I'm Not High Read Free Page B

conduit. You could call it karma or whatever you like. As time has passed though, I’ve changed my thinking on this. The maid had taken the pages somewhere and had not destroyed them. Maybe she needed them. Maybe something compelled her to take them, and once her shift was over she’d read through them. And maybe she found something in them. (Perhaps something as delicious as the candy she also stole from me.)
    Who knows? The book is once again intact. And there are messages in it. I’ve had a big bank account and a tiny one, and I’ve been spiritually rich and poor, too. In between playing stickball on the streets of Long Island, having loved ones taken from me at the worst times, meeting the woman of my dreams when I wasn’t even having dreams, and getting big breaks and also getting broken, I’ve figured out a lot. I’d never claim to have all the answers to the test, but I’ve looked over the shoulders of some great people and have cribbed the most important one: We all have a mission to honor ourselves and those around us.
    (And, by the way, yeah: There’s plenty of stuff about weed in here, too, Meatball.)

Chapter 1
    Nearly Aborted
    As a boy, I used to sit and talk for hours with my best friend Phil out in the street on Jefferson Avenue in Long Island. We lived in Valley Stream, a beautiful community near Queens that lies directly underneath about twelve thousand flight paths to and from JFK airport, which is just a few miles away.
    So maybe Phil couldn’t always hear much of what I said, but on one summer night we were hanging out, stargazing and discussing what our lives would be like in the year 2000.
    “Man, we’re going to be old,” Phil said, cringing at his own imagination. “Like over thirty.”
    “By then,” I said with all the confidence of youth, “I will have met all of the New York Mets. I will have hung out with AC/DC. And I will have acted with Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson.” I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I was certain fame was coming my way.
    Even by age fifteen, Joe Pesci was already my favorite actor and my inspiration. I watched him act in everything, from movies like Raging Bull , where he had a huge role, to Easy Money (which to me is a classic) to a bunch of films where he had bit parts. He just had such electricity. I was captivated by him and had started doing impressions of him when my friends and I played stickball in the street. “Come aaaahhhn,” I’d moan in my best Pesci-ese. “Pitch da bawl. It ain’t gonna bite ya. Jeez. Hey. Whatsa matta witch yoo? Ya trow like ya take it up the wazoo.” Doing Pesci impressions was where it all started for me, and the reaction I got for it told me that I’d make a living at performing someday.
    Phil had heard my Pesci and knew that I was committed to my dream, so on that night when I predicted I’d have it all, he said simply, “I believe it.” And that’s what I loved about him. He never said much, but he always had my back, and that was about the best endorsement of a dream a guy could get in Valley Stream.
    “Yep,” I blathered on. “I am definitely going to be famous one day.”
    Back then, in addition to my big dreams, I also felt like the world was looking out for me, and that if I stayed true to myself I’d someday be able to share my talents with everyone. And when I say the world was looking out for me, I mostly mean that I’ve always been blessed and lucky. That goes all the way back to before I was born, as I almost didn’t even make it into the world. I was nearly aborted.
    Let me explain.
    By the time my mom, at age forty, wandered into the Rock Front Tavern, in Valley Stream, in the mid-1960s and met my dad, a garbage man moonlighting as a bartender, she had already had enough kids. There were Eddie, Bobby, Dorene, and Patti, and they came from an array of different fathers, one of whom was dead and one of whom was a crazy maniac who almost killed them all before Mom made