Word: jay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jay flipped the bag of laundry he was carrying onto his shoulder and shook my hand eagerly. He asked what I wrote, what part of L.A. I lived in. Then he smiled broadly, wagged his index finger at me and told me we were going to "rock this place." Last Tuesday night, four years after we left that place, and following numerous other efforts to clean up, Jay was found hanging in his bathroom, an apparent suicide...
Nothing seemed more unlikely that morning we met. I hadn't anticipated his sort of relentless good cheer on my first day in treatment. The center struck me as a cross between a mental hospital and a minimum-security prison. Yet Jay acted suspiciously happy to be there. I figured him a flake, one of those self-proclaimed talent agents who pass out business cards to aspiring actresses...
...became friends, I discovered that Jay was as golden as Hollywood golden boys get, a behind-the-scenes show-biz dealmaker with his hands on the levers of the starmaking machinery. One of the most successful agents in show business and a part owner of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, Jay represented Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman, David Letterman and other major names. He had been the protege of CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz and was already being touted, at 30, as a future studio head. He dated models and actresses, drove a Ferrari, lived...
...Jay and I had something very simple in common: we had both done too much. We hadn't known when to stop. We had become addicts. We had gone through dark seasons at the end of which someone--in his case his partners at CAA and in mine my wife--had given us an ultimatum: get clean or get out. And we ended up at this treatment center outside Portland...
...time I arrived, Jay had been there two weeks, which to me, just beginning to come down from the pills and dope, seemed like an incredibly long time to stay clean. Over the next few weeks, his robust optimism and constant wisecracking would be an inspiration to me as I muddled through very early sobriety. I had been convinced after that first night that I would never laugh again. Jay was proof that life without drugs could be fun--that you could retain your sense of humor...