I remembered this about her because it was endearing and because she was hot. I’m sorry if the latter seems base or shallow but it’s intrinsic to human nature. Really beautiful and extraordinarily ugly people stand out in one’s memory. Congratulations to you if you fall into either camp. I’m far less likely to remember the middles.
Diana had heard me talk about my mother’s suicide on a Netflix special and this was the email I got from her.
Hi Doug,
I was hoping you could help me out with a medical question, if possible. I don’t have any cool doctor or lawyer friends, but given your experience, I thought you might know someone I could ask. I’m done and need to check out this week. I have 50 30mg OxyContin and I need to know if that will be enough. I’m fairly opioid tolerant (I usually take 5 at a time, up to twice a day so that’s around 300mg), so I want to know how much will be enough, or if there is something else I should take with it to make sure I don’t wake up. I’m sorry to bug you with this shit, and if you can help me, I’ll ask my husband in my letter to donate some of my life insurance money to some charity you like or some bullshit. This has been a long time coming, and unfortunately it’s really hard to find this information online. I’m a useless shit, but at least I’ll be able to financially help my family when I kick it. I’m sorry I never finished your painting. Self loathing makes it difficult to accomplish much. I still have it because the delusional part of my brain keeps thinking I’ll finish it tomorrow… tomorrow… tomorrow. Like everything else. But it never happens, and it never will. Anyway, thanks for bringing some laughs to us in OB. You’re one of a kind man. Oh, your Netflix special was fucking great.
I only include it because I get suicide emails frequently. The detail and utter lack of emotion in this one made me sure that she wasn’t bluffing for attention.
I wrote back a simple “Finish the painting.”
Not much of a pep talk but you never know how famous you are in someone else’s eyes. If nothing else, maybe it would give her some temporary purpose.
She came back with “It’s not gonna happen. I have other shit to wrap up in the next couple days. Please let me know if you get any info. This is as far as I got btw. Bye.”
My own mother’s suicide had been planned and she’d been advised by a doctor on exactly how much morphine would be a minimum dosage to ensure success. Diana’s wasn’t the first email I’d received since talking about it on that Netflix special. Several people who were in the same position were asking for specific doses or what kind of drugs could be used. Diana made it clear that she wanted nothing but information. No sympathy, no talking down. Just the facts. I don’t exactly remember Mother’s dosages and surely wouldn’t tell a stranger if I did. I was sure you could find it on the Internet and told her that. I did offer that she had to stay alive for the finale of Breaking Bad that was coming up that Sunday but that was just selfish. I myself was terrified of dying before the last episode.
She responded with the following.
Every forum on the net just ends up with a thousand people talking about how precious baby’s farts are, therefore don’t kill yourself. No real clear guidelines.
Oh well, thanks anyway. Enjoy your tv show.
After assuring her I would in no way try to interfere with her plans, she opened up.
I’m unfortunately one of those sorry fucks that used drugs to cope with life instead of for fun (oxy, that is… the other ones were fun). It was manageable from 15-25/26 years old, but it got out of control and I made myself quit cold turkey because I couldn’t stand how pathetic I was. I’ve been (oxy)sober since, I’m a few weeks shy of 29, and each year I hate being alive more than the last. I’ve tried shrinks and all the other nonsense to no avail. I have a wonderful family that is unbearable to be around because I feel either loathing, hate or nothing at all, but I don’t want to make their life any more difficult so I put on my happy face (which worked for a while but is near impossible now). This has nothing to do with why I wanna off myself, but my whole family is financially fucked so they’re constantly stressed and miserable which is awful because they’re such good people and I’m worth $250k dead, so that’s just icing on the cake.
She included a naked selfie taken in a bathroom mirror and wrote: “Now I have to kill myself because I’ll never be able to see you in person after sending this picture for fear of dying of embarrassment.”
Other comedians get naked pics from ladies who want to fuck them. I’ve even been sent nude photos from girls asking if I could forward them to my famous friends whose emails are not public. Me, I get naked pictures from suicidal girls so the shame keeps them on task. Even with poor lighting it was pretty fucking hot. I’m keen to believe that wasn’t the only reason I began to question my promise not to interfere. She had it planned to do the next day so I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder the moral dilemma.
I was the only person who knew about her plan. I was on tour but I told her that I’d even stay on the phone with her and have cocktails while she ate pills, à la Mother, so she wouldn’t have to be alone. I told her to delete all of our text messages and emails so I couldn’t be seen as complicit after the fact. If I was gonna lose one fan, I didn’t want to lose a second when her husband checked her phone. She kept telling me what a good guy I was for not judging her or trying to stop her.
We kept in communication through phone calls, texts and emails throughout that day and the next. All the while, I’d be questioning Chaille, Bingo and Junior Stopka in the van as to what the proper move was. If I ratted her out and she killed herself anyway, she’d die alone being betrayed by the only person she trusted to tell. If I let her go through with it, it’s on my head forever. She wasn’t terminally ill or facing prison. She was twenty-nine, perpetually depressed and gorgeous. I KNOW HER LOOKS SHOULDN’T MATTER!
Bingo thought I needed to let her husband know what was going on. Chaille was of the mind that this was none of my business, should have never been put on my shoulders to begin with and reminded me to plug merch during my set. Junior likes pie. So I was the deciding vote and I reluctantly erred on the side of betrayal.
I found her husband on Facebook and left him a message to call me ASAP. I didn’t say why. Shortly after he called. “Are you fucking serious? This is Doug Stanhope? I can’t fucking believe Doug Stanhope is on my phone!” I told him to relax, that I was calling to tell him that his wife had been in contact with me and that she was planning to kill herself.
“Oh, is she doing that again?”
His demeanor was both encouraging and demoralizing. If it was that common an occurrence, then maybe it was just another bluff and I’d misread her determination. Or I was right and she was going to kill herself but he’d heard it too many times to take it seriously. He told me that she’d been having a rough time and had been telling him she was going to commit suicide quite often.
“But still, Holy Shit, I can’t believe I’m talking to Doug Stanhope!”
He said he was leaving work to go check on her. He must have called her first because she texted me.
“Really wish you would have talked to me first. It’s my own fault for opening my fat mouth.”
I sent a few texts trying to explain my reasoning but she wasn’t having it. I’d fucked her over. I told her I’d be there for her and then I stabbed her in the back. And then I didn’t hear back from her.
Her husband and I had said that whoever heard from her first would notify the other. It wasn’t until the next night after the show that he let me know she’d been found in a motel bathroom. She left a note that explained how she’d woken up after taking the pills. As she said she would in the note, she had to finish the job by cutting her wrists as well as stabbing herself.
To this day I still feel like a fucking rat traitor. I regret my decision as much as I know I’d probably repeat it. I also regret, like Liam Hughes and the helium, that I didn’t think to tell Diana that your family can’t collect insurance from a suicide. Stupid.
>
I don’t try to talk anyone out of suicide. I don’t know you and don’t know what you’re going through that has driven you to that brink. I’ve shared emails with a twenty-one-year-old kid in the UK who suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, also known as the “suicide disease,” regarded as the most painful known medical condition and has a 25 percent suicide rate for those afflicted. He hasn’t killed himself as of this writing but would you be the one to tell him that it’s wrong to take your own life?
This brings us to the case of Tony Nicklinson, who in a roundabout way gave my most hardcore fans their title.
KILLER TERMITES
I had just started into that ill-fated seven-week tour of the UK when I read an article about a man named Tony Nicklinson. He made national news fighting with the high court for the right to die. Mr. Nicklinson was what they call a tetraplegic, or having “locked-in syndrome.” He was fifty-three and his mind worked perfectly but he was trapped in a body that could only communicate by blinking his eyes at a computer screen. He’d been there for six years and was at that time suing to have the right to an assisted suicide. You know, because you can’t blink yourself to death.
The Nicklinson story affected me because I’m an extreme claustrophobe. I get claustrophobic in my own body when I can’t reach an itch on my back. Sometimes I’m afraid to take hallucinogens for fear of fixating on the fact that I’m buried alive in my own fat carcass. Buried alive is one of my biggest fears along with burning alive. And I think that it’s fucked up that those are your two choices for what to do with your body when you die. Tony Nicklinson was living my biggest fear. Reading about him made me feel something that I was afraid might be an emotion and I sprinted for a bottle of vodka.
Allison Pearson was and is a gargoyle columnist for the UK newspaper Daily Telegraph who’d also written two romance novels, a feat as impressive as a songwriter landing a jingle for a douche commercial.
With the Nicklinson case in the headlines, Pearson scrawled out a half-assed, empty-calorie op-ed piece titled “Do Any of Us, No Matter How Ill, Have the Right to Die?”
The underlying text should have simply been “Yep.”
Fill in the rest with ad space.
The piece was disparaging not just about the right to die but seemingly of Mr. Nicklinson himself. She had very little or nothing of any bolstered argument on the issue, only snide, condescending personal jabs at the expense of a man who could only communicate by blinking his eyelids.
She suggested he should just starve to death if it’s so bad. She suggested he just go off his meds and hope for an infection, like some cruel version of Mother’s home remedies. All in the most sarcastic, condescending tone. She said that other people in similar conditions were making the best of it.
“Stephen Hawking comes to mind.”
Really? Name another. Maybe Tony Nicklinson didn’t have a Stephen Hawking genius brain to keep him entertained in that condition, day after day, year after pressure-sored year. Maybe his wife should have offered him that kind of tough love.
“Honey, why can’t you be more like Stephen Hawking? Quit your grousing and pick yourself up by your noodle-kneed bootstraps and come up with a quantum mathematical equation that solves the big bang theory!”
Vulgar.
So after reading the article I threw out a tweet that included a link as well as the word “cunt,” of course, to share the story. I also followed up with a tweet to her that I’d turned to Christianity so that I could pray she got an ovarian cyst, just to pile on.
I could have known what the response from my fans might be.
Shortly before this tour had begun, someone sent me a tweet or an email or a smoke signal to a link to the blog of a guy named Troy who had been stealing me. Not stealing a joke or some other petty comedy politics bullshit. He was stealing me. He had a blog that was taking stories from my lifetime of recorded material, web posts and interviews and printing them as though they were his own. He maybe changed the city, the name of the friend involved, etc. Otherwise they were all the same full stories, verbatim. It would be the same as if you found someone had copied your entire Facebook page with the only difference being that they’d Photoshopped their own head onto all of your pictures.
Not only that, but he was on all social media promoting this blog like he was looking to try to sell himself as me. “Come read my stories of drinking, drugs and fucking!” or something that benign. If I couldn’t make myself popular in those exact same words in this many years, good luck.
I tweeted a link to Troy’s blog with a simple “Fuck with this guy.” And they fucked with him so harshly that he no longer exists on the Internet.
Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, Troy’s blog and every other social media account were taken down and if you were to google his full name, to this day it would still come up with his attempt to steal my life. He is now listed in the Urban Dictionary as an example of a “shit dick” for “self-promotion through plagiarism.” It was overkill at minimum. He was a bonehead who did something stupid. I didn’t know it would go that far.
It got so brutal I had to call off the troops. I ended up feeling kinda bad for the guy and for being the person who fired the starting pistol. Maybe I should have been flattered or even sympathetic that some dude wanted to steal the fame of a guy who wasn’t even widely liked much less well known. But it made me aware that I had a bored and equally hateful band of idiots who, like me, needed an outlet for their impotent rage.
I felt no remorse when shortly thereafter, the brunt of their aimless rage fell on Allison Pearson.
My tweet about Pearson’s column referred to her as a cunt and I left it at that… buuuut my Twitter followers didn’t. They read this cold-blooded article she’d thoughtlessly dispatched and pounded her on Twitter. Again, a small cabal of fans but virulent and dogged. They drenched her Twitter feed with every repulsive obscenity imaginable and wished her and her children paralyzed or dead. Some not as articulately as others but all malicious. It got so brutal that, like Troy, I had to tell people to lay off. Hennigan even told me to put the brakes on it and he is an irrepressible sadist.
Allison Pearson responded with a series of head-scratching tweets threatening to report me to Twitter, investigate my employers and call the police.
Hang on. You’re going to investigate my employers? Meaning you are going to try to get me fired? From comedy? I would have gone so far as to say that I am my own employer. But the truth is that my audience decides my status of being employed or otherwise and they are the ones bombarding her with wishes and hopes of her kids being paralyzed or deceased.
I don’t think you really want to talk to my employers right now, Ally. They’re pretty high strung, especially when they’ve been drinking.
She tweeted again, twisting the “pray you get an ovarian cyst” into “he threatened me with cancer.” I tried to imagine a real-world application for this threat.
“I want two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills or all these hostages get small-cell carcinoma!”
I was never contacted about the “investigation” but I assume that Scotland Yard was either bogged down with other serious crimes or they just don’t live up to their reputation. I’m not that hard to find.
She called me a “vile misogynist” simply for using the word “cunt.” That had no legs. Especially in a country where “cunt” is a word used far more often for a man, usually a man who is your friend. “It’s yoor fookin turn to buy a pint, you fookin cunt.”
I only referred to Pearson as a cunt because “black-hearted vulture of a human being who uses the weakest of people as carrion for an easy meal just to fill space in a newspaper without so much as a cogent opinion” doesn’t jibe with the 140-character Twitter parameters.
So I shortened it to “cunt.” Probably tame compared to what Tony Nicklinson would have blinked about her.
Shortly afterwards, the whole affair seemed to die. I assumed that Allison Pearson had shut her ridi
culous clown mouth, put on her dunce cap and slinked off into the corner. I thought that was the end of it until a few weeks later when I found a big, full-color picture of me in her new column right beside a picture of a guy who’d just been sentenced to prison for “inciting racial hatred” on Twitter. He had live-tweeted the on-field heart attack of a black soccer player with the most puerile invective and was for a moment the most hated man in the whole country. His initial tweets and arrest happened within days of my initial tweet about Pearson.
Our photos sat side by side atop her new column about cyberbullying titled “The Curse of the Internet Trolls.” Of course, she put herself in as an equal victim to the soccer player who’d nearly died on the pitch. The article starts out with the fifty-six-day jail sentence Liam Stacey received for online taunting of Fabrice Muamba as he was lying on the field after having a heart attack that began with Liam tweeting “Fuck Muamba. He’s dead!!!” Fabrice didn’t die but came close. What made me curious was what exactly he said that had him sent to prison for this inciting racial hatred.
He was sentenced to prison for fifty-six days of which he served half. On a side note that is praise for the expediency of the justice system in England, he was arrested, convicted, sentenced, served and was out free all within the length of our seven-week tour. Yet in criticism of UK law and logic in general, I wondered how this specific breach of the law could stand.
After some digging I found screenshots of Liam Stacey’s tweets in question. They were a string of idiot trolling tweets, each using as many trained-offensive buzzwords as any moron could plug into a sentence. After he sparked some outrage with his initial “Fuck Muamba, He’s Dead!!!” tweet, he followed up and responded to detractors with more of the same.
This Is Not Fame Page 21