Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (19 page)

No matter if you
had happy Christmases or sad ones when you were a child, if you’re feeling fragile, the season can really kick your ass. Short days, enforced cheer, and nonstop TV commercials reminding you how inadequate you are in the giving-sharing-jolly department. It’s now my happy experience that the presence of excited children changes everything, but that year, with Scott behind bars and me in very early opiate recovery, it was an uphill slog. Scott’s recovery had started months sooner than
mine, and he’d reached a stage of cautious optimism. I wasn’t quite there yet.

Scott loves Christmas. He gets into it more than anyone I know. Even in jail, he made a celebration of it, coaching fellow inmates through the two- and three-part harmonies he’d learned in choir as a kid and rocking Christmas carols. I couldn’t even give him a proper gift—books were about the only thing accepted, and I had very little money of my own. Unless you’re six years old, buying someone a gift with his money isn’t really a gift.

I spent a couple of blurry days in San Diego with my family, then came back to L.A. Scott’s parents were in California to visit him, staying with his brother Michael and his wife. Scott had made it clear to everyone that we were going to be together when he was released, so I was invited over. I felt guilty that he was spending Christmas in jail while I was with his family. I recently found some snapshots from that day—all I can see is a scared, awkward, and very uncomfortable girl who couldn’t have told you what day it was. Also in the picture were some other very uncomfortable people who were doing the best that they could, and weren’t any happier about it than I was.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the turn of the new century, Scott got out of jail. With the exception of the long-ago first kiss in London in 1992, the hug we shared that day was probably the most important embrace of our lives. As a condition of his early release, he had another thirty-day rehab stint (at Impact), then he finally came home. We were sober, healthy, optimistic, and more in love than ever. Simple things—pizza, ice water, waking up together—took on the significance of treasure. We began to reconnect with our friends and
family, and Scott went back to work with STP, getting ready to take their fourth album—called, comically,
No. 4
—out on the road.

We went to twelve-step meetings together and to appointments with Bernie. One of us was always habitually late, of course, and I still dreaded getting out of bed in the morning (so coffee and breakfast actually happened at noon), but we were starting again. It wasn’t a cakewalk, but it wasn’t a constant jagged-edge dope run on the bad side of town, either.

One morning a couple of weeks after he got home, he suddenly got out of bed—stark naked—and went down on one knee. “I don’t have a ring,” he said, “but I want you to be my wife. I want to spend the rest of our lives together.” I didn’t cry, at least not at first—I’d always believed it would happen, but I also thought I’d be in my early hundreds when it did. For years, a normal life seemed like one of those paradise islands way off on the horizon—something to sail toward, but farther away the closer we got. Now the fantasy I’d created in my mind at sixteen was going to happen. That day, we held each other for a very long time.

Through all of our separations and setbacks, we had always talked about having children; within months of getting engaged, I discovered I was pregnant. We’d thought it might take longer, but as everyone joked, I held my own for the Mexican side of the family. When I called my mother to tell her about the engagement and the pregnancy, her voice contained nothing but love and excitement. Given the tumultuous relationship Scott and I had shared, no doubt there were a few people who raised their eyebrows when they heard the news—it was high time that Prince’s “Party Like It’s 1999” stopped being a Scott-and-Mary theme song.

We planned the wedding for May 21, 2000, in an L.A. restaurant called the Little Door, which had a beautiful patio and a hidden garden just beyond the doors, with red bougainvillea vines and ivy everywhere, and a tiled stone fountain. We hired a wedding planner named Randie Pellegrini, and I had only two requests: Keep it simple, and don’t tell me if anything goes wrong.

Although we were both raised Catholic, we didn’t have time to go through an annulment of Scott’s first marriage or to take the prescribed classes in order to have a ceremony in a church. We had waited long enough to really commit to each other, and I felt like God backed us up on that decision. We didn’t want an insta-preacher from the Church of What’s Happening Now, so we were happy to find a rabbi who’d taught at a Catholic university, which seemed to cover all the bases. If there’d been someone with even more religious qualifications, we would’ve taken him, too. Better safe than sorry.

Shortly before our wedding, Scott’s mother and I went shopping together for her dress. We were never close, and with everything that had happened, it wasn’t likely that we ever would be. But this was the woman who had raised the man I loved. Her heartbreaks had been at least as frequent as mine—I hoped that our wedding-outfit shopping expedition would lighten the tension between us. We spent an entire day looking and finally found the perfect outfit at Neiman Marcus, a soft shell-pink dress. The price tag was outrageous. She opened her wallet and pulled out a contraband credit card. “Mary, sometimes a girl needs to buy something that her husband wouldn’t agree with,” she said. “I suggest now that you’re getting married, you have a credit card that you pay on your own.” It was advice that my mother had given me long ago, but I enjoyed the confirmation
coming from another woman. Luckily, when it comes to fashion, Scott has always agreed that most items are a necessity.

For the No. of tour
, Stone Temple Pilots were hubbing out of New York, and Scott and I were staying at the Mercer Hotel. One night, we were going to meet Dean DeLeo and his then wife, Juliana, for dinner. Dean and Juliana were good friends with actor Patrick Dempsey, and we all met up at Nobu. I was still at the stage where morning sickness lasted all day long, and I had to work very hard to focus on the quality of the company I was with rather than on the fact that I was surrounded by the smell and visual of every kind of raw fish a fabled Japanese restaurant had to offer.

Right in the middle of dinner, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown came crashing through the door—and “crashing” is not an exaggeration of the kind of entrance they made. Afterward, we all went to a club for a while, where we were escorted to the VIP section. I was offered a seat next to Courtney Love. It had been five years since she and Scott had their adventures at Chateau Marmont. She was healthy, so was he, and there wasn’t a moment’s uneasiness among us. I knew that Scott cared for her, but never was there any romantic involvement (the only girl Scott wants within a ten-mile radius of him while he’s using is a drug dealer or someone making a delivery). That night, Courtney was very glamorous and gracious. Mostly, we spoke about Pilates and fitness. When Scott told her we were expecting a child in a few months, she lit up a cigarette and confided in me that she would mostly likely never have another baby (her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was about to turn eight), be
cause she couldn’t stop smoking. She said this while exhaling smoke straight into my nostrils. A few minutes later, David Lee Roth arrived and took the seat across from us. He had long, bleached-white hair and skin the texture of Fire Marshal Bill’s. I blinked through the smoke at Scott, giving him my “Really?” face; we got up in unison and ran for the hotel.

Courtney was also staying at the Mercer. She somehow squeezed Scott’s room alias out of the front desk staff, and called us every day with a new plan, inviting me to work out with her, or asking if we’d like to go with her to dinner at Donatella Versace’s. Eating, working out, or appearing in front of anyone having to do with high fashion weren’t on my list of things to do, so we gently declined. Courtney lives in CourtneyLoveland, we couldn’t get mad at her. Like us, she was doing her best. If you’d told teenage me, the one with the baby doll–clad Courtney poster hung in her room, that one day I would decline such an invitation, I’d have thought you were insane.

Jeff Kolsrud arranged
for me to meet with a designer for my wedding dress, just down the street from the Mercer.

There are girls who plan their weddings their entire lives, with scrapbooks full of magazine clippings and fabric samples for the dress, the outfits for the bridesmaids, the colors, the cake, the flowers. I’d never been that girl. I’d worn many beautiful clothes as a model, but they were costumes I put on in exchange for a paycheck—in my deepest self, it was still all about naked Barbie and a roll of tape. Now that began to change. I wanted to be pretty for Scott; I wanted to wear something special. Mostly, I hoped I’d stop throwing up from morning sickness by the time I became Mrs. Scott Weiland.

When I walked in the door of the designer’s studio and found myself surrounded by rows of beautiful gowns, I needed to sit down immediately. Nausea might’ve played some part in that, but a roomful of wedding dresses can really focus your attention: I’m here because I’m getting married. I wanted something beautiful—this would be my only wedding day. Finally, I chose a simple strapless gown, full length, with fine blue and silver beading.

As we started the fitting, I asked the seamstress to please leave a little room; I was pregnant and expected to be rounder on my wedding day. She smiled and nodded—I guessed she’d heard this many times before. We worked along in companionable silence until she asked when the wedding was scheduled. Very soon, I told her. The look of alarm on her face told me that my good news wasn’t good for her. Maybe a girl should have that scrapbook and start planning more than a few weeks ahead of time: It can take months to hand-bead a gown. I was so grateful when it showed up on time. It was enough to make me believe in fairy godmothers and singing mice with needles and threads.

My wedding day
was the first morning in three months that the bedroom floor didn’t roll beneath my feet like the deck of a ship—the baby nausea was gone. Kristen, Ivana, and my little sister Julie, all gorgeous in dusty rose dresses, helped me get ready. When it came time to help me put on my dress, they handled it as carefully as butterfly wings. But when we buttoned the last button, we realized we had a serious problem. Not only was the extra room not necessary, the morning sickness had dropped me a bra size (not that there’d been all that much there to begin with). Frantically, we began stuff
ing my bra with flesh-toned silicone inserts—“cutlets,” everyone calls them. Wiggly little chicken cutlets—as many as we had, we didn’t have enough to sufficiently stuff the top of that dress.

Scott’s groomsmen were Sonny (a close friend from Impact), his brother Michael, and Ashley Hamilton, who was working on his sobriety as hard as we were. Our parents and stepparents were all there, our brothers and sisters, our grandmothers, as well as Jeff Kolsrud and Bernie Fried, Anthony Kiedis, and all of the guys in STP and their wives. Seventy-five people, all loving us and wanting only happiness for us.

The moment before I began my walk toward Scott, my dad took my hand, and then he started to cry. I’m not sure I had ever looked full-on into his face before, and what I saw there moved me profoundly. I knew in that moment that my days as a little girl were over. As we walked together, I had a conversation with God in my head. I thanked Him for finally fulfilling my dream; I was so ashamed that I’d lost faith early on. I promised never to lose faith again. There were rose petals on the floor, and I looked at them as hard as I could, clutching my dad’s hand. And then he let me go.

I was crying, Scott was crying—suddenly, everybody was crying. Ivana, who was crying, too, handed Scott a tissue—between the heat and the tears, half the tissue stuck to his face. Ivana went from crying to desperately trying to hold in what she knew would be uncontrollable laughter. Scott and I laughed, then cried, started over again and cried some more, until finally the rabbi took pity and read the vows for us—we could not get the words out.

Once we stumbled through our vows and the roomful of weepy people began to shift into celebration (and a collective sigh of relief),
I put down my bouquet of deep red roses and spent the rest of the day hanging on to Scott with one hand and holding up the bust of my dress with the other. It was fine. I didn’t care. We were surrounded by family and friends, we were signed on the dotted line, and I was a grown-up wife, married to the blue-eyed man in the black suit. To marry him, I would’ve happily shown up with just the chicken cutlets and nothing else. Our first dance was to the Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms”—“And if I should fall / I know I won’t be alone anymore.” Scott heard it when he was in jail; he was mopping the floors, and when the song came on the radio, he stopped mopping and began to weep. “That’s when I knew I’d marry you when I got home,” he told me.

Last year, my sister Julie wore my dress for her wedding. Now it’s being saved for my daughter, Lucy. She wants me to save everything else in my closet for her as well. Every time I dress for an event, there’s my little girl, with her mother’s feel for clothes and her grandmother’s eye for a bargain. “Mommy, will you save that for me?” I may end up in a one-room apartment someday, but there will always be closet space for everything I’ve saved for Lucy.

After a two-day escape
to the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara’s wine country, we went back on the road with STP for their U.S. tour. For a while, life on the tour bus was like being in a cocoon—no long airport lines, no security checks or delays, and a kitchen I could visit whenever I wanted. Which was often. Scott made me a special bed, with soft down comforters, cashmere throws, and pillows to cushion my rapidly expanding body. Everyone from the road crew to
my new husband spoiled me rotten. If I wanted a cheeseburger, one magically appeared. If I wanted my feet rubbed or couldn’t reach my back to scratch it, shazam, a genie appeared.