Read It's So Hard To Type With A Gun In My Mouth Online
Authors: Steve Bluestein
AUGUST 21, 2006 -
ALLAN THICKE
I am exhausted this morning. My friends had an Estate Sale and I went over and helped. Why? I love selling shit. I love seeing it go out the door. I love emptying the space. Let's face it, I'm anal-retentive. I'm sure at some point I'll be in an institution for this but right now, I enjoy organizing things. (Once I was on a TV shoot and they set up the dressing rooms in a Laundromat. I had lots of time between takes and so I started cleaning the Laundromat. I closed all the lids, wiped down the machines, put the hampers in order and threw out all the trash and paper. Cast members would come and watch me. They thought I was insane... I was... but I wasn't bored between takes.... and, I made $3.24 cents in tips.
Here's a William Shatner memory/nightmare.
BACKGROUND
I went to Canada to do a TV show. It was the Allan Thicke Talk Show. Thicke had taken over the show from Allan Hamel. (Suzanne Summer's husband). Allan Thicke had a talk show in Canada before his show here in America. Got it?
STORY
Back then my agency would send comedians to Canada to get experience in front of the camera before they would send them out for American talk shows. I must tell you, I hate doing television and it's one of the reasons why I'm not a big name today. I learned how to do stand up in clubs and related directly to live audiences. In a TV studio there is 100 feet between you and the audience, there's also a stage crew and lots of distractions. I never learned how to relate to the camera and so I worked clubs for years while comedians who were much less funny than I became famous. Why? They had mastered that 6-minute spot and how to look right into the camera. I had not and spent 15 years on the road working shit holes and sleeping in scabies infested comedy condos.
So I'm doing the Allan Thicke show, I had done this show when it was the Allan Hamel show and I had done very well. This was a return booking for me. The trip up was uneventful as was the hotel and travel. As I remember, Lonnie Shorr, William Shatner and Raymond Burr were taping the show that day. I was to follow William Shatner.
The show is going along well and then it starts to fall apart like a crystal vase in an Iraqi shopping mall. Shatner, who has the ego the size of a Mac Truck, shared a limo with me. He didn't talk to me. Do you know what it's like to be with someone in a six-foot space and have no contact with them? Creepy. I hated him immediately. He got out of the limo and closed the door before I could get out. I was shocked and when his Star Trek co-star George Takei said in an interview Shatner was an asshole, I said "Amen". OK, the shows starts and I have to follow Shatner's segment. Allan Thicke says to him, "I understand you have some footage you'd like to show us." And I think its Star Trek out takes, no it's his latest cause, the clubbing of baby seals. He goes into this detailed description of how little, helpless baby seals are clubbed to death by arctic trappers. Now the footage starts... here's a cute little white baby seal... whack... blood comes shooting out of its head. Whack, there goes its nose. The audience gasps in horror. Shatner tells the story of how he's seen mother seals try to get between the pup and the clubber only to be clubbed themself. 350-pound stagehands are crying. The audience is crying. Thicke is crying... as he looks into the camera and says, "We'll be right back with the comedy of Steve Bluestein."
I'm backstage going absolutely insane. "Dead baby seals!! They want me to follow dead baby seals!!!" I'm furious... which means I am scared. They move me to the studio; I'm complaining all the way. They could care less. I am set on the stage, the lights come up, the camera light goes on and the stage manager points to me. I smile and say... " I can't tell you what a thrill it is to be back on The Allan Hamel Show." And then I realized I have just said the wrong host's name. My heart drops like Dolly Parton's breasts when she takes off her bra. We are live; I can't stop tape. I phumfa though the next joke. I phumfa through the following joke and finally said... "Could someone please club ME?" They laugh and I finish the set.
Allan asks me to the couch, the "You've made it sign" where Shatner and Raymond Burr are seated. Shatner has moved down to find someone else's act to fuck up and Burr is right next to me. Allan says, "So I understand you just got divorced." And I start in a set of divorce material and for some unknown reason I switch in mid set from the divorce material to material about fat people. The audience is laughing and I look over at Raymond Burr, who looks like a beached whale. He has this glazed look on his face. I suddenly realize I am doing fat jokes next to a man who is so big he has central heating in his thighs. I die inside and look at Thicke. My eyes are as big as saucers. Thicke says, "We'll be right back with the body of Steve Bluestein after this." I just cup my hands in my face and move down the couch so the next guest, a man talking about global COOLING, can sit. Talk about getting it wrong.
So I go back to the green room and Lonnie Shorr is there. He is wiping his eyes and runs up to me. Lonnie is a Vegas comedian who was a regular on the Dean Martin Show. He grabs me and says, "That was the funniest thing I have ever seen." However, he was talking as a comedian and seeing the irony in what had happened to me. He and I became friends immediately. We hang out in the hotel after the show and share a limo to the airport the next day.
Lonnie is a wonderful, down home, no ego, easy to talk to kind of guy and remains a friend to this day. We're at the airport standing in line going through Canadian Customs and he asks me what’s my next gig. I don't have a next gig. In show business you have to bullshit to look important and so I'm telling Lonnie about this deal and that deal that is pending for me. It's all bullshit, I know it's bullshit and he knows its bullshit. But it's show biz and it's bullshit. I was pumping out some grade A bullshit this day. Just as I'm sharing my bullshit the customs officer opens my case. I had taken the towels from the hotel. Lonnie sees them and says, "Yah, I can see how well things are going for YOU. Did you happen to take the soap too?" And I lift up the towels to reveal the soap underneath. Lonnie almost wets himself, even the customs guy laughed. I wanted to get clubbed in the artic.
Isn't it nice how I share my most embarrassing moments with you? And now, if you don't mind, I have to go clip coupons.
PS
Just so you'
ll know. Those white washcloths from the hotel are perfect for dusting. Steal them!
AUGUST 22, 2006 -
CHAPTER ONE
I can remember the first time I was able to remember. There was a void that lived in my head and then, one morning I woke up and said, "Wait a minute. There was a yesterday." The next day there was a day before yesterday and so it went from then on right up to the present. Unfortunately, I have spent the remaining fifty-nine years and eight months trying to forget those accumulated memories, but I cannot. Those moments are hard wired into the mainframe with code that only electric shock can release. God has gifted me with this incredible memory. It's a gift that I cannot return and I have struggled all my life trying to find the refund window of my psyche. I am fascinated with my ability to remember things but more so with what my mind has chosen to remember. I have in my head literally hundreds of "photos", snap shots of an instant in time that my mind has chosen to categorize, put on a file card and store away in the corners of what's left of my brain. These images come flashing back to me at the most inopportune times like when I'm driving in my car or auditioning for a part or trying to have sex with a stranger in a hotel in Ohio. For the most part, these memories don't inspire me, they cripple. It's not a catalogue of "warm fuzzies"; it's a litany of one nightmare after another. It's a series of bad memories followed by a catalogue of disasters. It's my childhood.
Let's get back to that "first time I could remember". The photo in my brain is as clear as if it were yesterday. There is no question in my mind what this scene looked like or what the colors were or whom the people were or the smells or the tastes. It was my miserable life and here's how it started.
It was a hot August evening. I know it was August because the humidity hung in the air like a wet sponge. The sun was just setting and the sky was that dull grayish blue that it gets in New England around sunset. I can remember feeling oppressed by the heat and sitting at the table in my t-shirt and damp training pants. I was so small I was seated on two telephone books to bring my chin up to the lip of the table. In front of me was the evening meal, a bowl of Cheerios. The morning paper was propped up and open against a half full bottle of humidity beaded milk. The moisture made wet spots on the newsprint and made them cling to each other like they were holding on for dear life. I created a little shelter for myself behind that paper, a place to hide from the world. I couldn't read, I could barely use the spoon; milk and Cheerios were spilling down my shirt only adding to my discomfort in the thick, August twilight air.
We lived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a town that had burned to the ground in 1908 and unfortunately had been rebuilt. The master planner of the time had built triple-decker homes. These masterpieces of modern architecture had no central heating. Their main source of warmth was the huge iron stove in the kitchen. Each home consisted of a large kitchen which included a pantry housing the sink and a screen door that led to a back porch where one could hang laundry, oh so convenient. Off the kitchen was the bedroom to capture the heat from the stove, a long hallway, a front room followed by a dining-room and somewhere in the mix was nestled a bathroom. This floor plan was replicated a thousand times all over the city and it was the floor plan of my childhood on Poplar Street. Sounds like a wonderful place to grow up, Poplar Street. It conjures up visions of tree lined boulevards and broad sidewalks where flowers lined the paths. But it was not so. My Poplar Street was and remains a dark, dirty alley hidden behind the backside, the ugly side, of an ancient school building. From our front room we looked on to a foreboding brick wall. It was the sentry guarding our view; it was the symbol of my existence on that street... trapped. The street, which was constructed for horse drawn carriages, was much too small for modern day automobiles and was congested. The school building shut out the light, sunshine was never my companion. It was a forgotten enclave in the city, an oasis of despair, and my own personal hell.
As the years passed central heating was added to these wonders of modern living. The front room became a bedroom, turning a one bedroom unit into a two bedroom home. Sometimes the front room remained the living room and the dining room was converted to a bedroom. That was the configuration of my Poplar Street home. That was the memory that stays in the photo album of my mind... two bedrooms and long hall with a bathroom off it, a kitchen, a pantry and a bedroom off the kitchen next to the porch where one could hang laundry.
And so I sat on my phone books, with Cheerios running down my front, in front of my newspaper. Now add my mother screaming in the background and you'll complete the picture. All that was missing was the grim reaper and the cast of Les Mis. I can picture my mother as if it was yesterday and, with her, it probably was. She was in a floral housecoat, over it an apron. Her hair was wrapped in something and the apron was wet from washing dishes. No modern appliances for us, we were extremely poor at the time. My mother was screaming at my father who was sheltered in the front room. Her voice was like nails on a blackboard and I remember at that young age wanting to be someplace else, with someone else, anyone else. I remember the ill feelings that would follow me the rest of my life, the feelings of "Why me?" I remember her turning her wrath to me "Finish your dinner!" and my dutifully scooping another spoonful of Cheerios into my mouth. I also remember wishing I wasn't there, a wish that would be repeated over and over again as I grew older.
I climbed down off the chair and walked over to the screen door. In the background the soundtrack of my parent's battle raged. They were fighting about God knows what. It was always something with them...clothes not picked up, lights left on, bills not paid, work not found, his being a man. I had my face pressed into the screen as if to push myself through it and escape the insanity of the moment. It was growing darker, there was no breeze to evaporate the humidity collecting on my baby skin or dry the milk on my tee shirt. It was just little damp me in a world of screaming adults feeling lost and alone at the age of two.
I remember being so small that the light switch was way above my head. It was a good foot from my reach. That's how small I was. It was growing darker as twilight turned to evening and I needed the light on, children always need the light on. It's their source of protection from the boogieman. But, I couldn't reach the switch and there was no one there to turn it on to protect me. Welcome to the theme of my life. They weren't there to protect me. They weren't paying attention to me, they were fighting and the echoes of that battle bounced off the walls of the adjacent three story house which mirrored our building and formed our mutual back yard, a yard I could look out on and see the kitchens of happy homes, of families having real dinners, of mothers caring for children and turning on lights.