As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  When I went to the bathroom before the fight, Jesse Jackson was at the urinal next to me. Basic urinal etiquette, while unwritten, is clear. You don’t talk to the guy next to you while you’re peeing. Even if you have known the guy next to you your entire life, you don’t talk to him. Even if he’s a civil rights icon—especially if he’s a civil rights icon. It’s a simple but very important rule and one that I broke that night.

  “How’s it going?” I said, making a point to keep my eyes forward. Eye contact at the urinal was also generally frowned upon.

  “Hello,” Jesse Jackson said.

  “Just wanted to let you know that I’m a big fan,” I told him.

  “I appreciate that,” he said before flushing and walking away.

  To this day, every time I see Jesse Jackson on the news, no matter what he’s saying or which cause he’s championing, I turn to the person next to me and say, “I peed next to him once.”

  The energy in the arena that night was like nothing I’d ever experienced, and it got even more intense when the fighters made their way to the ring. We were in the seventh or eighth row of the risers directly behind the floor seats. My seat was next to the aisle, which meant that as Tyson made his way from the locker room to the ring, he came right past me. There was a crush of people around him—police, trainers, men in suits. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” was blaring. Tyson had on black trunks and black boots and wore a white towel with the center cut out of it like a poncho. He was lean and he had an intense, distant look in his eyes as he walked past. He went on to knock Williams out in the first round. A single left hook and down he went. Dazed, Williams made it to his feet, but the referee waved his arms and called the fight. It was over.

  This was Tyson at his peak—before the rape conviction and jail. Before Holyfield’s ear and bankruptcy. Before the face tattoo. By the time I met him, he was nearing the end of his career. The appeal of a Tyson fight, much like the man himself, was in decline. He hadn’t held a heavyweight title in years, but he was a powerful, albeit polarizing, cultural figure desperately in need of redemption. I loved second acts and was excited to put him on the cover.

  Tyson was scheduled to fight Clifford Etienne in New Orleans at the end of the year and was in New York training and, on at least one oppressively hot September afternoon, hanging out with his pigeons on a Harlem rooftop.

  Birds circling overhead, I reached out to shake his hand, which was softer than I had expected. He didn’t let go, instead tugging me in for a bro hug I wasn’t prepared for and completely botched.

  “You like pigeons?” he asked me.

  I chose not to tell him that I’d eaten one once. I was living in Paris and a friend of mine connected me with the chef, Éric Ripert, who was in town for a few days. Eric took me to dinner at Alain Ducasse, where I’m pretty sure they brought us the entire menu, including a pigeon sliced in half lengthwise. Eric sat across the table from me and insisted that I have a taste of the brain.

  “They are incredibly smart birds,” said Tyson.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  From the roof you could see miles in every direction. Weather-beaten water tanks tagged with graffiti stood sentry atop neighboring buildings. We stood there talking, necks craned toward the sun as his birds flapped overhead.

  Tyson was surprisingly self-aware and introspective. He talked about people thinking he was a thug and a rapist and maintained he was a different man now, not the greedy, impatient, and immature young man he once was. He mentioned his late manager Cus D’Amato more than once and asked thoughtful questions about me and the magazine, but the weightier the conversation got, the heavier my head felt. After about forty-five minutes, I couldn’t look up at the pigeons anymore. I couldn’t hold my head up straight.

  There was no escaping the heat, yet somehow Tyson didn’t have a bead of sweat on him. I, meanwhile, looked like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. I peeled my jacket off. My shirt was completely soaked. I was dizzy and started to teeter. I looked at Tyson standing in front of me and tried to steady myself. He was a blur. This is what Carl “The Truth” Williams must have felt like that night in Atlantic City back in 1989.

  I took a deep breath and bent my knees. I remember watching an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos with a bunch of guys I knew when I was in college. Bob Saget introduced a whole segment on grooms passing out at the altar during their weddings. “You got to bend your knees,” said Aaron Lefkowitz. “My mom’s a wedding planner. It’s all in the knees.” Lefkowitz spat when he talked, so I did my best to avoid conversation with him, but I always remembered the knee thing. It came in handy on more than one occasion.

  “I think I should probably get going,” I told Tyson. “I need to get back to the office.”

  We shook hands and bro-hugged. Botched again.

  “Jimmy will take you down,” he said.

  The stairway seemed even hotter and narrower on the way down. Twenty stairs. Turn. Twenty stairs. Turn. Twenty stairs. Turn. It was unending. It felt like I was in an M. C. Escher poster. Twenty stairs. Turn. Twenty stairs. Turn.

  I finally stumbled onto the sidewalk like a drunk from a dive bar. My Town Car was sitting right there. I walked behind the Lincoln, bent down, my arm resting on the trunk, and vomited on 118th Street.

  Jimmy was standing in the doorway looking at me when I stood up.

  Yo, Mike, there’s a junkie down here on the sidewalk, man.

  Rock Star

  The rock star wore nail polish.

  It was a deep dark red. Almost black. You could see it on the poster Adam had tacked to the wall of his childhood bedroom, where the five band members stood shoulder to shoulder, one head of hair bigger than the next. (This was the eighties, and the Pikesville girls wore their hair the exact same way—bangs, voluminous teased-out curls, crispy to the touch.)

  In the poster, which hung just above the shelf that housed Adam’s impressive collection of colognes, the lead singer wore sunglasses and had his hands in the pockets of a black leather vest, which hung open, showing off his bare chest and a few long necklaces. Four of the band members were wearing painted-on leather pants—the drummer’s had fringe running down the side of each leg. Not the rock star. He was wearing a pair of faded skintight jeans, a white T-shirt, and an equally faded denim jacket. He was the only one with an instrument—his famous red and white guitar held upside down, the body clutched tightly against his chest with the neck pointing down toward his well-worn ankle-high black boots. He was also the only one wearing nail polish.

  Even though he wasn’t the front man, the rock star was the man. He was the one Kurt Loder interviewed on The Week in Rock. He was the one in the center of the poster. And he was the one Adam and Robbie used to take turns imitating back in the eighties when they would crank the band’s live album in Adam’s bedroom, one jamming on air guitar and the other using a black vent brush as a microphone. They would put on full concerts right there in Adam’s bedroom—dropping to their knees for blistering guitar solos and strutting around the room clutching the mic with all the confidence and camp of David Lee Roth. Most of the time, I would just watch. The perennial spectator. An audience of one in an imaginary arena somewhere in the Midwest or Eastern Europe or wherever Adam decided they were.

  Occasionally I would join in. “Why don’t you play keyboard, my brother?” Robbie said. I liked being called “brother.” It made me feel like one of the guys. But—rather like keyboard players in eighties hair bands—I was like the fifth guy in a group of friends, easily replaced without anyone really noticing. The guy who was just psyched to be included on the poster in the first place. I wasn’t a core member. I wasn’t essential to the DNA of the group.

  Playing air piano requires a lot of commitment—far more than I could muster. Plus, the keyboard player was always off to the side and was seldom the focus of the music videos we watched. It was challenging to find a solid reference on which to base my performance, so I copied the only piano player I c
ould think of and wound up swaying from side to side with my eyes closed as we played a sold-out stadium in Detroit. “Jesus, you look like Stevie Wonder,” Adam said, interrupting an especially spirited jam.

  I was a great pretender, of course. In fact, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t pretending. But my pretending was born of necessity—first as an escape and then ultimately as a matter of survival. Pretending to be a rock star in front of Robbie and Adam was theater, and this is where I came up short. I felt like a phony.

  The rock star wasn’t wearing nail polish the night we met. I checked when he handed me a rolled-up $20 bill in the back of his limo. Maybe nail polish was an eighties thing. This was the new millennium, after all. His hair was shorter and it’s doubtful he could’ve still squeezed into the same faded jeans from the poster, but he looked surprisingly good for a guy who, at least according to the entertainment shows, had been in and out of rehab a bunch of times and was on his third divorce. We had just left the Chateau Marmont and were making our way west on Sunset. It was nearly midnight, and the yellow Tower Records sign was still aglow. I took the rolled-up bill and snorted a toothpick-sized line of a crushed 80-milligram OxyContin pill off the cover of the Details issue I’d come to LA to celebrate with a party at the Chateau.

  Hosting these events came with the job. We threw them a few times a year to celebrate some movie star or a special section we’d put together. This was where my kind of pretending saved me. Of course I would have preferred to have been holed up in my hotel room or in my apartment back in New York shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke, a few pills away from oblivion or worse. That was my comfort zone. Yet I managed to work the room with ease, make speeches or toasts even, and laugh with celebrities and fashion designers about things that were neither memorable nor funny. This was pretending and I was a rock star.

  The party that night was packed with Hollywood stars. I think Lindsay Lohan was there. Shia LeBeouf may have been, too. It’s hard to say. The people of Los Angeles—or at least the ones who turned up at parties like this—had perfected the art of looking like someone. It’s as if central casting showed up, had a few mojitos, and then puked “types” all over the place. There were agent types mingling with model types flirting with producer types talking shop with rocker types. And of course there were the actor types. So it could have easily been Shia LeBeouf, but it may also have been one of several dozen leather-cuff-wearing, beanie-topped, American Spirit–smoking types who helped fill out the room on nights like this. The only way for me to really know for sure that someone was actually someone was when Kristin, the magazine’s publicist, came bouncing over to tell me in her singsongy voice that she needed me to pose for a picture with “this one” or “that one.”

  I dreaded these photo ops. That’s what Kristen called them, and it always made me think of events far more official—like the time George W. Bush moseyed across the deck of a destroyer in a flight suit like an extra in a poorly cast remake of Top Gun. Pictures of me with celebrities hardly mattered, and I resisted as often and as aggressively as I could. Details had taken over a portion of the Chateau’s iconic Spanish Gothic lobby, and whenever I spotted Kristin making her way over, I would duck into one of the room’s massive arched windows and try to disappear in the drapes.

  I hated the way I looked in pictures, especially when I was standing awkwardly next to a chiseled Hollywood actor with golden skin, an artfully tousled bed head, and a blinding Chiclet smile. I was pasty and doughy and brimming with self-doubt. Plus, I was easily twenty-five pounds overweight and my chest had ballooned to what felt like a set of B-cup man boobs that always ended up looking like D cups in photos. Then there were my teeth. I never liked my teeth, even after two years of braces and several costly whitenings. I’d been smiling with my mouth closed since I was a kid. And my hair . . . Oy. A thinning fauxhawk reinforced with enough product to style a boy band. So these photo ops—me side by side with the superhero from the superhero movie—made me feel like the poor schmuck in a plastic surgeon’s “Before” photo. I would eventually end up giving in to Kristin’s requests and stand still—lips pursed and turned slightly downward like a pensive Bill Clinton—long enough for the photographer to fire off a few shots. I struggled to produce my usual half-smile the night of the party at the Chateau.

  I was irritable and distracted and anxious. I was also nervous. I’d made the decision about an hour before the party that I was going to try heroin. That I needed to try heroin. Heroin and opiates were pretty much the same, or so I’d been told. It was time. I was ready. I’d considered this a couple of times before when I’d run out of pills, but had never had the courage to go through with it. After all, heroin was a drug. A real drug. A dirty drug. A druggie’s drug. Pills were clean. Prescribed and dispensed by learned men and women in white lab coats with framed degrees hanging over their desks. Pills came in tamper-proof bottles and had warning labels. Labels I completely disregarded, but still. They seemed safe. Kids from Pikesville didn’t do heroin. Kids from Pikesville went to summer camp. Kids from Pikesville knew the difference between lox and nova. They played tennis at the club. They married other kids from Pikesville and made their own kids from Pikesville.

  I’d spent two hours earlier in the day at a neurologist’s office in Sherman Oaks trying to get a prescription and came away empty-handed. I tried calling at least eight doctors in and around Beverly Hills, sitting Indian style on the floor of my beige hotel room at L’Ermitage crossing off names in the yellow pages as I went, but no one was willing to give a same-day appointment to a new patient—let alone one from out of town. I was convinced that every receptionist was on to me. That they were discussing me in a chat room—tipping each other off about the yuppie junkie from New York.

  I ended up in the Valley.

  It had been twelve hours since my last high, which wiped out my stash, and I was feeling the familiar pangs of desperation. My addiction had progressed to the point where I was no longer taking a set number of pills every day, which made it impossible to determine when exactly I might run out. Sometimes swallowing sixteen at a time took me where I needed to go. Other times it was eighteen. And still others it was twenty-one. Addiction is not an exact science. I was feeding a beast and it was always hungry.

  To make matters worse, Vicodin wasn’t getting me over the finish line anymore. I’d recently switched to something stronger. I had graduated from 7.5-milligram extra-strength Vicodin to 15-milligram tablets of Roxicodone. They were twice as strong and, I was sure, much healthier to abuse.

  Here’s my thinking: One of the active ingredients in extra-strength Vicodin is acetaminophen (Tylenol). So basically, I’d been putting somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty Extra Strength Tylenol tablets in my body every day for years. That’s more than two of the small bottles sold in the pain relief aisle at Rite Aid—a day. Roxies were made up of just the opiate. No acetaminophen. It was the perfect drug.

  And it was Roxies that I was looking for when I took a car service to the doctor’s office in the Valley that spring afternoon. I don’t recall it being particularly hot outside, but the office was freezing.

  “Our air conditioning is broken,” the woman behind the desk explained when I asked why it was so cold. I was shivering. Like many doctor’s receptionists I’d met—and there had been quite a few—she was as chilly as the waiting room. They were universally unfriendly, for some reason, which drove me nuts, as I also had an addiction to being well liked.

  “Fill this out,” she said, thrusting a clipboard toward me without looking up.

  Thankfully, the doctor was warmer. He had a port-wine stain just below his left eye, which I couldn’t stop staring at. He was chatty and had actually done his residency in Baltimore at the hospital where I was born. This was a gift. It gave me a chance to win him over—a reason for him to do me a favor. We had Baltimore in common. What were the odds? I tried everything. The Orioles. John Waters. Crabs. I cranked up the charm. I explained that I’d been trea
ted on and off in New York for lower back pain and that Roxicodone usually helped. He wasn’t having it. Not without an MRI, he told me. Dr. Do-right wasn’t budging. In the end, he gave me a small prescription for Soma, a muscle relaxer, and told me to follow up with my doctor when I got back to New York. No amount of Soma was going to give me what I needed. I dropped the script in a trash can in the parking lot and climbed into the waiting Town Car.

  My mind was made up. Fuck it—I was going to do heroin. No MRI required. No icy receptionist. No hassle. I would do only a little. I’d snort it. Enough to get rid of the chills and the headache and the cramping that were on the way. Enough to get me high, but not so much as to fuck me up. Or kill me. It would be like a Band-Aid—something to hold me together until I returned to New York three days later. A temporary fix.

  On the way back to the hotel, I told my driver that the magazine I worked for was doing a story on celebrities and drugs and that after the party I was considering taking a look at some of the areas in town where the rich and famous might go to score. It sounded like such bullshit. An obvious lie. I don’t know why I cared, but it was important to me that the driver think I was a good guy. I was usually much more confident in my lies. I needed to be—there were so many of them.

  “Huge problem out here,” he said. “So many lives and careers ruined.”

  He seemed to know a lot about the subject and told me about the intersection of Western and Melrose. And Skid Row. More options on Skid Row, he said. He then, without missing a beat, proceeded to explain that he was a former addict and that the Church of Scientology’s drug program, Narconon, had saved his life. He recommended speaking to some of the counselors he worked with for the magazine article we were doing. I assured him we would.