by Nic Sheff
We drive east to Thousand Oaks, where Spencer owns a little corporate video production company. He’s shutting it down to concentrate exclusively on making his horror movies.
I ask a lot of questions about recovery and the twelve steps, trying my best to listen. We both agree I should call my dad and stepmom, just to let them know I’m safe and all. I’m nervous about calling them. I feel embarrassed, but also kind of angry or something. I mean, what I do with my life should be up to me, right? I say as much to Spencer.
“So you think you should just be able to kill yourself and no one should care?” he asks. “You don’t think your actions are gonna affect other people—the people who love you?”
“No, I mean, I know it’s gonna affect them. I just…” I stare out at the canyon walls, dry earth broken out with thorned, crawling vines; snarled brush, prickling cacti. The sea air gives way to hot, stifling desert wind as we climb over the Santa Monica Mountains, over Kanan-Dume Road toward the valley.
“You just wanna be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want. That’s all it is.” Spencer smiles. “If you’re gonna kill yourself you might as well just jump into those bushes there and roll around till you get thousands of little cuts all over your body and you bleed to death. I’ll tell you what, that’s gonna be a lot more fun than what you’ve got to look forward to if you go back out there. And that way we all won’t have to worry about when you’re gonna break into our house, or steal our car, or run someone over.”
I nod.
“No, I know…”
“What does that mean, you know? What do you know?”
“I know that going out again is not an option.”
“It’s not an option. You’ve had all the good times you’re ever gonna have with meth, heroin, or any of that stuff. It just gets worse from here on out. But there is another way. I was no different, man. I was just like you. But today, man, I love my life. I love my life.” He grins with his big block teeth and steers the car fast around the steep mountain curves.
I feel like maybe he means it.
“So how do I get that?” I ask. “How do I start to love my life?”
“By committing yourself to the program. By doin’ what I did—going to meetings, working the steps, and by helping other alcoholics and drug addicts so we don’t have to be thinking about ourselves all the time.”
“But I tried all that before.”
“Did you?”
“I think so.”
He smiles and I can see my reflection in his wraparound black sunglasses.
“Did you work the steps? Did you commit to this thing with your whole life?”
“Sort of.”
“There is no sort of.”
I drink from the coffee that Spencer bought me.
At the studio we pack everything into boxes. It’s mostly just extension cords and whatever—computers, cameras, things like that. There’re a couple big tables and filing cabinets. I’m tired and frustrated, but at the same time, grateful to just have something to do. Plus Spencer has already done so much for me. I figure this is some sort of payback or something.
When we get to his house, his wife, Michelle, cooks us all dinner. They have a little girl named Lucy. She is four, with short black hair and eyes that are wide and green. She has a very round face and she hides from me as I sit at the table. We eat pasta and salad and Michelle is quiet, but warm to me. She doesn’t ask a lot of questions. She lets me be. Mostly she and Spencer just talk about business and school stuff and Lucy keeps hiding.
It’s strange, you know, being around Lucy. It reminds me so much of being with Jasper and Daisy. Growing up, I always wanted to take care of them, teach them things, help them along. We were so close at times. I remember coming home from high school and not doing my homework ’cause I just wanted to hang out with them. I loved being able to babysit them at night, or take them on walks in the garden. In some ways it felt like, well, since I’d sort of missed my own childhood, I was getting a chance to experience it all over again with them. Or, more importantly, to help give them the childhood I never had.
It’s not like my childhood was that awful or anything. I just grew up very quickly. I remember going to see The Crying Game in a theater with my dad when I was around nine. It’s a movie about a man in the IRA who falls in love with a transsexual. I went with my dad everywhere, to parties and concerts and whatever—everyone drinking and getting high. I felt like I was one of the adults and it was very exciting, though I missed out on just innocent playing and all that a lot of kids get.
And it was confusing for me to see my dad dating different women. I remember waking up one morning and running to my dad’s room like I always did. I climbed under the sheets with him, but the familiar smell of him was tainted with a new smell—perfume and sweat and I didn’t know what. I heard a high-pitched giggling. There was a naked woman in the bed with us. This was in the late eighties, the height of the AIDS scare in San Francisco. I was worried my dad would be infected because I knew he was having sex. He showed me with a condom and a carrot how he protected himself. I went to my first-grade class that day and told about it during show-and-tell time. My teacher sent me to the principal’s office. My dad used to tell that story to his friends like it was really funny and cool.
Plus my mom moved to L.A. when I was five, though I would visit her on holidays and over the summer. During these visits my mom would be working all the time at her magazine job, while my stepdad was laid off from his job producing TV. My stepdad would work on writing most of the day while I watched TV and movies and things. Sometimes we’d go run errands together—or play baseball, or basketball, or football. He was always trying to teach me stuff. But it wasn’t as if we just played these games and had fun—he was constantly criticizing me and telling me how I needed to stand, or toughen up, or whatever.
Todd would tell me stories about his childhood or young adulthood and all the great things he’d done. There was the time he scored the winning basket right at the buzzer. There was the time he convinced these two lesbians to fuck him because he said he had a bag full of cocaine, but it was really just Ajax. In fact, he told me a lot of stories about the women he used to fuck. I’d sit next to him in his silver Buick and stare out the window, trying not to meet his eyes.
I remember glancing over at his hands, seeing his thick fingers covered with bleeding sores—each thumb picked raw. He chewed Nicorette gum and his teeth, even then, were yellow and discolored. His breath stank. I guess I was terrified of him.
When Jasper and Daisy were born, I got to sort of regress with them, while also trying to protect them. I wanted to treat them differently than I’d been treated. Of course, once I started using that all was destroyed. I feel a strangling in my throat when I think about how I’ve thrown my relationship with Jasper and Daisy away. I look at Lucy and already I have a sort of longing to be a part of her life.
“Lucy,” says Michelle, trying to sound—what—authoritative? “You come eat your pasta or you get no dessert. I mean it.”
“Moooommmm,” she squeals in her little high-pitched voice.
“It’s pretty good,” I say.
Lucy stops and stares, stares, stares.
“Really—I mean, you might like it.”
She shakes her head—her eyes so big. I’m not sure if maybe she’s gonna burst into tears, or what. “Look, I’ll eat it.” I lean over and take a small bite of her pasta.
“Mmmmmm,” I say. “That’s the best thing I ever tasted. I’m gonna eat it all. You can’t.”
“Mooommm,” screams Lucy. “That’s mine.”
“Oh, all right. Here…” I hand the bowl to her and she takes it, tasting the pasta cautiously.
“Thanks,” says Michelle.
“Sure. I have a little brother and sister and all sorts of little cousins and things.”
“Well, we’re always looking for babysitters.”
“Yeah,” says Spencer. “But only if they can stay sober.�
� He whacks me playfully on the back of the head and I stare down at my plate.
“Spencer, be nice,” Michelle says, kissing his cheek. “What we do need is a receptionist to work at my salon a couple days a week. You ever think you might be interested in that?”
“Yeah,” I say, brightening. “I need a job.”
“He sure does,” says Spencer.
“I’ll have to talk to my business partner about it, but that could be perfect for everyone.”
“Sure. But, I mean—don’t feel obligated or anything.”
“I don’t. Call us tomorrow at the shop.”
I do the dishes while Lucy talks to me. She tells me her age and that she likes horses and things like that. I goof around with her some—talking in funny voices and whatever. Michelle keeps saying I don’t need to wash the dishes, but I do.
Spencer drives me home.
“Everything I have in my life,” he says, speeding through a yellow light on Lincoln. “Everything I have in my life is a result of working the twelve steps. My wife, my child, my career, my house—everything. As long as I put my recovery first, I can never lose. Even when it seems like something terrible is happening, I always find that, if I apply the steps in my life, it is ultimately for the best.”
“That’s not just some platitude or something—some Pollyanna bullshit?”
“Not in my experience. It’s like that story of the father whose son breaks his leg. The villagers come up and say, ‘Your son broke his leg, what bad luck.’ But the father replies, ‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ Then there’s a war and all the young men in the village must fight. There is a terrible battle and most everyone is killed—except for the man’s son who couldn’t fight because he broke his leg. So the villagers come up to him and say, ‘What good luck, your son didn’t have to fight and now he is alive.’ But the father replies, ‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’”
Spencer goes on to give some more examples.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “I get it.”
“I’m just saying,” he continues. “You relapsing seems like the most devastating thing now, but you may look back at this as absolutely essential. Nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.”
“Yeah, except I don’t believe in God.”
“Then how do you think you got back here? What pulled you out of San Francisco?”
He leaves me with that one.
I go upstairs and try to sleep, but end up watching some movie I rented till real late. In the morning I ride my bike down to Palos Verdes—still trying to answer his question maybe.
DAY 92
Recovery is strange, you know? I mean, it is so easy in a way and yet, well, so difficult. The woman who ran my Sober Living in L.A., the place I checked into after moving here from New York, describes addiction as a disease of amnesia. I think that pretty much sums it up. It’s not hard to stay sober at first. Sure, it’s hard as hell to get sober—to pull yourself out of the cycle of getting high every day and going through the horrors of detox. But, honestly, once the drugs are out of my system it isn’t too difficult to genuinely feel like I never want to go through that shit again. Staying sober right after coming back from a relapse is no struggle. Every time I’ve come out of detox, the last thing I ever want to do is get high. This time is no different.
But the thing is, as the months go by, I always seem to forget why I needed to get sober in the first place. The bad shit starts to not seem really that bad. I start blaming other people, thinking they’re all just overreacting and whatever. I tell myself that I wasn’t really that out of control. At least, that’s my rationale.
I swear, every time I’ve relapsed has been the same story. And, each time, I get a little closer to being dead. Things fall apart more quickly. I hurt more and more people.
I cannot let that happen again. I cannot.
Somehow I have to make this different. But how do I accomplish this?
One thing I do is I stick close to Spencer. He gives me hope, and at the same time, he reminds me of where I came from—how bad I got. But, well, the thing is, I can’t help but feeling kind of like a loser living the way I am—so simply. I mean, I just hang out with Spencer and a few people in twelve-step meetings. I have no girlfriend. I live by myself. I’m sort of embarrassed by who I am.
All my heroes, Kurt Cobain, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Jean-Michel Basquiat, they all lived these crazy lives. None of them ever had to go to these cheeseball twelve-step meetings and talk about all this corny twelve-step crap. Not that I don’t completely appreciate everything Spencer is doing for me. I am so grateful to him. But I can’t help feeling like I’m just not cool anymore. I guess that’s stupid, but it’s true.
When I talk to Spencer about it, he asks me how cool I was when I was prostituting and stealing. I understand his point, but, you know, I still feel hopelessly inadequate about myself and my life. I don’t want to live like some goddamn Pollyanna, yet I’m terrified to use again. I wonder to myself if maybe there is something chemically wrong with me. I feel so completely crazy sometimes. I don’t know which way I’m facing. All I can do is just shove all this shit to the side and try to move forward.
Spencer has me going to twelve-step meetings every day, which helps. The meetings aren’t like the stereotype at all—you know, old men in trench coats sitting in a circle complaining about how much they wish they could be drinking Long Island Iced Teas or something. There’re a ton of young people at the meetings and, because it’s L.A., a lot of industry people—like actors and musicians, or whatever. It’s almost, like, hip to be in recovery here. And despite the fact that I’m embarrassed about going to them, the meetings are really inspiring to me. Listening to the people who share about their experiences and how they’ve turned their lives around is amazing. They are brutally honest and introspective—not like most people you meet in the real world, outside of recovery. And everyone, it seems, agrees that if you go to these meetings and work the steps, you will stay sober. So I go to a meeting every day and I’m working the steps with Spencer.
Spencer encourages me to go through the steps very slowly, although the first step, “We admitted that we were powerless over our addictions—that our lives had become unmanageable,” seems pretty simple to me. I have no problem admitting that I am powerless over my addictions and my life is completely unmanageable. But the second step, “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” well, that’s a lot harder for me. Sure I’ve experimented with prayer, and Spencer is always pointing out to me how the Power is working in my life. He tells me that each day I’m able to stay sober is only by the grace of God. I admit that I do feel very blessed, or lucky, at times and prayer does help me clear my head and all, but my rational mind always tells me that these are only coincidences. No matter how much I want to, I can’t actually believe that there is a power guiding me. It just doesn’t make sense to me on a deep, visceral level. I don’t believe in God—not really.
Honestly, that scares me. I’m worried I won’t be able to work the twelve-step program. Spencer tells me to be patient. The longer I experiment with relying on God, the more I will come to believe. So I try it. I ask God for help in every aspect of my life, even if I don’t really believe it.
Anyway, for some reason this old girlfriend of mine, Emily, wrote me an e-mail yesterday. She was just checking in with me, but it made me think back to my time in western Massachusetts with her. Right when I started going to school there, well, I pretty much relapsed that first week. It was kind of ridiculous to think I could stay sober making that transition. I mean, I’d only been out of rehab less than a month. Of course, it just started with me smoking pot and then drinking and then taking acid and ketamine and cocaine. I was living in the dorms and I didn’t know anybody and no one knew me. I was grateful for the anonymity. There was no one there to express concern or whatever. There was no one there before I met Emily.
How we met was I
brought this Bukowski poem to our beginning poetry class and she liked Bukowski and we started talking. Eventually I told her I’d had a problem with crystal and I’d been in two rehabs over the past year. She seemed to understand. Her best friend had just gotten out of rehab. She started getting on my case about using and she was worried because I wasn’t sober. She said she wouldn’t hang out with me if I didn’t stop, but we still ended up making out one time.
Back then, there were these two girls, Jessica and Anna, that I partied with all the time. They were sweet, but lost and very, you know, insecure—like me. We ended up taking acid and eating some Adderall this one night and getting really drunk. We all went to my room and got into bed. Neither one of them was very attractive to me, but I guess I’m not very attractive either, so we all had sex together pretty much all night. When I woke up both girls were in my bed still and I looked in the mirror and I just saw the most horrible vacantness in my eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever hated myself as much as I did at that moment.
Later that day I found Emily and asked if she would mind taking me to a twelve-step meeting since she had a car. She agreed. I had barely gone to any classes since going to school there and I really just wanted to pull things together.
So I actually got sober. Emily and I started dating and I fell totally in love with her. She brought me home for Christmas at her mom’s house and I got along great with her family. I went to meetings and I spent every day with Emily, basically living in her dorm room. And we had fun, you know? Sometimes I’d dress up in drag and wear this pink wig and we’d go to the movies, or wherever, laughing at everyone who gave us strange looks. We’d rent tons of movies and play old-school Nintendo and go to coffee shops and the library and bookstores. We went into Manhattan a couple times, once to this protest and another time to see her sister in some performance art thing off of Union Square.
We were both doing really well in school and I couldn’t imagine ever being away from her. Even today, I’m not sure what happened. I guess it was the same old story. I stopped going to meetings and working a program. I was really just trying to do it on my own. Relapsing came up on me and it was such a goddamn surprise. Emily and I went home to her mom’s house for the weekend. I had to use the bathroom in her mom’s room and there was a bottle of Percocet on the counter. I had a headache and what harm could one Percocet do? It was that simple. I just forgot for a second how bad things had been. A disease of amnesia, right?