Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (8 page)

One day a few months later, I was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica, waiting to be called for a casting for
YM
magazine, when I noticed Drew Barrymore sitting right next to me. I’d never met anyone else who’d been emancipated and neither had she. We talked for a while, and she invited me to her upcoming birthday party, at the Opium Den, a club I would soon know well. There’s not much I remember about that party except that I drank too much. The next morning, even Scott’s arrival to pick me up barely got my death’s-door head off the pillow. As he drove me to and from my castings, I had to lie down in the backseat, hoping that would help. But the smell of his lunch sent my head out the open window.

Scott was my driver for three months, and then one day he said, “Mary, I’m not coming back—I got a record deal.” The band had signed with Atlantic Records. They weren’t Mighty Joe Young anymore; they were Stone Temple Pilots. There would be an actual album—
Core
—and he would be busy working on it and then touring with it. They’d be gone for a long time. No more driving Miss Mary. It’s temporary, I thought. Don’t panic.

After Scott left, his friend James started as my new driver. Miserable and mopey, I looked for excuses to bring up his name, fishing for anything Scott-related. Scott told me later that he’d taken some of my pictures from the agency and hidden them in his dresser; his girlfriend found them and made him rip them up and flush them down the toilet.

We actually had a weird near miss in the months that followed. Bordeaux hosted a party on the rooftop of West Hollywood’s fabled Chateau Marmont (it had a long history before John Belushi OD’d there in 1982, but that was its primary claim to fame the first time
I saw it). I had worked all day and went straight to the party wearing full makeup and hair teased out to there, looking somewhere between barely legal and drag-queen-in-training. It was noisy and crowded, and the bar was wide open. One of the first people I met was comic Pauly Shore, who asked if I’d like to go to the Roxbury, then the hottest club in L.A. “Of course,” I said in my best “Who, me? Underage? Don’t be absurd!” voice, and we headed for the elevator. As we walked out, Scott and his girlfriend Jannina walked in. “Oh, hi,” I said. “How are you?” He half-smiled, and I guessed immediately he had no idea who I was. “Well, good to see you,” I stammered, and fled with Pauly to the Roxbury, where I proceeded to drink. A lot.

When Scott and Jannina got to the party, he ran into someone from the agency and asked if I was there. “She just left with Pauly Shore,” he was told.

I managed to get so drunk at the Roxbury that when Pauly suggested it was time to call it a night, I couldn’t tell him where I lived. Could not remember the address. Did not have a purse; did not have any money. I was pretty certain, though, that I had a major shoot early the next morning, for Italian
Vogue
for men—
L’uomo Vogue
. Everyone at the agency had been very excited about it. “I think it’s a big deal,” I slurred. Mr. Shore then proved himself to be a complete gentleman (I think this may come as a shock to some people). He took me to his house, settled me into a room by myself, set the clock, and made me take an aspirin and drink a lot of water. I remember stumbling into the bathroom, seeing my first bidet, and thinking, Well, I know there’s a choice here, but I’m not sure exactly how one makes it….

I was out the door on time the next morning with sufficient cab
fare from Pauly to go to the shoot, still wearing my clubbing outfit and a pair of false eyelashes I couldn’t remove with a crowbar. When I got there, I discovered that the theme was Amish. Why
L’uomo Vogue
had decided this was the direction they wanted to go was beyond me. I was supposed to be the scrubbed-faced, healthy-looking maiden at the center of it all. Which is why there was no hair and makeup on site. I have seen birds’ nests that would’ve been easier to comb out than my morning-after hair. Nevertheless, I pulled it together, cleaned myself up, masked my hangover as best as possible, and got back to my apartment late that afternoon with the sole intention of falling into a coma.

The little light on the answering machine was blinking like the landing field at LAX, and every message was from Scott. “I didn’t know that was you. I’m sorry. No, really, I’m sorry. Are you okay? This is the third/fourth/fifth time I’ve called. Where are you? Is everything all right? Pick up, Mary. Are you there?” I played the messages over and over and over.

A week or so later, Scott called and asked if I wanted to come down to the Palace, where his band was opening for Ice-T’s Body Count. He had this idea, he said, if I wanted to go along with it, that my girlfriend Reggie, one of the bookers from the agency, and I would dress up and toss condoms with the band’s name on them into the crowd while the band played the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” onstage. We both agreed to do it.

This will be fun, I thought, as Reggie and I went inside that night. And then reality suddenly loomed in the person of the girlfriend—Jannina was there. Scott explained that she was going to put stage makeup on us. I’d thought my leggings, platform boots, and bustier were trashy enough, but evidently not. The whole time she
was working on my face, I was thinking how unfortunate it was that she was with my future husband. Lucky for me, she gave no indication that she was psychic.

Moments before Scott and his band came out, I started feeling afraid—what if the love of my life turned out to be awful? And then it started. The man who stepped to the front of the stage with the mic in his hand was not the one who’d been sharing fried rice with me. This man was someone else. But oh my God, he was amazing. Standing on the side of the stage watching Scott, listening to him, I knew he was going to make it. Of
course
he didn’t want to stick around and be a part-time driver for some twit girl model; he was a professional musician, a real one. What a fool I am, I thought. Even now, after all these years, after all the live performers I’ve been privileged to see, I still think he’s one of the best front men there is. He doesn’t just sing a song, he disappears into it—he simply takes off and goes someplace else.

It would be another couple of months before I’d see Scott again. James was driving me to and from my jobs, and coming home from a shoot one day, he said, “We’re going right past Scott’s—you wanna swing by?” I was still wearing my model hair and makeup, so I took a deep breath and said yes.

Scott and I spent most of that visit looking at each other sideways. I don’t remember much about that house except that it had hardwood floors, which is where I kept aiming my eyes—the hardwood floors and the top of my motorcycle boots. When he asked if I wanted to hear something from the album, of course I did. I sat on the pool table while he fiddled with the tape, winding it forward and back until he found the song he wanted. The music started, and suddenly I heard my name. Something like, “Where did Mary go?
Where did Mary go?” It was a song he’d written—“Wet My Bed”—and I was in it. Or somebody named Mary was in it, and it was about her. Or about me. I didn’t know for sure, but my face was on fire. “Did you check the bathroom, the bathtub? / She sleeps there sometimes. / Water cleanses, you know.” He turned around from the tape player and looked at me, and there it was: Oh God. I’m gonna marry him.

And neither one of us moved. Days later, he was gone.

Soon after Scott left
, I left, too—to Japan, for my first international travel experience. Contracts with Japanese agencies were very strict: be available for work all day, every day, and do not gain one single ounce. This weight challenge was always my personal demon, of course, but in Japan, it finally made sense to me—the sample sizes there are so tiny that the humans in them should probably be the circumference of a clothes hanger. In fact, a clothes hanger might’ve worked out better than I did.

Modeling in Japan didn’t offer a single ounce of glamour. Once you arrived at Narita Airport in Tokyo, you were taken directly to your first casting; after that, it never stopped. I got up at five, went to one job until noon, to another until four, to another at eight, got home after midnight, and started all over again the next morning. And the food just confused me. I’d go to a job, they’d hand me a pretty little lacquered bento box containing strange items (and no one could ever tell me what, exactly, each one was) and a pair of chopsticks. The Japanese clients laughed at my pitiful attempt to use chopsticks. “Oh, Mary-san, you no can use?” I had no clue. I wanted a donut. I wanted
some pizza. I wanted some of my mother’s homemade Mexican food. At night, I had just enough energy for one of two options: wash off the clown makeup, or eat dinner. Not both. Sometimes I just put a towel on my pillow and fell over, asleep before I landed.

Modeling in New York and Los Angeles, I was always a couple of inches too short; in Japan, unless there was another American model there, I was always the tallest person in the room. People stared. Walking up the stairs from the train, I’d sense someone right behind me, turn around, and sure enough, some guy was trying to get a look under my skirt. And then there was rush hour. There are guys employed by the Japanese train system called “pushers”—their job is to literally push, jam, shove, and cram every last person into every last available inch of space on the train. It was far worse than anything I’d ever experienced on the New York City subways, where, yes, people are packed in tight yet have this weird way of being distant from one another. Like, “Yes, I’m pressed right against your butt, and you’re glued to my hip, but I don’t see you, you don’t see me, we don’t acknowledge it, and we’ll just forget this unfortunate moment ever happened.” That was not my experience in Tokyo. Along with the pushers, there were grabbers—middle-aged businessmen trying to cop a feel and not being subtle about it. The first time it happened, I couldn’t quite believe it; after the second time, I started dealing out swats on their hands, a firm “Hey, quit that shit!” and then I’d carry on with my day.

The contract was for three months; after six weeks, I was so desperately sad and lonely that I knew I had to find a way to get out. I’ll eat my way out, I decided. Since it was clear that wasn’t going to happen with bento boxes for lunch, I looked for an alternative and
found a great one—an Italian restaurant! I started piling on the pasta and within days, every piece of clothing I wore was too tight. By the end of month two, I was back on a plane for L.A.

It wasn’t the Japanese culture I didn’t like; I never had five minutes to experience that. It was the grind, pure and simple, and a sense that my body was not my own. But to be fair, the payoff was, well, the payoff—I left with thousands of dollars, which certainly helped equalize that first experience and lured me back to Japan again. I brought back home so much money that I duct-taped cash under my clothes. It took going back to Japan on tour with Scott, and a little leisure time to actually look around, before I truly understood the beauty of the culture, its traditions, and its people—and the nutritional wisdom of the bento box.

Soon after I got back
—in June 1993—I was involved in a huge Calvin Klein event at the Hollywood Bowl, a charity gala to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles. Nearly five thousand people attended. Some of them (the big-ticket donors who sat in the box seats) were treated to special “picnic” dinners complete with white linen tablecloths and rosemary chicken. Tina Turner was the featured entertainment, but first came the fashion show, with a long runway that stretched nearly 150 feet into the middle of the audience. All together there were more than three hundred models in the show—among them Kate Moss, the famously tattooed Asian model Jenny Shimizu, and Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg. Rehearsals went on much of the afternoon, during which a lot of champagne was poured and more than a little pot smoke rose into the air. As the audience began to settle in their seats, everybody backstage was pretty happy.

Some of the models would be wearing Mr. Klein’s fashions for women, some would be wearing fashion for men. I was one of the few girls who had two looks, which was a great honor for me. For the first walk down the runway, I wore a long dress and tried to hold my own next to Cameron Diaz, who’s taller, blonder, and stops traffic whether she’s on a catwalk or a sidewalk.

For my next walk, I’d be wearing men’s boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts. I had very long hair—that, and my arms crossed demurely over my barely-theres, comprised the entire top of my ensemble. I don’t know if it was the champagne, the pot, the moon rising into the Hollywood Hills, the flashbulbs, the audience full of famous faces, or the short Brooke Shields video they ran just before the opener, where she once again uttered that famous line about nothing coming between her and her Calvins—but I had a case of galloping bravado, fueled by liquid courage. I was ready to rock my walk.

Mr. Klein stood just near the runway adjusting each model before we hit the runway. But there wasn’t much adjusting to do when I stepped up—the only thing between me and Calvin were my Calvins. “I’m not sure I need to keep my arms wrapped around myself like this. Are you?” I asked. He smiled, said nothing, then sent me on my way.

I got maybe twenty-five feet down the runway, took a deep breath, and dropped my arms. Lightning didn’t strike; instead, a slow roll of scattered applause. As I neared the end of the runway, I realized that on either side of the catwalk were two giant video screens focusing closely on each model in the show. Two topless Marys, four naked barely-theres.

A few moments later, Mark Wahlberg famously dropped his Calvin Klein jeans and grabbed his white-underwear’d crotch (which
had been famously displayed on the Times Square Calvin Klein billboard). The
Los Angeles Times
later called it “the skivvies segment” of the event. People hooted and hollered and applauded. By the time Tina Turner took the stage, they were dancing in the aisles, dancing on the stage, and dancing in the wings.

The event made all the newspapers and raised a lot of money for AIDS research. Initially, some accounts got me confused with the far more well-known Kate Moss—we were similarly built and had long hair—which then earned me more modeling work. One magazine editor that I still run into tells the story to anyone who’ll listen.