I'm Not High (6 page)

“What happened?” I asked.

“My boyfriend broke up with me,” she said, looking down, shielding her olive-skinned face with her hand.

“Hmmm,” I said, scrambling to offer advice. “You’ll meet others.” I’ve since learned that no one ever appreciates hearing that line.

“We dated for
five
years!” She looked at me like I was completely clueless.

I sat on the porch with her for a while and got nowhere. She continued to sob and wasn’t receptive to any of my clumsily offered generic advice.

“If I can’t help you,” I said, standing up, “maybe I should just take off and give you some privacy?”

She nodded quickly, then kept sniffling. Going down her walkway, I got an idea. I pulled the back of my T-shirt over my head, like some kind of shawl, and then turned around to face her.

“Unless, you wanna tell Grandma what’s wrong, baby,” I said in a crackly, brittle old-lady voice. “You know Grandma’s heart is with you, child.”

At first, she looked at me like I was nuts, but as I kept it up, a smile spread slowly across her face. Not a huge one, but enough to get her to stop crying.

“Now, tell me, who is this boy?” I crackled on, hobbling toward her. “He don’t know you like I do, girl. Let Grandma come and sit with you a spell. Oh, my hips is achin’. Do you know where I set my Metamucil, girl?”

She started laughing. Hard. “Stop,” she said, laughing even harder. “Stop it.”

“You can’t get Grandma to stop her love, baby. I’m sorry,” I said.

I continued on for ten more minutes, just acting like a kooky old grandma.

“You’re from somewhere else. This was the worst day of my life and you’ve made me forget all about it.” She looked at me like I’d performed a voodoo ritual. Then she gave me a hug. “You have no idea what you’ve just done. Wow!”

Satisfied that she’d stopped crying, I got up to leave. “Grandma’s got to try to ride this rickety bike and go fetch some marmalade now.”

I pedaled home, feeling like God had given me a gift. I had the power to make people laugh. I could use it to communicate and help. If this was my “mission” from Him, I accepted it, gladly. I never forgot that day and how the girl recognized something deeper in me.

All of my life humor had been a natural default operating mode for me. If there was trouble? Go to humor. Pain? Go to humor. Sorrow? Go to humor. Depression? Go to humor. Anger? Go to humor. To this day, it’s how I get out of arguments with my wife, and if my kids are crying, a little slapstick and humor gets them right out of it.

Sometimes Grandma and other characters would just emerge out of boredom. And they wouldn’t always be so benevolent. When I was in high school I worked in the paint department at the Valley Stream Sears, and I had plenty of time and unwitting participants on whom I could really craft my material. Some of my coworkers thought I was crazy, and others were drawn to it. There was an older coworker, kind of a bully, who’d wander over to my department and say gruffly and insistently, “Do Grandma.”

This usually meant jumping on the internal house phone and prank calling another department. Coworkers nearby would stand next to me and listen while I phoned Sporting Goods or any department that was super busy. The rule at Sears was that you answered the phone politely no matter what was going on. So “Grandma” would call and fire off the most annoying questions ever: “I understand you’re selling a new Wilson basketball? Well, how round is it? Have you had much trouble with them being defective? Could I get a rain check on one? I’m going to be taking the bus, do you have anyone who could come out and help me get off of it? Well, could you write my name on the box? And could you write my grandson’s name on the ball? My script is a little shaky.” And I’d just go on and on until the person on the other end of the phone quit or turned into a shivering pile.

When the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls got really popular, on the day of a new shipment, I’d go and hide them all on different shelves in other departments and watch the mayhem as the doors opened up and customers looked futilely for the dolls in the toy department, then stumbled on them placed next to microwaves or women’s skirts.

Sometimes that older coworker would come by and tell me to do “the bully and the popcorn.” So I’d play two characters—right out on the open floor of Sears—a bully selling imaginary popcorn, and a kid who didn’t want to buy it. Then I’d proceed to beat myself up.

“Wanna buy some popcorn?” I’d say really fast with a moronic lisp.

“Nah, I don’t care for any,” I’d reply meekly.

“What did you say?” I’d ask, sounding tough, then smack myself. “Just buy the freakin’ popcorn. Three boxes, five dollars.”

“Ouch,” I’d yell. “Lay offa me!”

Pretty soon a crowd would gather around, with guys from other departments cheering me on like it was a real boxing match. “Come on, hit him. Hit him again,” they’d yell. I’d throw myself into the paint cans or trip over lawn mowers. Then I’d start cowering or protecting myself from myself, dodging my own punches, flailing again all over the place.

One prank phone call I made at Sears could have easily landed me in prison. It was a federal offense, apparently. A new guy had started in hardware. He was in his late thirties, so to me, a teenager, he was already suspect. He wasn’t even in commissions hardware, where the guys salivate all over the power saws and riding lawn mowers, pulling down a percentage on each one they sell. This poor guy was just peddling wrenches for a measly hourly wage.

I was standing around the paint department (by the way, to this day, I know nothing about paint), and one of my coworkers, a kid a couple years older than me, came by complaining.

“Hey, this new guy in hardware is really serious,” he said. “I was looking for a lightbulb for my dad’s garage, and he booted me out of his section.”

“Why?”

“I dunno,” he said with a shrug. “He said I ought to stay in my department.”

“Oh,
really
?” I said.

I picked up the house phone and called hardware.

“Sears Valley Stream hardware,” the guy said. “This is Jack, how may I help you?” I could see him right down one of the main aisles, probably fifty feet away from where I was standing.

“Jack,” I said in a horrendous Middle Eastern accent. “This is Muammar Gaddafi.” This was at a time when some really heavy stuff was going on between the U.S. and Libya. Gaddafi’s name was as reviled and feared here as Osama bin Laden’s is today.

“Okay?” he said. He had no clue.

“I am Muammar Gaddafi!” I repeated loudly.

“How can I help you, uh, Mua . . . Muammar?” he said patiently, trying to get the pronunciation right. He had no clue.

By now, I had a few coworkers around me, listening to my end of the conversation, looking down the aisle, waiting to see what would happen.

“I have just sent six missiles to hit your Sears hardware department in Valley Stream.” My accent was so purposely hacky that I didn’t expect anyone to believe it.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“You heard me!” I yelled frantically. “You now have five minutes to get out!” I ended the call by shouting, “Long live the paint department!”

We watched as Jack hung up the phone calmly, without flinching, and simply walked away. He didn’t seem to have a care in the world. In fact, it looked like he was going back to organizing the screwdrivers. None of us could believe it. There was not much else going on, so a couple of us went and sat down in the break room, scheming about how else we could get him.

After a few minutes, we lost interest and started talking about the Mets and girls. We forgot all about Jack and Muammar. When we left the break room, we saw that the girl from the candy department was gone. The toy department people were nowhere to be found. There were no customers left on the floor. As we were looking around, wondering what was going on, an older security guard came racing out of the stockroom.

“Breuer!” he yelled. “What the heck are you guys doing here?”

“It’s called working,” I said cockily. “You should give it a try sometime.”

He ignored me and kept yelling. “You’ve got to get out of the store right now! The new guy from hardware just took a bomb threat.”

“What?!” I asked. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“They’re about to evacuate the whole damn mall,” he said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Then for dramatic effect, he added, “We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

Not thinking of the consequences, I said, “Wait, wait, wait. There’s no bomb threat.” I just wanted him to calm down.

“There sure is, Jim,” he said insistently.

“No,” I said. “I called this guy and said I was Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of Libya. I said I sent
missiles.
But I never said there was a bomb.”

“Oh my God,” the security guard said, turning pale. “You made that call?”

“Yeah, but any moron would have known it wasn’t a bomb threat.”

He looked down at his watch and unholstered his walkie-talkie. “False alarm! False alarm!” he shouted into it. “Don’t evacuate the mall!”

“Cops are already on the way!” someone chirped back through his speaker. This wasn’t going to end well. Or maybe it was. Two of my dad’s sons from his first marriage were cops in Valley Stream. The mall was Gary’s beat, and sure enough, he was on duty that day. Gary marched into Sears and huddled soberly with the security guard before walking over to me, shaking his head.

“Jim,” he said. “Stay off the phone.” I was lucky to get off without getting arrested, but an internal report was filed. And this report worked its way through the corporate bureaucracy, all the way to the top. I was soon notified that I had to meet with the president of Sears’s New York district at his office in Roosevelt Field, Long Island.

One week later, I showered, combed my hair, put on my only suit, and took the train to meet with the president. I sat down in front of his desk. He tried to appear stern, but I thought I could detect a smirk.

“Let’s hear your side of things,” he said, standing up and pacing his office floor. Looking back, I was very fortunate that there hadn’t really been any major bombings or school shootings back then.

I started to explain. “Well, I was done with all my work. I shouldn’t have made a prank phone call, but every once in a while I’ll admit that I call up other departments as a character, just to be silly. The fellow I called was being a little territorial about his store section. A little excessive, I felt. And I promise you, sir, with God as my witness, I said I was Muammar Gaddafi. Do you think that Gaddafi would really single out the Valley Stream Sears, go to the trouble of getting their phone number, then specifically contact the hardware department, telling whomever answered the phone that he was targeting it with missiles?”

The president scratched his chin and paced some more. “Yeah, I get that, Jim,” he said. “No one in their right mind would have bought this, but even still ...”

In the end, I didn’t get canned. I had to apologize in person to Jack, and about two weeks later, he quit, because pretty much everyone else who worked at Sears would walk by him shouting, “Muammar Gaddafi!”

Beyond those incidents, I have to say I was a pretty good kid. Maybe even na��ve, based on my age and where I lived. When I turned thirteen and kids at junior high and high school started talking about house parties, I had no idea what they were talking about. It was difficult to imagine. I was shocked they were willingly inviting people in to trash their parents’ houses. The stories came mostly from jocks who’d brag about it.

“Hey, Breuer,” one of the kids I played baseball with said one day after practice. He was tall and skinny, a popular guy, kind of the ring-leader of the bunch. A group of our teammates gathered around us. “When’s it gonna be your turn?”

“To what?” I asked.

“To start throwing parties,” he said.

“Like with beer and stuff?” I said. “Never. Fat chance of that.”

“You chicken?” he said, playfully taunting me.

“No. But why would you have a twenty-person party at your parents’ house?” I asked. “My God, if any of you numb-nuts knocked off even one wing off my mom’s Hummel figurines, I’d kill you.” I said that probably because I knew I’d never hear the end of it from my mom.

“Sure you would,” he said, and the kids laughed.

“Whatever,” I said. “You really have that little respect for your parents?”

“Well,” he said, “maybe you’re just not ready yet. Maybe it’s because you hang out with a bunch of younger kids watching Mickey Mouse.”

“You talkin’ about the kids from my block?” I asked. “They’re a lot cooler than hanging out with you guys, smoking pot and hanging out in your parents’ basement. That’s idiotic.”

Despite what you may have heard or think about me, I was completely straightedge until my senior year of high school. I didn’t drink or have a girlfriend until that year (though I had my first kiss a couple years earlier), and if that meant being a late bloomer, I was one, and happily so.

My mom and dad were pretty lax when it came to disciplining me, and I wasn’t going to ruin that by acting like a knucklehead. By the time I came into their lives, I figure, they’d seen it all. As such, my dad probably only intervened with me two or three times in my whole life, and that was only if I was doing something really bothersome or terrible.

I remember when I got a bit older and got my license, Dad had to step in. Remember that this was an era when it wasn’t completely uncommon to go out all night, have a bit too much to drink, and then drive home. It’s reprehensible, but it was a different mind-set back then. One morning after a night of drinking, Dad woke me up at five thirty A.M. before he went to work.

“Hey,” he said, leaning over my bed, shaking my shoulder. “Wake your ass up. What were you, all banged up last night? Did ya have a little too much to drink?”