by Dave Holmes
You know the Peter Principle? The notion that people get promoted throughout their careers until they get to the job they cannot do? I got to that point at age twenty-three.
I temped for a few months, then landed on my feet by the grace of my mouth and got myself another, simpler gig at another agency uptown, where I still wasn’t very good, but would do.
The experience left a mark, though. The universe was sending me a message. I wanted to try something new. I wanted to find my place in the world. I wanted to be as openly passionate as Janet was about the Walsh family, and get paid for it.
I wanted to be…I don’t know, something.
I have never been a drugs guy, because Nancy Reagan did her job well. “Just Say No” was a ridiculously simplistic response to the multilayered problem of drug abuse and organized crime in the United States, but that shit worked on a lot of us ’80s teenagers. Nancy Reagan was America’s Postwar Mom for a minute there—which is to say withholding and emotionally remote—and we didn’t want to let her down. Plus the message was so simple: Just say no! Don’t be bad, be good instead! Easy, practical, effective.
It worked on me.
Except for twice.
On a Saturday night in the winter of 1992, when I was a sophomore in college, I was preparing for a night out when my friend Andrew pulled me aside and asked, “Do you want to do Ecstasy?” Ecstasy was a brand-new thing in those days, and Holy Cross was not a drugsy campus, but somehow I had presented myself as a person who was up for anything. I threw caution, good sense, and Nancy Reagan out the window.
“Sure.”
Andrew had come by two hits of E at $25 a piece from a friend at a more adventurous college while he was home for the Christmas break, and he had never done it before either. He brought them back to the Cross, waiting for the perfect opportunity and the perfect person to do it with, which apparently were right now and me. His roommate was gone for the weekend, so we went back to his room, two dorms down from my own. He put Achtung Baby on the CD player, and pulled a Ziploc bag out from the back of his T-shirt drawer. The pills were massive, like something you’d give horses. Each was the exact size and color of an orange Chewy SweeTart. We broke them up with our keys and gobbled up the pieces.
A few minutes later, Andrew’s phone rang. It was his girlfriend, who lived off-campus. Andrew said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. See you.” He hung up, looked at me, and said, “She wants me to come over. Make yourself at home here if you want. Have a good night.”
And then he left.
And as The Edge’s majestic guitar introduced “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” my situation became clear to me. I was alone in a room that was not my own, in a hall where I did not live, waiting for a drug I had never taken—and could not tell anyone I had taken, for fear of getting a reputation—to kick in. Would it happen in a minute? An hour? Five hours? Andrew wouldn’t have had the answers even if he hadn’t left, which he had. I was in the single-rider line for what could either be a brief, gentle whirl in the teacups or a Space Mountain that would never stop for the rest of my life.
The thing about E is that it kicks in all at once. Your entire body begins to tingle, but not in a pleasant, love-struck way. It’s more like your foot is asleep, but everywhere. Your heart rate leaps like you’ve gotten a massive electrical shock. It is an instant panic attack, particularly if you are doing it in total isolation and “Mysterious Ways” is thumping out of a boom box in a strange and empty room. I would have put a finger on my wrist to take my pulse, but I could actually see my veins and arteries pump pump pumping through my skin. Much too fast. Deep breaths, Dave. I grabbed Andrew’s phone and cradled it in my arms like a fragile newborn baby. I told myself I’d call 911 if it got even 1 percent scarier. Oh, but then an ambulance would come and people would talk. No good.
I was going to have to get myself out of this situation. I was going to need a plan. I got up and started pacing, telephone in my sweaty hands.
Boxy, affordable sportcoats from places like the Gap and Structure were popular that year, and I wore them often. I enjoyed the slight Thurston Howell air they lent me, plus there were pockets the perfect size for cigarettes and a Walkman. I fished around for a Camel Light to calm me down. But instead, in my breast pocket, there was something smaller and harder than a pack of cigarettes.
Something perfect.
In the left breast pocket of my black watch plaid sportcoat was a cassette copy of the self-titled debut album by Wilson Phillips.
I pulled it out of its case, and stuck it into Andrew’s stereo with shaking, addled hands. I rewound it to the beginning, hit play, and walked over to Andrew’s full-length mirror to take a good look at myself.
And then track one kicked in.
You will recall that track one is leadoff single “Hold On.”
“I know there’s pain,” Chynna Phillips told me. You do know it, sister. It hit me in this moment that I had a clear choice between joy and fear, between anxiety and actual literal ecstasy, that if I was choosing to freak out, I could just as easily choose not to. Why do I lock myself up in these chains? Is it really fair to feel this way inside?
I spoke out loud to my reflection: “You hold on, Dave Holmes. Things will change. Things will go your way.”
The clouds parted, and a feeling like a combination of strong coffee, an orgasm, and the first warm day of spring trickled into my body. My blood was carbonated. This was great. And as Wilson Phillips predicted, something did make me want to turn around and say goodbye. Goodbye to the isolation, to the fear, to anything that held me back. I threw open the door to Andrew’s room, just as people began their Keystone Light–fueled pre-gaming for a Saturday night. I went room to room, delivering tight hugs and kind words, because even if I wasn’t real familiar with the kids on this hall, I knew they were the finest people I would ever meet. We had a connection. Every song on everyone’s stereo was the best song I had ever heard, until I got sick of it about twenty seconds in, and then would you mind if I changed it?
Life was beautiful. This was the way a person was supposed to feel.
That was the night Nirvana—they’re my new favorite group, can I tell you about them?—made their Saturday Night Live debut. I had a viewing party in Andrew’s room. It was also the first night of the Beth Cahill/Melanie Hutsell/Siobhan Fallon era of SNL, and when the three ladies came out for their Delta Delta Delta sketch? I don’t need to tell you that I had never seen a funnier, truer thing.
That nobody around me thought anything more than “Dave Holmes is in a moderately good mood” speaks either to how sheltered we were at Holy Cross, or to how much pressure I put on myself to behave like a person on Ecstasy at all times just to be accepted. Probably both.
It was a great night. But here’s the thing I learned about E: let’s say we’re only eligible to receive a finite amount of happiness units for any given day. Let’s say ten happiness units. Usually you get six to eight, sometimes you only get two, once in a very rare while you get all ten.
Ecstasy gives you fifty happiness units, all at the same time. And it feels great to have five days’ full happiness allowance all at the same time! You don’t know what to do with it all, where to put it, whom to give it to. You’re lousy with happiness units!
But then the next day, and the few days after, you do not have any happiness units at all, because you’ve used them all up in one go. You have to learn how to live for a few days with zero happiness units, and no eligibility to apply for more. It is literally physically impossible for you to get happy. You do things like turn on the radio, hear “The Way It Is” by Tesla, and openly sob. (Which I did the very next morning. The line “That’s the way it is, the way that it goes” was too real for me.)
So I know two things for sure: one, Ecstasy was a one-and-done for me, and two, I would have been the one person who ended up in a mental institution from a single dose of Ecstasy if it had not been for Wilson Phillips.
So that was it for me and dru
gs. It would be one tiny indiscretion, I told myself. Nancy need never know.
Except for this one other thing, which happened in 1996, after I got canned from Grey. I was sighing, roaming the streets of Manhattan dejected and in tweed. I was temping as a typist for Credit Suisse First Boston, taking gruff orders from financial analysts who were a year younger than me. The agency that assigned me there was called Mademoiselle, and when I checked in at security, I had to state the name of the agency and then my own, which meant I had to start each work day by saying, “Mademoiselle Dave Holmes.” I was at an emotional low. Ripe for the picking.
I had just begun doing some short-form improv shows at various bars around town—bars that had stages, but whose regulars never showed up expecting to see a show. We’d do our little games: World’s Worst (where you go off audience suggestions and act like the world’s worst porn star or prostitute or…really those are the only two suggestions you’ll ever get), ABC Shakespeare (where you improvise a Shakespeare scene except the first line starts with A and the next line starts with B, and then someone says “Zounds” at the end because it’s Shakespeare-y sounding and nothing else starts with Z), the thing where you put your arms behind your back and someone puts their arms through yours so it’s like their arms are your arms, and you have to justify what they’re doing. All the hits. And we did it all for the backs of people’s heads as they watched the game, or for small groups of Danish travelers who saw this bar in their travel guide. It was demoralizing, but we were doing it together. Comedy boot camp.
One night I had a really good show, which is to say someone turned around to face us, or understood our language, or seemed to laugh when I said “Zounds.” When you’re just starting out in comedy, that’s all it takes to make you feel like you’ve found your calling. I thought: I am strong, I am invincible, I am comedy. I had some post-show drinks at the bar with my teammates and headed for home. It was a Thursday and I had work in the morning.
When I got back to my building, there were voices coming from my neighbor Adam’s place. Adam was one of those Wall Street types who ran in a more glamorous social circle, but we had become drinks-every-couple-of-months kind of friends. I heard whooping and laughter as I turned my key. It seemed like he and his banker boys were having fun in there. I was the future of American comedy. I deserved to have fun with cool people. I was also a little tipsy. I knocked.
It turned out that Adam had a gang of college friends in town for a fraternity brother’s bachelor party out on Long Island. He’d taken the next day off of work, and he and his handsome, white-toothed posse were gathered around his Crate & Barrel coffee table doing cocaine off a Pharcyde CD cover.
I had always said that I would never do cocaine, but that was before what may or may not have been a laugh from a stranger had kick-started my next life. I was a new man now, and that man was impervious to consequences. Plus, I had instant crushes on about four of these six guys.
“You want in?” one of them asked, handing me a short straw and Bizarre Ryde II Tha Pharcyde.
“You know what? I do want in.” I put the straw in my nose, leaned forward, inhaled a line, and nothing happened.
And then four seconds later I was the happiest, warmest, and most confident I’d ever been, and the next thing I knew I was in an all-night jazz club in the West Village.
Loving it.
Loving my new friends and my new favorite kind of music and my new frame of mind and my new life.
I love this! I get this! I get jazz and I love jazz! I get why everyone is kind of looking at the musicians and nodding knowingly! I am nodding myself! Actually all of my limbs are moving! I am a jazz and cocaine person! Let’s talk about jazz! Do you like jazz? Who is your favorite jazz person? That guy playing jazz up there on stage right now? That’s so funny because he’s mine too! Let’s celebrate by doingmorecocainerightnow.
Aside from the fact that it makes you think and speak in italics, here is the thing I learned very quickly about cocaine: it is always almost the most fun you have ever had. On a scale of zero to ten, zero being your life before you discovered cocaine, and ten being the best time you have ever had in your entire life, better than Ecstasy, better than Space Mountain even, cocaine puts you at a 9.8. But cocaine also makes you greedy. A 9.8 just will not do. You can see a perfect ten from where you are sitting (and fidgeting and chewing the inside of your cheek). That ten is right there. You want it. And the only thing you can think of that will get you to a ten is more cocaine.
You decide that it is a perfectly healthy decision for you to reorient your life fully around cocaine. So you keep doing more, every ten minutes or so, chasing a kind of bliss that does not exist, until there is no more cocaine to do, and you have to face what you have become, which is a toilet person.
For me and my new best friends, that time came at around 10:00 the next morning, long after I had called in sick to my temp agency from a West Village pay phone at 5:00 a.m. We sat in my living room with the TV on, scraping up whatever trace amounts existed on my coffee table, which is to say aspirating dust mites while Rosie O’Donnell fired Koosh balls into her audience and called people “cutie patooties.”
When there is no more cocaine to do, the crash begins, and there is nothing you can do about it. The quickened heart rate that was exhilarating only moments before is now cause for alarm. The perspiration that gave you a sexy glow under jazz-club neon makes you look like a sweaty fat person in the morning sun. The head that was a Tesla coil of brilliant ideas at midnight is a half-deflated basketball at dawn.
It is awful.
When I am feeling low, I know I can always do one of two things to turn my mood around: I can take a nap, or I can masturbate. In particularly dark times, I find that I can bounce back and forth between the two, all day long. Cocaine will rob you of these two valuable tools. Once I finally decided to call it a night at around noon, I found myself sweating through my sheets, fitfully trying to engage a dick that wanted nothing to do with me. My only option was to stare at the ceiling and pray for my heart rate to return to normal. It was a physical hangover unlike anything I had ever felt, but the mental and spiritual aspects were far worse. The self-loathing descended and carried me off like the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys. Look at what you’ve become, Dave Holmes. You weren’t ever going to do cocaine, and now you have. You’re damaged goods. You’re a druggie. You’re one of those girls who tried to get Punky Brewster to join their gang. You’re what Nancy Reagan warned you about.
You’re disgusting.
And last night’s show was mediocre at best.
Obviously, the only way to silence these voices was to do more cocaine. I had asked Adam for his dealer’s number—the guy’s name, I swear to God, was Rocko—and I fumbled for my jeans and fished it out of the front pocket. I remembered Adam telling me that a gram cost $40. I went to the Chase Bank ATM at the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington.
I had $32. My direct deposit wouldn’t reflect my latest paycheck until midnight.
I got saved from a terrible decision that would have altered the course of my life irrevocably, by a slight bank delay. If I had had $8 more, I would probably be dead right now.
Months later, those same boys came back to town for that fraternity brother’s wedding. I told Adam I’d be around that weekend in case we wanted to get the gang back together—just for a beer, to reminisce. I missed them, somehow. We had bonded. We had bonded over jazz.
Adam broke the news gently but firmly. “Dave, they…they did not care for you one bit.”
I was not the future of comedy. I was not a glamorous cocaine person. I was not cool.
I was going to have to keep trying.
MTV’s first Wanna Be a VJ audition was an event that fundamentally changed the course of my life, and what haunts me about it now is how close I came to not going.
A few days before, I had been dicking around at my desk on a Thursday morning that was probably a busy one for whoever was doing what was supp
osed to be my job, when I clicked over to Billboard.com to check the charts, a weekly habit at the time. (K-Ci & JoJo had just leapt to #1 on the Hot 100 in an impressive two weeks with “All My Life,” while Robbie Williams’s “Let Me Entertain You” debuted at #4 on the UK charts; as ever, the Brits knew what was up.) And there, on the news feed down the right side of the screen, was the headline: MTV TO HOLD OPEN CALL FOR NEW VJ. I remember saying, in full voice: “Hel-lo.” For months, I’d been thinking I needed to make a lateral move to some other industry. I was living in New York City, working at a job I hated, and doing it terribly; I could do that in St. Louis and live like a king. If I was going to live in the hardest, most-expensive, most-stressful city in the country, I might as well do something I liked and wasn’t lousy at; it seemed a simple gift I could give myself. But I had no idea how to do that, and showing up at an open call was as good an idea as any I’d had. (If you have read this book in order, you will have noticed that my ideas were generally not very good.)
The audition was to be held at the brand-new MTV studio at 1515 Broadway, just down the road from my agency, the next Monday, April 13. I circled the date in my day planner and made a note on my PalmPilot: call in sick.
I tried not to imagine that I would actually pass through this audition and get anywhere. I told myself: This is a way to meet people. This is a networking opportunity. But of course, my mind went there. A lot. Like, what if they hire me and I end up on-air? Would I be friends with Duff? Would I get a muffin basket from Martha Quinn? How often does the society of current and former VJs get together? Is it a potluck kind of situation?
Sunday, April 12, was Easter, and my friends and I were too broke to spend it with our families or get a decent brunch anywhere, so we did our budget version of a Circle Line tour, also known as taking the Staten Island Ferry there and back. We celebrated the risen Christ with Budweiser tallboys and ham sandwiches. We wore pastels. We stayed up late. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing, because what I was doing was ridiculous. I was a twenty-seven-year-old man, with bills in my name and a job that people would give an arm for. I was going to stand in a line and audition to be an MTV VJ? Preposterous.