I woke up this morning feeling like someone hit me in the head with a hammer and covered my eyes in fiberglass insulation. As I stumbled into the bathroom, confused, unsteady, and trying to remember what I had done to myself the night before and why my tongue tasted like a liver-and-tobacco sandwich, it all came back to me. Simply put, I drank too much.
It’s at this moment when we all say to ourselves, “Never again.” And then you drag around all day, trying to hydrate and popping Advil, all the while feeling like crap but happy with your decision to take at least a night off. And then five o’clock comes around and without even thinking about it, you find yourself ordering a drink at the bar or mixing a martini in the kitchen.
We love to do things that are bad for us.
The reason for this lapse of judgment is that truthfully I didn’t really make the decision not to drink. That was a different guy. That was Morning Tom.
You’d like Morning Tom. Morning Tom is a great guy who gets up early, returns emails, and gets things done. Morning Tom puts on workout clothes and exercises before the day begins. He takes a blender and fills it with fruit and protein powder and makes fruit smoothies for breakfast.
But then five o’clock rolls around and a different guy shows up. This is Nighttime Tom. And he’s a very different guy. He does not work out. He does not care about getting things done. He’s concerned only with having a good time, and the fastest way to get that going is to start getting out the ice at 4:58 and the martini shaker at 4:59 so we are guaranteed to be drinking at 5:00. He’s an alcoholic, is what he is.
You’d like Nighttime Tom, too. You might even like him more than Morning Tom. He’s a lot more fun. He’s nothing but fun. He doesn’t make smoothies. He takes that same blender and uses it to mix up a batch of margaritas.
But as with all people who are a one-person party, there’s a good chance he’ll end up in jail. Morning Tom won’t call you from prison in the middle of the night, begging you to bring bail money. When the phone rings you can bet it’s Nighttime Tom.
It’s fascinating that we all have these two personalities inside us. This is the human condition at its most conflicted. One side is responsible and hardworking, plowing through the day, and the other is the bad student who knows just how to get you into trouble.
We’re all deviants. We love to wander from the safe and healthy path, in little and big ways. We all have a wild side to us. We are beasts with desires and sometimes lose control, which is why they came up with police, paddy wagons, and the Bible.
But we have to do things that are bad for us. Some of my most memorable moments have been out on the edge. I can’t remember a single vegan meal that I got at Whole Foods, but I sure as hell remember the night my nephew Sam and I spent way too much money at Il Mulino steakhouse eating medium-rare rib eyes after ice-cold martinis and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Did I remember any of the nights that I went home early and got a good night’s sleep? Not really. But I’ll never forget when my friends and I were so drunk that we woke up on a boat in the middle of a lake. We didn’t know what lake it was, and none of us owned a boat.
I love cheese. I could do a whole book on my love of cheese. And I know without a doubt that cheese is bad for me. Not only because it makes me fat but because I have an allergy to dairy products that makes my sinuses explode.
For years I thought I was allergic to cats, mold, trees, weeds, and old people. But after years and years of blowing my nose and sneezing like a crazy person, the culprit turned out to be dairy products.
I discovered this by mistake, after TV’s Marilu Henner told me to cut it out of my diet along with meat, alcohol, and sugar. That’s a weird statement. She didn’t tell me directly, but we were on The View at the same time. That’s an even weirder statement. Actually she was a guest on the show and I had come in to do audience warm-up. It went horribly wrong.
Allow me to explain.
I was a young comedian and at the time never woke up before noon, but I got an offer to fill in for the warm-up comic on The View at 7:00 A.M. I had never done anything like this, but I was poor, my girlfriend wanted to go, and I took the job. I shouldn’t have.
I was building a career in smoke- and curse-filled nightclubs and now I was thrust into a studio filled with morning-television enthusiasm. I didn’t belong there. I also had no idea what I was doing or how I should do it.
They handed me a microphone and told me to “be funny” and “keep the audience energized” in between segments and during the commercial breaks. My way of being funny at the time was telling distasteful, somewhat dirty material about living in New York. No one at The View was asking for this.
They cut to commercial and I came sauntering out, with sleepy eyes, a wrinkled shirt, and told an off-color joke. No one responded. I mocked someone’s shirt in the front row. Now I was just mean. The entire audience of nice suburban moms looked at me as if I had broken into their house and was peeing on the carpet.
I started to sweat.
The show came back from commercial again and I sat on the side, trying to think of what to do. My girlfriend smiled weakly and patted me on the back. That’s not something people do when things are going well. I was desperately trying to come up with some joke that would work as they threw to another break.
“I know,” I thought to myself as I walked back out. “I’ll do the joke about long nipples.”
I gave it my best. A woman gasped. The crowd shifted in their seats. A security guard put his hand on his gun, not sure if he should do something. I was going down in flames.
That’s when I saw Barbara Walters, who was the main host at the time and a national treasure, walking slowly toward me shaking her head. At eighty years old, this woman who had seen her share of national tragedies now had her sights set on me. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I thought that maybe she was going to support me and tell the crowd how funny I was. But as she got closer I heard her muttering under her breath, “No, no, no,” and she took the microphone out of my hand.
“That’s enough,” she said. The crowd applauded.
I sat back down. My girlfriend looked the other way. Any confusion and hurt that I felt was only made worse when Marilu Henner came out to promote her new diet book, to wild screams and applause. Order had been restored. Barbara had saved the show. The crowd really went berserk when they found out that everybody was getting a free copy of the book. Even the inappropriate comedian who seemed to be there only to sweat and annoy people got one, too.
I swallowed my pride and read the book, or rather listened to my girlfriend talk about the book, and we followed her advice. For a month, we went off alcohol, sugar, dairy, and meat.
It became clear that dairy was a huge part of my diet, and it was killing me not to eat it. But as I tried to abstain, I discovered an amazing thing. I stopped sneezing.
It was over. After decades of blowing my nose, taking pills, and going to doctors, I was actually cured. I could pet my cat in a moldy cellar at the height of allergy season and I was fine. As long as I didn’t eat cheese. Cheese is really bad for me.
Thank you, Barbara Walters.
But there was no staying away. Not a chance. I love cheese. Chips, omelets, sandwiches, what good are any of these things without cheese?
Wine and cheese. Cheese and crackers. Burger and cheese. There’s no way I was stopping. I’d rather blow my nose every day.
This is a perfect example of something I know is bad for me. It makes me sneeze, it makes me fat, and it probably clogs my arteries and slows my heart. But when I’m holding a slice of Mimolette or spreading blue cheese on a cracker or all over my face, I couldn’t care less.
You have to enjoy your life! Too much of a good time and you end up in pain. Too little of a good time and you end up miserable. I don’t know anyone who follows all the rules who’s fun to hang out with. They might be okay for a while, but soon you’ll get bored, and when you do it’s time to call that friend who keeps a beer funnel in his car and some cheese in his pocket.
Sorry, Morning Tom.