Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [14]
There was also the money problem—I didn’t have any. I had blown it all. On what? Drugs. Parties that cost $50,000. Drugs. Girls who wanted to be taken to Italy, Paris, London, St. Barts. Drugs. A Prada wardrobe. A new Porsche. Drugs. Rehab treatment that wasn’t covered by health insurance. The movie money from polishing jobs that had, at one point, showered down on me started drying up when the drug rumors became too detailed to ignore and after I sent back several screenplays with none of the requested changes made and just my random notes scrawled in the margins: “Not so good” and “I think this rather excellent” and “Let’s beef it up” and the ubiquitous “I hated my father.” The spark that had once animated me had majorly fizzled out. What was I doing hanging out with gangbangers and diamond smugglers? What was I doing buying kilos? My apartment reeked of marijuana and freebase. One afternoon I woke up and realized I didn’t know how anything worked anymore. Which button turned the espresso machine on? Who was paying my mortgage? Where did the stars come from? After a while you learn that everything stops.
It was time to minimize damage. It was time to renew contacts. It was time to expect more from myself.
I had lost the hustle, the nerve, the shit it took to keep myself standing in the spotlight. My desire to be part of the Scene shrank—I was exhausted by it all. My life—my name—had been rendered a repetitive, unfunny punch line and I was sick of eating it. Celebrity was a life lived in code—it was a place where you constantly had to decipher what people wanted from you, and where the terrain was slippery and a world where ultimately you always made the wrong choice. What made everything less and less bearable was that I had to keep quiet about this because I knew no one else who could sympathize (maybe Jay McInerney, but he was still so lost inside it all that he never would have understood) and once I grasped that I was totally alone, I realized, only then, that I was in serious trouble. My wistful attitude about fame and drugs—the delight I took in feeling sorry for myself—had turned into a hard sadness, and the future no longer looked even remotely plausible. Just one thing seemed to be racing toward me: a blackness, a grave, the end. And so during that terrible year there were the inevitable 12-step programs, the six different treatment centers, the endless second chances, the fourth intervention, the unavoidable backsliding, the multiple relapses, the failed recoveries, the sudden escape to Las Vegas, the tumble into the abyss and, finally, the flameout.
I ultimately called Jayne. She listened. She made an offer. She held out a hand. I was so shocked that I broke into tears. What I was being given—I understood immediately—was extremely rare: a second chance with someone. I was briefly reluctant at first, but there was one factor overriding everything: no one else wanted me.
And because of this I instantly rebounded. I got clean in May, signed a huge contract for a new novel with a reluctant Knopf and an insistent ICM in June and then moved into Jayne’s newly built mansion in July. We married later that month in a private ceremony at City Hall with only Marta, her assistant, as a witness. But Jayne Dennis was a well-known actress and “somehow” the news leaked. Immediately the National Enquirer ran an article on Jayne’s “spectacularly bad luck in love” and listed all of her ill-fated relationships (when had she dated Matthew McConaughey? Billy Bob Thornton? Russell Crowe? Who in the hell was Q-Tip?) before asking its readers, “Why is Jayne Dennis with a man who let her down so cruelly?” Comparisons were made to Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson, to Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger. A clinical psychologist hypothesized that famous women were no different from nonfamous women when it came to bad choices in relationships. “You