Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (21 page)
Definitely not the Rat Pack. Maybe more like the Crap Pack. Boys will be boys.
I once wrote this down as a possible joke: “You know what separates the men from the boys? The police.”
Before I end this chapter, I want to tell one last story, about probably one of the stupidest things I’ve
ever
done. How can that be after what you’ve just read? Seriously, I went into Inspector Clouseau territory with this one. It happened about ten years ago. My daughters were fifteen, twelve, and nine at the time.
It was right after knee surgery. I had torn my meniscus running on the beach. Only four miles, but I had come down on my knee stupidly like a semi-awkward man over forty can do. For all those screwed-up-knee guys who can relate, I ended up having arthroscopic surgery and wearing a cast.
Soon after the surgery, my dearest family friends invited me and my three daughters on a camping trip. It was a beautiful trip. We had guides with us—and two boats with a crew of four to go downriver . . . wait, that legally couldn’t be called a “camping trip.” It was what it was.
I was trying to enjoy myself but I just wasn’t feeling well—still in pain, taking ibuprofen, as we do for these things. Finally, after a long day of journeying down the Colorado to the Snake River, four parents, seven kids, and four guides, we pitched our tents on a beautiful riverbed.
A crazy-indulgent, barely-roughing-it, fun trip. We stayed up late playing guitar and singing every Beatles song we could remember. The adults were drinking whiskey. Chivas Regal. I was hurting as it’d been a long day.
It got late. We had our sleeping bags set up under the stars on a little hill. I was trying the best I could to get to mine and everyone was helping me get there. There were two tented portable toilets set up about two hundred feet away. “One for pee” and “one for poo.” It was easy to tell them apart. One smelled like shit.
As soon as the sun set, I’d kept warning all the kids: “Be very very careful if you have to go to the bathroom tonight. There could be snakes and you could hurt your feet in the dark.” We all had flashlights, prepared for anything that could happen.
I was a mess and couldn’t get to sleep. One of my friends had a sleeping pill and asked if I would like one. I’d never had one before. Truth. So I took my first Ambien. There’s a reason for all the disclaimers in the ad. Do not drink and take a sleeping pill.
I went right to bed—with an ice pack on my aching knee—and whiskey in me as well as the first Ambien I’d ever taken. I do not remember much else of what happened except it ended horrendously. Two hours later, I woke up a zombie. I immediately had to piss. I have little memory of this but I know I got my flashlight and slowly, carefully as I could, started to limp alone to the bathroom on the sandy hill in the distance.
It was far. Felt like a mile. Probably two hundred yards. I got to the tented “for pee” toilet, which had a metal A-frame around it. As soon as I walked in to pee, I immediately did what I told my kids not to do—ridiculously jammed my foot into the A-frame and it split my toe wide open. On my bad leg.
I peed and then, with blood gushing out of my toe, drunk and on Ambien, ambled down the hill moaning loudly like a ghoul from hell. It woke everyone up. The kind guides rushed up and started right away to do first aid on my foot. Cleaning the wound, bandaging it until my toe looked like a turkey drumette. I was in some pain. It’s cool we don’t really remember pain.
Then they offered me a Vicodin. And I took it. Actually, I took two. Do not do any of this. You can die. At two
A
.
M
. I was a bloody hot mess. I slept for a few hours before the sun came up, as it tends to do. Everyone gathered around me, staring at the creature before them: A zombie. A zombie hungover on Ambien, Vicodin, and whiskey. I was the poster boy for “DON’T.”
My dear friends and children helped me pack up my sleeping bag and dressed me in a long-sleeved shirt and a Gilligan hat—then they tried to put suntan lotion on me and placed me in the front of the boat we were traveling downriver in. I looked like the dead guy in my friend Jonathan Silverman’s film
Weekend at Bernie’s
.
I muttered some
Walking Dead
–type babble to my daughters and then slept like a mannequin from an out-of-business camping-supplies-store window, passed out for the two-hour river-rapids ride to our next destination.
By the time we got to the shore of the next campsite for the night, my mind started to come back. I sat in a lounge chair drinking filtered river water while my friends were fishing on the banks of the river. My dear friends’ daughter went to cast her line into the water—but it suddenly hooked onto her mother’s hat.
I saw this, got panicked like Lenny in
Of Mice and Men,
and on autopilot, leapt to my foot, yelling, “
I’LL SAVE YOU!!!”
Of course I had no balance—and fell back into the beach chair, somersaulting backward two times like a potato bug, landing flat on my back. Everyone laughed at me. The way you don’t want to be laughed at. I finally knew what it felt like to be the first-prize winner on
America’s Funniest Home Videos
.
I trust the things I’ve shared here have been received as more than just a whacked confessional and more entertaining than disconcerting. I’m obviously not bragging about this idiotic behavior. It bums me out when I meet young people who relish their stories of how fucked-up they get. And as I’ve previously mentioned, they want to get high or drunk with
me
. Honored some of you think I’m cool enough to warrant that, but my days of being a fucked-up zombie creature who somersaults backward on whiskey, sleeping pills, and Vicodin are over. I know, those are strong words. The words of a grown-up.
My mom told me fairly recently about a poignant dream she had. My father, who’d passed away several years before, came to her, she said, to tell her something he wanted us all to hear. The message he conveyed to her, that she wanted to impart to me, was:
“Stay alert. Pay attention.” Okay, I’m doin’ it, Dad.
My old joke used to be: “It’s not good to name-drop; Robert De Niro told me that.” I would occasionally mix it up and say, “Quentin Tarantino told me that.” Actually, Quentin worked at a video store in the eighties that was right next to the Comedy and Magic Club, in Hermosa Beach, and several years ago reminded me I’d rented tapes from him back in the day.
I didn’t remember any specifics so I asked him fearfully, “I didn’t rent porn, did I?” He said, “No, man,” and told me that when I’d come in we’d just talk about movies we loved. I was super relieved, and proud to hear my higher self was functioning that far back, since up until then I had self-diagnosed myself as being a perverted young bastard.
Here comes another name-drop. It was January 2003, and California governor Gray Davis was being sworn in. He was shortly after sworn out, but that’s another story. I was asked to perform at a star-studded event for the big night in Sacramento—alongside musicians Lionel Richie, Kenny G, and Coolio. It was my first and only time doing stand-up at an inaugural event. This may sound a bit self-important, but I can’t help but think perhaps my performance had something to do with the governor’s impeachment.
Beloved actor and activist Edward James Olmos was also speaking that night. His speech was long and thoughtful—about the dangers of what was happening to our planet. Then he took my friend Michael and me aside and started to philosophize about the life of an artist and an actor.
His theory went something like this: “It takes ten years to get discovered, it takes another ten to do the work and have people embrace it, then it takes another ten years for you to fall out of favor with the people for a while. Then you have to reinvent yourself—and only then do they, the people, decide that it’s their choice to discover you all over again. They want to think it was their idea, not yours.
They
rediscover
you
.”
Ten years, then ten years, then ten years. It was at that moment that I figured out Edward James Olmos was one hundred and twenty years old. He is the Immortal. I was recently reminded by my friend Michael that after Mr. Olmos finished describing his ten-years theory, he went on to talk to us about a variety of unrelated subjects, including 1) how easy it would be to poison our water supply, and 2) how on
Miami Vice
he’d been fortunate enough to hold full creative control over every scene he ever acted in.
I had been “Olmosed.” And to this day, much of what he said makes sense to me. For one, I only drink bottled water.
Applying his ten-years theory to my own life, it kind of matches up. My career has certainly had a few different incarnations. It took me ten years to get a TV show on the air, and I wound up with two of them simultaneously. I was double-teamed by family TV.
In my own self-involved bubble, I felt like I’d waited longer than anybody I knew to get a job of consequence in show business. When you’re struggling you think you’re the only one. Later you realize how many people had it worse than you even at your lowest. Especially nowadays, it seems ludicrous.
I once had a comedian friend who had no dental coverage, and when he chipped his tooth and half of it broke off, he picked it up and glued it back on with Krazy Glue. It wasn’t even like going to a dentist was an option.
There are some successful people who seem like they were always successful, like they’ve been unscathed by failure their whole lives—they rose to the top right away, didn’t have to struggle to launch their careers. Like anyone on a hit reality show. But as my dad used to say, “That’s just bullshit.” And though we all trash reality shows, the good ones are, at their highest point, documentaries. I don’t personally put anyone as talented as Anthony Bourdain or anyone on
Deadliest Catch
in the reality-show category. They are broadcasters and documentarians. To be clear, I wasn’t just being facetious—if you can catch fish or cook fish, I’m in.
Even people who achieve sudden meteoric success probably went through times when they didn’t think they’d make it. Even ten-year-old actors and eighteen-year-old singer-songwriters. All go through pain along the journey. It’s true of any kind of artist or anyone seeking out a career in show business, as opposed to just fighting for instant celebrity. Most performers and entertainers will tell you they didn’t arrive on schedule. Some are still waiting for their “arrival.”
I have a memory of the moment when the dog that played Comet on
Full House
starred in the movie
Air Bud
. Stamos was like, “Fuck that dog! How’d the dog get a movie and not us?” A year later, the dog died. It’s hard enough being an actor or actress and trying to keep your career alive another ten years . . . but if you only had a seventh of that time window? Without being aware of it, you live even more in the moment. Because you’re a dog. He worked like a dog too.
A couple years ago, I saw a really funny comedian take the stage at the Improv, at a benefit my friend Kevin Nealon was hosting where every comedian performing that night had a disability. The first comedian up was in a wheelchair and could only move a couple fingers and his head. He wheeled up to the mic and his opening line was: “They told me if you masturbate you’ll go blind. That’s not what happened to me!”
You just can’t get in and out of this life without something sideswiping you. You could be sitting by your beautiful pool thinking you’re the shit and a bird could suddenly fly overhead and—SPLAT—you
are
the shit.
And if, through all fault of your own, you walk around, regardless, believing no matter what the circumstance that you
are
still the shit, stuff will inevitably happen in the universe to balance things out and set you straight. It’s just how it goes.
To be clear, it’s great to have confidence and love yourself. I’m only calling out the people who are flat-out arrogant, who think their farts smell like Chanel. I once knew a girl whose farts did smell like Chanel, but that’s only because I inserted the bottle into her butt while she was asleep. Oh no, I “di-in’t.” Another phrase for you to remember: Do not insert things into anyone’s butt while they’re asleep.
If you’re going through a time in your life when everything is burning on all four burners, firing on all eight cylinders, both of your balls working in synchronicity, yet independently of one another . . . savor it. The greatest moments in life are when your kids and the people you care about are doing well, your work is going well, your relationship is going well, and you have your health. If you’re fortunate enough to have all those sectors of your life in a good place at once—friggin’ high-five yourself and keep it rollin’ as long as possible.
We mortals can lose our streak of confidence all of a sudden and fall off our game. No different than an athlete or model whose window of brilliance is shorter than that of people in other chosen professions. Yes, I just used the words
model
and
brilliance
in a sentence.
Someone not too long ago walked by me on the street and said, “Bob, you are the shit.” And I answered sincerely, “Thank you for adding the
the
.”
I’ve been on both sides of the equation. There have been times when people thought I was the shit. And there have been times when I thought someone else was the shit. When I was younger, I sometimes didn’t know how to act around people whose work I worshipped. Here’s a relatively brief example.
After my first appearance on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,
I was asked back but got bumped from the show because they ran out of time. The guests that night were Jimmy Stewart, Roddy McDowall, and bluesman Preston Smith. I was a little nervous but what I remember through the nerves is arriving at the show, beyond excited, and then being told by the talent coordinator, Jim McCawley, that I had been bumped.
I was disappointed of course but got over that quickly when Jim asked me if I wanted to meet Jimmy Stewart. He took me into the makeup room and there was one of my movie idols sitting in the chair with Kleenex coming out of his shirt collar.