I wake up as if from a weighted sleep at the bottom of a murky pond. The engine in my brain won’t turn over and my joints feel stiff. The clock radio reveals four horrifying numbers: 11:20. Which can’t be right; I’m due at work by nine, ten at the very latest. And I know my alarm went off at 7:00 AM because music is blaring from the radio. My unseated heart is now banging to R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” blaring from a random rap station chosen solely for its decibel level. I have a very important casting session this morning. I can’t have slept through it, can I? It seems that the answer to that question would be: Yes I can.
I’m allowed to arrive late for work on the occasional day. I’m a vice president and Head of Casting at Carsey/Werner/Mandabach, possibly the most successful independent TV production company in existence, having blessed our living rooms with shows like Roseanne, The Cosby Show, Cybill, and 3rd Rock from the Sun. Tom Werner, Marcy Carsey, and Caryn Mandabach like my taste and respect my opinion in general. Just last season, in an eleventh-hour frantic phone call, I’d convinced my friend and colleague, Jeff Marrone, to jump through logistical flaming hoops to get his then-unknown client, an actor/model named Ashton Kutcher, to come read for a role in a new pilot called That 70’s Show. Ashton had just finished testing for a surfing pilot with Bo Derek—heaven only knows why that Emmy magnet never got picked up—and was about to jump on a plane home. “It’s single-camera, it’s Bo Derek, and my client will get to run topless on the beach toward the camera,” Jeff told me, “We’ve got to go for that one.” My predecessor had dismissed Ashton as merely an “underwear model,” but I knew Marcy would love him: a good old-fashioned boy-next-door Jimmy Stewart type. He’d be perfect for a certain part. We’d read every young actor we could find for the un-castable role–there’s one in every pilot—but no one was right. We were going to the table read in three days, meaning that the show was set to begin in three days, and we still had no Kelso, a crucial lead. “Get him to us,” I begged Jeff. “And get him to us in first position. You’ve trusted me before. This show’s going to be a huge hit.”
When Ashton came in, we were all startled by his beauty, and the second he started reading, it was a mutual love fest. Marcy called Gail Berman, president of Fox, and told her, “Trust me. We found our Kelso.” Gail hired Ashton on the spot without a final read for the network, something I’d never seen happen in fifteen years of casting. The show became a hit, a very palpable hit. Of course, the success of the show didn’t rest solely on one actor; casting directors Marc Hirshfeld and Debi Grossman had assembled a stellar cast. But Ashton became the show’s heartthrob, and I got my fifteen minutes.
The big problem is that it’s been an entire year since that fifteen minutes, an entire year that I’ve been resting on my Ashton Kutcher laurels, and today we’re having the final casting callbacks for the spin-off, That 80’s Show. My lateness, or total absence more accurately, from the final callbacks is unthinkable. A lot people can miss a casting session, even an important one. But it looks really bad when the Head of Casting does.
But lateness isn’t really my biggest concern. Hell, I’ve barely even shown up for work in the past few months. No, my biggest concern—my only concern—is getting more Vicodin, because I’m an opiate addict. If I can’t get more immediately, I’ll enter full-blown withdrawal.
I already feel little tiny coal miners wearing little tiny helmets, scraping, scraping, scraping their little tiny razor-sharp pick axes against the insides of my bones over and over again. The pain comes from the very center of my bones, the bites and pricks of Caliban’s evil spirits hissing me into madness—tortured from within. (Yes, that’s right: a Sarah Lawrence English major, Theater minor and an opiate addict!) Unmoored by panic and pain, I’m a dope-sick hummingbird hovering over my own lifeless self. And I know it’s just a matter of minutes before the real fun begins: the vomiting and diarrhea on top of the intolerable needling by the coal miners. Though saying the needling is intolerable is like saying that Hitler preferred blondes.
I’ve tried everything to put the coal miners to sleep, including visualizing them dying and melting away. Which never works. They stay alive and the canaries in the mines keep singing. Nothing, and by that I do mean nothing, takes away the pain of opiate withdrawal . . . except one thing: more of that which made me sick in the first place . . . Vicodin. Or Lorcet. Or Oxycontin. Or any other rose by any other name. Understand: I don’t need to get high (though if I do, I won’t complain). I just need to maintain. I just need to function well enough to get to work. I have to be able to carry out my duties as the filter between the “Gods of the Theater” and the members of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Which means I’ve got to use every four hours to stay out of withdrawal, and my four hours is already up. Which leaves me with only three options if I’m going to get to the final callbacks of That 80’s Show.
Option Number 1: Get more Vicodin (or something like it.) Now that’s a tough one for a couple of reasons. First of all, I devoured my last four pills hours ago—the ones I’d promised, really and truly, I meant it, not to take until morning. And I have no way of getting more. I’ve exhausted every doctor from Eureka to San Diego, and I have many, many doctors. I have doctors for my back; my migraines; an aching foot broken two years earlier; a wrist wracked with end-stage tendonitis; and of course that vague all-over pain which is very real. I’ve also exhausted every dentist, root canal man, and gum surgeon within a five-hour drive. I’ve had seven teeth pulled needlessly, on separate occasions, in order to get that one prescription--24 Vicodin per tooth—the entire bottle usually swallowed in one fell swoop the second I unpack the cotton from under my newly hollowed model’s cheekbone. I’m now well known as a drug-seeker at every ER and urgent care within a 300-mile radius. I’m no doubt the poster child for manipulation the residents teach the interns to watch out for.
I do my best to bob and weave around the system, trying not to repeat visits to doctors, hospitals, within too short a time period. Last Christmas day alone I had to go to three different ERs before doubling back home to open presents, then hit the road again before and after my two Christmas dinners to visit two more ERs to score more. I’m very careful about when and how often I use my insurance. Whereas keeping track of everything else in my life--paying bills, returning calls, scheduling oil changes--has become impossible. I’ve committed a veritable Dewey Decimal System’s worth of pharmacies and doctor visits to memory. Yes, it’s a lot to keep track of, but my tolerance has increased so much—by four hundred-fold, which is about average for an opiate addict—and I require drugs so frequently, that soon I’ll have to expand my drug-seeking horizons beyond my 500-hundred-mile radius. Then I’ll be circumnavigating the globe in an attempt to find a sympathetic—read naïve—medical ear poised above a ready prescription pad.
To be continued . . .
Powerful writing! I’m anxious to read the next post!
Love this, Cara!!