Preview of a Tragedy

The 10 Golden Mike Awards were arranged in a row on the table, like shiny metal headstones. Scattered at their feet at AIDS Project Los Angeles on that spring evening in 1998 lay dozens of other plaques and certificates testifying to journalistic excellence. All bore the name of Steve Smith, community services director and editorial writer at KNX-AM (1070), the CBS radio news station in Los Angeles.

Smith became something of an icon at the station not long after taking the highly visible post in 1983. At the time, he was 23 years old. It was he who accompanied KNX General Manager George Nicholaw to Washington each year to confer with lawmakers and, as Nicholaw says, “hold their feet to the fire.” News director Robert Sims called him “the smartest guy in the building.” Tall and muscular, he was blessed with a sweet smile, a drop-dead wardrobe always at least slightly beyond his means, and a scathing sense of humor. (“That woman can’t say no to an accessory,” he once stewed about a friend bedecked with a scarf and heavy jewelry.) He was surrounded by friends, envied by acquaintances, sought after by lovers and treasured by a close-knit family in Montana and Idaho.

Smith left the station in 1994 to try his hand at writing fiction--before his HIV flowered into full-blown AIDS. He published a short story and began work on a novel. He was elected president of L.A.’s Gay Men’s Chorus, and by 1998 he was apparently winning his battle with AIDS, thanks to the then-new drug “cocktails.”

You can imagine how those of us gathered in the standing-room-only crowd of 500 in the AIDS Project Los Angeles auditorium were moved to wonder why someone so vital, so loved and so full of promise would swallow an entire bottle of antidepressants and half a bottle of Absolut and sign off for the last time three days after his 38th birthday.

As his close friend Scott McDonald asked at the service, “How does someone take his life after basically beating AIDS?”

One of the last speakers was Steve Smith’s mother, Hazel, a retired psychotherapist and schoolteacher. She pointed to the table filled with awards and invited us to take them home as remembrances. She consoled us for our loss, our grief, and then said simply: “We believe as a family this wouldn’t have happened to Steve if he hadn’t been in a down phase of crystal meth.”

On another warm spring day, three years after Steve’s death, I find myself in West Hollywood on the way home from my Saturday morning anchor shift at KNX, browsing blearily through the gay bookstore A Different Light on Santa Monica Boulevard. I’m still searching for some book or journal that will explain once and for all how a recreational drug could bring down a man who, as Sims said, “had every single trait a man could wish for.”

My research is partly motivated by guilt. I had mentioned to Steve’s parents after the memorial that I hoped to write something about their son, whose death haunted me. On the basis of this vague project, and my own work friendship with Steve, I had been privileged to join his immediate family and dearest friends on a white-water rafting trip a few months after his death. The invitation from his sister, Cindy, read: “We want to gather the people Steve loved most at the place he loved best--the Middle Fork of the Flathead River in Northern Montana--to scatter him upon dancing sparkles of crystalline water.”

This memorial in paradise was to be held at the southern tip of Glacier National Park on a brilliant July afternoon. The Smiths had vacationed there for years, at a large cabin on the river some 200 miles north of their permanent home near Missoula. Steve had often said that he felt freer, more serene, while rafting than anywhere else on earth. “On the raft, he was a thing of beauty,” said his dad, Les, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and a powerful oarsman in his own right.

It was a particular honor to be invited to the raft party since Steve and I weren’t close friends. I had become a freelance reporter and anchor at KNX shortly before Steve left the station. But his support was emboldening, his work inspiring. A budding friendship based on several shared passions--fiction, music, gossip--began to blossom after Steve left. He asked me to look over a draft of a short story, a fictional account of a real-life event: his participation in the mercy killing/suicide of a dear friend who was wasting away from AIDS. The story was tragicomic. Donald, the dying friend, kept springing good-naturedly back to life, searing wit intact, after each failed attempt by his friends to overdose him with narcotic pain medication. “The Pact,” which needed no help from me, was later published in a handsome anthology of works by participants in the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writer’s Workshop.

Then Steve started to slip away. Promises to get together were broken. Even his closest friends became fed up with his erratic behavior. Many assumed he’d suffered reversals and was losing his battle with AIDS. They were wrong.

In a letter to his parents, he announced his new adversary: “I may have met my ultimate demon in crystal meth.”

Now, in the spring of 2001, I am hearing about crystal meth again from friends, learning that it had grown into a scourge among young gay men. So I stop by the West Hollywood bookshop. I don’t know what I expect to find, but it isn’t here. I am about to head home when I spot a young man wearing a bright yellow “DEA” T-shirt. I ask if he is a drug enforcer. He laughs and says no; he just likes the shirt.

His name is Bill. We begin talking. I ask about drugs and then, specifically, about crystal, as it is commonly known among gays.

He says crystal is everywhere and speaks with concern about a subculture of gay men who “party”--the euphemism for mixing crystal with sex. “You can pick up guys on the Internet or on phone sex lines who say they ‘like to party,’ ” he says. “Everyone knows what that means.”

The drug has become so ingrained in the gay culture, he continues, that thousands of gay men attend elegant, drug-drenched raves known as “circuit parties.” They are held once a month or so somewhere in the world. In fact, he says, the biggest circuit bash of the year will be held this very night, April 14, 2001, in Palm Springs. It’s the famous “White Party.”

Astounded at the coincidence of my timing, I drop my plans for the day and head to Palm Springs.

Known variously as crank, speed, meth, ice and glass, the drug first caught the attention of medical authorities in the 1950s. Crystal’s popularity swelled a second time in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, sparked by San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury scene and the drug’s widespread use among truckers and biker gangs.

Epidemic No. 3 has been building during the past five to seven years, especially on the West Coast, where its allure is a mixture of low price, long-lasting and powerful effect, and ease of manufacture. Its use has been documented in several areas, including California’s Central Valley, the Antelope Valley and the Inland Empire.

Much of the “information” on crystal in the gay community is anecdotal, but health-care workers, drug treatment counselors and researchers confirm its increasingly widespread use. Perhaps the best statistics that show the drug’s use by the gay community can be found in an unpublished study by UC San Francisco researchers Michael Crosby and three colleagues. Among gay and bisexual men who were interviewed in Los Angeles in 1997 and 1998, 12% said they had used crystal in the last six months. That is more than five times the percentage who used crystal in the general population, according to the most recent figures available from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

To Howard Jacobs, a former crystal user and now deputy to West Hollywood City Councilman Jeffrey Prang, its use among gays is not just epidemic. It’s pandemic. UC San Francisco’s Crosby says the drug may be contributing to a sharp increase in unprotected sex, which many experts believe is pushing HIV infection rates higher.

Elliot K., 39, is a former nurse and recovering addict who recently completed a yearlong residential drug treatment program in North Hollywood. How much unsafe sex is he aware of between gay men who use crystal? “On a scale of 1 to 10,” he says, “9 1/2.” He describes marathon sex sessions at bathhouses that last three days.

Condoms?

Very scarce, he says.

Elliot’s statement is startling, but I want answers about Steve, whose HIV infection had nothing to do with crystal. By the time Steve became hooked on the drug, according to his mom’s calculations, he had known he was infected with HIV for at least nine years. Yet as I search for reasons for his death, I keep bumping into the nasty relationship between crystal and HIV.

Virtually every gay man I talked to who once used the drug describes the high in sexual terms. It makes them insatiable, they say; they feel invincible. When they are high, their fear of sexually transmitted diseases is obliterated. When they are off it, they are often depressed, paranoid and desperate to get high again. Medical experts agree.

At the Van Ness Recovery House, a residential drug treatment center in Hollywood for gay men, lesbians and transgenders, a 52-year-old former police officer and transportation executive named William says that he has battled a crystal addiction for seven years. It cost him his job, decimated his retirement account and nearly cost him his life. He thinks he is still HIV-negative, but he hasn’t been tested in two years. If he used crystal, he explains, he wanted sex, and he would go anywhere to find it.

“It was a compulsion,” says William, adding that he had “unsafe sex” 99% of the time. The aphrodisiac quality helps make crystal fiendishly difficult to kick, but it’s no picnic to begin with. Crystal methamphetamine causes the release of dopamine and other chemicals in the brain linked to feelings of well-being, and inhibits their return to a normal state. And crystal is long-lasting, with a half-life of about 12 hours. That means half a day later, there’s still half the amount of the drug in your bloodstream. The high is very high; the low feels like an eternity. You just want to get back up.

These days, crystal is purer and more addictive than ever, according to Dr. Tom Newton, who heads inpatient services at UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Program. It is, he says, arguably harder to kick than heroin. “There is no methadone-type remedy for crystal addicts,” Newton adds.

The most alarming statistics about crystal use and its relationship to unprotected sex are for gay men under 30. According to a study this year by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4.5% of gay and bisexual men between the ages of 23 and 29 are newly infected annually. The CDC study was based on a survey of nearly 3,000 gay and bisexual men in major U.S. cities. Jonathan Fielding, L.A. County’s public health director, conducted an analysis of the CDC study for The Times and found that 56% of those surveyed who reported using crystal over the last six months also said that they had unprotected anal sex--the most efficient sexual transmission route for the HIV virus. Among those men who did not use crystal, 41% had unprotected anal sex.

Sociologist Cathy Reback, director of the prevention division of the Van Ness Recovery House, estimates that while 20% to 30% of all gay men in L.A. are HIV-positive, the infection rate is much higher among crystal users. At the Friends Health Center, an outpatient clinic for gay and bisexual meth users that Reback runs with researcher Steve Shoptaw, almost two-thirds of the clients are HIV-positive. At the Van Ness Recovery House, the rate is close to 90%, Shoptaw says.

In Los Angeles, public health officials are finally catching up to the surge of unprotected sex among gay men. Tom West, lead social services specialist for West Hollywood, says workshops and forums on crystal abuse are now being offered by the city. A psychedelic orange poster campaign spreads the word: Meth + Sex = AIDS.

“It’s not enough,” says Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Weinstein, who recently lost a bid to put condoms in public places in West Hollywood, says the city needs to crack down on after-hours bars that cater to patrons under 21. He’d also like to ban alcohol companies from sponsoring events held by the city of West Hollywood. “If you look at AIDS prevention in Los Angeles right now, we were better off five years ago.”

I arrive in Palm Springs at about 8 p.m. Bill, the guy in the “DEA” T-shirt, had directed me to the hub of the desert’s gay district, Hunter’s Video Bar. The place is buzzing and about 95% male. Music floods the dance floor near the bar. I strike up a conversation with Geoff, a bartender with the hollowed-out cheekbones of an AIDS patient on triple-combination therapy.

As he hands out bottles of beer, he speaks frankly about crystal, the drug of choice of his dead lover. People on the drug “go on a sexual hunt, like a lion heading for the kill,” he says, shouting over the music.

Geoff’s lover died of AIDS before the drug cocktails came into regular use, but he says his partner wouldn’t have benefited from them anyway. A crystal addict doesn’t eat and hardly sleeps. To stay on the AIDS drugs, you need to adhere to a strict regimen. “You aren’t getting nutrients, and you are putting poison into your body,” he says. “I have seen too many people who are HIV-positive die because they were taking crystal.”

Geoff gives me directions to the White Party, which is within walking distance at the Wyndham Hotel and the adjacent Palm Springs Convention Center. I head for the hotel. Pairs of men dressed in white are heading in that direction as well. They have come from New York, Puerto Rico, Sunland--thousands of them, of every ethnicity and background. They are math teachers, clerks, lawyers, publicists, fitness trainers, computer scientists, social workers, city council members. They are here for a long weekend of dancing, drugs and sex.

They speak freely as we walk, even after I say I’m a reporter. Some tell me they are careful with sex but express concern about the vast number of partyers who are having unsafe encounters. Their greatest agitation is with young guys, HIV-negative guys, guys who hadn’t watched their friends die slowly of AIDS in the ‘80s. Complacency has set in, they say, fueled by the ads in gay magazines showing HIV-positive men climbing mountains. The White Party is the centerpiece of the four-day “circuit party.” The most popular drugs tonight, my new acquaintances say, will be crystal and ecstasy--although a number of other illegal substances will also be present. How many of their fellow partyers are using drugs? Estimates range from 85% to 98%.

It’s a lot of drug use for a long weekend of events that Palm Springs Mayor William Kleindienst later says may have drawn as many as 23,000 people.

We arrive at the party and step inside the vast, transformed convention center hall. It’s another planet, one of pure sensation. Throbbing techno music vibrates beneath my skin and jangles my eardrums. I can’t help but move to the beat, joining thousands of exultant, sweaty, white-clad men dressed in outfits ranging from loose white T-shirts and tight white jeans, to outrageously showy costumes, to nothing more than a few strategically placed feathers.

Both outside and inside, on a platform above the dancers, white couches and oversized chairs hold groups of men who are lounging, flirting, drinking. But the action is on the dance floor, where drugs can easily be ingested nasally.

The American Journal of Public Health reported this year that in a survey of men who frequent circuit parties, 95% said they had used psychoactive drugs at such circuit parties. One-fifth reported having suffered an overdose at an event. So party organizers have taken precautions: They have set up an in-house “MASH” unit, as Kleindienst would later call it. This temporary clinic employs two medical doctors for the sole purpose of dealing with overdoses and other party-related problems. They also practice prevention, plowing through the crowd to look for people “at risk” of overdosing.

Palm Springs paramedics would eventually treat 13 overdoses that night, in addition to whatever the MASH team handled at its temporary clinic.

I survey the scene for a while and continue talking to revelers. But facing an early Sunday morning shift at KNX, I head home long before the party peaks. I’m exhausted, but my mind is racing. I’m beginning to understand more about my friend Steve Smith.

Within days of the white party, i pull out the bulky envelope of Steve’s writings, which his mother had sent me following the memorial. It’s chilling to realize how clearly he understood that, for him, mixing sex and drugs would be lethal.

At Promises Westside Sober Living, a 30-day residential drug treatment program that Steve attended a few months before his death, he filled out a questionnaire about his habit. Under the section labeled “Leisure Time,” he wrote: “Sex remains a dangerous quagmire, full of potential for relapse--sexuality is now inextricably tied to crystal meth usage.” In response to the question, “How have chemicals placed your life or the lives of others in jeopardy?” he wrote: “Driving while impaired, hanging around with drug dealers (the threat of violence pervasive), allowing unsafe sex.”

Steve first flirted with crystal meth in the fall of 1996, some two years after he left KNX. By all accounts, he probably began the final steps toward his death several months after he began using crystal when, following a painful break-up, he began “slamming,” or injecting the drug into his veins rather than snorting it. Drug counselors say injecting the drug creates a more powerful high and is a turning point in crystal abuse. Even people who have used recreational drugs for decades bottom out precipitously once they begin slamming.

Steve tried to sort out his crystal habit twice: at an outpatient center in September 1997 and four months later, at Promises. During the outpatient program, he also was seeing a therapist and enrolled in the Aids Project Los Angeles Addictive Behaviors program. Through all of that, Hazel Smith says, he was still apparently using, “as he expressed continuing paranoia, extreme depression, inability to attend to task, lots of crying.”

In a letter home he wrote, “this is much worse than what I went through when I learned I was HIV-infected and later became so ill with AIDS. There’s even less known about my future now.”

In another Promises questionnaire filled out less than three months before his death, he was asked to speak in the voice of his drug of choice. “My name is crystal methamphetamine, and what I gave to Steve was euphoria & escape--oblivion. I got him out of his head. I turned him into an unstoppable sexual decathlete with an insatiable sexual appetite. And I helped him forge a new identity--an angry, slightly dangerous junkie; far more dramatic than the cerebral, strait-laced journalist he had been.

“What I took away from Steve,” he continued, “was his health, his pride in his appearance, his conscience, his rationality, his discretion, his sense of accountability and responsibility to other people. I stole his commitment to writing, and his discipline. I warped and distorted his values & sense of morality.”

Steve had been devoted to his family, traveling three or four times a year to Montana for at least a week--visiting, rafting, hiking, tickling his niece and nephew. In his drug treatment journal, he acknowledged that he felt “profoundly supported” by his parents. Yet three months before he died, he showed up strung out and late to a Christmastime family reunion in Cabo San Lucas, having missed the plane due to “a three-day [drug] run,” as he wrote in a journal. “I arrived looking like death. Caused alarm and anger on my parents’ part.”

Hazel says he spent most of the vacation in bed, feeling anxious, depressed and guilty. Some weeks later, he woke up one morning half-dressed on a lawn, on a busy street on the east end of Hollywood. It took him three days to find where he had parked his car, which still had his wallet in it. In the meantime, he was racking up hundreds of dollars a month in returned check fees.

As he pushed away his friends, Steve’s once-pristine apartment took on the look and smell of a flophouse. His mother wrote in a journal the day her son died: “The night-blooming jasmine you so lovingly tended is now reduced to brown, barren vines along the fence. The closet, (usually) filled with clean underwear, socks and shirts placed in piles with mathematical precision, now all is in ultimate disarray. But it’s the bathroom that finally does me in. I see black hair-like growth in the bowl of the toilet. What chemical detritus could have caused this phenomenon? It looks sinister, alive, and I am shivering.”

Jon Bailey, longtime conductor of the Gay Men’s Chorus, was fond enough of Steve to sit with him as he lay in a coma, dying. He believes Steve’s actions reflected the turmoil of someone who could no longer keep up the appearance of being someone he wasn’t. “Everything he did, his editorials, his singing, his body, his clothes, even his mind, it was all well-crafted. The dope was the expression of what was under all that--the part you didn’t see--the gnawing sense of inadequacy. It was a way to not feel.”

Steve’s close friend Joseph Maurer, an award-winning writer and producer of films for television, acknowledges it was incredibly difficult for Steve to just “be.”

“I said to him often, he was so addicted to the drama of it all. I told him, ‘You’ve got to get to the point where just getting up in the morning and being a regular person and having a regular day, where you’re not the star and you’re not the devil--you’re at neither end of the spectrum--where you’re just a human being, taking your licks with the rest of the world. When you can get to that place and authentically love yourself, you’ll be OK.’ ”

Howard Jacobs, who documented his battle with AIDS in The Times’ Westside Weekly section, says that since he quit using crystal, he has a much greater respect for his body. He now understands the notion that “your body has a value. You’re really sharing something special with someone. That’s not a lesson you really get as a man.”

So maybe Steve took the drug to escape from internal pressures. Maybe he took it to feel sexually invincible and naughty. But suicide?

In a survey by UCLA’s Tom Newton, 1,700 people just entering California state prisons were asked whether they had considered suicide in the last several days. Twenty percent said yes. Of those who had used drugs of any kind, the figure was 30%. And those who had used crystal? Fifty percent.

“So to me it’s very clear,” says Newton. “Methamphetamine is a uniquely potent drug for inducing depression so severe that people feel like committing suicide.”

Deeply hurt and angry at Steve’s suicide, Maurer now realizes it can take many attempts at rehab to get it right. He also has a greater appreciation for crystal’s pernicious nature. “I hold him responsible for getting addicted. But I can’t hold him responsible for all the things he did under the influence of the drug. Being with him when he was so paranoid [toward the end], it was like being with another human being. There was this furtive, terrified, frantic guy. He was sure FBI agents were following him. By then he was using so much meth, and hanging out with so many bad people, I thought maybe they were following him.”

Steve swallowed all those pills and drank all that vodka about one week after relapsing from his most concerted effort until then to stay sober. Then, says Hazel, he began a downward spiral of crystal, other drugs and alcohol that ended in his overdose on April 5, 1998.

When he heard the crash of Steve falling to the floor, upstairs neighbor and longtime buddy Scott Reader ran down to find Steve still conscious. He asked Reader: “Should I throw up? I took about 90 pills.” After being rushed to the hospital, he slipped into a coma and died the next day.

In Steve’s hospital room the day he died, Jon Bailey watched Hazel lean over her comatose firstborn child and whisper softly into his ear: “You never felt strong enough, good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough. But where you’re going, you’ll be perfect.”

Today, Steve’s friends are still divided as to whether he meant to die. They generally agree he was unable to tolerate his own weakness with regard to drugs. “He had a tremendous need to be a good person,” Maurer says. “He had a tremendous need to matter to the world. That can be a very healthy and motivating thing. And if you can’t accept your limits it can be very destructive. The scary part of this drug is no matter how strong you are, you are transformed. You become the vessel for a drug. Your self leaves the party.”

Was it strange he left no note?

“I think he was so out of it, he was looking for any pill that might help him at that moment,” Maurer says. “He was in so much pain. The reality is he was killing himself by being addicted.”

we drifted to the middle fork in the Flathead River on four rafts, each carrying a handful of Steve’s closest family members and friends. We stopped along a gravelly shoreline directly across the river from the cabin, a place Steve loved and a spot “the family could see from the river’s edge below the cabin whenever we wished to,” Hazel said.

The ceremony was organized with former Air Force officer Les’ military precision. This was important, since at the very same time that day, another close friend was releasing some of Steve’s ashes in the Atlantic, near another of his favorite spots: Provincetown. Hazel opened the canister of pale gray ashes. I couldn’t help but notice how handsomely they blended in with the speckled stone on which she emptied them. Steve would have appreciated the color coordination, being dapper even in death.

Hazel read from Isaiah, then suddenly, in a gust of wind, the ashes rushed upward, flaring out, “like an angel’s wings,” as Bailey recalls.

On this cloudless day, under an endless cornflower blue sky, flanked by West Glacier’s Eagle Head Mountain to the east and the Montana Rockies to the west, I looked around at our brave memorial party and I was overcome. I grabbed Bailey’s arm and said: “He knew these people loved him. He had to know.”

“He knew,” Bailey said, “but he couldn’t feel it here,” pounding his heart with his fist.

Then we hurled rocks into the river, as Hazel suggested, to put all our frustration and anger at Steve in those stones, and throw them away.