Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (15 page)

Once the birds flew away, we walked around the house looking for other objects to fixate on. The wooden Buddha in the dining room floated; the candlesticks danced. Experiencing these moments, looking forward to them—that was enough to keep me hooked and coming back for more.

But for Scott, every beautiful experience was almost immediately followed by something dark and frightening. After the sense of calm passed, he’d get agitated—he knew what was coming. He often said he had a lonely, desolate place inside him, and that no matter what he did, he inevitably ended up there. I wish I knew why our experience split into two like that. He would travel down a dark path, then I would follow him and try to turn him around. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed.

Not long before we were married (in May 2000), we went to Maui for a prewedding honeymoon. One night we watched the Robin Williams movie
What Dreams May Come
. I apologize in advance for spoiling it for anyone who’s never seen it, but it’s overwhelmingly sad; first, a couple’s two children are killed in an automobile accident, then the husband dies, then his grieving wife dies sometime afterward. The husband, safely in heaven, learns that his wife (who’d committed suicide after his death) is in hell. The love he has for her transcends time and the reality of their deaths; to save her, he leaves heaven and goes on a journey to hell. We cried through the whole thing, and like a glutton for punishment, I cried through it again just recently. This time I was overwhelmed by sadness from losing Scott and our marriage, but it wasn’t the old, familiar I-could-never-live-without-you feeling. It was a realization: Following Scott through the darkness felt a lot like searching for someone in hell.

And then at some point, he started following me.

There’s a point
where being high is no longer about being high at all—it’s about being really sick and the frantic need to get the drug into your system to stop the sickness from getting worse. Between
doing that, and doing that again, you spend hours being paranoid, looking out the window, having hallucinations. I know there are a lot of people who get high on a daily basis but still manage to get something productive done. That wasn’t us; we were watching a TV that wasn’t even on, convinced it was a program about insects.

Per court order (from a whole series of probation violations stemming from the crack possession in 1995 and another bust in 1998, with each judge warning “one more time”), Scott was again spending his nights at a sober living house, and his days holed up with me. He’d get up in the morning, do a group meditation and the house chores, then be the first man out the door. I’d be waiting around the corner. The drive back to Hollywood is fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, but it felt like an hour.

Once we got home, we’d immediately use anything we had left or wait for our dealer to come by and do a drop. At the end of each day, Scott would make it back in time for curfew with seconds remaining and do a monitored urine test with clean pee we got from God knows where. I spent most nights after he left sitting in front of the bathroom mirror staring at my pores until the sun came up. Sometimes my friend Stevie (a woman Scott had met through Maria, one of his dealers) would come and keep me company. She was a stripper, not usually the kind of girl I’d hang out with, but she was kind and funny—besides, everyone else seemed to have disappeared. I was grateful for the company. The thought of dying alone with a needle hanging out of my arm was too pitiful. Or maybe what I really wanted was the assurance that there’d be someone there to call 911 if I went blue. Probably not such a good idea to invest my rescue faith in Stevie, given the night she shot up in my shower and came very close to dying there. The water had been running forever and
after she stopped answering me, I broke into the bathroom to find her lying on the floor, naked and seizing. As we’d done with Michael, I pulled her into the cold shower until she finally came to. I was so unhinged that I spent the rest of the night picking at my face. By the time the sun came up, I looked like I’d been attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes.

The first time I ever met Scott’s stepfather, Dave, came during the worst stretch of our Chaos Tour. I’m not certain how long we’d been getting loaded, but long enough so that the modeling jobs had dwindled away; I’d gone from pretty to pretty scary-looking. This particular day, Dave was in town from Colorado, and he and Scott had made a date to play golf with Michael that afternoon. It was crucial that Scott come directly back from golf to hook me up again. We were out of dope; he swore he’d take care of it and get back on time. When the doorbell rang, Scott was upstairs in the shower, and I was on the bedroom floor having a mad anxiety meltdown. I went downstairs, opened the door, and there stood a giant of a man: six foot three, a former football player for Notre Dame. I can’t imagine what he saw. I hadn’t slept or eaten in days. My arms were scabby with track marks and looked like they should’ve been attached to a corpse. My eyes were barely open. For all I know, most of our first conversation together was conducted with my eyes closed.

Meeting your boyfriend’s parents for the first time carries a lot of stress. Add try-to-pretend-that-you-are-not-a-junkie pressure and you have a girl whose head might blow at any moment. Dave came in and sat down on the big green couch while I ran up to get Scott out of the shower. I never went back downstairs. Dave was sitting on the big green couch, we’d run out of drugs, and of all banal things, Scott was heading for the golf course.

The minute they left, I felt nauseated. I took a clock into the guest room and lay down. Every once in a while, I pried my eyes open and looked at that clock. As time went by, something was kicking me in the stomach. The kicking was soon accompanied by sweating and nausea. Hours passed and no Scott. The stomach-punching became so intense that I curled into the fetal position and held my breath as wave after wave went through me. I’d done my share of bargaining with God during bad trips and excruciating hangovers, but this time, I truly thought I was going to die. I went to my hands and knees on the floor, but not in prayer—instead, I went from one room to another, checking the wastebaskets, peering under the furniture, hoping to find a used needle, convinced that even a drop of dope would’ve helped. Unfortunately, Scott and I never left a drop behind.

I crawled back to the guest room to what I thought would be my final resting place and waited. I swear I heard the key turn when he finally got home. I screamed some version of bloody murder, begging him to help me. It was the fastest Scott had ever set up a rig for me, but it seemed like forever. Still lying on the guest bed, I could barely sit up while he fixed me. The reaction was immediate. Even before he finished, I felt new again.

I have so many vividly ugly memories like this, sometimes they all run together in my head like a Worst Nightmares Film Festival: showing up for a Disney catalog shoot and becoming convinced halfway through that my face was melting off, leaving in a panic and waking up behind the steering wheel about twenty minutes later, going west on the 134 freeway at 55 mph; attending a Fourth of July party with Scott at Leo DiCaprio’s in Malibu, both of us pale and sick, wearing long sleeves to hide the track marks and barely able to
talk. I’d been to the dermatologist’s the day before, and my face was such a mess from picking and scratching. I got a shot of cortisone and a bandage over the worst spots. Scott told him I’d been bitten by spiders. If we’d been less wrecked, we’d have noticed that most of Leo’s guests were going out of their way to stay out of ours.

The first red carpet we stepped on as a couple was in mid-1999, for the premiere of the second Austin Powers movie,
The Spy Who Shagged Me
. Scott sang the lead on Big Blue Missile’s remake of the Zombies’ “Time of the Season” for the soundtrack, so we came out of our drug-induced hiding. I was so out of it, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with myself while the photographers clicked away, so I stared at the carpet. It wasn’t even red—more like seventies’ orange shag. Something else did catch my attention: Verne Troyer—Mini-Me—being interviewed just to my left. Moments later, the crowd began to roar. Approaching the carpet to Scott’s right was, drum roll, please: Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless cat! I could feel my eyelids blink and blink again. Mini-Me, hairless cat. Mini-Me, hairless cat. I looked at Scott helplessly, telegraphing, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

And then there was a modeling trip when I got cripplingly drunk at an airport bar in Atlanta and surfaced at a coke party in New York City, in a scary scene out of
Scarface
. There was a mountain of cocaine there, what I call movie-producer-quality cocaine. As soon as no one was paying any attention to it, I stole it and split. Then I went off on a street-by-street search through the city for a needle I could use to put it into my arm. Once I found one, I took my treasure into a diner, ordered a sandwich I knew I’d never eat, went into the bathroom, used the water from the tap, and shot up. For the rest of the night, I walked a few blocks, found another diner, ordered a
grilled cheese, headed for the bathroom, and shot up again. Repeat. Repeat. By dawn, I was back in the models’ apartment, sitting in the bathtub and trying to scrub the stink off myself. I was also intensely exploring my legs, looking for another usable vein. I showed up at my
Redbook
photo shoot two days later, but I don’t know how, and I don’t remember anything about it.

The days run together; the drugs run together. And the rehabs run together, too. We each had a few more to go before we hit “surrender.”

We’d made reservations to go into Exodus, for time number, oh, who knows. We planned for an afternoon check-in, but when noon showed up, we still had a lot of heroin and coke left. It’s obvious where I’m going with this—we needed to ride it out. Scott was certain it would be our last run and I played along. It’s rare to voluntarily admit yourself into rehab without first running as fast as you can into a wall, and that was our plan.

In spite of our compromised state, we at least had the courtesy to call and let the nurse know that we were running late. We also let the limo driver know that he, too, would not be needed until a later time and could go until further notice. A limo to get to rehab? We were such douche bags. Every few hours, Scott would ring Barbara the nurse and let her know that we were still coming. He didn’t want our beds to be given up. We were upstairs in our own bedroom, sitting on the floor. When the imaginary ants had all marched away, it was time to go again. It was the end (or so we kept saying), and I wanted every ounce I could inject.

Before I could pull out the syringe, a strange ringing filled my head. I touched the palms of my hands to my ears and the room swayed like the floor was going to collapse underneath us—for a
split second, I thought it was an earthquake. I tried to focus my eyes on the heart rate monitor, but the numbers looked wavy. “Scott, something’s wrong.” He answered, I could hear him, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, the ringing was so intense. It grew louder, like a plane flying right overhead, and then everything went black.

Before I was completely gone, Scott was on the phone with nurse Barbara. He called her because he was too scared to call 911. She asked him a series of questions. “Is she still breathing? Is she responding at all?” I was breathing, but I wasn’t surfacing. He lay down beside me and spooned me the entire night, never releasing me from his arms. I thought I was dying; neither one of us knows now why I didn’t.

When morning came, he woke me up—it was time to make the trip to Exodus. He called for the douchemobile, we started to pack, and then we got high again. You’d think a near-death experience would make an impact, but it barely slowed our roll. We packed our rehab necessities as though we were going to Paris—feather boas and heels for me, one pair of checkered Vans for him, plus a three-piece suit and an assortment of hats. Except I only threw in
one
of my shoes, and Scott only threw in
one
of his. Packing for rehab when you’re still wrecked is an exercise in nonsense: if it’s July, you’ll probably throw in a fur coat. We always had to send someone back to our house to pick up practical items like slippers, pajamas, toothbrushes, and something comfy to sweat in.

When the limo came, we still had drugs that needed finishing, so we stopped at a dive bar on the way to Marina del Ray, shot up the last of it in the car, then went looking for somewhere to dump the evidence. We found a huge Dumpster in back of the bar and tossed it all in. Then we ran into the bar for one last drink, and
crawled back into the limo. Just more than twenty-four hours late, we finally walked into Exodus hand in hand, our driver carrying our bags behind us.

Just before the Chaos Tour
took off, Scott had begun seeing an addiction therapist at Promises Malibu. Her name was Bernadine Fried; Scott called her Bernie. He wanted me to come in with him. Well, if it will help
you
, I thought.

I don’t know what I expected when I met her, but the petite brunette who greeted us was a surprise. My first assumption was that she most likely wouldn’t like me or want me around Scott. I sensed that about a lot of people, and often I was right. Had Scott not liked her and needed to see her, I may have never gone. I had a wall of protection that I’d spent years building and not much energy for letting other people in.

Up until I met Bernie, every therapy session or twelve-step meeting that Scott and I attended together was based on my being the girlfriend or the appendage or, worse, the self-appointed watchdog. But this was different—the energy in the room was different. She looked at me, she asked what I thought and what I felt. She had a cool vibe; to some degree, I knew she knew me. She could see the road I was on, she knew how far I still had to go. She understood, as I did not, that Scott and I had more than our own demons to wrestle with—there was the business he was in as well. I was so lost in the fog that I didn’t completely understand what Scott’s fame was doing. He had toured across the country and around the world with STP; they’d made four multimillion-selling CDs, and his solo
12 Bar Blues
included collaborations with people like Sheryl Crow and Dylan’s
producer Daniel Lanois. He’d accumulated MTV Awards, American Music Awards, and a Grammy, and a host of magazine interviews (positive and negative), all of them detailing his drug struggles, his arrest record, and on-again, off-again relationships among the guys in the band. And yet, stoned or sober, I continued to see him as the sweet guy with a beat-up car. Seeing through the eyes of love is one thing; getting it consistently wrong is something else.