Fake It Til You Make It (Again)

When the movie The Wedding Singer came out in 1998, I remember fequently making the claim that I had been “all about the 80s” way before the decade started gaining momentum and abruptly stopped being considered lame and easily dismissable. I had been really into the 80s since 1995. That was the fall I went down to Baltimore to visit my cousin Deirdre during her freshman year at Loyola.

Deirdre lived below some dudes who seemed like the kind of guys who were cool and sort of dorky, but clearly didn’t care about being dorky and that only could be found when you went away to college. A couple of them were in a ska band. The first big event of the weekend was that Deirdre was taking me to a party her friends were throwing, a ‘G’ party. Everyone had to dress up as something that began with G. I told Deirdre that I was thinking about dressing as the devil.

“But how is that ‘G’?”

“I’ll say that I’m God.”

The upstairs guys decided they liked me. They liked me so much that they invited me into their group costume, the Goonies. They were in their apartment watching the movie to get the looks down. Benny, the leader of their group, was furiously trying to come up with gadgets to put inside his trench coat since he was going to be Data. I think that they let me be Mouth. Not only is he one of my favorite wiseasses in a movie, but he also gets to make out with an older girl who doesn’t know any better. Maybe I had more game than I thought.

I came back from that weekend and decided that I needed to buy The Goonies on VHS ASAP. There was just something that came over while I was watching it where I felt ‘this is what it’s all about.’ I told my Mom that I wanted a hooded sweatjacket. She promised to pick me up one because because she knew a spot that sold them for a mere fifteen dollars. I also sort of wanted braces, but settled for a retainer a few months later. I had wanted a ringer t-shirt for a long time and eventually settled on one with Smurfette on it. The red, white and blue Regis headband that had been sitting dormant in my top drawer became a staple of my wardrobe, along with a matching wrist band. On the arm I wore it on, I would roll the sleeve of my t-shirt up to my shoulder. And sometimes I would wear shorts over my sweatpants. If anyone asked, I would tell them that I was ‘waiting for my Punky Brewster.’ Maybe I still am.

The last jacket I got excited about buying was sky blue with rainbow stripes across it. When I described it to my Mom on the phone the day I bought it, she asked if it was gay. I said that I wasn’t sure. I’m pretty sure I’m not. But what if all of chaps from the eighties whose style has made such a big impact on my own were actually closeted homosexuals? This would be my ‘listening to techno’ or ‘joining the field hockey team.’ You rarely know why you get into the things that you do.

The rainbow jacket had a tiny logo on it of two green footprints. About a month after I got it, I was in a bar in Chicago and a drunk woman who had been at a bachelorette party spotted me and yelled, ‘Hang ten!’ Sure, why not? She looked like she was about five years older than me. And it turned out that she wasn’t just shouting a catchphrase at me to hammer home the point that she was more than down to party. Rather she had spotted the logo on my jacket and perked up because she hadn’t seen it in years. (Also, because she was drunk.) An inspection of the tag confirmed that this was in fact a Hang Ten product. She told me that they were an early eighties company that paved the way for Ocean Pacific, a line I do know because its name was written on many shirts worn by both me and my cousins growing up. And here I just thought it was a near looking jacket.

The one time I really had a sizeable hand in the decorating of my living space was when I moved into my own studio in Portland after Erin and I broke up. I inherited the fiery red-orange love seat I had picked out from the used furniture store, but the only other chair I had was the gross bean bag hand-me-down from Derek and Heidi. Then a few weeks after moving in, I was perusing the aisles of Value Village down in Milwaukie, the suburb I worked at a group home in. I spotted a piece of furniture unlike any I had seen before, a lime green love seat that both rocked and reclined. A rocking recliner love seat, wow. And it was only fifty dollars, a major steal. Of course being my Mom’s son, that price wasn’t good enough for me and instead I waited with bated breath for a week until Memorial Day, when everything at Value Village was 50% off. Can you believe that not one single person in suburban Oregon over that week realized what a steal they’d be getting for one of the most unique pieces of furniture ever crafted? At 8 a.m. on Memorial Day, I walked over to Value Village and paid a mere $25 for this dream of home furnishing.

Since I couldn’t exactly strap my rocking recliner on to the bus home, a guy I worked with named Joe Brown offered to take it back to the city with me in his pickup truck. Joe was 35, a lifelong Oregonian I believe and may have still lived with his mother. He also had a spare pickup truck. So the only thing I could think to offer him as a way of thanks and really, just of conversation, was to see if he wanted to smoke the pot that had been stored away in my freezer. He accepted the offer. So we sat on our respective love seats and got high. I remember that is wasn’t much past noon because one of the few stabs at conversation I made with Joe was saying, ‘It’s Christmas time.’ To which, he replied, ‘Huh?’ And then I explained ‘Oh, I just like to say that whenever I notice the (Mickey and Minnie Mouse) clock is at 12:25.’ I think he said something like, ‘You’re a pretty unique guy.’ Or maybe he just gave me that look. Joe looked around at the room and then said, ‘So you’re really into vintage stuff, huh?’

And the thought had honestly never crossed my mind before.

Come a Little Bit Closer

Dominic and I just played a good game of Hotter or Colder. It’s nice cause most of my friends don’t really like guessing games. But I love ‘em. Especially ones where someone has to guess what I’m thinking. My guess as to why? Because I’m in love with the way my brain works and I take great pleasure in seeing how other people perceive me.

The topic of our Hotter or Colder was my list of the five local areas I’d most like to live in. Dominic’s been on the hunt for a place to live for a few months now. It sucks to watch what a burden it is on him. I hate that these things end up taking over our lives: what apartment am I going to live in next? And then most of us end up leaving these places practically at the drop of a hat, when circumstances draw us somewhere else. It sounds really cynical when people say that life is nothing but pointless, but sometimes I really wonder.

Last night I was driving my Mom’s car on the BQE coming back to Greenpoint from Carroll Gardens. And I had forgotten that the highway over there has this marvelous way of winding around the corner of Brooklyn as it begins to approach the Brooklyn Bridge where the skyline of Manhattan sneaks up on you as you curve around the bend. Suddenly there it is and it appears like it’s so close, to you and to itself. The Empire State Building feels like it’s right next to the South Street Seaport. And of course you’re driving, so you can’t fully just rubber yr neck over and wade in it, but you also feel like you have no choice but to sneak a peek over at it every few beats.

Last night I heard at least three separate people mention how beautiful the sky was. Sam compared it to being under water and someone on Facebook called it a Harvest Moon. I’m not even sure what a Harvest Moon is. Is it a full moon? Can it only happen in autumn? Does it involve an orange tint? I like the sound of it though. It’s mid-September and we’re harvesting the moon. That sounds great. I also really like the song “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young, particularly the line where he sings, “Because I’m still in love with you.” I guess he does that a lot. But it never gets old.

What I liked most about driving on the BQE in between the lights of Manhattan and this alleged Harvest Moon was that it gave me the special feeling that I get when I’m visiting a place I’ve spent a lot of time in and am swept away by the imprint it has left on me that seems magical when it’s conjured back up in a moment’s notice. You don’t get to have that feeling enough when you’re just living in the same place without a ton of moving around. So last night I sort of felt, “Wow, what can compete with that? I should move here! Oh wait, I already live here. I came back for stuff like this.” And for a second, it seemed like I really knew what I was doing with my life.

There are so many lives I wish that I had that weren’t mine. I think the perfect life would be something like Sam’s on Quantum Leap. One day you’re a gym teacher. And the next day you’re in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. You have a best friend with a cool toy who’s always trying to help you out. You’re always trying to leave things a little better than how you found them. Trying to find the solution to one problem incidentally leads to the diffusion of another one. You pine for the love of yr life who is unreachable and in the meantime you get to experience lots of little loves. Sometimes you get to be a woman.

Dominic left and I’m alone listening to Sleater-Kinney in my headphones, one of my favorite songs called “The #1 Must Have.” It’s about being disillusioned when you realize that everything you’ve been fighting for might be unattainable and it’s time to call it a night. But when we feel like we’ve lost the fight in us, the best thing we can do is to encourage it in others. 

My friend Ange is on her way to meet me because she needs a boost climbing into her window because she’s locked out of her bedroom. Dominic texted me “‘What Do All the People Know’ by the Monroes” right after he left and now it’s on deck on my iTunes. There is a profound sense of hollowness within me. And yet I choose to be as okay with it as I can be.

I’m in Love With How You Feel

My favorite board game is called ‘Loaded Questions.’ It’s more of a ‘party game’ than one that’s really based in competition. Each person gets a numbered sheet of paper and each round whoever’s turn it is asks the group a personal question that comes from the game’s cards. The questions can be anything from ‘If you were going to get a tattoo, what would it be and where?’ to ‘What is something that you’d rather ‘leave behind in Vegas?’’ After everyone in the group writes down their answer, they pass the sheets around to the person next to whoever’s turn it is and that person then reads out each of the answers in random order. The person whose turn it is then has to guess just who said which answer. It’s a game that really has a way of quickly taking a group of people, be it relative strangers or long-time close friends, and giving them a distinct dynamic.

Often when I play Loaded Questions, my answers are drenched in some combination of sarcasm, absurdity and earnestness. Part of the reason that I’m not straight up with each answer is because it’s fun how much creative license the game gives you; there’s even an element of deception sometimes. But part of it has to do with the fact that I often just don’t know exactly how I feel about things. Right now if you asked to name one award that I’d like to win in my lifetime, my gut answer would be ‘World’s Best Dad (Coffee Mug),’ but there would also be an underlying voice inside me that was yelling in an angry whisper, ‘Stop being so full of shit!’ Yes, my Jiminey Cricket angrily seethes at me to ‘keep it real’ without ever really pointing me in the direction of where that reality might be. It’s no wonder that I always end up finding a group of lost boys to drink with.

The one round of a Loaded Questions game I’ve played that stands out in my mind as one in which I felt instinctively tapped in to what my simplest and most genuine answer was came from the question ‘What is your biggest regret?’ My answer, guessed correctly as being mine by my good friend and fellow Loaded Questions lover Kaitlyn Burch, was ‘my major.’

The biggest factor in my decision to be a film and television major may have been the department’s ample offerings of night classes which took no attendance and spent two of their four hours screening films and television shows that were too easy for my excuse-riddled brain to convince myself to skip out of. The second biggest factor was Tara McPherson. I’ve mentioned Tara before. She was a feminist. She had a dry sense of humor. She wore glasses. She was basically everything I wanted in a woman. Or was she just everything I wanted in a role model? This is where the angry whisper kicks in.

Since Regis was an all boys Catholic high school, there was naturally a lot of suppressed hormones kicking around. Mine were probably so deeply depressed underneath what was probably a nasty battle going on for control of my brain between the wiseass commanders who had reigned supreme throughout most of my youth and the burgeoning sentimental uprising that was beginning to take hold. I was beginning to become so fixated on my story that figuring out just who was going to be ‘my Winnie Cooper’ took precedence over any dormant desires to have some sex in my life. This clearly wasn’t the case for many of the guys around me.

In my four years at Regis, I recall two female teachers under thirty-five: Barbara O’Connell and Michelle DeCarlo. Both had a harem of guys that gravitated towards their desks whenever the fellas had a free period and just happened to be on that side of the building–’So oh I figured I’d just pop in.’ Actually a lot of the guys who had been part of the Ms. O’Connell harem freshman year in the math resource center made the transition over to the Mrs. DeCarlo camp in the computer lab when she arrived sophomore year. Maybe it was Mrs. DeCarlo’s big Staten Island hair that encouraged the jump. But I would pass by these guys and just sort of shake my head. Now I was fond of both teachers, enjoyed chatting with them every now and then and even would develop the hots for one of them as my late breaking puberty started kicking in by seventeen. But there just seemed something sort of pathetic about the transparency of this group of guys sitting around these women’s desks, hanging off the anecdotes they might share about taking a cruise with an old boyfriend or how geeky they used to look when they had a retainer. The guys had no chance with these married (and respectable) women, they knew they had no chance with them, and yet here they were just taking satisfaction in just sharing the air with one of the two sexual beings in the school every moment they could. I just didn’t get it.

Now, flash forward to college and the most reliable place to track me down on a given week my sophomore year was at Tara McPherson’s desk during her office hours. The first semester I had class with Tara so I suppose that I had a reasonable excuse to ask thorough academic follow-up questions such as ‘So what made you and yr grad school friends drive down to Chicago in matching t-shirts for that Oprah clip you showed last week?’ But the second semester I really had no legitimate reason to be there since she didn’t teach any class I was in. Not only that, but her office hours coincided with Todd Boyd’s ‘Race, Class and Gender in Film,’ one of the required courses that Tara knew I was registered in. Halfway through our weekly chats, she would realize that I had cut out of another screening in order to come hang out with her. But she laughed it off and turned a blind eye; it was our little secret. What wasn’t a secret to any of the TA’s or other students who dropped by Tara’s office more than once was that this kid was totally in love with his TV professor. But for some reason the women that I connect to the most are also the ones that I’m able to desexualize. So it was a secret to me.

That second secret semester of hanging out by Tara’s desk was the one where I had to declare a major. I had dropped American Studies (sorry Janeane) because of an 8am class. And sticking around school for more than four years was not an option for me because my scholarship wouldn’t allow it and there was no way my Mom (let alone I) could pay for USC without the aid. I had applied to both the theater school and the critical studies wing of the film and television school and got accepted into both. By that point I had started acting in student plays and my friends’ films they made for class and realized that I was really good at it. I had wanted to be a comedian my whole life and it seemed like it might just be taking shape. So taking as many acting and playwriting and solo performance classes I could have made sense. But what made more sense to me was Tara.

The main reason I wanted to major in American Studies when I got to USC was because that’s what Janeane Garofalo had studied it twenty years before at Providence. I made all these justifications to myself about the path to becoming a great satirist would sensibly require for me to immerse myself in the history of the culture along the way, that that must have been what Janeane was doing. But here’s one of the funny things about me and Janeane: she was never my favorite comedian. Did I think Janeane was funny? Sure. Did she ever blow me away and make me wonder how someone’s brain could dissect present day life the way Dave Chappelle did when I saw him do stand-up for the first time at seventeen? Not once. But Janeane was the one who I set the VCR for every time she was on Conan. She was the one who I swore off every girl I knew senior year for because I was so determined that I was going to get her to go to the prom with me. But if anyone ever asked me why I had such a crush on Janeane Garofalo, my defensive response was that I in fact did not, that she was ‘like a fairy Godmother to me.’

So I chose to study television even though I generally didn’t like writing papers on it or reading people’s essays about it. I majored in critical studies even though I had an aversion to criticism. I told myself that I could teach television some day, maybe at a high school. Because in the back of my mind I thought that eventually I could possibly mean to someone as much as Tara had meant to me.

When I really started falling for Deirdre Curran, I borrowed almost all of her CDs and copied them onto cassettes. That became the music that paved the way for most of what I listened to throughout high school. And if you ever asked me how I saw Deirdre back then, I would have told you quite honestly that I looked up to Deirdre and that I wished she was my best friend.

I’ve been so afraid and felt so unworthy of the women that I’ve loved. The closest I’ve felt that I could get to them is by following in their footsteps, by trying to become someone like who they were. The results have been mixed.

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.

My Imaginary Friend Was Real (Self-Deprecating)

Every year in the week after New Year’s, I like to sit down with my journal and make a list of the five people who have been the biggest impact players in my life throughout the previous year. This habit probably spawned from a similar list I decided to make in the summer of 1998 when I figured it might be fun to choose just who the most important people had been to me throughout high school. In an ideal world, the top two spots of that list would be occupied by the two things in life I had wanted most back then: a girlfriend and a best friend.

Number One was easy, as the previously mentioned Deirdre Curran had just recently dropped back into my life and put the cherry on top of what had been a mess of a four year sundae. After basically not speaking to me for all of our senior year, she and Liz called me up out of the blue one day. They were poorly disguising their voices behind hits from a nearby helium tank and were demanding that I “come out and go roller skating.” (I’m pretty sure none of us owned roller skates.) Three weeks later “roller skating” turned into Deirdre and I sitting in my grandfather’s Monte Carlo outside the Friendly’s on Tuckahoe Road, drinking Fribbles and listening to the classic Q on the radio. In a move that still blows my balls off when I think about it ten years later, Deirdre leaned in and started making out with me for what would be the first and only time. Right as it began, the radio cued up Joe Cocker’s cover of “Get By With a Little Help From My Friends,” the theme song to The Wonder Years.

Winnie Cooper, eat yr heart out.

But while Deirdre provided me with an epic romance that never was except for that one night when it amazingly was was, the rest of my high school fave fives did not present themselves so neatly. While Liz and I eventually developed a pretty solid (granted, abusive) friendship, we both had a pretty “take it or leave it” attitude towards staying buds. At the time I was writing the list, life was dominated by my gang of best friends, the Three Toed Sloths. But until that last year, those guys were more of just the Circle Kids, the friends I hung out with when I didn’t wanna leave the circle at the end of my block. And four years of Regis was just spent drifiting from one cafeteria table to the next. The only other real figure of consistency I really did have was the girl I had spent a good number of my Saturday nights with over the previous four years, Janeane Garofalo.

Between seeing my older cousins grow up in suburban Rockland and watching the West Beverly gang go thru their adolescent trials on Beverly Hills, 90210, I had entered high school with the notion that I’d spend the next four years going to house parties with a lot of Solo cups and would likely lose my virginity at sixteen. By about halfway into my sophomore year, I had realized that I was either on a very different path or else people just don’t make photo albums and write teen drama scenes inspired by how many Saturday nights they spent alone watching Comedy Central. With no real crew to turn to, I’d usually just check in with Janeane. At ten o’clock, I got to watch her do sketches on reruns of The Ben Stiller Show. Then at eleven, she would host the “alternative” stand-up comedy show, Comedy Product. At the end of the show would be the credit for her production company whose name we heard voiced over by a defeated Janeane, “I Hate Myself.” What a note to end another unfulfilling Saturday night on.

Janeane used to make cameos in my dreams sporadically back then. There was never any exchange about who I was, having to explain myself as a fan who was more than a fan, but a fan who had dedicated the feature piece in my zine to her. The dreams never took place backstage at a comedy club, like the one time we actually did meet and I invited her to the Regis Junior Semiformal. Nor were any of them set in the dog park in the West Village where she would walk her dogs and where I spent a lot of my senior year hanging around with hopes of bumping into her so I could ask her to senior prom. We never talked about being a celebrity, nor that she did comedy.

We just walked around Riverdale, hanging out, like it was no big thing.