By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (21 page)

Heidi convinced everyone. She sobbed on the witness stand and claimed that the reason she didn’t file charges at the time was that she was afraid no one would believe her. The jury, which was made up of seven men and five women, deliberated for three days. On August 18, they threw out most of the claims and I was found guilty of one count each of domestic violence, criminal threats, vandalism, and harassing phone calls. The domestic violence charge was for the
incident she claimed happened at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a few days before the car accident when she saved me.

My bail was set at one hundred thousand dollars and I was told that I was facing up to four years in prison, but that the sentencing would happen when we returned to court in October.

Even though I knew it could have gone worse, I was still devastated. But I did everything I could not to show that: after getting the news, the only statement I gave was one thanking my family and fans for their support.

SHORTLY AFTER THE
trial, I made a movie called
Hustle,
in which I played Pete Rose—the former major-league baseball player and manager who was busted for betting on baseball when he was playing for and managing the Cincinnati Reds. It was the first opportunity I had to work with the great Peter Bogdanovich, and there was quite a lot about Rose’s life that I related to. Playing a guy who had once received great accolades before having the press and then the world turn against him came pretty naturally to me.

Peter Bogdanovich and I worked well together. He told me that he thought I was extremely creative in terms of my ideas for blocking and movement and he was never afraid to say, “Actually, that’s a little quirky” and suggest I do something else. And I think in large part because of our relationship, I managed to stay sober for the entirety of the twenty-day shoot.

Peter would tell me that I really got “under the skin of the character” and found Pete Rose within me, rather than doing it in what he called Paul Muni style. Muni was a 1930s actor known for immersing
himself in the study of the traits and mannerisms of the real person being portrayed. Peter would say that people have a mistaken understanding of acting because they think it’s about being somebody else when you can’t actually
be
somebody else; so it’s really about how to best “look for the character in you” and find the facet of them that you can identify with. He told me that all the greats—Cary Grant, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, any of those guys—acted that way.

Even though a lot of directors might have considered me a liability at that point in time, Peter doesn’t really care about that kind of thing. He used to say that Mary McBride Smith, John Ford’s wife, would tell him, “Pete, if you want to stay in the movie business, never believe everything you hear and only believe half of what you see.” So he said he never listened to anything anyone else said about actors. Peter was just generally not judgmental. He saw more actors on coke in the 1970s and ’80s than probably anyone else, and when he talked to me about drugs, all he said was “You know, you should be careful.”

By then, I’d worked with a variety of creative geniuses who were often a bit cantankerous, and I actually felt that the animosity between us could summon up more interesting performances out of me. So sometimes I’d want to stir things up with Peter. But he just wouldn’t bite. I’d say to him, “Why don’t you do something to make me hate you? I can’t work with directors I don’t hate. Do something hateful.” And he’d just respond, “Tom, you’re crazy.” At one point I asked him, “Aren’t you ever a prick?” And he said, “I’m just not.” He kept a friendly, upbeat feeling on set.

We did get into a beef one time when we had to finish a scene in very little time and I was complaining about it. He suddenly snapped at me, “What the hell do you want to do about it?” I’m actually incredibly sensitive and get my feelings hurt fairly easily, which always seems to surprise people. I was pretty taken aback and just sort of
walked away, but he followed after me and we patched things up quickly.

Peter told me that his favorite scene in the movie is one near the end, where I’m being interrogated and I definitively say that I never bet on baseball. He said that the brilliance of it was that you somehow believed me even though you knew I was lying because you’d actually seen me bet. The irony, of course, was that I’d just been in court telling the truth while everyone assumed I was lying.

But aside from brief moments of being able to work with people like Peter Bogdanovich, my life just continued to go downhill. And one day when I was feeling incredibly frustrated by the state my life was in, I called my manager, Beth, and asked if she could come over. I wanted to see if there was some way she could help me get out of all the trouble I was in, but we ended up having a massive fight, which resulted in the dissolution of our relationship. We did work together again, briefly, when Rob Lowe helped me get on his show
Dr. Vegas,
but our relationship was never really the same.

The drugs had really lost their joie de vivre for me, as had life. I remember waking up one morning and saying to myself, “Why bother?” I was chained to that fucking pipe and I had this kind of deflated feeling where all the air had left my body and I felt like a bag of bones. It was a monumental effort just to get out of bed. On the one hand, I’d feel okay whenever I got more dope because I’d say to myself, “Hey, I’ve got a couple million dollars and everything is groovy,” but at the same time, I knew things were the opposite of groovy and that what I was doing was really, really wrong. I’d sit there on the couch and ask myself what I was doing but also feel like I had no choice but to keep hitting the pipe. And then I’d think or say out loud, “I’m going to stop,” and the next second I’d take another hit off the pipe. And then I’d think, “Okay, I’m going to call rehabs as soon as I finish everything
I have.” And then I’d call rehabs—I’d call places in Israel or Finland and ask them if they had any beds. They’d say, “Yes, where are you calling from?” and I’d answer, “L.A.” There would be a pause and then the person would say, “Well, sir, they have many rehabilitation centers in L.A.—maybe you should check there first.” I’d hang up the phone, knowing that I wasn’t really ready to change or else why the fuck would I have been calling a rehab in Finland? So then I’d throw myself into something like reading Proust.

After enough nights like this, I essentially fell into a monumental depression that no drug could ever remedy or make me forget. I couldn’t do much of anything. And whenever I’d start to feel better, I’d see a headline about “Tom Sizemore, the woman batterer” and sink again.

So one night near when I was due back in court, I’d just had it. I took somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred—I think it was 182—of my antidepressant trazodone, put on the song “Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Radiohead, turned the lights off in my house, and lay down in my gym. I really believed I was lying down to die. I was so fucked-up during that period of time that I’d forgotten that suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Jessie, the UCLA student that I’d been seeing, just happened to stop by. She wasn’t living with me at the time but I think she had a bad feeling about something so she took a cab up there. And when the cab pulled through the gate and she saw that all the lights were off, she knew something was wrong and she ran in screaming my name. I was unconscious, so I didn’t hear it, but that’s what she told me afterward.

She somehow knew to run to the gym—that was an area of my house that was just mine, that none of the girls or anyone else used—and found me back there, passed out, lying flat on my back with a glass of water and six empty pill bottles next to me. She told me later
that my face was already blue, so she raced outside and stopped the cabdriver, already halfway down the driveway, and got him to turn around and come back.

Initially he was telling her “I don’t want to be part of this,” but she convinced him to take us by assuring him that he didn’t have to be a part of anything and could just drop us off at a hospital. And so he drove us to Sherman Oaks Hospital, where they rolled me out of the cab. All I knew is that when I came to, I had a catheter up my dick. I cried for five hours when they told me how close I was to death, and I wasn’t surprised that they decided to keep me in the 5150 wing for a few days.

I went back to court in late October. People showed up to support me. Charlie Sheen and a few other friends were there. I was definitely humbled by everything that had happened, and I’d written a letter to that effect, which was read in court. The judge concluded that my problem was drug addiction and sentenced me to six months in jail, but he said that I could get my sentence cut in half if I successfully completed rehab.

So I went to a rehab called Rancho L’Abri in Mexico. Once again, I thought I wanted to get clean. But the drugs had a serious hold of me at this point—even more than they did before, because now I really wanted to blot out reality with a vengeance. They didn’t work anymore—I got no relief from them whatsoever—but I had to use them all the time to feel okay. Which is why I brought speed into rehab with me on some paper in a notebook.

The first night I was there, I did the speed. I’d figured out after Heidi had slipped the speed in my Visine bottle how to transport speed myself and discovered that you could put it on a piece of paper and then put a few drops of distilled water on it. If you use regular water, the chemicals ruin the speed, but distilled water doesn’t have
all this shit in it, so it’s fine. The speed is actually contained on there, very concentrated. You can’t go into a rehab or through airport security with seventy-five pieces of torn paper, but you can have a couple of phone numbers in your pocket, maybe one in your wallet, and another in your notebook, and that’s all you need. That’s two thousand dollars’ worth of speed. And if you’re not in a situation where you can take it out when you want to do the drugs, you can always just eat it. It’s not good for your stomach or your teeth, but it works. And nobody searching your bag is going to be suspicious of a few pieces of paper scattered around.

Rancho L’Abri wasn’t a lockdown rehab but it was a serious motherfucker, so they had security at night patrolling the fence and whole area. To even get to the fence was hard. And I’d decided I wanted out.

Later that first night—on November 22, 2003—I went to bed just after midnight. But at around three in the morning, I got up, did more speed, and pulled my blanket around me. I walked down the hall and, as I passed a tech, I muttered, “Fuck, man, any dope in this fucking place?” as if I was in pain, but I was actually high as a kite. I’d brought a mister bottle with me and had misted my face so it looked like I was sweating out a detox.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I watched the fence, counting how long it took the guard to get from one point to the next; it was a couple of minutes. Sometimes it was ten minutes, but you have to plan for the shortest amount of time. I was forty-one years old, and I knew that getting over that fence was going to be hard. I felt like Paul Newman in
Cool Hand Luke
.

I managed to climb over the fence and then walk the nine miles to the freeway and to a waiting limousine that I’d called and ordered from L.A. One of the girls who was living in my house was in the car, and we got high and had sex on the way back. The only way I can explain
why I did what I did is that my addiction was like a beast at that point and the beast was running the show.

When I woke up the next morning and remembered what I’d done, I almost had a heart attack. I thought I was going to prison. I called Rose, the administrator at Rancho L’Abri, and she said, “Get back here right away.” So I went back. And then, three days later, I did the same thing: climbed the fence, called the driver, walked the nine miles, and went all the way home to Benedict Canyon. But this time when I called, Rose said, “If you leave again, you can’t come back and you’re going to go to prison.”

So then I went back and stayed. I grew to like it there. Rose was very fair and a really nice lady. It was my favorite treatment center: I just liked the way it looked and I liked the instructors. It was beautiful and everyone who worked there was a recovering addict. I don’t like many treatment centers, but they were really smart people there. They were all little Bob Forrests: very eccentric, smart, fun to be with. These people were having fun, so they actually made rehab fun. Of course, it still didn’t make a difference for my recovery because I was a hope-to-die addict by then.

I was only supposed to stay forty-five days but I actually stayed fifty-seven. But after I was released, I got high yet again. I’d learned nothing. I still had money and I was an arrogant fool. And I didn’t realize how altered my reasoning had become.

All I had to do was go to a sober-living house for ten and a half months and I’d have been off probation and nothing else would have happened to me. Everybody who cared about me—my rehab counselor, my father, Bob Forrest—told me to leave rehab and go straight to sober living. Bob said, “If you want to get high, get high after your probation’s over.” Bob believes in harm reduction. His philosophy is let’s get the person out of trouble and then let him deal with the addiction.
So I listened to all these really smart people but ignored all of them because my reasoning was so skewed by the meth and all the sex I was having. But it was really the meth way more than it was the sex. When it came down to it, I’d have preferred the drugs to the girls, hands down. I don’t like thinking of myself as someone who would choose an inanimate object over a human being, but that’s the God’s honest truth.

The thing is, I knew I was going to get high when I was still in rehab. I’d gone online, googled “ways to beat urine tests when on probation in California,” and found out about this device called the Whizzinator, which is a fake penis that comes with dried urine, a syringe, and heater packs to keep the urine at body temperature. I ordered one and had it shipped to my house. But because the girls who were living at my house weren’t the smartest and I was afraid one of them might intercept and then lose the package, I had two more shipped there.