It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optomistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman (5 page)

“Obviously, I didn’t steal your coke seeing as you had your hand down my pants until fairly recently,” Abbie said matter-of-factly.
Thanks, Abbie. Real holy of you.

“So that leaves you,” the Terrorist said, pointing a hairy finger in my direction. “Which makes sense since you’re still wide-awake.”

“I’d still be awake if I had a half cup of coffee. This proves nothing. I think you need to leave.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going out to my car to get my gun and then we’ll see if you can figure out where my rock went.” I grabbed the phone to call 911, but before dialing I thought of how this was all going to look to the police. I didn’t imagine I looked like the picture of innocence at that point.
How could a night of freebasing cocaine go so wrong?

Just then Angela walked in.

“Shut up,” she said to the Terrorist. “He’s not going to do anything. He’s just really paranoid. He’s harmless.”
Yeah, isn’t that what most people say about their pit bulls moments before they rip some unsuspecting toddler’s larynx out?

And just like that, everyone left. And a month later, I moved to the San Fernando Valley into an apartment with a roomie I met on Roommates.com. Turned out she did a lot of coke, too.

Recently, I spoke to Beth on the phone. We remained friends through the years and still email all the time. She is a fun, normal mom of two who lives in a log cabin in Vermont with her husband. She’s been known to bake a pie.

“Hey, Beth, remember when we freebased coke that one time? And that crazy guy threatened to kill us ’cause he thought I stole his rock of cocaine?”

“
Oh my God.
Right. You know what’s really funny? Angela and I had found the rock in the carpet and totally smoked it.”

“Huh.”
Jesus, I was lucky to be alive. Oh, well.
“Yeah, pretty hilarious, I guess.” And then I went back to finishing the fairies jigsaw puzzle I was working on with my four-year-old daughter.

T
he earliest memory I have of my father is seeing him on television when I was about three. It was probably
The Ed Sullivan Show
or
Dean Martin
. I waved at the TV, which I recall my mother found hilarious and she wasn’t an easy laugh.

“Hi, Daddy! Here I am! Daddy!” I looked to my mom, demanding to know why I wasn’t getting his attention. In fact, he seemed engrossed in a conversation with a couple other people that annoyingly didn’t include me.

“He can’t see you, sweetie.” I didn’t know how that was
possible. I was right in front of him—yelling. And it was highly probable that I was naked and dancing. Looking back, it’s a good thing I wasn’t in the studio audience.

My father was on talk shows a lot when I was small—too small to actually know what a talk show was. When I heard “talk show,” the image it brought up was a group of great minds talking together like a think tank—I thought my father was part of a team of very important people choosing a new president or discovering a hidden planet. I had no idea that he was doing something way more difficult: he was telling jokes. Later, I found out that my father was a comedian and he was almost famous. Not quite there yet but definitely on the cusp, performing regularly on
Merv Griffin
,
The Smothers Brothers, Ed Sullivan,
even opening for Frank Sinatra in Vegas. I came along with my parents for one of his Sinatra gigs and my mother and I stayed holed up in our hotel room while my father ate spaghetti with homemade Ragu sauce with Frank and his posse after the show. Even though my father and his on-stage persona was classic nerd (Greek fisherman’s hat, big glasses, a slightly hunched-over posture, and goofy delivery), this was old school, men’s club Vegas and wives were definitely not welcome.

Eventually, he headlined Caesar’s Palace, which was quite the coup for a comedian known for subtlety at a time when most jokes ended with “Ba Da
Boom
!”

My father wasn’t a household name, but he was famous enough that when I moved away from Los Angeles to Spokane, Washington, when I was twelve, my junior high school
teachers thought it was “cool” when they discovered my comedic pedigree. “Oh, sure, I know who your dad is!” they’d say excitedly. “What was it like growing up with a comedian? It must’ve been so…funny! I bet he was constantly telling jokes!”

“Oh, well, I didn’t really grow up with him but, yeah, he’s a funny guy.” Sadly, fascination with my father never translated into better grades.

My parents divorced when I was four. My father was hitting his stride in the joke-telling biz, so with his wife out of the picture he did what anyone who’s made a few appearances on talk shows and knows he’s on the brink of “very big things” does—he relocated to a bachelor pad smack dab on the beach in Malibu. This wasn’t the Malibu of
90210
lame bonfire parties where Jennie Garth’s character might lose her virginity to the tune of a Color Me Badd ballad; this was the groovy
Love, American Style
Malibu circa the early seventies where anything goes.

My father had the requisite sponger friends (one with a huge mustache who could do a standing backflip), a throng of bikini-clad neighbors often running around with the top part removed, and he always had a small dog—usually a Chihuahua—that went with him everywhere. He was like the original Paris Hilton—if Paris Hilton looked like Woody Allen and could speak in complete sentences. Meanwhile, I lived first in a few one-bedroom apartments and then eventually in a two-bedroom duplex in a highly questionable part of town. My father became an occasional Sunday dad. I looked
forward to his appearances but definitely couldn’t count on them. He often had big plans to come and take me for the day but mostly couldn’t make it happen. Many times he had a migraine and called at the last minute to say he was not up to it. Sometimes he didn’t call at all and I waited by our front window looking for his car until it was undeniable that he wasn’t coming. But, in those days, when he did show up, it was all the more special.

We had our place, The Shrimp Boat, a seafood stand on the ocean that served fried shrimp with the tails still on in a long porcelain dish shaped like a boat, which I munched happily, leaving not a crumb of breading on my plate. Of course, I now realize that crunching down a shrimp tail has as much glamour and about the exact same sound as biting down on a cockroach. But when I was with my father, I didn’t want to leave anything behind. Sometimes we’d get a whole steamed crab that the cooks dropped into a huge vat of boiling water right in front of our eyes. My father showed me how to crack open the shell and get to the meat inside, separating the green stuff from the rest of the prize.

People constantly approached my father for his autograph. I didn’t understand why anyone would want my father to write his name on a piece of paper for them. He was always fractured, an absentminded professor type, but he lit up when people wanted a picture, an autograph, or a bit of his presence. My time with him was so limited that although it was interesting at first to watch a couple in matching Santa Monica Pier sweatshirts go crazy over my dad, I began to
resent the strangers who were taking up the little time and piece of my father I had left.

Sometimes we went to fancy restaurants where I wore outfits handsewn by my mother who couldn’t afford to buy me new clothes, and my father ordered me frog’s legs—a delicacy apparently enjoyed by French people, rich people, and people who will eat anything that comes from a pond.

“Come on, try it. It tastes like chicken.” I’d eat it to please him. And it was true that it tasted like chicken. But, I thought, then why not just order chicken? And while you’re ordering chicken, go ahead and make it chicken nuggets because chicken nuggets are seriously delicious.

When I was about nine, my father moved to a modest apartment on Robertson Boulevard, closer to the place I then shared with my mother, stepfather, brother, and newborn sister. His career hadn’t taken off like he’d been sure it would and our visits became even more infrequent. When we did get together, his tone started out jovial. He loved nothing more than to tell me jokes and recite lines of his act for me, such as:
I just had a very long accident. I was at the mall and I fell down the up escalator for about an hour and a half.
Even if I’d already heard them, I always laughed like it was the first time. His talent was awesome to me. But not long into our visit, he would usually roll into bitterness at the business. “These goddamn bookers are a bunch of thieves—not to mention the agents and managers. Have you seen me on
Merv
? I kill ’em every time.” He was usually in a feud with someone or other, but I didn’t know the players well enough to weigh in one way or another.

My mother told me that my father burned a lot of bridges. “He alienates people,” she’d say when I’d complain that my father didn’t have friends.

One Sunday, he took me to play tennis at the local park. I wasn’t exactly a sports-oriented kid. In fact, I was pretty horrendous, uncoordinated, and self-conscious with almost any activity that involved a ball, court, or field. If I was ever forced to take part in a team sport, the very last thing you’d hear from me is “Hey, coach, put me in!” The one and only time I was forced to play softball as a kid, I was sent far out to right field where I prayed that no ball would come within a city mile from my position. Of course, one did, and of course, I missed it and stumbled around like a drunken donkey trying to find the ball and throw it to someone, anyone—which in my blind panic ended up being someone from the opposing team. To this day, I will go to great lengths to avoid public sports humiliation. Invitations to join Jack and Jill softball leagues, bowling teams, and beach volleyball games are met with the same panicked response: “Love to, but this restless leg syndrome’s got me sidelined for a while—just waiting on a cure!”

On the tennis court, my father lobbed a few balls at me that zoomed straight by my head or bounced sloppily off my racket, leaving me running after them and leaving him frustrated. I think he could tell his frustration was making my playing worse, so he tried to distract me with small talk.

“What grade are you in now?”

“Um, fourth?”
Hello!

Even at the age of nine I understood that when your own father has to ask you what grade you’re in it’s a pretty good tip-off you aren’t close.

“Your father doesn’t relate well to children,” my mother told me on more than one occasion when I came home sad and disappointed with my failure to connect with him. “Things will probably be different when you’re an adult. He’ll be able to really have conversations with you then.”

My father’s favorite kind of music was jazz. To say I’m not a jazz fan would not do my dislike of it justice. I’m pretty sure I’d rather sit through a round of chemotherapy than a full record of experimental or improvisational jazz. It’s a lot like modern art—how do they know if it’s unbelievably genius or could be re-created by a monkey? There’s no melody, no lyrics. How do these “musicians” even name their songs? It’s always struck me that pop musicians will spend hours writing a song that lasts for three minutes. Yet jazz musicians will spend three minutes coming up with a song that goes on for hours. But my father believed that jazz was brilliant. He loved nothing more than to roll a joint with a small device that reminded me of a miniature old-fashioned clothes wringer and burn daylight together listening to those endless songs. I’d try to sit still and force myself to learn to like it because sophisticated people like jazz—they understood it. I figured it might be an acquired taste like eating mayonnaise with French fries. Or frogs legs.

“How about a glass of OJ?” he’d ask absently after an hour and a half of straight jazz uninterrupted by needless
chitchat because he didn’t want to miss a G chord, which I assumed was probably played accidentally anyway.

“You and I, we’re just alike. Two peas in a pod,” he’d say sometimes. I knew it wasn’t true; that he was only seeing what he wanted to see, not a jazz-hating, sports-sucking, unfunny fraud.

My mother was his third wife and he wasn’t yet on marriage number four. Sometimes when we saw each other he told me that he felt so lucky to have me as a daughter because I was the only one who really got him. With all the people constantly screwing him over, he said I was his only real friend, the only person he could trust.

So when he was seriously injured after getting hit by a car, I cried not just because he was hurt but from the weight of it. I cried because he said no one was coming to visit him while he lay in a hospital bed recuperating from a broken hip, arm, leg, ribs, and head trauma. He did, in fact, have three sons from his first two marriages, but I didn’t really know who they were or if he was even in touch with them, so I begged my mother and stepfather to please go see him because he had no one. So they did. He asked them to bring him a boom box so he could listen to the healing sounds of Chick Corea and a bunch of other essentials like chocolate, pistachio nuts, books, and “this dynamite extra-aged Gouda I absolutely love from a little store in Westwood”—and my mother and stepfather obliged. Not for him, but for me.

Much later, he wrote a joke about the incident: “I was in a terrible accident. I was walking along the sidewalk minding
my own business when I was hit by a mobile library truck. I was lying in the street moaning and crying in pain. Finally, the driver leaned out of the window and said, ‘Shhhhh!’”

I always thought that was one of his funniest.

A couple of years later, my family moved to Washington State. My father didn’t call much or write and I never saw him, but when people asked about him or knew who he was, I always said proudly, “Yes, that’s my father.” A few years after that, we moved again—this time across the country to Massachusetts. He was in his fifties now with a new wife in her early twenties and a new baby. I called to tell him I was moving. He ranted about his dislike of government, why we should all refuse to pay taxes (this was way before Wesley Snipes made it cool), and his high esteem for the Communist system. I wasn’t used to keeping my opinions to myself anymore and he wasn’t used to me expressing anything but awe, so we ended up in an argument. The call ended on a slightly sour note.

I didn’t see him or talk to him for the next three years that I lived on the East Coast, although I’d often go out drinking with my friends, come home, and scrawl him a long letter about how much I missed him, how horrible things were with my parents, and how I wanted to come live with him—luckily, I didn’t have his address since he’d moved again. It was the written version of drunk dialing—it included the hangover but saved me from “damage already being done.” In retrospect, it’s a great thing I didn’t have a phone number for him anymore because unresolved feelings plus poor impulse control plus access to a telephone is a recipe for humiliation.

When I turned eighteen and moved back to Los Angeles, I became intent on finding him. With no phone number or address (and knowing he was long since divorced
again
), I resorted to scouring the
LA Weekly
and finally found him listed in the paper performing at a local comedy club/jazz venue, The Alley Cat Bistro.

I stood in the back of the room mesmerized by his performance. He commanded the stage, deliberately and slowly setting up his joke so that the sly punch line snuck up on you like waking up on your birthday with a gift at the foot of your bed. The crowd was in the palm of his hand and their reaction juiced him up as he rode higher and higher on their energy. Even after all these years, his timing was impeccable.

He walked through the crowd afterward flush with approval, shaking hands with audience members. I waited for him to walk by me, my heart beating faster than a ferret despite the three Sea Breezes I’d downed for courage. “That was great!” I said as he passed by. He stuck out his hand to shake with mine, the fan, one of many, who was here to compliment, pay homage.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He smiled.