10/25/2013 In Podcast Episodes
Johnny O
Episode notes:
You can connect with Johnny on his Facebook page.
Episode Transcript:
Paul Gilmartin: Welcome to Episode 138 with my guest Johnny O. I’m Paul Gilmartin. This is The Mental Illness Happy Hour, an hour or two of honesty about all the battles in our heads. From medically diagnosed conditions, past traumas, sexual confusion to everyday compulsive, negative thinking. This show’s not meant to be a substitute for professional mental counseling. It’s not a doctor’s office. It’s more like a waiting room that doesn’t suck. The website for this show is mentalpod.com. Mentalpod is also the Twitter name you can follow me at. Please go check out the website. You can join the forum, you can take a survey, you can see how other people filled out surveys. You can support the show. And I’m sure there’s other-- you can buy a t-shirt, you can buy a coffee mug, and you can shop through our Amazon search portal. What did I want to share? Oh, we have a winner for the monthly donor/transcriber cutting board raffle. Kelly Price won. The number that I had picked was 105, and she came closest with the number 99. So thank you, Kelly, for being a monthly donor. I’ll be sending that out to her. The other thing I-- oh, I wanted to share this with you guys. Those of you that are regular listeners-- actually I’m going to back up even one step further and welcome our new listeners that may have found us through iTunes. iTunes was nice enough to put us on the homepage this last week, and I know we’ve been getting a lot of new downloads. So I’d encourage those of you that are new to the podcast and want to know what episodes to listen to, if you go to the website and do a search on listener favorites, there are two lists of the top 10 episodes as voted by the listeners from 2011 and 2012. That’d be a good place to start. I had an interesting week this last week. Overall, I’ve been feeling really good. I’m in the woodshop, and etc, etc. But as you regular listeners know, I have a very complicated relationship with my mom, cut contact with her about a year and a half ago. Some thoughts and feelings and memories surfaced that I had pushed down for a long time, and has just felt false to be around her. I’ve really enjoyed the time away, and she’s been sending me letters. I stopped responding about six months ago, because even the letters were starting to make me sad and bum me out, and it felt like there was manipulation and throwing other people under the bus. She sent me something recently, which was a clipping from a reading. In a nutshell – I won’t read you the whole thing – but in a nutshell, it basically said, “Your depression and all your issues come from your dad being an alcoholic. That’s what made you shut down. But you’re shutting other people out, and I’m one of them. It’s all in your head. I haven’t done anything wrong.” I just felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. But I was like, I got to a place a while ago, maybe a year ago, where I just was like, “This person is never going to change. She has her own issues, and I just need to accept her for how she is, whether I have contact with her or not.” But it just, I feel like I’m dealing with an octopus, and every time I pin one arm down, seven more are coming at me. It pissed me off and made me sad that she’s saying this is all in my head. So [laughs] as you regular listeners know, the way that I play ice hockey is a barometer of how I’m feeling spiritually. So I went to play a game the other night, and it’s so funny, because I said to my wife-- we were going to dinner beforehand, and I said, “Oh, it’s a full moon. You know somebody’s gonna lose their shit tonight.” Having no idea I would be the one that lost my shit that night. So I’m playing in this game, and it’s really close. We’re up by one goal, and there’s like two minutes left. The puck comes into our end, and this guy and I are battling for it. He grabs my arm and he pulls it around his waist and falls down. In other words, he makes it look like I’ve taken him down. And sure enough, I get a penalty for it. I saw red. I was just like… So I sit in the penalty box, and I can’t wait to get out to confront him about just what a cheap fuck is he for doing that. So I skate up to him, and I was like, “Man, that was really cheap,” and he starts talking shit. Like, “Yeah? Well maybe you should’ve stopped the two goals I scored on you.” And I just lost my shit. I’m challenging to him a fight, and I’m calling him a cunt. I like, too, how when people tap into my mom’s shit, how I always call them a cunt, but I never even realized until literally an hour ago that that’s why. I don’t call people cunts any other time. But I wouldn’t let it go. We got off the ice. I ran to catch up with him, calling him a cunt. And then accosted him in front-- didn’t punch him, but I took my helmet and my gloves off in front of his locker room. Everybody around me’s going, “Paul, let it go. Let it go.” His teammates are going, “Dude, what’s your problem?” I was so fucking angry. After I showered and got dressed, the rage had gone away. I went over and I poked my head in their locker room and I said, “Hey, I just want to apologize for losing my shit. I was just really wound up.” The guy shook my hand and his teammates were all, and everybody was really nice. One of the things that I have learned in the last ten years is when I do something really stupid or childish, it is to find someplace quiet to go to afterwards and go, “What was it that triggered this?” It almost [laughs] always has something to do with my mom or something to do with my dad. I got kind of quiet, and I looked at it, and I was like, “You know what, I think what really bothered me was that I was being blamed for something that I didn’t do. And that letter that I’d gotten from my mom was basically her saying, “This is all your issue. I’ve done nothing wrong.” I think it tapped into that. I’d like to think that I’ve processed all of this shit and I’m moving on, but I clearly clearly haven’t. I think it helps to talk about it, because I can’t figure it out when it’s just bouncing around back and forth in my brain. But I’m having a great week. I interviewed some great guests, and I really like this interview that I did with Johnny O, which I’m going to air in a couple of minutes. You know who I was thinking who would be a great guest to get, but I don’t know how I would go about it. But I would love to interview a serial killer. Not an [laughs] active serial killer. That wouldn’t be too much fun. “As you were pushing me into the van, what were you feeling in your body when you saw me wet myself?”
[intro plays]
PG: I’m here with my friend, Johnny O, who I’ve known for probably ten years. When I first got sober, you were one of the guys in the support group that I sadly looked up to.
Johnny Olsen: Hopefully I haven’t disappointed.
PG: [laughs] I’ve always enjoyed the honesty and the humor that you bring. I remember a moment – I think I was about six months sober – and you and Gary were across the room. You guys were sharing some sort of inside joke, and you were laughing and I remember being jealous. Because I didn’t have those kind of friendships yet. I would eventually, but that was a big attraction for me. I’ve never said that to you, and I just wanted to thank you for being--
JO: I appreciate that.
PG: --somebody that made it feel like home and something that could be fun for me.
JO: Right. You were actually the inside joke.
PG: [laughs]
JO: Since we’re getting rigorously honest. Did you see the size of Paul’s ass?
PG: Do you like to be referred to as former crackhead? [laughs] How do you introduce yourself?
JO: Retired carpet inspector? That one?
PG: Retired carpet inspector.
JO: Yeah, I had quite a few.
PG: For those of you that--
JO: Window blind repair. “Johnny, you’ve been over there for four hours, what’s the--?” “No, there’s something going on over here.”
PG: The SWAT team’s moving in. For people that aren’t familiar with the latter stages of--
JO: Stimulants.
PG: Stimulant psychosis. It’s peering out the blinds, peering out the peephole, convinced the SWAT team is coming in.
JO: Can I tell a brief--?
PG: Absolutely.
JO: Okay, so I--
PG: That’s why you’re on.
JO: Okay, so I’m convinced that-- I’m at this recovery kind of house. I’m out towards Pasadena, and I’m living in this place. I’m convinced that if I can drive to the top of Mount Wilson, which is here in Los Angeles, and it’s where they’ve got a camera for the news. “Let’s go to the Mount Wilson cam!” That’s always looking at all the smog and so forth coming into the Los Angeles basin. A lot of antennas up there. It’s a real high point. I was thinking, “If I could get up there and get my groove on, then it would be okay.” I’ll never forget--
PG: Even though you were living in a sober living, you weren’t sober at that point?
JO: No, no. Just because it says it in the name--
PG: [laughs]
JO: Just don’t let--
PG: It’s a suggestion.
JO: Yeah, I mean come on. No, I had actually relapsed, and I was coming in and out. But it was actually a good sober living. They kicked me out quickly, the first night that I didn’t show up. Which took a little while. It was a really nice place, too, in Pasadena. So I drove to the top of Mount Wilson, and I parked the car. Then I walked down this really steep hill. I knew that there was nobody anywhere near me. I took a blast, and I vividly – I mean, I would pass a polygraph – that as soon as I took this blast, I could hear dogs barking. Not like friendly dogs. You know, K-9 units, police K-9 “Woof woof woof!” looking for somebody. I heard shotguns, the “ch-ch” of the shotguns, and I heard radios, and I’m pretty sure there was a helicopter coming, too, at the time. Of course this was all imaginary at the time. But it was so real and so scary. That was at the point where I realized that I could probably be orbiting the earth solo and not be able to get away with it [laughs]. Spy satellites.
PG: Was that a moment of clarity for you? Or was that just another in a series of…?
JO: It was just another in a series. I mean it was just more of just like, wow, the experiments that didn’t work. I was convinced, “Of course I’ve got all the right answers to everything. I mean, you should come and ask me,” because I was happy to spread my wisdom with anybody that cared to ask. So I knew the answers to everything, and I was convinced that if I could just get up there, and I knew there was nobody around, that everything would be fine.
PG: You’d be able to use like a gentleman.
JO: Absolutely.
PG: You were a gentleman crackhead.
JO: Absolutely.
PG: Towards the end you were smoking in a top hat and tails.
JO: Exactly. That was all, though.
PG: [laughs] Let’s talk about what your childhood is like. Or, “is like”, you’re still a child.
JO: “Is like,” I know, at the tender age of 46. No, I left--
PG: You’ve been sober for how long now?
JO: January 1st ’97. So coming up on 17. It’s the end of October, so I’m coming up on 17. I take no credit for it. I take credit for getting out of the way and allowing support group and a god of my own understanding to step in and take the wheel. So growing up, I was youngest of six kids. Which, we call that Vatican roulette. I was born in New York out in Garden City out on Long Island, and I was there until I was about five. Then we moved to North Jersey to a town called Mahwah, which is about 20, 25 miles northwest of Manhattan. Pretty suburb-y kind of a deal. My dad drank a lot. I don’t think he was alcoholic.
PG: Just a heavy drinker.
JO: Some of the literature that we’ve got talks about a type of hard drinker who might die a few years before his time, but given a good enough reason, he can stop or moderate. My dad never missed a day of work. He made a good living. He worked as a lawyer. He’s a rager. Both my parents are still alive. My mom’s 88, my dad’s 87. They both live in the same house where I grew up in. So there was a lot of-- my dad kind of smacked us around a little bit because we got in trouble. I don’t think-- there was no such thing as-- not that it wasn’t child abuse, but back in 1970, your dad took off his belt and he smacked you. That was handling your business in 19-- there was no CPS and all of that stuff.
PG: And that was in the lobby of church on Sunday.
JO: Yeah, exactly. So it’s just handling your business.
PG: Especially with six kids.
JO: Oh yeah. I have abandonment issues being the youngest of six kids, and my parents, the whole family unit was intact. My mom was just tired at the end, you know what I mean? I got away with a lot of stuff. Nothing that really helped me out, either. “Hey Johnny, did you do your homework?” “Yeah.” Nothing got checked. But I always had this sort of abject fear of adults, especially men. Because everybody was my father, that rager. It wasn’t until I got sober that that fear really started to dissipate. The oddest thing, which was really quite a revelation to me, being such a scared, introverted kid. Because I’m no longer as scared and as introverted. People that see me on Facebook, they went to high school with me. I graduated high school with people that I was in kindergarten with. I stayed in the same-- which is quite a luxury. My fiancée moved around every six, eight different schools that she went to. They wouldn’t recognize me, who I am today, just because I’m--
PG: That shocks me to hear you say that you were introverted.
JO: Just scared. I was in a shell, I was in the tuck position. And it wasn’t until I got sober, because I remember when I was out there, when I was bottoming out out in the desert--
PG: Best place to bottom out, really.
JO: Absolutely. In the summer, too, of ’96. So when the low temperature is 99 at one in the morning, you know you’ve definitely got a winner.
PG: If you’re gonna do it, do it.
JO: Yeah, absolutely. I remember I saw a hustle done on me at the AMPM on Riverside and Lankershim.
PG: It’s like a 7-Eleven.
JO: Yeah. At the gas station. This kid came up to me, and he said, “I’m trying to make my way home to such-and-such. Can you give me--“ And I just remember thinking to myself, “That’s genius. That’s genius. Who doesn’t want to go home?” So that was my line.
PG: That became your line.
JO: Yeah, I’m like, “Hey, I’m trying to make my way home back to Pasadena.” I’ll never forget, there was a guy out in Palm Springs, and he said, “You show me a registration that says you live in Pasadena, and I’ll give you two bucks.” I showed him my registration, and he’s like, “Here’s your money.” I’ll never forget, the general public are pushovers. It wasn’t until I was backed against a corner where I really needed assert myself. It wasn’t like I was strong-arm robbing anybody. I was bumming money. Then I also did the universal sign that my car is broken down, and I put the hood up. Even though my line was that I was run out of gas.
PG: [laughs]
JO: But I knew the power of communication. If my car is over there, and I point to my car, and it’s just sitting there, nobody’s-- but if I put my hood up on the car, it says, “I’m broken down.” I’m a photographer and a visual, so I’m all about visuals. So even though I was technically run out of gas, which I kind of always was, because it got in the way of my using, I just remember thinking to myself, “Wow, I am a genius.” People would just be like-- and I remember--
PG: How much would you make a day doing that?
JO: Just enough to leave. I would put a few bucks in the tank and then go score. I remember one guy rolled his eyes, and he was like, “I don’t have any money. Here’s ten bucks.” I was just like, “Wow.” I remember there was this one family where I made 20 bucks. I got 5 from the backseat, 10 from the front seat, and another 5 from the driver.
PG: Were you just rubbing your hands together?
JO: And I’m just going, “The general public are pushovers. What was I so afraid of growing up?” It really shattered these-- I got sober at 30, so for 30 years this like, “Adults are scary. Don’t interact.” I heard a line, and I remember my dad later on when I was probably ten years sober or so. I went home, and my parents were getting up there in age. They’ve got money, but the yard is totally overgrown in their house. The shrubs are above the garage line on the house. It’s a two-story colonial. I went out there for a few weeks to just go be of service to my folks to do some yard work. It was around November time. I had to break out the chainsaw and stuff like that. I trimmed the hedges really great in the front. Then there was this one rhododendron in the front that I trimmed that apparently I wasn’t supposed to trim. My dad went off on me in a tirade for a solid five minutes, which seemed like five hours. “What the eff is wrong with you? How stupid--“
PG: You can say “fuck”.
JO: Okay, “How the fuck is stupid, that’s the stupidest fuck--“ Just going on and on about how stupid that I was, why did I cut that sh-- and I’ll never forget just the feeling. Here I am in the house that I grew up in since I’m five. I’m flash back to an eight-year-old boy.
PG: How long ago did this happen?
JO: This was 2007. So I’d been sober for ten years at the time. I just remember very small voice started in my head, and then it started vocalizing through my mouth. It said, “You don’t get to talk to me this way. You don’t get to talk to me--“ And I’ve learned-- I worked in the restaurant industry a lot as a waiter. I remember the one great people skill that I learned there was when people are yelling at you, if you whisper, it forces them to stop, because they can’t hear you. When they’re yelling at you, and you say, “Sir, hold on a second.” And if you start whispering to them, they have to bring it down. Because it also embarrasses them and shows them how loud they’re being. But it also forces them to be able to listen to you, and they have to stop talking for a minute if you’re whispering to them. Not super, but it just brings down the whole energy of the conversation.
PG: Actually now that I think of it, when I would be having a show with an unruly crowd, typically second show on Friday, I would get really quiet, and that would bring them down. But I never thought about that on a one-to-one interaction.
JO: Yeah, absolutely. I remember calling my mentor at the time. I kept just saying, “You don’t get to talk to me this way.” Then it started getting louder and louder and louder. I just turned around and I grabbed the car keys and I left. I just vacated the house. I just needed to exit that energy and just go decompress and make a few phone calls. I remember one of my other mentors that I called, this guy, and he said, “Alcoholics and drug addicts have the inability control the duration and intensity of an emotional state.”
PG: Say that one more time.
JO: “Alcoholics and drug addicts have the absolute inability to control the duration or intensity of an emotional state.”
PG: Their own emotional state.
JO: Yes. Which just “ding ding ding ding ding.” My dad, he was--
PG: Was he referring to your dad or you?
JO: My dad.
PG: Okay.
JO: Just freaking out--
PG: I gotcha.
JO: --for so long and so intense because I trimmed the hedges wrong.
PG: I love, too, that in a front lawn grown to the roof, that is--
JO: But there was one that was off in the front that was not part of next to the house that they liked. I don’t know. It was just one of those, it was a really eye-opening experience to also be able to stand up to my father. That was not in the cards. I’ll never forget. I’ve always been a struggling artist, and when I travel home, my dad would always give me 300 bucks, walking around money. When I would get there, he’d be like, “Here’s some,” and then when I’d left, he’d give me another couple hundred bucks or something like that. I was always grateful for it. Didn’t expect it. That had gone on for a couple of years that I had come out to visit, and the next-- because I’m debating whether or not I should leave or not, physically change my plane ticket and go back to Los Angeles. My one mentor said, “You’ll punish your mom by doing that. Your dad’s not gonna change. Why don’t you just stick it out and keep getting to a lot of support groups? Getting out there and doing what you need to do.” I’ll never forget: my dad walked into the bedroom the next morning. He handed me an envelope with $1,000 in cash. He said, “Sorry about yesterday.” And then he left. I just started to cry for my dad, because the best that he could do-- I don’t even think he said that he was sorry. Because I don’t think he’s really emotionally capable. That’s the best that my dad could do. I was so sad for him that he just knows to throw money at stuff. He has no other coping skills. He’s got no other-- he doesn’t know how to communicate his feelings. My dad had a really really difficult life growing up, his dad died early. So I know he’s got a ton of wreckage, too. So it’s not like he’s… But it was just one of those moments of clarity and sobriety of like, wow. Just really powerful. So growing up was not cakewalk. I had an older brother, he was 17 years old when I was born. He was off to college. He went to University of Virginia. I was still in diapers, and he was out of the house. So I never really knew him. We still talk, we talk on the phone, but he’s 17 years older than I am. And then I have four sisters. Which, that was challenging.
PG: How so?
JO: It really gave me some real great insight into women, as a result. I think I read – I always joke around – I read every issue of Cosmo from ’79 to ’89 that was left in the bathroom. I knew more about water retention, multiple orgasms, and heavy flow days than any ten-year-old should know. I was like, “Oh my god, I am behind the wall! This is some privied information.” My dad was out making money, wasn’t really around. Just had my sisters, it was just fight a lot and stuff. It was just really really weird. I just got lost in the shuffle a little bit. Like I said, abandonment issues just being lost in the shuffle. That stuff didn’t surface until I got sober of like, wow. Because I thought, abandonment issues, you needed to actually be abandoned and in a broken home or somebody died or this and that and the other. But sure enough, I can have dysfunction with stuff still being intact [laughs].
PG: It’s so interesting how we don’t realize that major stuff until we experience healthy relationships. Then we realize the absence of what was there, and that that can fuck us up or trigger issues that, then we can go, “Oh, okay. How can I control that now? When my dad yells at me, I can walk away instead of trying to change him.”
JO: Yeah, no. Fascinating.
PG: So let’s fast-forward then to the teenage years. Am I skipping over anything from childhood?
JO: No, not really. It was just really awkward and shy, just a shy kid. Teenage years, I started to play in a band. I learned how to play bass guitar in eighth grade or whatever and joined a band. That was a great escape for me, in music. That started to become a lot for me. I wasn’t a reader. I know a lot of peoples’ stories are that they got engrossed in books and that was their fantasy stuff. They would get out, be in a whole different place. I was massive ADHD to this day. People are like, “I just want to curl up with a good book,” is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
PG: Really?
JO: Yeah, I just--
PG: What’s the fantasy for you to deal with it when your anxiety or your ADHD is having its way?
JO: I do visual stuff. I tweak out on video games at home to this day.
PG: What are some of the favorites?
JO: Battlefield 3, of course. But I’m so extreme. So of course, you can’t just play the game, because you’re playing with 32 versus 32 of you. You’ve got 64 people in a game. You’re flying in a helicopter with a guy, and you’re not able to really communicate other than typing to the guy. That’s granted he speaks or understands English. So I’m on the voiceover IP, I’ve joined a clan. But the experience is so much better as a result, because you’ve got this whole group, and everybody’s actually doing something that focused rather than everybody running around like an ant farm.
PG: And probably there’s a feeling of the greater good, no matter how shallow and fantasy-like that is. It’s you’ve got a purpose for that moment.
JO: Absolutely. I can go for hours, because you can’t just log on for 45 minutes. You got to be able to go deep.
PG: I go until the hunger is so intense or my bladder’s going to explode.
JO: [laughs] Yeah, so I joined a band, and music was a bit of an escape. We played at a middle school in a town in Upper Saddle River. These girls were screaming. So we’re probably nineth-- I’m in nineth grade. My best friend, Greg Mayo, he’s in tenth grade, and the drummer was in tenth grade, too. I remember we played this middle school, and these girls were like scream-- it was like the Beatles. They were screaming, and we were like, “Oh my god.” It was just really weird, but awesome all in the same right. One of these girls tracked me down. Back in that day, when you lived in a different town and went to a different school, you might as well have lived in another country. Even though we really only lived about a mile away from each other. She lived in Upper Saddle River and I lived in Mahwah, but I lived right on the edge of Upper Saddle River. She got my number somehow and we started talking on the phone. I didn’t know what she looked like. We finally met up. So then this was my first girlfriend, and that went horribly well. Those 12-hour phone conversations where you’re nodding off, and like, “I need you.”
PG: [laughs]
JO: You’re trying to one-up each other. “I want you.” “No, I need you.” “I can’t live without--.” “No, you hang up first.” “Did you fall asleep?” “No, no, what makes you think--? I would never do that to you.” Just insane. So that didn’t go well. It went well for a time, and then it didn’t. Then we were breaking up.
PG: Had she found a shittier band to fall in love with?
JO: No, no. It was just getting too weird with us and just too intense. I’ll never forget, my sister Kathy told me as we were breaking up, she’s like, “I bet--“ and her name was Erin. She goes, “I bet you and Erin want to get married.” I was so horrified, because I was like, “You’ve been listening to our conversations?” Like I’m the only 17-year-old and she’s the only 15-year-old that has ever-- “we’re getting married--“
PG: So you were together for a long time.
JO: We were together for a few years. But we invented that we should get married. Nobody else had ever thought of this at our age. So when my sister told me, I knew that she was-- this was all before the NSA kind of stuff, the wire-tapping. I just remember being horrified. Then after five minutes later, realizing that I’m just an asshole. Like yeah, get in line. Everybody had these same feelings. You’re not alone, idiot. So we were breaking up, and we were working at the same-- at Van Saun Park in Paramus. We were working at the concession stand in the park together. She was going into work that day, I was going into work that day. And the parents got involved too, you know it’s really jumped the shark when parents are getting involved. So my sisters were like, “You’re not going to work today because Erin’s going to be there, and you guys, it’s not good.” I’m like, “Oh yes I am. I’m going to work. I have a job. I’m going to work.” My sisters physically got in front of me. I remember my mom physically stood in front of me, and I pushed my mom. Not hard, but something that I would never do. But they were really just up in my grill. So I went into my room and I locked the door and I cranked my stereo up to the loudest that it could possibly go. To the point where my one sister ran downstairs and just started throwing fuses until she hit my bedroom. They called the police, because now I’m “out of control.” In Mahwah when you call the police, they all show up.
PG: [laughs]
JO: So they come in, I’m just sitting on my bed, and this cop just fucking tackles me on my back.
PG: It’s his one chance. It’s his one chance.
JO: Like threw his hand behind my head, threw my head down and put my arm be-- and I got out of it and kicked the guy across the room. Just launched him across the room. So then six of them now jump on me, and now I am leaving literally hogtied. Hand and feet behind, you know what I mean? You could’ve put a pole between and just carried me. So they’re escorting me down the stairs. I am screaming, I’m like doing my Linda Blair impr-- I’m screaming profanity. I am just having a meltdown, which in and of itself would’ve been bad enough of an event. But my sister was having her wedding shower that morning and guests were arriving.
PG: [laughs]
JO: “Hey Maryann, I was gonna ask you how your kid brother is doing, but judging by the 12 cop cars, he looks like he’s doing pretty shitty.” As my buddy Randy Olay says, “They don’t lock you up in Camarillo State Mental Hospital for thinking crazy. They lock you up for acting crazy,” and I was acting crazy. So they put me in a suicide watch. I’m 18 now.
PG: Had you mentioned that you were suicidal, or did they just interpret that you were suicidal?
JO: No, I was suicidal. I had done some superficial cuts on my wrist prior to that. So nothing, yeah.
PG: Over the breakup?
JO: Over the breakup, and you know--
PG: Had she broken up with you?
JO: I don’t even remember. I forget exactly the specifics. But possibly. Or it was mutual, that it just wasn’t working for either one of us. So yeah, and that was – I don’t even know when that was – that was maybe October of my senior year of high school, ’84, and I was there until like Christmas.
PG: Wow.
JO: In Bergen Pines Mental Hospital, which is in Paramus, New Jersey. I think they changed the name now. Just out of my mind. I’ve been depressed a lot in sobriety, and I’ve even-- because suicide is always that ace I always keep up my sleeve, because it just is. That’s just who I am. I’m a depressive by nature, and it’s sort of cyclical. I’ve even thought about, in sobriety, of like, “I should check myself in a 5150, just do a 72-hour hold.” Then I’m thinking to myself, “No, you want real crazy? If you think you’re crazy, check yourself into a mental hospital. You will see some real crazy, and about 14 minutes into it, you’re gonna realize, ‘Fuck. I’m not this bad.’” So I had met some interesting folks there. It was really interesting and really sad, just really sad. We had to go to court, by law you had to show up in court and the doctor. This one kid came back, and he was not really that great educated, and he said something like, “The doctor called me incor...incor…” and I go, “Incorrigible?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s the word. What does that mean?” And I’m like, “It’s no big deal.” You know what I mean? I just didn’t want to fucking be the one to deliver the news. Here’s just a bunch of kids that are 17, 18. It was sad. It was really sad, and it was really interesting. I’ll never forget, when I came back into school-- I had been gone from my senior year of high school for two and a half months. Just gone. And nobody really knew I was gone anyway, because I was not even a blip on the fucking radar anywhere, because I was just so introverted and shy. A few people knew. I’ll never ever forget the school nurse saying to me, “Did they tell you what you should tell any of the kids why you’ve been gone for two and a half months?”
PG: Did she know?
JO: She knew, yeah. As the nurse, I think she needed to know for legal reasons or whatever. She knew. And I said, “No, I don’t have a story to tell anybody.” She looked at me with such sadness and compassion of like, “This poor kid.” I’ll never forget that feeling of the school nurse going, “Wow.”
PG: Did it feel good? Did it feel bad?
JO: No, it felt horrible. It felt horrible of like, “You should’ve come up with a cover story.” Thank god I wasn’t up for homecoming king or any shit like that. Nobody, not that many people even knew that I was gone. It was just really really interesting. And then when I got out of the—and I had not taken a drink yet. Because I had seen my dad. I had seen the instances and how he had treated my mom, just a lot of verbal abuse and emotional. No real physical abuse at all. My dad was a lawyer, so everybody was stupid. My mom was one of nine from a very very blue-collar, “You don’t get an education, you’re going to wind up like your uncles. Look at them fixing TVs for a living.” So when I got out of the hospital, I made a conscious decision that the world is not a safe place and I need to get high. But I can’t drink, because I don’t really like the taste of drinking, and I don’t like what it did to my dad. I saw what it did to my dad. And started smoking weed. Then started selling weed, because I was good enough at math to understand that you could buy an ounce in Nyack, right on the river there and right by the Tappan Zee Bridge, and sell it to all your friends for four times the price. Then it escalated, and then I started doing little purple microdot mescaline. Again, you could go to the south Bronx and buy them for a dollar a piece and sell them for four. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was in another band at the time, and we were over at this guy’s house, the guitarist’s house. This is probably May of ’85, senior year of high school still. I got a bag of 30 pills, a little Ziploc bag in the front of my shorts. My shorts don’t have any pockets. I went over this kid’s house, and the dad asked us to move some big items up to the curb for trash pickup, the once a year spring cleaning kind of thing. I grabbed the old garden hose and I dragged it up, and it rubbed up against my shorts, and the bag fell out onto the front lawn of these 30 hits of mescaline. Nobody saw it, nobody knew. I didn’t know it was gone. So we’re eating pizza, we’re watching Faces of Death, because that’s what you do when you’re 18 in 1985 and you’re all testosteroned out. The dad walks in and he goes, “I found a bag of purple pills on the front lawn. Does anybody claim them?” You can hear a fucking pin drop. There was probably like ten of us. Nobody threw me under the bus, and we all just played dumb. Then we leave, and I have a separate stash like a good pre-drug addict in training, I had a separate stash. We all dose, we all take a hit, and we start playing. We’re starting to come on and Brian Proctor’s mother, I’ll never forget, she interrupts band practice. We’re doing Crazy Train now, Ozzy, we’re into the chorus at this point or something. She interrupts band practice and she says, “Keith,” who’s the house that we were just at, “you need to get home immediately. Your mom is on the way to the hospital on a bad trip, and your dog is dying.” For reasons yet obscure, they found this bag of 30 pills and I think, to this day, I don’t know what she was thinking, I think she thought they were like sprinkles for cupcakes or something like that and she ate a handful of them. Maybe they poured them into the trash, maybe the trash spilled out onto the floor, and their dog, their purebred German Shepherd named Trooper that everybody loved in the neighborhood licked them off the floor and died. Now this guy, how shall we say, this all took place in North Jersey. Anybody that’s watched the Sopranos understands that that entire storyline was based in North Jersey. This guy was in the “vending machine business”.
PG: The father?
JO: The father of the family, yeah.
PG: And that’s the guy that had found them on the front lawn.
JO: Yes, yes. He, I’ll never forget. We’re in a huge house, it’s in a two-story house. I’m in the basement. He is at the front door banging on the front door. Now he’s back from the hospital and he’s looking for me.
PG: How did he know it was you?
JO: They gave me up at that point. When the mom wound up in the hospital, they gave me up. I can’t blame them. He’s like, “Where is he? That kid was eating pizza that I bought over in my fucking house. Where is he? I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him. I’m in the vending machine business. I break kneecaps for a living. Where is he?” I just remember being on the run. And I’m tripping. I’m still on mescaline at the time. So just total total fucking nightmare. Yeah, just not one of my high points. Ominous warning, which I failed to heed. I have not touched an ounce of alcohol in my story, smoking some weed, taking some mescaline. I’m six months into my drug career, and I put a mobster’s wife in the hospital and I killed their dog. I will go head to head with anybody on this podcast or anywhere that I am the biggest dog lover that there is. When I came home as a newborn from the hospital we had dogs. I’ve always had dogs in the house.
PG: When you went on the run, did that guy ever catch up with you?
JO: No. I remember the next morning, my mom came in crying. I guess they had called the house, obviously. My dad, being the lawyer that he is, “I don’t want you to talk to anybody about anything. Blahblahblahblahblah.” He just totally, zero compassion. Just a fucking lawyer talking to a client. I was like, “Gee, thanks dad.” I think what really triggered-- they had a daughter who was probably five years older who had been in and out of rehab. It was like, “Wow. One more time, drugs are infiltrating our lives.” I think they knew their son was involved, too, so I don’t know for whatever reason. But it just kind of dissipated and didn’t really come to a head.
PG: What’s the next seminal moment in your downslide?
JO: So I move out to Los Angeles because New Jersey, my family’s the problem, right?
PG: [laughs]
JO: If I can just, the tender age of 24, tear in my eye. I drove cross-country, I photographed all the national parks of the western United States on a three-month 17,000 mile driving tour of the Rocky Mountains to the West Coast. It was probably, what I didn’t even realize it at the time, but it was one of my first spiritual experiences that I ever. It was something that I was able to draw on once I got sober. It was to realize that, “Yeah, I didn’t make any of that stuff,” just sitting inside Glacier National Park at nighttime watching-- you can see the Milky Way. I’m a kid from Jersey. You don’t get to see many stars there based on just the scattered light from all the street lights and stuff like that. You can see satellites flying through the sky in Montana.
PG: Really?
JO: Yeah, just fascinating. You can see the Space Shuttle if the Space Shuttle’s up. It’s really fascinating and shit that I’d never seen before. It was just really fascinating, and shortly therein, I had a lot of entitlement issues. The world owed me. “Where’s mine?”
PG: Let’s just go back real quickly to that spiritual feeling that you had. Can you describe it? Was it a conscious thing? Was it just a feeling in your body?
JO: It was a feeling like that I’m-- it was very humbling that you-- look at all those stars. Every one of those is a sun and could possibly have orbiting planets with life, and you are a grain of sand on the beach. You’re really not that important. In a good way, not in a--
PG: Like your problems aren’t that big?
JO: Well, no, because my problems are my problems. If they’re in red lining for me, then-- it was more of a there is a much greater, bigger picture out there.
PG: I see, I see.
JO: And you’re not that important. You’re a cog in the wheel, and now there’s about a billion cogs in this wheel when you thought there were only six. So I just got downgraded quite a bit. But it was good. It was very humbling, and it was very refreshing. See a moose in the Grand Tetons and actual-- not that I’ve ever, I’ve never seen a moose before. I’ve never seen bison and elk. It was just really fascinating to just--
PG: Do you think it helped that you were by yourself?
JO: Absolutely. I really love being by myself. I was able to do my own thing as a result of being by myself. I met a million people along the way. I met a lot of Germans. This was fall of 1990 as we were sending troops to Kuwait for the first invasion, and there were a lot of Germans. I guess the exchange rate was really great, and they were riding-- I was meeting guys riding bicycles from Glacier National Park down to Colorado.
PG: Wow.
JO: Doing thousand-mile treks on their bike and camping out. I met them in the campgrounds. It was just really interesting, and I got to tell people a little bit about America. The little that I knew as some kid from Jersey who didn’t really get out much. It was really interesting. It was just very eye-opening. Just the sheer beauty. So what happened was, when the Gulf War broke out, which was on my birthday, which my natal birthday is January 16th of ‘67. But technically it was the 17th local time, Baghdad. But it was the 16th where I was in a Laundromat in San Diego. I remember hearing the, “Flashes over Baghdad.” I’ll never forget how patriotic that I felt after having seen America for the first time. I had toyed with the idea, because ’88 was the centennial or bicentennial of Australia. I remember I was like,“I would love to go to Australia.” I remember thinking to myself, “What are you going to say when they say, ‘What’s the Grand Canyon like? Have you ever been to Yellowstone National--‘” I’m like, “I’ve never even seen fucking America. How dare I go off abroad and try to be some ambassador? I’ve got nothing to say about America other than Jersey and Manhattan. Which is great, it’s just not America.” I just remember feeling really really patriotic when the-- I was not obviously as political as I am today. But I was just really patriotic that we were at war, and this is America. I don’t know. It was really interesting.
PG: I find it interesting, too, because you are left-leaning, correct?
JO: Yeah.
PG: And a lot of people assume that people on the left aren’t patriotic. I like that you prove that, quite the opposite, liberals, though many of them are accused of being too hard on America, that I think many liberals, myself included, comes from a place of loving this country and wanting to see it do the right thing. Not to take it down. I try not to be political at all on this podcast, but I felt like that was an important thing to make. Going back to photographing the national parks, can you talk about the difference-- I’m always encouraging people on this podcast to break out of their isolation. But there’s a difference between isolating and solitude, and I don’t know how to express what that difference is. Can you take a crack at it?
JO: During my trip? Or just in general?
PG: Just in general, because I know you understand the difference between that while solitude is a healthy thing and isolating isn’t.
JO: Well isolating is when-- this is just my opinion. Shared by thousands [laughs]. But for instance, my fiancée had spine surgery two weeks ago. So last week, major surgery, we run on this whole fundraising drive and, “Thank you for your contribution,” and we went on this huge GoFundMe fundraising thing, and we raised enough money for her to get the surgery. So we were having a gathering at our house of mutual friends, and they were coming by. I had just gotten back into town. I had just driven into town, and I had to unpack the car. They were having a little pow wow out there in the back, and I consciously made a decision not to be a part of. It’s just my defiant-- so I think isolation is when I’m given an opportunity to participate in something, and I give it the bird. I just flip it off, and I’m like, “nfw, I’m not going.” Based on just because I can say no, and maybe I’m going to exert some pseudo-power by saying no. It didn’t feel good. Although I did have a lot of work to do, and I needed to eat. I get really insane when I don’t eat, and my blood sugar, you know. But I just wasn’t feeling it. I just wasn’t feeling it at all. Then I went up and laid down in bed before that meeting was even over and stuff. People were like, “Where’s Johnny? Where’s Johnny?” I could hear them downstairs saying that, and I was just-- I treat loneliness with isolation. When I’m in that mind space, it’s a spiral, and it’s not good. I’m not going to fix the negativity what’s going on with my negative mindset. It’s this downward spiral. “I get it, I get it and I’m going to exert my will and I’m not going to go just to spite you guys. You guys are having a good time. I hear you guys laughing out there, and I sit with my arms crossed and I’m not invited.” No, I was invited by everybody.
PG: [laughs]
JO: They were sad that I wasn’t there. But I just haven’t been in a good headspace lately in general. My gal’s been really sick for really, on and off, for three years. The whole focus has been on her, as it should be. She’s 40, she’s got a 23-year-old daughter. She had a daughter when she was 17. Everybody left - her daughter was turning 23 - and they went up to central California, up to Tara’s mom’s house. Took the dogs, everybody. I was doing some work in Simi Valley, and I had the house to myself for a weekend. No dogs, nobody. I lost my mind. I had an absolute meltdown and was like, borderline suicid—because it all came crashing down of like, “Oh my god, Johnny, you have not taken any time for yourself in the last three years. You have not been able to walk through the house naked, shower with the door open.” It hit me like a ton of bricks, and it was just really fascinating of how that hit me. I’m on the road a lot, I’m working, I’m the sole breadwinner now--
PG: Tara’s health issues have been very very serious.
JO: Oh yeah. She had her first round of health issues, which was she had an underactive thyroid. She has something called Hashimoto’s, which is an autoimmune disease where your body goes and attacks your thyroid. Which, for those of you that don’t know, and I didn’t know, it’s really the central computer that runs all of your hormones, everything. She couldn’t get out of bed for a year. She was just fatigued. She’d do a load of laundry and felt like she just worked an 18-hour day on her feet. She was not sleeping, and she’d gained a bunch of weight. Right after that she was having ovarian cysts, which is like a stabbing pain, and pain pills were her thing. She needed to be on them, on and off.
PG: And she was a sober person?
JO: Yeah.
PG: Still is?
JO: Yeah, she’s coming up on five years. It’s like, don’t poke the bear. What I realized through all of this, which is really fascinating - and I know because I’m hyper vigilant on pain pills taking people out - is, if you’re in legitimate pain, you can take pain pills as prescribed. They work on the actual physical pain, and it was a really interesting thing. Another thing which I’ve heard a lot is always tell your doctor that you’re in recovery.
PG: An addict, yeah.
JO: Yeah. Probably one of - this is just my opinion and I’ve seen it - probably one of the worst things that you can do. Because then you’re only going to get Advil. Sometimes they won’t give you anything. Citing, “Well we don’t want to trigger--“ We had moved up to Washington State for her to have a job with health insurance, and that was an absolute nightmare. We were in Vancouver, Washington, which is about the end of the world, but you can see it from there. Right over the border from Portland. I didn’t even know there was a Vancouver, Washington. I know Vancouver, BC. It’s a beautiful city. We wanted to have kids. She’s got a 23-year-old daughter, I don’t have any kids, I’m 46. We wanted to have kids, and that was what brought our relationship from pencil to ink. Was, “Okay, you want to have more?” Because I wasn’t sure if she wanted to have more kids. She found out that she had to have a hysterectomy as a result-- she was getting her period for six weeks at a time, and they had to take the one ovary out. It was just a lot of grief and loss that goes behind that. We were fighting a lot, too. Beforehand with the thyroid issue, her hormones, they were having her on testosterone, they had her on all these-- and as my mentor, Ralph, says to me, he goes, “Johnny, you ain’t talking to Tara no more. You’re talking to her fear representative. Tara’s been long gone.” There is no truer statement. She’s scared.
PG: Understandably.
JO: Yeah. I always kid around meetings with her there, even moving back to Los Angeles. She found out that she was a victim of identity theft and stuff like that, and she’s like, “We’re totally fucked. We’re never going to find a place, we’re never--“ But there’s nothing I can do or say to her that’s going to make it any better. She needed to have her own experience. Through all of this, she has found out that the kindness of strangers with this GoFundMe site. She was very humbled by it all, and a kinder, gentler Tara has emerged as a result, and somebody who’s got a lot of faith. Because based on experience, that’s where my-- all my faith is not, “Oh I heard some guy tell a story.” No, it’s real world shit that took place. That’s where--
PG: Sometimes by doing nothing, by not reacting, can be the most spiritual thing that we can do, which is oftentimes the hardest thing to do. She was on the verge of being paralyzed by this growth in her spine.
JO: Yeah, she had a two-inch tumor inside her spine covering T9 through 12, which is, T is the thoracic vertebrae. It was pressing on her nerves to the point she was losing feeling in her extremities, and she was starting to lose bladder control. The spine surgeon saw the MRI. She used to go into emergency rooms. I mean, picture walking home, you come home. I do these sales gigs, I’m on the road for ten days, and I come home and your fiancée’s just sitting around the house fucking crying all day. Just in absolute pain. Even taking pain pills and it’s just not-- it’s just a really powerless, helpless feeling, and just really really really challenging.
PG: Did you make any conscious decision to feed your soul, to take care of yourself?
JO: No.
PG: I know you had that epiphany when you were in the house by yourself.
JO: No, that epiphany took place, that was when I realized how I had been neglecting myself.
PG: How long ago was that?
JO: Shit, that was only the end of September. That was a month ago. So I mean, I’ve just realized that you need to put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then the kid or the passenger or whatever. It’s been challenging. My whole focus has been on her. Challenging to be around her, and some of the times, I was like, “I’m glad I’m leaving for the next ten days, because we need to turn it into a tinder box.”
PG: I want to hear you talk about your experience in the desert.
JO: You could parachute me into Bangkok, Thailand not speaking any Thai-- you give me 20 minutes and I’m finding somebody that has dope. I think it’s a skill set that many of us possess. I’ll never forget, I was at a recovery place, and we’re going around, there’s like eight guys, eight girls. We needed the bed space, and I wasn’t done. I knew enough that I wasn’t done, and I shared at the noon meeting there in the house, and I said, “I’m leaving. I’m making a conscious effort to leave, and I’m going to go get loaded. I’m not going to sugarcoat this at all. It’s 12:20 right now. I will be high by 4pm. I will be in hell by 4:15. I do not want anybody to envy me for what I’m about to do. But it’s necessary and part of my plan.” And sure enough, I found some dope houses and hang out with some gang members, some brothers, from South Central LA that had been thrown out of South Central LA, which is a feat in and of itself. It’s sort of like, what is the one guy, the drummer for Guns and Roses that got thrown out for doing too much dope.
PG: [laughs]
JO: I don’t really understand how you get thrown out of a band like that by doing too-- you’ve got to be doing an exorbitant amount of dope to be thrown out of a band like that. So yeah, this was the cream of the crop, and the brothers took one look and like, “Who let this cop in?” and they fucking patted me down for a microphone. They swore that I was the police.
PG: This is where in the desert?
JO: This is in Desert Hot Springs, which is across the freeway from Palm Springs. If you’re coming out, there’s all the windmills that start. Palm Springs is off on the right, on the south side of the 10 freeway. Desert Hot Springs is off onto the left. It’s a very different town.
PG: [laughs]
JO: I don’t like to say bad things about it, because there was one guy that walked up to me one night, and he goes, “God dammit, I just bought property out there!” [laughs] I was like, “Nah, there’s some nice parts. Just not where I was vacating.”
PG: And your drug that you were looking for was crack?
JO: Crack, yeah absolutely. Yeah, that was it. So the brothers were slinging crack, and there were white guys slinging meth. Meth, I just didn’t like it, I didn’t like the taste, I didn’t like the drip, whatever. It was just too much. They had a lot of guns and drive-bys and stuff like that. I’m talking to these guys, and I’m going, “Do you understand that the white guys selling meth, they’re not shooting at each other? When you start shooting at each other, you force the hand of law enforcement. Just based on the neighbors, everything, you guys need to just really chill with all the gun shit. You guys need to bring it down a notch.” I remember there was a crack house that I was living in in Desert Hot Springs. It had no electricity, boarded up windows, bullet holes in the walls and stuff like that. There were probably about ten people in the house, and I’m having a cocaine coma. CC on the rocks, as I like to call it. A cocaine coma on the front couch. I had been up for about three days. I wasn’t one of the-- you know those guys who are like, “I was up for 14 days, bro!” I’m like, yeah no, two three the most. Sorry, I just was not. Not that I don’t like to out-bottom somebody, especially when you’re new. It was probably like four in the morning, and there’s only one door to get in and out. These rival gang came by and they poured gasoline in the house, they lit the house on fire. They ran back out into the street, and as everybody went running out the front door, it was like, “pow pow pow powpow pow pow”. I just remember sitting on the couch having a moment of clarity going, “Oh, my first drive-by. The promises are coming true, the flip-side ones.” I remember that was the summer of ’96. It was August of ’96, and I remember just seeing kids with backpacks on next couple of days waiting, because school was starting. I just remember thinking, “Johnny, the whole world is going on. The kids are starting school again. It’s the end of August. Nobody gives a shit about you and what you’re doing. The whole world is going on despite the fact that you are treading water here.”
PG: How did you get out of the house?
JO: I was one of the last ones out. Nobody got hit. Your aim, when you’re shooting sideways with a-- the one guy was like, “Oh it’s just a 22 anyway.” I’m like, “Yeah.” The police and fire department were 300 yards away, and nobody showed up.
PG: Wow.
JO: Nobody showed up, because nobody gave a shit. And this is the lifestyle I’m not sure I can give up.
PG: [laughs]
JO: To live a life based on spiritual principles or to die an alcoholic death is not an easy choice for a guy like me. Normal people are not perplexed by that, “Behind door number one, you can live a spiritual life. Behind door number two, you can die an alcoholic death.” More of me goes, it’s an alcoholic death, the big liver, track marks up and down my arm, maybe my lips burnt up from smoking out of an antenna. Yeah, I’ll take spirit-- I don’t even know what spiritual principles is, but I’m going to take it. Yeah, I’m going to have to get back to you on that one.” I just remember just seeing these kids going back to school. I don’t have any of my own kids, but I’ve got nieces and nephews, and I just remember going, “Nobody cares. Nobody really gives a shit about the decisions that you’ve made in your life to become a career drug addict.” It was just one of those moments. Then I found a little dog. The police came and raided 13 addresses simultaneously, and this little black Basset Terrier mix 31-pound little dog started following me around everywhere. I love dogs, and I’m a little busy, and I’m trying to shake this dog, and I can’t shake this dog. I had blown up the head gasket in my 1987 Nissan Sentra, so I’m on foot, and this dog followed me fucking everywhere. I wound up going to this one place, this fellowship place. This one woman walked up to me, and she said, “You’re new, right?” I was like, “Yeah, what gave it away?” She goes, “Is that your dog?” I’m like, “Ehh, she’s been following me around.” She goes, “Hey there’s a guy, he’s about five years sober, he runs a no-kill animal shelter here in Desert Hot Springs. His name is Herb. The place is called Save A Pet. There’s a little house and some trailers on the property that you can live in in exchange for work. Does that sound like something you would be interested in?” I was like, “Let me check my calendar here.”
PG: [laughs]
JO: “Yeah, I’m free for the next year and a half or so.” I would up staying at this no-kill animal shelter for a year, and I wound up putting nine months together. This little dog saved my life. I remember when I had six years sober, I was speaking, and I invited Herb and this woman, Lorraine. The moral of the story is that here’s this woman with 15 years sober, she could’ve been saying hi to all of her friends, and she helped somebody that was new. She took two minutes out of her busy day, and she helped somebody that was new. It changed the course of my life. 360 degrees on a compass, and if I move my compass one degree, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but then you draw out the trajectory from five years, ten years, fifteen, twenty years. I wound up in a completely different spot than I would have, had that compass not have been changed. I asked her, I said, “If I didn’t have that dog that day, would you have said anything to me?” She said, “Absolutely not.” At the same meeting, this woman came up to me and gave me this little dog angel pin. It had a little metal pin with a dog with angel wings and a halo. I try to wear it every time that I speak, and I tell my dog story. So here I am at ten years sobriety, and my dog is now, she’s got five vertebrae fused in her neck and can’t walk. I got her a little doggy wheelchair that I spent $1,000 dollars that I didn’t have. Custom fit, and she didn’t like it. She just hated it, never gotten in the groove of it. Used to carry her outside to go pee and poop and stuff like that and bring her back in. She would crawl and drag herself across the floor, and she was still fucking happy as shit. She still had that feisty terrier thing in her. I find myself, I’m on some website with crazy videos on them, and there’s this one video of this guy on a porch. He’s a black guy, and he’s not wearing a shirt. Older guy and he’s got shorts on. It’s a police stand-off. He says he’s got a gun, and there’s like 30 cops. The video goes on and the K-9 is there barking. They’re like, “Come on out or we’re sending in the dogs.” We’ve all seen that. So they release the K-9, German Shepherd, and the guy reaches into his shorts. They all open fire, like fucking 30 cops open fire on this guy and kill him. And they kill the fucking K-9 as a result, too, because the K-9’s running up on him. The guy’s got a fucking sandal that he had down his shorts. It was not a gun, it was a sandal. The K-9 officer is screaming at everybody, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” The dog’s fucking dead, just dead on this porch. It was one of those moments of clarity where I was like, “Oh, kind of like the dog in your story, Johnny. It just so happened that this is a German Shepherd.” While I didn’t directly kill that dog, it was by my hand. So I go and show up. The last bit on Intel that I heard on this guy was that he was a raging alcoholic. If you’re anything like I am, 23 years doesn’t subside a resentment, it fuels it. I called an ex-girlfriend of mine, I said, “Listen, no drama. But this is what I’m doing. If you don’t hear from me in a fucking hour, call my sister. This is the address where I’m going to be.” So I show up. I roll up. As I roll up, they’re rolling up in a PT Cruiser, the husband and then the wife. I’m like, “Ugh.” It’s a Sunday morning, it’s like 10 o’clock in the morning. I’m like, “Hey, how you doing?” I’m like, “It’s Johnny Olsen, do you remember me? Guess what, they did.
PG: [laughs]
JO: So I start crying. I tell them, “I’m here. I brought drugs in your house. I’m here to make it right. I’m sorry, and comma, and I’m here to make it right.” Because sorry is not an amends. So the dad’s like, “I haven’t had a drink in ten years.” Didn’t say he was sober. The mom is crying, and everything’s cool and copacetic, and things calmed down a little bit ten minutes into it or so. I go and I point to them, I’m talking to the mom now, and I go, “I’m not trying to discount your pain, but what really haunts me is your dog. Because I’m the biggest dog-lover there is.” And she goes, “Oh, that old dog? He was 15 years old. He had arthritis and could hardly walk. That dog lived a rich, full life. We don’t want you to feel bad about that dog. It was his time to go.” How what a 23, 25 year circle of shame that I felt over this incident, come to find out that this dog can’t walk from arthritis? My dog can’t walk from arthritis. It was just one of those absolute god-shot, god-conscious moments of, “Wow, I’m so humbled by the bigger picture. I’m so humbled by all of this.” Nine times out of ten, the unexpected happens. I read that somewhere. I love the feeling of being connected with the people that I’m around in the universe. My sisters have lake houses up near Lake George, upstate New York, and just being out there with Tara and connecting with everybody and just having it be perfect. These are the good old days, right here, right now.
PG: Johnny O?
JO: Pauly G?
PG: Love you, buddy. Thank you so much.
JO: Love you too, man. Thanks for having me.
PG: Many thanks to Johnny O. I hope you guys enjoyed that as much as I did. Before we take it out with some surveys, I wanted to remind you there’s a couple different ways you can support the show, if you feel so inclined. You can go to the website, mentalpod.com, and you can make a one-time PayPal donation, or my favorite, a recurring monthly donation. God bless you monthly donors out there that help keep this podcast going. You can sign up for as little as five bucks a month, and once you set it up on PayPal, it just takes it out every month until you decide to cancel it or your credit card expires. You can also support us by searching through our Amazon search portal and making your purchases through that. Doesn’t cost you anything. Amazon gives us a couple of nickels. You can support us also by transcribing an episode of the show. Email me at mentalpod@gmail.com and I can hook you up with transcribing an episode. Be forewarned though, that it takes an average typist about a full day to transcribe an episode. You can support us non-financially by going to iTunes, writing something nice about us, giving us a good rating. Or spreading the word through social media. I think that is about it. Oh, just wanted to remind you that there is finally some information about the festival in Toronto. It’s called the Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival, and I’m going to be doing a live version of the podcast on Saturday, November 16th at 4pm. My guest is going to be Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall. Tentatively going to do a group recording on Friday night the 15th, but I don’t have details about that yet. But there’s a link for the venue and tickets and all of that stuff on the homepage of mentalpod homepage. So please go check that out. I think that is about it. Let’s get to these piping hot surveys! These next couple are from the Struggle in a Sentence survey. These are filled out by Nick. About his PTSD he writes, “I am covered in gasoline and the world is made of flint and steel.” Turkey101 says about his alcoholism and drug addiction, “My alcoholism is like the cutoff switch. All feeling goes away until I wake up the next day and the switch is back on and someone turns the intensity all the way up.” I really relate to that one. This is from Callie Cat, and she says about her obesity, “It makes me feel like the whole world is watching every move I make in order to make fun of me.” About her depression, Sara says, “It’s like I’m reading the worst first-person narrative ever, and I have no desire or energy to keep reading to see if it gets any better.” That’s a great one. This is from the Shame and Secret survey. This was filled out by a guy who calls himself Latin Phrase. He is straight and he’s 22. Never been sexually abused. Was raised in a pretty dysfunctional environment. He writes, “I’m an only child. My parents have had pretty rough childhoods, but have never really addressed them or dealt with their own issues. My dad had an affair when I was about six years old, but my parents stayed together even after they told me that they were getting a divorce. My dad stayed in contact with the woman he had an affair with until I was about 16 until my mom found out. Once again, they said they were going to get a divorce, but stayed together. I’m 22 now. It led to a lot of uncomfortable dinners and a pretty good amount of resentment in our house. My mother had a miscarriage before and after I was born, so she considers me her “miracle child”. She can be a little overbearing. I barely talk to my dad, and when I do, it’s pretty superficial.” Deepest darkest thoughts: “I think about hurting my parents a lot. It’s like I’m so frustrated with our communication that every time I speak, I imagine punching her right in the head. As my dad interrupts me for the umpteenth time during a conversation, images of slamming his head through the drywall appear in my mind. They seem to have no concern for most things in my life, except when I make mistakes and have to tell them about it. Then they show some sort of concern or wonder why I’m not living up to the goals they’ve set for me without my approval. I think about them passing away so I would have carte blanche, do whatever I wanted, without ever worrying about their approval or disapproval.” Deepest darkest secrets: “All the times throughout my life I’ve been singled out because of my race. It’s not like I’m the only young black male to face some sort of hatred, but all the times it happened growing up, I never responded the way I wish I could have. I could never think of something profound enough to say to hurt that person like they hurt me, and I hate myself for it. I know I shouldn’t harbor all this resentment, but I’m really struggling to let it go. All the black kids at school that told me I talked white and wasn’t really black, but then made fun of me for how dark I was. All the suburban white kids that would slip up and say nigger around me, and then give me some bullshit apology when I get pissed off. Every time I think about it, my stomach starts to boil.” Sexual fantasies most powerful to you: “I just want to be wanted. It doesn’t go much farther than that right now.” Would you ever consider telling a partner or close friend: “Probably not. I’m a virgin and I’ve never had a girlfriend. My best friend doesn’t know I’m a virgin, because I’ve lied about any sexual encounters I’ve told him about.” Do these secrets and thoughts generate any particular feelings towards yourself: “Hatred, disgust, disappointment.” Well buddy, I am sending you a big hug. Sending some love your way. I know this sounds like an old fuddy-duddy thing to say, but you’re only 22 years old, and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. If I tried to judge how my life was at 22… I don’t know anybody who has been able to predict how their life would unfold. So just hang in there. Keep talking to people that are safe to talk to. This is from the Happy Moment survey. I got quite a few of these filled out this week, so I’m going to be peppering the end of this show with them. This is filled out by a guy who calls himself Rob Stoner. He writes, “A few years ago, I was at my best friend’s house playing video games on his couch. He has an L-shaped couch, so I had room to lay down while he sat and ate ice cream. The freezer he was in was so cold that he was cutting pieces off with a knife. I suddenly became angry at something in the game and was thrown into a verbal tantrum. Before I was able to really get going, my best friend cut a piece of ice cream off and put it, using the knife, to my mouth, and I accepted it. I was instantly quieted and at peace.” I love the image of that. Thank you for that. This is from the Shame and Secrets survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Tenacious Maggie. She is in her 30s, was raised in a stable and safe environment, was the victim of sexual abuse and never reported it. Deepest darkest thoughts: “I have a lot of body shame that I do not like owning up to. That’s because I believe that it is trivial and beneath me to spend so much time and energy on that worry.” By the way, it’s been my experience and I’ve noticed that most people that have serious body shame is, it’s not really about the body. It’s about something emotional underneath that. Maybe that’s obvious to everybody else, but that didn’t occur to me until I began to like who I was. Then I noticed that actually my face and my body looked different in the mirror. Now I’m a big, big who has let himself go [laughs]. But that has nothing to do with how I feel about myself. Deepest darkest secrets: “I still feel guilt about taking items from other travelers when abroad. The items seemed to have been left behind, but I had moved/concealed them by the time people came back looking for their stuff. They asked me if I had seen their stuff, and I said no. they looked so sad.” Oh, I forgot to mention that she considers herself asexual. She writes, “Primarily asexual due to hormonal issues from disordered eating. Big issue from my boyfriend, not me so much.” She was raised in a stable and safe environment, Midwestern, lower middle class catholic, she says. Sexual fantasies most powerful to you: “Initiating an unexperienced guy. Not very young though, perhaps around 30, so that he becomes almost worshipful. Then breaking his heart. Pretty mundane, I know.” Would you ever consider telling a partner or close friend: “Sure.” Do these secrets and thoughts generate any particular feelings towards yourself: “Some wistfulness for when I had perceptible sexual desires.” Sending some love your way, Maggie. This is from the Happy Moments survey filled out by Lucy. “Once when I was in high school, my dad took me out shopping. We spent the whole day together. He had turned his cell phone off, which was a huge deal. It was just us two.” I love that one. I love how simple it is. This is a Shame and Secrets survey filled out by a guy who calls himself Notzo Great. He is gay, he’s in his 20s. Was raised in an environment that was a little dysfunctional. “Both my parents are pretty manic-depressive. I had the pleasure of living with my dad, “adjust to his meds,” and go through violent and verbally emotional and pretty often physically abusive outbursts. He’s better now, but he really gave me a hard time growing up.” I love, by the way, that that’s considered a little dysfunctional. Deepest darkest thoughts. And he has never been sexually abused. Deepest darkest thoughts: “I’m actually surprised to find out that I am by far from alone from having completely obtrusive and disturbing thoughts revolving around hurting other people or even killing them. Thankfully, I no longer have those disturbing thoughts, thanks to me taking Zoloft. Other than that, my thoughts aren’t particularly that dark, or that great for that matter.” Deepest darkest secrets: “Here’s the reason I’m filling out this survey. I did something really bad when I was around 12 and my sister was only 5. I don’t even know what to label this behavior. I know for a fact I did not rape her, and I would be inclined to say it wasn’t even molestation. But I remember one night being really curious about kissing, and decided to try kissing my sister the kind of way you would probably kiss another person your own age, not your fucking little sister. I don’t know why the fuck I did that. I really don’t honestly, I really don’t. I honestly blocked out pretty much most of it from my head with the hope that I can eventually not ever remember it. I can only imagine how my sister feels. I know I was a child at that time, too, but what the fuck. I was 12 and she was 5. The difference is obvious. I remember feeling practically sexually turned on by this at the time. But one thing I am clear on is that I never went to the point of touching her genitals or her touching mine. Yeah, I know, how noble. I cuddled her in a way that was also, I don’t know. The whole thing was fucking weird. I have no idea if my sister has any recollection of this even at all either. But I’m deeply full of guilt and shame about this. I basically made out with my little sister and then cuddled her like she was another girl my age. I had no right to do that to her, and I feel like a piece of fucking shit. That I think honestly has led me to having as much depression and anxiety as I do. Interestingly enough, I’m actually not really into girls at all and identify as gay and am completely turned on by men. (I stare at their asses much like straight dudes would at girls.) I knew this when I was 12, too, which is why it’s even weirder that I did that to my sister. I have absolutely no interest in pedophilia, and least of all, little girls. Just the opposite: really strong, dominating, muscular, grown men. Paul, did I sexually abuse my sister? And if not, did I fuck her up mentally?” I would not be the person to ask that. I’m a jackass that tells dick jokes. But as I read this, it sounds like that’s a really common thing that kids do with their siblings. Did it fuck her up? I don’t know. But I think you should ask her and talk to her. And I think you should talk to a therapist about this. But I do know this: you’re being way way way too hard on yourself. Beating yourself up is not going to solve anything. It is going to make you less present for the people that are in your life. You need to get to a place of forgiveness. Even if your sister doesn’t forgive you, but I don’t know why she wouldn’t. I read about this all the time. You’re really hard on yourself, and I just want to send you a hug. That was the part of his survey that I wanted to read. You sound like a really sensitive guy that feels things really deeply. I’m sending you a hug, and I know the listeners listening to this just want to send you a hug, too. This is from the Happy Moments survey filled out by a guy who calls himself Johnny Doppler. His happy moment is, “Listening to an old Nirvana album for the first time in years in utero, and being transported back to my mid-teens when I was the lead singer in a truly awful covers band. Standing onstage and singing my heart out to a half-empty pub thinking I would be the next Kurt Cobain and feeling the king of the world. A really happy memory.” That’s awesome. Thank you for that. This is from the Shame and Secrets survey, filled out by a guy - oh no, a woman - who calls herself Alex Calypso. She is straight, in her 20s, raised in a stable and safe environment, never been sexually abused. Deepest darkest thoughts: “My boyfriend is Jewish, and after dating for a few years, I asked him if he’d be open to raising our kids both Jewish and Catholic, which I am. He said, ‘Absolutely not. I would only raise my children Jewish.’ His abrupt and uncompromising answer made me start to cry immediately. I cried for days and days. I’m not very religious - I’d say a secular Christian of sorts - but the idea of our kids not believing in Santa Claus, as silly as it feels to type, makes me profoundly sad. I think it’s just the pure and beautiful idea of Christmas and all its truly nonreligious celebrations that makes me so happy. As a child I always dreamed of having my own kids to be Santa for. So after crying for a few days, I decided I loved my boyfriend too much to let a Christmas tree break us up. I told him I’d be willing to raise our children Jewish, which is true. Years have gone by since then, and when the subject of having a Christmas tree in our apartment – where we are currently childless – came up, my boyfriend said, ‘Absolutely not,’ once again. Now I’m wondering if I’ve made a huge mistake and if I continue and eventually marry him, I will secretly resent him for taking away my family Christmas. Also part of me knows I don’t want to break up with him because he’s my first boyfriend and we’ve been together for five and a half years. Plus I’m afraid I won’t/can’t find anyone better. I feel completely undesirable and I hate the way I look. Also I’m not sexually attracted to my boyfriend physically at all. I think most of it has to do with the fact that he’s so turned on by me that makes me love him. I really wish he’d lose about 15 to 20 pounds, because he’s gained a lot of weight in his gut in the last few years, but I don’t have the heart to say anything. He also has the way lower sex drive than I do, which pisses me off, because after all the stereotypes that guys want sex all the time, he’s turning me down all the time because he’s too tired or too full from eating his weight in sushi to do me. So of course, that doesn’t help my self-image at all. We’re in our fucking 20s, and after five and a half years, I’ve maybe had sex 20 to 30 times. And now after living with him for the past month, I’ve had sex maybe twice. What the fuck? And it’s supposed to get worse as we get older? And I lose my figure? This blows.” My first thought as I read this is go to counseling immediately, or break up with this guy. Do not get married to this guy. Do not. Because from what you’ve shared here, you guys both have deep-seated issues that need to be worked on if there’s ever going to be any kind of intimacy between the two of you. The fact that you shared that you’re afraid that you can’t or won’t’ find somebody else is a terrible position to approach a relationship from, because you give all your power to that other person. It sounds like this guy is relishing his power. What a dick to say, “Absolutely not.” To not even ask you to talk about it in a nuanced way. Yeah. So I could read more of your survey, but that was the important thing that I wanted to read from that. You would be amazed with counseling and support groups how much people can change. My wife and I are completely different people than we were when we met 25 years ago. We’re both still assholes, but we’re completely different assholes. This is from the Babysitter survey, one that doesn’t get filled out too often. This is filled out by a female who calls herself Blurf. She’s straight, in her 20s. Was raised in a pretty dysfunctional environment. Was the victim of sexual abuse outside of the events described here and never reported it. She writes, “During a summer when I was around five, my mom asked a neighbor boy around 15 years old to watch my brothers and I several times. We knew the boy because he was a neighbor, and our mothers were PTA buddies. While lying on the couch, he invited me to lie on my back on his chest while watching TV. He put his hands in my underwear and rubbed my vagina while thrusting while I was on top of him. He did this several times while babysitting, sometimes with my brothers in the room. I’ve told boyfriends and my therapist. I tell serious boyfriends because sometimes I have moments of breakdown during sex that stems from this, and I want them to know it’s not their fault. Only very recently did I tell my therapist after two years of seeing her regularly, and I think this is because I knew it would lead to having to bring up some very difficult feelings around the event. As soon as I told her, it was like a light bulb went off, and she realized so many connections between the event and my emotional issues. At the time, I thought it was normal. How is a five-year-old supposed to know what is and isn’t appropriate? This was my cool neighbor friend. I felt special that he was giving me extra attention. I have never told my parents, and I don’t think I ever will. I believe this repeated abuse has had an immense effect on my relationships with men and my need for approval from them. I also find that I am attracted to men who are very aggressive during sex. Promiscuity in my life now is also something I think has resulted from the abuse. If a man wants to have sex with me, it somehow means I’m more worthy. I have a lot of resentment towards my mom for leaving me with someone who wasn’t trustworthy. Of course she could have never have know this would happen, but I wish she would’ve thought more about leaving her young daughter with a teenage boy unsupervised. Because I’ve never told her what happened, I sometimes want to throw it in her face when I’m upset at her and tell her that her negligence has made my life very difficult. But I can’t imagine what kind of guilt that would bring on her. Part of me also thinks she wouldn’t believe me, and having to endure the pain that would bring sounds worse than keeping the secret to myself, and shame of course, that I let him do it more than once because I didn’t know any better.” Well if you didn’t know any better, which children don’t, you’re not letting him do it. Something to pay attention to there is the fact that you’re afraid your mom isn’t going to believe you. That speaks of an issue with your mom, regardless of this event, that is, in my mind, kind of serious. But god, I hope that you can not blame yourself for any of this. Do you feel any damage was done? She writes, “Lots of damage. As I mentioned, I think the abuse has affected my taste in men, and I end up with people who aren’t good to me, and I’m honestly not attracted to the nice guys who are.” That’s really common, by the way. “Sexually, I’m unable to get off unless the guy fingers me, and I feel a lot of shame around masturbation, so I never touch myself in a sexual way. I also think this abuse happening so early in my life set me up on my path to major depression and anxiety issues.” That makes perfect sense to me. It’s great that you’re finally sharing this with your therapist. I hope you find some peace and get to a place where you feel like you can be present in the bedroom and be attracted to people that are healthy for you. Finally, this is from that Happy Moments survey, filled out by a guy who calls himself Paul Ford. He writes, “Sometimes I take mental snapshots when being somewhere I know I won’t come back to. One time I was sitting in my apartment in the old Soviet Union. Too much snow had fallen outside, and the radiator was working overtime. It was almost too hot inside. Maybe it was the tea I had just been drinking, but nonetheless, it felt really good being safe and warm on the inside looking out at this massive white-gray and dark-blue blackish color that comes around sundown in the winter when the snow is falling heavily. Maybe it was the week that had just passed that I was feeling good about. I can’t really remember. I just remember my toes feeling warm and the surroundings on that Sunday. That is a moment I really feel happy about, but there are many like this.” Thank you for that, Paul. And thank you guys for continuing to listen and give your support. Welcome to our new listeners, and I hope you heard something in this episode that reminds you that you’re not alone and that there is hope. Thanks for listening.
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Angela Stacey
07/02/2019 at 3:26 amI’d love to buy this guy a cup of coffee and pick what’s left of his brain…..LOL jk. Love Johnny for sharing this and feel like I know him even more- although we’ve never met!