I'm Not High (17 page)

Anyway, I started to eyeball the slices, but out of the corner of my eye, in the mirror, I could see two college-age dudes laughing at us from their table. They spotted me looking at them and kept laughing and gave me a thumbs-up.

“Amateur night,” I said to myself, writing them off as moronic drunks. But on the other side of me, there was an older guy who was shooting me disapproving looks, like I was a total child molester.

Then one of the two college dudes piped up. “That’s cool that you’ve got the little guy out and you’re getting him messed up for New Year’s! We salute you!”

I turned to ask them what the hell they were talking about, but they were finished eating and throwing away their garbage and walking out. I looked down at Billy for the first time since we’d gotten in there. He’d seemed totally fine on the walk, but his eyes were now all screwy and he was weaving and hanging on to the counter like it was a waterskiing towrope.

“What the hell happened to you?” I said.

He didn’t answer me. Out the front window of the pizza place, two cops on horses trotted past and caught his eye, and he slurred, “I wanna go pet the horses.” And he started staggering toward the door. I freaked out. If he got out there, I was sure I was going to get arrested for something, and I didn’t even know what was the matter with Billy.

“Oh, Uncle Jim,” he slurred. His face lit up, he had a plan. “Look at the cops. We gotta talk to ’em and find out the horses’ names. We gotta let them know how much we like the horses. Wouldn’t it be awesome to ride one? Think they’d give me a ride on one?”

“Come on,” I said, grabbing ahold of his arm. “Let’s slow down, champ.”

“No!” he said, walking out the door. I was reaching for his jacket collar, trying to delicately—but forcefully—steer him away from the cops without looking like a crazed child abuser, but it was close to impossible. “I don’t think you understand me! I
need
to ride one of those horses! It’s New Year’s Eve!”

And then in the middle of Bleecker Street he slurred, “Happy New Year’s, New York City!” at the top of his lungs.

I was beside myself. We had two blocks to walk to the diner to meet Dee, and I felt like this was an unbelievable task I had in front of me. Like tiptoeing past sleeping Nazis or climbing Mt. Everest or whatever. The only thing that worked on Billy was his voice box. His legs had turned to pure jelly, and I didn’t look forward to explaining a wobbling thirteen-year-old to the authorities, or worse, having him die on me. I had no idea what he was on. This was turning into the worst after-school special you could imagine. And I was in the middle of it.

As we edged farther from the cops, I asked him again, “Billy, what did you have tonight? Can you please tell me?”

“Ah, jeez, Jim,” he said. “Just a coupla beers.”

“Where did you get beers from?” I said. I was livid.

“I love what ya do, Jim,” he said. “This has got to be the greatest New Year’s Eve of my life.”

“Where did you get the beers?”

“The bouncer got me a sixer of bottles.”

“A freakin’ six-pack?”

“Relax,” he slurred. “I could only finish five of ’em.”

We made it safely to the diner. Dee and all of her friends were sitting in a booth wearing the tiaras and New Year’s Eve trinket-y stuff and laughing it up. They scooted over to make room for us, and so now, as the clock struck twelve and everybody was whooping it up, I was across the table from a drunken thirteen-year-old.

If you’ve ever been in a diner while drunk, it can go one of two ways. You eat something greasy and blissfully relax, or you get the spins and the fluorescent lights really start to irritate you and everyone’s food grosses you out, and you can feel your temperature rising and you just need to bail and get fresh air before you puke all over everything. Which way do you think it would go for a thirteen-year-old kid who’s had sixty ounces of beer in twenty minutes?

Billy kept bobbing and weaving in the diner, just as he had in the pizza place. And sure enough, pretty soon everyone in there was looking at us, and I’m sure it looked bad. Really bad. It’s a real buzz kill to see a young teenager wasted when you are tipsy yourself. And that’s what we had on our hands, on display for all the partiers to see. And soon Billy was starting to heave, like doing the worm, from the stomach up to his head. Within three seconds, I leapt up from my seat, grabbed him by the collar again, and pushed him out the doors of the diner. We made it a foot before he started puking down a staircase to a basement-level apartment.

He was geysering up buckets of vomit just off of Sixth Avenue in the Village on probably the most crowded night of the year in the city. And sure enough, in between all of the bouts of retching, I began to hear another familiar sound. The
clip-clop, clip-clop
of police horses. I was near a lot of restaurants, so I already began to formulate a defense in case the cops stopped: “The kid just overindulged tonight. Cheese fries. Doritos. Giant soda. He overdid it. New Year’s Eve. What are ya gonna do?”

Luckily, they didn’t stop. But now puke was coming out of his nose, and it just wouldn’t quit. I started panicking, thinking he had more than just beer. Who could puke that much after just forty-five minutes? I was really nervous that I was going to have to take him to get his stomach pumped, and that’s when the shit would really hit the fan.

“Did you do
any
shots?” I said. “Tell me the truth.”

“No! Swear to God!”

“’Cause if you did, I’m going to have to take you to the hospital.”

“No! No! I promise.”

“I don’t want to have to call your mom!”

“No,” he groaned. “Don’t call her! Don’t call her!”

We sat there for at least another half an hour. He probably weighed 85 pounds and puked 145 pounds. Then Dee came outside to check on us.

“Dee,” I said calmly, “this kid won’t stop puking. We’ve gotta just get out of here. Can you get some plastic bags from the restaurant that he can barf into on the drive home?”

“Yeah,” she said. And that was pretty much the end of her New Year’s Eve fun.

Billy puked all over the car, everywhere except into the plastic bags we’d grabbed. It was about 30 degrees out, but with the smell in the car we braved the cold with the windows rolled down for the whole forty-five-minute drive.

We got home to Franklin Square, and naturally he was even less mobile than he had been when he was puking down the stairwell in Manhattan. Dee unlocked the door, and I carried Billy up the steps and into the foyer. I had this great plan to throw him over my shoulder and fireman-carry him up the creaky wooden stairs, but he was a dead weight. It felt like trying to lug a giant deflated life raft up a flight of stairs. The sound of me readjusting Billy woke up the elderly neighbor couple, who were also our landlords and had a door adjoining the stairway.

All the husband saw were his tenants attempting to lug a drunken teenager up the stairs.

“Holy Jesus,” the old man whined. “What did you do? Is that the thing now? Get the kids inebriated?”

Soon his wife was standing behind him in her housecoat with her hand over her mouth. “Proud of yourselves?” she muttered.

“I’m sorry,” I said, doing my best to hoist Billy up the stairs. “I gotta explain this to you later.”

“Don’t bother,” the old man shouted. I was sure we were going to be evicted. Once inside, I stripped Billy down to his underwear, put him in the shower, and just hosed him down. During the process, he eventually passed out. I dried him off and put him to bed.

He slept until noon the next day. He woke up and wandered into the kitchen, and I poured him an orange juice and sat down with him.

“No one was prepared for what happened last night,” I told him. “You weren’t. I wasn’t. And that’s really dangerous.”

He just nodded.

“You can’t escape from what happened by getting wasted.”

He nodded again.

“And you can’t behave like this to the people that care about you.”

He didn’t answer right away. He took another sip of his orange juice and then looked up and said, “Do you think it would be cool if I moved in with you guys?”

“Uh, no,” Dee said immediately.

“Yeah,” I said. It would have been like housing the Tasmanian Devil. “I don’t think any of us are ready for that. But here’s the thing: Call me as much as you want. Come visit as much as you want. I’ll call you. I’ll come visit you. And if you tell your mom what happened, I will find you and beat you up.”

“I get it,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” I said. “I don’t have any answers for you. I’d be lying if I did. You got a raw deal. But alcohol and drugs aren’t going to help.”

I didn’t want to tell his mom about what had happened because I feared she’d
never
let me watch him or try to help again. Not surprisingly, the partying continued. His brother Eddie Jr. was worse. He began collecting guns and broke into some houses. It took a long time before they got on the right track. Later, when I think I was more capable of helping and the boys were more receptive to growing and figuring things out, I’d bring Eddie Jr. out on tour with me.

By the way, I went back and got that bouncer fired.

Around this same time, I found myself touring some far-flung places I’d never been to before, including Fairbanks, Alaska. I wasn’t going to make a lot of money after expenses, but it represented a good escape from everything. I don’t remember anything about the gig, but afterward, a bunch of people took me over to a bar that was built into a giant barn. The ceiling was spacious, they had well over a hundred different beers on tap, and the open areas were filled with pool tables and jukeboxes.

The best part about it was outside there was a giant fire pit. It was bitterly cold that night, and if you faced the fire, you could feel the heat rippling up your face, while the backside of your body turned numbingly cold within two minutes. As I stood there rotating like a rotisserie chicken, one side of the sky started turning a bunch of colors, green, orange, red, blue, yellow. Someone told me it was the Northern Lights. I’d never seen them before.

The next morning, before my flight out, I went into an empty little hippie café. I sat down and listened to Tom Petty come on the radio right after the Rolling Stones. I began to reflect on my trip, the Northern Lights, and how lucky I was to be doing this for a living. I started to talk to Eddie in my head. “You would have loved the Northern Lights, Eddie. You’d really like this lifestyle. I miss you so much. I miss your guidance, too. I wish I knew more about business, and I wish you were here with me right now.” As I was thinking, and saying all of this stuff in my head, I really felt like Eddie could hear it. As soon as I said, “I wish you were here with me right now,” sure enough, “Sailing” by Christopher Cross came on the radio. I had tons of great memories of Eddie taking me sailing out in the Long Island Sound, and that song had always made me think of him. I couldn’t hold back the tears. What were the odds? It was so unreal. I felt it was a message directly from Eddie himself, purposely toying with me.

God Fired Me from
Buddies
So I Wouldn’t Cheat on Dee

The
Uptown Comedy Club
show was a grassroots operation right in the middle of a gritty neighborhood, and it kept me humble.
Buddies,
the prime-time sitcom on ABC I landed a couple of years later, was the complete opposite. Before I even filmed one episode, I began to view the show as my one-way, first-class ticket straight to the VIP world of celebs. My head swelled, and I forgot all the valuable lessons I’d soaked up in Valley Stream, Florida, and Harlem.

The premise of the show was really unique. You could call it groundbreaking. Dave Chappelle and I were going to play buddies. And here’s the twist: He’s black and I’m white. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t so original. But it was an opportunity to work with Dave, and that was something I couldn’t turn down.