Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (11 page)

The word that comes to mind when I think of Robert, who plays bass, is
vintage
, and not just because of his love for vintage things—amazing old shoes and clothes, and beautiful pieces in his home. But Robert looks as if you got into a time machine and landed in the fifties, and he was on a set, ready to shoot his scene in an old black-and-white movie.

Eric Kretz doesn’t take center stage, but with impeccable timing (a very good thing for a drummer), he chimes in with something funny just when you’re about to make the mistake of forgetting he’s there. Scott and I think he’s Owen Wilson’s doppelgänger.

From Hamburg, the tour went to Frankfurt, then Munich, and after that, Scott and I were supposed to go on to Milan together—not only was it a stop on the STP tour, I had work scheduled there, and it’s where my ticket home was waiting for me. But the STP show had been canceled due to weather. And Scott wasn’t going back to Milan with me. I had to return by myself, he said, and I had to do it right now.

It turned out that Eric’s wife, Shari, was on her way to meet up with the guys. And she was a friend of Jannina’s. With whom, I finally realized, Scott was still very much involved. And now I was (literally) being tossed off the bus. It makes me shudder today to remember, but I begged. I wept and sobbed and shouted and begged him; I went to my knees, crying, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me.” But Scott was adamant. It was as though something had hit a switch in him. I had to go.

The tour manager drove me to the train station in Munich; I sobbed all the way through the Alps, whose beauty was wasted on me. Once back in Milan, I crashed completely. I couldn’t meet any of my obligations, I didn’t show up at any bookings, and finally I rearranged my flight schedule and flew home without telling anybody. I landed in Los Angeles totally broke, leaving behind me in Milan and London angry modeling professionals. I wanted the big romance, I got the big romance, and now the big romance was a big mess. And so, as usual, was I.

Scott’s phone calls
followed me home. She had been with him since the beginning, he said; often, she had financially supported them both. She never lost faith in him. He loved her; he loved me differently. How could he leave her now, just as what they’d both worked for was about to come to fruition? Couldn’t I please be patient and wait to see how it played out?

Every one of these phone calls just made me feel more foolish. More stupid. I’d traipsed all over Europe after him, and during our last hours
together, I was on my knees begging him not to leave. I would’ve done anything to erase those memories from my brain; they were so painful, even shameful. I didn’t know why I was expected to be understanding. I had a life, damn it. I had my own tiny cottage in Hollywood, just off Melrose, an even tinier studio in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, a good career, and family and friends who loved me. It should’ve been enough to sustain me until I either got over this damn man or figured out what was going on inside me that kept me feeling overwhelmed and stupid. So I went back to work. When I wasn’t working, Ivana and Kristen kept me busy, and we’d added a fourth Musketeer to our shenanigans, Charlize Theron.

Charlize had been at Bordeaux at the same time I was. She was from South Africa (she and Ivana were a constant reminder to me that there was a big world out there that didn’t necessarily revolve around Los Angeles), and from the beginning, she had a grown-up work ethic. Even in a crowd of crazy young people who were as competitive about having a good time as they were about getting work, Charlize never lost her way—she’d trained to be a dancer when she was a girl, and that fierce discipline stuck. She had serious goals back when I was still figuring out how to get across town, and she always booked more modeling work than any of the rest of us did.

It was my eighteenth birthday
, and my friend Tony Hickox’s brother James was directing a movie called
Children of the Corn 3: Urban Harvest
. I had been on a few of James’s sets with Tony when he asked me to come visit this one. I gathered up Ivana and Charlize, and off we all went.

Tony and James were shooting a couple of scenes that had a handful of people our age in them, and they asked us if we’d like to be in them. While the others sprinted to hair and makeup, I looked for some scenery to hide behind. Watching my friends so excited and focused, it was obvious that this was what they were born to do. I was a complete wreck just being part of a crowd (or, as I recently discovered on the credits list, “Young Woman 3”).

Some time later, Tony tried to convince me to give acting another try. “It gets easier with practice,” he promised. “How bad could it be?” He was shooting a cable movie called
Full Eclipse
and asked if I would play a young bride in a wedding scene with actor Mario Van Peebles (who with very good reason had been chosen as one of
People
magazine’s fifty most beautiful people a couple of years before—nothing intimidating there…).

I was picked up from the makeup trailer in a golf cart, and on the way to the set I began to feel the familiar light-headedness; I was actually going to have to speak. The scene was supposed to be our exchange of vows in front of a crowd of guests. I only had a few lines, and most of them were short and easy to remember. Nevertheless, they were nowhere inside my head. I started, stopped, broke into a sweat, and began to sway a little. I could not get the words out of my mouth. Finally, Tony gave up. “Okay, Mary, how about this—no lines at all, you just stand there and look like a nervous bride.” Now that I could do. Clearly, videos and commercials were more my speed—anything where I didn’t have to talk.

I was flying back
and forth between Los Angeles and New York for work on a regular basis, living out of a suitcase and sometimes not
sure where I was when I woke up. One weekend in L.A., Charlize and Ivana planned to go off to Magic Mountain for the day, but I had a bad case of the blues and didn’t go with them. I didn’t want to be cheerful or go play; it was all I could do to get dressed. I’d spend the afternoon at Charlize’s and wait for the girls to come back.

Someone had given me two communion-wafer-sized ecstasy tablets—MDMA, a special kind of amphetamine. I’d heard this drug made you feel better than perfect. I wasn’t looking for perfect, I’d have settled for all right. I turned on the TV, smoked some pot, then washed the first X down with a beer. Then I got up and walked to the fridge. Just as I got to it, I realized the floor under my feet was moving. When I turned around, hanging on to the fridge door for dear life, the entire living room broke into a million little squares. This was far from perfect, and it didn’t come even close to all right.

Holding on to the walls, I worked my way back to the couch. I tried focusing on my breathing to relax, but with the room in checkerboard fragments all around me, it didn’t work. Then a music video came on TV—Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” video. All of the actors in it were moving in slow motion, with demented gum-showing smiles—it looked as though their faces were dissolving. A man carried one of those doomsday
THE END IS NIGH
signs. One woman’s smile haunts me to this day—her lips were ringed with a heavy layer of red lipstick, and the wider she smiled, the more her head was distorted. I doubt I’m the only one freaked out by this video, but even now, if I see it, I get a mean case of the heebie-jeebies.

Even odder, the Soundgarden video was followed by a Stone Temple Pilots video, “Big Bang Baby.” In my hallucinating craziness, I thought this was perfect—Scott will save me! I sat in front of the TV and begged for his help. Not surprisingly, I got no response. Bas
tard self-important rock star. And then the room started to tilt. With the last flicker of common sense remaining, I called Ivana’s then boyfriend (whose name was also Scott, which seemed oddly promising), hoping I wouldn’t get an answering machine. He actually answered the phone, I muttered some barely decipherable garbage, and then he heard the phone on my end hit the floor.

When he got to the house minutes later, thankfully bringing a friend with him, I was on the floor rolling around in bong water, having what looked like a seizure. All I can remember is that I couldn’t stop moving my right hand; it was flopping around next to my head like a fish out of water. The two guys picked me up and put me on the couch, and for some reason started petting me like a dog. The seizure stopped, the arm flopping stopped. I calmed down. In fact, I felt just fine.

“You know what would feel really good right now?” I burbled. “A bath.” As alarmed as Ivana’s guy had been ten minutes before, he was even more alarmed at the idea of his girlfriend coming home and finding me wet and naked in the middle of an X trip. Apparently, there are still nice boys in the world. We compromised: fully clothed, I happily sat in the bathtub for two hours, letting the water run until finally the guys dragged me out. (It’s sort of comical that the drug’s previous marketing name was Empathy.)

When Charlize and Ivana got home, they heard the whole story. They were pissed off—my using drugs while alone scared them both. Nevertheless, they made me a sweet bed on the couch, soothed me into sleep, and that was, we thought, the end of that adventure.

I was half dead the next morning when I got a call from my agency—I’d booked a one-day cosmetic shoot for twenty-five thousand dollars. This was an amazing opportunity, the most one-day
money anyone had ever offered me. My mind started racing, my hands started to shake. I could barely get a cup of coffee down. Later that day, in the parking lot at the Santa Monica Mall, I realized I was having trouble swallowing and couldn’t catch my breath. Convinced I was dying, I drove myself to the hospital, fervently praying the Oh-God-if-you-get-me-out-of-this-I’ll-never-do-it-again prayer.

I suspect I’m not the only girl in L.A. to stumble into Cedars with breathing difficulties; the reaction in the ER was as ho-hum as if I’d come in with a bee sting. At first, I wouldn’t admit to the ecstasy (high or straight, I always felt like a fool for using), but finally I confessed. The explanation: the muscles in my throat were constricting because of the drug, an allergic reaction that could’ve thrown me into anaphylactic shock. I left with a prescription for a muscle relaxer and sprinted for the hospital pharmacy.

The next day Kristen and I went to Cabo San Lucas. Sitting by the ocean in Mexico is always a nice way to pass the time. Add some Coronas and a few muscle relaxers, and you have a girl who’s considering brushing up on her Spanish and never going north again. In every picture of me that Kristen took on that trip, I look like Gumby.

God got me out of it, but I didn’t keep that promise.

Whenever I was in New York
, I spent long, wonderful hours with Anthony Kiedis. We’d head for Tower Records, where he piled me up with music I didn’t know and bands I’d never heard of. We walked through the flea markets in Chelsea on weekends and bought silly stuff, and we were always engaged in Anthony’s endless search for the perfect French toast.

One September night in 1993 we went to
Saturday Night Live
, where the host was the massive basketball star Charles Barkley and the musical guest was Nirvana, who performed “Rape Me” and “Heart-Shaped Box.” After the show, we went backstage, where I met Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain for the first time. I’d never seen eyes like Kurt’s—they were electric blue. After watching the live performance, it was hard to believe this reserved, sweet man had been the man onstage.

As Anthony and I walked through the city that autumn, somehow the subject of football cropped up and Anthony learned that I had never been to a football game. This gaping hole in my cultural history astonished him. “How can you never have been to a football game?” he said. “How can that happen in America? We have to fix that.” We would go to a Giants game, he said.

Early on the morning he was supposed to pick me up, the phone rang. Anthony’s voice, quiet and incredibly sad, was on the other end.

“We can’t go to the game today, Mary,” he said.

I admit it, I was disappointed. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“My friend died last night,” he told me, his voice getting even smaller.

The night before, River Phoenix had died of an overdose, on the sidewalk just outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles. Reportedly, a mix of speed and heroin—a combination known as a speedball—sent him into convulsions and stopped his heart. As brilliant an acting career as River was predicted to have, he was also considered to be a gifted musician and composer. Anthony’s heart was broken, and he wasn’t alone.

Every time a community suffers a loss like that (no matter if it’s
a public figure or someone known and loved in private life only), we all take the vow to learn the lesson and do better. It won’t be in vain, everybody whispers. But everybody’s usually wrong. Six months later, Kurt Cobain was dead, too.

Not long after that
, Scott came to New York; STP was making an appearance on David Letterman’s show (to support
Core
, which had already sold more than two million copies). They were also playing at the Roseland Ballroom the following night. He and Jannina had ended it, he told me over the phone. Could we please meet?

I would like to report that I was outraged, or that I told him in no uncertain terms that I never wanted to see him again, or that I said, “After that debacle in Germany, where I crawled on the floor? Are you serious?” Sadly—or happily—that’s not what happened. My heart lifted at the sound of his voice and the idea of being with him. Once again, I thought, This is it. It’s finally happening.

I didn’t go to see the band perform;
Letterman
tapes in the late afternoon, and I was still working. Instead, we met at the Royalton on West Forty-fourth Street, where Scott was staying.

The Royalton was one of the first designer/boutique hotels, and everything in it, from the doormen’s elegant black Armani suits to the pointy Philippe Starck chairs in the lobby, was unique. It was the strangest, space-age-iest hotel I’d ever seen. No flowered polyester bedspreads here, no lamps with plastic shades or towels so thin you could see through them. The beautiful bed went on forever, but the bathroom was barely larger than an airplane’s—everything in it was brushed stainless steel, there didn’t seem to be any spigots on the sink, and yet in the middle of it was a big soaking tub, room enough
for two. And that’s where Scott and I found ourselves later that night, watching
Letterman
on TV when he introduced STP to perform “Wicked Garden.” “Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves!” he said, and he rolled his eyes. It was fun to watch the band while the man I loved was right beside me in the tub.

We decided we were hungry and went downstairs to ask if we could have something like chicken. “We don’t have any chicken,” the woman said. “But we have duck.” Oh, okay, we’ll have some duck. And out came the teeniest little duck I’d ever seen. I had a moment of sympathy for that duck, and then I had a bite of it. Then Scott had a bite of it. It was one of the most decadently perfect things either of us had ever eaten. “We’ll take more of these ducks, please.”

We went shopping the next day, and Scott bought me a necklace with a tiny flower on it and a vintage red velvet dress. It was like a little girl’s dress, and I felt beloved in it. I had a photo shoot that day (again, one of those sessions where thanks to the night before, I was glowing), and afterward, I went downtown to get a tattoo. I showed the necklace to the ink artist, who put the little flower on my right foot. Not long after I got the tattoo, the necklace broke.

The Roseland Ballroom performance that night was one for the Stone Temple Pilots history book—the guys came out dressed and made up like KISS, complete with white geometric face paint and long wigs of flying black hair. The room holds more than three thousand people, and from where I was standing, it seemed like most of them went crazy. Nobody could’ve predicted that YouTube would end up being the cybermuseum for these performances, but it’s all right there.