A vignette before the intervention
Tiffany had a ton of friends in Topanga, and everyone was concerned when she began to live in the little yellow hut along the highway. She had essentially locked herself up by latching onto the little hut. I was paying rent to Peter the hauler for the place for her to have. But it was hovel (sorry, Peter) and it had this ugly dog iron barred fencing around the porch with a swinging door that could be bolted shut, which it was when I saw it. She yelled at me to, “Get the fuck out of here!” I wanted to help her. My heart told me to stop—but she hated me, and I just couldn’t accept she had turned so badly against me.
Sheets billowing in the wind, I walked away, but other friends observed her pacing in her cage, smoking, drinking, and Tiffany’s circle of friends was really quite large—and right across from her was the Topanga Artists’ Cooperative displaying her paintings along with all the other artists, and in the grocery store were more of her paintings on sale, and one even hung in Carlos’s office. Carlos fixed cars at the gas station with the old gas pumps that used to be where the feed store is these days, across from the post office, near Pine Tree Circle.
Among her friends Drake and Teal Duckworth were two of our favorites. It was a tragedy when their house burnt down in 2004 and everyone thought it was because Drake’s favorite toy train set had been left on and sparked—but who knows, really, what went on? And shouldn’t a guy be able to have a train running around the Christmas tree? They were living for now in another home they rented (now they have a beautiful new home). Teal and Tiffany loved going out together and sometimes would take off to Palm Springs to go party, leaving husbands behind.
Teal was an emergency room nurse working in detox at St. John’s Medical Center. Drake was a psychiatrist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
“I’m worried,” she said hugging me tight and making a worried sound. I held her tight too for a while and just smiled helplessly, I suppose in her blue eyes, and then looked over at Drake’s countenance. He looked a bit like he could have been a modern day British Prime Minster. We sat outside. It was such a beautiful evening. Shenny came out with tea. We all took a glass.
“You know, she’s living in that little yellow hut on the side of the road.” Teal sipped her tea. “I went to see her the other day. I was really concerned. Tiffany was walking barefoot. There were shards of glass from broken beer and wine bottles everywhere. She didn’t want to see me or anybody. I looked in her eyes. I’ve been working in detox too long to not recognize the signs. I clearly saw the beginnings of jaundice—we see it all the time at St. John’s. It isn’t pretty. I am totally concerned. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. She says she hates me. I went to see her. She ended up throwing beer bottles at me. I can’t get through to her. I can’t make her see what is so obvious.”
“That she isn’t well.,” Drake said, fingers forming a steeple beneath his chin. “I can tell you, Tiffany is basically going through a massive manic-depressive episode with addiction and schizophrenia mixed in. Is this the first time you’ve seen this in her?”
“You know, we sent her to the hospital to quit smoking. They gave her Wellbutrin.”
“Well, there you go,” Drake said. “Wellbutrin is known to cause mania in susceptible individuals.”
“I didn’t know that. You didn’t look it up?”
“Yeah, later.”
“Is there a history of mental illness?”
“I want to help her.”
“If you say you want to help her she’ll deny that she’s sick and tell you you’re sick,” he said.
“No kidding,” I said.
“It’s very difficult to get through to people when they’re going through this phase, and we don’t know how long it will continue. Is she taking any other medication?”
“She’s drinking.”
“Besides booze?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know,” Teal said.
“I didn’t realize how little I do know about anybody. It’s positively frightening.”
“Have you thought of an intervention?” Drake said. “It’s unlikely she’ll seek help on her own. She thinks we’re all crazy, not her.”
“I don’t know how to do one.”
“You should call Promises in Malibu or Betty Ford in Palm Desert. That would be a start.”
Their silver GM Yukon pulled out of our driveway amidst a plume of hydrocarbon mist.
Everybody says they’re there for you.
Ha.
I called Promises, the place where all the Hollywood stars go. In any event, when I called, I am sure they heard my voice bitten up into pieces.
The cost was going to be forty-five thousand dollars for thirty days. They didn’t take insurance, and if Tiff left whether she stayed an hour, day, or month, the money was nonrefundable. “We’ve got another treatment center in Culver City. It runs around twenty thousand. No refunds there either, though. Payment in advance.”
