Suki Jones the author of “Sea, swallow me.” has given a number of interviews about her book and lifestyle.
This article is a verification of the facts stated in those interviews.
Dopey episode 418 – Qualudes at 9! Kidnapping! Trauma! Incest! Sexual Abuse! Parenting on Heroin! Crack! Overdose! Death and Recovery with Suki Jones
(In this article the commentary is by the book’s character known as “Dan”. Suki is quoted in bold, Dopey and other interviewers are in italics, and the times listed refer to the location of the quote in the interview being referenced. Note: Dan didn’t listen to the interview, we handed him a transcript to not prance on his nerves.)
From “Dan”:
I was dating or married to “Suki” during the time when most of the events in her book and the events she discusses in these interviews happened. My comments below are from what I recall and things “Suki” said in court documents.
“Suki” was not doing drugs or drinking at that time.
She did start taking Vicodin later in the marriage after the events in the book were over. However, it wasn’t enough to become chemically dependent.
(She didn’t start going by the name “Suki Jones” until her thirties. She was born “Susan Nicholson” and went by “Suzi”.)
Here’s a teaser:
Suki: “After Tower Records and after both of my kids were born I was like I’m gonna try to do some modeling and acting again”
She wasn’t a working model in her twenties or thirties. She was never paid money for her picture.
Time: 105:34
Fun fact, I’m also the guy who paid for her adult braces.
To the interview.
Time: 46:31.
Suki: “I was doing synchronized swimming and pulled a hamstring and the doctor prescribed vicodin.”
She briefly did synchronized swimming when she was 12 in 1979. Vicodin didn’t exist then.
(Wikipedia; “Hydrocodone/paracetamol was approved for medical use in the United States in 1982” aka Vicodin.)
102:55. “It was, well l mean it was great. It was I mean it was a lot of fun, like and I was managing a department for a while so I had you know like, backstage passes and VIP stuff, oh my gosh there are so many, I mean there are so many shows I went to, like bands that were nobody at the time that went big or bands that were really great that never took off, but like I saw so many shows”
First off, She did not go to any punk rock shows at all.
She thought that punk rock was dumb and the kind of people who went to those shows were gross.
She did go to some shows, but not a lot. I saw her go to; Throwing Muses, Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie and the yahoos, Primus and Morrissey. Over a three year period that’s not a lot of shows. Morrissey’s first solo tour was probably the last show she went to and she was pregnant.
She never collected records. She and her boyfriend once went through my collection, took some things, and then sold them. I think she had seven records when I met her, most notably a Stevie Nix solo album.
She didn’t even have a turntable. Weird thing to lie about.
105:34. “After Tower Records and after both of my kids were born I was like I’m gonna try to do some modeling and acting again”
She wasn’t a working model in her twenties. She was never paid money for her picture.
Dopey: “When did you have your first kid?“
“20, right around 20“.
Her oldest was born in 1990, Suki was 23. She was married with children the entire 90’s.
110:50 “I was kind of an anomaly, I was you know like if I wanted to go out and go to the shows, I had to get a sitter you know.”
There was no getting babysitters and going to shows. Only grand parents were allowed to baby sit and she was nervous about some of them and by the time she had children she had switched from “Pro-choice” to “Pro-life” and she was done going to shows.
More important, she was a panic attack at the thought of leaving her kids with anyone.
1:12
Dopey: “And why do you think you guys split up?“
“I mean, I think it’s a number of reasons, I think like I think we were young, and I, I don’t think either of us were happy in the marriage so, we weren’t ready yeah.”
We split up because she started to date other people.
She told me after. The way she told me was inside a request for me to move out. She said that some of the guys she was dating thought it was weird enough that she was still married, but the fact that her husband still lived in the house was a lot to deal with.
That was mentioned in the book.
I had committed to stick it out until the kids were 18. After my work got to the point where it was stable and I was only working one job, and not going to college, she had the freedom to branch out. She started with a french class at the local community college where she met people and started her bad lifestyle. I only bring this up now as she could have decided to use her freedom to be a better person and/or a wife and/or a mother. Instead she chose her own fun. se la vie.
Narcotics make you chatty as fuck? Which narcotics are chatty? Aren’t opiates narcotics?
1:15
Dopey “and your kids would be with your ex half the time, right?”
“They, they were with him occasionally, and so that was like when they were with him I was definitely like Dopey “far gone” Suzi “ I was definitely gone”
The Alameda County Courts gave me 42.5% custody. That’s pretty close to half the time. That is more than occasionally. In most of her stories in the book and podcasts, her husband was bringing her kids to the soccer games.
The Claremont Hotel is in Berkeley, not Oakland.
1:16
Dopey “when did the heroin show up?”
“It showed up in the 90’s with my friends in my group of friends, it was mostly like musician friends or friends that were like you know in bands that sort of thing in the Bay area that were experimenting with it, you know there was like this ecstasy wave that everybody was doing ecstasy, then there was this heroin wave where everyone was doing heroin and a lot of my friends just kind of experimented with it, like they would do it like you know like once in a while and for me like it was something like you know as soon as I started doing it with any sort of normalcy where I was doing it like you know every weekend, and I was like oh that’s it, like this is what I need.”
Those were my group of friends that I had been hanging out with since high school. She flirted with every guy to make them her friends too. I had to hear about that from every one of them who said no yo her because they felt obliged to tell me what she’d done.
1:17:43
Dopey “I never got that high from smoking it”
“yeah, I did, HA, HA, I mean eventually I didn’t, but that was actually that was the main way I did it was smoking it. I didn’t want to, because I had the kids at home, like I didn’t want like rigs around and I didn’t like…”
Ha! No one really gets high smoking heroin. That’s not what anyone does.
1:25 In regard to who she refers to in the Book as Casper her boyfriend.
“He like we kind of vibed to like the same, like this weird, we both like the Carpenters, weird music we listened to like this weird music, you know Mr. Bungle or like the the like Ada James, like there was this weird mix of music that we were both, you know when you like have music that you like both like oh that’s weird that we both we’re both into this kind of music, it also it’s like the soundtrack to our relationship”
Felix was one of our friends that started doing heroin at the time. There were handful of us, but we didn’t talk about it. There was a stigma. Heroin was not cool and upcoming at that time. She simply knew some people who did it and they could get it when she ran out of Vicodin. It was definitely cheap back then. $25 was enough for a good time.
There is a story in her book about going to sushi with Felix and he’s on heroin. She took that story line from the following story I wrote:
Hank, my sushi date.
http://tom-tom.com/travel/kiralla.htm
Anyway, that started in 1998. I don’t know when Suki first tried it, but it was after that.
(Susan annouced sobriety to the internet on 1/1/2000)
Which means not a lot of years of heroin abuse there.
I stopped listening after that rambling non-sense. The stories are dull.
Stereo Embers The Podcast: Suki Jones
Air date May 24, 2023
Interviewer: “Your father had this obsession with your looks”
“Like I don’t think it’s coincidental that I veered toward model and acting, l mean my looks were something that were very highly regarded by my dad, and his mother she was a socialite…”
This is another example of lying about modeling & acting, that she “veered” toward modeling & acting because she thought so highly of her herself. That does not mean she became a model or an actress. Her being an extra in a couple of movies is not acting for a living.
“What was his own level of vanity?”
“He was very vain actually, like he was a very vain man. So UM, yeah, I have many, I have many characteristics that I’m like yeah, that’s a lot like my dad, you know, UHHH, I am vain, I will not, I’m UH not gonna lie about that, I’m one (haha) vain individual. UM but yeah.”
Why does she point out that her vanity was not something she was not gonna lie about? Does this imply she lies all the time? She is being truthful here, she is extremely vain.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stereo-embers-the-podcast-suki-jones/id1338543929?i=1000614267904
CHURCH AND OTHER DRUGS PODCAST
Air date Feb. 7, 2024
Interviewer: “Okay, so how old were you when you got the job at Tower?”
“I was SIXTEEEEEN ??? SEVENTEEEEEEN???? SEVENTEEN I think, yeah.”
Suzi started at Tower Records in 1988 she was 20 at the time. She quit after she got pregnant and she had our daughter Lily at age 23 in 1990.
“What how fun, dude?”
“Oh my GAWD it was AMAZING.”
“What was the year? In the Bay Area? Like when you were?
“Like it was like early, like the height of my like all of my debauchery was, well all of my, the height of my debauchery was like the 90’s. Like I’m very much like 90’s like that was my era of like debauchery, like if I looked at it on, you know if you look at it on a timeline like the 90’s was just like crazy. And then like you know I got sober New Year’s Day 2000, so it’s like a very clean little measurement to look at, um so yeah I love reminiscing about that era and like the music and the drugs and the aesthetic, all of it, um, but I”m glad that I made it out. Because it was like a lot of debauchery, like a lot of debauchery, it was just like craziness.”
(Note: She doesn’t answer the interviewer’s question directly.)
Let me be very clear. From 1990-97/98 Suzi was a housewife, the marriage was intact.
Suzi was not an addict while working at Tower Records like she states. I started dating Suzi when she was working there. We moved in together soon after. Suzi was not a partier back then. If she drank it would be one or maybe two drinks a few times a year and she was definitely not doing coke or other drugs like she claims, I would know.
She never revealed to me a drug problem in high school either. And she would have. She and her Mom were homebodies and so they would talk about anything that happened to them. She couldn’t help it, she’d have to tell me.
Which is why I know stories about her that are not very entertaining.
“So I wanted to get to, so you got pregnant and that’s when you calmed down for a bit and that was when you”
“Yeah”
“You went through your like housewife period?”
“Yes, yeah, yeah the ahhh, yeah because I had worked at Tower up until I got pregnant, and then um, in some ways um, I was joking with my son was over yesterday and I was jokingly saying to him like yeah if you want to like fix everything in your life have a baby, and he goes what? And I go, I’m absolutely joking and he laughed, but um I was like yeah I think like I thought like um, I reallllllly, I think like my kids, like were kind of like um, they fulfilled something in me like I was so high on like being a mom and like being pregnant and like um, my kids and like all of that like it sustained that that like that ? within me for like a little while you know like and then as soon as um as soon as the drugs were reintroduced by a doctor you know like as soon as they were reintroduced to me it was like game on and like I couldn’t fight it like it was just like overwhelming, you know it was like the switch had been flipped. UM so YEAH. yeah.”
Suzi is trying to paint a picture of a pattern of drug use/abuse. There is a gap in that story. She can’t explain why her drug use just stopped after we were married. The gap in this story is that she was not addicted to drugs when we met. When we split up in 1997/98 Suzi was careless, flaky and partying, however, there were no signs of chemical dependency. She misused pills during that period and in court documents it states that Suzi went through N.A and got sober in March 2000 for a “pill problem.” (her own words). This misuse was probably not enough for her to be chemically dependent either, but her boyfriend at the time went on methadone, so she copied him (she claims herself to be a chameleon).
This is from the court documents as written by the mediators:
Salty Mom’s gone sober – Who is suki jones
Suki: “I have two lovely young adult children that I raised on my own, and got sober in 2000 when they were very young”
The children were 10 & 8 in 2000. Born 2/90 and 12/91
“In Junior High I got into modeling and that was both a terrible place if you wanted to do drugs and alcohol and a great place if you wanted to do drugs and alcohol, it was really easy to get drugs and alcohol at 15 no problem.”
The only verified modeling Suki did at that time was an unpaid demonstration at a local department store.
“So that really kept my addiction going it really snowballed I ended up dropping out of high school, I had two kids.”
Susan dropped out of high school during her junior year, which was 83-84’. She would have graduated in 1985. The children came five years later.
“The pinnacle for me for getting sober the person I was dating overdosed and died and it was really hard for me in I had survivors grief.”
The cause of death for Felix was blunt trauma sustained from an automobile accident. Amongst those closest, the guess was that he’d passed out while driving and went off the road. The further gossip was that Suzi was the person who gave Felix the extra Vicodin or Percocet that caused him to fall asleep. If the latter is true, it would explain her survivors grief.
Interviewer: “I’ve read some of your freelance writing, you’re a very talented writer, is that what you do for your full time job?”
“It is what I do for my full time job”
“Writing is one of the most consistent things in your life? “
“Yeah”
To date she has self-published two articles on the internet and has recently self-published her second book. The first was a book of poetry self-published in 1988. By self-published, we mean that she was not paid for the content and she paid all production costs herself.
“Getting noticed for your beauty and modeling there is no shortage of drugs and alcohol in that industry.”
“Yeah, I was the party girl, if there was a party happening I wanted to be there, I’m not a shy person, so you know like partying for me was not only, like drugs and alcohol but also a way to kind of assert my personality, you know like maximize on my social butterflyness. I always wanted to be at the party. With my group of friends that was always readily available and with modeling something that was always an option, so there was no lack of parties that’s for sure.”
Susan is known for being quiet in social situations and standing in the background. However, there is often “dress up” involved.
“I would be dope sick and dropping my kids off at Catholic school, but I was one of like two single moms.”
“I’ve made amends to my kids many times, both of my kids were super involved in me writing my book and were like my biggest cheerleaders.”
“It was a blend of two worlds where I was going to punk shows at night and then going to Catholic school functions, it was like unusual but in my head.”
As a socially awkward person, she often had her kid’s father attend Catholic and school functions with a story of why she was unable to attend. She has no history of going to punk shows at night.
“So were you still modeling up through this point? How were you taking care of yourself and your family and your drug addiction?”
“I was I mean I was modeling up until about ten years ago, but I wasn’t doing like you know like my hay day was when my kids were in elementary school.”
Susan stated in court ordered employment evaluation in 2002 that she was a homemaker and had intermittent seasonal office work.
Tax returns from the ten+ years she filed them with her ex-husband confirms that she did not personally make any money modeling or simply did not report it to the IRS.
At that time all of her expenses were paid by her ex-husband. That then turned into family support, and then child support and alimony. Also paid by her ex-husband.
“Like I was doing pilots, extra parts and commercials and modeling.”
“So that was what I did until just you know, not that long ago. It was harder to work in that industry when your not partying. It’s not the same when your not getting loaded.”
There is no physical or digital evidence to verify that any of that work happened.
Her initial family support was $4600/month. That started in 1998.
“You are this extremely talented writer, when did that shift happen, taking your writing seriously?”
“When they were very little I wrote a book of poetry which I have no idea where anyone could find that but I put that out and then I was journaling and writing throughout the years and I would do little things with it.”
The book of poetry was self-published in 1988. Years before her kids were born.
Dopey episode 387 – A voicemail
This content was a message that suki left on the Dopey voicemail system which they played on that episode.
“Many years ago when I was still actively using, my kids, who are now college age, were involved in soccer, we were living in Oakland at the time, but they were going to preschool and kinnergarten [sic] in ahhhh Lafayette, which is a more affluent city on the other side of the Oakland hills”
The kids were 30 and 32 at the time she left that voicemail.
“So, ahhh I think it was my daughter had a soccer game and my husband , or he was going to be my ex-husband, we were in the process of a divorce, had taken the kids to my daughter’s game.”
Her daughter played soccer in the 4th and 5th grade in 2000-2002. When the children were in pre-school, the family was still intact.
“And I had decided that it would be a good idea for me to do ecstasy before I went to the game, um… yeah that was a smart choice because we were involved in a custody battle and I didn’t want him to know I was using but somehow I thought I could get through the game easier um…. If I was loaded- cause that’s junky logic.”
Suki claims she became sober in January 2000. The custody battle happened after that.
“Sooooo, ahhh I did, I had done, I had, I think smoked some heroin and done maybeeee like one hit of ecstacy and went to the game and my eyes, you know my pupils are the fucking size of saucers, so I show up and then people are like I feel like at least people are looking at me weird so I’m trying to I’m telling people that I just had my eyes dilated and that I’d been at the eye doctor, and I started to feel really uncomfortable.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dopey-on-the-dark-comedy-of-drug-addiction/id1077823917?i=1000587527726 (her story starts at 17:35)
Judging meghan podcast
Min. 29
Interviewer: “You were just like booking, starting to book and got an agent, and all of that stuff and obviously eating disorders are very prevalent in modeling.“
“Yeah”
“Tell me a little about that, about how you started out modeling.”
“Well I had an aunt that I didn’t think liked me very much, she was kind of ornery and cantankerous, she had gotten me involved, there was something in the newspaper, you know looking for models and it was reputable and that was kind of my segway into that and I started doing like local things, like department store, going for commercials and things like that. I did uh, ah ah , during the time that I had my eating disorder I started working with a therapist and he was kind of on a speaker circuit so I started speaking with him about eating disorders and so I was like you know I was 14 speaking to groups about my eating disorder and it got picked up on a television show and I was on like a uh local evening news segment which was, which was wildly unpopular at my school kids, like it did not make me popular it made me, it was like uh it was like jealousy or contempt, I don’t know what it was, it really didn’t benefit me in any way socially.
The modeling referenced in the newspaper was for models to appear in an unpaid demonstration show at a local department store.
“So that I took the eating disorder out of the mix and I was working doing some modeling, that was my jam, that was my whole life, going to punk shows, going to concerts, doing drugs and like you know modeling and acting jobs and um that was my focus, my and then um, ah my focus was not however on school.”
There is no evidence that suki went to punk rock shows in the late 1980’s. For one reason, there were not many and they were mostly in berkeley/oakland and she lived in concord, about a half hour drive. It is confirmed that she was not proficient at “school”.
“So when did the drug addiction get really bad for you?“
“I think um, in the 90’s it progressed like I was, um I had two children I was raising two small children as a single mom.”
“and you were very young.”
“Yeah, yeah, so um, I but, I was really kind of peaking, for I would say my career peaked like in the 90’s. Like I was very much the look that was popular, you know I had the Uma Thurman bob, I was wafer thin, tall, pale, you know like I had the whole heroin chic thing down. And um I, I had done opiates & um, other narcotics and like when i started doing heroin it was very much like the kind of blast off feeling I had when I did cocaine for the first time.
She was a married homemaker throughout the 1990’s. There was no modeling career to peak. She attested to that in multiple court documents after the year 2000.
“I would dr. shop and go to hospitals and say like I feel awful I have the worst headache ever and they’d you know, they’d shoot me up and send me home and you know the next day I would be wretchedly ? Sick, but I wouldn’t believe it was because of the drugs.”
Min. 41
“But also, do you think it was the industry you were in it was very normal? Like that people were openly doing drugs?“
“I mean for sure, that for sure played into it. And not even just in modeling and acting, but like in the group of friends that I ran with. You know like I ran with people that were rock musicians, and um you know people that were artists, all these fun characters. Um and they were all doing drugs, and so I mean there was no lack of drugs, um it was just readily available all the time, so um. I went to amazing parties, dated amazing people, saw amazing places.”
“How long, I’m assuming you were successfully modeling and making a decent living to support your kids.”
“yeah”
There is no record of her being paid money to model. Ever.
“And your heroin habit how long until it got bad, like how long until you were like okay this is really bad and I have an addiction and I am sick?“
“It was uhhh years, I mean it was years. I mean there were, I def. Had dope sickness, you know quick, like before, so how do I say this, there was dopesickness.”
“I never went to rehab UM because my ex husband and I had had this exceptionally long divorce process, it was ridiculous. And the custody… In fact the marriage was bifurcated so that he could remarry while things were still unsettled with our divorce. And so one of the things that wasn’t settled was the custody of our kids and I knew he had brought up with a mediator my heroin use and I was like in the room you know like while he brought it up and I thought oh this is the nail in my coffin this is it they are gonna take my kids and for whatever reason the mediators glossed over it and like didn’t pick up on it, bc I was also like and I was like well you take them to bars and it was this whole back and forth and they didn’t really acknowledge it and um. So rehab to me was like if I go to rehab, there’s no way my kids’ parent, their dad is not gonna know about it, I’m done for, they’ll take my kids.”
Susan started the divorce process when she filed for divorce in 1999. After that she would not agree to or sign off on or agree to any part of the divorce process to allow it to move forward. She was most likely advised that when she settled, her MFA her payments would change from the existing high amount to a lower amount as specified by the DISOMASTER service provided by Alameda County.
She stalled on purpose.
Susan claims to have become sober in 2000 before the custody battle started.
In the sessions with the mediators, which were recorded, the only reference to pills was Susan explaining that she had previously had a problem with pills, but had obtained help with it.
From her ex-husband: “I did not bring up her heroin use at the time because I did not know about it until I read her book. I still do not believe she did heroin more than once or three times. At the time I would have brought up her pill usage if anything, however court documents show that she brought up the pill use herself in order to say that she had previously had a problem with pills but had sought help. I’m assuming she brought it up so that if I did she wouldn’t get in trouble? Preemptive strike? I don’t think she understands how divorces work in a “No Fault” state like California.”
“How old were the kids at the time?“
“They were young, they like kinnergarten [sic] age, sooo, or no preschool age. Yeah so uh, really young.”
The divorce process didn’t really start until 2000 when the kids were 8 and 10 which are different ages and not in kindergarten.
Narcan: the gift every parent should be giving
“Shout out to Oakland and New Years Eve 1993”
She was a “homebody” in 1993, a married homemaker with children.