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were dead!”
    “Could you please arrange that?” I replied.
    And then, in a matter of seconds, all was peaceful. All was lovely, all was soft, and pretty and painless. All was as it should be.
    I was on a Demerol drip. You could have brought cameras into that place, propped me up and shot away, and printed the gruesome image on top of every column that I wrote and at that moment, I would have let you. I would have
encouraged
it.
    I was HIGH. I was really HIGH. I used to think I had pretty good connections, but none of my guys ever came through with anything like
that.
I was higher than I was in all of 1994 combined, and that was the year I was
totally
into Janis Joplin.
    I smiled at my husband. “I want to take this stick home,” I said, grabbing my rolling IV drip. “I want to keep it by my bed and just be happy and soft forever.”
    I could have sworn I saw tears gather in a rush in his eyes. “Oh, Doctor,” he cried. “Thank you! Thank you! This is the girl I married!
There she is!
I haven’t seen her this happy since she stopped self-medicating!”
    “We think you have kidney stones,” the doctor informed me, which was good news as opposed to hearing, “You’re going to have a baby at any moment and you were just too fat and disorganized to know it!” or “You’re incubating numerous alien reptilian embryos and they’re about to burst through your rib cage in three seconds and then scurry into the hospital ventilation system. So hang on.”
    Kidney stones. How do you even get kidney stones? Could they be pieces of Bubble Yum that I’ve accidentally swallowed from my childhood, now fossilized and evil; Pop Rocks that never lived up to the “pop!” portion of their promise, and still retained their rock form; or little pieces of corn who thought to themselves, “Well, if I’m
never
going to be digested, why on earth would I want to go any further, where the lower you go, the worse it gets? There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s not a good one. Forget it. I just might as well stay here where it’s warm, velvety, and purple. It’s like being at the Artist Formerly Known as Prince’s house”?
    In addition, I didn’t know what you do for kidney stones, or how you get rid of them, and all the people at the hospital did was give me a prescription for Vicodin and send me home. But my husband was smarter than that. Way smarter than that, and when we approached our freeway exit, he sped right past it and kept on going.
    All the way to my mother’s house.
    When I woke up in her bed hours later, ice went through my veins. I was afraid that a version of my deepest, most horrifying fears had come true, which is that I have ultimately and tragically eaten enough sugar to force my body into a vegetative state and my mother takes me back in so we can finally have the close maternal relationship she has always craved, which consists solely of me not having the ability to speak and her picking out my clothes. Fresh from my Demerol daze, I knew it was only a matter of hours before my mom loaded me up in her van and took me to Wal-Mart so she could buy me several pairs of polyester short sets and back to the orthodontist to teach me a lesson for lying on my head-gear chart in eighth grade.
    And then a little rolling stone inside my body began gathering no moss but was bouncing around like it was a pinball.
    “MOM!” I yelled. “I need my drugs!”
    “Keep your pants on, Courtney Love,” my mother said as she doled out a Vicodin. “Which is more than what you did at the hospital from what I hear. You’ve had so many accidents with strangers seeing your coolie that I would wear shorts under
everything
if I were you.”
    I gulped it down.
    “You hungry?” she said. “I made some nice tapioca pudding.”
    “Give me back that bottle, please,” I said, reaching out my arm. “I don’t want to live like this. I just can’t do it.”
    “You just don’t know how lucky you are,” she replied.