Chapter Thirty-One.

     It's all fun and games to write about the world going to hell in a hand basket, and quite another thing when that shit actually starts to happen. The last two weeks have been nothing short of insane in my country, and a large part of that sad and tragic insanity took place in my own backyard, so to speak. I've listened to politicians and activists and pundits and regular old folks talk over and past each other for the better part of a fortnight, arguing their side and their point of view, and here is what I believe with absolute conviction:

     Somebody will have to be brave enough to listen first. 

     I'm not kidding. Someone - or a whole lot of someones - will have to find the strength and courage to stop talking and start listening. I mean, really listening. Because change starts with trust, and trust starts when somebody feels as though they have actually been heard; that what is in their hearts, that they speak out loud, matters. Fuck all the memes and posturing (and downright ugliness, defended under the banner of free speech) on social media. That shit not only doesn't help, and doesn't heal, it actually makes things worse. It makes you and me worse. Please, let's stop being worse.

     Alright. Anyway, time for the next installment of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, which is a very short period in my life, but has a decidedly long chapter. I almost didn't publish this one, because it definitely has some embarrassing shit in it, and then I remembered that I have pretty much already dumped my purse out here on this space, so giving it a good shake to see what else falls out isn't really going to make much difference. Except you might get a kick out of it. Enjoy.

Chapter Thirty-One

The Wisdom of the Dalton

It's nothing personal.

The year 1989 produced what is quite possibly the greatest cinematic achievement in the history of the medium. I’m speaking, of course, of the film Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze as Dalton, the greatest bouncer who ever lived. There’s a scene early in the film where he takes charge of a crappy little dive in Kansas, and he’s teaching the other bouncers his rules for operating:

1)    Take it outside. Never start anything in the club unless it’s absolutely necessary.

2)    It’s a job. It’s nothing personal.

3)    Be nice.

And I thought, I can do that. So the next day I went into Houston and applied at club that a girl I knew frequented. I’d never, ever gone to clubs, partly because I didn’t drink, partly because I’ve never been fond of crowds, and mostly because I was broke all the time. But working in a club seemed okay to me. I wish I could remember the name of the place, but all club names sound the same after a while. Though I had no previous experience as a bouncer (the polite term was “doorman,” like I was a fucking guy in a bellhop’s uniform on 5^th Avenue in New York), the management was impressed enough with my martial arts background to hire me. That, and I didn’t come across as playing the badass. Charming usually gets one out of more potential trouble than trying to be tough.

     I learned from the guys who’d been at the trade for a while. I learned how to spot a fake ID, and what tricks under age kids would use to try and scam their way into the club. I learned which bartenders would actually do the right thing and cut patrons off when they felt like they were drunk, and which ones didn’t give a shit, figuring it was the bouncer’s problem. I learned that most people, when you politely told them it was time to leave the club, went without a hassle. Some occasionally got belligerent, and of these women were the worst.

     I didn’t work at that first club for very long, because it went out of business, as clubs are wont to do. But I distinctly remember one episode that had nothing to do with a bar fight, or any kind of Roadhouse antics. I was walking the floor of the club on a Saturday night, smiling and generally being friendly, when one of the bartenders I’d become friends with waved me over. I figured there was somebody who needed escorting from the club, so I was surprised when he said, “Dude! Are you gonna talk to that blonde or not?”  I followed his gaze down the end of the bar and, sure enough, a stunningly beautiful woman was looking at me. I mean, looking at me. I have never been a guy who believed himself to be attractive to the opposite sex, and so have never carried myself with that particular kind of confidence. You know, that Hey, how you doin’? kind of confidence.

     I walked over to this incredibly beautiful woman, and her friend, an obvious wingman. Trying to put on a professional face, I simply asked, “Are you ladies enjoying yourselves this evening?” To which the beautiful blonde replied, “My name is Julie (not her actual name), and my evening would be great if you would give me your number.”

     I had never – ever – had a woman come on to me before. And certainly not one this hot. I pretended as though the bartender was calling me over, and temporarily excused myself. His name was Josh (not really), and I told him my predicament. After he finished staring at me for a punch line that wasn’t coming, and realized I was quite serious about asking him what I should do, he leaned toward me conspiratorially, got right in my ear, and said, “Give her your fucking number.”

     I carried a pager at the time, gave her that number, and told her I would be off on Sunday. She said she would call – and she did. She gave me an address, told me to pick her up at 7:30pm, and said to dress casual. I rolled up in a friend’s borrowed car to a really nice, really big house. Before I could ring the doorbell, she came walking out the front door in a pair of Daisy Dukes and a tight white tank top. She paused long enough on the front porch to give me a nice, lingering kiss, then walked past me to my car (not really mine), and announced over her shoulder that she was taking me to play mini-putt golf. At that point she could have said we were going to the retirement home to give sponge-baths to old people. I would have been great with it.

     We stopped and had a quick bite at some hole-in-the-wall, then went and played mini-putt. I couldn’t help thinking it was an odd choice for a first date, but I just as quickly dismissed the thought, because she was so damn hot. She was sweet and flirty, and we made small talk, which she was much better at than me. I didn’t want to blow up the evening by getting all deep and existential, so if she wanted to talk about how Miami Vice was her favorite show ever, that was just fine with me. Eventually, though, the evening ended and I had to drive her home.

     I walked her to the front door (like a gentleman), and before I could open my mouth, she asked, “Would you like to come inside?”

     What followed was one of the most memorable make-out sessions I ever experienced. I thought we were going to break her sofa, and I had such a raging hard-on that at one point I really thought I was going to pass out. That was when she asked me if I wanted to join her in the hot tub. Like an idiot, I replied that I didn’t have a bathing suit, to which she responded, “You know, you don’t really need one.” Totally focused on not jizzing my pants, I said, “Sure. Okay.” She excused herself and went to the bathroom, and told me to meet her out back.

     I was dehydrated from the sofa action, so I wandered into the kitchen to get a drink of water, visions of this blonde beauty, sinking slowly into a hot tub, swimming in my head. This was going to be ten kinds of awesome. This was the kind of stuff movies were made about. She was hot, she was obviously doing well financially, and she dug me. At 24, I was not above being a kept man to an independent hot chick.

     These were the things I was thinking about as I passed her fridge on the way to search her cabinets for a glass. And then I stopped, and backed up. That was when I noticed the pictures on her fridge. The cheerleading pictures. Of her. And then I paid closer attention to some greeting cards that were propped up on the bar area in the kitchen. They were birthday cards. I picked one up at random:

     Julie: Happy 17^th Birthday to the Sweetest Niece EVER!!!  XOXO Aunt Diane

     The next conscious thought I had was being in my car, speeding away as though I were fleeing a murder scene. When I got back to my shitty apartment, I slammed the deadbolt home, turned off my pager, took my phone off the hook (I’d never given her my phone number), and turned off all the lights. I seriously considered having my name legally changed. About 1AM, I went outside and threw my pager as hard as I could against the side of the building, busting it all to hell. First thing next morning I got a new pager, with a new number. And then, the very next day, the club went out of business.

     I uttered a silent prayer of thanks to the universe, and started looking for a new job.

     Fortunately, a new club was opening up just down the street. Back Alley was the first club I ever worked that had real money put into it. It wasn’t some retail space in a shopping center, with the interior draped with black cloth and a couple of strobe lights for ambiance. This was a stand-alone structure, and inside it was themed to look like a back alley out of a cartoon. They’d bought a 1950’s New York City taxi cab, and set it up in the main bar area. The stage had fire escapes flanking the sides, with platforms for dancers. The mezzanine upstairs overlooked the huge dance floor, and they’d spent a ton of money on the lighting and audio systems. I was hired a week before they opened, and they’d done a pretty good job of building buzz around Houston with radio ads and word of mouth.

     This was to be a class joint. In other words, a dress code. No guys walking in with baggy gym pants and muscle shirts. Of course, if you were a woman, you could dress as slutty as you liked. But classy slutty. The idea was to create an environment where people would want to have a good time drinking, dancing, and being seen. Just like Dalton said! I was applying the lessons of the wisest bouncer in cinema to my new gig. I also applied a little of my military training, and told management that all the doormen needed the ability to communicate with each other. So we got walkies and head-sets. By the night the club officially opened for business, we had a line out the door that was an hour and a half long.

     This presented both an opportunity and a problem. The longer people wait, the less excited and the more frustrated they get. We didn’t want people walking into the club after waiting 90 minutes, being all pissed about the wait, and then power drinking to take the edge off. I suggested to management that they let me work the line. I literally walked up and down the line of patrons, introducing myself, telling jokes, complimenting them on their choice of dress, etc. This was more like political glad-handing than stand-up comedy, but it worked. (And it proved to be very good experience when, just a few years later, I’d be walking lines of parents and children, entertaining them while they waited to catch a glimpse of their favorite television canine.) I was entertaining people (sort of), and I was getting paid for it.

     I was also getting laid for it.

     When I first started working clubs as a bouncer, my very first manager offered this incentive, which was also a warning: You will get laid. A lot. The catch, he said, was the old line from Robert Heinlein: TANSTAAFL. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If you’re going to have sex with a girl that walks into the club, make damn sure that’s all she wants from you. She doesn’t want free drinks all night. She doesn’t want you to let her under age friends into the club. She doesn’t want free valet parking. Etcetera.

     I did get laid. A lot. A few times with club patrons, but mostly with other employees of the nightclub service industry. Which translates into cocktail servers, and dancers.

     In the early Nineties, you didn’t call dancers “strippers.” They treated that word the way black people treat the n-word. In other words, it was okay for them to call themselves that, but no one else better use the term. There’s a reason for the stereotyped dancer that claims she’s only doing it to pay her way through college. The fact is, a lot of them said that. But just as many would tell you proudly that they made between $800 to $1200 a night, and all they had to do was take off their clothes and dance, and show me another job where you can make that kind of scratch, asshole. Most strip clubs had a strict hands-off policy, the customers bought the dancers drinks all night long, they walked away with good cash, and they never dated or slept with anyone who came into their club.

     Which is exactly why I never went to strip clubs. With the help of a couple other doormen, I quickly identified the dancers that began to frequent Back Alley when we opened. I made sure they got at least a couple of drinks on the house, and I made sure they were not bothered, unless they wanted to be. Dancers would often come to the club in packs, and all they wanted was to drink and dance with each other, and be left alone. I did my best to make that happen, and what I got in return was sex. There was always a mutual understanding that it was what it was, and that it might happen again, or it might not. And that was it. The only time it ever went sideways on me was when a particularly lovely dancer, after a crazy night in her bedroom, sent me a thank-you card to my apartment address – which I didn’t know she had, or how she got it. (When the fuck have you ever sent a thank-you card after a one-night stand?) The problem with that was, I was living with a girl at the time. Actually, we might have been engaged at the time. Remember the vegan? Yeah.

     As a young man, I never lived simply. When things were going well, I had a habit of unconsciously (or semi-consciously) fucking them up, in order to make a change that I was too chicken-shit to initiate. I enjoyed being a bouncer; I was good at it, and the job itself was relatively simple (thank you again, Roadhouse). I certainly enjoyed the sex, with dancers, and cocktail servers, and the occasional single mom (or married one) that wanted to take me home. I kind of thought maybe I’d found my niche. Then I took a promotion and everything went to hell.

     One Saturday night toward closing, the co-owner of the club called me back to his office. Sitting with him was the general manager, a guy he’d recently hired from Michigan, I think. They’d been buddies back in the day. They wanted to know if I’d be interested in the Day Manager position at the club. This was not hourly work; it was salary. Responsibilities included ordering alcohol from suppliers, hiring and firing staff, scheduling repairs to the club, paying the bills, and setting up the cash tills every night for the bartenders. There was a lot more shit I had to do, but at the time all I was thinking was, This is my way in with these guys. There was some scuttlebutt running around the staff that the owners planned to open a second club – in Dallas. I imagined creating a new position for myself: Senior Door Supervisor / Trainer. I accepted the Day Manager job, and continued to work regular shifts as a bouncer. I didn’t like the day job, because it was all the unsexy work that went into operating a club. But I had plans. Big plans.

     In his brilliant book on the restaurant industry, Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, has this to say about restaurant owners who sense that their place is losing money, and the public is losing interest:

     He thrashes around in an escalating state of agitation, tinkering with concept, menu, various marketing schemes. As the end draws near, these ideas are replaced by more immediately practical ones: close on Sundays . . . cut back staff . . . shut down lunch. Naturally, as the operation becomes more schizophrenic-one week French, one week Italian-as the poor schmuck tries one thing after another like a rat trying to escape a burning building, the already elusive dining public begins to detect the unmistakable odor of uncertainty, fear and approaching death. And once that distinctive reek begins to waft into the dining room, he may as well lay out petri-dishes of anthrax spores as bar snacks, because there is no way the joint is gonna bounce back.

     The same should be said of nightclub owners.

     The first thing I began to notice was that we weren’t as packed during mid-week as we used to be. Ladies’ Night was thinning out, and if there were no ladies, there certainly wouldn’t be any dudes, except the ones we didn’t want in the club, anyway: the power drinkers and the looking-for-a-fight crowd. The next thing that happened was, management told us they were “relaxing” the dress code policy. I should have seen the end right there. But I liked my job, and I wanted to keep it.

Then they announced we were going to start serving food. They spent thousands of dollars they didn’t have and bought fryers, grills, and broilers. They built an entire commercial kitchen - and didn’t hire anybody to run it. I actually think they made a couple of the bar-backs go in there, and learn how to operate that shit, since the manuals were in Spanish as well as English. When you begin serving food in your nightclub, you’re not a nightclub anymore.

     When the kitchen failed to add customers, they started the concerts. It actually wasn’t a bad idea, but it marked the death of Back Alley as a hip club where people went to see and be seen. Now we were just a fucking concert venue. We hosted The Smithereens, The Stray Cats, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Peter Frampton, Cheap Trick, and Eddie Money, to name a few. We also had a concert by an up-and-coming singer songwriter named Chris Whitley, who was completely jacked on heroin, but nevertheless put on a great performance.

     Management tried to have it both ways. They thought they could be a popular nightclub AND a concert venue, though how they ever thought they would be able to segregate those two very different consumers was beyond me. Once you let a guy in your place for a concert wearing shit-kicker boots, ripped up jeans (before they were cool), and an old flannel shirt over a wife-beater, you can’t really tell him to fuck off next Friday night when he comes back – in that same outfit – to buy a couple of drinks and stare at the ladies.

     Sunday nights at our club had been Industry Night. Most folks who work in restaurants or clubs usually have Sunday evenings off, and if they came to our club with a pay-stub showing they were in the business, it was free cover and discounted drinks. Management put the knife to that idea, and announced that Sundays would now be a rave party, and the actual club name would change (only on Sundays) from Back Alley to The Warsaw Ballroom. I have no fucking idea what drove that decision, except pure desperation.

     Of course, the guys that came up with this brilliant, cutting-edge idea didn’t do their homework. If they had, they would have realized that the age of the average raver was between 17 and 20, which meant almost no alcohol sales. These kids preferred Ecstasy, which we definitely couldn’t sell from the bar – though I suspect some of the bartenders were making cash on the side doing exactly that. The other note-worthy truth that went completely unheeded by the club owners was that raves were a counter-culture thing. They were underground. The way you got into a cool rave was, you heard about it from somebody else. And here we were, buying radio time to advertise one. We couldn’t have been more lame if we started up a Library Party, or a Bingo Night.

     The death-knell came during a Crowded House concert. They put on a great show, and part of the mezzanine was blocked off after it was over for the band and some of their friends to have a private party. I usually oversaw band security, if they didn’t have any of their own. I was mingling among the band and their groupies, making sure everyone was having fun, and keeping out folks who weren’t invited, when I looked over the bannister at the dance floor, and saw some kind of commotion in the rear of the club. Before I could key my walkie and alert the guys downstairs, I heard a gunshot, and saw the muzzle flash. Without really thinking about it, I drew out my Maglite – a giant, lead pipe-sized flashlight – and lit up the spot on the floor where I saw the flash. I illuminated a diminutive Asian guy in an expensive suit, and he instinctively raised his hand to his eyes, and his gun in my general direction. Which was when he was tackled and choked out by three very large officers from Houston PD.

     I hustled the band toward the Green Room, which was fortunately accessible near where the party was taking place. When one of them protested, I reminded him that some asshole had just fired a gun in my club, and I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t meant for him. They didn’t protest after that. We pushed through the party invitees, and I locked the door of the Green Room behind me. A few minutes later I got the all clear from downstairs, and let the band back out into the club. And what was fucking crazy was, the club was still mostly packed.

     Eventually I found out that the whole episode had been, as it so often was in nightclubs, a domestic dispute. The Asian guy – who was rumored to be involved with a Vietnamese gang operating in Houston – had come to the club because he heard his girlfriend was at the concert without him, and was possibly with somebody else. He confronted her near the back of the club, they argued, and then, I guess to make his point, he pulled out a 9mm and fired it into the concrete floor. I never found where the bullet wound up, and I looked for it for a fucking week. But a shard of concrete blasted out of the floor with enough force to embed itself in a female guest’s leg. She was treated and released at a local hospital, and we were damn lucky that no one died.

     I wound up firing the guy who was in charge of the door that evening. We never did pat-downs on regular club nights, but with concerts it was required. Too many people tried to smuggle in their own alcohol – or weapons – to a show. The guy at the door figured that, since the concert was over, he didn’t need to pat down anybody else coming in. I felt bad for him, because he had a point. But the gun got inside on his watch, and that was that.

     Back Alley was radioactive after that. The only people who came in any more were the barflies and the desperate. People with money tended to shy away from establishments where there had been gunfire. Staff started getting the boot, and I got fired as Day Manager, for two reasons. First, they could no longer afford to pay me. Second, because they knew I’d been lifting petty cash out of the safe. I won’t attempt to justify it. It was never much; just twenty dollars here and there. But it was stealing, and I’m not proud of it. The GM said I could come in on Saturdays (the only night the club was still open), and work the lighting board for $75 for the evening. I’d expected cash, but he said they’d continue to cut me a check, which I should have known was bullshit. The next payday, I went to the club, and saw what few staff members remained standing outside the employee entrance, reading a notice posted on the door. It said that the U.S. Marshall Service had taken the place over, as the property had been forfeited.

     I don’t know what the owners of the club were doing with the money I know they were making when Back Alley was new, and hip, and the biggest thing in town. But I do know what they weren’t doing with the money; namely, paying their creditors, or most of their vendors. Or their taxes. With chains on the doors, there was literally nothing for any of us to do except walk away, promising to keep in touch.

     We never did.

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Chapter Thirty.

Where were the women, Bill? Where were the goddam Winnebagos?

     This week's chapter is a period of which I am proud and not proud. You'll understand in a minute. I have nothing genuinely negative to say about my brief time in the military, but you must understand that the Army I came from is almost unrecognizable today. That's good and bad, but mostly bad, I think. I'm not climbing up on my soapbox today, though. I've had a rough week and I just want to keep on keeping on with the book. If you're still hanging in after thirty chapters, you have my undying gratitude. (You may also need to see a therapist...)

Chapter Thirty

Being (Mostly) All I Can Be

 And then I went completely out of my mind and joined the army.

     I wish I could tell you it was because of my deep love for country; my sense of patriotism and pride at membership in the greatest nation on Earth. The truth is, I knew that if I didn’t get out of that fucking house – by any means necessary – I was probably going to kill my stepfather, and I didn’t think I was capable enough to live life on the run. Without telling my mother or anyone else, I went down to the recruiter’s office. He interviewed me for half an hour, I took the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), and a week later I was being sworn in to the U.S. Army. I vaguely remember my friends throwing me a going-away party, but since at the time I didn’t drink, it was probably more depressing than festive.

     The next morning somebody – it might actually have been my stepfather – drove me into Houston, to the recruiter depot where I and a bunch of other newly minted government employees took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic. And I discovered that I actually meant it. That was kind of surprising. We boarded a bus for Hobby Airport, there to board a flight for Atlanta, Georgia, there to board another bus for a long, overnight drive to Columbus, home of the Fort Benning Military Reservation.

     We arrived at the Reception Battalion in the middle of the night. Maybe a few guys had slept on the bus, but I didn’t. I was beginning to wonder just what the fuck I had gotten myself into. As we rolled up, I could see several men in BDUs (battle dress uniform, or camos), wearing those Smokey The Bear hats with the flat brim, that made them somehow look more menacing than amusing. We all scrambled off the bus without being told, and tried to line ourselves up like the clumsy civilians we were, and it took a minute to realize that nobody was yelling at us. The drill sergeants quietly (and almost politely) asked us to secure our bags from under the bus, which we then placed at our feet and had to open for inspection. That was when the dogs were brought out, and that was when I realized that some guys might try to sneak stuff into the army that the army kind of frowned on. The drill sergeants went through every bag. One guy lost a stack of Playboys; another had his Walkman confiscated. At least nobody on my bus was dumb enough to try and smuggle in drugs.

     We were ushered into Reception Battalion, a brand new building with gleaming bays of bunk beds for new arrivals. Old-timers on base called these new buildings “starships,” and I was to learn just how new they were when I got down range to my training battalion, and essentially stepped backward in time to the 1940s. But for now I was assigned a bunk, I placed my bag underneath it, and crawled in. The time was 3am (0300), and we had to be up at 6am (0600) to begin In-Processing. The bay was already half full of recently arrived recruits, who’d gotten there maybe a day ahead of us. But they were already talking shit and acting tough. I did what I usually do in new situations, which was to keep my mouth shut and observe.

     In-Processing consisted of haircuts (shave it down to the nub), fitting and acquisition of uniforms (BDUs and Dress, summer and winter gear, standard infantry boots, socks, underwear, etc.), vaccinations (I actually saw a couple of guys faint during this process), more tests (to determine pre-disposition or education for things like how to drive tanks, make quick decisions under stress, eye-hand coordination, cognitive reasoning, etc.), and an endless number of poorly produced welcome and informational videos, during which we had to sit on benches designed to promote numbness in the legs and feet, followed by severe back ache. These videos consisted of everything from how to address a passing officer (salute and say “Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening, Sir or Ma’am), to how to pick the right running shoe. Because, as it turns out, we’d be doing a lot of fucking running.

     All told we spent about five days in Reception Battalion – long enough, I think, to give us all a false sense that this was what Army life was going to be like. And it wasn’t that bad. I was actually optimistic the day we boarded the buses to go down range and begin Basic Training. I firmly believe this false sense of reality was very carefully devised by the men in charge. We rolled into an area of whitewashed clapboard buildings straight out of a WWII film, and there were several more drill sergeants. As the bus rolled to a stop, one of them stepped aboard and said, evenly, “Gentlemen, welcome to Fort Benning, home of the Infantry. NOW GOT YOUR FUCKING ASSES OFF OF THIS BUS!!”

     We collectively shit our pants, and tumbled off the buses as fast as we could push each other out. Drill sergeants were on every side, screaming orders we couldn’t understand, ripping our duffel bags out of our hands and strewing their contents all over the blacktop. One kid passed right out from sheer terror (he wound up in my platoon). Once they had thoroughly shaken us down and lined us up, they started walking down the ranks, asking each recruit the same question: “What the fuck did YOU do in the outside world, asshole?” Some guys answered they were right out of high school, some had been in the trades (plumbing, woodwork,), some had been unemployed. When they got to me, I answered the only honest thing I could think of. I was NOT trying to sound tough; these people scared the shit out of me.

     “I was a martial arts instructor, Drill Sergeant!” (No fucking way was I going to answer, “I used to do standup comedy, Drill Sergeant!”)

     I got a double take from the guy who asked me the question, and he stared me down like he thought I was lying. Then he asked me something even more frightening: “Is your name Brantley?”  We didn’t even have name-tape on our uniforms yet; just white pieces of tape with our roster numbers. How the fuck did he know my name?  I answered in the affirmative, and he moved on down the line.

     I was made a Squad Leader, which meant I had responsibility for myself and seven other guys, in a platoon of forty. My primary responsibility was to make sure that my squad and me had our shit squared away at all times. The job of Platoon Guide was given to a guy named Pettit, I think, but he didn’t last more than a week. I was less than thrilled when Drill Sergeant Tiller (“Killer Tiller,” we called him – behind his back), looked at me and said, “YOU do it.” And just like that I was “promoted” to a position I didn’t want, responsible for forty guys, the only thing of which we all had in common was that we were wondering how we could have been so drunk or stupid as to enlist in the army.

     The military was the first place I learned I had the capacity to lead. I didn’t really have a choice, and I was a reluctant leader at best. If I could end most days of Basic and Advanced Infantry Training without any of my guys getting into deep shit with the Drill Sergeants, that counted as a good day. There were plenty of guys in the platoon that disliked me, maybe even a few who hated my guts – but mostly because I was the authority figure, I think. No one ever challenged me outright, and I think this was because back then there was still a mystique to somebody who practiced martial arts. You just didn’t fuck with them. But I hope the main reason nobody ever tried to beat my ass was because I was an okay leader.

     I will say that the army provided a structure and order to my life I had never known, and that I found I craved. Knowing what you were going to do every day, and what was expected of you, knowing the system of rewards and punishments, knowing the boundaries of your world; those things at that time in my life probably saved me from doing something completely stupid and self-destructive, had I not enlisted. I actually started to excel, and I liked the feeling of being good at something. I learned, for example, that I was a damn good shot with just about any weapon, even though prior to the army I had only fired a gun once or twice in my life (including the time I’d murdered a perfectly good bathroom window). I also learned that I sucked at Land Navigation (this is back when a GPS was referred to as a “compass,” and one of those is still as useful to me as a third nipple), but I befriended a guy in my platoon named Casanova (swear to God). He was this skinny little Mexican kid from Houston, with ears that stuck out sideways from his head. He looked like the Latin version of Alfred E. Newman, the face of Mad Magazine. But he saved me from flunking Land Nav, and he never got us lost in the Georgia woods once.

     For all the things I may have gained during Basic (order, structure, etc.), what I lost was my sense of humor. I simply didn’t have time for it. I couldn’t be the class clown in the platoon, because I was in charge. My desire to be good at something was in direct conflict with my nature as a human being, and I was miserable. Before I ever graduated Basic, I’d already decided I wouldn’t be making a career out of the military. I’d do my time, and I’d do my best – and then I’d get out.

     I’d enlisted late in the year, and was still in Basic Training as Christmas was approaching. The army has a contingency for just about everything, including new recruits and the holidays. I took part in something called Christmas Exodus, when all recruits in Basic are allowed – at the government’s expense – to travel home for the holidays. I went home for two weeks, and mostly what I did during that time was sleep. I also came down with the flu. I didn’t want to stay, and I didn’t want to go back. During her sober moments my mom would tell me how proud she was of me. I knew that failure to show back up at Benning would be a federal offense, and that might be the only thing that got me on the plane back to Georgia.

     I managed to finish both Basic and Advanced Infantry Training without getting “fired” from my position as Platoon Guide. I was Honor Graduate of my platoon, and my family actually made the trip up from Texas to see me graduate. We all spent that weekend in nearby Columbus, along with my best friend from Basic, a Miami native named Eduardo Lopez, whose family couldn’t make the trip. The following Monday, Lopez and I had to report to Airborne School.

     The First Battalion, 507^th Parachute Infantry Regiment is where soldiers learn how to jump out of airplanes and into combat. Lopez and I, along with our friend Sean MacGuire (who also came out of Basic with us), ended up in Delta Company, which had a history of the toughest instructors and the highest standards. Airborne School consisted of four weeks of training: Zero Week, Ground Week, Tower Week, and Jump Week. Our first day in, the company commander addressed us. I can’t remember everything he said, but this bit stuck with me:

     “Now some people might ask you WHY you would want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Your answer in these situations should always be that the U.S. Air Force doesn’t make any PERFECTLY GOOD airplanes, and it is best to know how to leave one quickly, and here we will teach you that skill.”

     I made it all the way through Tower Week. The Friday morning before we would actually start jumping out of planes, we went for a company run, as we had every day since the beginning of Airborne School. On a steep decline, making a sharp left turn to head back to the barracks, my left foot planted and stayed put while the rest of me turned 90 degrees, partially tearing my ACL. And just like that, my army days were done.

     I could have stayed in. I had options. I remember going over them with my company commander. I could have become a Range Instructor. I could have taken any number of desk jobs. But the last option he gave me was to honorably discharge, and I jumped at it. My friends had already graduated Airborne and were long gone. I was in a sort of bureaucratic Purgatory, and I already knew I wasn’t going to make the army a career. When I told him I wanted to go home, he looked over his thick spectacles at me with utter contempt. And I thought, I don’t care. You’re just one more person I’m disappointing. Get in line. A few weeks later, a guy I’d befriended at Headquarters Company, named Lennon, drove me to the bus station.  I hopped a Greyhound for Atlanta, and there I got on a plane and flew home, with absolutely no goddamn idea what I was going to do next.

     And that’s how I became a bouncer.

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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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