Rock / Drugs / Scissors

A grinning Jeffrey Sebelia stands before me in a narrow hallway under a fluorescent light. He has several large words etched into his throat that weren’t there when I last saw him. But that was before he surprised so many of his friends by leaving town to become a reality television star on Bravo’s “Project Runway.” As he leads me into his large downtown L.A. work space, packed with garment racks and green steel industrial sewing machines, the sound of gunfire erupts in the street below, followed by an explosion. Sebelia laughs as we move to a window and lean out, looking down on a phalanx of soldiers advancing through a nearby intersection. Several cars are burning, and a few pedestrians run past screaming. Then a voice bellows over a bullhorn and the action halts. Sebelia slides back inside and lights a hand-rolled cigarette. He tells me it’s like this all the time down here. It turns out that the battle is being staged for a big-budget film based on a toy line. It’s entertainment.

Real life can be far more interesting. Not what you see on television, reality or otherwise, but what you don’t. Everybody has a story, and some are better than others. Sebelia has a pretty good one.

For the last three years, the wiry, punkish-looking Sebelia has run his own label, Cosa Nostra. The look can best be described as dystopian rock ‘n’ roll--”Blade Runner” meets Vivienne Westwood’s Sex Pistols with a touch of Oscar Wilde dandy. His dark, zippered biker jackets and wax-printed drainpipe jeans have become popular among sullen young actors and preening rock stars of both sexes. The line sells at high-end boutiques from here to Hong Kong.

“Project Runway,” which tapes in New York, features 15 fashion designers of varying experience, some professional and others just starting out, all of whom compete in a series of elimination design challenges. Each week their creations are judged, and the loser is sent packing by a panel that includes uber-model Heidi Klum, who also serves as the show’s host. At the end of the season the remaining designers stage a runway show during New York’s Fashion Week, the winner claiming a prize of a new car, a spread in Elle magazine and $100,000 toward the launch of a line.

Although the fashion component of the show is interesting, the main attraction is undoubtedly the ruthless competition among the contestants. And while most, if not all, indulge in at least some duplicitous behavior, each of the three seasons has featured a standout villain. The first was a scheming schoolmarm type with the appropriately chipper name of Wendy Pepper. The second season’s appointed evildoer was an outspoken and intensely talented bisexual beatnik named Santino Rice. This season it is Sebelia who has been anointed the latest enfant terrible.

His role actually started before the competition was underway. During the first episode, Klum proclaimed the supremely confident Sebelia as “the next Santino.” The tag stuck, and not without reason. Before leaving for New York, he asked his girlfriend to pick him up a joy buzzer, an air horn and some fake dog excrement. By the seventh episode, he’d made another contestant’s mother cry. “It’s a competition,” Sebelia offers as explanation.

But these irreverent high jinks have polarized the show’s fans and provoked a barrage of sometimes rabid hostility across the Internet. He says that in one recent posting on a Television Without Pity forum, a woman wrote that at the mere appearance of Sebelia’s face on-screen, her husband would begin furiously pacing the house and describing how he wanted to kill him.

Sebelia says it was Santino himself who warned him never to look at the online message boards. As it happens, the two were friends in L.A.’s fashion scene well before either appeared on the show. Over coffee, Santino tells me, “Once you actually learn who those people are on the Internet, it doesn’t matter. There’s hate pages for everyone. There’s hate pages for Oprah. There’s even a hate page for Mother Teresa, saying she’s a star-[expletive]. Whatever.” Still, he seems genuinely surprised by the onslaught of hate mail he received. “I had nightmares and flashbacks for months after doing the show,” he says.

Five years ago, Sebelia would have agreed with those who wished him dead. His life was falling apart, and he wanted it over. Holed up in a ramshackle house in northeast Los Angeles, he had been awake for days, crying almost constantly. His girlfriend had left and he was in a deep depression, alone on a couch eating handfuls of Ecstasy and grinding his teeth. For the past year, he says, he had been growing and selling “medical” marijuana--he had a hidden basement nursery with more than 100 plants for distribution to his “patients,” all diagnosed with the same form of “hypertension.” Sebelia says he had given up heroin and other hard drugs but was smoking pot constantly, cooking with it and even smearing it on his body. He was also taking lots of LSD.

Not exactly the life he imagined back in his days playing bass with an alternative pop band called Lifter. The trio had created a buzz in the heady Silver Lake club scene and, after a brief bidding war, signed with Interscope. Their heartfelt debut album, titled “Melinda (Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt),” was eventually offered up with little fanfare--a casualty of shifting trends, record company indifference and the cliched, drug-induced self-destruction common to such scenarios. Eventually the band was released from its deal. “I was just sort of in shock about the whole thing,” Sebelia says. “I thought we would keep playing and something else would happen, but it didn’t. We just drifted apart and it was over.”

As his rock star dreams faded, Sebelia began a new career as a production designer on commercials and music videos. But then that was gone as well. Sitting alone on the couch that afternoon, he decided to hang himself. “It just seemed like the right thing to do,” he says. “I was so depressed I could hardly get out of bed. I couldn’t eat and I was having crying fits. There was this old chandelier in my bedroom. No one was supposed to be home. I took two belts, hitched them together, put one over the chandelier and the other around my neck. And I started trying to swing off of my bed.”

Luckily, a woman staying at his house showed up unexpectedly and interrupted his scheduled departure. The Musicians’ Assistance Program, a record industry organization founded to help addicted artists, paid for Sebelia to enter rehab and receive some much-needed therapy. A year later he enrolled in sewing classes at Los Angeles Trade Tech College. “It just dawned on me that I loved fashion,” he says. “And from the minute I sat down at a sewing machine, I loved it. The minute I started draping fabric on a form, I loved it--more than any drug.”

Sebelia has arrived on the set of another reality television show, “Rock Star Supernova.” The enormous soundstage at CBS Television City is dressed to resemble the beautiful old Mayan Theater in downtown Los Angeles. He is here with a rack of clothes for the show’s host and executive producer, Dave Navarro, whom he has known since his days in the rock clubs. Back in the ‘90s the lead guitarist for Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers would occasionally join Lifter on stage, and he also appeared in their rarely seen music video, “Headshot.” Cynthia Freund, the stylist for “Rock Star Supernova,” says she has been a fan of Sebelia’s Cosa Nostra line for the last year, using his clothes to outfit her celebrity clients. “It’s inspired by music but it can really appeal to anyone,” she says, then cautions, “but whoever wears it has to have some serious confidence.”

Sebelia is ushered into Navarro’s dressing room, and the two greet one another as old friends. Navarro immediately strips down and begins trying on pants and jackets, soliciting opinions from the room. With three episodes of “Supernova” remaining, he settles on three jackets. He also purchases a few items for his personal wardrobe. When asked to describe Sebelia’s style, he gives it a moment’s thought and then announces: “It’s couture meets the street with a foot in the future.” He looks over at me. “How’s that for a quote?” I ask Navarro if it surprises him to see Sebelia now as a fashion designer and television celebrity. “It doesn’t surprise me that Jeff is doing this at all,” he answers. “Because I’ve always known him as a creative guy. And creative people can branch out into different worlds. I’m a perfect example of that.”

Freund suggests I talk with Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, who appears on the show as a judge. She tells us that Lee recently wore one of Sebelia’s blazers to the Kentucky Derby, and it proved a big hit. Waiting on the soundstage, we watch as Navarro and his fellow “Supernova” judges rehearse their lines for the upcoming taping. A rotund and bald fiftysomething stand-in gyrates around the stage and lip-syncs to a Nirvana song that will later be performed by an actual contestant. When the song ends, the judges deliver their scripted comments on the yet-to-occur performance. During a short break, we manage to catch Lee and ask about the jacket. He listens, then nods enthusiastically and says something completely indecipherable that sounds like, “Yeahyeah, itwaztotally[expletive]raddude.” Sebelia and I exchange a look and ask if we should wait for a better quote. Everyone just shrugs.

I’m sitting with another old friend, Mike Coulter, in his backyard. Now graying and heavier, Coulter was the singer in Lifter. For the last month he has been having friends over each Wednesday to watch “Project Runway” and eat a homemade meal. Sebelia has been there several times, along with his girlfriend, Melanie, and their young son, Harrison. Coulter and Sebelia first met 16 years ago at a drug treatment center in Pasadena. The then-19-year-old Sebelia had been assigned as the 24-year-old Coulter’s counselor. “He seemed as nervous as I was,” Coulter says. “He had short hair and was wearing khakis and a button-down shirt--like this responsible person who was going to start a career as a drug counselor.”

The two became fast friends, and it was Coulter who taught Sebelia how to play bass. They eventually shared a series of dingy Echo Park apartments and played the neighborhood clubs. Nearly all of the songs Coulter composed were about a single doomed romance, and he would weep openly while singing them live. After Nirvana’s “Nevermind” sold millions, the record companies began searching out similarly pop-inflected alternative anthems. Lifter had a hit on college radio with “402,” which included the bittersweet nostalgic chorus: “I want to go back home and mow the lawn for my dad, I want to walk to school and get high with my friends.” When they signed with the heavyweight Interscope, both Coulter and Sebelia admit, they naively believed that their dreams of stardom were about to be realized. It didn’t help when smiling executives asked where they would be buying their big new houses. But when a large Seattle radio station began playing “402” repeatedly, Interscope called and asked it to stop. The label promised it would release the popular song as a single, but then never did.

A few months ago, Coulter says, he started taking his dog’s pain medication. Then he started using heroin and a little crack. But he says he has been clean for a month now and things seem to be slowly returning to normal. “I think one of the reasons I keep self-destructing is because I stopped playing music,” he says. “Actively denying I was interested in it. For a long time I wasn’t even able to listen to music. I hated it because it had broken my heart.”

If “Project Runway” has given Sebelia a sort of second chance, it has also helped his old friend. The two hadn’t spoken in almost a year, but as Sebelia was driving to the airport to leave for New York, he called Coulter to say hello and ask about selling some of Lifter’s songs on his website. After he returned, the two started to re-record a few of their songs, with Coulter actually singing again. When Sebelia recently unveiled some of Cosa Nostra’s latest jackets and pants, there, embossed into the fabric like ghost images of the past, were the band’s old concert fliers.

“It all ended in such tears,” Coulter says. “And when I first heard about Jeff’s success designing clothes, I had that typical jealous reaction. But then when I heard he was doing ‘Project Runway,’ it was different. I was already a big fan of the show, and was just really proud of him. And I really want him to win.”

Sebelia still lives in the house where he tried to hang himself. It looks a lot nicer now. When I show up to meet Melanie, who lives with him, I find a note on the door: She’s putting their young son down for his nap. I let myself in and wait on the couch. Minutes later, she appears, looking as motherly as one can with a two-tone mohawk. Like Sebelia, whose tattooed neck spells out Harrison Detroit and the phrase L’amore Della Mia Vita (the love of my life), Melanie recently had their son’s name etched below her collarbone.

The housewife role has admittedly not come easy for someone with so much ambition of her own. Melanie attended Juilliard and arrived in Los Angeles as a working actress and stand-up comedian. She was also a lesbian who had been accidentally shot by her cop ex-girlfriend. “I hadn’t been in a relationship with a man for eight or nine years,” she says, laughing. “I went from driving a Trans Am, dressing like a hooker, being a club DJ and doing stand-up comedy to being this kind of housewife character. I’ve come to a place of peace about my role now, but not without a few panic attacks.”

She says this situation is, in large part, a result of Sebelia’s appearance on “Project Runway.” It was she who suggested he audition, after watching their friend Santino on the show. But when Sebelia announced that he had been selected, she was less than enthusiastic. “It’s difficult to say this,” she explains, “but when he told me, I thought it was a little irresponsible. I mean, we have a baby that wakes up throughout the night and I’m going to do it all alone? The first week he was gone we both got the flu, and then the pipes blew out and the basement flooded. And there was no communication allowed. He was gone for 5 1/2 weeks and we talked on the phone three times, two of which were on camera so they were totally fake. ‘Hi honey, I’m so proud of you.’ Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘Get your ass home. Do we even have any money?’”

Although Melanie sees the benefits of Sebelia’s doing the show, she is not convinced it was necessary. She reminds me that he was already a successful designer, selling his clothes all over the world. She is also not thrilled with how the production has portrayed him. “Some people don’t realize that it’s all pretty much manufactured,” she says. “There are people who think that’s just the way he is, that he will arbitrarily take potshots at someone’s little soft cuddly mom. They see someone like Santino or Jeff and think, ‘How dare you act as if the rules of this world don’t apply to you?’ It’s kind of scary.”

Sebelia’s mother and stepfather arrive to pick up their grandson for the weekend. While they wait for him to wake from his nap, I take the opportunity to ask about their son’s chaotic life. His mother shakes her head, looking like someone who recently survived a harrowing ordeal and just hopes it’s over. She tells me of Sebelia’s intensely volatile relationship with his father. How when they divorced, Sebelia blamed himself because he had started to believe everything he did was wrong. Then there were drugs, and lots of them--cocaine and pot at 10, followed by speed and heroin. He also started running away. There were stolen cars and rehabs, and then Sebelia left for San Diego and disappeared into the streets. After that, there was the Pasadena rehab, followed by the record deal, and then things got bad again.

His mother now seems guardedly hopeful. She’s proud of her son’s success as a designer and says she enjoys “Project Runway,” though she wasn’t happy with how the crying mother episode, in which she also appeared, was edited. “They didn’t show the nightmare leading up to all that,” she says. “It made Jeff look rude without showing what was going on behind the scenes.”

When I ask if she thinks her son has been inaccurately portrayed, she hesitates. “I think he says things he wouldn’t normally say,” she offers. “He is trying to create this persona. But a small part of it is him when he gets backed into a corner. I think he’s defending himself. He’s not going to let someone walk all over him like his father did.”

Later that night, at his downtown work space, I ask Sebelia how his tumultuous past has influenced his clothing designs. He tells me about a time in the ‘80s, when he was a teenager and he and his suburban punk friends discovered New York break-dancing culture. They began reconstructing the popular clothes of the day, tearing them apart and reassembling them--over-dying shirts, ripping and safety-pinning things back together. “We developed this preppy-punk-hip-hop look with pegged pants and ripped up Le Tigre shirts,” he says. “The irreverence of that is in what I do now. I still like to take classic silhouettes and [expletive] them up.”

Sebelia reveals the latest designs for his Cosa Nostra line, and there is an undeniably dark, half-destroyed quality to them. “The world around me is [expletive], and I want to create beauty in the way I want to create it,” he says. “And I also want to express a certain amount of ugly that needs to be accepted as a part of life.”

A few weeks ago Sebelia attended the annual Sunset Junction Street Festival with Melanie and their son. The crowd was the typical Silver Lake bohemian mix of gay, straight, rich and poor of all races. And from the minute he arrived, Sebelia was embraced as a star. Tattooed punk rockers yelled his name, strangers approached to shake his hand, young girls posed for pictures with him and gay men wished him luck. “People come up to me all over the city now and say they are behind me,” he says. “The thing that feels good about that is I’m an outsider. I haven’t spent my life studying. I don’t even know who many of the influential designers are. I just know what I like and I know what I do. And I love the opportunity to sort of represent that person on the show. I get tons of e-mail from drug-addict kids. Like me, they’re unlikely candidates to be successful in anything. But they should be.”

It is well past midnight when we leave Sebelia’s work space. The sidewalks along Broadway are empty except for a few isolated souls. All of a sudden a gleaming black SUV with tinted windows rounds the corner and slows alongside us, gold rims spinning, a hip-hop bass line rumbling loudly from within. The window slides down to reveal the driver, riding low in his seat, gangster style. He stares at Sebelia for a long beat, then holds up a clenched fist and nods. “I like what you do, man,” he says.

The “Project Runway” finale airs Wednesday, Oct. 18.