Love is a Mux Tape

Back in the summer before I would turn eight, my Mom and I were driving down to our rental house at the Jersey Shore along with my cousin Deirdre, the youngest of my five older cousins and closest I had to an older sister and Bobby Baile, the son of my Mom’s softball coaching partner Loretta and the closest I had to an older brother. Both Deirdre and Bobby were eleven, old enough to always treat each other with equal suspicion. On no issue was this more true than when it came down to whose cassette we should listen to on the way down to the Shore. Up until then, my relationship with pop music had consisted of how uneasy I felt when I first saw the cover of my older cousins’ Van Halen tape with a baby smoking a cigarette on the cover and the invigoration I received whenever I wore my sleeveless “Beat It!” t-shirt out. So I was basically a blank canvas for Deirdre and Bobby as they attempted to court me for the swing vote on what we would listen to (I guess my Mom thought it a lost cause to try and lure me into a Lite 106.7 coup).

Deirdre and Bobby’s musical camps essentially came down to a battle of two bands: Guns ‘n Roses versus Def Leppard. Both presented strong cases when it came to cutting the other’s beloved hair metal band down to size. Bobby: How can you like a band whose drummer doesn’t even have both arms? Deirdre: There’s a reason people call them “Buns and Poseurs.” I was torn. Both bands sounded like they warranted equal merit when it came to my budding identity. All that would change when Deirdre pulled the ultimate strike in pop music warfare: she made me a mixtape.

I remember two things about the track list of that sixty-minute, pink Memorex, high-speed dubbing cassette that Deirdre gave me: the first song was Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” and the fourth was Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” In the years to follow, I’ve often seen the song order of a mixtape to follow the same logic that goes into making the lineup of a baseball team. “My Prerogative” set the pace of everything to follow by hitting the ground running like a speed demon. “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was a heavy hitter who was ready to clear the bases. The next time I saw Bobby Baile, I adopted a stance that is one of the few that I have firmly held onto in the twenty years since: “Guns ‘n Roses sucks.”

Deirdre’s mixtape laid a firm foundation for me to start navigating the radio on my own. Pop music can seem like an intimidating foreign language and that taste of Bobby Brown and Def Lep were like getting down some basic verb conjugations in order to venture into town all by myself. And town for me was Z100, New York’s biggest Top 40 station.  Friday nights over at my Grandma’s, which ‘til that point had consisted pretty strictly of the two of us watching the entire TGIF lineup on ABC now meant me hanging out in her bedroom alone with her old tabletop record player (whose only use over the ten years prior had been as a penny receptacle when I broke its tape player as a toddler). Somewhere around 1989 I slowly inched its FM dial to Z100’s 100.3 and it never left there for the rest of the time she lived in that apartment.

It might seem like a nine-year-old would get antsy just sitting around on his Grandma’s double bed and singing along to today’s best music. But luckily, I had been let in on a little well-kept secret by my buddy Erik Winniarski: Z100 had a toll-free phone number that you could call and request whatever song you wanted to hear. Ninety-seven percent of the time, the line was busy. So I would hang up my Grandma’s cream-colored rotary phone and just wind up the eleven digits again…andagainandagainandagain. My nine-year-old fingers would be sore from night’s end from dialing and getting so many busy signals. When I finally did get through, I would just light up when I heard the sound of the ring on the other end. It would usually continue for the next four minutes or so before someone finally picked up. Once they did, there was usually only one band whose songs I requested: Milli Vanilli.

In the post mixtape era, my Mom had started buying me full albums on cassette. She would get them from a table on the streets of Manhattan near where she worked because “these guys on the street sell them for cheaper than they do in any of the stores.” Often I was confused as to why the songs that were listed on Side A actually played on Side B or the cover photograph had a faded quality, but it was no real bother. I quickly discovered that most full albums had the two songs you knew from the radio that absolutely ruled and then about ten others that I could never remember the words to and really could just take or leave no matter how many times I listened to them. The one exception to this was Milli Vanilli. When my Mom bought me their album, I had only known the one (explosive) title track of theirs that was played on Z100, “Girl You Know It’s True.” There may actually be video that exists of me on the dance floor of my cousin Crystal’s wedding in 1989 wagging my finger at my nineteen-year-old cousin Allison as I sang her the chorus of that song. But the amazing thing about the Milli Vanilli album was that these guys didn’t just stop there. There were about five other tracks on the album that I had never heard before and yet were equally mind blowing. And while “Blame It On the Rain” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number” were some serious jams, I was most deeply under the spell of the album’s primary ballad, “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You.”

“Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” was the first tender slow jam that really took me to a place just a little deeper than all of the pop songs I had loved until that point. As Fab sang “It’s a tragedy for me to see the dream is over,” I would think about my crush on Monica Malone and how it seemed to be going nowhere, especially with no one in the fourth grade having made the leap into dating yet. And it would leave me a little sad, but also really comforted, that I wasn’t alone. It must have also served as a gateway drug into other ballads for me. I say this because I distinctly remember a Sunday morning car trip with my Mom where I had put on Casey Kasem’s “Casey’s Top 40.” That week “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” held on to the top spot for its fourth week in a row. The number two song chasing it was Warrant’s “Heaven.” And I was amazed thinking, “How is it possible that the top two songs in the country right now are also my two favorite songs in the world?”

The following year my classmates would start dating. Once Kevin Brown and Adrienne Boranni made that inaugural leap, about four other couples quickly followed suit. I wanted in on the action. I still definitely harbored some feelings for Monica Malone. Fifth grade at St. Margaret’s was the first year I remember her as rebellious enough to be the only girl to not pull her knee socks up to her jumper.  But Monica was not an option because she didn’t play sports and thus didn’t roll with the same girls who had started dating my friends. So instead I had Kev find out if Adrienne’s best friend, Shaelee Molina, would be interested in going out with me. She accepted. Our first date was six days later. I waited for Shaelee after she got out of JV basketball practice and she, I and Adrienne went to Riverdale Pizza. We each got a can of soda. The girls didn’t want pizza. I got along with most kids in our class pretty well so it was easy to hang out with Adrienne and Shaelee and talk about school of whatever. This dating thing seemed pretty easy.

The next day Kev told me that Shaelee wanted to break up because she realized that she didn’t like( ya know, “like-like”) me. I was devastated. That weekend was the annual St. Margaret’s Flea Market and a lot of the newly-formed couples were hanging out around the schoolyard. Shaelee and I were still pretty raw from the breakup and had trouble even making eye contact with one another. So instead I found myself on the front steps, sitting alongside Petey Donahugh. Petey had not started to couple up with any girls yet, likely cause they knew that he was a notorious mooner. He and I weren’t close at the time. He may have even kicked me in the balls in a recent skirmish during a basketball game in Kev’s backyard. But at that moment, he seemed to be able to tell that I was hurting pretty bad. And I don’t remember who started it, but at some point, Petey and I found ourselves on those steps singing in unison to the Number One song at the time, Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love.” And suddenly my first heartbreak didn’t seem so bad.

Fan Favorite

I’m not sure where this is going to go today. Not that I ever know exactly where this is heading. As you might expect with me, detours are always welcome. My friend Diana wrote me one of the last great testimonials I received on my old Friendster page. She encouraged me to write in the same way that I tell stories. She liked how my stories had a way of spinning out in fifty different directions sometimes. I met Diana back when I was doing monologues regularly for an improv comedy group I was in called Shit-Storm. She was a huge fan and would write about us in her online journal. Diana came to most of our shows and was taking improv classes herself. Many people who come see improv shows are.

Right now I am falling in love with comedy again. The other night my friend Jeff sent me a Facebook message (as well as a Twitter tweet to make sure that I got it) telling me that Sarah Silverman would be making a surprise appearance at Variety Shac, the stand-up show taking place that night at the club he works at. I got SO excited. The funny thing is that I’m not even that big of a Sarah Silverman fan. I’m sure that I’ve even snarkily bad-taken a swipe at her once or twice over the years. But here she was, playing at a small rock club where my friend books the talent for, and someone thought it to be a special enough occasion to make sure that I knew about it.

The show was wonderful. Sarah was loose and sloppy and made fun of herself for always doing jokes about vaginas and the Holocaust. She started by talking off the cuff about how she had just been peeing in the bathroom and spontaneously said to herself in a whiny little girl voice, “I want a ba-byyyy!” Then she just discussed all the implications of that for about three minutes. She was having a real moment with us.

After the show, I ran into John Gemberling, a longtime acquaintance. I met John about ten years ago because he was the singer in my first girlfriend Maria’s band. I had been dating Maria pretty intensely for months and had heard a lot about John. They were good friends and until I came around, John was “the funny guy” in her life. She was excited for us to meet because people figure that one funny person times another funny person will lead to an exponentially funnier situation. But it doesn’t often seem to work that way. When John met me at the band rehearsal I had popped into, he came over to the couch I was sitting on and cuddled right up into me, talking to me in sweet nothings. I pretended to be timid and mortified by how intimate he was being with me. In reality, I’ve made out with guys for less. But I just tried my best to play along and maybe John was just trying to get a sense of what I was like, but the end result was an uncomfortable interaction for everybody involved. And thus was the beginning of an awkward relationship.

John’s done quite well for himself as a comedian in the years since. He’s been in a couple movies, has been a big man on campus around UCB ever since I’ve been around it and most recently he’s the lead in a show that started airing on Adult Swim. We’ve run into each other consistently at one spot or another around the comedy circuit every few months over the years. Our interactions since that band practice have had less pressure and expectation than that first one did, but they’re often just as stilted. He’s always nice to me and seems genuinely glad to see me, but I always feel like he really could give less of a shit about me at the end of the day. Maybe I give off the same impression. Maybe at this point I don’t really give a shit about him. I don’t know.

John might have been the first person I met under the guise of being a “fellow comedian.” I grew up loving comedy. Starting at nine-years-old, I stayed up late every Saturday night watch Comic Strip Live and SNL. At sixteen, I was memorizing the theme song to Comedy Product. Comedy was a centerpiece of my childhood. Sure, there was a part of me that wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but stronger than that was a genuine love for stand-up comedians. My favorites seemed like the kind of people I’d wanna be around. I think that I just expected to grow up and become friends with “funny” people.

It never quite worked that way. I auditioned for the college improv troupe and didn’t get in. So I signed on to be a producer. I don’t think that I expected to butter my way into the troupe this way (which I did). I just figured that once we got to know each other, these would be ones I’d naturally roll with. But there was always this divide. When I hung around the comedy crew, I never quite felt like we were coming from the same place. Maybe it had something to do with them not being the types that spent Friday afternoons during high school regularly waiting in line for tickets to the Conan taping that day.

When I got to UCB, I was so set on turning comedy into my life that I basically pushed aside anyone else outside of it. The funny thing is, I never had any real goals when I showed up in New York and just started hanging around UCB all the time. One of my biggest senses of accomplishment was when I got hired to work the box office during ASSSCAT, the main improv show with the original UCBers and Horatio Sanz and Jack McBrayer. I would bring pop ‘ems into the green room to share with them and feel pretty awesome about it.

But when I actually started making friends with my classmates and other fellow performers, things never went quite as smoothly. There was a guy who didn’t like me for “trying too hard” and another guy who had it out for me cause I once made a joke that I was secretly dating his ex-girlfriend and then there were a lot of friends of mine who I never felt certain had my back. At some point, I gave up comedy because I didn’t wanna be a fellow comedian to these people anymore.

When I saw John after the show, he was coming from backstage where he had been hanging out with the girls who host Variety Shac. He asked me what I was doing there. Comedians often ask each other what they’re up to as a way of saying, “Tell me about the comedy projects you’re working on right now.” So it was nice just to tell him, “Oh I really wanted to see the show” and to feel more than content about just being there for that. I felt like I was a fan again.

The other day my friend Sarah wrote that the Olympics are really throwing off her internal clock because it’s not as easy to tell what day it is without having Conan O’Brien to watch every night. It’s been years since I’ve watched Conan that often, but I related completely. Lately I’ve been feeling a lot more comfortable with who I am and maybe it’s because I feel a lot less focused on just what I want to be. But the surprising thing is that whatever it is that is going on seems to be leading me right back to who I once was.

Self-Inflicted Assasination Vacation

There are a lot of bands I let sit on my peripheral for years because I just assume that I wouldn’t be that into them. Eighty percent of the time, it has something to do with the band’s name that scares me off. “Am I the kind of dork who listens to a band called ‘Modest Mouse’?” The other twenty it stems from the people who listen to them. Back in college, a bunch of the guys who were hanging out in our house senior year got really into kicking out the acoustic jams. They would sit around and play Tenacious D songs and scream the “funny” lyrics. I sort of hated it. Then they would mix in some new song they had heard called “Who Wants the Crack?” Coming from a Tenacious D crowd, it seemed like such a lame joke of a song. That is until one day I needed something to play on my radio show and grabbed the CD out of the Cool New Music rack that included “Who Wants the Crack?” It was by a band called The Moldy Peaches and it ended up being one of my favorite albums ever. When the desperately earnest girl on it sings “you are always trying to keep it real” and the sleepily disaffected dude responds “I’m in love with how you feel,” that shit gets me every, single time.

The funny thing about dismissing bands is that usually you’re not even aware that you’re doing it. A few years back, there was a New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden with Wilco, The Flaming Lips, and Sleater-Kinney. Sleater-Kinney is one of my favorite bands who never seemed like they’d ever be big enough to play the Garden and The Flaming Lips once gave me the most unique live music experience when I saw them on mushrooms while visiting LA the year before. On top of that, when I was a teenager in New York, New Year’s Eve at the Garden meant Phish or some similar tragedy. Seeing three bands that my friends and I loved would have probably felt like some real (yet imagined) sense of victory.

But then there was Wilco. Almost everyone loves Wilco. My cousin Chris who has the best taste in music of anyone in my family has always heralded them. Kaite liked them enough to go see the documentary about them in the theaters and Kaite’s the kind of person that just listens to music because it sounds good to her. There’s not some identity stamp for her that goes along with it like it does for a lot of the rest of us. Yet for some reason, every time I heard the name Wilco, my brain would register, “Oh, I am not a Wilco person.” Maybe it’s because the genre they’ve always been plopped into is “alt-country.” Well if I don’t have any particular allegiance or affection for regular country, now why would I be drawn to this alternative to it? Stupid music critics. Stupid words. Why you guys always dividing us?

So I skipped the New Year’s Eve show that my best friends in town for the week all went to and instead went to the UCB Theater with Erin. There we hung out around a bunch of people that I had turned my life on its head to get away from just six months before…along with the one person I should have turned it on its again to be with. What a dummy I was back then. I had everything in life in front of me and refused to make any sacrifices in order to truly relish in it.

It’s funny how a lot of times when things in yr life tend to feel so right, like they’re clicking on all cylinders, in retrospect that was the exact time when you were unknowingly setting the stage for it to all crash down in the months to follow. Wilco finally did find their way into my life about nine months later. Their staple album “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” was one of the dozen or so CDs laying around Scooter’s, the ice cream parlor I worked in when Erin and I finally arrived in Portland together. I applied at Scooter’s in late July when business was bustling, scoopers were taking in up to fifty bucks a shift in tips, and everyone was just generally in the mood to make their little kids happy with a detour to grab a cone on the way home. By the time I got the job, fall was arriving and the rainy season had begun. One day not long after I had begun my career as a scooper, the Scooter’s register took in a total of eleven dollars. The store only had one scooper per shift, so there was a lot of time spent alone with just me and the boom box. And I would listen to Yankee Foxtrot Hotel on repeat. Sometimes I would just let the seven minute opening track play and then go over to the CD player and start it over. Sometimes I’d do that about five or six times until finally letting the rest of the album ride out. The name of that song is “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.” As it often is, the irony was lost on me.

That Halloween, Scooter’s along with the three hippie burrito places owned by the same weird dude held a party for its employees. Erin was hung over from the Halloween parties we had gone to the night before and decided she wasn’t feeling up for it. So I dressed up like a clown and went to the gnome factory where the party was being held all by myself. I like going to parties alone sometimes because it gives me the chance to position myself alone in a spot outside of the main action. Sometimes it’ll be in the little hallway outside the rest rooms and sometimes like on this night, it’ll just be sitting on the floor against the wall right next to the dance floor. Intentionally or not, someone always plops themselves next to you.

At this party, it was a girl named Zelda who had shown up in matching wedding dresses with one of the hippies who rolled hippie burritos. I wasn’t sure if they were boyfriend-girlfriend or not, but it tends to really not matter when you yourself are boyfriend-girlfriend with someone. But oh wouldn’t you know, yr girlfriend just happened to not be there that night. Zelda and I struck up a quick connection. I casually mentioned not having a dad and she dropped that her mom had just died. We both seemed to be in an equally numb state. Put two depressed people next to each other at a costume party and watch them fall in love for a second.

I started visiting Zelda on afternoons before my radio show at the Downtown Stumptown, the coffee shop downtown she worked at. We would have a few laughs, maybe talk about the anniversary of her mom’s death coming up, and say we needed to make plans to hang out some time. Zelda told me I should come over to her place sometime. She lived in an attic. I would imagine what would happen if I ever did. But then for some reason, the soundtrack to these scenes would always be “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.”

We never hung out. I did a lot of terrible things during those few months where I was letting my life spin out of control while I stood back and frightfully just watched it happen. But that wasn’t one of them. People take a lot of satisfaction at being able to seek out the bands that they fall in love with. But more times than not, those bands seem to have a way of finding you.

Eff the BFFs

I’ve always sort of had a best friend conundrum. At five years old, I felt pretty confident that Danny Wynne was my best friend. By seven, things between us had gotten weird. Maybe it was when his mom started selling Tupperware or maybe it was when we found his Dad’s Penthouses. Sean Clark had the role for a short while, but I think that was mostly because we worked on a science project where we tested different shapes of paper airplanes and determined which would fly the best. Sean was pretty artistically gifted and constructed all the planes. I presented them to the class with some gadget I stole out of a board game that I could make light up either red or green to demonstrate which planes were a success (always the showman). One of the longest runs anyone had as my best friend was Kevin Brown. In fourth grade, we were both really into mooning. Not as much as Petey Donahugh (who someone once suggested should wear a “Caution: Mooner” t-shirt), but enough to recognize that we were kindred spirits as huge wiseasses. I think that our best friendship ended the summer I took Kev to the house my Mom rented at the Jersey Shore for a week. We were so resentful toward each other by the end of it that Kev told Barry Harpur that I could talk all the shit I wanted, but “at least his family could afford a house better than this” and “at least he had a dad.” Barry was down to stay with me for the second week and thus clearly audition for the position of my new best friend.

As I headed into eight grade, I really had to regroup on my best friend quest because the cool guys (read: little assholes) I had hung out with were on the path to becoming big assholes with 40s and joints while I was only ready for street hockey and wrestling pay-per-views. So when I found a new group of guys into those things (read: nerds), I felt pretty above them. Frank Ronan must have known that his stay as my best friend was not going to be long held and when he started copying all of the music I was getting into with his BMG selections, I decided that I couldn’t take it any longer. I tried the other end of the status spectrum with Deirdre Curran, but of course was informed more than once that she “did not want to be my friend.” Jimmy Peiser seemed like he had a shot, but then he got a little too gay for me (and by that I mean that he took being a theater kid a little too seriously. That led to a dry spell of best friends where I would just have a new fellow goof off at Regis for a few months at a time before someone else would take their place. I think that I make a lot of good first impressions and then eventually become too high maintenance for a lot of people.

Then the Three Toed Sloths became an official gang and I finally felt like I had a real group of best friends. Sean O’Connell, Mike Tracey, and Pete Baker each brought something different to the best friend table. Sean’s the only person I’ve known with as destructive a sense of humor as I have and yet his came with the ability to ruin everything (a party, a car ride, a neighborhood) and still have everyone like him. That made us a duo to be reckoned with for quite a few years there. But of course I get so sensitive that I was crushed when he didn’t email me as much as I wanted him to once I left for California. It really should have been obvious to more people that the west coast would really start to drag the softie out of me.

If there was a guy that I knew who I could turn to with my sentimental bullshit, it was Aris Blevins. I’ve never met a guy who could empathize without sugar coating the way Aris does. It’s no surprise that he was the first guy I know to develop an amazingly healthy and prosperous relationship that has evolved into my favorite marriage. Still that sort of thing can’t remain healthy and require the time needed to regularly deal with my bullshit (and the bullshit of the three other dudes who consider him a best friend as well).  Dominic Ciccodicola is one of those three and I’ve tried my damndest to push him into the best friend role over the years. Shit, part of the reason I wrote a blog about him for three years was probably to convince myself. Dominic has some sort of innate sense of wisdom that has always been well beyond his years. But I think that I’m always so sold on how intuitive he is about people that I’m convinced he could never hold me in as high a regard.

Girls always seemed like they’d be great candidates for best friends. Kaite Burch and I have always bonded over how much we care about the things that matter so little. Once she described this to her ex-boyfriend Ben that “we get along so well because neither of us give a shit about anything.” Basically we probably share a lot of misplaces priorities. After college there was Wendi Butterworth who was probably the most irreverent and sensitive girl I ever met. She once alienated a Jewish friend at a dinner party I had by making an angry (yet heartfelt case) that none of us truly could know if we would have been Nazis given the right circumstances. We used to roll so deep together that a friend of ours once remarked, “Wow, you really fill just about every need in her life, don’t you? Except, of course, sexually, that is.” And that’s the problem with girls as best friends. There are always boyfriends that are not you. You don’t necessarily want their job, but it’s also clear that you don’t have it. You’re never totally “the guy” cause there already is one.

Speaking of girlfriends, of course there’s Erin. She was the only girlfriend I had that I truly felt could be my best friend. We’ve always agreed on just what’s right and just what’s wrong about the world and at the same time recognized how ridiculous we probably are for feeling that way. But of course we’re also both emotional train wrecks who ended up on Steampipe Alley. At the end of the day, I think that we make each other cry more often than best friendships are supposed to.

I always sort of imagined that eventually there would be a best friend who would be the Best Man at my wedding and me at hers. Maybe sitcoms have convinced me of an unrealistic notion of buddyhood the way that movies do it for having that one true love. But there should always be at least one person you can turn to in order to catch a breath from how overwhelming all this shit can feel, right?

It’s possible that this is all just a lesson to me in impermanence. It could just appear that Fred and Barney have been attached at the hips since before there were even dinosaur cars. But what about the two years that Barney got drafted and had to go fight the Gondwandalandians? Maybe Fred was really tight with Betty in those days.

To the best friends whom I haven’t even met yet. One of you is gonna give a great toast someday.

Idle Worship

I like waiting in lines. It’s not that I’m an exceptionally patient person. I just like being a part of things, the camaraderie that comes out of the whole experience. Whatever it is that the line is waiting for is usually inconsequential.

There’s an episode of Saved by the Bell (one of the mysterious ones that acted like Jesse Spano doesn’t exist) where the gang has Screech sleep in line overnight at the mall so that they can all score U2 tickets before the concert sells out. (The Bayside gang were probably big “Mysterious Ways” fans.) Eventually Screech blows the whole operation by panicking in the face of choosing between Balcony and Mezzanine seats. By the time that Screech tracks down one of his friends in order to learn what the ideal section would be, he has lost his place and the concert has sold out. Feeling that Screech let them down once again, the group berates him for being such a bumbling fool, not realizing that such treatment is exactly what leads the poor guy to the sort of insecurity and anxiety that would prevent someone from making such a simple decision as balcony versus mezzanine without having to fear the wrath of his abusive friends. But worse of a crime than that is simply that the Baysiders would not have all found an excuse to sleep over at the mall as a group and experienced the wonderful spirit of the line.

One night during my junior year at USC, my friends Nick and Rob told me that they were driving out to Long Beach in order to sleep outside a Circuit City. I would not let myself make the same mistake. It really didn’t matter that I had no interest in purchasing one of the few Playstation 2’s that would be hitting the shelves the next morning. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Nick and Rob’s notion of the night wasn’t as romantic as mine. Theirs was a practical mission and thus they had no qualms about burying themselves in their sleeping bags and hibernating until their big spoils would be waiting for them come morning. Luckily I wasn’t the only one along for the ride. Our friend Simon was no stranger to staying up all night and had also jumped at the opportunity to not have to do so alone that night.

Simon and I had one of the best introductions. Freshman year some friends had talked me into auditioning for some low-key and silly student theater. Even though I really only used it as my Radio DJ and Intergender Wrestling alter ego at the time, I signed up on the audition sheet as “billy hot chocolate” on a lark. I think that I did so in order to make the whole thing a gas.

Freshman year I was trying to figure out what I wanted to major in. The big contenders were American Studies and Theater. American Studies came primarily from my desire to follow in the footsteps of my role model, Janeane Garofalo. Being a theater major on the other hand seemed like the only practical way to spend four years at a university if I was gonna make a run at one of the few dreams I had at the time–to have a career in professional wrestling. But my vision of theater students back then was still the archetypical image of kids who dressed in black and took themselves too seriously. And freshman year I was too lonely to have the urge to go out of my way to have people resent me as I figured the thespians would when they got wind of my aspirations to celebrate something I was sure that they held their noses above. So in order to keep my distance from the group of around twelve young playwrights I was about to go in front of, I wrote down my ridiculous, self-assigned nickname.

I guess I underestimated that there would be someone as zany as Simon in that casting room. Simon was there to cast a the short play he had written called “Peanuts Envy,” where he had imagined Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang “after dark,” complete with lesbianism, incest, and beastiality. After introducing myself to the room, my friend Ashley and I were just going to read the sides the writers had given us and do a simple improv game. But before we got to that, Simon interjected himself into the process and demanded that I “finish this sentence!” The sentence: “Kibbles and Bits and Bits and Bits and Bits and Bits and Bits…” The only thing I could think to offer up was a sheepish “…period?”

I ended up cast in Peanuts Envy as Linus, the voice of moral reason. The first day of rehearsal Simon *insisted* that I be billed in the cast list as “Billy Hot Chocolate.” I never looked back.

In the two years between Peanuts Envy and that night on the sidewalk outside Circuit City, I had learned a few things about Simon: he was about ten years older than almost everyone else we went to school with, he had legally changed his name for unknown reasons before he came to SC, and he had a reputation for staying up all night on what our friends referred to as “prescription speed.” Always generous, Simon’s prescription helped us stay up all night while Nick and Rob slept. What was equally valuable in keeping me up was that somewhere between Wayne Campbell and Michael Scott, Simon held onto the crown as being king of the “That’s what she said!” joke. Of the twenty people who had come out to this Long Beach strip mall that Wednesday night in October, Simon and I were the only two who had no intention of buying a game system in the morning. We were also the only ones who didn’t even attempt at getting a wink of sleep that night.

It’s nice to be aimless when the people around you have such clear intentions.

28 Days Later I’ll Be 28

One night sometime in early 2004, I called Caroline up out of the blue with an urgent request.

“No matter what happens, please promise me that you won’t let me move to northern California next summer.”

Something had clicked that day. As I prepared to move from New York out to Southern California, it dawned on me that my Mom’s older brother Billy had done the same thing at an almost identical age back in the late sixties. Then a year later, he decided to move up to San Francisco. Such a move down the line didn’t seem out of the question for me either, especially not knowing where I stood with Caroline. She was a native of San Fran who was always pining to get back there. And I had been pining for her for quite some time. So I knew that she could put a stop to me following my uncle’s trail because I wanted it to stop there. I wanted it to stop in LA because he never made it to San Francisco. He died on the way up.

After a year and a half out west, I was back in town for the holidays around Christmas of 2005. I found myself back at my old haunt McManus, the improv bar I frequented during my first run in New York. It was the bar where Liz and Sean Hart once stepped out to get a sandwich and returned to find me with ketchup down my shirt and in my hair. They asked me how it got there and I think that I told them that I didn’t know. I didn’t know because I didn’t remember pouring it there just minutes before. When I was back around McManus that year and a half later though, I was laying much lower. Erin and I were in bad shape and I think I had finally decided *not* to drink like a fish every day anymore because I thought that the point was coming where I was going to have to deal with how doomed we were.

That night at McManus was after a little reunion improv show with Sean and our old comedy group, Shit-Storm. As usual, there was a good crowd of improvisers from the old theater at the bar: a mix of tight friends, a few old acquaintances, and a handful of people who had just become regulars on the scene in the time since I had left. A crew of about a dozen of them were at the next table over from us playing a game that sounded a lot like my favorite board game Loaded Questions. They would take turns asking something like, “Who at the theater do you have the biggest crush on?” and then everyone would turn in their answers on anonymous slips of paper to be read out loud as the group speculated who said what. Since no one was having their identity exposed, it seemed that people were being exceptionally honest (for comedians, of course).

Eventually our table spilled into the game. Between being sober and not knowing a lot of them, I was keeping a pretty low profile. By the time the Shit-Storm crew rolled over, the questions had become surveys limited to how you felt about the people surrounding you at the table. Someone asked who at the table everyone thought had slept with the most people and the majority decided on Ben Rodgers. Then someone asked, “Who here do you think will die first?” One of the women at the table was about fifteen years older than most of us. Then there was a black guy and a gay guy who I thought might end up easy targets for a laugh with their relative high risk factors. And of course there will a couple of genuine head cases there whose depression I thought might be a factor in drawing some votes. But then:

“Billy Hot Chocolate” “Billy Hot Chocolate” “BHC”…

At first I thought that the Shit-Storm guys were the first ones whose answers were being read and were fucking around with me. But when about ten out of the twelve people sitting there voted for me, I wasn’t sure how to take it. People must have voted for me who had just met me that night. The worst was when someone wrote: “Billy Hot Chocolate–Dangerous Lifestyle”.

I have as morbid a sense of humor as almost anybody I know. I think that my friend Stephanie once fell for me because I ran into her at a party senior year of college and in response to “How are you doing?” from someone I barely knew, I decided to respond deadpan, “I wish I was dead.” We laughed. At my dear friend’s wake a few years ago, I was the one sitting around with my ex who can’t take much seriously and was cracking jokes about the guy who showed up wearing a wallet chain. Yet instead of the amusement I want to find when I think about winning that death vote, I only conjure up uneasieness when I think about those sheets being read.

I don’t think that I’m going to die at a young age. And I certainly don’t want to. Maybe it’s a natural fear and maybe it’s one that’s understandably compounded by being named after someone who did. But when I had the urge to write this blog today, I questioned if part of the desire came from an urge to leave this sad, strange relic out there if it ever does happen. Of course let’s pray that it doesn’t. I love anyone reading this too much to wanna think about you ever having to read it through those eyes.