Mike Destefano - The Junkie and The Monk

 

 

Hi, everybody. Just want to say it's an honor to share the stage with such amazing human beings. Thank you so much. My story's about. Well, when I was a kid, I had a spark in me, like, I was always a happy kid. I always had a little bit of a flame going, and nothing could really knock it out. I was beaten by my father, and my mother wasn't around much, and I went to Catholic school. None of that. None of that. [audience laughter] The nuns couldn't extinguish the flame that dwelled inside of me. They tried. I was 28 years old. I was living in West Palm Beach, Florida, and I was walking around in the Winn Dixie supermarket, and I'm shopping, and I felt this weird feeling come over me. And then I fainted. Well, I blacked out. Just went into a blackout.

 

And that's happened to me before, but it was on purpose with drugs. [audience laughter] This time, it was a little scary. I just knew something was wrong. And I was in and out of consciousness. I did get in an ambulance. I ended up. I'm in a hospital now. I'm in Palm Beach Gardens Hospital. And I'm lying there and I got machine like a tube in my nose, and I'm in this incredible pain and can't really move much. And what the problem was that I had pneumonia. I had double lobal pneumonia in all five of the lobes. There is only four lobes that's why it's funny. [audience laughter]

 

I'm a comedian. I'm going to tell jokes here and there. So, I'm lying there, and I was just. So, for a minute, I was really concerned about myself, which was weird because I hadn't had that experience of worrying about myself for a few years, because at home, my wife was dying of AIDs, and she was really sick, obviously, and they didn't have diagnosis for women years ago when they had AIDS, they just called it wasting syndrome. So, whatever that is what she had. She didn't have a specific thing, but everything was just falling apart. And all I could think about is, I got to get out of this hospital. I got to get home and take care of her, because that's all I did, was take care of my wife. That was my life, my job. And I loved it. I wasn't a problem. I loved it. 

 

People would say, “How do you deal with it?” How do you ask a question like that? Like, have you ever loved somebody? It was weird to me. So, I just was laying there and the phone rings and my friend Jimmy calls me and he says, “Mike, Franny was in a car accident.” And I said, “No, she's can't even fucking walk. She's on so much morphine. There's no way, you know what?” He goes, “Yeah, she got in the car.” And I believed it because I knew her. She was a drug addict. We were former drug addicts, recovering people. So, if you cut my leg off, I would be upset. But if you gave me heroin right afterwards, I'd be, “Eh, I can handle it, I'll be all right.”

 

So, even though she was suffering with AIDS and going through all this horrible stuff, the morphine helped her feel better. She would be okay. And she probably just thought, “Hey, I can drive.” And she tried to and the car flipped over. He told me several times, and I knew she was dead, So I laid back and I was just like, “Wow.” And I had these Buddhist rosaries because I'm from the Bronx. [audience laughter] I was sort of between religions at the time, [audience laughter] if anybody knows what I'm talking about. [audience laughter] Well, I needed something, I couldn't because quite honestly, my life, the drugs and the tragedy and people dying that I loved. And most of all, my wife being so sick after being off of drugs for so long, and really us trying to get our lives together, it just seemed really unfair.

 

And all I could think about a God was the one that I was told as a kid, God's watching, he knows. So, I figured that the God who's doing this to me and my wife, I'm not going to fucking pray to him, “Hey, can you. What am I going to say? Can you help me? I'm going to say, what the fuck are you doing?” It's like, get off the fence, make a move. Kill us or help us do something. 

 

So that wasn't really working for me. So, I went to this Buddhist place. Because I saw an ad in the paper, Buddhism. So, I'm like, “Oh, maybe, let's see, what.” And it was a guy just sitting there. [audience laughter] They just sit there, these people. And there's no nails or blood or anything. [audience laughter] So, I was like, “I can do that. I probably can do that sitting stuff there.” So, I walk into this place and they told me to take my shoes off. Fucking take my shoes, I was from the Bronx, take my shoes off. And then I saw everyone else had their shoes off, so I took my shoes off. And that was all they really asked, and they were just nice people, they were very sweet and kind and compassion. They had a lot of compassion. That's what they do. They try to get compassion these people here. We fucking call it co-dependency and charge you money to get rid of it. [audience laughter]

 

So that's it. No one else got that one. All right, [audience laughter] so thank you. So, this woman says to me, really sweet, kind darling. She said, “Would you like to see the llama?” [audience laughter] So, I'm thinking, there's a fucking animal somewhere, like a sheep type of thing, [audience laughter] whatever. So, I said, “What's the llama?” So, she said, “No, it's a Tibetan priest.” A holy. I said, when she said the word priest, I immediately thought of a scary priest. So I went to the room, and I'm like, “I don't know about anyone else, but if I was in church kneeling, if my knees didn't hurt, I was in trouble. I was like, “Your knees have to hurt in order to be really fucking praying.” There's none of this comfort shit. You know what I mean? 

 

So, I walk in there to meet this guy, and he's just sitting. He's this little man bent over, and he's like, “Oh, [mumbling sound]. And I'm like, “What's he doing?” She goes, “He just prays and meditates. He's been doing that since he escaped Tibet with his family. And he just does that for 20-some-odd hours a day. Like 21 hours a day. And then he eats and goes to sleep for an hour.” Who the fuck's paying for this? I want to know. [audience laughter] Is this guy getting federal assistance? Are my tax dollars paying for this guy? Like, this is all I can come up with in my head.

 

So the woman says, “Well, come sit near him.” So, I actually got on my knees like Good Catholic. And I'm like, “On my knees.” And she says, “No, relax, relax.” And he looks at me, and he couldn't speak any English, but he said. He said, “Oh, West Palm Beach. Thank you, thank you.” So, what the fuck? West Palm Beach. Thank you, thank you. So, I said, “What is--? She is like, “Well, he's just letting you know that you're in West Palm Beach.” And he's saying, “Thank you for being there.” You know, just simple thing. So, I'm like, I'm not going to go to hell another if I don't sit right. So, I'm sitting there and he puts his hands out. He said, “Oh, put your hands out.” 

 

She was excited that he put his hands out to me. She said, “Oh, put your hands out.” So, I put my hands out and he took my hands. And when he touched me, I tell you, I felt like this fucking relaxed. So relaxed, you know? And I was just there in the moment and just so relaxed. And I wasn't scared. All the pain went away. And then he put his forehead out, and she said, “Put your forehead out.” So, I did the same thing. And he put his forehead against mine and he said some Tibetan stuff. I don't know what he blah, blah blah, blah, blah. That's what he said. [audience laughter] And all I know is I just felt really good and happy. Like it gave me a great feeling. 

 

So, I leave and so now I'm lying in the hospital and I got these rosaries, and I'm thinking of this man, and I'm okay, I'm holding it. And he blessed these beads for me, by the way. Every time I touched those beads, I thought of him. Whenever I saw orange or yellow, I thought of him because that's the robe he had. It was just amazing. To this day, when I see orange thing, I go, “Wow, I love that color.” So, because of him. So, I leave and I spent a few weeks there meditating and praying, and now I'm in the hospital and the phone rings again and it's my mother. And she said, “Daddy has a brain tumor.” Yeah, this is a bad day. [audience laughter] And I just laid back and I had the beads, and I was so overwhelmed that I wasn't feeling anything per se. It just froze me. I don't know if anyone knows what I'm talking about. There was no feeling. It was just okay.

 

And took the beads and I threw them. I was like, “Fuck this.” And I don't know if anybody gets this shit. But I was like, “You know what? I've been a Christian, Catholic, angry person for 27 years and 11 and a half months, and now I'm a Buddhist for like three weeks. I'm going to fuck the Buddhism. I don't want that little bit of peace, man. It just makes the rest of it seem so much shittier.” Do you know what I mean? So, screw this. I don't want nothing to do with this. The phone rings again. 

 

So, now I'm like, “Okay, they're telling me my wife's dead.” Like, I know this. And it's Jimmy. And he said, “Mike, I'm outside. I'm coming up. Franny's okay, relax.” I said, “Oh, my God, that's amazing.” So, I got up out of the bed, and she's actually in the emergency room of the hospital I'm in. So, I have to go visit her down in this emergency room. And I got this robe on and my morphine pole and another machine that's giving me oxygen. And I took my robe off and turned it on backwards so that my balls would be hanging out. I don't know why to this day, if there's any psychologists in here if you can talk to me afterwards? [audience laughter] No idea. I think it was just me saying, “Fuck you, everyone.” know what I mean?

 

Will you give me a break here? I'm going to visit my dying wife down in the hot. She didn't die from the flipping over the car, but she's going to die soon anyway. But I'm going to go visit her now and I got pneumonia, and who knows what the hell's going on here? So, I'm like, “You know what? Here's my balls.” I don't know what the process was, but that's what I did. [audience laughter] So, I go down and she's sitting up in the bed, and she was a pisser, and she's out cold, sitting. And she got a little cut on her lip from the accident. Tiny cut. Car flipped five times on I-95, little cut. And I woke her up. I said, “Honey, honey.” She goes, “Hey, what are you doing?” She wasted on morphine. She goes, “I wanted to surprise you.” I said, “Well, you did.” [audience laughter]

 

A couple of weeks went by, and she ended up in the hospice again. She was in hospice two or three times. Young people don't like to die. Not that old people do, but some old people had a good life. She didn't feel that way. She was pissed. She didn't want to die. She was thrown out of hospice for not dying. They put her in. They said, “Look, you can't stay here. You've been here for four months. It's for like a week, two weeks. You got to go home.” Came back again. Yeah, three times. It happened. Finally, this time, she died. She died, they told me she was gone. I've never stayed home. I stayed with her every night, her mother was in town. So, I took a night and stayed home. And she died that night.

 

When they called me, there was no feeling about it, you know? And it reminded me when my grandmother died when I was a kid, I didn't have a feeling. It was just okay and I froze. And I held in all of that death that I had. And because I knew my father is now going to die and I loved my father. We were so close. And I was like, “I got to save this angst up, man. I got to hold on,” you know what I mean? You can't fall apart. And so, nine months after my wife died, I was out at a movie. I came home and there was a voicemail from my brother, “Mike, pick up the phone, Mike, pick up the phone. The second time.” Every time I heard him say, pick up the phone, I little more and more fear of what he was going to say.

 

And finally he said, “Mike, I'm sorry to tell you this on the phone, but Daddy's gone.” And, I never forget where I was. I was looking at my laundry machines, listening. And I literally felt my heart be ripped out of me. I actually reached for it. It was the weirdest feeling. And that was it. The flame that I had as a kid, all of it, gone. Because now everyone died. All at that one moment, you know? And I made arrangements to fly home the next day. And I got on the plane. And when I got on the plane, I decided that I was going to end my life. I'm pretty much done.

 

And I wasn't telling anyone. It wasn't a threat. It was a total fucking decision that I've pretty much had enough of this. There is no more, nothing else to live for, and I'm done. And I got on the plane and I was so excited because I'm really going to fucking die. This is so great. I was thrilled and at peace and I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait till the funeral was over because that's when I'm going to do it. [audience chuckle] I'm not going to jump off a building or jump in front of a car. People haven't heard of overdosing on drugs. [audience laughter] So, I'm on the plane and I've got this decision of ending my life. And I'm at peace and I am happy. 

 

And all my life, God or the universe, whatever the fuck's running this thing, would always go, yeah, it's really awful. Now you got this. You're almost out of hope. But here's a little something to keep you going. Here's something nice to keep you going. I get up, I go to the back of the plane to go to the bathroom, and Llama chimed, the monk that I had met is sitting in the back row, and he sees me and he says, “West Palm Beach.” [audience laughter] And I said, “You little motherfucker.” [audience laughter] And he put his hands out like he did before again, and he put his head out, and I did the-- it's called tonglen. And to meet a llama, you have to have amazing karma, they say. To have a llama actually want to do tonglen with you, which is giving and taking. That means give me all of your pain, and I'm going to give you all my joy.

 

And the reason he sat for 30 years in meditation was to open his heart so that it gets as big as the ocean, so that if you pour some pain into it absorbs it. That's what his whole life was about. And it worked for me, that particular tonglen. It worked. And I got home and I quit my job like Tom. And I said, “You don't want to be a fucking comedian.”