We both unconsciously poured water into the dish soap to make it last longer and had parents who didn’t pressure us to go to college. Instead they supported our artistic endeavors even though the odds were against us.
Stephen will sometimes look at me with fear in his eyes and ask, “What if we go bankrupt and lose our house and our careers?”
I’ll just smile at him and say, “Then we’ll move to a cheap city and get a one-bedroom apartment and have a baby and I’ll still make comedy and you’ll still make music and we’ll still be in love and happy.”
Stephen will smile back at me, then. “That sounds bloody rubbish, doesn’t it?”
It does a bit.
Stephen’s mom raised him on pop music. She’d have the radio blasting, and Stephen would contribute by banging pots and pans. When he got older, he traded the cooking utensils for piano, and then piano for synthesizers. By the time he was a teenager, he was creating elaborate musical soundscapes in his room alone, not coming out until he was satisfied with what he’d made.
When high school rolled around, his mother would drop him at the entrance of the school and he would immediately walk out the back door. He was completely over it—there was just no way he was going. He had music dreams to make happen, and they did not feature algebra.
He completed his angsty demeanor with all-black outfits and dark eyeliner. He and his friends would drop acid, travel to London, and walk around at four in the morning. One early morning when they were taking an acid-walk, a cop stopped them. “What’s going on?” the cop asked after blocking their path.
Pupils dilated, Stephen smiled at him. “We have emotional problems.”
The cop stepped forward menacingly. “It’s four in the morning, bud. You got drugs in your pockets?”
He and his friends looked at each other . . . then ran! Hey, Stephen didn’t have time to get arrested—he had a music career to attend to. When he was fifteen years old, he got a record deal, dropped out of high school, and moved to London. The record label put him up in this abandoned, repurposed church attic, where he would sit alone and compose music twenty-four hours a day. I’m not exaggerating. He started taking speed to keep himself awake and working, and he became addicted to it. In that music scene it’s common, even celebrated, to go to work fucked up. I can’t speak for him, but I’d guess that it’s even harder to realize you have a problem and fix it when you’re submerged in that world, surrounded by people who are also fucked up all the time.
Stephen really had his own crazy story. He’d start every morning with straight vodka, and pepper it through the day with drugs to keep the high sustained. He was even worse than me when he finally woke up from his addiction. But thank God, he did. He changed himself and figured out how to create music and use his genius without supplementing it all with drugs.
A short while before I met him, he got a call from Hans Zimmer. Hans said that he loved Stephen’s music and he wanted him to come out to LA to compose films with him. So Stephen hopped on a plane and came out here. It was that simple. I mean, when Hans Zimmer tells you to move, you move.
That’s when I met him. He was eight years sober. When we got engaged, when we got married, I had never even seen what Stephen was like when he was drinking or using. If he had been using, he wouldn’t have been able to handle the pressure of working under Hans Zimmer, he wouldn’t have moved out to LA, I wouldn’t have met him or liked him, and we wouldn’t have been together in this one-bedroom apartment cuddled up on the couch, peacefully ready for the rest of our lives, with our crazy Russian landlady skulking outside the window.
When things got more financially stable for us, we moved out of our one-bedroom apartment and into a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica. It was beautiful, with big windows and sunlight and a kitchen that wasn’t super-busted. But . . . our neighbors at the new place made us miss the Russian lady and her bathtub of fruit.
Our downstairs neighbors had this strange energy about them. They were full-on hoarders living in filth, and they were so angry all the time.