and handed me a Kleenex.

* * * * *

“Running," I replied.

"Jesus, RecoveryGirl," he murmured. "We just got home."

I threw on some Gortex raingear and streaked out of the hotel in Kensington over to Hyde Park. I hit the path in front of the Serpentine Gallery and continued running around the lake. Six miles, everyday, in London's blustery, frigid weather. Walkman cranked. Dire Straits, “Brother's in Arms.”

I key into the room, hair frozen.

"Dude, you're nuts." Nick is up, sucking down a huge pot of Earl Gray tea. "You've got that shoot tomorrow. Clean up, girl."

"Oh shit. Forgot. Total, fucking drag." I climb into the shower. My hair melts.

The shoot.

About a week before, Nick and I had been walking down The King's Road. He was forever searching for that Perfect Leather Coat. Some guy walked up to me and asked me if I wanted to be a model. I said sure. What the hell. He gave me his card; I gave him my number. His boss called the next morning and said he wanted to see me -- that the kid had told him I was a magnificent green-eyed beauty.

Whatever.

That afternoon I tubed over to his office -- what a weird office. All glass, chrome, ebony. He was short and horny. Boring. Gag me. He told me I'd make him and myself a lot of money. Sure. That I should shoot with a photographer called Pierre Maille.

I didn't realize then that this guy was a heavyweight. Gavin, the short, horny agent, had told me his name but it didn't mean anything to me. All I needed, he said, was £60 for the film and processing. Everything else was free.

"Dad," I explained the whole situation to him that morning. "So will you front me the £60? I mean it looks like I can make some money and I think it'll be fun."

"RecoveryGirl, don't get involved with these people. They prey on young American girls -- and just take their money."

"Dad....Sixty pounds is no big deal."

"I don't want you participating in what seems like voyeuristic prostitution."

"Dad is such a jerk," I've returned to the room. Nick is on Earl Grey Pot of tea number 2.

"I'm starting to feel like a human being," he replied. “I hate those calls from Mom. She sounds miserable.”

"Let's head to the Tate."

"Cool." My brother grabbed my hand and we strolled to the Hyde Park tube stop, hand and hand, taking in the day.

We arrived at the Tate Gallery and headed straight to the Mark Rothko room – a chapel of sorts, the size of a small dining room, with one burgundy leather bench. The walls were painted a soothing lime-sorbet. Eight magnificent Rothkos, hung on the walls. Nick and I made it our church; our solace. That's where we went to write in our journals, draw, read. I remember the guard there, I think his name was Sonny. He'd let us sleep. He became our friend. It was a spiritual place.

Nick and I headed back to the hotel around eight o'clock to change. We booked over to The Wag, where we met two American students on semester abroad. They were from some shitty college outside of Los Angeles. Mark, I think his name was, had a huge Rolex. He told us he drove a red Porsche around Beverly Hills. Snore. Six vodka oranges later, we hit an all-night cafe where some guy who looked like he was from the Middle East and I snorted cocaine in the loo.

Nick and one of the American students were playing this game where they tried to open Grolsch beers with a sideways, slicing swipe -- flat hand, palm down -- dislodging the intricate steel closure on top of the bottle. Of course, the top of one of the beer bottles broke. Nick gauged his palm BigTime. Blood everywhere. We hopped a taxi and took him to a hospital. Socialized medicine. It seemed all right at the time. Around 5:00 a.m. we arrived back at the hotel.

"RecoveryGirl...why are you setting the alarm?" said my bandaged brother.

"Got that shoot tomorrow … er … today."

"Seriously."

Honk. Honk. Ouch. The alarm. "Hit it Dude," whined Nick.
.
It even hurt to shower. Twenty minutes later we were off to Pierre's studio. Both Nick and I barfed, midway -- just as the doors opened to The Whatever stop.

“Doors closing,” said the intercom robot.

"Whew," said Nick. "That was close."

Pierre dressed me; his lover made me up and styled my hair. Nick sat in the corner drinking Pimm's Cups and reading magazines, patiently turning pages with his, big bandaged hand. We shot inside. We shot outside. Until Pierre's lover had an inspiration.

The Olive Green Blazer.

"Put it on her with those olive earring, Pierre!" He whooped. "Fabulous! Pure Fabulosity!" They slicked my hair back. Pierre set up his camera. The lover came forward with Visine. "Gets the red out, darling," he said in a cloaked accent. "Cherie, what were you up to last night?"

"Ugh. Too hung to debrief."

"Sounds like it." Pierre sat me on the edge of the bathtub.

"Look at me like you love me,” he said, peering through the lens. Through the eye of the camera he saw my left profile. I tilted my head left, and sneaked a glance – sideways – giving Pierre what I thought was a blank stare.

“Cherie, you give good Vulnerable.”

My agent later termed it as the RecoveryGirl Beauregard Come Hither Look.

"She's got it," Pierre said to The Lover. "I am sure that you've got the job."
The short, horny agent loved the pics. Vidal Sassoon bought the photos – head shots for the salon in Sloane Square. Gavin was thrilled – selling testshots! I signed a contract. He booked me for two lingerie shoots. He gave me a £200 bonus. We went out to the Wag that night and blew most of it on drugs and booze.

Wow.

I'm a model.

That's different.

Tune in next Thursday

Introspection, Perspective and a Dream

2010-02-11T10:00:00.004-05:00

The room is swirling with a gaggle of women chatting about everything from broken relationships to broken fingernails. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead while a statuesque strawberry blond, somewhere in her mid-fifties, struggles with a dilapidated Mr. Coffee machine. I reserve two spots at the large square table in the middle of the room by placing the bouquet of flowers I’ve brought and two cards neatly in two spots at its corner.

I look up just as Nicolio Bare Fit-Flops in. She’s wearing a black lululemon micro-miniskirt that makes her look more leggy than usual. “Hello Snuggle!” she exclaims when she spots me, winding her way over to where I’ve reserved the two seats.

“How does it feel?” I ask. “Do you feel any different?” It’s the same question I’ve asked myself ten thousand times in the past year.

“Not really,” she replies. I am already laughing quietly to myself, uncertain if it is understatement or humility. I am beginning to understand that it’s a combination of both. My ultimate confidante proves to be a delicate soul. The answer is buried somewhere within her large, emerald-green eyes. They are bottomless pools of knowledge. They seem to contain the wisdom of lifetimes.

Nicolio and I have a history with the statuesque, strawberry blonde in her mid-fifties. She is my idol and perennial Life Coach and she is Nicolio’s counselor of sorts. She sports thirty-three years of sobriety. The one word I would use to describe her is “humility.” There is another word, just as accurate: “grace.” A manifestation of the most natural intelligence and a living embodiment of prayer and meditation. She is totally non-judgmental, she is like an instantaneous pause in one’s stream-of-consciousness, like a deep breath followed by a long exhalation.

The meeting comes to a close. The statuesque redhead is a living contradiction—a Boston Brahmin and blue-blood—but of Irish descent. I know that’s impossible, there is no such thing. She’s somehow emerged from Where the Wild Things Are. So we’ll just call her Penny McKenny. She picks up a coin from a box of hundreds of medallions—years ranging from one to twenty-five years. Then she blurts out, “And does Nikki have one year?”

Nicolio stands up. “Hi, I’m Nicolio Bare and I’m an alcoholic.” She blushes. She stares at the ground. Then she looks up, smiling. “This year has actually been pretty easy for me. I mean, after the first three months…” Her voice trails off until she’s practically muttering to herself. “What I mean is,” she says, glancing at Recovery Girl, “everything’s great.” I do everything I can not to laugh. “And I’ve never had best friends before.” I don’t want to ruin her moment. It is beautiful and I can hardly contain my tears.

Five days later, Nicolio and I are flying Spirit Air to the Caribbean. Nicolio’s mother has planned the trip. I’ve been up since 5 a.m. for last minute packing, emails to my staff, etcetera. After plopping down on my couch for a nap, I wake up two hours later, almost missing our flight. But I made it. We are on our way.

The flight, the ferry, and we are in sight of land. St. John. We clamber into a taxi and begin to wind our way up the hill to the villa. It’s called Hale Lani—a four-bedroom, four-bath jewel, nestled in a verdant hillside on a cliff called Maria Bluff.

This trip coincides with the celebration of Nicolio’s first year of sobriety. It has evolved into a way for the two of us to sit back and reflect on what has transpired over the past nine months. There is no way to describe it. It’s something of a rebirth. But all through these long months the baby remains in the womb. And now… breathing, screaming, the stunning reality of the open air. It’s all very new, strange and ill-conceived. Everything appears to be normal, but nothing will ever be the same.

It begins at the Sanctuary. Nic and I are perched on the opposite sides of twin beds, staring at each other, wondering how and why we were chosen to be roommates. I just emerged from Sunrise Detox. She’s been here maybe a week. And we are on the edge of the beds in a room the size of a college dorm—but there is nothing collegiate about it. We are not sizing each other up. We are too tired for that. All I remember is the kindness in her eyes. I stare into the eyes of Nicolio Bare and I trust her. I read her eyes. I believe.

Here we are, nine months later, a happy-ending version of Thelma and Louise. The two of us can look back on nine months for me – and one year for her – of sobriety. We have nine days in St. John’s to savor every second of it. And so it goes.

I sense my subconscious dumping streams of quiet information from my brain. My dreams are extremely vivid. “Dreams are the touchstones of our characters,” Henry David Thoreau said. I am speechless but dreams are pouring out of me. I try to sweep all of that data completely under the Persian carpet. That’s a lie. But with the unwinding of my schedule, my brain patterning, my anxiety, my Full Throttle… my subconscious is catching up with me again in dreams. And I refuse to begin to interpret them.

I have completely stopped sleeping. My friend Jason is so worried about it that he confiscates my Blackberry. He explains it as an “Intervention,” of sorts. That may sound ridiculous. But, I’ve been sleeping with my Blackberry just in case more data pours in. I have yet to arrive. So what can I say? The circles under my eyes deepen, the messages come and go, but sleep never arrives, and if it does, it never stays.

The dream is always the same. Night after night, every night, I go from sleeping with the enemy to the Torturous Recurring Nightmare—strolling through winding paths at a government insane asylum in northern Massachusetts.

I've been committed—against my will. It is my genuinely caring, concerned boyfriend. He has convinced me, or, he has convinced me that I've convinced him, that I am suicidal. The dream always begins with me walking the grounds of the campus. I keep pulling on the locked doors. I stagger about until a security guard shakes me and shakes me and shakes me. Finally, I wake up.

I wake up. I sit up in bed, panting, startled, shocked. I glance at the enemy sleeping right next to me. I slip out of bed, careful not to wake him, feeling relieved to know it was only a dream. But was it? I am terrified that I've dreamt it once again. Or have I? I'd streak off to work five minutes later—still half-dressed—terrified of the recurrent dream. What is it trying to communicate to me? I am terrified by the silence and the solitude of my life. I am petrified by my unrepentant loneliness.

I throw all these emotions out the window and walk into work. I excel at pretending everything is fine. I am a professional. Everything is normal. Everything is just fine.

“RECOVERYGIRL!!!” Nicolio is shaking me. I am awake. Startled. In a cold sweat. We stare into each other’s eyes. I realize that Nicolio knows nothing. But she knows everything. I don’t really know what she knows, I don’t care. Because I know she cares, deeply.

“Let’s go into town,” she says. “Let’s explore.”

We pack up our stuff and we go to the beach. Nic and I are both reading a book called “The 12-Step Buddhist: Enhance Recovery from Any Addiction,” by Darren Littlejohn. His is one of those teachings of no teaching. Perhaps it is a glimpse into the emptiness. Perhaps it is sheer foolishness. One of the first sentences catches my eyes: “It is said in 12-Step meetings that addicts affect at least ten people with their shenanigans.” That’s an understatement. But I can’t help but think to myself—the shenanigans of ex-addicts and their self-help proclamations affect tens of thousands. Who is worse? When will we ever know?

We decide to hit an AA meeting in town. We need a sobriety affirming Blitzkrieg. We find one at the Lutheran church with about twenty people in attendance. The first guy who shares shed enlightenment: “There is a lot of booze on this island.” No fucking shit.

Nicolio and I decide to go to a yoga class the next morning. We arrive at the location and it turns out the beach is about four-feet wide. We hustle down to the beach, dashing through the very short stretch of sand, the waves lapping at our feet, only to find that the yoga teacher is nowhere to be found. Nicolio’s reaction to situations like this is one of her great strengths. She just moves on. She is well versed at holding very few attachments. I, on the other hand, take everything personally. I inevitably think I have done something wrong. I must have the wrong address, the wrong time. No, it’s always more simple than that. It’s the Caribbean Island time. Yoga teacher never shows up—whatever, who cares, we’ll live to see another day.

And we do. The ashes of ignorance, attachment and ignorance are scattered across the sea. We laugh at it all. We splash in the salt water and roll about in the sand. Eventually we climb back into the jeep and travel across the island back to the villa to prepare for a new day, an unpredictable day that reminds us of the fragility of our lives, the lives that we reconstruct from the wind that blows from moment to moment.

Tune in next Thursday...

The Ordination: Part 2

2010-02-04T10:00:00.004-05:00

“What are you going to do?” asks Pierre.

I don’t hear the question. I’m not listening. Not because I don’t want to. I simply can’t hear the question no matter how many times he repeats it. It’s too painful.

I don’t want to answer because I have no answer. I’ve been living at the monastery for 28 days. I have to leave in the next forty-eight hours. There are many rules here and one of them is that no one here is allowed to stay more than one month.

“What are you going to do?” this time his voice is a little louder. “You can’t go home,” he continues, now squatting in the space directly in front of my tree stump.

“Home?” I feel the ire rising in my voice. “What home?”

“You can’t go back to LA.”

I light another cigarette, ignoring him.

He grabs the smoke from my lips and tosses it in the bushes. “He’ll find you. You’ll get back together with him,” he says with a sigh, staring at the ground. “You’ll relapse. Game over.” Wow, Pierre didn’t use sports’ metaphors – not his style.

I look into his troubled eyes. Pierre is a flight attendant with Air France. The last time he saw his boyfriend they were in Montreal and he had cooked up a magnificent turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. He remembers smoking a little pot, polishing off a bottle (or two?) of 1998 Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Then he vaguely remembers burning the turkey and not much after that except that the cops came to the house. He opened the door. He remembers laughing and giving them the finger. He exposed himself. He ended up in cuffs. Three weeks later he boarded a flight to Amsterdam. It was his one stop on the way to our monastery in Thailand. He still finds it a miracle that he didn’t get waylaid in that town known for its decadence. It’s amazing how the former pleasures of this life evaporate for the broken-hearted.

“Why did you come, Double-Oh?” his voice is meek, innocent, solemn.

“Why did I come?” I find myself raising my voice at the very question. “Why did I come?” I feel the old defiance, the arrogance, the wounded pride rising from deep within me.

Why am I taking it out on Pierre?

“Fear,” I mutter. My voice sounds hoarse, damaged, scorched from last night's platoon of Marlboros. “Pure unadulterated fear, I imagine. It was the endgame.

Pierre is silent. He stares into my eyes with the startled look of a deer in the headlights right before impact. He’s got beautiful, warm grey eyes. I immediately regret the harshness of my tone.

“Look,” he says, seeming to catch his breath. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ve spent the past month in these prison-style, hospital scrubs sitting on the dirt floor of this monastery, lost in Thailand and… you want to pretend that you’re okay.”

“Listen,” I’m fighting back tears again. Tears of self-doubt, shame, fear, tears of rage. “I’ll be fine.”

“Let me ask you something,” he says in that soft, irresistible voice. “Do you ever let anyone in?”

Why don’t I let anyone in?

I've never known quite how to answer that ubiquitous question: Where are you from? I guess I could say I'm from Delaware – that's where I was born – but I didn't spend much time there as a kid because we traveled so much. Our first odyssey around Europe began when I was six.

My father had a passion for travel, fueled, in some part, by his contempt for American culture. Both he and my mother were English literature professors. My parents had developed a weird arrogance for the way Americans educate children. I remember the glee they shared when yanking us out of school to cart us off for years at a time. I guess you could say we were educated at home, well before it was cool to be home-educated.

Dad takes slides. He loves his antique Nikon camera and invariably heckles us into posing. He cranks out carousal upon carousal of slides. The documentary of sorts begins in southern Spain on the Costa del Sol. I am six. Our family moves to a little fishing village called La Herradura, which translates as “the horseshoe.” We arrive at our new home. It’s a beautiful if somewhat dilapidated villa perched upon a cliff. It looks to me as if it could slide off the cliff at any time. We arrive and our greeted by our cook, Encarna, who has prepared American hamburgers. I am absolutely thrilled. So is my older sister, Sasha, and brother, Nick. My mother is mortified. We have arrived at our destination in Spain and our first meal will be… hamburgers? Dad boldly requests ketchup. This only fuels Mom’s disgust and unease. But we love it, and she can’t help, but smile as we devour the meal.

We are told that we won't be attending the local school. Dad has taken note of the barefoot girls of the village.

"The kids will turn into peasants,” he proclaims. The liberal English professor suddenly thinks he’s an aristocrat. Mom’s expression reveals the utter irony of this statement.

I don’t know what a peasant is. But barefoot looks good to me.

My brother and sister and I settle into our new lives. Days pass under the hot Mediterranean sun. We sit on the floor of the villa, diagramming sentences and solving equations in the yellowed pages of dog-eared notebooks. One day it dawns on us that our parents aren't really paying too much attention to us anymore. Nick and I decide to take off on a little adventure. We grab our knapsacks, stuffed with workbooks, snag a pack of Mom's cigarettes, a couple of Cokes, and race up the cliff to an abandoned lighthouse. High on the cliff, overlooking the ocean, we conduct a ceremonial burning. The next day, the workbooks go unmissed.

It is spring. Nick and I run wild. We scamper around town with paper bags full of dried dog shit, setting them on neighbor's stoops and lighting them on fire. We construct stone forts on the beach. We attempt to tie up the cook when she refuses to give us snacks. We toss Dad’s slippers into the sea. My poor sister, Sasha. She always seems to play the role of the martyr. She is responsible for trying to control us. We shout at her in unison: "Get off the cross; we need the wood." We often make her cry. In spite of our hideous behavior, Sasha dutifully reads aloud from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Sometimes she reads two to three hours a day—anything to get us to stay still. But nothing really works.

In the decade between my seventh and seventeenth birthdays, I live in more than sixty villages, towns and cities, on islands, in different countries, amongst people whose languages I’ve never spoken, whose alphabets I cannot comprehend.

In most of the places we go, my siblings and I discover that the local kids are puzzled by us at first. They take in our brand new Levi's, our bright red Converse. A few decide to befriend us, but most don’t like us very much.

It’s a scorching hot July afternoon, a few days after my seventh birthday. My mother sends me to town to purchase a bag of lemons. The sun is beating down relentlessly. It feels like 99 degrees in the shade.

I arrive at the village market. I’m bargaining with the old lady at the fruit stand. She is dressed in black. She is in mourning. I wonder how she can stand the stifling heat. We finally agree on a price and I pick up my sack of lemons and turn to walk home, and run straight into an old man. We are both startled. I take two steps back and take in the bewildered glare of this ancient man in a wrinkled white suit clutching a gnarled wooden cane to keep his balance. He looks to me like he must be a hundred years old. He stares down at me and a smile breaks out on his wizened face. Why, he asks me, should a little girl with such aristocratic cheekbones speak such peasant Spanish?

I am frozen. I have no idea how to respond.

He asks me if I am American, as if it isn’t obvious. Then he tells me I am giving Americans a bad name.

I’ve had enough. I spit on the ground, preparing to barge past this old fogy.

“Wait,” he says. He insists that we share a lemon soda at the café. I tell him he has aristocratic cheekbones, too.

His name is Colonel Stevenson. During the course of the next hour, sipping lemon sodas, we become fast friends. He takes me under his wing, teaching me about the impressionists and revolution, abstract expressionists and alcoholism, politics and taxes, methadone and Mozart. We'd walk the steps up the big cliff on the south side of town to his villa. His wife, the adorable Mrs. Stevenson, teaches me the art of tea. I learn about watercress and clotted cream. She looks me over in my brother's hand-me-down blue-jeans, flannel patches on the knees, and laughs the most elegant laugh I’ve ever heard. The Stevenson’s take it upon themselves to make me a lady. They have the most ornate grand piano in the living room of their villa. We pass the afternoon playing piano.

Everyday at noon, I slip on my red-patent-leather clogs and clonk down the stone steps from our villa onto the beach. I wander into town. The Colonel and I meet at Cafe Pinata and sip expensive brandy. He teaches me to play poker. I’m a natural. By my seventh birthday, I can whip his ass at five-card draw. We play for pesetas. He fronts me a twenty and rarely wins it back.

The Colonel's wife occasionally walks down the cliff-side steps to join us. She is the best ballerina who ever lived, according to the Colonel. Sometimes he asks her to prove it. She extends her arm straight out, horizontal to the floor, for more than ten minutes at a time. Stone still, not even a shudder, at age seventy-one.

"She's still got the old touch," the Colonel smiles. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out what looks like an old photograph of a bronze statue outside of the Ballet Conservatory in London. It looks like a bronzed Degas. As it turns out, the ballerina in the photo is Mrs. Stevenson.

So here we are—the Colonel and the Kid at Cafe Pinata. The proprietor emerges one day to utter wry commentary. He says we look like two soldiers plotting to overthrow the government. We shout for more brandy and lemonades. We catch each other cheating and laugh until we get cramps. I start washing my face and wearing dresses. His arthritis slowly goes away.

Every evening, I arrive home at dusk. No one ever asks where I've been and I offer no explanations.

Until one day my father joins a friend—an expressionist painter called Roland—for a coffee at Cafe Pinata. I glance up to see my father wave me over. I make pleasantries to Roland. Dad and I leave. We take the beach route instead of the road. As we step into the sand, he flies into a rage.

“Eight years old and drinking brandy?” he shouts, his face turning as red as a boiled lobster. “Eight years old and gambling? Is this what you’ve been up to everyday day for the past 18 months?”

Where’ve you been? I think to myself. I stand frozen at the edge of the sea.

I have no idea that playing cards is gambling. No one seemed surprised when I order the same lemon soda that the Colonel drank. I’m in shock because I’m sure I’ve done nothing wrong.

My father's ice-blue eyes are filled with rage. I can’t bear to look at him. I glance off into the distance. A few clouds are streaked with yellow, red, orange, purple hues like an electric tapestry woven in the sky. The sun is a giant, bright-orange burning disc sinking into the ocean. I can’t see anything, I can’t hear anymore, but I know that as long as I am among the living, I will never forget that sunset.

“RecoveryGirl,” It’s Prah Sho, he looks angry, but not really. “The Abbot wants to see you … now.”

He breaks my trance. I’m ripped from the images of my childhood. I stand up and nearly grab the hand of my friend the Special Ops soldier – forgetting that we cannot touch the monks. No one can. Or, no woman can.

We walk up the hill to the Abbots home.

Prah Sho and the Abbott begin speaking. The Abbot stares at me. Then Prah Sho stares at me.

“RecoveryGirl, the Abott says you can stay,” He says with a big, bettlenut-red grin. “He’ll even let you keep you’re hair.”

“I can stay?”

“You’ll ordain as a Buddhist nun.”

The Ordination: Part 1

2010-01-29T08:31:00.001-05:00

It’s still pitch black after Broom Meditation. I toss the bamboo broom into the dirty, rubber galvanized bucket and flop down on my tree stump for a quick smoke.

The dawn is breaking and the committee in my head is still in hot debate about whether or not I made the right decision to venture fifteen thousand kilometers around the world to try to find peace and solitude and serenity.

The monotony of my life here at the monastery is good for me. This much I know. The daily round of sweeping, chanting, singing and the sound of the bells somehow works to settle my mind and still my thoughts. Even the vomiting ritual plays an important role. It freezes the chatter of my thoughts, stops me from telling myself the endless stories to make up for the vacuum of real information. There is no live news feed from the outer world. We are pilgrims of the void.

I still don't really know what's happened. I do, but I don't. One morning I wake up at this monastery in Thailand, trying to remember why I'm here. At the same time, I know exactly why I'm here.

“RecoveryGirl.” It’s Pierre calling me from behind the swimming pool. Ah, the swimming pool. It has become an inside joke because it is not a swimming pool at all, it's actually a rectangular hole in the ground that resembles a swamp, Bulgarian bath, and frog pond rolled into one. I can find no peace. My new best friend Pierre knows it.

There is a kind of Dr. Zhivago feel to it all. It could be a scene on some bizarre MTV reality show with a variety of United Nations ambassadors – all of whom are smoking crack – gathering to debate my future. Actually there is something distinctly Soviet about what I have dubbed The Yard at the monastery. The walls are about ten feet tall – covered in a kind of septic green mold, topped with a thick, twisting roll of barbed wire fence. The cracks in the concrete remind me of when I was a little kid – staring at the purple, bulging veins in my old Aunt Mary’s legs.

I sit down on top of my usual tree stump. And I recall. It’s the mid-nineties in New York City. I have just entered graduate school to study writing. At the time, I think going back to school will fix me. I am like a fairy-tale Rapunzel—beautiful, glamorous, wild, hysterical, but with a bizarre, Piccassoesque twist. The strange irony that has ruled my life is becoming intolerable: greater professional success has brought me nothing but deeper personal failure.

My solution is to become a recluse. My answering machine goes from twenty-five messages a day to one or two. I begin to think of my apartment on 101st and Broadway as a magical kingdom. I am Rapunzel. I let my hair down from the window, watching the addicts and prostitutes walk in and out of the revolving door at the single room occupancy hotel across the street. In and out they go, sliding through the perpetually revolving door, all night long. I gaze down at them from on high, my world is separate but not dissimilar to theirs—more instinctive than cerebral, more physical and visual than verbal. No words can describe my sense of free-fall. Everything seems futile. But it doesn’t bother me. I shut off the phone.

But the act of writing itself strips me of my armor. The armor I had devised of cynicism, shame, money, failed relationships. I create characters, surround myself with them. I write about them. I change their clothes, swap genders, transform their identities. I worship those who keep no distance between their lives and their work.

It is something that is said about many artists, but is rarely true. I become a character in these tales—the Picassoesque Rapunzel—starving myself, transforming myself, abusing myself, pushing myself to the brink. I begin to suffer a constant psychic pain. I can’t tell if it’s real or imagined, but it hurts. It hurts all over. I find it necessary to medicate.

I begin to believe I am too chemically imbalanced to feel safe without drugs. I am left with few protective devices or defenses. I become obsessed with Freida Kahlo. Her work is like surgery without anesthesia, emerging from her need to create art to survive. It is beautiful and terrible all at once. My world has turned surreal.

I wake up from my reverie. I find myself back in The Yard, the high concrete walls on all sides, topped with crude, twisted barbed wire. I look over at Pierre. There are tears in his eyes. My eyes are dry now. I am ready to fight. I am taking my life back. Broom Meditation is over for today, you see.

After about a week at the monastery, I am informed that if I stay “on point” I will be offered the privilege of serving breakfast to the monks. This is considered a great honor, and I know now that I must be making progress. To receive such a sign, a symbolic gesture, has a huge impact – on me anyway.

I’m no longer drowning, you see. I’m no longer merely treading water. I’m actually learning to swim. I’ve caught the flow of the current.

Pierre meets me at my tree stump. The light is just breaking across the land with the familiar rosy-orange hues. The sunrise over Thailand is unforgettable, a crystal mirror of dappled sunlight bursting over the distant hills. For me, even today, it signifies rebirth.

Pierre and I walk up to the temple where the monks and the nuns gather each morning to eat breakfast. It isn’t just breakfast. This is the Sala. It’s the only meal of the day. Each day at seven in the morning, we are not only appointed to serve the living, we also are tapped to serve the dead.

I realize this on the very first morning when I am instructed to set out four dishes in front of the giant gold statue of the Buddha. One dish is offered to the dead abbot, another to the dead aunt of the abbot, and the final two to each brother of the abbot who have passed away. They are served the most succulent dishes – the papaya, the sardines, the Twinkies and the rarely imported Camembert.

Why do the dead people get all the best food?

I have never seen such efficiency. The kitchens are buzzing with activity beginning at 4 a.m. The food is transported up the dirt path to the monastery by villagers pushing wheelbarrows, one after another. It arrives in gigantic steel pots and cauldrons and rickety plastic trays that I remember seeing glasses stacked in at University. But there were no Preppies here, not an Ivey Leaguer in sight.

I realize that I can’t squat – this is a disadvantage. There are no tables or chairs. Everything is arranged on the floor, so Pierre and I have to learn to squat. It doesn’t come naturally, but I’m a quick learner.

We scurry about with a crew of Thai comrades. We are from opposite ends of the earth, but we all wear identical uniforms. We put together elaborate plates of fruit, chicken, beef, fish and mounds of rice and noodles to sustain the monks and the nuns through their work day.

I feel a sense of pride in serving, to serve for no other reason but to be of service to others. I glance up at Pierre and see his calm smile. We lay out one hundred twenty-four veritable banquets for all the monks and nuns at the monastery. It is their only meal of the day.

Each morning, as we serve the monks and nuns, the work seems easier and my heart grows lighter. One morning it dawns on me. True liberation is to cherish others more than self. That’s the beauty of service, the heart of the purest love.

The dawn has broken. Pierre and I are kaput with our charge for the morning. We struggle back up the hill carrying small plastic bags filled with the leftovers of the morning. As we push through the iron gates of the monastery Pierre turns to me and asks how we should eat our scraps. We have a choice of about five stone tables surrounded by a buzzing toxic web of flies. We choose our usual – the table to the left with the slate, pewter and eggshell-colored cat, lounging atop.

Hot sauce is the answer. Pierre is convinced. We have to do something, you see, to make the food taste like something. Hot sauce for me, however, is a non-starter. I still have a belly riddled by the perils of detox. I eat in bland. I chew a lot. And I eat it slowly.

I turn to Pierre and sigh, tears no longer welling in my eyes. He looks up. “You’re a perfectionist, I see,” he says, chuckling.

“The highest expression of love is to accept without exception,” I retort.

“If only it were that easy,” he continues.

I have so much to learn.

Several spiritual traditions see kindness and altruism as the key to salvation or liberation. For instance, here is how the Buddha lists the benefits of kindness. Sharon Salzberg quotes him in her beautiful book Lovingkindness. If you are kind:

You will sleep easily.
You will wake easily.
You will have pleasant dreams.
People will love you.
Devas (celestial beings) and animals will love you.
Devas will protect you.
External Dangers (poisons, weapons, and fire) will not harm you.
Your face will be radiant.
Your mind will be serene.
You will die unconfused.
You will be reborn in happy realms.

The Vomit Cure: Part 2

2010-01-21T10:00:00.003-05:00

Clang.

The deafening bell sounds at 4:30 in the morning and we roll off our bunker-style mats into the darkness. Stiff, sleepy souls pour through various doors out into the yard grabbing brooms to begin sweeping the monastery. I envision how the aerial shot would look – a black and white photo of an army of ants pouring through a tiny hole in a dune spreading out to tackle a plot of sand.

While the monks stroll about in their dark brown colored robes tied neatly with cocoa-colored sashes we blearily sweep – identically clad in our burgundy-issue tunics and scrubs. Some of us lean heavily on our brooms made of sorghum grass, bamboo and wood while a chosen few carry large teal hand-woven baskets made to hold the leaves.

The only sounds are of the bamboo brooms hitting the stones and dirt and the rat-tat-tat of the Thai monks and a few Westerners’ complaints. It’s pitch black apart from the red ash at the end of the hundreds of cigarettes dotting the landscape of the monastery until the temples begin to emerge beneath a magnificent lavender pink and orange sunrise. It’s time for Broom Meditation, or so we dub it.

“Miss 007!” barks a Herculean Dutch monk with a round, pale face and large puffy ankles with dirty feet breaking my trance. “You must sweep.”

I raise my head and grab the cigarette dangling from my mouth, toss it into the dirt and stamp it out with my flip flop. He looks startled to see me crying. There is nothing surprising to me about my crying. The tears have been flowing on and off ever since my arrival. There is nothing unusual about this monk enforcing the rules of the monastery. What is shocking is that this foreboding hulk of a monk – who looks as though he may have once been either a drug lord or a marine – is devastated that I am crying. He steps forward, towering over me even as he bows his head.

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” he says softly, in a deep, thick European accent. “But I must ask you to sweep.” He stands up, back straight, military-style. He’s got to be about six-eight, three hundred pounds.

“I’m sorry Prah Sho,” I mutter, faking a smile – American style. “I received some contracts in the fax yesterday… it’s over with… these attachments I had had back home.” My voice trails off into the darkness.

“Miss 007…” he begins, looking at me in disbelief. His eyes are soft and compassionate. I suddenly realize that this intimidating man who towers over me like a mountain is perhaps nothing more than a gentle giant. “You hear about...this ending...this...over the facsimile?”

Pra Sho can barely hide his incredulity and yet there is humor in his eyes. “Miss 007, you do not want this type of…” he paused, searching for the right word. “Attachment,” he smiles, satisfied upon finding it. “Attachment… you are better off without any attachment like this, anyway.” He spins around, adjusting the swath of material on the shoulder of his robe, sticks a beetlenut between his cheek and gum and strides off across the courtyard.

Beetlenuts. He chews beetlenuts. That's why his lips are always so red. He isn't wearing lipstick after all.

It's late in the afternoon. I am perched in a chair on the veranda, staring at the pigs running around in the courtyard. Someone is calling my name. Impossible. I'm lost in Thailand. No one I know knows that I'm here. And no one here knows my name.

I look up and he's standing before me, smiling. It's Prah Sho.

"Miss 007, I have something for you,” he says, handing me a book. “I want you to read this." He turns abruptly and rushes off to his other duties.

I later find out that this strange monk was once a soldier. U.N. special forces in Lebanon, 1982. His stride is so wide it could cover twenty yards in three seconds. He's gone before I can open my mouth to speak.

I glance down at the book in my hands. "Awakening to the Sacred." Lama Surya Das. I flip through the first page or two, read the first passage that catches my eye. It's a quote from Lao-tzu:

Without going out of my door
I can know all things on earth,
Without looking out of my window
I can know the ways of heaven.

I run my hand over the page and read it again. Now I know I can do this. I can make this happen.

Clang.

I look up. Everyone is scurrying about. When I hear the bell, I know it’s time to do something different. That’s the thing about the bell. Whatever I am doing at that moment – it’s time to stop doing it and to do something different. It’s a metaphor. I get it. 2 o’clock.

The yard has burst into color. Instead of the monochromatic muddy tones of monks' robes and grays of concrete slab and slate the scene has exploded into a kaleidoscope of reds, blues, yellows, greens and purples … the checkered hues of woven sarongs. The patients have changed out of their burgundy best. It is time for the medicinal steam bath.

The first thing we do is line up – single file – and count off, in Thai. Well, after the first few times of not knowing how to say my number in Thai and holding up the entire process – creating massive confusion – I come up with a strategy. I memorize the letter six in Thai – pronounced “HOK” – and jockey for position. I am always sixth in line. So when it is my turn I just yell out as loud as I can, “HOK!” The others all begin to giggle. It seems to work.

This time, as we wander along the dirt path like an earthworm winding its way through the grass, I catch sight of a dark-haired, wire-bespeckled gentleman of a slight build in his late thirties clutching a copy of two books … one, I knew quite well, “The Alchemist,” by Paul Coelho. It’s as much of an allegory as a novel that follows the journey of an Andalusian shepherd boy. Some say it has a trivial storyline – but it is an enchanting masterpiece that enriched my mind and my soul – just what I needed at the time. I was intrigued by the man with the glasses who looked slightly European with the two books and the fancy soaps from a spa with French writing on the label.

What the hell was he doing here?

A few minutes later we are standing in front of a giant rubber tub about thirty feet around. It is filled with water from a hose with smaller pails floating on top. We pick up the buckets and pour water over our heads from this small swimming pool of sorts, shivering in the humid heat. Bucket after bucket of ice-cold rain water until we are soaked to the bone. Next, we enter the medicinal, herbal steam bath. We spend the next twenty to thirty minutes popping in and out of these small, hand-built saunas for our treatment. Treatment, I find myself thinking. Some kind of treatment.

I decide to meet the man with the “The Alchemist” under his arm. His name is Pierre. He wants to be friends with me, too. He says he saw me reading Lama Surya Das’ “Awakening to the Sacred.” He's read the author's first book: “Awakening the Buddha Within.” We strike up a conversation and I am relieved to discover that Pierre is gay, so we don't have to contend with all the complications of the girl meets boy vibe, which is generally a pain in the ass. Not that either of us are looking our best at the moment anyway. We shake hands, and kiss cheek to cheek. We promptly decide to be best friends for life.

Clang.

Time to vomit. They call it The Vomit Ceremony. Pierre has been here much longer than I have, so he has the privilege to be one of the on-lookers. I, unfortunately, am a participant. I carefully lay down my flip flops in front of a long open, drain. I kneel down on them so I don’t scratch my knees. I am kneeling next to seven other new arrivals. I hold out my hands as if to receive communion. Instead, I receive a shot glass from the medicine man.

It looks like distilled Coca-Cola, a bitter potion consisting of one hundred and eight different seeds, leaves and tree bark. The secret recipe is said to come from the visionary sister of the abbot of the monastery in a dream in 1960. It tastes like a cocktail of sewer water soaked in cigarette butts. I am told that the idea is to hold the brew down for as long as I can muster in order to allow the herbs to cleanse the toxins from my body. Then I am to grab the pail next to me and dip it into the bucket beside me and drink as many pails of water from the bucket as I possibly can until my stomach can hold no more.

I look down and my stomach is so full of water I look pregnant. I look up at Pierre. He is standing with the others who have already experienced this ritual a thousand times. He nods his head and quietly shakes it up and down and mouths: yes.

I stick two fingers down my throat as the monks have instructed me to do. I begin to projectile vomit. Streams of dark brown liquid spurt from the bottom of my belly, burning the back of my throat, pouring out of me until nothing is left.

When I finally look up, vomit still dripping from my lower lip, I can speak but I mouth to Pierre:
“Do I have to do this again tomorrow?”

He nods his head again. Yes.

Tune in next Thursday...

The Vomit Cure: Part 1

2010-01-14T10:00:00.008-05:00

I remember the dense dust and the pungent smells, the stray dogs and the ramshackle huts.

I heard the sounds of the rat-tat-tat of the young Thai Junior Monks as they built a gigantic concrete stone and iron structure with no visible architectural plans.

I later learned that the extraordinary, beautiful building is titled the “Sacca” Temple – where drug addicts take a vow to never, ever imbibe again.

Breathe. I recall turning over my passport, my credit cards, my cash and my clothes.

Inhale. Because I looked up – and out – of the iron bars, I found comfort in what is pictured through the lock down. Comfort?

It is a melding kaleidoscope of sorts – the backdrop of dull grays, beiges, and acid greens. The dirt, food, water and soot – visuals of subsistence life in the Third World. This all speckled by bright orange dots, the hue of a Buddhist monk's robe – a pink dot (perhaps an orchid?) – all highlighting the landscape and transforming a dull, matte still life into a bustling film, a cinema verité.

This is not Touristy Thailand, baby. This is the Third World, and I am here, and I am going to make the best of it – simply because that is who I am. That is what makes the RecoveryGirl007 shtick...stick.

I am going to survive, not because I am special, you see. Not because I am somehow picked out – sorted. Trust me, I know many of my limitations. But one of my big strengths is, I know when I have to “Pull Up.”

And it is time. It's funny. It is one of the phrases that Bianca laughs at so hard today, but I am really, really good at “Pulling Up.” And today, every time I say the phrase, we both laugh.

Inhale. I stared into the strong, dancing, icy blue eyes of Prah Halo, the Swiss monk at the monastery in Thailand, and trusting – for the first time in a long time, really trusting – to have an exquisite bucket of unique indescribable circumstances about … yes, my life.

Exhale.

So I completed the necessary paperwork with Prah Halo – I cannot really remember much – but I do recall being handed a burgundy, hospital scrubs-style jumpsuit with bright yellow lettering emblazoned on the back. I later learned that the phrase meant “Warrior” or was it “Winner” in English – that HAD to be a clue.

How did I get here?

There was the phone call. There was the betrayal. And all I remember feeling was that I had to get out of L.A. I had to leave, you see. It was over. I had become that omniscient narrator – the one hovering above the chessboard – watching the King and the Queen and the Knights and the pawns and well...me. And I was dying.

I had to run. Bianca offered up the monastery in Thailand, and I bit. I bit hard because I wanted to get out. And this monastery seemed to me to be a very, very faraway place for the very far gone, and I was very, very far gone. You see.

We were locked in at 9 p.m. at night for our safety, and at 4:30 am the door lock popped so we could emerge and sweep the entire monastery. We did everything on a bell – a loud, long bell that rang periodically throughout the day.

There were moments when it seems so surreal. Twice a day we were expected, no it was demanded, that we stand at attention in front of this gigantic statue of the King of Thailand – shrouded only by an equally enormous gold statue of Buddha – and then we would sing standing erect and sing the National Anthem. In Thai. For some reason, as the one of very few Western, English speaking women at the monastery – I somehow fit in.

I did not know, you see, that I would be sleeping in a room the size of my kitchen with 11 other Thai and perhaps one or two other Western women on a two adjacent rows of concrete with thin mattresses lined up on top. Locked in at night at 9 o’clock sharp to protect us from the outside world – apart from the concrete area in the back where we could smoke. There was barbed wire strung along top of the wall – which I found amusing since at any given moment at any given time during any given day we could have just walked out of two large cast iron gates.

But, remember, with no cash, no clothes, no credit cards, and yes, no passport. Those items were safely locked in the safe in the hut in the front at the entrance of the monastery.

I did not know that at 4:30 am a very loud bell would sound and we would be expected to roll out of our bunker-style living and pick up a broom and start sweeping the monastery until the sun had risen.

I didn't know that at 4:15 in the afternoon another very loud bell would sound, and we would be expected to participate for five days straight in a now very well-choreographed ceremony – where we would kneel and side-by-side in front of a long open drain – drink a quick shot of the herbal “medicine” and then chug large quantities of water and vomit … all this accompanied by drums and chanting. Yes, we'd drink buckets of water before sticking our fingers down our throats … then puke.

So why was I here?

I had arrived at a Buddhist monastery set against a Thai landscape that I thought would look like one of those idyllic watercolors on a postcard … from one of those operettas – yes – say, Gilbert and Sullivan. Looming statues rising out of the foliage like fevered dreams. Packs of stray dogs snarling at improperly dressed strangers – those not clad in the russet monks' robes or burgundy prisoner jumpsuits worn by the drug abusers who are staying on the sacred land. Oh! That would be me.

We were and are the proverbial lost souls. I just couldn't believe that Bianca had sent me to mull about the hundreds of long-term speed freaks, pill poppers, crack addicts, junkies, glue-sniffers and alcoholics at this Buddhist way station in central Thailand. I was RecoveryGirl007. Well, not yet, but this was beyond comprehension.

I asked Prah Halo: The obvious question. Did anyone come? Well, apparently a rock star did. The monastery's vomit cure proved too rigid for the guitarist Pete Doherty, the front man of the Libertines punk thrash band.

Tune in next Thursday for the next installment …

“RecoveryGirl007? … We’ve been expecting you.”

2010-01-07T10:00:00.002-05:00

I had arrived at the Monastery in Thailand two days prior. Fifteen thousand kilometers away from my home – and all the trappings of – Los Angeles. I now found myself crouched on a vast, cool, marble floor of an echoing, cavernous temple. I was alone and staring into a sea of chanting bald monks.

The near motionless men swathed in billowing, coffee-colored robes droned through the notes, harmonies and disharmonies from yellowing chanting books lain carefully in their laps, legs crossed. Hundreds of these men of faith were all creating an indescribable sound reverberating through the walls of the temple and the hills and mountains surrounding me. As the music began to fill my ears, my body and subsequently my soul the fresh wounds of loneliness began to ebb – slightly.

How did I get here?

In one of the last conversations I had before boarding the 8 p.m. flight from LAX to Singapore on November 12, 2008 was with my soul mate Bianca when she grabbed the sides of my face and said rather pointedly: “RecoveryGirl, you have completely lost the plot of your life.” I remember the tears pouring down my puffy, prematurely-aged face realizing that I had. Not realizing that I had but knowing that I had – seeing, feeling, touching, tasting all of it, the loss … The Works. I had completely lost the plot and it hurt like hell and I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Anxiety became the battlefield which reason and judgment continually waged war against my passions and desires. On the 36-hour journey to the Monastery - LAX, Singapore, Bangkok, Praputabat – I began to read a book that had been resting on my bedside table in Venice for, I don’t know, nine months?

Yes, I cracked open Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, the leading lecturer and writer in North America who had lived as a monk in a Catholic religious order for twelve years and had earned degrees in theology, musicology, and philosophy and had written this book that I couldn’t seem to put down after pouring over and over and over again the poem on the opening page of Chapter 1:

I am certain of nothing but the
holiness of the Heart’s affections and the
truth of the Imagination.– John Keats

I read "Care of the Soul" cover to cover and what I can say about it is that it changed the way I thought before I got to my final destination. Well, what I thought was my final destination. The first line of the introduction hit me smack in the center of my wildly neglected, emaciated, atrophied spiritual heart:

The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is “loss of soul.” When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence and loss of meaning.

The loss of meaning. That must be what Bianca was referring to – The Loss of Meaning.

You see I thought I was going to bring meaning to my life through obtaining or feeling pleasure. Somewhere above Hawaii, I stumbled upon Kahlil Gibran’s musings on the subject in his most powerful and mystical work, "The Phrophet:"

“And now you ask in your heart: ‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?’ Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, but it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is the fountain of life, and to the flower a bee is the messenger of love, and to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.”

Pleasure? Ecstasy. Those two feelings were so far from my cognizance that having no idea what was on the other side of the world at the Monastery in Thailand. Let’s just say that ambiguity and the mystery were a gift.

Back in Los Angeles I had become such a workaholic – a robot – in my dichotomized life marked by a sort of frantic success and self-pitying seclusion. I began to worship those who kept no distance between their lives and their work. It is something that is said about many artists and writers, but I have come to believe is rarely true. Although it became something I so desperately wanted to believe, you see, because believing that story – those stories we tell ourselves – became necessarily to justify my own self-destruction.

I began to think I suffered a constant psychic pain, which I found necessary to hide. It was almost as if I was watching myself from the standpoint of being the omniscient narrator in a play about me. So there I was … floating above the chessboard … watching the Kings, Queens, Knights, Pawns … moving about the board … and I could see them all … all the pieces … and I could study them move about … and observe “me” … interacting with them, one by one… but I could no longer hear the dialogue. I couldn’t hear anyone speak, you see. I had completely lost my ability to listen. I had rendered myself deaf and obsolete.

I was out totally of the game.

About a day and a half after boarding that flight in Los Angeles I gingerly stepped out of a black Mercedes sedan onto a dirt path in front of a modest, unmarked bamboo hut. A tall man in his fifties in a russet robe with dancing blue eyes and a quiet, giggling smile stood in front of the shack holding one of those school house clip boards from the late 70s.

“Madam, we’ve been expecting you. Welcome to the Monastery. My name is Prah Halo.”

I stared into the hot sun, steadying myself in my black, suede Gucci loafers and literally threw up – just a little.

“Excuse me, I said.” Mustering up as much grandiosity as I could garner. “Excuse me, Mr. Halo,” I replied, again, sheepishly, yet – in vain – attempting a adjustment of my dignity. Whatever was left.

“No worries,” he said in a heavy Swiss accent. “It happens all the time. Was it the stray dogs? There are a lot of them,” he added politely, squinting into my bloodshot eyes.

“No, I think the heat – or maybe the dust.” I added, desperately trying to be polite, as well. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it might have been the 450 Vodka Oranges.

“Ha!” Prah Halo chortled in a quick outburst. This is the man, the monk with whom I grew the closest. He was my teacher, advocate, father figure, idol and friend for the 60 days I lived at the Monastery. He was responsible for convincing the five High Monks to allow me to ordain as a Buddhist nun after thirty days – for thirty days. I had never met a man like Prah Halo; I believe I never will.

He turned and rat-tat-tatted some Thai to one of the Junior Monks to take my bag and then held out his hand to guide me into the office. “The last time a beautiful woman from Los Angeles stepped out of a black Mercedes here at the Monastery – my goodness she looked so much like you, Miss …” his voice trailed off, as if he had forgotten my name. Perhaps he really had. I thought of myself as so grand in those days – the thought was unimaginable to me. That he had forgotten my name. Wasn’t it written on the clipboard?

“This beautiful blond,” he continued. “She instantly threw up her hands … in these gigantic dark sunglasses … and said … ‘This place is not for me!’ … and she immediately got back into her Mercedes and sped back up to Bangkok!” His ice blue eyes danced with laughter as his belly jiggled while his words sputtered between chuckles. “I think her name was Marilyn Monroe … a movie starlet of sorts.”

We smiled a conspiratorial smile. The kind of wise-old-monk-meets-young-ingénue kind of conspiratorial kind of smile. “I think you’ll make it a bit longer, Miss ….”

“Just call me RecoveryGirl007 …” …. I winked.

And he winked too.

Tune in next Thursday for the next installment …

The Absence of Motive

2009-12-31T10:00:00.003-05:00

The Absence of Motive. I had heard a man share about that exact phrase tonight at The Church of the Palms and I couldn’t stop opining – in my mind and otherwise – upon it: The Absence of Motive.

This leathery, spray-tanned investment banker in his fifties was reminiscing about hooking and hurling clients on Wall Street and, ultimately … he was purring and postulating about his pure selfishness.

What was shocking and compelling – was that this guy – this surprisingly, increasingly sympathetic Ken Doll-type – had never really remembered doing anything for another human being without just that: Motive.Motive to get something back. Motive to reap … Something on the Back-End.

Had I always been that person? Or had I become that person after 9/11? I can’t really remember anything after that day – for at least six months anyway – and the Employee Assistance Program People wouldn’t really tell me much and I could never get my hands on the file. Not that I really told them the truth about how I felt – if I had really known how i'd felt anyway.

That's when I chose to give up. That's when I decided to believe the lie. I fixed in my mind that 9/11 was going to be the pivotal point in my life. Everything was fantastic before the attacks and that my life would be destroyed after the attacks. That's when I became super frantic. I became that girl in such a trampling, frantic acquiring rush who didn't give a rat's ass about anyone. That girl constantly looking to garner something on The Back End.

Now cringing at the thought, I whipped my yellow jeep Wrangler in to a spot directly behind Joan of Arc and peeked left to see Nicolio slide her SUV in right next to me. She was wearing a big, floppy terry cloth Juicy hat to protect her gorgeous, jet-black lengthy locks from the rain.

“Hi Muffin!” She mouthed through the glass. We grabbed our umbrellas, slid out of our jeeps and proceeded to file up towards the church in the rain – closely resembling the animals boarding Noah’s Arc two by two.

Nicolio split off to hit the loo before the meeting started. I told her I'd arrange seats and went on in. The room was loud and the crowd boisterous. I scanned the pack and just before I grabbed two seats in the second row I caught sight of Lacey. She was leaning - slightly slouched - against the back wall. There she was, that misanthrope, I giggled, out loud. What did she think someone was going to sneak up behind her and abduct her? I smiled at the thought.

I never got the feeling Lacey was long on going to lots and lots meetings anymore, but she went. She definitely showed up. Hey, she had double-digit clean time – she was one of those people who got sober when she was a teenager – and never really looked back.

God, I thought, I love that girl. She always makes me smile – totally unique. And Lacey is beautiful – the physique of a ballet-style, kick-boxer with jet black spiky hair, an elegant smattering of tattoos, and gigantic ink pools for eyes. She exuded a kind of intensity. People didn’t trifle with Lacey. There was just no point. I remember she told me she’d been studying martial arts and tonight she was sporting what the Grand Masters often call the Inner Smile. She seemed amused and peaceful.

Nicolio bounced into the seat next to me spilling her Diet Coke on the sleeve of her white lululemon jacket. “Awwww, Snuggle.” I know. I know. It was one of those things that Nicolio struggled with and it really, really bummed her out, but to the rest of us it was just one of those things that made her so cute. She whipped out her Tide Stick and went to work on the stain.

The meeting was about to start. The room quickly quieted down as the young lady at the podium began the obligatory, introductory readings, and then introduced the night’s speaker.

I looked up and saw a man in his mid-sixties with kind blue eyes, grey hair, a slightly ruddy face, and I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t stop staring at him. I put my soda down, crossed my legs, crossed my arms, hunched over and waited for him to begin talking. (Isn’t this the body language everyone exhibits to welcome God into their hearts and “accept” a message of hope?) I laugh to myself, mocking myself, rather.

I tuned in some point near the very beginning of this man’s story. This man with the kind blue eyes who calls himself “Jack. He was in the middle of recounting an anecdote from when he was six years old. He had stolen his little brother’s bottle of periodontal anesthetic and downed it in three swigs. He then filled the bottle back up with water and carefully placed it back in its proper place. Later that evening Jack lay in bed listening to his little brother cry because the pain in the boy’s gums just wouldn’t ease or ebb. Well, Jack thought, of course it wouldn’t, his mother was rubbing his little brother’s gums with water, not anesthetic. The anesthetic was in Jack’s six-year-old belly, making him stoned.  

As I sat there – transfixed – the man continued to wind through the tale of his life and I began to hear a message of deep spiritual love. He described lust, as a feeling made up entirely of power, control and manipulation while love, on the other hand, only comes alive when you truly want something better for the other person, than for yourself.

He quoted Martin Luther King: “Everybody has the capacity for greatness because we all have the ability to serve.” And he talked about unconditional giving and forgiveness and having a handicapped child or “challenged child” by ending with the point that he feels it is we who are challenged – not his little girl. We are the ones who carry the burden of our resentments towards others day after day until we become toxic. His little girl begins each day with a clean slate. As we all should, too.    

He spoke of his – former, mind you – “What’s in it for me?” filter. That admittedly, everyone suffers the defect of being selfish to a degree … but he, in his prior life, had perfected the art of being selfish. Over the past 24 years, he had begun to learn an entirely new way to live. Before, he said, information had come to him in bits … then those modules of content got pressed through the filter which gave the information a rating based on the following: “What can I get from this person? How can I benefit from this situation? How much is it going to cost me?”

It took a long time to change, he assured the 100 or so folks in the crowd. But today he lives a rewarding life and he adores his wife and he aims to serve and preserve a message of hope and faith and honesty and openness and willingness and service. “I have no money to give; I therefore donate my time.” Thank you for letting me share.

“Recovery Girl!” I turned around. It was Lacey. We fell into a huge, warm embrace. It was so nice to see her. We hadn’t spoken since Sunrise. I introduced her to Nicolio Bare. The three of us chatted about what had gone on with us over the past three months. I was teaching dance. I told her about the Sanctuary, and how Nicolio and I were roommates. And I told her how I was the most grateful girl on the planet for that. She told me about her son, about Sunrise Detox, about her relationship. She asked me about my writing. I told her I’d gone on an ill-fated date with a fashion photographer. We decided dating was not a good idea. For me, anyway. We laughed. Nicolio said she was exhausted because she was working for a complete lunatic – we all agreed on that – so she decided to turn in and go home.

That’s when Lacey asked me to go for coffee. I was delighted. We carpooled to the Coffee District. After ordering our lattes and sitting down outside at the little bistro table, I asked Lacey: "How do you do it? Working in detox. Day in and day out. Working with so many people getting clean in their first couple of days. How hectic it must be? All the pain and the regrets." Hey, I remembered my own experience and how I felt.

Lacey smiled. "RecoveryGirl, I love working in detox," she said. "I get to help each person who walks through the door of Sunrise really pause, you know? Really sit down and think about making that one good decision. The one that could change their life."

I looked up at Lacey a little puzzled running through the list of "good decisions." I thought she might have in mind. "What's that?"

"Where they'll go when they leave?"

To be continued … so Tune in Next Thursday for the Next Installment …

Colony Yoga: It's Just No Big Deal

2009-12-24T10:00:00.005-05:00

Fresh, chic and delicious.

That’s what I was in the mood for. Fresh, chic and delicious.

Those lazy, hazy days spent at Sunrise Detox, an investment in retrospect, felt very far away – a shrinking image in the rear view mirror. I had begun my New Life, and tonight I was hot, sweaty, exhausted, starving and the beauty of Barolo was that it was quick. It was a Tuscany-inspired café nestled deep in the Guava Grove – what shop owners on the Avenue referred to as the Arts District.

The Avenue was abuzz with talk of a pretty young hair dresser who at 9 o’clock two weeks prior had been walking along that same Avenue, window shopping. She’d been beaten down and was left bleeding and breathless by two so-called Crack Heads. They wouldn’t stop after ripping the white wallet from her soft white hand until they’d kicked her to the sidewalk and the gallery owner across the street had dialed 911. When the alleged drug addicts saw the whirl of the lights and heard the deafening cry of the sirens they split south vanishing into the softwood timber ties of the South Florida Tri-Rail. Poof. Gone.

The next morning, the petite girl’s car was still parked in the lot across the street as an eerie reminder of the violent crime – a sadistic act of brutality in this idyllic beach town smack out of an Edward Hopper water color.

The horror of the beating hit every heart here. The anger lay like a hissing snake just under the skin of every patron, shopkeeper and well, Human Being. People wanted answers. They wanted justice. The recession – well, let’s call it the sheer slowness of business here didn’t help. Crack kills and it’s ugly, it’s brutal and now it had hurt one of us.

Maybe people don’t think about it, don’t know it, or may not care. But there are more than 22 million alcoholics and addicts in America – some in recovery, some seeking recovery, some having had recovery and who are seeking it yet again. They are not just in prison, living and dying under bridges, writhing in psych wards, or blathering about bad parenting in treatment centers.

These same addicts and alcoholics – some healthy, some not – are your city council members, managing Fortune 500 companies, running touchdowns in the NFL, waiting on your grandparents in restaurants, teaching math to your children in schools and sitting across the table from you at Thanksgiving dinner. Folks yes, 22 million, it’s an issue.

And tonight at Café Barolo, people were talking about it - the horrific crime. They were waxing lyrical about the girl with the soft white hands who’d been beaten down and left bleeding and breathless and for dead right here on the Avenue in this tranquil beach town by two so-called Crack Heads. And what were we going to do about it?

I decided to check out from the chatter. Just for a moment I somehow needed to reconnect to my sanity, and focus on my dinner - just for that moment.

I liked this little bistro called Barolo because it felt a little bit like Manhattan – more of a busy order-at-the-counter and sit down place, than a restaurant which made it reminiscent of say Mangia on 57th Street. Food. Choices. I stared down through the deli-glass, knee-height: Jumbo Shrimp sautéed in Chablis & Garlic with Young Peas on Tagliatelle Pasta, Port Braised Short Ribs with Root Vegetable Fricassee. That was it. Red meat – I needed some protein - Short Ribs.

The door opened and I felt a breeze on the back of my neck and lower back. Or did the door open? Anyway, suddenly I felt a lot of energy to my left. It’s a little dark at night in Barolo, so it took me a second to focus. Yes, it was Keith and Kellie Foxx hurriedly eating their dinner while chatting amiably to an ethereal, smart-looking blond sitting across from them on the opposing couch. As I approached the cashier, I turned and smiled - they seemed to recognize me. Keith smiled broadly and Kellie giggled and waved an arc-like “hello” holding a voluptuous, grilled shrimp.

So I walked over – hesitantly – and said hello, immediately wondering what I would do next. It turned out that it just didn’t matter. You see - this is - Keith Foxx Speak. It is an intermittent peppering of (it goes without saying) wonderful, spiritual, adages, and divine sayings...Real Stuff. Coupled with clips like it’s no big deal, and that before I could do it, I just couldn’t do it.

It’s enormously subtle, which is what makes it so entirely effective. It’s a loving language that makes everyone and anyone belong. And that’s what we all want, right? To belong? It’s the language that Keith Foxx has invented that makes his rare breed of yoga so accessible. It’s what makes it so completely special.

Back to Barolo. Kellie flipped her ponytail over her shoulder with the hand not holding the herb-encrusted grilled shrimp: "RecoveryGirl," she almost whispers with a hint of a Southern drawl and a lot of encouragement revealing her North Carolinian roots. “Didn’t we see you at Colony yoga on Sunday? Why didn’t you join us? Don’t be shy.” She smiled softly again. Kellie has the inner sweetness and sly grin of a woman whom you know has some kind of a fantastic secret. She touched my forearm: “You’ll be fine.” I must have looked a little hesitant. This is when I believe Keith Foxx engages. Full on. He put down his fork, looked up and his energy kind of enveloped, like, the whole neighborhood.

Credit: Hedy McDonald

“RecoveryGirl, come join us on Sunday,” Keith offered up. It wasn’t just his voice, you see, there was something almost seminar-style about his way of expressing himself. Motivational speaking would be a stretch, but definitely kind of “neuro-linguistic programming” – trained meets yoga-teaching enthusiast. “Just come to the Colony on Sunday around 9:30 and we’ll comp you. Just say your name at the table and do yoga.” He smiled a huge grin...like...it’s that simple.

And it was. Camera pans forward to Sunday morning and I’m sitting on the floor of the Colony Hotel and it’s cool outside, but it’s hot in there because there are lots and lots of bodies. The yoga mats are lined up so tightly that the floor of the room closely resembles a majestic hand-woven bamboo rug. Then Keith Foxx was up front opening the class with a reading from the poet and dedicated practitioner of Kripalu Yoga, Danna Faulds: “Yoga is not about the pose,” he breathes the words into the room. “It’s not the alignment of toes or hips...yoga is an invitation to explore. It speaks the language of the soul...yoga is the union of prayer and movement. It is healing and the joy of saying yes to life.” The room grows almost silent, but it’s a comfortable quiet.

Credit: Hedy McDonald

“So everyone start off in child’s pose.” It is then that Keith Foxx’s speech blossoms into a very short discussion of how most people – most of the time – identify themselves with their ego, intellect - their minds. And that here, now, at Colony Yoga on Sundays we have an opportunity to depart from that. Rene Descartes, the 17th Century French philosopher is famous for his statement “Cogito, ergo sum,” meaning “I think, therefore I am.” Keith Fox assures us all it doesn’t have to be that way. Not this morning, anyway. We can just flow. The only thing he asks of us is that we breathe.

We’re in Warrior II. “Turn your right foot in slightly and your left foot out to the left 90 degrees,” he demands, not of us, but of us to demand of ourselves. “Align the left heel with the right heel. Turn your left thigh outward so that the center of the left knee cap is in line with the center of the left ankle. Exhale and bend left knee over the left ankle.”

Keith Fox’s voice is getting louder and louder. That’s because Keith Fox is now behind me. Keith Fox is now actually assisting me. My feet are firmly planted on the floor. My hips are squared to the left wall. And my ribcage is laying flat, parallel to the ceiling with my fingertips pointing straight up towards the chandelier. I felt like I was floating. Egad. I hope he doesn’t let go.

“Drop your tailbone towards the floor. Let your arms be in a tug of war, and let your right arm win, slightly.” I feel some type of release and then the cool breeze from the window, and just like that, Keith Fox has disentangled himself, I’m safe, and he’s gone. Poof! On to the next assist!

Class is over and I’m gathering up my mat and empty water bottle and bag and trying to get a little composure to try to figure out where I parked my car and there he is. Keith Fox. “Thank you,” I say, a little dazed. “Thank you so, so much. I loved it. I’m coming back.”

“Thank you, RecoveryGirl.” Keith Fox boomed with all of those endorphins of just having taught a delicious (one of his favorite words) yoga class. “Please do come back.” Then he paused and right before he turned to go he said: “One thing I noticed. You stopped breathing. Seriously, RecoveryGirl, right before you hit a moment of acute intensity...a super powerful pose, to you ... like the Warrior … a ton of physical, mental drama, or whatever ... you stopped breathing. Just like that. Can you tell me what happens right before you stop breathing?”

“I don’t know Keith Fox,” I said. “But I think that would be helpful if I figured that out, like, in real life.”

He smiled. “That’s your homework assignment for next week.”

Tune in Next Thursday for the next installment

Colony Yoga: A Sea of Oms

2009-12-17T11:00:00.020-05:00

Where was everyone going?

I had just veered out of the Delray News & Tobacco on Atlantic Avenue, clutching Sunday's New York Times when I caught sight of a steady stream of varying types of people – all kinds and styles – trickling upstream straight into the mouth of the Colony Hotel. It was 9 o’clock on a glorious, glistening Sunday morning in South Florida and this pilgrimage of sorts was pouring inside. Yes, inside. And they couldn’t all be eating – the hotel wasn’t that big.

And why did they all seem so carefree and uncomplicated?

I decided to toss the newspaper into my bright-yellow jeep Wrangler to find out. I dipped into the trunk and grabbed my camera. A by-product and part of the scar-tissue from the relationship I’d left out in California. I turned back to the scene outside of the Colony. The trickling assortment and diverse flow of people – chattering away – continued up the stairs to the brightly colored hotel – a burgundy and mustard yellow awning crowning its front.

Were those yoga mats?

At this point my curiosity was more than piqued. As I slung the Canon 40D over my left shoulder, I hopped up the stairs of the hotel, spun right and there it all was. A large open room filled with … God, it must have been more than a hundred people, all sitting, standing, kneeling, crouching, and every other manifestation of a “position” one could think of. It was a crowd of people perched in various poses in a big room in a hotel but today – at that moment – it almost felt like a temple, of sorts.

I later learned this was perhaps the cornerstone of the Yoga Foxx Empire – Sundays at the Colony. Up in the front, there were musicians on one side, including an Ophelia-esque, angelic-looking woman crouched in front of a large, gold harp. To the right of them stood a pretty, petite, brunette behind a large easel elegantly drawing – her eyes darting about the room – as her hand gracefully ran up and down the oversized sketch book. And out in front there were the hundred plus people simply waiting to flow.

Just as the final few folks funneled through the single gap in the tables – hurriedly signing in – Keith Foxx hustled up to the front of the room with long strides covering 50 feet in about 3 seconds. He clutched a piece of crumpled notes, all smiles, voice booming, “Welcome to Yoga on Sundays …” He then continued on about the hot weather and gave a short message about how not to worry about the possibility of mistakenly tapping or dripping sweat on your neighbor because it’s just “no big deal …” to which he seemed to continually receive a rising crescendo of appreciative laughs.

There is an unmistakable energy about this man whom you’d guess is somewhere in his mid-forties, built like one of the guys on the cover of Men’s Health with dancing blue eyes, a huge personality and larger laugh to boot. He touches the lives of so many people and it all becomes so readily apparent after class on Sundays to watch him speak to his friends and students about their loves, losses – their lives.

Just before class begins, during his introductory remarks you begin to see the way in which he mesmerizes the room and sets the tone for what will become an amazing journey over the next ninety minutes. His wife and life-partner Kellie is adorable and adoring.

Her dedication to the practice and to the mission they are building together is precious.

They are the perfect yin and yang – complementary opposites within a greater whole. An oversimplified view might be that Keith is the guru and Kellie is the C.P.A. – but it’s just not true. Keith is a sharp businessman who once built a company and successfully took it public while Kellie is an enormously accomplished yoga instructor in her own right. They seem to be constantly interacting – never existing in stasis – while always giving each other space and being supportive.

And everyone who knows them seems to know that.

I perched down in the corner and observed for a moment. Then in order to not be intrusive I moved just inside the door and watched but I more intently listened to the sounds of the class. There was the live music and Keith on headset, the humming of the harp and – what was the sound? Oh, it was the BREATHING.

Credit: Hedy McDonald

It felt as though the entire room was breathing – inhaling and exhaling – like a gigantic diaphragm. I could almost see the room expanding and retracting in front of my very eyes – and the tone, the sheer hums, echoes, noises and music of it all – it sounded like the waves of the ocean.

Breathing. Hmm. That was something I hadn’t done for quite some time. After about 70 minutes, it was clear the class was winding down. Keith was leading the crowd in what looked like a complicated round of contorted stretching. I peered into the back of my camera to scroll through some pictures and when I looked up Kellie and Keith were perched, cross-legged at the front of the room with their hands gently placed on top of their knees. Keith was explaining about something he was referring to as “the sea of Oms.”

Suddenly the entire room of people drew in a gigantic inhale and began exhaling in the sound of an Om but it didn’t stop. People were inhaling and exhaling Oms at differing rates and it felt like the entire hotel was vibrating. Wow.

As I was packing up my camera and turning to go I caught sight of a petite beauty with long chestnut hair flowing behind her. I’d seen her before. I knew that energy. “Steele … is that you?” I asked, nearly gasping, not just from seeing her there but still stunned from the Sea of Oms.

“Double-OH?” It was Steele Magnolia and she was just as startled I think to see me, too. “Oh, it’s you! RecoveryGirl … Come next week … You’re going to love it.” We fell into a big embrace and made a quick plan for brunch up the street at the Green Owl. “Ten minutes.” I jumped into the jeep to head out to meet Steele for a meal, which of course, was wonderful. “You know, Double-OH,” she said, sweetly. “This is what it’s all about. This is all a gift.” I smiled – perhaps just a little of that was beginning to sink in.

Credit: Hedy McDonald

The Sea of Oms. When I returned back to the house, I immediately logged on to www.yogafox.com … I wanted to know more. As my eyes focused in on the home page as it loaded up...a quote drifted across the screen:

“If it doesn’t change your life, then it isn’t yoga" – Amrit Desai.

Sold. I knew where I’d be next Sunday at 9 o’clock …

Tune in Next Thursday for Part II of Colony Yoga

The Sanctuary

2009-12-10T11:00:00.004-05:00

The dawn was breaking. The orange and peach light deepened as it crept across the sky. I sat perched on a driftwood bench in the back courtyard of the Sanctuary listening to the trickling of a wall fountain as I stared down at my navy suede Ugg clogs slightly bewildered by my predicament.

Bewildered but thankful that the madness was finally over. I’d be here at the Sanctuary for six months. It felt very comfortable. There was a way in which it all presented as extremely simple, particularly by comparison to the life from which I had just been extracted. L.A. was dark, complicated and mean. L.A. had become unsafe.

It was just starting to get light when the streetlight clicked off. I walked over to the corner of the property to check out the "hood." About three houses down I caught sight of a couple standing in their driveway. They looked rushed and in love. She was dressed as a flight attendant with wild, wet hair. He was wearing mint-green scrubs and flip-flops. The two don’t see me – or don’t care -- as he playfully pulls her into a faux-chokehold and she squirms her way out vainly trying to slap him.   He intercepts her open palm, turning it face down and gently kissing her knuckles. I'll miss you, she whispers, pushing out a pouting lower lip. I'll miss you, too, he mouths. He then grabs her into a big bear hug, and they say goodbye over and over again. She breaks free and throws her beat-up overnight bag into the back of her beige and green, two-toned Pinto and sputters off. He waves at her. He stands, mesmerized in her wake.

My eyes begin to sting with fatigue, or tears maybe? I'm so worn out – it's hard to tell. But there I stood, transfixed, somehow lost as the fly-on-the-wall voyeur, taking in the moment.

Hmmm. I'm lonely. That's it. I’m so lonely.

“RecoveryGirl … is that you?”

I turn to see the woman whom I’d been introduced to late, late the night before. Her name was Nicolio Bare and she was my roommate. This morning I saw her in silhouette as the light was behind her and I remembered how tall and willowy she was, such a delicate soul. I had come in so late the night before and had immediately fallen into a comatose sleep with little conversation. This morning she walked toward me, so delicately like a swan carefully stepping over some precarious brush after a storm.

“Double-OH … Are you okay?" Nicolio sweetly inquired and then folded her long legs to sit down on the grey, driftwood bench. "It can be a little hard at first.” Her gaze followed mine to the fountain and for a moment we watched the trickling streams of water – until our eyes met – hers beckoning me to come sit next to her. My God this woman had an old soul. Those eyes. They were these large, forest green bottomless pools of knowledge, of wisdom of lifetimes. It was Nicolio’s secret, you see.

After living together for 100 days and becoming best friends, I felt comfortable teasing her about it. Yes, indeed, she was one of “those people.” She could do massive amounts of tasks in these hugely varying skill sets and the sheer fact that she could do almost anything kind of crept up on you. Whether it was cooking a four-course meal, or reprogramming a remote control, or simply mowing the lawn, or designing a flyer to sponsor an event, or blowing your hair dry bone straight, or calculating how much food you’d need to feed a 1,250 pound race horse for three months – it just became more and more apparent, the more you hung out with her, that she was some kind of a magician.

But at dawn that morning on the back porch of the Sanctuary it was less about her skill set and massive breadth of core competencies as it was about her bottomless vat of compassion. I was in an excruciating amount of pain and I had no idea how to even begin to express it. And somehow Nicolio knew that. She placed her hand on mine.

“Why are you up so early?” She said softly.

I later found out she is extremely practical.

“Do you want some breakfast?” She added.

See? She was practical and kind of matter-of-fact without being annoying. It took some getting used to but with all the tears, hysteria, hyperbole and drama that accompanied anything and everything that had to do with recovery … this part of her personality was often very, very refreshing.

We went inside and she led me to the kitchen where I perched at the breakfast bar while Nicolio whipped up a breakfast bowl of egg whites, broccoli, some weird soy cheese and ketchup. I was told there were three other girls who lived in the house and we were to all meet for what was called “Morning Meditation." This was where the five of us sat in the Living Room and read from a book of meditations and then all “shared” about it.

Okay, I could do that.

I turned back toward the sunken living room to see two soft couches forming an “L” with three sleepy women lounging in sprawling positions underneath comfy blankets. Jennifer was from California and she looked slightly annoyed because she had to be at the Boys and Girls Club in 45 minutes for her volunteer job and couldn’t find a clean long-sleeve shirt to cover her tattoos – apparently a requirement to work with the five and six-year-olds.

Martha was a pretty little blonde who had studied art history in Spain and she was smiling and laughing – apparently she was there for co-dependency – and Nicolio told me that nothing ever really seemed to upset Martha. So I didn’t have to worry about her. (That was good.)

Wylie, on the other hand, was apparently a little tricky. She was just staring out the window out into the distance, completely in her own world. No salutation, nothing. Nicolio and I decided to sit down on the floor on a couple of cushions. I looked up and saw a brown pillow with “got hope?” embroidered in gold on the front and not-so-loosely based on the annoying-yet-popular ad: “got milk?” I smiled.

The energy was good here. Calm and soothing and quiet and healing. Suddenly Jennifer popped up and grabbed one of the meditation books off the coffee table, it was Melody Beattie’s “The Language of Letting Go” and then sank deeper into her brown, faux-chinchilla blanket and began the day’s reading.

Acceptance. Surrender to the moment. Ride it out and through, for all it’s worth. Throw yourself into it.

Stop resisting.

So much of our anguish is created when we are in resistance. So much relief, release, and change are possible when we accept, simply accept.

We waste our time, expend our energy, and make things harder by resisting, repressing, and denying. Repressing our thoughts will not make them disappear. Repressing a thought already formed will not make us a better person. Think it. Let it come into reality. Then release it.

A thought is not forever. If we don’t like it, we can think another one or change it. But to do that, we must accept and release the first thought.

Resistance and repression will not change a thing. They will put us at war with out thoughts … Today I will practice accepting myself and present circumstances. I will begin to watch and trust the magic that acceptance can bring into my life and recovery…

Now it was time to share.

Tune in next Thursday for the next installment …

Baggage Re-Claim

2009-12-03T10:20:00.004-05:00

I was expected to go to a meeting the first day I was out of detox and I ended up at what looked a little like a large public school class room on the West side of Delray Beach. I was still pretty banged up and disoriented and sick and stunned.

I think I was telling people I had Stockholm Syndrome, but I might have meant Münchausen Syndrome. No one seemed to care or notice the specifics – the women were just caring, compassionate, and helpful and seemed to want me to feel settled. Settled, what a concept.

You see I wasn’t going to go back to Los Angeles. That part was clear. The L.A . experiment hadn’t worked. Game over. Case closed. The work thing had ended when I went to the monastery in Thailand. And the relationship was officially over. Next chapter.

So I was set to enter the Witness Protection Program for six months. Well, not really. Part of The Plan, hatched together with Bianca that fateful night just six days before entering Sunrise, was that I would set off to live in a therapeutic community for six months – well, it was really called a half-way house. But it was a fine one. I quickly learned that I was about to become the most blessed girl on the planet. I ended up in a place not ironically called the Sanctuary.

But back to the public school classroom – well it wasn’t a public school classroom, it just looked like one – it was called a club house. A gray-bearded man in jeans and work boots stood at the podium with a massive set of keys on his belt banging into its edge. He was fumbling with the microphone and sifting through papers attempting to compose himself in order to get the room into some sense of order, which was not an easy task. The place was one gigantic Side Conversation.

A flame-haired woman in her fifties in a bright coral shirt with matching lipstick was speaking softly about her husband and two sons who were killed last year in a boating accident. She’d ended up alone in her Lazy-Boy gulping down Sauvignon Blanc until, she says, it turned far worse. Her voice trailed off but I felt my focus snap in and my hearing fine tune when she blurted out that it was only after she received the gobs of money from the insurance settlement that she tried to actually kill herself with pills.

Then, suddenly, what looked like a mere teenager shot up his hand and told his story of having been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He had been given two months to live and therefore made the decision to go on the road to follow a band called Phish. He ended up in the Emergency Room with 40 hits of acid in his stomach (which apparently got pumped) only to find out that the whole thing had been a mistake. Today, he’s fine. He only had a rare bacterial infection. He’s going to live for as long as he is supposed to, but he just can’t quite get his life back on track.

The meeting ends and the boating-accident woman seeks me out. Our eyes meet as she walks up to me raising her arms up and stepping forward. I step between them and we embrace. And I say: "The money didn’t heal the pain, I see?" And she says, "oh, no, it made it so much worse, my dear." She gives me a tiny slip of paper with her phone number carefully printed on it and tells me to call her anytime.

I turn and walk into the bathroom. I sneak a peek at my image in the mirror and inch forward to take a closer look and see all these black smudges on the right shoulder of my T-shirt. I now recognize that it was the jet black mascara that had run off the eyes of the boat-accident woman who had hugged me at the end of the meeting.

It’s the language of the heart, you see, which makes it so difficult to communicate now in writing. But there is that moment when an average, ordinary person – anyone – speaks and their words hit someone in the crowd.

Then you see that someone, another average, ordinary person – anyone – shifts, a shuffle of the feet, a redistribution of weight, perhaps, then their dull, grey, sad, sagging eyes begin to open and shine, sparkle, twinkle, glisten and light up. I know what that light is today – it is hope.

I walked outside of the meeting into the sunshine. I took a deep breath, sipped on my blue Monster, looked up and that’s when I saw her. There she was gingerly walking down the sidewalk toward me, a bit like a ballerina, smiling a kind of sweet inner smile, long chestnut hair flowing behind her, she, too, sipping on a blue Monster. To my surprise, she stopped right in front of me, smiled, a big, broad, smile, her hazel eyes dancing like they held a juicy secret.

“Hi, I’m Steele Magnolia,” she said crinkling her little bunny nose with a little giggle. “I’m from the Sanctuary and I’m here to pick you up.”

Steele. What a cool name. She’s so striking. Peaceful, too. Kind of carefree-ish. I get it. She had that uncomplicated energy (without being boring.) Wow, maybe this whole Sanctuary thing is a good idea, after all. I’ll have to remember to tell Bianca later.

“I’m RecoveryGirl007.”

“I know.” She smiled and placed her hand on my forearm and all I wanted to do was melt at that moment into a fiery puddle on the sidewalk and to tell her everything about everything. I somehow and immediately knew that she was this extraordinary person, an inimitable individual, beautiful and bona fide, sweet and strong. I also knew that it would probably be an enormous mistake to try to screw around with her but moreover to hurt, damage, wound or impair any of her friends.

We fell in to line and walked across the parking lot – drinking our dueling blue Monsters – and just as we got to the car my left hip started vibrating. I wiggled my Blackberry out of my purple spandex. It was Bianca. “The Eighties called. They want their clothes back.”

I held up my one-finger-up-please-hold-on to Steele and mouthed, whispering: “It’s Bianca. The Eighties called. They want my clothes back.”

Steele just crinkled up her nose again, looking a little confused, but smiling, nonetheless.

This was Bianca’s polite way of telling me that I was going to be able to buy some clothes for the next six months of my life. I motion to Steele that it’s going to be about 30 more seconds.

“Double-OH,” Bianca blurted loudly into my Blackberry. “Where do you want to shop?”

“Lululemon, UnderArmour, La Perla, and Target.” That made sense to me. Workout gear and underwear.

Bianca let out one of her hurricane sighs. “Ok. Reframe. RecoveryGirl … Please go stand in front of the mirror and say your name 10 times out loud. RecoveryGirl, RecoveryGirl, etc. What does that mean to you? Then tell yourself, again in front of the mirror, that you are living in a half-way house for the next six months. Hopefully that will provide some kind of a reframe for you and you’ll narrow that list down to just … Target.” We hang up.

My newfound friend looked sympathetic. “How did it go?”

“Well, Steele, how do you feel about Target?”

“Hmm.” She paused for a moment and looked up at the sky.

I once again gazed intently at my newfound friend named Steele Magnolia and I suddenly remembered the story behind the actual flower, the magnolia. These stunning flowering plants evolved before bees even appeared. As a result, the carpels of the magnolia flower became extremely durable and tough, to avoid damage by eating and crawling beetles. This, of course, did not detract from their voluptuous beauty. Did God know that when he named her?

“I feel really good about Super Target.” Steele said, tossing me a smile. We then clinked our blue Monsters and roared off into the sunset.

Tune in Thursday for the next installment …

The Landing

2009-11-25T19:21:00.000-05:00

Jesus said: "Can any of you add a single hour to your life by worrying?

It was three days after the car accident out in LA and my life had gotten more and more bewildering and painful and demoralizing – absolutely frightening. I was drifting in and out of brown-outs and black-outs and my only real touch points with reality were my periodic conversations with Bianca. Her intermittently telling me to Pull Up. Or asking me what I was going to do. Or imploring me to recognize that I simply couldn’t go on the way I was. Finally she laid down the news that there was indeed a first class airline ticket waiting for me at LAX leaving at 9 a.m. the next morning for West Palm Beach.

"Double-OH, Just get on it. When you get here, we’ll figure out a plan."

A plan. That’s what I needed was a plan. All I had to do was get to the airport.

P.S. That’s very Bianca. All I needed to do was to get to the airport. But in the shape I was in getting to the airport was not exactly a walk in the park.

I loved Bianca. There was something about her sense of humor in the middle of a crisis that comforted me. You see, she wasn't terribly terrific at "real" life. I mean, I guess she was. Well, now that I think about it, she had to be – she's very successful. But, I don't know, when things looked awfully bleak, I mean really bad, Bianca had this way of being stoic about it all.

I remember one time out in L.A., Bianca taking me to Hal’s on Abbot Kinney, and ordering a couple of Dos Equis and a couple of shots of Patron staring straight across the table at me and saying: “Hey, I wouldn’t mind it if you drank if I thought it made you happy.”

Because I knew and she knew that it didn’t. I knew and she knew that this scenario: two best girlfriends, the lit candles, the clinking of glasses, the spurts of hilarity, the sloppy Mexican food, the sharing of secrets and promises of eternal love and the ordering of just one more round – that wouldn’t happen and it hadn’t happened for a while.

For me, anyway. For Bianca it had, but not for me. That illusion of being able to stop after two rounds had been dead since I’d relapsed after being sober for two years. I’d been unwilling to accept it because I'd really been hoping that I'd only be an alcoholic on the East Coast and wouldn't have to be one after I'd moved to the West Coast. Wrong.

So there was no glass clinking, no secret whispering, no guacamole slurping and no smiles through the candle light. All that there was, was just a non-threatening stare down. It was so acute, searing, scorching, and unbearable that all I could do is lay my elbow on the table, place my hand under my chin, look down at my plate and blink as tears began to crawl down my knuckles.

Check, please.

I knew – and so did everyone else – that I had become the kind of drunk that no longer went out anymore. It wasn’t about sitting in restaurants, eating searing hot Mexican food while sipping from expensive snifters of tequila and swilling imported beers. It was instead about a hot mess of searing sadness and an aloneness where my nerve-endings felt like they were creeping outside of my skin. It was about me wanting to guzzle the alcohol and vomit it at the same time.

Bianca had the uncanny ability to show me the pain, the confusion, the bottom, and the brick wall. I believe I had become completely saturated by words until that final day when she laid it all out for me: “RecoveryGirl, you’ve completely lost the plot of your own life.”

That was then. I had to deal with the now. Bianca told me to do to four things: "Stop drinking, don’t pack, don’t worry and don’t miss the flight." So that’s what I did.

I walked in to Sunrise Detox carrying a small handbag, wearing a pink hoodie, grey yoga pants, flip flops with nothing else.

I had one outfit and my journal. I spent my first day or so at Sunrise swathed in as many blankets as I could find swishing around the corridors looking a bit like Moses (because I couldn’t find a hair brush, either.) Finally, I lay down on my bed and opened my journal to read some scribblings I’d written while I’d been at a monastery in Thailand a few months before. I’d run away over there for some peace and some answers after Bianca had told me I’d lost the plot.

Now I clutched my powder-blue journal and stroked the feather of a sharp-tailed sparrow glued to the front. I opened it and saw a quote at the top of the page: The mind will drag you along like a wild river. Then I continued to read on in Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet,” and in my chicken scratch handwriting I had written:

Alcohol is not a garment I cast off easily today, but a skin that I tear away with my cracked and calloused hands. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness … and who can depart from pain and aloneness without regret? To stay through the hours burning into the night was to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mold. Today I lift up my lantern into the empty and the dark and the guardian of the night shall fill it with oil.

I was getting sleepy. This place was pretty comfortable and because I didn’t have anything, I couldn’t worry about anything. So I just decided to surrender and chill.

VITALS!

Oh God. This is something that seemed to happen a lot. It feels like it happened every 20 minutes (although it couldn’t have been that often.) I hear VITALS! and I am then expected to shuffle through the winding hallways of the detox, again swathed in about a million blankets because it’s freezing inside Sunrise for reasons that are a complete mystery to me. I then sit down next to a “tech” – typically a friendly young man or woman in recovery – and have my temperature and blood pressure taken. After the Pavlovian pleasantries, I return to my room.

My soul is a battlefield which reason and judgment continually wage war against my passions and desires.

A tall, skeletal-thin young man with tattoos scattered about his body sticks his head in my room and tells me a friend of mine has dropped off a bag of clothes. Fantastic. Now, I really have something to live for. I snuggle back down into my mobile nest of blankets and proceed to follow him into one of the offices by the dining area to get my bag. Ah. The bag is the white kind with all the perfectly red round circles within another red round circle. Target! I grab my prize and scurry back to my room for a shower.

As I emerge from my room post-shower and blanket-free, my comrades in the detox comment on how well I look. I am feeling better. It's day number 5. And I leave tomorrow. I go back to my room and sink back into my bed for one last pass at the journal before I turn out the light. I find a poem by Walt Whitman. I leave tomorrow.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despite riches give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people … reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book … dismiss … what your very soul and very flesh shall become a great poem.

I begin to pack up my books and I see Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now." I recall reading it while I was in Thailand and a passage that went something like total surrender in the midst of intense suffering is the most powerful way to live in the Now.

The door of the detox opens and BAM! A gorgeous May day emerges as my eyes adjust from behind the amber tint of my Barton Ferrer sunglasses. I open the door of the burgundy Beamer wagon and slide in. Slam, goes the door. Numbed by the purring air-conditioning, I barely notice the vanishing horizon as my head falls back into the head rest.

Bianca starts chortling softly: "You ready?"

I turn and smile. "OK, if you insist. It’s time to live in the Now."

Tune in next Thursday...

The Burn

2009-11-19T11:36:00.002-05:00

An hour later, Bianca and I were barreling South on Route 1 and I almost changed my mind three times. Sunrise Detox was looming closer and closer when suddenly I stopped. I panicked. I was in really bad shape, but physical pain was getting trumped by fear.

"Bianca, maybe I should just Pull Up and detox on your couch. Sweat it out."

"Double-OH, I don’t know," Bianca said her voice trailing off, which was kind of weird and way out of character. She was perhaps the most opinionated person I’d ever met, and had very strong thoughts on the fact that I had to do something. I’d sort of identified and admitted to her months before that as long as I was creating an identity so deeply rooted in pain there was no way I was going to be able to escape it. She’d agreed, but quite frankly I think she was tired of the talk and well, less tired really, and more scared that I was really going to get stuck in it all. The great poet and philosopher, Kahlil Gilbran, wrote in 1926 in his most mystical and powerful work, “The Prophet"

Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burns your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

I sank back into the passenger seat of her burgundy BWM wagon clutching a white, plastic garbage bag half-filled with watery vomit and let out a long sigh. Bianca started chuckling; that deep guffaw. Then I started laughing too. Jesus Christ. How did I get here? I flipped down the visor above my forehead and peered into the tiny mirror. Holy hell. God, I looked frightening. Bianca careened left. “Sunrise Detox … A New Beginning.” She smiled. "We’re here!"

I shuffled up to the door. ADMISSIONS. I limped into a tiny hallway and sank into one of the three chairs lining the right side of the wall. Bianca started speaking to a woman who looked like a nurse; she seemed like she was expecting me. I felt like a poisonous blowfish floating along the side of a fish bowl – several sets of eyes were peering in on me – squinting through a mixture of pity, disgust and boredom.

Suddenly the door to my right with one of those tiny windows at shoulder height opened and I stared up to see a blank, but kind yet familiar face. Her hair was dark and spiky, tattoos scattered about her body, her eyes were big and beautiful, expressive and intelligent. She had her head cocked slightly, a wry grin on her face and black Doc Martins anchored to the floor.

"Lacey"

"Double-OH-Seven?"

Holy shit. Lacey. One of my favorite people in South Florida. I had known her from my two-year stint here, fourteen months prior. She and I had been friends simply because we danced together in the periphery of a pack that at least I no longer particularly bonded with anymore. But I was kind of stuck with this crowd due to “recovery” circumstances, nonetheless.

I loved her from before; Bianca adored her immediately. She looked into my eyes and saw the shame and the pain. She immediately understood why she hadn’t heard from me for more than a year – and because she was Lacey, my Lacey, she immediately wanted to make it better. She grabbed her clipboard and whispered in my ear that she’d try to arrange something for the nausea.

Twenty minutes later, a real nurse was wiping my bicep with an alcohol swap and I got stabbed with a shot of Tigan. About an hour after that I had finished filling out the necessary forms and I was kissing Bianca goodbye and shuffling my way back to my room down a maze of corridors and rooms with couches. I was told it was to be a five-day detox for alcohol withdrawal. Five days? Does that mean I could leave tomorrow?

I was terrified. I don’t know why. Trust me, it’s much, much scarier to detox on your couch. Anyone’s couch. At Sunrise, I had TV, food, meds, cigarettes, magazines, and entertainment. Entertainment in the form of other detoxing addicts and alcoholics telling their tall tales about what had happened – exactly, no holds barred, as they say – about what precisely they’d done to land their asses to get them here.

OK. It was time to acclimate. I decided to find out where the apple juice was and get another blanket. Then I decided my best friend was going to be a gigantic burly ex-con/teddy bear (missing one front tooth) with long flowing chestnut hair called Osmond. It was love at first sight. I called him Ozzy; he called me Triple-OH, for the fun of it. He told me he’d come in on “everything” but was only coming off “opiates.” He had a big decision to make, he continually reminded me. He was mulling over whether or not to return to Connecticut to serve out the 90 days in county “he had coming to him” or stay in Florida and risk moving back in with his family. What was the risk, I inquired? Killing them, he assured me. I told him to go for the 90 days in county in Connecticut. After a few days, he was leaning toward Connecticut. Me? I promised him I’d stay for the full five.

To be continued …

The Crash

2009-11-10T20:52:00.001-05:00

It was nearly 11 p.m. on a Saturday in Los Angeles and I was still stuck in traffic. Please. Where is everyone actually going in L.A.?

Apparently some guy in a Dodge had careened into a motorcycle and then a van while exiting the freeway and now a burgundy mini-RV was blocking nearly three lanes of traffic. Welcome to life on the 405. They should film a reality show here.

I was returning from the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. There had been some sort of a party for people who were being recommended to become involved in the Junior Board of Directors of something, I think, and I’m pretty sure I had been one of them. But right now all I wanted to do was be home in my lovely little house in Venice – three blocks from the boardwalk – sitting on my back porch listening to the sounds of the far-away reggae music and catching whiffs of exotic aromas.

Well, not true. All I really wanted at that moment was a drink.

But there were two really big reasons why I couldn’t do that. One, I was in the middle of eight lanes of traffic with no immediate access to a liquor store and two that I was an alcoholic – I hadn’t had a drink in 68 days. Don’t clap. I’d been here before.

Suddenly a man in what looked like a Prada suit and Cartier cuff links leaped out of his Audi and started shouting at three guys in a refurbished orange mustang. (Does he have a death wish?) The cops get between them only to be confronted by an elderly couple – the man shouting and sputtering while pointing his thin, bony, arthritic finger that the whole lot of them were “Sinners.” Yes, he shouted, they were going to “burn in hell." They were sinners, sinners. Big. Time. Sinners. I thought about it for a moment. I wasn’t brought up in a family governed by a religion fraught with sinning and hell and being damned and the whatnot.

So the antics I have gotten up to while drinking I’ve never really put into the “sin” department but at this point I had fully decided that alcohol – for me, anyway – was the Devil’s Juice. I guess I just hate the word sin. Sir Thomas Moore, the late 15th Century scholar and statesman, wrote in his work “Care of the Soul” that we should replace the word “sin” with “unconscious insanity.” I liked that. If I got into any more uncomfortable conversations with friends or family over the next couple of weeks (which was inevitable these days, by the way) I would simply smile, what my Tai Chi teacher calls my “inner smile,” bow my head slightly and tell them I was “unconsciously insane.”

Finally the bottleneck breaks and I’m sailing along the 405 headed home and all I hear is the deafening sound of crushing metal as I’m hurled into the seat belt and my steering wheel turns into an inflating, white, toxic airbag. I twirled left into another car and slam. It’s over. I hear the pops and the hisses and the clanking of falling metal. Then the crying, the whimpering and the moans. Then come the sirens.

I’d been rear-ended by a drunk driver.

I vaguely remember talking to the police. I really remember being very grateful that I was sober. That, indeed, was miraculous. I remember a tow-truck driver coming to get me. The two nice guys in the front seat told me they had to take me home first before they towed my car to the garage. It was only when I got home and let myself inside that I had realized that I’d twisted my ankle and broken a rib or two. But other than that I was fine. I picked up my Gucci bag and walked to the liquor store. And that’s all I really remember for the next day. Maybe two? Three?

What I do remember is my best friend Bianca being on the other end of the phone telling me that everything was going to be alright, but that everything wasn’t alright at that moment. All I had to do was pull up. There was a plane ticket waiting for me at LAX, direct to Miami. She would pick me up at the other end. We would put together a plan. L.A. wasn’t working and it hadn’t been working for a while. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been trying. For Chrissakes, she said, it was like I was the hardest working woman in Hollywood trying to stay sober but the whole thing out there was just way too hard. Come home, was the message, come home.

So I picked up my hand bag and walked out of the house and got on that plane. Bianca picked me up and that night I was fine. Of course I was fine. Because I had drank on the plane. It wasn’t until the next morning that I started to detox. It wasn’t until the next morning that I started to shake, sweat, heave. Well, you know that drill. Bianca hopped on the Internet and then she jumped on the phone. About two hours later I was on my way to Sunrise Detox in Lake Worth, Florida. Hmm. Hadn’t I seen that place on “Intervention?”