It was New Year’s Eve, the last day of 2009. I was standing in the middle of a hundred thousand people at the edge of Niagara Falls freezing my ass off and hoping Katherine, who was at home watching me on TV, didn’t go into labour.
ET Canada was hosting a monstrous live New Year’s Eve special from the Falls. It was a free concert with big bands, fireworks, drunken tourists all trying to stay warm, and a few million viewers. I don’t know why I agreed to do the special and nobody else did either. I have no memory of that show, who the bands were, or what I said on TV when we were live. I just remember sitting on a lighting box in between segments with my BlackBerry on my lap trying to make my frozen fingers work, texting Katherine to make sure she was all right.
“Hey, Rozzy! You okay?”
That’s what I heard in my earpiece during a commercial break. When you’re doing live TV, you have more wires attached to you than someone on life support. Our director, Frank Samson, was back in the broadcast truck and could see every camera on the monitors in front of him at all times—even when we weren’t live. He had a direct and private line to my ear, and he knew I was freaking out. He knew me well enough to see it. “Listen, I think you’re doing great, but what are you doing here, man? Isn’t Katherine about to give birth like now?” he asked.
“No, I’m good. She’s fine. No baby action yet,” I whispered back into my mic. I was having the worst time, and my head wasn’t at all in the show.
“What’s your plan?” Frank asked.
“Plan for what?” Now keep in mind, I was on a podium surrounded by a sea of people and my legs were too cold for me to walk, let alone run.
“What’s your plan if Katherine says it’s go-time?” he asked.
“I don’t have one,” I whispered again, while looking out at the chaos. I was a two-hour drive from home in no traffic, and the crowd was so big it had taken me forty-five minutes to walk five hundred metres from the hotel to the broadcast site at the beginning of the night. There was no easy way out. “I really don’t know. I don’t have a plan.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I have a helicopter. I’ll get you home. I got you.”
That wasn’t bullshit: Frank did have a helicopter. He’d hired one to shoot all the aerials of the crowds, the fireworks, and the Falls, and he was just crazy enough to use it for a badass first-time-father extraction mission if he had to. “Now let’s finish this show so we can all get out of here.” Then he told me to suck my gut in, get into position, and counted back from five. We were live again.
I didn’t need the helicopter that night, but I did need a friend.
One thing you should know about me: I’m not a very good friend. But I am a great friend. There’s a difference. I’m never going to be the guy who organizes wing night, I’ll always have to be reminded it’s your birthday, I’ll forget to RSVP to your wedding, and if I do show up, I’ll probably leave early. I’m rarely there for the little things, but I am the friend you call when everything goes to hell. I’m the “in case of emergency break glass” kind of friend. When your marriage is ending, or someone you love is dying, you just got fired or cheated on, or feel like your world is being pulled apart—I’m that friend. I’m the great friend.
Frank is too, and he’s a vault. He’s the only person I ever told about my Tourette’s, how I hide my tics on TV. He’s directed me on three shows, including ET Canada, and has spent more time staring at my face than anyone else I know.
“When I’m standing there, on set, and my head is down,” I explained one day in his office with the door fully closed, “or I turn my back to the camera or walk off set, I’m not being an asshole or trying to hold things up. I’m in hell. I have tics, and before we go on I try to get as many out as I can, then fight like hell to keep all the rest inside until you say we’re done. It sucks, but I manage. I just might need an extra minute every now and then.”
Frank never asked a single question. He didn’t want to know how long I’d had them, what caused them, or if I could show him. “No problem,” he told me. “I got you.” And that was that.
Midnight came and went, and it was officially 2010, and I held what I’m sure was one of the longest fake smiles ever attempted on live TV. I drank more champagne than I sprayed and hugged a hundred strangers as I pushed my way through the crowd trying to get the hell out of there. As I sat in traffic for more than three hours in a car hired to take me home, I realized this wasn’t going to be a one-time thing. This wasn’t the last time I’d feel like this. With the hours I work, the decisions I’d made, and the life I’d built, the feeling of missing out was going to be constant. Something I was going to live with daily.
I wanted to quit everything right then and there. I was going to miss the little things. I’d never be able to do school drop-off or pick our kid up when she was done. I’d miss birthday parties and whatever shows or recitals she’d have on weekends because I’d be god knows where interviewing who the hell knows about whatever movie they were trying to sell. I was panicking and convinced that every decision I had made to make sure we were good, taken care of, and free would result in my kid growing up feeling ripped off.
As soon as I walked into the house, still smelling like tourists and winter rain, I told Katherine all of this, in tears. “I don’t know if I’m going to be a good dad,” I told her.
“You don’t have to be a good dad,” she said. “Because you’re going to be a great dad.”