A Million Little Pieces - James Frey [81]
He stops and he stares at the ceiling for a moment as if there’s something up there besides the ceiling panels and he looks back and he starts speaking in a deep, serious voice. His first words are when I had my first hit single and I got famous I started to party really fucking hard.
From there he launches into a detailed accounting of his career. He talks about the number of records sold and the number of women slept with and the number of awards won. He talks about living on the road and he says it ain’t easy, man, even if you are staying at the Four Seasons. He talks about the rigors of recording an album and he talks about the pressures of being a Star. He talks about what he calls the national obsession with his lips and his hair and he talks about melodic qualities of his voice. After a while, after far too long a while, he talks about drinking and drugs. When he talks of heroin, he taps the bend of his elbow with two fingers, when he talks of coke he sniffs, booze he makes a motion like he has a bottle, pills as if he’s tossing them in. He claims that at the height of his use he would do five thousand dollars of cocaine and heroin a day mixed with four to five fifths of booze a night and up to forty pills of Valium to sleep. He says this with complete sincerity and with the utmost seriousness.
I am tired and I am spent. I am nervous and I am happy. I am calm. Were I in my normal frame of mind, I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a beating. Were I in my normal frame of mind, after I gave him his beating, I would make him come back here and apologize to everyone for wasting their precious time. After the apology, I would tell him that if I ever heard of him spewing his bullshit fantasies in Public again, I would cut off his precious hair, scar his precious lips, and take all of his goddamn gold records and shove them straight up his ass.
I don’t like this man. I don’t like what he has to say or how he’s saying it. I don’t believe him and his Rock Star status isn’t enough to make me buy the shit he’s trying to sell. Four to five thousand dollars a day of anything is enough to kill a Person several times over. Five bottles of strong liquor over the course of a night would render the strongest human on Earth comatose. Forty Valiums to sleep and he’d take a fucking nap from which he’d never return. He’d never return and maybe that would be best.
An Addict is an Addict. It doesn’t matter whether the Addict is white, black, yellow or green, rich or poor or somewhere in the middle, the most famous Person on the Planet or the most unknown. It doesn’t matter whether the addiction is drugs, alcohol, crime, sex, shopping, food, gambling, television, or the fucking Flintstones. The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. An all-encompassing, fully enveloping, completely overwhelming obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth. That this man is standing in front of me and everyone else in this room lying to us is heresy. The truth is all that matters. This is fucking heresy.
The Lecture ends and there is wild applause and enthusiastic cheers and the Lips, Hair, Leather and Silk on the Stage is smiling and waving and glowing and blowing kisses to his adoring Fans. I am tired. I am spent. I am nervous and I am happy and I am calm. Were I in my normal frame of