Cool article about Barry...
http://www.gaywired.com/article.cfm?section=73&id=16919
Unsung Heroes: Barry Jay Talks Fitness, Recovery
Part One of Six
Article Date: 10/16/2007
By Ross von Metzke
Barry Jay didn’t purchase his first bed until he was 42 years old.
The owner of Barry’s Boot Camp, the hugely popular Los Angeles workout staple that has given men, women and even a handful of celebrities a new lease on life since opening in 1999, has slept on dog beds, futon mattresses and his fair share of floors, but never a bed he could call his own.
But then again, that’s one of the things crystal meth addiction does—you just stop caring about the basics.
Three years sober, Barry Jay's focus these days is on staying that way, and helping those around him do the same. He teaches three consistently packed morning classes at his boot camp and then turns the reins over to a slew of other teachers while shuttling from meetings for his upcoming boot camp DVD release to songwriting sessions and creative meetings for his first screenplay. What hours in the day he has left are spent with any one of the 16 people he sponsors in the program, many of whom found their way to sobriety through his classes.
“I see them in my classes, we talk before and after class outside in the waiting area. It’s kind of like having a meeting.”
And it’s a way of life the 44-year-old fitness guru says he wouldn’t trade for the world. A way of life, he says, he almost didn’t have.
“My rock bottom wasn’t my worst drug night,” he remembers. “I mean, I’d been in an ambulance before, and I got out, went home and did more drugs.
“When I finally quit, I had a choice to make. I could go one of two ways. And if I hadn’t quit, I probably would have died. The drugs would have killed me eventually.”
It wasn’t always that way. Born in 1963 just outside of Manhattan, Jay says he grew up clean cut. He never touched any drugs, never smoked a cigarette. He was a Broadway kid, taking trips to the city to see shows and watch the performers. He dreamed of becoming a songwriter and, like so many kids with a dream, bypassed college for a journey out west.
“I knew I loved playing piano and I loved writing songs, so I showed up here with two songs and $800.”
Followed by an almost instant love of pot and cigarettes.
“I went from smoking one cigarette to smoking three packs a day,” he remembers. “And anyone who says pot isn’t addictive—if you have an addictive personality, you’ll find out with pot.
“The trouble is, you never know until it’s too late.”
For Jay, that’s how the better part of the next five years played out. Pot lead to booze (and not even mixed drinks—cheap wine, which he’d chug out of the bottle) which lead to cocaine, and before he knew it, Jay was an addict.
In 1988, he quit cold turkey.
“I didn’t even recognize myself,” he says. “I was 120 pounds, I had long, scraggy hair, dark circles under my eyes. I was sleeping on a dog bed that was not very clean.”
So he sobered up, joined a gym and cleaned house with his friends… a complete turn around and, for a while, it worked. After a quick stint in public relations, he landed a gig in the entertainment industry. Before long, he found himself managing artists including Chaka Khan. For a couple of years he stayed drug free—when he started up again, it was just pot, Jay says—albeit all day, every day. And why not? After all, one of the people he’d most frequently get high with was the boss, he says.
Then in 1995, he was fired. Not for pot use, he says, but for the attitude that came with his pot use. A few days later, he was asked to leave his apartment—again, not for drug use. This time because his new dog, Buster, wasn’t a match for the landlord.
So he did what any self-respecting pot head would do.
“I found a roommate who was a pot dealer—pay dirt,” he says. “The pot addict moving in with the pot dealer. I’d smoke my stash, smoke his stash, smoke whatever.”
And he was happy. He got a job at a gym in the same space Barry’s Boot Camp West Hollywood now calls home, working the front desk and teaching as many classes as he wanted—$8 an hour, he remembers… brainless work, and that’s just what he wanted.
Not that Jay went easy on himself. He took the offer to teach as many classes as he wanted seriously, piling 27 of them onto his plate. Jay became known for never missing a class, he says, and while he would smoke pot all day every day, he was a productive stoner.
After cutting back his class load for a steady gig at The Weather Channel, a pair of friends who had taken his classes had an idea. John, the lawyer with a bit of money, talked with Rachel, the actress who was looking for a change, and the two suggested taking over the gym and re-branding it Barry’s Boot Camp. John would fund the project, Rachel would manage the business and Barry would teach the classes.
Jay was a bit hesitant—after all, he had a good thing going, but he took a leap of faith.
One that paid off—camp was hugely successful, he no longer had to bike across town for his day job. Things were looking up.
That’s when he fell—hard. Not for drugs, this time, but for a man—Barry Hawkins.
“We were living together within a month,” he remembers. “I traded my couch for a bag of pot because he had a couch… and I moved in.”
Hawkins, it turns out, also had a thing for clubbing on Ecstasy—‘You’ve gotta try it’, he urged, and so they did it, together. And for the first time ever, Jay liked the clubs—perhaps a bit too much. What Hawkins could do a few times a year and leave at the club became a regular thing for Jay. One tab because two or three. Suddenly doing it at the clubs wasn’t enough—Disneyland on E had a certain appea tool. The last time Jay took E, he dropped 16 tabs… he’d built up an immunity to its effects, he remembers.
So he moved on to cocaine and, from there, GHB, a scary drug he says he didn’t like but he’d do if it was offered. The next stop was crystal meth, as is so often the case among drug users.
The drug killed his relationship. The couple had a civil breakup, Jay says—in fact, they’re still friends today. But the regular drug use just got to be too much.
The one thing that didn’t suffer—perhaps miraculously—was boot camp.
“Somehow, some way, I was always there,” Jay remembers. “I missed one day the entire time.”
Even still, rock bottom was right around the corner. For Jay, it wasn’t an overdose or even when he came to in an ambulance, went home and did more drugs. Rock bottom was the night when he started to see his life for what it had become.
“It was November of 2004 and we were being honored by the Leukemia Man of the Year dinner,” he says. “We’d raised something like $90,000 for the organization and I showed up late and coked out and I left early dying for more. I was up all night.”
Jay says got a call that night from a friend who was worried about her husband—he was on drugs and hadn’t come home and she was scared.
“Something in me just wanted to help them,” he says. “I told her to sit tight and to say a prayer, ‘he’ll come home. Tomorrow I’ll come over and we’ll have an intervention'."
“Something just felt wrong about that—I remember the words were coming out, but they were backfiring. I can’t begin to explain what it’s like to tell someone to clean up their life while you’re high.”
The morning of November 6, 2004 was the last time Jay touched a drug. November 7 was his first full day sober.
The first call he made, he remembers, was to Hawkins—it was such a tough call to make, he had to do it twice.
“I remember I told him, ‘I’m having a problem—I just can’t stop’. And he said, ‘I can’t help you, I can’t be around you until you do something’.”
Something, it turns out, was a trip back to Disneyland. Jay had no money—he’d blown through everything, but “I had a season pass with free parking and no blackout dates," he laughs.
As if by sheer coincidence, the next call Jay received was from his roommate, Asher, who said, very calmly, that he’d spoken to his friend who had been in the program for 16 years and said he was available for dinner the following night if he wanted to talk.
Jay said yes to dinner, and to a meeting the following night. The goal, he says, was getting Hawkins back in his life. A week later, while leaving a meeting, the two bumped into each other, Jay proudly able to proclaim eight days of sobriety. The two have been close ever since.
“Sobriety doesn’t guarantee that your life is going to be good,” he says he’s learned through his meetings. “It can be good, it can be bad, but it guarantees you’ll be present for it.”
Staying sober, and helping others stay sober, is his focus these days. He sponsors a whopping 16 people in the program, one of whom is his roommate. Coffees, dinners, movie nights and meeting at him Hollywood home have replaced the time spent using, and his morning boot camp classes are filled with people who have gone through the program and come back to Jay’s classes day after day—they help to keep each other sober, he says.
“He’s so much happier,” business partner Rachel Mumford says of Jay’s sobriety. “He was miserable. He was so unhappy. He was showing up but he wasn’t present. And the people who take his classes are all the more loyal because he proved you can work through it—you just have to want it.”
Mumford says not a day goes by that Jay doesn’t crave seeing the people who take his classes.
“I guess like kinds attract,” he says. “The 5 a.m. class is like a meeting, and I’m really proud of that. I’ve found friends for life through the meetings and the classes.”
Most importantly, perhaps, he’s found himself.
“I don’t dislike myself anymore,” he says, smiling. “I love being sober—it is such a good life.”
