Doc: A Memoir (29 page)

I knew better than to listen. I realized I didn’t have too many chances left. But I didn’t know enough not to get one last hurrah in right before I left New Jersey. And I fooled exactly no one. Within minutes of walking into the Pasadena Recovery Center, I tested positive for cocaine use within the previous seventy-two hours.

I lied about it for a minute. But my urine was dirty. What could I do? The counselors knew then that they were in for a challenge with me.

Cast-Offs

T
ELL ME ABOUT YOUR
relationship with your oldest son,” Dr. Drew Pinsky said to me.

We were sitting in his office at the Pasadena Recovery Center in Pasadena, California, the real-life drug-treatment center where
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew
is taped. The cameras were rolling, of course.

“Little Doc,” I said. “We have a lot of stuff, a lot of similarities. He was born in eighty-six, and that’s right around when I started my drug abuse. So his whole life I’ve been battling drugs. One of the things I still carry a little guilt about is that in oh-five, we were both locked up together.”

“You both were on a drug charge?” Dr. Drew asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “He was on a drug charge also, and that was very tough for me to accept and forgive myself for. I had dreamed about
wanting to continue my career long enough where, if he’d made it one day, we could hopefully play together.”

That would have been amazing, and Dr. Drew seemed moved by the thought. “Oh, wow,” he said.

“On the same team,” I added. “Not ever thinking we’d be wearing the same orange jumpsuits.”

Here’s the real secret of
Celebrity Rehab.
It isn’t that each season’s cast members are willing to throw their personal business all over TV. It isn’t even that millions of Americans like to watch a soap opera featuring a bunch of semifamous alcoholics and drug addicts. The real secret of
Celebrity Rehab
is that there is actual treatment going on, and some of it can be brutally intense. Don’t be fooled by the cameras and the conflicts and Dr. Drew’s high-fashion glasses. Despite the showbiz environment and need for ratings every week,
Celebrity Rehab
can actually change lives.

I know. It definitely changed mine.

The day-to-day process wasn’t so different from the programs at Smithers or Betty Ford or most other treatment programs I’d been in. Group therapy meetings where the residents share their struggles. One-on-one sessions with Dr. Drew or Bob Forrest, the wise ex-addict who is head counselor and program manager. A real attempt to focus each of us—not just on the substances we’d been abusing but also on the reasons we kept coming back to them.

For me, this journey into treatment just felt different. There was obviously the pressure of the court case. Prison was hanging over my head. Failing this time would be more costly and more public than my previous failures. And being older, maybe I was just more ready than I’d been before. But a lot of credit also goes to the
Celebrity Rehab
team. They seemed to get me, as no drug counselors had ever gotten me before. From the day I showed up, Dr. Drew and his team kept asking me about my relationships with my family, my kids especially. They
seemed to believe those relationships were key to helping me live a healthier life. If I was going to get better, my family would be a big part of the reason why.

In one of our earlier one-on-one sessions, Dr. Drew wanted to know how Dwight Junior and my kids reacted to my drug use.

“Does he blame you for this?” Dr. Drew asked.

That was a hugely painful topic.

“Um,” I said, thinking for a minute. “I’m not sure. I mean, I hurt my kids, and I’m aware of that.”

Drew pressed on.

“You know, one of the things that addicts often do is they isolate themselves from their kids because they don’t want to hurt them with their disease. But the isolating hurts the kids,” Dr. Drew said. “They want you, even if you’re using. They want you to be around them.”

I knew that was true. But, God, I hated talking about it.

Most addicts I’ve known, including me for most of my life, wouldn’t think of seeking treatment in front of a national cable TV audience. Most addicts seek out the dark corners and the shadows, where they can safely feed their habits out of view. Personally, I liked to get high behind closed, locked doors. But not this crew. These were public people who seemed to crave the spotlight even at the most embarrassing moments of their lives.

And what a cast Dr. Drew and his producers had pulled together for season five of
Celebrity Rehab.
Sean Young could be calm and pleasant one minute, then fly into a random fit of rage. Michael Lohan seemed to suffer chest pains only when the cameras were on. Steven Adler got so sick of Amy Fisher’s refusal to admit she was an addict, he delivered an ultimatum to Dr. Drew: “It’s either her or me!”

No one could cause a scene like Bai Ling. The erratic actress began her journey to sobriety by refusing to take her psychiatric meds, then climbing onto the roof of the treatment center in her bathrobe. The
staff wasn’t sure if Bai was going to jump or not. But everyone had to admit one thing: she was a stone-cold master at keeping the cameras pointing at her.

These were the people I was going to get healthy with? In this crowd, I actually felt like the sane one.

Here I was, quiet, low-key, mostly sticking to myself, trying to make some progress on the most stubborn issue in my life, my quarter-century battle with drugs and alcohol. I don’t mean to say I was the only one doing any hard work. I’m not saying I’m the only one who benefited from our three-week stay together. I’m sure others did too. It’s just that some of my fellow celebrity rehabbers seemed far more concerned with the “Celebrity” than the “Rehab.”

Sean Young was a last-minute replacement on the show for Michaele Salahi, the White House crasher who’d been featured on
The Real Housewives of D.C.
Michaele was dropped from
Celebrity Rehab
when it turned out she really wasn’t addicted to anything—except publicity.

Sean couldn’t seem to forgive herself for a series of bizarre public incidents, all of them fueled by alcohol. After days of moping around the group, Sean lost it big-time at Michael Lohan. She was in her room one morning when Michael began yelling about a fight he’d had with his girlfriend. Everyone could hear him. Suddenly, sad-faced Sean was leaning into Michael, jabbing her finger in the air and screaming at him.

“Shut up!” she yelled. “You’re so fucking loud, you woke me up. Shut up, you loud-ass!”

Then she turned and stormed away.

Michael waited until Sean was out of sight. Then, in a much quieter voice than either of them had been using, he said, “Are you drunk? It’s ten after eight. You’re supposed to be up, anyway.”

Sean must have excellent hearing. She spun around, marched back to Michael, and started screaming again, even louder this time.

“You sit there and talk about how you’re a Christian—turn the other cheek! Turn
your
cheek. Shut the fuck up and stop sucking up all the air around here!”

Michael glared back at Sean. “Talk about your anger issues,” he said. “Look at you.”

“SHUT UP!” she yelled, although Michael got the last word this time. The last grumble, anyway.

“Psycho!” he said.

I’m sorry to say this, but Michael was a joke. A former cocaine user, he’d replaced the blow with alcohol and rage. He was nice enough to me, asking, “How ya doin’, Doc? How ya doin’?” But he had real trouble playing nicely with others. Michael was clearly the person Michael was most interested in—that and reminding people who his daughter was. It seemed to me like he had come to Pasadena mostly to rack up TV time, which he was finding every bit as addictive as cocaine, alcohol, or anger.

One minute, he could be totally calm and normal. Then the camera light would go on, and he’d start screaming like a maniac.

“I’m gonna leave! I’m gonna leave!” he shouted in response to some imagined slight. When no one objected, he began frantically clutching his chest as if he were having a heart attack.

“My heart! My heart!”

When the cameras moved to someone else, he looked perfectly fine again.

To many of these folks, maximizing camera time seemed at least as important as getting better. Bai Ling was the gold standard at that. I’m not sure if she’s really as whacked-out as people were saying. But she acted so bizarre, the patients, the staff, and the cameras couldn’t help but focus on her.

Her first-night climb was just the start. Like Michael, Bai could be totally calm, talking like a well-balanced adult. Then, in a flash, she’d
be weeping or laughing out loud. She seemed to do this most often when the cameras momentarily strayed from her. I don’t think she liked that at all.

Jessica Kiper from
Survivor
was the same way She had battled just about everything—alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, Vicodin, Valium, and Xanax. She could turn her emotions on and off like a water faucet. Whatever their personal demons, these people are professional performers. They perform.

One morning, Jessica and a couple of other cast members were eating breakfast on the patio. She was sitting at a table. I was standing next to the table, just talking to everyone. No drama. Then Jessica looked up at me and turned dead serious. “You’ve got to understand,” she said. “When the camera’s rolling, you can’t stand in front of us.”

I thought that said a lot about Jessica. Here we were, confronting our deepest, darkest issues, and she was worrying about camera shots. If I was standing somewhere I shouldn’t, maybe the angle on her wouldn’t be right.

Among the eight of us, I think Jeremy Jackson and I were the only ones who went on the show for the right reasons—to get better and to stay that way. He was my roommate, a good-looking guy in excellent shape, which turned out to be part of his problem. Jeremy is best known for his role on TV’s
Baywatch,
where all through the 1990s he played the young Hobie Buchannon, the son of David Hasselhoff’s character. Jeremy had been a severe drug addict in his
Baywatch
days. He was arrested in a meth raid and did a long stint in rehab. Lately he’d been wrestling with a steroid habit. He took the group sessions seriously. You could tell he had a real shot at progress by the way he copped to his own disappointments. He wasn’t just trying to suck up the maximum camera time.

Amy Fisher seemed like a nice person. She’d gotten a lifetime’s worth of attention as a teenager when she shot her boyfriend’s wife in the face. But she still had a knack for drawing drama. She was a real
lightning rod in the group. She infuriated Steven. She could even get under the skin of low-key Jeremy.

All of us had promised to be blisteringly honest. But Amy would never say she had a problem. That infuriated Steven, who called her dishonest and kept pushing her. But Amy wouldn’t use the words: “I’m an addict.” She would say, “I struggle with alcohol.” Steven, who’d been fired from Guns N’ Roses for his heroin addiction and was now trying to get his pot smoking under control, seemed to consider all this a personal affront to him and everyone else in the group. He didn’t even try to keep his frustration with Amy under control.

One afternoon, I was sitting with Steven, Amy, and Shelly Sprague, one of the program techs, as Steven berated Amy again.

“If you’re not an alcoholic or an addict, why are you here?”

Shelly told Steven to calm down, which made him only madder. He redirected his anger at her. Steven grabbed Shelly’s arm, and she started pleading: “Steven, Steven, please let me go. Why are you grabbing me?”

It stayed tense like that for several long seconds, and no one looked ready to back down. I just sat there quietly, as the uproar unfolded around me.

Steven clearly had problems keeping himself under control. After several outbursts at Amy, Dr. Drew tried to make Steven see how hostile he’d become. Tried. But trying to make Steven listen, even the calm Dr. Drew, in his perfectly pressed shirt, lost his cool. “Steven!” Dr. Drew shouted. “I gotta finish, goddamn it! Listen to me! When your aggression affects other members of the group, the group doesn’t function. Amy maybe has shut down because you scared the shit out of her.”

The Amy drama never seemed to stop. One night, she packed her bags and threatened to leave, complaining that
Celebrity Rehab
had too many cameras.

“The camera crew is like paparazzi,” she said.

Didn’t she know this was a reality TV show?

Another day, Amy complained bitterly about how uncomfortable the recovery center was. “It’s one step above prison,” she fumed. “Prison beds. Prison food.”

As she spoke, Michael, Steven, and I were sitting there. Like Amy, we’d all been to real prison. “That’s ridiculous!” Steven finally erupted. “I cannot believe for one bit that you shot somebody in the head, and you went to a jail that was as nice as this.”

Jennifer Gimenez, a model and music video actress who is one of the rehab techs, surprised me with a request.

“I want you to write a letter to your kids,” she said to me.

“Um, okay,” I said.

“I want you to write the things that you feel guilty, shameful, and regretful about,” explained Jenn, who’d had her own long struggles with cocaine.

It was more than just surprise I felt. More like terror. Yes, I felt guilty—about a lot of things. Shameful and regretful too. I thought I’d said I’m sorry to my kids in my own way, though maybe not in so many words. I assumed they knew how awful I felt. But putting it down in writing? For them and for everyone else to see? I guess that’s what people mean when they say “Get out of your comfort zone.”

Writing a letter like that was a million miles out of my comfort zone.

Jenn told me I didn’t have to do anything with the letter, only write it. She handed me paper and a pen, and I began to write. “To my heart, which is my kids. I take this time to let you guys know how much I love you and that I’m very, very sorry for not being the dad that you guys deserve. I apologize deeply for being in the same house as you guys and texting from one room while you guys were in the other room because I was too high to come outside. Showing up at the graduations drunk, missing some of you guys’ birthdays. That, I don’t get to do over. Missing you guys’ school activities and basically divorcing you
guys for drugs. So it’s up to me now to do all I can. My goal is to be your father again. Someone you can trust, believe in, and be proud of. Love you all, Daddy.”