Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

by Tyler, Steven

  I went to the annual MAP Fun Benefit Concert honoring Alice Cooper and Slash. I presented Slash with the From the Heart Award for his support of MAP’s program: access to addiction treatment regardless of your financial situation. Slash had been clean and sober for three years and here was I still high. Aaach!

  I was high on drugs during that 2007 tour, so high on Xanax I let little things really get me over the top. Oh, god! I thought, Here I am again in that place again, being a fucking drug addict. I began to panic. Am I going to go out like this? I’m thinking to myself, Am I gonna go out like this? I have this running thing with the band about death, the deadline.

  I went off the deep end out in L.A. After a while of being absolutely insane, I decided to get off everything, but I wanted to do it by myself—never a good idea. My plan was to get myself a suite in a hotel and have a doctor—using other meds than the ones I was taking—wean me off my drugs of choice.

  I happened to know Justin Murdoch, whose dad owned the Westlake Four Seasons—he’s the other Murdoch, David Murdoch. He owns Dole, and he’s the largest landowner on the island of Lanai in Hawaii, my favorite place on earth. I’d met Justin a few years earlier at Koi, a restaurant in L.A. Outside the eatery was a car, a Shelby Cobra, no paint on it, just the body, and I went, “Aha! This is interesting, I wonder who that belongs to.” I walked in, it was, like, after hours, not many people there, and I asked, “Who’s fuckin’ car is that?” This guy stood up and it was Justin Murdoch. We’ve been best friends ever since. Justin’s got more money than God. He flew me over to Lanai in his father’s plane while I had hep C and introduced me to the doctor who invented a cure for addiction.

  So Justin got me a room at the family hotel, the Westlake Four Seasons—with an adjoining small room where the nurses would sleep. The idea was that my doctor would come see me every day and I would detox there. The doc and the nurses are coming in at night, I’m doing my meds while I’m sleeping. It was a good setup just with the drug he was giving me for my feet at home, Subutex, an alternative to heroin. It’s a drug that fools the nervous system. It’s a narcotic, different from heroin—almost as hard to get off. A month and a half and a hundred and forty thousand dollars later, I’m out of there. I was off the narcotics for a time, still doing an occasional OxyContin, you know, four times eighty milligrams a day, and still doing Subutex.

  While the doc was detoxing me, three weeks in—I went, “Stop! Doc, will you come to Boston with me because Joe is at home and just had a knee replacement and I know he could use a tweak. We gotta help him.” I got on the plane with Erin and my doctor and we all flew to Boston first class. Doc stayed at my house, and the next day I called up my brother Joe and for a moment he was into it, too. “All right, come over,” he said. The doctor went over and told him, “If you want to get out of this cycle of dependency I can help you. Come to L.A., and I’ll do for you what I’ve done for Steven.” Next day I jumped back on the plane with the doc, went back to L.A., was in the same hotel, started the regimen again, and after that I don’t exactly know what happened. But I didn’t hear from Joe again for months. A week later I fired that doctor because I was still as strung out as I was when I went it. I was singing Amy’s song before she wrote it. But I began to seriously think about rehab.

  Erin had left me the month before, went off with her girlfriend, started going to some meetings, and then checked into the rehab at Aurora Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena. Unlike most rehabs it’s on a huge estate, twenty-six acres. It was started in 1901 to treat alcoholic movie stars. The doctors were so rich and the place so prosperous back then that they were able to landscape it in the most picturesque style. They planted exotic and indigenous trees on the grounds. Trees from Africa, India, South America. It was like an arboretum. A lot of the Hollywood stars of the twenties, thirties, and forties would go there to dry out—that was before they knew that alcohol was a disease—and to get them off the booze, they’d give them morphine. While I was there I slept in the house W. C. Fields died in. Slept like a baby.

  I went to visit Erin in Las Encinas. I was going to take her to the movies, but she didn’t want to go. I was sitting in her little cabin at the outpatient clinic chatting with her and looking around and saying, “This is pretty nice! Hey, what’s up here?” And at that point her therapist came in, took one look at me, and said, “Steven, maybe you need to stay here tonight.”

  And I went, “Oh, god! Are you going to try and talk me into going through rehab?”

  “Yes, Steven, I think that would be a good idea.”

  I went into the bathroom, took my bottle of pills out, and dumped it in the bottom of her wastebasket, came out, and, given my impetuous Italian sensibility, I said, “That’s it! I’m in.” Because I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own, and they had an intensive detox program. So I went for the real rumpy-pumpy, baby.

  A week and a half later: Ahhhh! I was in there and God had put this guy named Joe (Yo in Spanish) in with me. He was from Mexico, right across the border. I thought I was in bad shape! I’d been doing, like, four Zanzibars a day, two Zanzibars during the night. I’d wake up every two hours, snort a half, go back to sleep, and sleep forever. This guy is lying on his back screaming at the top of his lungs, holding the backs of his legs, kicking up in the air, going, “Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh!” Sc-rea-ming. They’re shooting him up with shit, but nothing worked. He finally settled down after two weeks and when he was in good enough shape to talk I got to hear his story. He’d been eating six eighty-milligram OxyContins a day for ten years.

  I always wondered what I was gonna be like at fifty, and here I was sixty and fucked-up. Give me a fucking break! It was all going too fucking fast! Although time never slows down as much as it does in rehab. Going through detox you look up at the clock and say, “Fuck, it’s only one o’clock? Oh, god, it’s going to be a long fucking day!” And they get you up at six! When you’re in there detoxing at sixty it’s very humbling. You tell people, and they go, “What?! Muchacho, you don’t look sixty!” Or they say, “You telling me, my brother, that you bought that shit, you eat shit!”

  But, you try to protest, these were prescription drugs, man! Of course, that’s just the problem. Prescription drugs are the new plague. There’s career drug addicts like me—and just about every other person in America who’s on some kind of meds. Half of the people reading this book are going to be on pharmaceuticals, on legal meds. It’s a pharmaceutical world, baby. “Take when feeling anxious, when you can’t sleep—or just whenever you want to experience that mellow Swannee River mood,” reads the tiny Courier type on the label. Why would I go out and get drugs from a dirty low-down dealer when I can just go and get a script from my sweet old family doctor. “Uh, Doc, do you have anything that’ll, you know, attack the higher centers of pain because, see, I really need something that’ll get me through the night, through my divorce, I’ve just been laid off and I need to get rid of this pain in here. . . .” That’s why all my friends are cops, or dead.

  Have you looked in any of your friends’ medicine cabinets lately? You don’t have to go down to Avenue Z and score, no, you can get your drugs from your doctor and hide them from everyone. But trust one who knows from bitter experience, it will start to dawn on you, maybe not until you’re forty or fifty, that you’re hooked. Sooner or later the benzo fiends will come and bite you on the ass, your little sleep aids will turn on you. You began taking half an Ambien to go to sleep and now you’re up to six a night? But those prescription drugs just won’t come through for you.

  Wait a minute, what am I saying? Am I going to turn people off ? Are they going to say, “I’m not reading this damn book! This sonofabitch is preachin’ to me and I just got myself a big bottle of benzos.” Well, actually, you already bought the book, right, so what the hell?

  And that’s how I got into all this shit in the first place: helpful doctors and accommodating dealers all trafficking in the same Mephistophelian meds. I just couldn’t stand going
through twelve years of pain and suffering and not being able to sleep at night! Not my sleep, doctor, not sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, for god’s sake!

  Erin was at Las Encinas, halfway through her rehab. When you get through detox you go into residential units—just a hundred feet away. Nice cabins. There was a tree growing over my cabin roof. I would hear this plick-plick sound above my head. Hard little shell-shaped purple flowers falling on the roof. I put a sleeping bag on the bench outside my cabin and brought my pillows—and purple flowers rained down on my head. In the morning the ground was covered with purple flowers. I sang “Purple Rain” every day!

  Erin and I had been flying on this stuff for two years, Xanax being our drug of choice. I didn’t like the me that was me on benzos, and coming out of that din was a revelation. It was now you’re here, front and center, present. It was easier for me to do because I’d had practice. I’d come out of the din four times before this.

  But after a few days I went, “Oh, my god, what is this?” You’re in there for benzo addiction, and at the clinic they start telling you, “It takes months to get off that stuff.” I said, “Oh, yeah? That’s bullshit!” to that, as I do to everything. One of the things I hated (you’re in there with this Dr. Blum—Barry Blum, head of the Chemical Dependency Program, along with Dr. Drew Pinsky) is the forced damn cheeriness—“Good morning, Steven! How are we today?” “Hey, Dr. Blum, I’m feeling just great !” You see him every day and he has to be sure you really are cheery—but not too cheery (that would be suspicious) and not slipping into despair, depression, and suicidal gloom. So, because of the tendency toward morbid depression and desperation, Dr. Blum would see each patient every day—the more critical would be visited by one of the staff every fifteen minutes—because everyone’s detoxing, hitting walls. I couldn’t sleep for the first four days: “No one’s gonna die from no sleep,” he tells me. “But maybe we should up your Seroquel.” So they gave you Seroquel and Neurontin to sleep. By the time you’ve finished this book you’ll all have degrees in psychopharmacology.

  Seroquel is a nonnarcotic, antipsychotic med for people who are coming off stuff, especially benzos. They gave me a patch of Clonidine to lower my blood pressure. Clonidine is used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure), alcohol abuse, nicotine withdrawal, and dependency on benzos. “Nah,” I said, “I’m not takin’ them. I’ve been through that and I’m not going to start banging into walls and doors again like a rag doll.” “Well, Steven, we’re here to help you. Why don’t you just try one.” Look, I can be reasonable, so I said, “All right, I’ll do one.” And this time it was bearable. But in the other rehabs I was in, they had me on four patches or a bunch of pills. I was the living dead. I was grunting like a stoat, making ungodly noises: mrrr-vrreeeeeee. I couldn’t wake up, I couldn’t sleep or get up. I had no muscle control.

  I’d been on this stuff before at Chit Chat, that rehab in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. I got sober there the third and last time in rehab—or so I thought. Now we’re up to four rehabs: Hazelden to East House to Chit Chat to Las Encinas. I’ve been in so many rehabs they’re like my alma maters. My foot has been in rehab, for chrissake. In 2001 I got a wing of the Roxbury rehab clinic in Boston named for me. I did a “Got Milk?” ad—which was pretty funny given my reputation. I would even have done one for a rehab if they’d asked me—they could have used “The Farm”. . .

  There’s a cockroach in my coffee

  There’s a needle in my arm

  And I feel like New York Cittay

  Get me to the farm

  Whatever it takes—like I said, I’m just such a good drug addict. But this time I knew, because I’d been through it so many times before, that it was now or never. I was sixty, and if I didn’t stop now, when was I going to do it? Stop everything, including the Xanax, and Xanax was the killer. By comparison it was pretty easy getting off the narcotics. I couldn’t sleep at night—the anxiety I felt coming off Xanax was extreme. A benzo nightmare. Benzodiazepine, ach! But to be honest, benzos were the shit and I loved them. It’s just that I can’t be anywhere near them. I know I’m a drug addict. “Hi, my name is Steven and I’m an alcoholic, drug addict, coke freak, and benzo demon.” It’s insidious stuff. Benzo is Beelzebub’s latest brew and I’ll tell you why. You, even you, reasonable reader, I will tell you what you do without even knowing it: you open your bottle of Xanax or Valium or Librium, you take out mother’s little helper and slip it under your tongue and wait for that feeling to hit. You know just what that buzz is going to be when it stings your central nervous system like a pharmaceutical viper.

  And you’ll say to me, “No, not really, Steven. I only take it to go to sleep or when I have a panic attack.” Uh-huhn. But I know. When people take those drugs, even nonaddicts, they wait for that mood-altering brain fog to kick in. They go, “Yeah, I love it when it hits, I get that warm, woozy feeling, and that’s when I know I can go to sleep.” And I cry when I hear that, real chemical tears—a-heh-heh-heh-he-oooooh, ah-ha-ha-haaaaa—because I love that, too. I just can’t do it!

  One day I’m at Las Encinas on my way to the lunchroom. I’m stumbling around banging into things because they put me on Seroquel, and to get to the lunchroom you had to go through the bipolar clinic. That was really fun. As I pass through, a heavyset guy looks up at me and smiles. I see his teeth are all sharpened like Dracula. Remember that? That was a bit of insanity that was all the rage right before shaving your head became a craze. I said, “Hey, how ya doing?” And he goes, “Oh, real good. I love your music!” It was all very relaxed, as relaxed as it could be with people going through serious mood swings. I was glad it was all so casual and informal. Weren’t we all on the same ship of fools, all suffering, deluded creatures, all the same under the eyes of God and Dr. Drew Pinsky? But I forgot that I was still in the United States of Amnesia, where everything up to and including mental illness is subject to the overriding law of sensationalism, gossip, and innuendo. Paris Hilton: New Sex Tape! Nick Nolte’s Cocaine and Booze DUI! Lindsay Lohan Back in Rehab; Blames Astrologer.

  As I’m walking through, trying not to stare too much, I see a guy playing a guitar. “Woo, give me that,” I say. I don’t really play guitar, but I watch my fingers and I’m strumming away, and suddenly there’s a huge crowd of people around me and everyone’s got their cell phones out, taking photos, recording. I looked up and went, “Aiiiieeeee! Fuck! You know, I’m not supposed to be in here!” Word got out that I was in Las Encinas and I heard the tabloids were offering a considerable amount of money for a picture of me in there looking as fucked-up as possible. So after that, they put police out front—not to prevent homicidal psychopaths from breaking in and attacking their old shrinks, but to stop the paparazzi from sneaking in to catch me drooling on the floor.

  When you won’t answer their dopey questions—“Give us a full accounting of why you’re in there and what it feels like to be back in rehab for the fourth time”—they’ll go ahead and write what they want anyway. They did that with my divorce, Aerosmith breaking up, and Erin punching out the girl in the bar in New Orleans.

  I called Slash up from rehab and said, “Slash, I got somethin’ to tell you, man.” He goes, “So do I!” I go, “No, no, me first.” He says, “What? What?” He thought I was going to say, “I’m trashed and I’m here with my friend, I’m in—” but instead I said, “Slash, know where I am?” And he said, “Oh, I know where you are.” “You sonofabitch,” I said, “what do you mean?” And he goes, “Well, you know Steve’s in there with you.” I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “Yeah, Steven Adler’s right there in Las Encinas. He’s back in detox.” “What? Steven fucking Adler’s in detox again?” Steven Adler, the original drummer from Guns ’N’ Roses was in there with me at the same rehab and I didn’t know it.

  The poor guy. Talk about an appetite for destruction! He got fired from Guns ’N’ Roses in 1990 for being too fucked-up to play drums, ODed on smack in his car in 1995, a year lat
er had a stroke and went into a coma after doing a speedball (cocaine and heroin), and after a second stroke ended up with a speech impediment.

  Slash asked me to go over and say hi to him. Detox was right down the hill from my cabin so I walked down. Steven was a total wreck. He was slurring his words so badly I could barely understand him. “Uh hiyaaah, Steeeveeeen, aaahm noot stoooned right nooow, I juss taaalk liiike thiiis. I’ve haaaaaad twwwwwo sssssssstroooooookes, heeee, huhhh.” I was stunned. “You sound good, man,” I said. “Nice goin’!” And I walked out. I wanted to throw up. He’s had two strokes, slurs his speech, and he’s a mess. And because he’s like that, he’s never going to come back, and he’ll just never not be on drugs, and he’ll never be in the band again. So there’s part of his brain that knows that and goes, “Fuck it! I’m gonna go get high right now!” And I get that. I actually get it. I hope I’m wrong.

  Two weeks later I found out that the reason he was there was to do Celebrity Rehab, a reality show on VH1 hosted by Dr. Pinsky about famous people in recovery. They don’t film it there at Encinas, they do it in a hotel. They wait until the celebrity gets detoxed and then get him to reenact his former fucked-upness—which is pretty fucked-up, actually. Later on I heard some assistants from the show prepping Steven Adler for the Celebrity Rehab episode. “Here’s what I want you to do,” they were telling him. “Tomorrow night, just as soon as the sun goes down, we’re going to put you in an ambulance, we’re gonna take you over to the hotel. When you get there, fall out onto the ground and go, ‘Oh, my god! Where am I?’ ” They wanted him to act out his own messed-up state when he entered rehab. It was ghoulish and unreal. They gave him thirty grand for the episode, he snorted it all, crashed his car, and he ended up in jail detox.

  It didn’t seem to me all that ethical using actual fucked-up patients like Steven Adler in a reality show, but who am I to say? Not to mention getting trashed celebrities to mime their own self-destructive nosedives, which they then sensationalize on a melo-fucking-dramatic reality show, which so traumatizes them they end up in worse shape than ever—from the drugs they bought with the money from the show. Oh nurr-se!