As Needed for Pain Read online

  Dedication

  To Oscar, Sam, and Julian—

  For showing me the way

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Pills

  Brut

  Tawny

  MAGNUM Opus

  The Cartwheel

  Unraveling, Part 1

  The Kavorka

  Reunion

  Unraveling, Part II

  St. Vincent’s

  Crossing the Line

  Chickpea

  Tyson

  Rock Star

  I Never Died

  Warnings and Consequences

  Donna

  Rock Star Redux

  Busted

  Magic

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  Everything that I write about in this book actually happened. (Sorry, Mom.) The events I describe are based on my memory and interpretation of some truly unforgettable—and regrettable—experiences and interactions. This is, however, my story, and as such, I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of many of the people mentioned—childhood friends, girlfriends, acquaintances, all of the doctors (except for my pediatrician), etc., as well as altering the exact location of several events. I have also changed the name of at least one business—Elegant Affairs. I did my best to stay true to chronology, but one or two minor things have been moved around to make for more linear storytelling. Lastly, I tried to be as accurate as possible with respect to the quantity and dosage of the pills I was taking—but as the pages you’re about to read will illuminate, sometimes things got a little fuzzy.

  Pills

  Pills roll. First they bounce and then they roll.

  Shape doesn’t matter. Perfectly round. Oblong. Squares with rounded corners. Capsules. It may defy the laws of physics, but in the end they all roll. I’ve dropped more pills than the average person swallows in a year, and when they hit the floor, they scatter like roaches. And when they roll, they don’t stop until they’ve reached the farthest, most undesirable destination imaginable. Deep under beds. Wedged beneath the floorboard. Hidden in plain sight in the low pile of wall-to-wall carpeting. And, as it turned out on one particular evening in early 2003, under the urinal in the bathroom at the Waldorf Astoria. Three of them, to be precise, which—on a bended, tuxedo-clad knee—I rescued, promptly put in my mouth, and swallowed.

  It’s not the first time I did something I’m not proud of while wearing a tuxedo.

  There was the night I threw up in a garbage can in Times Square on my way home from a benefit performance of some Broadway show. I can’t remember the name of the show, but I do remember a man with a ponytail and a leather vest clutching his date tightly by the arm as they walked past me on a crowded sidewalk. “Don’t look,” he told her. “Just keep moving.”

  Then there was the time I stole a bottle of Valium from the master bathroom medicine cabinet of my friend Ingrid’s parents’ Upper East Side duplex while everyone was downstairs toasting her thirtieth birthday. I didn’t just take a few pills like any normal self-respecting degenerate might. No, I literally pocketed the whole bottle. Not just all of the contents of the bottle, but the actual bottle. They rattled like Tic Tacs in the breast pocket of my tux as I made my way past a multicolored Calder mobile and down the sweeping staircase to rejoin the party.

  And there was the middle-of-the-night trip to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, where I conned an exhausted young doctor into giving me a prescription for thirty Vicodin after being repeatedly flashed in the waiting room by a woman in a pink paper gown.

  I was in black tie for all of them. Dressed to impress—just as I was that night at the Waldorf Astoria in 2003. I was attending a gala fundraiser. Invitations to events like these were common, even if my attendance at them was infrequent. Sometimes Condé Nast, the publishing giant for which I’d been working as the editor in chief of Details for a few years by this point, would buy a table and I’d be asked to join. Other times, the evening would honor an executive or designer from a fashion company and the organizers would try to fill tables with editors, celebrities, and celebrity editors. I was, I assumed, a Plan B guest: fit to attend, but not first choice—like an alternate on an Olympic team.

  And I was rarely invited with a plus-one, though I wouldn’t have brought anyone had I been. As with just about everything else I did, I preferred to go to these functions alone. Plus-ones gave me anxiety. They slowed me down. They wanted to be treated like humans. They wanted to show up on time and be introduced to people and mingle and eat and stay for the performance. There was always a performance. Once, shortly before September 11, 2001, after she had been asking for months to join me at one of these, I finally agreed to bring my long-suffering, nightlife-loving girlfriend Caroline along. And of course she insisted on staying for the performance. I think it might have been Patti LaBelle. Or maybe it was Gladys Knight. Either way, Caroline wasn’t interested in leaving when I was.

  “Can we please just get out of here?” I pleaded halfway through the dinner. I was high—I was always high—but not nearly high enough for another hour and a half of small talk and rubber chicken.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asked for the thousandth time in our relationship.

  “I’m not here to have fun,” I said. “This isn’t fun for me. This is work.”

  “Work? We’re at this amazing party with all of these incredible people and an R&B legend is about to perform,” she said in the type of clipped loud whisper often reserved for public spats.

  “All of a sudden Miss Indie Rock is dying to see the Queen of Soul?”

  “Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul, asshole,” she said.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you,” I shot back. “Plus, everyone is staring at your nipples.”

  “You’re a dick,” she said.

  She was right. I was dick. A dick in a tux.

  From that point on, there were no more plus-ones. And so I went alone to the children’s benefit at the Waldorf in early 2003, but not before doing something else I wasn’t particularly proud of. Something that my fashion magazine colleagues would have frowned upon perhaps even more than my drug addiction.

  I went to the tailor and let out my tuxedo.

  Getting fat in fashion was never in fashion.

  I wasn’t what the editors of Details referred to as “sexy fat,” either. This was actually a thing. We once published a story about the Tony Soprano Effect and how “heft had become hot.” Guys like James Gandolfini and Julian Schnabel and Jack Nicholson. Guys who owned it and never bothered to suck it in. That wasn’t me. I was more like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, Scotty, in Boogie Nights, awkward and fleshy and testing the limits of my clothing in ways that made just about everybody uncomfortable. Nothing worse than bulges in all the wrong places. I was eating a lot.

  There were meals and there were feedings.

  Meals were food. Feedings were drugs. Both were vital and well planned. And I consumed both with gluttonous delight. As a rule, feedings generally preceded meals. Drugs kicked in faster on an empty stomach.

  My diet alone should have been enough to kill me. I had developed a three-bagel-a-day habit. At 10:30 a.m., on my way to the office and around two hours after the day’s first feeding of fifteen extra-strength Vicodin, I would pick up a toasted everything bagel with two eggs, bacon, and Swiss cheese.

  “Don’t forget to butter the bagel—both halves,” I’d remind the guy behind the counter.

  Once in my office—a small square room with giant windows overlooking the Empire State
Building, framed Details covers lining the walls, an overstuffed beige love seat, and a round blond wood table that served as my desk—I’d open a couple of small to-go salt packets and dump them out onto the greasy foil that wrapped my morning delicacy, then dunk the sandwich, glistening and slick, into a mound of salt before each bite. As if everything bagels weren’t already salty enough. I was going for maximum bloat.

  Lunch usually happened at around two—a couple of hours after my midday feeding of fifteen Vicodin—and was generally either a smoked turkey, a Black Forest ham, or a tuna sandwich on a plain bagel with a bag of chips and a Diet Coke from the company cafeteria.

  I usually didn’t eat dinner until 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. I’d survive on Cool Ranch Doritos, Twizzlers, three or four Diet Cokes, and half a pack of Marlboro Mediums between my 4:00 p.m. opiate feeding (fifteen pills) and dinner—the only meal of the day that I ate before taking drugs.

  The evening feeding—the final feeding of the day—was the most important. This was the high I fantasized about during all of the other highs. This was the highest high of the day. Daytime doses had become little more than maintenance—just enough of an energy boost to get me through the day without unraveling, like a cell phone with a dwindling battery that gets plugged in here and there during working hours, but doesn’t get the charge it really needs until the end of the day. The evening feeding was the biggest of the day. I’d usually add two or three pills on top of the now standard fifteen. I wanted a more intense buzz at bedtime. And I needed it to sleep, like a child’s threadbare blanket. Seventeen or eighteen Vicodin. Lights out.

  But first, dinner.

  “Phish Food?” the voice on the other end of the phone would ask. “One or two?”

  The guys working the counter at the deli around the corner from my apartment knew my voice and would rattle off my order even before I could. Smoked turkey on a plain bagel with sliced mozzarella and shaved lettuce. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food, a pack of cigarettes, and a Diet Coke, which I drank while the sandwich was being warmed in the microwave. I’d fill the empty bottle with a couple of inches of water and use it as an ashtray for the rest of the night. Sometimes, at around midnight, I’d have to add more water to the foul, sludgy mixture. The Ben and Jerry’s would also get microwaved—to the consistency of a milkshake. I’d eat it mostly with a spoon while leaning against the kitchen counter, but wasn’t opposed to drinking the bottom third right out of the responsibly sourced, eco-friendly container before crushing it in my hand like a triumphant frat boy after shotgunning a beer.

  The tux was a little snug.

  It was a last-minute trip to the tailor, but they agreed to turn the tuxedo around quickly for me because I made sure they knew I was the editor in chief of Details. Though I would never promise, the possibility of coverage in the magazine was enough to open many doors—and, as it turned out, seams. Entitlement suited me well, just as the lightweight Super 150 midnight-blue Armani tux had about fifteen pounds ago.

  When I was in my early twenties and a junior reporter at Women’s Wear Daily, I was sent to interview legendary GQ editor Art Cooper about the state of media. Hanging on the wall in his spacious midtown office was a print of a Slim Aarons photo of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Van Heflin, and Jimmy Stewart. It was called The Four Kings of Hollywood, and all four men were standing at a bar in Beverly Hills wearing tuxedoes.

  “Look at the ease with which they carried themselves. The elegance,” Cooper told me. “This photo should be a beacon for all men. Hollywood’s true power brokers at the time.” The following day, I actually tracked down Slim by phone and asked about purchasing a copy of the famous photo, but changed my mind when he told me how much it would cost. Still, I thought about it every time I put on a tux. When I finally got my own shortly after taking the job at Details, it felt like a rite of passage—another box I needed to check on my way to feeling like a grown-up. Power brokers owned tuxes.

  By the time I arrived at the Waldorf that evening in early 2003, the cocktail hour had already ended and dinner was being served. I picked up the place card with my name written in calligraphy across the front and headed over to my table. I had a small wooden box in my apartment filled with these cards. The box was polished walnut and had a silver-colored metal plate with my bar mitzvah invitation engraved on it attached to the lid—a gift from my stepfather’s aunt Gilda. She was one of half a dozen step-great-aunts whom I saw no more than once or twice a year on a Jewish holiday or some family function. These aunts were indistinguishable from one another, and while sweet, all seemed to smell like smoked fish and Bengay.

  At first glance, the cards in the box all looked the same—white, rectangular, a blur of black ink scrawled on one side—as alike as my stepfather’s aunts. But they weren’t. Some were linen. Others stood like tents. Some came in tiny envelopes. There was calligraphy, of course, but printed versions, too—a mix of bold and italics. Mr. Daniel Peres. Dan Peres. Daniel Peres, Details. Keepsakes of the world I both loved and loved to hate. Reminders that I was there—that I’d been given a seat at the table. Like Steve Martin when he excitedly flipped through the phone book in The Jerk, I’d been given long-sought validation by these little cards. “I’m somebody now.”

  Card in hand, I took my seat at the large round table. The auction was about to begin. In addition to charging a fortune for tables at these fundraisers, organizers also asked companies to donate items that could be auctioned off in order to raise even more for the designated charity—in this case, kids with diabetes. I always made it a point to bid in these auctions, even though I never won. I knew I’d never win. I’d learned over the years that if I got my hand up when the auctioneer—usually a well-known news anchor—called for starting bids, that I could show interest and a willingness to contribute without actually getting stuck writing a check. These bids could climb into the tens of thousands of dollars. I figured bidding early was an impressive display of wealth and compassion. Maybe someone might think that I, too, was a power broker. I wasn’t interested in winning two seats on the 50-yard line at a Giants game and a football signed by the team. Auction would start. Hand would go up. Bidding would go up. Hand would come down.

  Pushing my name card—Daniel Peres handwritten on heavy stock—into the inside breast pocket of my tuxedo in preparation for what I hoped would be a successful faux bid, I discovered a tissue tucked in the bottom of the pocket with what felt like five pills wrapped inside. This rarely happened. I was usually fastidious about managing my supply and seldom left pills somewhere and forgot about them. But when it did happen, when I did find a few Vicodin hidden in the back of a drawer or buried in a pocket, it was like winning the lottery—like finding one last M&M in the crumpled package you’re about to throw away.

  I could hardly contain my excitement at the discovery of a mini-stash and excused myself to the bathroom to investigate. In I went, past the attendant over to the relative privacy of the urinals, which were unoccupied. I hastily pulled the tissue from my pocket, accidentally dropping some pills—three Vicodin bouncing away like the tiny bubbles in the champagne glasses on the tables just outside.

  I popped the two pills that remained in the tissue into my mouth and swallowed them with a gag and a shiver before searching for the others, which had settled in close proximity of one another under the last white porcelain urinal in a bank of three.

  The surface below a urinal—even a urinal in a five-star hotel—is the same thing as the urinal itself. Urine. Spit. Wiry lone pubes inexplicably left behind like abandoned socks on a dingy laundromat floor. And, in this case, three Vicodin forming a near-perfect isosceles triangle on the bespattered tile just to the right of the urinal.

  Does the five-second rule count for piss-soaked drugs?

  I’d like to say I hesitated. That I took a moment to weigh my options. That I considered walking away. Surely a grown man should know better. Particularly one in a tuxedo.

  But then again, I’ve swallowed some truly unsavory th
ings in pursuit of a high. Basic pocket lint was pretty standard. I once unknowingly took a swig from a beer bottle that had a cigarette floating in it to coax a small handful of pills down my throat.

  Then there was the time I drank gasoline. A great big gulp. Of gasoline. Or it may have been diesel. It’s hard to know, but I suspect the flavor profiles are pretty similar.

  Caroline and I were in the Hamptons at the time. It was her idea. Her friends. I didn’t want to be there. I hated the Hamptons. The only thing I hated more than the Hamptons were the people in the Hamptons and the way they referred to going to the Hamptons as “heading east for the weekend.” I put that on par with asking someone where they went to college and being told “I went to school in New Haven.”

  Plus, I wasn’t a huge fan of being in the sun or on a beach or taking my shirt off in public. And I wasn’t interested in being around active people. They were always training for something. A tri. A half. A whole. More like a-hole, if you asked me. I was starting to dislike people, more and more—especially healthy, tan, active people.

  Caroline wanted to water-ski, which of course annoyed me. To make matters worse, she insisted on having me ride along in the boat. As it turned out, I had to swim a few yards from the end of the dock to the idling boat, and I had eight OxyContin in the pocket of my bathing suit. My only option was to quickly shove them in my mouth as I dove in and then take a giant gulp of bay water in order to swallow them. A layer of gasoline must have settled on the water as the boat bobbed gently in neutral, its two outboard engines humming away. It was like drinking straight from the pump. My throat felt like it’d been shredded by a thousand razors. My stomach burned. I wanted to vomit, but I fought to keep the Oxys down. I tasted fuel for the rest of the weekend.

  The bathroom attendant at the Waldorf also wore a tuxedo. He was unusually tall. NBA tall. His tux definitely would have come from a store specializing in clothing men with uncommon body types. Did he see me drop my pills? For a moment, I worried what this man, this towering stranger, might think of me.