They gave Dee her epidural. Her swearing ceased, or at least tapered off. But her temperature started to rise, all the way to 105 degrees. Dee was violently shaking in the bed from the fever. Five more people in pastel-colored scrubs arrived. I was freaked out about our baby.
“Is this normal?” I yelled.
“Well,” one older, calm doctor said, “you do see some reactions like this to the epidural from time to time.”
By now, her teeth were chattering like a child’s out in the freezing cold.
“We need to get this baby out right now,” her ob-gyn said. Nurses brought in ice packs and began rubbing them all over her body. Another doctor told me to leave the room. I thought fleetingly of lying on the blanket in Central Park. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way.
“No way!” I said, grabbing on to Dee’s bed. I refused to leave the room. I really thought she was going to die. All these images of her dying and the baby being born were flashing through my head. My life and my marriage were going to be over—the mother of my unborn child was going to die. I got a migraine and started throwing up all over the place.
“We’re going to have to do a C-section,” a doctor said.
“Is there anything else you can try?” I asked in between bouts of vomiting.
They decided to try suction cups. The doctors began sticking them in Dee, trying to get the baby out that way, and it wasn’t working. They brought in all of the C-section instruments and started prepping for it. Trays were being wheeled this way and that. The nurses were still rubbing Dee down with ice packs. The fetal monitor began beeping loudly. What else could go wrong?
“This baby’s heart is beating way too fast,” a nurse said quickly and matter-of-factly.
“Sweetheart,” a nurse said to Dee, “you’re gonna have to try to push this baby out now, otherwise we will have to cut you open, hon. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t cut me,” Dee said, gripping the bedsheets with both hands. She was soaking wet and shivering. “I think I can push the baby out.” I had no idea where she found the calm and the strength, but Dee started pushing to the point where it looked like her head was going to pop off her neck, and Gabrielle soon came out. She was tiny, all gray, and I thought she was stillborn. She was covered in goo and did not cry. She seemed lifeless.
The doctors raced around doing everything they could to help the baby, sucking fluids out of her mouth and nose. And all of a sudden Gabrielle started crying. I breathed a sigh of relief and stuck my hands out to hold her.
“You can’t touch her yet, Dad,” one of the nurses said. “We’ve got to take her into intensive care.”
I moved to block the doorway. “You’re not going anywhere,” I said, “until the mother gets to hold her.” Dee’d just delivered an Olympic-caliber performance. This was bonkers.
“I just want to hold my baby,” Dee said wearily, raising her head up off of her pillow.
“Sorry, sweetie,” her doctor said sympathetically. “You’re just going to have to wait a little bit.”
As the doctor was saying that, I plucked Gabrielle out of a nurse’s arms before anyone knew it and placed her in Dee’s arms. Dee cried silently while looking at our little miracle. I leaned over, and Dee handed her to me, and I just held her for a minute, taking her in.
“What’s her name?” one of the nurses said softly.
“I think we
have
to call her Gabrielle,” I said. They took her into the ICU, which is the worst feeling in the entire world. Your wife has the baby, they take her away, and you’re both sitting there helpless.
In the end, we were lucky, and she was 100 percent healthy. In the years to come my wife would give birth to two more beautiful baby girls. Those deliveries were comparatively easy. Maybe because we had them in New Jersey.
Chapter 17
Saving Steve-O
During the summer of 2002, my nephew Steve-O (no relation to the
Jackass
character) was getting out of the hoosegow down in Florida. Dee and I sat down and debated whether or not we’d want to take him in. Actually, it wasn’t much of a debate. We’d taken in family members who’d needed help in the past, and Steve-O was family, and he was going to need a lot of help.
Dee and I had two daughters by now, Gabrielle and Kelsey, and we knew that Steve-O had a lot of issues. At twenty-four, he was coming out of a five-year prison sentence, so it was clear that he wasn’t going to just move in with us for three months until he found an apartment, then be all better. This was a commitment, probably a couple years of dealing with the kid. Was I licensed? Not professionally. But I was a blood relative—one of the few who hadn’t thrown in the towel on the guy yet.
Steve-O’s mom is my half sister Patti, or as we call her, Hurricane Patti. He’d spent his whole life in Florida, and I didn’t want him going back home to his mom’s place to fall into old patterns. That would be just asking for trouble. The kid grew up with no direction. He told us that his dad was into heroin and had bailed on him when he was a boy, so he got into spray-painting property, stealing bikes and VCRs, selling dime bags, and racking up a juvenile rap sheet.
Patti has a great heart, but she’s ape wild. They lived around the corner from my parents’ place in Clearwater. Occasionally I’d pop my head in to see if I could stop the bleeding. A typical conversation:
Me:
Patti, why are there three bikes in your garage?
Patti:
[defensively] Steve found them all in the garbage. Sad, isn’t it? Some kids would toss out perfectly fine functioning bikes.
When I was filming
Buddies,
I brought my parents out to L.A. to check it out and Patti was supposed to watch their house while they were gone. Every day Steve-O and his knucklehead friends would go and party at my mom and dad’s house, and one day, they took my parents’ car out for a joyride and smashed it up. My parents came back to Florida to find a wrecked car and a trashed house.
It all caught up with Steve-O when he and some friends broke into a warehouse. They were high, and they started a brush fire inside. The thing got out of control and burned down the whole warehouse. Since he already had a rap sheet, it was like, “Boom. Show’s over. You’re gone.” And he went to prison for five years.
Steve-O served his time, and then no one was in his corner. The whole family knew Steve-O was getting out, but no one in Florida was going to give him a fair shot. I thought Jersey might be better for him. I couldn’t turn my back on him.
He arrived in our driveway in New Jersey, thinking he was just going to be visiting for a few days. He got out of the cab smoking a Marlboro Red, wearing a white tank top that revealed all of his tattoos.
“Hey, Jim,” he said half heartedly. He was slouching, throwing off really punky body language. My first thought was that I was really going to have to break this stallion. He didn’t know he was getting a chance, but my plan was to take him on my comedy tour and have him be a roadie. He’d be stuck on a bus for six weeks with me and my bandmates.
A typical situation would go like this: A customer would ask how much a Breuer T-shirt cost. And he would snidely say, “Can’t you read the sign?” Then the customer would turn and walk away. He was obsessed with proving people wrong or being short and negative with my fans who wanted to give him money. I was like, “Dude, you’re not getting it.” So pretty soon we took him off of interfacing with the general public and had him just loading and unloading the truck.
When we got back to New Jersey, I noticed that it was probably almost too quiet around our house for him at night. He was jumpy, up all night with insomnia. Jail had worn on him. He’d be outside smoking and pacing for a couple hours each night. He wasn’t used to the freedom, and it took a while before he felt free and protected. When he talked about being in jail, we’d never bug him about bad stuff that may have happened. Like a war veteran, he’d only share the lighter, funnier stories of his experience.
Once we’d been home for a while, I laid down the ground rules. “Go find a job,” I said. “After a while, you’re going to have to pay rent.”
He would just say, “I can’t because ...” It was a real favorite of his. Then he’d list these insurmountable excuses. “I need a ride to get a job,” he’d say.
“Ask for one then,” I said. “If you want to hunt for work, we’re happy to help you. But I may die tomorrow, Steve-O. And if that happens, you’ve got nobody. I’m trying to teach you things you can use out there.”
So he ended up getting a job at the Gap, and just being out in society was helping him achieve his potential. Soon, we helped him find his own car, after much consternation from him about not being able to get the best one on the lot.
“Take the car that costs four hundred bucks,” I said. “Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Take pride in what you have. It’ll be your car; you worked your ass off for it, and you earned it.”
As soon as he started making a little money, he’d disappear on the weekends with some local punks. I didn’t like where it was leading. I could see him around them, how he’d act, and he’d use the fact that he’d been to prison as a status thing around them.
“Dude, do you really want to be known as the guy in Chester, New Jersey, who brags about having been in prison?” I’d say.
Then he’d pout. I’ve got to be honest here and say that there were times when I threw chairs at this kid.
Dodging flying chairs might have worked a little, but what really turned him into the great human being he is today was being around my kids. One day one of the girls came up to him and said, “I love you, Uncle Stevie.” He left the room and cried. The kids would use him like a rented toy. They would play-fight with him and he would willingly hurl himself down a flight of stairs, just to make them smile.
He opened himself up and got to appreciate things he’d missed in his turbulent childhood. He’d never seen snow before. He was blown away by that. He and I began to take hikes in the mornings and have real conversations, just talking about faith and family. He was fascinated that I was on TV and in movies but that I was driving a Ford Escort. I told him he was going to be the glue to this whole family one day. Some of the best moments of my life were on those walks. All this stuff softened his heart.
Everyone around town began to call him “Uncle Stevie.” And once that caught on a whole different kid came out of him. The more time we spent with him, the more we realized he was just misguided. There was no evil in him. He loved to help the girls with their home-work. That made him feel really proud. He ended up staying with us for almost six years off and on. He’s now married and, believe it or not, the head of security at a major department store in New York City.
It wasn’t just Steve-O who benefited from moving in with us. I loved his company, and seeing him get things figured out really inspired me. Today I do a lot of work with Daytop of New Jersey, which is an organization that helps out kids who are mixed up in drugs. I know it’s a cliché, but charity really is its own reward.
I knew at some point, Steve-O would start a family of his own, and perhaps one day he’d have to be the anchor of this family, so I wanted to show him what it’s all about. How to play and enjoy one another and enjoy life. At the end of the day, all you have is family. And little did I know what was just around the corner in my own marriage.
Chapter 18
Life in the Jersey Burbs
The year was 2004. Dee and I were living in Chester, New Jersey. Gabi was five, our second daughter was two. We were helping Steve-O out. On the surface, things were pretty cool. Big yard, couple acres. Beautiful neighborhood. This was Happytown. Dreamland. There were deer in the yard—baby ones with spots on them. There were families. And highly organized PTAs. Kids out there got the best education. (Taxes up the pooper, too.)
But Dee was not happy. Looking back, I realize she probably had postpartum depression after the birth of our second daughter, Kelsey. But maybe it went even deeper than that and just took a while to surface. This was stuff I had no clue about. We’d met down in Florida when she was seventeen or eighteen years old and I’d never seen this darkness in her. She was always bubbly, full of sunshine, a great laugher, and fun to play off of. And that was the girl I married.
And now I had no idea what was going on. Trouble between us began to percolate around my tenure on
Saturday Night Live.
It was a great but intense experience, and it put her through the wringer, and I wasn’t sensitive to that. Back then, when we were out, she was no longer Dee, she was just Jim Breuer’s wife. I remember we would go out to dinner and I wanted to be recognized. It felt good to me at the time. And if someone did recognize me, I would purposely sit up, like, “Yes, I am that goat on television. That’s me.” I’d just bask in that.
To compensate, Dee began to wear the most gorgeous outfits. True fact: Hands down, Dee has the best butt ever. So she’d get dressed up and come to
Saturday Night Live,
and then she’d wait in my room for the show to end. And of course there’d be ten or fifteen other people sitting right there with her. After the show, I’d come in and blow right by her. “There’s the singer from Blues Traveler!” “Here’s the producer of that huge movie!” Occasionally, I’d stop to mumble, “Oh, hi, Dee, how ya doing?”
She always had my back before I had achieved anything, and I was paying her back by acting like a douche. But as time passed and I left the show, I outgrew my douchiness. We started a family and I thought things were fine between us. But when she gave birth to Kelsey in 2002, something snapped. She was beyond unhappy.
That was a major whoa. I could not understand that whatsoever.
At that time, I was going out on the road and doing stand-up. I had enough money to relax for a while, so I took the summers off with my family. I would play tiger with the girls for hours. I was a tiger that my Gabrielle had captured. Kelsey was in charge of training me. But I was wild. I would take them both down and start pretending to maul them. My older one would have to get a stick and beat me. It was a wholesome family game. But I digress.