When I got clean in ’88, recovery was really a
case of the blind leading the blind. There were six Narcotics Anonymous
meetings a week in Hollywood and the same 30 or 40 addicts showed up daily. Out
of our group, maybe five people had two years clean and they sponsored everyone
else. Aside from me—a New York transplant—it seemed like NA attracted the
addicted ‘80s LA punk scene. Since we lacked a Sunday meeting, a dozen of
us would venture to East LA or South Central. As soon as the motorcycle jacket
combat boot-wearing white kids entered the room, the secretary would chuckle
into the mic, “Our friends from Hollywood have arrived. We can start the
meeting.” Back then in Hollywood, NA was leather, Doc Martins, red lipstick and
punk, and AA was cowboy boots, three inches of bangles, big hair and Sunset
Strip metal. Inside Jumbo’s Clown Room, however, fellowship divisions fell away
with our clothing and we were all one.
I started dancing a couple months before I moved
to Los Angeles in ‘87, my bottoming out year. I was forever smearing concealer
over my tracks in the parking lot of the club because the other dancers only
smoked weed or sniffed a little coke. Shooting up really went against the
stereotype. Then again, I only worked the nude clubs—Seventh Veil, April’s
Cabaret and the Century. For extra drug money, I’d do all the contests and make
friends sit in the audience as tip plants to encourage guys to get competitive
with their dollars. I was fearless and stupid. I’d sass the gangbangers at the
Sly Fox for rifling through their stack of hundreds to find a single dollar
bill. I’d make fun of the biker owners of Valley clubs for not spending their
easily earned porn profits on me. When I was high, I didn’t give a fuck. I’d
swoop in with a garbage bag full of cheap ratty costumes and Maybelline
cosmetics and scoop up every $20 in the building, then head down to Marcy St to
cop.
After a stint in a Louisiana rehab, I returned to
LA with $100 and a few costumes. Prior to getting clean, I’d moved into
someone’s kitchen with a 17-year old junkie boy. He now had 60 days clean and
introduced me to a couple of sober strippers at my first meeting. They insisted
I work with them if I wanted to stay sober. This was my introduction to Jumbos,
the lowest rent strip club I’d ever stepped inside. It was like living in a bad
music video. And these girls worked hard for their money: pole work, elaborate
costume changes and five song sets. Day shifts had few girls—me, Courtney, my
sponsor Cat, Valerie and a couple others who hadn’t made it to the program yet.
This meant dancing to approximately 40 songs a day for roughly 60 measly
dollars that came from the two dealers propped at the bar. It was exhausting.
After a year of rolling around on the floor naked for two songs and hundreds of
dollars, Jumbo’s was like hitting a new bottom. It probably would have felt
more demoralizing if I’d worked there when I was high; it would have been
cruder evidence of the downward spiral of my addiction. Clean, it was chipping
away at whatever self-respect I hadn’t already destroyed. It baffled me that my
co-workers loved this place. I was only there to show my newcomer willingness
to follow direction.
It took three months of dancing five shifts per
week before I was able to save $600 for a 1969 Dodge Dart. I’d never worked so
hard for something in my life. Money always came easily when I was getting high
and I never valued anything I bought with it. This car was different. I had
earned every inch of it.
At six months clean, I was still working the sofa-surfing
homeless newcomer hustle. I’d moved into one of those ghetto-like luxury cinder
block complexes on Sierra Bonita and Fountain with an AA ex-wife of an NA
friend. For $50 a week, I slept on a sofa in a room that was essentially her
dog’s toilet. Every day was the same: 40 Def Leppard-type songs at Jumbos, a
7pm NA meeting, dinner with the girls and AA late night to flirt with big hair
rocker boys in leotards and cowboy boots. Between the dismal vibe inside
Jumbo’s and the claustrophobic scent of scat at home, I was starting to slip
off my pink cloud. One night, I was so tired that when I finally parked in
front of our building, I forgot my freshly laundered clothes (everything I
owned) in the trunk.
When I stepped outside in the morning, everything
I’d worked for—everything I owned—was gone. Who would steal an old car without
hubcaps, a broken stereo and an empty gas tank? Of course I hadn’t registered
the car, nor did I know the license plate. I had six months clean but I was
homeless and had nothing—again.
Back inside the always-dark ground floor
apartment, I side stepped new mounds of dog shit and threw myself on the bed,
too empty to cry. Were the good times of my life really behind me? Was the fun
really over before I hit 26? I tried to picture my future and could only see a
road covered in potholes of future disappoints. Maybe a good life wasn’t in the
cards for me. I knew I’d care a lot less if I was high. The thought frightened
me.
I reached out for the phone and wailed, “Ron, my
car was stolen! All my clothes—everything gone!” I started bawling. I’d met Ron
Athey at an NA convention a few months before I went to rehab and we’d become
fast friends upon my return. He told me to wait on the corner and within
minutes was driving me to his apartment (which became my last stop on the
sofa-surf tour). He kept telling me everything would be okay but I could tell
he was scared for me. I didn’t want to get high but sort of felt that it was
inevitable. He left for work but returned 10 minutes later carrying a birthday
sheet cake, saying, “If you feel like getting high, I want you to eat this cake
first. “ He made me promise while he scrawled his work number onto my hand, and
then hugged me extra long before he left this second time. It frightened me that
he was so concerned.
The way Ron tells it, the entire time he was at
work, he wondered if I’d be high or worse—dead—when he returned. We’d bonded in
such a profound way from the minute we met that he was personally invested in
seeing me make it. When he walked into his apartment, I was asleep on the floor
with my face covered in chocolate. Next to me was an empty cake box. We
have since referred to this as the day cake saved my life.
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