“Go Ask Sheila.”

The only time I ever did hard drugs started with a letter from my ex-boyfriend.

We had been broken up for over a year, and it had been one hell of a separation, leaving us both battered, but unwilling to sever the connection entirely.

The ex-boyfriend was in San Francisco, where he worked in a law firm, and I had moved to Chicago to start a new and fresh life as an actress. Chicago was a hubbub of theatre and I flourished almost immediately upon arrival. It was a youthful energetic environment, and I began to work right away. Chicago had been the right choice.

I had never been a date-r, or promiscuous, or anything like that, and I wasn’t when I moved to Chicago. But let’s not soft-pedal the situation. I went insane. I made out with guys I never saw again. I gyrated at dance clubs, sandwiched in between two lunatic Lebanese cousins vying for my attention. My main Chicago flame was a grumpy black-haired man who didn’€™t seem inclined to get too serious either, which suited me just fine. (I have written about him before. He turned out to be a really important person in my life, but at the time he was an escape and I ran towards him at lightning speed for that reason.) We hung out all the time. We stayed up all night, ordering takeout at 4 a.m., watching kung fu movies in the middle of the night, wrestling so roughly that he gave me a black eye once (and was so repentant that many years later he still mentions it with dismay), knocking over furniture, and enraging his poor long-suffering roommate who had an early audition the next day. “You guys, could you keep it down?” would come the roommate’s weary call from the next room as we had one another in a vicious headlock that had been going on for 15 minutes. (A humorous sidenote: that roommate is now famous. Literally. I laugh every time I see him show up in something, remembering hanging out at his place for a good two years straight. He was very nice. Especially considering the shenanigans going on in the next room which kept him from sleeping.)

All of this activity was interrupted by bouts of lying in bed, sobbing, because I missed my old boyfriend. He was my first boyfriend. He had courted me with gentleness and humor back in the day. I was a virgin at the time, and neurotic about my freckled plump lack of beauty. We connected on an emotional and comedic level. I laughed harder with him than I think I have ever laughed with anyone else. All of this is true, but after we broke up, never once did I think that we should have stayed together. There had been something not right in our dynamic, something insurmountable. We stayed in touch through letters and phone conversations. We missed each other. I would see a movie and have to talk about it with him, because he was the one I still wanted to talk to. He would have a question about an author or a book he had just read, and the only person he wanted to ask was me. I loved to know how much I was missed.

He was ready to settle down, but trying to get me to settle down was like wrestling with a typhoon.

Unfortunately, I did not have enough of a sense of self at the time to say to him, “I’m too young for all of that. I just got out of college. I don’t feel ready to pick out silverware.” Instead, I internalized his displeasure with me, and let myself be overwhelmed by how wrong I was. To be truthful, I still grapple with the anxiety left by that relationship. Something is wrong with me, was the message, and that is why things never work out.

The whole “wrong-ness” thing has to do with the story of the day I did drugs.

Every time I do anything, it seems that I must do it wrong first. This is true of big things (relationships, career choices) and also little things. For example, it always seems that when I go to make my bed with fresh sheets, I always end up with them upside down and backwards first, with the tag up. I have to then go and turn them over. This is also true of driving somewhere for the first time. I always drive by the street I am searching for, and then have to backtrack, sometimes two or three times. Perhaps it is because I am impulsive and impatient, starting something without setting myself up properly and calmly beforehand. This is okay when it’€™s just a new printer I am trying to install but disastrous when it comes to my personal life. When I’€™m in a self-pitying mood, it feels like the universe is slapping my hand, saying, “€œNo, no, no, you don’€™t get to do this right. Other people do, but not you.”

At that point in my life in Chicago, I had made a bunch of new friends, and I was living with Mitchell, an old dear friend from college. Our new friends were a lot of fun, and they had “€œx”€ parties where people gathered at an apartment and did ecstasy. Mitchell and I were curious about it so we decided to join them one night. Why not? We gave the dealer the money for a couple of pills of ecstasy for the following week

A word about drugs. I have never been a “why not?” person about illegal substances. I guess I was always afraid of losing control. There was also the Go Ask Alice factor to consider, which cannot be overstated. I read that book when I was eleven and it scarred me for life. I know now that it was propaganda, but at the time, I took it as gospel. According to Go Ask Alice you take one hit of pot, and the next thing you know you’€™re being gang-banged by a bunch of filthy hairy-pitted hippies and not feeling bad about it. I like to drink, but even then I have to be careful. If I stick to beer and wine, I’m fine. But once I start drinking whiskey, I’ll be weeping and talking about the glory days of fifteen years ago before you can say “Loony Tunes”. I smoked some pot in college, everyone did, but I never liked it. It didn’t seem to do for me what it did for others. It didn’t mellow me out. On the contrary, it made me feel like I was a hollow nonentity whom everybody secretly hated and scorned. In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing that I never tried cocaine, because I feel like cocaine and me would make an awesome match. It could, potentially, be the answer to all of my problems. Obviously, that road not taken is best unexplored. Heroin terrified, way too unrecreational. Needles? No. I never did any of the hallucinogenics either, mushrooms, LSD, because I had seen one too many movies-of-the-week and ABC Afterschool Specials in my day, and I knew, in my heart, that I would be one of those morons who would, while on LSD, leap through a plate glass window 80 stories up because “the sky looked so pretty”€, or I would try to stab my best friend because I suddenly saw Beelzebub gleaming redly out of her eyes.

I felt safe with these new friends, however, and Mitchell would be there, so it would be an adventure! Yay!

One thing that I think might have been a factor in my “wrong” reaction to ecstasy later that night was that I was flirting with anorexia at the time. Not full-blown but definitely a serious flirtation. Don’€™t let anyone tell you that being that thin is not addictive. It is. I was not healthy. I was running five to ten miles a day, and living on a diet of sunflower seeds and Snapple. Sometimes I would have some Lipton’€™s Cup-a-soup to shake things up. I watched the fat dissolve off of me, and it was awesome. I loved my eating disorder!

And then there was that letter from my ex-boyfriend.

It had arrived on the day of the party, and in it he informed me that he was moving in with someone, a new girlfriend, and that our conversations would have to stop, and I probably would have to stop sending books and newspaper clippings to him. He was not callous, giving me the heads up was the right thing to, but it killed him. He thought we never should have broken up in the first place, we should have fought it out, and come out on the other side, still together. But he had done what he needed to do, and found someone else, and wanted to let me know that everything would change.

I guess I had known it was coming. I knew he was dating someone. By that point, too, I had moved on in a significant way myself. I was in shows, I had new friends, a guy I got to kiss on a regular basis. My life had a structure. I hadn’t slipped off the rails without him. I had flourished! I remember reading the letter in our kitchen, Mitchell standing nearby, and I had a moment when I put it down, saying to Mitchell, “Wow. It’s really over.” I felt nothing. Not one tiny thing. No sadness came up, no familiar grief. I was calm and cool and quiet. I felt grateful that he had written me such a letter, and also amazed that I had come so far. When I was in the maelstrom of the breakup, it had seemed like it would never end and I would always be the sad-eyed tragic girl. Always. But of course, time moved on and I healed. I got better. That moment with the letter was evidence. Look at me. I am finally okay.

We set out for the party later that night. It was a hot summer evening. Chicago swelter. We waited for the cross-town bus. I had no idea what I was walking into, and I was excited, I felt shimmery and light. I said to my two friends as we stood at the bus stop, “You know what? I am fine about that letter! Can you believe it? I am fine! I cannot believe how fine I feel about that letter!”

We got to the party. An ecstasy party is a friendly and compassionate environment, even as the collective spinal fluid is compromised drop by drop. It’s not a “love bomb” where everyone’s “out of it”, floating around in some “Go Ask Alice”-inspired ether, ready to turn into the Manson family at the first suggestion. Jellyfish was playing when we walked into the main room. There was pizza. Our friends greeted us rapturously. Most people had congregated out on the wooden back porch, so typical of Chicago apartments. There was booze in the kitchen, but not too many people were drinking. They were listening to music, dancing, and watching I Love Lucy, reciting the lines in unison. Never saw a party like that in Go Ask Alice, did you? Not a hippie gang-bang in sight.

We downed our pills in the kitchen, and waited to see what would happen next. I had a beer. I felt a little buzzed, but that was probably because I had only had ten sunflower seeds in the last 24 hours.

The three of us ended up out on the back porch. The music was soft, and people were chatting. Everything was lovely.

Until suddenly I started to feel very “off”€.

First came a dizzying sense of vertigo that eventually got so bad I had to hang onto the railings of the porch steps. The moment my hands gripped the bars, the porch unhinged itself and began to fly around in a circle, leaving me holding on for dear life. It was like that last scene in Hitchcock’€™s Strangers On a Train where there is no way to step gently off such a runaway merry-go-round. I closed my eyes, trying to breathe through it. Obviously, the fact that I was clutching a stationary porch railing, huddled down against the hurtling imaginary wind, called attention to itself and someone said, hesitantly, “Sheila?” That was when I leaned over the side of the stairwell, and vomited up my sunflower seeds.

I have an almost pathological embarrassment about vomiting in public, and it is one of the reasons why drinking to excess is such a rare occurrence in my life. When I have gotten too drunk in public, and have to go vomit, I revert to high school, where I’m made fun of by the bitches in the cafeteria, and they do imitations of how I walk behind my back, cackling with glee. I feel like I will not be forgiven for my transgression. I am wrong, and wrong for good. It will not be forgotten. It will be a mark against me for all time.

I was paralyzed with horror on the porch over what had just happened. My friends, high on ecstasy, were full of love and support for me and my vomiting. They hunched over me, rubbing my back, getting me water. Dammit, why did that porch keep flying around like that? Couldn’t it stay still? I threw up another time. And another. I started crying at some point along in here, and my friends helped me stagger up the steps and took me into the bathroom.

I was “that girl”. “That girl” that you see at parties: too drunk, and weeping uncontrollably, a sloppy mess. I have lived my life avoiding being “that girl”.

We stayed in the bathroom for probably an hour. The vomiting finally ceased, which was a blessing, seeing as how my anorexic diet didn’€™t leave much to come up, but once the crying had started I could not stop. One friend sat on the closed toilet seat, Mitchell perched on the edge of the tub, as I paced around in my cut-off shorts sobbing about my ex-boyfriend, how much I loved him, how sad I was, how my life was over, how I would never love again, how angry I was at him, and how tragic it was that I would have my great and only love at such a young age. It was a monologue of truly Aeschylus-ean proportions. I went through two rolls of toilet paper, mopping the tears off my face as I ranted.

Now let me talk about the nature of my tears, because I haven’t cried like that before or since. At first, yes, I was sobbing, but eventually the tears became like any other bodily function: sweat, a sneeze, the flu; they happened whether I did anything about it or not, whether I felt sad anymore or not, they could not be stopped. Once the first hour of hysterics had passed, I could carry on conversations about things other than my lost love moving in with his new girlfriend. I could talk about I Love Lucy, music, food, but the tears kept falling. They fell and fell and fell. I was like Alice in Wonderland, drowning in her own pool of tears. The tears were unconnected to me, somehow. I didn’t feel the convulsive heaving sadness that comes along with sobs, I felt 100% normal inside, but still the tears would not stop.

I finally felt the need to remove myself from the action of the party. Not that I felt that others were embarrassed by me. As a matter of fact, an entire cottage industry of ecstasy-induced Sheila-Nurturing activities had cropped up throughout the party, people racing to get me food, or water, or a cold cloth. I felt I needed to go lie down. I went into the empty front room. There were windows on three sides, long curtains touching the floor. I could have some privacy there, but I could also hear the party going on down the hall. I piled couch pillows on the floor, lay on my back in the darkness, and let the tears flow. I cried years of tears in that dark living room. I cried more tears than I ever would have allowed myself to if I had been in my right mind. I got four months of potential grief out in one short evening. I didn’t lie in that dark living room, writhing with psychic pain. No. I was quiet, my breathing was calm and deep, I stared up at the shadowy ceiling, hearing Jellyfish blasting from down the hall, and let the tears fall. I stopped judging them or trying to hold them back. Out they poured.

Occasionally large groups of high people would come sit around me, carrying on their conversations from the kitchen, letting me feel included. Nobody tried to pull me out of it or cheer me up. Nobody expected me to participate. Their voices flowed above my head, soft, giving, benign, and it was considered completely normal that they would all be chatting about Ghostbusters as a girl lay on pillows in their midst, tears rolling down her face like the flooded Yangtze.

If only every person who was wounded could find herself surrounded by such a crowd.

I had now been crying for three hours.

People came and went. They hung around, standing over me, then meandered back to the kitchen, drifting in and out.

The guy whose party it was came into the front room. Nobody else was there. I didn’t even know him all that well. He sat down cross-legged behind me, gently picked my head up and put it in his lap. I was completely passive. A limp rag of tears. My head settled into his lap. We didn’t speak. No words passed between us. He was dating my good friend. This was not a sexual thing, he wasn’t making a pass. He was taking care of me. I lay there with my head in his lap, eyes closed, and as the tears fell – and they came slowly (but insistently) – one by one – he would brush them away. A tear fell. Gentle hand brushing it away. Another tear fell. Gentle brushing it away.

This went on for an hour.

We never spoke. He never asked me to explain myself. It was just accepted that I was on drugs, and sometimes when you’re on drugs, shit like this goes down, and you need to take care of a person like that. His hands, soft like wings, on my cheek, brushing my tears away. For an hour.

I will never forget him for that.

It’s weird. Years later, our paths have crossed again. He’s an Emmy nominee many times over. It’s always slightly bizarre when I run into him, because our lives are so different now, and a decade has passed since the day I did drugs. We never mention it. We talk about our pets, our work. That moment in the dark living room, his gentle wing-like hands on my face, is always there between us. That is in him. It’s not in everyone, make no mistake. Not everyone would choose to sit quietly like some Franciscan monk, and wipe away the tears off the face of a girl you don’t even know for an hour.

A crowd of anxious hovering people came in to see how I was doing. Voices in a tremulous chorus: “Sheila … how are you???”

I pulled my head up, squinted at them through my swollen eyes, and said softly, “I am having such a good time.”

I fucking meant it. Everyone burst into laughter.

Finally, it was time to go. Mitchell helped me get up and walk to the door.

Then there is a jump cut, and it is now the next morning. I have no memory of getting home, of going to sleep. I was at the party, and then suddenly it was the next morning. K. slept over on the couch. We woke up, still high as kites. We had hours to go before we would come down. The tears had stopped. I woke up fresh and sparkly in the bright day. The four-hour crying jag was something I had experienced, but in that moment it felt like it hadn’t left a trace. I woke up ravenous. I didn’t want to dole out sunflower seeds anymore; I wanted to eat a steak. K. and I bumped around the apartment together until deciding to walk to the diner down the street and get some breakfast. I felt like I had never been so hungry. As we walked to the diner, K. said to me, “I feel so skinny right now.” That’s one of the blessed side effects of ecstasy, especially for a borderline anorexic: you feel lithe and skinny, you flow through space without leaving a ripple. I said, “Me too.” K. said, “I feel like a prancing gazelle.” I was swimming in my clothes, my hipbones sharp picture hooks keeping my jeans up. We were gazelles leaping across the savannah of Ashland Street.

K. and I sat down at the table, drooling and ready for breakfast. We ordered everything on the menu. Eggs, bacon, home fries, bagels, lox, fruit cup, coffee, juice, Frosted Flakes, bring it all! The stacks of food arrived. Ohhh, we were so excited. Ohmygodgiveusthatfood NOW. But once the food was actually there, we could not eat a thing. We tried, but we choked on the crumbs, pushing our eggs around, washing it down with sips of burnt coffee. Mortified, we asked for the check, having eaten one corner of one piece of toast apiece. We slunk away, embarrassed gazelles.

It took us the rest of the day to get back to normal.

We started talking about my “wrong” response to the drug. Why had everyone else been so happy and loving, while I had a crying jag the likes of which the world has never seen? What had happened? Was it my anorexia? Was it the letter I had received? Was it something in me that is different (read: “wrong”) than others? That’s what I thought. I felt outside the human family. I didn’€™t “get” to have the experiences other people did. I have to be careful. Everyone else can let loose, but I clearly cannot be trusted. K. and Mitchell had both had a by-the-book ecstasy experience, a golden-lit feeling of warmth and love towards everyone they saw. But me? I cried for four hours in a dark room.

Mitchell said to me, “I don’t think ‘ecstasy’ the word actually means ‘ happy’. It’s more than that – it’s not just about being ‘happy’, Sheila. I don’€™t think it’€™s that literal.”

Naturally I had to drag out my dictionary.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “ecstasy” is defined as follows:

A state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed: allay thy ecstasy: “In measure rein they joy”€ (Shakespeare)
A state of any emotion so intense that rational thought and self-control are obliterated: an ecstasy of anger
The trance, frenzy, or rapture associated with mystic or prophetic exaltation (Mid-English extasie, from Old French, from Late Latin exstasis, ecstasies, from Greek ekstasis, from existanai, to displace, drive out of one’€™s senses).

The first definition was what I had been expecting from the drug, the traditional response, but #2 and #3 come closest to actually expressing my experience of that night, #2 especially with its “emotion so intense that rational thought and self-control are obliterated“.

I was the only one crying for four hours at that party, it is true, but the surrounding warmth, and the feather-light-brushing-off of my tears from that kind stranger, had helped me to feel that whatever I was going through was part of their experience as well. I was not an anomaly. I was not wrong. My tears, although excessive, were indeed an event where “normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

I never did ecstasy again. There is only so much “frenzy and rapture”€ one person can take.

I never cried that intensely again, either, about my ex-boyfriend, not even when he went ahead and married that new girlfriend the following year. My crying jag had been a condensed and necessary catharsis, leaving me totally purged of the leftover ghosts from that relationship.

So.

Just so we’re clear:

I am the type of person who did ecstasy once, and afterwards had to look the word up in the dictionary in order to verify the etymological roots of my experience.