THE PRESSURE was getting to be too much. All the problems I was having in my marriage, plus carrying the team and the whole Graham James situation, were causing me a lot of anxiety. I was winging it. There were demons in my closet and when they were triggered I had to shut them up. Throughout my life, I used several things to do this—drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, anything that numbed me or took me out of the moment. I was always attracted to the dark side.
There were bright spots. Veronica and I had a baby, Beaux Destan Fleury, on May 26, 1997. What his name stood for in our minds was “beautiful destiny.” We wanted to bless him with a great future, starting with his name, but my own future wasn’t looking so rosy. I was carrying around a lot of shit I had no answers for and didn’t know how to deal with it. I would be faithful for a while, then when I was on the road, I’d go out and have a few drinks. Inhibitions would go down and self-confidence would go up. When a pretty girl made eye contact, instinct would take over. “Hey, you wanna go back to the hotel?” “Yeah, sure.” Back in my room, the guy I was rooming with was usually sleeping. If not, sometimes he’d get up and sometimes he’d just roll over. I switched up roomies fairly often, but most of the guys didn’t care.
Chuck used to try to encourage me to recognize that marriage to Veronica was a good thing. He tried to tell us to change our relationship because it was up and down all the time. He told us to replace the words “I love you” with “I respect you,” and eventually we would mean it. That never happened.
We used to go to Vegas every year for our anniversary, and we would take friends with us. One year we asked Chuck and his wife, Elaine, my teammate Andrew Cassels and his wife, Tracy, my brother Travis and Veronica’s brother Carson. We stayed at Caesars Palace. In those days it was one of the most upscale hotels in Vegas.
On the third day, we played thirty-six holes of golf. Whenever I wanted to go out and party, I would pick a fight with Veronica and she would respond the way I wanted—by telling me to get lost. So I would. Chuck kept warning me, “One of these days you two are going to kill the other. This relationship is totally out of control.”
So on the way back to the hotel after golf, I said, “Shower up, boys, we’re heading out for the night.”
“No we’re not,” Chuck said. “I ain’t going anywhere with you tonight, Bones. I can smell a rat.” And Andrew said, “Nah, I think I’ll take a rain check too.” They stayed back and took the girls out for dinner, while Carson and Travis and I went partying. As usual, we ended up at a strip joint.
We made it home, just wasted, at about 5 a.m., and Veronica was livid. The front desk kept calling and telling us to turn it down or get out. I crawled into bed, pulled the covers over my head and crashed. She called Chuck, waking him, and said, “Chuck, you won’t believe what your little effing buddy has been doing! You’d better get up to this room right now!”
Chuck got out of bed and said to Elaine, “By golly, today could be the day.”
He came up to our room and saw me passed out. I was semi-awake and could hear the conversation. Veronica was yelling, “That guy has been screwing around!” Chuck tried to calm her down. “Now, Vern, you don’t know that. You can’t just say that.” She said, “He came in and sprayed himself with cologne before he went to bed, and I know he is screwing around.” And Chuck said, “Listen, Vern, you can assume that, but for Godsakes, he is out with your brother! He is not going to be screwing around.” “Yes he is, I can smell it on him!”
I knew Chuck was incredibly homophobic. So when she said, “Chuck, smell it—smell the sex on him,” I almost lost it. I heard him say, “Vern, you are like a sister to me. I would do almost anything for you, but smelling his cock is not something I am going to do.” Well, that was too much. I started laughing so hard the bed was shaking. Now Veronica was really mad. She packed up all her stuff and left for the airport. That day was our anniversary.
Chuck and Elaine had a flight out that morning, so they looked for her all over the airport, but she wasn’t there. Chuck told me he worried all the way home, but Elaine kept saying, “Chuck, they will have kissed and made up by the time we get to Calgary.” He didn’t think so. He was sure it was over between Veronica and me.
They got to Calgary and called me on my cell phone to say they hadn’t heard from Veronica. They caught us as we were in a limo, headed back to the hotel from dinner. “Aw, Chuck, she’s not at home, she’s here with me! We had an unbelievable dinner and I got her a great bracelet and she loves it!” Chuck later told me that he learned from that incident not to worry about me, because I was not worried about me.
I think the Flames were the only people who had a chance to rein me in. If you go back to when I was 23 or 24, if I had been suspended and told to piss in a bottle once a week, my problems might have been nipped in the bud.
In 1999, I went out after a game in San Jose with some of the guys from the team. We went to this bar we always went to. I got wasted—as usual—and thought, “Fuck, I need some coke.” Cocaine kept me straight. I started talking to this guy at the bar—“Hey, where can I get some shit?” He said, “No problem. I can make a phone call.” Bang!It was there in twenty minutes. Out of respect for my teammates and friends, I did not do coke or anything stronger than weed in front of them. So when the boys on the team went back to the hotel, I went into the bathroom, dug my key into the coke and snorted it.
Wham! This stuff hit me hard. Like a brick in the head. This was about 2 a.m. My new friend and I went to a party. We were snorting and smoking when I looked at my watch—and it was 7 a.m. Holy fuck. I called the hotel to tell my roommate, Andrew Cassels, to pack my bags and take them downstairs so I wouldn’t miss the bus. I made it back in a taxi just as the last person was boarding. We got on the plane and my whole body was numb. Hours later, I was driving Cass home and I began to feel really weird. Something was going on. I dropped him off at his house and made it home. Later, I was sitting on the floor, playing with Beaux, when all of a sudden I jumped up and started pacing back and forth. I was thinking, “I have finally accomplished what I have wanted to accomplish for a long time. I am going to die.” My heart was just pounding, and the more I started pacing, the more freaked out I got—which made it pound faster. Finally I said to Veronica, “Will you please call an ambulance? I think my heart is going to explode.” She was frantic and assumed someone had spiked my drink. Veronica had no clue I was doing cocaine. No clue. But I thought I was going to die, so I made kind of a deathbed confession about my drug use. She was shocked.
The paramedics arrived a few minutes later. Elite athletes have slower heart rates. My heart would usually beat about fifty times per minute at rest and maybe 140 at peak exertion, but they clocked my pulse at 190. That’s not good. It’s okay if your heart races for a little while, but you run into trouble if it continues. They said, “Just see how it is for the next little while,” and left.
I was sure I was going to die. I had been up for almost two days, played a hockey game, hadn’t drunk a whole lot of water—so I was dehydrated—had drunk a lot of booze and had a ton of what I thought was cocaine in my system. I was in a full drug-induced panic. I could not sit still for one second. The more I thought about dying, the faster my heart started to pound.
Five minutes later, I couldn’t take it anymore. I called 911 and said, “The ambulance has gotta come, now!” This time they gave me an IV full of the tranquilizer Ativan, which is like Valium, and I calmed down. The emergency room doctor asked me what I was on and I told him I’d been at a party and done some cocaine. He said, “It wasn’t cocaine. You overdosed on crystal meth.” Oh, great. Perfect. Not that cocaine is a health food, but crystal methamphetamine is bad shit. You can find the ingredients under your sink—drain cleaner, battery acid, iodine, paint thinner, lye, acetone and kerosene. Basically, I had ODed on fuckin’ nail polish remover.
We just happened to have four days off after that. I slept the entire time. The first twenty-four hours, I never even woke up. And you know what? I have never been the same since that episode. I have had panic attacks ever since. They are more manageable now, since I have had counselling and gained some tools. I think it was a sign from God saying, “You know what, man? You are not invincible anymore.”
And to compound things, earlier that season I had been crosschecked behind the right ear by Bryan McCabe while playing Vancouver. I was standing in front of the net and he got me with his stick. I got really dizzy after the next several games. And I had vertigo and all kinds of freaky shit, and I didn’t tell anybody that I was concussed. I had to keep my mouth shut. Can you imagine what the Flames would have looked like without me at the time? But even when I got to New York with the Rangers, I didn’t feel right. For instance, bright lights gave me trouble.
It was par for the course in my life. I couldn’t sleep because I had so much anxiety. I would lie there, staring up at the ceiling, thinking, “Okay, I know I am going to die. Please make it soon rather than later.” I was obsessed with dying. Drugs made the worry go away.