I'm Not High Read online

  But I had a peek anyway. And I couldn’t believe my eyes. Every page I had written on was gone, ripped out, and what remained were only blank pages. I closed it. What was happening wasn’t real. I reopened it again, and still the pages were nowhere to be found. I flipped page after page. This was impossible.

  I began to sweat. I took a deep breath.

  “Dee,” I called out. This time there would be a logical explanation. “Where did you set all the pages I was working on?”

  “What are you talking about?” she answered.

  “From my notebook,” I said.

  “I thought it was there.”

  “It is,” I said. “But it’s empty.”

  She came out of the bedroom and looked over at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “So, you didn’t touch this? ” I said, holding up the notebook. “There’s only blank pages in here.”

  “You must have put them in your suitcase,” she said calmly. She didn’t seem too concerned. “Wait, are you sure you didn’t take them into the bathroom, Jim?” She made a face indicating that working on the can was exactly the sort of thing I’d do.

  “No!” I yelled. “What are you, crazy? I kept them in the notebook. There was no reason to tear them out.”

  “Stop panicking and take another look.”

  “Dee,” I said, “the notebook is way thinner. The only pages left in it are blank. Everything I’ve written is gone.”

  “Why don’t you go ask the maid then?” she said. “There’s got to be some reasonable explanation.”

  “Why would the maid have them?”

  “Why would she have cleaned out all our chocolate, Jim?” Dee said, shrugging. “None of it makes any sense.”

  I took the notebook, bolted from the room, and saw the maid’s cart a few doors down. I poked my head in the room she was cleaning, and she came out into the hallway. She took a look at the notebook and started shaking her head and apologizing again.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “What happened?” I asked. I was close to losing it, but I did feel slightly relieved that at least I knew who was responsible for the missing notebook. “I thought you said the candy was the only thing that went haywire in there.”

  “Sorry. I thought was garbage,” she mumbled in broken English.

  “Garbage?” I said, exasperated. I shook the notebook. “You went in this and ripped out the pages and threw them away? Why? Why would you do that?”

  “Sorry. Sorry.”

  “Well, where’s the garbage?” I thought it might be on her cart. That seemed logical. I thought we could just dig through her trash can and fish them out, and then I’d go and stuff the pages in the safe or keep them in my pocket for the rest of the trip. Before she answered I dug into the garbage and started flipping through it.

  “All gone,” she said, shaking her head again. “Not in there.”

  “Come on!” Now I really felt like this might be a big prank. Maybe the comedians at the festival were behind it. But how would anyone know that this was the most important property I had on the trip?

  “He come and take garbage from hallway,” she explained. “I set papers in hallway.”

  “Who is he?” I asked. “What are you saying?”

  “Janitor,” she said. “He remove.”

  “Oh, man!” I yelled. “We gotta find this stuff. Don’t move a muscle, okay? Please, lady, just stay right where you are.”

  I went into my room and called the front desk. They said they’d send a manager right up. Then the maid hurried into our room and said, “I think I can go find them. I’m sorry. I will go look.” She wandered off before the manager arrived. I doubted she’d ever come back. I was thinking with all that had happened, maybe she’d just flee into the Vegas night with some free candy and the handwritten scribbles of my life story.

  If I hadn’t dared the universe to mess with that notebook, I wouldn’t have been so worked up about losing the pages. There was no explanation for what had happened. Why would the maid have removed all the pages I’d written stuff on and left the rest of it intact and on the table? Apparently the hospitality pledge at the hotel went something like: “At Caesars Palace, our maid service is so good, whenever you leave the room, you can be sure we will go through all of your handwritten documents and notebooks, remove any and all soiled pages, and leave what remains of your unused paper supply right where you left it. Promise!”

  After a few minutes, a manager knocked on our door. I told her what happened, and she was naturally dumbfounded. “I’m very sorry,” she said earnestly. “This makes no sense. I don’t know where the maid got the notion that you were checking out. The first people to know that would be us. If you left, we’d let her know. Otherwise, she’s got to believe that you’re still a guest. She knows that. There’s a chart right on her cart that says so. It’s really puzzling.”

  “I just want to get my writing back,” I said. Soon enough the maid came back holding the missing pages. As she handed them over to me, I noticed that they weren’t crinkled. There were no food stains or coffee grounds on them. They were pristine. None of this added up.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “I’m truly grateful.” I flipped through them and discovered that there were a bunch of pages missing. “Where’s the rest?” I asked. Panic returned. “Tell me where you found these! We’ve gotta keep looking.”

  So the maid, the manager, and I went down into the bowels of Caesars Palace, to the garbage chute.

  “I’ll scoop all the garbage by hand,” I said. “I don’t care. I just need to find my papers.” We looked and looked and didn’t find any more pages. I resigned myself to the fact that (a) I had gotten a big chunk of them back and (b) I had also been a dumbass who basically begged for trouble. The maid apologized and somberly returned to her work. Caesars Palace officials apologized again and again, and called our room a few times asking what they could do for me. I was tempted to say, “How about you start with comping that overpriced pedicure for me?” but I didn’t.

  In the end, I’d done a great set, had a nice getaway with Dee, and committed to paper a lot of the stories that make up my life. As I said, I don’t get overly tangled up in religion. In the pages to come, you’ll read about my views on the church, organized religion, and the concept of being born again. All my life I’ve bickered with people who say I should know the Ten Commandments, or take communion, or worship a certain way. I don’t have much patience for any of that. I’m spiritual on my terms and have my own relationship with God. And what went down in Vegas was definitely spiritual.

  After I left Vegas, I often thought about having my writing disappear that weekend, and for a long time I was certain it was because I mouthed off and challenged evil forces. The maid was just a conduit. You could call it karma or whatever you like. As time has passed though, I’ve changed my thinking on this. The maid had taken the pages somewhere and had not destroyed them. Maybe she needed them. Maybe something compelled her to take them, and once her shift was over she’d read through them. And maybe she found something in them. (Perhaps something as delicious as the candy she also stole from me.)

  Who knows? The book is once again intact. And there are messages in it. I’ve had a big bank account and a tiny one, and I’ve been spiritually rich and poor, too. In between playing stickball on the streets of Long Island, having loved ones taken from me at the worst times, meeting the woman of my dreams when I wasn’t even having dreams, and getting big breaks and also getting broken, I’ve figured out a lot. I’d never claim to have all the answers to the test, but I’ve looked over the shoulders of some great people and have cribbed the most important one: We all have a mission to honor ourselves and those around us.

  (And, by the way, yeah: There’s plenty of stuff about weed in here, too, Meatball.)

  Chapter 1

  Nearly Aborted

  As a boy, I used to sit and talk for hours with my best friend Phil out in the street on Jefferson Ave
nue in Long Island. We lived in Valley Stream, a beautiful community near Queens that lies directly underneath about twelve thousand flight paths to and from JFK airport, which is just a few miles away.

  So maybe Phil couldn’t always hear much of what I said, but on one summer night we were hanging out, stargazing and discussing what our lives would be like in the year 2000.

  “Man, we’re going to be old,” Phil said, cringing at his own imagination. “Like over thirty.”

  “By then,” I said with all the confidence of youth, “I will have met all of the New York Mets. I will have hung out with AC/DC. And I will have acted with Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson.” I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I was certain fame was coming my way.

  Even by age fifteen, Joe Pesci was already my favorite actor and my inspiration. I watched him act in everything, from movies like Raging Bull, where he had a huge role, to Easy Money (which to me is a classic) to a bunch of films where he had bit parts. He just had such electricity. I was captivated by him and had started doing impressions of him when my friends and I played stickball in the street. “Come aaaahhhn,” I’d moan in my best Pesci-ese. “Pitch da bawl. It ain’t gonna bite ya. Jeez. Hey. Whatsa matta witch yoo? Ya trow like ya take it up the wazoo.” Doing Pesci impressions was where it all started for me, and the reaction I got for it told me that I’d make a living at performing someday.

  Phil had heard my Pesci and knew that I was committed to my dream, so on that night when I predicted I’d have it all, he said simply, “I believe it.” And that’s what I loved about him. He never said much, but he always had my back, and that was about the best endorsement of a dream a guy could get in Valley Stream.

  “Yep,” I blathered on. “I am definitely going to be famous one day.”

  Back then, in addition to my big dreams, I also felt like the world was looking out for me, and that if I stayed true to myself I’d someday be able to share my talents with everyone. And when I say the world was looking out for me, I mostly mean that I’ve always been blessed and lucky. That goes all the way back to before I was born, as I almost didn’t even make it into the world. I was nearly aborted.

  Let me explain.

  By the time my mom, at age forty, wandered into the Rock Front Tavern, in Valley Stream, in the mid-1960s and met my dad, a garbage man moonlighting as a bartender, she had already had enough kids. There were Eddie, Bobby, Dorene, and Patti, and they came from an array of different fathers, one of whom was dead and one of whom was a crazy maniac who almost killed them all before Mom made a midnight escape, driving from Florida to Long Island in one straight shot with her young brood.

  So life hadn’t worked out the greatest for Mom. But she found a way to get through it and even had some fun along the way. She was usually the life of the party, and she loved to flirt and carouse. I figure that if she had been born a decade or two earlier she would have been a burlesque dancer. She still likes to kick up her heels, belt out tunes, dance around, and laugh from the bottom of her belly. Even into her golden years now, sometimes I’ll catch her batting her eyes at a strange man after she’s had a few martinis, and I’ll have to tell her to knock it off. That’s just who she is—and I inherited a lot of that from her. But I also think that some of her partying was an attempt to take the edge off a rough life.

  Mom was born in the mid-1920s, grew up on Long Island, and as a teenager fell in love with a man named Edwin “Lefty” Troy. He was her first love, and he was great to her. He’d take her dancing and was always a gentleman, doing all of the chivalrous stuff that made Mom believe that love was a wonderful thing. She and Edwin had big plans to build a life together. There were only a couple of small problems.

  The first was that Edwin’s family hated her. The Troys were Catholics and Mom was Lutheran. To me that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but to them, in that era, it was bitter like a race war. It crushed my mom that they couldn’t get married in Edwin’s church. And his family certainly wouldn’t attend a wedding in her Lutheran church. So they ended up having a simple civil service at city hall. And Edwin’s family still wouldn’t attend. It was completely out of the question. So she doesn’t have a wedding day memory of smiling in-laws looking on as their son placed a ring on her finger. Instead she remembers that in the days leading up to the wedding, Edwin’s father told her father, “I’d rather my son be dead than married to a Lutheran.”

  And there was the second problem: Edwin’s father soon got his wish. Edwin was sent off to fight the Nazis in World War II under General Patton. Two months before he was to be discharged, he was killed in action.

  Mom tells me of knowing it was coming. Of feeling it for a few days. She was pregnant when Edwin left, and losing the father of her child was what she dreaded most. And sure enough, one sunny afternoon, she was looking out the window of their little Long Island home—their baby, Eddie, who would never meet his father, cooing in a basinet behind her—and saw two soldiers walking somberly and purposefully up the sidewalk. They knocked on the door and Mom could barely open it. She dropped to her knees, sick with the knowledge of what they were about to tell her. She knew that as soon as she let them in, her life would change forever.

  “Mrs. Troy?” the taller one inquired. To her he didn’t look much older than her Lefty. “We’re here today to regretfully inform you ...”

  They handed her the official documents and left. She was the first person they told. Mom pulled it together enough to call her father, who then placed a call to Edwin’s father. When he answered, Mom’s father simply told him, “Well, you got your wish. Your boy is dead.”

  There was a service for Eddie at his parents’ beloved Catholic church, and the priest would not acknowledge Mom or baby Eddie. The whole ceremony was about a great Catholic man who left behind his parents. There was no mention of Mom or their son, who were, of course, seated in a pew right in front of the guy.

  My grandfather was there, too, and he grew angrier and angrier at the callousness of the priest. Eventually he squeezed Mom’s arm and said, “Get up!” through gritted teeth. Mom was mortified. She was there to mourn, not to draw attention to herself. It took her a second to gather up the baby and shuffle sideways out of the pew after her father. The priest had just finished his remarks and the organist was beginning to play when her father addressed the priest and the whole church with his booming voice.

  “This man had a wife and a son, thank you very much!”

  After what Mom went through with Edwin, her take on organized religion was that it was nothing but a scam and a business. To her, the church didn’t represent God, it represented money and the worst kind of clannishness, and that turned her off forever. But it didn’t diminish her faith, which she passed along to me when I was young.

  Dad, on the other hand, was pretty much a hard-core atheist from the word go because he didn’t have a lot of things to convince him otherwise. He was born in Dayton, Kentucky, the youngest boy in a family of ten kids. His mother died giving birth to his younger sister, who was stillborn, when he was four years old. His father was a massive alcoholic who’d issue beatings for small infractions like milk spills and overlooked chores. At age six he had to walk along railroad tracks to find coal every day for heat and hot water. Dad’s tough childhood came to an abrupt end when he joined the navy at age seventeen and became a gunner in World War II, stationed most of the time in the Philippines.

  And so that upbringing made him cynical about everything, but especially about notions that a great reward awaits those who live a virtuous life. Throughout my life, whenever a discussion of God has come up, he’s been extremely dismissive, but not without a twisted touch of humor.

  I’d ask him, “Do you believe in the afterlife?”

  “It must be pretty good,” he’d say with a wink, “because no one ever comes back.”

  If I asked, “Do you think that we have souls, or a spirit that lives on after us?”

  He’d say, “Sure! Sure we do. They l
ook just like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Floating around above us.” Then, without fail, he’d point up in the air and say something like, “And there’s your uncle now. How ya doing?” And give a sarcastic little wave.

  Anyway, after three and a half years in the war, seeing a lot of combat along the way, Dad wound up back in the United States. Many of his veteran buddies now worked in sanitation on Long Island, and they hooked him up with a job as a garbage man. He got married and had three kids with his first wife, but then they got divorced and he was trying to support them by moonlighting as a bartender. That’s when Mom walked into the Rock Front Tavern and batted her eyes at him. Soon they were dating, and then Mom got pregnant with me. Only she didn’t know it right away.

  She had been having some bad bleeding, so she went to her doctor. Pregnancy was the furthest thing from her mind. The doctor gave her a quick exam and explained that she probably just had an early miscarriage, and she wrote it off as that. The bleeding stopped and she never gave it a second thought. A couple months later, she and my father went out dancing at an Elks club. She was back to partying like crazy as usual (with my developing brain along for the ride). Dad gave her a twirl on the dance floor and she felt a kick in her stomach. She stopped mid-spin.

  “What’s the big idea?” he said. “I thought I was doing pretty good out here.”

  “I can’t tell you here,” she said, somewhat horrified. “But, boy, do I have some news for you.”

  The next day she was back at the same doctor, and he confirmed that she was pregnant, which is when all the abortion talk—due to Mom’s increasing age—began. Everyone she knew tried to talk her into it, even Dad’s sisters.

  But from the moment he knew, my dad never wavered. He wanted her to have the baby, even though I’m sure he knew what a rough ride he had in store for himself. He was in his forties and probably thought he was done raising kids. But Mom trusted his input and she prayed. And the message she got in return was clear. “Something told me over and over again not to abort this child,” she told me. I was born on June 21, 1967, the first day of summer.