Bare Bones (5 page)

Fans of my show are familiar with Vic Gandolph, who was my football coach from the eighth grade until I graduated high school. He still calls in to the show, and to be honest I'm not even sure I'd have a show without him. I know it seems hard to believe, but I was really dedicated to playing football, despite being a scrawny pip-squeak compared to most of the team. Coach Gandolph taught me to own up to your mistakes and that a lot of people have talent, but talent alone doesn't win. “If you want to win,” he said, “you must outwork everyone else, every day, all the time.” It's very much where my “Fight. Grind. Repeat.” mantra came from. He also taught me about adversity—that it's not
if
we face it but how we react
when
we face it. “Tough times don't last,” he said, “but tough people do.” I'm so grateful for my relationship with this man.

Then there was my best friend Evan's dad, Jerry McGrew. Evan and I had bonded over baseball; we were both on the team and Jerry was the coach. I admired Jerry, a veteran, because he had been injured in combat and still kept such a positive outlook on life. He also loved coaching Evan and me, even though Evan was his son and far more talented than I was. But I worked harder. And I think Jerry respected that. The McGrews also took me on my only childhood vacation. We went on a van trip to Colorado. I don't know if I had ever even been out of Arkansas at that point, and for sure my family couldn't afford any kind of vacation. But they took me to the mountains and paid for everything. I'm not kidding when I say that it is still one of the highlights of my life, and something I am still incredibly grateful for.

But by far the most significant stand-in I had for a father was my stepdad, Keith. I got lucky as a teenager; my mom married a good guy.

When I was about thirteen years old, we moved into his house and instantly made it very, very crowded. There were six of us at one time in his nine-hundred-square-foot place: my mom, stepdad, his two daughters, my sister, and me. So, again, I slept on the living room couch, cramming my bedding behind it and my clothes underneath.

But for the next four years, until I left for college, Keith was a solid and consistent presence—meaning, he had a job. My stepdad worked at the mill, when there still was one. Although he worked a lot, he still found time to do those things that I had heard fathers were supposed to.

He played catch with me in the backyard and even let me play on his adult softball team, which as a young kid was a blast. He was a decent athlete, but his real passion was fishing, and he often took me with him. I had fantasized about fishing with my dad, but when the time came to do the real thing I found it pretty darn boring. It didn't matter, though. Anytime Keith asked if I wanted to go fishing, I said yes, because I just wanted that father-son experience. We hunted, too, which I wasn't into. I don't like to kill animals, even though I like to eat them. (I recognize the hypocrisy of my statement. The deer we killed were good, and so was the pork I ate a few minutes ago.)

I was surprised whenever my stepdad showed up at one of my baseball games. I don't think anyone else from my family ever came to one of my school or sporting events, which I used as a form of permission to try whatever I wanted to as opposed to as a reason to hold myself back. I was never told that I could do things, but I was also never told that I couldn't.

Still, I had to admit it was nice seeing Keith in the stands that day, particularly since he had a job and therefore a good excuse for not being able to come to any of my games. I didn't make a big deal of it, and neither did he, but I liked it when he was there.

Despite every sign that proved Keith was a reliable man, when it came down to it, I never truly believed he would be there forever. I liked the idea of having a dad, but I didn't trust my mom to keep him around. I had no idea what their relationship was about. From my position, it was pretty dysfunctional. He worked a lot, and she sat home a lot drinking. My mom was who she was, and she was never going to change. Sadly, I too was hardwired by the time Keith came into our lives. I liked having him around, but as a teenager I'd already been burned enough by adults not to trust anyone but myself.

My mentality was very much that I was on my own, something that was reinforced by the fact that I had zero rules as a kid. I could do what I wanted, go where I wanted, see whom I wanted. As long I was on my couch/bed by eleven o'clock (and really, no one would notice if I
wasn't
there by eleven), there weren't any questions. You'd think as the kid with no rules I'd have some pretty cool partying stories. But I have none. I was and still am what most would consider a loser socially. I spend a lot of time alone. Even today my dog gets annoyed at me that we don't leave my bedroom.

The flipside of all of this freedom was that I didn't have anyone pushing me along, either. If anything was going to happen in my life, I knew I was going to have to be the one to put that into motion.

I was a really overachieving little kid, but not because I thought I had to be better than anyone else. Actually, it was just the opposite. Because there was no one to tell me I was any good at all, I worked hard to be the best so that there was no question I was good. This was particularly true at school. I was completely petrified of ending up like my mom and knew from enough after-school specials that if I didn't get an education, that's exactly where I'd wind up. (Yes, everyone below the age of twenty-five years old reading this, there used to be TV shows aimed at kids that included a heartfelt message. And they showed them at a specific time after school. I ate them up like Count Chocula cereal.)

Whether in school or out, I was super focused. I was lucky to have some natural ability when it came to academics. I was always able to pick things up quickly. That's not to say I coasted through junior high and high school. I also worked very hard, because I enjoyed studying and learning. By working hard in school I knew I could get past the railroad tracks that led out of our town, and that is what I wanted to do. As my buddy Evan wrote in one of my high school yearbooks, “Those railroad tracks may only be four feet wide, but they are almost impossible to cross.”

One example of my push to learn as much as I could is my encyclopedia habit. Beginning at nine years old, I would save up all my money from mowing yards, raking leaves, and any other odd jobs I could get (“allowance” was only a word on TV, and I hated the kids who got allowance on TV. Those kids on
Who's the Boss?
always pissed me off! And don't get me started on
Mr. Belvedere
). As soon as I had enough saved from my work around Mountain Pine, I'd get a ride from my grandma into town to go to the Piggly Wiggly, where I could buy an encyclopedia. Starting with Androphagi, I spent the next six years buying volumes of the encyclopedia, reading them front to back and building a wall out of them in whatever house we lived in at the time, until I wound up at Zymotic. For the record, I don't know if it was really Androphagi or Zymotic. I seriously just looked those two words up to seem cool. I could have easily said A to Z.

But I read the full set the way kids today read
Harry Potter
. Or kids five years ago read
Harry Potter
. I don't think kids read anymore. They watch YouTube videos. My buddy Eddie has a two-year-old who will spend an hour watching YouTube videos of a guy opening plastic eggs. Finding out what is inside each egg is the entertainment. Sounds dumb, but I watched a few and was totally hooked. Then I watched ten straight minutes of some weird dude with pale hands opening up plastic eggs that contained everything from candy to a Lego. Good thing YouTube wasn't around back when I was a kid or I never would have learned a thing. Speaking of which, I may take a break and go watch those egg videos for a bit. You should do it, too. Trust me, at first you'll think, This is stupid and meant for a two-year-old. But fifteen minutes later you'll be saying, “Just one more.”

Back to the encyclopedia—my grandma got a real kick out of it. “Look at you!” she said one day when I returned from the grocery store with Volume 22, Islam to Life. “You got your next encyclopedia!” (I made up Islam to Life, too. But you get the idea.)

Always real supportive of my learning, my grandma started to give me a dollar for every A on my report card. But when report cards came out, I would have eight subjects and eight A's, which meant eight bucks. That was a lot of money in our house. Eventually, my grandma said, “I can't afford it anymore.” She had to lower the payment to a dollar per report card. The money was nice, but more than that I loved the acknowledgment that I had done a good job. I worked hard for those A's, and like I said, in my family people were focused on getting food on the table. There weren't a lot of pats on the back to go around, though I know my grandmother meant well.

Everything—getting A's or reading encyclopedias—fed into a great desire I felt to be in competition with the world. I understood that to get out of Mountain Pine I had to rise to the top in some way. I don't remember when I first knew I had to get out of my hometown; that goal just always seemed to be a part of me. But as I got older, certainly by high school, it was obvious that very few opportunities existed in the place where I grew up. I didn't have any money or status, even in Mountain Pine, so the only way I was going to differentiate myself was by working hard and knowing more than other students. As soon as I realized that, life became a competition. I think it was probably a one-sided competition, but I didn't care.

That competitive drive is what catapulted me to become captain of the twelfth-grade Quiz Bowl team when I was only a seventh grader. As a twelve-year-old on the senior team, I was a shrimp among giants. But I was pretty good. Nah, I was great! And I got sooooo many girls by being the captain of the Quiz Bowl team in seventh grade. Walking down the hall at school, I had my pick of the ladies. I was THE MAN. Okay, that's a total lie. I'd say that being the captain of the Quiz Bowl team for five years straight probably contributed to the fact that I was a virgin into my twenties.

The competitions pitted one school team against another, and the matches were similar to
Jeopardy!
With four people on each team, you hit a buzzer if you knew the answer to questions on a wide range of subjects such as science, history, sports, current events, you name it. Contestants didn't even need to wait for the end of the question to be read before hitting the buzzer, which added another layer of stress to the game. But that's where I was awesome. No one was faster than me. (Unfortunately, sometimes I'm still quick but not in a good way, if you know what I mean.)

There were Quiz Bowl teams for every grade level from elementary school all the way up to college, but since they were basically a battle of who knows the most facts, and my hobby was reading the encyclopedia, I quickly moved up grades until I landed on the senior team. I was playing against eighteen-year-olds and just dominating them. I don't curse much, but I'm going to say it: THEY WERE MY BITCHES. It's not really anything to brag about, because it's pretty nerdy, but it was a big deal to me at the time. And I only got better and better until I became a legend—a little legend in my little town, but a legend nonetheless. I was basically the Uncle Rico of Quiz Bowl. Still living the dream, years later.

Being a Quiz Bowl god went to my head, too; I thought I knew
everything
. My hand was glued to that buzzer. So when a question came up that I didn't know the answer to, I still hit the buzzer. I remember the question to this very day: “What's the national holiday for trees?” Well, I know the answer now—Arbor Day—but at the time I buzzed in, I didn't have a clue. This was smack in the middle of a big tournament with a huge rival.
Oh crap
.

“I don't know,” I said, “but I bet it's tree-mendous!”

My line got a big laugh—and me kicked off the team for the next couple of games. It was funny for a second but then not funny at all. I hated having to sit out even one round. I wanted to compete in a match, all the time. It wasn't so much that I loved winning as that I hated losing. I felt like people were looking down on me when I lost, and I didn't want to give them any more reasons to look down on me than they already had. See, it was never about being superior. I just didn't want to be inferior.

I really was a huge nerd. I mean, for starters, there were my glasses. I've had terrible eyesight from as early as I can remember. I'm color-blind and my right eye has never worked. I was born with a severe astigmatism, which could have been fixed if the intervention had been done early enough. So at five years old, I was given a patch to wear and became the pirate who got beaten up on the bus to kindergarten. Imagine being the poor kid
and
the pirate. I mean, if you're rich and a pirate, that's kind of awesome. But the poor dirty kid who was the pirate, that's begging to get annihilated.

Each time I wore the patch, they would beat the crap out of me, break my glasses, and throw my patch out the window. By the third time, I told my mom, “You can send me to school with the patch, but I'll take it off as soon as you can't see me.”

True to my word, I stopped wearing the patch (and my glasses for years) and my eyesight in my right eye grew worse and worse until it got to the point where it is today. I can't see shape or color at all with my right eye, only light and darkness. For a while I asked about new medical techniques whenever they came out, but they were never for my eye because the real problem, the experts explained, is in my brain. Come to think of it, many experts have explained to me that I have a lot of problems in my brain, not just my eyesight. But the short of it is, my right eye doesn't work.

When I entered junior high school, not only did I have bad eyesight and need to wear glasses, I was also very small. Minuscule. I didn't grow much until my senior year, and didn't really get to my full height until college. To make matters worse, the school in Mountain Pine was split into two parts—kindergarten through sixth grade in a building at the bottom of a hill, and seventh through twelfth grade a hundred yards up the hill. So as a seventh grader, already small for my age, I had the pleasure of going to a school with twelfth graders who looked like giants.