Authors: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor
“Oh, cool. Cool,” I said as if I had conversations about nude modeling all the time, and I turned back to my phone so that no one could see my face. I tried really hard not to cry, but I felt so incredibly foolish—so ridiculous and gullible.
Was everything in LA like this? Did I always have to be on the lookout? Most important, did I have any talent in sales?
That night I reluctantly told Beth what happened. I might not have but she would’ve become suspicious when she found me in my pajamas all day eating bagels. I was fully expecting an “I told you so” or at least an appalled reaction. Instead she started laughing. Of course, she was a little high, but it still took the sting out of it. Before long I was laughing, too—possibly due to joining her in her drug abuse. But, really, it was pretty funny.
The next day I didn’t show up for work. Or the day after that. In fact, I never went back.
At 6 a.m. the following Monday after the mandatory “sales conference” I’d been absent from, I awoke to a pounding on the door. Beth and I, both startled, met in the hallway and looked at each other wide-eyed. We tiptoed up to the peephole and peeked out. Standing in front of our door were two burly men with matching bowl haircuts.
What the hell?
“Let uz in!” I grabbed the phone to call 911 but realized immediately that would be impossible due to the damn sticking #9. The pounding got even louder and the men outside started yelling. “Open up zis door. We come for Chubz’s television set.”
Damn. I really wanted that TV. And although it was a sleazy operation and one I wanted no part of, I still thought maybe I deserved the television.
Beth and I watched as the men walked down the long driveway with our beautiful television. “Stop!” I yelled. The men turned. “Here. Might as well take the phone, too.”
W
hen I was not quite twenty-one, I accidentally freebased cocaine. Sure, it seems a fairly unlikely thing to happen accidentally—I know what people might think when they read that: How do you accidentally freebase cocaine, an illegal drug? Isn’t it a bit like saying you accidentally ran down your ex with your car in his driveway? So, I understand how this could right from the get-go seem suspect. Add to that the fact that cocaine is a highly illegal and expensive drug, so it’s not like “accidentally” devouring all the donuts in a business meeting because they were just sitting there on the conference table taunting you with their deliciousness until you just suddenly went crazy and ate the whole box. Let’s face it, rock cocaine is rarely lying around a conference table—unless the conference table is at a record company.
But one night, I, a nice Jewish girl from Forest Hills, New York, sat on my couch that smelled like cat pee even though we didn’t own a cat, and smoked cocaine.
I’d snorted cocaine a handful of times at this point in my life. It was the eighties, and coke seemed about as dangerous as Molly Ringwald. It wasn’t unusual for someone to whip out a little baggie of powder at a bar, roll up a ten-dollar bill, and go to town. I didn’t often partake, mainly because when I do coke I feel amazing, self-confident, chatty yet genuinely interested in other peoples’ lives…for the first twenty minutes and then I lose all the good-feeling part but remain nervous, hyper, and fearful. For the next six hours, I’m slightly less fun to have around than an untrained Pomeranian. Uppers and my high-strung personality have never been a good match. Twenty years later, it’s only gotten worse. These days, I can’t even take a single Sudafed without wanting to go on a killing spree. But back then I was young, cocaine was hip, and I really wanted to make my relationship with drugs work—so I kept giving it a go.
My roommate, Beth, was only seventeen when we arrived in Los Angeles. Her newfound freedom had spun her straight out of control and she never let something as trivial as “having a job” get in the way of a good time. It wasn’t that she didn’t work; she was spontaneous and not afraid to quit a job at the spur of the moment for another job with better pay or fewer hours. As a result, she’d been through quite a few gigs throughout our first year in Hollywood. The night we freebased, she’d been working in a clothing store on Melrose
Avenue for a couple of weeks. She and the assistant manager, Angela, a Swede with a set of startlingly great real breasts, didn’t so much
work
at the store as much as they embezzled from the owners by intercepting new inventory, loading a ton of it into trash bags, hauling them outside to the trash, then pulling up in Angela’s Jeep around 2 a.m. to retrieve the bags before the actual trash trucks came. Then they could sell the clothes for a major markdown to their friends, reaping a nice little profit, or keep what they liked for themselves.
As Beth became more and more radical, I found myself cowering in the opposite direction. Beth was seeking adventures and freedom from an oppressive upbringing, but I was looking to make a fresh start and find the security I lacked growing up. After a few crappy jobs, I found employment in a life insurance company as a clerk because I was under the impression that working for twelve grand a year in a stifling-hot office with coworkers who by and large only spoke Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines, would give me that stability I so craved. I thought this might also lead to a better credit rating and a little spending money, but so far the only thing it had added to my life was fifteen pounds, thanks to my cubicle’s close proximity to the floor’s vending machine.
The morning of the freebasing incident, I was in a hurry to get to work; they’d just hired a new hyper-strict supervisor fresh out of the United States Military Academy and I was afraid I might have to drop down and give him twenty if I dared to punch in thirty seconds late. As I was running for the door, I tripped over Beth’s current boyfriend, Roo, who was
passed out on the floor while Beth watched cartoons from the nearby couch. Roo was a portly goth with a penchant for wearing eyeliner, who’d been released from the Marines on a Section 8, which meant he was psychologically unfit for service—but apparently great boyfriend material if mental stability isn’t high on your priority list.
“Damn it, Beth. Do you have to keep your boyfriends lying around on the floor where people can trip on them?” I bitched, while grabbing my car keys off the special hook I had on the wall labeled car keys.
“You know what? You are getting way too uptight!” Beth said, glaring at me from her perch. Although she was only about five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet, she still seemed kind of menacing with her pointy mohawk and the black monkey boots she loved to wear. That comment really stung since I’d always seen myself as the rebel. I mean, it was my idea to move to California, but with Beth being seventeen and me being a
full
year and a half older, I had tried to be the mother figure.
“Hey, someone’s got to make the money around here. The toilet paper’s not going to buy itself!” I caught sight of myself in the mirror next to the front door shortly after making that comment, with short, pouffy hair and puffy skin that due to daily fluorescent light exposure made me so pale I almost looked like a film negative.
Wow. I’m not headed in a good direction.
I also took in my long burnt orange skirt and matching blazer with lapels that had the wingspan of a falcon that I wore almost every day because I didn’t have any other
choices. I suppose Beth could’ve hooked me up with some stolen goods, but almost everything in her store featured skulls, which somehow didn’t seem suitable for a job where a client might drop by to discuss the accidental death clause in their policy.
When I came home that evening from work, my apartment was full of people. My high school friend Abbie, who was fairly loose in high school but since had become a born-again Christian and now worked as a flight attendant for Delta, had a layover in LA and was crashing with us for fourteen hours before heading back to Dallas. Next, our neighbor Garth, an out-of-work actor, if you didn’t count the “extra work” on
The Love Boat
he’d been bragging about (which I didn’t—but he did—in a major way), popped by to see if we had any pot. “Dude, I need to mellow out. I came
this
close to getting an under five today.” Garth, like most wannabe actors, paused for dramatic effect after using any phrase that had to do with acting, like “under five,” leaving plenty of breathing room for someone to ask for a definition. When no request came, he continued on as if we hadn’t heard about his close calls a million times before. “We were doing this scene where I was just talking on the Lido deck with another couple of extras. We weren’t talking
out loud,
but we were doing our thing I learned at the Learning Annex class I took on being an extra, mouthing, ‘peas and carrots, peas and carrots, peas and carrots’ when all of a sudden, Laurel, casting director
extraordinaire,
motions to me and says, ‘We need you, Garth.’”
“You know the Lido deck isn’t a real place, right?” I didn’t want to burst his bubble, but I honestly felt a little concerned for his safety out in the real world and I knew this was probably scaring Abbie. Instead I wanted to pull her into my room to gossip, but there was another knock at the door and in walks Angela’s boyfriend, who looked a lot like a terrorist, although I’d never seen one up close before.
At this point, Abbie and I decided to make ourselves scarce, so I took off my blazer, threw on a Hands Across America sweatshirt, and we walked down to the corner 7-Eleven for beef jerky and cherry Slurpees, hoping everyone would have cleared out by the time we got back.
Returning a little while later to the apartment, I’m not sure what was more discomfiting: the smell of cat pee (which Beth and I just couldn’t get used to), the smell of some other drug burning, or the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album playing at a level usually reserved for outdoor arenas.
“Guys, come on, we’re smoking up,” the Terrorist said as casually as if he was calling us kids to the dinner table. Abbie and I sat down on the couch and the Terrorist took a huge hit and then passed it over to Abbie. I looked at Abbie, fully expecting her to leap up and give an impromptu sermon or at the very least a Bible quote to fit the situation, but she nonchalantly took the pipe and pulled in the smoke. I guess the New Testament doesn’t explicitly talk about “no freebasing” so she was good as far as her faith was concerned.
The pipe was passed to me, but I only took one small hit, knowing cocaine was not always kind to me. I didn’t
want to get out of control. Who knew if smoking it would make it stronger? Within five seconds, I was flying higher than the Goodyear blimp. I was so high—like
holy crap
high. All sorts of crazy, speedy thoughts zipped through my head like lightning striking—so damn genius but so darn fleeting, I could only watch them flash by without being able to write it down or even share it with anyone. If I could’ve harnessed the high, I’m pretty sure I could’ve penned a best-selling novel in less than ten minutes or at least read one.
“Freebasing is the only way to do coke,” the Terrorist said as he exhaled a lungful of toxic vapors.
This was 1986, so it was well after Richard Pryor had spent six weeks at a burn center after freebasing cocaine and then accidentally lighting himself on fire while doused with Bacardi 151. But (a) Up until that moment I didn’t know what we were doing was freebasing. And (b) Even if I had known, I still probably wouldn’t have worried about Richard Pryor’s bad outcome because, clearly, if you’re going to freebase cocaine, you have to use common sense and not just go dousing yourself with Bacardi or other flammable liquids. And it’s probably best to stay indoors. That way, if there is trouble, the fire department has an actual address to shoot for and not just “find the guy running down the street on fire.” But it was still clear that what we were doing wasn’t exactly mainstream drug use.
Before I knew it, the fun buzz had worn off and I was passed the pipe again, so I did another hit, which was very possibly not the best idea given my low tolerance. I felt my
jaw go completely rigid. My brain was still speeding along, thinking about a thousand thoughts a second, but I couldn’t feel my hands or face and since my jaw was sort of paralyzed, I couldn’t talk. Plus, the palpitating in my chest was so loud it was tough to concentrate on anything besides the fact that
I was surely on the verge of a heart attack.
Many years later, thanks to my medical training that consisted of watching every episode of
ER,
I diagnosed myself retroactively with tachycardia, the only cure for which is to
stop freebasing cocaine immediately.
Beth, Angela, Garth, and another random neighbor whose name I didn’t even know but who clearly had a sixth sense when drugs were in the vicinity were howling at some story Garth had just told about Gopher. They were sipping beer and smoking cigarettes like nothing was out of the ordinary, while I sat like a frozen statue—a monument to all that could go wrong when smoking illegal drugs.
I never realized that I hate Garth. He’s phony and has weird bangs and he’s a damn extra, but the way he talks you’d think he gets picked up for work by a limo every day.
Above the din in my head, I heard Beth talking excitedly about all the great money-making possibilities of becoming a coke dealer.
Really? Turn our apartment into a coke den? What was wrong with her?
Obviously, Beth was completely delusional if she thought being a coke dealer would be a simple career move. It seemed to me that besides being illegal, it would involve an awful lot of travel and she didn’t have a car or even a pager for that matter.
I looked over at Beth, with her bags of stolen clothes in
the closets and dreams of selling drugs, and had the realization that I was going to have to move out of this apartment if I was to have any chance of not spending the rest of my life in a federal penitentiary.
Normally,
I
was the bad influence on other people and I felt fairly confident about my role, but my bad influence went about as far as coaxing people into talking back or making crank phone calls—not selling crank! I was barely out of my teens, freebasing cocaine in my living room. And, hell, I wasn’t even a starlet dealing with the high pressure of becoming America’s sweetheart because my sitcom suddenly blew up and now I was getting two tons of fan mail every day and paparazzi were camped outside my door and there was no way to relieve the intense pressure except heavy drug use. I was doing data entry.
Even though all I wanted to do was sit and grit my teeth, I felt I should look for Abbie, whom I realized hadn’t been in the room for quite a while. I hoped she wasn’t in a shame spiral, her head buried in the Good Book or, worse, praying to the porcelain god. But I needn’t have worried. She was in my bedroom in a full-on grope session with the Terrorist—aka, Angela’s
boyfriend.
They both looked up but continued what they were doing, like humping dogs who had no idea they were doing anything wrong. I wondered momentarily if I should intervene, but luckily, the Terrorist got up, adjusted his pants, and left the room.
Abbie and I laid in my bed, avoiding conversation, and tried to fall asleep, but since even snorting one line of coke
can keep me up for four days it wasn’t happening. I would need something to come down—like maybe fourteen Valium. Abbie and I tossed and turned for a while when suddenly the door to my room burst open and the Terrorist was back standing there looking like he’d just stumbled into the cockpit of a plane and was ready to reroute us to Brisbane.
“Where is it?” he yelled. He was sweating profusely and looked incredibly suspicious.
“Where’s what?” I asked, knowing full well I’d have no idea what he was talking about.
“Where’s the rock? One of you stole it. Where the fuck is it, you bitches?” Wow, now that was rude. Drug dealer or not, he was a guest in our home.