I could pay a surpise “visit” to a friend, which I’ve done, in between reading actors. I act like it’s normal showing up mid work day; make a modicum of pointless small-talk revolving around being in the neighborhood and having to use the bathroom; then I rifle through their medicine chests (Open houses are good for this too). Of course by leaving in the middle of casting sessions I put my career in jeopardy but I’m keeping myself alive in four-hour increments. I could lose not only my salary but the perks: the expense account; car lease; medical and dental; first-class travel; the diamond tennis bracelets from Tom and Marcy at Christmas; and my retirement package with its matching 401K. But I’ve devised a sophisticated economy should I lose my job—one where I can maintain my current lifestyle on the 18K a year I’d get on unemployment. I’ll simply abandon the Julian calendar and live a two-month year.
Option Number 2: Find a heroin dealer. I’ve never done heroin, solely because of my memory of a terrifying series of black and white photos in LIFE magazine. I was seven years old. My mother had left the magazine on her bed open to this famous Bill Epperson photo essay: a day in the life of two junkies trying to score drugs in what is now the little triangle where Columbus and Broadway split. The story would become the basis for the movie The Panic in Needle Park.
I found myself mesmerized by this bleak and depraved slice of New York in the sixties. And though I was scaring myself to death by doing so, I couldn’t stop looking at the photos. One haunts me still: a raven-haired woman wearing a gray and white striped hospital robe, her angry face contorted into a grotesque death mask. She’d gotten so sick during a heroin shortage (the panic in Needle Park) that she’d had to go into the hospital. This woman frightened me more than the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, the other emissaries of evil I lived in fear of at age seven. But for that photo, I’d be on the corner of 6th and Bonnie Brae right now scoring heroin.
Which leaves me with my third, and only, option: Find a methadone clinic. I’ve avoided this for several reasons. Of course, there’s the seediness factor. I make a fat six figures and drive an $80,000 car; aren’t those places the province of hookers and ex-cons (as though spending the morning dope-sick puking made me so much better)? Plus I’m terrified of getting on this runaway train. Once you’re on methadone, it’s famously hard to get off of. I remember hearing the warning so clearly from a woman I’d met in rehab a year ago. Gina was a heroin addict who’d then gotten hooked on the much more expensive Oxycontin after marrying a doctor. She was a beautiful Iranian woman with lots of long brown flowing hair; she wore gorgeous scarves and sandals. We met in the detox unit of an Arizona treatment facility where we’d clung to each other, both of us so sick from withdrawal we couldn’t move. We were sitting on the ground behind the detox unit under a dark Arizona sky, smoking cigarettes and talking about drugs, and pain, and the pain of not having drugs. I mentioned that I thought I should go on methadone, since I hadn’t been able to stop taking opiates, though I had tried. And tried. And tried.
Gina’s eyes hardened into slits. In her Persian accent she warned, “Do not ever go on methadone, you have no idea, it is the worst withdrawal you can ever have, I mean it, the pain is unbelievable.”
“Worse than this?” We’d just spent the last three days aching, sweating, and dry heaving.
“Worse than this? Ten thousand times! You can not believe it!”
I didn’t need to ask Gina when, where, or if, she’d tried methadone. I knew within minutes of meeting her--she had the same tortured look I’d feared so as a child—that finding ways to get off drugs or maintain her habit was full-time employment for her. This was probably her eighteenth or so inpatient rehab stay. (It was only my second, though “stay” is a word that doesn’t really apply to me and rehab; I was on my way out the door of this place and had fled my previous one after toughing it out for all of half an hour.)
“But I read that Matthew Perry went on methadone,” I said to Gina.“How bad can it be?”
Gina shook her head at me. “Don’t do it! I know what I’m telling you!” The warning sent a slight chill up my spine.
Despite the fact that I believed Gina—“The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” in Prada sandals—I now go online and look for a methadone clinic in the San Fernando Valley where I live. There’s one in Van Nuys, seven miles away. I quickly shower, dress, and mustering my courage, call Caryn’s office, where the crucial casting session is taking place, and ask to speak with my assistant, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is smart and prepossessing. She’s also protecting my career.You carry only so much superiority over the person who holds your career in her hands.
“Where are you?” she whispers urgently in the hushed tone of someone speaking into a cupped hand. They keep telling me to get you on the phone.”
“What have you been telling them?”
“That you’re not picking up, what else can I say?”
“Has Marcy said anything?”
“They don’t say anything in front of me, I can just tell they’re really mad.”
“I’m on my way,” I mumble.
“When will you be here? Everyone wants to—“
“See you soon,” I say, and hang up, leaving the “Why isn’t Cara in yet?” issue for Elizabeth to handle. I owe her big time. She’s spent more than a year covering for me and my addiction. But recycling the same shopworn play list—Cara’s back is out, the pipes in her bathroom exploded, her aunt died—is taking an enormous toll on her. Just another example of the collateral damage I leave in my wake.
I run down the long hallway of my home to the click click clacking of Saffy’s little feet on the hardwood floors. Saffron Monsoon, my golden Yorkie/Lhasa mix, is my dearest friend. She seems to think she’s been bred for only two reasons: to love me and to be my sentry. Even when I’m at the depths of despair—spun out on drugs, lost, crossed, and tempest-tossed—she never leaves me. Now I almost mow her down in my mad dash. Only when I’m in my car do I remember that I’ve forgotten to put down food for her. And I won’t be home for nine or ten hours. But I don’t stop. And I don’t return the gaze of the fluffy dog staring mournfully at me out the window. I just hit the gas.
I pull out of the driveway of my Encino home—the home I’ve taken such pride in renovating--and turn down White Oak, passing the estates in my neighborhood where I feel nested and protected and everything’s familiar. I come to Ventura Boulevard, the Champs-Elysées of the San Fernando Valley, the dividing line between my privileged wooded enclave and the hollow basin of “the Flats,” where I’m heading. I turn into the Flats one block past the on-ramp for the 405 and go north on Sepulveda. The landscape turns desolate almost immediately. Having to go into the Flats—the infrequent trip to Sears or Home Depot—always depresses me. I continue down a ho-hum stretch of Sepulveda until I reach the address of the methadone clinic.
I pull into a drab and extremely seedy mini-mall. My eyes frantically search the rundown establishments for anything resembling an entrance to a methadone clinic. I can’t find it. I pass a dilapidated laundromat, a check-cashing joint, and a taquería where the sign in front reads: “Quesadilla $2.99.” I think, “Case of diarrhea $2.99.” Still making dumb jokes out of the miserable--vestiges of a life spent in rooms with comedy writers. My heart is racing and I’m sweating; I’m in full-blown withdrawal now. Nothing feels worse. And I’m no hothouse flower. I’ve endured hepatitis, myriad flus, car accidents, and surgical procedures with nary a whimper. I even got off drugs once in my salad days. Made it all the way through the excruciatingly painful detox and stayed sober for ten years. In those ten years I built the auspicious career I am now destroying.
I’m fighting back the urge to vomit when I find the number I’ve been looking for, tacky plastic numbers stuck on a dirty, flimsy door. No clinic name, just the street address. I’m surprised not to find the words, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” above the doorway as I enter.
To be continued . . .
When We Dead Awaken part two
Intense!! Good thing it’s in installments bcs I wouldn't stop reading whether it had a thousand pages today and would have a book hangover. Your writing really transports me into that time of your life. I have great empathy.
Stunning