Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness Read Online Free Page A

easier when there’s a soundtrack attached—for example, I recall riding in the back of an old van (not only were there no seat belts, there were no seats), with Blondie cranked on the radio. I can’t remember where we were going, but even now, Debbie Harry’s voice makes me think something fun is going to happen.
    Second example: I was riding on the freeway in a station wagon, the kind where the last seat faced backward, and you can wave at the car behind you. We were on a family road trip that day, and a song about kissing came on the radio. For some reason, I decided in my head that the song was about sex. I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t listen. My face was hot, I knew it was red. All I could think of, was: Don’t look at me, nobody better look at me. I was being a prude and didn’t even know why. When you’re a kid, you’re convinced everybody knows what you’re thinking, when in fact, they’re distracted and busy with their own lives, trying to keep their eyes on the road.
    Third example: Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction , specifically “It’s So Easy.” I hear the opening chords, and my blood races—it’s about a wild ride I took for years, all twisted up in love and heroin and destruction and waste. And yet I’ll listen to that song every time. It’s like that stupid old joke about why the guy keeps hitting himself with the hammer—because it feels so good when he stops.
     
    In 1978 my parents divorced . Then, true to form, they reunited, remarrying in 1984, this time in a formal Catholic Church ceremony presumably meant to lock it down. In 1986, when I was eleven, my little sister Julie was born, and that was the end of my mom’s office work for a while. She began to run a licensed daycare center in our house and suddenly, there were babies and toddlers everywhere. Aunties and cousins dropped in and out, the TV was always on, the voices of people coming and going went on for hours. In 1989, after another long separation, my parents divorced for the second—and final—time. Mom packed us up again, and moved us to Coronado Island, one of San Diego’s most affluent neighborhoods. Because of this, it was also home to a very good public school system. “This is going to be our chance,” Mom said. I had no idea what she was talking about.
    Coronado Island is separated from San Diego by a long blue-and-white bridge that has five lanes of traffic and is high enough so that huge aircraft carriers can go under it. I think it’s meant to blend into the sky, but for anyone with a height phobia, the journey across the water is an invitation for a full-blown panic attack. Even today, driving over that bridge freaks me out. I say a prayer every time I do it. I wasn’t surprised years later to learn that it was the third-deadliestsuicide bridge in the United States. I couldn’t know then that once we crossed over it, everything I knew was nothing; my childhood was coming to an end, and not in a nice way.
    The island is about seven square miles in size, ringed by beaches, mansions, a naval base, and the Hotel del Coronado. When you come off the bridge, San Diego Bay is on your right, the Pacific Ocean is right in front of you, and a massive, perfectly manicured golf course is on your left. There is no unbeautiful view, from any direction.
    When we first moved to Coronado, you had to pay a dollar to cross over the bridge. The tollbooths are abandoned now, but when I was a kid, I was convinced that was why everyone on the island was rich—once a month, everybody lined up at the mayor’s office for their share of the cash. That first day, Johnny, Julie, and I sat squashed together in the back of the little Corolla, peering through the windows, waiting for our new home to reveal itself. Our tiny house was on El Chico Lane, almost in the shadow of the bridge. Just because it had an actual name doesn’t mean it was a street; it was an alley. But it was a house, and it was on an island. It was a