DEMONS AND ANGELS

Even with all the narcotics I’ve pumped into my body, I’m generally pretty great at recalling names, dates, and details of the events of my life. So it probably says something significant that the period covered in these next few chapters—starting around late 2006—is a little fuzzier in my memory bank. I still remember most of my outlandish acts of dickishness with clarity, but exactly where and when they occurred is less clear. Hence the increasingly frequent quotes from those unfortunate enough to have witnessed it all firsthand.

I’ve yet to mention my fiancée, Brittany, but any discussion of me at my worst must include her. First off, I’m not entirely serious when I call her my ex-fiancée. Yes, I did ask her to marry me, and yes, she briefly consented, but I was such a mess that I don’t think she ever really took it very seriously. I took it seriously at the time but only because I was such a mess. I’m getting ahead of myself though.

I met Brittany at a club in Vegas in the fall of 2006. If my relationship with May seemed doomed because of the shenanigans I’d been getting up to with Terry Richardson just a few hours before we met, the hours before I met Brittany were also quite telling.

I remember it was the night before Jackass/Wildboyz producer Trip Taylor’s wedding, but I can’t recall why exactly I was going to Vegas or why someone was flying me there on a private jet with Brooke Shields. But there we were—Brooke and I—chatting away for the whole flight like long-lost friends.

Once I got to Vegas, I went to a big party at this club called Tao. The gimmick was that bathtubs were set up all around this club and each bathtub had a bikini-clad model in it. I was sitting at a table with Paris Hilton and her personal photographer. This photographer suggested taking some pictures of me in one of the bathtubs with a couple of the models. I agreed, walked over to an empty tub, stripped myself naked, and started pissing in it. As with my red carpet urination from just a couple weeks earlier, this was not purely the work of a man too drunk to function. Sadly, there was once again actual thought behind my misbehavior.

My feeling at the time was that making these models sit around in bathtubs was demeaning. By pissing in the tub, I was not only making that statement but also ensuring no chick would have to sit in it again. I thought I was a hell of a guy—I was getting these chicks off work early! Amazingly, everyone else

—particularly the club’s bouncers—seemed to miss this deeper message. They just saw a drunken asshole pissing in a bathtub in the middle of a ritzy party and threw my ass out.

So I went to another club, which is where I met Brittany. She was gorgeous—twenty years old, long blond hair, ridiculous body. She worked as a swimsuit model and lived in Florida but was in Vegas that night with two friends. We all hung out together in their hotel room that night, and after I went back to California, Brittany and I kept in touch. At first, I’d just see her sporadically, either when I was back in Florida visiting family or when she came out to California for a modeling gig. Eventually, she started traveling a bit with me, and then, by the second half of 2007, things got serious—or seriously fucked up is probably more accurate.

One reason Brittany and I didn’t immediately jump into a full-on relationship is because back then I started spending a lot of time with Kat Von D. I’d met Kat at the Rainbow but we were little more than acquaintances for a while. She was already pretty well known as a tattoo artist and a star of the TLC reality show Miami Ink.

In mid-2006, I was hanging out with Kat in Miami and we got to talking about how neither of us ever wanted to have kids. I wanted a tattoo to memorialize this conversation. Originally, I was going to get a picture of a cute little baby with a circle around it and a slash through it—y’know, “No Babies.” Somehow, “No Babies” morphed into “Fuck Babies,” which morphed into my getting a tattoo on my arm of a guy literally fucking a baby.

I’ve regretted plenty of my tattoos but none were so immediately wrong as that one. I could tell from the minute I stepped out of that tattoo parlor in Miami onto the street that I’d stepped over a line. Anyone who saw the tattoo was rightfully appalled. Kat eventually changed it to make it less offensive by turning the baby into an ostrich. It’s amazing to think that a tattoo of a man fucking an ostrich could make anyone’s body art less objectionable, but in my case it did.

Kat’s relationship with me was really more motherly than a girlfriend-boyfriend kind of thing. Initially we partied a bit together, but when she recognized that I was rapidly going off the deep end, she actively tried to get me not to party. Kat’s intentions were totally noble: she really wanted to help me clean up. I didn’t want any help though, so I lashed out at her more than a few times in ways I’m ashamed of now. As she gradually withdrew from me out of justifiable disgust, I only lashed out harder. Sometimes that just meant nasty e-mails or texts, but the worst by far was when I posted a bunch of crap on my Myspace blog accusing her of cheating on her husband with a bunch of people and being anti-Semitic. It was all just scurrilous rumors that I was airing as if they were facts. They weren’t. Even for me, that was a new low and one that still makes me feel fucking awful every time I think about it.

Around this time, I was still living in the same building in West Hollywood that I’d moved into with Schliz all those years ago. In 2004, I’d convinced Simonetti to leave New Mexico and move out to California to become my Ballbag Inc. editor/co-producer. He moved into the apartment with Schliz and I rented out a separate apartment in the same building for myself. Their pad became the “Ballbag Inc. Headquarters”: Simonetti had all his computer stuff in there and we filled the living room with homemade skate ramps. Later, we knocked down the walls in that apartment to fill the whole place with ramps, and I rented a third apartment to serve as the Ballbag office. By that point, Schliz had moved out and J. P. Blackmon, our “shady prop guy” from Jackass, had moved in with Simonetti.

In 2007, I rented out a fourth apartment in that building for my personal assistant, Jen Moore. I’d first gotten to know Jen just after Jackass premiered.

Within a couple of weeks of the first show airing on MTV in 2000, I was trolling the Internet to get a sense of whether I was famous yet or not. I found just one Jackass fan site and was disappointed to discover that it had virtually no information about me on it. So I clicked the “contact” icon, and fired off an e-mail offering to provide info about myself. Jen was the webmaster, and at first she couldn’t believe it was really me e-e-mailing her. I quickly convinced her and we became instant friends. Knoxville let her fan site become the official Johnny Knoxville Web site and she set up an official Steve-O Web site for me as well. Around 2005, I got in the habit of forwarding her every e-mail that came in or went out of my account, and began referring to her as my

“webmaster, confidant, and archivist.” In 2007, I hired her to be my personal assistant. I probably didn’t need a PA, but I had grown so irrational, unreliable, and unpredictable, I did need someone to help clean up all my messes and reschedule all the flights I was constantly missing. In reality, she was something closer to a babysitter.

The pledge I’d made to swear off cocaine for Number Two lasted over a year, until January 2007. But once I picked it back up, my habit was even worse that it had been before. By mid-2007, I was practically living on a diet of coke, booze, and nitrous. The voices in my head that I’d begun hearing months before were now near-constant companions. They came in two basic varieties: demons and angels. The demons encouraged me to do more drugs—especially nitrous. They’d call me a pussy if I stopped huffing or even thought about stopping. They’d tell me I was worthless, I was nothing, and that I should keep huffing and holding my breath until I suffocated. The angels tried to convince me I was out of control and needed to stop. I often reacted to those voices the same way I did to anyone else who suggested I had a drug problem: I’d have a tantrum. It was a regular occurrence for me to be yelling

“Shut up! Shut up! I’m fine! Leave me alone!” while I sat by the computer in my empty apartment.

One night, after sending a particularly cruel message to Kat, I was screaming at the voices, telling them that I hadn’t been wrong to send the text, though I clearly knew I had been. In response, the voice of an angel in my right ear told me, “You’re going to have to answer for that.” The message was clear, and it came up again and again during my subsequent Internet research on the spirit world: We have free will to make any choice we desire in this life, but our choices have consequences that we can’t escape. Karma—it is a bitch.

The voices shared space in my head with increasingly frequent hallucinations. Again, these phantasms often seemed to have my best interests in mind.

At one point, I saw Jen’s head pop out of a case of beer and patrol the apartment with a video camera to make sure I didn’t do more drugs. I watched that

At one point, I saw Jen’s head pop out of a case of beer and patrol the apartment with a video camera to make sure I didn’t do more drugs. I watched that eighteen-pack of beer move around the apartment as Jen’s head monitored me with a camera. Another time, I remember watching a wall of my shoes, sitting on shelves, tapping their toes impatiently, telling me they were waiting for me to throw away my drugs.

I even hallucinated three well-organized interventions. Friends would materialize in my apartment, sit down, and express their concern for me. I considered these “divine interventions,” and despite being completely fictional, they were not totally ineffective. After each of these divine interventions, I’d go tell Ryan or J.P. what had happened, and swear off nitrous or coke or both.

SIMONETTI: He’d come down to my apartment and be like, “Dude, I found God. I’m done with all this.” I’d be like, “Okay, that’s good. You need to settle down, bro.” But the next night he was just right back to it.

None of these hallucinations really scared me much. It’s not just that they seemed benevolent; I was convinced that I’d crossed over to the spirit world and reached a higher plane of enlightenment than most people ever achieve. Those hallucinations felt so real, so tangible, that to this day I have a hard time dismissing them as simply drug-induced lunacy. I felt like they were revealing profound truths to me, some that still feel valid now.

But as 2007 wound down, it was becoming painfully obvious—even to me—that I couldn’t keep this up. My thoughts were jumbled and my breathing was frequently labored. I was huffing so much nitrous at this point it was like I was trying to cut air out of my life. I remember sitting in my swiveling office chair, facing my computer, alone in my apartment with my drugs, and having the crystal-clear realization that I was killing myself. If I didn’t stop this, I was going to die. Then I remember looking at my cocaine and looking at my whippet container and thinking, I don’t care if I die. I really didn’t.

A moment after that thought crossed through my brain, I felt the chair I was in spin around so powerfully that I was nearly thrown out of it. A doctor would’ve probably called that a tactile hallucination. To me it was a message from the spirit world: Some powerful entity or god was trying to tell me I wasn’t supposed to die yet. That’s not just how I felt about that then, either. I still believe that today.

Despite my raging drug problem, I had a pretty strong hand in the creative side of Dr. Steve-O. It was the first time I’d been asked to carry a show all by myself and as fucked up as I was, I recognized that if I had any hope of staying in the public spotlight, I needed the show to succeed. It took only about two and a half weeks to film the whole season, and I managed to pull it together enough to get through the shoots.

Well, mostly. One day, I had a few drinks with lunch and completely lost my shit. We had planned to shoot something with Kat, but in between the planning and the execution, she’d decided she wanted nothing more to do with me. But the other shooting location that day was right next door to her tattoo shop. When I realized that we were parking behind her studio, I threw a vicious tantrum. How could the producers do this to me? How could they be so thoughtless and uncaring? The rejection by Kat still stung, but the other real lesson from that outburst was that my tolerance for alcohol had dwindled so much that it took only two or three drinks to turn me into a monster.

Because I didn’t have a license, we needed someone to drive the ambulance for Dr. Steve-O. Initially, the idea was for Trishelle Cannatella, a former Real World star I’d known for a few years, to be the driver, but the producers decided they didn’t want to hide her behind a steering wheel. So they found Big Regg.

Reggie Pace was a six-nine 375-pound ex-college football star–turned–rapper–turned–bodyguard from South Central Los Angeles. He’d been working security for Paris Hilton when he met one of the Dr. Steve-O producers. Having Regg driving allowed Trishelle to interact more with “the wussies”

the show was aimed at helping.

I loved Big Regg right away. He was an easygoing, intensely amiable guy who was down for anything. He loved smoking pot and encouraged my rap career. Just after we met, we went into the studio and recorded the theme song for Dr. Steve-O. After that, we began hanging out on and off the set, and soon, he became more or less a full-time chaperone/bodyguard.

REGGIE “BIG REGG” PACE (Dr. Steve-O co-star/friend): I was always honest with Steve. That’s why I think we became close. On Dr. Steve-O we did a thing called Fart Art where each of the “wussies” got an enema with this nontoxic paint and then they’d have to fart on this piece of paper. Well, this one kid was from South Central L.A., right in the hood. The kid didn’t want to do it and walked off the show. Steve got really upset. I had to pull Steve aside and explain to him, “Brothers don’t necessarily play like that. If that kid did that on national TV, he might have a lot of problems when he went home to the hood.” Steve thought about it and got what I meant. That was the beginning of our relationship.

Dr. Steve-O wasn’t a bad show but I was in no condition to be carrying any sort of project on my shoulders. I was so involved in being a drug addict that nobody could ever get in touch with me. I rarely answered my phone or returned messages and when I did, I acted like a dick. I went on Howard Stern and insulted the WWE, the USA Network’s cash cow, as a bunch of “fake-ass bullshit” that I’d never watch. And whenever I was confronted with a problem on the show itself, I became an unreasonable, arrogant, grandstanding jerk-off.

PONTIUS: When he was doing Dr. Steve-O, a lot of the dialogue was stuff he learned from me. That was annoying but he was so unaware of when he was taking other people’s stuff because he was a sponge. The thing was though, he wasn’t saying the lines right. A lot of what’s in jokes is how you say it. So it pissed me off.

For one of the episodes, one of our “wussies” was a twenty-six-year-old guy who’d never had any sort of romantic encounter with a girl. We brought this guy over to a sperm bank at UCLA and had this porn star put a rubber on his dick and blow him. The whole thing was filmed and as far as I was concerned this was the greatest thing I’d ever done. This was the crown jewel in the Dr. Steve-O franchise.

The USA Network did not see it the same way. For reasons that probably don’t need explaining, the executives there wouldn’t allow any of the footage anywhere near the air. We couldn’t even insinuate that this was going on. I wasn’t so dumb as to think we could show an actual blowjob on basic cable, but I thought maybe we could show the footage of the girl going down and then the dude’s face while it was happening. USA was having none of it. In fact, the network was so worried about their liability, they ordered all the tapes of that scene sequestered, and every person present for it had to photocopy their driver’s license and promise not to leak any footage. The network was terrified of the repercussions if people found out what had happened on the set of the show.

I was furious at this injustice. My greatest accomplishment would languish forever on a cutting room floor. So I wrote an e-mail that not only expressed my disappointment but also did exactly what the network feared by describing in lurid detail exactly what had happened and then distributing it to the most powerful people in the entertainment industry whose e-mail addresses I could come up with—celebrities, journalists, producers, network executives, agents, lawyers, and anyone else (family, friends, associates) who I really wanted to impress. This was the first of what I called my “Rad E-mails.” The network was livid.

Dr. Steve-O didn’t exactly fail on its own merits. It was the highest-rated show in its time slot on basic cable and retained something like 72 percent of the audience from the WWE broadcast that preceded it. But despite these undeniable positives, the show was canceled after one season. As these Rad E-mails became my typical way of communicating with people regardless of the subject matter, the network decided I was more trouble than I was worth.

Dr. Steve-O didn’t exactly fail on its own merits. It was the highest-rated show in its time slot on basic cable and retained something like 72 percent of the audience from the WWE broadcast that preceded it. But despite these undeniable positives, the show was canceled after one season. As these Rad E-mails became my typical way of communicating with people regardless of the subject matter, the network decided I was more trouble than I was worth.