Crash and Burn (34 page)

I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, which turned out to be enough to feed medium-sized countries. I’m not happy about the weight I’ve gained, but if I had to do it to get where I am, then it’s fine with me. I feel good and that’s the only thing that matters. And I’m not saying I know better than AA, but if anyone out there reading this likes food as much as I do and is freshly sober, you might want to try something I wish I’d thought of when they told me to do whatever I wanted. See, if they’d suggested combining the things, I would be in a whole different place. If they’d said, “Eat as much as you like, have sex as much as you like, and if you really like food, have sex with food as much as you like,” that would have changed things for me. I love food, so I would have tried it—I would have fucked a pancake. And fucking it would have kept me from eating it. Because I know my problems, and food fucking isn’t one of them. That’s not the kind of behavior I could live with, so if it happened, even once, I’d make some changes and never do it again. Let’s face it, I’ve gotten pretty desperate, but even I wouldn’t eat a pancake I’d fucked, would you?

————

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m the type of guy who’s watched every single Super Bowl since I was ten years old. The first I saw was 1978, when the Cowboys beat the Broncos. I got started early gambling too, because I even bet on that first game: I took the Broncos over the Cowboys and I should have learned my lesson then because the
Cowboys killed them. My buddy Mike Ciccone, also ten years old at the time, took me for fifty cents on that game, which is something he enjoys reminding me of to this day. I can tell you who has won every single Super Bowl since then, and on a good day I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to tell you who the MVPs were too. I have forgotten so much thanks to drugs and just getting older, but sports stats like these are literally a part of my brain and they’ll never be forgotten. The Super Bowl is a big deal to me, which made the fact that I’d watched two in a row in institutions even more depressing. The first one I saw on a psych ward and the other one (well, half of it) from my bed in rehab, trying to ignore my roommate yelling, mad as hell, about the shampoo they’d taken from him when he’d been admitted because it had alcohol in it.

“They fucking think I’m gonna drink fucking SHAMPOO?” he kept saying. “What the fuck is that? They think I’m so desperate for booze that I’ll drink my fucking shampoo? I respect myself, you motherfucking fucks! Who drinks shampoo?”

Apparently he didn’t, but what I found out in rehab was that some people really do drink their shampoo, and from what I hear, Salon Selectives Level Six packs quite the buzz. Look, I’ve been pretty fucked up, but I’ve never been so fucked up that I’ve ever considered doing a shot of Prell. It just seemed so stupid and Nazi-like for them to take my shampoo, so I protested even when they explained why they needed to.

“But you can’t take that. I need that, because I don’t have manageable hair. The alcohol is the only thing that manages it.”

“Well, I’m afraid—” the orderly said, politely taking me seriously.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I said. “I never wash my hair or any other part of my body. I don’t believe in it. All of the products in my bag are just here for show. So when is the cavity search?”

After two years of what any sane person would call less than favorable Super Bowl viewing circumstances, in 2010, I came back with a bang. My DirecTV show was official and getting off the ground
nicely, and if you don’t know this already, DirecTV offers more NFL packages than any other network, which makes them a major player in all things football. I can’t thank Chris Crane, Jim Crittendon, and the big honcho, the one and only Chris Long, enough for taking a shot on me—I wouldn’t be here without those guys. Basically thanks to them, in 2012, I came back as a Super Bowl VIP employed by the best sports and NFL network around, which is how I ended up sitting third row on the fifty-yard line, watching the Patriots lose to the Giants. It couldn’t have been any fucking sweeter. Plus they let me play in the Celebrity Beach Bowl, which is a touch football game the network televises featuring retired NFL guys, a few players, commentators, actors who like football, and lucky losers like me. It’s a pretty fun event, and I’m not just saying that because they employ me; I’d watched it the three previous years they’d done it. Unlike the previous events in places like Miami, since Indiana is completely landlocked, my Beach Bowl debut was miles away from any actual beach. The beach had to be imported, so DirecTV put up a huge tent in the middle of downtown Indianapolis and filled it with a few tons of sand carted in by truck.

I salute them for the effort because it was insane and also proof that the guys in charge up there aren’t the types to take no for an answer. Chris Long is literally the greatest executive I’ve ever worked with and in a sea of networks like Bravo and all of those making programming solely for women, working for him and his team is like working for a team of Goodfellas. When they set their mind to something they find a way to make it happen. For example, sand had no business being in downtown Indianapolis, but there it was. The sheer fact that it was there made the characters—homeless and otherwise—that populate the area stand out even more by the way. It was a car crash, this beautiful, perfect, celebrity-driven event in a Podunk urban center so rough that you had to step over a mother with a crystal meth problem clutching her shivering child to get to the artist entrance to the artificial beach. It was a strange backdrop to
a four-hour, multimillion-dollar event, which unfortunately featured Pauly D from
Jersey Shore
as the DJ.

Listen, I was fresh out of my personal depression, so every cloud was gray for me, but all that aside, I stand by my impression that Indianapolis is pretty fucking depressed. It’s not where you’d ever send a friend on vacation. On the drive in from the airport, every house I passed looked like the four-hundred-square-foot shack in Gary, Indiana, where the Jacksons grew up. That place looked small on TV, but in person, that same kind of Indiana McHouse was even smaller than I imagined. All I kept thinking to myself was
How the fuck did eleven Jackson kids plus two parents live there and have room to learn those routines?
The Jacksons had one bathroom and eleven kids and they sang and danced and mostly all of them were involved. If they just stood in line from tallest to shortest they’d probably take up the whole living room. How the hell did they practice those dance steps? I mean, at some point while they were all sitting around trying not to step on each other did someone just say, “Okay, we have to do ABC. Everybody lend a hand, get up off what you’re sitting on, and help put all the furniture in the hall.” Four hundred square feet is some asshole’s scarf closet on
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
, and that’s all the room they had.

It’s all still a mystery to me, but that’s Indiana for you. Here’s something that didn’t surprise me about Indiana when I found it out: in the southernmost part of the state they’re real big on the KKK; basically Southern Indiana is the motherland of the modern Klan. I wanted someone to take me to a meeting during my time at the Super Bowl and even asked for a volunteer during our live broadcast. I don’t want to be a member and I don’t agree with the Klan’s worldview, as interesting as it is, I just wanted to get a taste of what went down at a meeting. We’re all human beings, but I find the ones that are that much different from me really interesting. Don’t judge me. Here’s what happened when I solicited audience members at the Super Bowl broadcast to take me to a KKK meeting. . . .

“So if anyone out there wants to take me, I just want to see a pure white bitch who is uncorrupted,” I said. I pointed to a real white Midwestern guy in the audience. “Would you take me? They’d let you in no problem.”

“I’ve only been to two,” he said, dead serious, while everyone laughed.

“What? Why’d you stop?”

“It was just, whatever,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said, “because what I’m thinking is horrible! Were you disappointed? Did you expect lynching ropes hanging from the ceiling? Did you expect them to burn Bill Cosby alive? Were you upset with the food?”

The kid was on camera, and he started to look nervous, like he might lose his job if he kept talking, so I let it go. As much as I love busting balls, I’ve come to realize that putting your job in jeopardy to do so isn’t as cool as I used to think it was.

Anyway, the Celebrity Beach Bowl was a great time. Joe Montana was the quarterback on my team, our coach was Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, and Maria Menounos was on my team along with a few others. Nick DiPaolo was on the other team along with Snoop Dogg and David Arquette and Deion Sanders and Kate Upton. Nick and I were the first ones in the locker room that day, so he got to witness the embarrassing moment when I realized they didn’t have a shirt that could fit me. When they’d asked me for my size before the event I told them in all seriousness that I was “size Enormous” and if they had any question about what that meant they should measure the biggest jersey they had and double it because double XL wasn’t going to cut it. They must have thought I was kidding and probably figured that since I was a celebrity I must be of normal human proportions. Clearly they weren’t familiar with my body of work.

The shirt they gave me was tighter than any condom I have ever worn. I could barely breathe, let alone think about running. I could probably throw and if the ball were perfectly aimed, I could probably
catch it, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. I was not going to be the go-to man in the clutch with that thing on, that’s for sure. I asked the intern handing out the shirts what size he’d given me and he told me that it was the biggest they had. I don’t give a shit what anyone says, those jerseys were tiny. In the end I gave my extra one to David Arquette, who is normal-sized (and a really nice guy), because his was too tight. If Arquette’s was tight, mine was a torture device. And I was screwed because contractually we had to wear these things, plus DirecTV had a deal with Reebok, so all of us had to wear the same bright yellow sneakers. Fueled by shame, I forced my way into my shirt, a shirt that was so tight I couldn’t lean over far enough to tie my new shoes. After a few minutes of uselessly diving at my feet, desperate as a midget trying to order a drink in a crowded bar, much to Nick’s amusement, I had to ask one of the LA publicist girls DirecTV had hired to run this thing for help.

The girl was such an LA cliché that it’s amazing she even exists in real life. “Is there something wrong with your shoes?” she asked with all the warmth of a frozen tuna. “Are they too small?”

“No, that’s not the problem,” I said. “They fit.”

“So what is it, then?”

“Well, I can’t get them on because my shirt is too tight and I can’t reach my feet, so what I need is someone to put my shoes on. Can you help me tie my shoes?”

She looked at me in abject horror, as if if I’d just gutted a kitten right in front of her. “Ohhh, okay,” she said. It seemed like she was thinking of a solution. “Yeah,” she said, staring at me through a wave of condescension. “That’s not my problem.” And then she turned and walked away. At that moment I wanted to strangle her.

By this time the rest of the participants in the Bowl had filed in, including Deion Sanders, who is just such a great guy all around, and Joe Montana, who confirmed my perception that he’s a nerdy, ultrawhite dumb dummy. I got all the proof I needed watching him interacting with the black guys, and seeing how he and Deion talked.
It only took two minutes to confirm everything I already knew about Joe Montana: the guy had no idea what Deion was talking about (and he was a terrible faker). I even asked Deion about it later and he said that he never really “got” Joe Montana but somehow they knew how to relate as quarterback and receiver. There’s a thing that players talk about that they call “football IQ,” which means that a guy is dumb as a rock in real life but get him on a football field and he’s a genius. Joe Montana is one of those. Think about it: the guy is a Hall-of-Famer, he’s still alive and functioning, but why hasn’t he been a commentator anywhere on any network, ever? Want to know why? I’ll tell you—because he’s dumb.

Everybody else in the locker room was excited to see Joe except for me. This had nothing to do with his regular IQ or his football IQ, it’s much simpler than that. The guy was a graceful, incredible quarterback in his day, but I never saw it that way. He was the guy who regularly ruined my bets and made me lose. By my count, he’s cost me around $24,000 over the course of his career, so basically I hate the motherfucker. It’s not something I can hide, and just then I realized how much it sucked that he was going to be the guy ordering me to run patterns and telling me where to set up for the play. This made the fact that I still couldn’t get my fucking shoes on just that much worse.

Great friend that he is, Nick might have called me every week when I was on the verge of ending it all, but the shoes were a bridge too far. Why, I have no idea—probably because he thought it was funny.

“I’m not putting your shoes on. That’s gay,” he said. “Just don’t wear any. Save yourself the dishonor of having another man put your shoes on for you. It’s disgraceful.”

“Thanks, Nick.”

I wasn’t going to ask Deion Sanders, and fuck Montana, I’d rather play barefoot, but I kept thinking that there had to be someone in the locker room that would help me out and not make a scene out of it.
I kept looking around for the right person and the right moment. It felt like an hour went by before I saw what might be my only hope: Neil Patrick Harris. Not only is he gay, meaning he’d be sensitive to my predicament (unlike a callous asshole like Nick), but he’s also a big
Stern
fan and he’d read my book.

Neil came over and gave me a big hug and told me he was glad I’d gotten myself together and was doing well. He was a class act; he continued to make small talk, and I did too, absentmindedly. That’s because I was debating whether or not to ask Neil Patrick Harris to help me tie my shoes. This was a real problem. I mean it, this was an issue. I was also concerned that Neil might tie the laces in such a way, with too much of a knot, that they would look really gay. I decided in the end that I just couldn’t risk it, so I didn’t ask him. No fault of his—it was definitely me—I was just too worried about the final product.