Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir (49 page)

Wait a minute, what am I saying? Am I going to turn people off ? Are they going to say, “I’m not reading this damn book! This sonofabitch is preachin’ to me and I just got myself a big bottle of benzos.” Well, actually, you already bought the book, right, so what the hell?

And that’s how I got into all this shit in the first place: helpful doctors and accommodating dealers all trafficking in the same Mephistophelian meds. I just couldn’t stand going through twelve years of pain and suffering and not being able to sleep at night! Not my sleep, doctor, not sleep
that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,
for god’s sake!

Erin was at Las Encinas, halfway through her rehab. When you get through detox you go into residential units—just a hundred feet away. Nice cabins. There was a tree growing over my cabin roof. I would hear this
plick-plick
sound above my head. Hard little shell-shaped purple flowers falling on the roof. I put a sleeping bag on the bench outside my cabin and brought my pillows—and purple flowers rained down on my head. In the morning the ground was covered with purple flowers. I sang “Purple Rain” every day!

Erin and I had been
flying
on this stuff for two years, Xanax being our drug of choice. I didn’t like the me that was me on benzos, and coming out of that din was a revelation. It was now you’re here, front and center, present. It was easier for me to do because I’d had practice. I’d come out of the din four times before this.

But after a few days I went, “Oh, my god, what
is
this?” You’re in there for benzo addiction, and at the clinic they start telling you, “It takes months to get off that stuff.” I said, “Oh, yeah? That’s bullshit!” to that, as I do to everything. One of the things I hated (you’re in there with this Dr. Blum—Barry Blum, head of the Chemical Dependency Program, along with Dr. Drew Pinsky) is the forced damn cheeriness—“Good morning, Steven! How are we today?” “Hey, Dr. Blum, I’m feeling just
great
!” You see him every day and he has to be sure you really are cheery—but not
too
cheery (that would be suspicious) and not slipping into despair, depression, and suicidal gloom. So, because of the tendency toward morbid depression and desperation, Dr. Blum would see each patient every day—the more critical would be visited by one of the staff every fifteen minutes—because everyone’s detoxing, hitting walls. I couldn’t sleep for the first four days: “No one’s gonna die from no sleep,” he tells me. “But maybe we should up your Seroquel.” So they gave you Seroquel and Neurontin to sleep. By the time you’ve finished this book you’ll all have degrees in psychopharmacology.

Seroquel is a nonnarcotic, antipsychotic med for people who are coming off stuff, especially benzos. They gave me a patch of Clonidine to lower my blood pressure. Clonidine is used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure), alcohol abuse, nicotine withdrawal, and dependency on benzos. “Nah,” I said, “I’m not takin’ them. I’ve been through that and I’m not going to start banging into walls and doors again like a rag doll.” “Well, Steven, we’re here to help you. Why don’t you just try one.” Look, I can be reasonable, so I said, “All right, I’ll do
one
.” And this time it was bearable. But in the other rehabs I was in, they had me on
four
patches or a bunch of pills. I was the living dead. I was grunting like a stoat, making ungodly noises:
mrrr-vrreeeeeee
. I couldn’t wake up, I couldn’t sleep or get up. I had no muscle control.

I’d been on this stuff before at Chit Chat, that rehab in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. I got sober there the third and last time in rehab—or so I thought. Now we’re up to four rehabs: Hazelden to East House to Chit Chat to Las Encinas. I’ve been in so many rehabs they’re like my alma maters. My foot has been in rehab, for chrissake. In 2001 I got a wing of the Roxbury rehab clinic in Boston named for me. I did a “Got Milk?” ad—which was pretty funny given my reputation. I would even have done one for a rehab if they’d asked me—they could have used “The Farm”. . .

There’s a cockroach in my coffee

There’s a needle in my arm

And I feel like New York Cittay

Get me to the farm

Whatever it takes—like I said, I’m just such a good drug addict. But this time I knew, because I’d been through it so many times before, that it was now or never. I was sixty, and if I didn’t stop now, when was I going to do it? Stop everything, including the Xanax, and Xanax was the killer. By comparison it was pretty easy getting off the narcotics. I couldn’t sleep at night—the anxiety I felt coming off Xanax was extreme. A benzo nightmare. Benzodiazepine,
ach!
But to be honest, benzos were the shit and I loved them. It’s just that I can’t be anywhere near them. I know I’m a drug addict. “Hi, my name is Steven and I’m an alcoholic, drug addict, coke freak, and benzo demon.” It’s insidious stuff. Benzo is Beelzebub’s latest brew and I’ll tell you why. You, even you, reasonable reader, I will tell you what you do without even knowing it: you open your bottle of Xanax or Valium or Librium, you take out mother’s little helper and slip it under your tongue and wait for that feeling to hit. You know just what that buzz is going to be when it stings your central nervous system like a pharmaceutical viper.

And you’ll say to me, “No, not really, Steven. I only take it to go to sleep or when I have a panic attack.” Uh-huhn. But I
know
. When people take those drugs, even nonaddicts, they wait for that mood-altering brain fog to kick in. They go, “Yeah, I love it when it hits, I get that warm, woozy feeling, and that’s when I know I can go to sleep.” And I
cry
when I hear that, real chemical tears—
a-heh-heh-heh-he-oooooh, ah-ha-ha-haaaaa—
because I love that, too. I just can’t do it!

One day I’m at Las Encinas on my way to the lunchroom. I’m stumbling around banging into things because they put me on Seroquel, and to get to the lunchroom you had to go through the bipolar clinic. That was really fun. As I pass through, a heavyset guy looks up at me and smiles. I see his teeth are all sharpened like Dracula. Remember that? That was a bit of insanity that was all the rage right before shaving your head became a craze. I said, “Hey, how ya doing?” And he goes, “Oh, real good. I love your music!” It was all very relaxed, as relaxed as it could be with people going through serious mood swings. I was glad it was all so casual and informal. Weren’t we all on the same ship of fools, all suffering, deluded creatures, all the same under the eyes of God and Dr. Drew Pinsky? But I forgot that I was still in the United States of Amnesia, where everything up to and including mental illness is subject to the overriding law of sensationalism, gossip, and innuendo. Paris Hilton: New Sex Tape! Nick Nolte’s Cocaine and Booze DUI! Lindsay Lohan Back in Rehab; Blames Astrologer.

As I’m walking through, trying not to stare too much, I see a guy playing a guitar. “Woo, give me that,” I say. I don’t really play guitar, but I watch my fingers and I’m strumming away, and suddenly there’s a huge crowd of people around me and everyone’s got their cell phones out, taking photos, recording. I looked up and went, “
Aiiiieeeee!
Fuck! You know, I’m not supposed to be in here!” Word got out that I was in Las Encinas and I heard the tabloids were offering a considerable amount of money for a picture of me in there looking as fucked-up as possible. So after that, they put police out front—not to prevent homicidal psychopaths from breaking in and attacking their old shrinks, but to stop the paparazzi from sneaking in to catch me drooling on the floor.

When you won’t answer their dopey questions—“Give us a full accounting of why you’re in there and what it feels like to be back in rehab for the
fourth
time”—they’ll go ahead and write what they want anyway. They did that with my divorce, Aerosmith breaking up, and Erin punching out the girl in the bar in New Orleans.

I called Slash up from rehab and said, “Slash, I got somethin’ to tell you, man.” He goes, “So do I!” I go, “No, no, me first.” He says, “What? What?” He thought I was going to say, “I’m trashed and I’m here with my friend, I’m in—” but instead I said, “Slash, know where I am?” And he said, “Oh, I
know
where you are.” “You sonofabitch,” I said, “what do you mean?” And he goes, “Well, you know Steve’s in there with you.” I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “Yeah, Steven Adler’s right there in Las Encinas. He’s back in detox.” “
What?
Steven fucking Adler’s in detox again?” Steven Adler, the original drummer from Guns ’N’ Roses was in there with me at the same rehab and I didn’t know it.

The poor guy. Talk about an appetite for destruction! He got fired from Guns ’N’ Roses in 1990 for being too fucked-up to play drums, ODed on smack in his car in 1995, a year later had a stroke and went into a coma after doing a speedball (cocaine and heroin), and after a second stroke ended up with a speech impediment.

Slash asked me to go over and say hi to him. Detox was right down the hill from my cabin so I walked down. Steven was a total wreck. He was slurring his words so badly I could barely understand him. “Uh hiyaaah, Steeeveeeen, aaahm noot stoooned right nooow, I juss taaalk liiike thiiis. I’ve haaaaaad twwwwwo sssssssstroooooookes, heeee, huhhh.” I was stunned. “You sound good, man,” I said. “Nice goin’!” And I walked out. I wanted to throw up. He’s had two strokes, slurs his speech, and he’s a mess. And because he’s like that, he’s never going to come back, and he’ll just never not be on drugs, and he’ll never be in the band again. So there’s part of his brain that knows that and goes, “Fuck it! I’m gonna go get high right now!” And I get that. I actually get it. I hope I’m wrong.

Two weeks later I found out that the reason he was there was to do
Celebrity Rehab,
a reality show on VH1 hosted by Dr. Pinsky about famous people in recovery. They don’t film it there at Encinas, they do it in a hotel. They wait until the celebrity gets detoxed and then get him to reenact his former fucked-upness—which is pretty fucked-up, actually. Later on I heard some assistants from the show prepping Steven Adler for the
Celebrity Rehab
episode. “Here’s what I want you to do,” they were telling him. “Tomorrow night, just as soon as the sun goes down, we’re going to put you in an ambulance, we’re gonna take you over to the hotel. When you get there, fall out onto the ground and go, ‘Oh, my god! Where am I?’ ” They wanted him to act out his own messed-up state when he entered rehab. It was ghoulish and unreal. They gave him thirty grand for the episode, he snorted it all, crashed his car, and he ended up in jail detox.

It didn’t seem to me all that ethical using actual fucked-up patients like Steven Adler in a reality show, but who am I to say? Not to mention getting trashed celebrities to mime their own self-destructive nosedives, which they then sensationalize on a melo-fucking-dramatic reality show, which so traumatizes them they end up in worse shape than ever—from the drugs they bought with the money from the show.
Oh
nurr-se!

Well, here’s how Dr. Drew does it: he gets people in and then he has an announcer explain in a smarmy, therapeutic voice what the patient’s paradigm is, his traits, his innermost feelings, how it was, how it is now, and how it could be in the future with positive affirmations spread over the top like butter on new bread. That’s how they get away with it. All delivered under a veneer of sanctimonious concern. Like the corrupt state senator who goes on the air with that stone-casting voice, “Yes, I was there, she was a prostitute . . . regrettable incident.” With no response . . . just that flinty smile. John Lennon read that type brilliantly . . .

There’s room at the top they are telling you still,

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,

If you want to be like the folks on the hill

Every Saturday morning, there was a “What’s Up, Doc?” session with Dr. Barry Blum, where significant others and family groups could come and talk and ask questions. Then on Saturday afternoon Dr. Drew would give a talk, and the room was packed. If everyone had inhaled at the same time the windows would have imploded, there were that many people. His talks were so interesting because he would expostulate about his theories. He had some curious poses and stances, which he delivered as psychopharmacological dogma. Such as that addicts have especially sympathetic receptor sites for narcotics—we all do, actually—and that’s why they’re drug addicts. Drug addicts, in other words, have the drug-addict gene. Well, if I have that gene, what did the conquistadors have, the El Dorado gene? And what about Magellan, did he have a global-navigation gene? “Flat? Did you say the world was flat? Get in the boats! We’re goin’!” Anybody that’s got any balls at all, are they the ones with the gene or without? Dr. Pinsky would claim that there’s a certain paradigm to our behavioral traits, but his argument is bullshit: “Well, I get why he would try drugs; he’s predisposed to them.” Which, of course, makes me wonder why
wouldn’t
this hypothetical person take drugs out of curiosity to see what they’re like? Are there genes for people who go up to the wall? Or do other people have a gene that suppresses adventure, risk, and curiosity? Shrinks don’t even go there!