26

THE BALLAD OF BARNEY’S BEANERY

or

IF I WERE A RICH MAN

Let me tell you about Barney’s Beanery.

Nothing’s old in Los Angeles, but as far as pubs go, Barney’s is one of the oldest. It’s a dive bar that bears the battle scars of the past sixty years. There’s a plaque dedicating a seat to Jim Morrison of the Doors where he used to sit, and the walls are plastered with memorabilia from every decade from the sixties onwards. The memorabilia records the passing of time like rings on a tree trunk. Maybe that’s why I liked it. Barney’s has seen it all. It doesn’t care who you are.

And nor do the people who frequent it: a colourful mixture of don’t-give-a-fudgers, as far removed from the beautiful people of the Hollywood circuit that you could wish to meet. These were my people. I didn’t have to pretend in front of them. I could be the easy-going joker my dad had taught me to be.

During my mid-to-late twenties I spent more hours, more nights, than I care to remember at Barney’s. Before that, I wasn’t much of a drinker. A glass of champagne at a wedding, maybe, but not much more than that. But when you spend a lot of time in dive bars craving normality, it inevitably leads to a lot of drinking. I went from being not particularly interested to regularly having a few pints a day before the sun had even gone down, and a shot of whiskey to go with each of them.

Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times. When you’re drinking to escape a situation, even more so. The habit spilled out of the bar and, from time to time, on to set. It came to the point where I would think nothing of having a drink while I was working. I’d turn up unprepared, not the professional I wanted to be. The alcohol, though, wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom. The problem was deeper and it drew me, almost nightly, to Barney’s. I’d sit at the bar, a beer constantly in front of me, maybe something stronger, and I’d shoot the shit with the regulars. Well into the small hours, I’d while away the time drinking, talking nonsense, playing shuffleboard. I told myself I was having a good time there, and on some level I was. On another level, though, I was hiding from something. Myself, perhaps, or the situation I found myself in. And Barney’s was a good place to hide.

I struck up friendships with the bartenders—female, mostly. These girls had seen it all, were hard as nails and were not known for their friendliness. After about six months they softened slightly towards me and we started having a laugh. They had wicked senses of humour. For me, half the attraction of a night at Barney’s was the prospect of us hanging out and taking the piss out of each other. And that’s what I did, the night before my life changed for ever.

I should have been tucked up in bed that evening, because the following day I had what I expected to be an important meeting at the office of my managers. It had only been in the diary for twenty-four hours, but I knew that it was potentially a big deal. In the normal course of events, if a member of my team had a script that they wanted me to consider, they’d send it over for me to read before we discussed it. On this occasion, though, I was being asked by my manager to go into the office to talk about something unseen that I didn’t need to read beforehand. I naturally assumed it meant a big project was on the table. I was pumped.

Far from being tucked up in bed, however, I’d spent all night at Barney’s. I’d had zero sleep and was a little the worse for wear, having had perhaps seven whiskeys too many. I said goodnight to the girls and that I’d see them tomorrow. As I valet-parked the Beamer outside my management’s office block the next morning, I felt pretty chipper, especially with the prospect of a big offer on the table. The office was housed in a glass skyscraper in one of the swankier parts of Los Angeles. I took the long elevator ride to the top, still tipsy from the night before, and signed in at reception. A couple of minutes later, my manager arrived to show me in to the meeting.

Did I detect a slight curtness in his demeanour, a slight restraint? I think perhaps I did, but I was looking forward to hearing what this was all about, so I paid it no real attention.

You wouldn’t know to look at it, but the building itself had been a bank in the past. There weren’t any Gringotts-like counting tables, heavy ledgers or dusty clerks. It was sleek and modern. But there was a big old circular bank-vault door, which led to an office where all the especially important meetings were held. I felt a bit of a tingle as my manager led me towards it. We were in the vault! Alright! This has to be good news!

We crossed the threshold into the office. My blood turned to ice.

It wasn’t a huge room. Big enough for one meeting table, me, and the seven other people sitting silently in a circle, waiting. Jade was there, sitting next to two of my agents. My lawyer. Both of my managers. And one big, bald, scary stranger.

Nobody spoke. They stared at me. I knew immediately that I’d been brought here under false pretences. I knew that this was nothing to do with some spectacular, career-defining acting job. Quite what they wanted with me, I didn’t know. But the look in their eyes and the energy in the room told me it wasn’t good. I’d heard of interventions, when friends and family congregate to tell a person that they’re in serious, life-threatening trouble. But I wasn’t in serious trouble. Was I? This couldn’t be that.

Could it?

I crumbled to the floor like a soggy towel. The room seemed to spin. I found myself shaking my head and muttering to myself: “I can’t do this. I can’t do this…” Nobody spoke. They just continued to look at me in that bleak, serious way. I staggered out of the room, my pulse thumping. They let me go. I went outside to try to calm myself with a cigarette, escorted by the big, bald stranger, but calm was not an emotion I was capable of at that moment. A crushing, relentless sense of betrayal and violation burned inside me. Everyone in my professional life and—worse than that—the person closest to me had conspired to get me here. I hadn’t seen it coming at all. I was angry. I was tired. Truth to tell, I was very hungover. I gave some thought to simply running away. But for some reason I didn’t. I went back into the building and through the vault door. Everybody was still there. Still staring at me, in a way that chilled and infuriated me. I sat down, unwilling—unable—to meet anybody’s gaze. And then the big bald guy, the one person in the room I didn’t recognise, took charge.

He was a professional interventionist. The guy they call when they want to be certain about the outcome of an intervention. My management company had paid for him to manage the process. It’s not a service that comes cheap and he was good at his job. There was nothing he hadn’t seen. No reaction I could have displayed that he hadn’t predicted. He explained that right now he knew I would be feeling angry but at some point I would manage to forgive the people in the room for what they’d done. I told him to fuck off with my eyes. Forgiveness didn’t seem at all likely to me. I was exhausted. I was spinning. I was hanging. The night before I’d been in Barney’s talking openly and honestly to my acquaintances there. Now I was surrounded by so-called friends who had lied to me, who had tricked me into thinking I had a new job in order to ensnare me here. They were dissemblers. I couldn’t understand why, if they were so worried, they couldn’t have just come to my house and talked to me in the usual way? Forgiveness? Fuck that. I was a long way from forgiveness.

Everybody in the room had written me a letter. They read them out, one after the other. The letters were generally fairly brief. Most of them I seem to have excised from my memory. I listened to Jade and the others as they told me how concerned they were about my behaviour, about my drinking and my substance abuse. I was in no state to hear them. As far as I was concerned, my vices amounted to no more than a few beers a day, the odd whiskey and maybe a couple of spliffs. It wasn’t like I was waking up with an empty bottle of vodka in my hand, surrounded by a pool of my own vomit. I wasn’t hiding out in crack dens, smoking opium, or unable to work, or out of control. When Jade spoke, I remember thinking: did you instigate this just because you think I’ve been less than the perfect boyfriend? She hadn’t, of course. In fact, she’d only found out about the intervention hours before. But my anger and frustration put thoughts in my head that shouldn’t have been there.

One letter, though, hit the hardest. It was written by the person in the room who I knew the least. My lawyer, whom I’d barely ever met face to face, spoke with quiet honesty. “Tom,” he said, “I don’t know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I’ve been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don’t be the twelfth.”

His were the words that cut through my anger and denial. And even though I still saw this as a massive overreaction to a non-existent problem, his stark plea made me bow my head.

We’d been at this for two hours by now. Everybody had said what they wanted to say. Everyone was drained. Nobody more so than me.

“What do you want me to do?” I pleaded.

“We want you to go into treatment,” the interventionist said.

“Rehab?”

“Rehab.”

One thing you should know about Californian rehabilitation clinics: they’re expensive. Some can charge upwards of $40,000 a month. Forty grand to stay in a rehab centre against my will? You must be fucking joking. The very notion was absurd. But the intervention had shocked me. The pressure to do what I was told was immense. “Fine,” I petulantly told them. “I’ll go to your little rehab clinic if it’s so important to you. I’ll not drink for thirty days, if you really believe it’s such a problem.”

Silence.

The interventionist said: “We have a place booked in Malibu and we want you to go now.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go home and sort my shit out. I can fit it in tomorrow, maybe the day after.”

He shook his head. “No. We have a car waiting. We want you to go now. Straight there. No detours.”

I blinked. Were they insane? This was preposterous. Was I so far gone that this couldn’t wait twenty-four hours? What had people been telling them? How the hell did we land here? Did I have any say in this at all?

I was told, quite clearly, that no, I didn’t have a choice. “If you don’t get help now,” one of my managers said, “we won’t be able to represent you anymore.” End of.

“I need my guitar,” I said.

They told me no.

“I need a change of clothes.”

They told me no.

My protests continued for another hour. Everybody was immovable. I was to get in the car with the interventionist, and I had to do it now.

And so, finally, I gave in. I was all out of fight.

It was one of the more surreal moments of my life, relinquishing all command and walking out of that shiny glass office building in the company of the interventionist, to his vehicle. The journey to Malibu took about an hour. A long, solemn hour as we sat side by side in silence. As Malibu approached, he turned to me and said, “You want to stop and get a final beer? Before we check you in?”

I guess he was just trying to make things easier for me, but at the time I couldn’t fathom his question. Everyone had just told me I had a problem with substances. I didn’t agree with them, not at the time, but why would I stop for a beer and make it look as if they were right all along? “No, I don’t want to stop for a fucking beer,” I told him.

He nodded. “Okay then,” he said. We fell into silence again as the miles passed while I chain-smoked cigarettes—the one vice they didn’t have a problem with. And before long the gates of the rehab centre came into view.

The centre was situated on the floor of a vast canyon, a mile and a half down a zig-zag road, surrounded by the thick forests of Malibu. As we trundled down that road, a kind of numbness fell over me. It was a beautiful location. Breathtaking, really. But I would rather have been anywhere else but there.

The interventionist dropped me off outside a big white house at the bottom of the canyon. It was a nice-looking place, and for $40,000, so it should have been. I’d barely spoken in hours. As I crossed the threshold of the rehab centre, I felt as though I was in some kind of terrible dream. I checked in. They were expecting me and the big bald man left me in their care.

A nurse sat me down and asked me some questions. What substances are you using? And how much? How often? I answered honestly, but I was still of the view that I was the wrong person in the wrong place. I wasn’t the kind of guy who needed a shot first thing in the morning just to get through the day. I wasn’t doing a bit of smack on the side. This was all a big mistake. The nurse recorded my answers. Then she said: “Would you like an alias?”

I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“While you’re here, you have to wear a name badge. If you’d prefer, we can use an alias. Like Bob, or Sam.”

I twigged. She’d recognised me, and I suppose she was trying to be sensitive to my situation. I was in no mood, though, to be handled. “If people recognise me from the Harry Potter films,” I said, “it’ll be because of my face. It won’t be because of what’s written on my name tag. You could write ‘Mickey Fucking Mouse’ on my chest and they’re not going to think I’m him.”

Not unreasonably, the nurse became defensive. “We just thought it would be a good way of protecting your anonymity,” she said.

For some reason the suggestion had made me irrationally angry. I took a deep breath to control my emotions. “I don’t want a fucking alias,” I said. The subject was quietly dropped.

Next, I had to endure a two-hour medical induction. They took blood samples and urine samples. They checked my blood pressure. They made me blow into a Breathalyser. They shone torches into my eyes and prodded and poked me. And then they put me into detox.

Detox is the process of ensuring there are no substances in your system before you go into treatment. I still had some alcohol in my blood from the previous night, so they led me to a small room, very plain and white with dusty, bland furniture. This was definitely not the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There were two beds and I shared the room with one other guy. He’d been there for three days and still wasn’t blowing sober. I was scared. I had no idea who this man was. He was shaking on his bed, coming down from a meth bender, and mumbling incoherently. I felt sick, and stunned. I’d had a few too many whiskeys one night, and suddenly I was sharing a room with a meth-head. We talked a little. I didn’t understand most of what he said but it was instantly apparent that he was suffering a lot worse than me. It didn’t do much for my belief that I really shouldn’t be there.

They’d given me some kind of sedative medication, so I slept deeply that night. When I woke up, they breathalysed me again and the test was negative. I’d been in detox for all of twelve hours before they let me out again. They gave me a tour of the facilities: the kitchen, the day room, the grounds. There was a ping-pong table. It reminded me that I was a long way from the recreation tent at the Potter studios, where Emma had good-naturedly slapped me in the face. That thought was a corkscrew in my gut. I thought of Emma a lot as I wondered how the hell I’d ended up here.

And of course they introduced me to some of the patients, who all sported name tags as if we were speed-dating. I quickly learned that the standard opening gambit in a place like this was: “What’s your DOC?” Your drug of choice. When people asked me that, I said weed and alcohol. After being asked, I felt obliged to return the question. The vast majority were in for what seemed to me to be much more serious predilections than mine: heroin, opioids, benzos, crystal meth, crack cocaine. Most drank, too, but that was secondary to their DOCs.

I don’t want to give the impression that this was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nobody was throwing faeces across the room, or screaming, or showing fits of rage. However, the side-effects of these people’s addictions were extreme and startling. Most of them trembled uncontrollably and couldn’t look you in the eye for more than a second. They tripped over their words. It was unsettling to say the least.

It was not only the patients who seemed alien to me. The whole concept of being in an American rehab centre was entirely foreign to a British kid from Surrey. The notion of paying ludicrous sums of money to segregate myself from the rest of humanity was discomfiting and frankly bizarre. I was the youngest person there, but the clientele weren’t exactly old. I presumed that most of them had wealthy families who could fund their rehabilitation. Their upbringings, I felt, were a million miles from my own. These were not my people. This was not where I belonged. The sick feeling in my gut grew stronger.

The emotional drain of the past twenty-four hours was huge. That, and the medication they put me on to keep me steady, put me into a solemn, reclusive, almost passive state of mind. I somehow made it through the day, occasionally exchanging a few words with the other patients, but mostly keeping to myself. If anybody recognised me, they didn’t show it. I guess their own problems preoccupied them fully. Why would they be interested in some Broomstick Prick from a wizard movie while they were going through their own personal hell?

Evening came. I ate dinner. I watched the sun setting high above me over the canyon ridge. I stepped outside into the grounds for a breath of fresh air. All I had on me was that dwindling packet of cigarettes. I had to ask somebody for a light. They’d told me earlier that if I wanted to smoke, I should sit on a designated bench but I ignored that instruction and instead sat on the grass. Nobody scolded me or asked me to move, so I just sat there with my cigarette, contemplating my situation and the events of the past couple of days. Clearly I’d reached a turning point in my life. I might not have agreed with the decisions of others that led to me being here. I definitely didn’t think this was the right place for me. But here I was, and I had decisions to make. Was I going to engage with this rehabilitation centre?

Or was I going to take a different path?

I had no idea, as I sat there finishing my cigarette, that the next few hours would define the rest of my life. No clue that I would reach a terrible nadir, and that I would have to rely on the kindness of strangers to see me through. All I knew was that I was angry and that I didn’t want to be here anymore.

So I stood up, and I began to walk.

I didn’t really think, as I strode up the zig-zag road away from the rehab centre, that anything would come of my moment of rebellion. After I’d walked a couple of hundred metres, I remember thinking that any minute now one of the security people would sprint towards me and rugby tackle me to the ground. I’d be dragged back to my room, and that would be that.

But nobody sprinted. There were no rugby tackles.

Two minutes became five and five minutes became ten. The rehab centre disappeared from sight behind me. I continued walking up the steep zig-zag road, but even then I was convinced that I’d be rumbled. There would be security gates and cameras up ahead. There would be people on watch. Any second now they’ll come and get me. I think I almost wanted to be caught. It would give me something else to be angry about.

But nobody appeared. I kept walking, and walking. A mile up the hill. Two miles. I reached the top and there was a fence. I managed to clamber over it. The terrain was a little treacherous underfoot. I was wearing my regular clobber and had nothing on me but a few cigarettes. No phone, no wallet, no money, no lighter. But I kept walking and before long I saw the lights of moving vehicles up ahead: the Pacific Coast Highway. I knew that the ocean lay beyond the PCH, and I’ve always had an affinity with the ocean. It called to me and I started to move in that direction.

I had it in my head that they’d be out searching for me by now. I switched into what I can only describe as Grand Theft Auto mode. Every time I saw a car approach, I ducked or dived into a bush or ditch, scratching my face and arms to ribbons. I hopped fences and ran through the shadows until I eventually reached a wild, deserted beach. The moon shone bright and by now I was covered in mud, blood and sweat. The urge took me to wade into the water. All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me. I was, I realise now, completely sober for the first time in ages, and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger. I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I’d let it all out, and I couldn’t yell any more.

I burst into tears. I was muddy, wet, dishevelled and broken. My clothes were torn and dirty. I must have looked like a complete maniac. I certainly felt like one. As my shouts echoed across the ocean into nothingness, a sense of calm finally washed over me. It felt like God had heard me. I quickly became preoccupied with a new mission. I had to get back to the one place that seemed normal. I had to get back to Barney’s Beanery. It was not an easy mission. I was many, many miles from West Hollywood. With no phone and no money, my only way back was on foot.

I continued to stalk my way along the beach, keeping my head down. I passed stretches of expensive Malibu mansions that glowed invitingly in the night, but down at the water’s edge nobody could see me. The beaches were steep and the waves broke noisily. There was no path. Mostly I found myself wading through the water, my shoes and trousers soaking wet, barely keeping my three remaining cigarettes dry. Sometimes the beach ran out and I found myself clambering over rocks to find the next section of sand. I was exhausted, both physically and mentally. I was dehydrated. I had no real idea where I was or where I was going. West Hollywood and Barney’s Beanery seemed what they were: impossibly distant.

I reached a quiet and remote stretch of coastline. Slightly inland there was a gas station. I made my way towards it. I must have looked incredibly frail emerging from the ocean and approaching the only building in sight. A shadow of anything I’d been before. All I wanted was a lighter. Perhaps I might find someone here who had one.

Three people saved me that night. I think of them as my three kings. Their kindness not only helped me get back to where I needed to be, it also prompted me to come to terms with my life and what was important in it. I had no idea, as I staggered up to that unprepossessing gas station, that I was about to meet the first.

There was nobody inside apart from an elderly Indian man working the night shift behind the counter. When I asked him for a light, he was quietly apologetic. “I’m sorry sir,” he said. “I do not smoke.”

I stared numbly at him. Then I mumbled a couple of words of thanks and stumbled out of the gas station. I was ready to continue along the road, but then I saw that the man had followed me out. “Are you okay?” he said.

I barely knew what to say. How could I even begin to tell him how not okay I was. Instead I just asked, croaky voiced: “I don’t suppose you have any water?”

The man pointed back into the gas station. “Go to the chiller,” he said. “Take one. Take a big one.”

I thanked him again and staggered into the gas station where I helped myself to a two-litre bottle of water. When I turned once more, the man was back behind his counter. “Where are you going?” he said.

I told him. “West Hollywood.”

“A long way.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have any money?”

I shook my head.

The man smiled. He took out his wallet, opened it up and pulled out what I could see was his last twenty dollar bill. “Take it,” he said.

I stared again, at him and at the twenty.

“I’m not a wealthy man,” he said quietly. “I don’t have much money. I don’t have a big house. I don’t have a fancy car. But I have my wife, and I have my children, and I have my grandchildren, and that means I am a rich man. A very rich man.” He fixed me with a piercing stare and inclined his head a little. “Are you a rich man?” he asked.

My reflex reaction was to burst into rueful laughter. “Rich?” I said. “I’m a millionaire! And here I am, asking you for a bottle of water and taking your last twenty dollars.” And what I thought to myself, but did not say out loud, was: I’m not rich at all. Not like you.

He smiled again. “That should get you some of the way back to West Hollywood,” he said.

“I promise,” I said, “I’ll come back and find you and repay the money.”

He shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Pass it on, next time you see a person who needs your help.”

I was profuse with my thanks as I left the gas station. His kindness was a balm. A pick-me-up. I began to feel that I might be successful in my mission. I continued along the Pacific Coast Highway in the pitch darkness. Every time a car passed, I ducked out of the way and hid in a bush. After a few more soggy-shoed miles, an old Ford Mustang sped past. I crouched and hid. Once it was a hundred metres away, I saw the orange glow of a cigarette butt fly out of the window and land on the road. I sprinted towards it, desperate to light one of my own damp cigarettes from that tiny spark. I reached it in time and smoked three cigarettes one after the other, each lit by the last as I hunkered down by the side of the road. I nodded to the sky and thanked God for his divine intervention. Then I carried on walking.

I met my second king at the next gas station, several more miles down the road. I was exhausted, still damp and sweaty, still bloodied and covered in dirt. I staggered into the gas station and asked the guy there if he knew anybody who could help me in my situation. The guy said no, folded his arms and asked me to leave. It was nearing midnight and there was only one car in sight, parked up—the first vehicle I’d seen for a good while. I staggered up to it and, ever so softly, tapped on the window. The driver, a young Black guy twice my size, opened the window. I started to say: “Mate, I know this sounds weird but…”

He shook his head. “I’m Uber only,” he said. “You want a ride, book me on your phone.”

But I had no phone. I had nothing but the damp, torn clothes on my back and the twenty-dollar bill the Indian man had given me. I made up a crazy story: that my girlfriend and I’d had a massive argument and she’d dropped me out here in the middle of nowhere. All I had was twenty bucks, and could he please see his way to taking me just as far towards West Hollywood as my money would last? I must have made a pitiful sight, and by rights he should have taken one look at me, shaken his head and rolled up his window. But he didn’t. He looked me up and down, then he indicated that I should hop in the back. A seat never felt so good. “Where do you need me to take you?” he asked.

I told him Barney’s Beanery, and reiterated that I only had twenty bucks and was happy for him to drop me off when my money had run out. But he waved away my protestations. Maybe he saw that I was in no fit state to hike back to West Hollywood. Maybe, like the Indian man at the previous gas station, he was just kind. “I’ll take you there,” he said. I struggled to understand his generosity. Didn’t he want a book signed? Didn’t he want a picture for his kids? Nope. He just wanted to help someone in need. He took me all the way. A sixty-dollar cab ride, maybe more. I begged him to write down his name and number so that I could repay him, but again he waved me away. “Don’t worry about it, man. It’s cool.”

It was half past one in the morning when he dropped me outside Barney’s. I had a final, failed attempt to ask him for his number so I could pay him the proper fare, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He drove down the road and out of sight. I never saw him again.

I turned towards Barney’s. It was kicking-out time. Most of the clientele had left. I couldn’t quite believe that, thanks to the unexpected kindness of strangers, I’d made it here. Drained and dirty, I staggered up to the front door. And there I met Nick, the bouncer. He knew me well. This was my regular hangout, after all. He looked me up and down, clearly aware that all was not as it should be. But he made no comment. He just stepped aside and said, “You’re late, dude, but if you want to come in for a quick one…”

I entered. There were still a few regulars propping up the bar. My eyes were instantly drawn to their drinks and it struck me that I hadn’t touched or even thought about alcohol for the best part of forty-eight hours. I stared vacantly, wondering why I was there. The bartender automatically put a beer on the counter. I instinctively went to grab it before realising I had no interest in that whatsoever. I backed away from the beer, back through the bar doors. Nick was kicking out the last of the drinkers. As I stared into nothingness, he asked me: “You alright, dude?”

“Can you lend me twenty bucks?” I said. “Just so I can get home?”

Nick gave me a long, steady stare. “Where are your keys?” he said.

“I don’t have them, mate,” I said. “I don’t have anything.” And as I said it, I remembered the voice of the Indian man at the gas station. Are you a rich man?

“You’re coming home with me,” Nick said. “Let’s go.” I didn’t question him.

Nick became my third king that night, as he took me back to his home. It was a small apartment, but it was warm and comfortable and very welcoming. He sat me down, made me endless cups of tea and then, for the next three hours, he listened to me talk. Words flooded out of me. Anxieties I had never properly articulated rose from somewhere inside me. The truth of my situation started to emerge. I confronted the one fact that I’d been too scared to admit to myself for too long: I was no longer in love with Jade. She had been instrumental in keeping my career on the road, no question. But I’d become too reliant on her, for my wellbeing and even for my opinions. It had blinded me to the uncomfortable truth that my feelings for her had changed. We wanted different things out of life. I was not being honest with her, but more importantly I was not being honest with myself. If I wanted to rescue myself, and if I wanted to do the right thing by Jade, I had to tell her the truth.

By now the sun had risen. The police, I later discovered, were out looking for me for most of the night. So were Jade and all my friends. For all they knew, I was dead somewhere in the forests of Malibu, or languishing in some prison cell. As dawn arrived, I asked to use Nick’s phone. I called Jade and told her where I was.

Jade was incredibly relieved to hear my voice and find out I was okay. She came to pick me up. We went home. I sat down with her and explained how I was feeling. It was emotional and raw. I was changing the course of our lives with a single conversation. My words were not something a person says, or hears, lightly. I told her there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her, for the rest of her life, and I meant it. But I’d lost my way and I needed to find it again. She accepted my explanation with a grace I probably didn’t deserve. And with that, our relationship was over.

I’d spent the night searching for my way back home, and I’d come to the realisation that I wasn’t there yet. The intervention had been upsetting. It had angered and confused me. But I was beginning to understand that it came from the right place and I needed to seek some help. I was going to do it for myself.