And so (deep breath): here you go...
Making Sh*t Up:
An Improvised Life
by
Larry Brantley
Dedication
This book
is dedicated to Ella Lane Brantley; my daughter, my Boo Bear, my Songbird, my
theater-loving, Broadway-aspiring, crazy beautiful light of my life. Chase your
whimsies, baby girl. Always.
P.S.
Don’t read this fuckin’ thing until you’re at least eighteen years of age. I’m serious.
Love, Dad
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely
in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside,
thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “WOW – what a
ride!”
– Hunter S. Thompson
Chapter One
Introductions, Comedy, Tragedy, Team Sports, and a Dangerous
Disrespect for
Firearms
Hi. I’m Larry.
I make shit up.
Most of the shit in this book is not made
up, though some of it may be exaggerated for comedic effect, or if exaggeration
makes me look wise, brave, or attractive. I really am a working actor. I really
was on a 90’s era family television show called Wishbone, and that show really did win a George Foster Peabody
Award, The Television Critics Association Award (twice), and four Emmy Awards
(though, to be truthful, they were Daytime Emmys, so take that into
consideration). I’ve really been in more commercials than I can remember,
mostly for my ability to look confused, or defeated.
I
really did start doing stand-up comedy at age 16, three years after my father
honest-to-God blew his brains out in a shitty little trailer in Conroe, Texas,
which coincided with my mother becoming a raging alcoholic. (Which, for the
record, was the only applicable lesson of physics that ever stuck with me: that
for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.) I really was the
class clown in every grade and in every school I attended, because humor (or so
I have been told by people with letters after their names and couches for you
to lie on) was, and remains, my coping mechanism. And whiskey. Good whiskey.
Why did I start this page with “I make shit up?” The first reason is
it’s an attention-grabber. At least, it is in my head. The second reason is
that making shit up is how I survived childhood, adolescence, and early
adulthood. I even wound up making a living at it. When your life starts to suck
at an early age, the two things you need most – even more than comic books and
rock n’ roll – are humor, and a hell of an imagination. The humor allows you to
have something akin to a social life; people are more apt to let you hang
around if you’re funny. (Counter-point: you wind up being “friends” with girls
when you’re funny, which guarantees that you will at least be around girls,
even while you are not getting laid by those girls.) And the imagination gives
you some place to go; some place that cannot be invaded, or conquered, or
dismissed by any person, or any event.
Humor and imagination; these are the seeds
of a life.
Where to start? Let me say right off the
bat that I don’t want to write a whiny, bitchy,
oh-feel-sorry-for-me-because-of-my-shitty childhood memoir. I really don’t
think my childhood was better or worse than a lot of childhoods. My dad wasn’t
the first dad to ever commit suicide. My mom wasn’t the first alcoholic. My
family has never been the first at anything. We have always been a
middle-of-the-road kind of people. If we’d ever had a family motto, something
like “That’ll Do” would have rung
true. Growing up I was extraordinarily ordinary. With one minor exception: I
was funny.
I believe children tend to gravitate to
what they are naturally good at. As a kid, there were plenty of things I
naturally sucked at. At the top of
this list would have to be Team Sports. My experience with little league
baseball taught me, at an early age, that if ever there were an alien invasion
of Earth, and the invaders were roughly the same size and shape as baseballs,
that I would be of no use whatsoever in defending the planet. I couldn’t hit a
baseball if it lay down in the dirt and begged me to, and then insulted my
family just for extra motivation. I had the eye-hand coordination of a blind
alcoholic with Parkinson’s. Little league basketball was no better. Evidently,
running up and down a court while dribbling a ball and trying to shoot a basket was, for me, the equivalent of running
the Boston marathon in clown shoes while shot-putting a watermelon. My coaches
said sports would build character. Since I always ended up feeling like a tool,
I suppose they were right. But that wasn’t the kind of character I wanted to
be.
I was, however,
pretty kick-ass at having my picture taken.
I can’t remember the first time I
purposefully made somebody laugh. I can tell you that it was probably when I
was very young, but old enough to understand that falling down stairs or
running into a door or fart sounds were funny. That was when I found something
I could do, something where other,
more physically coordinated people didn’t have to depend on me. I could be
funny all by myself. I suddenly had an identity that was all mine: Class Clown.
My family most definitely did
not appreciate my burgeoning sense of humor. Especially my younger sister. I
like to think that the reason she has grown into a well-adjusted, independent,
strong-willed person is because of the shit I did to her when we were kids. If
the stuff that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, my sister should be
She-Hulk. We get along great these days, amazed as we are that we survived our
parents and each other. But holy crap, did we used to fight. I don’t mean the
regular sibling rivalry stuff, either. I’m pretty sure we actively planned each
other’s deaths more than once when we lived under the same roof.
She spent a night over at my
house a while back, on her way home to Oklahoma City. I told her I was going to
crack open a couple bottles of wine to loosen her tongue and tell me what she
remembers about me specifically from childhood. In vino veritas, baby. I expected her stories to be unflattering
(for me), and I was not disappointed. I hadn’t even gotten the first glass of
cabernet down her gullet before she reminded me of the time I fired a gun
inside the house (I’ll get to that), or the time I humiliated her by informing
one of my little league baseball team mates that she had a huge crush on him.
Evidently, in addition to becoming a novice comedian, I was also a fledgling
asshole.
But you want to hear about the
gun, right? This happened on a night when my mother and new stepfather were out
on another personal challenge to drink Montgomery County dry. My sister had a
friend over staying the night, and I was the responsible one in charge. (That
sentence right there should give you some indication of the depths of my
mother’s alcoholism; she actually thought it was okay to give me responsibility
for two younger human lives, one of which didn’t even belong to us.) My sister
and her friend had retreated to her bedroom, and I had cable television all to
myself. Around about midnight, one of my favorite Clint Eastwood films of all
time came on: Magnum Force.
Some time in the second act,
when Dirty Harry was beginning to suspect that cops might be responsible for
all these killings in his town, I decided he needed a partner. I walked over to
my stepfather’s gun cabinet (which was never locked), and withdrew his
snub-nose revolver. I opened the cylinder, ejected all the shells, flicked my
wrist to snap it back shut, and went skulking around the house looking for
dirty cops. I checked every corner, moving stealthily and slowly, until I got
to the hall bathroom. I wheeled into the doorway, paused just long enough to
catch a glimpse of my bad-assedness in the bathroom mirror, and that’s when I
saw him: a rogue cop, five feet in front of me, and drawing his piece with bad
intentions. But I had the drop on the sonofabitch. I sighted in on his dirty
cop head, slowly squeezed the trigger – and
fired a .38 hollow point slug right through the bathroom window.
Knowing that you are about to
be in deep, deep shit before you are actually in it is somehow a more terrible
feeling. I put the gun back in the cabinet, went to my room, and knew that I
would have to talk to my mother in the morning. I had done something incredibly
irresponsible and dangerous, there was no covering it up, and the next morning
I approached my mother and did what I needed to do.
I lied my ass off.
Looking back, I see now the
dumbass story I concocted could only have been accepted by a mother who was
very hung over, and loved her kid too much to let him get in real trouble.
Still, she called the sheriff’s office (did I mention she worked for the sheriff’s office at this time?), after I told her
that I fired through the bathroom window at a prowler. The deputy came out,
took my statement, knew I was lying through my teeth, and let it go because he
was doing my mom a solid. Nobody got killed, and in Conroe, Texas, that was
usually cause for dismissal. That was the last time I ever handled a gun in my
life, except for a brief stint in the Army where it was required. I will never
have a gun in my house, because I have a child. And, while she is a girl and
has zero interest in guns, she also has some floatie toys from my gene pool – and she likes to make
shit up, too.
Next Week: Chapter Two: Dear Chronology - Fuck You.
