Running With Monsters: A Memoir (16 page)

I didn’t learn as much as I should have. Pupils only receive a limited education in a classroom setting. I continued my fieldwork, but the course work came fast and hard and a lot of the technical stuff seemed like gibberish to me. I did what I had in high school: I listened to what the instructor discussed and tried to absorb as much as I could. I already knew the psychology of chemical dependency because I had lived it, but that was intuitive. The clinical terminology was all new to me. No matter how frustrating and difficult the class work was, I knew that once I got certified, I would be set. People already knew me from MAP and from Pasadena Recovery Center, where I also worked. I was seen as a “personality.” Potential employers didn’t care about me. They wanted to hire the image they called “Bob.” It was kind of weird. I was good at what I did, but not everybody wanted to look deeper than the surface.

Around this time, I reconnected with Dr. Drew Pinsky in the parking lot at Pasadena Recovery Center. We had a history. I was acquainted with him before he became a well-known specialist in the treatment of addiction. When I first met him, he was on a Saturday-night radio call-in show in the 1980s called
Loveline
that broadcast from Pasadena’s KROQ-FM. I was still with Thelonious Monster back then. Drew had just completed his M.D. at the University of Southern California and was doing his residency. He hosted the medical segment of the show, during which he offered clinical advice about sex and relationships. The show would have guests, and because I was “that kid who knew everybody,” I might show up with whoever had been scheduled to appear, or I’d just pop in on my own. It was fun to be on the radio. I thought I was charming most of the time, but I also showed up drunk, high, and incoherent a lot too. I disrupted the show on-air sometimes by walking off so I could go outside to do drugs. So much so that the show’s producer confronted me one night.

“Look, Bob, we need to talk.”

“The show tonight was great, wasn’t it?” I said enthusiastically, jacked on the twelfth hit of crack I’d had over the past hour. It was a cold night and I was wrapped in an overcoat that had somehow grown several sizes too large for me. I pulled a pint bottle from one of the pockets and took a slug of vodka.

“No. The show sucked. It was terrible because of you.”

I stood there shocked. I thought I had been the best part of the night’s entertainment.

“You didn’t even make sense,” the exasperated producer said. “And I know why you kept leaving. I mean, have you taken a look at yourself lately? Drew thinks you have fuckin’ AIDS, man.”

I started to argue but was cut off. “Man—”

“So until you get yourself un-fucked and get your shit together, we don’t want or need you here.”

And that was that. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t need the show. It’s not like they paid me or anything. Fine. Whatever. I stomped out and didn’t return. So much for my charming personality.

In 1997 or 1998, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” from TV organized a lecture with MAP for a series he was doing on addiction. It was at the Sheraton Universal in Universal City and I went to listen. I plopped down in the front row. Nye did his thing and then brought out a guest to speak about treatment methods. It was Drew. He lectured the crowd of about twenty people in his earnest manner and then opened things up for questions. I had a few.

“Can a nonaddict ever truly reach an addict?”

“Why is the recovery rate for traditional treatment programs so abysmally low?”

Drew answered all my questions, but I had the distinct impression that he didn’t remember me. How could that be? I had done all those radio appearances with him. When the lecture was over, I approached him.

“How’ve you been, Drew?” I asked.

“Good, good. You sure ask a lot of questions. Have we met?”

“Drew, it’s me. Bob Forrest. You don’t remember me?”

A look of surprise washed over his face. He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost. Little did I know …

“Bob Forrest? I thought you were dead.”

“Come on, Drew. The hat. The glasses. Who else would it be?”

“I thought it was just … Holy crap, Bob, you look great! I mean, I’ve seen the transitions that addicts can make, but I’m looking at a miracle.”

“Look, I know you’re at Las Encinas. I wonder if there’s any work available for me over there.”

“Did you go to school, Bob?” he asked me.

“Yeah, but I did a fast-track program,” I said as honestly as I could. “But I’ve done lots of fieldwork.”

He must have seen something in me, because he invited me to interview at Las Encinas. I showed up the next week and Drew laid it out for me.

“Bob, what you’re doing now is beyond your expertise and training. I can bring you along here. Consider this ‘the education of Bob Forrest.’ I’ll make you an administrator. You’re going to learn how sick people work, and if you stick with it and give it all you’ve got—and read the books—you’ll end up running a program.”

I was scared to death when I went to work with Drew because I knew that I didn’t know enough. More important, Drew knew it too. I couldn’t fake it and I was unprepared. When it came to the clinical stuff, the medical and the psychological jargon, I was lost. Drew encouraged me. “If you don’t know something, Bob, ask,” he’d say. When we’d have staff meetings and people talked in an alphabet soup of acronyms and clinical terms, Drew said, “Get a medical dictionary and highlight pen. Look up words you don’t understand. There’s a lot that happens in these meetings and you won’t get any of it if you can’t understand what we say.” It was a learning process that took years.

But I was good with patients. I could keep addicts in a program even when they wanted to bolt. I calmed the friction that sometimes blew people out of rehab.

“Bob, this place sucks. I can’t take it here.”

“What’s the problem?”

It could be almost anything. “They don’t treat me right. They talk down to me. They’re late with my medication. They told me I couldn’t smoke over in that area.”

“Well, look. I can see your point, but come on. Those are the reasons why you want to leave? You want to leave because you want to get high. And if you leave now, you’ll be high within twenty-four hours. Guaranteed.”

The thing that I’ve found is that addicts have an almost unwavering belief in the righteousness of their arguments and complaints. About everything. And a lot of the time, they are right. I’ll take their side against the facility. But my job is to get them to see that the real issue at play isn’t some supposed slight or a restriction, but that those are just excuses to give in to the disease. If you throw bullshit at a patient, they’ll leave. If you show some compassion and they can see that you’re straight with them, most of the time, they’ll stay.

I also learned that there was an underlying problem with addiction: personality disorder. It often leads to self-medicating, which often leads to addiction. And unless a person’s sober, they can’t begin to work on that successfully. I knew that from my own experiences. I started to see connections between my work and my personal history, although it took me a while to recognize them. When I was at Las Encinas, they’d send me to the locked ward to do consultations. I’d go and evaluate the patient.

“What do you think, Bob?” Drew would ask.

“That girl’s just another addict! She could be any one of us.”

“Bob, there are other psychiatric conditions besides addiction, and you have to sort those things out.”

“No, no. She’s been completely adulterated by medications. She’s an addict and needs recovery.”

“Bob, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

However, he did respect my belief that for a lot of patients, medicine was overdone and overprescribed. Drug addicts used to populate the fringes of society, and they slipped in and out of a shadowy world most people didn’t even know existed, or, if they did, they didn’t know where to find it. Now you see great, wonderful people—young, old, in between—from all walks of life who desperately scuttle about to maintain that buzz, and in the process, sometimes they overdose and die. It’s a shameful thing and it gets worse every year. An entire industry keeps people doped and drugged and reaps huge profits under the guise of modern medicine.

And growing right alongside the pharmaceutical industry is the business of rehabilitation. My experiences through more than twenty different rehab programs have given me more than a little bit of insight into the game. Far too often, rehab just sells a commodity—sobriety—in the same sleazy, cynical way a late-night TV pitchman hawks used cars. And, like those cars, sobriety’s often a shoddy product. What else would you call something with such a spectacular failure rate? A lot of the time it looks like a straight con job. A distraught parent or relative calls up to say, “I have a loved one who’s an addict! I don’t know what to do!” The calm voice on the line says, “You have to get them into treatment immediately. If you don’t,
they’ll die
. We have a bed waiting.” Now, that’s a heavy thing to lay on a near-hysterical person. When a thirty-day stay can cost tens of thousands of dollars—or more—and insurance won’t cover it, then what? Well, your understanding friend on the end of the line will just transfer you over to the facility’s very own credit bureau, which will advise you about mortgaging your home to pay for treatment—which may or may not do your loved one any good at all. But those beds have to stay occupied and the facility gets its cut whether the program succeeds or not. I frequently find myself questioning the ethics of this business.

People in the rehab industry want to make money just like everybody else who works for a paycheck, but too often they get greedy. I’ve never been overly concerned about how much money I could make at this. I want to get paid too. This is, after all, a job I do. But I don’t feel the need to make millions of dollars. And if you think I couldn’t make that kind of money in this industry now, you’re nuts. I just couldn’t live with myself if what I did was con families out of a huge fee and exploit their fear and desperation.

At times, it seems that much of the recovery industry is riddled with corruption. You can’t trust anybody. Celebrities, especially, have it tough when they seek treatment. Not only are they ridiculed in the press and popular culture, they’re often exploited and their confidentiality as patients is violated. Any program that treats an A-list star can get put on the map by that one famous client. One of the reasons I chose Hazelden as my first rehab facility was because Elizabeth Taylor had gone there. Some of these places are prepared to leak that information to the press, although it doesn’t always happen that directly. Some hospitals have publicity and advertising departments that exist solely for the purpose of exploiting this kind of information. Worse, staff and patients have been known to sell out their celebrity clients to the tabloid press in order to flip a quick buck. Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler once told me he had been in the Priory—a well-known, high-end London clinic—for treatment and his roommate had sold the intimate details of Steven’s stay to one of the big British tabloids—which all too happily published the salaciously edited details.

Almost worse is that in the effort to keep celebrity patients in the facility and to exploit them as powerful marketing tools, the stars are allowed to get away with the most outrageous kinds of behavior—things that would get a civilian patient bounced to the curb immediately. It took me several stays in different facilities to begin to learn how to game the system, but a big star doesn’t have to do that. By the end of the first day they know their status and money can get them special treatment. Sometimes, they can figure that out before they even arrive.

I’ve heard outrageous stories, and I know they’re true. Some rehab facilities—the kind that dispense daily back rubs and keep their celebrity patients on a “replacement drug” treatment—will allow their famous clients to dictate the terms under which they’ll stay. One well-known pop singer once rented all the beds in an entire wing of a certain Southern California beachside center just so she could be by herself. What kind of place would allow that? That’s not how we do it. It doesn’t matter who you are. Here at Pasadena Recovery Center, you have a roommate. We know what works. We know how to treat drug addiction and the patients don’t. We realize that as a well-off, world-famous entertainer, these people haven’t had to have a roommate for many years—if ever—but it’s part of the process here. Now, I won’t say that we don’t make certain accommodations and allowances. When you have a celebrity in treatment it changes the dynamic of the relationship with the other patients. You have to address it. You can’t ignore the fact that news helicopters are flying overhead and there are roving packs of paparazzi circling the streets and climbing the trees on the perimeter. That has to be dealt with for everybody’s sake.

In 2010, I felt that I could do more good operating an outpatient program, so I started Hollywood Recovery Services from the 1924-vintage, twelve-story Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine. I patterned the setup after Buddy Arnold’s Musicians Assistance Program, which helped me so much. Since it was an outpatient facility, we didn’t have to worry about keeping “heads on beds” and we avoided a lot of the business headaches I tend to associate with the “recovery industry.” However, it was a business, and like all startups, it would take a while to see a profit. I took on a financial backer.

Maybe I should have been a little more discerning. My backer was a longtime heavyweight in the Los Angeles pornography industry who had found salvation for himself and some of his immediate family through recovery meetings. He was a gung-ho devotee of the philosophy and he liked my idea to start a program. He also liked that we had a track record through the television show, which I’ll tell you all about in the next chapter. We had worked with some notoriously difficult cases in front of the cameras that had caught his eye. In particular, the actor Jeff Conaway. His appearance on
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew
was tragic. He was belligerent and half-crippled, a sad, lost soul a million miles removed from Kenickie, the singing, dancing golden-boy hood he had played in the movie
Grease
. He was an addict and had been for a long time. His attempts to clean up had failed and when he checked in, he was close to total collapse from the previous night’s coke-and-whiskey binge and practically an invalid from a long-term back injury. It was painful to see any human in this condition and so desperate and in need of help, but, even so, he had a fighter’s spirit and a junkie’s fatalism. His outbursts made audiences tune in and our backer saw how hard Drew, Shelly Sprague, and I had worked to help him. Our team had a certain marquee value that appealed to our benefactor. Unfortunately, he came a from an industry accustomed to quick profits that far exceeded the investment costs. It also didn’t help that Porn Incorporated was caught in an epic tailspin brought on by the Great Recession and the proliferation of freely available smut on the Internet. We folded in 2012. When the call came to inform me that our sponsor was ending our partnership, he didn’t even have the decency to make it himself. He had an underling do it.