Almost Interesting (2 page)

In addition to being the shortest and now the poorest, I also had the worst school supplies. My crayons were always that little ghetto four-pack my mom swiped from IHOP and stuffed in her bra (“nothing for me today, thanks”). These came with the four basic colors: blue, red, green, yellow. One day this foxy chick, who should have been in pre-supermodel school instead of my dogshit class, was sitting next to me said, “Hey, can I borrow a crayon?” I was like, BOOOIOIOIOIOIOINGGG! Wiener went up so fast it did a gainer. This brat had never talked to me and now we have some chatter going. I couldn’t fumble it. This is not a drill! All these thoughts were going through my head. But I played it cool. “Why sure . . .” as I looked through my four nubby little crayons, trying to pick one that wasn’t broken. Then she coyly upped the ante: “Do you happen to have Burnt Sienna?” I froze. In my head, I was thinking,
WTF? How ’bout red you little grub worm?
But I didn’t freak out. I still was playing my Fonzie attitude. “Um, let me check . . .” (Mumbling as I sifted through them.) “Hmm . . . yellow . . . blue . . . yellow again . . .” I was stalling.

Then out of nowhere some rich prick in back of me chimed in: “I have Burnt Sienna.” I turn around and saw that he had the mega-box of sixty-four Crayolas. Like a cinder block. Biggest one you can get. It even has a balcony. Every goddamn color in the rainbow was in there, so many they are squirting out the sides. It even had Clear! Who needs Clear? It does nothing! It’s like writing with a booger. So he plucked it out and without warning started sharpening it on the back of the box! There was a sharpener on the back! It was so cool. A hush fell over the room. Even I was freaking out. All the chicks were staring in disbelief. They were so turned on. I’m serious, there was not a dry pussy in the place. Even the teacher was drenched . . . it was like Splashdown! Kaaaatrina! Niiiiiagra! He handed the crayon to her and she slid off her chair in ecstasy. Of course, she never looked at me again. So you can see, I’ve always had a way with the gals. This proved I needed some game.

When I was about nine my mom married a doctor. He was a very tall, very bald, very eccentric guy named Howard P. Hyde, and the polar opposite of my real dad, Sammy. This guy was
no
fun, had
no
personality,
did
have a job,
was
responsible,
and
gave a fuck about us. My mom liked the change of pace. Not sure she was ever in love with him because he was a bit quirky and not exactly
GQ
material, but he wanted to save us and apparently he was okay with Judy being only 5 percent into him. He was a little strange, but I liked him. He was from South Dakota. I’d never known anyone from there before and haven’t since. I never called him Dad, but I came close once. It just felt too weird. Even so, I almost kicked over and used his last name, Hyde. Spade Sr. hadn’t given me any reason to be proud of my heritage or anything. But when some kid I was riding bikes with said to me, “Hey Hyde, lets go hit 7-Eleven!” I realized that doesn’t sound as cool as “Spade.” Howie did have some lasting influences on my life. He introduced me to coin collecting, chess, and guns. (Wow, Spade, you were a total nerd.) Chess, you say? Well, this may come as a shocker but I was a smart kid. Hyde liked that because he was a member of Mensa and had gone to Duke. (Talk about a major nerd alert when he whipped out that Mensa card . . . sirens went off.) So, we bonded over smarty-pants things. He convinced me to take German in high school because he was fluent.

I really can’t think of a more useless language or waste of my high school time than taking a semester of German, especially since we lived in Casa Grande, Arizona. This was a dumpy copper mining town two hundred miles from THE MEXICAN BORDER! HOW ’BOUT I TAKE SPANISH? SOMETHING I’LL USE EVERY DAY OF MY FUCKING LIFE! But no, German it was. So I struggled through an elective and now I can maybe hit on Heidi Klum one day. (
Guten Tag, Heidi! Hast du einen Bruder? Nein aber ich habe zwei Schwestern!
Translation: “Do you have any brothers? No, but I have three sisters.” Yeah baby! That was right out of the German 101 textbook and, shockingly, never came in handy.)

So Howie was a smart guy, but mostly he was a little nuts. For instance, he gave me a shotgun and a shotgun shell reloader for Christmas once. When I was TEN, FOLKS. I was like, “Well, I wanted a skateboard, but okay?” So now it’s sixth grade and I’ve got street cred because peeps found out I had a shotgun. I went skeet shooting with Howie and reloaded all my own shells. I played chess, even making it to the state chess finals before I had to drop out. I got whomped with German measles in a cruel turn and I was laid out for twelve days. What a bummer. I almost croaked; actually that’s the closest I’ve come. I also read the most books in my school (forty-seven one year)
and
was spelling bee champ. (I got smoked in the first round. How could I choke on
apparatus
? A-P-A . . . Wait! GONG!!) So I was king of the local nerds with my nerdy stepdad. All was good. So I thought.

Then, the stepdad started getting crazier and crazier. He had been a doctor during the Vietnam War, so he had post-traumatic stress syndrome. Not that we knew that. We just thought he was being a weirdo. He would have flashbacks of battles and wake us up in middle of the night to go out and look for the enemy, wearing his green army helmet and carrying a gun. We would play along. Why not? It seemed like fun to three boys, until one night when he accidentally blew a hole in the roof of his closet. That’s when it got a bit “quirky-heavy” for me.

My brothers and I were three little white trash troublemakers running around our shitty mining town blowing up bullfrogs and horny toads with M-80 firecrackers, freezing locusts and tying dental floss around them so when they unfroze we could fly them around like locust kites, and causing all sorts of
Joe Dirt
–style trouble. My oldest brother, Bryan, was the craziest of our gang. He had a cage in his room filled with five rattlesnakes. He also had a boa constrictor and a python. And I thought nothing of it.
Umm, WTF??
That’s a lot of reptile in one house. Who were we? Marilyn Manson? Once we tried to add to Bryan’s collection by catching a rattler that was chillin’ in our front yard. We were trying to catch it with two tennis rackets. The idea was to grab the snake behind the head by pinching the rackets together and then push it into an empty plastic milk jug (white trash 101). Well, Howard Pierre Hyde pulled up, drunk as yoozsh. (This was when cops didn’t hassle you for driving drunk. Aka the good old days.) The man drank a case of Coors tallboys every day, so that wasn’t so unusual. He saw what we were up to and yelled out, “Why are you pussyfooting around? You just pick it up.” He grabbed the snake with his bare hands. (I always knew there was a reason why you don’t just pick up snakes. They BITE.) And naturally, it bit him. He didn’t even flinch. He just said, “Well, I’m going to go take a nap.” My brothers and I looked at each like, “No shit dude, I bet you will.” Howie took off his shirt and flopped on the couch, and we just stood and stared at him. In twenty minutes his whole side swelled up and turned purple and we watched it happen live (shout-out to Andy Cohen). We shook him awake and called an ambulance. He was in pretty rough shape for a while there but eventually pulled through. We still kept all the snakes in the house, though. We learned zero from that.

My stepdad also had a buddy from the army who lived near us with his family. This dude had married a Vietnamese girl during the war, and she already had four kids when they got hitched. HPH (Howard Pierre Hyde) helped the family come to the States, and they actually lived IN OUR HOUSE for a while. Um, so let’s do that math for a second. Their family of six. My family of five. That’s a grand total of eleven people in that shit shack. As you can imagine, that didn’t last too long, so they skedaddled over to the trailer park (shout-out to Kid Rock!). And we had to go over to the trailer park and hang with these kids. Their names were, in order, Shin, Que, Trang, and Lan. Not exactly Manny, Moe, and Jack. They were close to our ages, probably like eight, seven, six, and four. I have to say, I barely remember these kids at all, but I recall Trang being kind of hot. I’m not even super into Asians like my friends all seem to be, but Trang drew some plasma down to my dick region. Always sporting a slutty barrette, barely knowing English. It all worked. I was too young to know about sex, but I knew I was digging her and things were getting tingly in wiener town. Her mom must have caught on because she never let me hang out with her. Shin and I hung out the most. He was around my age and he was the smartest one of that crew, so we had that to bond over. That year, Shin and I were even put ahead in school two grades for reading and math. (That’s right, folks,
two
grades, not one!) I’d be talking to the ladies in my third-grade class going, “Oh shit, look at the time. I’ve gotta scoot. Have to trot down the hall to fifth grade for reading and math. We’re doing a little thing called fractions, you wouldn’t understand. No big. Don’t wait up . . .” It was a pretty solid rap for a third grader.

We had a pretty good run with old Howard, all in all. The sad part came when I was about fifteen and his therapists told Mom that Howie was getting worse, that he was a danger to us and to himself and that she should split. She got a divorce and it crushed him, but she had to keep her boys safe. He left for good after that. I felt bad. He was a good guy but seeing so much shit in the war fucked with him. All the kids liked the guy even though he was socially awkward. He had a good heart. My mom took it hard because she just wanted us to have a normal family and this latest sitch was coming to an end.

Then one day, out of the blue, I got a bike in the mail. The tag said that it was from Sam Spade, my real dad. Shocking but I’ll take it! Then, the next day, a couch showed up. Hmm. From Sam again! Double hmm. This guy hadn’t given me anything more than a snow cone for ten years. WTF? Something was fishy. Then more shit appeared. It just kept coming. Soon enough, we got the news. Howard had used his hospital connections to make a fake ID to pose as my dad. He started sending us the shit Sam never provided for us when we were younger. Howard was so mad at Sam for ditching us, that this was his kooky way of helping us out while also getting back at him. Sam wound up getting thrown in jail until it was sorted out.

The police eventually figured out the fraud and caught up to Howard. They cornered him in a motel somewhere in the Midwest. He didn’t give up; instead he quietly took the drugs he brought and killed himself. He had it all planned. It was pretty sad.

I found out later he had tried to take his own life once before with a shotgun, but my mom had knocked it away just in time. That’s when he blew the hole through the closet ceiling in our house.

A
few years later my mom got so pissed at Sam that she finally talked a lawyer friend into helping her out to get some dough out of him. My dad hadn’t paid a cent of child support or alimony in years. She could never do anything about it, because she was broke. So this lawyer friend got my mom her day in court. Sammy trotted in with his flip-flops, Lacoste shirt (collar flipped up), Bermuda shorts, and Carrera sunglasses. The judge said, “Are you Sam Spade?” “Live and in person!” he smarmily replied. “Is it true you never paid this woman a dime in all these years since leaving her?” the judge asked. “Well, it’s tricky, Judge, you know how it is with the dune buggy payments and the brunches . . .” SLAM! (Gavel coming down, in case you were confused.) SIXTY DAYS IN JAIL! Sammy got dragged away. “Whhhaattt? What’s happening?? I can’t go to jail, I have a thing at noon. Come on, Judge, don’t do this!! BE COOL! YOU’RE A GUY!!” Sam only did about two days (like Paris Hilton) but it was a good scare. Apparently all it did was scare him back into the bars looking for women to pick up, but at least Mom tried.

CHAPTER TWO

MAMA’S BOY

I
’m probably a total mess today because growing up, my mom was the only one around most of the time. And believe me, my mom did her best, but I was really just a boy without a dad, drifting aimlessly around Arizona. Don’t get me wrong, I had waves of seeming tough, but I didn’t realize it. When I was ten and my brothers were twelve and fourteen my mom would drop us off at one end of the desert when she went to work and pick us up seven miles away at a Chevron station when she got done. This was only when she didn’t have a babysitter and I’m sure done out of desperation. The funny part was she would also let us each bring a gun and ammo so we could shoot shit along the way. We had a rifle, a pistol, and a shotgun. But also a canteen, bag lunch, and Bactine (in case of emergency!). I never thought twice about this other than remembering it was really fun, and today some fuddy-duddies might consider this “dangerous.” But down deep I was a mama’s boy. As much as I wish it wasn’t true it just happened. The things that dads teach sons, I never really learned. My mom loved to give us presents, but there wasn’t a man around to tell my mom, “Hey hon, that’s kind of a fruity gift for our son.” Once HPH was gone, the shotguns stopped appearing under the Christmas tree. She’s a mom and moms are chicks. And that’s cool, but Mom didn’t get the fact that for every female-slanted present you give a boy, you have to even it out with some solid manly gift. That’s just the rule. Like for every set of socks or tighty whities, there needs to be a punching bag or skateboard. One Christmas, she had a major brainstorm. “I’m going to take a school picture of each of the boys, and put it on something they can keep forever!!” (Zero logic, by the way. This reeks of something in SkyMall but there was no SkyMall then. Somehow, in the seventies we managed to get by without a Bug Vacuum or Hot Diggity Dogger; go figure.) So, dear Mom went out and got us each a specific thing with our photo emblazoned upon it. Bryan got a coffee mug with his mug plastered on it. Not horrible, although he was fourteen and probably wasn’t a major Sanka drinker at that point, but no biggie. Coffee mugs also hold Tang and Mr. Pibb, so he was fine. And, if necessary, he could bury it in the back of the cupboard and no one would be the wiser. Then came Andy’s turn. He woke up Christmas morning and unwrapped a pillow with one whole side as his school head shot. Wow. None of us knew what to say. We all just stared while Mom beamed. “Dontcha just love it?!” she said. Andy sort of shrugged thank you, knowing down deep this wasn’t a great one for show-and-tell . . . because Andy and Bryan were tougher and more manly than me. Bryan is the dude who got into fights all the time, and went to jail at fourteen, which I don’t even think is possible anymore. He’s also the dude who loves snakes and beer and tarantulas. Andy’s not quite as Paul Bunyan as Bryan, but he’s the dude who dressed cool, had a cool bike, and got girls two years older than him. So he knew that he had to bury that present in the closet, facedown so in the event anyone peeked in they wouldn’t see this smiling head shot.