By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (24 page)

WHILE I WAS
away, in October 2007, VH1 had started airing
Shooting Sizemore,
the show that Tijuana Entertainment had made out of the
footage I’d sold them, and suddenly I was dealing with the aftermath of that. I was horrified by the end result. I’d only taped what was happening so that it could be used as a sort of cautionary tale—to show people what meth can do to you.

I showed myself smoking speed on camera as a warning to children, but the way they used it made it look as if I were glorifying it. In what I gave them, I’d talk to the camera every time I smoked speed, saying things like “This stuff is ruining my life and I want you to know what I’ve accomplished in life—what kind of a person I was.” I’d talk about everything I’d done and how meth had made those accomplishments meaningless. Then I’d say, “Why on earth would you ever do this to yourself? I don’t know why I have, and the most important thing I can tell you is if you’re not doing it, don’t start, because you’re just going to have to stop, and I can’t.” That’s a powerful message, but the company wasn’t interested in a powerful message. They didn’t play the footage of me saying, “I’m not a hero, I’m a drug addict. I picked dope over family, friends, and career.” They didn’t show any of that. My thinking had been that if I could warn people about meth by showing what it had done to me, something positive could actually come out of my addiction. But just about the only good thing I can say about the show is that it opened the door for
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

I couldn’t really watch
Shooting Sizemore
—I’d only watch little bits—but my mom would call me and say, “Those people are motherfuckers, Tommy,” so I knew it was bad. And life wasn’t all that great in general, since all I was doing was meeting up with my probation officer and getting tested. I managed to stay sober by enrolling in Matrix, an outpatient recovery program out of UCLA, and I drove out to Bakersfield for each drug test. Like I said, I was terrified of ending up back in prison again.

I have to say that my probation officer was actually a wonderful
woman named Tabitha Raber; it would have been so much worse for me had she not been such a nice person. Don’t get me wrong—she was tough. If you fucked up, she’d jail you. But Mrs. Raber cut me some breaks.

You have to go in for your progress report every quarter—just like in rehab. You go in there, and if anything happened, your PO writes it down. Even if you test dirty, they can arrest you, but they tend not to. And amazingly, I started using again. When I tested dirty, they ended up putting me back in treatment twice, both for ninety days. That was most of 2008 for me: using, testing, rehab.

I MET A
girl named Monroe at the Seventh Veil, a strip club on Sunset. I saw her dancing and thought she had a beautiful body. It took me a little while to convince her to come home with me—about four visits—but when I convinced her, I really convinced her because she actually just moved into the apartment I’d been able to rent with the
Shooting Sizemore
money.

Monroe was a very kind person who was born into a socioeconomic background that was just horrendously impoverished and devoid of any kind of hope, in the poorest parts of Oakland. Her chances of doing anything with her life were very small.

We did some dangerous things together. Once, when we wanted drugs and didn’t have any money, she introduced me to a gang member who fronted us a thousand dollars’ worth of speed. I didn’t know he was a gang member, but when I didn’t call to pay him the next morning at ten, my phone rang at 10:05 and he left a message saying, “Hey, look, motherfucker, I’m coming over with a handgun and I’m going to shoot your fucking ass.” Monroe and I left the house, and then
I actually had to call my brother Aaron and borrow the money from him.

By this point I was doing heroin with the speed and I felt like I just didn’t know how to do drugs anymore. They were beyond not working; they were destroying me. At that point, I’d met with the producers of
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.
I had met Drew six years before, when I’d been trying to get sober, and my old drug dealer Bob Forrest had actually stayed sober all these years and started working with him.

I had talked to them originally about doing the first season back when I’d just gotten out of prison and was clean. Drew had predicted back then that I would relapse because I wasn’t going to meetings or doing anything to stay sober—and, of course, he was right. And then I got a call when they were putting together their second season, so I went in to meet with John Irwin and Damian Sullivan, who were the producers, at the end of 2007. At that point, it was like I had one foot in the real world and one foot in the surreal subworld I was mostly operating in. I remember I had on a nice Ralph Lauren Polo shirt but my jeans were full of holes. I had a meeting with them but I sort of thought of the show as being the last stop on the block. And, amazingly, I didn’t think I’d reached that point yet.

But about a year and a half later, I was desperate. Monroe and I were holed up, really high, at this house, on Kings Road above Sunset Boulevard, that a producer I know keeps for friends of his who are in trouble and need somewhere to go.

I had serious doubts by then that I would ever have an acting career again—not to mention ever get clean. I was destroyed, and I could have easily died or killed somebody while driving or been arrested again and gone back to prison for seven years. There were so many disasters that were imminent. The list of things that would have happened if I continued to use was monumental. I was definitely at
the point where it was either die or go brain dead from drugs, get institutionalized, get arrested again, kill myself, or become a street person and disappear into the mist. I was out of options. So one night, I started crying and said to Monroe, “I’m going to die from this or go brain dead.” And I wrote down the names Dr. Drew Pinsky, Bob Forrest, and Las Encinas Hospital. I said to her, “Get one of them on the phone and tell them it’s a life-or-death situation.” She called Drew the next day and he said they’d come over. But I was so fucked-up that when I knew they were coming, I snuck out the back window and left. And then the same thing happened again. She called them, and I left before they got there. I ran down to Pink Dot, a delivery supermarket place that’s home base is on Sunset right near where I was staying. I’d been such a good customer for so long that the guy agreed to let me hide there in the bathroom, and when Bob came running in, asking the guy if he’d seen me, he did me a solid and said no.

But I told the show people again that I was in for sure. And I thought I was but then I got high again and didn’t show up when I was supposed to. I guess the show had started—they were into the fifth day I think—and they had my name on the placard, but I wasn’t there. The thing was, Monroe and I were so far gone that we were almost incapable of taking care of ourselves. I suddenly realized that we hadn’t eaten in at least a day, but we were too high to figure out a way to get food. So I called the
Celebrity Rehab
production company and said, “Hey, I’m up here in this house and we don’t have any food.”

Two of the producers and Bob showed up and they literally threw a John’s Pizza on the porch. We devoured it, but we were paranoid and high and didn’t feel ready to stop what we were doing, so we didn’t let them inside. The next day, it was pretty much the same situation. We were starving and didn’t have food or a way to get it, so I called the production company again and they came back and threw another
pizza onto the porch. They joke that they got me to commit by luring me with pizza, and it’s not inaccurate. Drew was with them this time, so I let Drew and Bob inside, but I didn’t want them filming anything. From there, I agreed to go in.

Of course, by the time I got there, I was having second thoughts again. But I checked in, saw Drew, and let them take blood and everything. I was so high and out of it that I kept forgetting that there was a TV show involved. When I first pulled up to go in and there were cameramen shooting what was happening, I thought they were paparazzi guys and told them to fuck off.

Celebrity Rehab
had already booked Heidi Fleiss for the season—something I found out about on the way over there—and I wasn’t sure how she was going to react to seeing me or, honestly, how I was going to react to seeing her. But she embraced me and when she did, it was like everything she put me through—and all of the horrible things we went through together—disappeared and we were only there to help each other get sober. Everyone was really nice, and I wanted to want to stay, but for reasons I can’t quite explain, I still couldn’t surrender. I told Drew and Bob that I needed to go see my kids, but I promised to come back by that night. They knew I only wanted to leave to get high, and they kept saying that if I left, I wouldn’t come back.

Drew gave me a shot of Ativan to try to calm me down but it barely affected me and certainly didn’t derail me. So I left with friends and I guess Drew told Will, the tech on the show, to follow me and do whatever he had to do to get me to come back. Will followed me to the house on Kings Road. He told me later that I’d accidentally left three of the burners on in the house; the entire place smelled so strongly of gas that a normal person walking in would have gotten an instantaneous migraine. I hadn’t noticed a thing.

When we got there, he gave me these two pills that I guess were
300 milligrams of Seroquel each. Seroquel is an antipsychotic but it has the side effect of causing extreme fatigue. It’s basically an instant sedative. Some people say it mimics a pot high; all I know is that at first I didn’t feel anything, and I was still so determined to do meth that I went into my bedroom and took a gun holster I had and laid it out on the bed so that Will and the rest of the crew could see it from where they were in the house. Then I went into the bathroom, which was attached to the bedroom, and called out, “Nobody better come in here,” to make them think that I actually had a gun and would shoot anyone who tried to stop me.

I just wanted one last hurrah. But once I was in the bathroom, all the Seroquel suddenly hit me, and even though I was holding a pipe, a lighter, and meth, I was suddenly so out of it that I swear to God I couldn’t figure out how to get high. I don’t really remember what happened after that very well, but Will told me later that I wandered out of the bedroom and said, “Man, you tell that Dr. Drew that I don’t know what he gave me but he sure knows what he’s doing.”

I was pretty compliant at that point, so they were able to take me back to the unit and check me in. But I still hadn’t surrendered entirely to the situation, and I asked Monroe to come and visit me and bring me drugs. When she showed up, though, the nurse wouldn’t let her in unless she took a drug test, and she didn’t want to so she couldn’t see me. So she took the meth she had brought me and stashed it in the garbage can of one of the bathrooms. Naturally, they have cameras all over the place, so one of the nurses saw her do it and pulled it right out. But by then I had just passed out. I slept the sleep of someone who had been on a ten-year run and I didn’t get up for a few days. And when I finally did, I wandered out to the back patio and saw that there were cigarettes and food and people I knew and liked and I figured I might as well stay.

I
DID
CELEBRITY REHAB,
honestly, for the money.

The truth is that I’d disappointed myself so often that I simply didn’t think sobriety was possible for someone like me. I was acting like I was sure that everything was going to work out, but I didn’t believe it. I only behaved that way for my family and close friends because I didn’t want them to worry any more than they already had, but I actually had serious doubts I’d ever get any semblance of a real life back. Ironically, if I’d actually thought I’d ever have a career again, I would never have done
Celebrity Rehab,
because I thought of it as something for also-rans and has-beens.

And yet despite the humiliation of even being on that show in the kind of shape I was in—despite many humiliating things—I was actually able to get clean.

In my first few days of being there, I was so disconsolate and hopeless and physically drained that I could only sleep. Bob told me later that he thought I was avoiding life and hiding in bed the first few days I was there, and maybe there’s an element of truth in that, but I
was mostly just emotionally and physically exhausted. My spirit felt like a dusty road. It had taken a lot of work to get that fucked-up. And once I started to get any kind of foothold in getting things repaired, seeing what I’d done with my life was almost too much to bear. I was heartbroken by my life—by how lost and untethered I was. I had no real agent anymore to connect me to my old life—which I considered my real life or at least the life I wanted. I’d become a pariah. I knew that people were looking at me and saying, “What a shame.” I fell so far down that people either feared me or thought I was pathetic. As Dennis Rodman told me on the show, I’d gone from Hollywood to Hollyweird.

Clearly, the drugs had stopped working for me. For at least nine months before I got clean, I’d go to bed saying, “I’m not doing this stuff tomorrow, it doesn’t work,” but then wake up and do them. I’d sit in the bathroom and do two hundred dollars’ worth of speed and heroin and leave the bathroom thinking, “I don’t feel any better. I don’t feel sick, but I don’t feel any better.” I’d have terrible stomach indigestion and be sweating and awake, not dope-sick exactly, and still wanting to reach that place drugs are supposed to let you reach, but I couldn’t. When you’re in that place—when you’re too destroyed to continue to live with drugs but too terrified to really begin to accept the idea of living without them—death starts to seem like a welcome possibility. And when you’re wishing that the drugs would kill you but they’re not—well, I can’t think of a worse place to be.

In retrospect, the people that I had working as my handlers were not acting in my best interest—not even close. I get the fact that, in my incapacitated state, I was a walking target; I vaguely recall even being pushed to sign legal documents without any idea of what I was signing. It’s unbelievable—I somehow ended up with only about $50,000 for both
Celebrity Rehab
and
Sober House
out of the $250,000 I
was paid. And I had to pay taxes on the full amount. I still haven’t had the energy to go after these people who took advantage of me and whom I trusted, although maybe I will someday.