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

by Mary Forsberg Weiland;Larkin Warren

  In Bali we had a private bungalow overlooking the ocean, which we could hear at night, rhythmically rolling into the shore and back out again. We spent the majority of that trip in one of three places: bed, beach, or eating our way through the buffet.

  For the renewal of our vows, we arranged a simple ceremony. This time, our promises to each other wouldn’t be for family and friends. We wouldn’t fuss about what to wear, or what to eat or drink, or what our guests might think. This was our solemn promise to each other that although we’d made mistakes, we could begin again and not look back. I was going to let go of my resentments and distrust. In return, Scott was going to give my “crazy” a free pass.

  We walked down a path of rose petals toward the ocean and exchanged our vows, not in a church but in a little structure resembling a cabana or a tiki hut. We had an actual minister, too, whose English was so fractured that we could barely make out what he was saying. We had wanted to be serious, but the laughter kept sneaking in; I’m sure that everything we repeated was incorrect (maybe this explains why those vows didn’t stick). Afterward, a photographer took pictures, and we toasted each other with glasses of local fruit juice. We finished the night with a private lobster dinner on the pier, under the stars. The only other people within half a mile were our waiter and a musician playing traditional Balinese songs. It felt like this time we had done the right thing. We headed home, reconnected and happy.

  On the way back to Los Angeles, we stopped in Hong Kong for a few days, and I began to feel a kind of dread about what would happen once we got back into the real world. The trip to Bali had been like a fairy tale, which would’ve been fine if we were fairy tale characters, but we were real. I’d asked Scott to stop drinking before we’d made the trip; he left one afternoon to “take a walk,” and I thought I’d jump out of my skin. Our love for each other may have been intact, but my head was not. Before my tan could fade, I was back to being edgy and distrustful.

  Once we got home, all bets were off. I went with him everywhere, including the studio. I was so scared to let him out of my sight. At first Scott liked it—who doesn’t like the post-honeymoon phase? But it didn’t take long before that glow wore off. He was a grown man, and I wasn’t giving him any room to work. I wasn’t giving him any room to breathe, unless I was standing right beside him breathing the very same air.

  TWELVE

  en fuego

  Once home I began to lose track of time. I would wander out of the house with a to-do list, and find myself hours later at the mall, dreaming over a Cinnabon and a cup of coffee that had gone cold.

  With Scott on the road and Ivana and Kristen leading their single-girl lives—and me having two babies, which made it tough for us to do our old fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants routine—I often went for whole days without talking to another adult unless Christine and I were planning an event. Happily, Jody Britt and I had gotten back in touch, and since her freelance work gave her some flexibility, we began to spend time together. Jody had known me for years, and she noticed things. She wondered why I didn’t answer my cell—had I turned it off? Half the time I forgot to put it back on the charger in the house or the car, and the battery simply wore down. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I told her. “I have so much now. I should be happy. I thought I was happy.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve known you for a long time, Mary. Everything around you right now feels heavy, incredibly dark.” She stopped, as though deciding whether to go further. “It’s like you’re drowning, just trying to keep your head above water.”

  “No, really, I’m okay,” I assured her. “I just need to get it together a little bit.”

  For a while, I threw myself into decorating the house. And then I decided that the problem was this house. What we needed was another, bigger house. It started out as our Ozzie and Harriet home, but somehow had turned into Nightmare on Elm Street. So I started shopping again—for houses, for new clothes for the kids, for something to do. I planned birthday parties, holiday parties. I read and reread all of Scott’s contracts, all the financial statements and royalty reports, and I arranged his schedule. I worked for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. Then I fell into bed with a crashing migraine, leaving a message on Jody’s machine, begging her to come and help me with Noah and Lucy. I didn’t know who I could trust. Was this real life?

  One day, a few months after Bali, when Scott was in L.A. between tour gigs, I just got in my car and drove off. I didn’t know where I was going or why. I drove and drove and ended up in Palm Springs. I checked into a five-star hotel, thought about getting a spa treatment or ordering room service, and just started sobbing. How spoiled, how worthless I was. Why did I think I deserved any of those luxuries, the ones I used to take for granted? I didn’t deserve them. Suddenly I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  But I wasn’t ready to go home. So I checked into the nearest Best Western; once I made sure the bed was clean, I lay there for the next two days. I never ate, and I never picked up my cell phone, which simply rang until it stopped. Unbeknownst to me, Scott had called his mother for help—he had to get back to work. Velvet Revolver was finishing up their second album, Libertad, plus he had a solo album in the works. He couldn’t just stop everything. I cried and slept, and woke up and cried some more. Nobody is going to forgive me for this, I thought.

  Finally, I called Scott, and he came to get me. He’d been drinking when he got there. But I’d been missing for three days. Giving him a lecture on responsibility didn’t seem timely. And besides, I was really glad to see him.

  I promised him I’d find another doctor when we got home; I promised to straighten up. Christine and I had some upcoming jobs for Double Platinum, so of course I had that to look forward to and work on. I could do this. I could pull myself out.

  A friend recommended a woman psychiatrist, who was very professional in our first meeting. I didn’t want to get into an endless recitation of my drug history or my marital history, or make a commitment to months of analysis. I just wanted some help with how I was feeling. I explained my history with certain meds: Ativan, prescribed after Noah, had made me jumpy and irritable, and Xanax had never relaxed me—it just made me feel impatient, even angry. She prescribed both Prozac and Xanax, thinking that maybe they’d work better together. I was skeptical—it felt like she wasn’t listening to me—but okay, I’d give it a try. I didn’t want the black cloud back in my life. I had too much to do.

  We’d found a new house, in Sherman Oaks. It was massive, on a big lot, with a big pool. We’d never had a pool before. The antidepressants will kick in, we’ll move, and everything will be all right.

  In the first week of March 2007, VR guitarist Matt Sorum’s little brother Daniel, then only eleven years old, died after a brutal battle with brain stem cancer. Scott and I could not conceive of the pain Matt and his family were going through at the loss of this child.

  A week later, I was in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival with Christine, hosting a swag suite for Double Platinum. We’d rented a house and set up companies like Tommy Hilfiger and BCBGMAXAZRIA in the different rooms. At night we’d scheduled parties with live music. It was going to be a big week, and we were expecting a lot of celebrity traffic.

  The first day we were there, I received a phone call from Scott. In his hoarse and choking voice was an agony I’d never heard before: His brother Michael was dead. “Baby, come home.”

  I got to the airport as soon as I could, knowing, as I sat waiting for the next flight to Los Angeles, that Scott was on his way to identify Michael’s body. He’d died in his sleep. We assumed it was drug-related, but nobody knew for sure yet. Ultimately, the cause of death was given as hypertrophic heart disease—cardiomyopathy—exacerbated by the effects of multiple drugs.

  Michael had two little girls—all I could see in my head were their faces. I sat with a perfectly stiff posture, clutching my boarding pass, taking deep breaths, trying to focus my eyes on the back of a man’s
laptop across from me. I thought of that long-ago awful morning in the Mondrian Hotel, Scott and I beating on Michael to wake him up, soaking him under the showerhead. Michael fought, he fought as hard as Scott did, and now he’d lost. What if it had been Johnny, my brother? How could I ever live through the rest of my life without my brother? I ran to the ladies’ room and hid in a stall, rested my head up against the cold metal partition and began my own hysterical cry. It took everything in me not to fall to the floor. Every possible version of how I could lose everyone I ever loved flew through my mind like a slide show. I’m not sure how I made it back to the gate on my own.

  I don’t remember actually walking onto the plane or sitting in my seat. I couldn’t release the visual of Scott standing beside his dead brother’s body. This wasn’t anything like what I’d seen on TV; this was real. Two broken boys. Only my broken boy would still have to get up every day, make coffee, and brush his teeth. I couldn’t imagine how he would actually do that. I thought of the scabs on my arms in the heroin days, never healing, the skin never really becoming new again. How does anybody ever heal from this? Scott’s parents and stepparents, Michael’s widow and their two little girls—there wasn’t enough scar tissue in the world to cover this wound or make it whole again. Something in Scott died that day, too. There was nothing here I could fix. There was nothing anyone could fix.

  Families are weird machines sometimes. All of the different personalities, the mix of memories, the who-said-what-to-whom, the arguments, the old scripts we play in our heads when we’re together and when we’re apart. The food, the joy, the silliness. All of that, and something more, connects us even through the years we’re doing our best to get away. And then comes loss or grief—the big cosmic magnet that pulls us back together.

  Scott’s family spent the majority of the following week at our house—they were actually staying a couple of blocks away from us, within walking distance, at the Graciela Hotel. I had no idea how to help, and in the deepest part of me, I knew there was no help to be given. But in my mother’s family, all occasions call for food, so that was my first priority—pounds of Sees candies and an insane amount of baking. I always make pumpkin pie. People like it, it makes the house smell good while it’s cooking, and it’s one of those foods that just feels good to eat. So I started making pie. I also made a major Costco run and brought home wine. Not just a bottle, but cases, all varieties of white and red. I uncorked the first bottle and didn’t stop until Scott’s grief-stricken parents got back on the plane for Colorado.

  My relationship with Scott’s parents will never be anything but fractured, but Michael’s death brought the cousins together. Noah, Lucy, and Michael’s daughters, Sophia and Claudette, spend more time together now than they ever did. Kids are more straightforward than grown-ups, more basic somehow. They were sad, but they were also little enough to play, and to get lost in whatever game occupied them at the moment. Noah found a large picture of Michael and hung it in his room. I can sometimes hear him telling his guests that it’s a picture of his uncle who died.

  Not long after Michael’s death, I took the four kids to Chuck E. Cheese. Before Michael died, for some reason he’d taken the family’s little Jack Russell, Kobe, to stay with Scott’s parents in Colorado. Jack Russells are notorious escape artists and faster than lightning; the dog made a break one day, went missing for a few hours, and was eaten by a mountain lion. On our trip to Chuck E. Cheese, the kids had been chattering away, and then suddenly one of those silences fell where you brace yourself for whatever’s going to come next. And then Claudette, then only four, announced in her sweet little voice, “My daddy died, and Kobe got eaten by a mountain lion.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, but before I could come up with anything, all of the kids started laughing. It was that kind of rolling, helpless, exhausted laughter that doesn’t stop, even when little kids are hollering “I’m going to pee!” We laughed all the way to Chuck E. Cheese, we had a good time, and then we laughed again on our way home. I pulled into the driveway and looked back at all the sleeping kids and felt for the first time that maybe everyone would be okay. Everyone but Scott.

  He’d started drinking somewhat heavily even before Michael’s death, but that loss was too much for him to carry without medicating. He felt guilty and responsible, and he felt like an actual part of his physical body was missing. It brought back a kind of paranoia that I hadn’t seen in years. He was convinced I was cheating on him, accusing me of being with every man and sometimes woman I came in contact with. He was so certain I was unfaithful that at times he even had me followed by private investigators.

  I saw them tailing me, but until Scott actually confirmed who they were and why they were everywhere I looked, I just thought that L.A. was crawling with creepy guys. Once he explained what was going on, I told him that whatever he was paying them, he was being hosed. They were not particularly skilled in the “private” part of “private investigator.” And the excitement of my daily round of chores probably put them to sleep in their cars.

  To be fair, there were some random incidents that might’ve sparked anyone’s curiosity. On one occasion Scott went to pick up a prescription for me, and the pharmacist handed him birth control pills with my name on it. I’d never had a prescription for birth control meds. It was an error on the part of the pharmacy. But Scott was livid and would not believe that it wasn’t mine. To this day, I can’t convince him otherwise. There were so many of these Three’s Company–type misunderstandings—he was like Jack Tripper overhearing part of a conversation, filling in the blanks, and taking it for the truth. I have never cheated on Scott or any other man in my life, and it made me angry for him to believe that I would. Didn’t we have enough on our plates without his unwarranted distrust?

  And I didn’t much like the effect the Prozac and Xanax were having on me, either. I felt jacked up and angry all the time. I was going for chill, and it was not happening. This new shrink was just not working out, I thought. I decided to stop going to her and to stop taking the drugs, too—once the move to the new home in Sherman Oaks was over and we were settled in, I’d go back to Bernie and figure it out.

  Scott was going into the studio every day working with VR; Noah and Lucy were six and four, wanting attention, needing reassurance and affection, surrounded by packing boxes and the chaos involved in being half out of one house and half into another. I could feel a rage building inside me at the messes under the two roofs, and finally insisted that Scott take the kids and go away for a couple of days. “Just go, go,” I said. “Please take them someplace. I need to do this alone, and I can’t think.” He took Noah and Lucy to the Graciela Hotel, just minutes away from our house, and they settled in for a Dad-and-kids sleepover.

  If I can just sleep for a while, I thought, I can start all over again. I climbed under the covers and couldn’t calm myself down. Sleep wouldn’t come. I closed the blinds, tried again—nothing. I reconsidered my decision about taking the Xanax—I always hoarded pills, I never threw them away, and the prescription bottle was still in the medicine cabinet. I got up, took a handful, and nothing happened. I decided to go see Scott and the kids. Uncombed, unshowered, I got dressed, putting on a beautiful deep-red Marc Jacobs dress. Looking in the mirror, I realized it was the one I’d been wearing when I ran away to Palm Springs. I thought I liked that dress; now I hated it. I picked up a pair of scissors and began to cut the dress to shreds—while I was still wearing it.

  I drove to the hotel, valet-parked the car, and stomped into the lobby. I got Scott’s room number from the guy at the front desk, who had an odd expression on his face. My dress had obviously been torn to pieces; it probably never occurred to him that I’d done it myself.

  When I got up to the suite, Scott was in one room; his assistant was in the other with the kids. Scott looked up at me in surprise.

  I was sobbing and out of breath. “You need to fix me! I can’t fix myself. I don’t know what’s wrong. Make it stop. You need to fix me
! Now!” I was yelling and crying. It was the language of the Chaos Tour, but hard drugs didn’t offer the kind of fix I was begging for. I didn’t know what I meant, I only knew that he had to do something, and he had to do it as soon as possible.

  He tried to talk me down. I told him I’d taken a couple of Xanax, but they weren’t having any effect. “You can’t be like this in front of the kids,” he said. “You’re too jacked up, you’re not making any sense. Maybe you should stay here and get some rest, calm down some. I’ll take the kids home.” He sent his assistant downstairs with Noah and Lucy.

  I ran to the minibar and started opening the tops of every little bottle. I drank vodka, bourbon, scotch, and gin. I found a stash of Vicodin in my purse and took those, too. I was moving so fast Scott couldn’t stop me. “I’m leaving,” he said. And then he did. At which point, I picked up a TV remote and threw it into the mirror. I tossed the bedside lamps into the television set and pitched the clock radio into the wall. Anything in the room that could be broken, I broke. I threw a glass into the bathroom mirror, and the shards flew back at me, cutting my hands. I tried to clean the blood from myself, gave up, and dumped the trash cans on the floor. And then I passed out.