But that fledgling actor was still very afraid of Lala. I hated him so much, yet at the same time, I knew we were dependent on him. He had a lot of money, he bought me things, he cared for us financially to make up for his lack of care physically and emotionally. But he managed to turn my mom into a weak, pathetic human being, sodeep down I still hated him. After Lala, my mother was never the same.
Sometimes if my mom and I got into a fight—the usual mother-daughter stuff—she would leave the house, and I’d be alone for hours, screaming and screaming and screaming because I wasn’t sure she was ever coming back.
Those are just some of the visions that fill my head when I’m stuck on my bed in my house in Laurel Canyon, just a mile as the raven flies from that house on Lookout Mountain Avenue. MS makes the simplest tasks excruciating, nauseating, tiring… I’m so often beyond tired. Sure, I have a large house way up on the mountain now, but some days I’m back there in our 750-square-foot house, the row house you could reach from two different streets.
Someone asked me recently aboutcomfort:What do I do for comfort, what comforts me the most in my new life of disability and painful stasis? I knew straightaway what my answer would be: “Nag champa, chimes, and a fire in the fireplace.” This has been a mantra for me since I was very little. These are the things—along with the horrors and my mother’s comatose body and that tumbler from South Bend—that I brought with me from my childhood, things that on a good day almost outweigh the Joe Lalas and the “caregivers” and the abuse and the addicted mothers of Laurel Canyon. My mother always burned nag champa, and there were always chimes tinkling in the windows, and we never wanted for a fire. In my journal from November 1988, I wrote,“Momma had a nervous breakdown this morning. So I bought her a TV and built a fire and put out candles and shit. I spent the rest of the evening with her. It was really nice. I think she had a good time.”
We return to the primal things whenever we need solace. Forothers it might be a song like “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound),” or a photo album filled with pressed flowers, or a car like a Nova heaving down a hill. For me it’s the holy trinity of Laurel Canyon: nag champa, chimes, and a fire in the fireplace.
Lala finally left us when I was seven. He grew convinced that my mom was crazy, and he had been calling my dad to say that my mother was an unfit parent, which was incredible given how terrible Lala had been to her. By then my mother had almost physically disappeared, and great, unfathomable damage had been done to both of us.
One day my father came to one of my school recitals and told me he was taking me for pizza. I protested that I needed to tell my mom, who was in the bathroom, but he said it wasn’t an issue, and stole me away, putting me in the back of the car and driving me back to his house in Woodland Hills.
When my mom came out of the bathroom and realized I was gone, she was, not surprisingly, completely hysterical. Fortunately, she was able to quickly figure out who’d taken me—I presume someone saw what had happened and told her—and she rushed to Woodland Hills to confront my father. I am told there was a terrible scene when she arrived—windows were broken, hair pulled out of heads, screaming and shouting, things said that could never be taken back…
Now, when I corral my mind to think of those days, there is sometimes a blank where disaster once was. This has nothing to do with the multiple lesions on my brain from MS. Instead, I think at somepoint my memory short-circuited, given the out-of-control drama of my young life. I do remember being mad at my mom, though, but I was mad at my father, too. I think I was mad at everyone; I’m not sure anyone could have blamed me for that.
Through it all my mother had tried to keep me innocent of the vagaries of the adults around me, but children, even if they don’t know the details, can easily and instinctually sense the tenor of a room, and I know that little girl understood all too well that the world was a dangerous, unforgiving place. Yes, there was nag champa and my mother’s rose perfume, but there was also the stench of violence, of loss, of being pulled this way and that by two people who couldn’t work out how to raise me together.
After the terrible events in Woodland Hills, my mom, leaving me with my dad, decamped somewhere out of town, where she tried to kill herself. She seemed to think that with my father taking me to Woodland Hills, she’d never get to see me again, and that was too much to bear. She had to get her stomach pumped after a dangerous overdose. I can’t remember how long she was gone. Again, my memory short-circuits. I don’t suppose it was longer than two weeks, but to me back then, it was an eternity. I remember my child mind fixating on how I didn’t even have any clothes with me, as it had all happened so suddenly.
Then I remember her pulling up to my dad’s house in the blue Nova, alive, a returning angel, and I couldn’t wait to get in the car with her.
She was my sanctuary. My mother was home. And that’s where we headed, the two of us silent on the 101, my heart leaping at the sight of the communications tower above the Mulholland Tennis Club, a beacon of returning, bright and sharp above Laurel Canyon.
Looking back, perhaps the most important thing I take away from that photograph these days is my smile—I am happy. I’m with my beloved grandparents, and though Lala and my mother, sadly, are probably both as high as kites on heroin at the time, she loved me and I knew she loved me and I felt safe with her, always.
THREE
THE BATHROOM FLOOR
MANY YEARS LATER, WHENmy mother discovered that Lala had cancer, she called him to see how he was.
When I asked her why she’d done such a thing, she said, “Well, I have to findclosure.”
“Closure to what, Mom?” I said. “Closure for ruining your daughter’s life, for ruiningyourlife, for destroying anything I could have had at the most formative time, taking that away from me and leading me toward a lifetime of attracting abusive junkie dicks to my life?”
Despite my anger, deep down I partly understand why she made that call, though it hurts to think she did so. We are all bound to create patterns we can barely break. And the bad people around us bring their patterns, too, which we fold into because we’re more comfortable with the pain we know than the threat of the unknown. Bad people like Lala cause damage, and then they apologize; theyvilify, and then they smooth-talk; they create huge mounds of shit, and make the shit seem like it’s your fault.
As for my mother, well, she’d been so financially dependent on that man, trying to raise a child with scant income and few job prospects, that she’d put up with so much more than she should have because there were mouths to feed.
So yes, all those years later she called him. She was bound upon her wheel, trapped inside her patterns, and was still hostage to him, too, I guess. I don’t know what she expected to hear, what kinds of words he could put together for her to feel closure. That’s for her to understand; her daughter, though, had a suspicion that all the greatest words imaginable could never make up for twenty-four hours of brushing her teeth, waiting for her mother to wake up and make it better.
Abuse doesn’t happen just once. And it doesn’t just affect one person. The model, this great pattern of hurt, had been created, the journey set before I’d even had the chance to understand I was on a journey in the first place. I was growing up the daughter of a mother trapped in a traumatic, abuse-ridden house, and I was to have that model as my very own for much of the rest of my life, too.
Now all I had to do was live it.
Back in L.A., reunited with her daughter but deeply alone again, my mother somehow kicked heroin on our bathroom floor all by herself (I was staying with my father during her detox). This was a truly heroic deed; I can’t imagine how she did it, not for a second. She later told me that it was the worst thing she’d ever dealt with in her entire life, but she’d done it so that she would never have to face beingaway from me again. She had to be there for me forever, so she fought back against the drugs and got clean.
She said that as she detoxed alone, she had wanted to rip the skin off of those fragile bones because of the pain. With heroin withdrawal, the body aches, you get palpitations, anxiety, insomnia, chills, diarrhea. You vomit, you scream with tears, you get feverish, you sweat. It’s a brutal, unforgiving detox, perhaps the worst detox a person can go through.
And my mother did it alone on the bathroom floor.
She is my hero. Our relationship, though sometimes fraught, has long settled into one of love and acceptance, but even back then, she taught me what it means to survive something terrible and emerge into a kind of bliss, akin to freedom. Sometimes an anger swells in me when I think of what we went through, what Lala put her through, and yes, what my father did to her by leaving us both right at the start of my life. But more and more that anger is replaced by gratitude, by acceptance, by understanding what she was able to build out of the chaos. I know now just how strong she had to be for both of us. I finally understand what it takes to put your own needs to one side because you love someone so much that all you can think about is their happiness. It took becoming a mother myself to fully comprehend just what my own mother achieved.
I’ll never stop thinking about her life back then: imagine the strength it took to quit heroin cold turkey on a bathroom floor. Imagine having no support to help raise your kid. Imagine wanting love but knowing that you have to put your kid first. Imagine the fear she must have felt in trusting anyone, let alone a man, after what Lala put us through.
When I was growing up, it was always just the two of us, so if it was often lonely and traumatic for me, imagine how hard it was forher. As I’ve grown older, I’ve been more able to find the heroism in my mother, the selflessness. And I’m grateful for that.
