I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (4 page)

I really didn’t get much recognition from my father. I don’t think it scarred me for life; it’s just the way it was. The more I read, the more I think that’s just the way fathers were at the time. I was a little bit like the son in the novel
The Kite Runner
, who was always trying to gain his father’s attention and affection but never succeeded. When I read the book, their relationship struck a responsive chord.

My mother’s father, whose name was Danny Burns, had some money. He owned an apartment building at 59 North Menard Street, where my parents lived rent-free for a while. My father owned a car that he parked out back, but he didn’t drive it because he couldn’t afford the gasoline.

Being kids, we used to play in the car. We would fill up the gas tank with sand. The day came when my father had saved enough money to buy gas and he discovered what we had done. Predictably, he went ballistic. My mother interceded. She said, “If you ever lay a hand on the kids, I’ll kill you.” And she meant it.

Years later, in 1989, my family in Chicago was at a Christmas gathering. My sister M.J. was seated next to my mother. Mom’s memory was beginning to fade. My mother said, “Is Dad with us?” M.J. said, “No, Mom, Dad died a few months ago.” Mom said, “There were times I could have killed him.” Then there was a pause and Mom said, “I didn’t, did I?” with a laugh.

Eventually we moved from the apartment building into a duplex at 26 North Mason Street. The story I heard was that my grandfather had taken out bonds for the apartment building but defaulted on them because the tenants couldn’t pay their rent. Soon he sold his half of the duplex and moved in with us upstairs. My grandfather took my bedroom, and I slept in the dining room. That’s when I truly realized we weren’t middle class.

When my grandfather died, I got my bedroom back. Then my grandmother on my father’s side, Emma O’Connor-Newhart, moved in with us, and I was back in the dining room.

No matter where we lived, I remember that the Kentucky Derby was always a big event in our house. At the time, I thought it was part of our heritage, but there may have been more to it. I knew that my mother’s parents, the Burnses, had moved to Chicago from Maysville, Kentucky, so I assumed there was a natural interest in the race because of that.

So you can take from my childhood whatever you want and decide that’s why I became a comedian, but I don’t like to analyze my comedy on that basis. Oh, yeah … there is one more piece of information from my childhood to factor in: I was addicted to Pepsi.

The real personality test for Chicagoans is whether they are Cubs fans or White Sox fans. For years, the two baseball teams have divided the town. The Cubs play on the North Side in homey, ivycovered Wrigley Field, while the Sox play on the South Side in a stone fortress now called U.S. Cellular Field. The dividing line for fans is at Madison Street, which literally divides the North Side of the city from the South. We lived on the West Side, so we could go either way.

My mom was a Cubs fan and so was I. She and a friend often took me to games when I was young. My dad was a Sox fan. I never went to Sox games.

Listening on the radio to a typical Sox game, I would hear that Nellie Fox would walk. Then the next batter, Luis Aparicio, would bunt, and Nellie Fox would run to second. Next, Minnie Minoso would hit a fly ball, and Fox would go to third. Finally, somebody would single and Fox would score. It was dull.

But the Cubs were exciting. Bill Nicholson could hit a homer at any time and clear the bases. I can still name the lineup from the 1945 Cubs, the last team to win the pen nant. They were: Phil Cavarretta at first base, Don Johnson at second, Roy Hughes at shortstop, Stan Hack at third, Mickey Livingston behind the plate, Hank Borowy on the mound, and Peanuts Lowrey, Andy Pafko, and Nicholson in the outfield. Really, that was from memory!

Until 2005, when the Sox won the World Series, both Chicago teams had underachievement in common. The Cubs, known affectionately as the “lovable losers,” had not won the series since 1908, and the Sox hadn’t won since 1917. While the White Sox have forever been plagued by the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, in which several players took bribes from gamblers and threw the World Series, the Cubs are famous for the curse that happened in 1945—the last time they made it to the World Series.

As legend has it, a bar owner named Billy Sianis brought his pet goat to game four of the 1945 World Series and was ejected on orders of owner P. K. Wrigley midway through the game because the goat smelled. Sianis, who owned the Billy Goat Tavern, hexed the Cubs, declaring that they would never win the World Series as long as the goat was not allowed at Wrigley Field.

Over the years, every time the Cubs have gotten close to winning the pennant and advancing to the World Series, something bizarre has snatched it away and talk of the curse is renewed. When I lived in Chicago, I was never familiar with the curse. I was just perennially disappointed.

My dad was a good bowler. Despite the fact that the eight-lane Austin-Madison bowling alley was a half a block from where we lived and the fact that I worked there as a pin spotter in high school, he always bowled at the sixteen-lane Cinderella bowling alley.

For two years, I was a pin spotter at Austin-Madison Bowling Alley from 6:30
P.M
. until 10:30
P.M
. every night. These were the days before the automatic resetting machines at bowling alleys, and the pin spotter’s job was to manually replace the pins after each frame.

Pin spotting required dexterity. After placing the pins down in one alley, you would stand in the adjacent alley while the bowlers used the first alley. For four hours, you alternated resetting the pins in those two alleys. It was also a somewhat dangerous job. Every now and then, a pin called a chaser would fly from one alley into the next and whiz around your feet, hitting the sides and the back of the area where you were standing.

If a guy threw a chaser, I often sent him a subtle message.

The first measure of revenge was to take the five pin (the middle pin in the triangle of ten pins) and offset it just a little bit. It was almost imperceptible, but just enough so that if he threw a perfect ball into the 1-3 pocket, he ended up with a split and not a strike. A good bowler would get the message: Don’t throw a chaser.

The other message you could send was lamely rolling the ball up the ball return so that it wouldn’t make it up and over the hump. The ball would then roll back down and come to rest in the middle of the lane, and the guy would have to walk down the gutter to retrieve it.

The women’s leagues were usually easier than the men’s. Because women didn’t generally throw with the power of men, I would sit on the bench at the end of the lane where the women were bowling, hold my feet up, and put my hand over a certain place that I didn’t want to be hit by a bowling ball.

However, I remember picking up the pins once for a woman who didn’t know the basic etiquette of bowling. As I started placing the few pins that this woman knocked down on the rack, I heard a
“cudump, cudump, cudump …”
Instinctively, I knew that the ball was coming right for me. Thankfully, she was so bad that she rolled the ball on the holes, allowing me to hear it. Had she thrown a spinner, I would’ve been a goner.

My colleagues were two grown men, a guy named Branch who was attending barber school, and an Eastern European who spoke no English. Branch and I would talk across the lanes by yelling at each other over the sound of clanking pins. I remember him loudly telling me about his barber-school final exam, in which he had to lather a balloon with shaving cream and shave the balloon without popping it. I never found out if he passed.

Pin spotting paid ten cents per round, earning me about six dollars for the night. After work, I would stick around and bowl a few games. The problem with this was that the alley charged one dollar a game and had no employee discount, so I ended up bowling away half my nightly wages.

I was a decent bowler. I threw what was called a semispinner, which doesn’t have the driving power of a full-roller. The full-roller bores through the pins to bowl a strike, while the semi-spinner jumbles them. I did that for years and carried a 170 average. Then one day, I threw my semi-spinner, and it dawned on me that I was never going to get any better.

So after devoting all that time to spotting pins, missing prime TV, and squandering half my earnings to boot, I quit bowling.

I did mine some comedic material from my everyday childhood world. My street was near the end of the suburban Chicago Transit Authority bus line. From around the time I was five years old, I watched the buses drive up our street, and then turn around and head back to town.

One day I began to wonder what kind of school bus drivers attended. Like baseball players, I reasoned, if there were good bus drivers, then there must be great bus drivers. This led to my imagining a school for bus drivers because they couldn’t innately know what to do—or how to treat people so rudely.

In a routine that I wrote just before moving away from Chicago titled “Bus Driver’s School,” I take the audience to that school. As we enter the school, there is a course in progress to train bus drivers:

Here is the situation, Johnson. You have just pulled into a stop. You have discharged your passengers and out of your mirror, you notice this old woman running for a bus. Let’s see how Johnson handles it. … Hold it, hold it. You are pulling out much too fast, Johnson. See, she gave up about halfway down the block. What you want to do is kind of gradually ease out so they are always holding out hope that they will catch the bus. One thing you want to watch out for, a lot of these old women will run at three-quarters speed. Then they’ll put on a final burst and they’ll catch up with the bus.

Graham, you want to try now. Okay, let’s see how Graham handles this situation. All right, did you all see how he slammed the door right in her face that time? That’s known as your perfect pullout. … It wasn’t part of your problem, but I want to compliment you on it: You blocked both lanes pulling in.

Mrs. Selkirk, I think we’ll take situation thirteen. You want to get in the Chevrolet. Drivers, you will be driving and there will be a student driver. Let’s see how Johnson goes about handling this situation. … That was fine, very good. Could you all see what he did? He gets back about ten to fifteen car lengths, gets it up to around sixty miles per hour, and then he gets right behind her … bang! He slams on his brakes and hits the horn at the same time. Did you all see how the car went out of control there? The minute she dove for the floorboard, it just swerved into the light pole.

Mrs. Selkirk, you be the woman with the package. … Granted, you drivers can’t be expected to know this. It is going to take time and lots of practice. … Mrs. Selkirk, fumble for your change. … Start heading for the back of the bus. … Johnson, hit your accelerator, then the brake, hit the accelerator again, now your brake. Did you see how she spun all the way to the front of the bus? Don’t get discouraged. Within five to six months, you’ll have all of them spinning. Just remember, accelerator, brake, accelerator, brake.

Finally, for homework tonight, you are going to study the mispronunciation of street names.

If none of that is funny to you, it may be because you’ve never seen a friendly neighbor in a fedora cursed by a bus driver for not getting off fast enough who then shouts back at the bus driver: “Same to you, fella!”

CHAPTER THREE

I Almost Had a Real Career

I heard my name being called out for the third time. It had already been called out for best new artist and best comedy performance. This time was for album of the year, beating out Harry Belafonte and Frank Sinatra. As I was walking up to receive my Grammy, I thought to myself, maybe now Dad will notice me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Being a comedian means you are antiauthority or subversive at heart. You are looking to expose the loopholes in the system, sometimes to make things easier and other times just because they’re there. Looking back at my life and career, I realize I was always antiauthority at heart. It just took me a while to realize it.

After making it through the Catholic grade school St. Catherine of Siena, the Catholic high school St. Ignatius, and the Catholic college Loyola University, I enrolled in Loyola’s law school, which was also affiliated with the Catholic Church. I had my undergraduate degree in management (heavy on accounting classes), and I was on a career path to become a lawyer.

What drew me to the law? I’m not exactly sure, though I was a voracious reader of the works of Robert Benchley, and at least on a subconscious level, one of Benchley’s essays influenced me to go to law school. It was about a Walter Mitty–type character who was a trial lawyer. This attorney made an absolute fool out of the opposing counsel to the point where the jury was applauding and even the judge was enjoying the show.

While attending law school, I worked as a law clerk in the afternoons for a firm run by three brothers. Their firm handled wage garnishments. My job involved going to a local factory, finding the guy who owed money, and bringing him back to the law office in a taxi so he could sign the papers to have his wages garnished. Even for a lawyer, it was a creepy way to make a living.

One day, one of the brothers asked me go into municipal court, stand in the back, and when a certain case was called simply say, “I’d like a continuance, Your Honor.” I refused on the grounds that I would be practicing law without a license. The lawyer shook his head and walked away. That was the dim view that those three brothers took of the law.