Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [118]
I looked into Vince’s sweet face and saw his pained smile, the worry he was desperately trying to disguise. I stared at him like he was an apparition. “How’re you doing, Dyan?” he said. I didn’t answer.
He went on. “Your mother called. Your bed hadn’t been slept in. The window was open.”
I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the edge of the tub. I could hear whispering in the living room and the sound of a rotary phone dial. Then Vince called through the door. “Dyan,” he said. “I want you to listen to me.”
I wrestled the bathroom window open and climbed out.
Vince was a step ahead of me. As I came out the window, he helped me to the ground and held on to my arm. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance arrived and Mom was standing next to it. She was crying, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. Beside her was a man I didn’t know, but he seemed very kind. He led me to the back of the ambulance and said, “You’re in good hands, Dyan. We’re going to take you to a place where you can get some rest.” That sounded good to me. I was so tired.
The driver and the kind man gently guided me onto a gurney and slid me into the ambulance. Mom climbed in next to me and held my hand. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said. “I promise you, everything is going to be all right.”
So now, five days later in Dr. James’s office, I recounted the broad outlines of the story to him.
“What was going on before you climbed out the window?” he asked.
“My boyfriend was supposed to come over for dinner and he didn’t show up.”
“Hmmm, okay. I don’t think you had a breakdown because of a broken dinner date. Let me ask you this: were you taking any nonprescription drugs?”
I hesitated to tell him about the marijuana, but I figured I might as well come clean. “I was smoking a lot of pot. And drinking a lot of margaritas.”
“What else?”
“Well, I don’t know if this counts, but I took a lot of LSD with . . . my ex-husband.”
Dr. James put down his pen and asked, “Why would you think that LSD doesn’t count?”
“It’s not a drug. It’s a chemical.”
He shook his head and took off his glasses. “Dyan, all drugs are chemicals, and LSD is the most dangerous psychotropic I know of. How many times have you taken it?”
I calculated about ten or twelve times, the most recent being about six months earlier.
“That’s ten or twelve times too many,” he said, and looked at me very directly.
“My husband said he’d taken it more than a hundred times.”
“Everybody has an individual tolerance for these things. But for some people, once can be fatal. Let me tell you something, Dyan. I had a kid in here a couple of weeks ago who’d been tripping out on LSD. We got him stabilized but he took it again and jumped off a building, thinking he could fly. He broke every bone in his body and is lucky to be alive. Hear me good, Dyan. You can’t even get in the same zip code with that stuff. Now or ever.”
But I had known that, hadn’t I? All along, something inside had warned me that I was dancing with a dragon. But I went ahead with it, because I wanted to please Cary, and he was convinced it would change my life. Well, it certainly did.
Dr. James telling me this gave me quite a boost. For the first time in longer than I could remember, someone had validated a belief of mine. My instincts had been right about LSD all along! And it seemed just possible that there might be some other things I’d been right about.
Dr. James looked at me thoughtfully. “The pills, the pot, the booze—none of it’s good, and all of it can cause severe depression. But I don’t think that’s what caused your breakdown. LSD can chase your mind into a rabbit hole, and unfortunately, it can get stuck there. In my opinion, LSD is what tipped you into the basket. With your level of sensitivity, you are lucky to be alive.
“I’m so glad you told me, Dyan. That explains a lot.”
The next afternoon, I met Gina, the occupational therapist, who sat me down with a sheath of cheap leather, some white string, and a plastic needle. I gave her a what-the-hell look. When she told me