Part 35 (2/2)

Roseanne: Always.

Judd: Even into like high school?

Roseanne: Oh, yeah. He'd walk over and smack me upside the head for whatever. I used to bite my nails a lot-I learned it from my dad, who bit his nails to where there was no f.u.c.king nail at all and he couldn't bend his fingers and he's like this all the time, just like anxiety, you know. And so I'd sit there biting my nails and he'd look at me and he'd go, ”Stop f.u.c.king biting your f.u.c.king fingernails.”

Judd: Because he loves you.

Roseanne: I'd be like, ”Well, you're biting yours.” And then he'd laugh. But sometimes he wouldn't. You never knew when it was coming. He'd sneak up behind you while you're biting your nail and crack you in the back of the head so hard that your knuckles would go straight up your nose and stuff. He hit me in the head constantly. He'd hit us all in the head. And hard, too.

Judd: We can't get our kids to do anything.

Roseanne: Maybe because we don't hit them.

Judd: Did you go to therapy and try to fix yourself, to learn how to not do it to your kids?

Roseanne: Yeah, but by then I had already done it.

Judd: To your first few kids?

Roseanne: Yeah. So then I'd correct it. You go to each one of them and let them curse you out and say all the s.h.i.+t that they want to say to you. And just go, ”Oh, honey, I did it and I'm sorry.” That's hard.

Judd: And how do they do after that?

Roseanne: Thank G.o.d, they are all functional and brilliant, creative people.

Judd: Well, almost no parents do that. Own up to their mistakes.

Roseanne: It's the hardest thing.

Judd: My mom could never do that. Well, right before she died, very briefly she said she was sorry for anything she might have done wrong. But for the most part-I once begged my mother to go to therapy and then sent her to my therapist. When she came back, I said, ”How did it go?” And she said, ”He told me that I'm right about everything.”

Roseanne: That's a good one.

Judd: We have to have those conversations sometimes with our kids, where we say, you know, ”We're not perfect people. We make mistakes and we have issues.” And we try to explain what they are as they're happening. Like, ”This is my issue and maybe that's why I did that. Sorry.”

Roseanne: Well, I took all the s.h.i.+t off my kids because I knew they needed to say it. I was lucky enough to be able to say it to my parents, too, and do some healing.

Judd: And it somehow got you here. That's the hard thing, too, which is: If your childhood didn't happen, nothing else would have happened.

Roseanne: I don't know about that. My shrink says, ”Don't say you're funny because of abuse; it's in spite of.” But my whole thing is, like, I've had severe mental illness my whole life. A devastating, dissociative ident.i.ty disorder-MPD, it used to be called. I had to heal from that, and that was like fifteen years of intense daily therapy. I look back and it's f.u.c.king crazy. It's nothing you can explain to people. You can't explain to people waking up in a mental inst.i.tution in Dallas, Texas, with a shrink screaming in your face, ”You don't have a p.e.n.i.s!” I mean, it's like, how are you going to- Judd: Were you high school age?

Roseanne: No, I was in my forties. It's real deep mental illness s.h.i.+t, man. But I got over it. Not over it, but I live with it.

Judd: Where do you think it comes from?

Roseanne: I think both of my parents and my grandparents were divided people, too. I mean, who's going to live through the Holocaust and not be f.u.c.ked up? I can't blame my parents. I had a good teacher, too. I had a good rabbi. He's on the other side now, too, but he helped me put it in perspective and that was all while I was doing pretty deep therapy and I just put it all back together, all those fragments which I kind of remade the world in my mind so that it made sense. It's like, you know, this is h.e.l.l.

Judd: What is h.e.l.l?

Roseanne: This planet.

Judd: Can you experience reality with MPD? Do you still experience reality where you feel like different sides of your personality are handling different situations?

Roseanne: Less than in the past. I used to never sleep more than three hours a night because I always was-you know, the whole comic thing was a big thing in my head. The comic, the writer who did stand-up. That was a separate state and I'd just get into it and, f.u.c.k, I don't want to know anything else. I'd neglect my health and my life. Once it started, there was no f.u.c.king way out. It was too much. Your head's like-you have no balance at all.

Judd: Because getting successful and being a performer, it feels like safety, but it's a safety that you can't maintain because you're abandoning everything else to achieve it.

Roseanne: You can't ever be how you are. It's like, Oh you've got to do these interviews, you have to go talk to the press and stuff-which is a scary thing.

Judd: They want to set you off.

Roseanne: They do, because they're just evil.

Judd: And you will go off if you have things to say.

Roseanne: Yeah, and that took me a while. That's what I wanted to do. Plus I have Tourette's.

Judd: How does that show itself?

Roseanne: I have to be the one who barks out what I had conceived as the thing that must be heard. And sometimes I didn't even f.u.c.king believe it, but, you know, in my head it was the perfect state of freedom. I have to say it. Because I have all that Jew Holocaust s.h.i.+t, you know. I mean when I used to play Barbies with my Mormon neighbor friend, it was always, ”Oh, we're going to go on a date. Ken's taking us out and we're going with Ken on a date.” And I was like, ”We're parachuting behind enemy lines to save the Jews.” That's how I played Barbies. It was just otherly.

Judd: Were you doing stand-up before you were married?

Roseanne: No, I had three kids when I first started stand-up.

Judd: Who did you see doing stand-up who made you think, I have to find the courage to get up and do this?

Roseanne: When I was little, my dad and I would watch Ed Sullivan together. I saw all those comics on Ed Sullivan. I saw Myron Cohen. My grandmother loved him.

Judd: Alan King.

Roseanne: Alan King, oh my G.o.d. And Jackie Mason, Jack E. Leonard, and Leonard Barr-my dad said maybe we're related to him. And then I saw Richard Pryor and that was it.

Judd: So you're a housewife and it's floating around the back of your head somewhere that it would be great to do this?

Roseanne: I always knew since I was three. When I was little, that was one thing that I was told in a vision: I was going to have my own show when I grew up. And it's going to be funny and it's going to be like Danny Kaye, who was another one of my idols.

Judd: So you always had a vision- Roseanne: I was always into TV. I knew I could get in the business somehow and find a place. I don't think I thought of what I could accomplish in the larger sense of it.

Judd: So in your head you knew it was going to happen and then you're having kids. At some point, you have to make the move to do it. What was the trigger?

Roseanne: I was a c.o.c.ktail waitress and this guy-I got tips because I made them laugh, plus you had to have half your a.s.s hanging out. I made them laugh so they'd give me big tips and this one guy one time, he said, ”Hey, you're so funny you should go down to this comedy club downtown.” And I was like BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG. It was literally like that. And so I'm like, ”Okay, where is it?” And he's like, ”It's the Comedy Works in Larimer Square in Denver.” So I go down there and I watch all the comics. And I went home to write my five minutes of material-and then I just kept perfecting it. That took a f.u.c.king year.

Judd: That's incredible.

Roseanne: It was almost a year and then I went down there and did my five minutes. I look back on it now and I'm like, it was pretty b.a.l.l.sy that I said the things I said. They immediately banned me and said don't ever come back here.

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