My illness was potentially fatal, a young nurse informed Debbie
The Times – Times2 – 27th May 2024
Pages 4 & 5
Chris Stein and Debbie Harry achieved global fame with Blondie, but his drug abuse was a catalyst for a rare disease. While he was hospitalised, she fed his habit, he recalls in this exclusive extract.
By 1979, Debbie Harry and I were really big stars and it was very weird. I’m a very optimistic person and through this all, I always perhaps egomaniacally assumed that everything Blondie did would be successful. At the same time the pressures were immense and, for me, getting stoned definitely buffered me from a lot of tensions and helped me tunnel-vision more of it.
Cocaine was everywhere all the time. We would meet some big celebrity and he would pull a bag of blow out of his pocket. But a lot of people were doing heroin as well. People we knew were functioning addicts. We began seeing a guy named Al who turned us onto the art chasing the dragons. We had screwed around with sniffing heroin already, but smoking it was pretty insidious. One night a neighbour of ours got mugged in Central Park. He fought off his attacker but got banged up and came over to our apartment. He was all bruised, so we chased some dragons with him without mentioning what it was. I think he thought it was some form of weed. He definitely left feeling better.
That was the problem; it made you feel better. At one point in one of the eternal Blondie tours, everyone was about to travel from Switzerland to Paris. Somebody in Zurich had given Debbie and me a bunch of heroin. As we were boarding the plane, after we went through the metal detector, one of the crew guys right behind us had a metal container of hashish in his shirt pocket that set off the alarm and he got nabbed. Everyone in the band and crew from the culprit back was taken away. Two security guys came on the plane and told us they’d be removing our luggage to investigate and asked if we wanted to leave the flight and accompany our bags as they were searched. Debbie and me said no, thanks, and stayed on the flight. We did have this fairly large quantity of drugs with us and we became concerned lest we get busted arriving in Paris. We dumped most of the dope in the plane toilet but put a small amount in a cuff of Debbie’s pants. Of course nobody even looked at us when we landed, and we spent the afternoon stoned, wandering around the Champs-Élysées while everyone else sat around in an office at the Zurich airport in their underwear.
I had a cocaine habit too and eventually my nose and sinuses were wrecked. Then very quickly I got bad sores in my mouth and my diet got very restricted. I ate a lot of tofu ice cream. The last act of deterioration was getting gross sores on my legs that didn’t heal. We made the rounds of a few doctors and finally one young guy we’d been put in touch with came over and said, “It could be pemphigus,” which was the first I’d heard the word. He said I should really be in hospital and called an ambulance. I got carried out in the middle of the afternoon on a sunny day. I said I was going to be okay to the doorman of the building next door who seemed concerned and got taken to Lenox Hill Hospital and put on the burn ward.
I had a little corner room with views of Park Avenue. If it were a studio apartment at that location, it would have been an expensive one. The first weeks were very fever-dream. The treatment involved high doses of the steroid prednisone, which is used for a lot of things, including skin diseases and inflammation. This plus my generally wrecked state, bad diet and drug habits combined to really put me into an alternate reality. Debbie was out scoring drugs to bring back to the hospital. I was frequently in a half sleep where I would see her in different countries with strange landscapes, walking around and searching. I gradually must have adjusted to the steroids and I settled into a vague routine.
Initially I was quite scared and I can only imagine what Debbie was feeling. Lenox Hill was close to our house and Debbie would sometimes stay on a cot in the room and sometimes go home for the night. It took a while for me to get an official diagnosis. I had a lot of tests done, including a spinal tap, which is a really miserable thing that must be what getting shot is like. I was very glad to deaden the post-tap aftermath with dope. I wondered how people did it otherwise. After a while I started hearing that I had this thing called pemphigus vulgaris. I thought I would have like to have a condition with a better name; I didn’t like that one at all. Some young nurse pulled Debbie aside and told her what I had was potentially fatal. It was a hundred or so years ago. Debbie was needlessly terrorised.
I was irrationally scared and very resistant to even leaving the room at first but they sent two really cute nurses to convince me to get into a large vat of chemicals – Betadine and whatever else made the water in this huge steel whirlpool bath a rust-blood colour. My whole back was covered in sores, and getting lowered into this tank was after a while an okay experience.
Days drifted by. I had my own bathroom with harsh neon lights. When I looked in the mirror it would bring back fragments of dreams I’d had of looking into a mirror in the same cold blue-white light. My mouth calmed down and I was able to eat normal food again. I gained some weight back. The doctors figured out that I was on drugs and tried giving me some methadone but my main physician was a skin guy and really didn’t know about addiction so he just gave me 20 milligrams of it or such and it didn’t make a dent. Maintaining a habit was difficult enough in the real world, but the hospital situation exacerbated everything. Supplies would dissipate and I’d go through stages of withdrawal.
About a month in, Jerry Hall was at the hospital having a baby and some camped-out media people spotted Debbie. The story was quickly all over the place. A photographer got a shot of Debbie in a supermarket looking dishevelled and that was printed with accompanying mournful tidings in several places. One afternoon a kid who was around 13 appeared at the door of my room and said hello. I talked to him for a minute and then he suddenly pulled out a camera and attempted to take my picture. I looked like a mess and just pulled a blanket over my head and yelled for security and the kid ran off. I figured he had probably attempted to get a picture of Jerry as well. I couldn’t tell if he had been encouraged by an adult or was just a fledgling paparazzi. Weirdly, this same kid called my room a few days later to apologise but I told him to f*** off and hung up on him.
Most of the people we knew assumed I had Aids; the first cases had been mentioned in the media a few years earlier. I don’t think that I was ever worried about dying and after a while the doctors kept repeating that I was improving and must be doing something right, either praying or thinking positively or something. I got to know this one orderly kid and we would sit around smoking pot late at night. I had a TV and got very invested in watching General Hospital. I built a few Star Wars model kits and discovered that I could get mail at the hospital. I ordered stuff from an antiques and oddities company that I’d dealt with for years. I got a really great old African drum, swords and a couple of masks and knives that were placed around the room.
A particularly severe winter descended. Major blizzards hampered Debbie’s efforts at procuring drugs and I kept dealing with withdrawal. I was in Lenox Hill for three months. I missed a whole season.
I finally was discharged in the early spring. Prednisone made me heavier and inflated my face a bit. Debbie brought a supermarket shopping cart to the hospital because I had accumulated so much crap. We pushed it back to the house.
Under a Rock by Chris Stein (Little, Brown £25). To order a copy go to times bookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
