As she did last season, house manager Jennifer Gimenez is set to give us her weekly take on each episode of Sober House with Dr. Drew. Below, Jenn talks about the fourth episode of the show, which chronicled what she refers to as “one of the craziest nights of my existence…”
One thing we didn’t go over regarding last week’s episode was a stray shot of Tom Sizemore with what looked like tubing tied around his arm in his apartment. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then I saw that so many people noticed that online.
Everybody asked me about that. That was kind of weird. I actually rewound it a couple times. When he returned, honestly he tested negative and I retested him the next day, as well. Also, there were no track marks on him. When they run off and throw tantrums and then come back, you really kind of want to assess them, and look at them and look at their arms and their nose and, you know, smell their breath and all that stuff, and he passed. That made it extra weird, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
The first thing that happens on this episode is that everyone shares their essays. Many of them, like Mike and Dennis did not take this assignment seriously.
When they were reading them, I was biting my tongue, trying not laugh. At the end of the day, I can’t tell them what to do, I can’t force them. At this point, I got Dennis to give me his phone and to actually write the essay and follow direction. It was like, “Wo, I think I’ve earned some respect here…to the best of his ability…for that moment.” At least he was willing to do some work even if it was just, “Why” 150 times…
And getting Mike to do anything was a miracle. He’s constantly saying he’s sick and saying his arm hurts, that’s why he can’t write. Then he saw everyone else was doing it, and that’s the thing with Mike. I think that he heard Kari Ann punched the camera guy, so he thought he could get away with hitting one. He follows everyone else in the house. As for Tom, he wrote this thing saying how his recovery came first, and soon after, he decided to throw a fit. It’s like, two seconds later, he’s trying to throw a vase at me. It shows just how explosive Tom is all the time. Here you start seeing how crazy Tom really is.
So he was telling you that he’s done with the show and that you have to give him his phone back. You knew this was just a ploy, right?
Yes. He said he was going to call the cops, but he handed over the phone to me. Also, there was a house phone literally in that living room area that we could all use. He could have asked me to use my phone. Tom wanted it his way and if he doesn’t get it his way he explodes. I’m going to get angry over that.
He left and came back. No surprise there, right?
No. It wasn’t like this was the first time he had left, either. Plus, I know how is Tom from being in treatment with him. I knew how explosive he is. He’s not going to scare me any more than anyone else in that house at that point. What was he going to? I think he wanted me to get crazy.
Here’s something that was a surprise: Mike went out on a search for “Thai food,” and ended up coming back to the house clean.
He was lucky that he didn’t get his “Thai food.” That’s a big thing that a lot of addicts have: they have code words for drugs and it was really sad to see that he was willing to go to any lengths to try to get them. He came back and was very aggressive. But the thing is that Mike was constantly in my face telling me he hated me, he was going to kill me, he was going to do this and that. So Mike being aggressive wasn’t exactly out of character. Then he came back, fighting us about taking the test, shutting the door in Will’s face. He did ultimately test negative, which was such a relief at the moment because there was so much insanity going on. Heidi had just come back from Nevada and was like, “Oh, I can’t pee yet,” and I knew something was wrong. There was so much tension in the house. It was a full moon that night and everything just started exploding at 7 or 8 and didn’t stop. I swear to you, I don’t know how that night turned out OK. I don’t know how no one got hurt that night. It was so crazy. At that moment, I was in survival mode.
Speaking of Heidi, there was more drama between her and Tom.
They were antagonizing each other constantly and it was maddening at that moment. They are both fighting and they are both yelling that they are going to leave. They were throwing tantrums while everyone upstairs was freaking out. I was playing ref.
And then, of course, Heidi did test positive. Did you think it was strange that she was smiling when you informed her you found amphetamines, opiates and benzos in her pee?
That smile was maybe her defense mechanism of how she was kind of bummed out that she did that. Her disease got the best of her. It was either a smile of embarrassment, like, “What am I supposed to do? I f***ed up,” or, at that point, the disease was really in Heidi. The disease took over. Really, when she got into it with Tom last episosde, I saw Heidi’s hope in recovery just diminish. And it’s really hard to get that back.
And the thing that just obliterates movie night is the fight that Tom and Mike have.
Tom was saying that he was tired of hearing Mike treat me like s***. I mean, everybody was. What you guys don’t see is how Mike treated me like s*** the whole entire time. There were maybe five minutes out of that day that he didn’t go off on me. And it’s kind of hard to be around that all the time. But also they were just trying to get better, and Tom just lost it. He literally was so angry that I think he deflected the anger that was coming between him and Heidi onto Mike. There was also some animosity between Mike and Tom. Tom would make side remarks like, “God, he’s getting on my nerves.” I told him to pay attention to himself, and obviously in this case he didn’t. That really was one of the craziest nights of my existence. And it was madness every single day. I feel at that moment it was no longer the Sober House, it was the recovery house. There were so many other things that people were recovering from, and so many things were going on, and so many more internal things and emotional things and issues that were being brought to the forefront. I’ve never seen so much unrelenting chaos in a house.
Did you start to feel like you were going crazy?
Yeah. I broke down that night, alone. If I lost it in front of the group, then they all would have lost it. They were literally all looking at me, staring. There were no words being said by anybody, so I had to just say calm and be like, “You’re gonna be fine.” I don’t know if Mother Teresa would have been able to keep her sanity that night
Tags: celebrity rehab,
In The News,
jennifer gimenez,
Journal,
LoVe,
SOBERHOUSE 2,
upate,
VH1
Loading ...
(5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)