by David Spade
DEDICATION
To my lovely mom, the real writer in the family and the
strongest person I know (excluding Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Bryan, Andy, and I would be nowhere without you.
Thanks for not bailing when things got tough.
Tough being an understatement.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
ONE
GROWING UP
TWO
MAMA’S BOY
THREE
LOSING MY VIRGINITY
FOUR
MINI SPADE
FIVE
JOINING A FRATERNITY
SIX
GETTING SOME HEAT
SEVEN
LOSING MY HEAT
EIGHT
HBO YOUNG COMEDIANS SPECIAL
NINE
GETTING ON SNL
TEN
SNL 1990–1991
ELEVEN
SNL 1991–1992
TWELVE
SNL 1992–1993
THIRTEEN
SNL 1993–1994
BEING VALUABLE
FOURTEEN
EDDIE MURPHY AND ME
FIFTEEN
TOMMY BOY
A FEW MORE THINGS ABOUT CHRIS
SIXTEEN
SKIPPY
SEVENTEEN
MY FIRST HOOKER
EIGHTEEN
MY HOUSEKEEPER
NINETEEN
A VICTORIA’S SECRET PARTY
TWENTY
CHICK TRICKS
EPILOGUE
THE TIME I DID TOO MUCH COKE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTO INSERT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
Hey. Welcome to my stupid book. I wrote it myself, so I’ll take all the blame. I had so many titles when I decided to do this. My friend said it’s like having a kid, naming it is the best part, and then the rest is shitty. Kidding! But the rest of writing it is actually hard work, which is not my strong suit. I had a few title pitches that were considered in my first meeting then promptly shot down day one after I signed up. I thought My Stupid Life wasn’t bad and we could run with that. But that was shot down. Then I tried My Life as a 10. I liked that. Sort of funny. (Because I’m only a 9.) I liked Dear Diary because it was nice and vague. Then came Rags to Bitches. That was briefly discussed, but bookstores said no. And of course Punchlines and Pussy never made it out of the gate. So we landed on the one you see now. I’m good with it.
FYI, this book is not that serious. This is meant to be read when super bored, then forgotten fifteen minutes later. It could be read cover-to-cover during one medium-to-severe case of diarrhea. Nothing in it will change your life. There are no easy tips to lose belly fat like I see on my computer every day. It’s just me blabbing away about my life and SNL and getting beat up by my assistant and any other stupid shit I could think of. It’s easy to read, no big words cuz I don’t know any. It’s like watching Dolphin Tale on HBO and then forgetting you ever saw it. By the way, I did see Dolphin Tale and didn’t forget it. In fact I had a few problems with it . . . this might not be the forum for this, but quickly: It’s about a dolphin with a bad attitude who gets caught in some lobster traps and his tail gets chopped off and so he’s fucked. He’s basically an anchor because he doesn’t have a rudder. He starts freaking out so people start to help him and for some reason he’s a dick about it. They make him a crummy little tail out of popsicle sticks or whatever and he doesn’t like it. This is where I’d say “It’s for your own good, dipshit!” but he’s not having it. Then they get a doctor to make a better one and he’s still being a pussy. He smashes it against the wall and breaks it. Like, “I hate it! It’s not my real tail! I hate the ocean! I hate everyone!!!” Full Jan Brady tantrum. Then he realizes it helped and starts nudging the fake tail like, “Put it back on, I get it now,” and they are like, “Fuck off, you don’t want it, remember?? You’re so fucking tough! Have fun drowning, moron, because this is going on a shark now. You’re an asshole.”
Anyway, I feel I went off on a tangent, but I think what I’m saying is my book is like Dolphin Tale but with fewer jokes.
Have a nice read!
CHAPTER ONE
GROWING UP
I was supposed to die. That’s what seven different doctors in a row told my parents. I came out a month early, a superpreemie (I think that is the street term). I was probably about five pounds and roughly the size of a hacky sack or a medium-size gerbil. To make matters worse, I couldn’t eat anything without barfing it all up. I was allergic to everything, so I couldn’t put on weight. It was all very scary to the parental units (warning: Coneheads reference). All I could choke down was goat’s milk, of all things. So gross. The hardest part was taking that goat everywhere. (JOKE NUMBER ONE, FOLKS! Stay close: there are four more buried in this book somewhere.) Thank God Mom and Dad kept hammering away at different doctors because eventually, they found one who said, “I’ve seen this shit . . .before.” (Very casual doctor.) “When he's a . . . year old he will grow out of it and start eating regular food.” The dude was right; when I turned a year old I climbed out from under that goat and said, “Fuck this, let’s go to Wendy’s!” Obviously I have bulked up to my present athletic appearance since then, but it was touch-and-go there for a while. You can all relax. Spade is ripped and ready for the Combine (NFL reference).
By the way, my parents met when Dad was in the air force as a radar man (the biggest pussy job) and Mom was a sweet, attractive little debutante who went from private schools to Denison University in Ohio. They both attended and I guess the sparks flew. I can’t imagine the sparks but they tell me they were there. So in a major playa move my dad, Sammy, put a ring on it and my mom was looking forward to a very quiet, normal life in the Midwest raising a family with her doting husband nearby. (We will find out how this plan went off the tracks later. These “hooks” keep you reading!)
Needless to say, growing up I was pretty microscopic, and I hated it. I wasn’t just short, I was “Oh fuck I hope everything’s cool with this kid. Maybe he’s actually a hamster” short. I’m one of three kids. All dudes. Bryan, Andy, and David. B.A.D., as my mom joked. (She’s not a pro comedian so I didn’t expect an LOL out of that.) I’m the baby. And compared to my brothers I looked like a baby, and I acted like a baby, too. I was such a gigantic pussy/mama’s boy growing up it was almost comical. Actually, not almost comical. It is comical. Now. At the time, it was just plain sad. Anyone could beat me up, at any time. I was fragile. And I was always scared.
I’ll back up a bit. I was born in Michigan. (Fuck this book—it’s boring already. Pick up the pace, Spade.) When I was four, my dad had the great idea to move from Michigan (where he was from and where my brothers and I were all born) to Arizona. I think the move was motivated by my dad’s desire to cheat on my mom in a different state. Apparently he had plowed through Michigan (literally) and was ready to take on the valley of the sun. Sammy wasn’t super reliable, so once we got there it became clear that he didn’t have the job he said he did, so he grabbed some temp sales job at a magazine that didn’t pay shit. He then scrammed on the family and that was that. No calls, no alimony, no child support. Crickets across the board. So my mom, who is truly a saint, had the unfortunate job of raising three selfish rug rats, with little to no income in a town she didn’t know with zero friends around. The least Dad could have done was bail out on her in Michigan so she had some peeps around, but he was too selfish to be that thoughtful.
So there we were frying in the desert with no dough, and no plan. Mom had to go out and get two jobs. However, th
is was the seventies, when guys were assholes and women didn’t get paid anything. (Sort of like today! Yay, progress!) So she worked constantly, as a secretary and also doing sales at a department store, while my brothers and I constantly bitched about not having enough of everything. (Why don’t I have a surfboard?!) It must have been tough on her. Mom would break down sometimes, but mostly she wouldn’t complain and tried to make her ungrateful children happy. My dad would show up once a year and give me a Nerf football for Christmas and act like he was a hero. (Me: Oh my God it’s two colors—you spoil us!) The thing was, he was sort of a hero when he came around. When your dad isn’t there, you wonder what the fuck you did that was so bad to make him go. It’s not like his kids were accidents. He’d planned to have a family. Then he couldn’t take the presh and skadoodled, leaving Mom with zero babysitting money and skimpy food rations. But when he came to visit, it was like the pope had come to town or something; we were all over him. Not really fair to Mom, but that’s just the way it works when you are a kid.
I never really noticed I was poor. When you’re a kid, you just find shit to do around the house or yard to keep yourself busy. If you’ve never had badass toys, you don’t miss them. And people around us were poor, too, so I fit right in. I had no complaints. I used my imagination to entertain myself. I also had a rock collection and a beer can collection I was very proud of. This was my mom’s idea. I didn’t realize till later this was genius on her part. “Hey Davey, you should collect rocks and cans! THEY’RE FREE! While you’re at it, collect old cigarettes butts and broken glass too.” Very crafty of her. And I’m not bragging, but I had mica, pyrite, and an amethyst in my collection. (Side note to readers: Amethysts, those big purple crystal-looking ones, were a big panty dropper back in the day. Even the big old-school seventies panties, with the louvers.) Dinners at home usually consisted of the five main food groups: tater tots, fish sticks, mac and cheese, Oreos, and cereal. Some combination of these. With a Coke or milk. She did her best; later we moved up to Lean Cuisine. We were ballin’.
From day one, I was the school pipsqueak. In class pictures they sat us shortest to tallest and I was always first. It was me then girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, then another guy. To be shorter than every chick was so humiliating, and made me the ultimate bully bait. In third grade a fellow student came up to me during recess and said, “Hey Spade, I heard your family’s poor.” Being in the dark about this fact, I was like, “What? Oooohhh no, you got some bad information.” A few hotties from my class were drifting by, and they stopped to listen. By the way, being poor isn’t the panty dropper you think it is, even in third grade. Chicks were like “Let him answer . . . !” The guy said again, “I hear you guys have no money.” Now I was getting nervous, but mostly I was thinking, What a dick! Why are you cock-blocking me?! I barely know you! So I tried to defend myself. I said, in a sort of “I rest my case” tone, “Would we have two tires on our lawn if we were poor?” He was like, “Uhhh, yeah?” So I keep going: “Would I be wearing the same thing every day if I was poor?” Now this one didn’t sound good as it came out. And then, it all sort of hit me. We were broke. And that sucked. But my mom was sneaky. She’d say, “That outfit looks so good on you, why don’t you wear it tomorrow?” Classic bamboozle. That day was the end of my poverty innocence. You’d think at some point my dopey brothers might have tipped me off.
In addition to being the shortest and now the poorest, I also had the worst school supplies. My crayons were always that little ghetto four-pack my mom swiped from IHOP and stuffed in her bra (“nothing for me today, thanks”). These came with the four basic colors: blue, red, green, yellow. One day this foxy chick, who should have been in pre-supermodel school instead of my dogshit class, was sitting next to me said, “Hey, can I borrow a crayon?” I was like, BOOOIOIOIOIOIOINGGG! Wiener went up so fast it did a gainer. This brat had never talked to me and now we have some chatter going. I couldn’t fumble it. This is not a drill! All these thoughts were going through my head. But I played it cool. “Why sure . . .” as I looked through my four nubby little crayons, trying to pick one that wasn’t broken. Then she coyly upped the ante: “Do you happen to have Burnt Sienna?” I froze. In my head, I was thinking, WTF? How ’bout red you little grub worm? But I didn’t freak out. I still was playing my Fonzie attitude. “Um, let me check . . .” (Mumbling as I sifted through them.) “Hmm . . . yellow . . . blue . . . yellow again . . .” I was stalling.
Then out of nowhere some rich prick in back of me chimed in: “I have Burnt Sienna.” I turn around and saw that he had the mega-box of sixty-four Crayolas. Like a cinder block. Biggest one you can get. It even has a balcony. Every goddamn color in the rainbow was in there, so many they are squirting out the sides. It even had Clear! Who needs Clear? It does nothing! It’s like writing with a booger. So he plucked it out and without warning started sharpening it on the back of the box! There was a sharpener on the back! It was so cool. A hush fell over the room. Even I was freaking out. All the chicks were staring in disbelief. They were so turned on. I’m serious, there was not a dry pussy in the place. Even the teacher was drenched . . . it was like Splashdown! Kaaaatrina! Niiiiiagra! He handed the crayon to her and she slid off her chair in ecstasy. Of course, she never looked at me again. So you can see, I’ve always had a way with the gals. This proved I needed some game.
When I was about nine my mom married a doctor. He was a very tall, very bald, very eccentric guy named Howard P. Hyde, and the polar opposite of my real dad, Sammy. This guy was no fun, had no personality, did have a job, was responsible, and gave a fuck about us. My mom liked the change of pace. Not sure she was ever in love with him because he was a bit quirky and not exactly GQ material, but he wanted to save us and apparently he was okay with Judy being only 5 percent into him. He was a little strange, but I liked him. He was from South Dakota. I’d never known anyone from there before and haven’t since. I never called him Dad, but I came close once. It just felt too weird. Even so, I almost kicked over and used his last name, Hyde. Spade Sr. hadn’t given me any reason to be proud of my heritage or anything. But when some kid I was riding bikes with said to me, “Hey Hyde, lets go hit 7-Eleven!” I realized that doesn’t sound as cool as “Spade.” Howie did have some lasting influences on my life. He introduced me to coin collecting, chess, and guns. (Wow, Spade, you were a total nerd.) Chess, you say? Well, this may come as a shocker but I was a smart kid. Hyde liked that because he was a member of Mensa and had gone to Duke. (Talk about a major nerd alert when he whipped out that Mensa card . . . sirens went off.) So, we bonded over smarty-pants things. He convinced me to take German in high school because he was fluent.
I really can’t think of a more useless language or waste of my high school time than taking a semester of German, especially since we lived in Casa Grande, Arizona. This was a dumpy copper mining town two hundred miles from THE MEXICAN BORDER! HOW ’BOUT I TAKE SPANISH? SOMETHING I’LL USE EVERY DAY OF MY FUCKING LIFE! But no, German it was. So I struggled through an elective and now I can maybe hit on Heidi Klum one day. (Guten Tag, Heidi! Hast du einen Bruder? Nein aber ich habe zwei Schwestern! Translation: “Do you have any brothers? No, but I have three sisters.” Yeah baby! That was right out of the German 101 textbook and, shockingly, never came in handy.)
So Howie was a smart guy, but mostly he was a little nuts. For instance, he gave me a shotgun and a shotgun shell reloader for Christmas once. When I was TEN, FOLKS. I was like, “Well, I wanted a skateboard, but okay?” So now it’s sixth grade and I’ve got street cred because peeps found out I had a shotgun. I went skeet shooting with Howie and reloaded all my own shells. I played chess, even making it to the state chess finals before I had to drop out. I got whomped with German measles in a cruel turn and I was laid out for twelve days. What a bummer. I almost croaked; actually that’s the closest I’ve come. I also read the most books in my school (forty-seven one year) and was spelling bee champ. (I got smoked in the first round. How could I choke on
apparatus? A-P-A . . . Wait! GONG!!) So I was king of the local nerds with my nerdy stepdad. All was good. So I thought.
Then, the stepdad started getting crazier and crazier. He had been a doctor during the Vietnam War, so he had post-traumatic stress syndrome. Not that we knew that. We just thought he was being a weirdo. He would have flashbacks of battles and wake us up in middle of the night to go out and look for the enemy, wearing his green army helmet and carrying a gun. We would play along. Why not? It seemed like fun to three boys, until one night when he accidentally blew a hole in the roof of his closet. That’s when it got a bit “quirky-heavy” for me.
My brothers and I were three little white trash troublemakers running around our shitty mining town blowing up bullfrogs and horny toads with M-80 firecrackers, freezing locusts and tying dental floss around them so when they unfroze we could fly them around like locust kites, and causing all sorts of Joe Dirt–style trouble. My oldest brother, Bryan, was the craziest of our gang. He had a cage in his room filled with five rattlesnakes. He also had a boa constrictor and a python. And I thought nothing of it. Umm, WTF?? That’s a lot of reptile in one house. Who were we? Marilyn Manson? Once we tried to add to Bryan’s collection by catching a rattler that was chillin’ in our front yard. We were trying to catch it with two tennis rackets. The idea was to grab the snake behind the head by pinching the rackets together and then push it into an empty plastic milk jug (white trash 101). Well, Howard Pierre Hyde pulled up, drunk as yoozsh. (This was when cops didn’t hassle you for driving drunk. Aka the good old days.) The man drank a case of Coors tallboys every day, so that wasn’t so unusual. He saw what we were up to and yelled out, “Why are you pussyfooting around? You just pick it up.” He grabbed the snake with his bare hands. (I always knew there was a reason why you don’t just pick up snakes. They BITE.) And naturally, it bit him. He didn’t even flinch. He just said, “Well, I’m going to go take a nap.” My brothers and I looked at each like, “No shit dude, I bet you will.” Howie took off his shirt and flopped on the couch, and we just stood and stared at him. In twenty minutes his whole side swelled up and turned purple and we watched it happen live (shout-out to Andy Cohen). We shook him awake and called an ambulance. He was in pretty rough shape for a while there but eventually pulled through. We still kept all the snakes in the house, though. We learned zero from that.
