By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir

by Tom Sizemore

  When I returned to L.A., I once again struggled to stay sober. One night Maeve and I went out to dinner with producer Brad Bell and his wife at Asia de Cuba, which had opened out of the pool bar at the Mondrian Hotel. I kept slipping away, saying I was going to the bathroom, but I was actually just going to the bar and ordering drinks. Because I was drunk, when I ran into a friend of mine named Michael Stone, I invited him to come over afterward. Maeve knew that Michael and I would do drugs together, and she put her foot down. She said, “If he comes over, I swear to God I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  When we got home, Michael rang the bell so Maeve—true to her word—started to dial 911. She was sitting on the couch with the phone, and I tried to kick it out of her hand but accidentally kicked her in the neck instead. I started apologizing as she hung up the phone and then Michael walked in the door. The phone started ringing, but we ignored it while Maeve told Michael and his friends that they had to leave because she didn’t want drugs in the house. Michael said he understood and that he hadn’t known that I was trying to stay clean. But the phone call we hadn’t picked up was 911 calling back, which is what they do if you call them and hang up. And if you don’t pick up, apparently they show up at your house. Suddenly six cops were at my door.

  Even though I’d been drunk, I was suddenly sober as could be. It’s like how if you’re drunk and get in a car accident, you suddenly feel completely sober. I was arrested and taken to the West Hollywood sheriff’s department. Still, I bailed out right away, and life kept moving forward.

  I’d have periods of sobriety, but chemicals just had such a hold over me. It was always the same old story: I’d get sober, have a few good weeks and go to meetings and show everybody that I was sober. And then I’d have something like a glass of wine. That would turn into three bottles of wine, which would turn into heroin. I’ve always had a very strong constitution. My friend Scott used to say that he would see me put away more liquor than he’d ever seen anyone drink, and then I’d bounce out of bed the next morning, ready to face the day. Of course, whenever I’d relapse, at first I’d always try to convince everyone I was still sober—I think some of the best acting I’ve ever done in my life, in fact, was pretending I was sober when I was high as a kite. But after a while, everyone would always catch on.

  Maeve hated all the dope street lingo and thought that it was all part of the addiction, so she’d never call anything by those words—she called balloons “tomatoes,” for example. Our whole marriage was fraught with problems because of my relationship with heroin. I kept thinking I could stay sober without going to meetings, but she thought I needed to go, so to ensure that I went, she’d go with me. But then she began to learn about codependency and realized that it wasn’t healthy for her to be doing that because it just made me rely on her to stay sober. She started going to Al-Anon and left me to go to AA meetings on my own, but I just couldn’t seem to commit to them.

  Like I said, Maeve could always tell when I’d slip up. At one point, she found out I was taking Vicodin, which I’d gotten from a Doctor Feelgood guy I’d met at the gym. She tore that guy a new asshole, but I continued to get away with taking it. I think, subconsciously, I would sometimes be purposely sloppy in trying to cover my tracks so that she’d catch me and I’d thus have to stop the cycle—at least temporarily.

  Finally, one day she said she thought I should go on methadone so that I could be weaned off opiates and wouldn’t then try to get ahold of Vicodin when I wasn’t doing heroin. I thought it would be like a regular methadone clinic—where you have to wait in line forever and people would see me there, so I told her, “I can’t go to the methadone clinic, Maeve. Heroin addiction isn’t chic.” She said, “You just don’t want to stand in line, you dick. You say the reason you can’t go is that you’re famous, but that’s not what you’re thinking about; you’re really thinking about the inconvenience of standing in line.” When she said things like that, I’d think, “This woman knows me better than I know myself.” Because it was true. I really just didn’t want to have to wait an hour in line. But she said, “I’ve handled it.” She’d called Dallas Taylor, the guy who’d led the intervention that put me in Exodus the first time, and he’d told her about a hospital in Century Park where they’d give you whatever amount of methadone you needed. The woman who ran the place was named Caroline Perry. People said she overcharged, but she had enormous success.

  The first day I went there, I lied to Caroline. I somehow got her and Maeve to do what they had to do, but then when I got Caroline alone, I said, “I lied to you, Miss Perry, because my wife was here. I’m using a lot more than I said I was in front of her.” They were going to give me 80 milligrams of methadone and I told her, “Giving me eighty milligrams is like giving me, if I was a cow, one piece of straw or blade of grass. I need a field.” So she upped it to 200 milligrams, which is the highest amount you can ever get. The way they give you methadone is they put it in Tang juice, because you can’t get high off of it when it’s diluted that much, and the sugar in the Tang makes it difficult to cook the juice down if you wanted to inject the methadone.

  I would advise anyone not to get on methadone, because it’s really difficult to get off of. It’s supposed to be curing you of heroin addiction, but you just become addicted to methadone. If you’re on a high dose, you can’t get out of bed unless you have it. You feel high on it but the high isn’t nearly as good as a heroin high. You feel some contentment and some sedation but you don’t get any of the euphoria you get from heroin—which is, of course, the best part of heroin. At first you feel stimulated, but as time goes on, you just feel sort of lethargic. I’d say being on methadone means feeling better than normal but not quite high.

  I stayed on methadone that way for two years, eventually walking down the ladder from 200 milligrams to 100 to none, but Miss Perry knew a lot of it was psychosomatic for me, so they didn’t even tell me when I was off. They just kept giving me Tang without any methadone in it. I actually drank the Tang for some seventy-one days and when I got home from shooting Big Trouble, they finally told me I was off methadone. And even when I knew the truth, I still wanted my Tang. It was bizarre. The whole thing was so mental.

  Then, on Easter of 1998, Maeve and I flew back to Detroit, since my younger brother Paul, who’d started acting by then, was starring in a play there. Maeve flew from Detroit to see her family in Chicago because she had to take her mom to get a CAT scan. And what they found out from the CAT scan was that her mom, Mary—a completely amazing woman I loved like she was my own mom—had stage-three ovarian cancer. Maeve and I were both stunned by the news, and soon after, she went back to Chicago to be with her parents for three weeks while her mom went through chemotherapy. My brother Aaron came out to stay with me—essentially, to keep an eye on me—while Maeve was in Chicago, but I had a short window of time between when Aaron was there and when Maeve was coming home, and I essentially planned a combined methadone and heroin relapse. When I got it in my head that I wanted to get high, I’d start scheming a way to make it happen: I’d figure out when I was going to be alone and how I could get ahold of as much heroin or methadone—or whatever it was—as possible. It didn’t really matter how much time I’d had sober or how much better my life had gotten since I’d been clean: when the idea got in my head, there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to stop it, and all rational thought—about what I’d be losing if I relapsed or about how much I’d disappoint people—flitted away. In a way, planning a relapse was almost a high in itself, since it took me out of the moment I was in and into a state of euphoric anticipation. And the night that Maeve returned from Chicago, her friend picked her up at the airport and then took her to a surprise girls’ dinner that she’d planned to help cheer her up about what was going on with her mom, so that left me even more time.

  Carolyn Perry had given Aaron four or five days’ supply of methadone and I had watched him like a hawk to see where he was going to hide it. Even though I hadn’t seen exac
tly what he did with it, eventually I found it. So I took the methadone, more than I should have, the morning Maeve was coming back. I took some more during the day. And when Aaron was gone, I took the heroin. Within a second, I knew I might be in trouble; it was very strong and I was gone.

  Maeve had a feeling something was wrong when she called from the restaurant and I didn’t answer the phone. She drove home immediately, and as she was coming up the canyon, she grew a bit more frantic. When she came into the house and turned on the light in the bedroom, she saw me lying there snoring, but it was a slow, weird snore that she’d never heard before. She tried to wake me up, but I wouldn’t wake up, so then she started shaking me and pushed me over. I was out. She called 911—I heard the tape later—and very calmly said, “I’m at 2761 Hutton Drive, my husband has overdosed, and I’m almost certain it’s on heroin.” The person on the other end said, “Ma’am, what does he look like? Turn him over, pound on his back, clear up his lungs, and now check for a pulse. We’ll be there any minute; they’re driving up the mountain now.” She said my pulse was really slow, and I looked gray. Maeve had never been around drugs and yet she somehow had the presence of mind to turn me over on my stomach and clear my throat.

  The ambulance got there and they threw me on a gurney. All I know is that I came to at Sherman Oaks Hospital, where the doctor took me by the chin and said, “You were dangerously close to suffering from brain damage, and you owe your wife your life so stop fucking bullshitting with us, stop fucking around, and let us fix you.” It was a terrible, terrible overdose. I was in the hospital for a while afterward. When I’d call the nurse, by the time she walked in the room I’d have forgotten what I’d wanted to ask her. They told me it was going to take some time for my short-term memory to return, and even when I got home from the hospital I was still having a lot of trouble remembering things. But I got clean right away after that. I took a little bit of methadone for a couple of weeks, and then I was done.

  They were right about my short-term memory. When I was first back home from the hospital, I’d go to the pool to go swimming and forget what I went outside for, then come back into the house. Maeve would find me crying in the front room. She’d ask, “What’s wrong?” And I’d say, “I can’t remember. Why did I do this to myself? What did I do to myself?” I had scared myself straight. I did not want to die. I was glad to be alive, but it took a good three months for my mind to return and for me to be able to even concentrate enough to read a few pages of a book.

  But I was determined this time. Maeve’s mom was still sick then, and one day Maeve said to me, “Look, my mom has a fifty-fifty shot of making it at this point, and the fact is, if she could go to a meeting that would help her cure her cancer, she’d go to twelve a day.” That really impacted me because I truly loved Maeve’s mom. I started going to meetings and became completely consumed with staying sober. I think I almost started to believe that if I stayed clean, Maeve’s mom would be okay. And her cancer did end up going into remission, which was a genuine fucking miracle—I mean, they really didn’t think she was going to make it and she pulled through; in fact, she’s still alive today. I was very close to her, and I’d have conversations with her where she’d say, “Please pull yourself together, Tom—please pull yourself together for my daughter.” I don’t think there’s any single thing that ever motivated me to stay sober more than that.

  In the midst of all this, in the summer of 2000, I left to do Pearl Harbor. I had originally met Ben Affleck back in the late 1990s at a tattoo shop, when I went up to him and told him that the speech he’d given at the Oscars for Good Will Hunting was the best speech I’d ever heard by a young person, and it was really reminiscent of a young politician. I don’t know how many people remember that speech but basically Matt Damon got up there and started giggling, and Ben just took the mic and started thanking Harvey Weinstein and Robin Williams in this very confident and smooth way. I actually told him that he reminded me of John F. Kennedy Jr. We became friends from there and he taught me to play poker—although, I have to admit, not very well.

  Ben was going through some personal trouble in the making of Pearl Harbor and the producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, asked me to go talk to him. There was an enormous amount of pressure on Ben for that movie. Josh Hartnett couldn’t carry it—it was one of his first leading roles. Kate Beckinsale couldn’t carry it. The job was resting squarely on Ben’s shoulders, and I think director Michael Bay made that fairly clear. Ben looked like he was in danger of cracking under the pressure, and I went and said to him, “Look, man, you can’t fuck up and throw everything you have away. You have a chance to have the brass ring and if you fuck up, you’ll regret it.” I don’t know how much of an impact my speech had on him but he did end up getting his shit together.

  Right after that, I left to do Red Planet—a futuristic movie with Val Kilmer about a team of American astronauts on the first manned trip to Mars—in Jordan and Australia. It was a brutal shoot. It was hot as hell and the script was sort of being rewritten as we went. Now, Val always had a reputation for being hard to work with—he supposedly burned a camera operator’s face on The Island of Dr. Moreau—but we’d gotten along well on Heat. But this time, it was a whole different story.

  Basically, the movie came along quickly and I needed to lose a little bit of weight because I was still carrying around what I’d gained for Witness to the Mob. So I got it written into my contract that production would pay for my elliptical machine to be sent out to where we were shooting. We started in Jordan and my elliptical was there but Val never saw it. When the movie moved to Australia, he finally saw this elliptical machine in my room and said, “What the fuck is that?”

  I was surprised—we’d been friends ever since Heat, and he was one of the main reasons I’d signed on to the movie. But he’d been difficult on this movie in general. We were about six weeks into production at this point, and he’d started making it a habit of not coming out of his trailer if he didn’t like a particular scene. One day he didn’t come out for half a day—not until the scene that was being shot was rewritten until he was written out of it, which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. He would keep us waiting an average of three or four hours on days when he’d have the director, Antony Hoffman, in his trailer reworking the script. At one point I said to Antony, “Stop going to his trailer to rework the script.” And he said, “I can’t—he’s the lead in my movie.” I responded, “No, he’s not—he’s the lead in your demolition.”

  That day, with the elliptical machine, I just said to Val, “What do you mean? You know what it is.”

  He responded, “I know what it is but what’s it doing here?”

  His attitude was starting to piss me off, so I just sort of taunted him with “Well, it’s an inanimate object so I don’t think it talks but why don’t I ask it?” Then I walked up to the elliptical and I said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

  He completely snapped. “Fuck you,” he said, and he threw a lighter at me. I was in shock. And then he started to say incredibly mean things—he called me names and said, “I’m making ten million on this; you’re only making two.” It may sound silly but he really hurt my feelings. I’ve always felt some shame about the fact that I came from a poor family, and someone like Val—who had always been a part of the elite and had been a revered actor since he went to Juilliard—was the kind of person I always felt the most inferior around. He knew that and took this opportunity to rub it all in my face. So for him to bring that up, in that tone and manner, just made me snap. And when I snap, I react with a real fight-or-flight instinct. At that moment, fight was winning, so I picked up the nearest thing to me, which happened to be a fifty-pound weight, and threw it at him. This was, of course, wrong. I regret it and the only thing I can say in my defense is that I wasn’t trying to hit him with it; I was just trying to fight back.

  He stormed off and I immediately went to his hotel room and knocked on his door, but he wouldn’t answer it. I kept
banging on the door, but he wouldn’t let me in and that’s when I really got pissed. I screamed, “Okay, I’m now your enemy and you don’t want me as your enemy—trust me!”

  In retrospect, the situation was bound to get problematic, and if anyone had thought out some of the arrangements we made ahead of time, they would have known that. For instance, Vera Mitchell was Val’s personal makeup artist. She had worked on Gandhi and A Passage to India and Heat, and was widely considered the best in the business. When they were originally working out everything for Red Planet, they asked Val if he minded if Vera did my makeup as well. He said he didn’t but then, once we were there and it was about 100,000 degrees and everything was tense because he wasn’t coming out of his trailer and we were all on edge, he clearly did mind. At one point, I asked Vera to come over to touch me up and Val said, “No, Vera, you come here!” And he turned to me and said, “Stop saying her name!”

  But when we were shooting, we would both try to be professional and do our scenes. That is, until we moved to our last location, the Fox lot in Sydney. There were sandstorms and it was hot as hell, and by the last week we were there, he was refusing to come out of his trailer at all. Now, Australia had been a penal colony, so our local crew was made up of some tough guys who just didn’t know what to do with all this dramatic, crazy-actor bullshit. And it was a first-time director on the movie, who was clearly in over his head. So they asked me, of all people, to go to Val’s trailer and ask him to please come out.