by Todd Glass
Now stop.
I know what you’re thinking.
Obsessive about cleaning? Check!
An eye for landscaping and design? Check!
Doesn’t like sports? Check!
It all adds up. It was obvious, even then, that I was . . .
Bullshit!
A lot of people seem to think that being gay automatically means you’re great at design, fashion, or throwing great dinner parties. This idea really bothers the hell out of me. Gay people aren’t born with these particular interests or skills in their DNA; they have to learn them slowly over time, like any other interest or skill. It would be like if you met an Asian doctor and said, “No wonder you’re a doctor, you’re Asian! You people are smart!” Oh yeah? What about the years of medical school and thousands of hours of work and study? Did you ever take that into account, you lazy piece of shit?
You’ll sometimes hear that stereotypes exist for a reason: because they’re true. I don’t think that’s right, either. I know a lot of straight guys who, if they pretended to come out of the closet, would have people falling all over themselves to tell you how they knew it all along. “No wonder he’s a great dresser and has such a beautiful home! Now it all makes sense . . .”
The truth is that some guys are good at this kind of stuff; some are not. Gay or straight doesn’t have anything to do with it. Most of our “stereotypes” are simple observations that don’t have any connection to what’s in your DNA.
Gay guys have style? They also have two incomes and no kids.
Asians love cameras? They’re on vacation in our country, fuckface!
Jews are cheap? You’re right, everyone else loves to overpay for shit.
So an eye for design and a dislike for sports didn’t mean that I was gay. However, there was one small detail that might have hinted that something about me was a little bit different: I started to have feelings for guys.
Which, I’ve got to admit, sounds pretty gay.
CHAPTER 8
GAY LIKE ME
Just when it couldn’t get any worse . . .
Look, discovering sexuality is hard enough for kids to go through when it’s accepted by everybody. If a boy likes a girl, and he’s thirteen and she’s thirteen, dipping their toes (and whatever else) into a heterosexual relationship embraced by society, it’s already so difficult. Holy shit are there feelings to go through. Feelings that are complicated and new and weird and exciting and terrifying.
Now imagine going through this process and also feeling dirty about it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
By the time I was thirteen, I knew. Sometimes I would see a guy and I’d feel a sense of attraction for him. I also knew enough not to say a word about it to anybody.
We’re talking about the late 1970s. While I wasn’t necessarily sure what my feelings meant, I was old enough to know that words like “gay,” “fag,” and “homo” were insults.
I should point out that I was a lucky kid in that none of these prejudices came from my parents, who socialized with people of every race, religion, sexual orientation, and economic class. But I grew up in the same straight world as everyone else did. If you could hide being gay, you did. And even if you couldn’t, you still did. (One word: Liberace.) I learned that “normal” people got uncomfortable when they saw same-sex couples, so I did, too. Whenever other boys my age started to talk about the crushes they were developing on girls, I immediately clammed up. I was pretty sure that my own weird feelings would go away. I just had to hide them until that happened.
One night I stayed over at a friend’s house. We were watching TV and our legs touched.
We didn’t say very much after that. There wasn’t any kissing, just a lot of groping. “Heavy petting” is the phrase that comes to mind—the kind of stuff you might expect a thirteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl to do. It felt good. It felt right.
And when I woke up the next morning, it felt dirty.
I can’t say that I handled it poorly, because I didn’t handle it at all. I went out of my way not to see him again. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when, a few months later, he moved away, so I could get on with the business of forgetting that it had ever happened.
I mean, what the fuck? I was failing out of school and didn’t know what was wrong with me, met people who hated me for being part of a religion that I hardly practiced, had been to five different schools in eight years leaving me with almost no close friends, and now I was going to have to be gay, too?
I must have been a real asshole in my past life to deserve all that in this one.
CHAPTER 9
THE POWER OF FUNNY
A comedian is born.
The last thing I want to do is to make my childhood sound more dramatic than it was. While I might get a little sad or angry when I look back on it, at the time, life seemed pretty good. I didn’t walk around depressed every day. Kids are resilient. I laughed a lot.
I always had a lot of fun with my family, and a lot of that fun revolved around comedy. My dad used to watch Fernwood 2Night—a show that was crazy ahead of its time—so he clearly had an evolved sense of humor. I didn’t necessarily get all the jokes, but I loved Martin Mull and Fred Willard, who could sell all sorts of funny with an upturned eyebrow or a deadpan expression.
Later, my brothers and I became obsessed with The Carol Burnett Show. Michael and Spencer learned all of the Eunice and Ed Higgins sketches by heart and would spend hours cracking me up.
Comedy was something I could relate to. I didn’t have to read anything. Even if I didn’t understand everything that the performers were saying, I liked the way they were saying it. They used their voices, going louder or quieter, speaking faster or slower, to create a mood and tell a story—it was a way of communicating that really resonated with me.
Every day I’d come home from school and watch Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin, two talk shows that usually ended with a stand-up routine, hoping to see comedians like Rodney Danger-field or Don Rickles. When Spencer got a George Carlin album, we played the hell out of it. Not only was Carlin hilarious, but it felt like he was talking right to us, telling the truth in a way that other adults couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Pretty soon, without even realizing it, I was starting to think like a comedian. I still remember the very first time I used irony to take a piece of information and turn it around in a way that highlighted how ridiculous it was. I was in the car with my parents and someone cut us off. “Sometimes I wish I had an old clunker so I could just plow into people,” my dad complained to no one in particular.
“Yeah, that’s a great idea, Dad. You think if you ran someone off the road and they called the cops, the cops would be like, ‘Sorry . . . Nothing we can do about this one. He clearly has an old clunker. We’re going to have to let him go.’ ”
I knew I’d done well when I heard my mom crack up from the passenger seat.
Meanwhile, since we’d been in the same house for a couple of years, it was obviously time for the Glass family to move again. This time we ended up in Valley Forge, which really felt way out in the country. The house was down a quarter-mile gravel driveway that led to a twenty-five-acre ranch—we lived on what was maybe two and a half acres on the back of the lot.
When you’re living in the middle of nowhere and you’re not into organized sports, it isn’t that easy to make new friends. But I found one at my new school, a kid named Blake who let me copy from him when we were taking tests. He was so gracious. He never did what some people do, moving their hand to cover the page—as a matter of fact, he’d even move the paper closer to the edge of his desk to make it easier for me. The only problem, I realized pretty quickly, was that I was copying from a straight-D student.
I figured I should probably find some smarter friends. Taking a page from the comedians I’d been watching and listening to, I tried to use my sense of humor. It wasn’t always successful. We were reading a book at school called Hey, Dummy. Later
, while riding in the car with my brother, I saw one of my classmates and wanted to make him laugh, so I yelled at him: “Hey, dummy!”
When I ran into him at school the next day and saw how pissed he was, I panicked and denied that it was me. He panicked and punched me in the face. This was a great lesson in comedy: Know your crowd.
But I was starting to see how a sense of humor could improve my social life. My first impression of Joe Greco, the kid who sat behind me in my new homeroom, was that he was kind of a tough guy. One morning, my new homeroom teacher announced that they were still looking for the lead in the school musical. All of a sudden Joe chimed in, singing, “I’llllllllllll do it!”
His delivery was perfect, but no one else in the class even chuckled. I, on the other hand, fell on the floor laughing. I still laugh when I think about it now.
A few days later, Joe got the chance to return the favor. My current obsession was Rodney Dangerfield. I’d recently bought his album and had spent hours mimicking his routine until I felt comfortable enough to try a few jokes out in class, replacing Rodney’s wife with my mother: “My mom is such a bad cook, in my house we pray after we eat. Guys, seriously, it’s really bad . . . The other day I caught a fly fixing the screen door!”
And . . . crickets. Except for Joe, who gave me what I thought was a pity laugh.
One of my classmates sneered at him. “You think he’s funny?”
“Yeah,” Joe said, in a voice that made the kid cower in the corner. “I do.”
And just like that, somebody my age thought I was funny.
What was amazing was that Joe wasn’t the only person who seemed to think so. The most popular kid in my class, Dave Olsen, started acting like he wanted to be my friend, too. Everybody liked Dave—he was smart, friendly, and got along with all different kinds of people.
I didn’t really understand why he was being so nice to me until years later, during a visit to his house, when his dad said, “Dave, don’t forget—remember to be friends with someone who doesn’t have any friends!”
“Wait a minute,” I said, looking at Dave. “That’s me! You became my friend in high school because you felt sorry for me.”
Dave denied it, but I was smart enough to know what was up. And at that point, who cared? We’d already become friends, which still amazes me. A lot of teenagers use their popularity for evil. But if you want your kid to be really, truly cool, teach him or her to use popularity for good, like Dave Olsen did.
I can’t overstate how great it felt to have a friend like Dave. For the first time in my life, I was looking forward to going to school. I liked having friends. We had a good time doing the kinds of crazy things that high school kids did. My friend Jamie bought a used unmarked police car. It didn’t take long to notice that the other cars on the road were slowing down when we pulled behind them. “Oh!” it finally dawned on us. “They think we’re cops.”
So we started pulling people over. No one who looked dangerous, just kids about our age who were doing something erratic—there’s nothing more fun than catching someone in the middle of doing something stupid. We’d flash the high beams and the car would pull over. Jamie and I both looked a lot older than our age; later we’d wear blue windbreakers and tuck them into our pants, just like we saw cops do, before we approached the driver. “How ya doing? You know, the reason we have unmarked cars is so we can catch people doing the kinds of things that you were doing . . .”
Look, as a full-grown adult, this is an embarrassing story—we were in it for the power and the fun. After we were done scaring the crap out of some poor kid, we’d get back into Jamie’s car and giggle like no real cop ever would. It was a great gag, at least until it came to a screeching halt when, one day on the way to school, we accidentally pulled over the principal.
For the first time in my life, I was really enjoying school. I was having a great time with my new friends and there was no way I was going to mess it up. Any romantic feelings I had for guys got pushed into the back of my mind where I hoped and prayed that they’d stay.
CHAPTER 10
DIM PROSPECTS
School is coming to an end.
Having friends made high school a lot more fun, but it wasn’t like I was suddenly going to become a better student. When (big surprise) I failed tenth grade, I seriously considered dropping out. By then it was clear to everyone around me (and, most importantly, me) that college wasn’t an option. We would have had to move to Mongolia to get away from my school record.
I probably would have quit out of sheer embarrassment if one of my teachers, Mr. Smedley, hadn’t felt sorry enough for me to let me walk into assembly room with my eleventh-grade friends, allowing me to hold on to some small shred of dignity before heading off to repeat the same lessons that I still wouldn’t be able to retain.
But my school days were coming to an end. What the hell was I going to do?
Fortunately, I had a dream: I wanted to be a landscaper like Comar.
Comar ran his own landscaping business, but he never seemed to have to do any of the backbreaking labor that should have come with the job. He’d pull up to a site in his $45,000 pickup truck, climbing out to survey the scene like a king stepping out of a royal carriage. His perfectly pressed shirt was always tucked neatly into his immaculately spotless pants. The few times I saw Comar pick up a hose, there were three guys standing behind him to make sure it didn’t get knotted or caught on anything that might have required the boss to overexert himself.
I wanted to be Comar. In the meantime, however, I had to settle for an after-school job at Dairy Queen in the Plymouth Meeting Mall. I loved that job. I was great at it, at least from the perspective of the customers. I made sure that people got as much ice cream as I could fit into whatever size they ordered—I’d stuff a small so full that it’d be larger than a medium. It brought me a lot of joy to bring that kind of happiness to others.
The feelings of joy didn’t extend to the owners, who more than once had warned me to weigh the portions like everyone else did. But I knew I was doing important work. I wore a clean, pressed shirt to work every day, tucked neatly into my pants, and occasionally lied to customers about being the owner’s son. Unlike the other sixteen-year-old slobs working for minimum wage, I showed up an hour early to work to bring the place up to my personal (and arguably insane) standards. I stopped serving milkshakes—man, what a mess—a half hour before closing; fifteen minutes later I’d put all the chairs up on the tables to encourage the last customers of the day to take their orders to go.
I wasn’t sure that the owners would fully appreciate the extra effort it took to close early, so I doled out free ice cream to the mall’s security guards to buy their silence. Their loyalty was put to the test when, twenty minutes before closing time, I refused to serve a milkshake to Angie, a forty-year-old who still worked at the Piercing Pagoda kiosk, and she ratted me out to my bosses.
The security guards came through for me, denying any knowledge of early closures, and the owners were happy to let it go. Not so much me—I didn’t want to do any damage that would be permanent, but I definitely had to teach Angie a lesson in the dynamics of power. I should explain that the Piercing Pagoda, being a kiosk, didn’t have its own bathroom, and I occasionally saved Angie the humiliation of using the public restrooms by letting her use our private toilet at the Dairy Queen. But that was before she decided to double-cross me. The next time she ordered a milkshake, I added three doses of Ex-Lax.
Let me tell you, when you’re sixteen, there aren’t many things in life as pleasurable as watching a full-grown adult who really has to take a shit. The few minutes I watched her squirm were pure enjoyment. I never found out what happened next, because I closed early and went home.
There was a bar next door to the Dairy Queen where musicians would occasionally play. For some reason—possibly because I was a sixteen-year-old who looked thirty—no one seemed to mind when I’d wander up to the stage after work, grab the mike, and break into my
Rodney routine.
I was just goofing off. While I knew there were famous comedians, I didn’t have any idea that “stand-up comedy” could be an actual job until the night I got a call from my old friend and neighbor Albert Nalibotsky, inviting me to check out a club he’d recently discovered.
CHAPTER 11
COMEDY WORKS
“Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher.”
Comedy Works was on the third floor of a three-story walk-up, above a Middle Eastern restaurant on Chestnut Street. The stairs opened into a long, narrow room that held around three hundred people. A few minutes after Albert and I sat down, the room went dark. “Before we start tonight’s show,” a voice announced over the PA system, “if there’s a Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer in the audience tonight, a Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher. Other than that, everything’s okay. Five minutes to showtime . . .”
I laughed at that goddamn announcement for a month.
But that was just the beginning. The owner of the club, a guy named Steve Young, kicked off what was for me about to become a familiar routine. He introduced the master of ceremonies—the emcee—usually a local comic just starting to work the clubs. The emcee did a few minutes of comedy before introducing the middle act, who tonight was the Legendary Wid, famous for using 250 props during his show. It was total mayhem—by the end of his act there were piles of one-off props everywhere. It was too huge a mess to clean up right away, so management threw a couple of blankets over the props so the headliner could begin—a rising twenty-year-old named Tom Wilson, who a few years later would play “Biff” in Back to the Future.
