I don’t know what it was. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I do know this. They say gamblers want to lose and stuff, which always seemed odd to me, but I will say the three times that I went broke, for a lot of money, I had a very freeing feeling. I would go to the coffee shop and have a coffee and have nothing. A lot of me is trying to get as ascetic as I can in my life.
Three times I’ve lost everything that I’ve ever had. The only time I went to a psychiatrist, it was for gambling. I was like, “How the fuck do I get out of this?” and he’s like, “Oh, you gamble to avoid life,” but my thing was, isn’t that why you do everything in life? To fucking avoid it?
It’s painful to think about, because now it would be nice to have the money, but it’s just like any escape. I was never a drug or alcohol guy, but when I watch a game and I have a bunch of money on it, then I can understand what’s going on. Nothing’s ambivalent or anything about it. There’s stakes. You know exactly the rules. You’re completely involved and you’re completely escaped from your life of the real fear. I’d rather fear losing money on a football game than ruminate all fucking night about my upcoming illness and death. My biggest problem is ruminating about death. If I could get over that somehow.
People that know they’re going to hit bottom kind of want it, because it’s exhausting to be obsessed with something. You are, I guess, trying to do it. Trying to finish it off, finally. If you have $450,000 in the bank and then you lose $400,000, you say, “Fuck it. I don’t want the $50,000 to remind me that I had more money.”
That’s how you do it.
JIM NORTON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, RADIO HOST
I can’t drink and I can’t do drugs. It’s an absolute. Sex is a really hard one. You can act out by being on the computer, and you read an e-mail that has one trigger word in it or one thing and, all of a sudden, you’re acting out.
Half the times I’m acting out, I’m actually doing it for the memory to jerk off to. It’s a really weird thing. There’s times where I actually missed the activity because I’m just getting through it so I can jerk off thinking about the memory of it. I’m more addicted to masturbating, I think, than I am to actual intercourse. I’m more addicted to the ritual than the actual cumming.
FRED ARMISEN—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, MUSICIAN
When I was in a band, my main goal was to hook up with strangers on tour. I have a suspicion that might have contributed to the fact that our band didn’t get as far as it did, because I certainly wasn’t about the music.
Through program stuff, I know that there are ways that every day I can try to have a better approach. Today I don’t have to worry about my phone or some stranger that I hooked up with. I’m having a good day today.
Marc
You’re learning how to not sexually act out and use people in that way?
Fred
Yes. It’s hard and I don’t assume that it’s a pill and everything goes away.
Marc
It’s the hardest one, dude. Drugs and booze, gambling, you don’t need those things. Food and sex? Kind of need it.
Fred
What’s tricky, also, is booze is in certain places, but people are just everywhere.
I’m not delusional about it. I’m not delusional about myself. This struggle that I have, I don’t have a choice. This is a struggle. It could be a lot worse. I also could be dead.
Marc
There are worse things than having too many vagina options.
Fred
Yes. I think as long as I understand that there is a struggle, that’s what most of it is. I’ve had some really great days. That’s the part where everything else falls away because I know that I’ve had this much time thinking by myself.
JIM NORTON
I remember one time I went to see a prostitute on Second Avenue. It really shook me. I walked into her place and it was an abandoned apartment. I looked into the bathroom and there’s dirty water in the tub. There were fruit flies in garbage. The place is like an old railroad apartment. It was dark, pitch-black, and she was holding a screwdriver.
I gave her $300 and she went to the door. I don’t know if she had somebody outside that she gave the money to but then she sat down with a screwdriver. I just felt like something very, very bad is about to happen, something really frightening is about to happen. I sensed that there was something else in the room. I was going to be hurt badly. I just said, “Look, I’m sick. I have to leave.”
I let her keep the $300. I was shaking when I left. I don’t know why. We have instincts. We have feelings. I saw it calling that night. I was like, “Something really fucking bad just happened.” It really threw me as to what danger I was putting myself in.
Marc
That’s the liability thing. After a certain point with drugs and drinking, it’s not the drugs and drinking that may hurt you. It’s the situation you’re going to end up in. I think that with prostitution, it’s the same thing.
Jim
When you’re a complete addict, if you only drink vodka, life gets boring, so you have to drink Seagram’s. You have to drink a little bit of this. A little bit of that.
DAVID SEDARIS—WRITER
A couple years ago, I decided to quit smoking. I smoked for thirty years and I’ve smoked a lot. I wanted to quit. I decided, let’s say November I decided to quit. I moved to Tokyo. I went to Tokyo and I rented an apartment for three months. My boyfriend went with me.
If I just decided at home I’m going to quit smoking, and I would sit at my desk the next morning, I would go, oh, this is ridiculous. Give me that cigarette. I was in a whole new apartment, I was in a whole other language. I was a whole new me.
Running away works. I went and quit smoking and I haven’t had a cigarette for six years now and I don’t even think about it.
I told myself that when I was born, I was allotted a certain number of cigarettes and I guess I smoked them all. If I’d smoked more slowly, I’d still be doing it.
I smoked all my cigarettes, and I took all my drugs too. Other people, they haven’t even touched their allotment yet.
I think it helps to have some kind of little story, don’t you?
ANDY RICHTER
I quit smoking on September 17, 2001. It was right after 9/11, but that was just coincidental. It had gotten to the point where I’d tried to quit smoking a number of times, and then we quit when my wife got pregnant, because she quit too. She struggled with it a lot. Then I started up again after my son was born. I went to work on a movie in Canada, and started smoking eight-dollar cigarettes up in Canada.
Every winter I was losing my voice twice, three times. I was starting to film this network television show that had my name in the fucking title, and I just really felt like, “I cannot lose my voice. I have to do this.” I was just ready. It was such a disgusting, gross habit, and I was not enjoying it. I rarely had that moment of that first cigarette, and going like, ahhhhhhh. I really felt like I was just jerking off with shit lubricant every time I did it.