An Abject Failure
Joel was 21 years old, broke, with no friends and loveless. He was crashing at his mom’s house again, “which is abject failure” in his eyes. Soon after Elizabeth took off, Joel overdosed on a drug called Nembutal. He obviously survived the lapse and decided to call Small to apologize. Small was shocked to hear of the incident, and so he raced to Joel’s mom’s house in Hicksville.
Rosalind Nyman, Billy Joel’s mother, and Billy Joel. Source: Wikimedia Commons / Photo by Bobby Bank, photolink.net / Shutterstock
He found Joel on the floor. “The next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital and learned that they had pumped my stomach,” Joel recalled. That’s when he thought to myself, “Oh, great, I couldn’t even do this right.” For Joel, it was yet another failure.