Bare Bones (23 page)

As it turned out, about ten houses down a guy apparently had murdered his wife and was now on foot in my gated super safe neighborhood. SWAT teams had invaded and were shouting through bullhorns for everyone to lock up and stay inside, because the man was armed and dangerous. They caught him in the woods a day later, but it proved to me that anything can happen anywhere. (And I soon moved.)

The wife murderer was an unfortunate but random event. Others were directed
at me
. Next up were two agent-type guys who showed up at my front door and showed their badges.

“Do you mind if we come in?” one of them asked.

Did I have a choice? Not really; they were IRS agents.

“You've been compromised,” one agent said. “Someone who works for us has hacked into your files.”

They showed me a picture and I recognized the woman instantly. A huge fan of the show, she had come to a number of our live events. Because her work computer was monitored, they were aware when she breached security by looking into my files. Of course they were! What kind of employee of the IRS doesn't know they are going to be caught if they dig into people's personal information? A dumb one, that's who. The agents asked me if I wanted to press charges. “Yes,” I said, and never heard anything more about the woman again.

That might have been my last interaction with that woman, but it wasn't my last with government agents. Shortly after the IRS showed up at my house, two
other
secret agent types showed up at my studio while I was in the middle of my radio show. This time, though, it was immediately clear the situation was a lot more serious.

“Get off the air right now,” one of them said.

“Well, two guys with suits walked in,” I said on air. “I guess I've got to go.”

I hit a song and told someone, “Just play songs till I'm done.”

The two men escorted me to a room in the station and said, “We want to know about the threats you've posted to the President of the United States.” Or something like that. I was so freaked out my ears were ringing, which made it hard to hear.

“I did not threaten the President of the United States,” I insisted to them. But in my head I tried to remember what stupid thing I had said on air that could have been misconstrued as a threat. It was hard to think, though, when I was pretty sure I was about to get a one-way ticket to Guantánamo.

If I was freaked out before, when they put up paper to block out the window in the door and started to press me pretty hard, I was downright panicked. Even though the men in suits identified themselves, I honestly don't remember what agency they were a part of—FBI, I guess? They could have been Secret Service. I was so scared I have no idea. I learned that the government doesn't mess around. I cracked a couple of jokes, but they weren't funny to anybody but me. And then I stopped cracking jokes. The government; they don't play.

“You didn't write this message to the president saying, ‘I'm going to kill you, N-word'?”

Once I realized it wasn't something I said on air but a written message, I breathed a sigh of relief. I sometimes say things I don't remember because I have to talk so much. “Guys, I absolutely did not do this,” I said.

The person who
did
send that threatening message to the White House was a listener, who had created an e-mail account under my name. As it turned out, the agents knew I wasn't the person behind it and were just doing their due diligence. (If that was just doing their due diligence, I'd hate to experience a real interrogation.)

Being a public person comes with an inherent share of craziness, but I found that each threatening event I experienced built on the next to create a sense of constant anxiety. From being robbed outside a club in Little Rock to being jumped outside of work in Austin by the man with a knife to my IRS files getting hacked to multiple death threats, I struggled to maintain my equilibrium. I didn't want to sink into paranoia and constant worry that the world is dangerous and ultimately against me. But every time something bad happened, no matter how much I had worked on myself in therapy and how far I'd come in life, it was like I went right back to the place from which I started.

Whenever I slid back into this bad state of mind the nightmares returned. These were the same ones that I had for weeks after the incident in Austin in the early morning hours outside the studio. I would dream that I was lying in bed—the same bedroom, the same bed that I was actually lying in. In the nightmare someone with a gun was breaking into my room. It was always the exact same thing, down to the same gun. The worst part, however, was that because the dream happened in my bedroom, when I woke up in that same room, I felt like I was still in the middle of my nightmare. Only it was real life.

That happens about forty, fifty days in a row and you are going to be exhausted.

After the Million-Dollar Bad Thing happened, all the other events rushed back—and so did the nightmares. I stopped sleeping altogether.

I have never been a great sleeper, because I'm always worried that I'm going to oversleep and miss work. And if I miss work, I'm going to lose my job. Back to square one. I sleep with my laptop in my bed. My phone is my alarm. And I sleep with another alarm set to back up my phone. Still, to make sure I don't oversleep, I check the clock three or four times a night. I'm not sure I remember what a good night's rest feels like.

Still, this was a whole other kind of unrest. Every night I had the same nightmare, over and over again. Waking up with my heart racing, there was no way I could get back to sleep. So I'd just stay up and work. I got to the point where I couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time. Then it seemed as if I didn't sleep at all.

It was murder, getting out of bed at 3
A
.
M
. and feeling like crap every day. Because I don't like to put any kind of drug in my body, and don't do coffee, it was sheer gut and will that got me through this show. And I got sick and stayed sick, because of the lack of sleep.

I was never late (have I mentioned that I don't do that?), but that didn't mean I was doing a great job. In that period when I didn't know how much I was going to get fined by the FCC and I wasn't sleeping,
The Bobby Bones Show
went through a really sour time. Months went by when the ratings were terrible. It wasn't even that our listeners were angry with me for the Million-Dollar Bad Thing. The trouble made the news, but mainly it was just in media circles. It was such a blip, hardly anyone in the mainstream knew about it. No, the bad ratings were simply due to the fact that I wasn't doing a good show.

This was the lowest point I had ever reached in my life—and that's when you go and ask for help.

My therapist had suggested a few times over the course of our working together that I consider taking antidepressants. It wasn't that I was depressed; I was just never happy. I never got out of being sad—if that makes sense. Still, I was terrified of taking pills. I don't like taking pills. And for good reason.

The obsessive nature I inherited from my mom was always lurking in the background. Like I said, if it wasn't golf or poker, then it was Subway sandwiches or working out. I had to work out at the exact same time, for the exact same amount of time, every day of the week, or I didn't want to work out at all. I started eating right, which meant no cheat dates, ever. For four months, I didn't touch bread or sweets, and I love eating bread and sweets. But I couldn't do it. I can't do anything in moderation.

I wish I were able to use alcohol to be more comfortable in social situations, because I'm very uncomfortable socially. I'm always quiet, shy, reserved. Even now. It's odd, because I talk for hours each day to millions of people and perform live in front of thousands. If I'm onstage at a Raging Idiots concert or doing a television show, I'm not unnerved because it's a performance. But real-life interactions, I'm not good at. So when I'm not performing, I mainly keep to myself, sometimes not even leaving my bedroom.

Did that mean I was depressed? I wasn't sure, but I didn't want to end up like my mom, so at a certain point I decided to talk to my doctor about taking antidepressants. I was so nervous, however, that I needed more than just the opinion of my therapist, even though I trusted her implicitly. I had three months of conversations with my medical doctor, too, who didn't push me either way as I asked tons and tons of questions.

“Am I going to be out-of-control up?”

“Will I be the same person?”

“Am I going to put on weight?”

“Am I going to be able to think the same?”

“Will I get addicted?”

He laid out the benefits and risks until I was ready to make a decision. I wound up taking them for three or four months, during which time I didn't notice any perceptible change at all. I know it takes a while for that stuff to kick in, and that you have to work closely with a doctor who really understands the right dosage and medication for you. But my ambivalence meant that I wasn't all that committed to the process. So I just stopped again, with the doctor's help.

Here I was, my life seemingly crumbling around me because I was unable to sleep. I knew that my inability to sleep came from deeper, darker demons that I needed to wrestle with, but in order to do that I needed to get some sleep!

I went back to my doctor and he prescribed sleeping pills, more precisely a pill called Edluar. Again, we talked all about it, the pros and cons, my fear of abuse. But I was at the end of my rope, and the fear of not being able to work outweighed my anxiety over becoming addicted to sleeping pills. So I started to take them, one or two every day.

It wasn't miraculous, but I did sleep—without nightmares. Many sleeping pills don't get you to REM sleep, the most restful type during which you dream, and this was one of those kinds of pills. So when I woke up, it didn't feel like I had had a full rest. But it was better than dreaming I was getting murdered in my own bed or not falling asleep at all. I was able to function, but if I didn't take a pill, the nightmares returned. I wanted to stay fixed. So I kept taking them and taking them and taking them.

Then on May 19, 2015, the FCC finally made its determination about the Million-Dollar Bad Thing that had happened seven months earlier. iHeartMedia, which agreed to a three-year compliance and reporting plan, was fined the million dollars.

One million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but the relief of having a resolution was priceless. I was deeply fortunate and grateful that my company paid the fine willingly and didn't ask for my head on a platter by way of compensation. As if a mega Band-Aid had been ripped from a wound, I was ready to heal. I said to myself, “You know what? Things really sucked for a while, and I'm not going to let them suck anymore.”

It was time to change my attitude and get back to it.

By this point, we had fallen all the way from number one to out of the top ten in ratings. We bottomed out because
I
had bottomed out. If I didn't fix the situation,
The Bobby Bones Show
was going to be over. Just as I had caused the problem, I had to fix it.

I talked to my CEO, Bob Pittman, the man who gave me my current contract and had invested so much in me over the past couple of years.

“Listen,” I said. “I'm going to turn this around. I'm not even going to say, ‘Trust me'; I'm just going to do it.”

And we did. We turned it around. It was one step at a time, one hour at a time, one show at a time. I started to crank up the machine again, keeping notes every day, all day, of things that popped into my head:

 
My grandma getting arrested once for playing bingo in a van

 
New smart chips in credit cards

 
How Amy can't keep a secret