Cockroaches scampered up the bed and scurried across my Greenwich Village apartment floor. I knew I was hallucinating. The empty liter of Bacardi rum glared at me next to barren packets of coke.

I was 26, sitting cross-legged like a child on my queen-sized bed. It was 6:00 a.m. and I hadn’t slept. It was 1988. A frigid March wind blew in from my windows facing Minetta Lane. Every nerve roared for more cocaine.

I watched with terror as a tarantula writhed on top of my dresser. I closed my eyes, hoping it would disappear. Tarantulas don’t live in New York but when I opened my eyes, the hairy black thing was still there.

My lap was littered with confetti-like shreds of eight-by-ten glossies. My painting portfolio. How could I have done that to the only thing I was proud of? I’d painstakingly assembled each page of the spiral book, with photos tucked safely under plastic sleeves in the hopes of finding a better job than waitressing. On one of the ripped pieces, I’d pressed down so hard with a pen that it left indents on the image. Hendrix lyrics: I don’t live today.

My mind scrabbled at the events leading to this last bender. The day before, my roommate Frederic had confronted me in the apartment. His long elegant fingers dug into my upper arms so hard it hurt. An angry vein popped out on his forehead and he shook me like a ragdoll. With tears streaming down his face he said, “If you don’t stop killing yourself, I’m leaving.”

In his eyes I could see the reflection of what I’d become. Disgusting, pathetic. Shame and self-loathing buckled my knees.

Frederic was the only person that mattered. Boyfriends came and went like subway riders. If any got too close, they’d see who I was. Or I’d decide a man’s hands were too hairy or he chewed too loudly. I’d break up with the bewildered fellow and return to my plague of loneliness. Then I’d fixate on a new crush and brood when he barely noticed me.

Happy couples on the street were a mystery. I wanted to run up and say, “How do you do that? What’s wrong with me?”

But Frederic, he was my best friend, like a loyal older brother who’d adopted me.

Our railroad apartment placed his room at the opposite end. Now, as I sat on my bed with jaw clamped in a coked-out grip and eyes bulging, I begged the universe not to let him wake up and see me like this. I’d sworn to stop after he threatened to move out. I had to because life would be unlivable without him. He was the only reason I didn’t jump out a window.

I remembered stopping off at Jimmy Day’s bar on West 4th Street for just one drink. The rest of the night was a blank.

My ashtray overflowed onto the nightstand, reflecting another broken promise to Frederic. Ever since he’d quit, he hated when I smoked. Gone were the days when we’d drink vodka together and play Scrabble for hours, chain smoking and laughing. He’d quit the cigs, cocaine, and vodka.

I emptied the ashtray into my leopard-pattern tin wastebasket. Suddenly, billowing puffs of smoke and high flames shot out of it. I closed my eyes and rubbed them hard. Slowly, I opened them again. Still roaring flames. I got up from the bed and put my palms on the sides of the tin to feel for heat. It was cold. Relieved there was no fire, I was terrified there was no sanity either.

I heard the long-ago voice of my cousin Angela, “You’re so lucky you can handle the drugs, Dor. But if you ever have a problem I’m the one to call.”

I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Ang?”

“Dor?”

After bursting into tears I slurred, “Uncle Carl had the right idea. I’m gonna get a gun and shoot myself.”

“Wait,” Angela said. “Do you have any more alcohol or cocaine?”

I had only the specs of coke that lined the empty packets and a few airplane-size bottles of Absolut stashed in my underwear drawer.

“Finish everything,” Ang said.

That was a first. People never told me to drink more.

“I’ll be there soon,” she said and hung up.

Her brother Brad called.

“Hey Sweetiepie.” It was soothing to hear his voice. “I reserved a bed for you in Florida.”

“Ooh, Florida?” I said, “Is there a pool?”

I heard the front door slam and realized I’d awakened Frederic. My throat went dry but I kept doing what I was told, scraping the last snortable flakes and downing the vodka minis.

Ang arrived at the apartment and yelled “Hey Dor!” After a bear hug she scanned the closet, grabbed a knapsack, and began to pack.

While she yanked t-shirts out of my dresser drawer I moaned with agony, “I’m out of cigarettes.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything is fine.”

Being exhausted and stoned made me pliable and obedient.

Angela carried my backpack while I navigated the four flights down to the lobby, gripping the banister to keep from wobbling. When we got to her double-parked car on Macdougal, she helped me into the passenger side and buckled me in. Sure I was going to puke, I unbuckled.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

The thought of eating made me gag. I managed a slurry “no.”

“We have to eat something,” she said. “It’s a long trip to Florida and when did you last eat?”

Before I could answer or stop her, she hopped over to the shake shop across the street and came back with two vanilla shakes. I got down about half of it before I bolted from the front seat and barfed on the pavement. She came around and helped me back into the car.

We headed off to JFK airport. As soon as Ang started to drive, I passed out. I have no memory of the airport or boarding the plane. I came out of the blackout while Ang was checking me into the rehab. There was a pink-skinned lady at a desk with a dopey soccer-mom hairdo who told me to sign paperwork. Then she led me down the hall to a room. Before she closed the door, I asked her to get Angela but the woman said she’d left. My tired bones collapsed on the cot’s thin mattress and I zonked out on the flat pillow till morning.

When I awoke, I tried to piece things together. Only isolated snippets. Frozen snapshots of laughing with a bartender, making out with somebody. I looked around the sparse room and wanted to go home. I got out of the bed and walked to the door but found it locked. There were no lights on. I peeked through the Plexiglas window in the door and could see a woman at a desk. I rapped hard on the window. She smiled and came over to me.

“Where am I?” I said.

“You’re in the detox room at the Hazelden Center in West Palm Beach.”

Her voice sounded like it was coming through a cloud of cotton. I could hardly decipher what she was saying, much less comprehend it.

“What am I doing here?”

She didn’t seem surprised by my question and patiently explained I’d come the day before and my cousin had checked me in, then left, and I’d be staying with them for the next 31 days.

I told her I had to go home and needed to leave right away. I demanded she find my purse. She retrieved it from a locker and handed it to me. I looked for the sliding Bayer aspirin container with my emergency line of coke and mini straw. I couldn’t find it and became frantic. She looked at me kindly and explained they’d searched my purse and disposed of the drugs they found.

Irate, I yelled, “You can’t do that!”

“Yes, dear,” she said, “we do that for all of our patients. You’re here because you’ve agreed to stop taking drugs and you signed the intake permission form.”

I demanded to leave.

“Okay,” she said.

To my horror, I found only two dollars and loose change in my wallet. I was a long way from home with no access to money. Dizzy, I asked the woman if I could lie down again.

“Of course you can, dear. That’s a good idea.”

She helped me back into the creaky cot and I stayed for 31 days.

Written for The Fix

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The Story

“It was like the heyday of crack,” said DEA special agent Mike Troster in the documentary. East New York in Brooklyn was a war zone, and according to Troster, “It was a hotbed for crime in New York City.”
In the late 1980s, the 75th precinct of the NYPD was the deadliest in the country. It handled the most homicides, including the most police shootings. “It was the highest murder rate in the country,” said Kenny Eurell, who worked there from 1982 to 1990. It was a time of 3,500 homicides per year in the city.
Eurell’s crimes escalated from drinking on the job to robberies, extortion, and selling cocaine after he’d retired on a cop’s pension. His book tells the story of being sucked into a world of crime and free money through his dirty cop partner, Michael Dowd.
While the doc focused mostly on Dowd, Eurell’s book reveals everything that was left out when much of the movie “ended up on the cutting room floor.”
The Fix landed an exclusive interview with the infamous criminal.

The Interview

Eurell told us he wanted to set the record straight on his years of working with coked-out Dowd. Yes, they robbed unsuspecting citizens, moved on to selling cocaine and finally went into free-fall after ripping off drug dealers. “It was greed,” said Eurell, “pure and simple. The money was so easy to make. It was impossible to turn away.”
“I became a cop at age 20 and was on the job for seven years before being partnered with Mike [Dowd]. It never occurred to me to go on a burglary call and grab the stuff that the burglar missed. It was not in my mindset until I was partnered with Mike. I don’t want to say I was brainwashed, but let’s just say, I was introduced to a different way to do police work.”
I asked him why he’d used the word “brainwashed.” He said, “I say ‘brainwashed’ because when we got in the [squad] car together, Mike talked about making money about 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time he talked about women. Once I was shown what to do—making all this easy money with no repercussion from it, greed took over.”

Regrets

Does Eurell have regrets about what he did? “I absolutely have regrets,” he said. “I wish I’d never took that first bit of money that Mike threw at me. I wish I had the courage to say to myself, ‘This is wrong. Don’t take the money.’ Even though that would’ve cut my own throat and ruined my career.”
He explained, “You can’t turn somebody in while you’re on the job because the word ‘rat’ will follow you around and destroy your career. There were guys when I was working—cops just suspected them of being a rat or a snitch—and every day, all the tires on their personal car would be cut. They go into work and their lockers would be in the shower, turned upside down, the locks broken open, all their stuff dumped out. Dead rats from the neighborhood were thrown onto the hood of their car. It makes a working situation absolutely impossible.”
“It sounds like the Mafia,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Eurell. “It’s that mentality.”
He added, “I wish I never went that corrupt cop route. There’s so many guys I was on the job with that retired as captains and hero detectives. Here I am, I’m an outcast as one of the most corrupt cops in the NYPD. It’s not something to hang my hat on.”

History of Alcohol, Cocaine and Corruption

Eurell launched into his history with alcohol, cocaine and corruption.
“When I was a cop, I was definitely an alcoholic, a functional one. I drank every day but was able to do my job. My last drink was in 1992, the year I got arrested. But after I quit cold turkey and stayed dry for 15 years, I was at my son’s engagement party and thought, ‘Oh yeah, my son’s getting engaged,’ so I had one beer, which was fine. Now, I have maybe two beers a month. If I go out I’ll have a beer, but we rarely go anywhere. We’re homebodies, my wife Dori and I. The biggest thing we do now is go out on a weekend on the motorcycle and I don’t drink when I’m on the bike.”

In his book, Eurell commented that alcohol opened up new doors for him but “It also opened up a new world of tension and problems.”
He said that the first time he drank on the job was because a boss told him to. And, despite the time he spent dealing cocaine, he never liked the drug. “I tried cocaine once,” he said. “I had a buddy who was going into the Marines. We were at a going away party and we gave him some cocaine. I did a bump with him but it really had no effect on me. And that was it. I never did it again.”
But his partner, Dowd, was a coke addict and “that was a major problem. We were working the patrol car. His personality is already high strung, you know, very hyperactive. On cocaine it was times a hundred. He was a talker.”
Back then, Eurell said, “everybody did cocaine. It was a very sociable drug. It wasn’t no heavy-addiction drug. All my customers were adults that had jobs and went to work every day and, you know, they would buy some cocaine for the weekend. We weren’t out on the street dealing to little kids at a school or nothing.”
Read more on The Fix.

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Showtime’s Ray Donovan is my favorite show. Brilliant writing, brilliant cast including Steven Bauer.

The magazine also quoted an unnamed source, who said, “He loves working on Ray Donovan and wants everyone to know he’s back on the straight and narrow … His mom, son Alexander and girlfriend, Lyda Loudon, have been there for him. He’s serious about staying sober.”

The actor is probably best known for his role as the drug dealer Manny Ribera in Brian De Palma’s movie, Scarface. He also played Mexican drug cartel boss, Don Eladio, in Breaking Bad.

Bauer has lived through quite a few upheavals in life. His first marriage was to actress Melanie Griffith in the ’80s. The couple parted ways in 1989. His next three marriages also ended in divorce.

Griffith and Bauer have remained friends. Radar Online reported last week that Griffith has been helping Bauer with his addiction, fearing that if he “didn’t get help fast, he was going to die,” said an anonymous source.

They added, “Steven has type 2 diabetes and pancreas problems. He was still doing a lot of drugs, mostly cocaine, which he’d been doing since at least the early ’80s!” Apparently his addiction was affecting his work on Ray Donovan and Showtime producers warned him “to straighten up or he’d be off the show.”

In a 1990 article in People, Griffith spoke about her marriage to Bauer and their use of cocaine. “We were wild but it was more me than him,” she said. “He was doing it too, but he didn’t have a problem with it. He tried to get me not to do drugs.”

Bauer said about using coke, “I was carelessly casual about it. It was as natural as the ingestion of liquor. But it hurt me in more than a few ways. I behaved irresponsibly when I should have been professional.”

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“I realize that I’ve been hypnotized.”  — Jimi Hendrix

Where do self-destructive impulses come from? I had romanticized images of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin but they were dead long before I heard of them.

The first time I shot heroin was down at St. Mark’s place in 1978. I was a 17-year-old aspiring artist looking for a place to sell my Pollok-ish hand-painted T-shirts. I’d seen people leaning against the walls of Cooper Union, selling their junk on the strip between Lafayette and Third Ave.

I have no idea where my self-destructive impulses came from. I was prone to dark thoughts and there’s a history of suicidal tendencies in my Russian Jewish bloodline that dates back generations.

One uncle shot himself in the chest and died before he hit the bed. His brother died from a second heart attack; he’d ignored the doc and kept on popping pills and smoking four packs a day. On the paternal side, my aunt was found with a plastic bag around her head. The topic was taboo but what’s more enticing to a teen hellion than something you’re not supposed to do?

I had romanticized images of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both long dead before I’d heard of them. Suburbia was traumatic for me and I was sick of arguing with my parents. I ran away at 15 and bee-lined for Greenwich Village where remnants of the sixties were everywhere. Guitars and radios played Bob Dylan, Neil Young; people singing waved me to come over. I liked the cool head shops on Eighth Street and hung around them, eavesdropping to learn about drugs and paraphernalia.

Read more

Written for Honeysuckle Magazine

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