News Junkie: An Excerpt
Jason Leopold at ‘Camp Justice’
The epic tale of addiction, News Junkie, by friend and occasional contributor to The Mudflats, Jason Leopold, has been reissued
Leopold, who now writes for Vice Magazine, and Al Jazeera on the NSA, Guantanamo, and other issues, has been called a ‘FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) terrorist’ by the government. That’s a badge of honor in our book.
Leopold has provided The Mudflats with an excerpt from News Junkie which is available at Amazon.com,
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There is no feeling like breaking a news story. The only thing that comes close is when you snort that first line of coke and all insecurities vanish and you feel like you can conquer the world. The first time I felt that white powder trickle down my throat, everything in my life became perfect. Suddenly I was taller, better looking, and the pain of being rejected by my parents disappeared. High on coke, I could talk for hours with total strangers, and was no longer afraid of being rejected by women. Everyone was my friend.
It was love at first sniff.
For years I tried chasing the feeling of that first high. The pathetic thing is that it never came back, and I nearly destroyed myself and my loved ones in pursuit of it.
Somehow I managed to keep myself employed and even moved up the ranks at several news organizations as a full-blown junkie and alcoholic. There were times when I would go cold turkey for a month or two, but then I would start the drinking and drugging all over again. I even tried to OD one night by snorting one impossibly big fat line. My heart raced so fast that I was convinced it was going to burst through my chest or shut itself down—but the fucker kept on ticking. Worst of all were those high hours of extreme paranoia, when I feared that rats were in my underwear and were going to crawl up my body and chew my face off. I’d strip off my clothes and stand naked in my bedroom, swatting at my genitals. This drug-induced terror was worse than death.
After enduring this sort of behavior for an entire year, my wife Lisa finally came to the conclusion that I was going insane. Incredible as it sounds, I managed to hide my addiction from her. Lisa is what drug addicts call a normie. She’s never been drunk, never experimented with drugs. She couldn’t spot a drug addict if he was sleeping right next to her. The quality of Lisa’s innocence attracted me to her, and I thought she could save me from myself. Deep down I wanted to be like her, but I enjoyed being out of control and self-destructive.
When Lisa could no longer deal with my psychotic episodes, she visited a therapist who told her that she was living with a drug addict. We went to see this therapist together, and the next thing I know Lisa’s crying and telling me she knows I’m on drugs and that if I don’t get help that she’s going to divorce me. Of course, I denied everything and walked out. My first instinct was to jet to some other state where I could hide out—alone, with my drugs.
Then I had what addicts call a moment of clarity and walked two miles to my mother-in-law’s house, knocked on the door and with my last bit of hope pleaded, “Help me.” I chose to ask my mother-in-law for help because she treated me like her own flesh and blood. It was nothing like the stereotypical in-law relationship portrayed in books or movies. We were friends. She knew everything about me, or so she thought.
Still, I was sure that when the dust settled she and everyone else in Lisa’s family would judge me, just like my blood relatives judged me. My father always compared me, particularly my intelligence, to the other children in our neighborhood, who apparently were all geniuses.
On my wedding day, my father asked me if Lisa knew everything about me, all the sordid tales of my life. I said, “Yes, she knows everything.”
“Wow. I don’t think I would be so accepting if Michelle brought someone like you home,” my father said, referring to my sister. That’s when I stopped speaking to my parents. It was either that or commit suicide. My father’s words made me doubt myself and wonder what my wife saw in me.
A bed was reserved for me at the rehab clinic and my mother-in-law and her sister, a psychoanalyst, drove me there. When I arrived, I was interviewed by a doctor who asked:
“Did you do cocaine last night?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Two, three grams.”
“Do you smoke?”
“No.”
I smoked like a fiend but never in front of people. My mother-in-law was sitting in the chair next to me and I didn’t want her to know that I smoked. Here I was admitting that I ingested a shitload of cocaine, but denied being a smoker because I was afraid of what my mother-in-law might think.
This was the same rehabilitation clinic in Marina Del Rey in which Kurt Cobain was confined the day before he escaped, flew back to Seattle, and blew his brains out. My rehab began like Cobain’s, through intervention. And like Cobain, I hated myself and wanted to die.
After a month in that clinic I went home and have been sober ever since. I attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings regularly. But I replaced my addiction to drugs and alcohol with an addiction to breaking news stories. Once you get a taste of the notoriety and the incredible feeling of power that come from breaking news, there is nothing else like it. Even in sobriety, I behaved like a drug addict. Instead of trying to cop a gram of coke, I was now hounding sources to see if they had any good scoops.
The anticipation of getting a news story, of being the first one to uncover a major development or a top-secret document, made my legs twitch and teeth chatter just like when I would be close to scoring an eight ball of coke. My sources were now my dealers, and I called them whenever the high from breaking a previous story was beginning to wear off.
I woke up at 7:00 a.m. Monday morning, showered, got dressed, and headed to a coffee shop. This was my morning routine. The only way I was able to work and stay high-strung was with my quadruple macchiato. Four shots of espresso in my stomach and pow—I was a freight train. The reason I got along so well with the French when visiting Paris was that I drank more coffee and smoked more cigarettes than they could. I only knew five French words and I would repeat them over and over: “Un café, s’il vous plaît.”
The Dow Jones Newswire Los Angeles bureau, of which I was chief, was only two miles from my house. The bureau housed two other reporters and was not your typical newsroom. It was a small space—one room to be exact—no bigger than a studio apartment in Manhattan. But we had an amazing view of the Hollywood sign from the fifteenth floor of the Wilshire Boulevard high-rise. Three large file cabinets and two dividers separated me from the other two reporters. Some genius thought that putting dividers in a 300-square-foot office would invite a level of privacy, but I could tell you everything that went on in my fellow reporters’ lives.
Because Monday was going to be a big news day, I needed to get pumped up. I turned on the CD player in my car and cranked up Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss. The combination of strong coffee and heavy metal was like a shot of instant adrenaline. I felt mean. I clenched my teeth, looked in the rearview mirror, and made a mean face like the Mafia figures I admired. I lit a cigarette and sucked it down to the filter. After rehab, I kicked the drugs but still couldn’t stop smoking.
Jessica, the other reporter who covered energy, got to the office an hour after me. She had just graduated from a journalism school in Texas and this was her first real reporting gig. Unlike most neophyte reporters I’ve worked with, Jessica had passion. I think she fed off of me. I told her the whole story about Maviglio buying stock in Calpine during the contract negotiations and she was floored.
“Shit, man, I wish I got that story.”
“You wanna work on it with me?” I offered.
“Hell yeah!”
I figured that having another reporter on the story would serve two purposes: one, it would take some of the heat off because I could pass the buck to Jessica and make her call Maviglio for a comment; and two, it would show my superiors in New York that I wasn’t one of these reporters who refused to share a byline.
Looks like a book I’ll borrow from the library. I only buy books I need for reference, or plan on reading more than once.