High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips

Author:Mackenzie Phillips
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781439153857
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-09-23T10:18:22+00:00

PART FOUR

PAPA’S NEW MAMA

17

My father was on trial for conspiracy to distribute narcotics. The potential for that forty-five-year sentence motivated him to get clean as nothing before ever had. Together with his doctor, Mark Gold, Dad hatched a plan designed to land him the most lenient sentence possible. He would first have a very public and zealous rehabilitation and then take a very public and convincing stance against drugs. He would be reformed, and the world would know it. As part of the plan, Dad and Dr. Gold thought that if I stood by his side, equally reformed, it would look like he had spearheaded the recovery of his whole family.

Dad was the center of the family, of our lives. If orbiting around him meant going to rehab, then there was no question I would do it. I became a day patient at Fair Oaks Hospital in New Jersey. For six weeks I went there every morning for group counseling. At that time Fair Oaks kept drug addicts and alcoholics apart. We went through treatment separately; we even ate separately. I’d look over at the alcoholics in the dining room and think, You wimps. I know it’s warped, but I had junkie pride. The alcoholics were lightweights, soft-core. They didn’t know what a good high or a bad addiction was. We had the best and worst of it. We’d been on the world’s scariest roller coaster, while they’d only ridden the kiddie rides. That roller coaster, in a junkie’s fucked worldview, was the whole point.

Here’s my favorite part: for some reason the well-intentioned doctors at Fair Oaks Hospital decided that it was perfectly fine for us drug addicts to continue to drink alcohol. Because alcohol wasn’t our drug of choice. Well, that was handy.

I became friends with a girl named Sue Blue who was working for my dad. Sue Blue was and is a wonderful photographer. She and my father had met in the Hamptons when he was walking down the street with Mick Jagger. Sue Blue asked to photograph them, and she and Dad became friendly. She was talkative and opinionated, but sweet. Before I met her, Dad told me I would be friends with her forever. Sue Blue walked into the kitchen, a New York girl with fuzzy hair and big glasses, and the minute she opened her mouth I got it. Dad was right. We would be friends forever.

After a long day in drug treatment, Sue Blue and I would drive around in her car and drink wine. In the evenings I’d come home to the “Big House,” a huge house that my father had rented in New Providence, New Jersey. Living there were my dad, Genevieve, Jeffrey, Tamerlane, Bijou, and I, and three counselors from Fair Oaks to keep an eye on us.

Soon enough Dad, Genevieve, and I discovered that booze helped fill the hole that cocaine (for me and Gen) and heroin (for Dad) had left. But the hole was deep, so it took a lot of booze to fill it.

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