American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

by Craig Ferguson

That I became a citizen of this country in January and was at a dinner with the president in March is, I think, in a small way, indicative that we are still the country we hope we are.

in an effort to escape the bombing, he was evacuated from the inner city to one of the notorious childhood labor workhouses—sweatshops in the countryside that kept children safe from bombs, but not from horrifying abuse and mistreatment at the hands of wartime opportunists.

Work, after all, is how my people articulate love, and it’s probably not a bad way to do it. Nobody talked about their feelings or, God help us, their issues, but I don’t believe my siblings or myself ever doubted the love of our parents for us or each other. They proved it daily with their labor.

sterile Scottish Presbyterianism (which I can only describe as Catholicism without the elaborate visuals)

On one of her visits I watched as my parents looked into each other’s eyes and he whispered something to her that only they could hear and she laughed a little bit and kissed him on the mouth. On the mouth. Like they were young and in love.

These atrocities were designed by pseudointellectual modernists who believed that the automobile would replace feet sometime in the 1970s. Any money they had left over from making boxlike dwelling hutches was spent on horrendous concrete abstract sculptures, totems to the gods of utter banality, which were placed throughout the town in random locations.

I still have a scar on my leg because my brother told me that the game of darts was played by one player throwing the darts while the other held the board.

most of my teachers were erratic sadistic nutcases who had no business being around children.

I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.

I remember thinking then, at around fourteen years old, that if there was any God or church that endorsed and inspired this fucking madness, then I wanted no part of it.

I was horrified by how much I could identify with Raskolnikov’s whiney self-justification—clearly there was a warning here. Raskolnikov led me to the Karamazov brothers, who were in the same part of the bookstore as Ishmael and Queequeg, who were pushed up on the shelves next to Winston Smith, Jem Finch, Joseph K, Mr. Scrooge, and Dracula. My education continued, haphazard and informal, American, European, and Russian authors all mixed together with no regard to any syllabus or any geographical or historical time frame.

In rehab, years later, I reread Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I equated that moment in Mrs. Henderson’s car to the awful realization Henry Jekyll has when he grasps that he no longer needs the potion to transform into the monster, Edward Hyde. He needs the potion to remain the ordinary Henry Jekyll.

Unloading and carrying Sheetrock all day was my first rehab.

Anne, though, was not a fan of the black eye, or the story, and she was getting very tired of my drinking. I don’t blame her, I was getting a little tired of it myself, but what could I do? If I didn’t drink I would be worse—I’d be locked up in a psych ward, or so I believed.

“I’ve discovered something. Try this.” He handed me a frosted glass containing a clear syrupy liquid. I sipped it. It was terrific, clear and clean, and it thumped you in the chest. “What is it?” “Stolichnaya. Genuine Russian vodka. The Soviets just started exporting it.” “Hey, Comrade!” I yelled to the nervous male model/bartender who had been trying to figure out if my overalls were a fashion statement or not. He walked over and smiled thinly. “Yes?” he said. I pointed to the Stoli bottle behind him. “Time to redistribute the fucking wealth!”

Like many people who come to New York to live and then have to leave before they really want to, I spent the next three or four years with the vague feeling that there was a great party going on somewhere and I was not at it.

I quit my job and signed up for unemployment benefits, making me a bona fide member of the show-business community.

I was then, and remain now, bewildered by how funny people find material once a newspaper has given them permission to laugh at it. Jokes that had only got titters before now got guffaws. This is tremendously encouraging to a performer, leading to more confidence and improvisation as he or she feeds off the positive energy of the crowd, which in turn leads to more laughs.

I toured Australia with an all-girl Jewish singing group called the Hot Bagels, and of course ended up having an affair with the Everything Bagel.

“Listen,” she said, not unkindly, “up until now I would say that ninety-nine percent of all the narcotics you have taken in your life you bought from guys you didn’t know, in bathrooms or on street corners, something like that. Correct?” I nodded. “Well, these guys could have been selling you salt or strychnine. They didn’t care. They wanted your money. I don’t care about your money, and, unlike your previous suppliers, I went to college to study just the right drugs to give to people like you in order to help you get better. So, bearing all that in mind…take the fucking drugs!” I took the drugs.

There are a million books about recovery and rehab, some written by charlatans and some by people far more qualified than I to discuss the subject, and if you want to stop drinking you could do worse than read a few, but you could save yourself a good deal of money and time by just looking up an organization very near the front of the telephone directory.

The desert is magical at night, and, with the instincts of a bikini model in a slasher movie, I turned off of the interstate and headed out into the wilderness for about five miles.

It’s difficult to explain the resiliency of Scottish women without romanticizing them, which wouldn’t play very well with Scottish women.

There were a lot of other Mormons around, too, and I was all ready to be oppressed by them, but it never happened. From what I know about that faith, it’s not for me, but I have to say I never met a Mormon I didn’t like.

Now that I have been divorced twice myself, I can tell you that it seems to me that the greatest danger is to get so stuck in the resentment stage that you never get out of it.

I was making enough money for Sascha and me to move out of our rented cottage and buy an old Spanish house in the Hollywood Hills. We even rescued a couple of dogs from outside a coffee shop, and although the dogs were free, the vet bills would have scared Trump.

That’s just the kind of financial wizard I need—one who respects money as a useful tool and believes it should be cared for and attended to prudently but never worshiped. I believe the correct quote, often mangled, is: “Love of money is the root of all evil.”