But that’s a possibility and I have to be steeled for it. While the show has gotten praise for its demystification of rehab and how we show that the path to redemption is navigable, there are also plenty of voices that say it’s sleazy and exploitative.
In 2009, the country singer Mindy McCready signed a contract to appear on the show. She was almost a living embodiment of every tragic female country star to ever have existed: failed relationships, pills, alcohol, domestic abuse, and underneath it all, a fragile vulnerability. She could have been a parody of the country music genre, but we all loved her and the audience did too. She gave all of us a huge scare when, on camera, she suffered a seizure and collapsed. All through her time on the show, she exhibited a concern and kindness for her fellow cast members and always seemed to care more about them than she did for herself. We were happy that she seemed to have conquered her demons when the season ended. But it wasn’t long before her name started to appear in the media again as her troubles once again started to consume her. In February of 2013, when news of her suicide came to light, I was heartbroken. We deal with troubled people and we try our best to help, but sometimes tragedies occur.
That’s the nature of what we do. All I can do is apply what I’ve learned and what I know and be compassionate, give encouragement, and, most of all, be real. It’s showtime now. A small army of crew people from VH1 runs about with clipboards and wireless headsets. The back end of the parking lot has been converted into an eating area by a catering company, and tables and folding chairs are set up underneath a makeshift awning that flaps in the mild breeze. Smoke curls up from a portable grill that an early-shift cook uses to prepare some kind of meat as well as chicken for lunch. In a room inside the facility, somebody has laid out breakfast: bagels, muffins, cold cereal, fresh fruit, and plenty of coffee. I stack some watermelon on my paper plate. In another room a large flat-screen television set gets the feeds from several different cameras throughout the center. The center has been converted to a film set and we’re all ready for another season under the unblinking eyes of the cameras.
T
he morning is typical for late spring in Southern California. It’s softly overcast and pleasantly cool. The warm inland temperatures of the previous afternoon have drawn in overnight moisture from the Pacific that has settled as mist in the valleys and canyons and will remain suspended there until the sun burns it off in the early afternoon. It’s a weather cycle that will be repeated endlessly until the summer heat of July finally brings it to an end. I’m at the Pasadena Recovery Center and the television show is in its second week of production.
The center, on Raymond Avenue, is dead center in one of Pasadena’s older neighborhoods. It’s what could rightfully be called a “mixed use” area. There are several convalescent homes nearby and on the larger streets are chain supermarkets and beverage outlets like Starbucks. There’s no uniformity to the residences on the smaller streets, unlike newer Southern California neighborhoods that aspire toward uniformity. Here, there are small, single-family stucco homes not much bigger than shoe boxes and some stately multistory models built in a fake Craftsman style. Directly next door to the center is a sprawling old home with a sagging front porch that sits well to the rear of a weed-choked lot. A cracked cement footpath leads in from the sidewalk and is guarded by two forlorn-looking stone Chinese lions that have begun to crumble with age and time. There are ancient trees everywhere. Gnarled pines, shady oaks, and, since this is Southern California, towering palms hold up the gray skies and provide shelter to an amazingly rich variety of mountain birds down from the foothills. A ragged symphony orchestra of scrub jays, mockingbirds, and, oddly, feral, nonnative green parrots shrieks and squawks from the shelter of the branches and fronds and carpet-bombs pedestrians and parked cars with their caustic droppings. The cracked sidewalks are stained white with the stuff.
PRC itself is a low-slung ranch-style building that blends in to these surroundings well. Its front is glass with cheery-colored inserts that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a California public school during the 1960s. Near the entrance are molded concrete tables and benches made to resemble stone, and a nearby tub constructed of the same stuff and filled with sand. The smokers here use it as their communal ashtray. It’s well used. Inside, the floors are made of a light-colored wood and there are pressure-molded plywood chairs that mimic the famous Eames style, all organic curves and retro-looking swoops. Hung on the walls are photographs of rugged-looking islands surrounded by gently lapping seas. In the office, a few of the workers drink coffee, chat, and answer phones. Their voices float through the corridor, where a sleepy-looking security guard sits at a table with a sign-in book. Up on the roof is a lounge area for the residents with padded chairs, chaises, and potted plants. It’s a modest place. Certainly nothing too fancy, but it’s pleasant and has a warm and welcoming feel to it. It’s about as far as one can get from the style of some of the “high-end” oceanfront treatment centers that cater to the wealthy and resemble palatial resort hotels and spas. Whatever works, as the old adage goes. But what is effective when it comes to treatment?
From personal experience, I can attest that not a single person from my peer group—the hardest of the hard-core junkies—can ever tell anyone how they were able to get clean. There’s no set formula. For a very long time, I was convinced that love was the answer. I was wrong. I loved Layne Staley. Love didn’t help him.
At the turn of the millennium, I had been clean for a few years and I had started to gain a reputation as someone who could talk to addicts. More importantly, they’d listen. Layne was the charismatic front man for the Seattle-based band Alice in Chains. He also had an increasingly heavy and debilitating heroin addiction. That habit, which had at one point seemed a certification of his outsider, rock-and-roll cool, now threatened to destroy him. His skin took on the look of bleached vellum, his weight dropped below ninety pounds, and he was becoming increasingly reclusive. He had entered the end stage of the game. It’s the same old story, and one that I had witnessed more than once.
But he had people who loved him and who didn’t want to see him check out early. His mother, especially, was worried. Somehow, she had heard that I had helped John Frusciante, so she called me.
“Layne’s in terrible shape,” she said. “I heard that you and John are doing okay these days. Could you please talk to Layne? Maybe you could get John to talk to him too?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
How could I refuse a request like that? I was aware of how bad Layne had gotten. The press loved to write about his fall. Layne was at the top of those “death pool” lists morbid people loved to put together. I gave John a call. If anyone could relate to Layne’s condition, it was Frusciante.
“Hey, man. How’s it going? You doing all right?” I said.
“Yeah. I’m good. What’s up?”
“I got a call from Layne Staley’s mother. She’s really worried about him. She says he’s in terrible shape. Worse than you were, maybe. She asked me if we’d go talk to him. What do you think?”
“Talk to him about drugs?” he asked.
“Yeah. Drugs. Of course drugs.”
“I’ll talk to him. But if he wants to do drugs, Bob, well, he should probably just do them.” It was classic Frusciante. He was the guy who stood over me once when I was in the throes of an overdose and said, “Just let it go, Bob. It’ll be all right.”
I thought a bit more about my decision to ask John to help out.
He continued. “I don’t want to preach to anybody like you and Anthony do. Look. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t like to get high anymore. But if someone wants to do them, they should. They totally should.” I was kind of surprised to hear him say that, but I also realized that John, like always, was staying true to his ideals and beliefs. He was consistent. I had to give him that, and I understood where he was coming from.
“I think he’s really sick, John. We should go talk to him.”
“Okay.”
I called Layne’s mother back. “John and I will talk to him. I don’t know how much it will help.”
Layne’s mom said she understood. “You know, Bob,” she told me, “Layne’s got an odd sense of humor. I told him that John had gangrene once. He said, ‘In his arm? That’s terrible, Mom. John’s a guitar player. He needs his hands and arms. Me? I’m just a singer. I can get by without them.’ I know he was joking, but I don’t like to hear stuff like that. Can you try to talk sense to him?”
“We’ll talk to him,” I said. I hung up the phone and wondered how much good it would do. Frusciante was probably right. You can’t preach to anyone. Sometimes, you can’t even point them in the right direction. A horse won’t drink if it doesn’t want to.
And so we went and found Layne. He didn’t look good at all. His mind still worked but he was a million miles away. He played a video game while we talked.
“Hey, Layne,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I know why you’re here,” he said as he idly fiddled with the control.
“Your mom’s worried, man. You don’t look too good.”
“I’m okay, though. Really.” I wasn’t sure what he based that on. He was adamant that he was fine. He pretended to listen. Neither John nor I could reach him. The newspapers had to have had his obituary on standby. After more fruitless talk, John and I left.
“I don’t think he’ll come out of this,” I said.
“It’s his life, man,” said John.
He was right. On April 5, 2002, Layne died from what the autopsy later indicated had been a coke and heroin cocktail. He had become so reclusive that nobody knew he was gone until April 19, when the police—along with his mother and father—found him decomposing in his condo after getting a tip that there had been no activity on his bank card for the last two weeks. On the table was a stash of cocaine and a couple of crack pipes.
Of the people I tried hardest to reach—John Frusciante, Jeff Conaway, Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, Steven Adler, and Jason Davis, the voice actor and oil company heir—two are dead, two are sober, and one still gets high. I loved them all, but love, or a reasonable facsimile, is never enough to fix an addict … even though in the absence of drugs and alcohol, an addict will search for something to fill that void. Sex is often the easiest score.
It’s why I’ve become quite in favor of what’s called gender-specific rehab—at least for the heterosexual community. Women and men in rehab almost always have some real problems in addition to their addictions. They’re what might have been called in a less-enlightened time “damaged goods.” They’ve been sexually abused or traumatized by life and usually have some form of clinical mental illness. It’s not their fault. They just happen to be people living in twenty-first-century America, and a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, as does a guy. When you put these people in a mixed-gender group, they can cause real chaos. They know how to manipulate situations and use their sexuality to their advantage. It can be tragic to watch it unfold, but there’s not much anyone can do but warn against it and hope people will be able to override their basic biological urges. Mostly, it’s a lot to ask, but you have to try to get them to see the light.
“Hey, man, you need to concentrate on yourself,” I might try to advise some poor lovelorn addict. “Get your own life straightened out. Now’s not the time to fall in love—especially with someone who, if you don’t mind my brutal honesty, is way more fucked up than you are.”
“Fuck you, Bob,” he might spit back. “You can’t tell me what to do. You don’t know how I feel. You don’t know how we feel about each other!”
“You sound like a goofy, love-struck teenager, dude.”
“Well, maybe you’re right, man,” he’ll say. But a week later you’ll see him furtively sharing a cigarette with his rehab girlfriend and you’ll know that there are some things that are stronger than any dire words of warning you might choose to use.
Redemption from the disease of addiction is entirely possible—but it has to be done alone. And yet, addicts constantly search for love and approval, and when their expectations aren’t met, they become resentful. Drugs and alcohol become their intimates. These substances may wreak havoc in users’ lives, but they’re constants. And they’re always there.
I had plenty of resentments when I started my journey. I was upset that my musical career had not followed the course I had projected. My friends Anthony, Flea, and John Frusciante had all started out like me and became some of the biggest rock stars on the planet. Why not me? What had happened? Back in the bad old days before my sobriety, I found myself at a Los Angeles drug house. It was nothing like you see in the movies. It wasn’t in a “bad” part of town. There weren’t gangsters with guns. There weren’t even the rusted carcasses of old appliances or automobiles propped up on concrete blocks in either the front or back yard. A gardening crew came once a week and kept things neat on the outside. It was just a typical, middle-class junkie pad with comfortable furniture, a carpet that could have used a good once-over with a vacuum cleaner, and a coffee table with half-crushed empty beer cans tossed about haphazardly and ashtrays that overflowed with old cigarette butts. All the mundane detritus of addiction as practiced by white folks. There was even, almost incongruously, a big-screen television set permanently tuned to MTV to entertain the stumblers who drifted in and out to take care of business. I was bundled up in an oversized coat to protect me from the nighttime chill outside even though I poured sweat from the crack cocaine I obsessively smoked in the corner of the room. Crack is the salted peanuts of the drug world. One taste demands another. And another after that.
There was a commotion at the front door. “Hey, what’s up?” said our friendly host as he ushered in a pair of new arrivals. I barely glanced up from the glass straight shooter I held to my lips and lit another rock pushed into in the opposite end. I held the medicinal-tasting smoke in my lungs and blew out a huge billow of it that expanded to the low ceiling. I felt the rush hit me, a sensation of a sudden drop in pressure while the hum of a ghost train ran through my ears. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered at the intensity of it. I stared blankly at the glowing TV in front of me, unable to comprehend what this strange electronic object was for a moment. I eventually focused enough to recognize it again as this thing called “television” and see that MTV was showing the latest video from the Seattle-based band Alice in Chains. As I looked past the set, I watched as the two arrivals were ushered toward the back of the house to do a little business. I recognized them as Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley and the band’s bass player Mike Starr. I looked at them and then looked at the TV. Weird. Here they were copping drugs, and on-screen, they were miming their latest hit single. It was an odd thing to see and it struck me as somehow unfair.
Everyone’s passing me by,
I thought bitterly. I shoved another rock into the pipe and took another hit.
Fuck it, man.
This was the same old resentment that I had felt after Thelonious Monster recorded
Beautiful Mess
and we went out on the road. The constant tours and endless one-night shows took a heavy toll on me, and the band was tired. We played badly, I thought, but we were still a vital live act. We were better than Candlebox or some of our Capitol Records label mates that we would tour with. I thought their shows were the equivalent of watching water freeze. They weren’t very fond of us, either. The bands with whom we were billed generally resented us for the chaos we brought as part of our package. We were a hard act to follow. Most of them were scared to have us open for them. It got to the point where we’d just tour with bands that were friends of ours, like Soul Asylum and Hüsker Dü.
Beautiful Mess
didn’t spawn any American singles, but one of the songs, “Body and Soul?” caught on with European audiences and was a hit over there. While the song was in rotation on European MTV, we made a lot of appearances on the music network in Europe and here in America. But we couldn’t deliver the goods in any sort of sustainable way and we fell apart.