by Nile Rodgers
The next day, I strolled over to the artist’s place feeling light and confident. “Hey, do you want to hear what you played last night?” he said.
“Wow, you recorded it?”
He nodded impassively.
I was eager to listen, because all I could remember was the cheering crowd and how great I felt. How cool that he had thought to record the show!
When the music started, I was shocked at how bad I’d played. What a fucking joke. I sucked. Years of mentoring by great musicians were erased in an instant. My father, our ancestral blood, and every person who’d helped me become a professional musician? Betrayed. I wasn’t being overly dramatic—every musician can have a bad night once in a while—but when you suck like I sucked, it’s disturbing. I don’t remember what excuse I gave to the artist, but I do remember him saying something to the effect of “You thought you were good, didn’t you?”
Forget good. I actually remembered being great. I couldn’t reconcile the feeling with the shit I was hearing. The evidence was clear—I’d gone insane. I’d been shamed by my behavior before, and I’d always resolved to restrain myself from further embarrassment. But this was different. For the first time, I believed that my ability to create music had been compromised by my lifestyle. I couldn’t face the artist again and I politely extricated myself from producing his record.
Back at the Marlin Hotel, where I was staying, things started to get worse. I began to hallucinate. I hadn’t slept since I’d stepped off the plane, about thirty-six hours ago, not counting the sleepless night before I left New York. I was terrified because I no longer trusted myself to judge reality.
“Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality—we judge reality by the responses of our senses. Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules,” said Mr. Spock on an episode of Star Trek. I one hundred percent agreed with the wise Vulcan.
Though I stopped working in Miami, I didn’t stop playing there. Partying had become more important than playing music. Despite bowing out of the production gig and my horrible performance at the show, I stayed in great spirits from my now-increased diet of cocaine and booze. I quickly accepted this shake-up in my priorities: Partying trumped working!
I was a new Nile, a different person altogether. Don’t get me wrong; I loved to hang, but never more than I loved to work. I’ve always felt very fortunate, because I’m paid to do what I was born to do. Now I was at the mercy of my addiction. Shame or no shame, my world was completely topsy-turvy.
PART OF MY PROBLEM may have been the company I was keeping. The after-hours scene, once the height of glamour, was no longer exciting to me. And though the drugs flowed like a river, I could never get enough. Consequently I’d started hanging out with more people in the drug trade. Forget the club crowd. These were the real party people. I increasingly hung out at their apartments instead of after-hours clubs. Hard-core killers were part of the mix, but they were, for the most part, very likable and a lot of fun. And I knew this breed. Mom’s old contract killer friend, Bang-Bang, had always been nothing but kind to me and my first girlfriend, Deborah. Of course, at the time I didn’t know that he’d violently raped Mom and dangled my newborn baby brother out the window.
My oldest friends and colleagues were worried about me, but I simply couldn’t be reasoned with. My girlfriend in New York, Jane, knew that I was doing huge amounts of blow and running without sleep; she also considered my new crew highly undesirable. But I didn’t care what she thought. They were my friends.
Jane and everyone else were powerless to intervene. Since I was still capable of remarkable clarity during our conversations, she thought that I was lucid enough to take care of myself. I assured her that everything was all right, that I was just having too much fun to sleep. “I might miss something good!” I’d shifted into high gear and was now pursuing death, con brio!
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE MADONNA’S PARTY, I bumped into a girl I knew from New York, the girlfriend of a very scary dude I’d been hanging with, and her friend. I had more coke than Scarface. The three of us were certifiable. I have no idea what actually went down, but I’m willing to bet the sex and drugs we did are in the “legendary, even in hell!” category.
Meanwhile, my increasingly lethal lifestyle was exacting huge economic repercussions on my bank account: I was burning through money like crazy, though I was far too gone to believe my accountant, who’d called an emergency meeting a few months before I left for Miami. He didn’t exactly beat around the bush.
He looked me square in the eye and asked if I had a drug problem.
“No,” I said. “I just go to a lot of parties.”
“Then why do you buy so much coke?”
“I want people to like me, so I share it with everybody.”
“Do me a favor.”
“What?”
“The next time you go to a party, buy a bag of gold ingots and give ’em away. Gold only costs three hundred bucks an ounce and cocaine is three thousand an ounce,” he said. “I guarantee that if you give people gold instead of blow, they’ll really like you. And you’ll save a hell of a lot of money.”
I fired him. But of course, he was right.
ON THE NIGHT OF MADONNA’S thirty-sixth birthday party, I hadn’t slept for four days.
My date for the evening was a stunning brown-skinned movie star named Theresa Randle, who was in Miami filming Bad Boys with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. I don’t remember how we met. Sometime that evening, I picked her up at the Biltmore Hotel. Her manager had confided in me that she thought I was “one of the nicest people she’d ever met.” By the next day, she probably had the opposite opinion: Her client wound up finding her own ride home, and I never heard from Theresa again. I am so sorry. From what little I remember of Ms. Randle, she was wonderful.
The only snippet of conversation I remember was Theresa’s remark, right after I downed my sixth or seventh bottle of sake at the Japanese restaurant where we dined before the party: “Wow, I’m scared of you,” she said. In the black community back in the day, that was a compliment. In retrospect, I don’t think that’s what she meant. After dinner this beautiful brave soul actually rode in the car with me behind the wheel, even though I wasn’t in a position to operate a doorknob.
I vaguely remember arriving with my gorgeous date, and that’s about it. The rest of the night is almost a complete blackout. I pissed off plenty of people, I’m told, but I can’t recall what I did to deserve their ire. One of the few memories I can still conjure involves Mickey Rourke and me commandeering one of Madonna’s bathrooms to engage in a typical coke rap, complete with the obligatory tears and the inevitable “I love you, man” endearments.
We were going to save the world before sunrise. Or at least we would have, but I passed out before we could get started. I had to be hand-delivered to my hotel by a team of concerned friends. Madonna has forgiven me, but I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself.
I wish that was the end of the story.
WHEN I AWOKE from my comatose state a few hours later, things went rapidly downhill.
First I called my answering machine in New York. A message started playing with a voice that sounded like Chazz Palminteri doing his worst mafioso accent. “I heard you waz wit my girl dee utta night. I hope yas had a good fuckin’ time because it’s gonna be your last, ya piece a shit.”
Click. I froze. It was the guy whose girlfriend I’d been, uh, hanging out with the other night.
I freaked out. I ransacked the minibar, but I’d already downed all the vodka, gin, champagne, white wine, and beer. The only remaining booze was brown in color. Believe it or not, I was still holding to my “Only real alcoholics drink brown liquor” theory, even four days into an epic bender. So since I was not an alcoholic, I wouldn’t touch the stuff. Still, I was in some deep shit and needed a drink to relax and think things through.
Desperate, I swigged down a bottle of straight Scotch. Then
I noticed the shutters on my window weren’t closed. I heard people outside my door planning to break in. I still had two half-ounce Baggies of coke on my night table, so I took a couple of hits and finished off a second bottle of the brown stuff. To my surprise, it tasted great. Then I called a martial arts supply store and had them deliver a sword. Yes, a sword. I called one of my new Miami coke friends and asked him to let me borrow his .45 automatic, which sounded reasonable to him. He said he’d drop it by. I started calling every connected guy I knew.
I whispered to a friend, who shall remain nameless in the interest of not incriminating him, “There’s a contract out on my life.”
“How did you hear such a thing?”
I told him about the answering machine and the bad dude’s girlfriend.
He called me an asshole for crossing the line. “What the fuck were you thinking?” he said.
Still, he promised me he’d look into it. After what seemed like an eternity, but which was probably only about twenty or thirty minutes, he called back. His next words were slow and deliberate: “Nile, are you doing coke?”
I screamed back, “What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Come on, man, is somebody after me or not?”
He then said something that even I, given my long drug history, had never heard before.
“Nile, that’s the coke talking to you.” He kept repeating it over and over, which made me angry, scared, and confused.
Finally it dawned on me: Oh shit, I thought to myself. He’s in on it. I’ve read all those books and seen all those movies. They get to someone who you trust to set you up for the hit. I can’t believe it’s him.
Actually, of course, I was in the hallucinogenic depths of full-blown cocaine psychosis. At the time, though, my situation felt intensely real, and I didn’t know where to turn. I rang up an even older and closer friend. After I related my story, he said an unexpected thing: “Nile, listen to me, that’s the coke talking to you,” which surprised and annoyed me. Et tu, Brute?
Then my connected friend called me back to scream at me. “Throw that fucking coke away or I’ll come down and kill you myself!” Thinking I could buy my life by flushing an ounce of coke down the toilet, I did as I was told. But this small act of contrition proved futile. I still heard people whispering—their voices were clear and succinct. I was moving in and out of reality, but I wasn’t aware which state was which.
In what may have been my final act of lucidity, I called a retired New York City detective I knew named Bo Dietl, who was familiar with my Real Deal crowd. “We have to take it to them,” he advised. “Get it out in the open.”
So I frantically packed my bag and rushed off to the airport, hopping on a plane back to New York. Hours later in my apartment, with a crushing hangover and cokeless due to the company of real cops, I tried to play the threatening message on my answering machine for Bo and the other ex-cops he’d brought with him. I was appalled to discover that the tape was blank.
“Oh shit, he somehow managed to erase the message,” I told my protectors.
AS THE COKE-FUELED PSYCHOSIS receded, and my rational mind returned, I slowly realized that the voices I’d heard so clearly in Miami were all inside my head. That didn’t make it much better. What really scared me was the thought that less than twenty-four hours earlier I’d been in a closet, clutching a gun and a samurai sword. I thought to myself, Shit, what if the housekeeper hadn’t honored the Do Not Disturb sign? Would I have shot her or cut her head off?
Then, to make matters worse, I picked up a newspaper article that said Keith Richards, of all people, had just kicked drugs. I knew Keith pretty well because of my work on Mick’s solo album. I’d had tea with him in London in what may have been the weirdest meeting ever—to sober himself up he’d taken an ice-cold bath fully clothed—to discuss the possibility of me producing the Stones.
Are you kidding me? Keith Richards got sober? If he could do it, I could do it. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
WHEN I ARRIVED at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, I was a mess. I felt naked and fragile and hadn’t touched my guitar since the embarrassing public performance a few weeks earlier. I’d convinced the admissions staff to allow me to keep an instrument in my room. They reluctantly agreed.
I now understand why they didn’t want me to have access to my guitar. Suicide attempts are regular events in rehab, and guitar strings are perfect for hanging yourself. The staff at the hospital was sure that I, patient Nile Rodgers, was not ready to succeed in rehab, at least not this time around. They thought I was just too self-centered and too entrenched in my lifestyle to stop.
What the staff didn’t know was that thanks to my bender on Madonna’s thirty-sixth birthday, three days before I arrived at Silver Hill, I’d already stopped. I had had enough. The thing is, stopping wasn’t hard at all. Every addict I know stops all the time—over and over and over again. And I, like every good addict, had stopping down cold. Stopping was easy; staying stopped was the hard part.
So I refocused on staying stopped, which, paradoxically, meant doing something instead of doing nothing. Hmm … this made sense to me. Anything of value (even drugs) that I had ever achieved required action and discipline. Double hmm … I remembered one of my teacher’s words at the end of a lesson: “The only thing to remember is this simple definition of the word ‘discipline’: the ability to delay gratification. It’s an easy way to visualize the training required to adopt a behavioral pattern.”
Suddenly so much was clear to me. The embarrassing guitar performance, the contract on my life, the message on my answering machine, the voices—they were all mental mirages, and all egotistical ones at that. I was just like my dad, lying in the gutter, or naked on the Hotel Greenwich fire escape, babbling about how his uniquely gifted life had been short-circuited because of my mother’s betrayal. In recovery programs they have a saying: An addict is an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.
And that described my family and me perfectly.
Over the next few weeks at Silver Hill, I was introduced to several simple slogans that answered complicated problems:
The door to hell swings both ways and it’s never locked; you can leave anytime you want.
What other people think of me is none of my business.
I’m one bad decision away from complete devastation.
An addict’s uniform is a crown, a scepter, and a diaper.
Keep It Simple, Stupid!—or KISS. I particularly liked that one because of KISS’s role in the birth of Chic. Maybe KISS could save me again.
For eight months I practiced these principles daily with the same diligence I’d brought to learning how to play the guitar. Everything in my life got better.
My first day out of rehab, I walked into a Westport, Connecticut, restaurant to pick up some takeout. While I waited for my order, the maître d’ said I had a phone call.
“Who is it?” I asked, surprised.
“Don’t worry, you know him.”
I took the call. “Who is this?”
“Hey, Nile, mate, it’s Keith. You got a bump?”
After eight months in recovery, the first person I heard from was the man who’d unwittingly inspired me to get clean and sober, Keith Richards, looking to score.
“No, man, I don’t,” I responded. “But I’ll give you back to the owner. I’m sure he can hook you up.”
DON’T THINK THAT RECOVERY was a piece of cake, but, eventually, I got it. I love logic, and rehab’s tenets were the essence of logic to me. Accepting the fact that I was just an addict lifted the psychic burdens that had plagued me all my life. It’s a good thing I got there in time. If I hadn’t stopped partying, I’m sure I would have lost my ability to make music.
When you’re an addict, even if you don’t use, you’re still an addict. The urge is always “right outside the door doing push-ups,” goes the classic refrain. In the sixteen years since I left rehab, I’ve never relapsed. The death of loved ones is one of the m
ain triggers for relapse, which continually tested me. For most of my adult life, hardly a week has passed without someone close to me dying.
Though most of the suddenly dead or dying around me were famous people, the riskiest to my sobriety involved a talented friend, Reginald Brisbon (Briz), who’s unfortunately relatively unknown. He was working with Paul Simon as a vocalist when he died in Le Bar Bat, a club on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York. On the night of July 15, 1995, while dancing with a friend, he suffered a fatal aneurysm and died on the dance floor. Like Stevie Ray Vaughan (whom he also worked with), he was clean and sober.
The news of his death caught me by surprise, and planning a musical memorial for Briz was a serious test for my sobriety. Briz died just a few months after I left rehab, and my addiction wanted me back in a big way.
At the memorial, Paul Simon paid tribute along with the recently re-formed Chic’s newest lineup, which included Jill Jones of Prince’s Purple Rain fame and the Uptown Horns. My greatest fear was performing in front of people without the aid of my usual high, and my emotions were all over the map. I’d suffered from stage fright my entire life.
Many people had turned out for the memorial and to offer words of support to Briz’s distraught mother. I was happy to let them all speak. But finally the moment of truth was upon me.
The last time I was in Le Bar Bat, I was the life of the party. Coke, a gorgeous female posse, and all sorts of hanger-ons made up my entourage. But now, I was the loneliest person in the world; I’d returned to being the sickly little boy in the plastic bubble. Sure, I was grieving the loss of my dear friend Briz. In retrospect, I was grieving too for the loss of my old lifestyle.
Dozens if not hundreds of people spoke to me that night, but all I heard was the voice in my head. “You can’t play worth shit,” it said. “You’re a joke. Remember that night at the club in Miami? It was the last time you played in front of a live audience, and what happened when you finally heard what you really played like?”