Almost Interesting

DEDICATION

To my lovely mom, the real writer in the family and the

strongest person I know (excluding Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Bryan, Andy, and I would be nowhere without you.

Thanks for not bailing when things got tough.

Tough being an understatement.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

H
ey. Welcome to my stupid book. I wrote it myself, so I’ll take all the blame. I had so many titles when I decided to do this. My friend said it’s like having a kid, naming it is the best part, and then the rest is shitty. Kidding! But the rest of writing it is actually hard work, which is not my strong suit. I had a few title pitches that were considered in my first meeting then promptly shot down day one after I signed up. I thought
My Stupid Life
wasn’t bad and we could run with that. But that was shot down. Then I tried
My Life as a 10
. I liked that. Sort of funny. (Because I’m only a 9.) I liked
Dear Diary
because it was nice and vague. Then came
Rags to Bitches.
That was briefly discussed, but bookstores said no. And of course
Punchlines and Pussy
never made it out of the gate. So we landed on the one you see now. I’m good with it.

FYI, this book is not that serious. This is meant to be read when super bored, then forgotten fifteen minutes later. It could be read cover-to-cover during one medium-to-severe case of diarrhea. Nothing in it will change your life. There are no easy tips to lose belly fat like I see on my computer every day. It’s just me blabbing away about my life and
SNL
and getting beat up by my assistant and any other stupid shit I could think of. It’s easy to read, no big words cuz I don’t know any. It’s like watching
Dolphin Tale
on HBO and then forgetting you ever saw it. By the way, I did see
Dolphin Tale
and didn’t forget it. In fact I had a few problems with it . . . this might not be the forum for this, but quickly: It’s about a dolphin with a bad attitude who gets caught in some lobster traps and his tail gets chopped off and so he’s fucked. He’s basically an anchor because he doesn’t have a rudder. He starts freaking out so people start to help him and for some reason he’s a dick about it. They make him a crummy little tail out of popsicle sticks or whatever and he doesn’t like it. This is where I’d say “It’s for your own good, dipshit!” but he’s not having it. Then they get a doctor to make a better one and he’s still being a pussy. He smashes it against the wall and breaks it. Like, “I hate it! It’s not my real tail! I hate the ocean! I hate everyone!!!” Full Jan Brady tantrum. Then he realizes it helped and starts nudging the fake tail like, “Put it back on, I get it now,” and they are like, “Fuck off, you don’t want it, remember?? You’re so fucking tough! Have fun drowning, moron, because this is going on a shark now. You’re an asshole.”

Anyway, I feel I went off on a tangent, but I think what I’m saying is my book is like
Dolphin Tale
but with fewer jokes.

Have a nice read!

CHAPTER ONE

GROWING UP

I
was supposed to die. That’s what seven different doctors in a row told my parents. I came out a month early, a superpreemie (I think that is the street term). I was probably about five pounds and roughly the size of a hacky sack or a medium-size gerbil. To make matters worse, I couldn’t eat anything without barfing it all up. I was allergic to everything, so I couldn’t put on weight. It was all very scary to the parental units (warning:
Coneheads
reference). All I could choke down was goat’s milk, of all things. So gross. The hardest part was taking that goat everywhere. (JOKE NUMBER ONE, FOLKS! Stay close: there are four more buried in this book somewhere.) Thank God Mom and Dad kept hammering away at different doctors because eventually, they found one who said, “I’ve seen this shit . . .before.” (Very casual doctor.) “When he's a . . . year old he will grow out of it and start eating regular food.” The dude was right; when I turned a year old I climbed out from under that goat and said, “Fuck this, let’s go to Wendy’s!” Obviously I have bulked up to my present athletic appearance since then, but it was touch-and-go there for a while. You can all relax. Spade is ripped and ready for the Combine (NFL reference).

By the way, my parents met when Dad was in the air force as a radar man (the biggest pussy job) and Mom was a sweet, attractive little debutante who went from private schools to Denison University in Ohio. They both attended and I guess the sparks flew. I can’t imagine the sparks but they tell me they were there. So in a major playa move my dad, Sammy, put a ring on it and my mom was looking forward to a very quiet, normal life in the Midwest raising a family with her doting husband nearby. (We will find out how this plan went off the tracks later. These “hooks” keep you reading!)

N
eedless to say, growing up I was pretty microscopic, and I hated it. I wasn’t just short, I was “Oh fuck I hope everything’s cool with this kid. Maybe he’s actually a hamster” short. I’m one of three kids. All dudes. Bryan, Andy, and David. B.A.D., as my mom joked. (She’s not a pro comedian so I didn’t expect an LOL out of that.) I’m the baby. And compared to my brothers I looked like a baby, and I acted like a baby, too. I was such a gigantic pussy/mama’s boy growing up it was almost comical. Actually, not almost comical. It is comical. Now. At the time, it was just plain sad. Anyone could beat me up, at any time. I was fragile. And I was always scared.

I’ll back up a bit. I was born in Michigan. (Fuck this book—it’s boring already. Pick up the pace, Spade.) When I was four, my dad had the great idea to move from Michigan (where he was from and where my brothers and I were all born) to Arizona. I think the move was motivated by my dad’s desire to cheat on my mom in a different state. Apparently he had plowed through Michigan (literally) and was ready to take on the valley of the sun. Sammy wasn’t super reliable, so once we got there it became clear that he didn’t have the job he said he did, so he grabbed some temp sales job at a magazine that didn’t pay shit. He then scrammed on the family and that was that. No calls, no alimony, no child support. Crickets across the board. So my mom, who is truly a saint, had the unfortunate job of raising three selfish rug rats, with little to no income in a town she didn’t know with zero friends around. The least Dad could have done was bail out on her in Michigan so she had some peeps around, but he was too selfish to be that thoughtful.

So there we were frying in the desert with no dough, and no plan. Mom had to go out and get two jobs. However, this was the seventies, when guys were assholes and women didn’t get paid anything. (Sort of like today! Yay, progress!) So she worked constantly, as a secretary and also doing sales at a department store, while my brothers and I constantly bitched about not having enough of everything. (Why don’t I have a surfboard?!) It must have been tough on her. Mom would break down sometimes, but mostly she wouldn’t complain and tried to make her ungrateful children happy. My dad would show up once a year and give me a Nerf football for Christmas and act like he was a hero. (Me: Oh my God it’s two colors—you spoil us!) The thing was, he
was
sort of a hero when he came around. When your dad isn’t there, you wonder what the fuck you did that was so bad to make him go. It’s not like his kids were accidents. He’d planned to have a family. Then he couldn’t take the presh and skadoodled, leaving Mom with zero babysitting money and skimpy food rations. But when he came to visit, it was like the pope had come to town or something; we were all over him. Not really fair to Mom, but that’s just the way it works when you are a kid.

I never really noticed I was poor. When you’re a kid, you just find shit to do around the house or yard to keep yourself busy. If you’ve never had badass toys, you don’t miss them. And people around us were poor, too, so I fit right in. I had no complaints. I used my imagination to entertain myself. I also had a rock collection and a beer can collection I was very proud of. This was my mom’s idea. I didn’t realize till later this was genius on her part. “Hey Davey, you should collect rocks and cans! THEY’RE FREE! While you’re at it, collect old cigarettes butts and broken glass too.” Very crafty of her. And I’m not bragging, but I had mica, pyrite, and an amethyst in my collection. (Side note to readers: Amethysts, those big purple crystal-looking ones, were a big panty dropper back in the day. Even the big old-school seventies panties, with the louvers.) Dinners at home usually consisted of the five main food groups: tater tots, fish sticks, mac and cheese, Oreos, and cereal. Some combination of these. With a Coke or milk. She did her best; later we moved up to Lean Cuisine. We were ballin’.

From day one, I was the school pipsqueak. In class pictures they sat us shortest to tallest and I was always first. It was me then girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, then another guy. To be shorter than every chick was so humiliating, and made me the ultimate bully bait. In third grade a fellow student came up to me during recess and said, “Hey Spade, I heard your family’s poor.” Being in the dark about this fact, I was like, “What? Oooohhh no, you got some bad information.” A few hotties from my class were drifting by, and they stopped to listen. By the way, being poor isn’t the panty dropper you think it is, even in third grade. Chicks were like “Let him answer . . . !” The guy said again, “I hear you guys have no money.” Now I was getting nervous, but mostly I was thinking,
What a dick! Why are you cock-blocking me?! I barely know you!
So I tried to defend myself. I said, in a sort of “I rest my case” tone, “Would we have
two
tires on our lawn if we were poor?” He was like, “Uhhh, yeah?” So I keep going: “Would I be wearing the same thing every day if I was poor?” Now this one didn’t sound good as it came out. And then, it all sort of hit me. We were broke. And that sucked. But my mom was sneaky. She’d say, “That outfit looks so good on you, why don’t you wear it tomorrow?” Classic bamboozle. That day was the end of my poverty innocence. You’d think at some point my dopey brothers might have tipped me off.