9
AN ALTERED, FALTERING SELF
Now, come back with me to when I was first told that I was an alcoholic—which greatly relieved me by the way, because I knew something was the matter with me, so I thought, “Great! That’s it—that’s what I’ve been struggling with (and enjoying) all this time! Fantastic!”
But what they further do—to (I think) soften the blow of this arguably awkward new way of looking at yourself—they enumerate a number of other famous and accomplished folks who have also struggled with (and enjoyed) alcoholism.
There was:
Scott Fitzgerald
Mel Gibson
Dylan Thomas
Ireland
Rush Limbaugh
Lindsay Lohan
Russia
And George W. Bush
I think their point is—don’t feel bad, you’re joining an illustrious group. Great people have been alcoholics. Oh, be one, it’s fun!
Now I don’t think they’re implying you could be great, but those people weren’t exactly losers (except probably to some members of their families, and all of their constituents) so relax and join the great drunks who staggered the Earth before you.
So, when I was told I was a manic-depressive, there was a whole new list waiting for me.
There was Abraham Lincoln—who wrote the Gettysburg Address in four hours—now that’s pretty manic
Winston Churchill, who called his depressed mood the black dog
Korea
Kristy McNichol and Sir Isaac Newton (who I think would have made an adorable couple!)
Mark Twain
St. Francis
St. Theresa
Jonathan Winters
Poor Brittany Spears
And George W. Bush
Well, naturally after this list I felt invigorated—but then that is part of my diagnosis.
So, to celebrate my newfound ascent into the lofty heights of this noble group, I thought I would inaugurate a Bipolar Pride Day. You know, with floats and parades and stuff! On the floats we would get the depressives, and they wouldn’t even have to leave their beds—we’d just roll their beds out of their houses, and they could continue staring off miserably into space. And then for the manics, we’d have the manic marching band, with manics laughing and talking and shopping and fucking and making bad judgment calls.
Of course, all this is still in the early planning stages—and knowing manics it probably always will be—but the point is we have a plan and that’s what counts. Because when you’re manic, every urge is like an edict from the Vatican. No plan is a bad one, because if you’re there and you’re doing it, it can’t be bad. It’s like a bank error in your favor.
Mania is, in effect, liquid confidence… when the tide comes in, it’s all good. But when the tide goes out, the mood that cannot and should not be named comes over you and into you. Because to name it would be an act of summoning.
Losing your mind is a frightening thing—especially if you have a lot to lose—but once it’s lost, it’s fine! No big deal! There could be a light shining out of your head. It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.
Part of my story—because God forbid you miss a minute of it—is that I stayed awake for six days. This happened because two of my medications were interacting badly, so the doctors put me on what they called a medication vacation—now on a vacation like this you don’t get a tan, there is no Club Med, and you can’t send cute little postcards. Now, anyone who has stayed awake for six days knows that there’s every chance that they’ll wind up psychotic. Anyway, I did, and part of how that manifested was that I thought everything on television was about me.
Now if anything like this should happen to you, I have some excellent advice. Don’t watch CNN. Please. Watch one of those pet training shows or cooking shows—even some of the discovery shows might be okay. But I watched CNN, and at the time Versace had just been killed by that man Cunanin, and the police were frantically scouring the Eastern seaboard for him. So I was Cunanin, Versace, and the Police. Now this is exhausting programming.
But by the time I got to be Versace, he was dead. And also by then I was in the real hospital part of Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and I could literally hear the nurses outside of the door saying, “Don’t listen to her, she’s crazy.”
My brother eventually arrived and he had to call the mental hospital to see about getting me in because there was, as my friend Dave says, “no room at the bin.” You had to be seriously nuts to qualify for residence in the lockdown ward. So finally, the head doctor of the facility came over. This guy looked like this kind of weird John Steinbeck character with his abnormally high pants and his strangely neat hair and his trimmed just so beard.
So he walks in, and I say, “Finally, here’s someone who can tell us what it’s like to get his cock sucked.”
Because (as you might have noticed) I had begun swearing a lot and apparently I couldn’t stop. Something in me had become unleashed and taming it was not imminent.
Anyway, this was my audition for the locked ward, and, as you probably guessed by now, I passed. I made it into the mental hospital. Hurray!
When you qualify for the mental hospital, you have to sign yourself in, like commitment papers, I guess; but I was so far gone I didn’t know what I was signing or doing, and so when they put the papers in front of me, I took the pen and I signed with my left hand, “Shame.”
That’s how I signed in for the mental hospital. How sad is that?
Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So, by the end of this book you could be gay and insane! Unless you began that way.
Anyway, ever since my fateful announcement on Diane Sawyer that I was mentally ill—like anyone really needed to know that. Don’t you hate it when celebrities just blah blah blah—talk about themselves—I mean, who asked?—I find it all so wearying…
Anyway, where was I? So having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything (okay fine, not acting, but what about a tiny little award for writing? Nope), I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I’m apparently very good at it and am honored for it regularly. Probably one of the reasons I’m such a shoo-in is that there’s no swimsuit portion of the competition.
Hey, look, it’s better than being bad at being mentally ill, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?
The first time I did drugs was when I was thirteen. Before we lost all our money, my family had a vacation house in Palm Springs, about two hours outside of Beverly Hills, where I ostensibly grew up. So periodically my mother used to rent that house in Palm Springs to these people who, after one of their stays, left behind a bag of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe they left it intentionally, a kind of chemical sacrifice on the altar of appreciation for their time there. Anyway, after my mother found the pot, she came to me and said, “Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble—I thought you and I might experiment with it together.”
Well, frankly at the time, and let’s face it—even now—I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. But what actually came to pass was that after presenting this bizarre, albeit marginally appealing proposal, my mother got swept back up in the whirlwind of her life and promptly forgot about it. But being the crafty, eager-for-the-altered-state person I was destined to become, I absolutely did not. So once it became obvious that our proposed experiment had slipped my mother’s mind, I snuck into the lab of her sacheted underwear drawer and stole the pot, subsequently experimenting my brains out in my backyard tree house with my friend May—who coincidentally also ended up in A.A.!