by Bob Forrest
“I’ll talk to him. But if he wants to do drugs, Bob, well, he should probably just do them.” It was classic Frusciante. He was the guy who stood over me once when I was in the throes of an overdose and said, “Just let it go, Bob. It’ll be all right.”
I thought a bit more about my decision to ask John to help out.
He continued. “I don’t want to preach to anybody like you and Anthony do. Look. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t like to get high anymore. But if someone wants to do them, they should. They totally should.” I was kind of surprised to hear him say that, but I also realized that John, like always, was staying true to his ideals and beliefs. He was consistent. I had to give him that, and I understood where he was coming from.
“I think he’s really sick, John. We should go talk to him.”
“Okay.”
I called Layne’s mother back. “John and I will talk to him. I don’t know how much it will help.”
Layne’s mom said she understood. “You know, Bob,” she told me, “Layne’s got an odd sense of humor. I told him that John had gangrene once. He said, ‘In his arm? That’s terrible, Mom. John’s a guitar player. He needs his hands and arms. Me? I’m just a singer. I can get by without them.’ I know he was joking, but I don’t like to hear stuff like that. Can you try to talk sense to him?”
“We’ll talk to him,” I said. I hung up the phone and wondered how much good it would do. Frusciante was probably right. You can’t preach to anyone. Sometimes, you can’t even point them in the right direction. A horse won’t drink if it doesn’t want to.
And so we went and found Layne. He didn’t look good at all. His mind still worked but he was a million miles away. He played a video game while we talked.
“Hey, Layne,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I know why you’re here,” he said as he idly fiddled with the control.
“Your mom’s worried, man. You don’t look too good.”
“I’m okay, though. Really.” I wasn’t sure what he based that on. He was adamant that he was fine. He pretended to listen. Neither John nor I could reach him. The newspapers had to have had his obituary on standby. After more fruitless talk, John and I left.
“I don’t think he’ll come out of this,” I said.
“It’s his life, man,” said John.
He was right. On April 5, 2002, Layne died from what the autopsy later indicated had been a coke and heroin cocktail. He had become so reclusive that nobody knew he was gone until April 19, when the police—along with his mother and father—found him decomposing in his condo after getting a tip that there had been no activity on his bank card for the last two weeks. On the table was a stash of cocaine and a couple of crack pipes.
Of the people I tried hardest to reach—John Frusciante, Jeff Conaway, Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, Steven Adler, and Jason Davis, the voice actor and oil company heir—two are dead, two are sober, and one still gets high. I loved them all, but love, or a reasonable facsimile, is never enough to fix an addict … even though in the absence of drugs and alcohol, an addict will search for something to fill that void. Sex is often the easiest score.
It’s why I’ve become quite in favor of what’s called gender-specific rehab—at least for the heterosexual community. Women and men in rehab almost always have some real problems in addition to their addictions. They’re what might have been called in a less-enlightened time “damaged goods.” They’ve been sexually abused or traumatized by life and usually have some form of clinical mental illness. It’s not their fault. They just happen to be people living in twenty-first-century America, and a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, as does a guy. When you put these people in a mixed-gender group, they can cause real chaos. They know how to manipulate situations and use their sexuality to their advantage. It can be tragic to watch it unfold, but there’s not much anyone can do but warn against it and hope people will be able to override their basic biological urges. Mostly, it’s a lot to ask, but you have to try to get them to see the light.
“Hey, man, you need to concentrate on yourself,” I might try to advise some poor lovelorn addict. “Get your own life straightened out. Now’s not the time to fall in love—especially with someone who, if you don’t mind my brutal honesty, is way more fucked up than you are.”
“Fuck you, Bob,” he might spit back. “You can’t tell me what to do. You don’t know how I feel. You don’t know how we feel about each other!”
“You sound like a goofy, love-struck teenager, dude.”
“Well, maybe you’re right, man,” he’ll say. But a week later you’ll see him furtively sharing a cigarette with his rehab girlfriend and you’ll know that there are some things that are stronger than any dire words of warning you might choose to use.
Redemption from the disease of addiction is entirely possible—but it has to be done alone. And yet, addicts constantly search for love and approval, and when their expectations aren’t met, they become resentful. Drugs and alcohol become their intimates. These substances may wreak havoc in users’ lives, but they’re constants. And they’re always there.
I had plenty of resentments when I started my journey. I was upset that my musical career had not followed the course I had projected. My friends Anthony, Flea, and John Frusciante had all started out like me and became some of the biggest rock stars on the planet. Why not me? What had happened? Back in the bad old days before my sobriety, I found myself at a Los Angeles drug house. It was nothing like you see in the movies. It wasn’t in a “bad” part of town. There weren’t gangsters with guns. There weren’t even the rusted carcasses of old appliances or automobiles propped up on concrete blocks in either the front or back yard. A gardening crew came once a week and kept things neat on the outside. It was just a typical, middle-class junkie pad with comfortable furniture, a carpet that could have used a good once-over with a vacuum cleaner, and a coffee table with half-crushed empty beer cans tossed about haphazardly and ashtrays that overflowed with old cigarette butts. All the mundane detritus of addiction as practiced by white folks. There was even, almost incongruously, a big-screen television set permanently tuned to MTV to entertain the stumblers who drifted in and out to take care of business. I was bundled up in an oversized coat to protect me from the nighttime chill outside even though I poured sweat from the crack cocaine I obsessively smoked in the corner of the room. Crack is the salted peanuts of the drug world. One taste demands another. And another after that.
There was a commotion at the front door. “Hey, what’s up?” said our friendly host as he ushered in a pair of new arrivals. I barely glanced up from the glass straight shooter I held to my lips and lit another rock pushed into the opposite end. I held the medicinal-tasting smoke in my lungs and blew out a huge billow of it that expanded to the low ceiling. I felt the rush hit me, a sensation of a sudden drop in pressure while the hum of a ghost train ran through my ears. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered at the intensity of it. I stared blankly at the glowing TV in front of me, unable to comprehend what this strange electronic object was for a moment. I eventually focused enough to recognize it again as this thing called “television” and see that MTV was showing the latest video from the Seattle-based band Alice in Chains. As I looked past the set, I watched as the two arrivals were ushered toward the back of the house to do a little business. I recognized them as Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley and the band’s bass player Mike Starr. I looked at them and then looked at the TV. Weird. Here they were copping drugs, and on-screen, they were miming their latest hit single. It was an odd thing to see and it struck me as somehow unfair. Everyone’s passing me by, I thought bitterly. I shoved another rock into the pipe and took another hit. Fuck it, man.
This was the same old resentment that I had felt after Thelonious Monster recorded Beautiful Mess and we went out on the road. The constant tours and endless one-night shows took a heavy toll on me, and the band was tired. We played badly, I thought, but we were still a vital
live act. We were better than Candlebox or some of our Capitol Records label mates that we would tour with. I thought their shows were the equivalent of watching water freeze. They weren’t very fond of us, either. The bands with whom we were billed generally resented us for the chaos we brought as part of our package. We were a hard act to follow. Most of them were scared to have us open for them. It got to the point where we’d just tour with bands that were friends of ours, like Soul Asylum and Hüsker Dü. Beautiful Mess didn’t spawn any American singles, but one of the songs, “Body and Soul?” caught on with European audiences and was a hit over there. While the song was in rotation on European MTV, we made a lot of appearances on the music network in Europe and here in America. But we couldn’t deliver the goods in any sort of sustainable way and we fell apart.
Deep down in my core, I felt like Thelonious Monster had more talent and charisma than most of the bands on the scene, but either we’d blow it at crucial moments or people just didn’t get us. It was frustrating to me. I hung on to those feelings for many years. It made my relationship with Anthony Kiedis difficult at times. We were friends, for sure, but I also harbored a lot of latent resentment toward him. How dare he get so much more successful than I did? We had shared that goddamn apartment at La Leyenda. It was hard for me to understand what it all meant and where it went wrong. It took me years of therapy to get over all that. I was damaged.
In 1994, I was broke and a lot of my friends weren’t. I got a publishing check for $3,500, and I went straight to a place called Bar DeLuxe to start some serious drinking. I got drunk quick and kept the bartender busy. I was with some friends and they couldn’t keep up with my pace. Fuck ’em, I thought. Doesn’t anybody know how to party anymore? I felt the hot, sharp need to use the restroom. I slid off my stool and pushed my way in its direction. I was unsteady and I bumped into a ponytailed waitress. She spilled the drinks on her tray. I stood there and swayed like a weed in a summer breeze. She wasn’t happy. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, asshole?” she spat out. I tried to throw the old Bob Forrest charm. The waitress was immune. “Who’s going to pay for these drinks?” she demanded.
It made me angry that she talked to me like that. Didn’t she know who I was? “Fuck you. I have to use the toilet,” I said, and brusquely pushed past her. I could hear her behind me: “You’re going to take care of this, jerk.”
Inside the restroom, I was alone. I locked the door and took care of business. The incident with the waitress preyed on my mind. I felt ready to explode. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw. Why hold back? I thought. I cocked my fist and hit my reflection solidly in its nose. The mirror cracked. I dully looked down at my hand and saw the bright blood start to seep through the jagged cuts in my knuckles. I somehow felt better. I threw another punch with the other hand and smiled at how the mirror now resembled some kind of road map. I ripped the towel dispenser off the wall and threw it at the cracked mirror and watched the shards of glass fall into the sink. I kicked the metal wall that protected the toilet and put a huge dent in it. I gave it another one and made the dent deeper. I could hear someone pound on the door and heard a voice call from the other side. It was one of my friends. It snapped me back to reality. I looked around at the all the damage I’d caused. Aw, fuck. I’m going to jail for this, I thought. You can knock over a waitress’s tray of drinks and, at most, you’ll get kicked out of the bar. You engage in wanton destruction of private property and somebody’s going to call the cops. I unlocked the door and my friend slipped inside. I locked it again. He took a look at the shattered glass, the dented stall, the towel dispenser that rested in the sink, and then looked at me. “Jesus Christ, Bob. What the fuck’s the matter with you?”
“I’m going to jail, man. I’m going to jail.” I stood there and stared at my shoes. I felt sick.
“Look, man. Nobody’s going to jail. We’re going to walk straight out of here, you’re going to throw a bunch of cash on the bar to settle up, and then we’re out the door and gone. Got it? You don’t talk to anyone on the way out and you don’t say anything to anyone. Understand?”
I was in no position to argue. The fight wasn’t in me anymore. “Let’s go,” I said. He opened the door and we walked straight ahead to the bar. Fast, but not too fast. I flipped a couple of hundreds on the bar and we were out the door and into the night.
So how did I get from a place like that, the destructive and out-of-control void, a place where I refused to take responsibility for my actions, to a place that, most of the time, resembles a state of calm? Treatment. But what was it about treatment that eventually worked for me? I still don’t know. It’s not like there’s one thing I can point at and say, “That! That’s the magical thing that fixed me and cured me and made everything right in my life and in the world.” It may work that way for some people, but I doubt it. The first big step for me came at Hazelden. When I was there they told me, “You can be sober.” That opened my eyes to the possibility, although I stumbled a lot of times on my journey to where I am now. Even though I had any number of relapses, I had the desire to be clean. I’d fall, but I’d get back up.
If I have one piece of advice to give, it’s this: If you really want to get sober, give up alcohol and drugs for twelve months. Stay away from them. Don’t touch them. Go to meetings, but use your strength and your will to not use or drink. There are people who will tell you that you have to put all your trust in God. Really? As soon as I said, “I don’t have control of this situation, God does,” I would have been right back in a world of hurt. Dogma is something that I’ve never found helpful. The support of a group can help, but use common sense too. Groups are just like anything else in life. There are cool people and there are not-cool people. You’ll have to figure out who’s who. And you’ll have to do that, like everything else in the process, by yourself. Nobody can save you but yourself.
If you stumble and relapse, don’t give up. If you really want to live your life without drugs or alcohol, you’ll hit those times when you give in and use. To fall into despair over it won’t help. Stop. Again. There is an astonishing failure rate when it comes to treatment. But failure’s an odd term to use with a disease like alcoholism and drug addiction. It’s like asking someone with type 1 diabetes, “Did your insulin cure you?” Of course not. Which brings up an interesting take on the success rates of treatment programs. Drew and I don’t trust the data that’s out there. We talk about it. I’ll see some stats and say, “We don’t seem to do a great job if these figures are accurate.”
“The data just depends upon how it’s measured, Bob. And it isn’t culled properly when addiction is studied. Addiction is viewed like pneumonia when it’s more like asthma. It’s a chronic illness and the end point is screwed up.”
He’s right. Drew also believes the studies are usually too short. Generally, they’re conducted over a period of months. You don’t really see studies that follow a single group of addicts over a ten-year period. Something like that might give you some insight. Another problem is that so many of the studies that are done these days involve what’s called “replacement therapy.” It’s a fancy term for giving addicts another drug to keep them off heroin. It used to be methadone. Now it’s Suboxone. It’s not really a cure for addiction.
Urine tests are unreliable too. In a clinical situation, most addicts know when they’ll be tested. They know how to manipulate that. They know how to beat the system. Urine tests are often done on the same day, week in and week out. An addict knows how long a drug stays in the body. Have a urine test on Monday? Well, from Friday night until Monday morning, don’t take drugs. Instead, drink heavily to cool yourself out. Your test will come back clean. Or you can buy clean urine from a friend to put in the specimen bottle when you’re alone in the toilet stall. It’s all part of the game in the addict lifestyle. To depend on drug addicts to give you straight facts is not a great strategy if you want to get to the truth. Worse, abstinence is not always seen as a cool or
sexy kind of treatment. It’s hard work for the patient and it involves drastic changes in the way life is lived. If anyone should be held up to the “succeed or fail” standard, it should be us, the people who run these programs. If we do anything less than attempt to give addicts who want treatment a decent shot at sober living—without replacement drugs—we’re the ones who fail.
But the main thing to remember is that addiction isn’t a bleak dead end. There’s hope. I know an awful lot of formerly helpless dope fiends who now live bright new lives of sobriety and have all the good things that come along with it. Did they stumble along the way? Sure, almost all of them. The important thing is that there’s a desire to live free from drugs. If you slip and fall on your journey to sobriety, just start over. Don’t be defeated. As they say in twelve-step meetings, “Keep coming back. It works if you work it.” And it does.
HAPPY #12 AND #35
I’m happy just to be alive …
I may have grown older, but I still enjoyed the things that made me smile when I was a kid. Here I stood under purpling skies as the sun set at the end of a cool and pleasant day in Los Angeles, just south of downtown. I was alone in the square in front of the glass-and-steel façade of the Staples Center on Chick Hearn Court. This wasn’t here when I was a kid and I tagged along at my dad’s side, amped up for a night of Lakers basketball at the Forum in Inglewood before we’d enjoy a guys’ night on the town, just the two of us, over in Chinatown for a postgame meal. At a restaurant called Hop Louie’s Golden Pagoda, heavily accented Chinese waiters in starched white shirts and heavy crimson vests delivered a steady stream of hot, steaming plates piled with shrimp fried rice, chow mein, and great, golden, greasy stacks of egg foo yung that swam in some sort of unidentifiable brown sauce. “Eat up, Bobby,” said my dad as he downed a gin and tonic in a highball glass filled with ice. There was a large aquarium along one wall, lit with a single bulb that gave the lone lionfish that swam among the plants and rocks of this artificial reef an eerie glow. “You know, Bobby, those things are poisonous,” said my dad as he pointed at the aquarium with his chopsticks.
