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I like to read the articles at FactCheck.org. I came across this bit about Obama. It seems that he made some of the mistakes that I did and mentions them now so that young people will know that such mistakes as drug use can be recovered from.
I have said the same thing myself. So has Stephen King in his book “On Writing.”
I’m in seriously great company as a recovered drug user.
Dear Mr. Dagstine, You are a NitWit.
I smoke cigars and a pipe. My favorite pipe tobacco is Black Cavendish.
Collards and Bowser’s toffee
G&B chocolate
Linder’s truffles.
And must have lots and lots of coffee
Although I grew up in bad neighborhoods, I had managed to avoid drugs because I was a shy, quiet, ‘get in my face and I’ll bust your chops’ loner. Even the black kids avoided me.
By the time that i was ten years old, I had worked out a pattern of picking out the kid with the toughest reputation and busting his chops. HIS i did not pick fights with girls. Doing so gave notice whenever we moved to a new area that the other kids were to leave me alone.
When I was eleven, I picked the wrong kid. His name was Danny. He was quiet and had nothing to do with the other kids. That should have sent some alarm bells going off in my head, but at eleven, you usually notice those things afterwards. I attacked and was sent tumbling across the dirt. I tried three times to land a punch and each time I ended up tumbling in another direction. He was a year older than I was, and he stood there with a bemused grin and an easy stance. Five years of judo training will do that for you.
Two days later, I lured him across the street and hit him with a stick. That made an impression. He stood there rubbing his head and asked me why I did it. We sat down on my front porch and had a long talk about it. Afterwards, I became the only kid in the neighborhood that played with Danny. If someone wanted to get rough with me, they had to go through Danny and no one in that area wanted to mess with Danny.
Two years later, we moved again and that was the last I saw of him. But it had been a good two years. That was 1968.
* * *
That was the kind of thing that had kept me insulated from the drug culture of the 60s.
H smoked pot — he chain smoked it like other people do cigarettes. i kept waiting and expecting it to make him crazy, like alcohol sometimes did Papa. It didn’t happen. I became more comfortable and eventually tried it. H was ten years older than I am and had been heavy in the drug culture, including the Haight Ashbury scene.
I hated pot. it made me sleepy and odd feeling. So i never got into it.
Despite a year and a half of working after I graduated high school, my social skills and attitude did not belong to the era in which I was living. My word choices belonged in 1940s and earlier, acquired mainly from Mama and Papa or books. I had survived my final three semesters of high school by making the rest of the students afraid of me. Texas had refused to accept all of my credits from California, and made me do an extra semester, so I graduated at mid-term, January of 72.
In 1974, I started college in California. I had a few friends in college. There was Gwen and Sherri, who I had met in karate classes, and there was the big black guy, Rain, who I had met in karate and dated until Mickey put a stop to it (my mother was a bigot), and more and more there were three people who became a centerpiece to a lot of what would come later, John, Arturo, and Stephanie.
John, Arturo, and Stephanie were Bahais. Mama liked them. (Mama was not a bigot)
It seemed like a good fit.
Because Papa was a weekend alcoholic while I was growing up, I had sworn I would never drink so much as a beer. I didn’t do drugs. And I had sworn I would not have sex until marriage (although hormones were kicking in and got harder and harder to deal with). And I was determined never to smoke.
Well, the road to hell is lined with good intentions.
Oddly, what offended Micky most was my studying karate. Mickey encouraged my half-brother, Don, to try and beat me up, put me in my place, prove to me that my years in karate (as physical therapy more than anything else) were worthless. By late 1975, the constant ‘fight me’ from Don, the sexual overtures from my step-father, and other matters drove me back to Texas.
A family consultation led to Mama, Papa, and me returning to the Lone Star State. I had decided not to contact the local Bahais, as I was finding out things that I did not like. My main mistake was in maintaining a correspondence with Stephanie. So eventually the Bahais showed up on my doorstep.
In early 76, while taking classes at Tarrant County Junior College, I came across a flyer for a New York women’s college, called Briarcliff. I had written my first novel, and I enclosed that with my application. The result of that was a phone call from the Dean of Admissions. Naturally, I went.
They set me up with two one-on-one classes to complete and polish the novel. One of those was with Josiah Bunting III, who had three novels published; and the other was with Paul Kane. I benefited more from Paul than I did Josiah, who was determined that I try my hand at mainstream. Paul had no difficulties with fantasy. Pace University purchased Briarcliff in 77, and I was encouraged to put my application in at other New York colleges.
However, my year in New York had made me very homesick. So I did not return the next year. I had acceptances at Marymount, Sarah Lawrence, and Vassar, yet even that was not enough to lure me back to New York.
Paul continued to critique my stories, and we stayed in touch for many years. In 1978, I sold my first two short stories, and my novel had finally started making the rounds of NY publishers at Paul’s urging and that of Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Daw rejected it, and I sent it to Jim Frenkel at Dell. Jim expressed a desire to buy it, but before he could issue a contract, Dell canceled their sf/f line. So i sent it next to a small Virginia Beach company called Donning/Starblaze.
The editor-in-chief at Donning/Starblaze was H. That’s how I met him. He bought my trilogy.
Three things happened in early 1980 that forever changed the course of my life.
Stephanie called me. She was having trouble with a man and wanted to come stay with me in Texas. I discussed with Mama and Papa. I had sole use of two of the three bedrooms in the house, one I used as a study and the other as a bedroom. I agreed to give up one of them so that she could stay with us.
i moved one of my twin beds into the study and Stephanie arrived. I was still very socially naive.
I also learned that Stephanie, whom I had idolized, was far different than I had realized. She tossed out my scrapbooks and all the the as yet, unmounted materials, and that hurt. She also took to sitting on the end of my bed as I slept. I would wake up in the night and there she would be, staring down at me. There were another few things that I’m not going into yet.
The Bahais had once more become the center of my limited social life, and when i tried to get some help dealing with Stephanie (as I had been informed was the right way to proceed by the community), I was accused of being jealous of her. I told them to fuck off, and tossed Stephanie out.
It hurt. i was an odd fish, because I believed that reason would prevail.
Guess what? it doesn’t.
Then my mother, Mickey, phoned to tell us they were on their way to Texas. They had sold their home.
I had gone to Texas to get away from them, and now three weeks later i had Don sitting and brooding on the living room couch of my home. He was fresh out of the Marine Corp and had reached the rank of Sergeant.
Day in and day out, there he sat. He went out of his way to make me miserable. One day I lost it and dashed a glass of water (just the water, not the glass) in his face. He knocked me across the room, I hit the piano with stunning force and cracked three ribs. He charged across the room, clamped both hands on my throat and started choking me. I was wedged into a corner with my back against the upright piano.
I reached behind me. There was a heavy flashlight standing on the end of the piano. I played havoc with his face, broke his jaw, and generally made a mess of him. His hold on my throat loosened, and I was able to step, throwing my weight forward and break his hold with my forearms. ironically that probably saved his life because Papa had come up behind him with a large hammer intending to break his head open.
I wore Don’s fingerprints on my neck for several weeks before they finally faded. My mother was enraged with me for winning.
I could not stop feeling sick.
I wanted to run and keep running.
H, upon hearing this, suggested that I move in with him. I agreed. Anything to get away from my family, and in August of 1980, i flew to Virginia.
This post continues the events posted here Let’s talk about my drug abuse
After drinking the bottle of Mr. Clean, I sat down and waited to die. My five-year-old daughter had been put to bed hours earlier. There was no way to anticipate what happened next. Normally she slept through the night, but that night she woke up and came into the living room where I was sitting alone and crawled onto my lap and told me she loved me.
I consider the thoughts that ran through my head next to be a moment of satori.
I could not abandon her that way.
I was not expendable
By the time that i got her back to bed and headed for my car to get help, I was staggering around and barely able to keep my feet. I had no business driving. However, six blocks away was a family friend, the guy would later be a president of HWA. He had been a close friend for many years. Or at least I had believed him to be.
I had helped him get his green card when he first came to this country.
It was all I could do to stay conscious as I went to his home.
I told him what I had done and asked for help.
His response was to get a friend to help him shove me into the back seat of his car. He drove me to my home and dumped me on the front lawn.
H came out, screamed at me for embarrassing him and ordered me to bed.
Instead, I make one last attempt to find help.
I was so out of it that i did not know I was walking through broken glass that sliced the bottoms of my bare feet open. The pain simply did not register at all. With the last of my will power, I staggered onto Van Nuys Blvd. My legs started to buckle.
A car full of young hispanic males swerved close and one of them grabbed me. The next instant a man shouted from the top balcony of a tall apartment building, “let her go. I’ve called the cops.”
And for emphasis, he shook the cordless phone he held at them. “I have your plate number. Let go of her.”
The young guys shoved me to the pavement and sped off. A pair of drag queens came and sat with me.
Paramedics and a patrol car arrived. That was my first encounter with that white haired cop mentioned in an earlier post.
The police officers waited at the hospital while the emergency room staff patched me back together. The officers told me they were going to take me home. Drugs were too prevalent in that area to bother arresting someone for an OD. It just crowded the otherwise crowded jails up.
I begged them not to take me home. Instead they took me to the county hospital for nutcases and I checked myself in.
H had very good medical coverage and the next day I was transferred to a private hospital near Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
There are many kinds of violence in the world. Each person deals with it differently.
Physical violence never seemed to bother me as much as the emotional kind.
Someone yelling at me, getting in my face with rage, close in on my personal space — it always produced a kind of Body Shock Reaction.
When H went into his rages, sometimes frothing at the mouth, getting right up against me, his face inches from mine. It always produced this reaction in me. I would feel as if I had been hit in the solar plexus. I could not breathe, I could not think. My head would echo and get a cottony feeling inside it.
if he tried to hit me or did hit me, my reflexes and training took over and I decked him.
However, I had no reflexes to deal with that kind of rage.
In the beginning, the trigger word was’ normal’; later it became ‘evi.’
I had therapy sessions. Every so many weeks, there would be a group therapy and the spouses were invited. I got along with the other patients and their spouses. There was one guy in those sessions that was a large Native American. He had been born with a cleft palate and been through so many surgical procedures to repair it since childhood, that he had developed a panic syndrome about doctors and one more surgery was scheduled. H came to only one of those sessions and never went back and pulled me out of them.
The reason was this: H went to that session. When it came time to talk, he said, “yes, but the this is still not addressing the fact that she’s evil. You can’t address the rest of her problems without first getting her to face the fact that she’s evil.”
The big Indian attacked H in a rage on hearing that. The other men in the group had to physically restrain him to prevent him from demolishing H.
Because I had edited so many self help books, I tried to conscientiously apply the techniques in them to get through to H. He would listen to me and then write off everything I had said with a casual, “Yes, but you’re evil.”
As the situation worsened, I went from illegal drugs to alcohol. The pattern went like this.
I would be standing in the kitchen doing dishes and he would come and watch me. Then he would begin a tirade on how evil I was that might last an hour or longer without a break. By the time he finished, I would be shaking so hard I could barely stand. I kept the bottle of cheap vodka under the sink. i would pour a double into a glass and drink it straight to stop the shaking.
When I was working fulltime, i would come home, make myself a screwdriver that as half vodka and half orange juice, drop down in front of the tv and play ninendo games and hope he left me alone long enough to unwind.
In order to sleep through and around his bouts of screaming, I would drink enough booze to knock me out. After a few years of that, the first thing I did in the mornings when I got up was pour myself a drink.
Alcohol did not take away the pain the way that the meth/cocaine had, but it deadened it enough to get through. I went back through my diaries recently and found the pages where I had made a coded chart. After all these years, I have forgotten the codes to some of the main entries. The chart happened to be one that came back to me easily.
Over the course of a year, there was only one day that he did not go off on me. There were only seven days in which he went off into a rage at me that lasted less than four hours all together in a twenty-four hour period.
The one day that he did not yell at me was because he had spent it with his current mistress.
I clamped down very hard to survive the events that followed as result of my drug abuse and suicide attempt. Survival became paramount. My child was so shaken up by what happened that she was afraid I would leave her.
So I made her two promises.
i promised that i would never leave her. No matter how hard it got, I would be there for her.
i also promised to always answer truthfully and completely no matter how much it hurt me to do so.
I kept my promises.
I wanted to give her a symbol of my promise, so I made what I called the “I love you” afghan. Granny squares in a rainbow pattern. She watched me make it, fascinated by the process. We rebuilt our relationship and trust. She would hug the squares as they were finished.
As the squares were assembled, Sovay stopped feeling so terribly worried and nervous.
I made the afghan large enough to cover her bed and drape down toward the floor. The first night that she slept under it, I also handed her my favorite teddy bear, Nudgins No-Tail. Her smile was beatific as she snuggled down beneath the afghan with the bear in her arms and I told her stories until she fell asleep.
Sovay reinforced my growing rejection of her father’s assertions that I was expendable.
My husband informed me the first day I was out of the hospital that I was no longer a member of the family, but only there on his suffrage.
I felt distanced from myself at first, unable to deal with a lot of stress, and taking turtle steps forward out of sheer tenacity.
While I was in the hospital, H’s wealthy father got him an attorney. Within an hour of my return home, they whisked me down to the courthouse and forced me to sign a paper that, I was told, gave H full custody of Sovay. I was still too dazed and out of it to know what was in it. As soon as we were out of the courthouse, H took my copy of the papers out of my hands and I never saw them again.
From that day forward, my daughter became a hostage. I did what i was told or I would never see her again. I could leave, but I could not take her with me if I did so.
As I made the afghan, I knew just how trapped and cornered I was. The shadow of those papers would hang over me for five years.
In January of 1984, we moved from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Los Angeles. I had gained a minor reputation for my short stories, but a larger reputation for my literary criticism. One morning, I noticed the Cinefantastique market report in Science Fiction Chronicle, and I got in touch with them. My first assignment involved student films based upon Stephen King shorts. My articles for Cinefantastique gave me an in with Judith Sims at Movieline. i was the first journalist to say that Frank Darabont was a genius. Back then he was working as a set dresser. But when I saw Woman in the Room, I knew he was going places.
I both loved and hated Hollywood.
If you wanted to network, you went to parties.
The parties were pretty much as you might imagine them. Drugs, alcohol, and sex.
But the literary side of Hollywood was just as bad. The best way to get invited to parties was to bring the drugs. After the first year there, the person bringing them was often me. Especially to the literary ones.
The one thing that I will not do in this blog is to name names when I talk about how I flushed my life down the toilet. You don’t need to know who was at those parties.
Suffice it to say, “it was part of the scene.”
There is rarely a single cause to anything, but a collection of causes. You can come to your own conclusions about what the percentages were.
Sovay was a year old when I started intermittantly doing drugs and she was five years old when I tried to kill myself, experienced a moment of satori, went cold turkey, and starting fighting back.
The first thing I did was give myself permission to be tired. Self medicating for chronic exhaustion with street drugs was not an answer that worked. The first two years were the hardest. Every time I got tired, I wanted to do a line. Another thing I did was keep a diary. I wrote it in a combination of Norse runes and the Enockian Alphabet.
i used a different set of codes to record instances and levels of psychological abuse. The harder I tried to get free, the more he upped the ante, and eventually it turned into a psychotic chess game. I was never good at chess and deception. As a result i got checkmated continuously over the next five years.
A pattern developed in which if i ‘misbehaved’ my daughter would disappear.
What I did understand and was good at was the physical side of fighting. But I had an ingrained reluctance to hit first that was so strong that, no matter how ugly he got, I could not hit him unless he swung at me first. Once he did that, I beat the shit out of him. Toward the end, he would get in a couple of blows and run, jump the back fence, and call the cops on me from a friend’s house in order to frighten me. But he would never press charges or be there when the police arrived. There were these two cops, one of them was a white-haired older man that would give me a bemused look and shake his head. Once I caught onto my ex’s game, I would sit on the steps of the front porch and wait for the cops to arrive, chat nicely with them, and they would leave. My ex would show up a few minutes after they had left wearing a shitty grin.
i’m not writing this in perfect chronological order. I have to write what I can handle as I can handle it. But the only cure for lies is the truth. The lies and false allegations that are following me around right now, the ones that Dagstine and Philbin are passing around, have the potential to become permanent. I have seen it happen to others.
Since it has become the Legion’s favorite thing to slap me around with online, much like Pacione does with The Fandom Writer, I’m going tell the public how it came about and what resulted from it.
Let’s lay the ground work for it to put it all in perspective. I have full blown post-polio syndrome. I have always had problems with my energy level, chronic fatigue and such as a result of it. It showed up early in my life. I was in an abusive relationship that I could not figure out how to escape from at the time. Someone without my physical difficulties would have been able to get out of the relationship far easier than I did.
My drug use took years to build up. The first time I used meth, it was to keep me awake. My ex needed help with a manuscript he was editing. His handwriting was illegible and I was one of the few who could read it. He had penciled in his corrections on the manuscript and it had to be fed-ex’d the next day to the author.
He told me that if it did not get out on time he might lose his job. We needed his income because my income from freelancing was not enough to cover everything. I had a year old child to consider and the prospect of him losing his editorial job frightened me. His comments, corrections and such were enormous. The book was non-fiction by a Ph.D. I corrected and fixed his handwritting, putting the comments in legibly in ink and erasing his pencil until my hand hurt. I was already exhausted when I started and it would mean going without sleep for 24 hours to get it done.
He had anticipated my lack of energy and acquired some meth. “Here, this will make a normal woman of you.”
Every time he wanted me to get more done, and his demands increased over the years, I did whatever form of speed/meth/cocaine he acquired for me so that I could meet his needs.
Toward the end, I was working fulltime, doing all of the housework, chores, errand running, and yardwork, despite the fact that I was disabled. In addition to this, I did a large portion of his writing and editing.
I needed more and more drugs to keep my failing body from collapsing. If I got sick or too tired to function, I had a choice of having him stand screaming at me for hours while I tried to sleep or taking drugs and meeting his needs and demands.
I would go days and days without sleep, using and using, and still he would scream that I had not done enough. That I was not providing for our child by sleeping. I became desperate for sleep.
Eventually I became desperate for death. On August 19th, our wedding anniversary, in 1988, I had gone five days without sleep to get everything done that he wanted me to. He started screaming at me because he was late on a writing deadline and claimed I had not done enough and that I was expendable.
An hour later, I filled a bunch of empty capsules with two grams of cocaine and swallowed them. That numbed out my insides nicely and I followed it with a bottle of Lemon-scented Mr. Clean.
After all, as he kept saying that day, I was expendable and my daughter’s life would be better without me.
Expendable.
