After all he’s been through, how much therapy does funny guy Andy Dick need?
You Don’t Know Dick
A half-hour of canned quotes and guarded conversation has passed, and fidgety funnyman Andy Dick is finally starting to open up about his roller-coaster career, the tragic deaths of old friends, his former all-consuming addictions, and his numerous sexual adventures.
Just as Dick is admitting to his appreciation for adult magazines that feature barely legal women, there’s the metallic clink of a key turning a bolt. and the front door of his Spanish-style duplex in West Hollywood flies open. A tall, stunning blonde who looks like she just stepped out of a Guns N’ Roses video storms in and slams the door behind her.
Dick leaps up from his black leather chair. “Lisa, I’m in the middle of an interview,” he sputters. The intruder, I realize, must be the 21-year-old he says dumped him last week because he wasn’t spending enough time with her. “You know, you’re really disturbing me,” he tells her.
“Well, you really disturb me!” she spits back, eyes burning with resentment. “Can’t I just sit in? I know you’re talking about me! I’ve heard you talk about me before.”
Dick meekly excuses himself and scurries upstairs to his bedroom with Lisa. The door shuts, and the muffled sound of angry voices rumbles overhead. Figuring they need a few minutes alone, I take the opportunity to explore the surroundings.
If the way a man furnishes his home reveals something about his personality, then Andy Dick is either deeply disturbed or happily oblivious of all notions of taste and interior design. Perhaps both.
The downstairs living room where we’ve been talking is painted lime green, and on the walls hang several large framed paintings from Dick’s performance-art show Andy Dick’s Circus of Freaks. The freaks, garish Coney lsland—esque caricatures of Dick with a huge, misshapen head and tiny body, were rendered by the comic’s ex-wife, lvone, who until three years ago lived on the first floor of the duplex with their son, Lucas. (At the same time, Dick was living upstairs with his then—girlfriend, artist Lina Sved, with whom he has two children, Jacob and Meg.) At one end of the large rectangular room a pair of purple lamps shaped like children’s jacks sit atop tiny end tables; near them are a fifties-era maroon boomerang-shaped couch and a similarly contoured wooden coffee table boasting several sprigs of black glass grapes and a book about Kids filmmaker Larry Clark. On the opposite side of the room looms a ten-foot-long green brontosaurus that Dick bought from a Sinclair gas-station owner, and a dozen curvy fluorescent vases that could be bongs from Mars.
Fifteen minutes pass, then 20, and still no Dick. What’s more, the yelling upstairs has ceased. I continue casing the joint, and encounter collages by Dick hanging in the hallway. One, titled There’s Always Room for Jell-O, is composed of a wooden box bordered with bottle caps and decorated with three metal stars and several rusted springs. Another, Troll Bowl, features a plastic troll riddled with nails inside a brown wooden bowl. Similarly crucified trolls decorate other areas of the house.
Supposedly there’s a piece here somewhere that contains a glass shard from the lamppost into which Dick smashed his Nissan Altima two years ago. He’d been driving home after a long night of partying when he lost control and skidded into the pole. Witnesses detained him as he tried to flee the scene; he was arrested for driving under the influence and possession of cocaine and marijuana. He spent the night in jail, an experience he’ll never forget. (“I remember them closing the door,” he recalls. “It made this clanging sound, and I almost shit my pants. I prayed all night that they wouldn’t put someone else in the cell with me.”) Dick was sentenced to three years’ summary probation, and ordered to pay for the lamppost. He was also ordered into rehab for a second time-ending a ten-year bender that had nearly totaled his career.
By now, Dick and Lisa have been upstairs more than half an hour, and I begin to wonder if the irate beauty hasn’t slashed Andy’s throat, shimmied out the window, and vanished. Tragic as it would be, it would make a fitting final chapter to a truly weird and wild life—the kind A&E Biography stakes its ratings on. In the past four years, Dick has endured the cancellation of NewsRadio, the NBC sitcom that launched his celebrity; survived the tragic deaths of close friends Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, and David Strickland; overcome the ravages of drugs and alcohol; and bounced back from being a public laughingstock to star in one of television’s most promising and outrageous new comedy series, The Andy Dick Show, which is entering its second season on MTV He’s also hard at work on a VH1 movie, and is considering several feature-film roles.
Just as I’m about to call 911, the bedroom door creaks open and Dick tiptoes downstairs. One side of his shirt collar is poking out of his worn green sweater, and his thick tortoiseshell glasses hang at a slight angle. His face is pink and his blonde hair is even more disheveled than when we first met. And he’s no longer wearing shoes. He waits ten seconds, smiles, then announces half-proudly, half-apologetically, “I just fucked her.”
He pauses again, grins, then says, “I had to. She needed it. She was so upset. It’s so funny that’s what she would want. I punished her a little.” He grins again. “It was just one of those slightly aggro fucks where you’re just a little angry, and the anger is kind of a turn-on.”
Even if it hadn’t been makeup sex, the odds are that Dick couldn’t have said no. It wouldn’t have mattered if the president of MTV had been waiting downstairs. Sex is Andy Dick’s Achilles’ heel, an incurable addiction that’s taken the place of drinking and drugging in his life. If he’s not getting laid, he’s thinking about it; and while he’s pumping away, he’s already planning his next encounter.
“When I was first going out with my girlfriend we had sex up to five times a day,” he says as he guides me back into his living room. “I literally was insatiable. I could not fuck her enough. I couldn’t get satisfied. The most ever was ten times, which is a lot. It gets to the point where your cock is chafed and she’s walking bowlegged and it hurts to come. It’s not even fun anymore, but it’s a behavioral problem I have and it’s part of my addictive personality.”
Back in his tooting days before he entered the Betty Ford Center in 1999, Dick was even more voracious, often finding himself in bizarre trysts with two women at once, or with a man and a woman. Sometimes he was unable to perform, which only made him want it more.
“For women, cocaine can be some kind of aphrodisiac, but for men it’s a sex killer,” he says as he heads to the kitchen to make a pot of green tea, his only addiction nowadays besides work and sex. “If you do cocaine, you wanna have sex but your dick doesn’t,” he says, filling an artsy, angular kettle with water. “I’ve been in situations where I’m with a small group of people and we’re trying the weirdest stuff just to get by. And it turns into a 24-hour limp-dick jerk-a-thon. Either you give up or you finally come 12 hours later, and it’s not even enjoyable. You look down and you’re sweating and sore. And then you look at the people you’re with and you go, ’What the fuck am I doing with them? I’d never have sex with these people if my head was on my shoulders.’”
These days, says the 35-year-old Dick, he no longer craves cocaine-fueled threesomes or sex with men, but he still likes to get a little kinky. “I’m a lifetime member of the mile-high club,” he boasts. “It’s very exciting. I’ll take my girlfriend into the [airplane’s] bathroom and her face will be pushed up against the mirror because in there you have to do it from behind. But it’s always fun.”
On the surface, getting sex pointers from Dick seems as absurd as getting poetry pointers from WWF’s the Undertaker. But look in one of Dick’s photo albums and you’ll find some ex-girlfriends who could be Victoria’s Secret models. What’s his power over pussy?
“You have to give women what they want,” he reveals, pouring his fourth cup of green tea this afternoon. “Some girls just want to be fucked hard and dropped, and others want sensitivity and attention in bed. I make the girls that I’m with come, and they like that. There are times when they’ll go, ’I don’t feel like having an orgasm.’ I make them come by kissing them and fucking them while I’m using my fingers on their pussy. Then I always say, ’I thought you said you didn’t want to come?’”
Like most guys, Dick relies on pornography for stimulation when his girlfriend’s not around. He’s pals with porn veteran Ron Jeremy, who supplies him with many of his own movies, but Dick usually fast-forwards past the actor’s scenes.
“It’s just so weird that he would be a porn star,” Dick exclaims in total disbelief. “He’s really a supercool and super-sweet, normal, nice guy. He just loves sex, like me. But he’s so fuckin’ fat and hairy. But that’s cool too, because it proves that you don’t have to look like a Greek god to make girls come.”
The next morning Dick arrives at a Hollywood studio for a script meeting with the eight writers he’s hired for The Andy Dick Show. Now that the program is in its second season, MTV, the network that has introduced other such edgy comedy series as Beavis and Butthead, Jackass, and The Tom Green Show, is over the moon about its new hit. Considering that Dick had already composed well-received short-film segments for the MTV Video Music Awards, the pairing seems like a nobrainer. Before he hooked up with MTV, Dick had pitched a Larry Sanders-style show to HBO. When that deal languished for a year in development, Dick jumped ship, much to the delight of MTV, which pampers its new star like a child. To celebrate the new season, the network bought Dick a purple Fender Stratocaster guitar, and for today’s meeting they’ve picked up the tab for heaping trays of top-dollar sushi for the comic and his crew.
It’s a special day for Dick for two reasons. Not only is he getting ready to read through scripts for the second season, it’s also his second anniversary of drug-free life. The responsibility of producing, directing, and starring in a weekly comedy program has had a twofold effect on Dick: It has put him back in the public’s eye, and it has helped motivate him to stay clean.
“This show requires tons of energy and focus and time,” he says. “When you do a sitcom, you can kind of breeze in and breeze out. With this, my name is right there on the title, so if the show fails, I take the brunt of it. That’s the fire under my ass to stay sober and make it the best show ever.”
Of course Dick couldn’t have on a more ironic or morbidly inappropriate outfit. Not only is he wearing the gold shades he had on the night he totaled his car, he’s dressed in a blue T-shirt that belonged to his father when the latter served aboard a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine.
“They used to do all these tests with nuclear materials, and I’m convinced that’s what killed him,” says Dick. “He died of cancer.”
Suddenly, Dick looks like he’s just received a failing grade on a college paper he thought he’d aced. Bewilderment turns to awe and his mouth widens considerably. “Oh my God! There’s probably still radiation in this shirt because that stuff doesn’t go away.” He shrugs off the notion seconds later, dismissing it entirely, then takes one of the chairs arranged in a semicircle.
The atmosphere for the writers’ meeting is breezy and playful, and though Dick is concerned about a recent mandate from MTV to cut back on profanity {three of the six episodes from the first season have been deemed too graphic to re-air), his stress doesn’t show. The reading begins, and Dick’s writers act out the first sketch: a spoof of MTV’s standards-and-practices department, in which Dick is trying to introduce the new season but keeps getting interrupted by a network censor who prevents his saying practically anything, including his last name. By the end of the skit everyone is smiling—everyone but Dick. There’s a problem. The script makes references to drugs and anal sex. “Seriously, we can’t have anything even mentioning butts or getting high,” says Dick sternly.
If he sounds harsh, it’s only because he knows what he’s dealing with. Earlier this year MTV nixed two completely filmed and edited sketches. The first, “The Cedar Creek Whore Company,” was about a mom-and-pop coffee store whose owner decides to peddle prostitutes instead of java, and offers exotic specials like the “tall blonde” and the “dark lappuccino.’’ The other, “Harvey Kubrick: Independent Porn Producer,” was about an adult-video director who takes himself way too seriously.
“It might be a blessing in disguise, because it’s forcing us to be more creative,” Dick says of the censorship. “If you can do anything you want, it’s kind of easier. But when you’re put in a cage and placed under this glass dome where you can only jump so high, it just forces you to do more twisty little flips. We’ll have to be funny without being as dirty, and without losing our twisted character, and in some ways that can only make us better.”
Fortunately for fans of such first-season sketches as “Anus & Andy” and “Midget Wrangler,” there’s still plenty of outrageous material in the hopper. The bawdiest sketch, “American Pie 38,” envisions characters from American Pie as nursing-home residents competing to see who can get laid one last time before meeting his maker. Other planned skits include “Andyland,” about a Dick-themed amusement park with rides like “Car Crash Under the Mountain,” “12 Steps Under the Sea,” and “Andy Dick’s Fall Down Go Boom”; “Frisqó,” a skit with a demented Sisqó clone who claims his tune “Crotch Song” preceded “Thong Song”; and “Zitty McGee,” which focuses on an acne-infested youth who works for a modeling agency.
“Maybe we should give him a really hot girlfriend, and when he kisses her, he leaves zit smears all over her face,” opines one bespectacled writer after the “Zitty” skit is read through.
“Or maybe she’s really pretty but she’s got one thing wrong with her, like a gorilla bush or something,” posits a long haired, overweight scribe wearing a baseball cap backwards.
A third offers the most gnarly scenario: “What if she’s the reason for his acne? Like she rubs corn oil all over her belly and crotch …. Hey, a man’s gotta eat!” Dick grins like a demented Cheshire cat. He’s in his element.
After the writers’ meeting, it’s back to Dick’s duplex, where Dick excitedly shows me the various items he’s bought through late-night infomercials, including a swiveling exercise chair and the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine. Then he grabs a shoe box, and we head to the Japanese garden in his backyard. The area is enclosed by tall bamboo walls and contains plenty of plants and a small pool filled with murky water and rocks. “There used to be lots of pollywogs in there, which is why I call my company Pollywog Productions,” says Dick as we sit on a large cement bench. “But they all died because I didn’t take care of them.”
Dick sets the box down in front of him and opens it. Inside are clear bottles of herbal fluid. He systematically opens one, fills its cap with the cloudy mixture, and downs it, grimacing. He repeats the process with three other vials.
“I was unhealthy for so long, now I really like to eat well and take lots of herbs and vitamins,” he says, “especially zinc.” He drinks another capful, coughs, and chases it with a tall glass of water. “Here’s a little secret: Zinc for men is stored in the balls, and if you’re jacking off and fucking a lot, you’re depleting your body of zinc, which you need. I take zinc so I can come a million times a day.”
He digs into his pocket, snatches a Kleenex, and sneezes loudly into it. Then he opens the tissue, examines his ropy mucus, and coos, “Ooooh, boogers!” Gross, yes, but not one of Dick’s many acts to intentionally disgust his audience. In the past, these have included stripping without warning, simulating rape onstage, and laughing maniacally into the mike for five minutes straight. During a recent appearance at Babson College in Massachusetts, Dick tells me, he confronted the largely female crowd with a song called “Mad About Cunt” shortly after stepping onstage. He smiles at the thought of it, stands up, and starts to sing the tune: “Buddy I’m nutty for a whack-a-doodle slutty with a—uh-uh—quivering quim / [snaps fingers Sinatra-style] I’m crackers for a crack and I’m telling you Jack, that I’m batty for snatch / Spend all my cash for a glimpse of a hot little gash.”
He stands and makes bold, sweeping gestures with his hands as he reaches the song’s climax: “Whether it’s tight or it’s loosey / Whether it’s dry or it’s juicy, man I dig that crazy pussy / I’m mad [dramatic pause] about cunt!”
For Dick, shock tactics are a way to force-feed audiences something they normally wouldn’t order from the menu.
“It’s pretty satisfying to think that maybe I’m actually making a difference and waking people up from the deep sleep of the naive,” he says.
Sitting by the pollywog graveyard, we discuss performance artists like Karen Finley, who has shoved yams up her ass onstage, and the late G. G. Allin, whose onstage antics included cutting himself with glass, masturbating, giving and receiving fellatio, and shitting and flinging his feces at the crowd. “I think anything that comes at you from left field and twists your reality is really valuable,” he says. Suddenly there’s a startling crash from a silver trailer parked in his driveway. “Oh, that’s nothing,” Dick says with a wave of his hand. “It’s just this homeless guy that lives in there.”
The homeless guy is not the only temporary tenant at Chez Dick. Friends from rehab, starving painters, and struggling musicians are all welcome. “I like to think of myself as the ambassador of the freaks,” he says. “I provide for them all so they’re not just freaks wandering aimlessly through the streets. They’re freaks with a purpose.
“The only rule is there are no freeloaders,” he emphasizes. “I look at the guy in the trailer as a watchdog. If someone is gonna be coming around, he’s gonna know about it and he’s gonna chase them away.”
The parade of artists, musicians, and madmen benefits Dick in a number of ways. First it fulfills his need to nurture, a powerful urge he’s felt since he was young. Over the years he’s had three children by two different women, but he still stays in touch with both moms, and sees his kids as often as he can. He’s also established tight bonds over the years with many close friends, and he was especially devastated by the deaths of three of them between 1997 and 1999. Longtime party pal Chris Farley overdosed on cocaine and morphine in ’97. (After which, Dick checked into rehab for the first time.) Then NewsRadio star Phil Hartman was murdered by his wife, Brynn, in ’98. After partying all night in Las Vegas with Dick in 1999, Suddenly Susan actor David Strickland hanged himself with a hotel bed sheet.
“I felt like the Grim fucking Reaper,” snorts Dick. “Can you imagine? You make all these friends, and you think they’re great and they’ll always be around to hang out and party with, and then suddenly they’re gone.”
Aside from making him feel like a nurturer, having assorted companions buzzing about gives Dick the sense that he’s heading a creative community. (He says he’s currently scouting properties for a “compound” where he can provide for his artistic friends a la Andy Warhol and the Factory.) It also helps keep his persistent fear of being alone at bay. For someone who purposely overlaps his appointments so his down time is minimal, this is critical. For his part, Dick recognizes that he’s something of a special case.
“My therapist said I still have emotional problems,” he says. “I get these crazy mood swings. Right now I’m so happy and excited, but I can get so fucking aggravated or so depressed over nothing. One little thing can send me into a tailspin of depression, where I just feel like giving up everything.
“One of the main things for me is that I have to feel like life is still gonna be fun sober. I’m really starting to believe that my life is really going to begin at 40, because by then I will have had seven years of sobriety, knock on wood.”
He whistles at the prospect, and says, “Can you imagine all the creative juices that will be flowing through my brain by then? Because if you’re not letting off steam through drinking and drugging, you’ve got to let it off creatively.” He snickers. “And I’ve got a lot of steam.”
