Stephen Steve-O Glover - A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What Ive Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions

This book started as a joke. I mean, how could it not? The very idea that I would be writing a book to impart my wisdom to others, that people would be coming to mea recovering alcoholic drug addict who once willingly tried to cross a pit full of alligators on a tightrope while wearing a jockstrapfor advice about anything is clearly absurd. Surely, if youre looking to Steve-O for help with your life, you are well and truly fucked, right?

Well, maybe.

Let me allow you behind the curtain for a second here: I wrote a book about twelve years ago. Maybe some of you read it. It chronicled my insane, near-suicidal descent into drugs, booze, and, well, near-suicidal insanity, and then my slow crawl back from the edge. When that book came out, I was freshly sober, the third Jackass movie had just been a number one box office hit, and I had recently started to tour as a stand-up comedian. So, smooth sailing and happily ever after, right?

Not exactly. For starters, I was only thirty-six years old when that book came out. For a long time, I had thought there was no way Id live to be even that old. The way I had been going, I dont think many people wouldve bet on it. Even putting aside all the booze and the drugs, Id spent most of my teenage and adult years doing incredibly foolish, often quite dangerous stunts, and occasionally getting paid for it. But there I was in my mid-thirties, very much alive, and realizing that if the average life expectancy stats were accurate, I probably wasnt even halfway through my journey. While most people would greet this realization as a profound gift, I guess Im not most people. I freaked the fuck out.

Getting older has always scared the shit out of me, and I had long figured that Id avoid having to deal with it by doing the sensible thing and dying young. With that option now seemingly off the table, I was looking at the possibility of having more than half a lifetime ahead of me during which the body Id relied on for my livelihood would be breaking down, my earnings potential would be dropping precipitously, and the public spotlight that Id ached for since birth would be gradually receding. Being an old attention whore is not a good look. I was overcome with anxiety about what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life and how I was going to eat.

If youre thinking that this is the point where I tell you thats why I got loaded again, its not a bad guess, but, fortunately, I didnt. Im fairly certain that wouldve killed me, or if it didnt, I wouldve been better off if it had. But I did do all sorts of other ridiculous, self-destructive shit that made the next decade at least as harrowing as the ones before it. Although Ive managed to stay sober, sobriety for me is kind of a moving target. The last ten-plus years have been like a game of addiction Whac-A-Mole: sex, sugar, fame, work, spending, meditationyou name it, I probably have a problem controlling my impulses for it. Ive spent large parts of the last decade on some frighteningly irresponsible sexual benders. Ive been a maniacally strict vegan who wont shut up about his healthy, ethical food choices and the kind of guy who can polish off an entire bag of fun-size Butterfingers in one sitting. I had myself hoisted up onto a Hollywood billboard (and duct-taped to it) to promote my comedy special, scaled a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot construction crane (and got thrown in jail for it) to protest SeaWorld, and climbed nearly nineteen thousand feet up a mountain in Peru (with a bunch of YouTube stars) to prove I wasnt a dick. Yeah, dude, Im fun.

I know: None of this is making a compelling case for me as Americas next great self-help guru. Shit, I can barely help myself, so should I really be dishing out advice to anyone else? My life in sobriety has been about as turbulent a roller-coaster ride as it was before I got clean, but as I started thinking about that roller-coaster ride, I realized that if you looked hard and in the right places, there were enough little nuggets of wisdom to be found to suggest Ive actually learned some valuable shit from my lifetime of terrible decisions.

I dont want to overstate the usefulness of this book: Its still, like, ninety percent tales of reckless abandon and (often criminal) stupidity. But that leaves a solid ten percent that might actually help some people in how they think about their lives, about growing older, and about whether or not doing snow angels in flaming rocket fuel on their living room floor is a good idea. (Spoiler alert: Its definitely not.)

Ill give you an example of what Im talking about. A few years ago, I was in bad shape. Now, if you know anything about me and my history, this will be about the least surprising sentence youll read in this book. So let me be a little more specific. This was 2013. Id been sober for about five years by then. I wasnt facedown, lifeless and bloody, on a patch of pavement after drunkenly throwing myself off a balcony to impress some girl. (That was 1995.) I wasnt laid up in a hospital bed after setting myself on fire. (That couldve been 1997 or 2017.) I wasnt even in jail. (That could have been so many dates that I wont bother to list them all here.) Yet I was still in very bad shape.

At the particular moment that I want to zoom in on, I was having sex in El Salvador, whichI knowdoesnt actually sound all that bad. But Id been engaging in a lot of risky sex that year, for reasons I promise Ill get into later on. There was sex with lots of strangers, some of whom I knew just enough about to know that having sex with them could potentially be very unhealthy. Plus, I was nearly forty at the time. Its one thing to be a twenty-three-year-old dude trying to fuck everything that moves. Thats kind of what twenty-three-year-old dudes do. But by this point, I was quickly becoming that sad middle-aged loser who is the last one to realize what a sad middle-aged loser he is becoming. After each of these encounters, Id feel awful and filled with self-loathing, yet it wouldnt be long before Id be balls-deep in another one. After a particularly troubling one of these couplings, I knew I had to do something about it. Thats when I flew to El Salvador to surf, meditate, read, get my mind right, and most important,