So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  I reacted predictably: “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod! Fire! Fire!” I screamed, octaves above what most eight-year-old girls are capable of. And ironically, exactly as those writers on Getting Personal had predicted. I pulled open the broiler, only to realize that it was actually a really dumb idea to pull open the broiler, because I was just giving the already robust fire more oxygen. Whooosh! More flames! I became a whirlwind of panic; I was accustomed to setting myself on fire, not major appliances! Smoke billowed. Smoke alarms squealed. Lisa’s dogs ran for the backyard. I threw open her kitchen cabinets looking for an extinguisher.

  When suddenly, with the silent deftness of a ninja, Lisa grabbed a nearby box of baking soda, adroitly emptied its contents on the broiler, and smothered the inferno. We stared in slack-jawed quietude at the smoldering pile of powdered nuts on blackened foil. It seemed my fire had met its match. And maybe the king of fire gags had found a queen. (Okay, that was cheesy, but I really couldn’t help it; she was very impressive.)

  We’d been going on dates for a couple of weeks and I’d yet to make a move. But accidentally setting her stove on fire is not a confidence builder that often leads to nights of passion. So, once again, after a delicious dinner during which she never betrayed even the slightest irritation that I’d almost burned her house down, I excused myself with a hug.

  * * *

  That week, Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith, was scheduled to be on. Robin and her friend Shelly (whom we now affectionately refer to as our sister from those years living with us) were naturally excited, considering their schoolgirl Aerosmith-worship society. They got his picture and autograph.

  The rest of us at the show were surprised, on the other hand, that this legendary performer couldn’t get his only line right.

  The setup was that Tyler moves in next door to the Harper boys in Malibu, and the front man’s famous scat vocalizing—all those high-pitched scoot-di-biddly-at-bap-baps—is driving Charlie nuts. Finally, at the end of the episode, he makes his appearance, and Tyler has to deliver one line: “There’s a lot of the seventies I don’t remember.”

  Well, there was a lot about that one line Tyler couldn’t remember. Every time the camera fell on him, he’d find some new combination of those words. “The seventies . . . don’t remember them.” “You know what . . . I don’t remember the seventies.” “Wish I could remember the seventies.” Believe it or not, writers spend a lot of time crafting a line for maximum laugh potential. It was such a strange rut—thank God we were preshooting his scene on Thursday, away from an audience—that when it was all over, the cue card with his line was nailed to the wall as a memento. It’s funny when someone who’s such a natural performer comes completely out of his element when you give him a scripted line.

  * * *

  I gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. We rode on silently. I’d just dropped the bomb:

  “Lisa . . .” I’d said, “I have an enormous crush on you.”

  Now she too was staring straight ahead. She ventured cautiously: “At first I wasn’t sure if you were gay or not. . . .” She looked down, then continued. “Y’know, because we’ve been going on dates for six weeks, and you’ve never even kissed me good night.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just nervous.”

  We’d been to Casa Vega for a late lunch and were now driving into Hollywood to pick up my son from a birthday party. This was to be the first time she would meet him.

  “So . . . why don’t you kiss me now?” she asked matter-of-factly.

  “Well . . . because I’m driving.”

  But now it was weird. I’d let her know that I wanted to kiss her, but simply hadn’t yet. And currently I was driving and couldn’t. Plus, it’d be strange for her to take the initiative at this moment and kiss me, because, again, I was operating a motor vehicle. So we spent the rest of the journey discussing how I’d pretty much dropped the ball every time I’d had a chance to make out with her. I was apologetic and tried to explain that due to my extensive history of romantic bungling, I was unlikely to handle this any better.

  Finally we arrived at the party and stepped out of the car. I opened her door, and as she stepped out I went to kiss her, and even though she was clearly a little startled, she let me.

  When I pulled back from the kiss I noticed an odd look on her face. Sort of a furrowed-brow mix of surprise, concern, a hint of betrayal, more than a little confusion, and finally, admiration. “Wait a minute,” she said as she grabbed my shirt purposefully. “Do that again.” We kissed again. I pulled back, and there was that same look. Like someone might look if they’d just found out their roly-poly accountant spouse was actually a deep-cover agent working for the CIA.

  “You’re really good at that,” she said. And to this day she swears that that was the moment she knew.

  * * *

  There was a wonderfully odd moment with Janeane Garofalo when she guest-starred as a woman who hates herself after sleeping with Alan.

  We had a joke where she confessed to taking her dog’s sleeping pills, and Alan sympathizes because it’s cheaper. It was an admittedly very sitcom joke, but a funny one. Janeane, however, who comes from a form of counterculture comedy that’s about subverting the traditional tropes of humor, and finding laughs in real stories instead of one-liners, bristled at delivering it.

  “I don’t want to say this,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “It’s such a . . . jokey joke.”

  “Well, is it something about the line? I think it’s kind of funny that the character takes her own dog’s tranquilizers.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Who would buy that?”

  Okay, I thought. She’s looking for motivation. I get it. I said, “So you don’t understand why somebody would do that?”

  “No,” she said. “I understand. They’re expensive. I mean, I take my dog’s antidepressants.”

  * * *

  New Year’s Eve, 2006.

  Also Lisa’s birthday.

  The night I popped the question.

  It’s a packed bar at the beautiful Martini House in Napa Valley, filled with friends and loved ones staring at the ground and moving furniture.

  Let me explain.

  It was my sister Robin’s idea to propose that night. Earlier in the year, Lisa had done a piece on a Russian psychic. At the end she asked her, “Hey, I’m in a relationship; what do you see in the cards?” The psychic said, “Now things are not so good, but next year they’ll be great.” Lisa said, “Did you hear the part when I said I’m in a relationship?”

  We laughed about it, but Sis pointed out how New Year’s Eve is technically the beginning of “next year,” which would make asking Lisa to marry me the “great” prediction come true. Terrific idea, I thought. We got a bunch of friends to go up to Napa with us to celebrate New Year’s and Lisa’s birthday—the ruse!—and when the magic night arrived, I had my moment planned. I’d hidden the engagement ring, and now the box was in my pocket being nervously massaged by my fingers. When the countdown started, I’d wait for the “Three! Two! One!” and unleash the, “Remember how that Russian psychic told you that this year was lousy but next year was going to be great? Well . . . will you marry me?”

  We had a pretty joyous group with us at the Martini House that night and the evening was going smashingly.

  Suddenly the countdown started. “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

  I nervously gripped the ring box in my pocket.

  “Seven! Six! Five!”

  About to open the box, I said, “Remember how that Russian psychic told you that this year was lousy but next year was going to be great? Well . . .”

  “Four! Three! Two!”

  “Will you marry . . .”

  I opened the box, and the ring was not there. Gone. How? I’d had it when we got there!

  Lisa look
ed at me. “Wait a minute. Is this . . . a joke?”

  “One! Happy New Year!” everyone in the bar screamed at the top of their lungs.

  At this moment, my sisters saw me with the open ring box, and also proceeded to scream at the top of their lungs.

  It took me a second to unfreeze my face, though, and respond to Lisa.

  “No! No! It’s not a joke! I mean it; will you marry me?” Where is that freaking ring?

  “Well, uh . . .”

  “I don’t know where the ring is!” I said, scanning the floor around me, which was unhelpfully covered in confetti and shiny decorative strips. Why? Oh, right, it was New Year’s.

  I opted for full disclosure. I announced to the crowd, “Hey, everyone! I think I’ve lost a diamond ring somewhere on the floor; could everyone take a look—”

  This prompted havoc, since we’re talking about a roomful of drunk people, all of whom began a quest for this precious piece of jewelry. Everybody in the Martini House bar was now looking for it, shoving chairs and tables aside, crawling all over one another, and getting on all fours.

  I turned to Lisa and said, “Would you marry me without the ring?”

  “Yes,” she said unequivocally, wiping away tears, then added with a frisson of laser-focused seriousness, “But I want to see it.”

  Visual confirmation occurred only minutes later, when our friend Suzanne Rico located the ring amid some glittering debris below the bar, holding it up and triumphantly shouting, “What does the person who finds it get?!”

  “My undying gratitude!” I yelled out, relieved.

  We were married six months later in June. I was now wedded to the most wonderful woman, and starring in a hit TV show that I looked forward to working on every day.

  * * *

  When Charlie told me in 2008 that he had asked his girlfriend, Brooke Mueller, an attractive blond socialite turned Realtor, to marry him, I expressed joy at the news. I had bounced back from divorce myself by falling in love with the exquisite, kind, talented, and intelligent Lisa Joyner. Let’s make this bliss spreadable!

  “That’s great, Charlie!” I said.

  “Yeah, well, she made a hell of an effort,” he said. “She earned it.”

  Earned it? That didn’t sound . . . positive. In any case, I couldn’t make the wedding because I was shooting a movie in Austin with Robert Rodriguez, so Lisa went in my stead. When it came time for Charlie’s dad to toast the newlyweds, the esteemed Martin Sheen stood up and the crowd went silent, anticipating the matrimonial eloquence that the guy who played President Bartlet those many years on The West Wing was about to lay down. He took a moment, eyed the crowd, then mumbled, “Hope you kids know what you’re doing,” and sat back down.

  More prophetic words . . . yadda yadda yadda . . .

  * * *

  In August, as my daughter, Daisy, was being born, she stretched her tiny gore-covered arm skyward and let out a wail. A beautiful being was emerging into my plane of existence, soon to fill my life with joy and purpose, but God help me, I’m such a sci-fi movie geek that all I could think of was how much it reminded me of Charlton Heston stretching his gore-covered arm skyward and wailing, “Soylent Green is people!”

  I shook that off, cut the umbilical cord, appropriately beamed as she was swaddled for the first time, and gingerly held her to my chest. As I cradled her in my arms I got my first real look at my daughter’s face. Of course she was sublime, a face I was already falling in love with. But the trip through the birth canal had done an outstanding job of giving her visage a noticeably compressed squishiness, and again, God help me, all I could think of was how much she reminded me of Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz.

  Clearly I’ve got a problem.

  It’s a beautiful problem to have, though.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2009 I was driving into work one day when I heard two KROQ deejays discussing an interview Charlie had given to notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, spouting crazy talk about how the U.S. government, like some really evil David Copperfield, orchestrated 9/11, destroyed the Twin Towers in a controlled demolition, slammed the Pentagon with a cruise missile, faked a plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and made us look the other way toward Islamic fundamentalists. They played excerpts from the interview, and I thought, What the fuck?

  When I saw Charlie at work that day, I pulled him aside. “Dude, what are you doing?” I said. “I don’t really understand how you could feel this way, but even if you do, you certainly don’t have to discuss it on the radio.”

  “Jon,” he said, “there’s so much going on that we don’t know about.”

  “You mean about how the United States government, an institution that can barely deliver our mail, was somehow able to wire two of the biggest modern office buildings on planet Earth with thousands of pounds of high explosives and hundreds of thousands of feet of trigger wire, and not have any of the approximately forty thousand employees notice? Then coordinate two hijacked jetliners flown by amateur pilots to crash into said building exactly where they happen to have planted the explosives so that half an hour later they can detonate the charges and complete their evil plan?” I replied.

  We continued our conversation in the makeup room that day, although arguing logic and reason against such a harebrained idea isn’t exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, because before you even start shooting you just want to stare at such poorly designed fish and say, “Really?” Nevertheless, I aimed to ridicule my colleague, even though talking politics at work is touchy, because people care, and hierarchy colors the taking of sides. I was surprised, in fact, that Charlie’s views earned quite a bit of support in the makeup room that day, but then, should I have been? Is the person applying blush really going to say to the star of TV’s biggest comedy, “You know, you’re actually disappearing up your own paranoid asshole at this moment? And could you tilt your head a little to the left?”

  At one point, I said, “Okay, so why destroy the towers?”

  Charlie said, “Well, they wanted to destroy the documents that revealed the plan.”

  “Did you see pictures of downtown Manhattan afterward?!” I said. “It was littered with documents! Pretty dumb way to keep your documents secret—by spreading them all over the lower third of one of the world’s most populous cities! What happened to just going to Office Depot and getting a shredder for thirty-nine dollars?! It’s only thirty-four dollars if they used their Office Depot Rewards card!”

  This went on for a while, but then I backed off. That Charlie stood by this was hard to fathom, unless . . . unless they’d gotten to him.

  Actually, I teased him about it whenever I could after that—someone remarking that the craft service table was out of something might incur a snotty, “Damn you, neo-cons!” from me. But it did really seem as if something wasn’t right.

  * * *

  On Emmy night in September 2009—my fourth year in a row as a nominee for supporting actor in a comedy—I was seated off to the side of the Nokia Theatre, and frankly, I understood why. That’s where the perennial losers go. That’s fine, I thought. It cosmically fits Alan’s persona to be in the loser role. Lisa and I sat next to female supporting actor nominee Kristen Chenoweth. Ah, I figured, they don’t expect her to win either.

  Then she won. Were we in the lucky section?

  Then I won. We were!

  Years before, the year of my first Emmy nomination for playing Alan, I’d come up with what I thought was a funny acceptance line, but as I kept losing I filed it away in the back of my memory. Now, in the flush of a win I didn’t expect, I was walking slowly to the podium because I wanted desperately to remember that line. Then again, I remembered, there’s nothing more embarrassing than outlasting your applause. Better hurry to that stage! Fortunately it came back to me, a joke about how I’d never thought of awards as much. Until right then, o
f course.

  It was an exhilarating night. To be recognized by your peers is a truly wonderful feeling, and the fact that we were entering our seventh season of Two and a Half Men—and logging our first Emmy win for acting—seemed to bode well for the continued health of the show. On top of that, the addition of Daisy to our family was already exponentially increasing the joy at home.

  This was a good time to be me.

  Jon Cryer, winner at the Emmys, winner at life. I could settle in for a continued existence of absolute normalcy and nothing weird ever happening at all.

  Chapter 26

  The Tsunami Is More Important

  I had been enjoying Christmas Day of 2009 so much with my family around me that I somehow managed to stay away from all Internet-connected devices for much of it. It’s the holiday present that doesn’t announce itself, really. You just wake up from concentrated yuletide merriment at some point and realize, Hey, I haven’t been online at all today. Sweet!

  Then, of course, you give in, check a news site, and read that your costar “Carlos Irwin Estévez” has been arrested in Aspen, Colorado, for spousal battery.

  Alarmed and freaked-out, I texted him: Dude, my thoughts are with you. If you need to talk, give a call; if you’ve got bigger problems, call me when you get back.

  A few minutes later, Charlie texted back: Thanks bro. Yikes—fukk me, wut a bad day. . . . I’m flying home tonite. I’ll try to call over the weekend. Shower rape was bad but the food was okay. Hair and makeup for mug shot got there too late. . . .

  He followed that with: And I had same bail bondsman as Kobe. . . . No joke . . . :)

  I took the sense of humor about shower rape and sharing Kobe Bryant’s bail bondsman as a good sign, although it seemed pretty clear my friend and colleague wasn’t sober anymore. We exchanged “Merry Xmas” texts, although mine had a question mark, to which Charlie texted back, I’ll take it!