Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera (34 page)

I pleaded with him, saying, “Dude, I’ve got to do something. I can’t do this. This is wrong.” I had a vial of coke in my boot—fine Peruvian flakes to be precise—and at this point Jerry’s a year or so sober, so when I pulled the vial out, his eyes flashed wide open. He was
that
close to using, but I said to him, “Let’s flush this shit now. Let’s not hang onto it.”

He suggested that I go to a rehab place that he knew in Pasadena run by the Mongols motorbike gang. These guys are wild and constantly battling with the Hells Angels, but as a rehab facility it turned out to be a complete joke. The head guy was a prominent figure in the rehabilitation business and they had James Caan’s brother in there working as a counselor, which helped attract celebrities in need of drug and alcohol treatment.

In reality it was actually more of a boot camp or a commune than anything else, with most of the guidance coming from gang members. It was sleeping on bunks, four guys to a room sharing a bathroom, just crazy, and for about half the time I was there they had me on Rohypnol anyway.

Why did they have me on Rohypnol?

Well, I forgot to mention that I’d been taking Klonopin as an alternative to Xanax for a while because it’s a milder form of anti-anxiety medicine. But the problem with Klonopin is that when you come off it, it’s truly a scary thing. You can lose it—seizures and shit—so they put me on Rohypnol and slowly weaned me down. For the last little bit I went to a halfway house where I stayed for another month or so. I’d get up in the morning and just go home for a while. Belinda was at work, so I’d just go home and play computer games and then leave, but I soon realized that, once again, I was seeking rehab for all the wrong reasons.

This time I had been doing it for my family, because they thought I needed help. That won’t work. You have to want it for yourself, and at this point that wasn’t my primary motivation. but at least I was sober. The thing is: sober and
dry
are totally different things.

Then Belinda and I separated. I suppose it had been coming for a while.

She really missed her friends from Texas and didn’t really enjoy L.A, because I was always out trying to make things happen on a business level. Her response to a lot of situations was to just split, and that’s what happened here. Obviously when we parted I had to keep paying her mortgage. She was, after all, the mother of my children, and while we could no longer exist compatibly under the same roof, I always wanted to make sure she and the kids were taken care of. Meanwhile, I was going to have to find a place to rent, at least in the short term.

I knew I definitely
didn’t
want to move into Beverly Hills because—while it may have been the expected thing to do for a rock star—it was seriously expensive and a world of craziness. So Warren Riker and I decided to move into a house together that we found in Sherman Oaks. Warren’s old man had died from alcohol, and he was therefore in a good position to keep an eye on what I was doing, so on a lot of levels it made sense. Although him being from Jersey and me being from Texas inevitably led to a few big spats.

We were living in a very private, gated community and the house itself had two separate living rooms: mine was the Texas side and Warren’s was the New Jersey side, and we each had them decorated appropriately. We both remodeled our areas. I put wood floors down, and made it mine.

Now, one thing that comes with addiction is the need to go out and rustle up chicks, and now that I was newly single, our place soon became fucking chick central. And only a certain, very high quality chick at that. These women had to be up to a certain caliber and that wasn’t hard at all.

I’d still see the kids on the weekends and I was able to not drink at all when they were with me, but when they weren’t around I’d drink in my room because I knew that Warren wasn’t going to approve. Secretive drinking is of course a familiar trait associated with addiction. Drinking in private, hiding bottles in places that even you forget where you’ve hid them, that kind of routine. Of course, to the person doing it, it’s no big deal because you can stop at any time.

Only you don’t.

Or if you do, it’s for a very short time until—like I said before in my case—the laces of my tennis shoes were untied.

GRADUALLY THROUGHOUT
2006 and early 2007, Down started becoming a significant part of my life and it looked like a new record was possible. Remember, we’d gone out in 2005 with no fucking product—only t-shirts—and sold out every single night of a twenty-one date tour. We definitely knew how to make the band a success.

We were starting to get reaccustomed to each other as people, too, and I would go down to New Orleans to hang out. Everything was written in Phil’s barn again and then we moved the whole process to L.A.—band-members and families included—to record
Down III
in various places in town. We did the drums at Sunset Sound and then got a call from Heaven & Hell to play some Canadian dates. Around halfway through the recording process we had a Friday through Sunday off, and so I decided that I’d take Belinda to Malibu.

We hadn’t been getting along, and even though we were technically separated, I always loved this place called Paradise Cove, and saw this as an opportunity to spend some time with her to see if we could repair the damage to our relationship.

So I went and found a little hotel there next to Zuma Beach that wasn’t too far from Paradise Cove.

In the past we’d taken the kids down there and had a great time, but on this occasion Belinda and I drank entirely too much and things got out of hand. The police were called and the long and short of the story is that they took me to fucking jail at the Twin Towers in L.A., the craziest fucking place you could possibly go to jail at. Just the holding cells alone can accommodate thousands of people; you can get lost in there.

I remember sitting there with my hoodie on, pulled tight down over my eyes because these people were so crazy I didn’t want to catch any fucker’s eye. Some dude got his nose spread across his face, just because he wouldn’t give another guy his sandwich. This was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. Not just that, I obviously couldn’t get access to any fucking booze or the pain pills that helped me to recover from the damage that booze had caused, so on all fronts it was a fucking nightmarish experience.

When I finally got out, I took a cab from downtown L.A. to my place in Studio City, and when I arrived the whole band was there in various stages of fucked-upness. I had around two thousand dollars’ worth of pain pills in the house because my stomach was really out of control, and Jimmy Bower had been taking them. Phil was out of his mind on something, and Pepper and Kirk were on blow, but they all decided that they were going to stage an intervention on
me
because they had found the stash of booze that I had hidden under the bed. They all wanted me to go into rehab, but they were missing the point on two counts: just because you relapse doesn’t mean you have to go into rehab every time, and also it wasn’t as if any of these guys could look at
themselves
in the fucking mirror with any confidence and say that they didn’t have problems that were at least comparable to mine. To me it was totally fucking hypocritical. Here’s these guys getting fucked up in my house, but I’m the one getting singled out for intervention. No wonder I eventually quit the band in 2011, but there were other reasons for that, too.

My main problem at this point was that I was about to have seizures from alcohol withdrawal while I was in jail and that I also hadn’t taken any medication for at least forty-eight hours. These junkies sit there and say, “Oh, you’re doing it wrong, man. You have to climb the walls and get through it.”

“Nope, you’re wrong again,” I said. You can’t just “get through it.” There’s a physical reason
not
to do that because you can actually die from alcoholic seizure, so I took two of each of the pain pills I had and washed it down with the half bottle of vodka that these guys hadn’t found in my house. If I’d waited another three or four hours, I’m not sure I’d be alive today.

I needed to get myself straight again before we went out and toured the record, and this time I did it for one reason and one reason only: for me, Rex Brown. I checked myself into a detox place in Tarzana. In all honesty I knew better than anyone that I needed to go into rehab again, but I certainly didn’t relish the prospect of the detox process because that is always the worst part. It was my friend Steve Gibb that suggested this place as the best possible detox option for me.

By the way, Steve is Barry Gibb’s (of the Bee Gees) son, and he was his dad’s guitar tech for a couple of years before going on to do his own music thing, playing bass in Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society for a while in 2000 and then guitar on Crowbar’s
Lifesblood for the Downtrodden,
a record I was involved with
.
I’d put Steve into rehab at a place called Promises on his own father’s request, and now I was asking him to return the favor. Problem was, there were no fucking beds available at Promises, so I had to find an alternative to get started with the detox process.

So Steve recommended this other place in Tarzana and it was fucking nuts going through the detox process there, because in order to do it they had to put me on methadone, which is no fun at all, trust me. You’re basically there until you wake up and when you eventually do, you soon realize that you’ve got another fucking problem: they need to detox you twice. Throughout the whole time I was in there I was calling Steve and saying, “Dude, get me the fuck out of here and get me checked into Promises
.
There’s no way I’m staying here.”

Promises is commonly regarded as one of the best rehab programs in the entire country, and it’s been used, often successfully, by every musician or movie star you can think of. There are secluded, private locations in Malibu and Mar Vista, as well as an outpatient rehab center in downtown L.A. It’s seriously expensive, as you can probably imagine, but their success rate was apparently very high, so I had it in my mind that they could put me through the whole detox process there, as well as doing anything else that they needed to do.

I was in there for twenty-eight days, and Promises was the answer for me because it was the right program at a time in my life where I was really willing to commit to the process for my future well-being and not for any other reason. That’s the key to rehabilitation. Any other agenda only results in a waste of time and money where you end up like Ozzy, who’s been to so many rehabs over the years. The story goes that he walked into Betty Ford the first time and they told him, “We’re going to teach you how to drink properly,” to which he replied, “Okay, so where’s the bar?”

“We don’t have a bar, that’s not part of this deal.” Until you get the message that rehab is intended to stop you from drinking, it’ll be a long road.

Promises rattled my whole soul, and that’s not overstating it at all. The whole program was just insane. As well as a structured series of seminars, they’d also take us out to the Self-Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades—and this place was nothing but ponds and flowers, complete serenity, and that helped me tremendously. Then we’d go to Topanga Canyon near Malibu to do therapy and spend the day dealing with horses. You’re sitting there on a horse with this whip in your hand but you’re not whipping the horse; then depending on your body language you could make the horse go in any direction you wanted it to go. The first guy to try it got just nibbled to shit. Horses have a sense about people. In Texas, that’s called horse sense.

When I came out of rehab in 2007, Belinda and I (we were still separated at this time) had some pretty severe talks about life in general. As I said before, she wanted to move back to Texas—she couldn’t hang out West—and I was also at the point where I felt like I had outgrown L.A. My social life wasn’t the kind that really suited me. We’d go to all these clubs and hang out and that just wasn’t me, and there was a danger of me finding myself in a similar situation that I’d left back in Texas a couple of years earlier. I just was not comfortable standing there in celebrity-ridden clubs.

After a lot of discussion and a little time, Belinda and I started getting our relationship back together. You always think the grass is greener on the other side, but she came back around and the truth of the matter is that I was still in love with her. It was as simple as that.

So we moved back to Texas in August of 2007. I got my moving guys to collect all my stuff and put it in storage in a huge warehouse they had for which they only charged me seventy-five bucks a month, and then Belinda and I moved into a little-bitty apartment because I was on the road with Down pretty soon after we got back. Now that I was sober and taking care of business, the tension within Down had eased significantly, and they also must have known that to kick me out of the band would have harmed ticket sales for the tour.

Soon Belinda and I decided to get a bigger place, and because the money was still coming in pretty good, we bought a large house in Colleyville. I had come full circle.
Down III
came out a month after we moved and got great fucking reviews and started selling substantial numbers on the back of that. It was a good record, but I like
Down II
better. I had an attachment to
Down II
that I didn’t have with this one because I’d done all my homework on it, got all the gear moved down from Nashville, and the whole bit, and for that reason I take a certain pride in it.