What Goes Up Must Come Down

The other day I was driving my daughter to her creepy new private school. She was none too pleased about going, and I had mixed feelings about taking her. It would be her fourth school in four years, and I was beginning to feel like we were in the military, marooned in some frozen tundra desperately awaiting new orders that would take us far, far away. I could see her in the rear-view mirror staring out the window, sullenly watching the strip mall pet stores and Barnes and Nobles pass by.

And as I was basically doing the same, I was suddenly hit with a wave of massive guilt. Either that or it was the bottle of sake I had drained the night before during a work dinner with a group of visiting Dutch journalists with bottomless livers and a penchant for mischief. Somehow I escaped relatively unscathed from the evening. If it was a few years ago, that sake would’ve led to a long and evil night with the end result being me sitting in some club at 4 a.m., not wanting to be there but unable to go home, wondering if anybody else had to take their daughter to Gymboree in the morning. I would somehow trundle home and crawl into the guest bedroom—a place I lived in semi-permanent exile, my wife having banished me there for what seemed like an eternity. Three hours later I would be shocked awake by the clatter of a two-year-old hollering from next door—a fetid, poo-filled diaper sending stink waves to a hangover beyond human comprehension. The diaper served the same function as a bracing cold shower.

From there I would put on a suit. The more hungover I am the better I dress, a ruse I learned from a longtime colleague who also liked the nightlife a bit too much. He called it “healing from the outside in.” It also threw people off your scent—mine was vodka and cigarettes and THC. Usually I dressed like a cross between a French preppy and the guitarist from Bad Brains. More appropriate for a basement rec-room than a boardroom. But I was entitled, or at least I thought I was.

I was, after all, playing a role. I was the adolescent-in-chief of one of the world’s top-selling men’s magazines (no, not Playboy). A place so completely out-of-control that the owner of the company was an avowed crack smoker with a penchant for screaming down the phone with homicidal rage. At any moment of the day I could purchase narcotic painkillers from a dude in the IT department, potent powders and other potables from a lad in accounting, or just walk out on the fire escape at anytime between 9 a.m. and midnight and get a contact high from one of 30 different employees. There was a bar basically in the lobby and a bar cart next to my desk. If we were sober for two hours a day it was a miracle. I’m not bragging—that’s what it was like. This was my “work day.” Somehow, through a combination of youth and sweat and the fact that most of my co-workers were British and were born hungover, we managed to publish a magazine.

The hours were punishing—9 a.m., sometimes later, sometimes earlier, often until midnight or beyond. For most of us the job was everything. Nobody really had wives or children, except me, who, pushed by some deep-rooted Midwestern probity, had both. I wore this like a badge of honor, though. I was 29 years old and felt invincible, like some kind of demented superhero who could have a family at home and still rock out till dawn. In truth, I was unraveling with a very tenuous grip on reality, like a balloon tied to a child’s arm slowly slipping out of his grasp and floating into the wind. My days were, well, what I just described, and they stretched into night where we would lay waste to Manhattan from the back of Town Cars and shiny SUVs. The city awash with piles of money lubricating our evenings, we could have whatever we wanted whenever we wanted.

Everything was free. There were bottles of vodka and prime booths at the city’s hottest clubs, five star hotels, backstage concert tickets, seats on private jets…. There was one time I plowed into a vintage Mercedes behind the wheel of a Cadillac Escalade while staying at some luxury flophouse in the Hamptons run by a group of club owners. The other guests included a hip-hop mogul whose butler delivered him steaks and a bong. I had a suspended driver’s license and was on a potent cocktail of none-of-your-business. Rather than waiting for the police, I handed the driver my business card, yelling, “We have unlimited credit!” before speeding off. I never heard another word about the incident. In the context of everything else it seemed like the smart thing to do.

In a given week I could roam from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, be at the Super Bowl or Sundance or one of a million corporate events put on by our marketing staff. I would spend a week in Bangkok for an international conference, flying first-class and being picked up by my equivalent in Thailand, which makes Manhattan seem like Omaha, Nebraska. Needless to say, I didn’t have the typical traveler’s experience. Rather, I spent my time riding shotgun in a Ferrari F1 with Thailand’s equivalent to Eminem doing some kind of evil, super-refined speed that kept us up for days. Everything was ours for the taking, and the worst part or best part, depending on your point of view, was how normal it all seemed. I convinced myself that this was part of the job, that somehow in the midst of all this madness I was “working.” I used it as a battering ram to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

I had it all. But at home my wife was seething, pretty much plotting my death and trying to figure out a way to leave me. I don’t blame her. She did not sign up for this tour. It was never in the cards to sit at home with a two-year-old while your husband roams New York City reenacting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on a weekly basis. I, of course, was blind to all of this. It was all about me. My career, my TV appearances, my “persona.” It’s all that mattered in my mind, crafting this identity for myself and thinking that when I came home I could leave it at the door and be a normal person. But let me tell you: It’s not possible. That shit warps your mind. I’m not talking about the drugs or the booze, but the access and possibility, the sense that everything is for the taking. That next to you is the fast beating heart of the city and media-industrial-complex and you can just pull the levers at will. So the mornings after and weekends when I wasn’t “doing something” and had to actually be a normal person who went to potluck dinners in the neighborhood and went to the park and to the grocery store to buy eggs made me feel alien. The weekends couldn’t end fast enough for me. Monday was my Friday, and the circus was in town all week.

Looking back at it now I was turning, quite simply, into an ass-hole. My wife knew it; she used the term quite frequently. I’m pretty sure my daughter did as well, who knew me in name only—that guy who was around for two hours in the morning sweating bullets and running out the door to a waiting Town Car that would whisk him to a TV studio at 6:45 a.m. to talk about some stupid celebrity, or pretend to be knowledgeable on one of a million other vapid subjects. I did the rounds in a semi-wasted stupor, which I thought made me some kind of outlaw. I smoked a bowl in the bathroom at CNBC minutes before going on the air, while seated just feet away was the Money Honey herself, Maria Bartiromo, shooting me a look of horror as I stumbled out onto the set to mumble a few words about this or that. I passed out asleep at some VH1 taping about The Fabulous Life of Jessica Simpson and did even worse things in the bathroom at Fox News before going on the air with Shepard Smith to talk about Paris Hilton and herpes or some such garbage.

I don’t know why I behaved the way I did. Maybe it was a way of dealing with everything. If I acted like I didn’t care then nothing really mattered. But in truth I was a walking zombie, stuck in a permanent midnight with no way out. Luckily what comes up must go down. Gravity is the one constant, and though I thought I was going to be on a mission to Mars forever, reality finally intruded. The company got bought out by a group of sober-minded investors. People with whom I didn’t stand a chance. Meeting with these folks, one of whom became the Car Czar in the Obama Administration, I must’ve been the one thing they didn’t want. At the time, I laughed off the meeting. I was the talent, baby, and this dude may manage Mayor Bloomberg’s money, but he didn’t know a thing about what I did. Or some such shit. I probably reeked of ganja sitting around their gazillion-dollar conference table, spouting the same bullshit I’d come to memorize. And off I went. In a Town Car, to the airport and then to Los Angeles to get lost in the Hollywood Hills for a week. Weeks or months or days later—I can’t remember, it’s all a blur—I was out on my ass. The party was over, and like when the lights come on in a club at the end of the night, what seemed so glamorous and fantastic was actually just tired and fucked up. So I went home. I really went home and tried to figure out who I was without any of the other shit attached. I wish I could say there was a hug waiting for me at the end of this rainbow but there wasn’t. Just a VERY pissed off family at their breaking point, and suddenly there I was trying to figure out where I fit into the mix, realizing that these people were strangers in my new life and if I didn’t come back to Earth I would have no one in my life at all.

Five years later, it all seems like something that happened to somebody else, or to no one at all. I’m still paying back the bill to my family and expect to for the rest of my life. My wife has a free pass. I can say nothing. Like the rest of the country at the time, I was living on borrowed credit. Only I was doing it with somebody else’s life.

I’m not going to lie and say it wasn’t fun. It was. The manic high of insanity, the belief that you are indestructible and the sheer force of momentum are irresistible. But it is not sustainable. Not with a wife at home and a child who could care less if you are a garbage man or an accountant; she just wants someone to tuck her in at night. So when I stared into that rear-view mirror and watched my daughter watching the world I got the shivers thinking about what I had almost lost. But now there are two, a boy and my life, while still not normal, is within the bounds of plausibility for a 35-year-old father of two. Am I a deviant? Yes. Do I miss the bad old days of the recent past? Not really. When I go back to New York now, I feel like I’m returning to the scene of a crime that I somehow managed to walk away from. There is no real point to this story. No lesson and no moral. I was just struck by the image in the mirror, and it brought back a flood of memories. Oh, that, and be careful what you wish for. Being a Deadbeat Dad is not without consequence.

Be well.

More from Deadbeat Dad:

• A Not-So-Happy Ending
• How Much Trouble Am I In?
• Everything I Need to Know about the Playground…I Learned by Watching Oz
• How to Use Your Two-Year-Old Child as a Drug Mule
• How to Get Drunk at a Children’s Birthday Party
• Deadbeat Dad FAQs