This is an overview of some of my arrest history for narcotics. I was arrested for possession of cocaine in 2004. I pleaded guilty in March 2005 to attempted possession of cocaine-based narcotics and was placed on probation. When I failed to appear in court in December 2005 for a status report, a warrant was issued for my arrest. On January 14, 2006, when I was arrested on a Los Angeles Metro Rail platform for not having a ticket, police found heroin on me. Because of the outstanding warrant for violating probation in a cocaine-related arrest, I was held without bail. I agreed to join a strict drug-diversion program, and my release from jail was ordered. I dropped out of the rehabilitation program and was taken into custody again on March 30 after a Superior Court commissioner determined that I had failed several drug tests while staying in a live-in drug-diversion program. At that point I acknowledged that I needed more help. On May 11, after failing to complete court-ordered drug rehabilitation, I was sentenced to ninety days in jail and three years’ probation. I was given credit for the jail time I had already served since March 30.
On February 1, 2010, I was arrested again for possession of narcotics. After denying having any drugs in my possession, I finally admitted to police that I had black tar heroin in my shoe. I posted ten thousand dollars for bail and was charged with a felony count of heroin possession. On October 18, 2010, I pleaded no contest to heroin possession in Los Angeles and entered a court-ordered rehabilitation program.
I hate revisiting these portions of my life. They are the darkest and worst things I have ever been through. I’ve tried to block them from my memory, but it’s hard. When you’re addicted to drugs, you don’t remember a lot about your days; they become one for so long. When I was addicted, I lost touch with pretty much everybody who meant anything to me, except for my mom. I have to say she was always there by my side for whatever I needed. For all of the differences we have had over the years as well as the questions I still have about my upbringing and the way things were done, my mom has always been there for me. She’s not perfect, but none of us is.
The first time I got arrested in an LA subway station, I think it’s because I looked like a junkie. I was that bad. Undercover cops have a good eye for guys like that, so it was pretty easy to peg me as a user. For one, I was wearing dark glasses at night. I was an easy mark. One of the cops said to me after they stopped me, “You work with us and we will let you go. Just tell us where the stuff is.” I was a junkie. I stupidly trusted them. I took my shoe off and showed them where the heroin was, and they cuffed me. “But I thought you said…?” “I don’t deal with junkies, asshole.” And they dragged me out to the car.
The second time I got busted for heroin, it was in the exact same place. What are the odds of that? I passed through the turnstile to go get on a train. I had about three hundred bucks in my back pocket and black tar heroin in my shoe, just like last time. So the cop said to me, “Hey, man, that show you were on, World’s Dumbest Criminals, is really hilarious!” I called out, “Thanks, man!” over my shoulder. Obviously I didn’t want to hang out too long and have a conversation. “Gotta run!”
I heard another cop behind the first cop ask, “Who is that?” And the other guy answered, “He’s the one that got popped last year, remember? The teen idol? That’s the same guy.” Great. Behind me I heard two sets of footsteps coming toward me and then felt the inevitable hand on the back of my shoulder. “Hey, kid, where do you think you’re going?”
Then there was the mug shot. I know everybody talks about that thing. It kills me, seeing it today. I had stared into the lenses of so many renowned photographers. My picture had been taken tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of times over the years. I knew how to work the camera. Knowing how was a big part of my life, after all. I was as much a model as I was a singer. But then I had to look into that lens for my mug shot. That’s how the world was going to get reacquainted with me. How shocked everybody must’ve been. But what can I tell you? That was me. As sad as it seems, that’s what my life had become. Everybody freaked out because the hair was gone. Guess what? That happens sometimes. When people stop me on the street and say nasty things about that, I don’t know what to tell them. It’s called getting older, and it’s okay. We have this cultural thing that no celebrities are ever supposed to grow old before our eyes.
Then it was into jail for ninety days. Gone was the rooftop suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Now it was a nine-by-six cell, one of twelve individual cells, and I was sandwiched between a pedophile priest and one of Suge Knight’s henchmen. Awesome. What can I say about prison? It’s the absolute worst. I wanted to be in protective custody, which meant I had to do the full ninety-day sentence. Had I agreed to be in the general population, I would have been out of there in four days. But I don’t think I would’ve made it out. It wasn’t worth it to me. I had heard too many stories about what might happen to me in that kind of environment, so I opted for the complete sentence.
The first day I was there, one of the female guards pushed an old photo of me from Tiger Beat into my cell. “Look at you now, you fucking loser,” she said, chuckling. I didn’t think that was right. I had been arrested; I had broken the law and accepted my sentence. But I didn’t need that bullshit. I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s right to humiliate people like that. But, of course, I had no say in the matter. I ignored her. My mom visited occasionally, and other times I would get an alert that there was somebody there. But they don’t tell you who’s waiting for you. You need to go up there and check it out and then decide if you want to have that visitor spend time with you. Several times there were fans who had come to visit me, but I had no interest in talking with anybody except my mom and a couple of very close friends. I was miserable.
My bail bondsman, Chris Cox, gave me occasional updates on my case, but there wasn’t too much to report. Of course, being locked up meant I couldn’t do drugs, and so that forced me to go cold turkey. I dealt with it okay. There had been times leading up to my incarceration when I did not use drugs for several months, so it wasn’t that big a deal for me. Don’t get me wrong, I was craving heroin. But I could deal with that.
For the most part, my entire world existed in semidarkness, with a dim fluorescent light overhead, a television that was blasting constantly, and food that was so horrible I can barely describe it. The first day that I was there, they brought a plate of noodles that had what appeared to be pencil erasers in it. I couldn’t even guess what they were made out of, but I certainly wasn’t going to eat them.
The next day they brought a bologna sandwich, and the meat was green. If you’re in prison and you’ve got somebody on the outside who can get money to you, then you can use what’s called the canteen, which basically has food from vending machines, like chips and Ramen noodles. That’s what I opted for, obviously. But the only water I got for the Ramen noodles was lukewarm, so it did not do any good.
Given the amount of time I had on my hands, I spent most of it reading. I read some of the Anne Rice vampire books and got into the Harry Potter books. Those were good. The stories were nice and escapist, and I thought the characters were well-drawn. I also took a lot of time to think. What was I doing there? How had I gotten to that point in my life? Was it just about being a little boy in search of a father? Or was it more about having been a fraud for so many years that I didn’t care what I did to myself? Was I simply trying to kill myself? Maybe it was all three. I’m still not sure.
Jail is a horrible place. You feel like an animal. You are treated like an animal. But in the absence of any real stimulation—mental, physical, or otherwise—a kind of clarity starts to reveal itself after a few days. I had never been alone like this. I mean, in my case in particular, I may have been the most overstimulated person of my generation. For a number of years, every single minute I was awake, something extreme was happening, for better or worse. I also had never been made to quit drugs cold turkey. I was sick and hungry. But again, this was an opportunity I could never remember having. Nothing but time.
In the void, I started to self-analyze a bit. I’m not sure if it was even deliberate, but it just started happening. All of a sudden, I could honestly judge things that had happened in my life. I thought back to the accident in 1979. I could have easily died. Roland and I both could have. What happened to Roland was tragic. But I’d never stopped to think about how close I came to death that night. What would it have been like had I died? How would I have been remembered? Would it be sort of like James Dean? Death in a fiery Porsche accident. Taken from the world while still beautiful and mysterious. No chance to erode before people’s eyes. A wistful, what-could-have-been story that might have grown larger over the years. Maybe that would have been better. I mean, what I had become was a disgrace. It was a very hard thing to confront. In that jail cell, alone and lonely, I was forced to accept that part of me wished I had died that night. And then I came face-to-face with the bleak reality that I had been trying to kill myself ever since.