Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,22
great, but manageable.
I figured as long as he wasn’t hitting the strong downers—benzos, heroin—maybe he’d be all right.
Graham: I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to help him or whether to trust what he was saying to me. I felt, stupid, honestly. I felt like, I’m his brother. I should know what he needs. I should always be able to tell when he’s high and lying about it.
But I didn’t know. And I felt … embarrassed that I didn’t always catch what he was up to.
Eddie: We were all sort of counting down the days. You know, sixty days until Billy has to get clean. Then it was forty days. Then it was twenty days.
Billy: We were in Dallas opening up for Rick Yates. And Rick was really into snorting heroin. I thought, I need to try heroin at least once.
That made perfect sense to me: that it would be easier to get clean if I tried heroin. And it wasn’t like I was going to use a needle. I was gonna snort it. And I’d had opium in the past. We all had. So when I was with Rick backstage at Texas Hall, and he offered me a bump … I rolled on up and took it.
Rod: I always tell my people to stay away from benzos and heroin. People don’t die staying up, they die when they go to sleep. Look at Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Downers kill you.
Graham: It all spiraled from there. Once he and Yates started snorting H, I lived with this dread in my belly. I tried to keep an eye on him. I kept trying to get him to stop.
Rod: When I found out he was with Yates, I called Teddy. I said, “We’ve got a dead man walking.” Teddy said he’d handle it.
Graham: No amount of advice or lectures or trying to chain somebody down ever stopped anyone who didn’t want to stop in the first place.
Eddie: When it got down to ten days left, and he was forgetting the words onstage, I remember thinking he was never gonna clean up.
Billy: On November 28, Teddy shows up at our show in Hartford. He’s there backstage when we’re done with our set.
I say, “What are you doing here?”
He says, “You’re going home,” and he takes me by the arm and holds on to me until we’re practically on the plane. Turns out, Camila had gone into labor.
We land and he drags me into his car and drives me to the hospital. We’re double-parked in a red zone in front of the lobby. Teddy says, “Get up there, Billy.”
This whole long journey and all I had left to do was walk in the double doors … but … I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t meet my kid like that.
Teddy got out of the car and went up there himself.
Camila: I’d just spent eighteen hours in labor with only my mom by my side. And I’m expecting my husband to walk in the door and straighten up. I understand now that you can’t just fix yourself. It doesn’t work like that. But I did expect it to work like that then. I didn’t know.
Well, the door opened and it wasn’t Billy … it was Teddy Price.
I was so tired and I was sweating bullets from the hormones running through me, and I was holding this tiny baby that I’ve just met, this girl who looks just like Billy. I decided to name her Julia.
My mom was ready to take us both back with her to Pennsylvania. And I was tempted. Right then, giving up on Billy felt easier than trying to have faith. I wanted to say, “Tell him I’ll raise this baby on my own.” But I had to keep trying for what I wanted for me and my kid. So I told Teddy, “Tell him he can start to be a father this second or he’s going to rehab. Now.”
And Teddy nodded and left.
Billy: I waited for what felt like hours, outside the lobby, fiddling with the latch on the door. Teddy came down finally and said, “You have a baby girl. She looks like you. Her name is Julia.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
And then Teddy said, “Camila says you have two choices. You can get your ass up there right now and be a good husband and father or I can drive you to rehab. Those are your choices.”