The first thing I did when I got home from those five months in the hospital was light up a cigarette. After all that time, the inhale, the smoke billowing into my lungs, was like the first cigarette I had ever had in my entire life. It felt like a second homecoming.
I was no longer in Pain—the massive surgery on my stomach had caused scar tissue, which in turn caused my stomach to feel like I was doing a sit-up at full stretch 24/7, but it wasn’t actually pain. It was more of an annoyance.
But no one needed to know that, so I told everyone I was in pain so I could get OxyContin. Pretty soon the 80 milligrams a day of OxyContin I had conned them into giving me wasn’t working anymore, and I needed more. When I asked the doctors for more, they said no; when I called a drug dealer, he said yes. Now all I had to do was figure out a way to get down forty floors from my $20 million penthouse apartment without Erin spotting me. (I bought the place—I swear to God—because Bruce Wayne lived in just such an apartment in The Dark Knight.)
Over the next month I attempted to do this four times. I was caught—you guessed it—four times. I was horrible at it. Naturally, the call came down from above that this man needs to go to rehab again. So—
After the explosion of my bowel, I’d been through a first surgery and needed to wear a rather attractive colostomy bag—a look even I couldn’t pull off. There was a second surgery pending, to remove the bag, but in between the two surgeries, I was banned from smoking (smokers tend to have much uglier scars, hence the stricture). Not to mention I was missing my two front teeth—a bite into a piece of toast with peanut butter had cracked them and I hadn’t had time to fix them yet.
So let me get this straight: you’re asking me to quit doing drugs and quit smoking at the same time? I didn’t give a fuck about the scars; I am a big smoker; this was too much to ask. What this meant was that I had to go to a rehab in New York, quit OxyContin, and quit smoking, simultaneously, and I was scared.
Once I got to rehab, they gave me Subutex for the detox, so that wasn’t that bad. I checked into my room, and the clock started. By day four I was going out of my mind, this had always been the hardest day. I realized how serious they were going to be about this smoking thing, too. It was decided that I could smoke while in detox, but once I moved up to the third floor the smokes had to go.
They insisted, so much so that I was locked in the building so I could not get out. I was on the third floor; all around, New York purred in the distance, going about its business, living life while their favorite sarcastic sitcom star was in hell one more time. If I listened hard enough, I could just hear the subway—the F train, the R train, the 4, 5, 6—deep below me, or maybe it was the rattle of something else, something unbidden and terrifying and unstoppable.
This rehab was prison, I was convinced of it. A real prison, not like the one I had made up before. Red bricks, black iron bars. Somehow, I’d found my way to jail. I’d never broken the law—well, I’d never been caught—nevertheless, here I was, in lockup, pokey, the House of D. Missing my two front teeth, I even looked like a convict, and every counselor was a guard. They may as well have fed me through a slot in a bolted door.
I hated the whole place—they didn’t have anything to teach me. I’ve been in therapy since I was eighteen years old, and honestly, by this point, I didn’t need any more therapy—what I needed was two front teeth and a colostomy bag that didn’t break. When I say that I woke up covered in my own shit, I’m talking fifty to sixty times. On the mornings when the bag did not break, I noticed another new phenomenon: when I woke up, I enjoyed about thirty seconds of freedom as I slowly wiped the sleep from my eyes and then the reality of my situation would hit me, and I would burst into tears at a rate that would even make Meryl Streep jealous.
Oh, and I needed a cigarette. Did I mention that?
I was sitting in my room doing God knows what on day four when something hit me, I don’t know what. It was like something was punching me from the inside. But even though I had been in therapy for more than thirty years and it had nothing new to teach me, I had to do something to get my mind off nicotine, so I left my cell and headed down the hallway. Aimless, I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going.
I think I was trying to walk outside of my own body.
I knew that all the therapists were on the floor below me, but I decided to skip the elevator and make for the stairwell. I didn’t really know what was happening—I can’t to this day describe what was going on, except that I was in a sort of panic, confusion, a kind of fugue state, and there was that intense pain again—not Pain, but pretty close to it. Total confusion. And I wanted to smoke so badly. So, I stopped, in that stairwell, and thought about all the years of agony, and the fact that the yard never got painted blue, and Pierre fucking Trudeau, and the fact that I was then, and still am, an unaccompanied minor.
It was like the bad parts of my life were appearing to me all at once.
I’ll never be able to fully explain what happened next, but all of a sudden, I started slamming my head against the wall, as hard as humanly possible. Fifteen–love. SLAM! Thirty–love. SLAM! Forty–love. SLAM! Game. Ace after ace, volley after perfect volley, my head the ball, the wall the cement court, all the pain lobbed up but short, me reaching up, smashing my head against the wall, blood on the cement and on the wall, and all over my face, completing the Grand Slam, the umpire screaming, “GAME, SET, AND MATCH, UNACCOMPANIED MINOR, SIX LOVE, NEEDS LOVE, SIX LOVE. SCARED OF LOVE.”
There was blood everywhere.
After about eight of these mind-numbing slams, somebody must have heard me, and stopped me, and asked the only logical question:
“Why are you doing that?”
I gazed at her, and looking like Rocky Balboa from every one of those last scenes, I said, “Because I couldn’t think of anything better to do.”
Stairwells.