Bad Habits

by Jenny McCarthy

  I flew back to California with an amazing feeling of accomplishment. I took care of my parents just like I had always wanted to, and now it was time to take care of myself.

  The only problem was that after paying my parents’ bills, I was back to zero. I was completely broke. But I had faith that I would come back strong.

  After all, my hero was Wonder Woman, and that bitch always made shit happen.

  21

  I’m Losing My Religion … Just Like R.E.M.

  When I moved to Los Angeles in 1993, I had hoped that it wouldn’t be that bad of a place. After all, the English translation means “the Angels.” That had to be a blessing!

  I was sure I would find a group of friends who were good people and would guide me in the right direction. I just wasn’t sure how to find them.

  What if I was like Sandy in Grease and befriended a gang of girls who weren’t really nice and forced me to perm my hair?

  Down the street from my new apartment there was a laundromat. From my kitchen window, I could see people coming and going with their baskets.

  The laundromat wasn’t an ideal place to meet new friends, but it was the only place I really “hung out” at frequently.

  Like clockwork, every Wednesday night I would grab my basket of clothes and head down there with a couple of magazines. It was never really the same group of people, and aside from small talk, I never made any connections with anyone or really hit it off. I guess my fantasy of meeting my dream man at the laundromat was a little off.

  There was a man who always went at the same time as me and I never had a good feeling about him.

  He introduced himself as Christopher and looked to be in his late thirties. He always appeared disheveled like he had just eaten at a greasy spoon and used his top as a napkin. He would park himself in the chair next to me no matter where he was already stationed.

  “Do you need some quarters?” he would ask in the most nasal-sounding Kermit the Frog voice.

  “No, I don’t, thanks,” I would respond without making much eye contact.

  After some time, I would come home and realize that a bra was missing. Another time a silky G-string was gone. My black thong, vanished. Did the sock monster have a relative? Sometimes I would throw my stuff into the dryer, grab a coffee next door, and then come back.

  Ahhhh. I was starting to put the two together. Christopher was a perverted panty thief! I had to catch him in the act.

  The following Wednesday, Christopher was at the laundromat, like always. He moved to the chair next to my station, as usual. I took out my clothes from the washer and threw them into the dryer and stepped outside to grab my pretend coffee. I waited a minute to give him time to repeat-offend, then I walked back into the laundromat and saw Christopher shove my thong into his pants and start jerking off.

  “What the fuck!?” was all I could say. The three other people in the laundromat turned around, obviously alarmed from the shrill in my voice.

  “This creep is rubbing my thong on his dick!”

  A guy in his twenties that I nicknamed Superman immediately came to the rescue and put him in a headlock. “Give her her panties back, loser.”

  Before I could say, “No, I don’t want them!” Superman yanked Christopher’s pants down and exposed his little Tic Tac.

  When he bent over to pick up his pants, I saw the gold cross around his neck swing like a pendulum. This man was religious?

  With all the temptations that existed in the world, Christopher had to victimize me? I wanted to tear the rosary off his neck and choke him with my Wonderbra, but instead I just walked away feeling violated by a man who clearly disobeys God. Christopher was definitely going to Hell. I left and vowed to never return to that laundromat again.

  But the laundromat was a stone’s throw away from a bookstore called the Psychic Eye Book Shop that kept winking at my soul. Every time I would drive past it, I kept saying, “I gotta go in there.”

  Shit like that always looked so interesting to me because I was fascinated with reading minds, and considering that my intuition had always been one of my best assets—well, I actually listened to it.

  One day, I took a stroll into the Psychic Eye and instantly felt a sense of belonging. The smell of incense, the music of monks chanting, and the cool hippies—they all felt strangely familiar to me.

  I ran my fingers past some books and let my energy pick the one that felt right. I landed on one called Spiritual Growth: Being Your Higher Self. The summary said the book offers the next step in spiritual growth for those who want to know who they are and why they are here on Earth. Holy shitballs, I thought. That was me they were talking about. Just like in the movie The Jerk when Steve Martin finds his special purpose, I felt this was the answer to my spiritual evolution. Catholicism wasn’t helping me evolve anymore, so the idea of this felt fresh and exciting.

  I wasn’t losing my religion at this point. I was just opening my mind to learning different belief systems.

  On my walk home, carrying my new book, all I could think about were those two sentences.

  Who am I?

  Why am I here?

  I think these are common questions for anyone in their twenties. Although I do know many sixty-year-olds who are still asking those same questions.

  I ran up to my apartment and dove into the book. I was devouring the pages like chocolate. There were no abstract mythical stories like those in the Bible. I wasn’t feeling fear or any wrath of God. Instead, I was feeling inspired, empowered, and awakened.

  This was 1993. There wasn’t a boom yet of spiritually enlightening books like The Power of Now, but this book was shifting my twenty-one-year-old spirit more than any of Oprah’s “Aha!” moments ever could.

  One of the biggest holy shits for me was the realization that I was in control of my own destiny.

  The book explained that when we connect to our higher selves, we can make anything we want happen. It talked about raising your vibration. At first I wasn’t sure what that meant. Did I need stronger batteries for my vibrator?

  I continued reading as it described the energy field we all have around our bodies called an aura.

  Being fresh out of eighteen years of Bible study, it took me a while to wrap my head around the idea of this aura, but it felt right.

  I started to practice expanding my energy field and bringing it back in. I would try to connect with my higher self. All that really means is being awake—dropping the illusions and stories we walk around with every day and looking at people with love and truth. This awakening hit me so hard that I couldn’t talk to any friends for a few weeks. I sat in it night after night, opening my mind, which was then opening my heart.

  I would giggle to myself, knowing there was a whole new world out there that didn’t involve shame and guilt.

  At the age of twenty-one, I found myself turning down LA parties to sit on the floor of the Psychic Eye Book Shop on Friday nights. I couldn’t have been happier. With every book I read, the fear of becoming trapped in Satan’s lair was becoming less realistic. Especially after reading almost thirty books about people who had had near-death experiences. They had the most incredibly beautiful stories of Heaven. Real assholes and perverts like Christopher who had near-death experiences talked about how great Heaven was. If they could get there, so could I.

  During this spiritual transformation, I continued to attend church every Sunday. But church wasn’t giving me the high I received from the spiritual books that were empowering me.

  As I sat there one Sunday staring at the priest, I tried to actually pay attention to the Mass. I had always just gone to church to not break a commandment, but now I thought, What the hell? Let me hear what the old bird is saying.

  What did I get out of it? Absolutely nothing. I felt good during some of the singing, but the overall feeling in the room was about guilt and seeking redemption. To me, it was like buying a product I wasn’t confident with and then being stuck with it. There is no exchange or retur
n policy and there is certainly no explanation as to why it may not be working for you. It just has to, so don’t question the mechanics of it. As a “buyer,” there’s a hell of a lot of remorse, and I was being reminded of that.

  What I did like about church was that it was a place that held me accountable for my actions.

  But the problem was that I was being held accountable for all of my negative actions. I wanted a place that held me accountable for my positive ones too.

  As Catholics, we sort of collect sins like food at a grocery store. We throw them into the cart, then we go to church and look at all those sins in the basket and beg for forgiveness.

  I was tired of focusing each week on the bad things that I had done. It was such a negative space and seemed to attract only more negativity and more sins.

  I tried to talk to my new LA friends about this, but they thought this path I was on was crazy. They said I looked so peaceful all the time that it became annoying to them. They were especially upset that nothing pissed me off anymore. They wanted to gossip and get mad at people, and I would giggle about it, knowing that any daggers they were throwing at others were being thrown back at themselves.

  Slowly, I started to notice my friendships dissipate, and I found myself more and more alone. I was a Playboy Playmate at this time, so you would think I would be caught up in orgies and parties (don’t worry, I am in future chapters), but in this initial awakening I was very alone.

  I have no doubt that I was operating on a really high vibration. The best way to describe it now was like I was on satellite radio and everyone around me was still on AM.

  I had to figure out what to do—either continue on this path of spiritual awakening by myself or go back to the static frequency and wait for some friends to catch up to me.

  I watched from the outside as the world walked by, including Christopher coming out of the laundromat with his hamper, and I wondered whom he victimized this time.

  I sat alone in my apartment and lowered my frequency to fit in with my friends. I felt a downshift inside me and hoped one day I would make it back to satellite radio.

  22

  I See Dead People

  I had always believed that there were people on Earth who were able to see ghosts, but I was never one of them until the night I pounded five hits of Ecstasy.

  Playboy had a group of girls going to Hawaii to shoot a video of them doing competitive water sports. They hired me as the host, which meant that I didn’t have to jet ski topless. Off we went to Maui to have an amazing time being young and stupid and (for the rest of the girls) naked.

  On our last day there, the production team decided to host a luau, where we caught many people’s eyes on the beach—probably because we looked like a lost episode of Baywatch. Suddenly, out of the water emerged this gorgeous hunk of a man. If you saw the movie Couples Retreat, he would have been the hot yoga teacher who molests all the wives.

  He sauntered over to us girls, who had seen only large Samoan people all week, and he had a smile that made our vaginas start clapping.

  He told us all about this private beach we could meet him at later and spend the night on. It was our last night there, so we figured why not?

  There was a full moon that night, which only accentuated the craziness that was about to unfold. We made it to the beach, and again our hot man emerged out of the water looking like some mystical merman. He grabbed a towel from inside his bag that was next to us, and we watched him dry off his hard, shredded body. Then he reached inside his bag once more and held up a little black box like it was magic.

  I was really hoping it wasn’t a glow-in-the-dark condom. I had seen one too many of those in 1994.

  “I brought some Ecstasy!” he said.

  Uh-oh. I had never done it before.

  No one else seemed to be too concerned, though. Holding up drugs in front of a group of Playmates was like holding up an arm to a cannibal tribe.

  We jumped on the box, fighting to get as many little white capsules as possible.

  Instead of saving some for later, we all pounded at least five at once. For anyone who has done E before, I know what you just said.

  Holy shitballs! No, she didn’t!

  Yes, I did. And so did the other geniuses I was with.

  We hung out on the beach waiting for something to kick in.

  Just when I started to believe we were given Tylenol instead of Ecstasy, my skin began melting into the sand. I was amazed by how the sand felt under my toes. It felt like I was walking on warm marshmallows.

  “Come here! These marshmallows aren’t sticky!” I shouted excitedly as if I had discovered a new planet. Metaphorically, I was traveling in another galaxy.

  I ran over to two of my girlfriends and yanked on their arms to get them up. “Come on, bitches! Get up!”

  But when my friends turned into old ladies, I screamed and backed away, tripping on tree branches as I watched the old ladies then turn into rocks.

  Strange things were happening. Everything was suddenly extra peachy and dreamlike.

  The looks on the girls’ faces were filled with such happiness. Even though I didn’t know some of these girls’ names, I felt driven to tell them what beautiful beings they were. So I walked on the water (much like Jesus did) and began to speak (much like Jesus did). “My children, I love you all so deeply. You are such beautiful beings.”

  “We love you so much too.”

  I looked at Miss December and said, “I can finally see your spirit and it’s beautiful. You’re not the cunt I thought you were at all.”

  She smiled back.

  “That is so nice of you! Thank you so much.”

  While we continued to talk about how much we loved each other, I noticed we were all rubbing each other’s heads, giving intense skull massages. It felt freaking awesome.

  The moon was full and the air was warm as we continued riding our head-rubbing train with limbs entangled, sitting waist-deep in the ocean.

  Waves of deep sensory stimulations went through my body. It was incredibly intense. So much so that we all began to express our love for one another by making out with each other. It was beyond ridiculous, but we were no longer in control of our actions.

  I looked around and I saw our hot surfer man standing about fifty feet away from us with his mouth hanging open.

  I can only imagine the shock he was in seeing that he was the only man on the beach with fourteen really fucked-up Playmates who just happened to also be making out with each other.

  Once that initial wave of sexual intensity calmed down, we tried to focus, but our eyeballs kept wanting to flip back into our heads.

  Surfer man started to approach us, but the look on his face had changed from shocked hotness to Hannibal Lecter.

  I whispered to the girls through my chattering teeth, “Hey, you guys, he’s walking toward us and I think he wants to eat us for dinner.”

  “Holy shit. It’s true!” cried Miss December. “He has forks in his eyes!”

  All the girls looked at him and moved in closer to form a tight cuddle puddle. “Hey, beautiful ladies, you’re looking delicious.”

  I’m sure he meant nothing by his comment, but one can’t be so sure when you’re on drugs on a deserted beach with a stranger, so I thought I would lead the group with my response. “Run!”

  I had no idea where I was going, but all the girls seemed to be following me. Once I thought we were far enough away, I jumped behind a big bush. (No, it wasn’t Miss December’s.) All I knew was that if we took five hits of E, we were probably in for many more, bigger waves of this shit.

  I sat up and tried to give the girls a pep talk for the sake of our survival. “You guys, um, we’re fucked,” I said. It wasn’t exactly the pep talk I was hoping for. Just then I noticed that we weren’t wearing anything. “Um, and we’re fucking naked.”

  “No, I’m wearing a bikini,” said Miss November.

  “Um, no, you’re not. You’re hallucinating.”


  Miss February chattered, “What the hell do we do now?” They all looked at me like I was the sober, logical one, when in fact I was the sole cause of the paranoid state everyone was in.

  Miss May said, “Let’s just walk to the nearest freeway and get help.”

  I responded, “Um, no, let’s not. We’re fucking naked. Let’s just try to sneak back to the beach and get our clothes.”

  With that, another wave of Ecstasy hit.

  I found myself holding a tree to brace myself. The texture felt so good that I decided to rub my head and boobs all over it. I noticed I was moaning loudly, which snapped me back to reality. I was shocked when I realized I wasn’t rubbing on a tree—I was rubbing on Miss June!

  “Holy shit, I’m sorry. I thought you were a tree.”

  Then Miss June walked up behind me and said, “Who are you talking to?”

  I looked back. It was a tree I was humping.

  “Fuck,” I said. “I am fucked up, you guys.”

  I looked around at the other girls, who were either spinning in circles or also humping trees. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  This must have been an act of God to punish me. I heard a chanting voice breathing down my neck.

  “Bimbos in limbo.”

  I wondered how many bugs we were walking on with our bare feet. I was still the leader of the idiots, so I was doing my best to try to stay calm. Just then, I froze in my tracks when I noticed a man wearing pioneer clothing from the nineteenth century standing in front of me, holding a bouncing baby up to me.

  One of the Playmates said, “Why did you stop?”

  I whispered, “There’s a guy from the 1800s holding up his baby to me right now. I think he wants me to take his baby.”

  Miss December looked at me like I was fucking crazy.

  “Listen, bitch, there is a guy standing here looking like he was shipwrecked or something and I think he wants me to rescue his kid.”

  Miss September shouted to the other girls, “You guys, Jenny is really, really fucked up. I think we need to help her.”