As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  Rock Star Redux

  “Rock stars don’t wear shorts,” I tell the rock star.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? Angus Young wears shorts all the time,” he says, a Marlboro bobbing up and down in his mouth like a conductor’s baton.

  “Not tennis shorts,” I say.

  We’re standing on the sandstone back deck of his modern Beverly Hills estate, which—in addition to an infinity pool and the small guesthouse, where I slept for a few hours after we called it quits at four a.m.—has a tennis court.

  Even after he tells me he plays once a week, it’s impossible for me to picture the man I just spent the night chain-smoking cigarettes and snorting lines of oxy with lunging for a forehand.

  The L-shaped house is framed by concrete and wood with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. It is surprisingly tasteful, particularly given the fact that the rock star had a fanny pack with him the first time we met. People with fanny packs don’t live in houses like this. Architects do. Or power agents. The property is walled in by perfectly maintained eight-foot-tall hedges, which seem to be standard issue for the neighborhood.

  I didn’t notice the tennis court the night before when I stumbled down to the guesthouse—so high and exhausted that I wasn’t sure I could make the twenty-yard walk without tipping over or, worse, ending up in the pool. I was a solitary drug user and I wasn’t used to snorting oxy. I was higher than I was used to being, which is saying a lot.

  For as uncontrollable as my drug use had become, there was a fair amount of control involved. I knew exactly how many pills I needed to get buzzed: fifteen extra-strength Vicodin; seven 15-milligram Roxicodone; twenty-one 5-milligram Roxicodone. Even though I’d been taking more at times, it was simple math, more or less, and snorting them messed with the equation. How many pills are ground up in this pile? Is one line equivalent to one pill? How much has the rock star snorted as opposed to what I was inhaling? It was impossible to know. Drug addiction isn’t an exact science, but I tried to operate with the precision of a chemist. Getting high with the rock star was like flying blind.

  I hadn’t planned on spending the night. Billy drove me to the rock star’s house at 10:30 p.m. after a business dinner in West Hollywood. The plan was to hang out with the rock star for a bit and divvy up the large bottle of 80-milligram OxyContin that Billy brought us from San Diego. Then I was going back to L’Ermitage hotel, where I sometimes stayed when I was in Los Angeles. It didn’t work out that way. Plans seldom do with junkies.

  I’d been spending a lot of time in LA. Aside from the usual reasons for me to fly out there—meetings with publicists, cover shoots, the occasional event the magazine was hosting in honor of a celebrity—my new girlfriend, Sarah, lived there. She was a beautiful and talented Australian-born actress whom I’d met a few months earlier at a mutual friend’s beach house in Malibu. She was, as usual, way out of my league.

  The first time I saw Sarah felt like a scene out of an eighties romantic comedy:

  EXTERIOR—DECK OF SEVENTIES-ERA MALIBU BEACH HOUSE—DAY

  Fade In

  It’s a perfect Southern California day. Boy in shorts and T-shirt walks out onto the deck. His legs are as white as the sand below. Boy notices breathtaking girl in a bikini reading a script. He’s immediately tongue-tied. Girl politely says hello.

  SARAH

  Hello. Nice to meet you. I’m Sarah.

  Boy tries to make small talk, awkwardly commenting on the color of the ocean.

  DAN

  Hi. I’m Dan. Wow, look how blue the ocean is. Amazing.

  Girl smiles at boy, then looks out at the ocean just beyond the deck, politely confirming that it is in fact blue.

  SARAH

  Yes, it is.

  Boy stands around for a few seconds, hands in pockets. Unimpressed by his silence, girl takes a sip from her Evian bottle and goes back to her reading. Boy exits, nervous and smitten.

  Fade Out

  It took me ten minutes to get up the courage to go back outside and speak with her. Normally I could talk to anyone, but there was something about this woman that made me nervous. It was the first time in a long time that I wanted to flirt, and I was rusty.

  I eventually sat down next to her and started a conversation. She was funny and smart and couldn’t have been the least bit romantically interested in me. I tried to flirt, but she was having none of it. She did, however, agree to give me her email address before she left later that afternoon.

  From that moment on, I saw Sarah everywhere. Literally. On my flight back to New York the following day, I was flipping through an issue of one of the celebrity weeklies—People or Us—and there was a photo of her shimmering on a red carpet. In a taxi the very next day, I drove past a Gap ad on a billboard and there she was—fourteen feet tall, her skin golden brown, gazing out over the city.

  In the chaotic, unpredictable world I’d created for myself, Sarah had suddenly—and inexplicably—emerged as a presence. I began emailing her and we quickly became friends. We saw each other a few times over the next few months, either when she was in New York or I was back in LA. Being with her, even as friends, somehow calmed me. I eventually wore her down and we starting dating. I would fly out to see her as often as I could.

  Trips to LA also meant seeing Billy. Ever since the night he had driven me to the sketchy heart of Hollywood on my quest for heroin, I called Billy when I was in town. It wasn’t that I felt beholden to throw business his way as a thank-you for saving me from an uncertain fate at Grenade’s hands. No. My rationale was far less altruistic than that. Billy could get pills. Lots of them.

  And he never once asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  Billy is listening to Michael Connelly’s City of Bones when I climb into the back seat of his black Town Car outside the American terminal at LAX. Detective Harry Bosch is investigating the case of a young boy who’d gone missing twenty years earlier. He hands me a small bottle of water from the red and white Playmate cooler on the passenger seat and ejects the audiobook. “Come Sail Away” by Styx plays on the radio as we make our way toward the 405.

  “Dennis DeYoung is a good guy,” Billy says. “A real sweetheart. I’ve had him in my car a couple of times. Some of these musicians are real pricks, you know. But Dennis is a kind soul.”

  There are as many nice-guy celebrity stories in LA as there are producers, and Billy is loaded with them.

  “But you also get the assholes,” he says. “The ones who keep you waiting all night, not telling me when or if they might be coming out. I mean, how hard is it to let me know it’s okay for me to run and grab a slice of pizza or take a piss, for Christ’s sake? I keep an empty one-gallon water jug in the trunk in case of emergencies. And I’ve had to use it plenty of times.”

  “Man, that sucks,” I said. I was sympathetic—but couldn’t help but think about my Louis Vuitton duffel in the trunk. “Listen, take it easy on these turns,” I said as we rolled into Beverly Hills.

  “You got it,” said Billy, barely missing a beat before jumping right back into his detailed account of celebrity client behavior. “I’m telling you man, you wouldn’t believe some of the shit that’s gone on in the back seat of this car. Man, people have been fully naked back there—you don’t want to know.”

  “No shit, I don’t want to know,” I said, scanning the back seat in disgust. “I’m sitting back here. I don’t want to hear this.”

  But it was true. Car service drivers see and hear everything. Condé Nast was famous for having a fleet of black Town Cars and SUVs on hand for its senior management. They lined the street in front of the company’s New York headquarters like an idling funeral procession. There was even a guy, Red, whose only job, as far as I could tell, was to wait outside the building and direct us to whichever car was ours when we came through the revolving door, like an air traffic controller for aimless executives.

  These drivers often knew who was about to be fired or promoted well before it was public knowledge. They knew who
was sleeping with whom and which executive was getting a divorce and who was having long, drunken lunches at the Four Seasons.

  “I hear [publishing exec] is on the way out,” one of the Condé drivers told me once. “They can’t stand him. Plus, he’s been screwing his assistant for over year. They’re trying to avoid a lawsuit.”

  I’m sure that the guys who drove me, whether in New York or when I was traveling for business, knew more about what was going on with me than just about anyone else. Doctor visits, pharmacy runs, and if they were paying attention—and they always were—they would have seen me shovel hundreds of pills into my mouth over the years. It was only a matter of time until I found a driver who could supply them.

  I’d seen Billy close to a dozen times since we’d met a year earlier. He lived in San Diego and would drive up with pills for his “special clients” from his friend’s pharmacy once a week. Billy had been supplying the rock star with oxy for a few years, making him—and now me—one of only a small handful of people who knew that the rock star was still using. The rock star’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction had been well documented by the tabloids.

  The first two times I saw Billy, he didn’t drive me. It was just a good old-fashioned drug deal. We met in the parking lot of Factor’s Famous Deli on Pico. Like any good Jewish boy, I was able to score drugs and a corned beef on rye at the same time. The third time I called him, Billy offered to get me at the airport. “It’ll just be easier,” he said. “It’ll help me justify the trip up to LA.” He also asked if I would mind his telling the rock star that he was getting me pills. Billy could get only large quantities. “It’s not worth it for my friend at the pharmacy if it’s a small amount,” he said, and suggested that the rock star and I might want to share the pills . . . and the cost. At first I found this a little odd. If I could afford the drugs—$1,500 for a bottle of four hundred pills—then surely the rock star could. But I agreed.

  First, we had to find a compromise. The rock star preferred 80-milligram OxyContin, while I favored 15-milligram Roxicodone.

  “Let’s each get what we like,” I told the rock star after Billy put us in touch. “It’ll give this pharmacy guy twice as much business.”

  “Let’s just split a bottle for now,” he said. “Maybe we can alternate—Roxys this time. Oxys the next. It’ll make it easier for me.”

  Also odd, but I said yes.

  This went on for the better part of a year. Occasionally, Billy would take me from the airport straight to the rock star’s house, where we’d split up the pills and smoke a couple of cigarettes. Still eager to launch a fashion line, the rock star would show me some of his designs and ask for feedback. It was bad LA fashion—studded leather belts and wrist cuffs and some Ed Hardy–inspired T-shirts and snapback hats haphazardly covered with rhinestones.

  “Rock and roll, right?” he’d say proudly.

  “Totally,” I’d say. “Very LA.”

  Billy was still talking about his famous passengers when we pulled up to L’Ermitage. The buzz from the eight Roxicodone I’d taken on the flight over was starting to fade, not that it had been especially satisfying. Plane highs were usually the best, especially in first class. A comfortable reclining chair with a footrest. Cabin lights dimmed. A selection of movies. And the freedom to nod out without being self-conscious. Everybody dozed off on planes. Everybody except addiction specialist to the stars Dr. Drew Pinsky, who, as fate would have it, was seated directly beside me on this flight. Talk about a buzzkill. It was like sitting next to a narc.

  He definitely knows I’m high, I thought, avoiding eye contact with him every time I climbed over his legs on my way to the bathroom. Don’t let him see your pupils.

  I didn’t even know if opiates did anything to your pupils or why Dr. Drew would even care. It’s not like he was going to stage an intervention at 30,000 feet. Still, I wasn’t taking any risks.

  “Always tons of celebrities at L’Ermitage,” Billy said as he pulled up to the curb.

  He was right. I had been staying at L’Ermitage since I got the Details job, and the crowd in the lobby bar rarely disappointed. As was often the case, the bars at swanky Beverly Hills hotels were as star-studded as back lots. Well-known actors taking meetings with agents and producers while sipping cocktails and snacking on wasabi peas.

  “Taking meetings.” That’s what they called it. It was never just “having a drink” or “grabbing lunch.” They were “taking meetings.” LA cracked me up.

  Billy was going to wait for me while I got settled in my room and showered before taking me to my dinner with the head of marketing for an independent production company and then to the rock star’s house, where I ultimately ended up spending the night.

  “I’ll be about an hour,” I told him. “Feel free to grab a slice, and for the love of God, if you have to pee, come in and use the bathroom in the lobby.”

  The minimalist rooms at L’Ermitage were large, bright, and monotone. The blond wood furniture matched the tan rug and drapes. I preferred to face the back of the hotel, to avoid any noise from the street. Being on New York time in Los Angeles, where it was three hours earlier, meant I was able to sleep later than usual. Mornings are the enemy of the addict.

  Sarah was out of town working on a television show in Vancouver. Lately I’d been staying with her at her house perched high in the Hollywood Hills whenever I was in LA. And while I missed her, I was happy to be alone in a hotel room, free to use. Sarah—like my mother and Adam—thought I was sober. I’d told them that I hadn’t taken a painkiller since the first time I saw Dr. Ron. They were all incredibly proud of me, which stung a bit, but I think, deep down, they all knew the truth—maybe not every day or even every month, but I figured that my erratic behavior and sudden bouts of irritability were enough to give them a sense that something was off.

  What’s wrong with you? If they weren’t saying it, which they were with increasing frequency, then they were most definitely thinking it.

  By the time I got to the rock star’s house I was desperate to get high. We paid Billy, who waited in the driveway, and set out to divide our take. The rock star immediately began to grind up five or six pills, using a marble mortar and pestle. He cut four chalky lines on the living-room coffee table with the edge of a small notepad and handed me a straw, which had been cut down to the length of a cigarette. I leaned over, placed the straw in my right nostril with my right hand, pinching the left nostril closed with the knuckle of my left forefinger, and inhaled deeply.

  “Why don’t you hang out?” the rock star said. We sent Billy on his way and got busy crushing and snorting our way through the night.

  The higher we got, the more questions I asked. It was more of an interview than a conversation.

  “So tell me about groupies,” I said as we both sat on the plush white sofa, our feet up on the oversize glass coffee table.

  “Who’s the biggest asshole in the band?” I asked after we had each snorted a couple more lines.

  “Did you ever hook up with Naomi Campbell?” I inquired, sitting on the marble island in his giant kitchen watching as he made us smoothies.

  And he went there. He talked. He trusted me.

  I still felt high when I woke up the next day. I lay in the bed in the rock star’s guesthouse, struggling to open my eyes. I could barely move my body, as if I was up to my neck in quicksand. It must have been late morning. The sun was pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up one of the walls of the room. There was a framed platinum record leaning against the opposite wall just beneath a giant Peter Beard photograph of a lion, the edges covered with dried blood. I finally managed to swing my legs off the bed and sit myself up. I rubbed my hands over my eyes and looked out the window at the tennis court.

  “So wait a minute,” I said a few minutes later, drinking a Diet Coke from the can and standing next to the rock star on the back deck of the main house, “you play tennis?”

  “Why is that so hard to believe?”
he said. “I’m in great fucking shape. You think going out on tour is easy? At this age? No fucking way.”

  The rock star dressed like a rock star even when he was just bumming around the house. He was wearing tight black jeans torn at the knee, a pair of beat-up ankle-high black leather boots with faded rivets across the toe, and a vintage Gibson guitar T-shirt with a black collarless chambray shirt hanging open over the top.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Can you pay for the pills next time?”

  “Um, okay,” I stammered.

  “Look, I don’t have access to a lot of cash,” he explained. “I have ex-wives and accountants and managers who all watch me like a hawk, man. No one can know I’m partying, and one of the ways they try to make sure I’m not is by limiting my access to cash.”

  “I got it,” I said. “No problem.”

  “I can pay it back slowly or I can give you a signed guitar or some shit like that,” he said.

  “Say no more,” I said. “I got you.”

  I understood what was at stake. What is was like to hide. How hard he must have been struggling to appear normal. He was running a con, just as I was.

  I paid for the rock star’s drugs regularly for the next year. We hung out a few more times, but things were getting serious with Sarah, and after we got engaged, I became more desperate than ever to finally stop. I saw Dr. Ron at least once a month, but I just couldn’t stop. I saw Billy just as often.

  Ten days before I flew to Australia for my wedding in 2005, I stopped taking opiates. It was the longest I’d gone without pills in five years. I toughed it out, with the help of Dr. Ron’s shots and sheer willpower. I was white-knuckling it, but I just couldn’t be high when I got married. I couldn’t do that to Sarah. Or my family, for that matter, who all came to New York for the engagement party that David Copperfield hosted for us on the roof of his penthouse, and were about to fly to the other side of the world for our wedding.