Page 79 of Daisy Jones & The Six

BILLY:Finally, I get out of bed and I’m in just my skivvies. And I answer and I say, “What do you want?” And then I look and it’s Daisy.

DAISY:I just needed to say what I needed to say. I had to say it. It was then or it was never and it couldn’t be never. I couldn’t live like that.

BILLY:I was genuinely in shock. I could not believe it.

DAISY:I said, “I want to get clean.”

Billy immediately pulled me into his room. And he sat me down and he said, “Are you sure?”

I said, “Yes.”

And he said, “Let’s get you into rehab now.”

He picked up the phone and he started dialing and I got up and I hung up the phone and I said, “Just…right now just sit with me. And help me…understand what I’m doing.”

BILLY:I didn’t know how to help somebody else. But I wanted to. I wanted to help somebody the way Teddy had helped me. I owed so much to him, felt so grateful to him. For getting me into rehab when he did. And I wanted to do that for someone. I wanted to do it for her. I wanted her to be safe and healthy. I wanted that for her…I…yeah, I wanted that for her very badly.

DAISY:Billy and I talked about rehab and what that would mean and he told me a little bit about what it would be like. It seemed so daunting. I was starting to wonder if I didn’t really mean it. If I wasn’t actually ready to go through with it. But I kept trying to believe in myself, that I could. At one point, Billy asked if I was sober.Was I sober right then?

I’d had a drink or two at the party, I’d had dexies earlier in the day. I couldn’t have told you what sober meant, exactly. Had everything worn off? Did I even remember what it was like to be entirely straight?

Billy opened the minibar to get a soda and there were all these nips in there of tequila and vodka and I looked at them. And Billy looked at them. And then he just took them and walked to the window and threw them out the window. You could hear a few of them break on the roof of the floor below. I said, “What are you doing?”

Billy just said, “That’s rock ’n’ roll.”

BILLY:At some point, we got to talking about the album.

DAISY:I asked him something that had been plaguing me for the past couple months. “Are you worried we’ll never be able to write another album as good as this?”

BILLY:I said, “I worry about it every fucking day.”

DAISY:All my life I’d wanted people to recognize my talent as a songwriter andAurorahad brought it, the recognition. And I’d immediately started to feel like an impostor.

BILLY:The higher that album went, the more nervous I felt thinking about how to make another one. I’d be scribbling down songs in my notebook on the bus and I’d just end up crossing it all out and throwing it away because it wasn’t…I couldn’t tell if it was any good anymore. I didn’t know if I was just exposing myself as a fraud.

DAISY:He was the only one that could understand that level of pressure.

BILLY:When morning came, I brought up rehab again.

DAISY:The thought I kept hearing in my head wasGo for a little while just for a break. You don’t have to stop forever.That was my plan. To go to rehab without planning to quit forever. It made perfect sense to me. I’ll tell you: If a friend lied to me the way I lie to myself, I’d say, “You’re a shitty friend.”

BILLY:I picked up the phone to call information to get the number for the rehab center I went to. But when I picked up the receiver, there was no dial tone. And someone on the other end was saying, “Hello?”

I said, “Hello?”

It was the concierge. He said, “I have an Artie Snyder on the phone for you.”

I told him to put it through but I was thinking,Why is my sound engineer calling me at the ass crack of dawn?I said, “Artie, what on earth…?”

DAISY:Teddy had a heart attack.

WARREN:A lot of people live through heart attacks. So when I found out, I thought…I didn’t immediately realize that meant he was dead.

BILLY:Gone.

GRAHAM:Teddy Price isn’t the kind of guy you think is going to die of a heart attack. Well, I mean, he ate like shit and drank a lot and didn’t take great care of himself but…He just seemed too…powerful, maybe. Like if a heart attack came to town he was going to tell it to screw off and it would.

BILLY:It just knocked the wind right out of me. And my first thought when I got off the phone, the very first thought in my head wasWhy did I throw the booze out the window?

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