I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t make it down a single step of the staircase after wrap had been called. My knees wouldn’t bend. They were stiff. The joke that I kept using to the concerned crew, who rushed onto the rooftop when it was clear for them to do so, was that it was so bloody cold I was frozen stiff. It wasn’t a funny joke, but I was in too much pain to care. I was taken to the elevator by two men who held me up, the weapons specialist on my left arm and the medic on my right, all the while I was telling them that their help wasn’t necessary, that I just needed to get into a warm bath. I don’t know why I refused to let the medic examine me. Maybe it was because his viselike grip on my elbow was more painful than walking on my own would’ve been. I just knew I didn’t want him to touch me, I didn’t want him to ask me questions, I just wanted to be alone. I knew that if I told him about my elbows and my wrists that he’d send me to a doctor, and I just wanted to finish the movie without any drama. I was already on the verge of making a scene and I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted to act out the scenes already scripted.
When I closed the door to my hotel room after the PA had walked me down the long corridor holding my arm (this time by the biceps), I cried. I cried out in pain and then I just quietly cried as a means to console myself. My gentle sobs seemed to say, “It hurts” and a silent tear falling replied, “I know, old thing. I know.” I turned the hot water faucet on to fill the tub and crawled into the bedroom to pour a glass of wine. Now that wine was my dinner, I bought my own bottles and hid them under the bed for fear that the mini-bar Nazis would take the corked bottle away even though I asked them to clear the mini-bar and didn’t allow them access to my room. I didn’t allow the housekeeping team into my room either. I was too afraid they would take away my chopsticks and my dishes by accident, or steal them. When I was on location shooting the movie Sirens, a toy mouse that I’d had since before my dad died was lost. I didn’t tell anyone that it was lost when the sheets were changed because I was too ashamed to admit to the concierge that I slept with stuffed toys. The housekeepers at this hotel weren’t allowed into my room unless I was there watching them. I couldn’t bear to lose my white and green dish with the flowers and the hairline crack. I’d already lost my mouse.
By the time I crawled back to the bathtub on three limbs, one hand holding the wineglass, the tub was full. I made another trip to get cigarettes and an ashtray and attempted to slowly remove my clothes. The joints in my fingers joined the cast of painful joints acting out in my body, needing attention and recognition for the important role they had thanklessly performed prior to this moment, and just unbuttoning my jeans was difficult. By the time I slid into the bathtub, the pain ravaged my body. It was like the hot water boiled the acidic fluid that lubricated my joints and the fluid seeped into my bloodstream, attacking the muscles and organs in its path. Everything hurt. I wept and wept. I was aware, however, that being in the bathtub in excruciating pain was the first time I hadn’t felt hungry all day. At least the whining, complaining pain in my gut that was like a five-year-old tugging at my shirtsleeve repeating, “I’m hungry,” had given over to the real pain in my body. At least I shut that little girl up.
I threw up the wine before I got into bed. I’d always been a bad bulimic but throwing up wine was the only thing that I found easy. Food was really difficult for me to throw up. I tended to give up after a certain point, never knowing if I got it all out. I felt bad about the whole process; the binge made me feel pathetic and out of control and the purging was the punishment. With every heave I hated myself more. I felt the blood vessels in my eyes burst and I knew that for days they would show everyone who cared to look at me that I was a pathetic loser, that I couldn’t control myself. But throwing up wine was different. For one, wine wasn’t a particularly nourishing thing to drink, and throwing it up is often better for your body than keeping it in. Also, throwing up alcohol is something that almost everyone has done at some point in their life; it wasn’t reserved for sick bulimic girls who didn’t have enough self-control over something as pathetic as food. Unlike food, at least alcohol is addictive. I threw up the wine because it was easy and because I was aware that asking my liver to break down alcohol when my body was obviously sick enough to cause me so much pain was destructive. I threw up the wine because I’d put my body through enough.
Throughout the night, as I lay in bed rereading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I drank wine and threw it up. I worried that there would be traces of sugar from the wine that would cause me to ingest incidental, unaccounted-for calories, but I just said, “To hell with it!” I’d gotten so loose with the wine anyway. I felt completely out of control and crazy—but in a good way. My loosening up of calories was a healthy, good thing that would enable me to go out for a beer with the director, who I really liked. I could be social again. I just worked out a little harder in the hotel gym and stopped brushing my teeth with toothpaste. It wasn’t that I was crazy thinking that I could get fat from accidentally swallowing toothpaste; I was just ensuring that I cut out those incidental calories wherever I could. I ate less chewing gum and I didn’t use toothpaste. It was a compromise that worked for me. I really liked wine.
Five days later, we went on location overnight to an out-of-the-way part of town for the next day of filming. I felt a little better, was well rested, and even ate a little more as I realized food worked like Advil, and the more food I had, the less my joints ached. I went back up to 300 calories but kept my wine ritual. I had to finish eating food by 2:00 p.m. so I wouldn’t accidentally throw up tuna when I threw up my wine. The place where we went was so remote we had no choice but to stay at a spiritual retreat that didn’t serve wine or allow smoking. As I was given a tour of the log cabin they called a facility, I felt nervous and anxious like I was in rehab. I wondered briefly if the production company had sent me to rehab under the pretense of it being the only place close to the location. (Could they know about the wine?) The woman in a turban showed me the spa, which consisted of saunas and a coffin.
“Please let us know if you’d like to use the hyperthermic chamber.”
“It looks like a coffin. How does it work?”
“You lie down in the chamber for forty-five minutes and it removes the toxins in your body.”
The thought of being in a capsule for forty-five minutes was bad enough, but the fact that it removed all the toxins in your body gave me pause. My body was made up of toxins. I imagined the inside of my body covered in a spider web of toxins that held it all together. Toxins were the thread that bound my stomach to my intestines and the skin to the muscles. The webs in my body were the unabsorbable chemicals, the residue particles strung together from the artificial sweeteners, chemicals from the butter spray, and chemicals from the Jell-O, the alcohol, and the nicotine.