Jail Bird

Things were not easy at home. Especially since Blake would not even sleep in our bed with me. Oh, he would come in there for sex occasionally but as far as sleeping went, he slept in his recliner. I wondered what kind of message he was trying to send. Yeah, right!

I was given a prescription for Ambien for sleep. Did I like it? Of course! It was a pill that changed the way I felt! I loved it! I also found that if you took 3 you could hallucinate – what a funky concept. The designs in my wallpaper would dance around. If you looked at a picture of 2 faces long enough there would be 3. It was, in a word, a trip! Ambien did everything but help me sleep. I figured since no one was sleeping with me I might as well do something fun.

During the next year I did not work. I smoked more crack because the only pills I could get were Ambien from my psychiatrist. During our visits I was very careful not to tell her about my addictions or anything more than just scratching the surface about my childhood or the rest of my life. I had gone through some of that in treatment but the thought of telling anyone, especially a group of people I barely knew, absolutely repelled me!

Problems began to come to the surface when I decided I would be fun to trip on Ambien during the day. I was leaving the house to get away from one of Blake's tirades barely able to walk straight and nearly took out the stop sign at the end of our cul-de-sac. All the while Blake just let me go, knowing I was messed up and knowing, perhaps hoping, something bad would happen to me. It did.

I hit a car on Highway 49 at Highway 80. Yes, in Rankin County. I still had my act together well enough to convince the cop I was sober so he asked me to just move my car out of the lane of traffic which I promptly did and then backed into the front of his cruiser. Out came the cuffs, the reading of the rights and then a blackout. I do remember bits and pieces of them trying to print me and me giving them lots of trouble.

The next thing I remember is waking up to bright lights being turned on lying under a scratchy, wool blanket. Upon further examination I was wearing a bright orange outfit with stylish orange rubber sandals. Quite the ensemble! I didn't know exactly where I was but I knew I was in jail. Ambien causes terrible amnesia and that was probably a blessing. I opened the door to me cell into a large common area where girls were walking, exercising, talking, etc. There was a Styrofoam plate of breakfast at my door the smell of which sent me reeling. A girl came of up me and much like the quote from the movie “Life”, “You gon eat yo cownbread?” she asked “You gon eat yo brefass?”. I gave it to her and was glad to be rid of it.

Soon they called my name over a loud speaker to come “up front”. The girls pointed me in the right direction. Blake's dad had come to bail me out. He truly is the sweetest man I have ever met. He took me back to their house and we discussed treatment again. I agreed to go back to Clarksdale.

Clarksdale was just a repeat of my first stay there. Nothing new, still not willing to tell everything that tortured my mind and my life. Getting clean requires “rigorous honesty”. No one was ever going to get that out of me. I pulled from my theatre days, told them what they wanted to hear and was out again in 3 months. After I had been there about a month, Blake served me with divorce papers. And by the way, that is about the most horrible thing you can do to a person in treatment but I didn't expect any better from him.  Even though I knew divorce was inevitable and I knew, in my heart of hearts that it was the best thing, I was devastated  Also, serving someone with divorce papers while they are in alcohol and drug treatment is one of the most hateful things a person can do.

Prior to my leaving treatment a headhunter who was a friend of Peggy's tracked me down. She was looking for a top-notch assistant for a former high ranking public official who was going into private practice with a prestigious law firm in Jackson. I went back home, aced the interview and got the job. I would be doing lots of marketing and PR in the job so I finally could justify the stiff student loans I was still paying each month and actually afford to pay.

The job lasted about 2 years which is amazing considering I was smoking crack and still taking Ambien from time to time. My work suffered tremendously and it's amazing that I kept the job that long.

The downward spiral was beginning to spiral with the speed of sound.