As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  In the middle of all of this, I had to deal with a crisis at the magazine. I’d told my staff and my boss that I was down in Baltimore dealing with a back problem and that I needed to take some time to recover. But this couldn’t wait. We had recently put Ben Affleck on the cover of Details, and he was furious over some things that were written in the story that shouldn’t have made it past our fact-checker. I had to get on the phone with him and assure him that we were taking this seriously and were planning an unprecedented correction. So there I was, sitting in the den of my mother’s house, a shivering, quivering mess with a blanket wrapped around me, talking to Ben Affleck.

  “I accept full responsibility for what’s happened here,” I told him. “And I am sorry for putting you through this.”

  I may have been speaking to him, but I was really talking to everyone—Sarah, my family, the staff at Details. Sarah, while grateful that I was going through detox, wasn’t ready to have me back in the apartment.

  “Just give her time,” my mom told me. “You’ve put her through a lot.”

  I needed to go back to New York and get back to work. I was scheduled to begin an intensive outpatient program at a facility just off Madison Avenue, which had been recommended by my shrink.

  “Can you call one of your friends and maybe stay on their sofa for a few nights?” my mother asked.

  So I turned to the person who had always been there for me. I called David Copperfield.

  “Hey there,” I said when he answered his cell phone. “It’s Dan. Listen, David . . . um, I’m a drug addict. I’m in Baltimore getting sober.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he said.

  “I’m coming back to New York in a couple of days,” I explained. “Sarah isn’t ready for me to come home yet—understandably. Would it be possible for me to stay at your apartment for a few nights?”

  “Stay as long as you need,” he said.

  Magic

  There are no bad highs.

  Not to me, anyway. Not with painkillers. Some highs are better than others, but in the end, like with pizza or sex, even the ones that underdeliver . . . deliver.

  There are, however, many different types of high.

  There’s the hotel-room high. The Sunday-afternoon high. The early-morning-get-back-in-bed high. The nobody-can-know-I’m-high high.

  There’s the I-think-I’m-going-to-die high. The I-have-no-more-pills-left high. And of course, the I’m-never-getting-high-again-after-this-time high. There were a lot of those.

  After a brutal fourteen-day detox at my mother’s tidy, Elle Decor–inspired house in Baltimore, I was finally heading back to New York. Anxious, I took my seat on the train and waited. Reality was creeping in as slowly and steadily as the southbound Metroliner on the opposite track. I wasn’t ready for what awaited me at home—a heartbroken and angry wife who’d been lied to from day one, a bewildered and leaderless staff at the magazine, and an outpatient drug program that I’d already regretted agreeing to attend.

  The only thing I was truly looking forward to was the I-haven’t-been-high-in-two-weeks high that was waiting for me in Manhattan.

  “Getting clean is the easy part. Staying clean takes work,” the sixty-something man with the mustache told me. “It’s not going to happen until you’re ready. Addiction doesn’t just go away.”

  This I knew.

  I’d wished it away for years. Begged Dr. Ron to take it away. Prayed to a god that I wasn’t sure I believed in to make it disappear as effortlessly as a simple coin vanish.

  No luck.

  It didn’t work that way. I’d learned this the hard way. I didn’t need to hear it from the man with the mustache. I knew you couldn’t just hide from addiction under the covers at your mom’s house as if avoiding the school bully, that you couldn’t just puke it up or flush it down or sweat it out.

  This wasn’t the flu or a zit—where you could lay low and ride it out for a week until it’s gone. There’s no chicken soup or Clearasil for addiction.

  I knew all of this. I was obviously still missing something—the elusive secret code that would help me solve the puzzle—like an ancient keystone in a Dan Brown novel—and finally fix me. This is what I wanted from the guy with the mustache at the AA meeting. I was seeking wisdom, not that “one day at a time” bullshit.

  For as long as I can remember, I’d been searching for a shortcut. I’d never been terribly interested in putting in the work. If there was a test at school, I was cramming for it on the bus that morning. I read CliffsNotes instead of books and hastily slapped together projects the night before that other kids had been working on for weeks.

  “If Danny applied himself more, he would be an exceptional student.” My mom and dad must have heard this at dozens of parent/teacher conferences over the years. But I didn’t need to work any harder than I already was. Cutting corners got me into NYU and sent to Paris and the job at Details by age twenty-seven. If there was a shortcut, I was taking it. So that’s what I was hoping to find when one of my mother’s oldest friends, Lou, took me to an AA meeting while I was detoxing in Baltimore.

  I’d known Lou my entire life. Her real name was Louise, but my brother and I had been calling her Aunt Lou our whole lives. When I was growing up, Aunt Lou was always at our house. I remember her sitting at the white kitchen table smoking Merit Ultra Light cigarettes with my mom when I was a young boy and moms still sat around kitchen tables smoking. Aside from the cigarettes, which Aunt Lou gave up the same day as my mom in the late eighties, she was a health nut. She did aerobics every day when that was still a thing, before becoming an early suburban devotee of yoga.

  Aunt Lou was reed-thin, had a year-round tan, and always brought me Twizzlers when she visited, which was often. She was like family, but I wasn’t up for seeing her when my mother told me she wanted to come by.

  “I think you should talk to her,” my mother said. “She’s coming over tonight.”

  “Mom, look at me. I’m a mess. It’s enough that you’re seeing me this way, I don’t need your friends rolling through here like it’s some kind of petting zoo,” I said.

  “Listen to me, sweetie,” my mom said. “You need to trust me and see your aunt Lou.”

  I couldn’t really fight her. I didn’t have the energy. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours in my first five days in Baltimore. I had the second floor of my mom’s beautifully appointed two-story white brick house all to myself. There were two large bedrooms, a small office, and a bathroom. Restless, I paced the tan carpeted hallway in the middle of the night—down and back like the Queen’s Guard—my mother occasionally coming out from her bedroom directly below to see if I was okay.

  Nights were the worst. I tried sleeping in both of the bedrooms, spending an hour or so in one bed before moving to the other, desperate for a reprieve. I had uncontrollable chills, which wasn’t helped by the fact that my mother loved to keep her house very cool, particularly at night. It was like a cryo chamber in there. I was freezing one second and drenched in sweat the next. I took two, sometimes three, showers a night—shivering under the hot water, hoping to somehow rinse off the addiction like salt after a swim in the ocean.

  There was a white bookshelf directly across from the bathroom. Every night when I got out of the shower, I stood weak and naked in the bathroom doorway, a white bath towel draped over my shoulders, and stared blankly at the framed family photos on the shelves in front of me. There I was, celebrating weddings and bar mitzvahs; at summer camp and graduating from college. I wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures.

  The nights were long.

  I was thirty-five years old and my mother was still taking care of me. Despite all of her stereotypical Jewish-mom-ness, my mother rose to the occasion with extraordinary composure and a level of measured calm I don’t remember ever seeing before. Both she and Sarah saved my life. Sarah for having the courage to throw me out and the wisdom to sound an alarm. And my mom for having the strength to watch her youngest son fall
apart right in front of her eyes and the grace to calmly pick up the pieces.

  But in the end, she was also a stereotypical Jewish mom and she ran a rehab the way one might expect a Jewish mother would—she fed me.

  “You need to eat something,” she said. “Get your strength back.”

  The kitchen counter was lined with bottles of Pepto-Bismol and Imodium and Tylenol and ginger ale. She served up chicken broth and turkey sandwiches on thick slices of challah. I went from having no appetite to eating everything in sight. I lost five pounds the first week I was there and gained ten the second. I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my second grilled-cheese sandwich when Aunt Lou walked in.

  She sat down next to me in my mom’s kitchen. She had a pack of Twizzlers in her hand.

  “I don’t think you know this, but I’m an alcoholic,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve been sober for seven years.”

  She told me that she used to drink a bottle of wine a day by herself and then hide the bottles in the garage where no one would find them.

  “But you’ve always been so healthy,” I said. “All the yoga and stuff.”

  “That was my cover, darling,” she said, taking my hand. “Don’t get me wrong, I love exercising, but I always figured that no one would suspect I had a problem if they saw me working out all of the time. I didn’t want anyone asking me any questions about my drinking.”

  Aunt Lou explained that she went to AA meetings almost every day and told me there was one starting in forty-five minutes just a short drive from my mom’s house.

  “Do you want to come with me?” she asked.

  “But I’m a drug addict, not an alcoholic,” I said.

  “It’s all the same, angel,” she said. “Trust me.”

  Aunt Lou drove me down the long winding driveway to the campus of Sheppard Pratt. I’d never been there before but knew it was a mental hospital. I’d always pictured One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest whenever I drove past—crazy people in hospital gowns flinging applesauce at each other and fighting over crayons.

  There were half a dozen people standing outside of a small building smoking cigarettes and laughing. I couldn’t imagine what anyone going to an AA meeting had to laugh about, and I looked at them curiously as Aunt Lou led me into the building. I was terrified. Inside, there were folding chairs set up in a U-shape around a small table where the man with the mustache was sitting.

  “You’re in the right place,” he said warmly after Aunt Lou introduced us.

  The meeting wasn’t what I was expecting, even though I had no idea what to expect. The people were clean and well dressed. Young and old. And there wasn’t a trench coat in sight. I don’t know why, but I was expecting men in trench coats. Halfway through the meeting, the man with the mustache, who seemed to be running things, asked if anyone was celebrating an anniversary. A young, healthy-looking guy in jeans and a polo shirt, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, stood up and said that it had been six months since he’d last done drugs. I was floored. I looked at him in awe. How on earth did he manage that? I thought.

  I sat perfectly still in my chair, listening as people shared their stories. I was just starting to relax when an older man standing in the back of the room raised his hand and started to speak.

  “I was sober for twenty-seven years,” he said, his voice trembling as he spoke. “I was on a plane last week and the stewardess asked me if I wanted a drink and I said yes. Just like that. I drank three vodkas by the time we landed.”

  What the fuck? I was shocked, but everyone around me just listened and nodded their heads.

  “I’ll tell you this,” he continued. “It’ll sneak up on you if you’re not careful.”

  “How can that happen?” I asked Aunt Lou as we were driving home. “How could that guy just order a drink on that plane?”

  “It happens,” she said. “It happens all the time. Do you know how much courage it took for him to walk in that room and tell on himself like that?”

  “Wow, that’s amazing,” I said.

  “You need to tell on yourself, too,” she said. “You need to call the doctors you were getting the pills from and tell them you are an addict.”

  “I know,” I said. “I will.”

  “Good,” said Aunt Lou, pulling her large black BMW into my mom’s driveway. “I’ll be over in the morning and we can do it together.”

  I knew the phone numbers by heart. I was ready to tell on myself. Aunt Lou showed up a little after ten a.m. I was going back to New York the next day, and this needed to happen. My first call was to Donna in Dr. Fine’s office. I was nervous.

  “Hi, Donna. It’s Dan Peres. I’m a drug addict,” I said.

  She couldn’t have been sweeter and asked if there was anything that she and Stanley could do for me. I explained that I’d spent the last two weeks detoxing and that my parents had registered me in an outpatient rehab program.

  “We’re here for you if you need us, Dan,” she told me.

  The next call was to Dr. Leo Krauss. His receptionist, Nikki, whom I knew well, told me that he was with a patient and asked if the doctor could call me back.

  “It’s urgent,” I told her. “I just need to speak with him now for a minute.”

  Dr. Krauss always wore three-piece suits and we often discussed bespoke tailoring when I was in his examining room. Like Donna, he wasn’t surprised and was pleased to know I was getting help.

  I had planned to make one more call that morning, to Dr. Scott Shaw. Aunt Lou looked at me proudly as I held the phone. I put it down on the kitchen table and smiled.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Wow, that felt great.”

  In that instant, I had decided to keep using. It was as simple as that. Like the man in the meeting who ordered a drink on the plane, it just happened. I didn’t even think about it. Using drugs had become my default. My escape. It had been my go-to for seven years. It’s what I did.

  I was visiting an older friend once a few years earlier, and his teenage son was sitting in the living room doing math homework. While I was waiting for his dad to get ready to go out to dinner, the son was going on and on about his love of fractions.

  “There are infinite divisions between 0 and 1,” he said. “You could literally spend forever fractioning between the two numbers. If it was the distance of an inch, most of the fractions would be imperceptible to the human eye. But they exist nonetheless. There’s a ton of stuff going on between 0 and 1, you know?”

  A lot can happen in one second. That’s precisely how long it took me to decide I wasn’t done.

  I was somewhere between Wilmington and Philadelphia when I called Dr. Shaw’s office from the train. Every now and then, he would let me come by to pick up my Roxicodone prescription without an examination. I asked Anna, the receptionist, if the doctor would leave it for me at the front desk.

  “It’s here waiting for you,” she told me after a brief hold. “I’m running out to pick up lunch in a few minutes. Do you want me to drop it at the pharmacy downstairs?”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Thanks, Anna.”

  I went right from Penn Station to the pharmacy, paying for the pills with the $200 that my father had given me so I could have some money in my pocket when I went home.

  I had arranged with Sarah for me to come by the apartment and get some clothes before going to Copperfield’s apartment. We’d spoken only once while I was in Baltimore. She wasn’t there when I got home and I quickly packed a bag and made my way to David’s, the prescription bottle tucked into the front pocket of my jeans.

  David was mainly living in Las Vegas, where he performed twice every night at the MGM Grand. He’d arranged for one of his assistants to meet me at the apartment building to introduce me to the doormen and help me get settled. It was close to five p.m. when I finally took the pills. I sat on the edge of the bed in the guest room and swallowed seven 15-milligram Roxies with a small bottle of Fiji Water I took from the kitchen and gazed out the floor-to-
ceiling windows at the city below.

  The high rushed over me like a giant wave. It was intense. I hadn’t had any opiates in my system for two weeks and probably should have taken fewer pills. When I lay down, it felt like I was sinking into the bed. I couldn’t move. And I didn’t, for the rest of the night.

  The first thing I saw the following morning was the pill bottle on the nightstand. I lay there, still wearing my clothes and shoes, and stared at it.

  Take 1–2 tablets by mouth every 4–6 hours as needed for pain.

  I was three months away from becoming a father and I had gotten so high the night before I couldn’t even take my shoes off.

  “Getting clean is the easy part,” I remembered the man with the mustache telling me a few nights earlier. “Staying clean takes work.”

  “Time to do the work,” I said out loud to myself and got out of bed and flushed the pills down the toilet.

  I was ready.

  I stayed at David’s apartment for over a month, going to AA meetings every day, sometimes twice a day. Sarah eventually agreed to let me come home.

  Oscar Peres was born on a bitterly cold January morning in 2008. I had been sober for ninety-two days. Late that night, as Sarah slept in the hospital room, I pushed Oscar around the maternity ward in a clear basinet on wheels. He was wrapped tightly in a blanket and had a tiny cotton cap on his head. All I could see was his chubby red face. He lay there staring up at me as I walked.

  “All right, buddy,” I said, looking into his eyes. “We’re both kind of new to this world. Let’s figure it out together.”

  I looked up and saw a woman in a white robe pushing her own newborn toward me. I smiled and congratulated her. She stopped to look at Oscar.

  “Isn’t it just the most amazing thing in the world?” she said. “It kind of makes you believe in magic, doesn’t it?”

  “It sure does,” I said.

  Acknowledgments