Beauty, Disrupted

by Carre Otis

  When I entered the pounding Club Expo it seemed like a million gorgeous models were on the dance floor, bumping and grinding to the loud music. Spotlights arced over the crowd, zooming from floor to ceiling, highlighting a sea of writhing bodies. And then I froze. One of the floodlights had found me. I stood there pinned in place, isolated and stone-still in the midst of the frenzy. Marie-Christine moved me toward the burly arms of one of the bouncers.

  “Hey, Carré!” he shouted. “Let me show you to your table.” Gratefully, I grabbed his arm and let myself be led through the crowd, up the stairs, and to a booth that was sectioned off with a red velvet rope. This is ridiculous, I told myself. I didn’t need a VIP table. But somehow we had scored one, and M.C., who loved the good life, languished back in a chair and proceeded to order us drinks.

  The club was like an amphitheater, with several different levels. The dance floor was below, and each tier had a view of it as well as a view of large screens projecting images onto the wall above. Getting my bearings and holding a fresh drink in my hand, I swayed from side to side, trying to find a rhythm in the maddening cacophony. The music was too loud to let us hold a conversation, so I looked over at M.C. and smiled. But I was uncomfortable. I felt as if I were on display. Every now and then, ­people looked up at me from the dance floor and held out their drinks in a toast of some sort. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a plan of some kind was unfolding and that I was somehow in the dark. With Mickey in town, I felt as if trouble was always looming.

  Moments later a ruckus broke out. There was a tussle in the crowd below, and then a group of men started to make their way up the steps, past the tier I was on. An argument ensued. I looked toward Marie-Christine but her eyes were locked on the cause of the commotion.

  Just then, I spotted Tupac Shakur, the rapper and a longtime friend of Mickey’s. He was followed by the whole gang. Mickey was in the center. My heart stopped. As the boys sat down, a bouncer came over to me. “Excuse me, Carré. I apologize, but it appears you are in Mickey’s seat,” he said nervously, half shouting into my ear over the din.

  “What? Are you fucking serious?” I asked. This was too much. Who would have made a mistake like that? Flashbulbs were going off. I could barely see. I looked to M.C. for an explanation. Full-blown paranoia began setting in. I had been betrayed by so many ­people in this godforsaken industry already that in an instant I started to think the worst of everyone around me. Marie-Christine included. I had known her for years. She couldn’t have helped arrange this, could she? I wondered. The Helena Rubinstein deal Mickey foiled had cost us both a lot of money, but I prayed she wasn’t still upset with me for that. Or was it my earlier run-in with Pinky? Nothing with Mickey and his boys was ever coincidental. I put my drink down on the table and still confused, I muttered, “No problem. I’m ready to get the hell out of here anyway.”

  M.C. had come here ready to party, but she quickly gathered her things to follow me.

  Before we could stand to leave, though, Tupac was hovering over me, extending a hand in a friendly manner.

  “Yo, Otis,” he said, smiling with his molasses eyes.

  “Tupac, hey.” I grabbed his hand and shook it, smiling back. He was an impressive artist, and it was a pleasure to meet him, regardless of the circumstances. “Otis, Mickey misses you!” he yelled over the roar of music.

  “Yeah, Tupac . . . come on. You don’t need to get into the middle of this. If Mick needs to talk to me, he’s a big boy,” I said. Then I stood up and began to make my way along the tier toward the exit sign, grasping the red rope to help me navigate my way. Unfortunately, I had to pass Mickey to get to the stairs. I kept my eyes on the floor to avoid any contact.

  But then I felt a hand on mine. A warm, familiar hand. I looked up, and my eyes met Mickey’s. Everything in the club faded away. The lights, the sounds, the frenzy—all seemed to quiet as we stood there in our own bubble. I held my breath. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to cry. But in an instant the rush of the club came back at me, flashbulbs going off again. Mickey leaned toward me, and in my ear, loud enough for only me to hear, he said, “I miss you so much.” I leaned my forehead into his, a private moment in a public place. It was just like a kiss. A kiss of the spirit.

  “I miss you, too, Mick,” and with that I forced myself away, turning my back on the club and stepping into the cool October night. What a rush. A soul-breaking rush. My heart pounded with sorrow, my breath was quick with longing. I wanted to go home. I needed to go home.

  Thankfully, I soon got what I needed. Less than twenty-four hours later, on a Sunday afternoon, I got a call from my lawyer informing me that the case had been dropped. The D.A. could do nothing without my help. They had decided not to prosecute me if I failed to testify. I could come back to L.A. Back to my dogs. Back to my own reality.

  I had one or two more jobs booked before I could leave New York. Early the next morning I showed up for the first shoot and met the only other model booked for that day: Myka Summers. We couldn’t have been more different, but those differences seemed to work.

  As the rain poured down outside, Myka and I hung around in the makeup room, cracking jokes, comparing our tastes in music, and smoking cigarettes. There was something about her I liked, and I usually didn’t get along well with other models. But Myka wasn’t just any model. She was a rebel. And she was gay. I had a thing for boyish-looking girls, but I was particularly drawn to her unique brand of androgyny. She had a ripped, muscular body, angular cheekbones, voluptuously full lips, shaggy blond hair, dark eyes—and I don’t just mean in color. But what intrigued me most was the way she wore her jeans slung low enough to reveal her men’s briefs underneath, Marky Mark style. She seemed infinitely beddable and her mischievous air just added to the allure.

  “Let’s hang out tonight,” she suggested. “My girlfriend, Heather, is in town. We can come to your place?” I liked the idea. A little New York farewell party was definitely in order.

  “Cool. Come on over,” I answered with a wink. Who knew what was in store? I was up for it.

  And that was my first intro to the heroin so many other ­people seemed to be doing. Myka and her girlfriend arrived at the Lowell, and they soon pulled out their bag of tricks. As she lit up the foil and inhaled through her metal straw, she offered a few warnings that sounded more like a disclaimer from a doctor’s office. “This is addictive, okay, Otis?” she said, coughing as she exhaled the drug. Rolling over backward and laughing hysterically, she handed me the hookup. “And you simply have to try this.”

  What can I say? It was better than any sex I’d had at that point in my life. It was absolutely awesome. It was exactly what I’d been looking for. I was tired of running. Tired of trying to get high enough to leave my hardships behind. But now, thanks to heroin, a new world seemed to open up to me. I didn’t know yet that nothing would be as good as the first hit. I didn’t know yet the true meaning of the phrase “chasing the dragon.”

  I awoke in the morning with two naked women sprawled next to me, both of whom were passed out. But I had a flight to catch. I climbed my way over their gorgeous bare asses and laid myself on top of Myka.

  “Yum,” I said in her ear.

  “I know, Carré, yum,” she said in a sleepy voice. I kissed her ear, and she turned to face me. After blinking a few times, she broke out into laughter.

  “Dude! Look at your nose! Rug burn, baby!” She chuckled, kissing the end of it. I frowned, not having a clue what she was talking about. “Go look in the mirror. Your cherry was popped, baaabbbby!” She laughed again. I rolled off her and stood up, and as I walked toward the mirror, she slapped my naked butt.

  “Oh, shit! What the fuck?” I vaguely recalled needing to scratch all night and rubbing my nose to relieve what seemed like the great primordial itch. I had apparently rubbed it raw. “Damn it, Myka!” But I started laughing, too.

  “Catch your flight, babe,” Myka said. “We’ll see you in L.A.”

  I jumped into the shower,
got dressed, and grabbed my bag. I was finally heading home.

  HITTING BOTTOM, HEADING SOUTH

  Ask anyone who has struggled with addiction and then recovered: There’s always a moment when you realize you’ve finally hit your bottom. For me that moment came in early 1995. It was the year that everything I’d been trying to deny finally came out into the open. It was the year that all the tricks I’d used to fill the void inside me finally stopped working.

  After being allowed to return to L.A. at last, I couldn’t wait to be back in my little place on Orlando, in the heart of Los Angeles. I wasn’t entirely alone. I now had our six Chihuahuas by my side: Angel, Beau Jack, Chocolate, Monkey, Romi, and Loki were my constant and loving companions. I loved my small house because it was mine. Mickey didn’t call the shots there. I did. I needed a safe place to regroup, and it seemed I had found it. I came back from New York with something else that made me feel safe, at least for a while. Heroin.

  Myka Summers and her girlfriend followed me from the East Coast. Within a few weeks, they were crashing at my place. It wasn’t always pretty. Heather was submissive, while Myka, as it turns out, was prone to violence. There was more than one physical battle I had to break up during their stay.

  A few days after their arrival, Myka and I were sitting on the living-room floor of the Orlando house, listening to music and hanging out with the pups. She pulled out a small dark leather purse. It was her “kit,” and in it was some tinfoil, a straw, a lighter, and a dab of white powder. The powder was China White. I’d been hoping she would get me high again, as we’d done in New York. I was hugely relieved I wouldn’t have to ask.

  That first inhalation was almost indescribably good, better than I remembered. I thought I was dying, and I didn’t care. No fear. Just total surrender. It’s somewhere on the edge between orgasm and death. In an instant the pain, the fear, and the constant crushing loneliness I’d felt for so long vanished. I was riding that dragon, and it was sweeter than anything I’d ever felt. And as soon as it was gone, I wanted it back.

  I fell fast. After Myka and her girlfriend left, my life was all about the score. My days became very focused. Everything I did during my waking hours was about getting my hands on more heroin and staying high. I fell in love with the ritual of using. I loved the sound of the tinfoil in my hand, the smell of the China White or the Black Tar cooking, the feel of the straw between my lips. All else went by the wayside. I ignored friends, agents, bills, phone calls, and the ever-growing number of answering-machine messages. The one responsibility I didn’t neglect was caring for the dogs: No matter how high I got, no matter how desperate for a hit I became, I never let my babies go unfed or ignored. (Years after we divorced, Mickey would tell Barbara Walters that our dogs saved his life. As bad as he got, he, too, never fell so low as to let these small and loving creatures suffer. It was one thing we had in common.)

  I was slipping down, and slipping down fast. In one sense it was hard to notice. Because of Mickey I had been so walled off from the rest of the world that I’d lost my sense of connection with most other ­people. Since depression and loneliness had become familiar to me before I ever started using heroin, I didn’t notice how much worse those feelings had gotten after I was hooked. But on the other hand, I was lucky: I fell so far and so fast that it would quickly become impossible to deny that I had a serious problem. My life was out of control.

  As Los Angeles slipped into what seemed to be a particularly cold and wet winter, something shifted in me. My days had become like the weather, a gray and depressing blur. My body ached, and my bones felt cold. A weariness permeated every high and the spaces in between. I wasn’t riding the dragon anymore, I was chasing it—and falling farther behind. Rather than give me that ecstatic sense of freedom and bliss I craved, the drug left me in a near-constant state of oppressive despair. Each high was now only a few frantic, scrambling seconds long, and filled with struggle as I tried to escape the darkness that would quickly envelop me afterward. The heroin had stopped working. And I was ready to quit.

  I realized that my body was addicted, but I was completely unaware of how tough it would be to withdraw. Myka had already warned me that I was past the point where quitting would be easy. I didn’t listen. I knew I could handle a lot, and I was convinced I could kick the drug in one hard weekend. How wrong I was. Opiate addiction (heroin is an opiate) is widely considered one of the toughest addictions to overcome. Once hooked, the body becomes so dependent on the drug that withdrawal is not only prolonged and painful but also very dangerous. It’s not unheard of for addicts to die of the consequences of going through a medically unsupervised withdrawal. I didn’t know this at the time, and even if I had been cautioned, I’m not sure I would have listened. I was confident in my ability to accomplish anything, including ridding my body of this addiction on my own.

  I started the withdrawal on a Friday, figuring it might take me until Sunday to finish the detox. Rain poured down, flooding my little patio, which I watched silently from beneath a pile of blankets on my king-size bed. The dogs stayed close, sensing something ominous. It was one of the few times I heard thunder overhead from my home in L.A. I was expecting a range of symptoms, like headaches, perhaps some nausea, and general discomfort. But nothing could have prepared me for what I faced that weekend. By late Friday night, I was in real pain, and I was terrified, scared shitless that it would only get worse. It was an ugly situation, getting uglier by the hour. And there was no way around it, no way but straight through the fire. By Saturday morning I was like a caged animal—sweating, vomiting, shaking, unable to stand. In my agony it was the first time I realized just how much trouble I’d gotten myself into. I couldn’t do this, not alone.

  Saturday afternoon I threw in the towel. I was done. Defeated. It was one of the worst moments of my life, as I realized how helpless I was in the face of this addiction.

  Myka was back in town crashing at my place again between jobs. Exhausted and ashamed, I went into the room where she was staying. “I can’t do it,” I cried to her. “I can’t take any more.” Beads of sweat were on my brow, my hands trembling. As my desperate gaze lifted to meet Myka’s, I watched her smile slyly. It was as if she had known all along that I wouldn’t make it out. Without a word she handed me her kit, straw and all. And seconds later I was high again.

  I knew I needed to do something. Convinced now that I couldn’t kick it on my own, I searched my mind for the name of someone, anyone who might be able to help. Not knowing whom I could turn to and feeling completely defeated as a result of my first failed detox, I put off reaching out for help. I kept using, slipping further into a dark abyss. I was truly fucked.

  A few weeks slipped by, and then Mickey called. It was out of the blue, but we all knew that Mick kept tabs on me. He had heard rumors that I was strung out, and he was worried. I was so beat up by the drug that by the time he came around, I couldn’t turn him away. At that point he seemed like a welcome old friend, which in a sense he was. It was clear to me that we still cared for each other, and after a fair amount of time apart from him I wanted to believe that he was coming to me less as a lover and more as someone who was concerned enough to help. For all the drama in his life, Mickey had never been hooked on street drugs. Mickey had, however, helped his own brother, Joey, quit drugs. He knew firsthand what was involved in getting clean.

  As it turned out, Mickey did genuinely want to help me, but he also wanted me back in his life, by his side as his wife. Even in the throes of my addiction, I was conflicted about that. I’d had a lot of time to reflect in our months apart. As so often happens during a separation, I’d gotten a chance to heal a bit from my dependency on Mickey, even as I’d become dependent on something else. I had also begun to see someone new, a man closer to my own age, a guy with a regular job and the capacity to be present on a regular basis. Seeing him was giving me a new perspective on what I could possibly have in my life. But I also knew that until I was clean and sober, I couldn’t weigh a
nything out. As normal as this guy was, he also had an addiction. The fact that I considered that to be normal is a pretty good indication of how distorted my sense of reality was at that point.

  Mickey and I had a long discussion. He wanted me back, yes, but he also wanted me clean. He told me about a treatment center in Ensenada, Mexico, where they offered a cure for opiate addiction called Rapid Detox. Invented by a remarkable Israeli doctor named Andre Waismann, Rapid Detox is a radical procedure that reverses addiction to heroin and other opiates. Done under general anesthesia, Rapid Detox accomplishes in less than twenty-four hours what normally requires up to two weeks of agonizing and dangerous withdrawal. Today Rapid Detox is approved for use in the United States, and Dr. Waismann himself operates a world-famous medical center in Israel. But in the mid-1990s, this cutting-edge treatment was not yet available in the United States. If I wanted help, I would need to go south of the border.

  I was excited by the possibilities. The idea of kicking drugs under anesthesia seemed almost too good to be true. I knew damned well that if I kept using, I was going to die. And I sure as hell didn’t want that. I was in a prison, one that I had built around myself, and I was willing to do just about anything to get out. Rapid Detox sounded like a promising solution.

  But I was scared for another reason. I didn’t want this recovery to be about Mickey. I knew that if he was the one who made it possible for me to be free from drugs, then I wouldn’t be truly free. I would be indebted to him again. Mickey has always been marvelous at playing the part of the knight in shining armor coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress. It was one of the qualities that had first drawn me to him. Mickey truly “got” me in a way that few others did, and I felt very early on that he could help me in a way no one else could. After all we’d been through together, here I was back where he wanted me—dependent upon him, needing his help once more.