Part 5 (1/2)

I have only really learned to take care of myself properly recently, over a decade after I first found out about my condition. I spent too many years thinking I knew best, paying attention to my mind and not my body. The symptoms of my disease had been there long before I was diagnosed; I'd just gotten used to them. I'd get tired, I'd get moody, I had pains in my legs and headaches-but wasn't that normal for someone living the life of a stand-up comedian? I never thought drinking was a problem because I didn't bother to learn how much sugar was in vodka and champagne and beer. Ask any doctor or any diabetic; drinking was the worst thing I could have been doing. All that liquor put my blood sugar on a roller-coaster and seriously stressed my organs. I'm telling you, a couple of vodkas and juice to a diabetic is like freebasing c.o.ke to a normal person. It really sends you up and down. At the time I liked the feeling, I was wiling out. I just thought that's what everybody felt when they were drunk. What I've realized since is that I probably had no problems with the disease as a young man because I was an athlete. If drinking is one of the worst things a diabetic can do besides eating a whole jar of honey or drinking a bottle of maple syrup, then regular, vigorous exercise is the best thing he can do. All that training kept my condition from hurting me, until I stopped. Then the symptoms started to creep into my life.

During those three or four years after I left The Tracy Morgan Show, I almost slipped into a diabetic coma twice-I got real close. What I didn't know is that most people who go into a diabetic coma never come out. I don't remember much of those days because I was so sick that I had to be hospitalized and stabilized with IV medications for several days. By that point I had started to give myself insulin injections every day, and I'd throw in a few extra shots when I'd start to feel sick. Since I was drinking every night, a lot of times I couldn't keep track; I'd pa.s.s out and be in pretty bad shape in terms of blood sugar by the time I woke up. I thought all I needed to do was be regular with my shots, but as I know now, it just doesn't work that way.

It really caught up to me in 2007, during the second season of 30 Rock. That was the first time I ever took my health seriously. I came clean to the doctors about my drinking and how I'd been using the shots, and they were amazed that I was even alive. Once I understood what I'd been doing, I was amazed too. I wasn't malnourished in the traditional, Red Cross sense, but the way I was living, I was starving my body on the inside. During the last half of that season I got worse and worse, until my immune system broke down and I ended up with pneumonia. I had a high fever and I could hardly breathe. I finally went to the hospital, where my doctors found that the A1C level in my hemoglobin was 18 percent and had been for some time. A normal person's is typically between 4 and 6 percent; acceptable levels for a diabetic are between 6 and 8. My level was so high I should have been dead. I'll tell you how I managed to stay alive: adrenaline. It couldn't last forever, but like a soldier in battle, it kept me going during my touring years and especially once we started 30 Rock.

Getting that sick was a sign from G.o.d that I had to get my health together-and I listened. I'm just glad it wasn't too late. I also understood that I had to change my behavior. You're probably aware that I got into trouble for a few DUIs during those years. I did it right-I got fitted with an ankle bracelet and everything. They call it a SCRAM, which is pretty funny, because you ain't going nowhere with that thing on. My first DUI happened in Los Angeles in December 2005, and that incident got me strapped with probation. I went to this hot karaoke night with my boy Strong and got really f.u.c.ked up because karaoke is just my thing. You've got to hear me, I'm telling you, I've got soul. I'm Jimmy Morgan's son-what do you expect? I do everything when I karaoke: throw on some Prince, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson-I'll kill you with my voice. So I had myself a good time until they closed-which, being L.A., was too d.a.m.n early anyway-and I got ready to head home.

”Tray,” my boy said, ”let me drive you home.”

”I got it, dude,” I said. ”I got it.”

”I'm telling you, man, this is L.A. Let me drive you home.”

”What you talkin' about, man? I know where I am.”

”I'm telling you, dude, this is not New York. Don't f.u.c.k around. Let me drive you home.”

”Nah, man, I got this.”

I got into my Jaguar and got the f.u.c.k out of there, and as I drove home, the police started following me, probably right out of the parking lot. I wouldn't have known because I was enjoying my music and trying to keep the car on the road. When they pulled me over, they got me out of the car-I'm sure I smelled like a one-man club-and asked me to take a sobriety test.

”Please walk along the line, sir.”

”Okay, Officer. I'm happy to.”

I saw two lines, so I did what I thought was right: I walked both of them, one right after the other.

”Sir, what are you doing?”

”You ain't going to trick me! I'm walking both of these motherf.u.c.kers. I know how you ask those trick questions.”

”Sir, will you consent to a Breathalyzer test?”

”h.e.l.l yeah I will. I only had one beer like two hours ago.”

They brought that thing over to me and I blew on it and sparks flew out the motherf.u.c.ker. That's how drunk I was. They took me in, and when I got out I went right to the airport and got on the first plane out of there. By the time I was halfway across the country that s.h.i.+t was all over the news. Like I said, I ended up getting probation for that incident.

Probation didn't slow me down any, nor did it quiet my enthusiasm for either drinking or driving, which are two great appet.i.tes that don't go great together. I got back to New York and kept living out loud like I'd been doing. I definitely drove after having a few drinks, which was stupid, but I didn't have any problems again until November 2006, when I was arrested in New York for another DUI. That night I went to New York Giant Michael Strahan's birthday party. I was separated from Sabina by then, and I'd taken this Italian girl to the party with me, but she got on my nerves because she thought she was all that. So I barked on her at the party for acting that way, and she left. I'm convinced that she called the cops on me and told them that I was drinking and driving. I left there with my cousin and got on the West Side Highway, where they followed me from 27th Street all the way to 150th Street, where I was going to drop my boy off-and that's when they pulled me over. They weren't even in a cop car; they were in an undercover car disguised like a yellow cab. I wasn't even sure what was happening when they put those red and blue lights on behind me.

”What's this s.h.i.+t?” I said. ”We got Starsky and Hutch behind us.”

Once I realized the gravity of the situation, I hoped there was some way out of it, because another DUI when you're already on probation-that's a whole lot of trouble. Since the officers recognized me, I hoped that they were fans and that there was some way out.

”Officer, I'm going to be honest,” I said to the guy. ”I was drinking beer at a club, but I'm fine and I'm almost home. Can you give me a pa.s.s this time?”

”We can't do that, Mr. Morgan. Step out of the car, please.”

By the time they got me to the precinct to book me it was already on TMZ.

I could have been sent to jail in L.A. for violating my probation in New York, but I was lucky enough to have a relatively clean record and a good lawyer. By the time we were through with all of the court appearances, I ended up pleading guilty to a DUI misdemeanor charge and agreed to undergo supervised treatment by a doctor and stay out of legal trouble for six months. I had to do community service too, and wear one of those alcohol-sniffing ankle bracelets.

But I wasn't going to let it bring my work schedule to a halt. I shot all of First Sunday with Ice Cube with that bracelet on, and went back to do most of the second season of 30 Rock with it on too. As I said, this was the year that my health really hit rock bottom. One side effect of diabetes is that flesh wounds, like cuts and bruises, do not heal well. Cuts don't close up, and if they're not kept covered and treated right, they get infected and can become really dangerous. Diabetics have inefficient blood flow and an imbalance of the components that make up healthy blood, so something like a heavy bracelet on the ankle can do all kinds of damage, which it did to me. I started to develop a wound underneath it almost right away, and it got worse over time. My ankle swelled, and since the circulation was cut off by the bracelet, I could have developed gangrene in my foot-another hazard for diabetics. If the gangrene gets out of control, it can do so much damage that the foot may have to be amputated. This happens to diabetics more often than you'd think, and my ankle was definitely heading in that direction.

I tried to play it off as much as I could. I made jokes about the ankle bracelet, saying I was getting it blinged out by Jacob the Jeweler. And I made lots of public appearances during that time, at clubs, on Letterman and everything. It was a crazy thing to do because the way those bracelets work is that if you have alcohol vapors on your skin, a signal is sent to the police station and you get arrested. I'd be out at a club, not drinking, just hanging out, telling everyone in my booth to step off with their apple martinis so I wouldn't end up downtown. I was sitting on the couch one day, trying to put some ointment behind the bracelet to help protect my open wound. My son Tracy sat down and just stared at me like I was stupid.

”What's up, Tray?” I asked him.

”This is not cool, Dad,” he said.

”You mean this cut I got back there? No, it's not.”

”That's not what I mean, Dad. What if I start drinking and driving just like you? What happens if I get into an accident and get killed or kill some other people? What happens then? I'm going to be seventeen soon, you know.”

That did it, right there, right then. Two DUIs and the threat of jail didn't do it and ten years of diabetes so bad that I might have lost my foot weren't enough either. But my son looking at me, disappointed, and drawing a very clear line between my lack of leaders.h.i.+p as a parent and the effect it could have on him as a son got right through my thick skull. I cut drinking out of my life-first gradually, and then, after my health deteriorated later that year, altogether, forever. It really wasn't hard for me physically or mentally once I decided to do it. I didn't have to go to rehab because I never had a drinking problem in the first place. You might laugh when you read that, but it's true. Like I said, I knew it then and I know it now-I'm not addicted to alcohol. How can I say this? Because I never drank at home. I only drank socially. I'd go out and I'd want to get liquored up because everyone else was liquored up. That's the thing about me; I reflect whatever I see back at the world. If someone comes at me crooked, my reaction is to come back at him crooked. If I was in a room where everyone was drunk, I was going to get drunk too. When I was on SNL, I drank big every Sat.u.r.day night because that was how we did it. Those after parties turned me into a social alcoholic, and I didn't even know it.

Sabina was great to hang in there and deal with most of my wild times, but those legal troubles pushed our relations.h.i.+p over the edge. I'd been misbehaving for too long, and that drinking s.h.i.+t on top of it would have been too much for anybody. Even Mother Teresa would have kicked my a.s.s out of the house by then. I was always in the papers for doing crazy s.h.i.+t during those few bad years, and Sabina got real tired of hearing about it. She couldn't help me either because it was my trip to deal with-just like Martin had warned me-and I usually wasn't home under her watch when I was getting into trouble. She stood by me, but Sabina's no doormat. She eventually got fed up, and once a woman is fed up, there's nothing you can do to regain her love. If she hates you, that's fine, you've still got a chance. f.u.c.k that; if she hates you, you're still in! But when she's fed up, it's over, because indifference is something else. Once that love turns, believe me, you're done. I know this from watching my mother and my father. When a good woman's love goes cold, it never comes back. That's when you've really got something to cry about.

You want to know the hardest part about finding love? When you get it, you want it to last so bad that you try to hold on to it even when you both know it's over. No one is to blame. It's the same reason you still root for a team that won the champions.h.i.+p when you were a kid, even if since then they've sucked year after year after year. That's why New York still has Knicks fans, and why I'm one of them. I will always love the Knicks; I don't care if they don't see the playoffs again until 2026. When they do, I'll be courtside.

When we humans find something that makes us feel whole and connected, we don't want to let that s.h.i.+t go, no matter what it is. Even when everything is telling us we're wrong, even when everything in the relations.h.i.+p is pain, we hold out in the hope that we'll get that feeling back one more time. That's us, that's human. That's love.

Sabina and I got together in 1987 and we raised three kids. We were beyond best friends and lovers-we were each other's everything. It hadn't been bad all along; we hadn't been fooling ourselves. But things did start to go bad around 2003, and we separated in 2007. That break-up-and-make-up s.h.i.+t? We'd had four years of that. If you think about it, after twenty years together, that's the least we could do. So after being apart for a year, we tried it out again, but it didn't work. We finalized our split for good in 2008.

I'm gonna say something to all you people in relations.h.i.+ps. Listen to me: If you feel like something is wrong, do not bother holding on-break up now. Don't expect anything to get better and don't expect people to change. If you're broken up, there's a reason for it and you should stay that way. If you get back together, there's a d.a.m.n good chance it's just because you're having a hard time saying goodbye. If you don't have kids or some other reason to stay together, get out and move on with your lives.

I had to do it, but I sure as h.e.l.l didn't want to. I had to give Sabina her life back. Like I said, it took us about four years to finally let each other go. At the time of this writing, we've only been apart officially for one year, unofficially for two. Up until the moment I signed those papers, I wasn't sure it was even going to happen. But that's love, and without it we humans are nothing.

All this talk about love and drama reminds me of someone from my past: Monique, my girlfriend for three years who lived out in Brooklyn when I was a kid. I was seventeen, and she was my first love, my puppy love. She was older than me, and she taught me things. Man, me and Mo ... we had some times. Until she left me for an older guy whose f.u.c.king name I can't remember. That's enough about Mo. I mention her only because she truly broke my heart and taught me that nothing is forever. What did Mo get, a few lines in my book? Yeah, that's a few too many.

Looking back on this period, I wish I could fix some of the damage that was done to my relations.h.i.+p with my three sons. I wish I could have been home more, earning money locally so I would have been around for them. Before I got into show business, when my boys were little, I would take them to the park every day and do everything a dad should do. Once I got on the road I wasn't there every afternoon playing baseball or basketball with them like I used to, and they were old enough to realize I wasn't the dad they'd had when they were younger. I tried to make up for it when I got home, but that wasn't often enough.

Once I got busy, I got busy. I provided for them like never before and managed to keep them out of the kind of life I barely survived, but I don't know if they'll ever understand it. To them I'm sure it came down to this: Our dad is not around. I hope that they know how much I love them and that the only reason I wasn't around was because I had to provide. I'm sorry for all those days I didn't spend with them. I can never get them back, and no one besides my sons realizes that more than me. Maybe someday soon or when they're a bit older we'll be able to talk about it all and they'll see it differently than they do now. In the meantime, I wish we were closer. It's harder now that I'm separated from their mother.

My wife and my sons were my whole world for my entire adult life. That's why, even once I knew it was done between Sabina and me, I still didn't really understand all that I was losing. I had let alcohol rule my life, and I paid the price: I nearly destroyed my health and I drove my family away. I was the kind of drunk who was a completely different man than he was when he was sober.

Everyone knew it, and that guy I turned into had a name: Chico Divine. Chico was a motherf.u.c.ker who came out of the depths of my mind and took over my body after about three drinks. He was definitely my dark side, and he was 100 percent hood. Chico was a wild card-you never knew what you were gonna get when he came out, you just knew it was going to be a party. It might be the kind of party where everyone cried and Chico was the only one who had fun, but it was a party regardless. When Chico came out, somebody might get hurt and there was a good chance someone's sister might get pregnant too. Chico could be verbally abusive and was always loud and obnoxious, but he was also wild, fun, and likeable-even lovable to some. Chico was the kind of guy who had to take his s.h.i.+rt off when he danced because he couldn't find the rhythm of the music trapped in all them clothes. Chico was that crazy dude you see hanging from the rafters at the club on, like, Wednesday at six o'clock in the morning.

After a while, I realized it was either him or me, because there was no way the two of us could share one body peacefully. So I had to figure out what to do with Chico. He wouldn't move out, because he lived in here too, so I had to put that G to work for me. He could stay if he earned his keep, so I started to bring that Chico energy out onstage, and now he's my vehicle in the club. Now he drives me to and through my stand-up. But back then, he just drove me crazy. In my last few years at Sat.u.r.day Night Live, Chico showed up every week at the after party. He definitely became the president of my fan club and my road manager during those years. When I went out on the road, Chico always did a late-night set, no matter what town we were in or what room we were in. And once we'd made it back to our hotel, Chico would usually stay around to work out new material even if I was the only one still awake! Chico would go out with at least thirty people, and he made sure that every single one of them got f.u.c.ked up. One time Chico got so drunk he threw up in the club Suede in New York, right there in his booth-I think that one made Page Six. My boys had to carry me out. And I had to be on Wendy Williams's radio show four hours after that! The best or worst part of that story was that Chico threw up right on the foot of the lady who was the William Morris Agency's publicity director. There she was, this tall, well-dressed white lady, and Chico just threw up right on her shoes.

I somehow got through Wendy Williams's show, but it all got worse when I got home. I walked in my house and went right to the cat's litter box and took a s.h.i.+t and p.i.s.sed all over the motherf.u.c.ker. My ex-wife woke up and found me there, still drunk, trying to squat in that thing so I didn't make a mess. She just shook her head. She was laughing, but she just shook her head. And it wasn't the last time I got caught like that! Man, that used to be a problem. I'd get drunk and the litter box would seem more appealing than the G.o.dd.a.m.ned bathroom. Chico did all kinds of s.h.i.+t.

Then there was one night in 2004 when Chico ended up at Prince's house. It was the night before the Grammy Awards and my joke writer Bradley Lewis and I were going to Clive Davis's famous black-tie pre-Grammy party. We decided to start with some pregame partying at about five o'clock. We ended up running into Method Man, Redman, and the RZA, and we started going hard, drinking and smoking and having a good time. Sometime during that pre-party, Chico came out, and he decided to start calling Redman by his government name, Reggie n.o.ble. All of a sudden, Red goes from getting high and having a good time to staring at me, all tense in the face. He stayed like that for about ten minutes as I dug myself out. All those nights I'd spent in front of tough audiences came in handy-I did whatever I could to soothe his aggression. I reminded him that he'd called himself Reggie n.o.ble in one of his songs, and then I just ga.s.sed him up real good until we were boys again. I had to do that because Redman is one big dude and even Chico didn't want to get into it with him.

The next stop was Clive's party, but on the way we got pulled over by the cops because, to be honest, we should not have been driving. The cop was black, though, and somehow he just let us go. He recognized me and all that, but as I can tell you from experience, that does not mean s.h.i.+t. Man, where was that guy when I really needed him? Clive's party was held in a banquet room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and was all formal, with finely dressed people and well-appointed tables. We rolled in drunk as h.e.l.l. I said hi to Robin Williams, who was sitting behind us. And then, during Fantasia's performance, I went to the bathroom, and in the hallway outside, Chaka Khan tried to tongue-kiss me. I'm serious-Chaka just leaned in and went for it, and her breath smelled like Bacardi and franks. My boys didn't believe me, so when she came back from the bathroom I pointed at her and said, ”See! There she is! She just tried to kiss me!” After that I remember going over and saying hi to Jay-Z and Beyonce and running into Stephen Belafonte, who is married to Mel B from the Spice Girls. Stephen told us about this party up at Prince's house, and he rolled with us up there.

We showed up at Prince's place in the Pacific Palisades and rolled through the front gate with the huge Prince symbol above it. The doors opened and there's Prince, in silver and red silk pajamas, no shoes, playing with his band on a stage by the pool. He's got his pool packed end to end with purple roses floating on top of the water-looked like a carpet of motherf.u.c.king roses over the motherf.u.c.ker. Prince is jumping from instrument to instrument; he's got a full band, all of that. I ended up playing pool with Mekhi Phifer and a whole bunch of guys and everyone was having a great time. We're at a house party and a Prince concert at the same time! Can you think of anything better than that?

At one point I walked outside to find Damon Dash just destroying Paris Hilton, which I thought was really funny. Everyone stopped what they were doing and watched, because he was laying into her like I think so many people wanted to do right about then, in 2004. He was in her face, saying, ”You don't do s.h.i.+t! What the f.u.c.k you do, anyway? What are you famous for?” He was crus.h.i.+ng her, just grilling her in the head. Dame had just had enough of her being everywhere he looked, and for no good reason at all. Everybody had to love Dame right then for doing that. It was much deserved. She put her little dog in her purse and stormed the f.u.c.k out of there real quick.

This party went on all night-booze was flowing, liquor was good, and the music was off the meat rack! Before you know it, it's six-thirty or seven the next morning and everyone's gone. The only guests left are me, my boy Bradley, and these two girls we were talking to. We were sitting, chilling on a couch, just the four of us, and I looked up and Prince was standing there at the front door with his wife.