I'm Not High (8 page)

My dad hopped out of bed, and raced over to take me to the bathroom, like that was going to do any good. He picked me up by the back of my shirt and my hair and started to carry me as fast as he could. And as he did so, I doused him again, and everything else in the room, too. I was hitting the wall from about three feet away, so hard it was splattering back at us. Maybe 5 percent of my puke ended up in the toilet. It was the first time I got sick from drinking, and I’ve never been that sick again, drunk or sober. And I couldn’t claim to my parents that it was the flu or food poisoning or anything. They knew that I was
wasted.
They knew I was unhappy. I couldn’t believe the turn our lives—
my life
—had taken.

I passed out for the rest of the night in the bathroom. And I’d wake up only to throw up again. I remember my parents scrubbing themselves off in the bathroom, then trying to sleep on the floor, while reminding me, “You’re gonna clean this up!”

“In the morning, Mom,” I slurred. Like that was going to happen. And their nagging just made me mad all over again. “I don’t wanna live down here . . . ,” I yelled from the toilet.

And then we finally got to move into our house, and it had a swimming pool. I liked that. But still I wasn’t going to give this place much of a chance. It was a foreign territory, and I had no direction. Was I going to get a job? Doing what? Over and over again, I constantly asked myself, “What am I doing here?” And I had no clue.

The only thing that made any of it bearable was the girl who lived next door, Kristen. At seventeen, she was a couple years younger than me, and we hit it off immediately. We’d sit together on her front stoop every night talking our heads off while we shared a cigarette. She was from Boston originally. She had moved down to Clearwater a year or two before we did, so she was pretty immersed socially but remained a little skeptical of Florida at the same time. She was the kind of ally I really needed, and trusted.

Only it took a while for me to realize that because my initial stint in Florida lasted just a few months. It wasn’t long before I told my parents, “I’m outta here.” For better or worse (and in my mind it was better), I was going to go back to Long Island and make it on my own.

I let Kristen know, and she wasn’t cool with that. She had scored tickets to see Pink Floyd in concert in a few weeks and wanted me to stay at least until after the show, but I wasn’t hearing that. We were becoming confidants, but that wasn’t going to derail my big plans: I was going to stay at my friend’s house on Long Island and work at TGI Friday’s. That would show everyone.

My friend Rooster was my age, and he lived on Long Island with his mom and brother. The plan had been for me to live with them for a month, but I ended up staying for five or six. Rent-free. They were a generous, great family. Okay, Rooster’s mom was a little rambunctious sometimes, but only with her kids, not me. She was a crazy Italian woman who never
discussed
things with her kids, because chasing them with a broom was much easier (not that she ever intended to really hit them). One night she chased Rooster into his room full-blast, only she had the handle raised. When it smacked the door frame, the broom went flying and she wiped out hard. Yes, it was great to be back in nice, normal Long Island.

Oh, and there’s this, too: I would sleep on their living room floor, right next to the bathroom, where there was a massive cockroach infestation. When I’d go in there in the middle of the night and turn on the lights, tons of them would scurry out of the sink, running for cover. My mom would call and ask how it was going, and I’d say, “Awesome!” But really I was too grossed out to even take a shower there. I remember waking up one night and feeling something around my chest and also on my nose and mouth. I slapped at my face and saw two of them drop off and crawl across the rug. That’s when I knew I had to get out of there. And as generous as Rooster’s family was, I could feel that they were getting tired of having a dude crashing in their living room.

But I just couldn’t make enough money to get my own place. I loved bussing tables at TGI Friday’s, but when it came time to wait on people I was a disaster. The thing that really sucked about the place is that the waitstaff had to bring (and be
fluent
in) fifty-three different-shaped glasses to the bartender depending on what drinks patrons ordered. Because you really couldn’t appreciate the fine palate of a Purple Rain cocktail if it came in a glass designed for a Seabreeze. Do you think I was any good at keeping the glasses straight?

I was great with a table full of kids. I would draw on their place mats and make them laugh, but if I got a table full of businessmen and they were all ordering crazy drinks? Forget it. They would never get their food orders because I was too busy trying to find out what I needed to give the bartender just to get a vodka 7UP back from him. It got to the point where I’d grovel, but the results were always the same:

“I don’t get you your drinks until you get me my glasses, got it?”

Pretty soon, I was just giving my tables to other waiters and waitresses. I got great pleasure whining and complaining back and forth with this kid who worked there as a dishwasher. Once as I was icing my fingers after having slammed them in a door, he came up to me with a puzzled look and said, “Dude, what are we doing here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My parents moved to Florida, man. I’m just trying to get by.”

“Yeah, but why are we working?” he asked. He was getting philosophical about bussing tables and washing dishes at TGI Friday’s. “Why can’t we just hang out? Life should be about hanging out, not working. We should be like the Indians, man.”

“I agree!” I said, even though it was my understanding that Indians had it pretty tough. Those awesome leather pants they wore didn’t make themselves. But the hanging out part of his speech resonated. My dishwasher friend had a point. My TGI Friday’s career was far from fulfilling.

While he was saying all of this, we were watching an ice cream truck pulling up into the parking lot. The driver hopped out and started unloading all of these giant barrels of ice cream.

“Bro,” my buddy said, eyeing them up, “I’m quitting right now.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “me, too.” What did I have to lose, after all? “Should we tell them we’re quitting or just leave?”

“No way,” he said, “Let’s just leave, bro.”

So we quit right on the spot. And as we were sneaking away, we started looking closer at that ice cream truck. Real close. The delivery guy had gone inside the restaurant leaving a truckful of delicious ice cream unattended. We both had the same idea at the same time.

“Open your trunk,” my friend said.

We quickly snagged three or four giant barrels of ice cream, and floored it over to my sister’s place in Valley Stream; we were laughing our asses off the whole way. It felt like payback, I guess, to the whole Friday’s infrastructure that was unfairly keeping us down. We got to her place and hauled the ice cream into her house, extremely psyched about our caper, before realizing that the barrels would not fit in any normal-sized freezer.

“Dude,” I said, “what the hell are we gonna do with this ice cream?”

So we went out on the street and started giving it to all the kids in the neighborhood. We were like the Robin Hoods of pilfered chain-restaurant ice cream. Later we bought a bunch of Tupperware containers and scooped the ice cream into them to better store what was left of it. Genius idea. I’d just quit my job, I was getting kicked out of my cockroach-infested crash pad, I had very little money, and what I did have I spent on Tupperware for stolen ice cream.

Yep, clearly living in Florida was all that was keeping me from realizing my full potential. So I moved into my sister’s place for a while in Valley Stream and soon enough I was ready to go back to Florida and give living with my parents a second chance. My attitude had changed. I wasn’t going to be mean-spirited anymore. I would find a job. I would not puke on any relatives. And I would count my blessings, like having a swimming pool and a face free from crawling cockroaches.

Based on the extensive industry knowledge I accrued working at TGI Friday’s, I enrolled in hotel and restaurant management classes at Tampa College. It made my mom happy because my parents always were so pragmatic about my having a fallback career. At that point, having only the Long Island Governor’s gigs and opening for my friends’ bands under my belt, no one in my family trusted that comedy was going to do it for me.

I took a real estate class, but I cheated on the exam. My sister Patti took it with me, and the whole time, I was like, “Pssssst! What did you get for number fourteen?” She wouldn’t tell me and, needless to say, I didn’t get very far in that field. None of it was me.

I was dying to go into stand-up comedy. I was dying to go into acting. And I did end up taking one acting class, but it was terrible. It was leagues beneath the stuff we worked on in community college on Long Island. So I dropped out of college and I went back to waiting on tables (this time at a place with simpler glasses). I was biding my time, trying to figure it all out, but life, strangely, wasn’t sucking as bad as it did in Long Island. A lot of that was because of Kristen. I was talking to her every day, but there was no romantic motivation behind it. We both just really needed to have a friend—someone else who was trying to figure everything out, too.

And besides, I was a twenty-year-old, and I thought I was a
cool
twenty who should be dating a twenty-one-year-old woman. So even though Kristen was cute—petite, with great, blond, totally eighties big hair and blue eyes—and liked the same music and TV shows as me, I wasn’t looking for romance. She got the signal that I didn’t see a romantic future for us, so she went out of her way to try to hook me up with different girlfriends of hers, as well as introducing me to everyone else I knew at the time. She was by far the best friend I’d had in years.

Of course, the pull of show business still lingered. One day I saw an ad in the newspaper for the Paramount Talent Agency. It said, “Models and Actors Needed.” Paramount sounded familiar to me. It sounded like a name I could trust. People who knew what was going on. The agency was located in a strip mall, but it was a
nice
strip mall. When I walked in, I saw eight-by-tens of Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, and famous models. This, I thought, was show business. I had finally landed where I needed to be.

My thought was that they must be related somehow to Paramount Pictures. There was no Internet then, so it wasn’t super easy for a twenty-year-old, fame-hungry guy to figure it all out. And besides, their office had posters for Paramount movies all over the walls. It seemed too good to be true. Who would have thought they’d have an outpost in my town, Clearwater, Florida!

“You definitely have the look,” one of the “execs” there told me. First words out of his mouth. “Hang on a sec!” Then he summoned someone from the back room. “Ted, you gotta see this kid.” Then he looked at me seriously and said, “You want to act, but have you ever thought of modeling? Why not do both?”

“W-well,” I stammered.

“Well, you should,” he said. “Truth is, you could model, but you’re also going to be in movies really quick. I suppose you’ve got a head shot, right? ”

“No.”

“Oh, you need one. We can do that for you. And you should sign up for some of our classes, too. Things are going to start moving really fast for you.”

Before I knew it, I walked out of there $1,500 poorer. I was getting pictures taken of me in a business suit, a tennis outfit, a dentist’s uniform—because you never know what kind of roles might be out there. It showed my versatility. They sent me on auditions where the only people trying to get cast were other people who had signed up for the program.

Of course, I shared it all with Kristen. I’d bring all of the portraits of myself in different settings over to show her and she was my sharpest critic.

“Are you sure this isn’t like some porn ring? ” she would say teasingly. “Who else do you think is looking at you in those little white shorts? ”

“It’s all legit,” I’d say. That would only make her laugh harder.

“I thought you wanted to do comedy, anyway.”

“Well,” I’d explain, “if I can make millions of dollars modeling should I turn it down? ”

“I don’t think there’s any danger of that.”

She didn’t want to see me get taken advantage of, and I think she thought ridiculing me was the quickest way to get me to wake up or change course.

Throughout it all, Kristen never alluded to the fact that she wanted more than friendship, but her mom and stepdad would sometimes hint at it. We went out for New Year’s Eve once, and her parents sat us down and talked to me about what we were going to do and how we were going to behave. I bought her a sweatshirt once at Busch Gardens because she was cold, and every once in a while her mom would pull me aside and tell me how much Kristen adored it. Their behavior seemed odd to me, and it never added up that Kristen might be into me. In fact, one night, after I’d just moved back and it was clear that I was going to be around for the foreseeable future, Kristen told me that I
had
to meet her friend.

“You’re going to love Kelly,” she said. “She’s so
you.
She’s a goofball. She’s laid-back. She’s funny. She’s into the same music that you are. You have to meet her.” She was really pushing her on me. I knew that she was trying to help me socially, but this was intense.

So I took Kristen’s advice and went out with Kelly. And she was great, but she, too, was pretty much just a friend. I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in pursuing anything with her. But the fact that Kelly and I hung out changed something in Kristen. For one thing, Kristen started dressing a lot hotter
.

And Kristen
already
looked hot. Amazing. She had a knockout body. And she grew less and less excited to hear about my hanging out with Kelly. I thought that was weird because she was the one who pushed for it. Slowly, I came to learn that there was a bet between the two girls: Which one would get Jim to kiss her first? Typical high school stuff. And what was at stake, besides my dignity? One dollar.