This episode was all about the new patients. Kari Anne proves herself to be a mean, spiteful brat that would probably screw over the devil himself for a pack of Newports. Tom, on the other hand, is the opposite. He's busy trying to charm everyone, including Dr. Drew. Who suffers because of this? You and me, in the case of Kari Anne, and Heidi, when it comes to the great Mr. Sizemore.
]]> I still think that it's a big mistake to allow two people with a past relationship to be on the same floor in rehab. This isn't couple's counselling, this is life and death, for goodness sake. I'm still afraid that the other patients will fall through the cracks because of the distractions and this week does nothing to dispel my fears.We begin with Kari Anne, who I am going to be referring to as Carrion until she proves otherwise, and she arrives to a hug from Shelly. Surprising, when you consider the nice way she treated her in sex rehab. Actually, she's lucky that nobody cares enough or else she'd probably be on every hit list, from the lowly message board commentors all the way to her fellow pageant contestants.
We get treated to another reminder of her "incorrigible behaviour" from sex rehab flashbacks, and then Shelly goes through her stuff. She asks, over her glasses of course, if Carrion wants to get clean. She says that she can stop on her own (yeah, sure) but wants to find out why she doesn't want to.
You don't say. Oh well, self awareness is not the number one trait of the addict.
She says that she doesn't remember the last time she was sober and that she doesn't keep track of how much drugs she uses. Or how much makeup she packs.
Shelly seems disappointed that she's not finding anything that Carrion has smuggled in until, voila! A baggie with one little rock of crystal meth that she joyfully flushes down the loo.
I'm still hating Shelly's attitude, by the way. I have to wonder about her sometimes. Are there people like Mikey and Carrion that she just doesn't like, that she wouldn't get along with in any other circumstances? Sure, probably, but I have to ask myself if she's in the wrong field because one minute she holds up contraband with a mixture of glee and wistfulness and the next minute she seems to be undermining the patients with little passive aggressive digs. Not healthy, right? Better suited for a women's prison or judging American Idol, if you ask me.
I know that some of you will say that sneaky little addicts will get on your last nerve and I do not doubt that for a minute, but how is someone supposed to heal when a skinny blonde harpy is pissing them off constantly? Why should you have to worry about whether or not Shelly woke up on the right side of the bed that morning when you should only be worried about achieving sobriety?
The other female patients meet her one by one and then run out of her room like they can't get out of there fast enough. Somebody's reputation has preceeded her. Mack and Lisa are pissed because she's got her own room with a nice big bed, but Mindy tells them that they should count their blessings since none of them have to room with her.
Besides, where would a roommate put their stuff? She's taken up every available surface with products and brushes and flattening irons for that shitty weave of hers.
Plus, she dropped it on a pile of clothes, probably still hot. I sure hope that the cameramen are paying attention. She probably hopes that the place burns down.
I hate crappy uneven hair extensions. I bet she caught her real hair on fire while smoking crystal, and it was either look like a Rock of Love girl or a choppy coiffed troll, and she picked the former. Ah, the mind of a former beauty queen.
She meets with Dr. Drew for her evaluation and tells him that she does about 2 grams of speed every day. She says that she's more embarrassed to be in rehab for drugs than she was for sex. Wow. I don't know how to take that. Does it mean that in her world it's okay to have unhealthy attitudes toward sex, but not drugs? Both can be deadly, quite frankly. AIDS is back on the rise and I wonder if she even realises that both of her addictions are closely related. Probably not.
Before she got into the meth she did vicodin/narco/coke/ambien/alcohol for two years. Is that all? She is still on Adderal and when Dr. Drew tells her that she has to quit that as well, she is none too happy. She pretty much threatens to act out if he takes it away but he is adamant about it. "Nobody ever gets sober on Adderal," I believe was what he said. It's a type of amphetamine that helps AD/HD sufferers concentrate and I personally know some people on it, in their 40s. They say it helps, so I believe them. Then again, none of my friends are in rehab.
The next morning the smokers are smoking, Lisa And Dennis are playing Blackjack, Joey is admiring his freakish biceps-
..and Carrion won't get out of bed. She looks like a zombie and probably hasn't had a decent night's sleep since Sex Rehab.
She is already on my last nerve. She better have one hell of a story to explain her crap personality because she's completely unlikable and doesn't seem to care. Poor Loesha. What patience she shows trying to get her to go to group.
I get that Carrion is easily agitated while detoxing, but her communication skills are completely rudimentary at best. How does she try to win arguments? By telling people to stop arguing with her. Is this girl a moron? You have to wonder.
The subject of group today is the varying levels of sickness they each have. The Bob says that some of them are sicker than others, physically and spiritually, and that's why treatment is so different for every individual. What might work for a housewife that chases martinis with valium may not work for a gutter crackhead.
He starts in about how Tom is such a complicated case but before he can blow too much smoke up his ass, Heidi says that she'll walk out if he continues putting him on a druggy pedestal. I am with her 100 percent.
I find it very strange that Tom seems almost to be admired for his spectacular levels of drug abuse. His ego is already immense and subject to even greater inflation by the adulation he receives from Mikey. Bob should know better.
The Bob says that Tom never quits, even in the face of consequences like jail. He's such a bad-ass addict that he keeps using at times that would send other people straight to rehab. Heidi calls B.S. once again. Thank God she's there to keep everybody from kissing his ass. He's lucky that she even cares.
Let's remember, this guy hit a woman. That woman is in rehab with him. Just because he was high doesn't make it okay. Come on!
Once again we have a fine line here and it's getting crossed. When Bob points out that Tom is homeless, that he lost his Beverly Hills mansion and his condo in L.A., is Tom hearing the right message? He's a royal fuck-up to be sure, but is he hearing that or is he getting everyone to feel sorry for him? Why is his experience so much more special than that of the patients with less fame, or less to lose?
So, yes, everyone is on different points in the addiction continuum and yes, even Heidi went to rehab because she was threatened with jail time. I think that the idea that Bob was trying to get across was never say never. Nobody expects to be homeless and Heidi isn't but did she ever picture herself as the crazy bird lady? Nope.
She still hates people, though. It's actually her 'saying,' her motto. That is so beyond sad. She must have had some pretty bad relationships with people, not just Tom. I'm going to bet it started way earlier than that, even before the whole Hollywood Madam period of her life. Nobody grows up happy and healthy and then decides to peddle flesh for a living. Something happened. No doubt about it.
Mikey pipes up from his stupor at this point to say that he hates people too. They were always ripping him off, not surprising since he comes off a little like Joey, buying people's affection and allowing his vulnerabilities to show so glaringly.
Bob says that the hate of other human beings is really fear and with that, Carrion opens her mouth to fill the air with like, fifty million likes, and like, she needs her adderal, man! She can't concentrate or get better without it so it's all big bad Dr. Drew's fault if she doesn't like, get better and stuff. Waaaaaah.
Is this her plan? Annoy people into letting her get her way? She really hasn't progressed past the second grade, has she? The funny thing is that it's not even good TV. I just want to change the channel whenever the camera focuses on her. She's pathetic and the producers have given us absolutely no reason to care if she gets better or ends up in a dumpster somewhere, and that's the honest truth.
There's someone else out there who is almost as pathetic as Carrion and her name is Monroe. This girl is in the clutches of drugs just as bad as Tom is, and should be in rehab herself. She decides to visit Tom and bring him a suitcase just before midnight. Brilliant, because THAT doesn't raise any red flags, having your normal business hours start when everyone else is asleep.
The night supervisor, Rhonda, tells the little drug smuggler that she can't go in the facility with her purse or her fanny pack or her cell phone.
They should only allow her in after a strip search if you ask me. She slipped him drugs when she waltzed in last time so they aren't taking any chances and tell her she has to take a pee test if she wants to see him.
Well, slap me and call me Mary, she refuses! Were you as shocked as I was? HA! The more I watch this kind of childish behaviour, the more it seems like Day Care to me. She acts like she doesn't understand why she can't just slide back into Tom's room until Will explains to her that she signed a piece of paper when she arrived and her refusal to tinkle is grounds for being turned away. So- go sabatoge someone else for a change.
She leaves, and Loesha joins Will in going through the luggage Monroe brought for Tom. Further evidence of her brilliance- she put oxycontin and valium into a plastic CVS pill tray. Like they wouldn't know the difference between a narcotic and a vitaminC pill.
Wake up, Monroe. These are former addicts! They could smell a grain of cocaine from a mile away, even if you wrapped it in a baggie and stuffed it into a shampoo bottle. They are the Princess and the Pea of dope diggers, the bloodhounds of benzedrine. Trying to fool them would be as smart as trying to convince a Twihard that New Moon was crap. Ain't gonna happen.
The next day Dr. Drew and Shirley meet with Tom to ask him about getting Monroe some help. They tell him that they will put her in the adjacent facility and treat her for free. They remind him that it is crucial to his own well being that she get treatment too, and he agrees. Sounds good, right? We'll see. I give it a 50/50 chance of succeeding.
I am willing to bet that she could go into a room for ten minutes with that crackhead fool and she'd come out begging to be admitted. Call it a hunch but I am willing to bet that she isn't what one would call a 'coddler.'
Tom heads out to the patio to get more shit from Heidi, yay! The more the merrier, I say.
She gives him grief for making 200 grand and still ending up homeless while she left in bare feet with a bloodied noggin and still managed to keep a roof over her head. Mikey wants her to take it easy on him since he still has his Tom man-crush operating at full force, and she agrees that he's lovable but.....he beat her.
She winks at Tom and tells Mikey that at one point she wanted to marry the great Sizemore and have hideous little speed babies with him. Thank goodness she got those abortions. There are enough crack babies in foster care as it is.
I could be wrong. They could have produced a beauty queen for all I know.
Tom walks off and Lisa joins in the chorus, telling her to lay off because he looks soooo handsome and her sister has a huge crush on him. Heidi tells them to stop lying, he looks like the walking dead, something she is an absolute expert on, unquestionably.
All kidding aside, Drew finally meets with her to find out how she is taking this, what her feelings are now that he is in rehab with her. Since she has already interviewed that she thinks that he's a disgusting scumbag who needs to quit trying to be cool in rehab, and that she can't believe that she ever liked him, I think it's safe to say that she isn't terribly happy.
She tells Drew as much and he barely pays much attention to the fact that he hit her and it still bothers her. I found that to be wierd. He seems more determined to convince her that it's all right because she said that she didn't mind before, so what's changed? Um, he's actually THERE. That's what changed.
What more does he need? Sheesh.
She says that it may seem not to bother her in group but that's because she is stronger than him. She can take it, but why would she be cool with it, and why does she have to reiterate that this guy threatened her when she left and was really creepy to her for months afterwards? Because he's freaking Tom Sizemore? Meh. I'm over him.
Drew asks her if she wants to call him out on any of his actions and she tells him that Tom already apologized in private but would never do so in public. Please, it would ruin his sterling junkie reputation. He also never said he was sorry when he was sober, and she no longer cares because caring would mean that she was weak.
Okay, let's work on that, let's work on her fucked up ideas of what is strong and what is weak, and take Tom out of the picture, please. He was only in her life for a couple of months, stop making it all about him, please Dr. Drew.
Before she leaves, they joke about him waving a magic wand over her to make her better and she says that she may hate people but not to worry. She's always nice to everyone because she sees people as potential jurors, HER jury if she ever goes to trial again. It's funny, but bittersweet because of the grain of truth there.
She heads outside to talk to Tom some more, and to give him shit for falling as far as he has. Good. If it makes you feel better, have at it. Heidi is the only person not kissing his ass right now, and he needs that.
She tells him that nobody ever schooled her on being an addict, she just assumed that she could stop whenever she wanted. He jokes that they are the only two there that have been to prison and tells her that when the judge told him that the next time he screwed up he'd be back there, he got high. He thinks it's funny, she asks, "What's wrong with you? You really have a problem." He laughs, and so does she.
This is such a strange conversation. They obviously still like each other. Their body language is almost perfectly in synch, right down to the way they wipe their mouths.
She says that she's there because she's lonely and she needs a rich boyfriend. He WAS that person once, but he screwed it up. How does he handle this admission of hers? By saying that he has sex on the brain. Yay, not only are you a disgusting pig, but you're a horny one. How can she say no.
Let's all try not to gag when he says that she was the best sex that he ever had. Tough shit, sweetheart. Heidi tells him in no uncertain terms that those days are looooong gone. Thank you, Heidi. My stomach thanks you, all of TV land thanks you, I bet even dead people are relieved that you are not entertaining that idea of his. Yuck.
It is now Day 11 and time for another field trip. This one is at a church, there is a coffin prominently displayed between the pulpits and a haggard looking sad woman who will be trying some scared straight shit with them.
Dani is her name, and she worked hard to get her nursing degree at age 38, was a single mom, a functioning alcoholic that wanted to celebrate her new engagement to a wonderful man by getting hammered back in March of '06.
Someone called to tell her that she was late picking her daughter up, and she rushed to get her, somehow ending up driving into on-coming traffic. When she woke up in the hospital, she found out that she had killed another driver, a father and husband and a doctor to boot.
She went to jail for a few years and lives with a heavy heart every day of her life, knowing that she deprived a man of his life and a family of their loved one. How horrifying. Shelly and Mack are crying and even Dennis seems moved.
She wants them to know that she got out of jail, went straight to rehab and that they can get clean too, if they trust the process. Heidi seems moved as well. She likes to act tough but how can you not be upset when you see the affect being an addict can have, even if you only consider yourself a social drinker, or in Heidi's case, doing drugs because you have no one to tell you not to except your probation officer.
She needs AA or NA really badly. She needs other people, and I'm rooting for her pretty strongly (in case you couldn't tell) because she has so much potential. She shouldn't give up on herself and other human beings, even though it's hard not to when you've been betrayed by love so badly. She should write a book on what not to do, at the very least. Helping others might help her help herself.
Am I sounding corny or what? I can't help it. I really like her.
Before we move on to Carrion's next retarded display of wasting space and making everyone around her as miserable as a former beauty queen denied a decent Playboy spread, I have to ask- Is there anything that Mack can't relate to? Every single time ANYTHING comes up, she has a story to tell or has felt the EXACT SAME WAY at some point. You could tell her about your experiences with New Guinea cannibals and she'd chime in about that one time her dad served mystery meat after the gardener went missing.
Don't even tell her that it's Black History Month. She'll figure out a way to relate to being a victim of slavery and when you try to point out that she's white, she'll answer-
You know the type. It's like the Debbie Downer hypochondriac who won't let you enjoy your Swine Flu sympathy visits in peace because of the time she ALMOST had pneumonia so bad, she thought she was going TO DIE, I tell you. The doctor never saw anyone that bad EVER. They wrote whole articles in JAMA, look it up. All true.
Yikes. So, what is chapping princess Carrion's ass, you ask? Nuclear proliferation in Iran? The atrocities in Darfur? The difficulty of finding good meth in Simi Valley? Nope, soft packs. She doesn't like them. Can't stand them. It's like smoking freaking cow shit, if you care to know. Nobody understands! How awful!
Once again, I have to give Loesha credit for not spiking her meds with shoe polish or slipping a few drops of Visine in the water she washes them down with. She calls Carrion a "vicious brat." Hahahahaha! So true.
Lisa calls her diva-liscious, which is putting it mildly, even Dennis looks on in disgust and I am absolutely positive that if you took a vote at this exact moment, they would unanimously send her ass to Huntington. By way of Kabul.
She is on the phone with her agent David, and is asking him to send her assistant over with the proper hard pack brand, make and flavor so that she can blacken her lungs with class and style.
Excuse me, why does Carrion have an assistant? What does this assistant do? Organize her curling irons? Track down 'dates' with wealthy men that aren't at all particular?
She calls everyone at the PRC idiots, and then Mack has to chime in that she "hasn't met a single idiot since I've been here."
"And don't you dare insult this vase. We've been through everything together. I feel this vase."
Honey, that's not the point. Lisa is the only one that seems to get it. She calls her snappy and rude and says that she believes that Carrion is there for all the wrong reasons. You know- ratings, drama, getting made fun of by Joel McHale on The Soup.
Anyway, before the troll monster/beauty queen goes completely apeshit, Loesha throws her the correct package of cigarettes. Unfortunately, you can't knock someone out by throwing Newports at them, and we are treated to a close-up of Carrion dragging lustily on her cancer stick. If you ever wanted to quit smoking, watch that scene over and over again. Simply vile.
It's time to meet with Monroe and get her to enter rehab. Tom is talking the talk about getting sober but not really walking the walk yet since his crackheaded girlfriend keeps trying to smuggle his drugs in, and failing miserably. I'm sure the plan was to get him his drugs in rehab, he'll pretend to work the program and then leave when he has finished making the law happy. Unfortunately, it's not working out so well.
Drew tries to talk to him about what goals he has, as far as Monroe is concerned, but Tom justs tells him to bring her in to the room. He wants to see her, and he really starts sweating.
She's as high as a kite. BAD IDEA. They kiss and Tom whispers to her that they want her in rehab too. Uh-oh. That would ruin their little plan. He doesn't want to quit, and out of nowhere he says that he wants to go home.
Okaaaay. One minute you want your girlfriend to admit herself to rehab and two seconds later you want to go home? This reeks of a set-up.
Monroe acts all surprised and says, "But you're not done here." Tom- "There's no dope st home, right?" Monroe- "I threw it all out." Tom- "You found everything, the stuff in my white suit?" monroe- "I threw it out."
Sure she did, right into her nose.
So rehearsed, so obvious! Drew knows that they are trying to scam him and he tells him so. Monroe gets even more shifty eyed, Tom starts sweating even more profusely and they get up to leave. He only went there because he HAD to. I don't think that he has any interest in quitting, ever.
They left this episode with 'to be continued,' but what the hell? I don't see how anyone is going to get better with all the time they waste on keeping someone there who so obviously isn't ready to stop. You can't save everybody. I hate to be cold, but it's true. Don't let others go untreated because you are so busy trying to catch the big fish. Take care of the little fish first. If the great Tom Sizemore wants to come back, stop kow-towing to him like he was fucking Robert DeNiro and Mother Teresa rolled into one! God, I'm pissed off.
Thank God Brigitte is making an appearance next week, looking gorgeous and sober. We need some fresh air in the joint. Carrion and Tom's behaviour left a bad taste in my mouth this time. What do you guys think? Am I right? Are you as pissed as I am? Let me know in the comments, and so we don't leave on a completely sour note, here's a great picture of Heidi:
Love and Kisses,
Twunty McSlore
