Running With Monsters: A Memoir (17 page)

“Bob? There’s going to be no more funding.”

“What?”

“We’re going to need you to clear out the suite and turn in your keys. We’re also going to need you to give back the car we leased for you.”

There was no point in arguing. It was over. “Okay, I’ll have it all wrapped up by the end of the month.”

“Oh, no. That won’t work. We’ll need you out and the car back in five days.”

And that was that. We closed up shop. Porn barons are profit-driven. Extremely so. It was a noble experiment and it could have worked given time to grow. Two years just wasn’t long enough. I like to think we could have made a difference, but addiction treatment is a tricky thing. No one, and I mean
no one,
is ever going to successfully beat the monster that is a drug or alcohol habit until they want sobriety for themselves. I can lead, I can show the way, but if they’re not ready for what I have to offer, I advise them to stay away until they are. Do you want to know the real secret to sobriety that I’ve learned after all these years of rough-and-tumble personal experience? The main one is this: Don’t drink and don’t take drugs. You can mainline that as the straight dope.

I
n February of 2007, I had spent a long day at Las Encinas counseling my clients. Twelve straight hours dealing with the pain and frustration of addiction. Beyond that, they’d suffered additional traumas. Childhood violence, sexual abuse, personality disorders. I had listened to this litany of hurts and had tried to maintain my professional distance, but these were real people and I was affected by their stories. One kid in particular had gotten to me, an eighteen-year-old stoner with a harrowing history. A product of alcoholic parents, he had spent most of his teens numbing himself with whatever substances he could get his hands on. He had recently graduated to OxyContin that he bought on the streets for $20 per ten milligrams. His home life had been a wreck given that his father’s favorite form of recreation wasn’t golf or bowling but long sessions dedicated to the development of a wicked left jab. He didn’t need a heavy bag. He had a son.

The kid had an acute sense of self-awareness. “I know I’m a mess, Bob,” he said. “And I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Getting high won’t help that,” I said.

“It’s the only thing I’m good at,” he said, and it was heartbreaking.

I was still thinking about him when I arrived home. He needed rehabilitation and he was at the right place. I hoped he would stay and complete the work, but I wasn’t sure. I felt a sense of relief when the key to my front door slid into the lock. I just wanted to unwind and catch my breath. I tossed my keys on the coffee table and turned on the television. I flopped down on the couch just in time to catch Jay Leno as he delivered his monologue. All the news of the day, told in Leno’s nasal whine and given the humor treatment, only it didn’t make me laugh. It made me angry. Rehab, addicts, and troubled celebrities were fertile territory for the funnyman, and it was a trend I had started to see filter into the popular culture. Rehab and recovery had become jokes.

Celebrities and their troubled relationships with the bottle and drugs had long been fodder for the supermarket tabloids. Actors like Robert Downey Jr., Drew Barrymore, and Shannen Doherty and their doped or drunken public antics provided splashy, breathless front-page stories for outlets like the
National Enquirer
. These kinds of stories gained even more traction with the advent of the Internet and its countless sites devoted to celebrity gossip. Just look at what happened with Britney Spears. She had, for nearly a decade, been America’s pop princess, and she had come a long way from her days on Disney’s rebooted version of
The Mickey Mouse Club
. After she broke through to the pop market and cemented her image as a teenage entertainer who walked the razor edge between sultry and innocent, she was constantly in the public eye. To get where she was—and it makes no difference whether you like her music or not—she had put in a lot of hard work. But in February of 2007, some major cracks started to show through her carefully crafted public persona. She checked in to—and then almost immediately out of—a drug-rehabilitation center on the island of Antigua, and now, back home in Los Angeles, she had been followed by the paparazzi vampire squad and caught in a very public meltdown. She walked into a Tarzana, California, hair salon and grabbed a pair of clippers and gave herself a number-0 buzz cut that was a throwback to Sinead O’Connor’s. Following that, she attacked a photographer’s SUV with a large umbrella. She checked into Promises Malibu treatment center, a sort of posh country club for celebrities in recovery. Again, she didn’t stay long. Everything she did was captured on film and written about. And, given the nature of the Internet and the gossip press’s hunger for celebrity scandal, she became an overnight laughingstock. Britney’s troubles peaked when she was eventually taken out of her home on a stretcher and carted off in an ambulance for another rehab stint while news copters whirled overhead and photographers on the ground snapped pictures. And there was Leno, who got a big laugh when he said, “Apparently, Guantánamo Bay has the same success rate as the Promises rehab center in Malibu.”

The work we all did at Las Encinas was trivialized by the media and the glare of celebrity. I talked to Drew about Leno’s show the next day. “This is bullshit, Drew!” I said. “We really should do a TV show about what we actually do here.” Drew was in agreement.

About a year earlier at Las Encinas, I had met a dapper TV producer who liked to wear sweaters and ties. Very avuncular and personable. His name was Damian Sullivan. He was there to visit someone close to him who was in treatment. The rehab world was alien to him. I sensed he didn’t know what to make of it, so I started to talk to him. I think he must have had the same perception of rehab that everybody else did: It was a joke. One hundred percent pure snake oil. I started to tell him the true story of what happens behind the walls of Las Encinas. There’s real work that goes on there, and peoples’ lives can be profoundly changed. I continued to see Damien when he’d visit and every time we talked, I brought up the idea of a doing a TV show at Las Encinas. Damian started to get interested and eventually thought that maybe a show about rehab would be worth doing. It wasn’t an easy sell. Damian took it to fifteen different networks and they all said, “No way.”

And then Britney’s public meltdown happened.

I laugh now when I talk to Damian. “We owe everything to Britney Spears,” I say. Once she was wheeled out of her house, the networks were suddenly interested. Celebrities admitted into rehab were hot news and VH1 jumped at the chance to do a show.

The idea we had was to show that when it came to treatment, celebrities were no different from anyone else despite what the media might portray. We pushed for doing a show that mixed celebrities with everyday people. VH1 thought about that for about two seconds before they said, “No.”

Damian and I started to push and pull to shape this thing. It had never been done. The lifted veil that would show what went on in a rehab facility required a deft hand to avoid the usual schlock aspects of reality television. After all, we’d show people’s most intimate, vulnerable, and private moments, unvarnished and untreated. We also had to make sure we had the right cast assembled. Some people are better on television than others, and Damian and I had to find people who could do their jobs and who could also work effectively under the ever-open eye of the cameras. Drew, of course, was a given, but the quest to put together a team would take some thought. One of the first people who came to mind for me was Shelly Sprague, who would be our resident technician.

I had been acquainted with her since the late eighties. She ran with the same crowd and had the same bad habits as I did back in those days. I had always admired her. No matter what she did to herself, no matter what kind of trauma or abuse she heaped upon her head, she managed to hold it together. She always had a decent place to live and did okay as a hairdresser. She was also a hard-ass, and that kind of no-nonsense attitude would be crucial for this gig. I spent a lot of years as an entertainer, so I knew instinctively what would work on a show like this. When I walk onstage, I know what to do. I don’t get flustered. I sensed Shelly was right for this gig. And I knew she was in the market for a job. I approached her.

“Hey, Shelly. How do you feel about reality TV?”

“I hate it, Bob.”

“What would you say if I offered you a job, but you’d also have to be on this show?”

“Is this one of those ‘either-or’ things?”

“Pretty much.”

“So what does that even mean, Bob? If I don’t do the show, I don’t get the job?”

“Well … yes.”

Fortunately, she came on board. For the celebrity patients, we looked to people we knew and had treated before. This is Los Angeles, and, as the tabloid media had already shown, there was no shortage of entertainers with dependency problems. However, the network had its own ideas about who was suitable. That first season, Steven Adler, the former drummer from Guns N’ Roses, was ready to go.

“Steven Adler would be great on this show!” I said. I pushed for him, but the network absolutely didn’t want him. No reason given, although I suspected it may have been an image problem. Steven suffered from a nasty drug dependency that he had battled since his days with Guns N’ Roses. He had suffered a stroke that was likely a result of all the abuse he had given his body during the height of his rock star fame. As a result he was left with an unsteady gait and a noticeable speech impediment. He could be difficult to understand because of it. Perhaps that was why the network was so dead set against having him on the show. When the second season came around, Steven still had problems with substance abuse and I brought him up again. This time the network was happy to have him aboard. It was crazy how it all worked. Unpredictable.

Through the grapevine, I heard that Valkyrie-like actress Brigitte Nielsen was at Cri-Help in North Hollywood. “Has anybody called her?” I asked. “I think she’d be a good candidate.” A producer from the show reached her at the center and told her about what we planned to do. She agreed right away. It’s pretty much how we found everybody for the show. We asked and they came … with network approval, of course. After that first season, after we had a hit, it became easier to find patients, but before the show made its debut, I started to get a little nervous that VH1 might not have the same goals as the rest of us. I worried that we would all look unprofessional, but I was also sure that wouldn’t be in the channel’s best interest. This show had the potential to do well for them, although in the back of my mind, I knew that something new like this would have no middle ground. Viewers would either love it or hate it.

Now, all this may seem a bit disingenuous coming from a guy who is best known these days as “that guy with the hat” on a reality TV series. I have had some real issues with some of the show’s direction. The producers shot an entire documentary about
Jackass
star Steve-O’s recovery with Dr. Drew. Steve-O, a limber, jocular guy who’d made an implausibly successful career out of performing ridiculous and dangerous stunts that generally involved his scrotum and a staple gun, had been a lifelong stoner and was engaged in a serious downhill run when he came to us. Drugs were only a part of his problem. He was also addicted to the camera. While he was supposed to be going through the program and the sober house follow-up, he was shooting segments in his room with his
Jackass
costars and his producer Jeff Tremaine. It was unbelievable. He’s managed to maintain his sobriety, but it couldn’t have been easy with all that entertainment nonsense going on around him. I have difficulty with that Hollywood, glitzy, exploitative aspect of the show. One thing I learned fast: Television is a ruthless, heartless business. It’s one with no friendships and few alliances, and it feeds and fuels itself on two items: money and bullshit. Take it too seriously and get too deeply enmeshed in the day-to-day, and it will make you crazy. Drug dealers have more ethics than television network executives, but I figured out a way to make the intrinsic greed work for me: I cut a deal. No agents, no lawyers. Just me.

I spoke with the executive producer of the show, John Irwin.

“Look, I think this show will do well and we’ll do a number of seasons with it. Start me out at two thousand dollars a week, and if we’re a hit, double that for the next season … and we’ll just progress from there.”

“How long do you think this show will run, Bob?”

“Five or ten years, easy. Besides, I’m putting my career at risk even doing a show like this. And I’m coming to you straight, no lawyers or agents.”

“You’re nuts, but okay. Deal!”

By the time we entered the third season, the lawyers came.

We all sat down at the big table. “Well, we hear that you have some kind of deal?”

“Yep.”

I had started to make pretty good money by then and the show had produced spinoffs like
Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House
and
Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew
. I was being paid well for them too, but I also realized that come the fourth season, there was no way VH1 was even going to consider continuing with the deal that I had cut. I agreed to $5,000 a week with a 10 percent annual increase. I also specified that my contract never have any mention of or stipulations about any subsequent seasons. Television can burn you out, and I didn’t want to be trapped into another season if I wanted out. Five weeks on a set can be a grind, and I needed that option.

Besides the spinoffs we’ve done, we decided to take a new direction this time out. The new version of the show has no celebrities at all. All of our patients are just plain folks. Unlike celebrities, who have the resources to explore various treatment programs, people of average means don’t really have that option. We put out ads throughout the country on places like Craigslist.org and offered treatment to people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. There was no mention of VH1, Drew, or myself. We asked applicants to send in a short video of themselves and what their goals were. We were inundated with hundreds of responses from all over America within the first hour. Some, of course, weren’t genuine. Even though the ads hadn’t mentioned the television show, some of the respondents figured out what the deal was and applied as a way to get on the air and make a play for reality stardom. We had a good crew that was able to discern between those who wanted help and those who hoped to become the next Honey Boo Boo.

“Please help me!” said one wolf-eyed kid from a small town in Alabama.

“I don’t know where else to turn!” cried a girl with pink hair and a nose ring.

“I won’t live to see next year,” stated a young mother as her kids wailed offscreen and she calmly pulled on a cigarette, the curls of smoke framing her delicate face.

It was heartbreaking. These were people who had suffered and who had been victimized by bad treatment centers, and their plight put me in a strange and frightening position. Most of the patients on this new season have an abiding and unwavering faith that Drew and I are the only people who can help them. It’s the power of TV. That faith can be unnerving, because nobody can wave a magic wand and administer a cure. It takes work. Not only from Drew and me, but from the patients themselves. It’s a lesson I had to learn over a period of years as I faced down my own struggles. When someone says to you, “My crappy life would be different if only you were my counselor … and now it’s happening,” it puts a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. As a counselor, I’ve never experienced this kind of thing. Right now, as we get started with the show, it’s okay. It’s the honeymoon phase of things. It’s usually that way. But once the weeks start to roll by and the cameras don’t back off, it could all come crashing down. The words I would hate to hear are “Fuck you, Bob. You didn’t do anything. I’m going home.”