Chapter Eight
I Am Not High!
My doctor told me to watch my drinking. Now I drink in front of a mirror.
So, now I’m back in show business. I should have been a real happy guy, but I wasn’t. I still had my bouts with depression.
Like most people in that situation, I tried to self-medicate, which is New Age talk for “I got loaded.” I used to drink. A lot. Too much.
When I was drinking, sometimes my judgment was not at its best. I left a club one night after getting half loaded and I was very hungry, so I drove to a deli called Smiler’s that was open all night. I grabbed a package of Swiss cheese and asked the girl behind the counter to cut me a roll. I unwrapped the cheese and put it in the roll, took a big bite, and away I went.
I got home, parked my car, got up to my apartment, and I was almost finished eating the Swiss-cheese sandwich, but I was thinking, Wow, this cheese is chewy!
So I looked at it. I was at the end of the sandwich, which meant I had eaten almost all the cheese…and all the pieces of wax paper between the slices. No wonder it didn’t taste quite right.
That’s what I did when I was drunk. If I had been high on pot, it would have been different—I would have eaten the wax paper, the cheese, and the girl who sold me the cheese.
I went to the store to buy some rat poison and the clerk said, “Shall I wrap it, or do you want to eat it here?”
All my life, I’ve heard people say that booze is a social lubricant, but I always found that people got along much better when they were smoking pot. Back in 1949, I was working a nightclub called the Famous Door on Fifty-second Street. The show was me and a three-piece band, all black guys.
My first night there, the place was empty, but the boss told me to start the show. I said, “How can I start the show? There’s no audience.”
He said, “You do the show anyway. If someone is walking by outside and there’s no show, they’ll just keep walking. But if they see that the lights are on and there’s a guy onstage telling jokes, they might come in.”
He knew the business better than I did. I got up on that stage and told my jokes to the empty chairs and the empty tables, and after about fifteen minutes, people did walk in. So, I did my act again, then introduced the trio. After they finished, I came back, did another fifteen minutes, and closed the show. An hour later, we’d do it all again.
That first night, when the first show was over, the musicians and I were all sitting in one big dressing room, talking about nothing in particular, when one of them said to the other two, “Wanna get some ice cream?”
They both perked up and said, “Yeah, let’s go.”
The next night, same thing.
Then it hit me. They don’t care about ice cream. They’re getting high.
The following night, between shows, I said, “Hey, boys, I’ve got some great shit. Wanna get high?”
They looked shocked—in those days most people thought marijuana was only smoked by black musicians—but they quickly got over their surprise and said okay.
After that, it became a nightly thing—between shows, we’d all go out for “ice cream.”
I tell ya one thing about me. I say “No” to drugs. When people ask me for some of my drugs, I say “No.”
Nobody partied harder than John Belushi—not even me. Here’s a rare shot of both of us standing up.
Courtesy of Dangerfield’s, New York
I first smoked pot back in 1942. I was twenty-one, just on the edge of getting into show business, working a Saturday night here and there, just plugging away. One night in Kellogg’s Cafeteria on Forty-ninth Street in New York, a popular hangout for acts when they finished working, I was sitting with a couple of show folk—a comic named Bobby Byron and my Car 54 friend Joe E. Ross.
We were sitting there talking, doing what we were doing, and Bobby and Joe E. decided that they wanted to get high. They invited me to join them.
“I don’t get high,” I told them, “but I’ll keep you company.”
So we walked back to the Belvedere Hotel, which was where Bobby lived. I even remember the room, 1411. We went upstairs, and Bobby took out a joint and lit it. He and Joe E. took a couple of hits off that joint, then offered it to me.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m not into that.”
It took them about ten seconds to convince me to try it. After a while, Bobby asked me how I felt. I said I felt fine, no different, and Bobby started laughing at me. “You’re high,” he said, “and you don’t even know it.”
“I’m not high,” I said.
He said, “Okay, why don’t you stand up?”
I said, “I tell ya, I’m not high, man.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Let me see you stand up and walk.”
I said I wasn’t going to get up, and he said, “You can’t, because you’re too high.”
I said, “I am NOT high!” and to prove it, I stood up and walked around my chair a few times.
That made Bobby laugh even harder. With him, you couldn’t win.
“That proves you’re high,” he said. “If you weren’t high, you never would’ve gotten up.”
After a few minutes I realized I must be high. I felt relaxed, peaceful, everything was okay. That night I found a new friend for the rest of my life.
I tell ya, I’m a bad drinker. I got loaded one night. The cops picked me up. The next morning I was in front of the judge. He said, “You’re here for drinking.” I said, “Okay, Your Honor, let’s get started.”
Back in those days, we used to call really good marijuana “boss pot.” The boss rarely came around, though. He was too busy. He had a lot of territory to cover. But when you did get boss pot, it was like, “Wow!”
Going back about fifty years, I was with a friend when a guy told us, “I have a pound of boss pot.”
Everything stopped. You didn’t hear that very often—the “boss” could be elusive—so I bought some from him.
As soon as I got home, I smoked it, and it really was the boss. So much so that I had a problem—I was working in a nightclub called the Golden Slipper out in Glen Cove, Long Island, and I had to do my act that night. The problem was that I can’t do my act when I’m high on pot because my timing is all off.
I smoked that boss pot at about six or seven o’clock, then got in my car, drove out to the club, and had dinner. I knew that I usually came down from a high when I ate a big meal, so I wolfed down everything on the menu, but the food didn’t dent my high at all. The show was now only a half hour away.
I got dressed and was ready to go out onstage, but I was still stoned—whacked, in fact. I was thinking, What am I gonna do? I then remembered that I could work pretty well on a few drinks—so I decided that the best thing I could do was to counteract the high by getting drunk real fast.
I went to the bartender and said, “Line up four shots of Scotch and a beer, will ya?”
He said, “What’s with you?”
“I know what I’m doing,” I said. And I knocked down the booze and the beer—bang, bang, bang—to put my head in a different place…which it did. Just not the place I was looking to go to.
The show started, I did my act, and it was very tough for me. The pot was stronger than the booze. My timing was terrible.
After the show I called the guy who had sold me the boss pot. I wasn’t mad at him…I wanted to buy some more.
I solved my drinking problem. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I still drink, but I use a different name. Oh, when I’m drinking, I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes the next day, I wake up in a strange bed, with a woman I can hardly remember and a kid with an accent playing with my feet.
All the stories you hear about people getting wild on marijuana are ridiculous. It’s been proven that pot does not make you violent. In fact, it makes you passive. When you’re high, the last thing you want to do is fight.
Booze is the real culprit in our society. Booze is traffic accidents, booze is wife beating. People see a picture of a cocktail glass and they think, How dainty, how sophisticated. They oughta think about what booze leads to—you lose your wife, your home, your life. In my life I’ve seen many doctors and psychiatrists, and all of them have told me that I’m better off with pot than with booze. In fact, I now have written authorization from a California doctor that allows me to smoke pot for medicinal purposes. It’s a license to get high. What better reason to move to L.A.?
Wish I’d had that “prescription” thirty years ago; life would have been easier. I was sitting in an airport one time, waiting for my plane. There was no one around, so I lit up a joint. I was taking a few tokes from it, but no one noticed, because it was a busy place. Everything was cool—or so I thought.
Suddenly a cop came running toward me. I had the joint in my mouth, so I took it out of my mouth with my left hand and let it hang down by my side. When the cop said, “Hey, Rodney!” I figured I was screwed.
But when he was standing right in front of me, he said, “Rodney, can I have your autograph?”
I said, “Sure.”
He had paper and a pencil with him. “Just make it out to Fred,” he said.
I said, “No problem.”
He gave me the pencil and paper, and with one hand—my right hand—I wrote: Fred, good luck. Rodney Dangerfield.
As he walked away, I put the joint back in my mouth and took another hit.
Don’t try that unless you’re in show business—and out of your mind.
I tell ya, my wife and I, we don’t think alike. She donates money to the homeless, and I donate money to the topless.
When you’re high, you become an avid reader. I remember one night I smoked some pot, then started reading the newspaper. An hour later, I said to myself, What am I doing? I was reading about fishing conditions in Anchorage. And I don’t even fish. And the paper was a month old.
Pot does it for me, but some people want to go further. They try coke.
I did coke for a while. What a mistake that was. Coke is easy to start, and hard to stop. If a group of guys are hanging around and one guy is doing coke, he’ll say, “Take a hit. You’ll feel like a new man.” He’s right; the problem is that once you feel like a new man, that new man wants a hit so that he can feel like a new man. And that goes on and on until the coke runs out, and you’re broke.
When you’re on coke, things can be going bad and you think you’re doing great. I remember one night I was playing dice in Vegas, high on coke. I had lost $3,000—but on coke, I thought, Man, I’m doing great! I’m still here!
Coke makes you do stupid things. One night I was home alone and decided to snort some coke, then watch TV. So I took a shower, then sat down on the edge of my bed and poured out two lines of coke. I snorted them, then sat back on the bed, put my feet up, and turned the TV on.
A couple of minutes later, I spotted some coke down by my feet, at the end of the bed.
I thought, How did I miss that?
So I grabbed my straw, sniffed it up, and sat back to watch some TV.
I was sitting there for a while, my feet on the bed, and I saw some more coke that I’d missed.
Now I was thinking, What the hell’s going on?
Then I realized what was going on—I had powdered my feet after my shower. I had been snorting foot powder.
I wish I could say that was the stupidest thing I ever did on coke.
With my wife I could never have a good time. The other night I was drinking. She said, “I want you to stop. You’re drunk enough for me.” I told her, “I’m never drunk enough for you.”
You do things on coke you wouldn’t normally do, and you say things you wouldn’t ordinarily say, like, “Honey, I love you. It’s you and me against the world forever.”
The next morning, you’re beat, your heart’s racing, you can’t breathe, and you feel terrible. You want out, and you hate everything—especially her.
One night I was with a chick, and we snorted coke all night. The next day we took a walk on the beach. As we were walking along, she said, “Rodney, did you mean all those things you said to me last night?”
I looked at her. I said, “Who are you?”
I’m not a sexy guy. I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped her price.