Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness Read online

  A week before her eighteenth birthday, my mom discovered she was pregnant—with me. “I thought I was hungover,” she says now, “but the hangover lasted three months!” Morning sickness hit her hard and fast; she dropped out of nursing school. Although Roe v. Wade had become law, abortion was not an option for this good Latina Catholic girl. On the other hand, she barely knew Mike, let alone loved him. For a while, she hoped for divine intervention, but then Dad sealed the deal—if she wouldn’t marry him, he threatened to go to L.A. and tell her family that he’d gotten her pregnant. Evidently, the idea of standing in front of Grandma Rosa, pregnant but with no wedding ring, was scarier to her than the alternative.

  My parents eloped to Yuma, Arizona, came back to San Diego, and tried to settle down, with lots of family involvement on both sides. They probably should’ve paid attention to the fact that they hadn’t liked each other in the beginning, because that back-and-forth was the dynamic for the rest of their marriage, which ultimately lasted thirteen years. Dad gave being a grown-up his best shot, bagging groceries during the day and clerking the late shift at 7-Eleven. He sold shoes at JC Penney, he worked construction; later, he specialized in sheet metal, as well as heating and air-conditioning. But he was overwhelmed and unpredictable. He was also battling a crystal meth addiction, which I didn’t know then—I just knew he and my mother fought all the time. Dad would punch a hole in the wall and stomp out; Mom would patch up the hole, pack up, and move out. Six months was their average stay in an apartment, and they were separated almost as often as they were together. On Mother’s Day 1975, Mom drove herself to the hospital to have me.

  When I was a year old, we lived for a while in a tacky motel in Chula Vista. The room lacked many amenities (including a fridge), so Mom kept everything on ice in the sink. My parents’ diet consisted primarily of sandwiches made of Goober peanut butter and jelly (the kind that looked striped in the jar); my own diet was primarily Carnation evaporated milk. To supplement their income, during the day Mom would put me in my tinny little used stroller and go out looking for cans and bottles for recycling. One day, she was crossing the street and the stroller telescoped, folding and collapsing with me in it. For a few seconds, she was convinced I’d been chopped in two; once she realized that wasn’t the case, she was humiliated because it happened on the corner of Broadway and E Street, one of the busiest intersections in town. Everyone was looking at her; everyone knew that she didn’t know what she was doing.

  Because of the constant moving, there weren’t many San Diego communities we didn’t live in—Lemon Grove, Chula Vista, and San Ysidro, where you could literally walk right up to the Mexican border. I was three when my little brother, Johnny, was born, at which point Dad abruptly hauled us all up to Tacoma, Washington. He had friends there, he told my mother; it would be a new start.

  It didn’t take long for things to go bad. For one thing, it never stopped raining. My father pulled a disappearing act, and my mother, stuck in an unfurnished duplex with two tiny kids and no one to talk to, taught herself to bake—sugar cookies, from scratch. I loved the ritual of it, watching her put all the ingredients together, rolling the dough, cutting the little circles with a water glass, and then that amazing butter-sugar smell filling the apartment. Sugar was my first addiction; the second was the bottle of codeine-based grape-flavored cough syrup in the cupboard above the refrigerator. I would lean on my elbows, look out at the gray rain, and think, Guess we’re not going outside today. Then I’d wait for the chance to sneak a quick swallow or two out of that bottle. I had to carefully hoist myself up on the counter to get it. It just made me feel better. I’m not sure exactly when I started feeling sad most of the time, but if I had to guess, it would be in Tacoma, in the rain, with the cough syrup and the cookies.

  One morning, Dad stayed home from work with what he said might’ve been the flu. “I’ve got some medicine that might help,” Mom told him helpfully, and she gave him a couple of whopping tablespoons of the cough medicine. Turns out she’d been planning our escape from the rain forest for days, and she wasn’t going to let him or the flu or anything else stop her. When he was safely in a deep sleep, she hustled us out the door, telling us it was a game, shushing us to not wake Daddy.

  A neighbor drove us to the airport in a lime green and white VW bus. “I feel like I’m helping you cross the Iron Curtain or something,” the neighbor said.

  By the end of that day, we were back in California, camping at Grandma Rosa’s, whose house was always full of family members coming and going, so she didn’t seem particularly surprised to see us. Grandma’s English was never very good, but Mom helped me understand her Spanish, and soon enough I was hanging on her every word. Her favorite thing to watch on TV was videotapes of the pope saying Mass, followed by episodes of the British comedy Benny Hill, featuring a lecherous old guy chasing half-naked women around, which made her laugh until she ran out of breath.

  Grandma told me of the myths and legends she held certain to be God’s truth, as sure as anything the Catholic Church taught her. If I would only know these things in my heart, she said, I would stay safe from harm. For instance: If you get scratched in the eye by a cat, you’ll see ghosts, so it’s probably best to avoid cats. Do not go outside and jump up and down, because it will make your guts fall out. Don’t ever pick up a solitary baby in the desert with the idea that you’re rescuing it; an unfortunate cowboy did this once, whereupon the baby sprouted huge teeth and started talking about hell—it turns out the baby was the Devil himself. And finally, if you are pregnant, always keep a pair of scissors in your pocket in the event of an eclipse; otherwise your baby will be born with a harelip. In Grandma Rosa’s world, everything was a potential threat, so the best course of action was to stay in the house with the pope and Benny Hill, and pray.

  It wasn’t long before Dad came back from Tacoma and retrieved us. He and Mom tried to work it out, then separated again. Too young when they married, and chronically poor, they struggled constantly with the outside world, and with the one inside their own walls. Very early on, I understood the connection between work, a paycheck, a roof over my family’s head, and food on the table. The grown-ups were always talking about jobs—who had one, who’d lost one, who knew somebody who maybe was hiring. Describing them as blue-collar is to overstate it; even when they were working, they were the working poor. We “borrowed” the neighbors’ cable connection for months; we qualified for food stamps and free lunch at school. And the legendary government cheese line: Just show up and pick up the goods—powdered milk, fifty-pound bags of white rice, and big blocks of cheese with no labels, colored an odd yellow-white or Day-Glo orange. On weekends, Mom had me sit with her while she balanced the checking account; by the time I was seven, I knew addition and subtraction, which bills had to be paid right now and which ones could wait. She kept us in clean, good clothes (I’m remembering a particular striped T-shirt from Mervyns that, by the time they applied the discounts, cost forty-eight cents), and she always made sure we looked presentable.

  I knew there had to be another way to live. I wanted more. In fact, I’m pretty sure that WANT MORE! is tattooed somewhere deep inside my brain. I was always trying to make money. From elementary school on, I sold (or resold) whatever I could get my hands on: trinkets, candy, ice cream. I even sold my lunch.

  The summer I was nine, I started my own small business, which I operated through the open window in our living room. I came up with the idea one day when my mother and I were shopping at Price Club. When I told her about my idea, she loaned me a little money, which I used to buy chips, candy bars, and frozen Otter Pops. Mom’s job was just a block from our apartment; I stayed home to watch my little brother, and during her breaks or lunch hour, Mom came home to check on us. When TV’s The Price Is Right was over at eleven in the morning, that was my cue to open the window and wait for my customers. After checking out the local ice cream man who drove his truck around the neighborhood, I lowered my prices by five cents an item
and made a tiny fortune.

  In the summer, different public libraries had reading events for kids and rewarded you with fast-food coupons or tokens to a nearby arcade. This was great incentive, since the only way my little brother and I ever got to play arcade games was scrounging for dropped quarters between the games tables. I actually read James and the Giant Peach from start to finish in one day while sitting in a tree on a very uncomfortable branch. I also went through a phase where I read anything I could find on gymnast Nadia Comaneci. I thought it would smooth my way when I moved to Texas to work with Comaneci’s famous trainer, Béla Károlyi. I believed that with the fierce Béla at my side (plus blood, sweat, tears, and tragically being separated from my family), I would someday win a medal. I had a Mary Lou Retton red, white, and blue leotard, and I was ready to wear it for my country. It was sadly true that I had no gymnastic skills whatsoever (and in the fourth grade was already five inches taller than most retired gymnasts), but that didn’t stop me from picturing myself on the podium, waving after the national anthem played.

  For a while, my mother didn’t have a car. She walked to the grocery store, walked back and unloaded the groceries from the shopping cart, then walked the cart back to the store. She took a six-week class in medical procedures (walking to and from school, about a mile away) and did well enough to qualify for a job in a local podiatrist’s office. Dad took a course in night school; he says now that it’s because I corrected the spelling in a note he’d left me, and he thought he’d better get back to school so that he could keep up. Dad got me into Little League, too; we even collected baseball cards for a while. He didn’t want me to be that girly girl who yelps, “Oh, no, a ball is coming at me—what should I do?” When we played catch, he fired the ball at me like crazy, hollering, “You better learn to catch it, Mary, or you’re gonna get hit!” Wise words.

  Mom was the queen of coupons and a master of strategy: she knew how to squeeze a nickel to the squeaking point, and could plan a menu for a month at a time and never bend the budget. When we got to the market, she’d pull out her list, give me a handful of coupons, give my brother, Johnny, another handful, and the three of us would fan out, then go through separate checkout lines to get even more discounted multiple boxes of Wheaties and Cheerios.

  There was a point when I insisted we take the food stamps and coupons to grocery stores far away from where we lived, so I wouldn’t see anybody I went to school with. One day, the government cheese line was very long, stretching out into the parking lot under the hot summer sun. “I can’t believe we have to do this,” I whined.

  “Be glad that we can,” said my mother calmly. “We don’t waste money; we don’t waste food.”

  I may still have the coupon-clipping habit, but I cannot go near a box of Wheaties, and I would rather mix rat poison with water than ever again drink powdered milk. Whenever there’s a food drive in my neighborhood, I buy and donate the best vegetables, the best sauces, the top-brand fruits and juices. When I think of someone who’s poor, struggling, or sad because they have to eat generic crap and Day-Glo cheese, it just makes me angry.

  In spite of their hardships, my parents had music playing all the time: in the house, in the car—the radio was free. On my fifth birthday, they gave me the coolest fold-up portable record player that played 45s. The label on the inside read, DEJAY HAPPY TUNES/PHONOGRAPH PLAYER. It was covered in a denim print, and when you flipped it open, a little cord came out of a hole in the back and plugged into the wall. Along with this beautiful piece of art came three records—“Pac-Man Fever,” “867–5309/Jenny” (Tommy Tutone!), and my favorite song ever, Joan Jett’s version of “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.” That song had me playing air guitar and flying off my bed like Eddie Van Halen.

  A few years ago, I actually met Joan Jett. Despite that I was well into adulthood, I thought I’d pass out from excitement. I managed to hold it together and blurt, in a super-fan kind of way, “‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’ was my first record!” She smiled and looked at me with that pleasant but safe-distance expression that most celebrities wear when someone’s blurting at them. It’s the “Hmm, she’s just a little bit bananas, isn’t she?” look.

  No artist was safe from me and my little denim record machine. Madonna, New Edition, the Cure. Yes, I know these artists don’t belong together—even now, my iPod looks like some kind of cyber malfunction downloaded the history of all music but in no particular order. It’s not my fault that I have no musical boundaries: My father’s favorite record is still David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs; my stepdad’s is Prince’s Purple Rain. Most nights, I fall asleep with headphones on, and before my eyes are 100 percent open in the morning, I’ve already inhaled at least three songs, the majority of them ridiculously loud rock. I require large amounts of caffeine and an earthquake of music to get going, and I am filled with gratitude every day for all the artists who get me out of bed and back into the world.

  I never played dress-up when I was a kid, except for the times Mom and I played rock star, taking turns wearing her special Saturday-night outfit, the burgundy wrap skirt with the matching long-sleeved leotard. We’d put on layers of her mascara and the pink cheek stain from the little pot she carried in her purse, then stand in front of the mirror and wail like Stevie Nicks into our hairbrushes. My air guitar was, in fact, all air. I would’ve played with a tennis racket if I’d had a tennis racket, but I didn’t; I had a hairbrush and Joan Jett.

  Accessing memories is so much easier when there’s a soundtrack attached—for example, I recall riding in the back of an old van (not only were there no seat belts, there were no seats), with Blondie cranked on the radio. I can’t remember where we were going, but even now, Debbie Harry’s voice makes me think something fun is going to happen.

  Second example: I was riding on the freeway in a station wagon, the kind where the last seat faced backward, and you can wave at the car behind you. We were on a family road trip that day, and a song about kissing came on the radio. For some reason, I decided in my head that the song was about sex. I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t listen. My face was hot, I knew it was red. All I could think of, was: Don’t look at me, nobody better look at me. I was being a prude and didn’t even know why. When you’re a kid, you’re convinced everybody knows what you’re thinking, when in fact, they’re distracted and busy with their own lives, trying to keep their eyes on the road.

  Third example: Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, specifically “It’s So Easy.” I hear the opening chords, and my blood races—it’s about a wild ride I took for years, all twisted up in love and heroin and destruction and waste. And yet I’ll listen to that song every time. It’s like that stupid old joke about why the guy keeps hitting himself with the hammer—because it feels so good when he stops.

  In 1978 my parents divorced. Then, true to form, they reunited, remarrying in 1984, this time in a formal Catholic Church ceremony presumably meant to lock it down. In 1986, when I was eleven, my little sister Julie was born, and that was the end of my mom’s office work for a while. She began to run a licensed daycare center in our house and suddenly, there were babies and toddlers everywhere. Aunties and cousins dropped in and out, the TV was always on, the voices of people coming and going went on for hours. In 1989, after another long separation, my parents divorced for the second—and final—time. Mom packed us up again, and moved us to Coronado Island, one of San Diego’s most affluent neighborhoods. Because of this, it was also home to a very good public school system. “This is going to be our chance,” Mom said. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Coronado Island is separated from San Diego by a long blue-and-white bridge that has five lanes of traffic and is high enough so that huge aircraft carriers can go under it. I think it’s meant to blend into the sky, but for anyone with a height phobia, the journey across the water is an invitation for a full-blown panic attack. Even today, driving over that bridge freaks me out. I say a prayer every time I do it. I wasn’t surprised years later to
learn that it was the third-deadliest suicide bridge in the United States. I couldn’t know then that once we crossed over it, everything I knew was nothing; my childhood was coming to an end, and not in a nice way.

  The island is about seven square miles in size, ringed by beaches, mansions, a naval base, and the Hotel del Coronado. When you come off the bridge, San Diego Bay is on your right, the Pacific Ocean is right in front of you, and a massive, perfectly manicured golf course is on your left. There is no unbeautiful view, from any direction.

  When we first moved to Coronado, you had to pay a dollar to cross over the bridge. The tollbooths are abandoned now, but when I was a kid, I was convinced that was why everyone on the island was rich—once a month, everybody lined up at the mayor’s office for their share of the cash. That first day, Johnny, Julie, and I sat squashed together in the back of the little Corolla, peering through the windows, waiting for our new home to reveal itself. Our tiny house was on El Chico Lane, almost in the shadow of the bridge. Just because it had an actual name doesn’t mean it was a street; it was an alley. But it was a house, and it was on an island. It was a start.

  Thanks to the domestic adventures of Mom and Dad, Coronado Middle School was my seventh transfer since first grade. Vista La Mesa Elementary, Baldwin Park Elementary, Rosebank Elementary, Vista La Mesa again, San Miguel Elementary, Lemon Grove Middle School, La Mesa Middle School. I should’ve been an old hand at being the new kid, but it was agony. And the seventh grade is its own kind of weird: you’re not quite a teenager, but you’re not a little kid anymore, either.