By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (26 page)

I started hanging out around the Midnight Mission in downtown L.A., going to the AA meeting down there and then staying and volunteering. I somehow felt comfortable there in a way that I didn’t in Hollywood AA. No one down there cares about how you look or where you’ve been. The homeless people down there are completely forgotten about by society, and I really felt for them. And taking the focus off me and putting it on them changed my perception of things. I began to see how truly lucky I was.

Bob would tell me I had to do sobriety the way he did it and the way he helped Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Kiedis to do it, by going to this specific meeting he’s been going to for fifteen years. He’d say that going to that meeting and feeling uncomfortable would do more for me than going down to the Mission and talking to those guys. But I did it my way, and it worked. I used to think going to a meeting was a big deal—I fought it for so long—but it’s an hour long and it’s easy once you get in the rhythm of it. It’s just like anything else in life: you can make it into a good habit in the same way that you can make doing drugs into a bad habit. And it takes a lot less time to stay clean than it does to stay high. Even just getting the dope was a full-time job.

Once I got really organized and was doing all my AA and therapy things, I would finish everything I had to by two in the afternoon, unless I was going to go to an evening meeting, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. So I would call Drew and say, “I’ve done everything—went to a meeting, volunteered, and met with my sponsor—and still have nine hours before bed, so what should I do?” At one point he said, “You’re going to need to get a hobby.” I said, “What’s a hobby?” And he said, “Tom, please.” But I was serious; I really didn’t know. I’d never done anything for fun, for years, besides drugs. I like to play football, or even just throw a football against a wall, but I take
it so seriously that that doesn’t really feel like a hobby, either. He said, “A hobby is something you don’t do for any kind of money and is ideally not competitive. It’s something that’s all positive and fun—where you’re not trying to be better than the next guy.” So I said, “How about the guitar?”

Although I’d been in a band before—Day 8—I didn’t play an instrument; I just sang. And it’s not like I really learned how to play guitar really well or anything. I mostly just sat there like a bump on a log unless someone gave me something to play. Of course, nowadays you don’t have to play an instrument to be a musician—you just have to have a six-pack and a couple of arrests and you can be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I did start to miss the band, though. My former guitar player, Rod Castro, had become a really popular session guitarist and my bass player, Tyrone Tomke, had started scoring a lot of TV shows. And it was because I kept getting arrested that the band dissolved. We had thirty-eight songs and actually produced a four-song demo that got some attention. But since that was over, it was nice to still be musical, and I enjoyed screwing around on the guitar.

I also spent a lot of time around Bob Forrest. We didn’t go on fishing trips or to clubs or anything like that, either: all we did was go to meetings and bookstores and Amoeba Music, and all we’d talk about was sobriety. Drug counseling is an imperfect science, and Bob has his own style, but what’s great about him is he’s just so curious about everything, which makes him a good counselor. He told me once, “Tom, you have no idea why people do drugs—every week someone gives me a new reason, and it will blow my mind.” I see his job mostly as someone who sees through the bullshit. He’s somehow able to tell when people are lying and also when they really want to get sober, which is a great gift.

A lot of getting sober involved becoming sane for the first time in a long time, and a lot of that involved realizing that I couldn’t control what other people did. I couldn’t control what Heidi did, and I couldn’t control what Drew wanted me to do or what my mom was thinking or what someone who interviewed me was going to write. All I could control, I saw, was my reactions to these things.

I also realized that I couldn’t really control how I
felt
a lot of the time. All I could do was remind myself that things change. I used to have a false sense of security that I could control things, but I saw that I couldn’t even control my own kids. I could give them a “time-out” if they did something bad, but I wasn’t necessarily going to be there later to know whether they were going do whatever it was again with their mom or her parents. I could only say to the boys, “I don’t approve, but I love you.”

When you’re using drugs and it gets bad, you blame everybody but yourself. You forget that there are decent people out there rooting for you. But suddenly I was encountering people who were walking up to me with tears in their eyes—strangers who would say, “Oh my God, you’re alive. You made it. You look good!” Of course, there are a lot of mean people and horrible things that have been said, but I could finally see the great things, too. You lose sight of that when you’re using drugs—you just think everybody’s an asshole, everybody’s against you, and the world sucks. And it’s just not true.

I started to see how immature I’d been and how much I’d been coddled in my life. I saw with incredible clarity the extreme permissiveness that is given to successful actors and how, because of that, you can become a monster before you even know it. I used to think the idea of “surrendering”—as they say in the program—was garbage. I used to say that something about it didn’t feel right. But I think it was more fear of doing it that made me say that. But even when I
finally surrendered, it was still hard. It certainly didn’t mean that the difficult times were over.

Of course, my regrets about what I should have done differently began seeping into my thoughts along with all the new recovery thoughts. I never really defended myself during those years when I was doing nothing but getting in trouble, because when I did talk, I made an ass of myself. I was falsely accused, intoxicated all the time, and being hounded, and I’d never been in that situation before so I didn’t know what the protocol was. I’d learned in playing sports as a kid that if you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. But I’d get high and then forget I’d decided not to do anything. I just wish I’d gotten some kind of advice about what to do, about how to address the accusations in a sane way, instead of doing what I did—which, at times, was to start mocking the police. Before all the bad stuff started happening, I always liked the police. I’d played them a lot in movies and knew them from researching roles and riding around with them. In getting clean, at least I started to repair some of those relationships.

I also started to repair my relationships with my family. My mom had stood by me the whole time, and she did her best to not make me feel any worse than I already did. She has this kind of funny thing she does where she says “delete” if you bring up something unpleasant. If I brought up prison, she’d say, “Oh, Tommy, I deleted that a long time ago. I deleted all the years you were in trouble. I don’t know what happened. Ask me anything.” I said, “Do you remember when I went to trial?” and she said, “Nope, delete.”

In a lot of ways, I’ve actually been able to even forgive Heidi, even when she was saying crummy things to me on television. It was hard to hear those things, but I know she only said them because she was hurt. I’m not interested in revenge. Obviously, I wish that whole thing had never happened, but you can’t reverse time. In my ideal world,
she would go to the press and say “He never hit me.” Then I would have true closure. But that’s not going to happen.

But I realized that I had to forgive people because I still hoped to be forgiven for a lot of the things that I’d done. I shot heroin while making
Heat,
which was irresponsible. It ended up not hurting the movie, but that’s just a fluke. It could have affected thousands of people—the crew, Michael Mann, the other actors—but I never thought of it that way.

In the early days of sobriety, I’d sometimes wish I were still in rehab—say, the fifth month when you’re feeling great and can get up and do the daily meditation and then run five miles. I do well with a schedule, which is why movies are good for me, since you have to be somewhere at a certain time. But when I became responsible, I’d have to fight the temptation to lie in bed, knowing I had to get up for a meeting and that I wouldn’t have time to work out before and I’d never work out after because it’d be too late and I’d then want to do some creative work and take a walk and throw the football. I’d be stressed before I’d gotten out of bed, and I wouldn’t even technically have anything to do.

But after a while, I knew it was time to start trying to do all that I’d ever wanted to do: to act again. Robert Downey had warned me that you get in a position where you’re sober and you really want everything back again, but you’re worried that if you do get it back, you’re only going to get fucked-up again because suddenly you once more have access to money and everything else that goes with it. But I understood that I wouldn’t know unless I tried, and it was time to try.

ONE OF THE
first movies that I did once I got clean again was called
White Knight.
The title was changed to
Cellmates
along the way, but when I
was doing it, it was called
White Knight
. It was a comedy about the KKK, and while those things don’t normally go together, the cowriter and director, Jesse Baget, is a true talent, and he was able to pull it off.

My character in that movie goes through an evolution not unlike my own. He transitions from being this very shut-down, hateful, racist southern man to a sort of 1967 Summer of Love hippie who falls in love—and it’s all funny, if you can believe it. There’s a part when one of the characters hands my character a note that says, “Anybody can change, but only if they really, really want to,” and when I first read the script, I just started crying, because it’s so true. It made me realize that we all get second chances—some people, like me, even get nineteen chances.

The opportunity came along at the right time, because I really thought I’d ruined my career and was actually thinking about trying to work as a drug counselor. Bob had said he thought I could have a future in it. I honestly didn’t know what else I could do since I didn’t have many traditionally marketable skills or interests. All I’ve ever really liked to do is read, see movies, look at art, and be around people, which doesn’t exactly make you very viable in the working world.

The script was 116 pages of pure dialogue, and I was in every single scene. The first reading didn’t go very well because I was nervous, so then Jesse and I spent about four solid days together, just talking about the script and watching movies like
Raising Arizona
and
Oh
Brother, Where Art Thou?
to try to get into the tone of the movie. It can sometimes take me a little while to warm up to doing the work, which gave us time to just sort of hang out and bond. We’d toss a football back and forth on the roof and keep talking.

We shot for thirteen days in downtown L.A. The way I work is I learn my dialogue but then wait to really perform it when the director says “Action.” So I don’t really have a chance to see how it works until
the first take. Because of that I stumbled a bit on the first takes, but then would nail it on the second.

The movie walks a fine line and I was a little scared that I was going too big with the character. I’d ask Jesse, “Are you sure we’re not going a little too broad with this?” He’d say, “No, trust me”—so I did. Being funny in a movie is hard. Timing and delivery is everything. You also need to be with other people who are funny, and Jesse created the right atmosphere for that.

Jesse told me that I added a lot more emotion to the role than he’d expected me to—that in my first speech about all the hardships I’d suffered as a Klan member, I grounded the character so much that you actually feel for the guy, rather than just hearing a speech that was actually intended to be funny and sort of facetious.

Because I was so focused and trying so hard to prove myself, I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep over those two weeks, and I actually fell asleep when we were shooting these scenes of me lying down in jail. But I’d just wake up and keep going. One of the amazing realizations I had while doing that movie was that I was facile again—meaning that if I thought a scene should go a certain way and it started to go another way, I’d be able to transition with ease. I was very rigid with my acting when I was using because I just wanted to get through the scenes, and I used to have this attitude when acting of “If it’s a square peg, I’m going to fit it in this round hole—I’ll make it work, goddamn it.”

When I could afford to, I hired a sober companion—this Nazi-type guy with long hair who would say things like “You’ve got to do what I tell you to do—I’m not here to play.” He wasn’t a lot of fun but he was still a very nice man. And people started to get less worried about hiring me. I’d have a physical before a shoot and have my blood taken, which would show I was clean. You can fake a lot of things but you can’t fake blood.

I knew that the long-term plan was to work as much as possible but that I’d have to start small. I also knew that the end goal was to get full-time custody of my kids and then be able to give them whatever they needed to succeed in life and send them to college. But at this point I still just owed money.

While I couldn’t believe people were willing to give me another chance, at the same time I know that America loves to watch people rise and fall and rise again. For some reason, it’s built into our culture and DNA to enjoy seeing people from the highest heights fall the greatest distances and then watch those very same people dig themselves out of the mire and re-ascend to that hallowed place. I think that unconsciously people are jealous of success, so the fall is somewhat satisfying. But then I think they like to see the rise again because it sort of affirms for them that anything’s possible—and in turn makes them feel better about their own struggles.