We were like these two homeless kids, running through this maze. My friend didn’t have a Social Security card. “Because of that I had no address to list on the forms. “I was living at home and I didn’t want to know about it,” Curtis Hall says. To clean up, Curtis Hall says he and a friend went to hospitals and other public detoxification programs and were pushed from one desk to another-a situation he plays to humorous effect in “Gridlock’d.” The hardest part, he says, was getting help, not actually quitting. He says that he was never a heavy heroin user and had quit altogether by the time he graduated from high school in 1974, at age 17-but not without some tribulations. In order to compete, we thought, we figured we needed the tools to compete with others that were pushing the edge, to play faster, write better songs and sing better. “It was really a competitive thing we did, to be accepted. “We shot up that night,” Curtis Hall says. Curtis Hall remembers being at a house party where one of his peers pulled out a bag of heroin and urged everyone to try it (an event described in the film by Shakur’s character). He says things took an unsavory turn when members of his music scene, like many of the more famous rockers they idolized, began using hard drugs. “In retrospect, it’s amazing that I’m sitting here talking to you,” he says. The film depicts the darkly comedic escapades of two heroin-addicted musicians, Stretch (Tim Roth) and Spoon (slain rapper Tupac Shakur), as they move from one medical waiting room to another, thwarted by red tape at every turn in their bid to detoxify.Ĭurtis Hall says elements of this story really happened to him-24 years ago, when he was a 16-year-old musician growing up in Detroit. Last year, Curtis Hall earned an Emmy nomination on NBC’s “ER” for his portrayal of a suicidal transsexual.īut for “Gridlock’d,” his writing and directing debut, which opens today, he returns to familiar territory: hospital corridors. Dennis Hancock, an important member of a staff that’s prepared to deal with a host of medical emergencies at a moment’s notice. On CBS’ “Chicago Hope,” the experienced character actor plays the sometimes brooding, always driven Dr. You’d think that by now Vondie Curtis Hall has seen the inside of enough emergency rooms to last a lifetime.

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