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

by Mary Forsberg Weiland;Larkin Warren

  Oh, and somewhere in there I discovered cocaine.

  SEVEN

  not dark yet (but it’s getting there]

  Cocaine in Hollywood in the nineties was like a secret everybody was in on but nobody talked about. Somebody always had some, or knew someone who did, and I rarely paid for my share. Quickly, my share grew. It lifted me out of the depression and the stuck-at-five Prozac position, and into a more comfortable eight or nine. Or twelve. Or, what the hell, sometimes twenty. It helped me wake up; it helped me pay attention. When I was doing it, I wrote poetry and poured words into my journals. I lost weight. I went to modeling jobs and everybody said I looked great. I wasn’t flying, exactly—mostly, I was feeling for the first time in a long while that I wasn’t living with one foot in a ditch.

  I hadn’t spoken to Scott in nearly a year. We led totally separate lives, we didn’t know many of the same people, and no part of our routines overlapped. But I never stopped missing him or hoping that someday, in some way, our relationship would be different. The Scott stories were beginning to accumulate, though, and some of them were unnerving. Scott was unpredictable; he was melting down onstage. The second CD did well; the third was in some kind of trouble and parts of the tour were being canceled. Scott and Courtney Love were at the Chateau Marmont. The rumors were that they were together. I knew in my heart that they weren’t. Vast amounts of heroin were supposedly being consumed. Driving in the car one day, I heard Courtney’s voice on KROQ—106.7 on your L.A. FM dial—talking about Scott’s arrest for possession of crack. He’d gotten a year of probation. I shook my head, took a deep breath, tried to bury my emotional response, and muttered, “That woman needs a day job.”

  And then he called me out of the blue. He was on the road with STP and wanted me to fly out and meet him in Dallas. “You’re married,” I said.

  “We’re not together anymore,” he answered. “I need to see you. I’m going to send you a ticket.” I resisted for five minutes, and then I folded like a beach chair.

  I packed and repacked the same suitcase three times in as many days. The day before I left, I had most of my hair cut off. I know that in normal life, women get haircuts every day, but when your job depends on having long hair, it defies common sense to run out and have it all hacked off. Looking back, I don’t think my behavior was a result of anxiety; I think it was mania.

  Scott sent an embarrassingly long white limo (the kind that usually hauls a dozen kids to a prom) to take me to LAX; another long white limo was waiting for me in Dallas when I arrived. The band was flying in from someplace else, and Scott would be arriving at the hotel after I did.

  I went to the room, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited. I wondered why I thought this was a good idea. I wondered who was going to come through the door. I kept putting my hands up to my cropped hair. We were not the same people anymore.

  When he finally arrived and wrapped his arms around me, all the familiar feelings came rushing back. But there was something different about him. He told me he was taking some kind of medication to block drug cravings, and he seemed just off somehow—tentative, careful. He’d always been somewhat quiet offstage, but the volume now was definitely turned down. Scott’s blue eyes can turn to green, and they have a beautiful pattern, almost like Mexican tiles. I kept looking into them, trying to understand what was going on inside.

  That night, we went out with the guys from STP to a strip club just outside Dallas owned by someone in the metal band Pantera. Strip clubs were never my idea of fun, but I thought I could stand it for a little while if that’s what Scott wanted to do. What I didn’t realize was that he had a minder at the club, a sober companion (as part of his court-ordered probation from his drug arrest), and that he wasn’t even supposed to be drinking. I never saw the guy. I didn’t know he was there, and Scott did his best to pretend that he wasn’t.

  I learned later that a sober companion is someone who’s had a healthy block of sober time—five, even ten years. Ideally, they’re calm in a crisis, they’ve worked in a treatment center, they’ve had education in addiction treatment, and they’re working with a supervising addiction specialist or therapist. They know, or should know, every trick an addict will try—it’s a little like the underground computer hacker taking what he’s learned and going legit. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to go. A movie studio or record company can insist on a sober companion as a condition of a contract. It’s liability protection, and it’s supposed to build a protective layer between the addict and temptation. It can strengthen sobriety, like a cast on a broken leg. But I’ve seen it backfire. Sober companions can get caught up in a celebrity’s lifestyle and lose track of what the actual job description is. Suddenly, they’re assistants and yes men, part of the entourage that gets inside the velvet rope. And sometimes, even when sober companions are seasoned professionals, it turns out celebrities have hired them just for show, with no real intention of working a program for recovery—the simple truth is, they’re just not there yet.

  When Scott kept asking me to go to the bar and order a Jack Daniel’s and Coke and a plain Coke, I did it. They both came in the same kind of glass. When I got back to our table, he’d switch the glasses and drink the one with the whiskey in it. I didn’t know that booze wasn’t okay. Nobody said, “Here are the new rules of the road, and this is why we have to stick to them”—I’d have to learn that the hard way.

  When the lap-dancing started, my skin began to crawl; as one girl lathered up for a shower scene, I looked at Scott and was relieved to see he didn’t like it, either. We left and went back to the hotel. The following day, we went ice-skating at a local mall, which was a comedy show all on its own—Scott skates like Scott Hamilton, and I skate like a girl who spent her formative years in flip-flops. That night, we went to a Social Distortion concert. Afterward, it was the same Jack-Daniel’s-and-Coke routine.

  At some point, someone mentioned his wife. The word went up my spine as though someone had applied a cattle prod. I was supposed to stay for another couple of days, but decided that if the word wife was still in play, I couldn’t be there. I had no intention of revisiting my on-hands-and-knees-begging scene from Germany. I packed up and prepared to leave, and just before I did, I announced my new rule. “I don’t want to see you until you can show me an official piece of paper containing the words legal separation or divorce. When that happens, please call me.”

  A few weeks later, the call came. “I’ve got something I want to show you,” Scott said. When he arrived, he was thin, almost gaunt, and there was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. “Legal separation,” he said. I had tried to imagine this moment in my head many times, but it had never looked like this—sad, solemn, even broken.

  We went to Chateau Marmont, where Michael, Scott’s younger brother, and a couple of their buddies awaited us in a suite. I’d never met Michael before. He was taller than Scott, with dirty blond hair, and kind of scruffy. Here, however, it was clear from the drug paraphernalia on the coffee table that these guys had been getting into trouble long before we walked into the room. Oh God, I thought. Someone here is going to die.

  Logic seemed to dictate that Scott and I go to a bar across the street and score some cocaine, which we did, in one of the most disgusting bathrooms I’d ever seen in my life. Do a line on the toilet? Hell, yes. When we got back to the hotel, Scott joined the guys in the other room, and I climbed into bed, trying my best to focus on one Scooby-Doo cartoon after another. I’d convinced myself that staying awake and being ready to rescue someone was my mission; concentrating on the cartoon would help me with that. Fortunately, I’d inhaled so much coke that there was little danger I’d fall asleep on my watch. My right mind had definitely left the building. I was stuck in a tape loop of simultaneously being high and being Florence Nightingale—the boys were on a tear, and I had to stick with them just in case someone went down.

  Then we all pulled up stakes and mov
ed to the Mondrian Hotel.

  If you’re rereading the previous couple of paragraphs, looking for the rationale that brings us to this point, you can stop now—there is no rationale. Paranoia is not even a strong enough word for the way these guys reacted to everything, constantly looking under doors for shoe shadows or out the window for anything “suspicious” every time they saw a white van, they were convinced it was the FBI. We had to stay ahead of “them” we had to move—and I had to save them.

  The next morning, when something like consciousness hit me, I found myself alone in the bed; Scott was in the bathroom. I walked out into the sitting room, where Michael sat on the couch, his eyes closed, his head thrown back at a weird angle. His face was white, his lips were blue, and there was a kind of foam at the edge of his mouth. I knew what sleep looked like. And I knew that what I was looking at was not sleep.

  “Scott!” I shrieked. “You’ve got to come out of there! I think your brother’s dead!” There was no response from the other side of the bathroom door. I ran to it and banged on it with my fists. “Come out now!”

  We dragged Michael (who was six foot three, bigger and beefier than Scott) into the shower and turned on the cold water. We yelled at him and slapped him until finally he came to. “Hey, guys, come on,” he said mildly, putting up one soaked arm to ward off the blows. “I’m fine. Jesus.” It wasn’t the response you’d expect from someone just back from the dead (well, maybe the Jesus part). Mostly, he seemed irritated that we got him all wet.

  It was like a bad version of Adventures in Babysitting. I know now that every step I took was wrong, for me, for them. But I always had to learn everything the hard way—this would prove to be no exception. Finally, exhausted and scared, I left and went to Ivana’s. The guys kept using. I’m not sure anybody noticed my departure.

  I didn’t see or hear from Scott for nearly a week, until he showed up at Ivana’s. He arrived just as I was melting down old lipsticks. When the tube is nearly empty, you scoop out what’s left into a spoon, heat it up, then pour it into a little sectioned pill box. I opened the door holding the burnt spoon full of melted goo, and Scott nearly had a heart attack. “What the hell are you doing?!” he yelled, at which point I almost flung melted lipstick into the air. He’d thought I was prepping heroin. “But I wouldn’t do that,” I insisted.

  Being together one day was no guarantee we’d see each other the next. He’d go to the studio to write or rehearse, he’d go out for a pack of cigarettes—and that would be the last I’d hear from him until he reappeared. One day when he did (missing a tooth, wearing an ugly hat, and sporting a scraggly beard), he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten or slept. I gave him something so he’d calm down and sleep, and when his head hit the pillow, he was out for twenty-four hours. He tossed, he turned, he muttered, and he sweat, soaking the linens right through. I didn’t know that was not a safe way to go through detox. When he woke up, he woke up in withdrawal. And it was New Year’s Eve.

  “I’m supposed to be at my house,” he said. “My brother-in-law is throwing a party there.”

  My brother-in-law were not words I wanted to hear. “Jannina’s brother?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Will she be there?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I was too pathetic to ask him to leave. I just wanted him home with me. I wanted a “happy” happy New Year’s, but Scott was on his way home to his wife. Legal papers changed nothing, and I was right back where I started. Happy New Year’s.

  Early one morning, I was driving on the freeway, realized that I was driving high, and couldn’t remember for sure when this particular coke binge had started or how long I’d been at it. I saw a black-and-white cop car behind me in the rearview mirror and braced myself for what was going to happen next. Nothing did. He pulled around me, passed, drove on down the road. This can’t be good, I thought.

  Charlize had purchased a big house in L.A., and it was scheduled to be totally remodeled while she was away shooting a movie. Because I was traveling so much, I’d given up my apartment and basically camped at this house whenever I had jobs in town. Except for a bed and my computer in the master bedroom, the house was empty. Everyone who came over thought it was spooky, but in the beginning, the darkness, the stillness, the emptiness didn’t bother me. It had a very Old Hollywood vibe; interesting people led interesting lives here, I thought. Sometimes at night I’d turn on the pool lights and go for a swim by myself—it was warm, like bathwater. Someday I’m going to live in a big house all by myself and do what I want—stay up all night, sleep all day—and nobody will bug me or tell me what to do. That had been the dream of that long-ago seventh-grade girl, riding her blue bike all over Coronado Island. Well, so, here I was, dream come true. Alone in an empty house, coked-up, driving stoned. Not exactly what I’d had in mind. Suddenly I was deeply afraid.

  Anthony had been sober for a long time, and I felt closer to him than I did to my dearest girlfriends, who I’d so far managed to keep in the dark about what I was doing. And so I called, looking for him, asking for help. But he was out of the country. His tour manager, Louie Matthieu, was my friend, too, and well along in his own recovery. When I told him what was going on, he said he was on his way.

  When Louie got there, I was huddled on the floor in one of the many empty bedrooms. He drove me to his own home, where I sat in his living room with his wife and new baby while he made some calls. “This is how it works,” he explained. He would take me to a place where I could detox; from there, we’d find some kind of rehab setup. He drove me to the Exodus Recovery Center in the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital in Marina del Rey.

  Because I’d checked in at night, no one from the counseling staff was on duty. Sitting at the nurses’ station, I went through the first step in the process, what they call “intake”—answering questions about my general health, my family history, a list of whatever drugs I’d been taking. I didn’t think the list was all that bad until I actually started to recite it. Xanax, for anxiety (from more than one doctor); Vicodin, thanks to the dentist (and my own trickiness with the written prescription, circling five refills); muscle relaxers, on a renewable prescription after the bad ecstasy trip that had closed my throat. And cocaine. A lot of cocaine. Oh, and I’d been drinking steadily, too. I was deep in chemical soup.

  The detox meds they gave me (to reduce cravings and keep me from convulsing) threw me into reverse. I could barely move. And I still can’t understand why anyone ever believed that overhead fluorescent lighting was a health-enhancing design decision.

  Hospital decor—can there actually be a professional job description with these words in it? I’ve never met anyone who was thrilled about their time in a hospital or rehab experience, so why not do something about the dreary vibe? Beige and mud almost everywhere you look. No music, no color. No, wait, there is color: a pink hospital-issue blanket. Or a faded blue one. At the rates these places charge, you’d think they’d cozy it up a little to encourage you to stay longer.

  Detox lasted a week; a few days in, I met with a drug counselor, but I didn’t go to any twelve-step meetings. I can get better on my own, I thought—all I need is a place to rest. I was told that my next move would be to Impact, a rehab center in Pasadena. While I was waiting to be scheduled on the “druggy buggy”—the van that would take me there—a girlfriend, someone who was doing well in her sobriety, came to visit. “This is a good place to start, Mary,” she said. “I know a lot of people who came through here. They know what they’re doing. Oh, and by the way, there’s news about Scott. He’s back at rehab, too—at Impact.”

  My brain lit up like the Fourth of July. I hadn’t seen him in months, and now he was going to be in the same place I was going? Great. I’m there. I couldn’t wait for her to leave so I could start packing.

  Before she left, my girlfriend (wisely) told one of the counselors about me and Scott. Exodus called Impact (it occurs to me that this sounds like a CIA operation), and Sco
tt was questioned about his relationship with someone named Mary Forsberg, a potential candidate for transfer from Exodus. He didn’t shrug it off with a casual, “Oh, yeah, we dated for a while” response—he told them that what had gone on between us was serious. That did it. Impact was out and Cri-Help, in North Hollywood, was in.

  One of the first barriers I hit at Cri-Help (after another round of questions about drug consumption, family history, and a litany of all the terrible things I’d ever done) was an assignment of chores. Mine was to clean the bathrooms. No, no, there must be some mistake, I don’t do bathrooms anymore. “Everyone here has a job to do,” I was told. “Your commitment to doing yours is a symbol of your commitment to sobriety.”

  “Well, then, I guess I’m just not that committed,” I said. Five days later, I walked out the door, heading back to Charlize’s big, empty house. I can do this myself, I thought. Besides, I knew where Scott was now, and I knew what I was going to do about it. His birthday was coming up, and after hitting a dozen card stores, I couldn’t find a single one that said what I was feeling. So I made one: plain white, with a little sticker of a birthday cake on it. Inside I wrote “Happy Birthday, Baby,” signed it, sent it, and waited.

  A few days later, I was climbing the walls, wanting to use. As if on cue, a letter came from Scott, followed by a phone call. He said that he was in a sober living facility, and that he was ready to get clean and stay clean. He loved me and was so glad I was getting help as well. “They give me passes to go to AA meetings away from here,” he said. “I’ve been going, and I want you to come with me.”

  Yes, I thought, this will be good—for him. If I go, it will help him. I don’t know why I believed that dates at a twelve-step meeting (dates that often involved his sponsor or a sober companion) were romantic or formed a good basis for some kind of actual relationship. Whatever happened to dinner and a movie? But I’ll take it, I thought. I’ll take anything.