Chapter Twenty-Nine.

That pretty much sums it up.

     There's nothing quite so self-awareness raising as writing a memoir. Some people can't believe I actually post some of this shit about myself. Others simply don't believe it. They believe, as the name of the book suggests, that I'm just making shit up. I'm not. That's some James Frey shit. If you never heard of him, he wrote a book in 2003 called A Million Little Pieces, which was published as a memoir, and went to the top of the NY Times Best Seller List after Oprah made it a "Book of the Month" selection. Then a little while later, a rag called The Smoking Gun did some investigating and discovered that James Frey was full of a million little pieces of shit, and that an awful lot of what he claimed happened to him never did. And then that poor fucker had to go back on Oprah's show, and receive a very public bitch-slapping from a mad black woman. 

     I think the chances of Oprah ever picking my memoir for her club are about the same chances I have of winning the lottery, and getting mauled by a polar bear. On the same day. Still, I'm not taking any chances. The shit I write about my life actually happened, and I've written it down as accurately as I can remember. You hear me, Oprah?

     Anyway. Off we go...

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Competitive Speech, Lipstick, and The Great Drift

 

   The first time I got the idea that I could actually DO something with my humor – other than entertain my classmates and annoy my teachers – was in Mrs. Anderson’s speech class at Travis Jr. High. I believe it was 1981, and my father’s suicide was still a topic of conversation. Mrs. Anderson’s class was primarily a “how-to-give-a-presentation-in-front-of-your-classmates-without-shitting-your-pants” kind of thing, but for those of us with a penchant for crowd-pleasing there was something called Humorous or Dramatic Interpretation; basically, acting out a scene from a play or book, in which you play one or more characters, without the benefit of costumes or scenery, or any of the other trappings of theater performance. (I realize that I have previously explained Humorous and Dramatic Interpretation earlier in this book. But you know those people who, even though they missed the start of the movie – like, the first fifteen or twenty minutes - will come traipsing into the theater, anyway? Blocking the screen, and dumping half their buttered popcorn in your lap while shuffling to that one empty seat in the middle of the aisle? I have to believe there’s some guy out there who does the same thing with books. The above explanation was for him. Quit being late to books, asshole.)  This struck me as an interesting challenge. I had to pull people into a little world that I created all by myself, and make them believe it.

     I was competent enough at it that Mrs. Anderson registered me for my first competitive speech tournament. There were several categories, and I can’t remember which of them I competed in, save one: Impromptu Speaking. Contestants drew a scene out of a hat. They had one minute to think about it, then had to perform a three-minute sketch based on the scene. I made it to the Finals, and I can still remember the scene I was given: you are the captain of an airplane. In the middle of the flight, you lose an engine. Now, this could be played dramatically, of course, but fuck that. I decided to take a scene of a fully loaded passenger plane in the process of CRASHING, and make it funny.

     And I killed. That was the first competition I ever won. When I stepped onstage at the awards ceremony, and was handed a cheap-ass medal to commemorate my victory, it was as if they had handed me the Grail. That was also probably when I started craving the adoration of the entire planet, as I was getting nothing of the kind at home. Finally, here was a way to use what came naturally to me, and get recognition for it –the good kind of recognition. It didn’t make me any more popular with girls, but it would do.

     I competed all through seventh and eighth grades, sometimes in the categories of Prose or Poetry readings, always in Impromptu, and always choosing material that was funny. I also learned pretty quickly that Competitive Speech people were very different from Drama people, and rarely did the two groups comingle. Drama people tended to be purists, and viewed any acting that wasn’t performed on a stage, with lights and sets and costumes, as beneath their artistic integrity. And Competitive Speech people thought that Drama people were mincing little pussies.

     When I got to high school I continued to compete. The competitive speech coach my freshman year was a woman named Martha Roach. I never really liked her, and not just because of her name. But I do owe her thanks, because she pushed me out of my funny-zone and into Dramatic Interpretation. This was also the year I actually had to start performing with somebody else, which began my life-long love of creative collaboration, maddening as it can sometimes be. I was to compete in the Duet category with a girl named Shawn Day. She was two years older than me, and crazy beautiful. She and I developed a love/hate relationship, which must have translated well to performance. We were given a scene from a play about the final hours of the life of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, whom he beheaded for convenience. The scene takes place in the tower in which Anne is locked away, awaiting her execution. It’s one last conversation between king and queen, and at the end of the scene they kiss. Now, I had no problems with kissing. By this time in my life I thoroughly enjoyed kissing. And Shawn was game too, especially because that kiss never failed to produce a gasp from audiences when they saw it (keep in mind this is Texas in the 80s, and even the more liberal speech judges were usually dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who believed that high school students should never hold hands in public, much less make out at a school-sanctioned event).

     The problem was Shawn’s lipstick. She insisted on this blood-red color that made her lips pop as if she’s just eaten a handful of roses. And when we kissed – and it was a for-real, lip-mashing, grab the back of my head and hang on kind of kiss – that shit would smear all over my mouth, so that when we parted my face looked somewhere between circus clown and transvestite. I’m sure lipstick technology has come a long way since then, but in the 1980s it had the consistency of congealed bacon grease. I never really minded though, because I was getting to lock lips with easily one of the prettiest girls in school. And everybody knew it.

     Ms. Roach left after freshman year, and was replaced by Mom Murphy. She began letting me experiment in Humorous Interpretation with pieces that Roach wouldn’t let me touch. As for Duet, her belief was, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So the first tournament of my sophomore year I was back performing as Henry VIII, with Shawn as my Anne Boleyn. As luck would have it, we made it to the finals. (Not just luck; we’d gotten pretty tight by then.) But there was another duet in the finals from a school that had a new speech coach: Martha Roach. She ran straight to the judges to point out a technicality that competitors could not perform the same piece within a certain amount of time after the previous season had ended. She got Shawn and me disqualified from the finals. Now, you can say she was just abiding by the rules. But I’ll call bullshit. She was vindictive as hell, and she knew we were better than her duet, and I swear when Mom Murphy delivered us the news, and Shawn burst into tears, I looked a few tables over at Roach and caught her smiling.

     The problem – my perennial problem, it seems – is that I could never fully commit. Performance came easy, and, as such, I felt no great need to actually work to get better at it. Also, remember, I was choosing pieces that I wanted to perform, not pieces that were likely to be respected (or even recognized) by judges. As successful as I was, Mom Murphy pointed out (correctly), that I would fare even better if I would just suck it up and perform something more easily recognizable; something more mainstream. To me, “mainstream” meant “boring,” and I spent most of my high school years doing exactly what I wanted. Only my senior year – the very end of my senior year, actually – did I agree, at the last minute, to switch what I was going to perform for NFL District. (That’s National Forensic League. I stopped playing football in junior high.) I was going to perform yet another collection of Monty Python sketches, but Mom Murphy convinced me to switch to a monologue out of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. I think I literally had two days to work on it before the competition. I made it to Finals, but came one spot short of qualifying for Nationals, beat out by two students who had clearly put in the time and effort needed to be successful. I would not be performing on the national stage. Once again, my lack of ambition had placed me right where I deserved to be.

     I wish I could tell you that I learned from that experience, but that would totally be making shit up. I believe my response to that episode was something along the lines of, fuck it. Who needs it? I finished out my senior year, blew up my relationship with my girlfriend, graduated mostly unknown in a class of over 600 seniors, and spent my summer hanging out with my friends and practicing (and teaching) Tae Kwon Do. Thus began a phase of my life known as The Great Drift.

     The night of my graduation, the high school held a party/dance. I went to the party/dance, because that’s what everybody else was doing. I did not party. Nor did I dance. I sat at a table, mostly alone, with one thought running around and around the hamster wheel in my head: what the fuck am I supposed to do now? I was teaching Tae Kwon Do, and making next to nothing. My mother had remarried my sophomore year to a guy I hated, mostly because he was a huge enabler of Mom’s alcoholism. So I didn’t want to stay at home. I sat there absolutely confounded as to how to proceed with my life. I might have sat there all night, but a friend who was a junior invited me back to his house, as his parents were out of town and the hot tub was already fired up. I wound up in a Jacuzzi with several other couples, and a girl who might also have been a junior, and her name might have been Stacie or Stephanie. She was quite pretty, and either she thought I was good-looking enough, or she felt sorry for me, and we ended up making out until the sun came up. I never saw her again.

     The next morning I had a vague recollection that I was on the hook to some upper-middle class Junior League Ladies’ Club, because I had entered some sort of competition from them for a college scholarship, and I had won. A whopping two-hundred and fifty dollars, which unfortunately they would not give me in cash. Since I could think of nothing better to do, I scraped together a few more meager funds, enough to enroll for one semester at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Which, coincidentally, is also home to the prison where Texas carries out all its executions. In addition to general courses, I also registered for their competitive speech team.

     I hated the entire experience. I was pretty miserable in high school, but at least it was a familiar misery. Now everything was new again: the campus, the students, and the teachers (which you couldn’t even call them “teachers” anymore; they were “professors” now). It had taken me four long years to make even a handful of friends in high school. I found that I just didn’t have the capacity for it in college. I dropped out of the speech program almost immediately. And I remember taking a history course where I actually spoke the entire semester with a Russian accent. I have no idea why.

     I don’t believe I actually finished the one semester of college I enrolled in. (That doesn’t keep the SHSU Alumni Association from asking me for money two or three times a year, though. I still don’t know how those fuckers manage to track me down.) One morning I just couldn’t stomach the thought of getting in the truck and driving the 35 miles to the campus. I just stopped going. I kept on making no money, kept living at home, kept my familiar misery.

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