The Harder They Fall (37 page)

As a rule, when I was working, I didn’t use. Only once I was caught at doing that. It was on the film
Cat People
. I was told, “Great, you are finished for the day.” At that I rushed to my trailer, having already called the dealer and left him a drive-on pass to come on onto the lot, and as I walked in he handed me the pipe. I threw the costume off. I felt pleased with myself: I’d done good work, was very happy, time for a little celebration. I took a big hit, was sittin’ there in a daze, and a bang sounded on the door, and of course the director needed me to do the take again.

I had to get dressed again. It was unbelievable! I went down to the set and couldn’t do the short scene for love or money. Could not! And I had to take the director aside and say, “I do apologize. I thought we’d finished and I took a hit of coke, and now I’m stoned.” And so he talked to the cameraman and probably went, “Okay, we’ll use what he did before.” But it was embarrassing. It was pathetic. I did have a handle on that. If I was working, the getting high didn’t mix. I managed to keep the drugs separate from the work. But it’s different for an actor than a musician or someone else, say, because often I just wouldn’t do the film. Did the drugs affect the work? Yes! It affected the work in that I had to say no, I didn’t want to do a film. My agent supposed it was for art reasons, whereas I just wanted to stay high. … I’d be on a run. The run would last a few days. If anything came up during
that time, I wouldn’t even answer the phone. They could never even get ahold of me.

The paranoia that went with it was a very big part for me. I sort of enjoyed it, weirdly enough—had a very masochistic view of it. In reality it’s not enjoyable, but during my addiction when I stayed up nights, I used to get into hallucination. I loved that. That was really fabulous! Just embraced it. Where I used to live up in the Hollywood Hills, it was like the houses were floating like moons. Often I was alone. Once, though, I had a friend of mine there and I tormented him, saying, “There’s somebody up that tree, I know it! Ghosts in that tree!” Scared the poor guy. And all that—crazy!

I was a naughty boy. Such a loser with my wife. I didn’t care. In fact, I’m surprised Mary put up with me as long as she did. For a year or two, and into my recovery. But once the love had gone, it had gone; it was too late. Often you’ll find with addicted people: They hold their marriages together, yet when sober, they split up. It’s the strain that tells. Also, when you’re in this situation of one addicted person in a couple, there is this other side of it. From the other point of view, somebody may have to play the enabler, or whatever position they take. Somehow that’s also a comforting part of the dynamic of the relationship. So when that dynamic is removed ’cause that other person is on the road to recovery, and the dynamic changes completely—it didn’t work for us. We tried and went on for another three years after I got clean.

The using ended because I went down to the Betty Ford Center. The friends who took me down there put me in a hotel, and I had one last binge before I had to check in the next morning at nine o’clock. I smoked everything that I had, and at the end of it, I threw the pipe in this ornamental lake. It was like the ceremonial sinking of a ship. Down it went, and in my mind, it was the end of that period of my life. Thank God. Thank God!

I didn’t thank God at the time, however. I felt I’d lost a great friend or mistress, that I’d lost the one thing that I could totally trust—all that bullshit! It wasn’t until I started to work on myself at Betty Ford, which is a wonderful place as is anyplace that gets you sober. Treatment for cocaine addiction was quite new in those days. I don’t think they’d had any
freebasers in there, or very few. Had mostly alcoholics and a few heroin addicts. It was a twenty-eight-day program, and they keep you longer if they don’t think you’re gonna make it. That was twenty-two years ago. I had an incredible experience.

When I went there, I was put with a cocaine dealer. We bunked together. The first few weeks, we were planning a big scam. He was a huge dealer who had a couple of kilos stashed in a place by a lake where he used to go and party. We planned—O Lord!—we were going to have the greatest boat ride on this lake. (He was in treatment because a court required it.) I remember thinking, “Two kilos, that’s more than I ever imagined” as he told me his exploits, and how his father drove the cocaine across state lines. After two weeks of our plotting to do this, I came back from a group session, just looked at him and said, “You know, Gary, I’m going to give sobriety a try. Your plan sounds great, beautiful, but I’m going to give this a try.” He goes, “Are you serious? You’re crazy!” I went, “You know what? I’m just going to hang in here with these people and give it a try.”

Then the big issue was the wine. I told them, “I’ve an excellent wine cellar in my house.” (Ten thousand dollars worth of wine, which is like a hundred grand’s worth today.) And there was a girl in our group of five, who was a checkout clerk in a supermarket, who looked at me. When I said, “What am I supposed to do with this wine collection?” there was a little
hrummph
and she looked at me and said, “Why don’t you just stick it up your ass?” I went, “I get it. Okay, right. What the fuck am I wincing on about? You’re so right. I’ll just get rid of it.”

After all that, I remained unconvinced about the drinking though. I thought it was a load of bollocks. I thought I could drink and keep it under control once I had stopped using the coke. But two days before I was to leave, it was arranged for me to meet with a chaplain. I wasn’t particularly religious, but I went to have my hour’s meeting with him. He was very easy for me to talk to. I was relating this problem to him: “I don’t get it. Why should I not have a glass of wine? It’s part of my culture.” Blah blah blah—the excuses came. He looked at me and he goes, “Malcolm, why take the chance? Do you want to do all this work and then have a glass of wine? For what? It may, just may, lead you back to cocaine. Why take the chance? It’s
just more sensible not to do it.” And a penny dropped for some reason. I guessed he was right. I thought, “Why? Is it really worth the risk? It’s no big deal.” So I never did it again.

What the chaplain observed made a profound impression on me. It really made me feel good about my decision, helped me see that I could come to a decision and that was that. There is really no point, at the end of the day, to deceiving yourself. You can make excuses for this, that, and the other. But there is no point deceiving yourself. They wouldn’t have let me go had I
not
changed my thinking. I was genuinely looking for a way to reconcile that portion of my old life-style in my mind and saw it’s no good paying lip service. You have to dig under every emotion, feeling, everything. It’s no good leaving anything there. And I think that was one of the last issues of the addiction troubling to me.

The joke on me is that in the first month after I came out, that guy, who had offered me a world of drugs, looked me up. My cocaine dealer friend who’d gone through the clinic with me came by to visit, and of course brought a big envelope of white powder. I just went, “Wow!” Then I broke it to him: “I definitely am not going to join you on this. I’m really determined to make my sobriety work.”

That wasn’t too bad. I passed that test quite well. The next test was more lingering. For years driving around the freeway system of Los Angeles, I remembered every turnoff for a dealer. That was weird. The car wanted to turn off and go score! But, slowly, all that subsided. Through the help of my peers and all that, it slowly but surely receded. Eventually, after a year or two or more, the craving gets less and less, and at last you don’t even have to think about it at all in terms of “Do I want to do it?”

My resolve when I came out of treatment was firm. Once I made that decision two weeks into treatment not to plan that run with Gary, I let that go. It had been fun talking about the pipe and the whole deal, but somewhere in the recess of my brain, my intelligence took over. It wasn’t anything spiritual, except in the sense of discovering something about my own humanity. But having said that, it must have been the Higher Power looking out for me. Not a great shining light, more mundane, more earthbound: “What the fuck am I doing? Am I insane? Let’s not talk about this escapade
anymore because it’s not helpful. I’m not going to be doing it. It was fun, but I’m here to do serious work.” And, of course, it’s hard work, recovery. Less and less hard as the years have gone by, but you know, the way we live our lives is all recovery in one sense or another. We go through a shattering experience like that, and everything we do in life from then on is in a way influenced by what we’ve been through. It has to be. Otherwise you wouldn’t have any sensitivity at all, and we only learn by experiences, good or bad. I believe that there’s a code, sort of a Twelve Step program that we all try. We don’t succeed, but try to live by it. I’m not just talking about not taking a drink or a substance, but just the acts of living, the day-to-day being a good human being.

After treatment I retained some of my old thinking, yes, but I had help: people like my friend Rift. Rift was a great influence on me because he had been there and done it way more than me. Made me look like a beginner as we compared stories. Wow, thank God I never used with him! Rift was a protector, but it’s all up to the individual how you can keep your sobriety intact.

Touch wood, thank God, I’ve never had a slip. My son Charlie is twenty, so it’s been twenty years. My son has never seen me take a drop either of drugs or alcohol. By the same token, I’ve never seen him drink a beer or use anything because he knows what happened to me.

I’ve told him, and my ex-wife has told him too. And I’ll be telling my new son, Beckett, when he is old enough to understand. I will tell him and warn him because it is obviously in the genes. But I’m very proud of my older son, how he’s resisted the peer pressure. He is a surfer and filmmaker. It’s very hard when everybody’s doing something.

I’ve always been open with him about my problem, and I know that’s influenced him. Charlie has never told me, but his girlfriend told my wife that that was the reason. My son wouldn’t say it to me, but she told my wife, who told me. When I heard that, it was a wonderful moment. All I went through, the whole fucking thing, was worthwhile for that, to hear that. It may have saved him, and I hope the knowledge will save my small one, because I’ll tell him too. At first you don’t want to tell your child because you’re ashamed, but it’s wonderful! A very freeing and relieving thing to do.
And of course, it’s brilliant for them to hear. Also means you’re a real person, not an actor in a family play. I’ve always been, oh my God, the bundle of energy “let’s have fun with” kind of dad that we see on weekends. Pa-pa-pa-pa, pa-pa-pa-pa, like, Mr. Energy. But it’s good for them to know the dark side too.

But of course the other side of it is we are what we are because of what we’ve done—the experiences—and in a strange way, I would never change anything. Even though it destroyed elements in my life, I felt it was meant to be. I have a feeling I’m a much better person today than I would be had I not learnt about recovery and gone through those hard lessons. On appearance, that’s not a great message for young people, yet I know it to be true.

(poet)