Sex, Lies and the Dirty (20 page)

For twenty days, I’m depressed.

I stay at Scooby’s place, literally on the couch all day unless it’s to use the bathroom or get food. Most of the time I’ll text Scooby to bring me something from Jack in the Box or Carl’s Jr., and he’s too nice to tell me to fuck off and get it myself. He’s either coming home with greasy comfort food or booze. We eat in his living room, and sometimes he’ll try to bullshit with me about sports or make small talk but I’m not feeling it. His heart is in the right place, but at this point I’m a fucking wall. I’m not acting like me. I don’t feel like me—Nik Richie or otherwise. Something about that overdose in Vegas has stuck and I haven’t shaken the numb feeling. I’m defective, and even though I can technically be a sad fuck on a couch and hide from the world,
The Dirty
has to appear business as usual.

For twenty days, I blog.

Submissions come in the same as they always do, asking me if I’d fuck this or that chick. They want my opinion on some stranger’s social life based off of one photograph, and the photograph is them drinking or partying or making out with some girl that’s not their girlfriend. It’s all the stuff that I do, but I’m exempt from my own rules. I can be the double standard. I can say this chick is too fat or she needs a nose job. Nik Richie demands improvement of everyone but himself, and he’s doing this from his best friend’s couch after an almost-suicide. He can’t answer basic questions about where his life is going and who he wants to be, but he can eat a cheeseburger in his underwear and tell people they need to change. You’re the one with the problem. Not me.

For twenty days, I act like I’m fine.

Running the website helps sell it. If you can work, people assume you’re perfectly healthy and happy. That’s the beauty of what I do. I can work from anywhere without anyone having to see me. I can work from a couch and not shower for two or three days. As long as I say my little remark regarding some chick’s hopeless modeling career or whatever, people continue to think Nik Richie is fully operational. So I blog all day. Scooby brings me food, brings me the occasional bottle. Not to get drunk, but to stay calm and keep the spiders away. Sometimes I’ll put the laptop aside and stare at my phone. People call. Text. I’m trying to figure out who my friends are. Who cares or who’s just saying “hey.” It’s a string of non-personal stuff: if I can get a table for someone at a certain club or a girl who wants to hook up or it’s business-related. Everybody wants something.
Everybody has an agenda. I don’t return any calls or texts, and everybody is okay with that because they just assume I’m too busy.

So for twenty days I hide in Scooby’s apartment on his couch, not talking to anyone, essentially hiding from the world, but I’m doing just enough so everything appears normal. I’m on an island that only one other person can see, and he’s the guy bringing me food and booze and the occasional sympathetic glance. Then, close to three weeks after I set up camp in Scooby’s apartment, he brings me news. Fucking terrible news. A death sentence.

He tells me, “We have to go back to Vegas. You’re hosting again.”

Nik Richie hosting LAX nightclub at the Luxor in Las Vegas, Nevada with the sixteen hottest girls in America.

54
Refer to the 1998 comedy-drama
Pleasantville
, starring Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon.

Vegas; Lavo

I’m in Vegas again.
How many times have I been to Vegas?

Scooby says I have to be here even though I’m not feeling it. We’ve already been paid up front to host, and giving the money back now would look really shady. People will start asking what’s wrong with Nik Richie, if he’s having personal problems, and we can’t have that. Also, I believe Scooby secretly thinks that if I get back out there, back in the scene, I’ll get over whatever my issue is.

So we’re sitting at the table at Lavo with all the usual stuff happening: bottle service, house music blaring, photos firing off, people yelling, screaming for my attention, and I’ve got my hood up with my hat pulled down. Ignoring it. Hiding. Not talking to anyone. I’m being paid five figures to look bored right now. Scooby tries to get me to perk up, suggesting I have a drink or talk to a girl.

“Chill, man. Try to have fun,” he says. “It’ll be okay.”

“It’s not fun. What part of this is fun?” but it’s a stupid question.

Scooby can’t see what I’m seeing. He didn’t watch me almost die, so he won’t understand what I’m about to do.

We’re at Lavo: myself, Scooby, and twenty-five girls from ASU.

I’m drinking. More than usual. I’ve never drank so much before. I’m standing on a small ottoman-type thing, drinking, college girls are chugging to keep up while the club lights cut through the dark and hip-hop music plays. I don’t even like hip-hop music, but I’m above the crowd, drunk out of my mind and pretending like I do. Our bottle server approaches and I yell at her to bring me a bottle of Jack. An entire bottle. I want to bury myself. A blackout. Bring it now. And there’s twenty-five girls around me,
laughing, dancing, smiling. Careless. Just living in the moment—hoping that they somehow end up with me. Any one of them could be mine, but none of them love me. They don’t know me. It’s the story they’re after: the night they partied with Nik Richie, so I give them what they want and keep drinking. Keep going because I want to show them the worst.

My fingers start to unbutton my shirt, and now my bare chest is out and soaked in liquor. Girls from ASU are rubbing their palms on me, touching and groping, and then I lose my footing and fall off the box onto the floor. Sal Wise, another Vegas promoter, is asking if I’m okay. He’s yelling this over the PA as he props me back up onto the box.

Asking, “You good, man?”

I say, “Fuck you!”

“Are you okay?” he tries again.

“Sal, I know what the fuck I’m doing—I fucking run this place,” I yell. “Watch this,” and then I grab the nearest ASU girl in my vicinity—not caring what she looks like or her name or if she’s even into me. I grab one and shove my tongue into her mouth, squeezing her with liquor-soaked hands until I’ve gotten the point across. Order another bottle. Grey Goose. I pound it like it’s water. Then I order a bottle of Patrón, screaming at the help that it better have fifty flares attached to it, and the servers are looking at me like I’m not okay. After seeing me do this for two years, they can sense something’s not right. It’s not going well anymore. They start to see the cracks, the damage, but they bring me the bottle anyway and I pound half of it. Scooby finally asks me if I’m okay, and maybe I’m mad at him for showing his concern too late or I’m just
that
drunk, but I plant my hand on his face and push him. Maybe I’m hoping he punches me—hits me so goddamn hard that I go unconscious, but he doesn’t. He gives me my space, backing away as I try to give the bottle of Patrón to an ASU girl. She makes a face and refuses to drink it. I call her a cunt, take the bottle back and drink it myself. A different girl, a blonde, comes over to kiss me, and I’m too drunk to say no so I do it. My tongue slides over hers, and we’re grabbing each other under the club lights and music, and she’s clawing my chest and probably saying something about wanting to get fucked, but then I fall over again. My skull claps against the ground, but there’s too much liquor in my body for me to realize I have a slight concussion. It doesn’t even hurt. Arms are hooking under my armpits, lifting my body off the ground so I can get back onto the box. People are asking, “You all right?” and I’m like, “I’m good, I’m good, I’m good. It’s her fuckin’ fault. Get her out,” and all these ASU girls are looking at me like I’m some kind of rock star.
A god. Not someone who’s obviously falling apart right in front of them. So I take more liquor. I put so much fucking liquor into my little 140-pound body that I’m sweating it. Can’t focus. Or think. I’m incoherent as I fall off the box again, but this time there’s a glass table behind me. A corner pens its signature from my lower back down to one of my calf muscles, cutting through my jeans and underwear. Blood is seeping out of my leg and I have a concussion, but I’m back on the ottoman again, drinking, yelling at these ASU girls who are going to grow up and have careers. No one is taking me out. We’re going hard, I tell them, and then I shake the bottle of champagne and spray it on the crowd.

That’s the last thing I remember.

I wake up in a hotel room,
a bed—which I’m assuming is my bed, and everything hurts so bad I could vomit. Liquor clings to the inside of my mouth. My skin. I stink like vodka and tequila and the smallest traces of girl, although I’m waking up alone. Can’t remember the last time I woke up with just me. And there’s blood. So much blood. My leg has been bleeding all night—enough to soak through the bedding into the mattress. Everything’s fuzzy and unclear, and I think I might have tried to kill myself with alcohol. The back of my leg needs stitches and my skull feels bruised. It’s the first time I consider that I might have a legitimate problem with alcohol. I need help.

Five hours later, Scooby comes by my room.

He asks, “Dude, are you okay? You were fucking crazy last night.”

I tell him, “I honestly don’t remember.”

I just tried killing myself with pills, and then I tried it again last night with alcohol. Scooby still can’t see the problem. I’m too proud to tell him, so he’s going to keep pushing. He tells me it’s time to go again. Flip the switch. Be Nik Richie again.

“Let’s get you a Gatorade…get you back on the horse,” he’s saying. “You gotta host Tao, man. You’ve got to host the beach.”

He’s saying this, looking at me in a bed covered in my own blood, and it’s obvious this is the last thing I want to do. So he keeps pushing me.

“You can’t pull a no-show, man,” he says. “You can’t. Nik Richie has never
not
shown up to an event.”

I break. Openly.

“I can’t do it. I can’t,” I tell him. “I need to get on a flight home. I need to go home. I need to go to rehab.”