Two Turns from Zero

by Stacey Griffith

  And then one day, fate intervened: One of the fitness instructors wasn’t able to make it to teach her abs class, and one of the students—who knew I was an athlete and figured I was capable of training everyone at the gym—asked if I would teach the class. I said yes, and it was as if I discovered by accident exactly what I was always supposed to be doing. Teaching other people how to exercise correctly felt as natural as breathing, and I was instantly hooked. For the first time, I discovered how great it felt to make other people feel good about their bodies. And even better, that experience gave me as much back as I got from the killer workouts I did for my own body.

  That’s how my career as a fitness coach and trainer began.

  When my girlfriend graduated, she wanted to move back to the San Jose area, and I didn’t. At this time, I was having problems getting along with my parents, and she had not told her parents that she was a lesbian. Her parents were devoutly Catholic, and we had told them we were just roommates. We even went to church with them three times a week.

  After I struggled a bit over the what, where, when, and how to manage my life, I knew I could count on Grandma Stella to come to the rescue. She actually made me move in with her, go back to school, and get my high school diploma. She even wanted me to practice real estate with her, which I just couldn’t do, but I did decide she was right about school, and I was proud to have that high school diploma.

  I was still living with Grandma Stella and wondering what was next when a dear friend, who I have to keep nameless here, got “saved” at a megachurch in Torrance, California, and decided she was straight after telling me she’d thought she was gay. She wanted a family and thought it would never happen if she were ever to be living with a woman—this was in 1990, mind you, when it was very, very rare for a gay couple to have children. Another friend took her to the church, not because he thought it would convince her to be straight, but because he wanted her to have some religion in her life, and knew she was struggling with issues of spirituality.

  She found the experience so amazing that she asked me to go to church with her. I happily agreed. Despite my Mormon baptism, I considered myself a Christian but not affiliated with any denomination. I was simply open to every religion and didn’t have any judgment about any of them—I thought of myself as a spiritual person who liked to pray occasionally, but religion was not at the top of my priority list.

  So we went to the Cottonwood Christian Center, and I got saved again, this time by Pastor Bayless Conley. And it was on television. I got up in front of two thousand people and professed my love to God. And the weirdest thing was that I literally got lifted out of that freaking seat by God. I’m not kidding! I don’t even know how to describe the sensation—I just know that I must have been meant to experience it. I really feel as though I was blessed by this congregation for life.

  Afterward, we were taken off the stage so that they could explain what had just taken place, and one elderly woman pulled me aside. She was so sweet, and I had no idea who she was.

  “My child,” she said, “you’re such a beautiful girl. Jesus loves you, or you would not have been chosen.” She smiled beatifically. “I want to tell you something very special. I am not usually here on days with our new members of the church, but today, I felt that I had to come. You see, Pastor Bayless is my son. The man who gave the sermon and who saved you. Looking at you, my dear, makes me realize why I am here now, today, and it is so I can tell you that you are one of God’s chosen ones. You really are a chosen child. This is a very, very amazing day in the eyes of the Lord.”

  Well, I mean, come on. To say I was astonished is a rather large understatement. I had no idea what to say or do after hearing that.

  “God wants you to speak,” she went on, more emphatically. “He wants you to speak. He wants you to save lives; he has chosen you to save lives.”

  You have to remember, this was before I had any real teaching experience, except for some fill-ins at the YMCA.

  She wasn’t finished yet: “He has blessed you with a specific tongue, and I want to see if you’re feeling what Jesus has planned for you in this moment. Have you ever heard of speaking in tongues?”

  “Yes,” I told her. I was too shy to explain that I knew about this phenomenon because I’d had a devoutly religious friend in high school, and when I spent time with her family, they often spoke about it.

  “Do you think you could speak right now?” the woman asked.

  I nodded, and she grabbed my hand, and I started speaking some weird language. I had no idea what I was saying. She started crying as she patted my hand. “You are chosen,” she said between sobs. “I want you to know how special you are. This will be one of the most memorable days of your life because the Lord has saved you. And you are to speak about Jesus.”

  When I told my gay-friend-who-didn’t-want-to-be-gay-anymore about this conversation, I was torn. Clearly, something profound had happened, and I had been chosen, but I didn’t want to do what Pastor Bayless’s mom wanted me to do—to give up the life I was living and devote it to Jesus. I still liked to drink. I still liked to smoke pot. I still liked to party.

  She nodded. “I knew it,” she told me. “I knew you were the one, because I wasn’t chosen like that. I can’t speak that language. I’ve tried, but it’s not my gift. That’s why I wanted you to go to church with me. I just knew.”

  So I started going to this church for about six months, and moved in with a platonic guy friend who I’ll call Stan. He had a large apartment in Irvine, with a huge living room in the front with a church-like ceiling. I would put on a Christian radio station and stand in the middle of the living room and worship, speaking in tongues and singing the songs and the hymns. I would open my heart to God and ask for his strength and his power, and I asked Him to please guide me. I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do with my life. I didn’t know where I was going.

  Surprisingly, all the time I spent praying helped me stop drinking and partying without the effort I thought it would take. Still, I honestly did not know what was next because I’d been heartbroken by another failed relationship, and it dawned on me that Stan, who was as straight as a man could be, was dropping hints that he liked me. Liked me a little too much, even though he knew I was gay.

  Complicating our friendship was that he liked to come home and tell me what he was doing at work—he was starting a porn website, and this was when Internet porn was barely a thing. (Trust me—you can’t make things like this up!) His sexual interest in me and his job that I couldn’t respect made my living arrangement increasingly fraught.

  “I’ll help you,” he would say to me. “I know you’re on this new path. God wants you to be with a man. I’m your man.”

  But he wasn’t, and I knew he never would be. So I threw myself even more fervently into trying to save people who didn’t believe or weren’t worshiping. Because after all, that woman at the church had said this was my gift, right? She’d said this was my purpose.

  So I went around to as many of my other friends as I could, and I tried to convince them to go to church with me, but most of them looked at me as if I had two heads and said, “Stacey, you’ve lost your mind. . . .”

  Maybe I was a bit loopy with the whole trying-to-convert-other-people thing, but I will admit that something magical happened to me during this enlightenment. It changed me forever. It gave me that feeling that someone truly believed in me. Pastor Bayless’s mom told me that God believed in me . . . and I believed her, and I believed Him. That meant I was worth something. Someone finally believed in me, believed I was meant to heal people.

  Then one night, something amazing happened. I was lying in my bed. I had prayed most of the day, and I was praying again, and suddenly I felt like I was levitating off the bed. Oh my God, what is happening to me? It was as if my chest opened up, and I swear I saw this imaginary hand come down—it was God’s hand, I knew it—and it came down and pushed hard on my chest because I had so much anxiety about what I
was going to do . . . and He just put His hand on my heart and told me that everything was going to be fine, and the pressure of His hand was so comforting I fell asleep.

  SG TRUTH For several years, I was out of communication with my family. I didn’t visit anyone, or even check in to see how they were. From the time I was eighteen, I would say I was “on the run” until I went to Grandma Stella’s. After that, I still was not so great at being a great daughter; it wasn’t until I got sober years later that I was able to be present and helpful to my entire family.

  When I woke up the next morning, I knew it was time to go. Time to make a big change in what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Time to say good-bye to that apartment and my friends. Way past time to get away from Stan. Amazingly enough, a few hours later, I got a call from my friend Barry. “Hey, Nosh,” she said—she called me Nosh because I loved to nosh on bagels—“what are you up to? I’m moving to LA to start a PR company. Do you wanna come work with me? I’ll pay you. You need to get out of there.”

  That was the clincher. I moved up to Los Angeles in 1991. My own Sin City. I ditched church, and I started doing stand-up comedy. I took classes at the Improv and did so well at my showcase that I got an agent who was really interested in developing me as a comedic actress—this was the same time Ellen DeGeneres was big on the circuit. The problem became me choosing the night life over the professional “comic” life. I made the choice to get in with the wrong crowd, and started partying and doing drugs again.

  The good news in the bad news was that these party people were also, paradoxically, very healthy. They were totally into eating right and fitness. And speaking of fitness, this is when I first heard about this thing they called Spinning—they were obsessed with it. They literally did not stop talking about it. I remember being impressed that they didn’t seem to care if they had to spend more than an hour in traffic on the 405 Freeway if it meant they would end up at their favorite Spinning class.

  Finally, after I’d been hearing so much about it, I had to try it right away. I loved it! I was hooked. After the first class, I wanted to be the one picking the music; after the third class, I knew what I really wanted was to lead the entire thing, and I was determined to become an instructor.

  Okay, here’s where I have to admit something. I had to tell a lie to get my first real Spin-instructor job. The job was at the Workout Warehouse, which at the time was the hottest, celebrity-heavy studio in West Hollywood, and the only one that had Spin classes. It was run by Doug and Cheo, two big muscle-heads and beautiful gay guys who welcomed everyone to all their classes.

  I told myself that claiming to have taught my own classes wasn’t that bad of a lie because I had such good intentions and was so desperate for the job. (Um, sorry, it was still a lie!) I asked a friend who ran a much-smaller fitness studio where I had started taking classes if he would cover for me and say I taught there even though I didn’t. He knew that once I’d taken over an aerobics class when one of the instructors hadn’t shown, and a lot of people told me I’d held down a pretty good I’ve-done-this-before kind of attitude as I led that one class. He shrugged and said no problem.

  So I lied on my application about my experience teaching Spin classes, and was very lucky that Doug and Cheo didn’t thoroughly vet my résumé, or I would have been busted. I got the job. I was a really awful instructor at first, thanks in part to the antiquainted microphone technology at the time. This was before cordless microphones were invented, so I had to hold the mike in my hand and talk and spin and do my thing. I was good at the doing-my-thing part of teaching from day one, but it took me a while to get used riding the bike and holding the mike so I could talk and teach and check on my students’ form at the same time.

  I owe a lot to Doug and Cheo. They taught me how to teach the method that I teach now. I learned how to put musicality and physicality together on the bike, and to do a lot of pushups, a lot of turning and burning, and a lot of weight training on the bike. In fact, I owe my career to their kindness and their smarts.

  It wasn’t long before I became very successful as an instructor. I thought I was doing awesomely well. My classes were written up in magazines and featured on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. My career seemed to be really taking off. I was working at one of LA’s most famous fitness studios, and I was regularly having eighty people take each of my Spin classes. A lot of people in my classes were well-known celebrities, and some of them became my friends. And outside of my classes, I was partying more and more. Did my fitness clients know that I was also a partier? Some did, some didn’t. Did they care? Not a bit. My coworkers didn’t care, either—because they were partiers, too.

  This was the 1990s, in Los Angeles, and nearly everybody (well, not everybody, but most) in the fitness industry was on either cocaine, meth, ketamine, or Ecstasy. And sometimes all of the above. We were living the Hollywood life, baby.

  Everyone in my circle was doing drugs all the time, and that’s all I needed to know for me to think it was all okay for me to do it, too. I loved being high. It was how I made myself feel less anxious and how I shielded myself from the pain in the world that I was unable to face.

  I knew going in to all this that alcoholism ran in my family, and it was something I would have to battle with myself. But even as much as I knew this, I plunged feetfirst into this decade. I wasn’t just an occasional drug user and pot smoker and someone who liked to drink. I was someone who had to use. Looking back at this time of my life is where I realize that I crossed the line and became an addict. A functioning one . . . one who could show up to work high, lie about it, and know that people literally had no clue. I occasionally run into people now who knew me during this decade, and they still can’t believe it when I tell them what was going on back then. That’s how good I was at hiding the truth from nearly everyone—especially myself.

  I am not being glib when I say I was very much a “functioning addict,” because I was still an athlete, and still fit and healthy, which meant I could party until late at night, and still show up for work the next morning, ready to lead a kick-ass Spin class, as if I’d gone to bed at nine P.M. and slept like a baby through the night. Although I must admit that sometimes I did sleep through classes, and got fired many times. But I was so good at teaching that I always got hired back!

  I don’t want to give the impression that while I leading this partying lifestyle I was unhappy. A lot of the time, it was amazing. I had an unbelievably good time. And that’s one of the reasons I stayed addicted so long. I was having such a great time, so why stop the party? So what if it’s three A.M., and I have a one-on-one training session at six A.M., and I’m teaching a class at seven thirty A.M.? No problem. I can do it. Do it all and bring it on, 100 percent. Oy.

  It’s amazing that I didn’t even sober up when a terrible tragedy took place in 1999. Seann, my half brother from my dad’s second marriage, was living in Hawaii at the time. He was twenty-three years old, and his girlfriend had lost a baby who was stillborn. Not long after that, he and five of his friends were driving in a car when they hit a patch of water and hydroplaned on the freeway. The car flipped, everyone got ejected, and they all lived. Everyone except Seann. My little brother was the only one who died, and he was the only one wearing his seat belt.

  It hit me very hard, but I pretended it didn’t. About a month after his death, I got a strange feeling that I should go out clubbing on a night I usually wouldn’t go out. I didn’t want to, but this feeling was so overwhelming that I finally gave in. I decided to go to a private underground bar I’d been invited to before but hadn’t yet been. A few minutes after I arrived, a group of young straight kids came up to me and said, “Are you Seann Griffith’s sister?” I said I was, and one of the girls said, “I was with him just before he died.”

  I stared at her for a moment, stunned. I’d never met those kids before, and I still don’t know how they got in there. And then it hit me. My brother sent them. “He was so happy,” this girl went on. �
�We can’t believe he’s gone. He was the love of our community.”

  We all sat down in one of those weird Kumbaya moments, with our arms around one another as we all started to cry in the middle of the club. It was like a sign—of something special, because I never got a chance to say good-bye to my brother. He was such a happy guy, and he made a lot of other people happy with his spirit.

  I remember that he used call me on the phone, and he would say, “Dude, I met someone who knows you. Can you believe it?” He was fascinated that people he met would actually know his big sister.

  A few days after that night at the bar, I went to a party with some friends. All of us were either fitness trainers or actors, and we all were making it in our careers at the same time. I had started doing a TV show that was on the Travel Channel called Intersection. (Please do not google that one, as it’s embarrassingly bad!) My classes were doing great. Two of my students from this circle had been on Beverly Hills 90210, which had recently gone off the air. Christian Kane had his band, Kane, and was shooting Life or Something Like It with Angelina Jolie. Vin Diesel had shot The Fast and the Furious during this time, and I remember standing in the kitchen with my friend Lee, who introduced me to Vin, who said, pointing to Vin with a wide smile, “See him, Stacey? This guy’s about to blow up. Everyone in this house has blown up. It’s a good-luck house.”

  A psychic had been hired for the party that night. I sat down with her, and she said, “What do you want me to read you for?” and I said, “My brother, Seann.”

  She closed her eyes and said, “Wow, I just got a really big flash of a rainbow. Seann’s with us, and he’s standing at the foot of the rainbow holding a wiener dog.”

  My jaw dropped. “That’s our family dog that died, Heidi.”

  The psychic nodded. “Seann is surrounded by water. Does that make sense?”

  I nodded. “Yes. He just died in Hawaii.”

  “He’s there with the dog, and wants you to know he’s okay, and he’s super happy where he is.”