Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America Read Online Free PDF Page B

about how his rival couldn’t have a baby. In Kentucky, he routinely made fun of an obese woman who hosted a show on another station, using Godzilla sound effects and claiming that at her wedding “instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn.”
    In New Haven, Connecticut, Beck’s last stop before he sobered up, he insulted on air yet another broadcaster at a sister station. The man, a retired hockey player, was so infuriated that he struck Beck in the head in the parking lot, the Hartford Advocate reported. The paper quoted a colleague as saying the man who assaulted Beck was “hailed as a hero” at both stations.
    That’s consistent with Beck’s own description of himself from the time: “I was a monster,” “I was a scumbag,” “I’m a recovering dirtbag.”
    Beck’s on-air performance deteriorated as the drugs and alcohol took hold, causing him to bounce around from town to town—Houston, Baltimore, Washington, Corpus Christi, Provo, Louisville, Phoenix—finally winding up at KC101 in New Haven. “There’s nothing like being eighteen years old in the fifth largest market in America, and then spending the next dozen years dropping ninety-seven spots,” Beck writes.
    The depressing confines of KC101 were located on a suburban road in Hamden, Connecticut. The site includes a corrugated metal building sitting behind a drab red-brick building in a weedy field across from an elementary school. The radio towers spring from the weeds. Here, the addicted Beck found himself doing such dignified things as dressing in a plush banana costume for a radio promo.
    It was around then that Beck, living in a nineteenth-century farmhouse in the next town, Cheshire, divorced his first wife. He says he blacked out while telling his girls a bedtime story and couldn’t remember it the next morning. He spent time with his “good friend and physician for many years: Dr. Jack Daniel’s.” His motto, he said, was “I hate people.”
    “I’d lost everything,” Beck recounted later. “I’d lost my money. I’d lost my fancy car. And I was about to lose my family.”
    Beck says he became a “dry drunk”—he quit drinking, went through the DTs, but continued the behavior of an alcoholic even as he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in a church basement in Cheshire. This went on for a few years, until he was rescued—by his future wife, Tania, and by the prophet Moroni.
    Beck met Tania in the parking lot of the radio station; she had come to pick up a Walkman she had won in a contest. At about this time, Beck was heading back to the bottle. “I couldn’t hold my alcoholism,” he said in tearful testimony to an audience of Mormons. He prayed to God that by “this Thursday, if you don’t put a roadblock in my way, I’m going to drink. I cannot walk alone anymore.” Beck described how he went to the bar, ordered a Jack and Coke, and “I pick it up and I’m about to drink it and I turn around … there across the room is Tania.” They left the bar—for coffee.
    About a year later, the two were considering marriage, but Tania, a Catholic, told him, “We don’t have a faith—I can’t marry you.” Tania, Beck, and his two daughters went on a church tour, ending up (reluctantly, in Beck’s telling) at a Mormon church to appease a longtime Mormon friend and colleague. His decision was clinched when his daughter Mary told him, “I want to go back there.” They were baptized in 1999 and married three months later.
    “The guy firing people because of the Sharpie was dead and buried,” Beck proclaimed. “Where I was only focused on money, booze, business, and cars, I now only wanted to focus on family and people.”
    Well, maybe not “only” family and people. His conversion gave a big boost to his business—a development Beck describes as miraculous. In Beck’s tearful retelling of the moment cited earlier, he was called “out of the blue” by an agent