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

by Tom Sizemore

  I had serious doubts by then that I would ever have an acting career again—not to mention ever get clean. I was destroyed, and I could have easily died or killed somebody while driving or been arrested again and gone back to prison for seven years. There were so many disasters that were imminent. The list of things that would have happened if I continued to use was monumental. I was definitely at the point where it was either die or go brain dead from drugs, get institutionalized, get arrested again, kill myself, or become a street person and disappear into the mist. I was out of options. So one night, I started crying and said to Monroe, “I’m going to die from this or go brain dead.” And I wrote down the names Dr. Drew Pinsky, Bob Forrest, and Las Encinas Hospital. I said to her, “Get one of them on the phone and tell them it’s a life-or-death situation.” She called Drew the next day and he said they’d come over. But I was so fucked-up that when I knew they were coming, I snuck out the back window and left. And then the same thing happened again. She called them, and I left before they got there. I ran down to Pink Dot, a delivery supermarket place that’s home base is on Sunset right near where I was staying. I’d been such a good customer for so long that the guy agreed to let me hide there in the bathroom, and when Bob came running in, asking the guy if he’d seen me, he did me a solid and said no.

  But I told the show people again that I was in for sure. And I thought I was but then I got high again and didn’t show up when I was supposed to. I guess the show had started—they were into the fifth day I think—and they had my name on the placard, but I wasn’t there. The thing was, Monroe and I were so far gone that we were almost incapable of taking care of ourselves. I suddenly realized that we hadn’t eaten in at least a day, but we were too high to figure out a way to get food. So I called the Celebrity Rehab production company and said, “Hey, I’m up here in this house and we don’t have any food.”

  Two of the producers and Bob showed up and they literally threw a John’s Pizza on the porch. We devoured it, but we were paranoid and high and didn’t feel ready to stop what we were doing, so we didn’t let them inside. The next day, it was pretty much the same situation. We were starving and didn’t have food or a way to get it, so I called the production company again and they came back and threw another pizza onto the porch. They joke that they got me to commit by luring me with pizza, and it’s not inaccurate. Drew was with them this time, so I let Drew and Bob inside, but I didn’t want them filming anything. From there, I agreed to go in.

  Of course, by the time I got there, I was having second thoughts again. But I checked in, saw Drew, and let them take blood and everything. I was so high and out of it that I kept forgetting that there was a TV show involved. When I first pulled up to go in and there were cameramen shooting what was happening, I thought they were paparazzi guys and told them to fuck off.

  Celebrity Rehab had already booked Heidi Fleiss for the season—something I found out about on the way over there—and I wasn’t sure how she was going to react to seeing me or, honestly, how I was going to react to seeing her. But she embraced me and when she did, it was like everything she put me through—and all of the horrible things we went through together—disappeared and we were only there to help each other get sober. Everyone was really nice, and I wanted to want to stay, but for reasons I can’t quite explain, I still couldn’t surrender. I told Drew and Bob that I needed to go see my kids, but I promised to come back by that night. They knew I only wanted to leave to get high, and they kept saying that if I left, I wouldn’t come back.

  Drew gave me a shot of Ativan to try to calm me down but it barely affected me and certainly didn’t derail me. So I left with friends and I guess Drew told Will, the tech on the show, to follow me and do whatever he had to do to get me to come back. Will followed me to the house on Kings Road. He told me later that I’d accidentally left three of the burners on in the house; the entire place smelled so strongly of gas that a normal person walking in would have gotten an instantaneous migraine. I hadn’t noticed a thing.

  When we got there, he gave me these two pills that I guess were 300 milligrams of Seroquel each. Seroquel is an antipsychotic but it has the side effect of causing extreme fatigue. It’s basically an instant sedative. Some people say it mimics a pot high; all I know is that at first I didn’t feel anything, and I was still so determined to do meth that I went into my bedroom and took a gun holster I had and laid it out on the bed so that Will and the rest of the crew could see it from where they were in the house. Then I went into the bathroom, which was attached to the bedroom, and called out, “Nobody better come in here,” to make them think that I actually had a gun and would shoot anyone who tried to stop me.

  I just wanted one last hurrah. But once I was in the bathroom, all the Seroquel suddenly hit me, and even though I was holding a pipe, a lighter, and meth, I was suddenly so out of it that I swear to God I couldn’t figure out how to get high. I don’t really remember what happened after that very well, but Will told me later that I wandered out of the bedroom and said, “Man, you tell that Dr. Drew that I don’t know what he gave me but he sure knows what he’s doing.”

  I was pretty compliant at that point, so they were able to take me back to the unit and check me in. But I still hadn’t surrendered entirely to the situation, and I asked Monroe to come and visit me and bring me drugs. When she showed up, though, the nurse wouldn’t let her in unless she took a drug test, and she didn’t want to so she couldn’t see me. So she took the meth she had brought me and stashed it in the garbage can of one of the bathrooms. Naturally, they have cameras all over the place, so one of the nurses saw her do it and pulled it right out. But by then I had just passed out. I slept the sleep of someone who had been on a ten-year run and I didn’t get up for a few days. And when I finally did, I wandered out to the back patio and saw that there were cigarettes and food and people I knew and liked and I figured I might as well stay.

  CHAPTER 8

  COMING TO

  I DID CELEBRITY REHAB, honestly, for the money.

  The truth is that I’d disappointed myself so often that I simply didn’t think sobriety was possible for someone like me. I was acting like I was sure that everything was going to work out, but I didn’t believe it. I only behaved that way for my family and close friends because I didn’t want them to worry any more than they already had, but I actually had serious doubts I’d ever get any semblance of a real life back. Ironically, if I’d actually thought I’d ever have a career again, I would never have done Celebrity Rehab, because I thought of it as something for also-rans and has-beens.

  And yet despite the humiliation of even being on that show in the kind of shape I was in—despite many humiliating things—I was actually able to get clean.

  In my first few days of being there, I was so disconsolate and hopeless and physically drained that I could only sleep. Bob told me later that he thought I was avoiding life and hiding in bed the first few days I was there, and maybe there’s an element of truth in that, but I was mostly just emotionally and physically exhausted. My spirit felt like a dusty road. It had taken a lot of work to get that fucked-up. And once I started to get any kind of foothold in getting things repaired, seeing what I’d done with my life was almost too much to bear. I was heartbroken by my life—by how lost and untethered I was. I had no real agent anymore to connect me to my old life—which I considered my real life or at least the life I wanted. I’d become a pariah. I knew that people were looking at me and saying, “What a shame.” I fell so far down that people either feared me or thought I was pathetic. As Dennis Rodman told me on the show, I’d gone from Hollywood to Hollyweird.

  Clearly, the drugs had stopped working for me. For at least nine months before I got clean, I’d go to bed saying, “I’m not doing this stuff tomorrow, it doesn’t work,” but then wake up and do them. I’d sit in the bathroom and do two hundred dollars’ worth of speed and heroin and leave the bathroom thinking, “I don’t feel any better. I don’t feel sick, but I don’t fe
el any better.” I’d have terrible stomach indigestion and be sweating and awake, not dope-sick exactly, and still wanting to reach that place drugs are supposed to let you reach, but I couldn’t. When you’re in that place—when you’re too destroyed to continue to live with drugs but too terrified to really begin to accept the idea of living without them—death starts to seem like a welcome possibility. And when you’re wishing that the drugs would kill you but they’re not—well, I can’t think of a worse place to be.

  In retrospect, the people that I had working as my handlers were not acting in my best interest—not even close. I get the fact that, in my incapacitated state, I was a walking target; I vaguely recall even being pushed to sign legal documents without any idea of what I was signing. It’s unbelievable—I somehow ended up with only about $50,000 for both Celebrity Rehab and Sober House out of the $250,000 I was paid. And I had to pay taxes on the full amount. I still haven’t had the energy to go after these people who took advantage of me and whom I trusted, although maybe I will someday.

  While I was aware of the fact that I was on a show, I was going through terrible withdrawal almost the entire time and didn’t really wake up to everything that was happening until the show was over and I was on Sober House. I barely noticed the cameras on Celebrity Rehab. But this time, unlike all the other times I’d been in rehab, I really, really wanted sobriety. If Drew had told me that in order to achieve it, I’d have to stand on my head for five years, I would have stood on my head for five years.

  Later, when I watched the show, I saw so many things that I didn’t remember. Plus, I had no idea how bad I looked. Like many drug addicts, I was very skinny, but I thought back then that I looked good skinny. Instead, I just looked ill. And there was so much sadness in my eyes. When I watched some of my first couple of private sessions with Drew, I thought, “The guy sitting with Drew looks like the saddest guy who ever lived.” It made me cry to look at myself. Watching it, I had another period of grieving, but I was also grateful to have that footage as evidence, because I have the propensity to forget how bad things were.

  Being in rehab and shooting the show with Heidi was complicated, obviously. She was very sweet and welcoming at first. She hugged me and made me food and rubbed my hair and basically acted like she loved me. I think she was really shocked when she found out how low my drug addiction had taken me. In one of our group sessions, Bob said something about how I was a “complicated case” and Heidi snapped, “What’s complicated? He’s a drug addict.” And Bob said that while that was indeed the case, in the face of circumstances that would have gotten most anyone else to stop—mainly prison and homelessness—I kept on going. She looked completely shocked and said to me, “You’re homeless? When I left you, you were in a two-million-dollar house and making two hundred thousand dollars a week!” I nodded and I could see, despite her tough-as-nails exterior, how much that affected her.

  But I think the fact that I had Monroe in my life and coming to see me made Heidi crazy. It also made me a little crazy—but in a different way. During one of Monroe’s visits, just when I was starting to get into the idea of getting sober, I was suddenly overwhelmed by my desire to get high. Drew used to say that he could see me smell the joy of doing drugs—he called it the “siren of the drug”—just by seeing Monroe. That day, I started sweating like crazy and itching, almost as if being around her and remembering what it was like to get high with her actually made me high. It suddenly felt like I had no choice but to surrender to my cravings. So I told Drew I was leaving and asked Monroe to take me home. It wasn’t until I got to the car that I realized—or really, remembered—what I’d be giving up if I left. I saw very clearly that I might not make it back if I got in that car. So I walked back into the unit and sat by the pool, shaking and trembling and realizing that I had just been seconds away from giving up on this new chance at life, so I had to be very sick.

  Another thing that drove Heidi crazy was the relationship I had with Kari Ann Peniche, a former beauty queen who’d come onto the show after I did and who was, honestly, being difficult. But she was just a kid, and I always defended her. Because she also happened to be a very attractive kid, that made Heidi jealous. But I went out of my way to try to be appropriate with Kari Ann. One day she took off her shirt and brought out this body paint and asked me and Mike Starr to paint a bikini on her. Mike went for it and, as a red-blooded male, I wanted to jump right in as well, but I know trouble when it’s lying in front of me naked.

  Drew had told me that coming off meth was particularly horrific. Meth is apparently the only drug that can impair you mentally for good. With all the other drugs—crack or heroin, even—after two or three years, everything is back intact: your dopamine, your serotonin, and your short-term memory. But with meth, it’s tougher. Irritability and social difficulties are common permanent effects—and honestly, I’d already had enough issues with both of those things without drugs. Chronic meth abusers can struggle with violent urges, insomnia, and actual psychosis like paranoia and mood disturbances for the rest of their lives.

  Still, I started to get glimpses of what life could be like when I was in there. One day, we all went to Two Bunch Palms, a resort hotel in Desert Hot Springs, and I was just sitting there in the shade on this beautiful day when I realized that for the first time in a very long time, I felt content. Just normal. I turned to one of the show producers and said, “My God, is this what it’s like to be a regular person? It must be nice.” Everyone laughed—but I meant it.

  While I was primarily convinced that I’d ruined my life, part of me didn’t believe it, and that’s the part of me that got me there. And I needed to hear Drew say, “Tom, you haven’t ruined your life—you need to trust me on this.” I needed to hear that every day from him; otherwise, I just felt like, “Fuck it.” But to hear Drew’s reassuring voice say, “Tom, you’ll work again, you’ll be happy again, and you’ll be healthy again,” meant everything. And every day, he’d take the time to say it.

  I still need to hear it, by the way. I’ll call him up now and say, “Drew, one, two, three, go!” He knows what to say. I really enjoy my relationship with Drew now. You really can’t appreciate him until you’re sober; when you’re high, he just seems like this really good-looking space monkey or something—like he’s been sent down from another planet. Did you know I’ve never even seen that man sweat, even when it was about 175,000 degrees in that hospital and he was in a suit and tie? Dennis Rodman would be sweating in a tank top and Drew would be cool as could be.

  Drew and Bob saved my life. Before Celebrity Rehab, I just didn’t care. I felt so crummy. The withdrawal from that drug physically wasn’t that painful—it was the mental and psychological stuff. When I could see more clearly and had some more clarity about what had gone on in the previous six years of my life, I would get so depressed that I would just go, “I don’t want to care about my life, because I’ve ruined it.” I had to work to get back to the point where I would once again care. I cared about my children, but I was in such a depressed state that I thought I’d ruined all of the opportunities I could have given them. Bob would say, “You can’t do this for them—you have to do this for you.” It was really hard for me to do it for myself, because part of me didn’t much like me anymore.

  It makes me angry whenever I hear anyone say that they think what Drew was doing with Celebrity Rehab was exploitative. All he was ever trying to do was educate people about how addiction is a disease, and he knew that the most effective way to do that would be to use celebrities. I don’t even think he made much money from the show. He also helped Monroe get sober—he literally paid for her rehab himself—and now she’s going to college. She and I are still friends, but we couldn’t be together once we were sober because each of us was too resentful toward the other for letting us get so fucked-up. Bob would say that he wasn’t sure if Monroe was an addict—that anyone can abuse drugs, not just addicts—but he thought it was a good idea for us to be apart from each other. />
  I felt, in many ways, like I was cracking wide open on Celebrity Rehab. On the night when they played Mindy McCready’s song and showed the slide show of all of us when we were younger, I started crying, and pretty soon that turned into me sobbing uncontrollably. Of course, I wasn’t the only one; everyone was crying at a certain point, even the cameramen. But I was definitely crying the hardest. The combination of that song and the new feelings that being in rehab and being sober had stirred up, along with seeing photos of all of us looking so young and full of life before the drugs had gotten to us, made me unbearably sad. But it also made me grateful in a strange way, too.

  Because we had all bonded so much, I was completely shocked at the graduation ceremony when Heidi suddenly busted out with the statement that I could turn any woman gay. I had just told her that I knew she was a loving person and that she should come home—meaning back to L.A.—since she’d been living for a few years out in Nevada with a bunch of birds. For her to respond in that way stung. It was obvious that she was only saying it to make me feel bad—there would be no other reason for someone to say something that cruel—and it surprised everyone else as much as it did me. We all just sat there for a minute afterward going, “Wait a minute; did that really just happen?” But Bob told me to just ignore it, and I did.

  Celebrity Rehab is shot in only three weeks, but for me it was even shorter because I didn’t come in until they were on day nine, and I slept for the first few days. I was, essentially, still kicking when it was over, so I chose to pay to go live in the NASH House, which is the sober-living facility on the Las Encinas grounds, for nine days before moving on to Sober House, the reality show that followed the recent alumni from Celebrity Rehab as they tried to adjust to sober life. At that point, my head was still a dirt road. And I was afraid that if I didn’t stay at NASH—if I went home instead before Sober House—I’d just get high.