Then this whole fear thing came into play. “I can’t go on the road. I can’t leave Dee alone with these kids when she is feeling that low.” So I had to stop touring. I had to be around the house. And then everything was a fight. If we went on a date, it would inevitably end with a speech from Dee about what sucks about me.
Finally, I said, “Let’s get help.”
So Dee agreed to start seeing a therapist. That went rather shittily. So then she went to a “positive thinking” retreat called the Forum. (It seemed a bit like brainwashing to me.) Came back like a zombie. She changed her diet. Didn’t help. She didn’t take any meds, but she tried a ton of different vitamins. She was doing everything she possibly could to figure it out. None of it worked. We’d think that it would be working for a month or two, she’d say she felt so much better, and then whammo—it would just turn right back around.
We had two wonderful daughters and plenty of money. What the hell was she so mad about? Because it didn’t make sense to me, I couldn’t come up with a solution. Our life was just her saying, “I’m miserable and you suck.” If I cheated, if I was a drunk, or if I was verbally abusive, I could understand it. But I wasn’t doing any of that stuff. Once I started facing what was going on between us, I was torn up and scared. I thought things actually might not work out for us.
Praying has always worked for me. And I was praying my balls off about Dee and me and our family. I didn’t have an upbringing in any faith, but I’d found a way to God. I guess you would call him the Christian God, but I don’t think of it like that at all. I don’t read the Bible, and I never have. I don’t know any of the commandments. But I have a few rules for myself that I think are in keeping with the Bible.
Religion is a purity thing to me. If you look at Jesus, He would never charge you, He would never ask you for money. He would never give advice with the idea of wanting anything back. I tell people, don’t get fooled into thinking that the guys in the robes and collars have all the answers or any more power than you do. Someone once said that God is a phenomenal product, but the people who sell him are thieves. I agree. So I pray in my car, in my garage, in my backyard, wherever I am. I ask the questions and God always points me in the right direction. Now, whether I listen to him or not is a whole other question. I casually brought this up to Dee one afternoon at home.
“Do you ever pray?” I asked.
“I’m not going to
effin’
pray.”
That’s how that went. She wanted physical proof of God’s existence, and I would say that the physical proof was right in front of her in the form of kids.
“That’s not proof!” she’d exclaim.
I began to look for my own apartment. I found a simple little two-bedroom place not far from our house. It was on the main street in Chester, right above a mom-and-pop restaurant. I told the landlord I would take it and be back the next morning with the deposit.
My plan was to move out of our house for at least a year, or however long it took Dee to get her head together and find peace. I’d come home every day to play with the kids, help put them to bed, and then leave. Dee hated me, and I just wanted to give her time to think and be alone. I wanted no other women. I just wanted calm. I was confident that with some space, we could figure things out. If finding some other guy was what made her happy, I would even be okay with that (although of course I would be devastated).
I never considered telling Dee to move out. She wanted a big house, kids, and a yard, and now she had it. I wasn’t going to be the guy who kicked her when she was down. I was just going to leave her alone. I could survive in an outhouse, so I wasn’t worried about living in some apartment.
I jumped in my car the next morning, ran a couple of errands, and showed up at the apartment a couple hours late. I knocked on the door. No answer. I peeked in the restaurant window. Didn’t see the owner. Knocked again on the door. Finally, the guy drove up and got out of his car. “I’m back,” I said. “And I’ve got the deposit for you.”
“Hey,” he said, looking somewhat pained. “Tell ya what. I’m really sorry, but I had to let the place go. A guy came by this morning and really wanted it.”
And that was that.
Part of me was secretly happy, but I really questioned God’s motivation. Did he want me to tough it out a little longer at home? What was that about? I felt like I was already at the end of my rope. I was really puzzled. I drove home. By the way, I hadn’t told my wife any of these plans, but when I walked in the living room, she was in a chair, weeping without making any noise, inconsolable.
“Dee, are you all right?” I asked. I thought maybe she had found out I wanted to move out. Or maybe it was just another rotten day.
“I followed a stranger home today,” she said, looking up at me, fighting back more tears.
My heart started pounding.
“You what?!” I asked. Her eyes were all swollen. I was freaking out.
“The woman from the coffee shop,” she said.
“What woman?” Dee would routinely go to this little coffee shop every morning in downtown Chester.
“The older one,” she explained. Dee knew a woman who worked there, but just barely. “She brought me into her house.” I felt sick to my stomach. I had no idea where this was going but I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
“Why did you go to her house?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, still crying. This was like some awful riddle that would probably end with a few squad cars showing up.
“You don’t know why you went to her house?”
“Well, she wanted to talk,” she said with a little bit more composure.
“Keep going,” I said.
“She was there,” Dee said. “And her husband was there, too.”
Ugh. This was going from bad to worse.
Dee continued. “And we prayed together.”
“What do you mean you prayed?” I asked.
“They dropped to their knees,” she said.
“What? Then what happened?”
“And then I just left,” she said.
“This is ridiculous!” I exclaimed. “What on earth are you talking about?”
It turns out the couple were born-again Christians. Dee started talking to the woman at the coffee shop, and for a long time she had been begging Dee to come home with her and pray about our marriage. This turned out to be the day that Dee followed through. Dee explained that she literally could not stop herself from going to the woman’s house, even though she was sure that praying was horseshit and would do no good. But when the couple actually got down on their knees in front of her and prayed, Dee was so moved that she began crying.
And that was the beginning. Soon enough she was asking me, “Have you ever read the Bible?”
Here I had a wife who had been far more cynical about faith than I was but was now waking me up for church and taking me to see Christian rock bands. I didn’t even mind the music—I would try to shake my ass a little or nod my head—but then in between every song one of the guys would start preaching and moaning, and I was like, “Hey, wasn’t this a concert?” It was tiresome.
And then after two or three months of intensity, it balanced out. Dee would go off to little meetings or church and come home and want to talk. She’d say, “This Christian lady is actually not very Christian, and this other one is very judgmental. And I don’t really appreciate that.”
I’d be like, “Yeah, well now you see there’s a little bit of a balance. You don’t have to be like, ‘We’re Christian and we hate gays and abortion clinics need to be bombed.’”
And she grew into it. And we fixed it ourselves. The fights with things getting thrown around the house stopped. If I walked you through my house, you’d see a gallery of stuff that is now repaired but was once broken: tables, dishes, vases, and my marriage itself.
Chapter 19
Partying Like a Rock Star
I realized that as I get closer to the end of this book, if I’m not 100 percent honest about myself, I won’t have achieved what I set out to do. I’ve told true stories about myself, my wife, my parents, relatives, and other comedians. Now I need to tell some more truth about me.
One day in 2004, I think (it’s a little foggy), after Steve-O had been living with us for a while, and Dee and I had been going through our struggles, I was playing tiger with Gabrielle. I was way into it. Then she stopped playing and looked at me funny.
“Your eyes are really red, Daddy,” she said.
I know she had no clue what I’d been up to—smoking pot—but she was studying me really hard. That moment smashed me like a brick, because I had distinct memories of playing with my own parents when I was four or five years old. And I didn’t want Gabrielle later in life to remember playing with her dad and suddenly realize that her dad had been high. I never want my kids to grow up thinking I needed to be high to play with them or engage with them.
I had always been a pretty light toker, especially for someone who’s kind of famous. But in the early 2000s my marijuana use really escalated. When I was out touring then, all anyone wanted to do was get high with me—the guy from
Half Baked
. Yup, get baked and talk about aliens and life on the other side. To me that was better than sitting alone in a hotel room, missing my family. It was an even trade.
And even though I talked about helping socially rehabilitate Steve-O, he’d smoke up right along with me. Dee would sometimes say, “You can’t be a role model
and
hang with your nephew like that.” But I felt like pot was the only thing that would get him talking. We would hang and go out on an awesome hike into the wilderness for hours. And I’d let him vent and talk about his past and just listen to him. So weed did help. The problem was that it became a habit and a crutch.
I never thought I’d be the person to say this, but anyone who says pot is not addictive is out of their mind. To me,
anything
is addictive. I found myself starting to abuse it at the end of my run on
Saturday Night Live.
I used it to numb my aggravation and frustration at how I was being used on the show. I used it to numb any situation. When I’d get a horrifying migraine, I always thought pot was the answer. And when you find yourself planning your day around a substance, then you’ve got a problem.
By 2003 or so I found myself planning out my smoking, and that’s when I knew I had a problem. I’d stop for months or weeks and go back. By early 2007, I finally quit. I’d also be a liar if I said I didn’t think about it a lot even today. That just illustrates that I really was addicted to it. I know now that I have to stay away from the stuff.
Things were a lot clearer without weed. I didn’t feel like I needed to save the world. I didn’t think everything was a conspiracy. In 2007, I was itching to go back to doing stand-up and I had to remind myself that before
SNL
I was killing it on the stand-up circuit and pot had nothing to do with it. I was already funny without it. Dee was super supportive of my attempts and efforts. “You’re creative and funny,” she’d say. “Do you really want to say that’s what helps you create?”
For me, and the direction I am headed now, the best feeling was starting to tour in 2008, because it was a weedless environment, and it reassured me that I didn’t need anything to make myself funny. It gave me so much confidence. And for the record, Steve-O quit smoking it, too.
I still like to go out and spend time with rock stars—back in the old days Lars Ulrich from Metallica and I used to tear it up. We once moshed for two hours to System of a Down with my band on our tour bus, destroying a $3,000 sound system in the process.
But ultimately I was just not cut out to be a heavy partier. Lars also has a place in New York, and one night in the late nineties, we had plans to go out rabble-rousing after I did a gig. We hopped in a cab together to go down to Greenwich Village to the club where I was scheduled to perform, and I immediately noticed a knapsack in the backseat. I unzipped it and discovered it was full of books belonging to some NYU student. My nieces and nephews are in school, so I know how expensive books are. I planned to hang on to it, get the kid’s address, and give it back to him the next day. That was the only right thing to do in that situation. When I announced that to Lars, he looked at me like I’d suggested we carry around a forty-five-pound pontoon anchor all night. When we got to the club, and he saw I was going to bring the knapsack along with me, he really lost it.
“Dude, do you mean to tell me you’re getting out of this cab with the knapsack?” he said, perturbed.
“Yeah,” I said, leaning forward to pay the cabby. “Why? Does it bother you?”
“Yes!” he said. We hopped out of the cab. “We’re going to have to keep an eye on this stupid thing all night. All because some kid was irresponsible with his possessions.”
“Everyone makes mistakes,” I said. “He’s going to want them back.”
“Exactly,” Lars said as I slung the bag over my shoulder and walked into the club. “And this is the kind of mistake that will teach him to be more careful with his shit! It’s a valuable lesson. If anything, you can be proud to be a part of that.”
“Don’t worry about the backpack,” I said. “Just keep it out of your mind, and I’ll handle it.” I did my set. We walked down the street and wound up at a little bar, and made our way up to order a couple of beers. It didn’t take long for Metallica fans to trickle up to Lars to say hello and shake his hand. Another fan, a young guy, approached and noticed Lars was smoking.
“Hey, man,” the kid said. From the look on Lars’s face, I knew right off the bat that he didn’t like being addressed in such a familiar way. “I like your band. Is it possible to bum a cigarette from you?”
“Seriously?” Lars asked caustically. “In what universe do you decide to go out for the night knowing that you will want to smoke but not having any cigarettes in your possession? Do you just plan on the goodwill of others?”