by Breuer, Jim
“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.
Chapter 9
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.
I’d been friends with Dave for a couple of years. One night Phil, my old buddy from the Jefferson Avenue gang, came into the city from Valley Stream to check out some comedy clubs. As luck would have it, we wandered into the Boston Comedy Club, near NYU in the West Village, took our seats in the back, and waited for the next comedian to take the stage. It was Dave—and before he even opened his mouth, Phil and I were sold on him. He had quick, funny gestures and a way of exaggerating his body language without forcing it.
“Who’s he?” Phil whispered.
“No idea,” I said, “but he’s going to be a star.”
“No kidding,” Phil replied.
And we just sat for the next twenty minutes with our mouths hanging open. Dave just improvised the whole time, asking the crowd questions, then going into riffs about apartments, cops, getting high. As soon as he came offstage, I went out of my way to introduce myself, and that was something I usually didn’t do. It didn’t always seem genuine, but in this case, I was really approaching the guy with praise.
After that Dave and I would see each other on the circuit all the time, and we’d goof around trying to make each other crack up. Pretty soon, we shared the same manager, Leon. He’d helped me wrangle free from the Rat, with whom I’d be tied up in litigation well into the midnineties. Leon worked hard at finding projects for us, and before too long Dave and I each had these wonderful almost-completed development deals—where a network pays you not to do anything else while they try to develop a show for you. I was on the verge of a huge one at NBC, with the guy who produced The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They’d work on a sitcom for me, while I would collect $250,000 and sit still for one year.
Dave had an even bigger deal in the works at HBO. A completely unheard-of, pants-crappingly huge amount of cash for a stand-up special and his own talk show. To top it off, he was only nineteen or twenty. He was on fire. I remember my wife and I went to see him in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the Mel Brooks movie, and both of us thinking, “Wow, this is the coolest thing in the world. Look at Dave! He’s in a movie! He has it totally made!”
While this stuff was going on, unbeknownst to Dave and me, Leon scored himself a producing deal at Disney/ABC. He then went to them and said, “I have two of the hottest young comedians working now. They’re about to do separate deals, but I can deliver them to you together. Let’s develop a sitcom around both of them.” If ABC bought it, Leon would be making money on both ends of the equation. My gut told me not to leave the Fresh Prince guy and NBC dangling. My agent Ruth was really against Leon’s plan, too. She and I were introduced by Leon, and I knew from the get-go that she had my back. She helped my career tremendously.
“There’s a lot of passion for Jim at NBC,” she’d tell Leon during these long, drawn-out conference calls.
“Well,” Leon would grumble, “we’ll go and get an on-air guarantee from ABC.” And we went around in circles for a few days until one day that’s what he did. The money Disney/ABC offered Dave and me was drastically lower than what else was on the table, but they promised Dave and me three guest appearances on Home Improvement and a minimum of six episodes of Buddies. No matter what, I was going to get the money. But I wasn’t thinking of the money. I was thinking, “I am going to be on TV very soon.”
Still, my feeling on this was awful. But just like when I signed with the Rat, I had a way of letting my greedy brain overrule my gut. I called up Dave to see what he thought.
“I gotta be honest with you,” I told him. “I don’t know if I would walk away from an HBO deal. That’s every young comic’s dream—to have their own HBO special.”
“Jim,” Dave said, “it’s not one special. It’s two.”
“Then you’re really crazy.”
“And don’t forget the talk show.”
“So, why are we even on the phone?” I said. “I really have to advise you against this ABC thing.”
Still, ABC was going to put us on the air. The other things were likely to happen, but not 100 percent, and Dave and I found ourselves sucked in by the immediacy the Buddies deal offered. We made a pact with each other.
“I’m not going to do Buddies if you don’t do it,” he said.
“Well, I’m not going to do it if you don’t do it,” I said. “But again, I’ve got to stress, I don’t know if I would do it if I was you. I’m not too worried about me, but you’re a little farther ahead in the game than I am.”
We went back and forth on this for a while, until in a stroke of pure genius we decided to do Buddies. By the time Dave and I landed in L.A. to make the pilot episode, every celebrity-chasing woman in Hollywood knew why we were there, and every aspiring actor en-vied us. At night, we would go out to the Improv and I would strut around with an attitude like “Get used to it, you’re gonna be seeing me everywhere.”
One night Drew Carey was standing next to me—this was long before his show even aired—and he said, “No offense, but I hope your show tanks, because I’m next in line after you guys.”
I said, “No offense taken, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got a hit. And we’re guaranteed six episodes, either way, so enjoy the wait.”
“Okay,” he said. “No problem. I’ll just be hanging around. You know, waiting for you to fail.”
I liked Drew and his deadpan humor, and knew he was half-joking, but that conversation underscored a truth I’d soon discover about Hollywood—envy, pettiness, and competition fueled every part of the machine. That attitude permeated every conversation and seemed to serve as people’s main motivation for doing what they did—trying to be a star at any cost. I began to fit right in.
Our home for the next few months was the Sheraton Universal Hotel. Even though we were newlyweds, Dee stayed behind in New York, working her job as a nanny. She wanted to make sure this sitcom was going to fly before she quit her job. I felt single again. Single in a city full of young women, with skies that were sunny and blue, and where I was cruising around in a free Ford Mustang convertible.
Dave, on the other hand, was given a Lincoln Town Car. It was too nice to be a taxi and too small to be a limo. But still, it had chauffeur-driven vehicle written all over it. The studio used a special car leasing company for long-term rentals, and since Dave didn’t drive much, when it came time to pick out a car, he told the lady, “Just bring me whatever. I’m cool with anything.” Well, Dave definitely wasn’t cool with the Town Car.
The car leasing company had a guy drive it up to the hotel, and I think when Dave saw him pull up, he just thought the guy was picking someone up to take to the airport. But then, the guy parked the car, jumped out, tossed Dave the keys, and handed him the paperwork.
Dave turned and looked at me and whispered, “It’s because I’m black.”
“You think the woman on
the phone knew you were black,” I asked him, “and decided to give you a Town Car?”
“Oh, she knew all right,” he said with a sneer. “Always givin’ the black guy a pimp mobile,” he muttered. “And not even a good pimp mobile at that. Stupid Town Car.”
But it didn’t take long for Dave to get the itch to start driving that pimp mobile around. Our first stop was an acting lesson at Gordon Hunt’s house in Beverly Hills. The directors had been all over us about developing our craft. To me, this was exciting because Gordon was Mad About You star Helen Hunt’s dad. Dave and I both wanted to drive our new cars, so we did just that. I’d follow closely behind Dave because, well, he sucked at driving.
Dave had grown up in D.C. but spent a lot of time in New York City, obviously, and had never really gotten a handle on driving. And that was no biggie. But the thing was, this was L.A., a whole new sprawling territory where you used a car to get around, not the smelly Q train. So he couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel.
“Dave,” I said, trying to warn him one day as he was about to leave our hotel, “traffic here is nothing like anyone has ever seen. Even people that are from here can’t take it. That’s why they have freeway shooters in California. People get so aggravated that they just shoot random drivers. It’s practically legal.”
“I hear you, man,” he said.
“Just be careful,” I said.
“Yes. I hear you, man.”
“Check your mirrors and your blind spot before you change lanes,” I told him. “And don’t give anyone the finger. Never, ever do that.”
Dave just nodded, tossing the keys from one hand to the other impatiently.
“Better yet, don’t even make eye contact with any other driver,” I said. “And keep your driver’s license in your shirt pocket. That way they’ll be able to identify you quicker, in case something happens.”
Dave pulled cautiously out of the hotel parking lot and I followed behind him in my Mustang as we made our way to the freeway. I could see him getting more comfortable behind the wheel, bobbing his head to his car stereo. Then came the moment of truth—the on-ramp. Dave coasted down it flawlessly, put his turn signal on, changed lanes, and drove perfectly for about three hundred yards before he got into a fender bender. It looked almost calculated, like bumper cars. He tapped the back bumper of a Chevy economy car, driven by a little Asian guy.