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

by Tom Sizemore

  When I woke up the next morning and remembered what I’d done, I almost had a heart attack. I thought I was going to prison. I called Rose, the administrator at Rancho L’Abri, and she said, “Get back here right away.” So I went back. And then, three days later, I did the same thing: climbed the fence, called the driver, walked the nine miles, and went all the way home to Benedict Canyon. But this time when I called, Rose said, “If you leave again, you can’t come back and you’re going to go to prison.”

  So then I went back and stayed. I grew to like it there. Rose was very fair and a really nice lady. It was my favorite treatment center: I just liked the way it looked and I liked the instructors. It was beautiful and everyone who worked there was a recovering addict. I don’t like many treatment centers, but they were really smart people there. They were all little Bob Forrests: very eccentric, smart, fun to be with. These people were having fun, so they actually made rehab fun. Of course, it still didn’t make a difference for my recovery because I was a hope-to-die addict by then.

  I was only supposed to stay forty-five days but I actually stayed fifty-seven. But after I was released, I got high yet again. I’d learned nothing. I still had money and I was an arrogant fool. And I didn’t realize how altered my reasoning had become.

  All I had to do was go to a sober-living house for ten and a half months and I’d have been off probation and nothing else would have happened to me. Everybody who cared about me—my rehab counselor, my father, Bob Forrest—told me to leave rehab and go straight to sober living. Bob said, “If you want to get high, get high after your probation’s over.” Bob believes in harm reduction. His philosophy is let’s get the person out of trouble and then let him deal with the addiction. So I listened to all these really smart people but ignored all of them because my reasoning was so skewed by the meth and all the sex I was having. But it was really the meth way more than it was the sex. When it came down to it, I’d have preferred the drugs to the girls, hands down. I don’t like thinking of myself as someone who would choose an inanimate object over a human being, but that’s the God’s honest truth.

  The thing is, I knew I was going to get high when I was still in rehab. I’d gone online, googled “ways to beat urine tests when on probation in California,” and found out about this device called the Whizzinator, which is a fake penis that comes with dried urine, a syringe, and heater packs to keep the urine at body temperature. I ordered one and had it shipped to my house. But because the girls who were living at my house weren’t the smartest and I was afraid one of them might intercept and then lose the package, I had two more shipped there.

  Without something like a Whizzinator, beating drug tests is actually really hard. It used to be that if you didn’t get high for twelve hours, then drank enough water and took these capsules called Urine Luck for four hours before, you tested clean. But probation officers started to figure out that people were flushing drugs out of their system with water, so they made a rule that your urine wouldn’t count if it contained over a certain percentage of water.

  What you have to go through if you’re using and want to pass a test is horrific. I did it once, but I could never go through it again. For four days, I sat in a steam room all day, drinking water and not eating, and then I spent a day drinking this disgusting thing they make gelatin with. Then, the day before the test, I drank half a bottle of vinegar so I’d throw up. I then drank cranberry juice with water before taking seven aspirin. It was insane, and the whole time I was doing it, I wanted to die. Your stomach is distended from the water so you’re pissing all the time. For it to really work, you’re supposed to be able to take nine pisses an hour. Do you know how much water you have to put in your body to piss that often? And we’re talking about a body that’s already fucked-up from drugs, so it’s not working right anyway, and it’s not used to having fluids in it because most drug addicts are not drinking enough water.

  If you have enough money, you can actually inject clear piss into your bladder. It’s not healthy but it’s a quick fix and you piss it out in two hours. I didn’t do that, but I’ve heard that some guys in the NFL do.

  So I started using the Whizzinator and fake piss—synthetic urine—a lot. Now, if any probation officer or observer of a urine test were to look closely at anyone using the Whizzinator, they’d see it wasn’t real. But the rationale when you’re getting tested is that the people who are testing you look at dicks all day long so the last thing they want to do is look at another person’s dick, much less when they’re pissing. I overheard one probation officer say, “I’ve been here eighteen years; you don’t want to know how many dicks I’ve seen piss.” They all feel like that on some level. Nobody wants to look at three hundred dicks a day peeing in a cup. And let’s be honest: these are probably not the nicest dicks. We’re talking about people just out of prison who probably don’t have the best hygiene.

  Once you take your dick out, they’re going to look away if they assume you’re clean. And once I understood that beating the test was really all about acting casual so that they didn’t feel like they even had to watch me pee, I realized that how I behaved once I walked in the door was more important than anything else. If I came into the room and the prevailing wisdom was that I was not using drugs, the PO wouldn’t even look, really. I went through a long period of time where I was using drugs, but I’d stop using them as much when I had to get tested. I’d do my best to look good. I’d get a haircut and a facial, and try in general to look as much like a movie star as I could. Then I’d go in there with a Visine bottle to hold under my testicles or the Whizzinator. The PO would hand me the bottle and say, “Sizemore, what’s going on, man?” I’d say, “Not much, man,” and then he’d stand across the room while I was at the urinal because I would have convinced him, through the way I looked and the way I was behaving, that I was clean. But you can only do that in the beginning of using—when you’re out of rehab and for about nine months afterward. Eventually the drug tears you down so much that it doesn’t matter how many tanning salons you go to; you just can’t look good when you’ve lost twenty-eight pounds and there’s wear and tear on your face from being awake all the time. You can’t turn the clock back unless you go to rehab.

  My problems kept piling up while I was in this phase of using drugs and getting tested. I tested dirty in March 2004 and was refused a new trial in July. The judge just didn’t understand why, since I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar and my whole life changed, I’d go and put my hand in there again. He would say, “Approach the bench, Mr. Sizemore,” and when I did, he’d say, “What is wrong with you, what do you need? Do you want to come up here and I’ll play golf with you once a week?”

  He saw a guy with obvious good qualities—talent, good things in his life before, college-educated. He’d say, “You’re ruining your life with this drug. Don’t you know you’re doing that and that it’s going to leave me no choice but to put you in prison again?” I have to imagine that it’s impossible for someone who wasn’t as bad an addict as I was to even understand this, but I did know that I was ruining my life, and I was so far gone that I couldn’t seem to be able to do anything to stop it. Once he realized I was hopelessly addicted and not just a bad person, he became different. Initially he was just angry with me. But he took on a fatherly role after a while.

  At this point, cops were showing up at my house regularly. There were people partying and being loud and playing music, and the neighbors would call. Those cops would always try to freak me out, but I considered them Keystone Kops and called them that.

  All I could do for a long time was just try to stay positive and tell myself that things would work themselves out, but at the same time, I didn’t believe in myself. I’d wanted to stop doing drugs but hadn’t been able to so many times, and I’d made so many terrible decisions that I doubted myself. I’d never really doubted myself before. A lot of my drug taking was to obscure that, I think.

  One night in August of 2004, I had some peo
ple over and the cops showed up at my house at about six in the morning. I had asked Jessie to hide the meth I had, and she put it in a bag somewhere, but they searched the whole house, found it, and arrested me. At the time, I blamed Jessie but the truth is, it was all my fault—it was my meth. I went to court for that in October and was given thirty-six months of probation. All I had to do was be good. But I didn’t know if that was possible.

  I’VE EXPERIENCED MY fair share of dramatic phone calls in my life, but none was more dramatic than the one I got in December 2004 from Jinele McIntire, a woman I’d been with for a total of nine days and had sex with maybe four times. She told me she was pregnant. Jinele was a pretty brunette from a middle-class family in Palm Springs who went to Palm Springs High School, and that was literally about all I knew about her when we got together. I met her through Slash, the guitarist from Guns N’ Roses, whom I knew through his wife, Perla Hudson, who was an old friend of Heidi’s. It was as simple as this: one day I went to see Slash, I started talking to an attractive woman who was over there, things got amorous—and suddenly I was going to be a dad.

  She didn’t say what she wanted to do and I told her that I’d support whatever she decided, but I also let her know that I was in much bigger trouble than she might realize. This was right around the time that my business manager had told me I was broke. I’d spent over $10 million on legal fees and wasn’t raking in the dough the way I once had, but I hadn’t known that I was even close to broke. He had wanted to spare me the stress of the situation, but suddenly he was telling me that I had to sell my house or else the bank was going to foreclose on it. It was heartbreaking and, honestly, I didn’t care about money until I lost it, which makes me wish sometimes that I’d never had it at all.

  In February of 2005, I went back to court, where the judge told me he thought I was out of control. He was right. He said, “There are two ways for you to go: one is to recover and the other is to die.” Unfortunately, I didn’t feel ready to recover yet. The next month, I officially filed for bankruptcy and lost my house. I tried to face the world—I did an interview on Dateline—but it was all so upsetting that I got angry in the middle of the interview and stormed off, though I came back and apologized. In May I was ordered back to court again because I hadn’t given my probation officer my new address, then I went back to court in June and stupidly denied faking the drug tests. I missed my next hearing, and then it was back to rehab again.

  The next month, Jinele gave birth to our twin sons, Jayden and Jagger. I wanted to be able to provide for my kids, but I wasn’t exactly being offered Heat or Saving Private Ryan anymore. I did a small movie called Splinter with Edward James Olmos and another one called Shut Up and Shoot! with Daniel Baldwin and Gary Busey. Like I said, not Saving Private Ryan.

  Then, that September, I got busted faking a drug test with the Whizzinator. I had the Whizzinator sewn together between two pairs of underwear. You really couldn’t see a thing, and I’d been getting away with this forever. But the PO who was in there with me knew that I was intoxicated. I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t really hide it anymore.

  Obviously, this kind of ridiculous thing makes news. Howard Stern called me and said, “I hear your cock’s really popular in Hollywood.” I told him, “Call the DA; he’s got it now.” But all jokes aside, I was humiliated. And screwed. Which is a terrible combination.

  In October, instead of putting me in prison, they reinstated my probation. I was grateful that I wasn’t being put away, but at the same time, I didn’t think things could get much worse.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN

  ON NOVEMBER 1, 2005, I officially didn’t have anywhere to live anymore—I couldn’t even afford a small apartment—and I was still with Jessie, so we moved into a sober-living house in Whittier. Because I was so out of it, I didn’t actually understand how Prop 36 worked. If I’d understood it, I could have had the government pay for it, but I didn’t so instead my mom did.

  I was a guy who’d come from very little and risen to the top: I’d had the multimillion-dollar house, the Porsche, the restaurant I partially owned with Robert De Niro. And now I had absolutely nothing. I had about eleven dollars in my pocket. Even though I’ve never cared all that much about money, to have sunk lower than where I started out truly decimated me.

  By this point, Jessie and I were both doing a lot of meth, even though it was making us miserable—and even though we were staying in a sober-living place. I was so hooked on meth by then that I was convinced I could never get off of it. There’s a reason that meth is public enemy number one: it fucks up your judgment. I never did anything as outrageous as some other people I’ve heard about—I never thought I was talking to God or jumped off the roof of a building because I believed I was Jesus—but I felt those kinds of thoughts coming on. And of course I wouldn’t have been homeless if my judgment hadn’t been completely fucked. There’s something about meth that’s different than other drugs: doing it after a while just feels completely unnatural and wrong. The high is so intense that it makes your thoughts go to dark places and after a while you’re seeing distorted figures and shadow people and nothing but horror around you.

  We stayed in Whittier until the following May, when I was able to rent an apartment in the San Fernando Valley with the money I’d made on a couple of straight-to-video movies. But I owed a lot of people at that point, so after paying them back, I had trouble continuing to make my rent on my place in the Valley. After three months, I gave up on that and moved into a friend’s garage in Studio City.

  Jessie and I had already been videotaping a lot of stuff, and that’s when I decided to start documenting my own downfall—what ended up becoming Shooting Sizemore, a piece-of-shit reality show that aired on VH1. The whole idea, when I sold it to the production company, was that my footage was going to carry the day, but there was less than one percent of my footage in there and the only stuff they used is really ugly—just me smoking speed and carrying a fake gun around, completely out of context.

  But with the advance I made on Shooting Sizemore, I got a loft downtown and Jessie and I moved in there. I managed to put some sober days together, but then I slipped again. This was a period when I overdosed a lot. I’d be with people shooting dope and then all of a sudden, I’d fall over. They’d take me to Cedars-Sinai and push me out the door of the car. They didn’t want to call EMS because they didn’t want to get arrested, and they didn’t want to be charged with murder if I died, so they’d just take me to the ER and leave me there. I can’t say I blame them.

  The first time it happened, I had to be told that I had OD’d, but after that, whenever I’d wake up in the hospital, I’d understand the situation right away, pull the IV out of my arm, and say, “I didn’t die so I’m going home.” I’d ignore the doctors and walk outside, where I would call up the people I’d been using with and say, “What happened, where’s my fucking dope and where’s my car? One of you come over here and get me.” After about six months of this, I went into Cri-Help, a no-frills rehab in North Hollywood. I stayed at Cri-Help from the beginning of April through July, when I went to Canada to do a movie called Superstorm.

  By then, I’d met a pornographer guy who owned property out in Sylmar, which is about a half hour outside Los Angeles. Sylmar is best known as the town where Charles Manson hid Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet after killing her, in the hope that someone would find the wallet, use the credit cards, and be framed for the murder. And, well, that just about sums up how creepy a place it was. It was a place where fine dining meant Shakey’s Pizza Parlor or Casa Torres for Mexican. It’s a bunch of unpaved dirt roads and overgrown fields of tumbleweed. Olive trees that once flourished—once upon a time, before World War II, Sylmar-brand olives were sold all over the United States—now dotted dusty lanes through a landscape of deserted barns and sheds.

  After Superstorm, Jessie and I moved into one of those places. It was, ostensibly, a cabin on this guy’s property
, but I think that’s doing the word cabin a disservice. It had no electricity, running water, ventilation, or even doorknobs. It was an abandoned shithole, and the door didn’t close all the way, so dirt blew in, though I did fix it up by painting it and rigging up the electricity. Yes, my life had sunk so low that it was a big thrill when I was able to steal electricity from someone living nearby who had actually paid for it. Being homeless might have been better because at least when you’re completely homeless, the chance always exists that you can go stay with someone in a nice place.

  At this point, I was continuing to do the meth not just because I was hopelessly addicted but also so that I could block everything out as much as possible. I was as lost as I’ve ever been. The best thing I can say about that time in my life, though, is that the cops couldn’t raid me anymore because no one knew where we were. Still, the only sign of civilization was a 7-Eleven about eight miles away—that was our Statue of Liberty—and the guy who owned the property we were on filmed porn all the time, so you’d wake up in the morning and see people out on the balcony having sex.

  Before long, this pornographer guy started talking to me about doing a sex tape, and I was so desperate for fucking money—so desperate in general—that I listened to him. So one evening I had sex with six girls that he picked out for me. It was disgusting, disturbing, and shows you what methamphetamine does to your judgment. Honestly, out of all the ridiculous things I did, that’s the one I most want to take back.

  I checked back into rehab—at Las Encinas this time—and put together some more sober time. Then, in January 2007, I met with a casting director I’d known for a long time, Mary Vernieu, about doing a movie called American Son, which was shooting in Bakersfield—about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Mary asked me point blank if I was sober, and I lied to her and said yes, even though I was in the midst of a full-blown relapse. Because I was only about a month into using really heavily, the wear and tear hadn’t started in any kind of an outwardly noticeable way. But I was smoking a lot of meth every day and I swore up and down that I wasn’t. And by the time I needed to work on the movie in April, I was only in worse shape.