Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (20 page)

Scott was sober and happy, the guys in the band were as affectionate and funny a band of brothers as they’d been since their earliest striving days, and the fans were consistently amazing. STP played small stadiums—called “sheds”—and venues all over the country. They headlined with groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with crowds ranging from three thousand to eighty thousand. If there was anything but joy in the eyes of everyone around me, I didn’t see it.

Throughout the years, I’ve been privileged to see some astonishing concerts—I’ve loved losing myself in the music, lights, and even the smell of an arena. But one downside of being at the side of the stage instead of in the audience is having to let go of the sense of fantasy that drew you into the music in the first place. When you travel with the band, you always see the man behind the curtain—the band behind the curtain. Turns out the Mighty Oz is just a group of guys, and sometimes watching grown men bicker about who’s got the missing eyeliner sort of crushes the vibe.

Unlike the cliché, I never glowed when I was pregnant. My hair hung limp, my skin was impossible, and I gained far more weight than I should’ve. Toward the end, with both my babies, I looked more like the Kool-Aid pitcher than I did a radiant mother-to-be—I was a perfect circle. But, sadly, a bosomless one. All my life, my only nonsurgical hope of filling out the top of a bikini was motherhood. One day, midpregnancy, I ran into Victoria’s Secret certain that I finally met the requirements for bikini cleavage. I stood in the dressing room with my arms above my head while the very nice woman wrapped a tape measure around me in two places that tickled. I
waited for the announcement that would graduate me from the 34A I’d been since I was thirteen.

“Thirty-six,” she said.

“Thirty-six what?” I asked.

“Thirty-six,” she said again, then sort of shrugged. Great. Evidently the pregnancy was doing nothing for my bosom; on the other hand, my back was expanding. Pouting, I bought some very large panties and left. I’ll never know why I was booked for modeling jobs while I was pregnant. When I look at those pictures with friends now, we drop to the floor laughing. Damn chili cheese dogs!

I stayed with the tour for the rest of the summer, until I was too pregnant to be comfortable and not allowed to fly anymore. In September I realized it was time to do that nesting thing.

One afternoon when I was back in L.A., Scott somehow hit a button on his phone, and it speed-dialed me without his being aware of it. When I answered, then realized that he didn’t know I was on the other end, I decided to listen and see what kind of tour shenanigans he was up to (I’m a girl—what did you think I was going to do?). It was riveting beyond belief. The guys were having a conversation about how difficult it is to eat enough vegetables on the road. Yes, this is the
Inside Edition
truth of it all—no sex or drugs, just concern over fiber intake, a lesson on the importance of one of the five food groups. My eavesdropping was a bust, and I was laughing so hard I thought I’d get caught.

Scott wrote
“Sour Girl” (and almost everything else on STP’s
No. 4
album) primarily about and during his divorce from Jannina. “A sour girl the day she met me…a happy girl the day she left me.”
I understood what he was writing and why, but I never felt at ease with it. So many of the songs were about the end of that marriage. Did I feel guilty? Sure I did. And possessive, too. I didn’t want to hear those words. Moreover, much of Scott’s time working on it in the studio had been during our Chaos Tour. Objectively, I could admire the work; subjectively, I didn’t want it as a touchstone for the beginning of our life together.

I was hugely pregnant with Noah when they were getting ready to shoot the “Sour Girl” video with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Scott had become a big
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
fan while he was locked up, and he liked her. A day or two before the shoot, I let him know that the idea of him shooting those scenes did not make me feel very cheerful. Not because it was Sarah Michelle—it could have been anybody. I was blimpy, she was gorgeous. Yes, I knew it would help promote the album—
Buffy
was at the top of the TV ratings. Yes, Sarah Michelle was beautiful. Yes, the director, David Slade, was terrific, and he had an interesting concept—oh, the hell with it, I’d just have to deal. So I waddled onto the set the next day and planted myself in the director’s chair. Relief strolled into the room in the smiling, handsome form of Sarah Michelle’s now-husband, Freddie Prinze Jr. We sat together during the shoot, him watching his wife, me watching my husband. It could’ve been worse.

Noah Mercer Weiland
decided to make his entrance on November 19, 2000, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in West Hollywood. Scott didn’t have an assistant at the time, so I was managing his calendar; when my labor began, as we were getting ready to head
for the birthing suite at Cedars hospital, I found myself saying things like, “Well, you’ve got a dinner at the Ivy tonight, probably better cancel that. We’ve got a massage scheduled for later, probably better cancel that, too.”

“Oh, the masseuse can come to Cedars,” he said. “She can do your shoulders or something.”

My response was less than enthusiastic. “No. I can’t even feel most of my body and the thought of some strange lady touching me while I’m half-naked and in stirrups makes my skin crawl. Thanks, but no thanks.”

We settled into what I called the Madonna Suite at Cedars, complete with living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette. Except for some mind-blowing sciatic pain and the fact that an actual baby was on the way, the scene resembled a party. At the time, Ivana was dating our friend Brent Bolthouse, who’d become a successful club owner and promoter. Everyone in L.A. wants to know Brent so they can get into his clubs—we joked that he was working the door at Noah’s birth.

For me, the party atmosphere soon evaporated. I wasn’t a pretty girl during pregnancy, but I’d had a lot of pretty thoughts, all of which ended in the effortless arrival of a pretty baby. Now I was in agony. Every time I had a contraction, the sciatic nerve screamed up my leg like a hot poker. I don’t care how talented you are at breathing through labor contractions—you’d have to be some kind of Zen yoga Superwoman to manage both kinds of pain at the same time.

My new best friend the anesthesiologist kept increasing the IV dosage, but those meds were specific to the labor pain, not the sciatica. Ultimately, my legs, which felt roughly the size of an elephant’s,
were dead weight. I couldn’t feel or move them, and I couldn’t feel the contractions, either. But I could feel that goddamn sciatic nerve.

And then the masseuse walked in and began setting up her table. What the fuck? Then Scott asked our friends to leave so he could get his massage. He turned the lights down, he began to remove his clothes, the masseuse lit the incense, and our friends slowly backed out of the room with looks of stunned disbelief on their faces.

I knew that new dads were stressed; I’d heard that sometimes they suffered sympathetic nausea or even real labor pains that were medically treated. But this was ridiculous. However, screaming “Are you fucking
kidding
me?” is probably not the kind of ambience a birthing suite requires. I was quite certain that if I gave full vent to what I was thinking, both my heart rate and the baby’s would’ve blasted the heart rate monitor through the wall and into the next room. Breathe, Mary, just breathe. When the OB nurse came in to monitor my progress, the expression on her face was a perfect movie moment spit-take. “Excuse me, sir? Your wife’s having a baby right now. You need to bring your relaxation time to an end. Get this woman and this equipment out of here. Now. I mean right now.”

The doctor who had been treating me throughout my pregnancy was coming from Hawaii on a plane; someone I’d never met before arrived to take his place. In moments, I had little oxygen cannulas in my nose, I was being encouraged to push, and the sciatic pain was so harsh I thought I was going to pass out. Come on, little baby. Finally, we had to go for assisted delivery, where the doc used the grotesquely named vacuum extractor/suction cup to bring Noah into the world. He arrived with a little cone head—not the most glam entrance a rock star ever made, but hands down, the most miraculous one we
had ever seen. When they lifted him away from me, I suddenly had an irrational fear that they were going to switch him with somebody else. “You need to follow that baby!” I told Scott. “Don’t let him out of your sight!”

Noah had a bumpy beginning—jaundice and some breathing difficulties. Nursing didn’t start off well for either the mother or the amazingly hungry child. We left Cedars in time for Thanksgiving, which we’d arranged beforehand to be at our house, since all of our family members had come to town for the blessed event. In what alternate reality had I ever thought this would be a good idea?

Learning to nurse a child sucks. There, I said it. You’re exhausted when you start, your boobs hurt, everything else hurts, sleep is something in the dim past, privacy has evaporated as well. There’s joy in the arrival of a new healthy baby, but why didn’t anybody tell me about the embarrassing, painful, and frustrating part?

And trying to learn to nurse a child (let alone find a comfortable way to sit in a chair) in a room full of extended family joining hands and endlessly sharing what they were grateful for was agony. My mom stayed, Scott’s parents stayed, the phone rang off the hook, company kept coming in and out. I couldn’t decide whether to eat or shower or nap—I was so out of sorts that one of my cousins stopped by and I had no idea who he was.

I thought I’d read all the right baby books, but I must’ve missed the one that told me how to actually do this. All I could do was cry. My breasts were huge—finally!—but I couldn’t produce enough milk to satisfy Noah. When he finally fell asleep, I put him into his little carrier, took him into my walk-in closet, shut off the light, and sat in the dark and cried.

The hormones that had been protecting me since my first months in sobriety seemed to have turned on me. Was this normal? In those first days, I was so in love with my colicky, cranky baby, and so exhausted by what he needed from me, that in the middle of the night I’d look out the window and think I’d hallucinated people in the street. Women had babies all over the world every day—I wondered if they just knew automatically how to do the right thing at the right time. Because I did not.

It wasn’t just galloping postpartum depression and a houseful of noise that had me sobbing on the closet floor. The day we left the hospital, Scott’s parents drove me and the baby home while my mother drove Scott to a dentist’s appointment. Where he picked up a prescription for Vicodin. Mom waited in her car while Scott ran into the pharmacy. She assumed he was getting an antibiotic prescription filled. When they came home, I took one look at him and seriously considered kicking him in the nuts. As fuzzy as I was, I knew what he’d done. I went into our room and tore it apart looking for that bottle. When I found it—and it was missing the number of pills the label said it contained—I confronted him, freaked out, and ran to the closet to cry. More than eighteen months of recovery, up like cigarette smoke. I was angry, scared—and a tiny bit envious. On some level, I wouldn’t have minded taking the edge off in the good old-fashioned way. Every twelve-step meeting and rehab we’d ever been to warned us that relapse was part of the disease; you fall down, you get up, you start all over again. Nevertheless, looking down into Noah’s little face, I knew in my soul that that option was out the door for me forever, no matter what. I may not have yet been a fully competent mother, but I was damn determined to be a fierce one. I could not understand why Scott couldn’t find that same determination in himself.

For the first three months
of Noah’s life, we all moved to a rented estate in Malibu, where STP was working on their fifth album,
Shangri-La Dee Da
.

At first it seemed like a good plan—all the perks for a rock band in the throes of creation. A chef, a trainer, a swimming pool, a tennis court. Like the idea of a baby suite at Cedars, how could anyone complain about this setup? Scott and I lived in a guest house on the property, where I was either taking care of the baby or sleeping when Scott took a shift. I couldn’t leave Noah alone—there was no baby monitor (because of our location, we couldn’t get them to work) and no nanny, since I was determined that no one was going to raise our child except us. Scott was completely immersed in what he and the band were doing in the big house, where they were surrounded by staff, tech production people, an ever-changing guest list of visiting friends, and hour after hour of live rock ’n’ roll. This was a far cry from lullaby territory.

He was also using—Vicodin and I didn’t know what else.

I don’t know what kept it going after the fateful trip to the dentist. I understood a slip—we’d both been warned. I was a mess myself, exhausted and messy and on edge when I wasn’t in a coma an hour at a time. But at least I could put it down to hormones and sleep deprivation. What was up with him? Did he feel excluded by the bond that had formed between Noah and me? Was he overwhelmed by the responsibility of having a wife and a child, after so many years of freedom and wildness? Did it bring back the uncertainty of his own childhood, when his divorced parents each remarried and quickly had other sons, other babies, shiny
new little boys who took center stage and inadvertently pushed their big brother off to the side? Those were all new families, just like ours was now—maybe he’d somehow gotten lost in them and was afraid of getting lost in this one as well. Whatever the reason, I was as far away from Scott as I’d ever been, in spite of the fact that physically, he was usually only a few yards away.

It was winter. The holidays had somehow blown past in the haze of Everything Baby. We were at the beach in the cold and damp, with gray skies everywhere I looked, and I couldn’t remember the last time I talked to a grown-up who wasn’t actually a member of Stone Temple Pilots or the band’s entourage. I missed people, but I wasn’t sure I remembered how to talk with them. I missed my old body, which I deeply regretted taking for granted. How could I deliver an eight-pound baby and lose only three pounds? I was a sodden lump, usually with spit-up or baby drool rolling down the front of my shirt. When Noah snuggled into me, I told myself it was all going to be okay, but where had these headaches come from? Sharp-pointed migraines, worse than any hangover I could remember, with colored lights, purple flowers, and hot-pink cartoon animals hovering just outside my range of vision. Sound hurt. Light hurt. I was convinced that I was going crazy.