How I Escaped my Addiction to Hip

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Then I got involved with Billy, a heroin addict with a Triumph motorcycle. He took me away after I finished high school to a commune in Vermont, where I discovered booze, sex, drugs, and raw cashews. I became a wild hippie girl and soon got caught up in a new kind of striving. The striving to break things apart, to explode suburbia, authority, mediocrity and comfort. The striving to challenge the status quo. Finally I had something I believed in. I became a kind of performer, a provoker. People were awed when I took off my clothes at demonstrations or when I smuggled large quantities of drugs across state lines. They were scared when I didn't sleep for weeks at a time. They were awed and scared, but they couldn't love me. I wasn't there.

My status as a hip person rested largely on the fact that I lived dangerously, on the cutting edge. So I needed to keep pushing the limits, to be more and more outrageous. But the hipper I got—in my own mind anyway—the more removed and distant I became. By the time college was over, I had all but disintegrated. I moved to New York City, hoping to finally disappear. I spent my nights drifting in and out of alcoholic blackouts in after-hours clubs, sleeping with Mafia hit men and Italian butch dykes, waking in sleazy hotels and bedrooms. My politics and values had long since vanished. I was looking more pathetic than hip.

One night I came out of a blackout and discovered a Mafia guy banging my head against a bar and ripping off my necklaces as his friends stood by casually watching. Although I was numb from the booze, it was clear even to me that something had gone badly wrong. This was not hip. I was dying, and I couldn't figure out the cause.

I moved to Greenwich Village to find safety and salvation. I worked as a waitress and met a bartender, Mac, who was sober. We fell in love, and I pretended to stop drinking. But one night Mac and I were walking home from work, and I went into another blackout. Then, I later learned, I picked up a sharp piece of glass on the street, sat down on the sidewalk, and tried to cut my wrists.

That was it.

I came very close to dying, but, thanks to Mac and others, I was saved. I don't know how really. Oh, I know the literal mechanisms: the recovery program, the kind and amazing people who supported me. But the real how is still a mystery. I know that I wanted to stay alive more than anything. And if that meant living as a square nobody, I was willing.

Drinking was my mask. I was terrified of giving it up, because I thought if I did I would become a straight person again, a girl from the suburbs. Though I didn't know it then, I was also terrified of all the things I'd repressed for years: sadness, grief, anger, longing. I was terrified of my desire to belong, my hunger to be loved.

Without alcohol and drugs, I was stripped raw. My self-hatred and low self-esteem became toxic. I craved fame as a substitute for getting high and began trying to make it as a writer. If I was famous, hip, somebody—I said to myself—it would fill the terrible emptiness inside me. Fortunately, I didn't get what I wanted. Pain forced me inside.

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