TREATMENT: IT’S UP TO YOU
The morning is typical for late spring in Southern California. It’s softly overcast and pleasantly cool. The warm inland temperatures of the previous afternoon have drawn in overnight moisture from the Pacific that has settled as mist in the valleys and canyons and will remain suspended there until the sun burns it off in the early afternoon. It’s a weather cycle that will be repeated endlessly until the summer heat of July finally brings it to an end. I’m at the Pasadena Recovery Center and the television show is in its second week of production.
The center, on Raymond Avenue, is dead center in one of Pasadena’s older neighborhoods. It’s what could rightfully be called a “mixed use” area. There are several convalescent homes nearby and on the larger streets are chain supermarkets and beverage outlets like Starbucks. There’s no uniformity to the residences on the smaller streets, unlike newer Southern California neighborhoods that aspire toward uniformity. Here, there are small, single-family stucco homes not much bigger than shoe boxes and some stately multistory models built in a fake Craftsman style. Directly next door to the center is a sprawling old home with a sagging front porch that sits well to the rear of a weed-choked lot. A cracked cement footpath leads in from the sidewalk and is guarded by two forlorn-looking stone Chinese lions that have begun to crumble with age and time. There are ancient trees everywhere. Gnarled pines, shady oaks, and, since this is Southern California, towering palms hold up the gray skies and provide shelter to an amazingly rich variety of mountain birds down from the foothills. A ragged symphony orchestra of scrub jays, mockingbirds, and, oddly, feral, nonnative green parrots shrieks and squawks from the shelter of the branches and fronds and carpet-bombs pedestrians and parked cars with their caustic droppings. The cracked sidewalks are stained white with the stuff.
PRC itself is a low-slung ranch-style building that blends in to these surroundings well. Its front is glass with cheery-colored inserts that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a California public school during the 1960s. Near the entrance are molded concrete tables and benches made to resemble stone, and a nearby tub constructed of the same stuff and filled with sand. The smokers here use it as their communal ashtray. It’s well used. Inside, the floors are made of a light-colored wood and there are pressure-molded plywood chairs that mimic the famous Eames style, all organic curves and retro-looking swoops. Hung on the walls are photographs of rugged-looking islands surrounded by gently lapping seas. In the office, a few of the workers drink coffee, chat, and answer phones. Their voices float through the corridor, where a sleepy-looking security guard sits at a table with a sign-in book. Up on the roof is a lounge area for the residents with padded chairs, chaises, and potted plants. It’s a modest place. Certainly nothing too fancy, but it’s pleasant and has a warm and welcoming feel to it. It’s about as far as one can get from the style of some of the “high-end” oceanfront treatment centers that cater to the wealthy and resemble palatial resort hotels and spas. Whatever works, as the old adage goes. But what is effective when it comes to treatment?
From personal experience, I can attest that not a single person from my peer group—the hardest of the hard-core junkies—can ever tell anyone how they were able to get clean. There’s no set formula. For a very long time, I was convinced that love was the answer. I was wrong. I loved Layne Staley. Love didn’t help him.
At the turn of the millennium, I had been clean for a few years and I had started to gain a reputation as someone who could talk to addicts. More importantly, they’d listen. Layne was the charismatic front man for the Seattle-based band Alice in Chains. He also had an increasingly heavy and debilitating heroin addiction. That habit, which had at one point seemed a certification of his outsider, rock-and-roll cool, now threatened to destroy him. His skin took on the look of bleached vellum, his weight dropped below ninety pounds, and he was becoming increasingly reclusive. He had entered the end stage of the game. It’s the same old story, and one that I had witnessed more than once.
But he had people who loved him and who didn’t want to see him check out early. His mother, especially, was worried. Somehow, she had heard that I had helped John Frusciante, so she called me.
“Layne’s in terrible shape,” she said. “I heard that you and John are doing okay these days. Could you please talk to Layne? Maybe you could get John to talk to him too?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
How could I refuse a request like that? I was aware of how bad Layne had gotten. The press loved to write about his fall. Layne was at the top of those “death pool” lists morbid people loved to put together. I gave John a call. If anyone could relate to Layne’s condition, it was Frusciante.
“Hey, man. How’s it going? You doing all right?” I said.
“Yeah. I’m good. What’s up?”
“I got a call from Layne Staley’s mother. She’s really worried about him. She says he’s in terrible shape. Worse than you were, maybe. She asked me if we’d go talk to him. What do you think?”
“Talk to him about drugs?” he asked.
“Yeah. Drugs. Of course drugs.”
“I’ll talk to him. But if he wants to do drugs, Bob, well, he should probably just do them.” It was classic
