I received exactly two posters. One was for a Claire Danes movie called Brokedown Palace, where Ms. Danes gets locked in a Thai prison. I gave the poster to my Thai friend Jan. The other was for a Ted Danson vehicle called Mumford, which, to this day, I’m not even sure was ever released.
The poster distribution was the most definitive way in which status was shown at the theater. The higher-ups certified whom they accepted as part of the in-crowd by giving them cool stuff. I got the message. I was the Mumford of the staff.
One day, after a particularly miserable daytime shift, Bassie and a few of his cronies were behind the service desk. I walked by on my way out, staring at the floor.
“Hey, Chris,” Bassie said with a sneer. “Want that?” The employees standing with him snickered, and a cocky grin inched across his face.
Bassie pointed across the lobby to a stand-up cardboard contraption promoting Inspector Gadget starring Matthew Broderick. It was a 3-D display and had all sorts of gears and gizmos popping out at different depths, all anchored to a heavy cardboard base.
Everyone chuckled and something inside me clicked. I’d officially had enough. Instead of shrugging off his offer, which was only meant to make fun of me, I looked him dead in the eye.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
They all looked confused. The display was about twelve feet high and three feet thick. There was no way it was going to fit into a car, and no clear way to take it apart without destroying it.
Still, something inside my brain had snapped back into place and my pride returned, if only for a brief moment. I remembered what my life was like before I was eating garbage. I got mad that I wasn’t being invited to parties with Lynne the sex addict. I became furious that my only friend was a Christian hell-bent on converting me to a cultlike sect of born-agains. All of the emotions I had managed to turn off in order to work at this demeaning job came flooding back all at once, overwhelming me. I hated that I’d taken so much shit for so long. And here I was, being laughed at by the very authorities who had created and fostered this environment. I figured it was time to call their bluff.
I walked across the theater, grabbed the display, tipped it onto its side, and dragged it out the door. As I walked past the desk where Bassie and the others sat, straining to pull the heavy cube behind me, they all seemed confused. I took this as a sign of victory. I had beaten them by baffling them.
When I got to my car, I quickly confirmed that there was no way to fit the behemoth into my back seat. Nonetheless, I had proven my point. I wasn’t going to let the powers that be at the Loews Cineplex laugh at me ever again. Instead, I would destroy them by making them think I was weird, if not borderline crazy. Mission accomplished. If nothing else, I was certain that now they would at least leave me the fuck alone.
I decided to drag the cutout to the dumpster out back and call it a day. But when I got there, Rhoderick was throwing cardboard into the thresher.
“Hey, man!” he said, with a level of joy that can be attained only by a man who has escaped his Hutu tormentors. “What are you doing?”
“I’m just gonna throw this thing out, Rhoderick,” I said, sheepishly.
“What?” He seemed so sad. “But it’s beautiful!”
“I really don’t—” I began, but he cut me off before I could finish my sentence.
“You MUST keep it!”
His voice was deep with conviction. His eyes locked into mine, and the burning intensity within them let me know that the ability to own a twelve-foot-tall Inspector Gadget promotional cutout defined to this man everything beautiful about America.
“Okay,” I said. There was nothing else to say. I had taken the display because I was willing to look crazy as long as it pissed off the management at a shitty multiplex on the side of a New Jersey highway. But I wasn’t willing to look wasteful and ungrateful in front of someone who had been through so much. I was being defiant, fighting back against the powers that be, but Rhoderick was an instant reminder that my reality remained a very privileged one despite any issues I had. I was willing to look crazy to piss off and confuse the snobs I worked with. I wasn’t willing to follow through so hard that I broke the heart of a man who I assumed had been through enough already.
Rhoderick told me to drag the cutout back to my car. He would find some rope. He seemed not just enthusiastic but driven. He took off running and met me at my car a few minutes later, holding piles of shredded clear plastic in his hand.
“I couldn’t find any rope,” he said, grinning, “so I made some!”
Rhoderick had torn apart a handful of clear garbage bags and braided them together. The effort he put in only further reiterated to me that I had made my bed and now I had to lie in it. He hoisted the cardboard cutout onto the top of my car and told me to get inside. While he passed his homemade rope through the windows and lashed it above the cutout I sat in the car, listening to him grunt as he strained to tighten the knots. After a few minutes, I heard him muttering in satisfaction. Covered in sweat, he walked to the window and tenderly put his hand on my shoulder.
“Go home,” he said, “and enjoy this.”
His eyes wandered off toward the Raritan River, where the setting sun was reflecting off of the muddy brown water. Rhoderick smiled, and a soft chuckle escaped his lips. His mind was clearly elsewhere.
I hit the gas and drove about ten feet before the wind caught underneath the cutout, lifting it up against the “rope” and slamming it down onto the roof with a thud. I screeched to a halt.
“Rhoderick,” I said, leaning out the window. “This isn’t a good idea. I’m just gonna throw it away.”
“No!” he scolded me. “It is yours. You must take it home. If it starts to fly off, just reach up and grab it with your hand. You will be fine.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds good.”
I sat in the car, hoping Rhoderick would make his way inside so I could drive over to the dumpster and throw out both the cutout and the piles of plastic tied to my car. Instead, he stood with his hands on his hips and grinned at me. After a few very awkward moments, I was left with no choice but to drive home, using two major highways, with a giant Inspector Gadget display strapped to the top of my 1986 Chevy Celebrity.
I made my way out onto Route 1, and had to go only 150 yards before merging onto Route 18. But in this short span, the cutout caught the wind and began bouncing off the top of my car. Taking Rhoderick’s advice, I reached up and grabbed at it with my left hand. It lifted me off my seat. If I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, I would have been sucked out of the window and tossed onto the busy highway.
Panicking, I threw my hazard lights on and merged onto Route 18. Cars whipped past me, their drivers leaning on their horns. I was going only about forty miles per hour, but the cutout was bouncing up and down with a frightening amount of force.
Then I heard a “thwap” noise. One, two, three times. It wasn’t the sound of the heavy cardboard violently hitting the car. It was a strange whipping noise, and every time it happened, I felt the cutout offer up a little less wind resistance.
I looked in the rearview and realized that pieces of the cutout were tearing off from their 3-D perches and flying through the air behind my car. An evil cartoon cat tore loose and went whizzing to my left. Moments later, an iron glove peeled away and flew off to my right.
Then, a third piece went hurtling straight back. It was a metal gear with Matthew Broderick’s face on it. I watched as it flipped through the air—cardboard gear, Broderick head, cardboard gear, Broderick head, cardboard gear, Broderick head—over and over until, finally, it landed Broderick-head-down on the windshield of the police car that had pulled up behind me.
“Pull over right now,” the trooper said into his loudspeaker. He didn’t even bother to turn on his lights or siren.
I rolled to a halt on the shoulder of Route 18. The cop pulled up next to me and rolled his window down. Mine was already down, as I couldn’t close it with the t
hick swatches of homemade rope ensnaring my car. The officer looked at me from his driver’s seat, his eyes glancing from my face to the Gadget cutout to the yards of plastic. He shook his head and held up his hands.
Then he asked me a question that was totally fair.
“Are you fucking stupid?”
I didn’t know what to say. So I went with honesty.
“Well, I work at Loews,” I answered. He nodded his head in understanding.
He told me to throw everything away into the dumpster of the apartment complex we’d pulled over next to. He shook his head one more time before driving away. He didn’t even give me a ticket. It would have been like kicking a three-legged dog.
I did as the officer said. It took me close to ten minutes to tear apart all the rope and hoist the cutout into a dumpster. The entire time, a confused housewife watched from her apartment window up above. I quit my job at Loews shortly after. For many years, the Mumford poster hung in my kitchen, a reminder of what I went through and how good it felt to escape. The scars of the horrible indignities and atrocities I participated in and witnessed at Loews are with me to this day. Wherever he is, I’m sure that Rhoderick understands.
Breaking Up, Breaking Down
Losing your mind is actually pretty fun when it leads to things like police chases and fistfights.
You feel like a maniac, but in an exhilarating daredevilish sort of way. This is the side of manic depression that’s hard to realize is a problem: the manic side. That’s the side that makes you wander down an abandoned boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey, carrying an envelope containing close to $3,000 cash just to see what happens. It’s the side that makes you participate in a rap battle circle you randomly stumble into by yourself near the West Side Highway in Manhattan at four in the morning on a Wednesday night. It’s the side that makes you write a one-act play called “Time Phone” in less than fifteen minutes, and try to convince your friends to perform it that night in the ATM annex of a closed local bank.
It’s fucked up to admit, but there’s a part of me that didn’t seek help for my manic depression because the manic side was pretty addictive. It made me feel daring, masculine, creative, and attractive to be around. The bottom line is that the manic side of manic depression is really fucking fun.
Of course, there’s the other side of things, and that can catch up with you fast.
Veronica was the first to notice that my anxiety issues were overrunning my personality.
“Don’t be nervous,” she told me as we entered a party together. “Try not to do the thing where you rub your legs.”
Veronica and I had grown pretty far apart by our junior year at Rutgers, but we were still dating. We’d developed two entirely different sets of friends. I rolled with a crew of dirtbag punk rock guys with nicknames like “Bonadooch,” “Dirty Dave,” and “The King of Coitus Interruptus.” She’d linked up with a whole bunch of preppy musicians who were all current or former members of marching bands, loved to get together to jam out on their woodwinds, and redefined sweater-based fashion at Rutgers University.
We lived in different worlds. The difference was Veronica was able to adapt to mine. Sure, hanging out and drinking 40s of King Cobra malt liquor in a house that should have been condemned while listening to Screeching Weasel wasn’t her cup of tea, but she was able to roll with the punches. On the other hand, when I was tasked with hanging out among her ilk, I shut down.
When conversations were at the most basic level, I’d be fine. I could answer questions like “How are you doing?” and “What is your major?” reasonably well. But as soon as those kids launched into discussions of what their favorite Sousa march was, I was socially crippled. I couldn’t jump in with a joke. I couldn’t ask a question to get them to explain what they were talking about. I couldn’t even stay quiet and nod politely. As soon as I felt out of my element and in over my head, my lack of confidence would spiral out of control. The first warning sign that I was having an anxiety attack would be that I’d vigorously run my hands through my hair over and over again. Then I’d bite my nails one by one until I’d bitten all of them. Eventually I’d sit and rock back and forth. Rubbing my thighs was the final nail in the coffin, a sign that I was done for the evening. Once the thigh-rubbing phase of social anxiety had been achieved, I was unable to recover.
Veronica’s gentle efforts to preempt my social meltdowns didn’t help. Knowing the person I was closest to could see so clearly that I was falling apart only furthered the plummet in my self-esteem. While running around like a lunatic was fun and gave me cool stories, the rest of the time I was putting myself through hell. I’d go days without leaving my bedroom, skipping classes and avoiding friends. If anyone told me they thought I needed help, I’d find a way to cut them out of my life. I was backing myself into a corner with my own depression; I knew I needed help, but I was too scared to get it. And anyone who tried to make it happen became someone I feared.
Veronica, to her credit, stuck by me far longer than anyone should have. When I’d disappear for days on end, she’d accept my rambling apologies and excuses and try to move on. When I’d shut down in front of her friends and ignore her in front of mine, she did her best to accept it as a reflection of my growing problems and not as a judgment of her. And when I’d shut down completely, she’d quietly do her part to help get me back on my feet.
One of her main ways of taking care of me was making sure I was eating. Veronica would show up each afternoon with a slice of pizza from Ta Ta’s, the bizarre restaurant across from my house on Hamilton Street. We’d sit together in silence, usually watching reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 on cable, as I sadly ate. Often that would be the only thing I ate all day.
The fact that I owed my existence to Ta Ta’s said it all. Because if there was any individual on earth who could unquestionably be deemed sad, it was old man Ta Ta, who burned through his days in a small pizza shack, a large metal oven four feet behind him, doling out slices to drunk, mean college kids. Ta Ta and his wife spent all day every day confined to that tin heat box, and going there as often as we did, my friends and I saw Ta Ta show signs of cracking on numerous occasions.
Once while I waited for a slice, Ta Ta received an order and dispatched his delivery boy. “You go to the side door of this house,” he said. The delivery boy looked at him in confusion. Ta Ta’s eyes grew wide with terror.
“Be careful,” he continued. “This is a very scary house.”
On another occasion, my friend Mike entered and Ta Ta was inside alone, crying behind the counter.
“Ta Ta, what’s the matter?” Mike asked.
“It’s nothing,” Ta Ta answered. “I just found out my village in France has been destroyed by a flood. I’m waiting to hear if my brother is alive. What can I get you today?”
And yet, even this self-imprisoned sad sack was a step above me on the ladder of sanity, a veritable rock of stability in comparison. After all, my girlfriend could always count on stopping by his place for a slice on her way to my place to help me hold things together.
Eventually, though, not even a saint like Veronica could put up with me.
All throughout growing up as an angry little kid I’d managed to find a small sliver of hope in the form of comedy. I was obsessed with David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Eddie Murphy, and Saturday Night Live. I consumed episodes of Kids in the Hall voraciously, and soaked up Mystery Science Theater 3000 religiously.
Just as things were crumbling around me during my junior year, comedy provided me with hope again. It was during this time that I found the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan, a grungy comedy space housed in a former strip club on Twenty-second Street in Chelsea. As soon as I found it, I fell in love. There were shows every night of the week, and often they were free or five bucks. Most of the shows were hilarious and bizarre, and all of them were interesting on some level. And all of the performers were weirdos just like I was, a lot of them not that much older than me. Once I signed up fo
r classes at the UCB, for the first time in a long time I felt like I had a home and a focus. Every weekend I’d head up to the city, hang out with people I felt connected to, enjoy the opportunity it provided me to be creative, and then get back on the train to New Brunswick.
Of course, the mere fact that this outlet was great for me didn’t make it any easier to be around me. If anything, in addition to being a salvation, UCB gave me another place to hide, a way to put even more distance between myself and the person who wanted to help me the most.
After many years of watching me unravel and refuse help along the way, my high school sweetheart had finally had enough. One morning I was getting dressed before heading to the city when my phone rang. It was Veronica.
“When you get home today, don’t make any other plans,” she instructed me. “We have to talk about some stuff.”
My stomach dropped.
“I get it,” I said. “I’ll call you when I’m back in town.”
I headed to the train station, my head spinning. Veronica was going to break up with me. It had been a long time coming, and I knew I’d forced her hand. But still, this was the girl who had seen me grow up, had helped me do so, and now she was done with me. It was overwhelming. I didn’t even have the energy to glare at The Worst Guy Ever when he came by asking for money.
The Worst Guy Ever wore a children’s cancer hospital T-shirt and walked around the train station soliciting for money. The first time I saw him, I gave him a dollar. My older friends then told me that he had nothing to do with a kids’ hospital and instead pocketed all the money. The next time he hit me up, I gave it to him.
“I know your scam and I think it’s fucked up,” I told him. “You’re not getting any more money from me.” I got on the escalator in the middle of the train station.
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 15
