Spank: You gotta only tell them about the wins.
Na’im: I stopped playing as soon as I noticed that the person who needs the money the least always wins.
All heads turn to look at that particular person.
Kevin: What?! I’m a lucky guy. That’s why you all roll with me.
I’m the type of guy that Las Vegas was built for because I’m an optimist. Someone who’s practical, like Na’im, will make a little money at the blackjack table, then stop. He’ll look around the giant, luxurious casino and see that it was built by people’s losses.
Me, I’ll make a lot of money, then keep going because I think it’s my lucky day and nothing can stop me so I need to go bigger. And every time I go bigger, I lose it all.
When I go to Vegas today, the casinos love me. They give me a free panoramic penthouse suite with a Jacuzzi and assign me a complimentary hostess. I feel so important, but when I leave, I realize I’ve lost enough money at the casino to book that “free” room for the entire year—and pay the “complimentary” hostess’s salary and benefits. I’m always leaving casinos, pointing to chandeliers and couches and telling the staff, “I just paid for that.”
I tell my kids that working hard earns you the right to play hard. No matter what happened in this intense period of my life, work always came first. But just because you work smart doesn’t give you the right to play stupid. And I played stupid. Real stupid. I could have lost everything I’d worked for because of one mistake I kept making and not learning from.
93
* * *
ALCOHOL
When I’m drunk, I think everything is a toilet.
This doesn’t mean that I will go to the bathroom just anywhere. I’m not an animal. I don’t even like to touch the door handle on the way out of a public bathroom. I’ve seen Spank ignore the soap dispenser, wet his hands, and then dry them on his pants one too many times.
But when I’m wasted, anything with a door looks like a bathroom to me. And anything with a lid or an opening looks like a toilet. So I’ll piss wherever I think a bathroom is or should be.
I’ve peed behind the bar in my house because I thought it was a urinal. I’ve peed in hotel closets, thinking I was walking into a bathroom. I’ve even peed in my daughter’s potty.
And I can honestly say that one time in Vegas, I pissed in Eniko’s purse. I remember saying to myself: Oh, it’s a toilet with a zipper. I got it. I’ll just unzip this piece and I’m good to go. I wonder when they started making these.
In the morning, Eniko was furious: “Why’d you piss in my bag?!”
“I didn’t pee in your bag.”
“Yes, you did!”
She showed me the inside of her purse: Everything was soggy and smelled like asparagus. I promised never to do it again. A week later, I pissed in her Louis Vuitton luggage.
Another time, I got out of bed, walked to the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat, peed, and put the seat back down for Eniko. Then I went back to bed, feeling good about having been so considerate. I woke up the next morning in a puddle of my own piss.
It turned out that the whole trip to the toilet happened in my head. I was so drunk I thought I was in the bathroom and wet the bed.
If you want to know what birthday present to get for the comedian who seems to have everything, the answer is rubber sheets.
* * *
Despite what you may be thinking right now, I didn’t have a drinking problem. Drinking had a problem with me.
The difference is that someone with a drinking problem abuses alcohol. In my situation, the alcohol abused me. I only drank when I was out with friends (which was all the time—because who goes out with enemies?) and I never felt like I got drunk.
Alcohol impairs people in different ways, and with me, it impaired my ability to tell that I was drunk. No matter how many shots I did, I still thought I was sober. Even if I was vomiting, I’d think I caught the flu from someone at the bar. I’d only find out how drunk I was the next morning, when Eniko told me where I’d pissed.
Because of this, I’d get behind the wheel after a few drinks and think that I was completely sober and perfectly fine to drive. The best thing that ever happened to me was getting a DUI. This isn’t funny in any way, because I could have killed someone. It’s disgusting to think of the number of times I’ve woken up in the parking lot of a drive-through with half a burger in my lap, thinking, “Oh, shit, I’m still fucking here?”
I almost killed myself and Dennis Rodman one night. We were driving down a hill, and I fell asleep at a stop sign. My mother, or some angel who protects assholes, must have been looking out for me, because when I woke up, my foot was still on the brake. If it wasn’t, we would have rolled down that hill and smashed into someone’s house, and North Korea would have lost the only American it liked.
The same angel was looking out for me the night I crashed into a fence and a metal post speared straight through the engine of my Range Rover. The car was still running, so I reversed it, sputtered into the street, and kept driving. I forgot about the accident, until I saw smoke billowing from the hood. When the engine died, I examined it and called AAA: “Hey, I need help. Someone stuck a sword or something into my engine.”
The next thing I knew, I was woken by a firefighter knocking on the window and yelling, “You’re sleeping in the middle of the highway!”
It was amazing that he didn’t call the police—and that no one turned me in a few weeks later, when I crashed into a highway median, left my car there, and took a taxi home.
What the fuck are you doing, Kevin? I thought when I saw my car smashed against the concrete median early the next morning. Are you trying to really fuck up your life? Is that what you’re trying to do?
But it took the DUI to really wake me up.
I was on the freeway driving home from a club with Eniko, and she was trying to lower my pants. I veered a few times outside of the lane in the process, and we got lit up.
I started to pull over, figuring I’d deal with this inconvenience and then we’d go home to pick up where we left off. My next thought was, I gotta put both hands on the wheel in plain sight. But my pants are down. How can I pull ’em up without getting my junk blown off?
Fortunately, the cop told me to pull off at the next exit, which gave me enough time to get myself situated.
“I pulled you over because you were swerving all over the road,” the officer said, taking my license and registration. “Have you been drinking?”
“No, sir. I’m leaving the club. I had a good time, that’s all.”
“Sir, step out of the car!”
What? I stepped out of the car.