Crash and Burn (7 page)

I’d gotten two of my friends into the Mansion that night, the actor Jimmy Palumbo, who played Johnny Trinno in
Beer League,
and my friend Anthony, who produced it. Those two morons rolled up in Jimmy’s 1982 Honda Civic. There were lines of limos, Bentleys, Maybachs, you name it, in that driveway, accompanied by one completely shitty Civic . . . with my friends in it. I was standing there with one of the promoter guys when my buddies pulled up, and the guy looked over at me like he was missing the joke. I mean, there was no joke, and that’s the point he was missing. He then told me that my friends’ car made me look bad and that I should never, ever have them back to the Mansion or any other place I wanted to make a good impression.

“Yeah?” I said. “I’ll remember that. I told them not to take their nice car because this one would make me look more down-to-earth.”

His frown said it all: my ripped pants, scruffy beard, and scotch-and-Percocet eyes were the epitome of class, so those losers, in that car, were definitely bringing me down.

Just after my boys showed up, I noticed that the “ladies of the night” had arrived, and it was a very dark night. These were the most hard-core—and I mean fucking hard-core—whores I’ve ever seen
in my life. These were $20 crackhead cocksuckers from the mean streets of Compton and without a doubt I’d say a whopping two out of 150 of them were legitimately cute. It looked like for some this night at the Mansion was BYOB (Bring Your Own Bunny). It was never like that back in the day, which depressed me, but I was very high by then, so I didn’t give a fuck for long.

My buddy Anthony asked one of the two cute ones how much a blow job would cost him.

“One thousand dollars,” she said.

“Get the fuck away from me!” he said. “You’re crazy.” She was, because she wasn’t that hot and I’m pretty sure that even if you tapped Tiger Woods’s finest talent, you’d get more than a blow job for $1,000. Still, and this was the drugs talking to me, I sat there wondering what a thousand-dollar blow job felt like. What could she or any other chick possibly do to justify that price tag? I halfheartedly decided I’d try to find out.

“So it’s a thousand dollars for a blow job, but what would you do for some Percocet?” I asked her.

“Nothing, I have my own,” she said, looking at me suspiciously.

“Oh, you do? You like Percocet? Well, how much does it cost to buy your Percocet?” I asked. “A blow job is a thousand; how much is the Percocet?”

“They’re not for sale, I don’t do that,” she said.

“Oh, you don’t? So you’re only a whore?” I asked. “You should think about diversifying your interests and pursuing drug sales. You really should cover a few other markets, honey.”

She probably didn’t even have Percocet. She probably didn’t even know what it was, because she got so mad that she stormed off and told all the girls within earshot that I was a jerk-off. Thanks to me, none of the whores would talk to us, so none of us hooked up. Let me tell you, that was really adding insult to injury, because these girls had no business even being in the same zip code as the Playboy
Mansion. They were an insult to everything the place stands for, historically or otherwise.

There was no sex in the grotto for me, but that didn’t stop everyone else at the party from getting their dicks wet. Before too long it might as well have been 1974. Actually I wish it had been 1974; I might have seen some hot chicks with feathered hair and great banana-boat tits. Instead I found myself watching a two-hundred-pound hooker with a tattoo of her murdered boyfriend’s name across her chest blowing three goofy white record-executive types by the pool. I was the only one who saw this as horrifying. Her tits were flabby, her thighs were huge, and there was nothing sexy about any of it. Aside from my personal misfortunes, I’m pretty confident when I tell you that this was the worst night the grotto has ever seen . . . at least I hope so. If those rocks could talk they would pretend these events never happened.

The thing about drugs is that they can erase all of that kind of carnage, or at least make it all seem okay at the time, which is pretty much what happened to me that night. What I was seeing before me became a bad movie that I suddenly wasn’t in anymore. Sure, I’d played my role onstage earlier, but I was high now, so that was yesterday as far as I was concerned. All the gross sex I saw was just ugly wallpaper, because everything was fucking fine, man. Wanna know why? Because finally I was fucking high!

When Teddy showed up with pants (I’d forgotten that I’d ever needed pants), he brought this pair of red silky pajama pants that could have been Hef’s cast-offs. By then, that was so cool, I couldn’t have been happier. Teddy . . . what a useless, cool guy I employed. I thanked him for those pants and then I ducked into the bushes, threw my ripped ones deep into the shrubs, and put my new ones on, and when I came back out, I felt like a beautiful mermaid. I strutted my stuff as if I were wearing a $4,000 tuxedo that fit me perfectly. I mean, these things were covering my ass and junk, but that
was about it; they were nothing special. Actually they were tight, and I looked ridiculous. I was also wearing white Nikes that were smeared with orange French dressing, plus my jean jacket and some oversized fat-guy T-shirt, so alongside these red pajama pants I probably looked like Ignatius J. Reilly from one of my favorite books of all time,
A Confederacy of Dunces
. Or at least the way I picture him if he ever walked the Earth with you and me.

So I was definitely feeling fine, and in my mind I was looking really fine. And according to me, it was time to give Teddy some payback, because that fucker hadn’t done his job. He had it coming, and nothing is better than fucking with some guy who has it coming, especially if your victim is completely stoned on marijuana. It’s shooting fish in a barrel, it’s clay in the kiln, it’s just too easy. And that little prick deserved it. I even knew how I’d fuck with him: I’d make him chase down my incorrectly written check.

“Ted, listen to me. I need that check tonight. You have to find the guy and have him cut me a new one,” I said.

“Dude, I can get that from him tomorrow.”

“I’m paying you out of that check, Teddy,” I said. “You don’t get that, I’ve got nothing for you for this weekend of work.” That got his attention.

Off he went, while my friends and I continued to drink and watch this sad pack of derelict Compton whores sucking and fucking goofballs. About ten minutes later Teddy returned and he told me that the guy had no more checks, which I already knew, and that they’d have to mail it, which I also already knew—because the guy who’d thought my name was R. D. Lang had already told me so and taken my address.

“Man, that sucks, Ted,” I said. “I’m a little bit disappointed in you. I wanted to give you your money tomorrow. It’s just gonna have to wait. Um . . . hey, did you tell him the address was wrong too?”

“No, wait . . . what?”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s got the wrong address too. He’s got it going to
my mom’s, which isn’t right. That’s gonna delay this even more. Can you go sort that out?”

This took Teddy at least forty-five minutes, long enough for my friends and me to totally forget about him altogether, until he came running up, all proud that he’d gotten it handled. I mean, Jesus, he didn’t even suspect that I was fucking with him, which was great because the kid deserved all of it, but I still wasn’t done, because there was just one last thing I could think of that could be wrong with the check.

“Listen Ted, you probably think I’m crazy, but I didn’t give him the full nine-digit zip code for my address in Hoboken. I hate to do this to you, but I’ve lost checks—I’ve lost a lot of checks—and I really don’t want that to happen anymore. Would you mind running that guy down and making sure he’s got the full nine-digit zip on that address? I’m sure you don’t feel like doing it, but it’s better to handle it now.”

That kept him occupied for another half hour, by which point, when he finally came back saying he couldn’t find the guy (who was probably hiding from Teddy by then if he wasn’t being blown by an overweight mother of eight), I decided it was time to go. It was one of the worst gigs I’ve ever done at one of the top places I’ve always wanted to play. That’s life, though, isn’t it? You can sit around thinking that some place is the Taj Mahal, but when you finally get there, you realize it’s shit. Who knows, if I didn’t care so much about drugs and money I might have managed to have a good time and maybe even do a good set. I was so in my head that when it started to go wrong up there, the paranoia, the false perception, and the lessened ability that comes with drug abuse defined what happened next. And the only thing that made it go away? Complete obliteration via puke-covered Percocet. Oh yeah, speaking of those, once I got back to my suite at the Park Hyatt in Century City that night I realized I’d left those at the scene of the crime: they were in my ripped-up pants, deep inside a hedgerow at the Playboy Mansion. Tell you the truth,
I hope they’re still there. That would be the type of mark I’d be proud of leaving on the Mansion.

Without a fix of Percocet to get me through the day, my flight home was going to be more of a living hell than my set had been, times ten. I was in first class and Teddy wasn’t, so the only joy I got was laughing at him as he shuffled his lazy ass back to coach. He was hungover and I knew it, and in reality that was all I had (aside from the obvious): ways to feel superior to him.

“See ya later, loser!” I shouted as he shuffled by. “Maybe I’ll bring you something to eat, jerk-off. I’ll let you know how the warm brownie and ice cream taste. Hey, do they give you champagne when you first enter coach? Ted, don’t worry, I’ll come see you after I watch my favorite episode of
Taxi
.”

“Yeah, really funny.”

I could make fun of him all I wanted, but it didn’t matter; I was the one who was truly fucked. No amount of alcohol could soothe the raging, toxic headache brewing in my brain. Fifteen minutes into the flight I got the sweats because my withdrawals had set in. As soon as the seat belt light went off I was pacing up and down the aisles, asking for more scotch, praying that the anxiety and sweats and itch would go away, and knowing that they wouldn’t. I’d planned it wrong, I’d not brought enough stuff to get me back to my home base in one piece. But all was not lost; I knew that I just had to get through the flight to be able to get myself shipshape again. Luckily I was met by a very, shall we say, “understanding” driver whom I had ridden with before. He picked me up at the airport that day, took one long look at me, and said: “Where we goin’, man? I don’t think you’re goin’ home just yet.”

“No, man, I’m not,” I said. “I’m in bad shape.”

I borrowed a few hundred dollars off him (I told you he was amazingly understanding), and I won’t tell you where we went to score, but I can tell you it rhymes with Shmarlem. That night we
got me about two hundred Vicodin, and this guy was wise—I’d have to pay him that cash back with ten percent interest. That’s how it was, and I considered it normal. Ah, fuck it, I don’t even know if I thought it was normal. I didn’t give a fuck what it was anymore. It was my life.

If you’re still
with me by now, even if you weren’t there the first go-round, you probably realize that 2008 was a banner year for me. My first book,
Too Fat to Fish
, debuted at number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list and remained a bestseller for nearly two months. When it went into paperback a year later, it hit the list again—the thing just didn’t let up, because it somehow crossed over from interested people who knew me from stand-up or were just die-hard
Stern
fans to becoming its own entity, a collection of autobiographical stories that touched people. Making the
Times
list and the media that came along with it piqued the curiosity of people who didn’t know who I was, but I guess they wanted to know what this weird book with the stupid title at number one was all about. I hope they found it to be entertaining, or at least purely disgusting—at the best I hope they found it enlightening. I’ll also settle for educational, in the way that any video preceded by a don’t-try-this-at-home disclaimer can be educational. That book is one of my proudest achievements, no matter what other heights I manage to scale, God willing.

Anyway, my stand-up schedule was as busy and lucrative as it had ever been and between the
Stern Show
, invites to Comedy Central roasts, and a few small acting roles, I’d tapped into everything I’d always wanted from show business besides banging Angie Dickinson
and playing Jean Valjean in the Broadway production of
Les Misérables
. I also received the opportunity to give back to our country, which is something I’d always wanted to do. That year I went to Afghanistan with the USO to entertain our troops—a milestone for me—but I couldn’t let myself enjoy it completely and had to fuck it up by scoring fifteen Valium at the airport in Kyrgyzstan while waiting for our Armed Forces transport flight out of that hellhole. I got so out of my mind that I had to be driven back to the US Army base to sleep it off for thirteen hours because I was deemed unfit to fly. This was the army, by the way, so they had the authority to strap me into a seat as if I were a box of emergency rations, but they chose not to—I was that bad. If I was what might be called “mildly ill behaved” at the airport, once they got me back on the base I really put on a show, because all fifteen of those black-market Valium, about 150 milligrams’ worth because they were the biggest-sized generic pills—really kicked in. When they let me out of the car I proceeded to run around like a crazy man, until the top dog sergeant in charge caught up with me and told me in no uncertain terms that I was either going to bed or getting locked up in a cell by him personally. There’s one thing I can say about me, which is that I rebel all I can to the furthest degree, always to my own detriment, but when true authority knocks and real trouble is at my door, I answer and at least try to fly right.