Happy People Are Annoying

Josh Peck

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9780063073630
• Print ISBN:
  9780063073623
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

A wonderfully candid memoir from one of the most recognizable faces of a generation, actor, writer, Youtuber, and television superstar, Josh Peck. In his warm and inspiring book, Josh reflects on the many stumbles and silver linings of his life and traces a zigzagging path to redemption. Written with such impressive detail and aching honesty, Happy People are Annoying is full of surprising life lessons for anyone seeking to accept their past and make peace with the complicated face in the mirror.

Josh Peck rose to near-instant fame when he starred for four seasons as the comedic center of Nickelodeon’s hit show Drake & Josh. However, while he tried to maintain his role as the funniest, happiest kid in every room, Josh struggled alone with the kind of rising anger and plummeting confidence that quietly took over his life.

For the first time, Josh reflects on his late teens and early twenties. Raised by a single mother, and coming of age under a spotlight that could be both invigorating and cruel, Josh filled the cratering hole in his self-worth with copious amounts of food, television, drugs, and all of the other trappings of young stardom. Until he realized the only person standing in his way...was himself. Today, with a string of lead roles on hit television shows and movies, and one of the most enviable and dedicated fanbases on the internet, Josh Peck is more than happy, he’s finally, enthusiastically content.

Happy People are Annoying is the culmination of years of learning, growing, and finding bright spots in the scary parts of life. Written with the kind of humor, strength of character, and unwavering self-awareness only someone who has mastered their ego can muster, this memoir reminds us of the life-changing freedom on the other side of acceptance.

1

Sex and Deli

Here’s what I know. My father was a semihandsome, older, curly-haired man who owned an apartment in Manhattan and a home in the country, which, anyone who grew up in New York City knows, is the sign of someone with disposable income and their shit together. In the dog days of summer, there is nothing more coveted than a friend with a country home and an open invitation, so that you may escape the smell of hot trash and traffic, if just for the weekend. My father had it all, a thriving business, a wife and kids, and at sixty-two, the makings of what should have been a triumphant victory march toward convalescence.

Until he knocked up my mom, that is.

Getting pregnant is both easier and harder than we think. As teens, we’re conditioned to believe that a mere glance could get someone pregnant, that the safest course of action is to seal oneself inside a giant condom indefinitely, until we have permission from God, our parents, and the president to procreate. As we get older, of course, we’re met with the reality that procreating can be quite difficult for some people, and an entire billion-dollar industry is devoted to those for whom getting pregnant is challenging. And while people are having kids successfully later and later these days, there is still the assumption that after forty you might just want to adopt.

My mom was forty-two. She had always wanted kids, but biology being the cruel arbiter it is had decided she had missed her sell-by date. “Want” is one thing. Being a fit candidate to spawn new life is another. And the sands of time were not moving in her favor. It was a dream she’d given up on, an agreement one makes when they’ve crossed that invisible line that says, “I suppose I’ll just have to sleep in, every day, forever.”

So how, you may ask, how did the egg of a forty-two-year-old woman and the seed of a sixty-two-year-old man, having hooked up only once (or so she tells me and also, gross), intermingle to produce the icon writing here before you? HOW did this miraculous bit of birthing occur, second only to the immaculate conception of Jesus himself? The answer, simply, is deli. It must be deli.

The Carnegie Deli was a New York landmark for more than seventy-nine years. Opened in 1929, it served its loyal customers oversize portions of pastrami and corned beef slathered in Russian dressing, and sometime in February of 1986 it served my mother and father a late-night postcoital feast. (I hate that sentence a lot.) And while yes, it’s reasonable to think that deli, having no known reproductive qualities, had nothing to do with the miracle of birth that occurred that night, I still like to think that the sodium of the pickles, or the bubbles of the cream soda, were somewhat responsible for pushing the puck past the goalie.

My mom and dad knew each other, kind of. Before the deli, they were acquaintances, business colleagues, the kind of people who meet twice a year for lunch and at the end say “we should do this more often” but never do. They weren’t close enough to share a sandwich, let alone a baby, and I’m sure when my father found out my mom was pregnant, similar thoughts came crashing through his philandering head. Now, I’m not one for slander, and while I’ve not named this mysterious man I call Dad, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when he told my mom he was “separated” from his wife the night I was conceived. And hasn’t he paid his karmic debt anyway? I mean, gosh, nothing gets in the way of a well-intentioned affair like impregnating a person whose middle name you don’t know.

I don’t know a lot about my dad but I do know a lot about being a man, and while I can only speak for myself, I know what it feels like to be blinded by the thrill of a romantic interlude. I also know the feeling you get once it’s over, realizing that perhaps there was more to be considered before engaging in such a consequential act. All that to say, I’m sure my dad was just trying to get some. And get some he did, some illegitimate son, that is. Sure, it was irresponsible of him to disregard the realities of a possible pregnancy, but thank God he did! Thanks for throwing caution to the wind, Dad, happy to be here!

So, you’re probably asking yourself, Who does this? Who sleeps with a man who is supposedly separated, after she was summoned to his high-rise apartment for some “business advice” (oh, Mom), gets pregnant, and decides to keep the kid, knowing full well she might have to do this alone. That woman is Barbara Peck, and she’s my mother.

My mom is an enigma. A once-in-a-generation type of person, a tigress, an empath, a counterculture Jewish priestess who has been sticking her middle finger up to societal norms since she was a kid. Simply put, she gives very few fucks, and until I was born, made a habit of breaking convention in how she worked, lived, and loved. It was not an odd occurrence for her to jump in a car, drive the twelve-hundred-mile trip to Florida, cut hair on the beach all summer for pocket money, or get fired from being a waitress for sitting down with customers and picking food off their plates. One of my favorite stories is when she opened up an employment agency at twenty-six, only to be held up by robbers a few weeks into starting the business. When I asked if she was scared she replied, “Scared? No, I mean no one likes getting tied up, but I tried to offer the guys a job, seemed silly that they would rob an employment agency, they should have just filled out an application.” That’s my mom. Fearless.

So there she stood, pregnant, unmarried, in her early forties, and ready for whatever came next. It shouldn’t have happened, the odds were not in her favor, so the fact that she was pregnant seemed like a cosmic confluence of events.

My father, on the other hand, was, let’s just say, less excited about this whole cosmic confluence. Here’s the thing, I don’t blame him for not wanting to be in my life. “Majority rules” someone once said to me when I told them that I didn’t know my dad. It took me a minute to digest what that meant. They went on to say, “I mean, ya know, he had a wife and three kids who were already grown, a whole other life. So when given the choice between them or you and your mom, I guess majority rules.” Simple. Brutal. True?

My mom did a really good job of obfuscating the reality of my dad and what she went through after she found out she was pregnant. Maybe “obfuscate” is the wrong word, perhaps “omit” is better. At a young age she told me the good things about him, that he was successful, a charming businessman, a handsome raconteur, you might say (don’t worry, I don’t know what “raconteur” means either). And I believed her. I walked around day care thinking, There is some incredible guy out there who is a real bespoke-type gentleman, a man about town, a socialite. A Jewish James Bond strolling the streets of Manhattan in a Brooks Brothers suit and an eight hundred credit score. Sure, he wants nothing to do with me, but other than that, he seems sterling!

Later, as I got older and was able to handle it, Mom started coloring in the story for me. The stories of him refusing to meet with her when she told him she was pregnant, requesting she go get a paternity test and after receiving the results, accusing her and the doctor of being in cahoots. Later he demanded she get a paternity test with his doctor, and when she showed up expecting to see my dad there, the doctor told her to please leave. She’d called his bluff—and that was it. Finally, out of options, he just kinda . . . went away. He pretty much disappeared in plain sight. He didn’t go into witness protection, he just acted as though none of it was happening, he returned back to his fantastic life, leaving my mom in a precarious position.

A surprise is a birthday party, a mistake is a DUI. A surprise is a winning lotto ticket, a mistake is getting caught smuggling drugs at the airport. They’re two very different things, and yet somehow, me being born can be categorized as both. It’s interesting to be able to assign different words to the same thing and have them both be true.

My mom had a brother who died of leukemia when he was ten. Sixteen and heartbroken, she said the only thing that mended that broken heart was twenty-six years later, when she had me. I mean, with that level of Hallmarkian platitude, it’s no wonder she was able to withstand the hardships of single motherhood from jump. She spent the next nine months saving what she could, setting up a nursery in her apartment, throwing herself a baby shower, and eating hot croissants from the French bakery around the corner from her house, which explains my early-onset high cholesterol. For her, surprise!

For Dad, mistake. I was an accident, a blemish. He rolled the dice and they came up double holy shit. He was sixty-two, this wasn’t a guy who was figuring his life out, sharing some prewar apartment in Williamsburg with three other roommates. This was an established dude, someone who had spent most of his life probably having successful affairs. Or maybe not! But either way, he was not going to shake up his world by doing the right thing, it was just never going to happen. Majority rules, remember? So when my mom asked him to contribute, to at least help financially if not physically with the whole rearing of a human being thing, one he donated twenty-three chromosomes to, he passed. A hard no. Come on, Dad. . . . Do you mind if I call you Dad?

Well, you all know how these things go, nine months and copious amounts of hot croissants later, there I was, born at New York Hospital, a solid thirteen pounds, eight ounces. Just kidding. I was a svelte seven pounds, thirteen ounces and have been actively working to get back to my birth weight ever since. All the nurses couldn’t stop talking about how lean I looked in a onesie, trust me. In a fit of alchemy, my mom gave birth to The Man in her life, me. I was her son first but her life partner second, and we were about to muddle through this thing together, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.

Don’t let the incestuous undertones of that last statement fool you, it’s not like that. Look, when you’re a single mom and an only child, the dynamic is one of pilot and co-pilot. It has to be, especially when you’re struggling, which is most of the time for a parent doing it on their own. My friends who grew up in traditional family structures seemed to be part of a closed corporation. They and their siblings were employees, some with seniority, of course, but all around the same pay scale. Then there were their parents, upper management, who barked out orders over the radio. My mom and I were more like a scrappy start-up, juking and jiving just to stay afloat. Sometimes the CEO would have to sweep the floors and other times the assistant would get to pitch the big investors.

It was shortly after I was born that my father, in a crisis of conscience, decided to do the right things, acknowledge my existence and help financially to oversee my life, if only from afar. Just kidding. My mom took him to court.

She asked her best friend, Jeff, to represent her. As far as I know Jeff has never practiced family law but definitely went to law school. Shout out Jeff. The three of us headed one cold morning in November to the New York County Supreme Court. There she stood on the steps of the courthouse, her lawyer on one side, her baby on the other, waiting to beg a judge to force my dad to do the right thing. I mean is this not the stuff of fairy tales or what?!

My dad showed up with his lawyer, cold, clinical, and ready to clear up this whole “mess.” I can’t imagine what it was like for my mom to stand there with her new baby and look at this disappointing man she shared deli with only a few months prior. Before they made it to the judge, my father’s lawyer asked for a sidebar with my mom’s attorney, and by the time it was over, they’d agreed on a one-time payment. An asshole tax. My mom knew he didn’t want to be involved and certainly she didn’t want to chase him for child support for the next eighteen years, so yeah, she took the money, which was probably the equivalent of three or four years of child support, and sent him on his way. Clearly, my dad wanted no record of this transaction, and in hindsight, she probably should’ve fought for the child support, but my mom’s always been more of a lump sum kind of gal.

I’ve asked my mom a lot about the day she took my dad to court. I’ve always been slightly in awe of how it all went down, especially my dad’s ability to just disconnect. “Didn’t he cry? Beg for forgiveness?! Look at you deeply in the eyes and say, in another life, you and me, kid, we could’ve had it all? Something?!” My mom replied, “After we were done, he looked at you sleeping in your stroller, touched his heart, and walked off. That was it.”

Hmm, now, I don’t know if that’s true or not. Not that I think my mom is lying to me, it’s just that memory is a funny thing, and sometimes we put a halo of decency around situations, especially when we’re trying to make our kids feel like the world isn’t unjust. But we know it is, the world is unjust, this is not new, some of us are just introduced to it sooner than others. From what I can tell, the pieces I’ve put together, I think he just wrote a check and left.

That money, like most money in our life, lasted until it didn’t, and with the final dollar went the last connection we had to him. When I was five, my mom sent him a letter and a picture of me that I’m sure never arrived because who wouldn’t reach out to an estranged lover after catching a glimpse of such a fetching five-year-old? Maybe he saw the writing on the wall, that I was destined to be a chubby child star and wanted no part of it, or maybe at seventy he didn’t want to summon the herculean amount of courage it would have taken to tell his family about me. Maybe he was just scared. Either way, I gotta hand it to the guy, once he made a decision, he sure did stick to it. I like to think I inherited that quality from him, just in a less evil way, like the kid of a drug dealer who never understood why he was so good at math.

I’ve thought about him a lot throughout my life. Like pain for a phantom limb, absent fathers have a really cute way of invading your thoughts. Father’s Day? Not my favorite. Even those sneaky questions at the doctor’s office. Father’s health history? Um, bad at commitment but with a formidable libido? Oh, and there’s always the fun moment of having to deliver lines to an actor playing my father in a TV show or a movie. I always secretly worry I’m not doing it right, that the words “Hey, Dad” will come out funny, like a foreign language. Might just be lack of talent, but I’ll blame it on the old man.

It’s worth exploring my mom’s culpability in all this. I mean, it takes two to tango, isn’t that why it’s a saying? And there are two sides to every story, so yeah, I’m sure there’re things she could have done differently. She didn’t have to get pregnant and she certainly didn’t have to keep it. God knows there were enough signs along the road glaring, STOP, HAZARD, THE DUDE’S MARRIED, HE LITERALLY DOESN’T EVEN WANT TO PAY FOR A SANDWICH. It’s not like she was under the impression my dad was going to stick around, leave his family, and move us to Long Island so I could play lacrosse and develop a really unfortunate accent.

The writing was on the wall: she was signing up for the potential of a really tough life.

When I was six, My mom and I went to file for welfare after, let’s just call it, a financially challenging few months. A homely woman behind an incredibly thick piece of glass responded, “We’ll need to contact the boy’s father before we’re able to give any type of assistance.” My mom weighed her options, looked down at this kid, this new appendage she created, and told them to forget it. The idea of someone from local government calling my father, looking for him to put his hand in his pocket, and the emotional fallout that could result just wasn’t worth it. All for some EBT and food stamps? No thanks. She got us into this and she’d get us out of it, with or without the help of the State of New York.

Here’s what I know, she showed up. For the first nine months I mean I was a literal interloper, feeding off her nutrients, but every day since then and for my entire life she’s shown up for me. A ship is safe in the harbor but that ain’t what ships are made for. So I’m less interested in how you flex your yacht and more interested in how you fare in the rough seas. Because calm seas never made a skilled sailor! Where the fuck am I getting all these maritime references from?! And sure, my mom might have paddled out in bad weather but she never let us sink. She battened down the hatches when it stormed and raised the sails when the wind blew.

She’s the captain of our ship, and she always got us home.

2

Too Fat for Commercials

When I was ten years old, I overheard my mom having a heated conversation with my agent—I won’t mention her name but if you’re reading this, you were probably right. Also though, I was ten, so I think that still makes you a bad person.

Mom: I just don’t understand why Josh doesn’t have more auditions.

Agent: I don’t know what to tell you, Barbara.

Mom: So many of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Happy People Are Annoying
• 1. Sex and Deli
• 2. Too Fat for Commercials
• 3. The Laughing Jew Welcome Committee
• 4. New Kid on the Lot
• 5. Fear and Loathing in Beverly Hills
• 6. What Does That Say About God?
• 7. Daddy Gandhi
• 8. Some Not Nice Things About Myself
• 9. When Existing Is Exhausting
• 10. Laugh Loud, Cry Hard
• 11. The Fourth Hemsworth Brother
• 12. Premium Economy to Bali
• 13. Fortune Five Hundy Money
• 14. Adapt or Die
• 15. Begin Again
• 16. You’re the Fish You’re Trying to Catch
• 17. There Are No Experts of the Future
• Conclusion: Happy People Are (Still) Annoying
• Acknowledgments
• About Josh Peck
• Copyright
• About the Publisher