Waiting for the Punch
Page 19
We walked a little farther. She said, “I thought of something else.” I was like, “Ugh. There’s more?” She’s practically like, “Do we have time to stop and get a catalog?”
WANDA SYKES—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I can’t believe this is my life. Me, married to this beautiful white Frenchwoman, and I have two blond-haired, blue-eyed kids. Me? Really? The country girl from Virginia? Bizarre. All the time, I wake up and I just go, “What the hell? How did this happen? How did I get here?” I am grateful, but it’s just all so bizarre.
I wake up in the middle of the night—this is one of the scariest things ever. The kids are five, the twins. It’s one of the scariest things ever to wake up in the middle of the night and see two little white kids standing at the edge of your bed. It’s some creepy shit. It’s just creepy.
“What the hell? What are these crazy little white kids doing at the edge of my bed? What kind of horror movie is this?”
“Oh, they’re mine. They’re my kids.”
ADDICTION
“Introduce Yourself to Your Sickness”
There’s a weird assumption that drug and booze problems disproportionately affect creative people. I don’t believe this is true. It doesn’t matter what you do or who you are, the bug isn’t picky. It can live in anyone. People from all over have addiction problems. Once you know you have the bug, you know it can feed on almost anything: drugs, food, booze, gambling, spending, people, sex, etc. Sometimes it’s a combo.
My struggle with drugs and alcohol didn’t start in earnest until 1999. I was in rehab in 1988 because I hit the wall with cocaine, but I didn’t realize I had a problem. I just thought I needed a break. After that I would clean up every few years for a bit and then start up again. But 1999 was the year that it stuck. Things had gotten to the point where I realized that if I didn’t stop, I would die, somehow, either from the drugs and drinking or being in a situation where shit got out of hand because of drugs and drinking.
Everyone’s journey to the bottom is different. Rob Delaney told me how his alcoholism led to his arrest after a horrible car crash. Norm Macdonald found his bottom after gambling away his life savings. Artie Lange and Natasha Lyonne thought they hit their bottoms when they got hooked on hard drugs, but both found out that they had even farther to fall. Sadly, you have to get there to realize you have to change. For me it came after years of knowing I had a problem and not really dealing with it. I found myself bitter, in complete career stagnation, in a marriage I didn’t want to be in anymore, and lying in bed blasted on coke with my heart pounding out of my chest, hoping it would stop beating. Fortunately, I was intercepted by an angel of recovery in the form of a beautiful woman who reached out and got me going to meetings. It was also fortunate that I wanted to be with her. So I completely turned my life upside down, destroyed it as I knew it to get sober, and more important at the time, got with her. That ultimately didn’t work out, but I did get sober and I’ve stayed sober since. I’m grateful to her for that. Not for leaving me. Though I’m not sure I would’ve ended up where I am now if she hadn’t destroyed my life when she left.
Talking to other addicts is part of the way I stay sober. When I have conversations with people who have struggled with addiction, the connection is deep. When the emotions of the struggle are shared it is relieving, moving, and helpful. I get e-mails all the time from people who are either sober or trying to get sober telling me that hearing people they only knew from TV or music or movies talking to me about addiction made them feel less alone in their fight. I count this as one of the most important reactions to the show. I’m very grateful to provide this help and solace.
PATTON OSWALT—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I wish there was a way to program my head to look at certain foods as if they were crack or like poison.
TOM ARNOLD—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
My mom would come and visit once in a while. When she came, she gave me a dollar. You could go to Kent’s grocery and buy ten giant candy bars for a dollar. In the old days, the big ones. Sometimes she wouldn’t show up or whatever, but I wanted that dollar because that was my candy bars, it was my sugar. I would put up with that. Whatever, I want to see her. I wanted that dollar.
I’d go right to the store, I’d buy them, I’d come home, I’d line them up on my bed. I’d say, I’m not going to eat them all. I’m going to hide it from my brother and sister, whatever, but I ended up eating them all. That sugar high.
And then my grandmothers were wonderful. They would feed me and watch me eat. I became that guy in the family people liked to watch eat because I ate so much. You feel so loved. That’s absolutely my first addiction.
LOUIE ANDERSON—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I could eat twelve pieces of toast, buttered. If you do that slowly, that doesn’t seem like a big deal.
You know what I’m talking about. You make four. I have a four-slice toaster. You make four slices and then you butter them, and then you put four more pieces of bread in so you can cut out that time.
Marc
Is there a moment where you’re like, I’m not going to have four more?
Louie
Yeah, there’s always a moment. This is a whole switch. There’s a switch in your brain where you’re either in your addiction or you’re not. Right now I’m not in my addiction.
MARIA BAMFORD—COMEDIAN, ACTOR
I called a suicide hotline after I could not stop eating, because that’s how I stayed in my dorm room by myself. And it was not pleasurable at all, like, it’s not fun. I called a suicide hotline, they gave me a number for the Overeaters Anonymous, which is a thing. Just the idea that there were people out there helped me immediately. I stopped doing it.
JEFF GARLIN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I’m an addict, man. I’m an addict. That’s how I approach it. I even go to AA meetings sometimes. Here’s the problem with Overeaters Anonymous: A lot of people at OA are very casual. They haven’t hit bottom. Whereas you go to an AA meeting, nobody there is not taking it seriously.
What’s bottom? Eating until I can’t stop throwing up. Not that I’m making myself throw up. Eating a box of Little Debbie cakes and the same night having a half-gallon of ice cream and maybe a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and three or four Pop-Tarts. I used to go to the 7-Eleven by Wrigley Field, buy a bunch of crap, and sit on the hood of my car by the left field wall and just down it. No joy. And the feelings the food was stuffing down, they were stuffed down temporarily, and then, of course, you feel worse. It’s any feeling, man. Any feeling. Anything you feel, you want to shove down.
PATTON OSWALT
Let’s say you go do an audition or go do a show. The stuff just doesn’t go the way you want it to. You go, “Oh fuck, I’m going to go eat.” Let’s say you go do a show, or do something and it goes spectacular, then you want to go eat as well. You want to go celebrate.
Marc
It’s the same with drugs.
Patton
“I deserve it!”
Marc
“I suck, I’m going to drink!”
“I’m the best. Yay, drink!”
ANDY RICHTER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I have a food thing. I mean I’ve always been kind of the fat boy. I’m active, but I certainly could lose thirty or forty pounds. That’s the main thing for me, is I would love to lose weight, but a lot of that is just stuff like not drinking.
Whenever I’ve had occasion, for whatever, like a health reason, to not drink, weight just flies off. I had this health thing a few years ago, so I didn’t drink for a couple of months. I lost like ten pounds in a week and a half. I don’t even really drink that much. I probably have like a glass of vodka four nights a week. That in itself, that’s like an extra meal.
The only thing I ever felt out of control with was weed. That was prior to when I actually had health care and could afford antidepressants, and I was kind of self-medicating.
RAY ROMANO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR
I actually have a little history with gambling, back before I had money. I tried to lose money I didn’t have. I got close to being bad. It was bad, at one time. But I had no money to lose, thank God. Thank God I got a handle on it before I made money.
NORM MACDONALD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I went broke a few times when I actually had lots of money. With gambling. And I mean broke. Dead broke.
I don’t know what it was. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I do know this. They say gamblers want to lose and stuff, which always seemed odd to me, but I will say the three times that I went broke, for a lot of money, I had a very freeing feeling. I would go to the coffee shop and have a coffee and have nothing. A lot of me is trying to get as ascetic as I can in my life.
Three times I’ve lost everything that I’ve ever had. The only time I went to a psychiatrist, it was for gambling. I was like, “How the fuck do I get out of this?” and he’s like, “Oh, you gamble to avoid life,” but my thing was, isn’t that why you do everything in life? To fucking avoid it?
It’s painful to think about, because now it would be nice to have the money, but it’s just like any escape. I was never a drug or alcohol guy, but when I watch a game and I have a bunch of money on it, then I can understand what’s going on. Nothing’s ambivalent or anything about it. There’s stakes. You know exactly the rules. You’re completely involved and you’re completely escaped from your life of the real fear. I’d rather fear losing money on a football game than ruminate all fucking night about my upcoming illness and death. My biggest problem is ruminating about death. If I could get over that somehow.
People that know they’re going to hit bottom kind of want it, because it’s exhausting to be obsessed with something. You are, I guess, trying to do it. Trying to finish it off, finally. If you have $450,000 in the bank and then you lose $400,000, you say, “Fuck it. I don’t want the $50,000 to remind me that I had more money.”
That’s how you do it.
JIM NORTON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, RADIO HOST
I can’t drink and I can’t do drugs. It’s an absolute. Sex is a really hard one. You can act out by being on the computer, and you read an e-mail that has one trigger word in it or one thing and, all of a sudden, you’re acting out.
Half the times I’m acting out, I’m actually doing it for the memory to jerk off to. It’s a really weird thing. There’s times where I actually missed the activity because I’m just getting through it so I can jerk off thinking about the memory of it. I’m more addicted to masturbating, I think, than I am to actual intercourse. I’m more addicted to the ritual than the actual cumming.
FRED ARMISEN—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, MUSICIAN
When I was in a band, my main goal was to hook up with strangers on tour. I have a suspicion that might have contributed to the fact that our band didn’t get as far as it did, because I certainly wasn’t about the music.
Through program stuff, I know that there are ways that every day I can try to have a better approach. Today I don’t have to worry about my phone or some stranger that I hooked up with. I’m having a good day today.
Marc
You’re learning how to not sexually act out and use people in that way?
Fred
Yes. It’s hard and I don’t assume that it’s a pill and everything goes away.
Marc
It’s the hardest one, dude. Drugs and booze, gambling, you don’t need those things. Food and sex? Kind of need it.
Fred
What’s tricky, also, is booze is in certain places, but people are just everywhere.
I’m not delusional about it. I’m not delusional about myself. This struggle that I have, I don’t have a choice. This is a struggle. It could be a lot worse. I also could be dead.
Marc
There are worse things than having too many vagina options.
Fred
Yes. I think as long as I understand that there is a struggle, that’s what most of it is. I’ve had some really great days. That’s the part where everything else falls away because I know that I’ve had this much time thinking by myself.
JIM NORTON
I remember one time I went to see a prostitute on Second Avenue. It really shook me. I walked into her place and it was an abandoned apartment. I looked into the bathroom and there’s dirty water in the tub. There were fruit flies in garbage. The place is like an old railroad apartment. It was dark, pitch-black, and she was holding a screwdriver.
I gave her $300 and she went to the door. I don’t know if she had somebody outside that she gave the money to but then she sat down with a screwdriver. I just felt like something very, very bad is about to happen, something really frightening is about to happen. I sensed that there was something else in the room. I was going to be hurt badly. I just said, “Look, I’m sick. I have to leave.”
I let her keep the $300. I was shaking when I left. I don’t know why. We have instincts. We have feelings. I saw it calling that night. I was like, “Something really fucking bad just happened.” It really threw me as to what danger I was putting myself in.
Marc
That’s the liability thing. After a certain point with drugs and drinking, it’s not the drugs and drinking that may hurt you. It’s the situation you’re going to end up in. I think that with prostitution, it’s the same thing.
Jim
When you’re a complete addict, if you only drink vodka, life gets boring, so you have to drink Seagram’s. You have to drink a little bit of this. A little bit of that.
DAVID SEDARIS—WRITER
A couple years ago, I decided to quit smoking. I smoked for thirty years and I’ve smoked a lot. I wanted to quit. I decided, let’s say November I decided to quit. I moved to Tokyo. I went to Tokyo and I rented an apartment for three months. My boyfriend went with me.
If I just decided at home I’m going to quit smoking, and I would sit at my desk the next morning, I would go, oh, this is ridiculous. Give me that cigarette. I was in a whole new apartment, I was in a whole other language. I was a whole new me.
Running away works. I went and quit smoking and I haven’t had a cigarette for six years now and I don’t even think about it.
I told myself that when I was born, I was allotted a certain number of cigarettes and I guess I smoked them all. If I’d smoked more slowly, I’d still be doing it.
I smoked all my cigarettes, and I took all my drugs too. Other people, they haven’t even touched their allotment yet.
I think it helps to have some kind of little story, don’t you?
ANDY RICHTER
I quit smoking on September 17, 2001. It was right after 9/11, but that was just coincidental. It had gotten to the point where I’d tried to quit smoking a number of times, and then we quit when my wife got pregnant, because she quit too. She struggled with it a lot. Then I started up again after my son was born. I went to work on a movie in Canada, and started smoking eight-dollar cigarettes up in Canada.
Every winter I was losing my voice twice, three times. I was starting to film this network television show that had my name in the fucking title, and I just really felt like, “I cannot lose my voice. I have to do this.” I was just ready. It was such a disgusting, gross habit, and I was not enjoying it. I rarely had that moment of that first cigarette, and going like, ahhhhhhh. I really felt like I was just jerking off with shit lubricant every time I did it.
KAREN KILGARIFF—COMEDIAN, MUSICIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I don’t drink anymore. In 1997, I started having seizures from drinking and, also, I was on speed for a while. Trying to get down to a nice Hollywood fighting weight. After speed and booze, there’s no time for eating after all that. These diet pills are like prescription pills, but they were on par with the best cocaine you’ve ever had. It was like a cocaine high and it lasted for twelve hours.
I was having seizures at night and I didn’t know it. I would wake up with a really bitten tongue or I would wake up on the floor and I’d be like, “That’s s
o weird.” I once had a dream I was a spinner dolphin and I was just having a seizure basically.
The big climax of that story came when I woke up one morning and I immediately got on the phone and was talking to somebody and I was like, “I keep biting my tongue and my tongue is so bitten.” I turned and looked back and the wall of my bedroom had just a huge spray of blood on it. I looked at it and I was just like, “I can’t deal with that. There’s no way.” It looked like a minimurder and I had no capacity to deal. This was literally when I was getting up in the morning and walking into my kitchen and grabbing a bottle of Jameson and taking a huge swig. In my mind, I knew things were getting really bad.
But, at the same time, when you’re a comedian and you go out every night and drink there’s this weird kind of normal, it kind of normalizes it. Anyway, eventually my friend Kristin came and stayed with me and she woke up one morning and I was having a seizure, like my lips were blue and I was totally out. I woke up one morning to a couple LA firemen sitting on my bed saying, “Do you know your name? Do you know what day it is?”
I’m just wearing a Dodgers T-shirt and no pants and I was just like, “You guys.” They were amazing-looking, of course. It was very surreal.
Marc