Chapter 3 The Bathroom Floor
THREE
THE BATHROOM FLOOR
MANY YEARS LATER, WHEN my 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 find closure.”
“Closure to what, Mom?” I said. “Closure for ruining your daughter’s life, for ruining your life, 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; they vilify, 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 being away 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 for her. 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.
And there was joy, too.
We used to drive up the 5 freeway to Magic Mountain all the time, just the two of us, and always on Mother’s Day.
I can’t imagine that many mothers would choose a trip to Magic Mountain for their special day, but she knew how much I loved it, so it became a family tradition, me hoping each year that I was finally tall enough to be allowed on the Gold Rusher, the Log Jammer, the Colossus, or the Great American Revolution.
And given what we’d both been through—the violence, the fear, the struggle to just survive—we’d think nothing of those huge roller coasters, whooping and hollering as our stomachs got left behind, free for a few minutes from the pressures of our shared pasts, our challenging presents, and our uncertain futures.
The two of us—always the two of us. Some weekends we’d drive down off the mountain and head to the coast. We’d roller-skate through Venice all the way up to Santa Monica, which at the time wasn’t the safest thing to do, despite the lo-fi, retro filter through which we now view the seventies.
It might have been the era of free love, but there was plenty of hatred, too—we’d see blood splatters on the bike trail that hugs the beach because some dudes in jean shorts had been fighting drunk again.
But I was never afraid—my mom always made me feel safe, that I was okay, that no one would get me.
We’d buy a hot dog on a stick, or a corn dog, or even a cheese corn dog if we were feeling fancy, and then on we’d roll until the sun started to set and the L.A. chill descended.
In the end, I became a really good skater, joined a troop, the whole bit. We were even highlighted in the opening shots of an episode of CHiPs, rolling along the boardwalk in Venice. It’s funny to me how even my hobbies would end up as jobs; we were thankful, as ever, for the work.
Other weekends, when I wasn’t with my dad in Woodland Hills, my mom and I would head south to Laguna Beach, where we’d stay at the Laguna Riviera, a beachfront motel with an indoor pool on the street side.
There was no room service, just a Danish and a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup in the lobby.
We’d eat at a cool little vegetarian stand around the corner, and that’s how it was: just the two of us.
One such weekend my mom suddenly said, “Let’s go to Tijuana!,” just over the border into Mexico, about a hundred miles south of Laguna. We sang “Cuanto Le Gusta” all the way there, which was funny as we often didn’t have a dime, but we had a happy time, just like the song says.
We’d long since given up the Nova and now my mom drove a sage-green used Cadillac, and I felt like I was in an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Once we’d crossed the border, we bought a pair of sombreros and a little purse for me that had, confusingly enough, ACAPULCO written on it.
I put all my money in that purse, but one of my junkie babysitters stole it. I still get mad when I think of it—$300, which was a lot in 1979.
Once my mom was off the heroin, it’s hardly surprising that she turned to Valium to calm her nerves.
She was, as they say, “California sober,” meaning she’d quit the really bad stuff.
She had bad anxiety and constantly fussed about her weight.
Some of those issues surely rubbed off on me.
Some years later, when I was probably twelve or thirteen, my mom sent me to school with a bottle of pills all my own.
At first, it was a mixture of diet pills.
My mom always thought I could lose a little weight.
She made me go to Weight Watchers, and we always had Weight Watchers food in the house for her.
I was in my teens and no longer teeny tiny anymore.
I had hips, and a butt, and my mom would often say, “You could stand to lose five pounds.” But we were all a product of the times as much as anything.
These were the days informed by ads like the one for the diet cola Tab, in which a honey-voiced male actor croons over a sickly song, “When you can’t be with him, be in his mind.
Be a ‘mind sticker,’ with a shape he can’t forget. ”
This was standard stuff in the seventies zeitgeist, and my home was no different.
The issues of the time became her issues, and her issues became mine, and soon she started sending me to school with my own stash of Valium.
Those she told me to chew so they activated faster.
One day I got into a fight with some kid and chewed all the pills.
When my mom came to pick me up, I was lying on the cot in the nurse’s office.
She was so mad she threw her keys at me.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said.
Drugs were everywhere in the Canyon by that point, and the days of weed had long been supplanted by a darker scene.
One of the renters we took on to fill the garage was a weird guy named Alan Burke. Not only did he provide some much-needed income, but his presence also offered some additional babysitting for me.