Mackenzie Phillips - High On Arrival

HIGH ON ARRIVAL

HIGH ON ARRIVAL

MACKENZIE PHILLIPS

with HILARY LIFTIN

Simon Spotlight Entertainment

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Copyright 2009 by Shanes Mom Inc.

NOTE TO READERS

The names and identifying details of some individuals portrayed in this book have been changed.

Music Permissions:

Shes Just 14 (John Phillips) published by Phillips-Tucker Musicfrom the John Phillips album Pussycat (2008 Varese Sarabande Records).

If King Can Can, Who Cant? (My Name is Can) (John Phillips) published by Phillips-Tucker Musicfrom the John Phillips album Andy Warhol Presents Man On the Moon (2009 Varese Sarabande Records).

Wee Funkie Little Bats (John Phillips) published by Phillips-Tucker Music from the John Phillips album Andy Warhol Presents Man On the Moon (2009 Varese Sarabande Records).

I Miss You Copyright 2001, Welsh Witch Music, EMI Virgin Music, INC, Future Furniture Music. All rights on behalf of Welsh Witch Music administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Photography credits:

(top): CBS/Landov; (top), (top and bottom), (top):

Suzanne L. Sinenberg; (bottom): Neal Preston.

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First Simon Spotlight Entertainment hardcover edition September 2009

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Designed by Jaime Putorti

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4391-5385-7

ISBN 978-1-4391-5757-2 (ebook)

For Shane

Love. Love. Love.

R.I.P. Max

January 15, 2001June 3, 2009

Shes just fourteen

Little movie star queen

There isnt much

She hasnt seen

Shes ridden in limousine cars

Dated pop stars with rainbow hair

She says thats nowhere

She always says

Im just a sexy trashcan

But shes just a little girl

Who thinks like a man

Sometimes her daddy spoiled her

Sometimes he treated her rough

Sometimes shes gentle

Sometimes that chick shes tough

But shes always too nice to the driver

She says, James have you had your supper?

Shes always too high on arrival

She runs on her high platform heels

She falls flat on her face

She knows how life feels

And shes just fourteen

From Shes Just 14 by John Phillips

Contents

PHILLIPS, LAURA MACKENZIE

In the mideighties, when I was on tour with the New Mamas & the Papas, a porter brought two packages up to my hotel room. One contained a book, my fathers newly published memoir, but I was more interested in the other packagea flat FedEx letter containing an eighth of an ounce of cocaine.

The band, a reconstituted version of the Mamas & the Papas, included my father, Denny Doherty, Spanky McFarlane, and me. We were on an extended tour, performing in city after city for more than 250 days of the year. In each city, a FedEx like the one I was holding awaited me, and I spent all day every day in my hotel room, shooting up coke, coming out only to appear onstage for the nightly gig. Then Id return to my hotel and do more coke. I was twenty-six years old.

I put Dads book aside, opened the FedEx, and prepared a shot. Using a scarf, I tied off my arm. As I looked for a vein, I felt the familiar rush that accompanied the ritual itself. I knew what was coming. I pushed the needle in. As the coke entered my bloodstream I felt a euphoric onrush of sensation. I was back where I wanted to be.

Only then did I pick up my fathers book. Papa John: A Music Legends Shattering Journey Through Sex, Drugs, and Rock n Roll was a brick of a book with the title faux spray-painted on the jacket in neon colors. I turned it over in my hands to look at the photo of my father on the back. He was clean-shaven and smiling a newscaster smile, the sanitized, post-rehab version of my father. He didnt look remotely like his hipster self.

Then I flipped to the index and looked to see if I was in it. There I was: Phillips, Laura Mackenzie. Under my name was a list of subheadings and page numbers. I scanned down the entries:

Phillips, Laura Mackenzie

acting career of

arrested on drug charges

attempts to clean out

in California

childhood of

drug use by

early childhood of

at finishing school in Switzerland

Jeff Sessler and

marriage to Jeff Sessler

Peter Asher and

rape

shipboard romance on QE 2

There it was, my life to date, with highlights selected, cross-referenced, and alphabetized. I had been organized and reduced to a list of sensational and mostly regrettable and/or humiliating anecdotes. Being indexed, particularly under such dubious headings, gave me a weird feeling that definitely wasnt pride. I felt like I wasnt a real person, just a list of incidents and accidents. Whoever compiled that indexIm pretty sure my father wasnt up to such a mundane and detailed taskwas just doing his or her job, but it was cruelly reductive.

Decades passed before I thought about that index again. In 2008, now nearly fifty years old, I found myself in a police station in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. I was sitting in a hallway on a bench. My hands were cuffed and the handcuffs were hooked to the bench. All the cops were staring at me: the middle-aged lady, the former child star, who had just been busted at the airport for heroin possession. A low, low moment.

How had I gotten myself here? Was this happening? The best and worst moments of my life have always felt surreal, as if the events were just another entry in that foreign index someone else created. But the cuffs cut into my hands with the cold rigidity of reality. Id been addicted to drugs before, and Id overcome my addiction. That was fifteen years ago, so many long, mostly happy, entirely drug-free years. I never thought I would relapse. Id been clean for so long that I thought I was fixed. But if the addiction was a cancer that had been carefully excised, well, Id missed a spot. It had grown back, all the more fierce and malignant. Here I was again. Back at the bottom, caught in the arms of a bad-news lover I thought I had dumped for good. I could envision the new entry in the index, typed in the same font. Chronologically, it belonged right below happy working mother. It would say, second arrest on drug charges, a one-line condemnation that only hinted at everything that had led me to that bench.