Jimmy and I used to joke that people invited us to parties as the entertainment. I’m not sure about that, but I do remember laughing nonstop—and believe it or not, it had nothing to do with pot. I met Jimmy when my first six years of grammar school at Most Precious Blood ended and three local Catholic schools merged for the seventh and eighth grades as Trumbull Catholic Regional School. There, I was exposed to kids from St. Catherine’s School and St. Teresa’s School—kids the likes of which I had never met before. They were all white, Catholic, middle-class…well, at the time, they seemed different.
There were Roxanne and Patrice, two edgy girls who wore sparkle knee socks and David Bowie haircuts with their school uniforms. God, were they cool! But they were nice too. There were even rumors that Roxanne, who was at least a B-cup at twelve years old, smoked cigarettes, something that my pre-period, flat-as-a-board self could hardly imagine. There were Kim Horvath and John Spiegel, two blond lookalikes who were “going out.” Of course, “going out” didn’t mean they went on dates. “Going out” back then pretty much consisted of them walking hand-in-hand to class, slow-dancing at our eighth-grade dance, and generally making the rest of us girls feel inadequate for not having a boyfriend. But still, it seemed so rad! I mean, a couple? In seventh grade? At Most Precious Blood, the closest I got to boys was during games of touch football, where me and Patty Kraull (an exact duplicate of Peppermint Patty, in looks and probably sexuality) would sack the quarterback and then celebrate by dry-humping him until the coach pulled us off. In short, my world expanded the minute I left MPB behind, and Jimmy Pantelones was my key to a whole new way of life.
Grammar school had been, to put it mildly, a very sheltered experience for me. Sure, I had learned to stick up for myself, but I had still kept relatively to myself. Well, Jimmy changed all that. He was hilarious, he had a tennis court and a swimming pool in the backyard, his mother and sisters were fashionable and skinny, and his father was a doctor—an ob-gyn. Best of all, they were friendly and happy and joked around a lot. I loved going to the house for dinner—the absence of drama and chaos was a welcome change. And the fact that Jimmy and I loved making out in their music room—I mean, how rich do you have to be to have a music room?—only added to the draw of the place. In my house, the “music room” was a room where you turned up the music so you didn’t have to hear all the screaming and yelling.
Kim Horvath and John Spiegel may have been the class couple in middle school, but Jimmy and I, in my opinion, were the best couple. I mean, who wants to hang around with Donny and Marie when you can have Cheech and Chong? We had fun together, we listened to the best music (Yes, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant), and we watched the coolest TV shows and laughed our asses off. And we were a lethal team when it came to the classroom—both of us were smart as a whip and not afraid to use our wits for evil.
Of course, Trumbull Catholic Regional was still Catholic school and everything was a privilege—even getting a drink of water from the fountain, especially in the sweltering month of June before school let out. And during the June we were to graduate, the members of my eighth-grade class had spirits that were running high, with short attention spans to match.
As the days went by, I got ballsier. And Ms. S, our social studies teacher, got the brunt of my bad behavior. Why? She was the gazelle with the broken foot—and her little frail teacher frame and demeanor begged me to push her to the limit. Plus, she was one of those teachers who felt that students would respond if you treated them with respect and dignity. That’s the biggest fallacy since “A man will respect you in the morning.” Puleeze!
In a particularly gutsy move—one that makes me nervous thinking about it today—I was turned completely around talking to Jimmy and our friend Monica O’Neil during a lecture. I don’t mean looking over my shoulder—I mean completely facing the desk in back of me from my seat in the front row, blatantly ignoring Ms. S’s words. As she stammered to keep our attention, she whipped out the big guns: “Lisa, if you do not turn around immediately, you will prevent your entire row from getting a drink of water.”
For most of the students in the class, that would be their call to order. But not for me, Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong. Ever so sweetly, I turned around, looked Ms. S right in the eye, and said, “That’s okay, Ms. S. I’m not thirsty.” Without missing a beat, I turned around again and queried, “What about you, Monica, are you thirsty?”
“No, not particularly, Lisa. What about you, Jimmy?” came her reply.
“No, I’m fine. Wet as a whistle.”
Now, if anyone ever did that to me at one of my shows, I would fingerbang their asshole with the microphone. But back then, the dumbstruck Ms. S just sputtered her way through the rest of the lecture and gave up.
Over the summer, we heard the news that Ms. S had quit her job because, rumor had it, she had had a nervous breakdown. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel just a little bit proud of myself. When you’re an adult, it’s easy to ruin someone’s life. But when you can do it as a kid—that’s a gift.
But the Jimmy and Lisa story hit a bump in the road after graduation, something that made me think the relationship was as doomed as doomed could be.
I spent most of the summer between eighth grade and freshman year of high school at the tennis courts at Trumbull High School, and it was there that I met the guy for whom I risked everything: Dave Cloutier (no, not the douchebag from Full House—a different Dave). Dave was the number-one tennis seed in his age category in the entire town and I thought he was hot. Now that I look back on it, he had goofy, round Coke-bottle glasses and bowed legs, but I thought he was the shit. He was confident, cool, had an amazing double-handed forehand, and didn’t give a crap about me. But like any good codependent-in-the-making, the more he resisted, the more I chased, and when I finally got him to make out with me behind the tennis courts at the high school, I was in my glory. I immediately told Jimmy I was breaking up with him—I mean, I had the guy who was the number-one seed, for God’s sake!—and Dave immediately never called me again. In fact, I heard he started dating Ms. S.
And so I started high school minus a boyfriend and minus a best friend, all in one. Jimmy gave me the silent treatment for about half the year, and then, finally, after being paired up for a class project together, we both let it go and became best friends again, minus the boyfriend/girlfriend stuff.
All throughout high school, Jimmy was there. He was the guy on the tennis team who, when we were told to do our daily run, knew to jog straight to the car with me, where we’d jump in when we were out of the coach’s sight, jet off to Friendly’s for ice cream, gobble it down, park again, and run back down to the courts as if we’d completed the two-mile run. Nothing brings two people together like a Fribble.
Jimmy even had a way of making the uncool seem cool. When I cracked open my high school yearbook recently, I laughed out loud when I read that Jimmy and I were members of the “Emerson Lake and Palmer Music Appreciation Society.” As the only two members of the fictional club, Jimmy and I threw in the face of all the cheerleaders, football players, and other conventional members of the student body that it was okay to be so unhip it hurt. But sometimes our “hip to be square” attitude got us into trouble—not with the administration but with our classmates, and one night it was really clear that it was the two of us against all of them.
Fancying ourselves the music aficionados of the school and experts on all things avant-garde, Jimmy and I somehow convinced the junior class to put us in charge of scouting and hiring a band for our annual ring dance. Sick to death of the typical cover bands hired to play “The Long and Winding Road” and “Color My World” over and over throughout the years, Jimmy and I set out to do something different. We visited every basement and garage in a four-town radius and listened to and assessed every group of longhairs who had ever picked up an instrument. After our exhaustive two-week search—when I sat on dozens of washing machines and endured hundreds of renditions of “Smoke on the Water” whil
e gagging on the stench of stale bong water—we had found the perfect ensemble to play our junior dance. The theme was “Nights in White Satin”—probably picked because the homos in our class thought it was “Knights in White Satin” and it fulfilled one of their kinky Dungeons and Dragons sex fantasies. But, despite the theme, because of Jimmy, me, and our band of choice, this would be the dance to remember.
The night of the prom, Jimmy and I arrived fashionably late to the school’s festively decorated church-a-gym-a-torium, expecting to see our fellow classmates swaying and boogying to the band we had so carefully chosen. But as we walked into the room, instead of being greeted with bouquets of thanks and tips of the hat, we were greeted with whispers, folded arms, and looks that could have shot daggers. I couldn’t feel this much hate if I was hired at this point in my career to do my act at the NAACP Image Awards. Ends up our little band of music makers didn’t know any real songs—you know, tunes our classmates had heard on the airwaves of New Haven’s WPLR and the more pop-friendly KC101. No, the band we had picked played only long, meandering prog-rock originals that rivaled Jethro Tull’s full-album-length Passion Play in duration and pomposity. Let’s put it this way: They played rock operas that were as about as entertaining as regular operas.
There they were cranking out forty-minute song after forty-minute song about Excalibur or King Arthur or some shit, completely oblivious to the fact that people hated them. I haven’t seen a performance that delusional since Howie Mandel hosted the Emmys.
Now, remember: These were the days before girls were contractually obligated to give it up on prom night, so the band was all the attendees had to look forward to. So naturally the entire class blamed us for ruining the prom. And, looking back, they probably had a point. The band was as bad as Winger without the street cred. And while I’d love to say they went on to become REM, I’m pretty sure most of them went on to become drywall hangers with socks stuffed into their leather pants. But at the time, Jimmy and I thought they were the shit. So instead of hanging our heads down and apologizing, what did Jimmy and I do? We held on to our dates, marched right over to our front-and-center table, and sat coolly jamming to the music that no one else was sophisticated and smart enough to appreciate. What plebians! What philistines! This was real music! “Their loss,” our glances told each other, and even as the Stepford Bitch class president rushed over in a panic to tell us that the band didn’t even know how to play the prom theme song by the Moody Blues, Jimmy just shrugged and told her not to sweat it, to just enjoy it. As she stormed off in a huff, her little skinny arms ending in balled-up fists of fury like Mary-Kate Olsen waving away food, I glanced over at Jimmy, whose head was bobbing slowly to the music’s meandering beat, his arm slung casually over the back of his date’s chair.
“That’s how I want to be,” I remember thinking. “I want to be like him. I want to make life look that easy.”
part three
Comedian, Heal Thyself!
CHAPTER EIGHT
My Big Fat Italian Bottom—Tommy and the Crash of 2007
In my life, one thing has always been consistent. Any time I felt like “Wow, all my problems are over,” the biggest one was right around the corner. So, on the May day in 2007 when I bought my first four pairs of really expensive shoes—two pairs of Jimmy Choos, two Guccis—I should have known trouble was around the bend. But as I swung the designer bags—logos facing out, of course, so people would know I had money—and headed up to the Comic Strip to perform for a benefit after a sold-out show at the Friars Club, I felt like the world was at my feet. Little did I know, I would be brought to my knees for the entire following year.
“Can I put those in the office for you?”
Those were the first words Tommy spoke to me, and for the rest of the evening, it seemed like every time I turned around, there he was—at my elbow while I watched the other comics from the back of the room, at the bar where the comics got their drinks, watching my set from the booth. The guy was near me so much that night I got a cramp from holding in my farts. It wasn’t until I was halfway home to Connecticut that his comment—“Hey, if you ever decide to dump that Spanish guy, give me a call”—struck me as something he may have said seriously.
I called my friend/stylist, Andy, to check the facts. Could a guy that cute, that white, be flirting with me? I knew I’d lost a bunch of the weight I’d put on after my breakup with Darryl, but still, I had to call her to confirm my suspicions.
Andy is a gorgeous woman and was one of my only happily married friends. I told her about Tommy’s attentiveness, his hailing of my cab, his come-on, and asked her opinion. Ever the love addict and romantic, Andy gushed, “Oh, my God, he likes you. You should call him.” So, in a combination of revenge against the emotionally unavailable Latino from Chicago I was seeing and a compulsive need to have this seemingly emotive Italian in my life, I devised a plan to see if he could put his money where his mouth was. Or, as I prefer, my pussy where his mouth was.
“Hey, J.R., it’s Lisa Lampanelli,” I told the club manager the next day when I called from Houston, where I’d flown less than twelve hours after the show at the Strip. “I was wondering if I could get the name of your Tommy—I may need some security.” Knowing full well that I was full of it, J.R., who was, unbeknownst to me at the time, Tommy’s best friend, readily gave out the number.
I dialed the 917 exchange and crossed my fingers. When Tommy answered and I told him it was me, he later told me he literally jumped up and down with joy. “Just ask my friend Steve,” he said a few days later as we sat talking on the phone for what must have been the fifteenth time in three days. “I couldn’t believe it was you—I was so happy!” Well, that’s all I needed to hear to send me into full-tilt “in love” mode. I had found the love of my life—I just knew it. I didn’t care that he was a struggling comic (the number-one entry on my brand-new list of dating no-nos) or that he ended most of our conversations with the statement “I gotta go smoke a blunt with Steve” (entry number three). He was nearly giddy at the thought of me! With that one sentence, the rule book went out the window. And let’s face it, my rule book is consulted less than the one for Candyland. When I say “Don’t date a struggling comic or drug user,” the unspoken end of that sentence is “unless they’re reasonably attractive or show any interest in me whatsoever.”
And so began the year of Tommy—also known as the Year of Darkness. Now, before you misunderstand and think I’m putting all the blame on Tommy, let me make this clear. There’s a saying I heard in a therapy group once that went “Every time I got screwed, I got into position.” Sure, Tommy may have stuck it in—metaphorically and physically speaking—but for a year, there I was, ass in the air and begging for it. What I’m trying to say is it takes two, motherfucker, and he had me at the word “blow.” Sadly, I now wish that “blow” was in reference to drugs.
For our first date, we arranged to meet at the New York Hilton bar, where I got a room upstairs—just in case I got tipsy and couldn’t drive home to Connecticut or, even better, if we both got a little tipsy and wanted to make out. And make out we did! From the second we met outside the hotel—which felt like a reunion right out of The Way We Were, complete with giddiness that can only result from hours and hours of late-night conversations—to hours later, in my favorite martini bar. There, among the velvet furniture and dark green walls, we tipped back a few even though I never drink, watched videos on Tommy’s portable player—his constant companion—and kissed and kissed and kissed. My head was spinning like rims on an Escalade, and I was in love. His voice mail message to me the next day saying, “New York misses you already,” sealed the deal. He was the one—this was the one who would make my life complete and the search would be over.
As any addict does, I chased the high. I will explain. Ask anyone who’s ever used heroin or cocaine, and they’ll tell you that that first high is the best high of their life, and their continued use of the substance is their effort to recapture that special
way they felt when they first used. Well, from the time I took my first hit of Tommy, I was hooked. But like any other drug, the second high didn’t quite live up to that first hit, and for the next year, I chased and chased but soared less and less every day.
First, there were the unanswered phone calls at carefully prearranged times. Then there was the fact that Tommy wanted to keep our relationship a secret so no one would think he was dating me to get ahead in the business. A secret? What am I—your girlfriend or a genital wart? By the time he canceled a date with me because it was “pouring out,” I was frustrated, furious, and more focused than ever on making this pot-smoking, minimum-wage-earning, emotionally distant thirty-six-year-old mine. He was the prize, damn it, and I was going to win him. Now I understand why rednecks spend fifty bucks at a fair to win a Lynyrd Skynyrd mirror worth a nickel.
Looking back, I don’t hate Tommy. He was what he was, and he did the best he could, given his tumultuous upbringing, mixed messages from his parents, and distrust of all things psychological. I feel for him and hope that one day he works on his issues and finds what he needs to be happy. However, at the time, the mood swings he stirred in me from sunup to sundown so mirrored the ups and downs of my childhood in a challenging, turbulent household, he was simply irresistible. Now, after a few years of therapy on the subject, I can see that he was the most lethal combination of my parents’ bad traits, minus most of their good qualities. He alternately ignored me, worshipped me, adored me, yelled at me, shamed me, and stormed out on me—not that those are necessarily bad things, they just didn’t work for me. So naturally, he was my drug, my tonic. Besides, he was hot, charismatic (what pothead isn’t?), tons of fun, and had those adorable puppy dog eyes that sucked me in every time. And he was my first hot white guy ever. I was obsessed.
Chocolate, Please Page 10
