Crash and Burn (39 page)

The gendarmes got to the bottom of it by making me pee in a cup at the jail and once they learned that I was clean of all narcotics they kept their promise and let me sleep it off. I have to say that the Parisian authorities were fantastic, just very calm, very professional, and for very no-nonsense law enforcement officers, they were very compassionate. Their American counterparts should take note. I had a cell mate who looked like Casey Stengel when he was ninety-two, who was lying with his head on the toilet, talking nonstop all night. He sounded like a maniac speaking in tongues, but in French. The only thing I could understand, because he said it over and over, was “
la plume
” which is some kind of bias of mine. When someone speaks French at me, to me, or near me, I only hear “
la plume
,” which I’ve come to discover means “pen.” So whatever this scary old guy was yelling about, to me it was only pens. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I called a guard over and told him that the guy belonged in a psych ward.

“Monsieur, come here, read this,” the guard said.

“I can’t read French,” I said. “You have to tell me what it means.”

“This means that you
are
in the psych ward.”

That was a wake-up call, and another first—a foreign psych ward. So the old guy belonged there, but thank God he was old and lacking in stamina: he fell asleep in an hour or so, after which I managed to doze off for a while too. I woke up around seven a.m. And what scared me more than the guy’s crazy voice the night before was the fact that he was still comfortably asleep, with his head pretty much inside the toilet bowl. Put it this way, I had to move him in order to take a piss. Even then the guy didn’t wake up; he just let me move
him over a bit. I know I sprayed urine on him, but I can’t imagine he cared. I just hope that weirdo is doing okay, wherever he is.

At that point the guard came over and decided I was sober enough to get the hell out of there, so they gave me back my possessions and signed me out. I wasn’t charged with anything and that was that. Once again, the French police are wonderful people. As I mentioned, I threw my shirt at a car or a person sometime the night before, so I had no choice but to wear what anyone would call a sure sign of trouble: the blue plastic hospital-style smock they’d given me the night before. It was the kind that ties in the back, pretty much leaving you hanging out in the wind, especially if you’re my size. Basically I looked like an escaped mental patient (something I also know quite a bit about) which didn’t help me any when it came time to hail a cab.

The sun was coming up by then and I started walking as bits and pieces of the night before came back to me, none of them good. The jail was just off the Champs-Elysées, near the Arc de Triomphe, smack in the center of a beautiful, busy tourist destination in Paris. There was no getting lost in the crowd or going about my business unnoticed on a Wednesday morning at seven a.m., being an obese American in a blue smock who spoke no French. I wandered, trying to get any cab I saw to stop for me. After about an hour I found a cabbie willing to take me, who coincidentally looked exactly like Susan Boyle from
Britain’s Got Talent
. I mispronounced my hotel’s name, but she was patient and cool, and got me where I needed to go, God bless her.

I texted Anthony to tell him that I’d just gotten out of jail as I pulled up to the hotel. He and Dan had taken Adrienne to get her things out of our room because she wanted to move to another hotel, and I can’t blame her for that. But I got out earlier than anyone expected and showed up while they were still there waiting for her to finish packing. I got up to the room and found the two of them standing there, but what I didn’t realize was that Adrienne was in
the room too, hiding behind the door. I barged in like a maniac and went straight to the bathroom and when I did, she ran out and went to Dan’s room. I literally just missed her because I came out a minute later and told Anthony and Dan to get the fuck out of my room, out of my life, and to go to hell, because I hadn’t sobered up enough to be rational. I told them they were “traitors,” “liars,” I told them they were fired, crazy shit like that. All I cared about was being alone and taking a shower. That’s the first thing you do when you get out of jail, by the way, you take a nice hot shower. It’s the only way to get the stink off.

I was confused, I was angry, and that anger hadn’t gone away during my evening in jail. I wanted to see Adrienne just as badly as I’d wanted to see her when I was drunk, playing chicken with Peugeots, the night before. But I’d scared her so bad that she’d checked into another hotel, and since I’d been acting like a homicidal maniac, neither she nor my friends thought it was a good idea for me to know where she was on the off chance that I’d show up and storm the walls to get to her room if she wouldn’t see me. I found out later that Anthony and Dan even refused to let Adrienne tell them the name of her new hotel because they didn’t want to know. They’d had enough of our drama, for one thing, but more importantly, they wanted to be sure the two of us would stay apart until I calmed down. They also didn’t want to have to lie to me; it was just better for everyone if they didn’t know. Adrienne knew how to find them if she needed to and when she was ready to talk to me she would—that’s how they left it. This may come as a shock, but in my mental state, drunk or not (and I did continue to drink immediately after my shower), I didn’t believe my two friends at all. I was convinced that they knew where she was and I got more belligerent about it at every opportunity. I was pissed as hell and believed that the entire world, starting with them, was against me. I just had to see Adrienne so badly that I was going to scream her name from the balcony of the room until someone brought her to me.

There’s one thing I need to say about Adrienne: I love her to death, but I don’t think any woman overpacks more than she does. Listen, all women pack a lot of shit, but this girl is ridiculous. Left to her own devices she will pack three suitcases for a two-day trip to the beach where she’ll only end up wearing one bikini. I’m all for being prepared, but she takes it to another level. She’s got this one bag she takes everywhere with her (because it could, literally, fit everything the average family of four might take with them on vacation), and that’s what she had in our room in Paris. This might sound crazy but looking back I’m not surprised at all that the couple hours I spent in the drunk tank weren’t enough time for her to get her shit packed back into her bag and out of the room. A midget could live in her bag; it’s like a studio apartment.

Anyway, when I came in and Adrienne ran out to Dan’s room, there was no way she could have snuck out and taken her bag, so she left it behind. And there was no way I was going to let Dan take it down to his room, because that bag was the only leverage I had to get to see her. I was so angry that as I sat there all alone, I began to stare at her bag and just get more and more pissed off. I called Dan’s room and started asking him, calmly at first, where Adrienne was. When he couldn’t tell me because he said, for probably the tenth time, that he really didn’t know what hotel she’d moved to, I just started yelling. Eventually I told him to fuck off and hung up. I called Anthony, insisting he knew where she was and started yelling at him to tell me, but it was no use because he didn’t know either. I called him a bunch of names and threatened his life, and then hung up on him too.

I was so full of rage and had no outlet for it. I stomped around the room, like a caged animal. I kicked over the furniture, I broke a glass coffee table, and then I went to the minibar and began to empty it, bottle by bottle. It was the first time I’d felt calm since our plane took off from Newark. I’ve emptied minibars on my own many times in my life, so I consider myself an expert on what I’ve come to refer to
as a Noah’s Ark drunk. A minibar, you see, is the Noah’s Ark of little liquor bottles, because, like the ark, it’s a structure that contains two little bottles of every liquor known to man. If you consume the entire minibottle ark, the insane variety of liquor creates a very specific type of buzz, and it’s not pretty. It’s a Noah’s Ark drunk. If you’re doing that in the first place, it’s safe to assume that you’re not doing it for pleasure, which means you’re probably going at it the way it should be done: downing the wine like it’s water and putting away the Pringles and M&M’s while you turn the inventory into a pile of little plastic empties. All I can say is that the mixed booze and all the trimmings make for one Biblically out-of-control drunk once the sugar, salt, and alcohol collide. Just hope you don’t puke, because it is no fun coming up—I can tell you from experience.

So like hanging out with the worst kind of old friend, that’s how I dealt with realizing I’d fucked up the night before, which was a terrible idea. I’m not sure of the timeline, but at some point soon after I started sailing on Noah’s Ark, I know that Anthony and Dan came by to make sure I was okay, both of them hoping I’d gone to sleep. Nope! The found me in full rage mode, stalking around the room. After I told them to fuck off for the tenth time and threw bottles at them, they left, leaving me to destroy everything in sight, from the one remaining coffee table to the bathroom door. When there was nothing left, I got to work on the mother lode: Adrienne’s suitcase.

I knocked it on its side, opened it up, took armfuls of her clothes to the balcony, and threw them onto the street below. We were staying in this particular hotel because Bill Murray, who is one of Dan’s close friends, had recommended it. He’d told Dan that if anything went wrong with me, if I fell off the wagon or otherwise misbehaved, the staff there would take care of everything and no one would be the wiser. I can’t even begin to tell you how right he was. When I threw Adrienne’s clothes off the balcony, the bellboys looked up and without a word began to catch what they could and fold it. They waved up to me a few times as if what I was doing was one of the amenities
in the brochure: Throw your girlfriend’s clothes down to one of our doormen and they will fold them and bring them back upstairs to you!

That’s the least of how cool they were if you think about it. I’d just come in like a maniac wearing a hospital robe, smelling of prison, and within an hour I was drunk again, throwing my girlfriend’s clothes out of our window as I screamed every obscenity known to man at the top of my lungs. If that’s not cause to call the cops, I don’t know what is. But they didn’t. Instead the doormen and bellboys picked up her stuff as it landed, some of it in traffic, some of it on the median in the middle of the road, all of them smiling as if it was just another day on the job. During a brief moment of clarity I realized I’d probably be arrested again and if I were it might cost me my job, and at that point I stopped. When my phone rang I figured it was the hotel and that I was fucked, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was the front desk, but instead of threatening me, they’d just called to ask when I’d like to have Adrienne’s belongings brought back up. I’m telling you, this place is a dream hotel for fuckups. By the time I was done, there was smashed glass all over the floor. I’d destroyed two end tables and the coffee table, ripped the bathroom door clean off its hinges. At some point I passed out on the floor, between the two mattresses that made up the king-size bed. When I woke up, it was like magical elves had been there: the coffee table was cleaned up and replaced, the door was fixed, and all of Adrienne’s clothes were in the drawers.

I’m ashamed to say that it took a couple more days full of manic fits of drunkenness and anger before I got control of myself and sobered up completely. As I mentioned before, my AA sponsor Don was on the trip, but he was staying in a different hotel, so, like a true addict, I made sure I got wildly drunk—and irrational and crazy—whenever he wasn’t around. Then I’d spend time during the days with him without any of the others around and I’d act like nothing was wrong. After my emotions ran their course I began to get control
again and truly calm down. I knew we’d flown out there with problems, but I’d had such high hopes for Adrienne and me on this trip that when it didn’t happen I literally lost my mind. After my friends told her that I was doing okay and that I seemed somewhat back to normal, Adrienne agreed to talk to me, so long as the guys chaperoned our meeting by waiting outside of the room. If things got heated, they’d hear it, and if it got out of control they’d step in.

The two of us went into the bathroom and she sat in the tub, looking as beautiful as ever, wearing a little flannel shirt like you’d expect to see at a Nirvana concert in 1991, just so gorgeous. And there I was in Paris with her, the love of my life, the woman I’d planned to ask to marry me, as I realized that anger, resentment, jealousy, and everything else had probably ruined us for good. Those drives within me always ruin everything I care about.

I got into that bathtub next to her and the two of us cried.

“Maybe you’ve got to move on,” I said.

“Maybe I do.”

She went back to her hotel, and she still wouldn’t tell me where it was. She wouldn’t live with me there or anywhere else anymore. She even changed her flight because she didn’t want to be on a plane with me. I’d been so crazy that she didn’t feel safe around me and she worried that if we got into a fight on the plane I’d be arrested in the States, which would have ended my career with my employers at DirecTV. So I left Paris without my baby; she came home a couple of days later. That wasn’t the end of the drama between us. A few more crazy events happened and after those we decided that there was no way she and I could possibly work. Adrienne was still so very mad at me and that wasn’t going away. She told me, to my face, that she couldn’t see me anymore, that she couldn’t have me in her life in any way at all. Her parents and her family agreed—actually they insisted, and I couldn’t argue with their point of view at all because they were right.

And so we had another awful, gut-wrenching good-bye. For me
this one was the worst of them out of what I must say have to be some of the world’s most horrible good-byes. We got that Paris trip in, but instead of it being the romantic adventure we’d dreamed of, it was a train wreck. We had a couple of moments—and those I’ll never forget—but it could have been so much more. We had one insanely romantic night during the trip, and that gave me great comfort. It still does—no matter how things ended, at least Adrienne and I had one night in Paris. We had one night where things were great, one night where we were the way we used to be back when we first fell in love, back before everything else got in the way. Paris is where we always dreamed we’d go, but that’s where we ended too, and it’s sad. Due to my self-destructiveness, my anger, my resentment, and my self-hatred, I lost the light of my life. I lost that smile. I lost those beautiful eyes, the eyes that were going to show me the path to happiness. I lost all of that because of me.