by Tom Sizemore
AT THIS POINT in time, I was making a lot of new friends—mostly actors who seemed to have exciting lives.
One night, not long after I’d been cast in the movie Heart and Souls, with Robert Downey Jr., Robert invited me to a party. It got pretty late and a group of us—Robert and five or six girls—ended up in the private music room of his apartment; there was a guitar and piano and a few other instruments. I remember that Robert took out a plastic bag filled with coke and put a whole bunch of it onto this gold plate he had. He was dividing it into lines and I was just watching; the whole thing made me really nervous—especially when everyone started doing the lines. Still, I wanted to be in that room, and everyone else was doing it, and I felt all this pressure—it was all in my head, of course, because I’m sure I could have not done it and no one would have even noticed. But I wanted to be like they were, fabulous or whatever it was in my head that I thought they were. And really, I had no idea at that point that I’d ever end up being an addict. At that point, I never thought I drank alcoholically. The girls went first with the coke and then Robert did it; he passed the straw to me and I thought, “Well, since he did it, then I’m going to.”
I’d watched everyone really closely, so it wasn’t hard to act like I was familiar with the process. So I just did it: I snorted a line. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then all of a sudden I felt this incredible rush. It wasn’t like a landslide or a tidal wave—instead it was a slow build. Then, undeniably, I felt invigorated and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It felt like Christmas, my birthday, and losing my virginity all at once: everything that was good in my head went off at the same time. I probably should have known right then how much trouble drugs would cause me. I know a lot of people who try coke and say, “Oh it hurts, it burns, I can’t sleep.” My body’s response was the complete opposite of that. I thought, “Wow, this is the greatest thing there is.” I remember squeezing my hands together and just getting really quiet as I exhaled. I didn’t want anyone to observe me; I just wanted to luxuriate in how I felt.
And then, suddenly, I started to talk—more than I ever had before. I don’t even remember what I was saying. But within five minutes, I had done my second line and also pulled Robert aside and said, “Where do you get this stuff?” I was trying to act like I knew what I was talking about, even though I’d literally never been around cocaine before in my life—I think I even said something ridiculous like “Hey, it’s pretty bomb dope,” thinking that made me sound like some sort of a cocaine veteran. He later told me, when I explained that it had been my first time, that I did a very good job of fooling him.
I ended up staying the night. The next afternoon, he gave me the name and number of the dealer. The guy’s name was Gil; I ended up calling him Guilt because that’s what I would feel as the years went on and I kept buying coke from him. Robert said to me at the time, “I’m going to give you his number but don’t call him until I call you and tell you I’ve heard back from him—that’s the protocol with a drug dealer that doesn’t know you.” But I couldn’t wait.
Within two weeks of doing cocaine, I was a daily cocaine user. It wasn’t a sexual thing at first: initially it just left me with a really good feeling, a euphoric kind of confidence. And gradually and then suddenly—like most things in life—my cocaine use evolved into a sexual thing. I’d say after a month, I used it as an aphrodisiac. In the end, all the drugs I ended up doing—except for heroin—I used as aphrodisiacs.
In the back of my head I knew that getting hooked on cocaine wasn’t a good idea, but the attitude about drugs was different then, and besides, it felt liberating. I was becoming an actor—and even, in some ways, a star—and this seemed to go with it. I’d always had excessive appetites.
Another thing that thrilled me back then was that I was suddenly mingling with the literary community. I’d always been a big reader, and now I was hanging around with these people. Willem Dafoe and his wife were plugged into that whole world. When I read this book called Monkeys, by Susan Minot, it was so beautiful and the author looked so pretty from the picture on it that when Willem told me she was coming to a fund-raiser for his theater, the Wooster Group, I asked if I could come, too. I talked to her for a few minutes that night and stammered the whole time. Willem jokes about it to this day. “You handled it really well with Susan,” he’ll say. “She thinks you have a learning disability.”
I also knew Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Downey introduced us at a restaurant in New York’s Noho neighborhood, but I’d actually waited on Jay when I was working for Great Performances. Bret was really the wizard of the whole group, but he was so fucked-up you could never talk to him. Even if I hadn’t seen him in a year, he’d walk right up to me and ask, “Tom, do you have any more speed?” or “Hi, Tom, I’m out of black.” I’d ask, “What’s black?” And he’d say, “Heroin.” He acted like we’d been doing drugs together forever, and I’d just met him. It was hard to do drugs with Bret because he took all of them: he would steal dope from you when he himself already had dope and a million dollars. It was a trip. I was in a bathroom with him once when I had a bindle of coke, and when I turned around, it was gone. He was the only person there, so I asked him, “Where the fuck’s my coke?” And he said, “You’re tripping, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he wouldn’t give it back! I hounded him for over an hour and he just said, “Tom, you’ve lost your mind. You’re seeing things and making things up that aren’t true. You might want to cut back on the coke.”
I was mostly in L.A. at that point, and though Edie and I had broken up, we were still very good friends. That December—the Christmas season of 1992—I went back to New York before going to visit my family in Detroit. When I got to New York, I went to a party with Willem, Edie, and her new boyfriend, Peter Greene—whom she’d met on a movie they did together called Laws of Gravity—at Julian Schnabel’s. I’d become friendly with Schnabel when I lived in New York in the late 1980s.
Like I said, I was doing a lot of cocaine then, and even though Edie didn’t do it, Peter did. He and I had never met before but we became fast friends that night—cocaine has a way of doing that. As the night went on, though, I kept saying to Peter, “We have to get some booze because I don’t have any pills or anything to come down with.” It was getting toward 4 A.M., when the liquor stores would close, but he kept saying, “Don’t worry, I’ve got something,” and I had no idea what it was he had. I said, “Motherfucker, I’m worried about it,” because at that point I had started to have paranoid episodes when I was crashing on coke, so I always needed a lot of booze to take the edge off. Edie, Peter, and I finally got in a cab but when the cabbie dropped us off on Perry and Hudson, it was 4:04 A.M. and the liquor store was closed. I threw a major fit but again Peter told me I had nothing to worry about. We went over to Edie’s place, which was on Eleventh and Hudson Streets, just four blocks from my apartment, and that’s when Peter took me into the bathroom.
He asked me, “Have you ever done heroin before?” I said no but told him that I’d been curious about it. Still, I explained, I didn’t want to shoot it. He said that was fine—I could just snort it—and he gave me some China white, a very pure form of heroin. Within a minute of doing it, I knew that it was the best high I’d ever experienced in my life. The coke high was completely obliterated—it was a distant memory. This was every bit of the euphoria I got from cocaine, multiplied by about a million, with absolutely no paranoia, along with this very calm, beautiful feeling that everything was simply perfect. I just lay back on the futon, feeling like I was in heaven for a long time. Eventually I fell asleep and the next afternoon, when we were all pulling ourselves out of bed, I knew that what I’d experienced the night before was something I needed to experience again, as soon as possible, so I asked Peter where he got heroin. He took me down to Alphabet City and explained the process. You walked up to the dealers on the corner of First Street and Avenue A and said, “Hey, what’s up?” One
of them would ask, “Uptown or downtown?” Uptown was coke and crack; downtown was heroin. It worked. We walked up to them, I said, “Downtown,” and the guy took me into a brownstone and sold me heroin.
But it was hard to buy a lot in those days; the dealers just didn’t have a lot on them. Peter had to take me to three different spots so that I could get two hundred dollars’ worth. And I needed at least that much because I was pretty much a full-blown heroin addict from the beginning.
After a week of doing heroin in New York, I went home to Detroit and kicked at my dad’s. It wasn’t a horrible withdrawal or anything, since I’d just started doing it, but I’d been doing coke for two and a half months before that, so it wasn’t exactly easy, either. I was actually uncomfortable enough to call up this girl that I’d started seeing in L.A. and ask her to come and bring me some coke. She got on a plane that night with four grams of coke stored in a condom in her pussy. She’d never done anything like that before, and I was very grateful. And let’s just say that I made a very miraculous recovery from what my mom believed was a bad case of the flu.
My dad, though, knew what was up. (Even though my parents weren’t together, my dad was over there a lot.) At one point during that trip I got up in the morning, having not slept at all because I’d been up all night getting high. I was trying to act like it was a normal morning and had been a normal night, that I’d slept the whole time, and he said, “You’re certainly going to a lot of trouble to convince someone that you slept. I’m not dumb, Thomas.” I asked him what he meant and he walked to my bedroom, where the bed had, of course, not been slept in. He got in it and messed it up and said, “You forgot that beat.”
When I got back to L.A. after Christmas, things started to get weird. On the one hand, it felt like I was on this magic carpet ride—that I was young and my life was really happening and this was how I was supposed to feel—but then, very quickly, drugs consumed me, and I’d be locked in my house doing them.
Whenever I’d do coke, if there were people around I’d have to excuse myself and immediately go lock myself in a bathroom in my house once I was high. I’d turn the shower on and act like I was taking a shower for two days. I’m not joking. I’d literally lock myself in there and write a note that would say, “Please leave me alone,” thinking that was a really good idea. And for about twenty minutes, I’d think, “I’m so clever—I’m locked in here,” but then I’d be scratching and thirsting and losing my mind and thinking zombies were coming out of the walls. People think cocaine makes you the life of the party, and I guess it does at first, but very quickly it made me so paranoid and panicked that I really couldn’t talk to people, out of fear of how much they were judging me. So I’d create situations where I could be alone and then I’d end up overwhelmed with loneliness and the desire for company. It was the ultimate catch-22, and there was no solution. I truly don’t know how people do cocaine.
With heroin, it was completely different. The high didn’t make me paranoid at all. I became a very high-functioning addict, which I actually don’t think is as rare as some might think. A lot of drunks and drug addicts do some of their best work while under the influence. That was true even for a heroin addict like Kurt Cobain. The way I started to look at it was this: if I could work sixteen hours a day on a movie set and be really spot-on with my work, then I could do whatever I wanted. Drugs hadn’t begun to interfere with how I looked or how I behaved or my work so I didn’t see it as a problem. Later, when I realized that I had to do heroin or else I’d get sick, I knew that I had a big problem that I was going to have to deal with, and I was dreading doing that.
Still, in many ways drugs didn’t agree with me right from the very beginning, and I was already starting to cancel appointments. I might have been highly functioning, but I was also moving things around and just doing unprofessional things I’d never done before. When I first started acting professionally, if I was told I had to be at an airport at seven thirty in the morning—like I was with Born on the Fourth of July and Lock Up—that’s what I did. I didn’t call my agent and say, “Call these motherfuckers up and tell them I’m not going to the airport until three thirty this afternoon; I don’t give a fuck what they’ve got to do or if they have to get me a stork to bring me back.” But that was my on-drugs behavior. I’d be partying all night and wouldn’t have packed. My place would be a disaster, too, because it had probably been an epic blowout. So I’d try to make all the travel arrangements work around that.
Back then I was getting my drugs from a variety of dealers, but one night, at a big party in the hills, I found the best one of all: Bob Forrest, a guy who’d been the lead singer in the band Thelonious Monster but was now mostly selling drugs. He didn’t call himself a drug dealer—he considered himself someone who connected the people who wanted drugs with the drug dealers, but really, what’s the difference? He’d been a big musician and a crazy one, too—a guy who would shoot drugs onstage and was best friends with Anthony Kiedis and Johnny Depp. There was a whole scene that Bob was a part of: John Cusack and Christian Slater and River Phoenix and Leonardo DiCaprio were all a part of it. Bob used to say that musicians always hated actors because actors got paid so much more to do so much less, but that this was a bizarre time when musicians and certain actors were all hanging out and appreciating each other. You’d see Robert Downey Jr. hanging around with Scott Weiland and Bob and Anthony with Johnny Depp.
That first night I met Bob, I had run into Downey and asked him for some coke. He said, “Sizemore, I’m so tired of giving you drugs.” I said, “Robert, you make ten million dollars a movie,” and he said something crazy because when he was high, he was nuts. I think he said, “Size it up, size it down, get your own, you fucking clown.” That pissed me off, so I blew a gram of coke out of the packet he had in his hand.
Then I went downstairs and found the girl throwing the party and asked her if she knew anyone I could buy coke from. She pointed to the corner of the room and said, “Yeah, see that guy with the red hair?” I saw she was pointing at Bob so I said, “That’s the guy from Thelonious Monster. He sells drugs?” And she said, “He doesn’t just sell drugs; he is drugs.”
So I walked over to him and asked him if I could get some dope and he said, “Dude, not on the phone, and not here!” He was wearing that fucking hat he always wears, so I knocked it off his head, stepped on it, and said, “Dude! Hatless, on the phone, and here!” He just started to walk away without his hat so I grabbed him by the arm and said, “Don’t you want your hat?” He actually said, “Unhand me.” I said, “What are you, in Gone with the Wind?” Then one of his cronies stepped forward—it might have been John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers—and I “unhanded” him.
He wasn’t really pissed-off—he was just really high. Bob was always really high in those days. He would wake up and smoke four-dollar rocks of crack before he’d even pissed. Anyway, I apologized, told him I wanted to buy in bulk, and asked him to meet me at Duke’s Coffee Shop the next day at three thirty with $2,500 worth of coke. He said, “Done.”
From there, he became my regular dealer and friend. And I think I was allowed into his circle—actually, he told me I was allowed into his circle—because of my appetite for destruction and my talent. This circle wasn’t about fame. Keanu Reeves wasn’t a part of it. Tom Cruise wasn’t there, either. It was a group of people who all sort of felt like rock stars even if they weren’t rock stars—people who liked to party and could handle their shit. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were in it. It was a group of people who weren’t going to snitch on each other. In 1992 and 1993, the whole scene really took place between six or eight houses and a handful of bars, including the Viper Room and Small’s K.O., which was on Melrose and Gower and later became Forty Deuce. People wouldn’t even really go to Small’s—well, you’d go to the bar to see who was there but then you’d end up at this room across the street, doing drugs all night.
Bob would get heroin and coke and drop it off for you at your
house. He was a fan of mine, and I was a fan of his, but mostly we were both just fans of drugs. He told me that he and Anthony had this thing where they could look into someone’s eyes and immediately know if they were a junkie just like you and you could trust them for life. I think I was a part of that.
I didn’t have a lot of perspective on my life then so I never sat back and said, “Hey, I’m a part of this crowd of hot young actors and musicians.” I basically just took it for granted that I deserved to be there. I had this weird belief in myself. I didn’t think anyone I met was a better actor than I was. I felt like I belonged. Later, when I met Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, that felt like a big deal. But I didn’t give a shit about actors my age. It was cool to be with those people but I just felt it was where I was supposed to be. And I didn’t think of what we were doing as particularly dangerous, really. When River died—and later, when Kurt Cobain died—I was shocked and it broke my heart, but it didn’t stop me from doing what I was doing.
Still, I didn’t hang out with anyone all that much. I was never the guy that hung out. I’d pop into places that were hip and cool, usually just to see if I could meet a girl maybe, but I didn’t really spend a lot of time with other guys much at all. I was not ubiquitous on the scene, like some other actors. I liked acting, I liked reading, I liked movies. And I always loved the company of girls. Really, I’m pretty much the same guy today, just without the drugs.
