Buddy, I am in trouble! My agents have whooshed me out of hardcore rehab (seventeenth time’s the charm!) in Georgia thanks to my good ol’ ‘issues’ with food and drugs and booze so I could present a little Best Documentary award at the Oscars here with Spade (I’m at the Oscars! Me! A three hundred pound goofball from Wisconsin!), and now I’m in the room for photo-calls and everybody thinks this situation is normal—there’s Tom Cruise!—and somebody must have made a mistake letting me in here and I’m awful scared and, oh, buddy, I wish, I wish I could dash out of here and get higher than King Kong.

My sponsor came out special to help me but I had to pay for her flight and that doesn’t feel OK and she’s not being my guardian angel, she’s gone Yogi Bear on all the goodies in my gift basket. I mean, half of me wants to go to a shelter and give those fancy gizmos and Rolexes to the needy because Christ knows that’d be the nice Catholic boy thing to do and the other half of me with the horns and pitchfork wants to bolt and sell it all for an XL trash bag full of dope and coke and Skittles and Sara Lee Double Chocolate Layer Cake and Slimer all that good stuff up then they could stick me in a trash bag, too, when I was done and throw me to the curb. But no! Ol’ Chris isn’t allowed to have fun anymore: Me! Santa’s insane son! I’d eat Leonardo Di fucking Caprio just in case he ate candy in the last 24 hours. No cops in a room like this! Nope, gotta be a good boy.

What the hell am I doing here again?

Oh, yeah, buddy: photo call! OK, do a big dumb face like on Picture Day at school! And now the jackass angel on my shoulder is whining in that super-sad Droopy Dog voice: “Chris, why’d you ruin a nice photo, huh?” I don’t know, I don’t have too much brain: A lit cherry bomb doesn’t have big scary thoughts about “the Nature of Explosions,” he just goes bang! A guaranteed Whoa from the crowd. Anyway, all I did was make my eyes pin-ball in my big ugly bubblegum bowling ball head, that’s minor. I coulda got naked, everything’s funnier if I’m naked. Except sex. The counselors in rehab say that’s not a good way to think, not a healthy “self image,” but what’s wrong with getting everybody to laugh so hard they puke? That’s the best high. And that’s what God wants, right? For me to make everybody happy?

OK, I just wanna get out into the parking lot for a quiet smoke, please, a little trouble-free smoky-smoke, and then maybe call somebody for some... no! I’m sweating like a zoo here, buddy, and the shirt’s so big there could be a family of raccoons nesting in here and I still wouldn’t know! Say “Thank you, thank you.” Cartwheel, crash into table, everybody goes nuts. They’ll whisper “How’d that big slob do that?” Ignore the bruises. Yell “You ever get stabbing pains in your chest and arms?” That always kills, too! Stumble across the room to the fire exit instead of standing here like an idiot and—bingo! Outside! Nope, Steve Martin wants to talk SNL. Steve Martin. Is this a joke or a dream?

I really miss SNL, buddy. SNL was the golden goose. (Mmm, goose...) Thank God Lorne’s bringing me back as a host in the fall. Gotta be in shape for that. I wish I was a manatee. Those guys are happy all the time, just zoned out in the water. Hi, my name is Hugh Manatee, and I have a problem. I’ll be a stoned manatee in a marble Jacuzzi and I’m having fancy Moët, and Chris Rock could be a dolphin, all sleek, who swooshes over and says, “You’ve gone too far, man!”

Where’d Steve Martin get that champagne? I was sober for three years. I used to know how to do it, I really did. Beer, please, tequila, please, champagne, Guinness, pot, mushrooms, acid, crack, heroin, please... I should be giving an Oscar acceptance speech tonight: Best Sober Person, yeah, how I beat the devil of temptation. I wanna thank my mom and dad, I wanna thank Jesus Christ.

I mean, buddy, it’s hard to find Serenity being sober in the real world like they tell you in Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. I can snort Serenity, bagful after bagful, until there’s hot Jell-O flowing through my veins, until the whole world’s giving me a big hug.

It’ll be dark out there, all alone with my precious Marlboro, and the dopey lil’ angel will whisper, “Scared of the dark? Need to get through the night?” And now inside my deep-fried brain there’s one of the crowds from the football games back home chanting “DRUGS!” Remember those big snowy fields? I was a hungover snowman. Oh say can you see, my big white ass?

Almost at the door. One night at a time, buddy, one night at a time, so saith the Holy Book.

But what if a guy comes up and says, “How’d you do it, Chris? Don’t you get scared being on TV?” I’ll say, “Nope, the thing is, being alone with one person is way scarier for me than being with a great big crowd!”

Nearly there. And I’ll see the telltale junkie glaze on the guy’s eyes and catch the big hand on the clock pointing somewhere I don’t like and I won’t know what lie to tell when the guy stands between me and the door and asks, “Hey buddy, where are you going after this?”

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Photographed by Christiaan van Heijst

Written by Charlie Fox