Unhappy Hour

“Make it a double. On the rocks. Hurt me.”

That’s what I used to say to the bartender.

When I got The Ropers, the confluence did me in. My brother, my hero, gone. My father, my protector, was going, soon to be gone. And…now, less than honorable work in television, work we scoffed at.

In Television City, I walked to the end of the building between rehearsals of The Ropers. It was the day And Justice for All came out. I stared out at the Los Angeles skyline. How did I get here? This very building is where my dad took me as a kid. This is where I met Red Skelton, my boyhood hero. What have I done? This is not Broadway. What is this “Los Angeles”? As Gertrude Stein said, “There is no there there.”

Here—$6,000 dollars per week. Ten times what I earned on Broadway working my tits off, exactly. I don’t need $6,000 per week. I don’t do anything. City Slicker is where I drink at five—after rehearsal across the street from TV City. I have a charge account—Greg, my business manager, thinks I’m buying raincoats. “Why so many raincoats?” he says.

“Make it a double. Hurt me.”

Go to my friend’s apartment building on Sunset and Sweetzer, do laps for thirty minutes. Perhaps the best shape I’d ever been in.

Then drive back to the Slicker and sit with D. my director and C. the script girl. D. keeps looking at his watch. It’s a TV director thing—always know what time it is and where you are.

Where am I? How did I get here? And drink and drink and laugh and smoke cigarette after cigarette.

I had a wife and child at home, and I was not there. What they had was: the spaghetti sauce stain on the dining room wall where I threw an entire serving dish, and the smashed glass of the double doors out to the swimming pool that I had thrown my glass against.

Danger was a huge ingredient, trying to get in as much trouble as possible, because in the absence of being creative it at least felt like being creative. Getting into trouble, finding the edge, immersing myself, losing myself. And trouble I did get.

I woke up in many strange beds—one time I woke to find a naked woman doing bicep crushes in front of her mirror. Had we had sex in a gym? I had no idea because—wait for it, again the irony of our Creator—blackout. I couldn’t remember a fucking thing. There were buttons and lingerie on the floor. No idea what had happened. I would make my way home, the sun coming up as I sat by the side of my pool shaking, my wife inside getting Molly ready for school.

Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof talks about the click. For me, it was the ahhhhh.

The pain in my chest, deep down, that ache, would cease for a time…until morning.

This memory: In a jazz bar one night, I had gone to the bathroom while the Don Randi band was on break. Coming back, I passed behind the trumpet player talking to the bartender. “That is the saddest person I have ever seen,” he said.

He was talking about me.

It was Kasia who got me to help, to Dr. Ron, recommended by a friend. Kasia and I went together.

“Do you drink?”

“Yep, I do.”

“Yes, he does—too much.”

“Do you think you might be an alcoholic?”

I laughed out loud at the lunacy of this. “No.”

And then tick, tock. The finger pointed outward…

Eileen was an alcoholic.

Larry died of alcoholism.

My sister is MIA and was addicted to heroin.

…and started moving slowly around back to me.

Cleff is an alcoholic. He is heading for the Colma cemetery to rest right next to Larry and Grandma and Grandpa Tambor.

I was ashamed of taking my brother’s place, and being so, I actually took my brother’s place. Dutifully, I became the drunkard. I bonded with my mother in booze. Now I bond with my mother in Maura. One of Maura’s signal traits is the hand clasped around the neck. That was Eileen’s.

As of February 15, 2017, I have been sober for fifteen years.

Thank you, Kasia.

Thanks, Mom.

Hi, Dr. Ron.