By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (25 page)

While I was aware of the fact that I was on a show, I was going through terrible withdrawal almost the entire time and didn’t really wake up to everything that was happening until the show was over and I was on
Sober House
. I barely noticed the cameras on
Celebrity Rehab
. But this time, unlike all the other times I’d been in rehab, I really, really wanted sobriety. If Drew had told me that in order to achieve it, I’d have to stand on my head for five years, I would have stood on my head for five years.

Later, when I watched the show, I saw so many things that I didn’t remember. Plus, I had no idea how bad I looked. Like many drug addicts, I was very skinny, but I thought back then that I looked good skinny. Instead, I just looked ill. And there was so much sadness in my eyes. When I watched some of my first couple of private sessions with Drew, I thought, “The guy sitting with Drew looks like the saddest guy who ever lived.” It made me cry to look at myself. Watching it, I had another period of grieving, but I was also grateful to have that footage as evidence, because I have the propensity to forget how bad things were.

Being in rehab and shooting the show with Heidi was complicated, obviously. She was very sweet and welcoming at first. She hugged me and made me food and rubbed my hair and basically acted like she loved me. I think she was really shocked when she found out how low my drug addiction had taken me. In one of our group sessions, Bob said something about how I was a “complicated case” and Heidi snapped, “What’s complicated? He’s a drug addict.” And Bob said that while that was indeed the case, in the face of circumstances that would have gotten most anyone else to stop—mainly prison and homelessness—I kept on going. She looked completely shocked and
said to me, “You’re homeless? When I left you, you were in a two-million-dollar house and making two hundred thousand dollars a week!” I nodded and I could see, despite her tough-as-nails exterior, how much that affected her.

But I think the fact that I had Monroe in my life and coming to see me made Heidi crazy. It also made me a little crazy—but in a different way. During one of Monroe’s visits, just when I was starting to get into the idea of getting sober, I was suddenly overwhelmed by my desire to get high. Drew used to say that he could see me smell the joy of doing drugs—he called it the “siren of the drug”—just by seeing Monroe. That day, I started sweating like crazy and itching, almost as if being around her and remembering what it was like to get high with her actually made me high. It suddenly felt like I had no choice but to surrender to my cravings. So I told Drew I was leaving and asked Monroe to take me home. It wasn’t until I got to the car that I realized—or really, remembered—what I’d be giving up if I left. I saw very clearly that I might not make it back if I got in that car. So I walked back into the unit and sat by the pool, shaking and trembling and realizing that I had just been seconds away from giving up on this new chance at life, so I had to be very sick.

Another thing that drove Heidi crazy was the relationship I had with Kari Ann Peniche, a former beauty queen who’d come onto the show after I did and who was, honestly, being difficult. But she was just a kid, and I always defended her. Because she also happened to be a very attractive kid, that made Heidi jealous. But I went out of my way to try to be appropriate with Kari Ann. One day she took off her shirt and brought out this body paint and asked me and Mike Starr to paint a bikini on her. Mike went for it and, as a red-blooded male, I wanted to jump right in as well, but I know trouble when it’s lying in front of me naked.

Drew had told me that coming off meth was particularly horrific. Meth is apparently the only drug that can impair you mentally for good. With all the other drugs—crack or heroin, even—after two or three years, everything is back intact: your dopamine, your serotonin, and your short-term memory. But with meth, it’s tougher. Irritability and social difficulties are common permanent effects—and honestly, I’d already had enough issues with both of those things
without
drugs. Chronic meth abusers can struggle with violent urges, insomnia, and actual psychosis like paranoia and mood disturbances for the rest of their lives.

Still, I started to get glimpses of what life could be like when I was in there. One day, we all went to Two Bunch Palms, a resort hotel in Desert Hot Springs, and I was just sitting there in the shade on this beautiful day when I realized that for the first time in a very long time, I felt content. Just normal. I turned to one of the show producers and said, “My God, is this what it’s like to be a regular person? It must be nice.” Everyone laughed—but I meant it.

While I was primarily convinced that I’d ruined my life, part of me didn’t believe it, and that’s the part of me that got me there. And I needed to hear Drew say, “Tom, you haven’t ruined your life—you need to trust me on this.” I needed to hear that every day from him; otherwise, I just felt like, “Fuck it.” But to hear Drew’s reassuring voice say, “Tom, you’ll work again, you’ll be happy again, and you’ll be healthy again,” meant everything. And every day, he’d take the time to say it.

I still need to hear it, by the way. I’ll call him up now and say, “Drew, one, two, three, go!” He knows what to say. I really enjoy my relationship with Drew now. You really can’t appreciate him until you’re sober; when you’re high, he just seems like this really good-looking space monkey or something—like he’s been sent down from
another planet. Did you know I’ve never even seen that man sweat, even when it was about 175,000 degrees in that hospital and he was in a suit and tie? Dennis Rodman would be sweating in a tank top and Drew would be cool as could be.

Drew and Bob saved my life. Before
Celebrity Rehab,
I just didn’t care. I felt so crummy. The withdrawal from that drug physically wasn’t that painful—it was the mental and psychological stuff. When I could see more clearly and had some more clarity about what had gone on in the previous six years of my life, I would get so depressed that I would just go, “I don’t want to care about my life, because I’ve ruined it.” I had to work to get back to the point where I would once again care. I cared about my children, but I was in such a depressed state that I thought I’d ruined all of the opportunities I could have given them. Bob would say, “You can’t do this for them—you have to do this for you.” It was really hard for me to do it for myself, because part of me didn’t much like me anymore.

It makes me angry whenever I hear anyone say that they think what Drew was doing with
Celebrity Rehab
was exploitative. All he was ever trying to do was educate people about how addiction is a disease, and he knew that the most effective way to do that would be to use celebrities. I don’t even think he made much money from the show. He also helped Monroe get sober—he literally paid for her rehab himself—and now she’s going to college. She and I are still friends, but we couldn’t be together once we were sober because each of us was too resentful toward the other for letting us get so fucked-up. Bob would say that he wasn’t sure if Monroe was an addict—that anyone can abuse drugs, not just addicts—but he thought it was a good idea for us to be apart from each other.

I felt, in many ways, like I was cracking wide open on
Celebrity Rehab
. On the night when they played Mindy McCready’s song and
showed the slide show of all of us when we were younger, I started crying, and pretty soon that turned into me sobbing uncontrollably. Of course, I wasn’t the only one; everyone was crying at a certain point, even the cameramen. But I was definitely crying the hardest. The combination of that song and the new feelings that being in rehab and being sober had stirred up, along with seeing photos of all of us looking so young and full of life before the drugs had gotten to us, made me unbearably sad. But it also made me grateful in a strange way, too.

Because we had all bonded so much, I was completely shocked at the graduation ceremony when Heidi suddenly busted out with the statement that I could turn any woman gay. I had just told her that I knew she was a loving person and that she should come home—meaning back to L.A.—since she’d been living for a few years out in Nevada with a bunch of birds. For her to respond in that way stung. It was obvious that she was only saying it to make me feel bad—there would be no other reason for someone to say something that cruel—and it surprised everyone else as much as it did me. We all just sat there for a minute afterward going, “Wait a minute; did that really just happen?” But Bob told me to just ignore it, and I did.

Celebrity Rehab
is shot in only three weeks, but for me it was even shorter because I didn’t come in until they were on day nine, and I slept for the first few days. I was, essentially, still kicking when it was over, so I chose to pay to go live in the NASH House, which is the sober-living facility on the Las Encinas grounds, for nine days before moving on to
Sober House,
the reality show that followed the recent alumni from
Celebrity Rehab
as they tried to adjust to sober life. At that point, my head was still a dirt road. And I was afraid that if I didn’t stay at NASH—if I went home instead before
Sober House
—I’d just get high.

By the time I was doing
Sober House,
I’d reentered the world of the living again. I didn’t have anything that real people have anymore—a bank account, a driver’s license, a car, or any of the things that everyone just takes for granted. Damian Sullivan, one of the
Rehab
producers, went with me to put a lot of those things in place again. We went to the DMV in Van Nuys and got me a license, and he went with me to the bank to open an account. He also came with me to a court appearance in Bakersfield, where the judge told me that if I violated probation one more time, I’d go to prison again.

Everything with Heidi grew even more complicated at the house. Kari Ann continued to be problematic for everyone, and I kept defending her. When it got to the point where people were saying, in front of Kari Ann, that they didn’t want her in the house, my heart went out to her. I went up and comforted her and told everyone to stop jumping on her. That just drove Heidi insane. When I walked down the hall with Kari, Heidi yelled after us that I was a pervert and that Kari Ann and I should both leave.

Eventually, all of Heidi’s jabs got to me and I left the house. Everyone thought I was going to get high but I just wanted to cool off—so I went back to where Monroe was staying and spent the night. I tested clean and thought everything would be okay, but then Heidi kept at it until I completely snapped. I ended up going off on Mike Starr, really just because he was sitting there, and I can’t tell you, especially now that he’s gone, how horrible I feel about that. Heidi and I eventually made up, and some days she’d be incredibly affectionate with me, sitting on my lap and telling me how good I looked. Nobody understood our relationship and, to be honest, I was right there with them. Our relationship was so bizarre to everyone that we actually started talking about doing another reality show together for VH1, one that involved the two of us becoming roommates. I wasn’t entirely serious
about the idea, but I was entertaining it, although obviously it never came to fruition—which I think is definitely for the best.

But I had finally walked through that first layer of withdrawal and realized I was willing to do the footwork: to call people and make amends and look at my behavior in an honest way. I had never wanted to do that before. I’d always thought I was better than other people because I wasn’t willing to do that, but really it was the other way around.

I was starting to feel like I was getting it together by the time I was doing
Sober House,
especially in comparison to some of the other people around. It was complete chaos. As Bob said back then, “When Tom Sizemore’s the sanest person in the house, you know you’ve got a problem.”

I GOT RELEASED
into the real world in June 2009, and Drew had suggested I take at least six months off before I started working again. But I wanted to follow Robert Downey Jr.’s recommendation that I hire a sober coach. Robert had said that if a coach helped me to not use even just one time, he’d be worth every dollar, but I knew I’d have to start working again to be able to afford one. Of course, people weren’t exactly lining up outside Las Encinas to hire me, and I was still trying to reacclimate to sober life anyway. I was also single for pretty much the first time in my life. It used to be that even when I was with someone, I had a decent idea of where I was going next. But I knew I had to be alone for a while if I was going to be able to change at all.

Honestly, early sobriety was really hard. Probably my favorite thing about drugs was that I always knew how they were going to make me feel, and I really missed that. My emotions would flare up.
I’d be looking for a pair of shoes and not be able to find them and suddenly my thoughts would go, “I probably lost this pair of shoes. Just like I lost my house. Just like I’ve lost everything that mattered to me.” I would catastrophize everything. I’d sit in the back of Bob Forrest’s truck going to meetings and sometimes I’d be thinking, “I hate you, Bob. I hate your hair, I hate your hat, I hate this truck, I hate going to this meeting in the middle of the day.” Still, other days I would go and feel grateful and really proud of my sobriety. But I needed the group to hold me up and help me to be more honest about my feelings. I used to minimize everything and try to act like I was a tough guy, when really I just played tough guys in movies and behaved like one in front of the press because I thought that was what a man did. The truth is that I have always been a softy. And it felt surprisingly good to admit all of this, which is good because the pressure of being the tough guy or the cool guy or the drug guy was exhausting. People were surprised when they found out what I was really like: that I was actually a momma’s boy with a master’s in fine arts who loved Shakespeare.

I’d been around AA rooms since 1991, and the meetings in and around Hollywood never seemed to work for me, so I started going to AA downtown. I knew that people were gossiping about me—“I wonder if he’s really getting high,” that kind of thing. But after a while, that stopped. I started going to a group made up of around twenty-five people, mostly men, and I started going to meetings outside the meeting—coffee and all that. But I saw that there were people in AA who didn’t blend life with sobriety—people whose only friends were their fellow sponsees. Bob told me he thought that was unhealthy—that you have to get back into normal life as much as you can. You can’t be around dangerous people, but you can’t only be around alcoholics in recovery, either, because that’s not really living.