by Breuer, Jim
“Hey, Jim,” the PA girl said. “This sucks, but the producers are asking if you can go and film one more scene tonight.”
“Uh. Um. Scene?”
“I know you’re done,” she said. “They want to call and ask you personally and apologize.”
The PA girl left, and sure enough, my phone rang. Producer Bob Simonds was on the line explaining that Clarence Williams, the guy who played Sampson, was leaving the set. He was fed up. He wanted out and he wanted to be done tonight. Could I please do my last scene with him, so he could be on his way?
So I went to go do the scene, and this is why I freaked out: There was this makeup lady, Inga. She was in her fifties and sort of a motherly type to me. She had those instincts, you know? I made my way nervously over to the set, still high as a kite, as there was no time to sit in a chair in the makeup room; we were going to shoot this thing, send Clarence on his way, and wrap it up for the night. And Inga was just going to do my makeup really fast as I stood there, two feet away from the whole production.
She started staring at me. I was still sweating from the Metallica jam session. Then she looked right into my face and said, “Are you all right?” And that sent me beyond paranoia.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just thinking about my lines.”
“Well, you don’t look all right.”
That was all I needed to hear. Clarence was having a temper tantrum. They were all going to find out that I was high. I was not going to be able to do my lines. And I was going to get fired. I truly thought I was going to get fired from doing a weed movie just for smoking weed. And meanwhile, everyone on the set was probably blasted out of their minds. I was having a major internal meltdown. I started sweating more. Inga couldn’t get the makeup right because of it, and I had to keep assuring her I was fine. Finally she threw her hands up, and I went to the set.
Before they started shooting the scene, Tamra Davis, the director, explained to me that Clarence was supposed to fall down on this X, and I was supposed to step over him and say, “Sucks to be you, man.” So simple even a guy who is baked could do it, right?
The first time Clarence fell down he didn’t land on the X. Or maybe it was my own perception playing tricks on me. So I did what they told me to do, the best that I could. As high as I was, I stepped over where Clarence landed and tried to make it look seamless. I was moving in slow motion. It felt like it took about forty-five minutes. My own voice in my ears sounded like I was some underwater creature. “Suuuuckkkkksssss toooooo bbbeeeeeee youuuuuuuu, mmmmaaaaaan!” The world stopped spinning. I started hyperventilating. I convinced myself that I forgot how to breathe properly. The director, Tamra Davis, in a please-tell-me-we-got-this voice, asked, “Did we get this?”
The camera guy leaned over to her and said, “Nope.”
Then Clarence stood up and yelled, “Well, I landed on my mark.” That jarred about half of the high right out of me. And, you know, everyone was scared of him, so we had to do it all over again. And again. And again.
Clarence missed his mark three or four more times. Eventually, people were so bummed with Clarence that my fears of being found out dissipated.
In case you were wondering, I last saw Dave a couple years back at the Aspen Comedy Festival. It was long after his whole trip to Africa and all that jazz. I really felt for him at that time, and I called him and left a message saying I was willing to help him out if I could in any way. He called back and let me know that he appreciated it. In Aspen, he was a little weary of all that surrounded him. My only advice to him was that he should spend time with his kids and enjoy his family. He’s one of the few guys who are such big talents that they can disappear from the public for years and then come back and pick right back up. And maybe that’s what he’s doing now.
Chapter 16
Birth of Gabrielle
Tracy Morgan used to tell me, “You know, you should have children, Jim. God wants you to have children, and he’s gonna show up in all kinds of mysterious shapes and forms, and you may never know when he’s here, but I can tell you now, one of those shapes is a baby.” Tracy Morgan is crazy but he’s also usually right.
In 1998, Dee and I decided to start a family. We didn’t know and didn’t want to know the baby’s gender, but I’d been having visions of a girl who looked like a little version of my wife since forever, even before we were married. A cute, smiley-eyed girl with pigtails. Once Dee was pregnant we just prayed for a healthy baby, and if it wasn’t a healthy baby we prayed for the strength to raise a child with whatever complications it might have.
If we were having a boy, he’d be named Bill, after Dee’s grandfather. But we had zero names chosen for girls. I thought a little girl would be an “angel” so we hunted around for some variation on that. Just not Angela or Angelica, though. Too Italian.
When Dee was seven months along she suggested “Gabrielle.”
“I’ve heard of Gabriella, but not Gabrielle,” I said. “That sounds kinda Irish to me.”
“Nope,” Dee said. “Like the Archangel Gabriel, the messenger of good news.”
“You know,” I said, “I’m not even sure I know what an archangel is. I’m not so into that name.”
The clock kept ticking and with about two weeks before Dee was due to go into labor, we’d settled on Jaquelin. It was a pretty name to us, but it had no real meaning. We were living in Manhattan at the time, and our routine was that we’d walk into Central Park on nice days, lay down a blanket, and just talk and snuggle. Our lives were going to drastically change forever, so this was a nice chance to chill and bond.
One day in the park, Dee said, “Have you ever given any more thought to Gabrielle?”
“No,” I said.
Dee took a nap, and as I watched some kids playing in the distance, I started testing it out. “Gabrielle, come here.” “Ladies and gentlemen, Gabrielle Breuer.” “Don’t touch that, Gabrielle.” “I love you, Gabrielle.” I still wasn’t convinced. A while later, Dee woke up, and we folded the blanket and began walking home.
As we exited the park on the West Side, near the Sheep Meadow, a goofy-looking guy approached us. He didn’t feel threatening, but I didn’t know what to make of him. Dee’s belly was protruding, obviously, and he came right up to it and said, “You’re holding a little angel in there!”
“Thanks,” we both said, smiling and walking carefully away from the man. He followed us, all smiles, and said, “It’s a girl, isn’t it?” Before we could answer, he said, “It’s a girl and she is a little angel.”
I began to get angry. I wanted to get home, not tell a stranger about our unborn child’s gender.
“It is a little girl, right?” he asked us again.
“We don’t know what it is,” I said. “But thank you.”
“I’m telling you,” he said. “It is a girl, and she’s an angel. Do you have a name picked out?”
“We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl,” I said again. “We have names picked out for both.”
Out of the blue, this nutty man said, “How about Gabrielle? That’s a beautiful name for your little angel girl. There you go.”
The hairs on my ass stood straight on end, and time froze. Dee squeezed my hand. We stood there, numb.
Call it whatever you want, joke about a homeless guy naming our kid, but I still get goose bumps.
If only Gabrielle’s birth had had a little of that magic. For one thing, Gabrielle was stuck. When Dee began to go into labor in our apartment, she really was in pain. She screamed that the baby was coming out of her ass. I’d never seen her in so much pain, so I brought her to the hospital. They stuck her in a room, and she sent me immediately to the nurse’s desk and told me to ask for her doctor ASAP.
“My wife’s in a lot of pain,” I told this ginormous West Indian nurse.
“Of course she’s in a lot of pain,” the woman said dismissively. “She’s pregnant. I called the doctor and when she come, she come.”
I walked back to Dee’s
room. Another nurse examined Dee and said we should go home for the time being because Dee was only dilated two centimeters. They gave her some painkillers, which Dee took. Soon thereafter she was tripping and falling all over our apartment. I freaked out and brought her back to the hospital at three thirty A.M. In the end my wife was in labor for nineteen hours, and she was cursing so much that truck drivers were stopping by to take notes.
Her doctor finally came in.
“This woman needs an epidural!” the ob-gyn said.
“No sh—,” Dee started to say through gritted teeth.
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 pr
obably 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.