Crash and Burn Read online

  “Teddy?” I said, inhaling slowly, trying to calm down (knowing I was way beyond calm). “I can’t get the scotch, Teddy . . . but I’d like to. Want to know why I can’t get the scotch, Teddy? Because my fucking pants are ripped!”

  That of course sent him into hysterics. And made me homicidal.

  “You’re right, I forgot about that,” he said, completely serious but laughing still, and headed off toward the bar.

  He was that high.

  The little prick.

  The first thing he did right that whole day was come back immediately with my drink, at which point I told him he needed to score me pills, any kind of pills, as fast as possible.

  “Why do you want pills?”

  “Because I want to be high. High . . . high like you, Teddy, high off my fucking ass, laughing and having fun. Fucking fun, Teddy! Since you and Sarah smoked all the pot, I’m stranded. I need pills. Get me a Vicodin. Get me one right fucking now! This place is crawling with shit like that.”

  “Scoring for you is against my morals, Art. I won’t do it.”

  “Against your morals? Really? Your morals? How much do those cost to circumvent?”

  “I’ve told you, I won’t score for you.”

  “Your morals allow you to get high and talk to monkeys instead of doing your job taking care of me while I’m onstage, though, right?”

  “That’s different. You have a problem with drugs.”

  “Oh, right. I guess so. Yes, Teddy, I have a problem with drugs. No, I’d say you have a problem with drugs . . . because I don’t have any! I need pants and drugs and you have neither of them for me! So as my assistant you need to handle my PVS: pants, Vicodin, scotch. Now get going and don’t come back here empty-handed, you stupid little fuckwit!”

  He didn’t look happy, but then again he never looked happy whenever he had to actually do something for me. As usual, a threatening tone yielded results: first came another large scotch, which, much like the first, I treated the way a marathon runner would Gatorade, I sent him off again, demanding drugs and pants. Call me a skeptic but I wasn’t willing to put my faith entirely in Teddy’s hands, so I called over a scummy-looking staffer and proceeded to tell him about my knee injury. You know the one—the one that had started acting up, the one I “got operated on for” a few months back. That imaginary injury was just about killing me that night after my run-in with the French dressing, so I needed something to kill the pain.

  “Man, I must have torn my injury wide open tonight. Can you get me something?”

  In about fourteen seconds he came back with fifty Percocet, and being a true scumbag he wanted to charge me twelve dollars a pill for them—which, being a seasoned drug addict, I knew was a little high. Really, I was something to be proud of during my Playboy Mansion debut. I was the picture of class: ripped pants; a pint glass full of scotch; a useless, red-eyed, assistant in tow; haggling over the price of a pile of Percocet. At this point, does it matter that I did twenty minutes and bombed beyond belief? (Honestly, I’m not sure.)

  I had $280 on me, so I couldn’t afford all fifty pills, because this fucking guy wasn’t budging on his price (really, dude?). If I weren’t so desperate I would have lectured him about it, but I was so I did what I could and bought twenty of them, which came out to $240. Of course, seeing as this wasn’t in any way my night, I didn’t have exact change, so I gave the guy $250.

  “I’ll be right back with a ten for you, man,” he said. “You’ll be right here?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, knowing he wouldn’t yet still hoping that he’d come back with my ten dollars.

  I didn’t get depressed about it for long; I had a bag of pills to swallow, and I got into it immediately. The only problem I had was that I was still a fucking slob wearing half a pair of pants. And my assistant was still nowhere to be found. The Mansion is decadent and there were people making out, half-dressed here and there, but it wasn’t a scene out of Caligula by any means. Being sexy, touchy, and debauched is one thing; munching pills hand over fist out of a Ziploc bag out in the open is another—and that’s what I was doing.

  Teddy finally came back around then, and for whatever reason I asked him what he thought I should do about munching these pills at this party. I mean, why did I? But I did, and what did I expect this kid to say other than just one more retarded, idiotic piece of non-wisdom? I really don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me when it comes to some of the people I keep around me, let alone pay for their “services.” I very well may never have crashed and burned if I’d been smart and just made Whoreguide™ my assistant.

  Teddy encouraged me to just walk to the bathrooms and not worry about my ripped up, open-assed pants or anything else and to go take my pills.

  “It’s the Playboy Mansion; no one is going to look,” he said.

  “Fuck it,” I said. I was desperate. I had to turn this night around.

  I walked to the Porta-Johns, pants ripped from balls to waist, French dressing on my sneakers, a warm, half-empty pint glass of scotch in hand, thinking that maybe, just maybe I’d be allowed to have fun at the Mansion.

  When I was about fifty feet from the Porta-John, I heard hysterical laughter behind me—like crazy-person loud. It was fucking Teddy, still so high that he couldn’t help himself! It wasn’t just the sight of my ripped pants, it was me—that little piece of shit was laughing all out of control. He sounded insane, he was half-crying, he was doubled over like some gleeful maniac, making such a scene that everyone nearby was looking at him, wondering what the fuck was going on.

  He couldn’t contain himself, that little prick; he was pointing at me, crying, cackling at my fat, briefs-covered ass. There were people pointing in disgust, and all of them made me want to crawl inside my skin and never come out. I shuffled as fast as I could into the can, that Porta-John, spilling my scotch the whole way. I slammed that blue plastic door behind me and finally I was safe, and fuck them, I didn’t care anymore. I had enough pills to get high. I had enough pills to get so high that nothing they could do or say would ever fucking affect me. I wouldn’t give a shit what anybody thought the next time I opened that door. I reached into my pocket to get the pills . . . and I came up with nothing. I’d dropped my bag of Percocet. I’d dropped it somewhere between the bar and the bathroom door. Really, this night could not get any fucking better.

  Just then I heard a knock at the door and thought more than twice about opening it. I mean . . . Anyway, I did so slowly, just a crack, and I met a young girl who introduced herself as one of the associate producers of the event (which is Hollywood code for bullshit artist who gets people coffee).

  “You dropped something,” she said, handing me my bag of pills. She was very nonplussed.

  “What is this stuff?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s just aspirin. Prescription aspirin. I get bad headaches. Thank you so much.”

  “C’mon, I’m not stupid,” she said. That was debatable.

  “Well, okay, it’s not aspirin. It’s something stronger. I’ve got a condition. Listen, you’re not going to write about this, right? You are a publicist, aren’t you? You realize that certain realities should be kept out of the press?”

  “Yes. I’ll make sure of that. We are here for charity . . . but you should get yourself together.”

  I excused myself, which was easy since I was already in the toilet, locked myself into the darkness of the Porta-John, and started eating my Percocet as if they were Flintstones chewables, taking down five in one swallow of scotch. The thing about painkillers and opiates of any kind is that they make you nauseous, even if you’re an addict who loves them (like I do) and does them all the time. I felt queasy, but I didn’t care. I kept going until the inevitable happened: I threw up.

  Actually, that’s an understatement. What I did was hose down the entire porta-potty with vomit as if I were a fire hose and there was a fire. It was violent, projectile-style puke and it coated the walls, the toilet, and the urinal in waves for abou
t three minutes straight. Everyone outside heard it, believe me. I can still hear the echoes, and I’m sure they still can.

  After the storm subsided, I heard a knock at the door.

  “Boss?” Teddy asked quietly. “Boss? . . . Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. . . . I just threw up.”

  For a millisecond I thought that Teddy might actually care about me. Then that motherfucker started laughing again. Fuck him.

  I wiped the puke off of myself as best I could with whatever still-dry, limp toilet paper I could find. I didn’t have the means to get all of it off of me; I knew there was puke in my beard and I could smell it on me, above and beyond the smell of shit and plastic that had permeated the air beforehand. To me, I’d made it through the rain, so I ate a few more Percocet, because there was no fucking way I wasn’t getting high tonight. I fucking deserved it. I’d crapped onstage. I mean, please, what else was there besides getting fucked up by now?

  I had eaten five pills and thrown them up, and since I still felt nothing, I ate four more. Don’t judge me until you’ve had a night like this. If you do I suggest you take ALL of the pills you can find right away!

  That was my plan. And here’s how it went down. I’d bought twenty pills and I’d gone through nine, and I needed to save some for the plane. At that point, if I didn’t have access to heroin, I was up to about fifteen painkillers a day. So I was cutting it close. I looked down and saw three full Percocets, completely untouched, sitting there in my puke. I’d sucked them down so quickly that I hadn’t gotten a chance to chew them. Aside from the puke, they were virtually brand-new! I was such a fucked-up addict by then that I picked them up without hesitation and put them in the Ziploc bag for later. I got puke all over the bag in the process, but that didn’t matter because now it matched my shirt, my beard, and the rest of me.

  By then my high was actually kicking in, so everything had suddenly become beautiful in my mind. I didn’t give a shit about the stares I received when I left the bathroom. Who were those fucking people anyway? I was high, I had no pants, and I had one mission: dealing with Teddy’s insubordination. I started arguing with him immediately, telling him that if I were a corporation, and he were an employee, even if he were a high-ranking executive, he would be fired on the spot for his performance that night. It sucked; the kid was so stoned that nothing I could say got through to him, so he was, at best, halfheartedly apologetic for his lack of being the least bit on point. I fucking couldn’t stand that shit, so I told him the only way to redeem himself was to find me pants, and if he didn’t he’d be dead by the end of the week. At that point I didn’t care about the pants anymore: I was so high that the wind on my ass was actually quite refreshing, and I was amused at all the idiots who kept pointing at me and giggling. Meanwhile Teddy had come down enough to realize that I was his boss and that he should probably take me seriously. And so things got even sillier.

  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 Frenc
h 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.