ASTUNTMAN WALKS onto a stage with a problem. “I’m in a terrible position,” he says. “I’m Steve-O in my 40s.”
As always, Steve-O is the punchline. The 47-year-old begins his touring comedy show The Bucket List with a joke highlighting the unlikelihood of his being here to deliver it.
He didn’t die jumping off a balcony and lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood trying to impress a woman as a young “attention whore”—his accurate term, with which he liberally seasons his continuous “diatribes” (also his accurate term). Steve-O did not perish getting sepsis from stapling his scrotum to his thigh for his Don’t Try This at Home video or blowing himself up by shooting fireworks out of his ass on Jackass or inhaling 600 canisters of nitrous oxide a day—and filming the whole thing—during a period of drug use so prolific he spent his time communing with hallucinated friends inside his apartment and sending hostile email missives to a group of corporeal friends he rarely saw and who in 2008 had him involuntarily committed to a psych ward after he informed the entire “Rad Email List” that he was planning to throw himself out of his third-floor bedroom window.
“Most people would be delighted to hear that they’re actually not going to die in their early 30s,” Steve-O says now, almost 14 years into the sobriety wrested from what he believes is a familial predisposition to addiction. “It came to me as a crisis. I was confronted with the most terrifying possibility: I was only like halfway through my life.” He had little money and no idea how to make more, having alienated his personal and professional connections and seeming to possess few skills beyond inspiring people to shout, “Oh shit, it’s Steve-O!” when they saw him. “The ultimate fear for me would be to be a recognizable personality and totally broke,” he says.
But in a series of events as improbable as surviving his attempts to destroy himself for our entertainment, Steve-O transformed himself into someone who is a credible model of men’s health After taking the novel steps of “changing my lifestyle and actually which sold more than 170,000 copies and is revealing even for someone whose rectum we have become acquainted with. Its follow-up is a self-help book, which will be published this September.
