By Rob Lowe

Rob! Rob! Pick up, it’s your mother!” I’m standing over my answering machine with its seventy-three unanswered messages. “Rob, please. Are you there?” begs my mother, clearly in a panic. But I am too messed up to pick up the phone; there is no way I can face her in my condition.

“Your grandfather is in the hospital. He’s had a massive heart attack.”

I listen to my mom as she describes his critical condition and asks for my help. Still, I do nothing. I stare at the answering machine, frozen, until my mother hangs up.

As shame and guilt begin to penetrate my altered state, I begin to hatch a plan of attack. I need to chug the last of the tequila, I tell myself. So I can get to sleep, so I can wake up ASAP and deal with this.

This insane logic holds right up until I catch a glance of myself in the bathroom mirror. Then, very slowly, I turn and face myself full on. I’m so hammered that I can barely stand. The girl I love has just left me, because I can’t keep my word and I have no integrity. My grandfather is dying. My mother is in crisis, desperate for help and comfort, and I am cowering and hiding in shameful avoidance. I have arrived at the bottom.

Since I was a boy I’ve been running. Running to make my mark. Running to avoid reality. Running to avoid pain.

And now … a moment of clarity. I can run no longer.

I go into my bedroom, past the sleeping girl, a total stranger, and find my wallet. In it is a business card that I have carried for over a year. I find it and pull it out. It’s from a drug and alcohol counselor named Betty Wyman. I take her card, head back to my office, and sit next to the phone. I hear the terrible chirping of the early-morning birds. I watch the cityscape, gray on the horizon as the sun begins to rise. A new day is beginning.

I make the call. It’s May 10, 1990.

There are many kinds of rehabs. You can pretty much get any setup that suits you. You’ve got your shaved-head cuckoo’s nests and hard-core lockdowns, you’ve got your latte-sipping, horsebackridin’, yoga-centric country clubs. You’ve got your remote, Spartan locations; you’ve got ’em smack-dab in L.A., convenient for visits from managers, agents, publicists, and dealers.

I’m on a plane headed to Arizona for a middle-of-the-road version. Betty Wyman, in her wisdom, got me the hell out of L.A. to a serious rehab, but well short of a lockdown. Less than forty-eight hours have passed since I called her, but Betty moved quickly when I said, “Help me. I want to stop. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.” Now I sit, shaking with anxiety, next to her associate, Bob, who is escorting me to the monkey farm.

Bob is a former Hells Angel. He’s tattooed head to toe, with a beard that makes him look like Charles Manson but a voice that sounds like Kermit the Frog.

“Let me tell you my story,” says Bob, attempting to comfort my now crushing anxiety, and to bond us together.

“I first remember feeling different and scared and anxious when I was a little boy and my mom invited the mailman into our apartment. We found out later, but didn’t know then, that she was a paranoid schizophrenic,” he says in his sweet, Kermit-like singsong.

“Anyway, she stabbed the mailman to death, then cut up his body with a butcher knife. She made me lie down in our bathtub and placed his severed limbs on top of me. She told me that God would be angry but this would protect me.” Bob takes a sip from his fifteenth cup of black coffee and continues. “Anyway, that was hard for me. And growing up after Mom was committed, I got into heroin and selling it. I went to prison. But when I got out, I got sober and have been now for seventeen years.”

I try to conjure up an appropriate response to this story, but my instincts tell me that since there is no way to top it, I should just take it in. Bob smiles. “Don’t you worry about a thing. You are right where you should be. Scared. Freaked out and shattered. Ain’t nobody ever gotten sober who wasn’t.”

The rehab (I won’t name it, to protect anonymity, and any names I use here have been changed) sits in the low foothills of glowing, red-rock mountains. There is nothing but saguaro cactus for miles. If I decide to flee, it will be a long walk to civilization.

But I won’t flee. Bob will check me in and say good-bye, and I will begin one of the most exhilarating, liberating, and exciting four weeks of my life. Scary, yes, and filled with unspeakable emotional discomfort, but for me, it’s unquantifiable relief that I am being shown a different way to live. I am so tired of the lying, my inability to keep my word, the bullshit relationships, the hangovers, the cover-ups, and the helplessness to stop doing the things I truly want to stop doing. I had long ago become a creation that was an amalgam of self-crafted persona built to succeed and public image made to be consumed, piled on top of a precarious shell of a little boy wanting to be loved. Finally, the whole thing has caved in around me, and I am thrilled. Now, just maybe, I could find out who I really am.

My roommate is a loud, snoring, middle-aged cross-dresser. I melt wax and put it into my ears to sleep at night. I’m gonna be here for thirty days, and I’m not gonna make it without sleep.

Unlike in some rehabs of today, there are very strict ground rules here. Whereas now a rehabbing starlet can check in and still swan around the Malibu Country Mart to get a frappuccino and a copy of Us Weekly to take to her manipedi before her photo shoot, we have no reading materials, TV, privileges to leave, or even caffeine. It’s for serious folks only, the Harvard of treatment centers.

I am under the care of a hip, young counselor named Mike. And being hip is a big plus for me because my greatest fear is that being sober means being boring. And that, to me, would be worse than cirrhosis of the liver.

I am also worried about people finding out I am in rehab. When I share this with Mike he says, “You don’t think people know you party too much? You should hope they hear you’re getting help!” But it proves to be a moot point as by the third day I have to hide in the pool to escape the helicopters from the National Enquirer. They tell me that there is a wonderful program that’s helped millions get sober called Alcoholics Anonymous.

I wouldn’t know. My level of anonymity consists of being on the Enquirer cover, dressed in my underwear (they used a movie still), with a headline about rehab for sex addiction, which in hindsight is an improvement from my last national media exposure—at least this time I have underwear—but it pisses me off because the sex addicts in the center have much more interesting stories and treatments than my group of drinkers did.

But my relationships with women (and every other relationship in my life) are a big part of the puzzle that was worked on each day in therapy. I dig into my issues with my mother, her illnesses, my father and abandonment, and my relationship with being famous. I am surprised by what I learn about myself. I assumed that since I love “the scene,” I also love crowds and people and small talk and the like. Free of alcohol, I learn that while I do love people, I hate small talk, am bored by idle banter, and am wildly uncomfortable in big rooms with people I don’t know. I want a real connection, not a surface one, and in its absence, I will medicate my discomfort and boredom.

Being in treatment lets my real self emerge. But first, it will have to gradually strangle the good-looking, successful, charming poster-boy pod person that stunted its growth many years ago. There is a school of thought that believes your emotional maturity is frozen at the exact age you become famous. My experience tells me this is more true than not, and I got famous as a teenager. So, if I want to be a fully functioning, sober adult, I had better get busy.

Sheryl is the only person other than family I let visit me. And showing her true colors, she works from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. on location in Seattle, drives an hour and a half, catches a plane, flies three and a half hours to see me for the one hour allotted on Thursdays, makes the return trip, and is back at work that same night.

I am never happier to see anyone than when I see her mane of blonde hair in the window of the arriving cab. We hold hands in the dayroom (anything else was grounds for expulsion) and walk along the trails through the enormous cactus.

“I’m proud of you. I love you,” she says. And I feel better already.

Fridays are graduation days. I’m standing in the large circle we form to surround those who are leaving this co-coon to try their hand at a new life in the real world. Some won’t make it ninety days; most won’t make it beyond a few years. And for some, this is not their first time in treatment. Some come back again and again, more broken and yet more brave each time. It’s painful to watch. I don’t want to do this again. Not ever.

I know two things: I take direction for a living and I’m competitive. This gives me great advantage. If they tell me to stand on my head to stay sober, I’ll do it. And I won’t let anyone get the better of me while I try. So as I slowly gather my days free of alcohol or any mind- altering substance, I know that I won’t give up my string of days, my time, for anyone or anything. I can be so extraordinarily self-centered, now I will try to use that for a greater good.

I would kill for a cup of coffee. I would drown puppies for a Big Mac. I would really also very much like to get laid. Forget not drinking for thirty days, how about not having sex! I mean, I hadn’t gone thirty hours previously! And what would that be like stone cold sober? Without even a glass of wine to loosen me up?

Will I really never drink again? No toast on New Year’s, no celebratory sip at my wedding (if I ever have one), no beer with the boys—if I ever father a boy? Not even a sip? Not ever?

After days and days of therapy, discussion groups, watching some very shattered people pull themselves together, tugging at the frayed strands of their lost lives, it is time to leave. I’ve been to “sober school” and as always was the first to sit in the front row, ready to learn. And I loved every inspiring, painful minute.

But now, as I stand in the good-bye circle, I’m filled with shaky apprehension. In three hours I will be back in L.A., in the bachelor pad, right back in the middle of life designed by a man I hope I no longer am.

But Sheryl will be with me. Over the four weeks of treatment I earned her trust and another chance for us to be together. I hug my counselor, Mike, good-bye. He looks me hard in the eye.

“Remember. You can be one of those celebrities who go in and out of rehab or you can just stay sober. It’s completely up to you.”

Sheryl and I slide into the cab for the ride to the airport and back to our lives. We pull onto the beautiful, winding desert road, the scenery extraordinary on all sides. I try to look ahead, to see where the road is leading, but I can’t.

After rehab, Rob and Sheryl were married in 1991 and now have two sons. Among other career successes, he won an Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations for his role in the TV series “The West Wing.” This article was adapted from Lowe’s book, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, published by Henry Holt and Company. © 2011 by Robert Lowe. Lowe has been sober for 21 years.