473. Ziggy’s Diary: 1

Dear Diary,

How many times have I resolved to keep a diary and then I don’t keep it up? Well how’s this for a test of the new leaf I turned over. Hello! The whole fucking tree is new! If I really mean it then here’s the proof. Or at least when the entries stop I’ll be able to see the exact day I fell back off the wagon.

New leaf new leaf new leaf SONG IDEA?

At the center we had writing assignments. It was like taking a test in school except the subject was your own twisted mind, and you think you wouldn’t have to study up on that but you do! So much learning at the center. Psychology, medicine, neurology, biology. I was crap at the therapy assignments but they got me back in the habit of writing stuff like this. So, diary. Here I am. On the plane to London, where we change planes for India. Bought this notebook in a shop in Burbank. Three continents in one day. After not being allowed to leave the center for 28 days, you think I’m overdoing it? I’m not. I’m doing everything I can to preserve my sanity, not break it.

Jenn’s asleep on my shoulder. Aww. Fortunately she’s not on the arm holding the pen. She’s a sweet girl.

Why did I just write that? No she’s not. She’s a cynic. What I don’t know is whether she was a cynic before she got to Hollywood or if that came after. Maybe once upon a time she was a sweet girl. Or maybe she just plays one on TV. If you believe her, and I do, by the time she was sixteen she had decided if blowing the casting director was what it was going to take to get famous, she’d do it. I admire that kind of drive and that kind of sex-forward thinking. She never let herself be victimized by the business. (No, it took drugs to do that.)

You’d think someone that forward — someone who let me fuck her on camera for a movie where zero percent of that footage was going to get onto the screen just because she, and me, and the director got off on it — would be a good match for me. You’d think.

But honestly I’m utterly sick of her in bed. I’m not sick of the comfort of being close to someone, of the cuddles afterward, or the talks we have. She’s a friend. She knows it too but lovers is easier to explain. Lovers is easier to understand. Friend? She told me once I don’t know how to be a friend and she’s right. She doesn’t know either is the thing. Like me, she relates to everyone through sex. For most of the world, the second they touch your dick they can never be “friends” again. I don’t get that. I don’t get that at all. It’s a spectrum, a continuum. You don’t magically stop being friends just because sex happened. But people act like the dick is a magic wand. It touches you and poof, you are magically tossed over the wall to the other side.

I guess most people can’t understand that there isn’t a wall between gay and straight either. Yeah, touch a guy’s dick, ever, and you’re gay. Cooties.

These days cooties are fatal.

Jenn doesn’t mind that I’ve had men. She sees us as equals that way. We had sex every day in rehab, some how, some way. 28 days in rehab, 28 sexes. (There needs to be a word for that.) We went there to get off drugs and to get off dependency. They keep you busy there, you know. Up at 6:30am every day! I think they do it so the ones who were addicted to sleeping pills will be good and tired every night. Crack of dawn and then a walk before it gets too hot, and then chores and meals and group therapy sessions… The center is like summer camp without the fun.

The center. Everyone calls it that. Like it’s actually at the center of everything. But god help me if the center of my world is ever rehab itself. If it comes to that, suicide starts sounding reasonable.

The center is a hospital. I get that. They’re trying to get your body clean without you dying. Some of the people there really needed the serious medical intervention, too, organs failing and that kind of shit. Me, not so much. I was by far the youngest person there and my addiction was so recent comparatively speaking that I was the healthiest of the bunch. Some of these guys drank a bottle of vodka every day for twenty years and you can barely believe they’re alive. Or the women who can’t make it through a single day without a regimen of uppers and downers and prescriptions for every situation. I know what that’s like. I know. I know the strategies that go through you head, and how you structure everything in your entire day, your entire life, around what pill to take when. At the center, they break you of that.

Instead, I structured every day at the center around when to get off. No, I didn’t tell my counselor that. I was warned not to turn sex into an addiction. Sure. But he seemed to find it a good sign that I could get pleasure from something other than the drugs. Some of the people there couldn’t physically experience pleasure because they’d wired themselves to their drugs. Some of them couldn’t emotionally or spiritually experience joy for the same reason.

Jenn’s one of those. That’s why we’re going to India.

I have a feeling the sex between her and me will stop as soon as we get where we’re going. That’ll be fine with me. We needed it in rehab. It was the only pleasure we could get. But now we’re out.

God, I’m tired. I’m going to close my eyes for a little bit. I’m sure the second I fall asleep the damn pilot is going to make an announcement.