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.

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

      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

Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE.

Chapter Fourteen.

     First of all, thanks to everybody who tuned in last night to catch the band during rehearsal. We're definitely going to do that again. We were so happy with the turnout that we damn near forgot we still had an hour of actual rehearsal to go.

     It's Wednesday, and that means it's time for yet another chapter of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. If you're new to this blog, you should probably back up and catch the last thirteen chapters. There's laughs, a few tears, some really horrible shit, and the time I unintentionally creeped-out a Golden Globe - winning actress. It's worth a read. And off we go!

     Chapter Fourteen

Cancer, Leprosy, Honesty, Sympathy, and Skipping School

    

Every kid’s eighth grade year is awkward. That is a universal truth. But I will risk a little conceit and suggest that my eighth grade year was more awkward than most, compounded by the fact that, just a few weeks before school started that year, my father had blown his brains out. And, Conroe being the small, gossipy Texas town it was, every kid in school had heard about it. I became an instant celebrity in eighth grade, and for all the wrong reasons.

     I have never had cancer. Or leprosy. But I feel I can relate, if only a tiny little bit, to what it must be like socially for victims of either disease. Not because my schoolmates treated me like something to be avoided at all costs; my father’s suicide didn’t cost me any friends. It’s just that nobody knew what to say to me. Eighth graders can pretty much handle the sarcasm, derision, contempt, scorn, and outright mockery that they get from other eighth graders. That comes with the territory. But sympathy? Pity? What use has an eighth grader for those things from his peers, who were as ill equipped to give them as I was to receive them?

     So, there were a lot of awkward silences betwixt my classmates and me that year, which I started filling in with humor, which seemed a very great relief to my friends. If Larry was clowning around, then he must be okay, and so we need never speak of “the thing” again. The only honest response I got that year was from my buddy, Tony Vilardi. We never hung out after eighth grade, but I’ll never forget what he said to me. It must have been one or two weeks after the school year started, and I was feeling a lot of eyes on my back as I passed people in the halls. Kids hanging around my locker would scatter at my approach, for fear they’d be expected to say something. One morning, as we were hanging around outside waiting for the bell to ring for First Period, Tony looked at me square and said, “So, your dad. He just killed himself, huh?”

     Me: Yeah.

     And then he said the most honest thing I heard from any of my friends that year:

     “Shit. That sucks, man.”

     I did not understand – and so could not have voiced in that moment – that what I felt at those words was a profound gratitude. Because Tony wasn’t offering sympathy; he was simply stating the truth. My dad was dead. And it sucked. He didn’t say he was sorry for my loss. And he didn’t – thank the universe – say, Bless your heart, which I never heard from any of my classmates, but which I heard from practically every adult I came into contact with for that year. Where I come from, Bless your heart often – but not always – is a good Texas Christian’s magnanimous way of saying, You poor fucking bastard. Better you than me.

     I did get a goodly amount of sympathy from my teachers in eighth grade, which I exploited as much as my non-criminal mind would let me. Some let me slide on homework assignments that were incomplete, or that I didn’t turn in at all. How I mainly cashed in on their sympathy was being absent from school. A lot. This carried over into my freshman year of high school, where the one and only time I was called into the counselor’s office was to discuss my chronic absenteeism.

     I wish I could remember the guy’s name. This was still at a time when – at least in small-town Texas in the early 80s – counselors were still the people whose primary occupation was to paddle the asses of wayward students. Actually counseling children was a few years away. But this particular counselor was what I would now call one of the “new breed,” though at the time he was probably considered a leftie-hippie-free-love radical at Conroe High School. First of all, he was younger. And by “younger,” I mean he wasn’t alive during the exodus out of Egypt, which most other counselors at the school obviously were. And secondly, he seemed genuinely concerned – about me.

     He basically said that he’d added up my absences for the year-to-date, and that I had essentially already missed one whole six-weeks (a semester) of my freshman year. He asked me if there was anything going on with me – a health issue, problems at home with parents or siblings – that could possibly account for being gone from classes that much. Here, then, was an adult’s (albeit, a young one’s) honest attempt to “reach” me. I also realized at that moment that this guy had to be new in town, because he didn’t ask me about my Dad’s suicide, which meant he didn’t know. Which meant he didn’t go to the local Baptist church.

     All this I see with the wisdom of hindsight. This poor guy was probably earnestly concerned about my situation, and was really trying to get me to open up. His earnestness had the opposite effect. I slammed shut tighter than a new prisoner’s sphincter on the first day of incarceration. And instead of answering his question, I responded with one of my own.

   “Mr. Whatever The Hell His Name Was, do you have my report card in front of you?”

     “Yes.”

     “Do you mind telling me what my grades are?”

     “You’re making straight A’s.”

     “And do you have my report cards from the beginning of the year until now?”

     “Yes, I do.”

     “And can you remind me what my grades have been all year?”

     “You’ve been making straight A’s all year.”

     “And can you tell me whether I make it to tenth grade is based on my attendance, or my grades?”

     (Pause) “Your grades.”

     “Then what’s the problem?”

     And that was the end of that. I never got called to the counselor’s office again for attendance issues. In fact, I never got called in for anything. I was not a trouble maker in the classic sense. But I did know just how far I could push people and circumstances, and (most of the time, at least) I knew when to back off. Besides, staying home all the time was getting boring, and the girls were all at school. And I made a shit-load of trouble with girls.

     Next Week, Chapter Fifteen: Giving Myself A Hand

     Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE. 

Chapter Eight.

     Hello, all seven of you. Before we get to the latest installment of my memoir, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, which is an actual book that I actually wrote, and am publishing online for free, I've gotten a few inquiries in the last couple of weeks, asking if regular readers of the blog (and the book) can make personal contributions to the cause (the cause being me, and this shit I write). I'm looking into it, but it's complicated for me, as it involves not only technology but math, both of which make my head hurt, and have me reaching for the Xanax. I'm hoping to have some sort of something in place soon, to make it very easy for subscribers to make a financial contribution to the book (and also a big middle finger to publishers who sent me rejection letters). If any of you, dear readers, have experience with that sort of thing, your help would be greatly appreciated.

     In the mean time, should you wish to make a donation, simply private message me via social network connections. However, if we're not currently connected via a social network (for which I blame myself), simply leave a comment here expressing a desire to help me continue my bad writing habit, and I will contact you offline with information on how to make that possible. Thanks, you guys.

     And now...

Chapter Eight

Sex, Contact Highs, and Rock n Roll

It's not really the 8th Wonder of the World. It's more like the third nipple on the kid at gym class, that you can't stop staring at.

     [Author's Note: at the top of this chapter I write that I have only ever been high once in my life. That is no longer a true statement, given that, when some of my friends found out about that, they made it a personal mission to get me good and stoned a few times in Middle Age. Mission accomplished...]

    I have been drunk many times in my adult life. As I’ve previously mentioned in this memoir, I like to drink. A lot. I don’t need to drink, and I know this is true because the only times I have ever had booze before noon is when I’m on vacation, which is perfectly acceptable to any culture in any age. (Except maybe cultures who eschew alcohol completely. Which is just fucking weird.) But I have only ever been high once in my life, and that’s what this story is about. I wish I could tell you it was an awful experience, that it made me nauseous and guilty, and afraid I would become a horrible addict who would lie and steal, or maybe even kill to get that next high. It wasn’t like that at all. It was a second-hand high I got in 1982 at the Texxas World Music Festival in Houston.

     A brief word about me and drugs. I don’t do them, and never have. I figure if any teenager could have been forgiven for a crippling drug habit, it would have to have been a teenager whose dad had killed himself, and whose mom lived in a bottle. I was THE prime candidate for drug abuse. I never did drugs for two reasons, the first of which is that I was too poor to afford them, the second of which is that I had already discovered sex, and no one could convince me that drugs were better than that. They still can’t. If you think drugs are better than sex, then you’re doing it wrong. Period. So, that’s me and drugs.

     1982 may have been the greatest year for big-ass rock concerts the city of Houston has ever, or will ever, see. Houston was one of the last rock ‘n roll bastions against New Wave, which had already claimed some of my more marginal friends in Conroe. But the Texxas World Music Festival was the big Middle Finger to all that techno, plastic, one-hit-wonder pop trash, and it had been going on since 1978. The gods of rock descended upon the Republic of Texas every summer to lay their hands on adoring fans (and their guitars, and sometimes their penises, if you were a hot chick), to scorch the heavens with full-throated vocals and sear flesh with white-hot guitar solos, to perforate ear drums and implode chest cavities, all in the name of rock ‘n roll. I freaking loved it.

     On June 13, 1982, I found myself in a van with my two best friends, Doug and Geoff; their girlfriends; my sort-of girlfriend at the time; Doug’s brother David, who was driving, and Doug’s older sister Sara, whom I was completely wacko-insane about, as she was the single most attractive girl I had ever been that close to in my life, ever, up to that point. There were probably some other people in the van as well, but none of them was Sara, so I don’t remember who they were. We all had our tickets to the Texxas Jam, and we were heading south on I-45 out of Conroe, bound for the Houston Astrodome.

     If you’ve never been inside the Astrodome, all I can suggest is that you keep it that way. I know it’s been remodeled a bunch of times since my teenage years. It’s just that building a huge stadium designed to hold thousands of people and then slapping a dome over the top of it is, in my opinion, a fundamentally bad idea. Like pet rocks. Or New Coke. You can do it, sure. But why? The Astrodome was built in order that the city of Houston could get some professional baseball and football franchises in a part of Texas where the weather can be so shitty, you have to seriously question the mental health of anybody who would choose to live there. It’s bad enough that the summers typically stay in the mid to upper nineties range, but on top of that the humidity is always like 170 percent. It’s the kind of humidity that makes you actually think, and I’m paraphrasing Lewis Black, “Gosh, you know what? I really wish I had put antiperspirant on my balls.”

     In 1982 the Astrodome was a colossal concrete and steel cave, with bad ventilation and worse acoustics. (The bad ventilation will become important shortly.) It was also the venue for the Texxas Jam. This was the lineup of bands, from opener to headliner: Point Blank, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Sammy Hagar, Santana, and Journey. The only band I wasn’t balls-out excited about was Santana, but it was a solid line-up and I couldn’t wait for the show to kick off. As a lot of people weren’t bothering to show up until the second or third band took the stage, we had no problem parking and getting to our seats in the Gold section. That sounds like a really great section to be in because of the name, but really it was called the Gold section because that entire section of seats made a dingy yellow ring all the way around the Astrodome. We were midway up in the dome, on the left-hand side of the stage.

     One of the biggest reasons Doug and Geoff and I were friends, was that we were music freaks. We had huge record / tape / CD collections. We briefly had a garage band, with Doug on a Fender Jazz bass and Geoff playing a Peavy POS guitar, but we folded for two reasons: we didn’t have a drummer, and I couldn’t squeeze my nuts hard enough to sing like Paul Stanley or Rob Halford. And we meant business when it came to rock concerts. We watched the show. The whole show. None of this running about the venue, dicking around, trying to find a non-urine soaked corner to make out in. We were there to rock. So, when Point Blank hit the stage we were firmly planted in our seats. We only got up during band breaks when the stage was rearranged to make ready for the next group, and then we only went to pee or load up on concession food. Joan Jett came next, and I had no idea at the time that she was a lesbian. I didn’t even know what a lesbian was. I only knew that she kicked ass, and I should have suspected something when I went to the bathroom after her set, and there was a line out the Women’s restroom made up of women that I’m pretty sure could have kicked my ass in a fair fight. And I was a black belt at the time.

     Sammy Hagar was still the Red Rocker, and still three years away from joining Van Halen, thus ending my love affair with Sammy Hagar and Van Halen. Maybe you liked that weird incarnation, but to me it was too much liking kissing your sister. But the night of the Texxas Jam he was shredding. After the Hagar set I got up to walk around and look at the merchandise (my high school wardrobe for four years consisted mainly of jeans and concert t-shirts). I was in no hurry to get back for Santana’s set, and I was walking through the very large music library in my head looking for Santana songs that I was actually familiar with. There was Evil Ways, Black Magic Woman, and Oye Como Va for sure. And in the last two years they’d had a couple more mainstream singles, Winning and Hold On. So, okay, if they played those five songs, I’d be happy. But Carlos Santana had always been known as a jam-guitar guy, who could segue from one Latin-infused solo into another so effortlessly that after a while you thought you were at a jazz concert, for God sakes. I paid for my commemorative t-shirt and headed back to my seat.

     And that’s when I first began to notice that things had gotten… foggy.

     Santana opened with Black Magic Woman, and while I was kind of familiar with the song, I had this thought about two minutes in: Damn. I am really enjoying this song. I also thought that the stage guys were overdoing it on the fog effects, because there was a thick miasma hanging out everywhere in the Astrodome. And it seemed to be making the music sound better. I have no idea what the second song in Santana’s set was. But I do remember thinking: Man, this is better than the first song. And halfway through the song I didn’t know, I thought: This is the best fucking music I have ever heard in my entire life. Carlos Santana is a goddam genius. How have I never seen that before? Toward the end of his set, when he broke into Oye Como Va, I nearly shit my pants with excitement. I was singing along in perfect Spanish, and I don’t speak Spanish.

     When Carlos left the stage, I was more despondent than the time my dog had abandoned me for a family that could actually afford to feed him every day. But that feeling evaporated when somebody in our group said, “Anybody want anything to eat?” I was about to open my mouth and say hell freaking yes, but as soon as I did open my mouth I saw in my own head the list of things I wanted – no, needed – to eat at that moment, and I knew they’d never be able to remember them all, and they didn’t have octopus arms, which they were going to need to carry all the shit that I was hungry for, and then I realized that I’d been sitting there with my mouth wide open for way too long and it was Sara who’d asked the question and I was staring at her open-mouthed like a goddamn lunatic. I slammed my jaw shut so hard that my nasal passages hummed, and fled to the concession stand. Here is a partial list of what I know for sure I ate:

     *Two large orders of nachos with cheese sauce and extra jalapenos (which I wasn’t going to order because at the time I didn’t like jalapenos, but the concession lady was like “Aw Honey, you gots to eat nachos with jalapenos!” and I thought Well, shit, she sells this stuff, she should know…)

     *TWO foot-long chili dogs with relish, onions, mustard, ketchup, and a bag of Fritos crushed and sprinkled over the top, because why the fuck not?

     *One (maybe two) corn dogs slathered in mustard

     *Two giant salted pretzels (I just realized that this event alone is probably why I have high blood pressure to this day)

     *One large barrel of popcorn that was probably left over from the first Texas Independence Day, drowned in imitation butter product

     *One Snickers, one Baby Ruth, one bag of M&Ms (plain)

     *Two Dr. Peppers, one Mr. Pibb (Dr. Pepper’s “special” cousin), and a Coke. All big enough to drown a child in

     I did not at the time realize that I was experiencing what stoners everywhere call “the munchies.” I only knew that it was the best freaking food I’d ever eaten in my life. A few hours later, when the high had worn off and the gastro-intestinal consequences had kicked in, I would significantly alter this view. But for the moment, it was awesome.

     I was high through Journey’s entire set. I should mention that this was the Journey of the Steve Perry days, and that the Escape album had just been released the previous year, which was, and remains, their pinnacle music achievement. When they broke out Open Arms – probably the greatest power ballad in the history of ever – there was no cheering among the more than 53,000 fans at the Astrodome, because every single one of them was making out. I was making out with my sort-of girlfriend. But I may have been making out with Doug, or Geoff. I honestly don’t know. I wanted to be making out with Sara, but she had flown away on the back of a rainbow-colored unicorn to destinations unknown. Or maybe that didn’t happen, and I only thought it happened because I was high.

     By the time Journey was into their second encore, and all the pyrotechnics were going off, the Astrodome had been transformed into the world’s largest rock ‘n roll bong. It’s a miracle that the sheer volume of weed smoke didn’t blow the roof right off the place. Evidently the people who built this monstrosity had never heard of air scrubbers, or were too cheap to install them, because the recycled air was blowing back out on the entire audience like a fog machine. And I had a brilliant thought, as only truly stoned people can have: a new home air conditioning system that cooled you down and got you high at the same time. And I would call it “Air-ijuana.” I was just about to share this idea with my friends, but Journey started into Wheel in the Sky and my brain immediately went to “Dude! ‘Wheel’ and ‘Sky’, are two images that are both symbolic of infinity. Holy shit!” And I was trying to explain this to the couple sitting next to me, but they couldn’t hear my brilliant analysis of the song lyric over the volume of the song itself. Plus their faces were mashed together in a desperate attempt to see who could suck the fillings out of the other person’s mouth first. So I sat back and let the last song of the evening take me wherever it wanted, and I was awash in second-hand weed smoke, smelling vaguely of chili, and, for a moment, pretty damn happy.

     Rock concerts were a huge part of my teenage years, mainly because live music was my drug of choice. Alcohol is a close second these days, but I didn’t really drink until I was in my late twenties. I’ve been going to concerts since before I could legally drive. And what I mean by that is, yes, I did illegally drive my friends and me to concerts more than once. I think one of the reasons I never really fit in with any clique in high school was that a big identifier was the kind of music you listened to. The Kikkers listened to country, the Preps listened to pop, the Homeboys listened to rap, the Jocks didn’t know what music was, and the Band Geeks listened to… well, band music. I listened to rock ‘n roll, in all of its varieties and subsets. I would go to a Judas Priest concert one week, then turn around and hit the REO Speedwagon show the next. I will also admit here and now that I attended a Neil Diamond show one year, but only because Doug had an extra ticket, and his sister Sara was going. I had heard rumors that women became so enamored of Neil when he performed that they would spontaneously take off their bras (and sometimes their panties) and throw them onstage. If there was even a one in a million chance that Sara would do something like that, then I was going to sit through a Neil fucking Diamond concert.

     She didn’t.

     Every spare dollar I had in high school usually went toward concert tickets. My friends and I had long ago made the acquaintance of the owner and proprietor of Rainbow Records and Tapes, the only real record store in Conroe. (I later learned that the owner also ran a paraphernalia and dope operation out of the back of the store, for which he was later busted.) He became a Ticketmaster outlet not long after the store opened, and we spent many nights sleeping in front of his shop on lawn chairs, so we could be first on line when tickets to shows we desperately wanted to see would go on sale. This strategy got us excellent seats for shows such as ZZ Top on the Eliminator tour, YES (90125 Tour), Judas Priest (Screaming for Vengeance), and front row center for REO Speedwagon (Wheels Are Turnin’).

     So, when I say that I have developed a bit of a hearing problem in my mid-forties, this should come as a surprise to no one. You do not (at least, I didn’t) think about the repercussions of constantly exposing your ears to a decibel level that has more in common with a battlefield in World War II than a music performance. I remember at the REO show, our buddy Joe S. had shoved cotton in his ears, and I think we all made fun of him for it. We were all standing there, front row and center stage for the entire show, and it was awesome. REO always ended their encore with Ridin’ The Storm Out, and on the last few power chords they’d fire off these huge pyrotechnics. So it’s the end of the song, and guitarist Gary Richrath hits that first ending chord, and at the same time BOOM!!!, this cannon or something goes off – and something hits me in the side of the face. Not hard, not like shrapnel or anything. It was soft. And I turn my head, and there’s Joe, standing next to me and looking shocked and awed, and he’s pointing at the sides of his head and shouting something, but I can’t hear him over the song, so I look at his mouth and what he’s saying is IT BLEW THE COTTON OUT OF MY FUCKING EARS! That was the first time I thought there might be consequences to all of my rocking, later in life.

     Next Week, Chapter Nine: Dad Before The End