As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  I saw the rock star talking to a few people just outside of the Chateau Marmont’s main entrance when I snuck away from the Details party for a cigarette and a minute to myself. He wasn’t there for our event. If he had been, Kristin surely would have shoved me into a picture with him by that point. Four or five women in their mid-twenties stood a few feet to his right, smoking and laughing just loud enough to try and get his attention. Every few seconds one of them would glance over to see if he had noticed her. He hadn’t. The laughs grew louder. Still nothing. One of them asked his friend for a light. The rock star didn’t even look up. It was as if they weren’t there. Women like this—beautiful and braless—had been trying to catch his eye for decades. He didn’t need to see them. He’d seen them. If he wanted one, he knew where to look. And—I suspected as I studied the scene—one look was all it would have taken.

  It had probably been that way for twenty-five years. His band was a constant on MTV back in the early days, and they had reached icon status by the time I was in college, where a guy who lived down the hall from me once went to three nights’ worth of back-to-back sold-out shows at the Garden. I hadn’t listened to the music in ages, but if one of their power ballads came on while I was in the car, I would crank it up and—if I was alone—sing mangled lyrics at the top of my lungs. By the time I ended up in the back of the limo with him, the band hadn’t had a hit in well over a decade or even put out a new album, for that matter. But they were still touring, and their old concert T-shirts had become trendy vintage shop finds worn ironically by hot chicks with cutoff jeans and cowboy boots.

  I watched the women watch the rock star for another couple of minutes before stubbing my cigarette out in a crowded ashtray. As I turned to head back to the party inside, the rock star looked me dead in the eyes. “This guy right here?” he asked one of his friends.

  I flashed my non-smile smile, as if to say Sorry for creeping you out, and headed toward the door.

  “Dan, is that you?”

  It was Lila. I’d been so busy watching these women pretend not to notice the rock star that I failed to notice that Lila was standing right next to him. Of course Lila knew him—she’d always had a way of finding herself in the center of the action. It was her gift and what made her a great publicist.

  I met Lila shortly after I started at WWD in the early nineties when I was an associate editor covering parties for the Eye page and she was a junior fashion publicist for a showroom on Seventh Avenue. Despite being total opposites—me with my chinos and Brooks Brothers button-downs and brown bucks and Lila with her tattoos and fishnets and fedoras—we became friends. If I was assigned to cover three parties on any given night, odds were that I’d run into Lila at two of them. She was perfect for LA and moved there to start her own business repping West Coast fashion brands around the same time I came back from Paris.

  She ran over and gave me a hug. “I can’t believe you’re still smoking,” she said. “You never looked like a smoker to me.”

  Do I look like someone who does heroin? I thought to myself. ’Cause I’m about to go get some.

  “Come meet my friends,” she insisted. “Do you know [the rock star]?”

  Lila explained that the rock star was considering launching a fashion line and that we should definitely speak. She told him that I was a men’s fashion expert and that he shouldn’t do anything without first hearing what I thought. She had always been prone to hyperbole. One look at me, and this guy would have been able to tell that I was hardly a fashion maven. I was basically wearing the same thing I was wearing when I first met Lila a dozen years ago, only more expensive versions.

  “Why don’t you join us for dinner?” asked the rock star. “We’re about to sit down.”

  It wasn’t unusual for me to be introduced to celebrities who were thinking about getting into fashion. Over the years, I’d had countless conversations with singers or models or NBA All-Stars who were interested in starting brands. The rock star wanted to put together a small collection of leather accessories for men and then eventually get into clothing. These projects seldom—if ever—got off the ground. No one wanted to buy a belt from an aging rocker. They were barely buying them from aging designers. I didn’t say that, of course. Instead, I explained that I couldn’t leave my party yet and that I would come by in an hour for a drink.

  The final stragglers left the party at around eleven p.m., not long after they shut down the open bar. I was feeling pretty good, especially considering the fact that I should have started feeling signs of withdrawal already. It’s amazing, but the promise of a high was able keep the boogeyman at bay—at least for a few hours. I was going to get heroin, and even though I was sweating a bit and had a slight headache, I was holding it together nicely.

  The rock star, Lila, and two men were sitting at a table in the Chateau’s restaurant when I stopped by to say good night. The other men looked like musicians, but because this was LA, they probably weren’t. They both had arms covered in tattoos and were wearing an unnecessary amount of silver—rings on nearly every finger and heavy stacks of bracelets on each wrist. Had it not been for the fact that one of them was bald and the other had shoulder-length hair, it would have been difficult to tell them apart. I’d never been a big fan of men wearing jewelry. Obviously certain guys could pull it off—Johnny Depp, Run-DMC, the pope—but wearing an entire jewelry store was something else altogether. Ed Hardy was created for guys just like this.

  The rock star waved me over as I walked toward their table, and Lila jumped up to give me another big hug.

  “Do you want something to drink?” he asked.

  “I’d love a Diet Coke,” I said.

  “Come on, I haven’t seen you in forever . . . have a drink with me,” Lila demanded.

  “You know, I have a little headache and Diet Coke always seems do the trick,” I said.

  “I think I have some Tylenol in my bag,” she said, reaching for an overstuffed black leather purse.

  “No,” I said, putting up both of my hands as if to stop oncoming traffic. “I’m good.”

  I did have a headache, of course, but I also didn’t want to drink any alcohol, as I wasn’t sure that I should be mixing booze and heroin on my first outing. I was a cautious druggie. An oxymoron if ever there was one.

  My plan was to join them long enough to finish my soda. My stomach was turning—equal parts withdrawal and nervousness about my late-night plans. It was a perfect Southern California night—clear skies and just cool enough to keep the sweat from beading up on my upper lip and showing through my shirt. This was a plus—the perspiration could get pretty bad during the first few hours of withdrawal, and I didn’t want to sit there making small talk while sweating like Nixon.

  Most of the tables on the terrace were still full. The rock star was wearing black—jeans, a denim jacket, and a long-sleeve Henley unbuttoned down to the middle of his chest. I’m not sure why, but I was expecting him to be aloof—maybe even a little bit of a dick. He always looked so intense in the music videos. Angry, even. But he wasn’t a dick. He was charming and asked a bunch of questions about me and the magazine and men’s fashion. And he was funny. You don’t expect rock stars to be funny. He laughed a lot. He laughed the laugh of a two-pack-a-day smoker.

  “How’s your back, by the way?” asked Lila. “The last time I saw you before you moved to Paris you came to a meeting in my office and ended up lying on the floor. I felt so bad for you.”

  I’d been faking back pain for so long at this point that it was oddly refreshing to be reminded that it was once real.

  “Comes and goes,” I said. “It’s much better than it was back then, but it still hurts sometimes. Like today.”

  “You take oxy for that?” asked the rock star.

  A question only an addict would ask. I was really starting to like this guy.

  “Whatever does the trick,” I said.

  I explained that I took oxy or Vicodin or Roxicodone, but that I didn’t bring any medi
cine with me from New York, so I should probably head back to L’Ermitage and get some rest. I had a car waiting, I told them, and I didn’t want to keep the driver too long.

  “Call him and let him go,” said the rock star. “I’ll give you a ride to your hotel. I have something in the car that might take care of that back pain.”

  Addicts have the strange ability to sense when someone else is an addict—kind of like vampires knowing when someone else isn’t human. I wasn’t human. It must have been obvious to him.

  The back of the limo smelled like smoke. The rock star had left a small leather bag that looked like a fanny pack in the corner of the car’s L-shaped leather sofa. Bluish-white LED lights illuminated a two-foot-long curved rosewood bar on the opposite side of the car, next to the door we just climbed through, where two beveled glass decanters, one with Scotch and the other with vodka, sat in recessed holders on top next to an ice bucket. Backlit champagne glasses hung underneath like icicles. And of course there was wall-to-wall carpeting. It felt like the inside of a brothel. I’d been taught from my earliest days as a reporter at Women’s Wear Daily that stretch limos were the height of tacky—right up there with walking through a party with a lit cigarette in your hand or grown men wearing shorts in the evening. I could practically hear Robin Leach—champagne wishes and chlamydia dreams.

  “Billy, this is Dan,” the rock star said to the limo driver through the open partition. “He needs to go to L’Ermitage. Easier to drop me first?”

  Billy said that it was and slowly pulled away from the hotel. The melting ice on the bar sloshed as we turned onto Sunset and the rock star unzipped his fanny pack and took out a small round plastic container the size of a Carmex lip balm jar. He dumped the contents of the container onto the Details issue he grabbed from a stack in the hotel lobby—Kristin made sure they were there—and separated the pile into four lines with a matchbook cover.

  I’d never snorted oxy before. I took the rolled-up $20 bill, leaned down, and went for it. As I inhaled, I suddenly became very aware that my pinkie was extended like I was sipping an imaginary cup of tea in some kid’s playroom. I must have looked ridiculous. Other than smoking an occasional joint, I hadn’t done drugs with anyone in years. I wasn’t a social user.

  The rock star didn’t extend his pinkie.

  We pulled up to his house somewhere behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Billy punched a code on a keypad that opened a white wooden gate. It was a single-level modern house with floor-to-ceiling windows. As we made our way to the top of a circular driveway he told me who used to live there, but I had no clue who he was talking about. I said, “Cool,” and nodded. Houses in LA had pedigree.

  “Great hanging with you, man,” the rock star said as he opened the door. “Let’s stay in touch.”

  “Definitely,” I said. “Would it be okay if I made a quick stop on the way to my hotel?”

  “Billy, take him wherever he needs to go,” he said.

  He went in for a bro hug, which I botched just as thoroughly as I had with Tyson, and we said good night.

  “Do you know where Skid Row is, by any chance?” I asked Billy as he pulled out of the rock star’s driveway.

  “The band?” he asked, giving me a quick glance over his right shoulder as he made his way toward Santa Monica Boulevard along the quiet streets of Beverly Hills.

  I fed him the same bullshit I gave to my driver earlier in the day about celebrities and drugs and a magazine article. It still felt like a lie. He told me he knew exactly where to take me.

  “That’s Dr. Phil’s house,” he said as we rolled past a well-lit gated property somewhere below Sunset. It was after midnight and a full moon hung in the sky like a giant Klieg light there to simulate a full moon. Dr. and Mrs. Phil would have been fast asleep. That’s what normal people did, I told myself. Normal people slept at night. They woke up early. They went running. Or to the gym. Normal people had routines. Normal people lived their lives. I was desperate to be normal.

  But I wasn’t.

  Billy told me that he worked for a limo service out of La Jolla and that he drove the rock star whenever he attended an event. They’d been to a gallery opening earlier in the evening before having dinner at the Chateau. It was a last-minute booking and all the company had for him to take was the stretch. He preferred an SUV. So did the rock star. Though he had a full head of gray hair, Billy was only in his mid-forties. “Fucking divorce,” he said.

  I eventually started feeling the effects of the oxy. I kept breathing in through my nose the way my doctor asked me to when he held a stethoscope to my back. Slow, deep breaths. I wanted to be sure everything I snorted had made its way into my bloodstream. It definitely wasn’t enough to get me high, but my headache was gone and I felt a slight tingling just behind my eyes. I was relaxed for the first time all day.

  Billy eventually pulled the limo over the curb. I had no idea where we were or how long we’d been driving. We’d been talking more or less the entire way—or more specifically, Billy had been talking. He was a sharer. I sat in the back, at the end of the L-shaped seat closest to the partition, smoking cigarettes and listening. His ex-wife used to have the body of a pinup, but had put on a ton of weight since their divorce, which brought him endless joy. He saw his daughter only about once a week—and usually for breakfast—because his work schedule was so unpredictable. He listened to books on tape during his frequent late-night drives back down toward San Diego and had recently been making his way through a bunch of Michael Connelly thrillers.

  “How’s this?” he asked, putting the car in park and turning in his seat to face me.

  If it was Skid Row, it wasn’t anything like I’d imagined. I was expecting a tent city. People with stained blankets and matted hair huddled in rows on the sidewalk like the teenage girls I’d seen on the news lining up overnight to buy *NSYNC tickets. People pushing shopping carts loaded with fraying plastic bags and mangy dogs. The great unwashed masses. There wasn’t any of that. Still, it felt a million miles away from Beverly Hills, and I was relieved when Billy locked the doors.

  Across the street, a man in is early twenties sat on a too-small dirt bike in front of an empty parking lot. He looked at the limo, took a sip from the can he was holding, and rode off down a dark side street. I told Billy I was going to take a look around and that I shouldn’t be too long.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Maybe you should do your sightseeing from the car.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “I won’t be long.”

  I got out of the car—fueled by adrenaline and desperation—and walked around the corner in the same direction as the guy on the bike. On my right, a row of two-story buildings ran all the way to the next street corner. Most of the stores on the street had black metal folding gates covering large plate-glass windows. Many were boarded up. The awnings hanging over doorways were faded and torn. “Discount Furniture,” read one. There was a large For Lease sign in one storefront. “Prime Hollywood Location,” it said above a broker’s name and phone number. I must have been in Hollywood, but there was nothing “prime” about this location.

  The guy on the bike was talking to someone about a half a block away from where I stood. When he saw me, he slowly rode over. He was holding a can of Dr Pepper. I just stood there. I was tempted to walk over and shake his hand but thought better of it.

  It’s never a good idea to show up in a stretch limo wearing designer khakis and blue Italian suede slip-ons when looking to score dope in the middle of the night on a sketchy street corner. I was dressed like a vacationing aristocrat. I looked like I should have been carrying shopping bags on the streets of Saint-Tropez. I’m not sure I knew what my element was, but it was pretty clear that I was out of it. But that’s how it happened the first—and only—time I ever tried to get heroin.

  “You lost?” the guy on the bike asked as he rode past before turning around and stopping just in front of me. He was wearing red sweat pants and a red Nike shirt. Tonal dressing
was all over the runways in Milan last season, but I chose not to share that.

  “I’m looking for some H,” I told him. My voice quivered as I spoke. I listened to Journey and practically knew the room service menu at the Ritz in Paris by heart. I didn’t know how to do this. Did people even call heroin H? I didn’t have a clue. I could con drugs out of just about any doctor in Manhattan, but I couldn’t pretend to have street cred. I should have worn my Wu-Tang T-shirt.

  “You’re looking for H? he said. “That your limo? How much money you got?”

  “You know what,” I said. “I think maybe I’m in the wrong place.” My heart was beating so hard I could hear it.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  He studied me for a second.

  “Grenade,” he yelled.

  What the fuck?

  I took a few steps back and stumbled into a newspaper box that was bolted to the sidewalk behind me. Now, I’ve never been in the military, but when someone yells Grenade! at the top of their lungs, it’s probably time to go. I steadied myself and turned to leave.

  “Wait there, man,” he said. “Here comes Grenade. He’s got you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and starting walking back to the corner.

  “Hold up,” Grenade called out. I stopped long enough to turn around and see an ox of a man, maybe thirty years old, making his way toward me on a pair of crutches. He wore a white tank top and a pair of low-slung jeans. He was missing his left leg; his pants were folded up and pinned above the knee.

  “What did you come here for?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer and started walking briskly back the way I came.

  Grenade’s crutches made a distinct sound every time they hit the pavement—like someone walking across a stage with tap shoes.

  Clack . . . Clack . . . Clack.

  The frequency of the sound increased.

  Clack.Clack.Clack.Clack.