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

by Tom Sizemore

  I worked for two weeks and then, three and a half weeks later, I had to go back to shoot just one more scene. Now, during the two weeks that I’d been on the movie before, I’d stayed at the Four Points Sheraton in Bakersfield. I’d been relatively quiet during that time because I was working, but one of my using buddies who was working as my assistant on the movie was not. I got him a room in the same hotel on a different floor. I had met a girl up there and, unbeknownst to me, he had gotten friendly with her and made this arrangement that he would sell dope to her and her friends. So he was having his wife FedEx drugs to him there at the hotel, and he was selling it to these people, which means there were a lot of people coming and going at all hours. I didn’t know about any of this, but I guess the hotel got tired of what was going on, and since his room was in my name, they banned me from the hotel. But we didn’t know any of that yet.

  My friend drove me to Bakersfield the day I had that one scene, and the plan was for me to just go to the set, do my one scene, and come right back. But he kept saying we should check back into the hotel and stay the night. I had no idea that it was so he could have a place to sell a bunch of dope to the people he’d met there. When we got to Bakersfield, he pulled up at the hotel. I asked him what he was doing and he told me that he had an outstanding bill there that he had to take care of—that the hotel had charged him for a blanket when we’d stayed there the month before and he needed to pay for it. I told him I’d wait in the car.

  So he walked into the hotel and said he needed a room under the name Tom Sizemore. The guy at the front desk said, “There’s no room here for him.” My friend was high and pissed. He snapped, “Yes there is—check your fucking records!” And the guy responded, “I don’t need to check my records. I’m the one that banned him from this hotel.” My friend still wasn’t getting it, and told the guy to go get his boss. This gentleman at the front desk had a harelip so my friend added, “You know that harelip you have? You’re about to get another one if you don’t go get him now.” The guy excused himself, and my friend thought that his threats had scared the guy into going to get his boss. So my friend, who was on parole, stood there for eighteen full minutes—with a pipe, enough meth to get high with, and Klonopin pills in his pocket—while I was outside in the car, asleep. I’d been reading the paper and had fallen asleep with the USA Today sports page on my chest. What my friend didn’t know is that what he’d said to the guy counted as a terrorist threat, and so the guy had called the cops.

  The cops came, searched my friend, found his pipe, and handcuffed him. I didn’t have long to go before my probation was up, and I would have walked away from all my legal troubles—I was telling myself, in fact, that I was only partying so much because I was celebrating how close I was to freedom. But for reasons I still can’t explain but that my former friend may know, somehow the cops decided to come outside and search the car. The cops came out, and I woke up to a bunch of them standing there pointing guns at me, with one of them saying, “Show me your hands.”

  They searched me and they searched the car and when they found the meth, they asked me whose it was. I said, “Not mine.” He and I were both arrested and taken to jail in Bakersfield in separate cars. I bailed out and went to stay with a woman who was working as my agent at the time.

  When I went to court on May 8, people showed up for me. My mother had seen Martin Sheen on TV talking about how horrible it was that the California’s Drug Court focused on punishment rather than recovery from addiction and she called up his agent to ask him to come to court with me. He spoke at length with my mother on the phone, and then not only took his seat in court, right there next to my brother Paul, but also spoke to the press afterward, saying that he didn’t think prison was appropriate for someone in the grips of drug and alcohol abuse.

  Of course, in the end, his kindness didn’t matter. On May 22, I was charged with five felonies and one misdemeanor and had another hearing set for June 5. My request for bail was denied on June 6, so I was taken to L.A. County Jail. After all the close calls, it was really happening now: with only two and a half weeks to go on my probation, I had been completely busted and was going to prison. My probation officer, who had been my PO for four years, actually cried. I was put in HPPC, or “high-powered protective custody”—where you go if you’re famous. There you’re kept separate all the time.

  I stayed in jail until June 26, when I went back to court, and that’s when I was sentenced to sixteen months in prison for probation violation. Sixteen motherfucking months. The next day brought the only bit of good news during that entire period: my sentence was cut in half because of the time I’d already spent behind bars and at rehabs. But I couldn’t believe it: I’d survived the Fleiss ordeal but was going to prison anyway because of meth.

  Because there was another actor in Chino State Prison at the time—Lane Garrison, who was on the TV show Prison Break and was convicted of vehicular manslaughter for killing two kids in a drunk-driving accident—I was moved from there to Delano State Prison in Kern County. Inmates want to either kill or extort actors who are in prison—there’s no HPPC there—and I guess they just didn’t think it was a good idea to have both of us.

  I was transferred to Delano on August 2. My experiences in both places were horrific but the Kern County facility was especially run-down; it was a horrendous, awful, filthy place. I have to say, prison was even worse than I’d feared it would be and I feared it was going to be pretty bad. I’d honestly rather be dead than go back there for a week.

  I was in solitary confinement initially. That’s the California penal system’s version of protective custody. It’s called 1750, and it’s where O. J. Simpson and Robert Downey were. But their version of protective custody was to put me in the hole. Usually the hole is for people who have misbehaved—either killed somebody or been caught with narcotics—but that’s where I went.

  When I was out of solitary, this is what it was like: I’d wake up on a bed that was made out of round wires, where’d I’d been sleeping on a shitty mattress that was from Goodwill in probably the 1900s. The intercom noise that blared at six in the morning was the loudest, most jarring sound you could possibly imagine, so every morning my goal was to wake up before that: getting up was bad enough without it. So I’d get out of bed and wait for my cell door to open, at which point I’d walk down to the chow hall with the other guys.

  The time you ate depended on the section of the prison you were in: first cell block A went, then B, then C. They stacked it like that because it cut down on the number of fights that broke out. You’re heavily guarded the whole time you’re eating. Breakfast would be a lot of potatoes and scrambled eggs and these really unpleasant pancakes, and then you’d pick up your lunch in a bag for later: peanut butter and jelly and some old fruit. And you’d go back to chow for dinner.

  There’s really no way to describe what being in prison is like to someone who hasn’t lived it. All you’re thinking about all the time is how you can avoid getting hurt. And you try to make sense of the fact that this, for the moment, is your home, and yet you’re surrounded by barbed wire. I would sit there and think, “Man, I was just a couple of mistakes away from glory.” Because I felt like I was close to glory when I was starring in major motion pictures. And let me tell you, when you’re in prison, the word glory doesn’t enter your mind—it isn’t even a part of your vocabulary anymore.

  To get through the days, I would try to reenact all of the plays I’d done in college, graduate school, and New York and also recite dialogue from my favorite film roles. I initially just wanted to make sure my memory was still intact after all the drug abuse. But after a while, I just did it to pass the time. Later, I wrote to my mom and asked her to send me books; I remember that I asked for The Possessed by Dostoevsky, a collection of John Cheever short stories, and a James Patterson book; my taste has always spanned fairly wide.

  But it didn’t matter how many plays I reenacted or books I read; I really lost it when I was in
prison. My nervous system shut down to the point that if I had to spell my name, I was literally spelling it backward. And the summer of 2007 was the hottest summer I could remember so you’d better believe it was fucking hot in prison. I started to really fall apart and every second was extended torture.

  The guys I was in there with were monsters, but so were the guards. Eventually I met some people who weren’t as bad as the others—guys like me, who were addicts just in there for possession. But a high ratio of the people in there were extremely mentally ill. Some had been there for thirty years. And just being around people like that made you want to throw up.

  When I went to the yard the first time, I took about four steps before somebody said, “Give me a piece of that Hollywood ass; I’m gonna fuck it until it gives me money.” I had to fight him off. That’s when I learned the way things worked there: the white guys were in a gang called the peckerwoods, unless they were Aryan Brotherhood, in which case their gang was called AB. There was also the Mexican Mafia, the Norteños the Sureños, the Bulldogs, the Crips, the Bloods, the CCI, and a few other groups.

  The peckerwoods came to my cell later and said, “Hey, motherfucker, shave your head; you’re with us now. You’re going to do what we say or we’re going to kill you.” You don’t have any choice but to pick a gang in prison. You need a gang to protect you from the prisoners and the guards. Frankly, the guards were worse than the inmates. I saw guards betting on fights and letting inmates fight each other to the death. And I had a couple of close calls with getting stabbed and they couldn’t have cared less.

  People have nothing to do in prison. There are no girls there and there’s literally nothing to do but fight. That’s what most of those guys have done their whole lives, and they’re angrier than fucking hell and they’re in a gang and they’re doing life and they’ve got nothing to lose and they don’t care about a goddamn thing. That’s the mentality.

  One day, one of the old-timers told me, “Look, Sizemore, you’re going to get out of here; everyone knows you’re leaving real soon. So if you’re not careful, someone’s going to kill or frame you because no one wants anyone going home.” Because of that, in my last forty-odd days I just stayed in my cell. I didn’t talk once for seventeen days. I didn’t even shower. It upsets me to think about prison because probably about 60 percent of the people in there are innocent, and it’s the most horrible place on earth.

  I worried that prison would change me in a way that it would be impossible to come back from. I was already worrying that I had gone too far—in terms of legal trouble and drugs—before prison. But in prison I felt I had probably altered myself in not just some physiological way but also some fundamental emotional way. I felt, essentially, an entire loss of innocence. Most people don’t lose their innocence all at once, but I did. I learned about a kind of loneliness I’d never experienced before. People came to visit me—my little brother Paul would come with his girlfriend and bring me Whoppers and cigarettes and other things I couldn’t get, and Jinele would bring the boys. But it was almost harder when people came. One time, one of my boys saw my shackles and asked, “Why do you have those chains on you?” It was all so heartbreaking.

  I was released on December 16, 2007. I had no idea what kind of life—if any—I’d have in store for me. And when I first got out, I could barely talk. I felt like I’d never been on planet Earth before. I’d only been gone nine months but it was so overwhelming that it was like all my years of life before had been erased. I didn’t know how to go into 7-Eleven to buy a pack of cigarettes anymore. I was never a tough guy and never did I realize that more than when I was in prison and then got out. I’m a guy who, when it comes down to it, is afraid of the dark.

  When I was first released, I wanted to talk about what I’d been through but I just couldn’t. I was so ashamed. People were worried about me because I couldn’t talk about it. But I was so fucking scared that I was going to end up going back. They make you think that when you leave—they say, “You’ll come back, motherfucker, see you in a minute.” Inmates yell that at you for weeks when they know you’re leaving. I thought my personality had been forever destroyed by my experience, and in all honesty, I think some of it really was. I’d always been a curious person and I’d always been an outgoing person when I was comfortable. And the fact is, my curiosity and other aspects of my personality were quelled, if not killed, by my time away. I still haven’t given up hoping that they’ll come back, though.

  WHILE I WAS away, in October 2007, VH1 had started airing Shooting Sizemore, the show that Tijuana Entertainment had made out of the footage I’d sold them, and suddenly I was dealing with the aftermath of that. I was horrified by the end result. I’d only taped what was happening so that it could be used as a sort of cautionary tale—to show people what meth can do to you.

  I showed myself smoking speed on camera as a warning to children, but the way they used it made it look as if I were glorifying it. In what I gave them, I’d talk to the camera every time I smoked speed, saying things like “This stuff is ruining my life and I want you to know what I’ve accomplished in life—what kind of a person I was.” I’d talk about everything I’d done and how meth had made those accomplishments meaningless. Then I’d say, “Why on earth would you ever do this to yourself? I don’t know why I have, and the most important thing I can tell you is if you’re not doing it, don’t start, because you’re just going to have to stop, and I can’t.” That’s a powerful message, but the company wasn’t interested in a powerful message. They didn’t play the footage of me saying, “I’m not a hero, I’m a drug addict. I picked dope over family, friends, and career.” They didn’t show any of that. My thinking had been that if I could warn people about meth by showing what it had done to me, something positive could actually come out of my addiction. But just about the only good thing I can say about the show is that it opened the door for Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

  I couldn’t really watch Shooting Sizemore—I’d only watch little bits—but my mom would call me and say, “Those people are motherfuckers, Tommy,” so I knew it was bad. And life wasn’t all that great in general, since all I was doing was meeting up with my probation officer and getting tested. I managed to stay sober by enrolling in Matrix, an outpatient recovery program out of UCLA, and I drove out to Bakersfield for each drug test. Like I said, I was terrified of ending up back in prison again.

  I have to say that my probation officer was actually a wonderful woman named Tabitha Raber; it would have been so much worse for me had she not been such a nice person. Don’t get me wrong—she was tough. If you fucked up, she’d jail you. But Mrs. Raber cut me some breaks.

  You have to go in for your progress report every quarter—just like in rehab. You go in there, and if anything happened, your PO writes it down. Even if you test dirty, they can arrest you, but they tend not to. And amazingly, I started using again. When I tested dirty, they ended up putting me back in treatment twice, both for ninety days. That was most of 2008 for me: using, testing, rehab.

  I MET A girl named Monroe at the Seventh Veil, a strip club on Sunset. I saw her dancing and thought she had a beautiful body. It took me a little while to convince her to come home with me—about four visits—but when I convinced her, I really convinced her because she actually just moved into the apartment I’d been able to rent with the Shooting Sizemore money.

  Monroe was a very kind person who was born into a socioeconomic background that was just horrendously impoverished and devoid of any kind of hope, in the poorest parts of Oakland. Her chances of doing anything with her life were very small.

  We did some dangerous things together. Once, when we wanted drugs and didn’t have any money, she introduced me to a gang member who fronted us a thousand dollars’ worth of speed. I didn’t know he was a gang member, but when I didn’t call to pay him the next morning at ten, my phone rang at 10:05 and he left a message saying, “Hey, look, motherfucker, I’m coming over with a handgun and I’m going to shoot
your fucking ass.” Monroe and I left the house, and then I actually had to call my brother Aaron and borrow the money from him.

  By this point I was doing heroin with the speed and I felt like I just didn’t know how to do drugs anymore. They were beyond not working; they were destroying me. At that point, I’d met with the producers of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. I had met Drew six years before, when I’d been trying to get sober, and my old drug dealer Bob Forrest had actually stayed sober all these years and started working with him.

  I had talked to them originally about doing the first season back when I’d just gotten out of prison and was clean. Drew had predicted back then that I would relapse because I wasn’t going to meetings or doing anything to stay sober—and, of course, he was right. And then I got a call when they were putting together their second season, so I went in to meet with John Irwin and Damian Sullivan, who were the producers, at the end of 2007. At that point, it was like I had one foot in the real world and one foot in the surreal subworld I was mostly operating in. I remember I had on a nice Ralph Lauren Polo shirt but my jeans were full of holes. I had a meeting with them but I sort of thought of the show as being the last stop on the block. And, amazingly, I didn’t think I’d reached that point yet.

  But about a year and a half later, I was desperate. Monroe and I were holed up, really high, at this house, on Kings Road above Sunset Boulevard, that a producer I know keeps for friends of his who are in trouble and need somewhere to go.