Bare Bones

by Bobby Bones

  I’m a control freak. I like knowing that if something gets screwed up, I have only myself to blame. And on October 24, 2014, I screwed up big time.

  Now, I have to be very careful about what I write here. Even in a joking manner. I got in a lot of trouble with the U.S. government (you know, those guys) because of something I did on the air that day. Something that was a total accident. Something that ended with me getting my company hit with a fine of one million dollars. Let’s just call it the Million-Dollar Bad Thing. I am so nervous even to write about it that I’m just going to say, google “Bobby Bones Fined $1 Million.” What a terrible writer I am! I ask you to pay good money for a book in which I require that you google something to get the full story. Listen, I’m not getting in trouble with Uncle Sam again for a paragraph of a book that maybe no one is even going to read anyway.

  I’m joking now, but at the time that the Million-Dollar Bad Thing happened, I wasn’t laughing. In fact I was panicked that I was about to be fired. Not even when Charlamagne Tha God, DJ for one of the other biggest morning shows in the country, out of New York City, and a mentor and friend, sent me hundreds of emojis laughing so hard they were crying could I calm down. And if Charlamagne couldn’t get me out of my head, no one could.

  I first met Charlamagne at an iHeartRadio Music Festival several years earlier when the company we both worked for took its top people for an off-site where we were stuck together for three days. That’s when I became friends with Charlamagne and Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (aka Kennedy, the original conservative MTV VJ now turned Fox Business Network host). I don’t use the word “friend” lightly, and I’m even stingier with the term in media circles, but Charlamagne, Kennedy, and I became a tight little triangle of friends.

  I particularly identified with Charlamagne, who grew up poor in South Carolina and, like me, had to grind out a career path for himself. Ever since that festival where we met, we talk all the time on the phone, sometimes three times a week. We motivate each other in our work, because we are both examples that where you’re from doesn’t have to determine who you become.

  So it was no surprise, then, that after the Million-Dollar Bad Thing happened, he was one of the first and only people to reach out to me.

  “It sucks right now, but fight through it,” he said, “because this is what legends are made of.”

  I appreciated Charlamagne—I always do. But even he couldn’t get through to me with this one. I felt like a complete loser. People trusted me to do the biggest show this format’s ever seen—and I let this happen? It wasn’t like I went on a creative limb and fell off. What happened was just a dumb technical error that shook my foundation. And usually nothing, nothing messes with me.

  Whenever I do something on a massive level—like when I hosted morning TV with Kelly Ripa or some of the biggest music managers in country came to see one of my Raging Idiots shows—I don’t experience it as pressure and get nervous. Instead it’s time to compete and win—and I get pumped. Now, sometimes I don’t win. But I always try to.

  The Million-Dollar Bad Thing rocked me pretty hard, though, not only because of the enormous sum of money iHeartMedia was facing in terms of FCC fines but because I let down the same people who had taken such a big chance on me. Unlike many of the other disappointments I have experienced, this was one I couldn’t compartmentalize and put away.

  Work wasn’t the only thing in my life that was out of control at that moment. After Rachel and I dated for about a year, her team convinced her that she needed to stop seeing me because it was ruining her career. I had predicted this moment months before. “You know what’s going to happen?” I had told her. “They’re going to tell you that I’m hurting your career. And maybe I am. If you date the biggest radio personality on iHeartRadio, you may be penalized by Cumulus or CBS.”

  Rachel didn’t want to hear it. She told me how much she loved me and wanted to stay together. But I cut it off. I couldn’t stand the idea that there was even a chance I was hurting someone’s career for a relationship that probably wasn’t going to last anyway—no matter how good it was. It didn’t matter that we laughed all the time. Or that we started as friends and morphed into a relationship in the best possible way. I knew no one would stay with me long term.

  As soon as Rachel and I split up, I found myself in a bizarre scenario. For the first time in the short history of Bobby Estell, women, and lots of them, were interested in me. It was crazy. Women, real-life women, wanted to go out with me. So, like a man who’s been starving for years and is taken to an all-you-can-eat buffet, I dated everyone. At the height of this small blip in an otherwise flatlined social life, I went out with six or seven girls—all at once.

  They were actresses and musicians, famous folks, but I never talked about any of it on the air. I would have, but it was their business. That’s always my rule with what I’ll say on air—I’m not going to talk about you; I’m going to talk about me. And then, if you’re okay with me talking about you, I’ll talk about you, too. But in terms of the women I was seeing during this period, I didn’t need everyone to know I was dating them. I especially didn’t want the women I was dating to know about each other!

  Keeping my stories straight was the hardest part of being a Casanova. (The second-hardest part was typing that line.) I had to remember what I had or hadn’t told to each woman. Sometimes I’d repeat myself. Other times I made a reference to something she’d never heard before. It was a mess. Again, I didn’t have tons of experience with women, and certainly never juggled multiple relationships, so this was all Louis-and-Clark stuff to me. One area where I nailed it, however, was my phone system.

  I’ve only had one phone number for the past fifteen years, and I don’t keep two phones. So I came up with the idea to put the women I was seeing into my phone under the names of old Cubs baseball players. In my twisted code, a woman whose name started with M appeared as Mark Grace—the Cubs’ first baseman—when she texted. I could be out for a romantic dinner with said Mark Grace and suddenly my phone is blowing up with Andre Dawson, who played right field; Shawon Dunston (shortstop); Ryne Sandberg (second baseman); I had the whole 1989 National League East’s winning team sending me text messages.

  It was fun for a minute, but more as a diversion than anything else. It wasn’t like I sowed my wild oats. I went on lots of dates, held lots of hands, paid for lots of dinners, and that’s about it. In truth, I didn’t go out with any of my Cubs more than a handful of times. We’d make out a little bit and then become friends. My fear of getting an STD or a woman pregnant slammed the brakes on getting freaky. Sad but true.

  In the end, my serial dating was more wearing and exhausting than anything else. I couldn’t even find fun in dating beautiful and occasionally really famous women. Everything seemed to be draining—even work—mostly because I had stopped sleeping. The Million-Dollar Bad Thing was out there and hanging over my head. At this point, the dollar amount still hadn’t been decided, but I was told it was going to be a Five-Million-Dollar Bad Thing. I beat myself up about it over and over while I lay in bed at night.

  The stress pushed me over some kind of edge and I found myself reliving a series of traumatic events that had happened since moving to Nashville and which until this point I had kept bottled up.

  The first messed-up thing happened after I’d been in Nashville for only three days. On my company’s suggestion, I had moved into a fancy, gated neighborhood right on a golf course. I thought it was way too expensive a place to live, but they insisted. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve had too much crap happen to you,” one exec said, referring not only to the crazed lunatic with a knife who had been waiting for me outside the radio station in Austin but also to repeated death threats against me.

  I wasn’t even that controversial. I talked about not getting girls and my dog, Dusty. Still, people wanted to mess with me. (After a person repeatedly called to say, “If you walk outside of the radio station, I’m going to kill you,” the station had to build a
whole bulletproof-glass room in the front of the building and hire security.) So I moved into my super safe house in Nashville with twenty-four-hour security. And three days later (I hadn’t even started to unpack my boxes) I was asleep when everything went insane—my phone, my computer, and my sense of well-being.

  As it turned out, about ten houses down a guy apparently had murdered his wife and was now on foot in my gated super safe neighborhood. SWAT teams had invaded and were shouting through bullhorns for everyone to lock up and stay inside, because the man was armed and dangerous. They caught him in the woods a day later, but it proved to me that anything can happen anywhere. (And I soon moved.)

  The wife murderer was an unfortunate but random event. Others were directed at me. Next up were two agent-type guys who showed up at my front door and showed their badges.

  “Do you mind if we come in?” one of them asked.

  Did I have a choice? Not really; they were IRS agents.

  “You’ve been compromised,” one agent said. “Someone who works for us has hacked into your files.”

  They showed me a picture and I recognized the woman instantly. A huge fan of the show, she had come to a number of our live events. Because her work computer was monitored, they were aware when she breached security by looking into my files. Of course they were! What kind of employee of the IRS doesn’t know they are going to be caught if they dig into people’s personal information? A dumb one, that’s who. The agents asked me if I wanted to press charges. “Yes,” I said, and never heard anything more about the woman again.

  That might have been my last interaction with that woman, but it wasn’t my last with government agents. Shortly after the IRS showed up at my house, two other secret agent types showed up at my studio while I was in the middle of my radio show. This time, though, it was immediately clear the situation was a lot more serious.

  “Get off the air right now,” one of them said.

  “Well, two guys with suits walked in,” I said on air. “I guess I’ve got to go.”

  I hit a song and told someone, “Just play songs till I’m done.”

  The two men escorted me to a room in the station and said, “We want to know about the threats you’ve posted to the President of the United States.” Or something like that. I was so freaked out my ears were ringing, which made it hard to hear.

  “I did not threaten the President of the United States,” I insisted to them. But in my head I tried to remember what stupid thing I had said on air that could have been misconstrued as a threat. It was hard to think, though, when I was pretty sure I was about to get a one-way ticket to Guantánamo.

  If I was freaked out before, when they put up paper to block out the window in the door and started to press me pretty hard, I was downright panicked. Even though the men in suits identified themselves, I honestly don’t remember what agency they were a part of—FBI, I guess? They could have been Secret Service. I was so scared I have no idea. I learned that the government doesn’t mess around. I cracked a couple of jokes, but they weren’t funny to anybody but me. And then I stopped cracking jokes. The government; they don’t play.

  “You didn’t write this message to the president saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, N-word’?”

  Once I realized it wasn’t something I said on air but a written message, I breathed a sigh of relief. I sometimes say things I don’t remember because I have to talk so much. “Guys, I absolutely did not do this,” I said.

  The person who did send that threatening message to the White House was a listener, who had created an e-mail account under my name. As it turned out, the agents knew I wasn’t the person behind it and were just doing their due diligence. (If that was just doing their due diligence, I’d hate to experience a real interrogation.)

  Being a public person comes with an inherent share of craziness, but I found that each threatening event I experienced built on the next to create a sense of constant anxiety. From being robbed outside a club in Little Rock to being jumped outside of work in Austin by the man with a knife to my IRS files getting hacked to multiple death threats, I struggled to maintain my equilibrium. I didn’t want to sink into paranoia and constant worry that the world is dangerous and ultimately against me. But every time something bad happened, no matter how much I had worked on myself in therapy and how far I’d come in life, it was like I went right back to the place from which I started.

  Whenever I slid back into this bad state of mind the nightmares returned. These were the same ones that I had for weeks after the incident in Austin in the early morning hours outside the studio. I would dream that I was lying in bed—the same bedroom, the same bed that I was actually lying in. In the nightmare someone with a gun was breaking into my room. It was always the exact same thing, down to the same gun. The worst part, however, was that because the dream happened in my bedroom, when I woke up in that same room, I felt like I was still in the middle of my nightmare. Only it was real life.

  That happens about forty, fifty days in a row and you are going to be exhausted.

  After the Million-Dollar Bad Thing happened, all the other events rushed back—and so did the nightmares. I stopped sleeping altogether.

  I have never been a great sleeper, because I’m always worried that I’m going to oversleep and miss work. And if I miss work, I’m going to lose my job. Back to square one. I sleep with my laptop in my bed. My phone is my alarm. And I sleep with another alarm set to back up my phone. Still, to make sure I don’t oversleep, I check the clock three or four times a night. I’m not sure I remember what a good night’s rest feels like.

  Still, this was a whole other kind of unrest. Every night I had the same nightmare, over and over again. Waking up with my heart racing, there was no way I could get back to sleep. So I’d just stay up and work. I got to the point where I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. Then it seemed as if I didn’t sleep at all.

  It was murder, getting out of bed at 3 A.M. and feeling like crap every day. Because I don’t like to put any kind of drug in my body, and don’t do coffee, it was sheer gut and will that got me through this show. And I got sick and stayed sick, because of the lack of sleep.

  I was never late (have I mentioned that I don’t do that?), but that didn’t mean I was doing a great job. In that period when I didn’t know how much I was going to get fined by the FCC and I wasn’t sleeping, The Bobby Bones Show went through a really sour time. Months went by when the ratings were terrible. It wasn’t even that our listeners were angry with me for the Million-Dollar Bad Thing. The trouble made the news, but mainly it was just in media circles. It was such a blip, hardly anyone in the mainstream knew about it. No, the bad ratings were simply due to the fact that I wasn’t doing a good show.

  This was the lowest point I had ever reached in my life—and that’s when you go and ask for help.

  My therapist had suggested a few times over the course of our working together that I consider taking antidepressants. It wasn’t that I was depressed; I was just never happy. I never got out of being sad—if that makes sense. Still, I was terrified of taking pills. I don’t like taking pills. And for good reason.

  The obsessive nature I inherited from my mom was always lurking in the background. Like I said, if it wasn’t golf or poker, then it was Subway sandwiches or working out. I had to work out at the exact same time, for the exact same amount of time, every day of the week, or I didn’t want to work out at all. I started eating right, which meant no cheat dates, ever. For four months, I didn’t touch bread or sweets, and I love eating bread and sweets. But I couldn’t do it. I can’t do anything in moderation.

  I wish I were able to use alcohol to be more comfortable in social situations, because I’m very uncomfortable socially. I’m always quiet, shy, reserved. Even now. It’s odd, because I talk for hours each day to millions of people and perform live in front of thousands. If I’m onstage at a Raging Idiots concert or doing a television show, I’m not unnerved because it’s a performance. But r
eal-life interactions, I’m not good at. So when I’m not performing, I mainly keep to myself, sometimes not even leaving my bedroom.

  Did that mean I was depressed? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to end up like my mom, so at a certain point I decided to talk to my doctor about taking antidepressants. I was so nervous, however, that I needed more than just the opinion of my therapist, even though I trusted her implicitly. I had three months of conversations with my medical doctor, too, who didn’t push me either way as I asked tons and tons of questions.

  “Am I going to be out-of-control up?”

  “Will I be the same person?”

  “Am I going to put on weight?”

  “Am I going to be able to think the same?”

  “Will I get addicted?”

  He laid out the benefits and risks until I was ready to make a decision. I wound up taking them for three or four months, during which time I didn’t notice any perceptible change at all. I know it takes a while for that stuff to kick in, and that you have to work closely with a doctor who really understands the right dosage and medication for you. But my ambivalence meant that I wasn’t all that committed to the process. So I just stopped again, with the doctor’s help.

  Here I was, my life seemingly crumbling around me because I was unable to sleep. I knew that my inability to sleep came from deeper, darker demons that I needed to wrestle with, but in order to do that I needed to get some sleep!