The MSNBC situation was souring, and my simultaneous efforts to make a peaceful home for my wife and new family were consuming me. In August of 2013, my wife had just given birth to our daughter, Carmen. As Hilaria tried to embrace this remarkable time in her life, a period now filled with an intrusiveness she had never experienced, several tabloid reporters and photographers started to collect around our apartment building. In past exchanges with these people, some of them played by the rules, as I see them. Others walked a line between what they argue is journalism and what I label as harassment. When that line is crossed, sometimes I let it go. Sometimes I don’t. I make the call. I remember the curse Joe Zarza put on me, about learning everything the hard way, whenever I think about November 14, the afternoon Harvey Levin, always prompting my own chronic hatred of the tabloid press, came back to pay me a visit.
When I left that terrible voicemail message for my daughter Ireland in 2007, there was no mistaking what was said and who the recipient was. I spent the subsequent months either in a state of suicidal depression or wanting to find Harvey Levin and my ex-wife’s lawyers and beat them to death. Afterward, I was careful to make a vital distinction between an excuse and an explanation in terms of my behavior. There was no excuse for what I did. But my explanation was that I was completely outmaneuvered by my ex-wife in the gamesmanship of divorce custody. Kim’s attorneys were the most contemptible people I had ever met. I suppose I never had a hope of prevailing in any of the rigged contests that California family law insists you participate in if you simply want to see your child. I had wanted to be a father to Ireland. There had never been a complaint, publicly or privately, about my parenting before my divorce. Everyone knew how much I loved Ireland. Ireland knew, too. That essential fact is dismissed in divorce court, allowing the legal fees to flow. Certainly, protecting innocent children from the shrapnel of divorce combat is an important task. But it is not the only task. Fathers’ rights are among the lowest of priorities in these cases, making it easier for judges to take a side and simplify the matter and, thus, move things along. With the voicemail, I provided the court with the tool it needed in order to disassemble that relationship: the incontrovertible proof that I deserved to lose the custody decision.
*
In Westwood, California, in 1983, I pulled up next to a pump at a gas station and got out of my car. Back then, you still had to “pay inside,” and as I walked toward the garage, I heard a man shouting. I turned and saw that a thirty-something white guy was actually shouting at me. A bald and bullet-headed bantam of a guy, a less-interesting-looking Ed Harris, was complaining that I had cut him off at the pump. (Actually, he appeared to be at a different pump and attempted to back into the space I was in line for.) He rushed up to me and was basically spitting as he yelled, now right in my ear. I was, for all intents and purposes, still the Berner High School football team’s Billy Pilgrim when it came to physical confrontation. I entered the store and squared up to the counter, where two short, very powerfully built Iranian guys who ran the place prepared to ring me up. I continued to ignore Typical Southern California White Dude as he said something like, “Why don’t you go back to fucking UCLA, man!” I didn’t actually register that as offensive, but then he put his right hand on my left shoulder and started to spin me around. “You hear me, man?” he shouted. And, in the briefest moment in time, I changed.
I cracked this guy right on the chin. I only weighed 190 then, but he went flying backwards, his arms windmilling, and crashed into a metal rack of candy and gum. The Iranian bodybuilders were right on me, lifting me nearly off the ground and shouting “No to be fighting in zee store” as they escorted me out. The voices of my high school coaches may or may not have been sounding in my head, like in some Alan Sillitoe short story. The last time I experienced that was when, during my college years, Eugene Valentine put fireworks in my mom’s garbage can, waking her up one evening. Eugene, very drunk, virtually walked into four or five punches, and it was over. I was always someone who hated that kind of situation. But it was the LA paparazzi who really turned me.
Walking through the terminal at LAX with Kim and, later, with Ireland, we had a bodyguard/driver, the great Jeff Welles, who would peel off and put Kim and Ireland in the waiting car while I went for the baggage. One day, as we separated, a photographer began his taunting spiel. “What happened to you, Alec? You used to be such a nice guy. Then you met that crazy fucking bitch and—” Bang! I hit him. Another time a guy, walking in front of Jeff, lunged over his shoulder and, single-handed, tried to snap Kim’s picture, his long lens nearly hitting Kim in the face. Bang! I hit him. The day we took Ireland home from the hospital, a photographer named Alan Zanger followed us. In the driveway, Kim was sobbing, asking me to get rid of the guy so he couldn’t get a picture of her with the baby. As I approached him to wave off his camera, he said, “Let me get the picture and I’ll go,” as if we were bargaining. Then he cocked his arm back as if to hit me with the camera. Bang! Zanger had me arrested. That evening, on the local CBS affiliate, their legal correspondent railed against me for my assault of Zanger. The correspondent was a lawyer named Harvey Levin.
On the Internet there are many pictures of me wrestling a paparazzo named Paul Adao. In August of 2013, immediately after the birth of Carmen, Adao was around every lamppost and awning on our block. The pattern was typical. I don’t bother with photographers who keep their distance. Adao not only did not keep his distance; he literally tripped, fell, and sat on a baby in a stroller as he walked backwards, shooting film, on a residential street in Manhattan. The thought that my neighbors now had to contend with the excesses of the tabloid media since I had moved onto their block saddened me. Just a few months later, the tabloids wanted to hound me about a stalker who tried to rush her way into our lobby and, eventually, up to our apartment, insisting she was my jilted girlfriend and had to either explain something to my wife or attack her. (The woman was found guilty at trial and literally chose to accept a sentence of six months at Rikers Island rather than enroll in court-supervised therapy.)