Bam Margera ‘didn’t want to wake up’ before meeting her fiancé

Bam Margera shares more insight into what his relationship with fiancée is like Danni Marie came at the right time.

If We weekly exclusively revealed, the Viva La Bam alum — whose real name is Brandon Cole Margera — suggested he model Danni Marie at pro skater Ed Duff‘s property in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on October 27. Margera and Marie, both 44, first crossed paths in June — just weeks after the professional skateboarder was placed on a 5150 hold when he was caught acting erratically outside Trejo’s Tacos in Los Angeles in June, according to TMZ.

(The 5150 ruling came after several years of problems for Margera, including hospital admissions, arrests, rehabilitation periods, tensions with his former Fool costars and a custody battle over son Phoenix, 5, whom he shares with ex Nicole Boyd.)

After being released from the hospital in June, Margera checked into the Sunset Marquis hotel, where she found herself in dire straits. “I wasn’t planning on checking out. I bought a lot of drugs and I didn’t want to wake up,” he says Us. “I had so many lawsuits and lawyers who took my money but didn’t follow through Fool and file a lawsuit with them. Every time I got a call it was just a problem.

Hitting rock bottom forced Margera to do something he rarely did: pray. “I was like, ‘If I wake up from the amount of drugs and alcohol I bought, please show me the best eye candy in the world — and I need a brown pit bull,’” he says.

“The next morning I woke up at the Sunset Marquis [and] I’m like, ‘S–t, I’m alive,'” he continues. “I went to the pool and heard it [Dannii] talking about how she’s 44, Sicilian and Irish. When I met her, she said, ‘I have to go home and walk my dog’ – a brown pit bull.”

“I thought, ‘Thank you, God,’” he says of the chance encounter.

Marie, who is also a stretching coach, helped Margera get sober (she was by his side as he detoxed) and helped him get back into shape so he could start skateboarding again.

“Stretching has everything to do with skateboarding,” he explains. “I would do it for five minutes and give up. [A] doctor said that in 2013, [my muscles] were so dehydrated from alcohol abuse. They were dry rotten rubber bands and they would never return to normal.”

“Dannii said, ‘Don’t listen to that,’” he says. “I skate better than ever – now I skate every day.”

With more than 130 sober days under his belt, Margera is looking forward to the future (“Every sponsor I had, they all want to do something again,” he explains) and is happiest about returning to his roots. “I call the mom-and-pop skate shops, let them know I’m coming that way, [and] all the locals who rip show me the good spots,” he says.

Most importantly, he focuses on his relationship with Phoenix — who he recently reunited with after receiving supervised visitation — and his sobriety.

“I always woke up not knowing what to do with the day… I just looked across the street, saw an Irish pub and said, ‘That looks nice,'” says the former stunt performer. Us. “Now I wake up, I walk the dogs, I stretch, I go to the gym, I go skateboarding. Everything is a structured, fun schedule.

“And we do it together,” he adds of his fiancée. “It’s just a perfect thing.”