By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (28 page)

The more episodes I was on, the more Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan, the two stars of the show, started pushing Peter to make me a series regular. And though I’m told he very seriously entertained the idea, it would have basically been impossible to continue to come up with reasons to justify having a series regular who wasn’t a part of the
Five-0
team. Honestly, I was happy to be involved at all.

Apparently the joke around the K/O office is that they now have to find a role for me in everything they do. As soon as they put something into development, I guess everyone says to Heather, “But who’s Tom Sizemore going to play?”

I loved everything about the shoot. It was great to connect with Scott Caan, since I’d known his dad, James Caan, a long time—but probably the best part about it was that when they were putting together the episode where my character was getting killed off, they needed someone to play my wife. I suggested Maeve. We hadn’t been in touch in a long time but I knew she’d continued to act and had actually moved into producing shows. I was, of course, thrilled when she agreed to sign on and even more thrilled when she came to Hawaii for the shoot. While we didn’t have any scenes together, I finally got to sit down with her for the first time in a decade. I’m not going to lie; a large part of me fantasized that now that I was getting a career going again, I could win her back. But I also understood that this was, on a certain level, a fantasy. And just to be around her and have her say that she supported me and that she could see that I was in a good place meant more than I can ever express.

BECAUSE OF EVERYTHING
I’ve been through, I definitely psych myself out when it comes to work in ways I didn’t before. If you were to sit down and think about the pressure of each take—the amount of money being spent on a very large production—you wouldn’t be able to work. Most actors know all this intuitively, so they don’t focus on it. If you actually sat there and thought, “If you don’t know your lines or if you make a mistake, you could, in effect, cost somebody a hundred and twelve thousand dollars,” you’d lose your mind. But suddenly I was thinking about those things.

And honestly, the hardest part about acting, for me, is that you’re sitting there on a set for fourteen hours only to act for maybe around twenty-eight minutes. So for thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes
you’re sitting in your trailer, and when you have a mind like mine, that’s a very long time to think about a lot of bizarre shit.

But once I started to realize that things were actually going well, the more positive I felt during my downtime. I still have really bad days where I don’t even believe that what’s going on is going on. And then I have really good ones. When I watched one of my
Hawaii Five-0
episodes, I actually sat there and thought, “Wow, I look good—I look like a real movie star again. And I still know how to make bold choices.” Of course, you can’t make bold acting choices all the time but I still know how to do stuff that makes people go, “I’m willing to continue to watch this guy even if he’s talking about banal shit, like the weather.”

Still, sometimes I feel like I’ll never escape my past. In September of 2011, when a friend who was staying with me was arrested for erratic driving, the cops came to my place to get him and arrested me as well—claiming that I hadn’t finished my community service even though I’d finished it in April and had actually done extra hours. It was all because of some clerical mistake, which I told the police, but they just didn’t care. Because I had just started shooting
Hawaii Five-0
and I knew this wasn’t the kind of thing I needed at all, I pleaded with them, saying, “All you have to do is press a button and you can see the truth—I know it’s something you can do. And if you arrest me again, I might get fired from my job.” They didn’t care and I didn’t expect them to. Yet it was my first time getting arrested sober and let me tell you, the experience was very different; my fear level was markedly lower because I had nothing to hide. But then, of course, the press got ahold of the information and the headlines read
TOM SIZEMORE ARRESTED AT DRUG HOUSE.
The truth is that I was arrested at home, I was only in custody for about two hours, and when they found out that I was telling the truth, they couldn’t have gotten me out of that jail fast enough.

Then, about two months later, a girl I’d been seeing, Megan Wren, was reported missing. She lived in my building and even though I consider myself pretty savvy about these things, I didn’t know she was a heroin addict, because she was very smooth and clever about hiding it. Once I realized she had a drug problem, I tried to get Bob Forrest to come talk to her and also tried to help get her into different rehabs. She didn’t go or clean up and her father had filed a missing persons report when he hadn’t heard from her, after which somebody told him she’d been spending time with me. TMZ found out and published a story that said my girlfriend was missing and I was wanted for questioning. I hadn’t heard from her for a couple days, but I got ahold of her. She had no idea what was going on but as soon as she heard that she’d been reported missing, she walked right into a police station and the whole thing was cleared up. Still, the headline remained. A good thing came out of it, though, in that the scandal totally woke Megan up and she went to rehab.

All I can do is remain positive and healthy and consistent. My son Jagger will say to me, “Dad, are you going to stay this time? Are you going anywhere?” I feel sad that I’ve made them nervous and created this anxiety, but it makes sense. It’s a result of all those times I’d say, “I’ll be right back, I’m going to the store,” for instance, and not come back because I’d gotten high. More than anything, I don’t want to hurt these kids. They’re entirely innocent and didn’t ask for any of this bullshit.

Most of my time these days, honestly, is spent working, and when I’m not working, I’m trying to relax. My life isn’t really all that exciting. I take a bath every night. When I was growing up, we only had a bathtub, until we were able to jerry-rig a showerhead to it and make it into a shower, so I’ve somewhat always equated baths with being poor. But when I was married to Maeve, she took a lot of baths, and
I would see her in there, luxuriating with all of her salts and bubbles, and think how nice it looked. Now I do that myself.

But the focus, really, is on work. Even though I know it’s not possible, I want to make up for lost time. So I played a government operative in a Bernie Madoff movie,
Madoff: Made Off with America,
which was ironic in that I think I was just about the only actor he didn’t steal from—I didn’t have any money to steal when he was in his prime, and besides, I was a bit caught up in my own pyramid scheme with myself.

I did a movie called
An Evening with Donald Klemsk
y, where I played a blind man, and another called
El Bosc,
in Barcelona with Oscar Aibar, who’s a very big deal in Spain. He’s Pedro Almodóvar’s protégé, and his movies are a sort of amalgamation of comedy and sci-fi. I also shot a movie called
Company of Heroes
in Bulgaria with the football player Vinnie Jones. It was based on a computer strategy game and follows a group of soldiers during World War II. I made an independent movie called
Five Hour Friends,
where I played a golfing ad executive who’s fairly committed to ephemeral relationships, until he meets an outspoken attorney. And I shot a horror movie called
Slumber Party Slaughter,
which was made by the grandniece of silent movie actor Lon Chaney. I play an actor with a substance abuse problem, and while I’m not exactly sympathetic, you can see that I’m a good guy. This was definitely a case of life imitating art. The writer-director, Rebekah Chaney, actually wrote the part for me while watching me on
Celebrity Rehab
.

The work is coming and it’s coming fast—just like it did in the beginning of my career. They may not all be my dream movies but I get that I’m rebuilding what I lost and that it doesn’t all materialize perfectly and in an instant. That’s probably for the best. A slow build means that if I do eventually get everything back, I’ll be able to understand and appreciate how much it’s worth.

SOMETIMES, OF COURSE,
I miss the drugs. I miss feeling immune to the suffering of growing older. But at the same time, that’s life, man: you’re born alone, you die alone. When you’re going to go, you want to look back and say, “I did something: I traveled, I met people, I was a citizen of the world, I showed kindness, I found a vocation, I became a certain person,” and you’re not going to be able to do that if you’re on drugs. Even if you had all that before you started doing drugs, like I did, you won’t be able to keep it. You’ve got to stop. Robert Downey Jr. stopped. River Phoenix, Brad Renfro—those guys didn’t stop and they’re not here anymore. When River died, out there on Sunset and Larrabee, asking for his brother—well, it just broke my heart. It broke all of our hearts. Before that, I felt invulnerable. I was becoming a star. But I was forever changed when River died. We all were. But of course, it didn’t stop us from continuing the downward trajectory.

Now that I’ve been sober a little while, I can see my life coming full circle. I recently finished playing a wiseguy in the sequel to
Raging Bull,
and the script was written by a guy I’ve known for fifteen years, Rustam Branaman. We’d met back when I did
Devil in a Blue Dress
and had seen each other over the years, because he was friends with Downey and a few other people I also knew.

Once, when I was deeply into the meth but still had my Benedict Canyon house, Rustam and I started talking about De Niro and I doing a movie that Rustam would write and direct. I was pretty far gone at that point and one night, when I was really high, I videotaped myself working out on a Precor machine and talking to Rustam—basically giving him ideas for the meeting. Because I was high and somewhat confused, my notes and ideas were sort of about the movie and sort of about me, and then I went off for an hour or so about how he
should actually make the movie the story of my life. I called Rustam and asked him to come over, telling him I had something for him to watch. I think I made it sound like it was a ten-minute tape or something. So Rustam came by and I put the video in. He watched it for about twenty minutes and saw I was clearly gakked out of my mind. “All right, I think I get what you’re going for,” he said as he started to get up to go. But I wouldn’t let him leave. In my delusional state, I thought he had to see the entire three-hour tape so that he could see how brilliant my ideas were. He kept saying, “Tom, I’ve got to go,” but I would jump up and say, “No, it’ll be over any minute now—just watch this one part!” Then, if at any point I thought he wasn’t paying perfect attention, I’d stop the tape and quiz him on what he’d just watched. He was such a good sport about it; he’d been sober a long time and he just listened to me run my mouth and watched the tape until I got tired. Then he said, “I think maybe you should get some sleep,” and left. The next day, Jessie, who was living with me at the time, said, “I’m not sure it was such a good idea to show him that whole tape.” I thought she was crazy and told her so.

A few years later, in the summer of 2004, I was driving with Jessie down Santa Monica Boulevard toward Bundy Drive and I suddenly couldn’t find my meth pipe. I was on my way to get drug-tested because I was on probation, but I was so addicted at that point that I needed to get high and then figure out a way to pass the test. I went into this full-blown panic just as we were reaching Bundy, and then I remembered that there was some sort of a head shop around there, which would solve my two problems in one fell swoop: I could get a pipe and also buy synthetic urine so I could pass the test. So I stopped the car and started running around looking for this head shop. Finally I saw it and I went running in there, telling them that I needed a pipe and synthetic urine. They handed me the pipe and I asked to use their
bathroom so I could go smoke some meth; the guy who worked there just gave me this look that said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was standing there holding the pipe, sweating profusely because it was the height of summer, about to go smoke meth, when who should walk in but a fresh-faced-looking Rustam. He happened to have an office above the head shop because the rent was cheap.

Then, a couple years after that, I called up Downey and lied and told him that I was sober because I knew it was the only way he would see me. It was when I was really circling the bottom of the drain—when I didn’t have anywhere to live, a car, or a penny to my name. Robert and I hung out for a few minutes before he saw that I was high, and I guess he realized that he was too new at being sober to be around me in that state. So he called up Rustam and said, “Can I hand Tom off to you? Maybe you can say something that will motivate him to get sober.” So Rustam came and met us at Mulberry Street Pizza in Beverly Hills. I was too high to eat, but I knew I could get some money off Rustam, so I asked him if I could borrow twenty bucks. He gave it to me and I thanked him by excusing myself to go to the bathroom and then climbing out the bathroom window. I was paranoid from how much speed I was doing and got it in my head that maybe Rustam was some super-sober guy who would chase me down, so I started running. I ended up at a nearby gas station because I knew a guy who sold meth there; once I bought the drugs, I called up the sober-living house where I was living and essentially forced the guy who answered the phone there to come pick me up and take me to a dope house.

But it’s funny how life works. I got cast in the
Raging Bull
sequel and when I saw the script, there was Rustam’s name on it. I hadn’t seen Rustam in eight years—since I took the twenty bucks from him and snuck out the pizza parlor bathroom window. When I got to the
set for the first time, I went around asking everyone where he was. An assistant went and got him. When Rustam saw me he just looked me in the eyes, saw that they were clear, and said, “So, it’s really true—you really are sober.” Here was a guy who had all but begged me to get sober in the past, and he was looking at me and seeing that, against all odds, I had actually changed.