by Phil Collins
This is not rehab, technically speaking (and when you’re a serious drinker, you become expert in such nuances—“I’ve only had the one drink…”). But at the urging of Lindsey, Dana and Tony, I am looking at rehab facilities, albeit with not much enthusiasm. I don’t need to go to rehab. I can just stop. And I do stop—a few times. I become very good at stopping. But I become even better at starting again.
In the University Hospital intensive care unit I’m wired up to an array of blinking, beeping machines. But even the best tech in town might not be enough: my pancreas is on the verge of shutting down and I am, it seems, close to dying.
Intensive care is truly awful. I’m having terrible dreams because of the very heavy medication. I can’t move because I have wires and cables snaking from my nose, neck and penis—I’m on a catheter. I don’t have a colostomy bag, thank God, but I have to, shall we say, work all that out. So going to the toilet is traumatic, the mortification of my public humiliation—I’m in intensive care, but not in my own room—mingling with the pain and fiddly horror of dragging behind me a spaghetti of tubing dangling from nearly every orifice.
But none of that is the worst. The worst is the fact that I’m trapped and strapped in this hospital when Nic and Matt depart Switzerland for a new life in Miami. I don’t even get to say goodbye. For one thing, they have to leave home at 4 a.m. to make the flight connections. For another, Orianne, quite rightly, says, “You’re not seeing the kids in this state.”
My sons leave the country—emigrate—and their dad doesn’t even get to say goodbye.
My heart and soul are racked with pain and guilt, but at least I’m not in actual pain: I’m up to my eyes on morphine. Please, Nurse, can I have some more?
“Are you in pain?”
“Ah, a little bit.”
“OK, then.”
One night, pumped full of opiates and completely wired (up), I try to rip the whole lot out. Alarms ring and in rush the nurses. I’m given a stern telling-off. Little wonder—it seems these cables and wires are keeping me going; they’re literally plugging me into life’s back-up generator.
I’ve gone from being stupefied with drink to stupefied with drugs and, unknown to me, I’m in so deep that various medical professionals are taking Lindsey gently but urgently by the elbow and asking her, “Is the will of Monsieur Collins in order?”
Two weeks pass. I say to the head doctor, Professor Berger, “Can I please go back to Genolier today?” She says no, maybe tomorrow. I’m desperate to get out. I’m on a ward where there are motorbike accident victims coming in on a Saturday night. There’s only a curtain separating us and I can hear the moaning and the groaning, so I know the guy a few feet away is in a bloody mess. My dreams are already bad enough.
Throughout all this, mercifully, Dana has been a constant presence at the hospital. She’s managed, via a sympathetic boss, to get some compassionate leave. She’s there when I wake up, and there when I go to sleep. That helps, a bit.
Eventually I’m discharged and I start to have something like a relatively normal life. I’m on various medications—for hypertension, my pancreas, my heart. And against all medical advice, non-medical advice and sanity, I start to drink again—slowly. Slowly at first. What else am I going to do? My family have left me and I’m rattling around in Féchy, pretty much on my own. Dana will come and stay for a few days, Lindsey comes by, even though, with the boys gone, there’s no reason for her to come. I know what she’s doing. She’s making sure I’m not dead.
With the boys now in Miami, I have to start visiting. That’s when a particularly turbulent flight happens. Having hit rock-bottom, I’m about to go sky-high.
—
Lindsey, Danny and I are scheduled to fly to the U.S.—Swiss International Air Lines to New York—then to travel by private plane from New York to Miami. Lindsey arrives in Féchy to take me to Geneva airport.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“Sure I am!” I’m definitely all right, because I’ve got up and I’ve finished a drink from yesterday. I have no qualms about, first thing in the day, going to the freezer, getting a bottle of vodka, having a couple of sips—oof!—and carrying on.
We’re booked on a midday flight, so we’re in the Swiss lounge at around 10 a.m. Lindsey and Danny have both started to become the police. But I know the location of everything—by “everything” I mean the complimentary booze—and I know what I have to do, and how quickly I need to do it. While they’re getting coffees, I make a break for it. Quick drink. Then another one. Standing by the fridge, I neck the vodka. They can’t see me, there’s no evidence.
This is where it gets a bit seedy, if it hasn’t already reached that level. The new boss of Swiss comes in to meet me. Apparently I have my legs swung over the side of the lounge chair. Certainly I don’t get up and say “pleased to meet you” and make small talk, which is what I would normally have done. I’m just uncharacteristically brusque, and everyone is very embarrassed.
The Swiss boss leaves. We get on the plane. “Glass of champagne, Monsieur Collins?”
“Yeah, all right.”
Now, I am not drunk. I promise you I am not drunk. But according to the account Lindsey later gives me, I won’t pull my seat forward for take-off. I point-blank refuse. Even before we leave the gate, the captain is looming over me. I’m oblivious, but he’s been alerted by the obvious disturbance. Do we need medical assistance? Lindsey and Danny, true to form, cover for me by blaming a dodgy knee. It’s the medication, honest, Captain.
They have to fasten the seat belt for me, and be content that in a few minutes we’ll all be putting our seats back. This dynamic duo then have to spend the duration of the eight-hour transatlantic flight standing watch, making sure they don’t lose me.
I have no recollection of any of that flight, not the take-off, not the landing, not the eight hours in between.
It gets better.
When we land in New York, I’m taken off in a wheelchair. Because for some reason, I don’t understand why, I can barely be woken and I certainly can’t walk. Nicoletta, the lovely Romanian lady who greets the first-class passengers, wheels me into the lounge where we make the connection for the private plane to Miami. Another journey of which I have no recollection.
By now I’m more than a little bolshy…apparently (in actual fact, I later learn, I’m awful). We arrive in Miami and check into the W Hotel. Clearly phone calls have been made, because word has reached Orianne. She appears at the hotel, scared out of her mind, with Nic and Matt. She’s meant to be dropping the boys off for this lovely weekend we have planned. Dana has been alerted, too, and is whizzing her way south from New York to join the party.
Me? I’m very lively. I’m saying, “What’s the problem?”
By now I’m in my room. A W hotel room has a kitchen, and in that kitchen there’s whiskey. So I’ve opened the whiskey, had a few drinks. And this goes to show the tolerance I’ve developed. I’ve been on the go—on the booze—since before I left Switzerland. About eighteen hours.
Orianne’s husband turns up to take the boys back. They’re confused. “What are we doing? Where are we going? Daddy’s here!”
In the time it takes for my boys to be taken away by their stepdad and for Francesca, a doctor friend of Orianne’s, to turn up, I’ve gone into the bathroom, taken off my shoes, slid on my socks and the shower towel and hit the floor with an almighty thump.
I stagger out of the bathroom and Francesca orders me to sit down. I go to lie on my bed but I’m in too much pain. She says, “We’re going to have to take you to the hospital.” Turns out I’ve broken a rib. And the broken rib has punctured a lung.
I’m still protesting. “There’s nothing wrong with me! I’ve come to see my kids!” But the doctor is persisting. And I’m spinning—even for a drinker of my heavy experience, this behavior is not my handwriting. I’m starting to wonder about the combination of my medication (which includes Klonopin, a powerful tranquilizer) and
the alcohol.
Suddenly there are two burly guys in my room.
“I’m not going to hospital.”
“Yes you are. These guys are gonna help you.”
I’m thinking, “Nurse Ratched.”
So they “help” me, almost kicking and screaming, to the wheelchair. They take me downstairs. Lindsey is close behind. This is her worst nightmare.
Down in the lobby of the W, the manager who had been so nice and solicitous to me when I arrived is now looking rather anxious. “Are you all right, Mr. Collins?” But what she’s really saying is: “Don’t die here, please.”
Dana has arrived from New York by this point, so she hears me saying, “I want to be with my mum.” My mum died in November the previous year.
I’m carted off to Mount Sinai Hospital and propelled to my room. There’s another burly guy sitting there already. I say, “You can go now. I’m fine.”
“Oh no, I’m here for the night.”
“What, when I go to the toilet, when I fart, you’re here? I don’t need you.”
But I look on my wrist and see a bracelet: “Dangerous.” Might-jump-out-of-a-window dangerous. He’s there with his flashlight and his book, to stop me from doing harm to myself, or to anyone else.
The next day I’m ready to get out of there. I have a meeting with the doctor. She says, “I can only let you go if you check yourself into rehab somewhere.”
I say, “I don’t think I can do that.”
I go back to the W Hotel, where somehow I’m still welcome. Dana and Lindsey are both there, and both crying. They can’t go on like this. They tell me I can’t go on like this. The boys are worried, too.
In Switzerland they had seen me drinking. Once Nicholas had wisely suggested to Lindsey, “I think we have to stop buying drink for Daddy.” A gut-wrenching thing for Lindsey to hear from a ten-year-old boy, and an awful image for his dad to process.
They’d also seen me falling over at home in Féchy. Not falling over drunk. It was, again, the lethal combination of Klonopin and alcohol affecting my balance. I got up to give them a hug. Bang. My teeth went into the tiles in the living-room floor. There’s still a mark there, and my teeth are still chipped. The bloody lip’s long healed, but what hasn’t healed is the memory of Mathew shouting, “Lindsey! LaLa! LaLa! Daddy’s fallen over!”
So by now, in Miami, I’m getting pressure from all sides to go into rehab. But I dig in my heels. I want to do this on my own. I can do this on my own.
They keep at it. Tony Smith is now involved. He says he’s been in touch with a woman called Claire Clarke, who runs a clinic, Clouds House, in Wiltshire. Will I call her?
I say I will, but I’m not promising anything.
“Hello, Phil,” she says. She’s a nice lady and an experienced professional well used to addicts and recovering addicts. Eric had been a resident at Clouds, as had Robbie Williams. But it’s no “celebrity” rehab. She explains that people tend to view it as a boarding school.
“Can I leave if I want to?”
“Yes, you can.”
Lindsey again says, “I can’t stand it anymore. I’m not walking in one day and you’re lying there, dead.” Dana adds, “You’re gonna kill yourself.”
That persuades me. The next day I call Claire back. “OK.”
I fly on a private plane from Miami to Bournemouth, not the most heavily trafficked flight path. On the plane I have a lie-down. But first I say to Dana, “Can I have a last drink?” “Yes.” So I have a ceremonial glass of wine. I think we all do, as we finally have something to celebrate. Well, we think we do.
I get off the plane and am driven to Clouds. Our driver, David Lane, who’s known me for donkey’s years, is surprised. He’s never seen me drink at all. “Eh? Where are they taking Phil?” he seems to say to himself. Just another person in my world for whom all this is a sense-scrambling shock.
At Clouds, new arrivals’ escorts stay in a holding area while you’re shown around. Again, as I meet the inmates, I’m reminded of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“And this, Phil, will be your room.”
“Haven’t I got my own room? I don’t want to be with Billy Bibbit.”
“Well, we can work that out.”
“I want my own room,” I press. “I don’t want to be stuck in a room with another loony.”
I return to the holding area and say, with a shrug, that I’ll stay. Lindsey and Dana breathe out. Everyone is crying. “Are you sure you’re gonna be all right, Phil?”
“I guess…” But I’m not sure.
The nurse takes my bags and starts going through them. “Don’t care who you are. We’re searching them.”
“Why? You think I’ve smuggled in booze? I haven’t brought anything in.”
They remove all my prescription pills. They’re going to give them to Clouds’ clinicians, who will prescribe something “more medically appropriate.” Everything else goes in a locked cupboard. My sense of incarceration is mounting.
I’m shown to my room, in which there’s another bed.
“Don’t put anyone else in that,” I growl.
“OK, we’ll be OK for a couple of weeks like that.”
“Well, how long have I got to be here?”
“Four weeks,” they say. “Or six weeks.”
I don’t know if I can take that.
Because I have medical issues—the pancreatitis, the rib—as well as alcohol issues, they put me next door to the medical bay. Unfortunately, in this old house (and boarding school isn’t far off it) the medical bay is where everyone queues at 6 a.m. for their morning meds—and queues again at 11 p.m. to get their night meds. So I can never go to sleep before eleven, and am always woken up at six. On top of that, whenever anyone goes outside after dinner for a smoke, they congregate right below my room.
The reasons to hate this place—to hate myself for putting myself in this place—are piling up. But at least I have some smuggled-in help. I’ve brought some sleeping pills—mild homeopathic ones—and I have a phone. They took the iPhone, but I managed to keep secret my old Sony Ericsson. I have to charge it very discreetly, so I can call the kids every day. Still trying to be a good dad, even from behind bars.
I do the morning prayers, where everyone has to say something revealing/honest/self-lacerating. I don’t have any problems with this kind of group-therapy stuff, but it’s weird the people you meet, from hard nuts to housewives.
At breakfast, lunch and dinner we tend to sit at the same tables with the same group. There’s a lovely lady called Louise, who’s a worn late forties. Her husband has sent her here, threatening that if she doesn’t stop drinking, she won’t see her daughter again. Very sad. And very close. That could be me next.
There’s even a journalist from The Sun in here. I’m convinced that I’ll be all over the front pages of the tabloids again, but he turns out to be very nice. Being here is quite a leveler.
I invite Pud and Danny to come visit. They both say, “This isn’t you, is it? You haven’t got this kind of problem. You can stop this. You don’t need this.”
I’m given homework. I have to write a story about myself, then deliver it a month in. Where do I start? “My name is Phil Collins, I’ve sold zillions of albums…” Yeah, we know that. It’s a great story. Yet, in spite of being record-shifting, Oscar-winning Phil Collins, here I am in rehab, trying to deal with a drink problem. Just like everybody else.
Tony Smith calls: “Eric is going to come down and see you.”
“Please tell him no. I don’t want to see anybody.”
After a week, I’ve had enough. I call Danny on my contraband phone. “Get the car and come get me.” God bless Danny; he’s been staying in the bed and breakfast a few miles down the road. “You’d better book a plane because I’m out of here and I’m going to Switzerland.” It’s The Great Escape.
I say to Claire, “You did say I can leave when I want to.”
“Are you sure, Phil?”
“Very
sure.”
“OK…I don’t know if it’s that easy. But when do you want to leave?”
“Now? Tomorrow?”
As it happens, my leaving has coincided with two other inmates legitimately exiting the building. They’ve served their time. Me? I’m bailing because I can’t stand it, and because I kid myself that I know what has to be done.
After breakfast there’s a leaving ceremony for those about to re-enter the free world. Hugs, kisses, singing. I join in, but as I’m cheating, I feel squeamish. They’ve stuck it for six weeks. Me, only a week. But to my surprise (and comfort) they all insist that just coming in was the big step, and that I should be proud of that. I try hard to be.
The paperwork completed, I’m at the door with my bags and Danny turns up. I say goodbye as nicely as I can muster and get in the car. “Danny. Drive. As fast as you can.” Now I feel like Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. This big bouncing balloon is going to catch up with us and take me back.
We drive for what seems like an age, get to the airport and I climb aboard. I’ve never been so happy in my life to be flying anywhere. To be leaving.
—
It’s November 2012 and I’m a week dry. No twitches. No DTs. But I guess I do have a drink, because at home in Féchy on the 15th I find myself at the bottom of my concrete stairs, all eighteen of them. The back of my head is split, there’s a pool of blood and, quicker than you can hum “Smoke on the Water,” I’m back in the Clinique de Genolier.
Peter Gabriel phones to check on me. Tony Smith, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford fly in to see me. I’m very touched. I’m also very embarrassed. My bloody head wounds are leaking onto the pillow and we can all see the mess.
With some serious amends to make, I decide to take Nic and Matt away for a break, booking the four of us (lifesaver Lindsey comes too) a holiday in Turks and Caicos. My boys feel further away than ever—an abortive spell in prison-like rehab can make you feel that way—and I’m desperate to keep them as close as possible.