So things got really bad. As my therapist told me, I needed to get as much affection as possible from women to prove to myself that I was worthy of a woman’s love. Writing and performing was a natural high, a way to express myself. I was scared when I started, like everyone else. I struggled. I was poor, but I didn’t care. I had this tremendous passion for comedy, and it took me ten, fifteen years to make anything close to a decent living, but I couldn’t care less. I felt like a million bucks, I really did. I felt like I was living in a castle. I was going on stage in the early days in New York for free. Getting laughs, talking about my feelings, and that’s all that mattered. I really needed that. Unfortunately, alcohol came into my life. Although at the beginning I knew how to manipulate the booze while perfecting my craft, in the end I finally couldn’t.
At the height of some of the greatest things in my career, I quit. I could have made a fortune at stand-up and put so much away, but I knew in the back of my mind that I would have blown it. Drinking was affecting my performance, so I just coasted.
I remember once in Hollywood during this time, I went to a screening of Penny Marshall’s movie A League of Their Own, a baseball movie. I drank most days, unless I thought I had the flu. If I wasn’t working, I would often binge, but I wasn’t stumbling around like a Robert Louis Stevenson pirate all the time. You know, I’d had horrible days, and normal drinking days, and some days nothing at all. On this day, I had a little dinner and a couple glasses of red wine. The premiere was at a huge theater in Hollywood, with everybody there, every high roller in town. I was in a relatively successful sitcom at the time, with Jamie Lee Curtis. Everybody knew me. So I went and sat in the front row, and as soon as the curtain opened, I fell asleep. Literally fell asleep. I don’t know if I snored. I could have walked in my sleep. I could have gone shopping for pajamas next door. I have no idea what I did, but as soon as I heard applause, it woke me up. I don’t recall my exact feeling, but I knew that I had to fake something really major, ’cause I didn’t see the movie. Forget about being rude—falling asleep! I wish someone would have tapped me on the shoulder … “Wake up, jerk!” Instead they let me snooze for two hours.
So I walk up out of the theater and hear, “Hey Richard, Richard, over here!” The cameras—Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood—all those shows are there. “What did you think, Richard?” … “Unbelievable! Tom Hanks. Is he ever bad?” I was going way over the top. It was a good film, I eventually saw it, but I was so nervous that I hadn’t seen it that I was making it like Citizen Kane.
So I got home and said, “Wow, I dodged a bullet.” I thought, “Great, who knew?” About three in the morning, I got a call from a friend who knew I had a drinking problem. He said, “Let me tell you one thing, Richard. If you think nobody in Hollywood thinks you’re alcoholic, I got news for you. Everybody knows.” Then he hung up. And I still had three years left in my run.
I just had lunch with a friend of mine who was very responsible for my intervention. She and another friend set up the intervention in 1994 to get me to this great doctor in New York. I was in a hotel, and I was out of it. They barged in the door, all of them, including my sister. That did it. When my sister came up from Maryland along with my friends, that connection with my family just brought me down. I would have gone to their doctor but not with the same kind of import, if my sister hadn’t shown up there.
I ended up going into rehab. I didn’t do the twenty-eight days. I wish I had. I would have learned more about my disease had I stayed. But I worked my ass off. I couldn’t believe I had ended up such a mess. Like I said, I left the facility because I felt ashamed when other people recognized me. So I flew home, but the next day, I went to a support group and I haven’t left since.
When I think back now, had I bottomed by the time I got to rehab, I would have stayed. I wasn’t ready. I used the fact that people pointed and said, “That’s Richard Lewis,” and that shame caused me to bolt. But the truth is I wasn’t ready. I wanted to see if I could still do it.
There’s a guy, a very famous songwriter and a real recluse, who lived a mile away from me. I’ll never forget this. I was in my house. I had been doing cocaine for about six days, and I looked like hell. I knew this guy had done coke, but that he didn’t do it anymore. I was scared, so I reached out to this guy. I knew he wouldn’t throw me into a rehab again but was somebody who understood the disease. He flew down to my house and sat there with me. He’s one of the most brilliant songwriters in the world, a rock-and-roll guy.
In my house, an old house in Hollywood, I have a lot of photographs of dead people who OD’d. Lenny, Joplin, so many. And this guy sat there, and he looked around. He told me about Miles Davis and Tim Hardin, an old folkie that I loved, and he said to me, “Look, Richard, these guys checked out way before they had to.” He said, “You don’t have to check out now. You’re going to check out, but you don’t have to.” I started crying. I was scared. I thought it was over.
He left, but he started faxing me. Faxing me these beautiful letters of support. Then I called somebody, a very prominent sober person in one of my support groups, and he zoomed right over, like my songwriter pal. He said, “Okay, here’s what you’re gonna do.” Whatever the guy said, I was going to do. If the guy said, “Don’t eat mustard,” I wouldn’t have eaten mustard. And you know, it worked. I listened. I’m a decent actor. I know how to listen, but for a long time, I wouldn’t listen about alcohol. I changed when I started to take direction.
I’ve also learned how to help friends. I never knew when to stop trying to help, and it took a few years to learn that they have to want it. It was really hard for me to let go. To say, “I’m here. You know where to reach me. Get sober and we’ll get help.” For years I would go to friends’ houses. They were high; it was insane. It almost brought me down. I was told by people with long-term sobriety: “They’re high, you say no. You want to get sober, call me, and I’ll help you.” I couldn’t understand that. Now I get it. I have to watch out for my own sobriety.
One reason I love being sober is that I thought about this guy I saw before coming to New York, who slipped last week, who I spoke to this morning. I wouldn’t have got up at six in the morning and written him this long e-mail. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was drinking. I couldn’t have helped this guy. To think if I walked over to the refrigerator in this hotel room and had a Scotch, not only would I let myself down but I couldn’t help anyone else. It’s one of the greatest things of the rest of my life. If I’m going to leave any kind of legacy, making people laugh is fine, but to help somebody get the darkness from out of their eyes and to turn their life around, it’s the most important aspect to my life.
It felt like hours I was fighting with this demon. / He rips my clothes and laughs at me. / He throws his staff at me as if it was a spear. / He was surprised that I caught it. / He grins at me and says, / “What are you going to do with that?” / With a smile that a dog would make. / I said back to him furiously with my chest / Scratched / “I’m going to break it so you can fight / Me as a real man!”
—Tone One, “My Battle with Life”
Steve Earle
(musician)
* * *
STEVE EARLE REMINDS me a little bit of me. When I started getting high on a regular basis, as a very young man in the early sixties, I was drawn into a newly forming culture for divergent reasons. Drugs took me to wonderfully imaginary places in my head, and using them with abandon said a big “fuck you” to authority. Making them available to women I knew also helped me get laid once in a while.
While my alcoholism and drug addiction led me to an inevitable downfall and a thankful recovery, my attitude toward authority never really changed much. Sure, I’ve mellowed with age, experience, and perhaps some wisdom. But my heart still warms when I see street protests challenging the establishment in the form of big brother, big business, or any other “big” that wields power over the little.
So when the name of Steve Earle
was mentioned as a possible candidate for this book, my first thought was a big “Hell, yeah.” I got hold of his newest CD, The Revolution Starts Now, and I was immediately drawn back to my “street-fighting man” days. This is one contentious hombre.
After a few calls tracking him down, I was offered the chance to interview him at the offices of Artemis Records in New York, while he was there for one full day of interviews promoting the new record. I was given the 3:00–3:30 slot, which, as you can imagine, didn’t give me much time to settle into the conversational pace I’d grown used to while doing these interviews. But Steve is professional and jumped right in. I came out of it feeling grateful for the chance to include this extraordinary artist in the book.
I identify with what Michael Moore said: “Steve pulls no punches and gives me much hope. … If I were a rock star, I would be Steve Earle.”
I used from the time I was really young, smoking marijuana before I started drinking, started when I was eleven or twelve. I drank because everybody drank. It was the late sixties, early seventies, and there were a lot of drugs out there. There was a lot of rampant recreational drug use. Psychedelics were a very big deal. Probably the very first thing I had a problem with was LSD. I got so fascinated with it that I took it as often as I could. Heroin came along pretty early. The first time I shot dope, I didn’t get sick. Everybody else I knew threw up. That should have told me that I was in trouble. Heroin completely, totally agreed with my system. Almost everyone else I ever saw shoot up for the first time immediately vomited. I had an uncle who was five years older than me that turned me on to the first drugs that I used. His father was an alcoholic and had gotten sober in New York right after World War II. He knew Bill W. and Dr. Bob. AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] was still a relatively small program in those days. The program really kind of started in New York. So I grew up with the Serenity Prayer and the Twelve Steps on the wall. It didn’t save me, but I’m not one of those people that had to find out that the program existed.
For many years, I used what people referred to as “successfully.” Being very, very driven by art and what I do, and not concentrating on any one drug for any particular length of time. I sort of settled into drinking way, way, way, way, way too much by the time I was in my late teens, and alcohol became the core rather than heroin. I was physically addicted to heroin at several points when I was in high school and after I dropped out of high school, but I could always lay down and kick. I moved to Tennessee when I was nineteen, and heroin was almost nonexistent there. There were a lot of Dilaudids on the street, but they were really expensive and I couldn’t afford them, so I concentrated on alcohol and smoked a lot of pot. I began having anxiety attacks when I smoked marijuana; I started getting paranoid and having full-on anxiety attacks, so I stopped smoking pot. About every nine months or a year, I would try it because it had been in my repertoire from the beginning, but I’d end up hiding my head under a pillow or going to the emergency room.
I did cocaine when I was younger, and sometimes mixed it with heroin when I was bored, but by the time I got to Nashville in the mid-seventies, the whole world was trying to have cocaine declared a vegetable. I sort of knew it wasn’t. I sort of knew that this was a really addictive, dangerous drug, but I kind of conveniently forgot. I’d use it but I never really liked it. Everybody I knew was doing it. I really couldn’t afford it. By that time I was a songwriter. I wasn’t making a lot of money. I watched as it became the drug of choice in the music industry. Drugs sort of ruined the street-level democracy in Nashville because it created a caste system. Suddenly people were hiding in bathrooms and being paranoid that people were only hanging out with them because they had drugs. All these strange things happened around that drug.
I was living with my second wife. The demise of my first marriage was because of my drug use and my attraction to the woman who turned out to be my second wife. My attraction to my second wife was totally about our mutual interest in drugs. I had found a woman that could keep up with me. I thought that would keep me from having arguments at home. We almost killed each other during the three years we were together. It was ridiculous, but it was mostly about drugs. I was probably one of the first people that freebased cocaine in Nashville. I had a brief experience freebasing one night, and I thought I was going to die, thought I was having a heart attack. It was just another anxiety attack, but it scared me bad enough that I stopped taking cocaine. So suddenly I was faced with the fact that if I wanted to hang out with my wife, I had to watch a lot of other people taking cocaine when I wasn’t taking it, which was ridiculous. It eventually led to the demise of that marriage. I stopped taking drugs altogether because none of them were working for me. I stopped and I stayed stopped.
Cynthia and I split up, and I didn’t use for a while until I met the woman who became my third wife. She worked in a bar, so I started drinking beer. I also discovered and started taking prescription opiates, when I could get them. I had some problems with my teeth by that time, probably brought about by my drug use, so I got a few prescriptions from dentists and I remembered how much I liked opiates.
In the eighties, when I first started making records, I wasn’t having much success. I was writing for different publishing companies and sometimes working a day job. You know, I would take anything with an opiate in it. That’s what I liked. Later on I would take just about anything. I bought some of it on the street and got some of it by prescription. Tussenex cough syrup was one of my favorites. There were a couple of doctors that would give me prescriptions for it. There were also crooked pharmacists.
Then I made my first record, Guitar Town, and I was not getting strung out. I didn’t smoke pot. I drank some, and when I drank, I tended to get very drunk. I was never much of a keep-a-six-pack-in-the-refrigerator drinker. I was a binge drinker. I drank hard liquor when I drank. Sometimes red wine with dinner because I was starting to make a little bit of money after my record came out, and I liked a little bit of that wine. If I drank wine with dinner and nobody else was drinking, I’d drink the whole bottle of wine. I could drink a half bottle or I could drink the whole thing. I was discerning as I started to make some money. I wouldn’t drink Jack Daniel’s because anybody who knows anything about sour-mash bourbon knows it’s not very good whiskey. I didn’t drink beer except in Ireland or England or a few other places where I genuinely liked the beer. I wouldn’t drink American beer.
Around that time I started traveling, which brought me to places where there was good, cheap heroin. Suddenly I was going to New York, and I was going to L.A., and Amsterdam. I didn’t use needles during this period. I smoked heroin when I was in England. That was how almost everyone did it. If it was highly refined white heroin, I would snort it. I had a pretty steady habit going. I could lay down, however, if I was going someplace where there wasn’t any drugs. And usually before tours I would kick. I would usually come back off a tour strung out, depending on where we played. If there was plenty of heroin, and it was easy to get, then I’d come back strung out. That went on for … My first major-label album came out in 1986. I toured pretty much nonstop in ’86, ’87. By 1988, when Copperhead Road came out, even making that record. I made it in Memphis. I’d stay up for days and days, drinking Tussenex. I really liked it. Before I started using needles, I probably liked Tussenex best. It’s OxyContin in timed-release form.
By the time I was halfway through the Copperhead tour, I was strung out on cough syrup. I finally ended up kicking by the end of the tour. I got strung out a couple of times as we traveled into more heroin-friendly areas. The second summer of that tour, we were asked to go out with Bob Dylan. It was a tour that never ended. I thought, “This will be my last shot to ever do this.” Dylan hadn’t toured in years and who knows if he’ll ever go out again, so we did it, but I was pretty strung out. For the first time, I was unable to lay down and kick. I could not do it! I don’t know why. I was probably just unwilling to do it. I was drinking two or three ounces of Tussenex a day, which is a lot. Most
people would be flat on their ass for twenty-four hours taking that much.
I ended up in a methadone program. The one I was in was run by people who really thought they were helping people. They did encourage people to go to meetings, but they weren’t addicts, they were doctors. They didn’t understand how little good it does. Around Twelve Step programs everybody’s welcome, but it doesn’t start to work for you until you abstain. You can go, and I encourage people to go, but until you get clean, you’re not actually going to get anywhere and you’ll probably use again.
When you are on methadone, you are using. It’s the most powerful narcotic ever invented. The same circle of chemists synthesized methadone and benzine. The most addictive narcotic known to mankind and the most toxic nonradioactive substance known to mankind. The Germans were kicked out of northern Africa relatively early in World War II. It’s the first place they had to abandon. Mainly because of the two fronts opening up in Europe, which cut them off from their main supplies of petroleum and morphine, and you need both of those things to fight a war. So they put their guys on it, and they came up with these two substances to replace them. It was kind of a bad karma situation in Nazi Germany. The evil that pervaded may have had something to do with these guys coming up with these two horrible substances.
The Harder They Fall Page 25