Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  I dropped the first bomb on my husband, and everything he had built for the two of us to share with his assistants, his family, and his friends, when my maid, Rosario, pulled me aside to tell me she had found one of my husband’s assistant’s panties in our bed. Rosario and I emptied my husband’s closet of the handmade shoes and boots and tuxedos he bought so as to be befitting the husband of a queen into the beautiful pool in our meticulously manicured Brentwood backyard, which Tom, coming from a fairly moneyed family, had designed in order to cheat on me in a manner befitting a queen whose husband cheats on her.

  The plot began to thicken into a rich pudding indeed. I then drove straight to my husband’s office and tore all of the pictures of him posing with various celebrities off the walls and helpfully dropped them from the balcony, where they shattered below on the concrete. The poor assistant sat wide-eyed and trembling.

  As the fear that I might smudge her perfectly drawn lip liner in my rage washed over her dimwitted face, she then lifted the phone and placed a call; within minutes, the guards from the Rad-ford Studios came to escort me off the upper part of the studio lot and forced me to contain myself behind the doors of the Roseanne stage set. Once there and newly angered, I enlisted the help of my prop crew to retrieve hammers, nails, and boards, and then marched across the entire four-block lot to nail my husband’s office door shut.

  As we were doing this, my husband showed up in a golf cart with his childhood friend and fellow Iowan, who had relocated to California and now worked for us, and was having sex with the assistants who preferred not to attempt to have sex with Tom. Tom got out of the golf cart and yelled, “Honey, you are mentally unstable and need to go back to Sheppard Pratt mental institution, and I am going to help you do just that! A private plane is on reserve, and you have been given time off from your show.” A young woman from the prop crew spoke up behind me and said, “Say, ‘Honey, you are the one who is sick, and I am firing you from my show!’” Loving the suggestion, I repeated it, loudly. Unbelievable to me, then and now, the guards came back and banned me, not Tom, from the lot where I made my television show. They took down the boards from his office, escorted him inside, and sent a team of people to sweep up the scattered glass and save the glossies of Tom with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Planet Hollywood crew. Sheppard Pratt is lovely during autumn, as I recall.

  Chapter 22

  The Great Escape

  Tom, in his own mind, had done everything humanly possible to make himself happy, and therefore make me happy, and I was supposedly just too self-obsessed and negative to appreciate all that he had done for himself, and therefore me. At the end of our relationship he said, “There is no pleasing you. You are an awful person!” I actually thought I was an awful person for all the things I suspected Tom of doing, and that made me resolve to be a better wife and stay married to him for three years longer than the three years, six months, and three weeks that we should have been married. I blame the Prozac. After the divorce and the Prozac detox, I found that I was actually right about almost everything that I thought I was wrong about, and I then had to forgive myself for being wrong in doubting that I was, in fact, right all along.

  In a matter of weeks from that day, I had finally determined that the demons in me that kept me in this bad and painful relationship needed to be totally destroyed once and for all. I was so mad at them for all of their codependency issues. First of all, they couldn’t exist without parasitically living off me, and I couldn’t exist without a man telling me that I deserved to be treated like a queen. I needed my ego stroked promiscuously the way that only other people’s demons could do. I decided that I would face my demons down and slay them all—a very tricky proposition for any normal woman, but especially for one who had, at twelve years old, sold her soul to the devil for fame, fortune, ego, and snacks.

  I recognized that I must first unleash my demons fully, in order to destroy them and that it must happen in Paris, beginning at the Louvre. After having my thirst for wine and cream and edibles slaked, I ventured forth, and passed ’neath the Crystal Pyramid. Inside was all the beauty of the world I had dreamed about since I was a girl. Art makes the “terror of existence bearable,” as some old genius once said.

  While in Paris, I returned to the Louvre daily, and I also drank and drank and drank, and smoked and smoked and smoked, and then I wrote and wrote and wrote, walking down dimly lit streets, reclaiming my anonymity, swearing, yelling, wasted from feeling hopeless despair and existential angst, unwashed for days, stinking, sitting next to beggar women on the street, reading Henry Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris, writing about madness, barefoot, knowing that no one knew who I was or wanted anything from me. I wasted $3,000,000 on castles, boats, hotels, planes, booze, drugs, tour guides, chauffeurs, and sin. I was sinning as big as I could, unleashing the madwoman. “You got to sin to get saved,” sings Miss Maria McKee.

  I fell in love with my big, blond Finnish bodyguard, Ben, who had helped with my ruse and my escape, and on our first night together I asked him if he would father Number Five, and he said yes. He accompanied me to the greatest museums and architectural marvels of Europe and the Mediterranean—from Paris to Florence, Venice, Rome, Madrid, Marbella, Sardinia, Marrakesh, and Amsterdam. In Nice, inside the museum where the works of the greatest Jew of all, Marc Chagall, are hung, I saw the truth of the longing for God in an upside-down world, expressed by another once living and thinking soul, on canvas, and felt the transcendental shock of it—of psychically merging with the vision and brushstrokes of an avatar. It is the most healing thing that exists.

  Ben and I drank, danced, smoked, and partied our way through my divorce/soul retrieval. I got to see Michelangelo’s David in Florence, where I dropped the second bomb on my husband by pay phone, telling him I was filing for divorce. And I got to eat real Italian garlic bread.

  Recipe for Real Italian Garlic Bread

  2 teaspoons minced garlic

  ½stick(1¼cup)unsalted butter, softened

  Dash of sea salt

  One 15-by-3½-inch loaf day-old Italian bread, sliced in half lengthwise

  Pinch of sweet paprika on top

  Preheat oven to 400°F.

  Chop garlic so fine that it disappears when mashed into the softened butter. add the dash of sea salt and then paint the garlic butter on the inside of both halves of the old bread. Wrap the bread in a moist towel and let sit for thirty minutes. remove the moist towel, place the bread halves on a cookie sheet, and bake for ten minutes. Sprinkle each half with paprika, and slice before serving.

  I saw and studied everything Michelangelo. His work has some nice, bipolar, morbid, thought disorder stuff going on in it. I felt sorry for the guy for having to create those images of damnation and cruelty on the hallowed walls of hallowed halls, where witch burners could relive their crimes while pretending to be innocent of them. The deep fear and loathing in those Sistine Chapel paintings, commissioned of a homosexual artist by an all-male clergy, is apparent in the depiction of women, who are all represented as dead or cringing mothers, bleeding victims, whores, or demons, and not once as stand-up comics, writers, or CEOs of small businesses. I must add that it was during this trip that I heard on Spanish TV, while in Madrid, that one O.J. Simpson had been arrested for the double homicide of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman, a nice Jewish boy who just got in The Juice’s way.

  I still think about the circuitous irony of that time in my life: how O.J. killed two people and got away with it; how the same rabbi who converted Tom, married us, and bar mitzvah’ed my son eventually married Tom to his new wife, a non-Jewish midwestern blonde; and how I married and got pregnant by the guy Tom had hired to drive me around and protect me, Ben Thomas.

  Chapter 23

  Buck Stops Here

  Getting pregnant by in vitro fertilization wasn’t easy. I was forty-three years old and sterile, but thanks to my Brentwood neighbor, a fertility doctor, I had my eggs harvested and mixed in a dish with my husband Ben’s sperm, a
nd then I took a bunch of shots to make me artificially fertile. The procedure is called ZIFT (zygote intrafallopian transfer), and I became pregnant on the very first try. The eggs were implanted sunny-side up in my uterus on Thanksgiving Day, 1994, during a three-week break from filming Roseanne. I have a picture of me dressed as a ballerina with a smiling Ben seated next to me on that happy day when our son was manufactured. The doctor told me that six fertilized eggs would be implanted in my womb, and that I must stay in bed and be calm for three to four entire days, and not get stressed out, so that they could implant on the old uterine wall.

  That was very difficult for me, because on the third day, my new husband, Ben, had to have emergency surgery after breaking his leg. I did not get stressed out by any of these things because I had also learned that very morning that I was pregnant with quadruplets. My first thought was, I am eating for FIVE! Heaven on earth! All the pain of the recent past washed away. Quadruplets were definitely the way to bounce back!

  Once I saw all four of them on the screen that was hooked up to my womb, I wanted to know them. I wanted to know people who were born by design. Their mentality would be positively futuristic. They would have to be new kinds of thinkers.

  Then, not more than a couple of weeks later, I started to absorb the eggs, one by one, over a three-week period. I burst into tears at the thought of losing them. My doctor told me it would all be all right if I moved as little as possible and did not get stressed. I began to pray for hours and hours each day, I needed the big soul hookup to the big soul battery in the sky badly. I would walk slowly to the car and sit on a pillow to ride slowly to the doctor’s office to be hooked up to the ultrasound machine. I watched as, one after another, three zygotes disappeared into the ether. Only Buck was left and he was tearing away from the tissue, hanging on by a thread. I began to breathe deeply and slowly and send my thoughts to the energy in the screen, to the little tiny speck there. I told it that it was okay to come here, and that this was an okay place to hang around for a while. I attempted to make a deep psychic connection with the zygote and invite it to stick around so we could hang out.

  I wanted my son to come to earth so badly because I knew that he would be funny and bright, as well as handsome, and that he’d make the varsity tennis team in ninth grade—and of course I was right about all of this. Most of all, I think I wanted my son because I knew that having him would force me to change, and though I didn’t really know all that back then, I see it now.

  At the most crucial fourth week of my pregnancy, my husband, Ben, with his broken leg in a cast, was bedridden right next to me. One night while we both lay there unable to move, we saw on the news that a hurricane was headed our way. I instantly imagined the worst: being ripped to shreds by Mother Nature, as my husband and I lay there helplessly underneath Ralph Lauren bedding. My anxiety was getting the best of me. Desperate not to miscarry, I decided to call Rabbi Eitan, a friend of my friend Sandra Bernhard, another loudmouthed sister Jewish comic. Sandra told me I would love him, and that he was for real, and righteous. I decided that this was probably as good a time as any to finally listen to what a rabbi-type guy had to say. Besides, the way I figured it, I gave so much money to the Jews in my lifetime, one way or another, that I should at least get something useful in return, when I needed it.

  I wanted to be comforted by him, but also I wanted to be able to get off the phone before he tried to speak to me about my sins. The poorer rabbis always seemed to bring those subjects up, and it was never as much fun for me to talk about as it seemed to be for them. I was quite pleased when our conversation instead turned to the topic of helping me remain calm. Teaching people to remain calm in crisis is what the richer rabbis do, and I like them better than the pushy poor rabbis who talk about gluttony and selfishness for many reasons, some purely selfish.

  Eitan genuinely seemed to want to help me, though, and he asked me if I would like to learn a valuable tool. I asked how much it would cost and was told there was no cost. I reminded him that I was on doctor’s orders not to move. “Yes, Roseanne, you have mentioned that quite a few times, but what I am about to teach you requires that you only close your eyes and breathe.”

  “Hell,” I said, “I can handle that!” And he proceeded to teach me the valuable art of breathing in the substance that I then breathed out. The substance that I contained briefly after breathing it in and just before it was breathed out would adhere to my inner workings and construct a spiritual vessel to contain itself. This simple letting-go-of-thinking thing, the meditative-state stuff, was very new to me, and it felt so powerful that I imagined that one day, perhaps, I could achieve the impossible: self-control!

  Once I was pregnant with Buck, the doctors ordered me to avoid stress, so I had to back down and turn my show over to other writers and producers. For a huge control freak, the most stressful thing in the world is to give up control. Not to get stressed doing the most stressful thing was difficult as hell. I was carefully driven to the Roseanne set and I delivered my lines from a couch or a chair. I left all the worry to other people. Thank God for the O.J. trial, which I watched every single day for the three months I was on bed rest.

  Anyway, that zygote wanted to come here pretty badly, and it is now a fifteen-year-old boy named Buck who still cannot believe that I was ever married to Tom Arnold. He says, “You were married to that guy? The one who gets all those hot chicks? Why do you think he went out with you? Did you not know it was just for tha cheddah? Dude, no way! Were you high?”

  “I was on the government pills for sure, son,” I said. “Now go do the dishes, or I’m grounding you off of Facebook.”

  Another ironic tidbit is that it was in my son’s nursery, while changing his dirty diaper, that I saw on TV that the jury had acquitted one Orenthal James Simpson of murder. It was then that I knew I must move away from Brentwood, where he might subsequently return. Already, it was almost impossible to even venture outside without boatloads of tourists from all over the world driving up and asking you to direct them to Rockingham Avenue.

  Being able to marshal all of my will, force, and ability to focus on emptying out and being silent, was indeed the closest thing to heaven that I ever felt here on earth. Being in a peaceful and heavenly state helped to quiet the voices in my mind, and I was able to stay calm enough to carry Buck to full term. Meditation became essential to me then, and still is today.

  While this newfound tool was successful in enabling me to have my son, I also found that all that focusing became detrimental to me as well. It was no longer allowing me to dissociate and turn a blind eye to my behavior, my decisions, or my past. Now, mind you, dissociative behavior is what allowed me to survive a complicated and at times traumatizing childhood. I had learned to function and even become wildly successful in this state for most of my life. I had multiple personalities and bipolar disorder diagnoses to prove it. I know it is hard to understand how a person on the verge of madness can function as well as I did in a world where portly, loudmouthed, bipolar delusionals are supposed to be locked away, not starring in a successful family sitcom for nine years. I was good at my life when it was a story told through fictional characters that I could make do and say what I wanted them to. My real life was the scary thing, though. I had little control over that.

  Rabbi Eitan wanted me to come to meet his teacher, Rabbi Berg, at the Kabballah Centre in Los Angeles. He escorted me into a room and said he would be right back. Sitting alone in the room waiting for his return, I was surprised to see the door open and an old hippie guy wearing a dashiki enter. He handed me a book and said it was about me and my show. “This was written by a friend of mine; he used your TV character as the example of the average woman. I thought you might want to read it. I have never seen your ‘Little Beaver’ show,” he said, “but I know everyone else has, so …”

  I liked him right away, because I like kooks like me—we understand each other’s language. So I said, “You mean, Leave It to Beaver? That was an old show with
a perfect mother named June on it, and many people have said that my show was its antithesis. Is that what you mean?”

  He said, “I don’t know anything about TV shows or movies, but something is telling me to have you read this book and get back to me on it if you want.” Then he disappeared behind closed doors.

  Opening the book, to no particular page, it just so happened (as it always seems to) that my eyes fell on the right words: “Rose-anne Connor is a character authored and portrayed by Roseanne Barr, a Jewish woman who is questioning the philosophical assumptions regarding the status of women in popular culture. Roseanne Connor as well as Roseanne Barr could be helped along greatly with some deep meditation.” It was all true, every word!

  I stepped out into the reception area. “Who was that guy and where did he go?” I asked a few of the staff members.

  “What guy?” they responded.

  “The older guy with the dyed beard and the hippie robes,” I said.

  “There is no one here fitting that description,” they replied.

  “He just came out and handed me this book!” I insisted.

  They looked at the book, and then, almost in shock, a woman said, “The Rav came out and gave this to you? You are so lucky!”

  Needless to say, I read the book and got back to him on it. I told him that it was very good, and almost spooky that I had come there to meditate and was handed a book about how I and my character should do just that. “The Light!” he replied, laughing.

  As it turned out, I was lucky enough to become one of the Rav’s students. He taught me tons of new angles on Torah stories and meditations that helped me to become not only calmer but more and more aware of things I had done in my life, or that I had blocked out of my mind. I was able to learn to relax enough to experience self-awareness in all of its twists and turns. I told the Rav that I had multiple personality disorder. He showed me the page in Zohar that says we are made up of many entities. Becoming more self-aware put me on a deep and dark yet ultimately illuminating journey of repentance and integration after my son was born.