Around this time, I reconnected with Dr. Drew Pinsky in the parking lot at Pasadena Recovery Center. We had a history. I was acquainted with him before he became a well-known specialist in the treatment of addiction. When I first met him, he was on a Saturday-night radio call-in show in the 1980s called Loveline that broadcast from Pasadena’s KROQ-FM. I was still with Thelonious Monster back then. Drew had just completed his M.D. at the University of Southern California and was doing his residency. He hosted the medical segment of the show, during which he offered clinical advice about sex and relationships. The show would have guests, and because I was “that kid who knew everybody,” I might show up with whoever had been scheduled to appear, or I’d just pop in on my own. It was fun to be on the radio. I thought I was charming most of the time, but I also showed up drunk, high, and incoherent a lot too. I disrupted the show on-air sometimes by walking off so I could go outside to do drugs. So much so that the show’s producer confronted me one night.
“Look, Bob, we need to talk.”
“The show tonight was great, wasn’t it?” I said enthusiastically, jacked on the twelfth hit of crack I’d had over the past hour. It was a cold night and I was wrapped in an overcoat that had somehow grown several sizes too large for me. I pulled a pint bottle from one of the pockets and took a slug of vodka.
“No. The show sucked. It was terrible because of you.”
I stood there shocked. I thought I had been the best part of the night’s entertainment.
“You didn’t even make sense,” the exasperated producer said. “And I know why you kept leaving. I mean, have you taken a look at yourself lately? Drew thinks you have fuckin’ AIDS, man.”
I started to argue but was cut off. “Man—”
“So until you get yourself un-fucked and get your shit together, we don’t want or need you here.”
And that was that. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t need the show. It’s not like they paid me or anything. Fine. Whatever. I stomped out and didn’t return. So much for my charming personality.
In 1997 or 1998, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” from TV organized a lecture with MAP for a series he was doing on addiction. It was at the Sheraton Universal in Universal City and I went to listen. I plopped down in the front row. Nye did his thing and then brought out a guest to speak about treatment methods. It was Drew. He lectured the crowd of about twenty people in his earnest manner and then opened things up for questions. I had a few.
“Can a nonaddict ever truly reach an addict?”
“Why is the recovery rate for traditional treatment programs so abysmally low?”
Drew answered all my questions, but I had the distinct impression that he didn’t remember me. How could that be? I had done all those radio appearances with him. When the lecture was over, I approached him.
“How’ve you been, Drew?” I asked.
“Good, good. You sure ask a lot of questions. Have we met?”
“Drew, it’s me. Bob Forrest. You don’t remember me?”
A look of surprise washed over his face. He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost. Little did I know …
“Bob Forrest? I thought you were dead.”
“Come on, Drew. The hat. The glasses. Who else would it be?”
“I thought it was just … Holy crap, Bob, you look great! I mean, I’ve seen the transitions that addicts can make, but I’m looking at a miracle.”
“Look, I know you’re at Las Encinas. I wonder if there’s any work available for me over there.”
“Did you go to school, Bob?” he asked me.
“Yeah, but I did a fast-track program,” I said as honestly as I could. “But I’ve done lots of fieldwork.”
He must have seen something in me, because he invited me to interview at Las Encinas. I showed up the next week and Drew laid it out for me.
“Bob, what you’re doing now is beyond your expertise and training. I can bring you along here. Consider this ‘the education of Bob Forrest.’ I’ll make you an administrator. You’re going to learn how sick people work, and if you stick with it and give it all you’ve got—and read the books—you’ll end up running a program.”
I was scared to death when I went to work with Drew because I knew that I didn’t know enough. More important, Drew knew it too. I couldn’t fake it and I was unprepared. When it came to the clinical stuff, the medical and the psychological jargon, I was lost. Drew encouraged me. “If you don’t know something, Bob, ask,” he’d say. When we’d have staff meetings and people talked in an alphabet soup of acronyms and clinical terms, Drew said, “Get a medical dictionary and highlight pen. Look up words you don’t understand. There’s a lot that happens in these meetings and you won’t get any of it if you can’t understand what we say.” It was a learning process that took years.
But I was good with patients. I could keep addicts in a program even when they
