It's So Hard To Type With A Gun In My Mouth (55 page)

DECEMBER 26, 2006 -
CHRISTMAS 2006

Well it turns out Christmas 2006 was the best one I have ever had. I don't know if the Gods are giving me a little extra this year because they knew certain family members would be ignoring me for the holiday season or if they know I'm about to have that stroke.  Whatever the case may be, I had a wonderful Christmas.

First, let's start with the gifts. A weekend at a Hilton Hotel, 1000 dollar Guess jeans gift card, shirts, clothing and the most wonderful gift of all.... an electronic garbage can. I swear to you. It's a trashcan with an electric lid, when you put your hand up to it; the lip opens and then closes when you remove your hand. It's all automatic and so hysterically funny that it's sitting right in the middle of my kitchen for all to see.

But here's the bottom line. It's not the gifts; it's the love from the people. It's someone saying to me, we love you, we thought about you and we want you to be happy. I have never had that. What I always got was... we love you, here's a gift certificate because we didn't take the time to figure out what you wanted. This year the gifts were from the heart not the wallet and they made me so happy. One person baked bread and an entire basket of THE most delicious cookies I have ever had. To me a gift from the heart like this is the best gift someone can give. It took time, it took effort and it just says I love you. I can't tell you how much I loved that gift. You could feel the love dripping from it.

Ok enough about that shit , let's talk about "the gig."  As you know I detest doing Temple gigs. I hate doing any unprofessional gig, Temples, churches, women's social clubs, private birthday parties, Bush impeachment Bashes...no, wait, that one I would do.  I hate doing them because the people who run them have no idea how to run a show. And since I am a perfectionist, I get terribly stressed when working with the ladies garden club.   However, this show on the 24th was NOT like that at all.  I must admit there were some tense moments before the show because they changed the times.

Liz Torres taught me years ago, "You don't get dressed. You don't go on the plane. You don't even warm up until you get it all on paper."  And so I asked for something on paper about the show. I was told it would start at 8:15 p.m. and end at 10 p.m.  The night before the show I get an email telling me I would be going on about 9:50 which means I would not get out of there by 10:45. I had dinner plans that I made based on the "written" agreement and now they were changing at the last minute.  I was really upset and asked since it was running so late, did they really need me? This got them very upset... ah...  duh. What was I thinking?

They moved the show around so I could get on at 9:30 and be out by 10:00 and it was all-good. When I got to the auditorium I was very impressed.  They had a stage, they had proper lighting, they had a follow spot, they had a good sound system.... Round tables!  However, everyone had turned their chairs facing the stage and...NO FOOD WAS BEING SERVED.  The first act went out and got solid laughs. I could tell the crowd was very warm and receptive. However, I was a nervous wreck. Every single time I go out on stage, every single one of them, I know this is the time that the audience is going to hate me; that they are going to stare at me and not laugh. It's a lot a pressure I put on myself and it's the main reason I detest doing stand up.

I asked my friend Monica Johnson if she would like to come with me. I needed a loving soul in the audience, someone who would laugh even if I were bombing. Monica is the genius behind all the Albert Brooks films. She wrote Mother, The Muse, Lost In America, Real Life...and on and on and on. But, she's been a friend for 30 years and having her rooting for me meant a lot. 

I was doing my ritualistic pacing before the show, praying to all my dead friends to be with me when suddenly I hear them announce my name. I was not even ready to go on and had to bolt to the stage. I walked into the spotlight and it was like someone turned on a switch in my brain. Suddenly I was sitting at my computer writing my book. Things came flowing out of my mouth that I had no idea where they were coming from. Words were spilling out of me like I had verbal diarrhea... and people were laughing. The more they laughed the more confident I got. The more confident I got the funnier I got. Suddenly I was rapid firing out material and they were screaming. My style of comedy is non-stop. I don't like those long stories with set ups and no laughter. I like joke, joke, joke, joke... like Rickles or Rivers... and two nights ago the jokes were a flyin'.

To give you an idea how confident I was ON stage, I started doing new material that I had never done before. I started telling jokes that I thought of in the car going to the gig. THAT tells me I was really comfortable on stage. And when I got off I wondered why, no matter what the gig, or the time or the place, I feel that I will not be good enough to please this crowd. (long pause)  OH my God! Did you see what I just wrote? I will not be good enough to please... if that isn't out of the book of  Freud, I don't know what is. I'm sitting here shaking my head in wonderment.   This is like the best therapy I could ever pay for. I should send each one of you 90 dollars every time I write. Yah that will happen. Not.

DECEMBER 31, 2006 - 
A NEW YEAR'S THOUGHT

Soon it will be New Year's Eve and I'll be with friends and we'll be remembering the past year and wondering what the future year will bring. But before I got lost in that world I wanted to stop and write and just say "thanks".  Thanks for being there for me. Thanks for listening to my stories. Thanks for cheering me on, bolstering me up and pushing me forward. Thanks for lifting my spirits and giving me a shoulder to cry on.  Thanks for letting me know you care and for letting me know I've changed your lives. Thanks for being there.

I never expected the book to become so earth shatteringly important in my life. I just wanted to write funny. What I ended up doing was sharing my life with you and you all accepted it with open arms. Well, maybe my family didn't open their arms but the rest of you did. And now I have friends in Indiana, in Nova Scotia, in Virginia, in Minnesota, in Massachusetts, in Maine, in Australia, in France, Italy...who knows where.  All I know is that all of you have helped me through a year of transition. You've celebrated when I got the news of my play being optioned, you cried when I told stories of my departed friends, you held me when I got abandoned. You were my family.

I want to wish each and every one of you a Happy and Healthy New Year. I want to thank you for giving my life some purpose this year. I want to wish for you only the best and most prosperous. And I hope you will continue to stick with me... because I will stick with you, maybe not every day like I did this last year but certainly when something wonderful or bad or incredible or silly happens like having a garage door fall on my car.

Happy, Happy New Year Folks, if anyone deserves it... it's you all!

December 29, 2009

I can not tell you why this happened but I can tell you that I remember it in such detail that to relive it here tonight  is a piece of cake. I was about nine years old. My father was home this night. My father being there was peculiar because usually he came home from work, ate dinner, changed his clothes and was out the door.  The atmosphere in my home was one of distrust and alienation. They fought nonstop. They could not be in the same room for five minutes without her screaming at him or him blasting her with a  barrage of insults. And so, his way of dealing was to get dressed and leave.    In any case, that night he was home.

My mother walked into the room dressed to go out. I hadn’t heard anything about her going out and so it seemed strange to me. “I’m going out. Daddy will stay with you.”  And folks, it’s fifty-five years and I can still feel the feeling I felt when I heard those words sheer panic. I got hysterical. Instantly. “No, you can’t leave. I don’t want you to leave.”

Now for everything that ever happened in my life, I can give you a reason.  I can tell you the motivations of this and the understanding of that… But this night I had not a single reason for this sudden and complete panic. It was instantaneous terror. I began to scream. I remember running to her and clutching her thighs. “No, you can’t go…don’t leave me. DON’T LEAVE ME.”  She pulled my arms from around her legs with a , “Stop it.”  The more she pushed me away the more I screamed. I was hysterical, the kind of crying you get with that machine gun gasping for air on the intake.  She would have none of it and was out the door.

I ran to the window. Screaming at the top of my lungs. I flung myself against the huge living room picture window. The trails of my nine-year old hands made a path through the condensation that accumulated on the warm interior panes as I slid down to the floor.  The water collected in icy puddles on the sill as she got into her car and drove off.  I collapsed into a ball of screaming terror.  My father was on the sofa, four feet from me, motionless. Through all the hysterics he had not said a word. Not a single word.  He was watching it like the whole thing was on T.V.  He had no words of calm for me, no nurturing understanding. He just watched me like I was a science project.

As I watched her car turn the corner at the end of the street and disappear into the cold winter’s night. I turned to him to see what he was doing. Nothing. He had a transfixed glaze on his face. I had quieted down now, just the repeating gasp of the machine gun air intake.  There was nothing I could do. She was gone. I picked myself up off the floor and went into my bedroom where I closed the door and remained for the rest of the night.  I thought the horror was over… but it was not.

The next morning my mother was furious. “What is wrong with you? How could you act that way? Do you want the neighbors to talk?”  The  neighbors… that’s what she was worried about, what the neighbors thought. “I am not having them think I raised a little animal. Today you are going to every single neighbor and apologize for the scene you made last night.”  I could feel the fear in my feet. I was going to have to go out and knock on doors and apologize to everyone for being a scared child.

I remember going to that first door looking down at my feet and mumbling something like, “I’m sorry I made noise last night.” I cannot tell you how they responded. I simply don’t remember. But I do remember going to at least five doors and repeating the embarrassment over and over. Even at that age I was ashamed. I have wondered over the years if that was fitting punishment.  Should a child be made to pay the price for a screaming fit? Should they have to apologize to every person on the plane or in the supermarket aisle?  I don’t know. Should they?

I don’t know why this memory came to me tonight. It just did. It happened fifty-five years ago and the pain of that night still remains with me. Some people can move on and get over it. I have not learned that skill yet. I can’t tell you why, I just haven’t. Somewhere in me, I think maybe it’s because I never got closure.  I never got to understand the why this happened or why that happened.

And so as most of the world sleeps, I relive  a childhood trauma… or the death of a friend… or a painful experience…a loss…a pain. It’s my life and I’ve learned to deal with it. How, you ask?  By getting out of bed and putting  it into written form. By getting it out of my mind and down on paper. That’s how I deal. I am a writer. I write.  If I were a song writer, I’d put it to music but I’m not a song writer… I’m a word writer and so I put it into words.  To stop me from writing is to negate my very existence. I have grown enough in the last couple of years to know that I will not feel guilty about writing or expressing myself. Because what I have learned is that when I do put it down on paper, someone else who is unable to sleep reads it and says, “I’m not alone.”  And to me, that is what this whole thing has become. Me, helping you, through my pain.

EIPLOGUE

The trip is almost over; the actual trip through the Panama Canal and the written trip through my life via the
book.  I've seen the sea come crashing down on the hull of this vessel like it was a rubber ducky in a bathtub. I've seen my life change in the same way.  I know now I am a writer and I thank all of you who have taken the time to tell me you agree.

I will continue to write. Maybe there is another book in me, I don't know.  I sit down as often as I can to document the insanity of my life. But when I write now, I am not encumbered by the fears that I'm not good enough or that I don't know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. I know how to do it. I can communicate with the written word. I can bring a smile to a face or a tear to an eye. I am a writer. Yet there is always that voice in my head telling me I'm not enough. Telling me the next time they'll figure out I'm a fraud.  I try to ignore that voice. Try to tell it to go away but it stays with me like my dog that lies at my feet. Maybe it's what drives me? Maybe that voice is where my creative juices flow from? Who knows...  accept and move on, Steve, accept and move on.