As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  The rock star called me a few days before I was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles, where I’d planned to stay for a night before heading off to Sydney, where Sarah had already been for a week putting the finishing touches on our reception.

  “I’m clean right now,” I told him when he asked if I wanted to call Billy and share a bottle of pills with him. “I feel pretty good and I don’t want to fuck with that.”

  “That’s awesome, man,” he said. “Is there any chance I can borrow $1,500? I won’t ask again, but I’m in a jam.”

  I wanted to say no, but I liked being friends with him. I didn’t want to let him down.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “I’ll be staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’ll leave it for you at the front desk.”

  Maybe it wasn’t really a friendship, after all. Maybe we were just using each other. I got him high and kept his secret and he brought me into his orbit. Having celebrity friends had become its own kind of drug for me. It made me feel like an insider. That was worth $1,500 to me.

  I left him the money, as promised, and boarded a Qantas flight to Sydney feeling a little nauseated from the opiate detox, but I didn’t let it bother me. I had finally beaten the addiction. I was ready to start a new life with an incredible woman. A new beginning at last.

  My sense of triumph wouldn’t last long. It was the beginning, all right—the beginning of the end.

  Busted

  They didn’t know my name this time.

  Maybe the doormen were new. It was hard to tell. They looked the same, with their comic book superhero jawlines and perfectly maintained three-day stubble, but New York City was loaded with guys like this—guys waiting to be discovered while working shift jobs behind the bar at trendy downtown lounges or modeling for midrange fashion catalogues or swinging the door open for guests at one of the city’s many small boutique hotels.

  Either way, they didn’t know me. There was no “Welcome back, Mr. Peres!” this time. I was just another guy—as indistinguishable to them as they were to me—walking into the Morgans Hotel on that warm September afternoon in 2007. I carried a small, hastily packed brown leather Louis Vuitton duffel bag. I didn’t have a reservation, but I needed a room.

  My wife had thrown me out of the house.

  I got the last available room in the hotel, a small dark one on the second floor, barely large enough to fit a queen-size bed, a desk, and a dresser. The room’s only window looked out onto a narrow shaft and a brick wall about an arm’s length away. I lay down on the bed, shoes on, and cried.

  An hour earlier, I had been sitting in the living room of our large three-bedroom apartment on the sixty-first floor of a midtown high-rise, about to get high—without a care in the world. Large windows facing west offered stunning views to the Hudson River. Sarah was on her way to rehearsal in the Theater District ten blocks away for a play she was starring in about Frida Kahlo and Dorothy Hale. She played Kahlo’s friend and benefactor, Clare Boothe Luce, and though Sarah was six months pregnant at the time, the costume designer had done an amazing job of concealing the baby bump.

  I wasn’t supposed to be there. It was early afternoon on a Thursday and I should have been at the office, which is where I’d told Sarah I was when we spoke shortly before I got back to the apartment. But I wasn’t at work. I was waiting for her to leave home, watching the front door of our building from inside the small overpriced croissant and coffee place across the street. I watched, like a shady operative in a Cold War thriller, as she greeted the doorman on her way out, making her way down 56th Street and disappearing from view as she turned the corner to head down Seventh Avenue. I dashed across the street and went inside.

  “You just missed your wife,” the doorman said as I rushed into the building.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “I was hoping to see her before she left.”

  Once inside, I sat on the cream-colored sofa and counted out pills on the coffee table. The room had windows on three sides and was flooded with light. I had just swallowed seven 15-milligram Roxies when Sarah, having just arrived at the theater, called me and changed my life forever.

  The apartment was beautiful. We had found it about eight months earlier after a long search. Sarah kept her house in LA, where we tried to spend as much time as we could, but she’d officially moved to New York. This was our first home as a couple, and we brought in an interior designer to help bring it to life. I was spending more time there than I should have been, some days not going into the office at all, making excuses to my staff about kidney disease and blood disorders and exhaustion. On these days, I would call in to the office, pretending to be in a doctor’s office or sick in bed, and answer questions from the editors about which stories I wanted in the upcoming issue or which celebrity we should be trying to book for the cover. The fax machine was constantly humming as it churned out article after article waiting for my approval. Half the time I didn’t even read them. I just lay in bed, high, and watched MTV, which seemed to be showing Rihanna’s “Umbrella” video on a continuous loop, before nodding off. This was easier before the pregnancy, when Sarah was still spending a ton of time in LA working. When we were both in New York, together all of the time, the addiction got harder to conceal—the lies more frequent and elaborate and unbelievable.

  The marriage didn’t start out this way. There were no lies—at least for a couple of days. I managed to stay sober until our honeymoon, or what passed as a honeymoon. It was really more of a long weekend at a luxury resort in Cabo. We’d rented a small villa that had its own pool. From the moment we landed in Mexico, I planned to get drugs. But Cabo wasn’t like Tijuana. There weren’t three pharmacies on every block. I couldn’t just casually slip out while she was in the shower and score the pills that I so desperately needed. I’d been hanging on by a thread in Australia, the only thing keeping me going the promise of drugs in Mexico.

  I needed time to explore. Time to venture away from the resort and find not only a pharmacy but the right pharmacy.

  “I just got off the phone with the office,” I told Sarah after she woke from a nap. “I hate to do this, but I need to go to a local printing office and look at a high-resolution printout of our next cover. A faxed version won’t do. My assistant found a place about twenty minutes away. I promise I won’t be gone for more than an hour.”

  I jumped in a cab and told the driver to take me to the closest pharmacy. It wasn’t until we went to the fourth one, miles away from the beach and the swanky hotels that I found what I was looking for—four small white boxes of Tylenol with Codeine. With the wild abandon of a kid opening a present on Christmas morning, I tore into a box in the back seat of the taxi and swallowed a whole sleeve of pills, twelve in all, one at a time without water. It had been two weeks since my last high.

  The honeymoon was over.

  The first year of my marriage was one long series of stops and starts. Sarah had been asking, “What’s wrong with you?” on a weekly basis and on more than one occasion had asked me point-blank if I was using drugs again. “Of course not,” I’d say. But the signs must have been clear. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, and when I went to office—if I went at all—I would be back at home a few hours later.

  “I need to read all of these pages,” I’d say by way of explanation. “I can’t get it done in the office. Too many interruptions.”

  I’d close myself off in the bedroom that we’d converted into a home office and drift off into a drug-induced stupor while pretending to read. Even Dr. Ron was getting concerned. His usual Zen-like demeanor had been replaced by a firmness that I didn’t even know he was capable of.

  “You need to go to rehab, Dan,” he said. “You’re coming in here now every two weeks. You can’t keep this up.”

  “I want to stop,” I told him, tears in my eyes. “I really do. I just can’t.”

  “I can see that,” he said, “but I’m beginning to think that I can’t help you. You need to be in an inpatient facility. You need meetings and
structure, Dan. You need to be around people who can give you the tools of recovery.”

  I didn’t want to be around people. I could barely bring myself to look at anyone. I would walk out of our apartment building some mornings, using all the energy I had to push the revolving door, and just stand on the sidewalk gazing at the swarm of New Yorkers breezing past me.

  How do they do it? I’d think. How do they keep going?

  I envied everyone. Especially Sarah. The way she’d wake early and jump into her day, running to auditions and seeing friends. Smiling and healthy. I never wanted to do anything.

  “It’s beautiful out,” she’d say. “Let’s go to the park.”

  “What?” I said. “I’m not going to the park and sitting around with a bunch of tourists in shorts. That’s not what real New Yorkers do, Sarah. Come on, cut it out. I have work to do.”

  Most of the time, envy would quickly turn to resentment, and I would lash out, sometimes viciously. At Sarah. At my staff. At my mom. Anyone—even strangers.

  Like, for example, the night when Sarah and I were having dinner at Seppi’s, a crowded French bistro across the street and down the block from our apartment. When I did agree to go out and do something “normal,” I did it on my own terms and not readily. “Fine,” I’d say, “but I want to go somewhere close. I’m not going downtown.”

  The restaurant was packed, the air heavy with the smell of garlic and fresh-baked bread.

  “Can you believe this place?” I said. “No one’s even come to give us menus yet. We had to go out, didn’t we? I’m not leaving a tip, I’ll tell you that.”

  We hadn’t been there for more than five minutes.

  The booth we were in backed up to a narrow walkway next to the wooden podium where the hostess stood. People waiting for tables were congregating right behind me, and someone must have accidently bumped the back of the booth I was sitting in. It wasn’t bolted to the floor and it moved. Without even thinking, I aggressively bucked backward, sliding the booth into the walkway and knocking into the couple standing behind me.

  “What’s wrong with you?” a man in his mid-thirties asked. “You just hit my wife.”

  “You just shoved me into the table,” I said, turning around to look at him and his wife. She was pregnant.

  “It was an accident,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  “Well, I didn’t hear you apologize,” I said. Sarah was understandably mortified.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But you don’t have to behave that way. You can act like a human at least.”

  I was trying to, but it was proving impossible. The only thing I cared about was drugs. My unrelenting need for them had long ago transcended the bounds of acceptable human behavior.

  It’s also quite possible that my drug use was preventing Sarah from getting pregnant. After trying for six months, we went to see one of New York’s preeminent fertility specialists and began IVF treatments. I tried to stop again, fully aware that all of the injections and poking and prodding that Sarah was having to endure might well have been because of me. The day before we were scheduled for our first IVF procedure, I threw a full bottle of Roxicodone down the garbage chute in our apartment building. I was done. I simply couldn’t bear to think about what I was putting her through. But I didn’t even make it till the next morning. I went down to the lobby after midnight, once Sarah was asleep, and explained to the doorman that I’d accidently thrown away my medication. He called the building’s overnight porter, who took me to the trash room in the subbasement.

  “I don’t know if you really want to go through this mess,” he said, “but you’re welcome to. We bagged and took out the trash last night, so what’s here is from today.”

  Wearing a pair of plaid pajama pants, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, I climbed into a large plastic bin the size of a compact car and began digging through mounds of trash. The porter just stood there watching. After ten minutes, I found the pill bottle. I went upstairs, rinsed it off, and got high.

  Once Sarah was pregnant, my use escalated. And so did her suspicions. I’d always loved children. From the time I was a little boy, I loved playing with other people’s children—showing them magic tricks and juggling for them. I couldn’t wait to be a father. But I was terrified. I knew I needed to stop before our baby was born, but I couldn’t.

  Dr. Ron wasn’t treating me anymore. He refused, unless I’d agreed to go away to rehab. The closer we got to Sarah’s due date, the more anxious I became and the more I used. I was taking more pills than I’d ever taken. I was waking up in the middle of the night to get high. I was FedExing cash to Billy and having him send me pills. And of course I was still seeing the two pain specialists who hadn’t yet caught on the way Donna and Dr. Fine had.

  I was getting careless. Over the last few months, Sarah had begun spotting charges at various pharmacies on our credit card statements. I usually ran the prescriptions through insurance when I could and paid for the rest of them with cash, but since I’d sent Billy $1,500 a couple of times, I had no choice but to charge them. The first time Sarah asked about a several-hundred-dollar credit card charge, I made up a lie about needing some things for a shoot on grooming products that we were doing at the magazine.

  I tried serving up the same lie the second time she asked, the day I watched her leave for rehearsal. She had just gotten off the phone with our accountant, whom she’d asked to review our credit card bills for charges at pharmacies, when she called me. Our accountant had confirmed her suspicions.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re doing drugs. I know you are.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “You know that I have to charge things for work on my personal card sometimes.”

  “You’re lying to me,” she said.

  I sat on our living-room sofa, the pills that I swallowed a few minutes earlier starting to make their way into my bloodstream, trying to figure a way out of the situation. I had been manufacturing lies for so long, and they usually came quickly, but nothing was coming this time.

  “You’re taking drugs again, aren’t you?” she said. “Just tell me the truth.”

  “I am,” I said.

  It was over. She’d been through enough and I’d had enough.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I’m about to have our baby. I don’t want you at the apartment when I get home. How could you do this? What’s wrong with you?”

  What’s wrong with you?

  I was finally asking myself the same question.

  I was lying on the bed at the Morgans when Adam called.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m at work. I can’t talk,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Sarah called me and told me what’s going on. Where the fuck are you?”

  “The Morgans Hotel,” I said.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  When Adam showed up thirty minutes later, I burst into tears.

  “Do you have any pills?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “And I’m high right now.”

  “Give me the pills,” he said.

  Adam took the bottle of Roxicodone that I’d tossed in my bag with a change of clothes and my Dopp kit before leaving the apartment and dumped them into the toilet.

  “You’re done, brother,” he said. “Enough.”

  “I know,” I said, crying. “I want to be done. I’m so fucking relieved that she knows. That you know.”

  “Your family knows, too,” Adam said. “Sarah told them. I spoke with your mom on the way over here. You’ve got to see this for what it is. It’s a wake-up call. You’re about to be a father. It’s time to start acting like it.”

  “I know,” I said. “I want it over with.”

  “You want what over with?” he said. “I don’t need to take your shoelaces and belt or anything like that, do I?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to be done with this. With the pills.”

  Adam spent the night with me at the
Morgans and waited with me the following morning until my father and brother, who were driving up from Baltimore, arrived to take me back home with them.

  I laid down in the back seat of my dad’s car and didn’t say a word. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. When we got to my mother’s house we sat down, as a family. They asked me if I wanted to go to rehab and told me that they’d already researched it.

  “No,” I said. “I just want to stay here. I want to go through the detox here. I’ve done it before. I did it right before the wedding. Let me just stay here.”

  My mom and my brother took my bag and dumped it out on the kitchen table. They started going through my things, searching for drugs.

  “Adam already took them,” I said.

  “Well, we’re going to double-check,” my brother said.

  They took out each article of clothing and pulled at it and shook it and examined it, like prison guards searching for a hidden shank. Something fell from the pocket of my khakis and bounced onto the table in front of them.

  “Get it,” my mom told my brother. “Flush it.”

  My brother grabbed a round pink object and ran to the bathroom and threw it in the toilet. “Gone,” he said.

  “That was an Altoid,” I told them. “A cinnamon Altoid. Nice work.”

  Going from upward of sixty pills a day to none is a bit like driving 100 miles an hour and slamming on the brakes. You’re all over the place and not exactly sure what’s going to happen. Doing it in your Jewish mother’s house is even more intense.

  My mother worried about me even when she thought everything was fine. This was intense. Every time I’d get out of bed to go to the bathroom, which was often, she called upstairs to me: “Are you okay?” And every time she’d hear the toilet flush, she’d call upstairs, “Good boy. Get the junk out of your body.”

  I stayed there for two weeks, speaking with Sarah only once, though my mother talked to her several times a day. Nights were the worst. I couldn’t get comfortable and my entire body was restless.