The first time I ever did cocaine alone, I had a magical experience. I had been at a friend’s house—and by friend I mean person I would never have known under normal circumstances but who loved cocaine as much as I did and lived just down the street and so I considered him my best friend at the time. He and I had just bought coke and were doing it with a bunch of the other people who hung around his house and I suddenly looked around the room and realized they were the most annoying people on earth. This could have been because I was high. Or it could have been true. Or both. They were yammering and talking about their great ideas for businesses we were all going to start and telling stupid stories and their mouths were dry and they were sniffing like crazy and it was like the Calgon Take Me Away commercial where I snapped my fingers and was transported into a bath but instead of snapping my fingers I walked down the street and instead of ending up in a bath I was sitting on my couch chopping up lines and marveling over the fact that I was suddenly someone who did drugs alone.
Doing drugs alone is, some say, one of those invisible lines you cross. You could also call it a visible one. There’s no convincing yourself that you’re only partying like this because you’re the life of the party when the party is just you and two cats.
But I wasn’t going to let that get me down. I had work to do. I was going to use my high for better purposes than yammering at a bunch of equally high lunatics, all of us fighting for a center stage no one was looking at. I was going to get creative.
Obviously, writing and substances have a long, storied history. You will hear many people say that drinking and drugs enhance their creativity. That one night, I thought I was one of them. At the time, I was an aspiring TV writer and so my writing partner and I had been churning out spec scripts of shows that were popular at the time—Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill and Third Rock From the Sun. But that writing partner had been avoiding me—something to do with the fact that I always insisted on starting our writing sessions with a call to the dealer—and it was time, I decided, for me to break out on my own. I sat down to write my own Third Rock From the Sun spec.
I should clarify: I had never seen Third Rock From the Sun. No matter! I had read some of the scripts and I had the sort of manic confidence only white powder can give you. I didn’t map anything out; I just let my creativity flow. And flow it did. I typed and chopped and snorted and smoked and washed it down with beer and typed and chopped and snorted and smoked and washed it down with beer and suddenly the birds were chirping, the sun was up and I could hear my neighbor leaving for work.
This exact scenario would come to depress me in nearly indescribable ways when it repeated itself ad infinitum over the next few years. But this first time, it didn’t seem depressing; it seemed thrilling. I had figured out the secret to an all-night creative jag that would produce a brilliant spec script!
Alas, that Third Rock From the Sun script sucked. No one liked it. It might have helped if I’d actually seen the show. No matter! I kept getting high and writing scripts, including an episode of Dawson’s Creek (another show I’d never seen) where Joey, Dawson and a whole bunch of other characters none of us care about today all became coke addicts.
Roughly a year passed. I was occasionally working at websites, doing script coverage, writing spec scripts no one liked, not getting signed by agencies and just generally running my life into the ground.
Then, one day, not high, I stumbled upon what should have been obvious from the beginning: if I wanted to be a TV writer, why didn’t I write a spec script for a show I actually watched? Within an hour, I had finished my Sex and the City spec, “The Grey Zone.” In it, all the ladies have experiences centered around the idea that all men are a little bit gay—Carrie meets a guy she thinks is gay because he only has female friends, Charlotte meets a guy who tries to get her to have a ménage with one of his buddies, you get the idea.
That’s when something weird happened. People loved this spec. I gave it to a friend who gave it to a friend and I suddenly had two literary agents courting me. One of them said that even though you were never supposed to send specs to the actual show, they would send it to Darren Starr because it was that good. Whaaa?
I went to the agency meetings high, signed with one and they started sending that script around. And thus began my experience with general meetings or “generals,” where you sit with executives who seem like they’re really just trying to fill their days and they tell you about a bunch of TV shows they’re developing which sound terrible and they’re never going to hire you for anyway.
Then one day I got a call from my agent that she had a real opportunity for me, not another BS meeting: a Showtime show needed a baby writer, she told me. The woman who created the show was amazing and it was based on her life. It was called, she told me, Rude Awakening, and it was about a coke-addicted actress struggling with sobriety.
When you’re in complete denial, the irony in these situations can be entirely lost on you. All I knew, as I watched all the episodes of the show, was that I loved it. This was my job, I could feel it, the one that was going to get me out of the terribly pathetic way I was living and launch me on the right path. And yet: I didn’t think it was weird or funny or perhaps sad that I was chopping and doing lines while watching the show and coming up with possible episodes. The night before I went in for the interview was one of those all-night coke binges but I was used to pulling it together after those, no matter how much the drugs were still in my system.
When I sat down for my meeting with the show creator, I remember thinking I had this job nailed. I loved her and she seemed to really like me. I ignored the fact that I had coke drip going down the back of my throat as I told her various ideas I had for the show. She nodded and smiled and then asked me if I’d ever been to an AA meeting.
An AA meeting? I asked.
Let me point out: this was a completely reasonable question in that the show was about a woman going to AA meetings.
And yet: I was wildly offended.
“No!” I exclaimed. “Never.”
This wasn’t true. For the previous few years, worried friends had insisted I go with them a few times.
“Okay, no worries,” she said.
I have to assume that even though I was holding it together to a degree, this woman was savvy enough to pick up on the fact that maybe this slightly jittery, sniffling nose rubber who reacted to her question about going to AA meetings like she’d been asked if she’d killed anyone may have some issues.
I didn’t get the job—not because I was a barely functioning mess but because, my agent explained, they ended up going with a more experienced writer.
A few months after that, I went to rehab, got sober and ended up going, of course, to those AA meetings I had been horrified to be accused of going to. And one night, I was doing one of those things where I went to a meeting I’d never been to but didn’t go early enough to use the cigarette smoke outside to figure out exactly where the entrance was and so I was wandering around trying to determine if I was in the right place and how I could get in. I saw another woman doing the same thing and when she turned to me, I realized she looked familiar.
“Oh, hey Anna, is this where the meeting is?” she asked, casual as could be. I stared at her. It was the show creator. She didn’t seem remotely surprised to see me there.
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