Back in the city, it went on like this—tiring, depressing, strange, numb—for a few weeks. In February, I was arrested for drug possession in the Lower East Side after two undercover cops found me doing key-bumps outside a shitty club, and it was late March or early April when she overdosed. I was starting to see other people in the extended circle of druggies and theater kids and people I called “my friends” disappear, drop out, dissolve into…something or nothing. Ashes to ashes. At my normal dive bar haunts—the type of places where promoters with names like “Jagger” would practice dark arts on young, unsuspecting twinks—bodies were moving around like musical chairs.
It only took a few weeks before I was digging back into my old Rolodex of dealers and scoring my usual everything-but-the-kitchen-sink cocktail of pills and powders and flowers and mushrooms and vials and whatever else the vagrant in front of me was hawking. Some cocaine to bring me up, Xanax to help me sleep, Molly to sprinkle into beverages and blunts, and, of course, my newest addition (who was rapidly becoming a series regular): heroin. I would get it in white powder form to snort, because shooting up just wasn’t for me. And so, to nobody’s surprise, really, but my own, by the time my birthday came around, I had multiple eight balls at the ready and a night of mediocre Brooklyn debauchery planned. It was to include some dumpster fire gay bars (that definitely did not go on to survive the pandemic), and the wild mix of friends I somehow managed to hang on to during my rock-bottom moments.
It’s just—I’d understand if you were enjoying yourself, but you seem…
We’re back to 2013. Peter again. I want him to stop talking, my ears are bleeding and my brain is struggling to keep up. Like, shut the fuck up.
I don’t want to be presumptuous, it’s just—and I’m not judging you, I promise. I’m just curious, like, why do cocaine and whatever else if it makes you so…
Miserable? I manage to croak out.
Yeah.
I don’t know… I don’t want to do it, but I can’t…not.
I struggle to remember the end of this conversation, because really the only thing that matters now is that it happened at all. That for once in my fucking life I could honestly say to someone I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop doing drugs. That I could not sneak, lie, cheat my way out of confrontation, like I did when I said I was going to rehab a few summers prior to avoid getting expelled from Semester at Sea for sneaking drugs onto the boat. Peter opened a door for me to finally admit for once that I didn’t want to do drugs anymore and that I didn’t know how to stop. A seed planted, and the sunrise fertilizing it.
***
We’re driving out to East Hampton. Being in a confined space with my father means endless tapping of my toes in anticipation of whatever serious-but-not-too-serious, slightly-misguided- imparting-of-wisdom-cum-jeremiad he has cooked up. Except it never comes. I look down at my hands, marveling at how their square shape mirrors his own, only a little smaller. Larry Ivan Dorfman, born in the mid-50s in Brooklyn, Jewish with a signature crew cut and an infectious smile. A teddy bear of a man. His hand is gripping the gear shift and I’m thinking, Oh, shit. This time is different. This time he’s quiet and reserved. When I’d called him and told him I wanted to try to get clean, he’d simply exhaled, and in the same breath, said, Finally. Thank you.
He assured me he’d be on the next flight out of Hartsfield- Jackson, but I asked him for one last night alone with Peter. He obliged.
Here’s something dark: When searching for a rehab that night, I literally googled “celebrity rehab fancy.” I wasn’t famous, not even close; I was just delusional and unwilling to go somewhere that would ask me to mop floors or give me cafeteria duty. Because heaven forbid this shit actually be, you know, hard.
The closer we get to East Hampton, the more I regret my decision. A pit in my stomach starts growing, screaming at me to jump out of the car Lady Bird–style (even though Lady Bird was still a few years off—bless you, Greta).
I don’t think I can do this, Dad.
You can.
I don’t know. Maybe I jumped the gun.
You didn’t. But if you did, you’ll find out soon enough. We’re here now anyway.
I press my forehead as hard as I can into the cold window of the car—except it feels more like a hearse.
Fuck.
Adapted from Maybe This Will Save Me: A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation by Tommy Dorfman, to be published on May 27 by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2025 by Tommy Dorfman
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