Fuck.
One of the biggest challenges of dealing with a depressive disorder is that your brain can decide to mind-fuck you on a dime. This morning I had a kick-ass workout (for
me, I mean. I'm about to be goddam fifty years old, so my definition of "kick-ass" has appropriately shaded to reflect that hard fact), it's great weather outside, I get to see Boo this afternoon, and I get to ride a magnificent horse this evening - and get paid for it. Pretty awesome, right?
And then I am reminded - not harshly, just reminded - that I'm not doing all that great. I'm having to accept the fact that the career I've had for almost all my adult life just isn't paying the bills anymore.
And I have no idea what the fuck else there is to do. Except I have to. I have to figure out how to make a living outside of performance. It's the kind of thought that makes you reach straight for the Xanax - which I did. (But not the whiskey. Don't drink and self-medicate
and think you can ride a giant fucking horse.)
And so it's with a very astute awareness of irony that I publish the next chapter of
Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, because it's all about giving thanks to a couple of people who were instrumental in my becoming a performer. Maybe putting this chapter out here (hell, maybe the reason I'm putting the whole book out here), is sort of my way of finally letting that go. (I always thought when I gave up performance I'd have some kind of Viking funeral, except I would have to be
in the burning boat as it rolled out to sea, and fuck that idea with icing on top.)
And so here you go. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the book. You've literally helped keep the lights on, and I appreciate the shit out of you.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gratitudinal Propers
But influences are less
important, I think, than those people who, early in your life, recognize that
you are tinkering with the building blocks of the person you are going to
become and give you the opportunity to
try it out. And two of the most important people in my life – who gave me
the shots to take early on – were Mr. Gilliam, and Barbara Murphy Garner. They
are two people you never heard of, and they were both highly influential in my
achieving whatever I have that can be called career success.
Mr. Gilliam was my Home Room
teacher in sixth grade (O.A. Reaves in Conroe, I think it’s an elementary
school now), and I was a complete shit in sixth grade. I was around eleven
years old, and I had discovered that making people laugh made me feel good.
And, sort of, in a tragic-clown type of way, popular. So I was doing it all the
time. In Science class, I would use my dissected frog as a puppet and make him
do a little dance. In English, as the teacher was reading a long and boring
passage (or so I then thought) from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I would pretend to fall asleep, then fall over
backwards in my chair. I would listen to comedy albums from Redd Foxx, Richard
Pryor, and Gabe Kaplan (remember Welcome
Back, Kotter?), and then tell
those jokes at school, not even
censoring myself, but happily throwing words around like ass, pussy, and motherfucker.
I never told those routines in front of teachers,
mind you. I was too much of a chicken-shit to be a Bad Boy. But I did enjoy
being a Funny Guy.
All of these shenanigans
naturally frustrated my teachers – though never enough to get me into real
trouble. The bullies in my schools (and there were plenty of them) always took
the real heat: the trips to the principal’s office, the ass-whippings (you
could still whip a kid’s ass in those days), the suspensions. I don’t think I
ever got a note sent home informing my parents that I was a troublesome kid.
But I was definitely a distraction, and Mr. Gilliam was the first teacher I
ever had who figured out how to co-opt my tomfoolery. He made a deal with me:
every morning, before roll call and announcements, I would get one minute.
Sixty seconds to tell a joke, fall over in my chair, do an impression. To an eleven
year-old kid with a debilitating need for attention, this was pure gold.
And it worked. I was still the
class clown, but now I had an attentive audience for one minute every day – and
it was okay. I never realized until
much later what a genius move this was on Mr. Gilliam’s part. He was just
trying to maintain control of a bunch of rowdy kids. He could have squashed me,
but he didn’t. He gave me a shot. I got to be funny, even if I was never picked
by the school principal to be a guest DJ for morning announcements over the
loudspeaker. Fuck that noise, anyway. I didn’t want to be mainstream.
Mr. Gilliam, and my
first captive audience. See the poor bastard dead center with the horizontal
stripes? Bingo.
The next opportunity I got was
in high school. My sophomore year I was in competitive speech and debate, and
we got a new teacher/coach. (A word about competitive speech and debate: yes,
mostly populated by nerds and other social outcasts. Yes, some of the more
interesting, genuine, and funny people I ever hung out with, many of whom I am
friends with even into Middle Age. So there.) She was a young, fresh-faced
woman not terribly older than us, and after one day of putting up with our shit
looked about as shell-shocked as an artillery officer in the First World War.
Imagine being thrown into a classroom of teenagers who are too intelligent for
their own good, and all of them desperate attention hounds. It’s a wonder we
never drove her to suicide; I’m certain
we drove her to drink.
Her name at the time was
Barbara Murphy (later she remarried and became Barbara Murphy Garner), but I
always called her Mom. I think I called her that from the first day, which, in
retrospect, probably made her feel older than she actually was. But everyone I
really care about in life I attach a term of endearment to. I always have. And
she became Mom Murphy.
The way competitive speech
worked in those days was you selected a category of competition (mine was
usually Humorous or Dramatic Interpretation, and yes, I can be dramatic, and
not in a Drama-Queen type of way, though probably sometimes). Then you selected
a literary piece to perform. The operative word there is “literary.” The piece
you performed had to be from a published play, or novel, short story, etc. You
then did your “interpretation” of the piece, in a classroom, in front of judges
and your opponents. No stage, no costumes, makeup, or props; just you and your
emotions, facial expressions, movement – no bells and whistles. It was a
bracket competition, filtering out through preliminaries, quarter and semi
finals, and finals. I guess for me this is really where the possibility of
acting for a living took hold. The problem was, I wasn’t a rule-follower.
Mom Murphy tried, bless her
heart, to help me select performance pieces of high literary merit: Christopher
Durang, Woody Allen, William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller. To which I was all,
like, no fucking way. I wasn’t
interested in that stuff, because it didn’t make me laugh. I wanted to perform Monty Python sketches. I wanted to
perform scenes from movies, or stand-up routines from my favorite comics. In
short, I wanted to perform the most non-literary shit I could find. And here’s
the thing: Mom Murphy let me do that. She
recognized that the only way I was ever going to learn anything about performance
– what worked, what didn’t, and why – was to let me try on my own terms and
fail. And when I landed flat on my ass – which I did, often – she never said, “I told you so.” But she always asked, “What did you learn?” And that was when I think I became
unafraid of failure. And a good thing, too, because I have failed a shitload in
my life.
When Wishbone hit the airwaves, my first
“big” interview was with The Hollywood
Reporter.
And when they asked me who had the biggest influence on my
career, I didn’t hesitate. (This was back before anybody could Google “Barbara
Murphy Garner,” and the blank look on the reporter’s face was priceless. He was
also terribly disappointed that I didn’t mention somebody famous.) Give credit
where it’s due. Mom Murphy and Mr. Gilliam: couldn’t have done it without you.
Next Week, Chapter Twenty-Six: Some Shit I Watched
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