High On Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips Read Free Book Online Page A

Switzerland while my new friends attended classes, went horseback riding, and left for daylong field trips. I wandered around the school all day embarrassed and depressed, abandoned. I waited for my MIA father as I had before and would many times again. Weeks went by.
    Finally, Dad sent a plane ticket with a note promising to pick me up at the airport in L.A. The school put me on a bus from Neuchâtel to Zurich … or Geneva. What did I know from Swiss cities? I was fourteen and traveling alone. I just climbed aboard whichever bus they put me on, feeling like Paddington with his “Please look after this bear” tag. When I arrived at the Swiss airport, I tried to find my flight, but something had happened. The flight was delayed, or canceled, I couldn’t tell exactly. I’d missed most of the classes, so my French wasn’t great. I knew how to order oxtail soup at a small-town pub at midnight, but it was unclear to me how I’d ever get home. I sat on my suitcase in the airport and cried.
    Eventually there was a plane. I made it back to the States, but I still had a layover at JFK before I flew the last leg home to L.A. As I disembarked the international flight at JFK, one of the heels on my huge, ugly, white plastic platform shoes broke. My many-hours-long layover had just begun. I had a full day of travel ahead of me, and all my shoes were in my suitcase, checked through to Los Angeles. I limped through the airport, one leg a good six inches longer than the other. People were glancing at me with recognition for the first time in my life. So it was true, I was a movie star. But I walked around JFK as alone as a girl can possibly be, in gimpy limbo—lost in an untethered nowhereland that was already familiar to me at fourteen.
    At last I arrived at LAX. In a rare show of timeliness and reliability, my dad was actually there in the flesh to pick me up. He stood at the gate, always taller than I expected, with his long hair and beard, chamois suede pants and top, and a rhinestone belt. Alongside him were his best friend, Michael Sarne, and my cousin Patty. I was relieved and happy to see my father and overjoyed to see Patty. She was twenty, six years older than I was. We’d been little girls together in Virginia, living in the same apartment building and having family dinners at our grandmother Dini’s every Sunday. While I was away, my aunt Rosie and her two daughters, Patty and Nancy, had moved to Los Angeles. When Patty met me at the airport she said, “Now I’m going to be your big sister.” Then she gave me a Quaalude. Welcome home, kid.

5

    Not long after I made it home from my ill-fated summer at boarding school in Switzerland, I went to see American Graffiti for the first time with my dad and Genevieve. It was a private screening for the cast, producers, and their invitees. I wore an amazing 1940s red-and-white polka-dot dress of Genevieve’s, white patent leather six-inch platform heels, and short, spiky hair. I’d shaved off my eyebrows and painted on glitter lightning bolts. Dad wore hand-stitched suede pants, and Genevieve looked like a movie star, as always. Mom and Lenny were there too. It was my big night.
    It seemed like ages since I’d first landed the part. Nearly two years had passed since I’d shot the movie, during which time I’d moved from the shadow of Lenny’s scary dictatorship to the trippy glow of my father’s hedonism. When I think of that night, it’s as if I’m watching it on a TV screen. I can see myself stepping out of the Rolls in my teetery heels and walking into the theater, but I see it from a distance. I remember a lot of the major events in my life like this, as though I watched the moment instead of experiencing it. Maybe it’s a side effect from years of drug use, maybe I disassociate because it’s easier for me to digest my life from a distance, maybe I create memories from stories I’ve been told, or maybe I’m just insane.
    Regardless, we walked down the red