My Fair Junkie Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy Dresner

  Cover design by Amanda Kain

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Sections of this book were previously published in different form on The Fix (www.thefix.com), and are used here by non-exclusive license from The Fix.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dresner, Amy, author.

  Title: My fair junkie : a memoir of getting dirty and staying clean / Amy Dresner.

  Description: New York : Hachette Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017016499| ISBN 9780316430951 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781478976974 (audio download) | ISBN 9780316430920 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dresner, Amy. | Drug addicts—United States—Biography. | Addicts—United States—Biography. | Addicts—Rehabilitation—United States. | Substance abuse—United States.

  Classification: LCC HV5805.D74 A3 2017 | DDC 362.29092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016499

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-43095-1 (hardcover), 978-0-316-43092-0 (ebook)

  E3-20170802-JV-PC

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NEWSLETTERS

  For anybody who thinks it’s too late

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is true to what I believe happened. I have changed names and some descriptions. And I have reconstructed dialogue to the best of my recollection and reordered or combined the sequence of some events. Others who were present might recall things differently. But this is my story.

  The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don’t let it get the best of you.

  —Will Rogers

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s maybe twelve thirty at night. I am high on OxyContin. My husband, Clay, and I are in our coldly decorated luxury condo, fighting viciously after a particularly tense and overpriced Christmas dinner with my mother at the Peninsula Hotel.

  The marriage has been crumbling for a while. Clay has retreated into his work and I into my opiate addiction, but tonight, all of our hatred comes out of hiding to duke it out. I go out onto the balcony to smoke and try to calm down. Next thing I know, he’s right there, and we’re going at it mean and loud. I feel woozy, like I’m about to lose my balance. I can see the valet guys scuttling around below me, and I think, This is what a Jew gets for celebrating Christmas.

  The fight moves back inside. More screaming. I shove him. We wrestle. He’s a big guy. Almost three hundred pounds. And I’m maybe 115 with premenstrual bloat, holding a fifth of scotch. Then something inside me snaps. I don’t have the best impulse control to begin with. The OxyContin took away what was left of it as well as making me unusually agitated. The marriage had become desolate and painful, and maybe on some level I just wanted to put it out of its fucking misery. I break away and stomp into the kitchen, grab a knife out of the knife block, and stomp back into the bedroom.

  “I will gut you like a fish, you fat fuck,” I hear myself say.

  “I’m calling the police,” he says. “You’re done.”

  It was a game we’d played for a while now—me pushing him to extremes, him fighting back—and we were good at it. But tonight felt different. The ante was higher, the rage was deeper, and nobody was backing down.

  “Yes, hello. My wife just pulled a knife on me,” he says into the phone. “She’s mentally ill and a drug addict.”

  I don’t wait to hear any more. I snatch a bottle of Valium off the bedside table, grab my purse, and lock myself in the bathroom. I begin to panic. I pour out four pills and then shake out two more for good measure. If the police are coming for me, I need to be relaxed. Really fucking relaxed. I crush the pills with the handle of my electric toothbrush and cut thick lines with my credit card. I snort them quickly. My eyes water. Within minutes, that narcotic veil between me and reality will come down, and I’ll feel safe. Safer, anyway. “Okay,” I say. I run my finger under the running tap and stick it in my nostrils, wiping away any evidence. I catch my eyes in the mirror. They look glassy, feral, empty.

  I bolt out of the bathroom, grab my car keys, and head for the elevator. Four cops come barreling around the corner of the hallway. I freeze.

  The female officer among them approaches me and asks clinically for my version of the night’s events.

  “He kneed me in the ribs,” I begin, trying to sound innocent, but my already deep voice is thick with anger and opioids, not the best quality for a wannabe damsel in distress. Also, I don’t feel very high, and I’m pissed about it.

  The officer isn’t really listening, and it’s soon obvious to me that it doesn’t matter what I say; I am going to jail. I turn my head and see the other three officers down the hall talking with my husband. They are taking pictures of his neck and hands and writing things down. He holds up the knife I pulled. It is a large bread knife with a serrated blade and snubbed point. Whatever. It wouldn’t have done the job anyway.

  Moments later, I am handcuffed. The handcuffs are tight and cold around my wrists.

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Law & Order is my favorite show. I know the fucking drill,” I say. The Valium is starting to kick in, and it’s making me mouthy.

  I am put in the back of a cop car. The seat is hard plastic. They make them like that for e
asy cleanup in case arrestees puke, bleed, or shit themselves. I have never been in the back of a cop car. My bony ass is chafing on the rigid seat. My hands are cuffed so tightly that I can’t lean back so I am pitched forward. I stare into the glass divider. And then I start crying hysterically.

  “This is bullshit!” I scream to the cops, tears streaming.

  “Tell my partner,” the cop in the front says mechanically. I go silent and then decide to change my approach.

  “Perhaps I was just jousting?” I say, trying to break him with humor. I am a professional comedian, after all. Maybe if I can get a laugh out of this guy, we can all forget about this and go home.

  “Hello?” I tap on the glass with my forehead. He ignores me.

  I switch tactics yet again.

  “Fucking shit! I can’t believe this is happening. I am a nice Jewish girl from Beverly Hills. I graduated magna cum laude…” I shake my head violently. “I’m not a bad wife, I swear! I’m not crazy. I’m not a fucking criminal. I…” And then my words are just swallowed up by sobbing.

  They take me to jail. It’s all a bit fuzzy because of the Oxy and Valium. It is surprisingly quiet in the West Hollywood police station that night. It’s Christmas, and it looks like only assholes like me get arrested on Christmas.

  They take away my purse and shoes and give me some dirty tube socks with orange stripes to put on. My mug shot is taken, and I am fingerprinted. Maybe it’s shock; maybe it’s the drugs; but it all feels surreal. Like I’m just watching, anesthetized, as it all happens to somebody else.

  I am given a wool blanket and thrown in a holding cell. I pace around the small, cold cell in my jail socks. Numb. There is a pay phone on the wall. It mocks me. Inside that pay phone is the answer to the ominous question: Who are your real friends? I am about to find out.

  I take a deep breath and call a woman I know from AA, Trina. In fact, I had been Trina’s sponsor years ago. Back then, I’d been her guide, and she had been the newbie in the program. I’d been like her Sherpa, her priest, and her therapist all rolled up into one. I had just tried to offer her laughter, stability, unconditional love, things she’d been hard pressed to find in her own upbringing. And even though we’d kept in touch, casually, it felt like a lifetime ago.

  Trina was fiercely independent, sensitive, loyal. She was also a bail bondswoman. And I needed both her empathy and her expertise right about now.

  “Hi, Amy. Merry Christmas!” she answers cheerily. “How are you?”

  “I’m in jail.”

  Trina gets in touch with my mother and organizes my bail (10 percent of $50,000, which is a hefty $5,000) and springs me from the clink herself. Trina is a pretty, busty, forty-something ex–hard-core drug addict gangster girl who’s remade herself into a respectable businesswoman. She holds her cards close to her chest but her big, brown, doelike eyes reveal a lifetime of sadness and disappointment.

  She takes me to the posh hotel in Beverly Hills where my mother is staying. My mom is visiting from Santa Fe, in town for the holiday festivities. I don’t think having her only child arrested for felony domestic assault with a deadly weapon was exactly what she wanted from Santa. Despite my mother’s feeble protests, I raid the mini bar, get shithoused on tiny bottles of vodka and sneak out to smoke cigarettes. Then I pass out for the next two days.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Once I’ve sobered up, I go home to my husband. There is a quiet and palpable tension. I think we both know the marriage is over but just haven’t admitted it to ourselves yet. I offer to sleep in the den. I collage him a card, with a big red “X” over a knife, trying to make light of a potential homicide. I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that I pulled a knife on him or the fact that I thought a cutesy card would make everything okay. I apologize profusely, with pleading eyes, wrapping my legs around him.

  “Amy, don’t.”

  “Oh, God, you hate me,” I mutter and start crying.

  “Don’t fucking cry. This is always what you do. You do something shitty and crazy, and then you cry and make it about you.”

  He’s absolutely right. I start fidgeting with the long shag rug, ashamed.

  “You’re abusive. You really need help,” he says.

  “I was high.”

  “You were abusive before you got on that shit.”

  “You gaslight me, Clay! You provoke me, and then, when I react, you tell me I’m crazy. You’ve been doing it for years.”

  “‘Gaslight’? Where’d you learn that term from, Cosmo?” he snorts.

  “It always my fault, right?” I rage. “All my fault. You’re fucking allergic to apologizing. You can never take any bit of responsibility.”

  “Responsibility?” he says. “You lie in bed all day while I go to work. And sure, maybe you go and tell some dick jokes at night… for how much money? Oh yeah… none. So don’t tell me about responsibility, princess.” Contempt drips from his every word.

  “Clay, I can’t do this right now. I’m three days into an Oxy withdrawal.”

  “Of course. It’s alwaaaaays something.”

  Another day of bickering like this and he decides that it would be best if I go stay with my best friend, Linda, “temporarily.”

  Linda is a bipolar bisexual from Nebraska. She’s one of those haute hippies who only wears cashmere and the highest-grade designer leather, loves animals almost violently, and has a house stocked full of crystals and “natural” cleaning products. She wears $300 perfume and $2,000 boots, but won’t shower for days. She is an aspiring singer, but, in the meantime, makes great money as a personal assistant to the demanding rich and famous of Hollywood. When I first met her, she was medicating her bipolarity with marijuana. Eventually, I urged her onto a hefty dose of psychiatric meds and away from all of that “hippie bullshit,” as I called it.

  Linda and I are both depressive Scorpios, obsessed with true crime shows and threadbare vintage tees. We bond over the world’s darkness and the absurdity of everyone. Other people’s lives seem like Portlandia to us, and nothing is sacred. She is brutally witty and, despite a background of trauma and some serious mental illness, she is super high functional. She keeps her shit together, something I can’t manage to do. I admire that.

  Linda lives in Eagle Rock, a relatively new hipster enclave of a primarily Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles, where overpriced coffee shops are perched next to shitty stores selling piñatas. It’s only a thirty-five-minute drive from where I had been living, but it feels like a completely different world. I can just be a tourist in this magical boho land. Not a chance I’ll run into anybody I know. This is good. It will make it easy to compartmentalize the wreckage of my life and pretend everything is okay.

  We go to her favorite coffee joint, frequented by young, tattooed moms, famous alt comedians, and successful underground actors. On the walls hang overpriced amateur artworks, which we both make fun of relentlessly.

  “What do you want, dipshit?” she asks.

  “Two iced agave soy lattes. With three extra shots. Each.”

  She gives me a look like “it’s your life.”

  “Don’t judge me, fag,” I say while I put her in a headlock.

  We get our coffees and go soak up the sun in the nearby park.

  “Are those the new shoes I just bought you?” she asks, referring to my cream-colored suede boots, which are already grayish.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “You shouldn’t be allowed nice things. You’re dirty.”

  “When’s the last time you washed your hair?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Okay, so shut your mouth.”

  Yeah, that’s the nature of our friendship. Deeply sardonic with a love and loyalty that rivals sisterhood. I was never sure exactly how Linda and I became best friends, always wondered why a seemingly together, successful woman like Linda would be inexorably drawn to me. That was, until she told me about her dad. Linda’s dad lived in that space where genius and insanity meet for a be
er. He was indestructible, despite his chronic penchant for self-destruction. He was an alcoholic who lived for twenty years with a brain tumor that doctors claimed would kill him in six months. After a slew of seizures had paralyzed him, he’d just roll himself to the front door in his wheelchair and then army crawl on the pavement to the car because, goddammit, he could do it himself! He was so stubborn he even kept smoking years after cancer took one of his lungs. Suffice it to say, she was used to, dare I say magnetized by, chaos and people on the edge, those circling the drain. In Linda’s mind, the “Danger” sign that most people saw hanging above my head was soothingly familiar and probably read “Welcome.”

  One day Linda takes me shopping at Loehmann’s in Beverly Hills. I am extremely agitated. My Oxy withdrawal is surprisingly painless, aside from some pronounced irritability and mild but terrifying bouts of mania.

  I’m on the phone with my mother, who’s “very concerned.” She’s in her managerial “fix-it” mom mode and it’s annoying me.

  “Honey, are you taking your vitamins? Last time you sounded this agitated, you had stopped taking your B12 and weren’t meditating. Can you find a way to start doing those two things again?”

  “Mom, I’m coming off drugs. Hello!… What the fuck?!” I say loudly as I push violently past a wide-hipped woman. “They need to make these aisles bigger or the shoppers smaller.”

  Linda shoots the woman an apologetic smile and frowns at me.

  “Baby, you sound very upset, very angry,” my mom says flatly, stating the obvious.

  “Yeah, Mom. I am angry. My life is fucking over. It’s shit.”

  “Now, honey, that’s not true… The universe will take ca—”

  “It is fucking true, Mom! Please don’t tell me some New Age bullshit right now. I might go to fucking jail…”

  My mom is still talking, but I just hand the phone to Linda. “I can’t deal with this right now… Here!” I say, and I walk away to look at some cheap purses.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dresner…” I hear her start. Linda ends the phone call with my mom and quickly escorts me out of the store.