Not Taco Bell Material Read online

  (Throughout this book I won’t be able to stop myself from going off on a few tangents. These will be signaled by this dapper fellow—a Tan Gent. Get it?) I’ve spent the better part of my life in a society that’s trying to make me feel guilty for a crime I did not commit. My dad’s family was in Italy during the time of slavery. And forget about owning people, those losers would be lucky if they owned a donkey. Once on Loveline when I was trying to plead my case about the Carollas and slavery I made the mistake of using my sister’s children as an example. They’re not black, they’re the opposite. They’re German. I said, “These kids were born in Germany, their father is full-blooded German, and they arrived on this planet a lot closer to the Holocaust than I did to slavery. Does that mean they should be held responsible for the Holocaust or bear the guilt associated with it?” Of course that would be an insane notion. But somehow this same math doesn’t apply to many Americans when it comes to slavery. On a happy note, some cunt my sister carpools with told her that I called her kids Nazis.

  Side note to my side note. I’d like to address this to the people who feel the need to pass along hurtful information, especially when they have to bedazzle it with bullshit. You should kill yourselves. Please kill yourselves. You’re driving me fucking crazy. It’s profoundly disappointing to me that people feel the need to invent “facts” to bolster their incorrect arguments. Your motives are worse than a serial killer’s, you’re going out of your way to hurt someone, but you stand to gain nothing from it. At least the serial killer gets to go home and beat off.

  But back to Mom. When I was nine or ten she used to ship me off to hang out with the Boyd brothers, black twins who were on my Pop Warner team. Henry and James Boyd lived in a ghetto on the edge of Los Angeles called Pacoima. I was the only white guy amid a sea of black faces. Their dad wasn’t around, their older brother was in trouble with the law, and Mama was morbidly obese. We used to eat grits and collard greens. Think Steve Martin’s family from The Jerk.

  One semi-awkward moment came when I was spending one of many weekends there and we were playing football on the front lawn. At this point in my development I couldn’t be tackled by someone my own age. I had supernatural balance. Even the Boyds couldn’t take me down. I got the ball, did a little shake on Henry and a little bake on James, and scored a touchdown. And I followed it up with a hearty “How do you like me now, nigger!” Before you call Al Sharpton, you have to remember a couple of things. This was the mid-seventies, the height of Richard Pryor’s fame. That word was used liberally at the time, especially by the Boyd brothers. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I was just fitting in. They’d been saying it all day. And more important, they weren’t offended. In fact they were kind of impressed. It was like that scene in Goodfellas where Spider tells Tommy to go fuck himself and everyone is proud of him. Of course Spider ends up getting shot in the chest seconds later.

  (I can’t tell those people apart—twins, not blacks).

  But Pop Warner was the most important thing in my childhood. I think everything that’s wrong with our kids today could be corrected with just a few seasons of Pop Warner. Teamwork, discipline, and, most important, a fat guy in a maroon windbreaker screaming at you. Dig this notion for just one minute. I played seven years of Pop Warner football, ages seven to fourteen. I played offensive tackle or guard every single one of those seven years. I never scored a touchdown or even touched the football. All I did was block for the guys who did get to do that. And I liked it. It felt good to be lying on the ground and look up to see a guy run through the hole I just opened. I can’t imagine your average nine-year-old feeling that way today. But my mom just saw it as violence and completely ignored the self-sacrifice, drive, and discipline it taught me. She didn’t have enough energy to stop me from playing, so she adopted basically the same stance a Buddhist would have with the Vietnam War. To put it another way, Arianna Huffington has more interest in tractor pulls than my mom has in football.

  In ten years of football and six years of baseball, I accumulated a closetful of participation trophies. None of them means as much to me as a little cup the size of a soft-boiled-egg holder on a piece of imitation marble with a plaque that didn’t contain my name. It was awarded to me by the opposing team at the 50-yard line following a bowl game and simply said BEST DEFENSIVE PLAYER. The fact that a group of athletes we’d just finished competing against decided that I was the best on the defensive side of the ball means more than any participation trophy ever could. (Unless it’s the one they gave out to those guys who set the world gangbang record.) The criteria for a trophy should be more than being born and having a mom who owns a minivan. Without distinction and achievement, it’s not worth the plastic it’s molded out of. The handful of brave souls who attempted to take out German pillboxes on Omaha Beach weren’t lumped in with the guys stateside setting up folding chairs for a USO show. In the past, we never confused stepping up with showing up. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to present my son a plaque for making a solid BM.

  The following story demonstrates just how nuts I was about football. In my fourth season, I suffered a freak injury. I broke and dislocated my right shoulder during a game. The injury was so severe that they called an early halftime and let me lie there in the middle of the field until an ambulance arrived. I don’t think any of the dads were up to moving the kid with his shoulder dangling out of its socket. So we just sat there and waited. The separation was so bad that my shoulder was out of its socket for the following four days. That’s got to be some kind of record. How was my shoulder out of its socket for four days? Day one: took an ambulance to the emergency hospital, shot my shoulder up with God knows what, and the poor ER doctor tried to pull it back into place. It didn’t go, and you only get one attempt because the screaming and writhing in pain is too much for a second round. Day two: went to the orthopedic specialist, he shot it up with something, and he got one try. Day three: checked into a hospital and waited for day four. Morning of day four: I was put under general anesthesia, and that’s when they were able to put my shoulder back where it belonged. Now how does this illustrate my resolve when it comes to Pee Wee football?

  The next year rolled around and I was excited for my fifth season. My parents took the only stand I could ever recall. They were separated and didn’t agree on anything. But on this topic, they were a unified front. No more football. My injury from the year before had been so severe that the doctor said my arm might not grow correctly. The orthopedic surgeon wanted to put a permanent pin in my shoulder. My mom fought against it, and I ended up with a cast for three months instead. Either way, if my shoulder was injured again it would have been catastrophic. I told my parents I was playing and that was that. The only upside to having a family that took a laissez-faire approach to child rearing was that you could call the shots. Them not saving for college or preparing meals was the downside. They, in a very uncharacteristic burning of calories, said absolutely not. I said, “Either I play football this year or you don’t have a son.” I proceeded to not talk to them for more than two weeks. Although I’m not sure if my dad noticed. Finally they gave up and said go ahead. I played six more years including high school and a year of college and never injured that shoulder again. When I think back on that experience, I now realize my motivation wasn’t so much a love of football but a hatred of my life off the field.

  My freak shoulder injury sidelined my first love of football and was about to sideline my second love, riding a unicycle. Contrary to popular belief, Julianne Hough didn’t teach me to ride the unicycle in my early forties. I, in fact, mastered that discipline by my tenth birthday. My dad was dating a woman whose son had a unicycle. One day when we went to her house on the west side, I decided to spend several hours teaching myself to ride it. I went out into the street, propped myself up on a car fender, and refused to quit until I could take five pedals away from the Pontiac. The first time I did it, it felt transcendent. That night on the ride home I could think and talk about not
hing else. But how was I going to get my hands on a unicycle? My family was the opposite of the Make-A-Wish Foundation: They took able-bodied kids and did nothing for them. This was pre-eBay, pre-Craigslist, and North Hollywood wasn’t exactly Sarasota, Florida (headquarters of the Ringling Brothers). And then it hit me. Dave Lewis, son of the Munsters’ Grandpa Al Lewis and older brother to my former best friend Teddy Lewis, had a unicycle, albeit covered in rust and duct tape in his backyard. He was willing to part with it for $10. I washed a bunch of cars at my dad’s apartment building that weekend, and the next thing you know, that unicycle was tucked neatly between my ball sack and asshole. I polished the chrome with a Brillo pad, oiled the only moving part it had, and even sewed a denim seat cover from the part of cutoffs they never talk about. In a few days I was getting on and off it without the aid of a car fender. Within a few weeks I was riding off curbs and park benches, and by the end of the year I was dropping off picnic tables and riding away. Even the huge cast on my right arm from shattering my shoulder didn’t slow me down. Unfortunately, a kid with a broken arm on a unicycle was a rolling billboard for my mom’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” parenting approach. She put her Birkenstock down and said no unicycle. Since my unicycle license had been revoked, my friend Chris Shipman decided that as long as it was gathering dust, I should let him borrow it. I did, and it was a mistake. When my cast came off, I asked for my unicycle back. Chris said that he had returned it to my backyard, and that if it wasn’t there someone must have stolen it. Chris’s mother immediately snapped into action by doing nothing. This led to a standoff. She was too busy creating a self-entitled monster to make him return something that wasn’t his, and my mom was too apathetic to go and demand back something that was stolen from her kid. It was like Ali–Frazier. Two great warriors going at it in a “Well, that’s that. What are you gonna do?” grudge match. Ultimately my mom retained her belt when Chris’s mom did not return my unicycle.

  I’ll never know for sure if Chris put that unicycle in my backyard or not. He died at twenty-five from what most people think was AIDS. His older brother Jesse had already died at nineteen in a car accident. My guess is his mom doesn’t think about the unicycle nearly as much as I do.

  Through most of my life I had a large unicycle-shaped hole in my soul. It wasn’t until I was in my early thirties that I finally got my next unicycle. I went out, bought myself one, and got back on it. Riding a unicycle is just like riding half a bicycle: you never forget. My point is this. You can see that life did not start well for me, and for a lot of you reading this, it didn’t start well either. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late to go out and get back in the saddle of your proverbial unicycle.

  That said, I had several more years of purgatory to wade through before I could even consider achieving my dreams. My dad had just closed escrow on a $15,000 A-frame with a dirt driveway, so it was backward and downward.

  WHILE I was shackled to my mom’s shitbox house, my dad spent a couple of years in a one-bedroom apartment on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. When I was twelve, he managed to scrape together enough money to buy a shitbox of his own. Fifteen thousand dollars. I know this seems like an unobtainable sum for my dad, who at the time was a substitute schoolteacher. So how did he do it? Well, he got into a car accident, and a friend of a friend who happened to be a lawyer told him he could make five grand, and that was more than enough to cover the 20 percent down payment.

  One day it came up that I was going to go live with Pops. There was no discussion, but there was also no drama. People tend to a view a moment like that through the prism of their normal family and have notions of being “torn away” from their mother. But with mine it was not a big deal. There was as much tearing away as a glass pancake in a Teflon pan filled with talcum powder. My mom was glad to get me out. Actually, my mom is glad to do anything that makes her life easier. So dodging the bullet of raising children was great as far as she was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, she liked seeing us kids on weekends and taking us out to eat, but the nuts and bolts of parenting were not something she enjoyed. And who’d blame her? I’d like to have a dog that I could take to the beach once a week and throw a ball around with, but not have to deal with trips to the vet and buying sacks of kibble.

  As far as the house went, it would be tough to tell which was worse, my mom’s place or my dad’s. You could take a thousand people to both houses and they would split fifty-fifty on which was the bigger dump. Or, to be more accurate, the smaller dump.

  My dad’s house was an A-frame, and I slept in the loft. My bedroom was up a very steep and uneven flight of stairs covered with bad green shag. The ceiling at its high point was about six feet high but quickly dropped from there. If you took a half step to your left or right, you’d bang your head on the bottom side of the roof sheathing. The only insulation was my seventies Jewfro. My bedroom was more like a rec room for bats and hunchbacks. And damn, did that loft get hot. It would still be 100 degrees, even at night. The heat rose from the rest of the house and baked me like a potato. It was a terrarium and I was the iguana.

  The house had a dirt driveway, which complemented the dirt lawn quite nicely. A memory from this house that perfectly epitomizes my childhood—the mediums and the lows—took place one hot August afternoon on that dirt lawn. Having a choice of three and a half stations on a thirteen-inch black-and-white Zenith, no dog, no swimming pool, no basketball hoop, no money, and a dad who hated the outdoors but loved philosophy books was a perfect storm of boredom. I should also mention that this is all, of course, pre-masturbation. That immediately leveled the playing field. It’s what they call a game changer. Even if there was nothing to do, you could always beat off. But I was still a few years away from learning the joy of sex with myself, so I engaged in something that now sounds pathetic but at the time seemed like a good idea. I took the plastic, misshapen, swollen, laceless football that I found at the park and used the aforementioned miniature plastic cup I’d received for best defensive player as a kicking tee. I booted the ball aimlessly back and forth from one side of the yard to the other all afternoon. Eventually the cup broke and instead of being repaired was thrown out. A sad and pathetic tale for sure, but on a happy note I’ll get to torture my kids with it every time they complain about not being able to find a pair of 3-D glasses that stay on in a bouncy castle.

  This house covered my time at Walter Reed Junior High. You might have seen a picture of it behind John McCain during the 2008 Republican convention when they should have shown a picture of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In keeping with tradition, I gravitated toward the structure of sports. An outstanding memory from this period is the time we had an interschool softball tournament and played a team from Compton. My team won, and during the forced postgame handshake the team from Compton started talking smack. They were saying they would have beaten our asses if we were playing football. I said, “Bring it on. Football is my sport.” Before I knew it, a three-hundred-pound black chick, a relative of the first baseman, was on top of me swinging at my head. I had my feet in her chest trying to push her off, but she had a 150-pound advantage so I couldn’t. Fortunately, this created enough distance that her wild swings were just grazing my nose. Everyone, including the coaches, was stunned and just gathered around staring. I finally shouted, and this is an exact quote, “Get this bitch the fuck off of me!” They removed the sister and I dusted myself off without any physical harm. It did, however, make for a very long ride home on the same bus with her cousins.

  My dad wasn’t so much into discipline. When I was a kid, I only got hit by him once. I can’t remember what I had done but he gave me a choice: be grounded or get a spanking. I looked at his arms and thought, Have at it, wuss. I’d rather get whacked with your wet-noodle arms than miss a fresh new episode of Chico and the Man.

  By the way, I’ve only been hit by my dad once, but I was hit by the parents of two different friends growing up. And I’m cool with that. I think if a kid is being an asshole an adult—w
hether it be his friends’ parents, a teacher, a relative, or even a stranger in a restaurant—the adult should be able to give him a nice smack. One time back when I was still living with my mother, I was with my friend Monty in the back of his mom Roberta’s station wagon. We were playing that hand-slapping game, the one that every human being has played but no human being knows the name of. Its PR people need to be fired. We were clowning around and being loud and she told Monty to be quiet. I saw an opportunity to distract Monty and get up in the game so I mocked his mom’s high-pitched nasal voice and said, “Yeah, Monty, be quiet.” Then the slapping game moved up to the next level. Roberta reached back and smacked me across the face. Take a second to think about the irony of that moment. Imagine you are channeling all your focus and concentration into not getting the backs of your hands whacked by an eight-year-old and then immediately getting smacked in the face by a forty-year-old woman. That would be like carefully stitching something with a thimble so as not to get your finger pricked and then being stabbed in the head with a fireplace poker. She instantly regretted it and said that she’d have to explain it to my mom when she dropped me off. I told her it was cool and that she didn’t need to. I figured my mom would probably take her side and I’d get in trouble again after Roberta had already taken the punishment, literally, into her own hands.