Deep down in my core, I felt like Thelonious Monster had more talent and charisma than most of the bands on the scene, but either we’d blow it at crucial moments or people just didn’t get us. It was frustrating to me. I hung on to those feelings for many years. It made my relationship with Anthony Kiedis difficult at times. We were friends, for sure, but I also harbored a lot of latent resentment toward him. How dare he get so much more successful than I did? We had shared that goddamn apartment at La Leyenda. It was hard for me to understand what it all meant and where it went wrong. It took me years of therapy to get over all that. I was damaged.
In 1994, I was broke and a lot of my friends weren’t. I got a publishing check for $3,500, and I went straight to a place called Bar DeLuxe to start some serious drinking. I got drunk quick and kept the bartender busy. I was with some friends and they couldn’t keep up with my pace.
Fuck ’em,
I thought.
Doesn’t anybody know how to party anymore?
I felt the hot, sharp need to use the restroom. I slid off my stool and pushed my way in its direction. I was unsteady and I bumped into a ponytailed waitress. She spilled the drinks on her tray. I stood there and swayed like a weed in a summer breeze. She wasn’t happy. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, asshole?” she spat out. I tried to throw the old Bob Forrest charm. The waitress was immune. “Who’s going to pay for these drinks?” she demanded.
It made me angry that she talked to me like that. Didn’t she know who I was? “Fuck you. I have to use the toilet,” I said, and brusquely pushed past her. I could hear her behind me: “You’re going to take care of this, jerk.”
Inside the restroom, I was alone. I locked the door and took care of business. The incident with the waitress preyed on my mind. I felt ready to explode. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw.
Why hold back?
I thought. I cocked my fist and hit my reflection solidly in its nose. The mirror cracked. I dully looked down at my hand and saw the bright blood start to seep through the jagged cuts in my knuckles. I somehow felt better. I threw another punch with the other hand and smiled at how the mirror now resembled some kind of road map. I ripped the towel dispenser off the wall and threw it at the cracked mirror and watched the shards of glass fall into the sink. I kicked the metal wall that protected the toilet and put a huge dent in it. I gave it another one and made the dent deeper. I could hear someone pound on the door and heard a voice call from the other side. It was one of my friends. It snapped me back to reality. I looked around at the all the damage I’d caused.
Aw, fuck. I’m going to jail for this,
I thought. You can knock over a waitress’s tray of drinks and, at most, you’ll get kicked out of the bar. You engage in wanton destruction of private property and somebody’s going to call the cops. I unlocked the door and my friend slipped inside. I locked it again. He took a look at the shattered glass, the dented stall, the towel dispenser that rested in the sink, and then looked at me. “Jesus Christ, Bob. What the fuck’s the matter with you?”
“I’m going to jail, man. I’m going to jail.” I stood there and stared at my shoes. I felt sick.
“Look, man. Nobody’s going to jail. We’re going to walk straight out of here, you’re going to throw a bunch of cash on the bar to settle up, and then we’re out the door and gone. Got it? You don’t talk to anyone on the way out and you don’t say anything to anyone. Understand?”
I was in no position to argue. The fight wasn’t in me anymore. “Let’s go,” I said. He opened the door and we walked straight ahead to the bar. Fast, but not too fast. I flipped a couple of hundreds on the bar and we were out the door and into the night.
So how did I get from a place like that, the destructive and out-of-control void, a place where I refused to take responsibility for my actions, to a place that, most of the time, resembles a state of calm? Treatment. But what was it about treatment that eventually worked for me? I still don’t know. It’s not like there’s one thing I can point at and say, “That! That’s the magical thing that fixed me and cured me and made everything right in my life and in the world.” It may work that way for some people, but I doubt it. The first big step for me came at Hazelden. When I was there they told me, “You can be sober.” That opened my eyes to the possibility, although I stumbled a lot of times on my journey to where I am now. Even though I had any number of relapses, I had the desire to be clean. I’d fall, but I’d get back up.
If I have one piece of advice to give, it’s this: If you really want to get sober, give up alcohol and drugs for twelve months. Stay away from them. Don’t touch them. Go to meetings, but use your strength and your will to not use or drink. There are people who will tell you that you have to put all your trust in God. Really? As soon as I said, “I don’t have control of this situation, God does,” I would have been right back in a world of hurt. Dogma is something that I’ve never found helpful. The support of a group can help, but use common sense too. Groups are just like anything else in life. There are cool people and there are not-cool people. You’ll have to figure out who’s who. And you’ll have to do that, like everything else in the process, by yourself. Nobody can save you but yourself.
If you stumble and relapse, don’t give up. If you really want to live your life without drugs or alcohol, you’ll hit those times when you give in and use. To fall into despair over it won’t help. Stop. Again. There is an astonishing failure rate when it comes to treatment. But
failure
’s an odd term to use with a disease like alcoholism and drug addiction. It’s like asking someone with type 1 diabetes, “Did your insulin cure you?” Of course not. Which brings up an interesting take on the success rates of treatment programs. Drew and I don’t trust the data that’s out there. We talk about it. I’ll see some stats and say, “We don’t seem to do a great job if these figures are accurate.”
“The data just depends upon how it’s measured, Bob. And it isn’t culled properly when addiction is studied. Addiction is viewed like pneumonia when it’s more like asthma. It’s a chronic illness and the end point is screwed up.”
He’s right. Drew also believes the studies are usually too short. Generally, they’re conducted over a period of months. You don’t really see studies that follow a single group of addicts over a ten-year period. Something like that might give you some insight. Another problem is that so many of the studies that are done these days involve what’s called “replacement therapy.” It’s a fancy term for giving addicts another drug to keep them off heroin. It used to be methadone. Now it’s Suboxone. It’s not really a cure for addiction.
Urine tests are unreliable too. In a clinical situation, most addicts know when they’ll be tested. They know how to manipulate that. They know how to beat the system. Urine tests are often done on the same day, week in and week out. An addict knows how long a drug stays in the body. Have a urine test on Monday? Well, from Friday night until Monday morning, don’t take drugs. Instead, drink heavily to cool yourself out. Your test will come back clean. Or you can buy clean urine from a friend to put in the specimen bottle when you’re alone in the toilet stall. It’s all part of the game in the addict lifestyle. To depend on drug addicts to give you straight facts is a not a great strategy if you want to get to the truth. Worse, abstinence is not always seen as a cool or sexy kind of treatment. It’s hard work for the patient and it involves drastic changes in the way life is lived. If anyone should be held up to the “succeed or fail” standard, it should be us, the people who run these programs. If we do anything less than attempt to give addicts who want treatment a decent shot at sober living—without replacement drugs—we’re the ones who fail.
But the main thing to remember is that addiction isn’t a bleak dead end. There’s hope. I know an awful lot of formerly helpless dope fiends who now live bright new lives of sobriety and have all the good things that come along with it. Did they stumble along the way? Sure, almost all of them. The important thing is that there’s a desire to live free from drugs. If you slip and fall on your journey to sobriety, just start over. Don’t be defeated. As they say in twelve-step meetings, “Keep coming back. It works if you work it.” And it does.
I’m happy just to be alive …
I
may have grown older, but I still enjoyed the things that made me smile when I was a kid. Here I stood under purpling skies as the sun set at the end of a cool and pleasant day in Los Angeles, just south of downtown. I was alone in the square in front of the glass-and-steel façade of the Staples Center on Chick Hearn Court. This wasn’t here when I was a kid and I tagged along at my dad’s side, amped up for a night of Lakers basketball at the Forum in Inglewood before we’d enjoy a guys’ night on the town, just the two of us, over in Chinatown for a postgame meal. At a restaurant called Hop Louie’s Golden Pagoda, heavily accented Chinese waiters in starched white shirts and heavy crimson vests delivered a steady stream of hot, steaming plates piled with shrimp fried rice, chow mein, and great, golden, greasy stacks of egg foo yung that swam in some sort of unidentifiable brown sauce. “Eat up, Bobby,” said my dad as he downed a gin and tonic in a highball glass filled with ice. There was a large aquarium along one wall, lit with a single bulb that gave the lone lionfish that swam among the plants and rocks of this artificial reef an eerie glow. “You know, Bobby, those things are poisonous,” said my dad as he pointed at the aquarium with his chopsticks.
“Do people eat them?” I asked.
“I think the Chinese do. They eat a lot of different stuff.”
“Is it good?” I asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Looks too spiky for me to ever want to try one.”
“Yeah, I don’t think I’d like it either. Especially if it’s got poison in it,” I said, going back to my plate.
One of the waiters took away an empty platter that sat on the table and said something about “armond chicken.” I lifted a small, handleless cup filled with tea and took a sip right as my dad shot me a comical look in reaction to the waiter’s remark. I laughed hard, and warm, heavily sugared tea erupted out my mouth and nose. Later, after we couldn’t eat another bite, a solemn waiter brought a small tray with a couple of fortune cookies. “Crack it open, Bobby. See what the future holds,” said my dad. I took one of the brittle treats and snapped it in half. Inside was a little strip of paper. I pulled it out and was disappointed to see that all the writing on it was in Chinese. “I can’t read this,” I said. My dad motioned for a waiter.
“Could you read this for us, please?” he asked, and handed the paper to the waiter.
The waiter looked at the little strip and then said, “It say, ‘You have very good-a ruck.” My dad and I broke into gales of laughter.
Here on Chick Hearn Court, I waited for Flea and Chad Smith, the rhythm engine that powered the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I had called Flea earlier. “Hey, man, we should go catch a game.”
“Let’s do it tonight,” he said.
“Cool. Meet me at the Magic Johnson statue,” I said.
An individual might be hard to locate in the kind of crowd the Lakers draw, but it was impossible to miss the recently erected tribute to Magic Johnson. Seventeen feet tall and cast in bronze, it depicted the former Lakers point guard frozen midaction in his gold uniform and old-school shorty-shorts as he led the team on a fast break, one hand palming the ball and the other pointed down court. And so I waited for my friends as the pregame crowd grew larger and made its way inside. I reached in my pocket and fished out a piece of nicotine gum. I fumbled with the foil backing and finally managed to peel it away to get to the mint-flavored lozenge inside. Four milligrams’ worth of nicotine in a chewy treat. I had managed to quit cigarettes, but I still needed regular doses of nicotine. I figured that even if I had given up all my old vices, I should hang on to at least one. So it was nicotine and caffeine. Pretty safe when I considered all the other stuff that used to pump through my veins.
“Hey, man!” I heard, and looked up. Flea and Chad made their way through the throng. I thought back to when we were much, much younger and how we had lived. In those days, I don’t think any of us could have pictured ourselves creeping into middle age, when a big night on the town meant a hometown basketball game. When the game was over, we didn’t go out on the town and tear it up like we did when we were kids; we went home.
I left the city and drove back to the Valley, where my wife, Sam, and our baby, Elvis, waited for me. In the car, I thought back to the first time Sam and I met. It was at Las Encinas. I was intrigued by her. It wasn’t anything I could pinpoint absolutely. It was any number of things. Mostly, I just thought she was cool. She stood apart from the crowd. I started to see her at different recovery meetings, but I kept my distance. I stayed at arm’s length for nearly six years. Sam was admitted to Las Encinas for a second stay as an outpatient, and I finally said to myself, “This is ridiculous. Ask the girl out.” It was a bold move. Staff is definitely not supposed to do that. It’s one of those rules designed to keep vulnerable people in treatment safe from predatory manipulations, but I thought to myself,
I’m not a predator. I’m not a creep. I’m just a guy who really likes this girl
. I approached Sam, who, by this time, had also shown an interest in me.
“Look, you know the rules. We’re not supposed to see each other socially,” I said in my most professional manner.
“But … ,” she said, which gave me tacit permission to continue.
“Maybe we could go have some dinner and talk.”
“I’d like that.” She smiled.
“We could get in trouble for this, you know. Me, a lot more than you.”
“Nobody’s going to do anything. We’ll be discreet.”
On December 18, we went out on our first real date and we found that there was something there. We thought it was happiness, but these things are always tricky, especially in our particular situation. Word got out and I was betrayed by a friend. Loesha Zeviar, who has appeared as a resident technician on
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,
was a director at Las Encinas. She deduced the relationship that I had with Sam and went straight to her supervisor to spell it out. I felt hurt. I had known Loesha since she was sixteen. Our relationship covered years. She was married to my friend Flea for a time. But she was scared when she learned of my relationship with Sam. She felt like she was in over her head and so she went to her boss, a guy who had only been at the facility for four months, and trouble came hard and fast. I was called into the boss’s office. You know it will be bad when the first thing said to you is, “Please, sit down.”
I took a seat and watched this rookie study me. I don’t think he liked me much to begin with anyway. “Bob, did you go out with one of our clients?”
It made no sense to lie about it. He already knew the story from Loesha anyway. “Yeah,” I said.
“I’m going to need you to go clear out your office and leave the premises,” he said with the kind of icy reserve personnel people seem to cultivate. There was no opportunity to argue and no recourse. I was out. As I walked to the door he added, “Oh, and Bob? I’m going to ask you to stay away from here. You’re banned from the property.”
“Banned from the property?” I sputtered. “Are you fucking kidding me, dude?”
“Bob, this is a serious violation of our standards.”
Well, adios, amigo. I went to my office and piled my personal effects into a cardboard box and left the premises. I was upset. Sam was upset. But we stayed together and after a few years as a couple and the birth of our son, Elvis, we were married in December of 2012 in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. I don’t hold any of this against Loesha. Her job at Las Encinas was incredibly difficult and I’ve always thought the demands placed upon her were beyond her experience. She might have handled it differently given our history, but she made her decision and I got the boot. I also got a lovely wife and beautiful child in the deal.
I was thinking about them as I wheeled onto our street and pulled into the drive. I fumbled with my keys at the front door for a moment before I slid the right one into the lock and walked inside. “Honey, I’m home,” I said, sounding exactly like the kind of person I never thought I could be when I was lost in my increasingly faraway wasted years. Sam and I went to look in on Elvis, who was asleep in his bed. I thought to myself,
I may not be completely well, but I’m much, much better
. And I was happy.