talking. She kind of recognized me, which means she recognized that I had money, and after we had a bunch of drinks at the bar we went to my room and out on my terrace, in broad daylight, overlooking the beach, she gave me a blow job. I remember drinking a Jack Daniel’s and water, admiring both the view of the coastline and the top of her head blowing me and thinking to myself, Nobody gets it. Why would I ever want to stop partying? This is great! Fucking rock and roll! What a perfect prick I was. I had become that asshole who’d forgotten every single value my Italian-American family had instilled in me.
It couldn’t last forever, because no high can, so my last night there I had dinner at Nobu with my former assistant Michelle and I remember listening to myself, knowing I was lying, telling her how I’d get clean the minute I got home.
“Oh yeah?” she asked. She has these insanely expressive, beautiful eyes, which she squinted up at me and sarcastically said, “How?”
That was all she needed to say. Both of us knew I had no answer, so we simultaneously started giggling. “Yeah,” I said, kind of mock frowning. “I don’t know how I’m gonna do that.”
I flew home the next day and went back to the show and made light of all of it. I told all my crazy stories and at once I felt like the status quo had returned. I’d gotten through the holidays and 2009 had arrived and everything was fine—right? It was a new year, and a week later I found out that another one of my dreams was about to come true.
The success of Too Fat to Fish drew the attention of the kind of mainstream media that had ignored me until then, one of which being Rolling Stone magazine. I’d always wanted to be in those pages because what warm-blooded American rock-and-roll fan wouldn’t? I was overjoyed to hear they wanted to do a feature on me and had assigned a reporter to follow me around during the first two weeks of January. They didn’t want a manufactured photo, they wanted me in my element, at home, with no pretense, so they asked to have the shoot take place at my apartment. That sounded perfect.
This was really important to me, so I hired my former assistant Michelle to come in to town to make sure everything went smoothly. That didn’t keep me from oversleeping the day of the photo shoot because I’d done drugs all night the night before. I had no awareness of the wreckage I was leaving in my wake. I saw my abuse as harmless to anyone else but me just as much as I saw it as necessary to my existence. I’d do drugs, sitting there watching the clock tick away the hours, knowing I should get some rest but continually procrastinating, telling myself I could handle it. When something important was scheduled for the next day I’d tell myself I’d get the rest I needed after I snorted just one more line. There’d be time to sleep after that high. And then it would wear off and I’d convince myself that I’d be good to go after just one more. And then one more. I was always running out of time because time flies when you’re getting high. The thing was, I pretty much always showed up to my engagements, maybe unprepared, but I was always there, so what was the problem?
That was my train of thought in the hours leading up to what in theory was one of the proudest moments and greatest tokensof success in my life. I guess I was truly laying myself bare before one of the most legendary magazines in the world by getting numb and hungover, but it was so far from being premeditated. As usual when I was on a bender of any kind, I slept in my clothes and didn’t shower, using all those minutes to chase the high or hover in between sleep and euphoria.
I had to fly Michelle in from Miami to be my stand-in assistant, because as I’ve mentioned, I’d burned through four assistants in the New York tri-state area, none of whom could deal with my drug abuse and insanity. No one wanted to work for me, even on a short-term basis, even for
It couldn’t last forever, because no high can, so my last night there I had dinner at Nobu with my former assistant Michelle and I remember listening to myself, knowing I was lying, telling her how I’d get clean the minute I got home.
“Oh yeah?” she asked. She has these insanely expressive, beautiful eyes, which she squinted up at me and sarcastically said, “How?”
That was all she needed to say. Both of us knew I had no answer, so we simultaneously started giggling. “Yeah,” I said, kind of mock frowning. “I don’t know how I’m gonna do that.”
I flew home the next day and went back to the show and made light of all of it. I told all my crazy stories and at once I felt like the status quo had returned. I’d gotten through the holidays and 2009 had arrived and everything was fine—right? It was a new year, and a week later I found out that another one of my dreams was about to come true.
The success of Too Fat to Fish drew the attention of the kind of mainstream media that had ignored me until then, one of which being Rolling Stone magazine. I’d always wanted to be in those pages because what warm-blooded American rock-and-roll fan wouldn’t? I was overjoyed to hear they wanted to do a feature on me and had assigned a reporter to follow me around during the first two weeks of January. They didn’t want a manufactured photo, they wanted me in my element, at home, with no pretense, so they asked to have the shoot take place at my apartment. That sounded perfect.
This was really important to me, so I hired my former assistant Michelle to come in to town to make sure everything went smoothly. That didn’t keep me from oversleeping the day of the photo shoot because I’d done drugs all night the night before. I had no awareness of the wreckage I was leaving in my wake. I saw my abuse as harmless to anyone else but me just as much as I saw it as necessary to my existence. I’d do drugs, sitting there watching the clock tick away the hours, knowing I should get some rest but continually procrastinating, telling myself I could handle it. When something important was scheduled for the next day I’d tell myself I’d get the rest I needed after I snorted just one more line. There’d be time to sleep after that high. And then it would wear off and I’d convince myself that I’d be good to go after just one more. And then one more. I was always running out of time because time flies when you’re getting high. The thing was, I pretty much always showed up to my engagements, maybe unprepared, but I was always there, so what was the problem?
That was my train of thought in the hours leading up to what in theory was one of the proudest moments and greatest tokensof success in my life. I guess I was truly laying myself bare before one of the most legendary magazines in the world by getting numb and hungover, but it was so far from being premeditated. As usual when I was on a bender of any kind, I slept in my clothes and didn’t shower, using all those minutes to chase the high or hover in between sleep and euphoria.
I had to fly Michelle in from Miami to be my stand-in assistant, because as I’ve mentioned, I’d burned through four assistants in the New York tri-state area, none of whom could deal with my drug abuse and insanity. No one wanted to work for me, even on a short-term basis, even for
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