This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  I had Matrix’d nuts. It was quite possibly the most instinctive, athletic move I’d made in the last thirty years. What was more incredible was that I never have that kind of luck—not as an adult, not in social situations like this. My usual luck would involve a delayed surprise reaction, which would produce a gaping jaw, which would in turn give the guy’s nuts a perfect place to come to rest and a direct path for his dick to drop flush onto my face. A true, full-on teabagging. Then, with a deviated septum that makes breathing through my nose difficult at times, I would have to struggle to say, with my mouth full, “Sir, would you get this off my face, please?”

  Twenty minutes later, my consciousness expanded even further, and I found myself thinking about the multidimensionality of the universe in which we live and the seemingly diametrically opposed nature of infinity. One kind of infinity goes on forever and is so large as to be incalculable—like the universe, or pi. But then there is the infinitely small. The kind where, because you can’t divide by zero or divide to get to zero, you can split something in half into infinity, but not into nothingness.

  I started thinking about that in the context of an atom. If my car, sitting in the parking lot of the reception hall here in Los Angeles, were the nucleus of an atom, the electrons orbiting us would circle over New York City, the Panama Canal, Hawaii, Alaska, the bottom of the arctic circle maybe. And in theory, because there are an equal number of negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in a stable element, we should be able to count on the path of those electrons orbiting us in the car out in the parking lot. But we also know that an electron can dip up and down from an excited state to its ground state, emitting light. Because of the physics of light, the electron and the light it emits don’t, in theory, have to stay on their orbital path around the nucleus. They can take an infinite number of circuitous routes through time and space to get from point A to wherever point B is. Then I started to contemplate that maybe it’s those electrons that make up the thread that holds us to this dimension, that keeps all of us at this wedding reception right here, right now. That’s what was going on in my head.

  My body had other ideas. Turns out, while my mind was expanding in an attempt to unify myself with all earthly forces, I was actually standing by myself on the edge of the dance floor tweaking my nipple, holding my crotch, matching the gyrations of my junk-swinging Puerto Rican friend as we swayed to the rhythm of a Kesha song.

  I told you, these pills fucking worked.

  * * *

  Diego ended up being spot-on. We went until 3:40 a.m. It was a hell of a party. If you ever get invited to a gay wedding or a gay party of any kind, let me give you some advice: go. Do not second-guess it. Do not worry about what your coworkers might think. Just go. I’m so glad I went, and not even for the drugs. Okay, maybe a little for the drugs. I was mostly happy that I went and could be an ambassador for my accent. Most gay men, especially in places like New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, think that people who sound like me hate guys who sound and look like them. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I got to be proof of that for at least one night.

  If there is anything I regret from that night, though, it’s not having August and April there with us. Sure, they would probably have been asleep under the table by eleven thirty. And sure, after seeing all those giant swinging dicks everywhere, they might not ever look at me the same way again as a father figure or a male role model. But I wasn’t much older than April when I noticed how little girls could already be little bitches to each other at that age based on who they were friends with, what they wore, and what things they liked. I wanted April to be friends with everyone—with anyone. And I wasn’t much older than August when I started being taught that one of the worst things that could happen to you as a man is getting hit on by a gay guy. It meant that they’d identified something soft and fairy in you. It was ridiculous shit, and I didn’t want August to ever think that way. I knew his school and some of his friends’ parents would do a lot of the heavy lifting on that front in the years to come, but still, it would have been nice to have laid some of that groundwork myself in an experience that was new to each of us.

  What I regret most of all, though, was that this was one of the last fun things we did as a family before the wheels fell off.

  19.

  THIS IS THE END

  Lahna and I both changed after my pulmonary embolisms. Once I was physically recovered enough to travel and work, we started fighting day and night. It was neither of our faults. Lahna was feeling my mortality more closely than she ever had before, which kicked in her maternal, caregiving drive to make me get healthy. And since I was no longer able to self-medicate the demons away with weed, my behavior got erratic.

  For a good year, I was hostile and easily agitated. In some periods I was totally out of control. Like the time I attacked a barista at the Starbucks on Sunset down the street from the Comedy Store because one of his dirty hippie dreadlocks kept dropping into the large frothing pitcher he was using to steam the milk for my Venti caramel macchiato. Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch an out-of-work actor dip his furry granola tentacle into your lunch without a care in the world? Every red-blooded American would be horrified and livid if that happened to them, and I believe they would be within their rights to throw the tainted coffee right in that barista’s fucking face. That said, I also believe they would not have gone on a tirade that involved threatening to wash/drown him in the prep sink. Instead, most reasonable people would have just left and walked the three blocks down Sunset to the next Starbucks.

  In my defense, I was on drugs. All kinds of prescription medications for my other ailments and aches and pains. They made me crazy. I would regularly lose track of time. I was constantly awake, usually for days on end. The only times I did sleep were when I was home from the road, but then I’d sleep for two straight days and end up spending even less time with my babies than I did back when we were all on the road together.

  Eventually I started having panic attacks and bouts of severe anxiety, so doctors added Xanax to my list of prescribed meds. I used them primarily when I had to fly, like I used the THC strips. I’d pop one and knock myself out.

  Unfortunately, Xanax ended up being too much for me. The final nail in the coffin came after flying back to LA from a gig in Tampa, of all places. Lahna was set to pick me up at the airport, but I was so out of it that I forgot and went over to Hertz to rent a car. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal on the surface, but if you’ve ever rented a car at Los Angeles International Airport, you know it’s a long, exhausting process that even sober, well-rested people screw up: you have to walk all the way out of the terminal, wait on the center island for a bus to pick you up, ride two miles in shitty airport traffic, stand in line for heaven knows how long, pray they have cars available, refuse all the extra bullshit they want to offer you that turns a car rental into indentured servitude, then once you’ve found your car and exited the lot, you have to figure out where you are because an LAX rental-car lot is the most disorienting place on planet Earth. I’ve walked out of the Arkansas forest in the middle of the night baked like a Virginia ham and had a better sense of my bearings.

  If the myth of Sisyphus were written today, it would not feature a man pushing a giant boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down just as he reaches the top. Instead, he would be endlessly circling the arrivals level at LAX during that two-hour period in the afternoon when all the flights from Asia and the Middle East come in. By the time Lahna figured out where I was, she had lost count of how many times she’d circled the airport waiting for me to show up at the curb. When she finally got to me, I was standing outside the bus entrance to the Hertz lot waiting for the tongue-lashing of a lifetime. Instead, right there in the car, on the side of the road, Lahna did an intervention. She wanted me to go to rehab. Today.

  I don’t know if she was planning to take me somewhere like on the TV show Intervention and I messed up the l
ogistics, or if she got so fed up that she couldn’t wait any longer, because my door wasn’t even closed yet when she just started talking and talking. At first, I had no idea what she was saying. All I heard was noise coming from the hole in her face. That sweet, melodic voice I fell in love with now sounded like Freddy Krueger trying to get his change out of a vending machine. Worse, I was in no mood to talk. My head felt like a sack of mashed potatoes, and I just wanted to be left alone. None of that stopped Lahna. She had to say her piece while she had me as a captive, barely functioning audience or God only knew when she’d have the next chance.

  Finally, she got Jay Mohr on the phone. I tried to turn my ears off as he added his perspective to this mess, but it’s hard to shut out a Jersey accent, and it’s even harder to ignore the guy who literally changed my life. I was still pissed and irritable and tired—not even Jay could change that—but eventually they wore me down. I agreed to go to rehab in the shittiest, least confidence-inspiring way possible.

  “Fine. Fuck it!”

  We drove right from LAX out to the Canyon rehab center in Malibu. You want a real mindfuck? Take a drive from the dirtiest, busiest, most run-down airport in the country, up one of the most picturesque stretches of road on the West Coast, to a secluded hillside paradise in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country, all because your wife thinks you’re a drug addict and your life is falling apart. There isn’t enough Xanax in the world to make that not sting.

  Checking me into the Canyon, Lahna told them unequivocally that I was a drug addict. I told them that wasn’t the case at all. I was only taking the drugs that had been prescribed to me, and never more than the recommended dosages. I told them that I did have a ton of weed in my system, though. Dr. Katz, if you’re reading this, sorry, brother, old habits die hard.

  The intake workers took all of my belongings, drew my blood, and gave me a tranquilizing dose of Ativan so I wouldn’t experience any kind of withdrawal. By the time I woke up two days later, in a puddle of my own piss, the drug counselors had the test results back: no opiates in my system, just like I’d told them.

  They were confused because Lahna told them I was hooked on pain pills. I can see how she thought that, what with all my prescriptions, but she was just focused on the wrong kind of pain. I was managing my physical pain just fine. But the mental pain was fucking with me and pulling me back to self-medicating by smoking weed with two hands.

  Everyone acknowledged that I did not have any kind of narcotic or alcohol dependency that one could responsibly classify as an addiction. That didn’t mean I didn’t have any problems, Lord Jesus, even I knew that, so they put me with a psychiatrist. By the end of the session, I was diagnosed with severe PTSD. When she explained what PTSD was, how it worked, and what the symptoms looked like, it felt like she was reading from my emotional Wikipedia page. My parents’ divorce, my car accident, the torment from the old Houston comics—it had all cascaded over the years, and instead of dealing with it, I’d obscured it in a giant cloud of pot smoke.

  I could have left the Canyon at any time, whether they labeled me an addict or not, but I decided to stay and start working through some of these things. That was the greatest thing about the Canyon, even better than the view. I got to work through all of the trauma that I’d had in my life. We tinkered with different meds and found an antidepressant that worked for me. I learned to meditate. After two weeks, I was exercising during the day and sleeping well at night.

  Still, I was in a precarious position with Lahna. She put me in the Canyon and told me I had to stay there to get better, otherwise she and the kids wouldn’t be at home when I got back. Yet she was upset at how expensive it was for me to stay there. I understood her anxiety and frustration—we had a big nut and I was the primary breadwinner. But, you can’t have it both ways, sweetheart. There’s no such thing as getting better on your terms. It’s either get better or don’t.

  When I finally left the Canyon and went home, I was still angry at what I felt was a cruel and selfish double standard. I got over it because I knew Lahna meant well, but you can’t tell somebody what to do and give them no choice in the matter without their resenting you for it. That’s where my real anger was coming from. She’d given me no choice about going to the Canyon, and I did the work. Now, probably because she was afraid I’d backslide like I’d done before with the weight loss after gastric bypass and the pot smoking after my embolisms, she wanted to be in control of everything—my diet, my exercise routine, my schedule. Everything. And that just wasn’t going to work.

  * * *

  By 2014, our relationship was in a rough place.

  Not long after my stint at the Canyon, our dog Pimp died. Lahna and I had gotten Pimp together way back when she first moved to LA to be with me. For a boxer, Pimp lived a long time, and in some ways he was like a metaphor for our relationship—against all odds and conventional wisdom, he just kept on chugging. His death fucked me up.

  I don’t know if it was related, but at the same time I started spending more time at our place in Nashville and treating Zanies as my home club like I had with the Comedy Showcase in Houston and the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. I used touring logistics as my reason for camping out in Nashville as much as I did, but I knew that was just an excuse—one Lahna was not going to let me skate on. She’d fly out from LA with the kids and our other dog, Hoochie Mama, for a visit and spend the majority of our waking moments together yelling at me for not being a good enough father. I was barely keeping it together enough as it was. Trying to manage this shit on top of it? It was too much to bear. Eventually I snapped.

  One day I had what doctors call an insomnia-induced dementia event. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I made more than one hundred calls to Lahna, my assistant, and a number of other people who I can’t (or won’t) remember. When the phone wasn’t good enough, I fought with Lahna on FaceTime and showed her a gun. I threatened to use it to kill myself. As all this was happening, I casually drew myself a relaxing bath before bed. Just as I was about to hop in, I heard a loud banging that didn’t seem to stop. At first I thought it might be the wind slamming into something across the street, but soon I realized the sound was much closer. It was at my front door. I threw some clothes on and went downstairs. When I opened the door, I was greeted by a handful of cops. I had no idea why they were at my house. I was genuinely perplexed. They explained that they had received a call that someone at this address had threatened to kill himself. I thought they had the wrong house. I told them that was impossible because I hadn’t talked to anyone all day.

  The police were cool about everything. They found my wallet and keys, gathered up my medications, and escorted me to the Vanderbilt University hospital emergency room, where I had a great conversation with the doctors. I told them exactly what the police told me, and for a minute they were as confused as I was, primarily because I seemed totally lucid. Still, they didn’t want to take any chances since I’d come in under threat of suicide, so they placed me in their psychiatric ward on a seventy-two-hour hold.

  I spent Friday night, all of Saturday, and Sunday morning in their care without incident and without much sleep. Then, on Sunday night, the crazy came back. I was out of my mind. The hospital staff thought for sure that I’d gotten my hands on some drugs, but they did a toxicology screen and found nothing. By process of elimination, the doctors were finally able to diagnose me with insomnia-induced dementia. They explained that the loud banging at my front door probably triggered an adrenaline dump that brought me out of my dementia that was responsible for my having no recollection of the phone calls or the FaceTime conversation or the gun. I was lucky, they said.

  I stayed in the ward for a few more days while they tinkered with my antidepressants and I went through some intensive counseling. Eventually I was referred to a doctor who gave me medication to sleep, anti-inflammatory drugs for my pain, a bipolar medication, and supplements to correct a pretty substantial vitamin and mineral deficiency. Within
a few weeks I started to feel better than I had in a long time. Of course the meds helped, but regular sleep, a better diet, and a newly balanced mood were a godsend. Without them, I’m not sure I would have been able to get over the whole humiliating experience as quickly as I did. Who wants to be known as the big fat funnyman that had to spend a long weekend with a bunch of schizophrenics and meth heads down at the ol’ psych ward? Half these fucking people had to be tied down. It was bananas. This was not me.

  * * *

  Lahna is a storyteller. I have admired and supported this talent of hers since the day I met her in Houston. We share this talent, which meant that there would always be something that bonded us besides our babies. It was a comforting feeling in the more turbulent times. In early 2015, she had the idea to do a documentary. She wanted to scratch that storyteller’s itch by telling a story about our lives. My immediate reaction was entirely negative, though I tried to keep as much of that to myself as possible. You want to tell the story of this life? Right now? That’s a sad fucking movie, jack.

  All I was doing was working. All Lahna was doing was taking care of the kids. The littlest things set us off. If I was five minutes late to something, she’d lay into me like it was a personal affront to her, even when I was late because I had been working out trying to keep myself alive. Inevitably we’d land in an argument where I’d get mad and exasperated, then she’d bring up my bouts of craziness or how much money I spent while I was in rehab. I would breathlessly explain how hard it was to bear the burden of providing for the lifestyle our family had become accustomed to, and she would then turn that against me by reminding me what a fuckup I was, and how if anything happened to me, I’d be shifting that burden solely onto her. I knew she was scared for me and worried about our future, but just once I hoped she might dial it down to a 7 instead of going nuclear all the time. She had no incentive to do that, however, because little was still holding us together. Our connection had so weakened that our sex life was effectively nonexistent. That’s an important part of a relationship that reconfirms connection and galvanizes a partnership. To have that gone was brutal. And she wanted to make a documentary about it?