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| Nick carter alcohol |
In Facing the Music and Living to Talk About It, Nick writes that his first home was an apartment located above a bar and sometime strip club, The Yankee Rebel in Jamestown, New York. It was owned and operated by his parents and grandmother, and from Nick’s earliest days, the temptation of alcohol beckoned.
“Family legend has it that when I was two years old, I crawled into one of the Yankee Rebel’s liquor storage rooms where I was caught drinking for the first time,” he reveals. “My parents always laughed at that. I laughed too, for a while, and then I didn’t laugh at it any more.”
Indeed, alcohol was a constant presence in his home growing up. “My parents …always stressed about money, which is another reason they turned to alcohol so much,” he explains. “I’m shocked to see home movies taken when I was nine and ten; in them, I’m pretending to be drinking. Clearly, I’m mimicking my parents.”
In one home movie, my cousin and I are acting as if we were going out to a bar like two adults,” he writes. “We danced and feigned we were partying. Looking back at how alcohol was part of our playtime, I realize just how deeply my parents’ drinking affected me. It was as if I was programmed to drink.”
And before long, he did, with all of his energy, even as he found success with the Backstreet Boys at age 13.
“I began drinking heavily in my teens,” Nick writes, “and then moved on to drugs at eighteen or nineteen, starting with marijuana and moving up to cocaine, Ecstasy, and prescription painkillers among other substances.”
“Kevin [Richardson]and the other BSB members saw me drinking and getting into trouble and all they could do was shake their heads,” he says. “…They told me that I had the potential to be a better person and make more of my talents. They knew I had a good heart and soul and wasn’t using my head. The guys warned me many times that my partying was out of control and that I was headed for serious trouble.”
Sadly, they were right. Nick was arrested for the first time in 2002 at the Pop City bar in Tampa. “We hit it hard and then things got out of control around closing time,” he remembers. The rest of the night is hazy, but he ended up in the back of a cop car for resisting arrest without violence.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t learn from it,” Nick says. “I just kept compounding my problems by continuing the same unacceptable behavior and messing up. No internal alarms went off for me, despite what the other guys in Backstreet said. I rolled on, repeating the same self-destructive pattern for quite a while longer.”
In his early 20s, Nick says he moved from marijuana to Ecstasy and prescription painkillers.
“I did a lot of Ecstasy over one particular three or four month period,” he reveals, “and I probably regret taking that illegal and dangerous drug more than anything I’ve ever done. I’m afraid the amount I did caused changes in my brain that are responsible for bouts of depression that I now struggle to control.”
Indeed, alcohol was doing more than enough damage to Nick’s life on its own. After one night of downing shots of 151 rum, he remembers, “When I woke up, I was back in my apartment and scared as hell because I didn’t know how I got there or what had happened during the time in between. Blacking out like that was typical when I was drinking…”
On another night, “I was doing prescription painkillers on top of drinking alcohol,” he says, “and I remember going back to my condo, getting in bed alone, listening to my heart pound and feeling as if my body was falling apart from the inside out … But despite those fears, I never seemed to learn from my mistakes.”
And in 2005, he was arrested for DUI. The judge sentenced him to 13 AA meetings, and while Nick says a small part of him awakened to the truth about his problems, he still and a long way to go to sobriety.
“My life plummeted to an all-time low … ,’” he remembers of that period. “…We’d chug beers and pound down shot after shot until we reached the semi-comatose state where the alcohol made us sleepy and lethargic. Then we’d do a bump of cocaine for an energy boost.”