Riding the Elephant Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 by Craig Ferguson

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  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ferguson, Craig, author.

  Title: Riding the elephant : a memoir of altercations, humiliations,

  hallucinations, and observations / Craig Ferguson.

  Description: New York, New York : Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018045212 | ISBN 9780525533917 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525533931 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ferguson, Craig. | Television personalities—United States—Biography. | Comedians—United States—Biography. | Actors—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PN1992.4.F47 A3 2019 | DDC 791.4502/8092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045212

  The names and some identifying information about many of the people mentioned in this book have been changed. Sometimes the text signals when a pseudonym is being used, but not always.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  1 Riding the Elephant

  2 Mad Nomad

  3 Out, Damned Spot

  4 Dulce et Decorum Est

  5 An Education of Sorts

  6 Swim Davie

  7 The Festival

  8 A Right Song and Dance

  9 Down Under

  10 The Helpers

  11 Four Queens

  12 Four Kings

  13 Love and Bullshit

  14 2008

  15 Learning to Fly

  16 Therapy

  17 Resentment

  18 A Marked Man

  19 Japanese Bar Mitzvah

  20 Morning at LAX

  21 Draining the Swamp

  22 Millport

  23 Margaret

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  From backstage I watched the tape run for the last show’s introduction. I always assumed it was tape, even though it probably hadn’t been for years. Tape is a thing of the past, a relic, redundant—exactly how I should have felt at that moment. My time was up. I had done ten years, it was someone else’s problem now. I should have been sad, even just a little, a touch of bittersweet melancholy at least. I had certainly experienced those feelings on the run-up to the show’s ending, but in that moment I wasn’t sad, not even a little bit. It felt like the last day of my grim high school. I was elated. I felt the fog clearing. Finally I’d be able to see the horizon, get my bearings, and continue the journey.

  The tape ended and both drummers thundered out the beat. I walked out, waved to the audience, and climbed on top of that fucking desk to sing the last song. I stomped in time, doing what I have always tried to do: attempting to follow the beat while trashing the varnish.

  * * *

  —

  I have never thought of myself as a late-night talk show host. I’ve said that often to anyone who would listen, but I suppose it was a bit confusing, since all they knew about me was that I hosted a late-night talk show. The press was convinced that I was crushed not to be taking over for David Letterman when I left The Late Late Show in 2014, despite my public insistence since 2005, when I started in late night—often quoted in their very publications—that I didn’t want the job. I didn’t and I don’t. You can check this online if you want, although I can’t think why you’d bother at this point. Certainly nobody seemed to find it necessary at the time.

  It seems to me people make up stories to fit their perception about you. They don’t just do it about me, of course. It happens to everybody. I do it to myself. I’m getting older now and the shadows are getting longer. When I look into them I see shapes move and stir and I think I remember what they are, but maybe I’m just making it up to suit a reality about myself that I find comfortable.

  From January 2005 until December 2014 I hosted a late-night show on American broadcast television. I found it in turns rewarding, frustrating, difficult, easy, immensely satisfying, soul-crushingly dull, hilarious, and depressing.

  Sometimes all in one show. Sometimes all in one monologue. Sometimes all in one “interview” (I have never really thought of myself as an interviewer, but if you talk to people on TV and the show title has your name in it then you are, by default, an interviewer, I suppose).

  The strict traditional format the show was produced under demanded that each episode begin with a monologue. A late-night tradition dating back to the early ratpacky nicoteeny alcoholic madmen days of TV. My first stumbling attempts were the clumsy reading of jokes written in black ink on giant white cards that were held just off camera by a very nice man called Tony.

  Tony’s job was holding up jokes for me to read out. It didn’t matter to him if the joke was good or bad, clever or stupid. He didn’t care, he passed no judgment. He was like a good undertaker, handling each case with professional detachment. He didn’t get involved.

  I was expected to do the same. Sell the joke and move on, deliver the monologue. I tried but I was terrible at it, as the early reviews for the show gleefully and wickedly pointed out. I found myself saying mean and bitchy things about people or groups of people who I didn’t know anything about. By doing the task assigned to me, I found myself espousing the rage and questionable morality of whatever writer had been lucky enough to find favor with the producers that day. I found I had to defend myself about jokes I made on TV when I didn’t agree or even have much knowledge of the stance I had supposedly taken.

  I vas just obeying orders.

  It became evident to me that if I was to continue on the show, that if I were to espouse any rage and questionable moral judgment, it would have to be my own. Otherwise I was inviting a level of self-loathing that even an apostate Scottish Calvinist couldn’t survive.

  I fired the writers I disagreed with and hired a few whose weltanschauung ran in tandem with or complemented my own. The monologue went from being a necessary chore to being a creative emotional outlet. When it was at its best it was more of an essay that contained the requisite amount of jokes. An op-ed column in a suit and makeup. Not every night, of course. Sometimes, like most people, I simply had nothing to say (hence the annual Latvian Independence Day monologue was born). On some nights, though, maybe a dozen or so per year, it all clicked and I made myself and a few others laugh or cry or think about things differently.

  The monologue didn’t give me total freedom, of course. The concerns of the network or the FCC or the sponsors could be restricting at times. Performing stand-up in a theater or a comedy club with no cameras running is a more liberated vehicle of articulation, but it does require a certain singularity of purpose. It should be funny.

  I don’t miss doing the late-night show, but my brain has become used to the format of these monologues/essays. So much so that the initial title of this book was going to be Mono-Logging. But I thought that it sounded too much like a sophomoric euphemism for masturbation—and maybe that’s what’s going on here, maybe I’m just pleasing myself.

  Herein, then, is a collection of recollections and observations and—occasionally, in the spirit of poetic license—fabrications that don’t fit in any other format but this book’s. Not really monologues and not really essays, they have no agenda, not even comedic, although I’d like to hope every now and then they raise a chuckle or two. These are stories that I couldn’t or wouldn’t tell in any other way than the one in which I present them to you now. The timeline is not strictly linear because that’s not how I remember things, so you can start reading the book in the middle if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t. You’ll understand why when you’ve finished it.

  I settled with the title Riding the Elephant because it’s the name of one of my favorite stories and also because it’s a slang phrase employed by potheads to describe being stoned in a foggy and confused way, though I’m not sure there is any other way to be stoned. Foggy and confused is just how I remember things.

  It also seems to me that the phrase riding the elephant contains a perfect description for a life which seems to take any direction it chooses, paying scant attention to my instructions or commands. The big gray fucker just goes where it wants.

  For Megan

  But if you study the logistics

  And heuristics of the mystics

  You will find that their minds rarely move in a line

  —BRIAN ENO

  1

  Riding the Elephant

  In the time before I loved you, I never thought of the world as precious. It had value to me only in its sensuality and its ability to satiate my appetites. This was the time when I was ruled by the tyranny of desire. If I couldn’t eat it or snort it or own it or drink it or make it cry or laugh or give me money, then it was invisible to me. I had no empathy, but used sentimentality and wit and slurred prose to cloak my ugliness. Even then I was reaching out to find you, almost imperceptible, a daisy on a mountain of shit. Even now when I warm the pool of recollection and look into its depths I can see the ice melt around the old monsters and watch them cast a sleepy eye to the surface on the off chance of an opportunity to attack.

  It was a time of a quiescent conscience but not a deep, restful sleep. I thrashed around in the nightmares. In the cold light of day though, or in the neon, I didn’t give a fuck. I sang and danced and joked in the spotlights; I drank and snorted in the bars and clubs and made as much bloody noise as I could so I couldn’t hear the discordant hymns of purity and constancy that whined incessantly at low volume in the background. This was a time when I would tear the burned flesh of the dead with my canines and drink stolen mother’s milk so that riding on the back of a majestic, sad, captured god would not even register as an issue of morality. I would not be comfortable riding an elephant today, but I was a different man then, and although I do not ask for your forgiveness for who I was, I humbly apologize to the elephant, wherever she may be.

  I had been separated from my wife, Anne, for a few months before I attempted my first adult relationship. Her name was Helen and she was an actress. She was English and was older than me and had a cool Mazda RX-7 with pop-up headlights. She wore a perfume called Giorgio that proclaimed proudly that it came from Beverly Hills on its expensive-looking yellow-and-white packaging. Helen had chic Italian clothes with padded shoulders. She had performed Shakespeare in the theater and been on really good television shows and had known Ian Curtis when she was at school. She knew famous people who were still alive too, and she took reasonably priced holidays to exotic places, sometimes with those famous people. She rode horses, for God’s sake. She could have groceries in her refrigerator and not eat them all in the same day; she could pay her bills and make appointments on time. I was bewitched by her functionality. That’s not to say she was boring. On the contrary, she had a great laugh and an unpredictable temper. She was, to all outward appearances, a well-rounded human being, although I question that now given that she chose to be in a relationship with a recently separated unsuccessful alcoholic stand-up comedian eight years her junior. I was telling a lot of lies to myself about who I was then; perhaps she was unfortunate enough to believe some of them too.

  Helen wanted to go Sri Lanka. She had read about it in a magazine. She showed me the pictures. Charming jungle scenery and giant golden Buddhas. I didn’t care about going to Sri Lanka, but I didn’t want Helen to know I was that provincial so I enthusiastically agreed. Although I could ill afford it, I borrowed some more money from my increasingly concerned bank, and we bought tickets and booked a hotel.

  Although Helen had questionable taste in men, she wasn’t an idiot; we had separate finances the entire five years we were together. Smart move, I’d say.

  The problem with trying to hide active alcoholism from someone you live with is one of balance. You have to drink because you’re an alcoholic, but you don’t want to appear too drunk because then the poor unfortunate that is supposedly in a relationship with you might insist on you getting help. That’s the last fucking thing you want because every drinking alcoholic knows “getting help” means stopping drinking, and that is unthinkable. Keeping your shit together is a tightrope act and is only halfway possible with luck, good timing, and cocaine. Even then it doesn’t always work.

  Let’s be honest, it hardly ever works.

  It never works.

  The con I was selling Helen on the flight from London to Sri Lanka was that I was drinking iced tonic water, but on an early bathroom trip I had bribed the charming Tamil flight attendant to slip a double vodka into every drink I asked for. Consequently, I slept most of the second half of the journey, and then had to pretend I didn’t have a head like a brown dog as we went through customs and immigration into the surrealism of Colombo at night. I suppose if you live in Colombo it’s not strange at all, but if you get off a plane having never experienced anything like it before, it is—or was, I haven’t been there in nearly thirty years—a sensory overload in the speedball class, that charming if slightly fatal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Literally takes you in two directions at the same time.

  The traffic and noise and heat and moisture and smell of the city slammed me the minute I stepped from the airport. The only time I had experienced anything like the climate was in the steam room of one of the health spas that Helen was so fond of. I didn’t like the atmosphere of that steam room even when I wasn’t wearing jeans and a leather jacket or suffering from a knee-buckling secret vodka headache or experiencing small, fierce taxi drivers yelling at me in a language I didn’t understand.

  We made a deal and got in a taxi, an old Morris Minor. Every vehicle in Colombo was an old Morris Minor except for the buses, which were giant red double-deckers that had been bought as a job lot from London Transport. They still had the black destination signs on the front and I was thunderstruck to see my local, the thirteen to Stoke Newington, rumble past with at least fifty more passengers than would ever have been permitted in London, even at rush hour on a bank holiday Friday.

  * * *

  —

  We stayed in a big Western hotel in the city that night and the next day I ate a dog.

  I didn’t mean to eat a dog. Please don’t tell our dogs about this. I was hoodwinked by providence and a horrifying mixture of restaurateur opportunism and the excessive desire of bourgeois tourists to not offend.

  Helen wanted to see some of the city before we headed down to the resort we would be staying in on the coast. Like the good little yuppies we were, we wanted to experience the local cuisine, but the authenticity which was essential for dinner party anecdotes dictated we couldn’t go anywhere that was in a guidebo ok or a map. This was the last week of the 1980s. There was no Yelp or Internet or even cell phones, really. We organized our lives by Filofax, which was woefully inadequate for on-the-spot restaurant recommendations. After getting lost in a labyrinthine network of satisfyingly cinematic side streets, we eventually settled on a café that had a few local customers sitting at a Formica table playing dominoes. There was a ceiling fan that was moving so slowly it could have been a clock, and a neon sign for a beer I’d never heard of.

  A friendly apple-cheeked waiter come to our table and said hello enthusiastically. We said hello and asked for a menu and he said hello again and we asked if he spoke English and he said hello again. It became clear that either he was really keen to get his hello message across or he had reached the extent of his knowledge of the language. In the time-honored tradition of travelers, I pointed at the beer sign and held up two fingers.

  He said hello again and went off to fetch our drinks.

  While he was away I expressed some reservation about ordering food in this place, but Helen would have none of it. We had to experience it or else what was the point. I said the point might be to avoid dysentery and she called me a racist so I shut up in a huff.

  Mr. Hello came back with what I have to admit were two deliciously cold bottled beers, and after we’d had a few each—Helen never questioned my drinking in tropical climates for some reason—my mood lightened and I decided I was in fact being a racist and we should eat. I asked our waiter for a menu and his answer was, predictably I suppose, Hello.

  I mimed opening a book and then eating and he mimed opening a book and shook his head, which I assumed to mean “no menus.” He then mimed eating and nodded and waggled his elbows in the universal sign for chicken and said, “Bawk.”

  “Bawk?” I asked.