by Ralphie May
“Hey, man,” he said, “I really love you on Comedy Central.”
What the fuck? What do you say to that? To a large government official with your balls in his hand, no less.
“I bet you never thought you’d be holding my balls, did you?” That’s about all you can say.
He finally cracked, which made me and the initial agent crack, and for the first time since walking into the room, I wasn’t worried about going to fucking prison for the rest of my life. Turns out I had much worse things to worry about.
“Okay, you can turn around,” the Samoan agent said.
I turned around expecting the other agent to hand me my clothes so I could get dressed. Instead, the Samoan agent quickly double-checked his partner’s work and went through my hair, my ears, and my face. With the same gloved hands he’d just run through my butt. Those gloves were full of musty twenty-four-hour travel ass and ball juice! He finished by checking my mouth with his pinkie. I was horrified. I had literally just teabagged myself and eaten my own ass. Is this how they greet everyone in Guam?!
They didn’t end up finding anything, like I told them they wouldn’t, and both agents pronounced me clean, which I certainly was not. I was so not clean at that point. I was right, though. This was the room where violations happened.
When that gloved pinkie went into my mouth? I’m sorry, but that was rape.
* * *
Once they were done with my mug shot, the lieutenant in charge came in and asked me if there was anybody I wanted to call. I wasn’t sure if Lahna’s cell phone was working down here, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t take a call from me even it was, so I told him there was nobody else for me to call.
“Okay, Mr. May. One thing. I don’t really know what’s happening, but a lot of people are coming here—all of my bosses—so be respectful when they come in.”
Fifteen minutes later the head of Guam Customs, the federal prosecutor for the territory of Guam, the district attorney for that area, and another high-ranking federal official whose title I can’t remember walk through the door of the holding area.
“Mr. May, we’d like to inform you that the transportation of a Schedule One narcotic such as marijuana through a federal facility is punishable by a five-thousand-dollar fine and five years in jail,” the district attorney said.
“Since you’ve been to LAX, Honolulu International, and now Guam International, you’re now facing fifteen thousand dollars in fines and fifteen years in jail,” the federal prosecutor added.
They just let that sink in a little bit. I apologized and explained that I hadn’t meant to do anything illegal, but that I was prepared to pay the consequences like a man. I could take that lick if I had to. That’s the kind of shit you say when you watch Shawshank Redemption every time it comes on TNT.
“The only thing you have going for you, Mr. May,” the federal prosecutor went on, “is that we have to prove intent in order to indict you with the full slate of charges. That you intended to bring marijuana to Guam.”
“We just looked at the security footage,” the head of Customs chimed in, “and it appears that you went approximately one hundred feet out of your way to pet a drug-sniffing dog that was wearing a vest that said DRUG DOG, DON’T PET. Then you did it again.”
“Nobody is this fucking stupid,” the other official said finally.
Agreed, motherfucker. Agreed!
“So how about this,” the head of Customs said. “How about instead of this jail stuff, we give you a ticket for possession for less than an ounce of marijuana.”
“Yes, yes, okay.”
“It’s a misdemeanor and you can pay it where you pay for airport parking tickets.”
“Great, absolutely.”
“On one condition: that you let us use the video at our Christmas party.”
He was dead serious. It was so dumb and funny that they wanted to show everyone at the CBP and TSA in Guam. What was I going to say: No? I agreed and left as soon as they opened the door.
Walking out of Customs into the terminal with my backpack over my shoulder, I realized I was the last passenger in the airport for the day.3 When I got outside to the cab stand, a cabbie was standing next to his car, waiting for me.
“Are you the guy who pet the drug dog?” I hadn’t even left the airport and already the entire island of Guam was laughing their asses off at me.
The cabbie had taken Lahna and the kids to the hotel hours earlier. She told him what I looked like and paid him to come back and wait for me.
“She is not happy with you, bro.”
“Oh, yeah, how bad is it?”
“It’s bad, bro. You might not want to stay with her.”
He was right. I didn’t stay with her. I had to get a new room.
* * *
A year and a half later I went back to Guam to do another set of shows. When I landed, the lieutenant in charge and another customs officers met me at the bottom of the escalator and presented me with two stuffed dogs.
“Here, you can pet these dogs,” the lieutenant said. “They can’t smell a thing.”
17.
ELEVEN DAYS AND NIGHTS
In 2011, things in my professional life were starting to collide with things in my personal life in a way that affected both negatively. My run-in with the Guamanian K9 unit a year earlier was the first indication that all the benefits of being a rich stoner had begun to turn into liabilities. As the father of two young children, I couldn’t be so casually and chronically ensconced in the pot-smoking world that I might end up in jail for years and risk not being there for my babies. I was already feeling like an absentee dad with all my touring. Even when we’d all be on the road together as a family, I still wasn’t totally there. I’d headline until 2:00 a.m., not get to sleep until 3:00 a.m., then be expected to play Daddy by 7:00 a.m. when they woke up.
Life was crazy like that, and it was a lot to handle, especially now that Lahna was doing fewer gigs and less touring in order to care for our children. The impact that had on me, besides guilt, was a sense of tremendous pressure to work. I had to work constantly to pay for everything, to provide, and to make up for not being there as much as I wanted to be.
One of the events at which I agreed to perform was the Cowhead Cruise, put on by my buddy Cowhead, who was the morning DJ at 102.5 The Bone in Tampa, Florida. This seven-day Caribbean cruise left the last week of October out of Tampa on the Norwegian Star, destined for the Mayan Riviera, Cozumel, Belize, and Roatán Island. which is off the coast of Honduras. This was the fifth annual Cowhead Cruise, so it wasn’t just some far-fetched radio stunt (like taking a Nolan Ryan fastball to the grill), this was a thing. A real gig. One I booked pretty early in the year, in fact.
By the time the cruise came around that fall, I had worked sixty-seven days straight, and I mean straight. I had gigs on sixty-seven consecutive nights, amounting to well over one hundred individual shows. I don’t care how healthy you are, that kind of pace will catch up with you eventually. Three weeks before I had to be in Tampa, I was in New York for a stretch of shows, and I got super-dehydrated while trying to pass a kidney stone. The pain got so bad that they took me to Bellevue Hospital, where they take the dregs of society and, famously, all the fucking crazy people that Manhattan somehow accumulates. We went to the emergency room at first, but they decided to admit me and then put me in a shared room with a homeless man who had some kind of nasty chest cough that sounded like a chain saw getting fired up. I don’t know what he had, but I walked out of that hospital with some version of it.
Initially I thought it was just the sniffles, but it only got worse as I continued my nonstop string of gigs. By the time I got to Jacksonville, which was my last set of shows before the Cowhead Cruise, I was legitimately sick. I had been diagnosed at some walk-in clinic along the way with mild walking pneumonia and given antibiotics and an inhaler. I didn’t think too much of it at the time because over the years I’d gotten used to working sick. Usually I’d just lay off
the weed for a while and try to let my lungs do their thing. So when my last show in Jacksonville was over and I’d taken the last photo with fans at around 2:30 a.m., I hopped in the car and drove straight through to Tampa to catch the boat.
Cowhead could immediately see that I was sick. He told me not to come on the cruise and just to go get myself better. I told him not to worry about it and that I’d just bought a bunch of medicine so I’d be okay. I thought I was going to be fine. My body is weird that way. I don’t have high blood pressure, I’m not prediabetic, I don’t have any of the markers for heart disease, but when anything viral comes around, it kicks me right in the dick for a little bit, lingers, and then goes away on its own.
I was not fine, by any stretch of the imagination.
* * *
We weren’t out to sea more than a day before that walking pneumonia decided it was going to lie down right in my chest. Quickly I couldn’t walk without wheezing. I couldn’t catch my breath. People who didn’t already know I was sick were concerned with just one look at me. After the first day, I quarantined myself in my cabin so I didn’t become patient zero for whatever I was dealing with. It was scary. I spent those first three or four days wide-awake, afraid to fall asleep because I was worried I might stop breathing.
Every day when we pulled into a new port, I thought about getting off and going to a hospital. I was desperate. But Belize? Roatán? Cozumel? I love my Latino hermanos in LA, but I’m not trying to play doctor with any of them. Fuck that. It was only a couple more days, I could ride it out until we got back to Tampa.
I didn’t quite make it.
On the last leg back to Tampa, I called the ship’s 911 and had them come take me to the ship’s infirmary. My lips were blue, my extremities were gray, my blood/oxygen content was at 48 percent, my heart rate was 250 beats per minute. The nurse immediately put me on oxygen and gave me as many antibiotics as they had on the ship. They took a chest X-ray once I was stabilized, and that’s when they were, like, “Oh, shit, wake up the ship’s doctor right now.”
The doctor aboard the ship was a woman who had been an ER doctor at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, DC. She was ostensibly on vacation. Two minutes with me and she wanted to airlift me off the ship immediately and get me to Tampa General. But just my luck, guess what took off from southern Honduras the same day we took off from Tampa: a fucking hurricane. Hurricane Rina had been stalking us the entire cruise. As we went south and east, it went north and west. It was like a tango. The hurricane had dissipated into a tropical storm by the time we got north of the Yucatán Peninsula headed home, but as it weakened, it dropped a metric shit ton of torrential rain right between us and Tampa that a medevac helicopter couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fly through.
That poor doctor, she was not happy: “You know, I came on this ship to bandage small cuts, deal with the occasional broken bone, and distribute diabetes medicine. I didn’t come on this ship to watch people die. Do not die on me. I seriously would not be able to take it.”
She had a lot of fight in her, which encouraged the fight in me, but her sense of urgency let me know of the real chance I could die here. On a fucking cruise ship of all places. That’s barely one step above dying on the toilet.
When we finally got back to port in Tampa around 6:00 a.m., we were met at the dock by Tampa Fire Rescue. They put me on a gurney and loaded me directly into the ambulance while they took my vitals. They had the same exact reaction as the nurse and the doctor on the boat: “Oh, fuck.” That scared me a lot.
We got to the emergency room at Tampa General superfast. The EMTs off-loaded me and handed me over to the ER nurses. One of them scanned my chart, redid some of the vitals that the EMTs had done dockside a few minutes earlier, and said, “Oh, shit.”
I started laughing.
“Why are you laughing, Ralphie?” she said.
“You’re the first person that hasn’t said ‘Oh, fuck,’ so I must be getting better.”
* * *
I was in the ER from approximately 7:00 a.m. well into the night while the doctors ran tests and I waited for a room in intensive care to open up. Lahna had arrived by the time one finally came available just after midnight, which we were thankful for, though a little concerned about. When an ICU room opens up that late, I feel like the C part of that acronym probably didn’t work out so well. I was not so interested in spending the night in an unlucky room.
To move me from the ER to the ICU, nurses called in the lift team to get me from the ER gurney to the ICU bed. The room was only like fifteen or twenty yards down the hall, so I told the team that I’d just walk. My oxygen levels had gotten back up to around 94 percent by this time, and they’d filled me up with about seven different drugs including a blood thinner called heparin, so I was feeling a lot better.
Five minutes later, Dr. Katz, the head of pulmonology at Tampa General, comes in to talk with me. I’d barely gotten more than a few words out when it started to feel like I was getting stabbed in my right shoulder, and the pain was radiating all the way into my lungs.
“PE, PE, PE,” Dr. Katz started repeating to the respiratory techs. I was so doped up at the time, I was totally lost. Physical education? Yeah, Doc, I get it, I’m fat. Fuck off! Now I know that PE stands for “pulmonary embolism,” which is the fancy way of saying “blood clot in the lungs,” so the hospital can charge your insurance an arm and a leg … and a lung.
The respiratory techs came in, took the small oxygen mask off me, and put a Top Gun–style mask over my face that shot oxygen into my nose at fifty miles per hour to hyperinflate my lungs because they had already started collapsing.
It was fucking bad. People die in the hospital from that kind of embolism all the time. That I had mine right in front of the head of pulmonology, who had probably seen hundreds of these in his time, was nothing short of a miracle if you ask me.
As the oxygen did its thing and the pain subsided, Dr. Katz gave it to me and Lahna straight:
“Mr. May, you’ve experienced a severe pulmonary event. I believe a large blood clot has gotten into the blood vessels in your lungs. I have recommended that radiology come in here as soon as possible to place a filter in your vein so that no more clots make it to your lungs or heart. They have to go in through your neck to do this. Then they’re going to go into another vein and chemically explode the remaining blood clots. If they get them all, and they get them fast enough, you’ll be fine. You’ll live. If they don’t, you could die on the operating table. I want to be perfectly clear with you both: this is a last-ditch-type effort to save your life.”
I was stunned.
Lahna was freaking out. “What are his chances? What are the chances this filter thing works?”
“Twenty to thirty percent.”
“Oh my God, there’s a twenty to thirty percent chance he’ll die?”
“No, that he’ll live,” was Dr. Katz’s reply.
This conversation took place at 1:00 a.m. The surgery was scheduled for 7:00 a.m., which seemed far away considering that in six hours I could well be dead. That wasn’t the worst of it. Because I had no lung capacity, they couldn’t put me under any kind of general anesthesia whatsoever during the operation. I would have to be awake for the surgery. They were going to have to strap me down because this was going to be hands down the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced.
This is it, I thought. I’m never going on a cruise again.
* * *
Thanks to the oxygen, the blood thinners, and some other antiviral meds, I spent much of the rest of the night hacking up mucus out of my lungs. It was the nastiest thing Lahna and I had ever seen, and we had four years of diaper-changing experience under out belts. The mucus looked like peanut butter and had that consistency too. The techs were nerding out over it. They’re used to seeing all manner of gross shit, but most of them had never seen anything like this before. They came in and out of the room frequently to check on me and keep track of the mucus
volume. They said it was so they could calculate my lung capacity, but I was convinced they were running a pool out at the nurses’ station.
By morning, I’d ejected something like 220 cubic grams, or ten ounces, of lung butter. To prep for the procedure at 7:00 a.m. they did another set of chest X-rays, and my lungs looked a lot better. The drugs were working and my lungs were now able to expand.
When Dr. Katz looked at the charts and the X-rays, he decided to call off the surgery. He came into my room to deliver the good news along with the full diagnosis of my issues: I had bilateral double pneumonia and pulmonary embolisms, which meant I had viral and bacterial pneumonia in my lungs and a blood clot blocking most of the remaining lung capacity.1 I was basically drowning in an infection.
For the next seven days in the ICU I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t have insomnia; I mean, I wasn’t allowed to sleep. My lungs were on a razor’s edge, and the infection I was fighting was doing its best to try to drown me in myself. To beat it, I had to consciously force every breath in and out of my lungs until Dr. Katz said otherwise.
Breathing is an autonomic function that most of us take for granted (thank you, Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume A). We even have sayings about it when people are passionate about something: Writing is like breathing. What they’re saying is they have to do it, they can’t control it. Now I had to control it.
The idea that my body was so fucked that I was forced to make myself breathe so I wouldn’t die was not only excruciatingly painful physically, it was also a total mindfuck. Lying there in the ICU, wide-awake in the middle of the night, often by myself, I started to make my peace. I wrote a letter to April about what it means to be a strong woman. I wrote a letter to August about what it means to be a strong man. Then I wrote a letter to Lahna and apologized for not taking care of myself. I wrote a long list of I Love You’s and Thank You’s to all my friends.
By the end, I was content. They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die, and it does, but it’s not the career highlights or anything you place value on. At least not for me. It was all of the regrets I had: missing the first sonogram of my baby girl because I was making people laugh in Cleveland, or having to watch my son’s first steps on video because I was making people laugh in Miami. Shit like that came to me constantly over what ended up being eleven straight sleepless nights (including the scary nights on the cruise ship).