Primal Fears

I'M LEAVING FOR WHAT SHOULD BE QUITE THE ADVENTURE TOMORROW, TWO MONTHS IN the great city of New Orleans. That translates to exciting stories aplenty in the coming weeks, but right now, I want to delve into some good old-fashioned nostalgia as the best part of summer draws to a close.

I’ve had many-a-conversation with fellow children of the suburbs about how kids raised in cities always seem to turn out kind of fucked up. In a place like Los Angeles or New York, you develop a particular kind of hardness: rather than worrying about your mom killing you if you flunk a test, you worry about a homeless man killing you on a subway or bus home from school; instead of catching fireflies, you try not to catch AIDS. Those sorts of things.

I’m not a “city kid” per se, but I spent my first five years in New York, and I do think it had an impact. As I said, the fears and anxieties you develop are more basic and legitimate than monsters under the bed and bee stings, and the funny part -- again, not at the time, but looking back -- was how circumstances in my life always seem to conspire to give me worse and worse things to fear.

When I was 12, I went with my parents to see the movie The Devil’s Own. It was Rated “R,” but that was a good thing as far as I was concerned. My friend’s dad took me and some other kids to see Air Force One not long before, and I liked it so much I went back twice more that weekend, once with my elderly grandfather, who didn’t enjoy the gratuitous violence as much I did, probably because it didn’t cause me to have hellish flashbacks to WWII.

With regards to The Devil’s Own, the key detail here is that I watched it with my parents, who I love very much. The film opens on a pleasant scene of an Irish family -- father, mother, and son -- enjoying a nice, relaxing dinner. “That’s just like my family,” I thought. Then, a guy in a mask kicks open the door and shoots the boy's father in the head.

Don't know why, but I suddenly developed a pretty strong fear of my parents being murdered.

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Norm MacDonald Therapy

NORMALLY AFTER SOMETHING CRAZY HAPPENS, IT'LL BE A MAD DASH ON MY PART TO POST a full account on this site for your entertainment. But this past weekend I had an experience that strained the limits of believability and good taste, even for me; one that I've recounted in snippets to close friends in the strictest of confidences, friends who have only been able to respond with a pair of confused interjections:

"What?! Really?!"

And...

"No. No! How did that happen?"

After that introduction, you'd probably expect me to tell the story. But I won't. You can ask me in person and I'll do my best to remember parts, but it's not something I want up on the internet. Besides, I've got other priorities right now, like trying to rebuild my shattered life.

Part of my treatment and recovery process: Norm MacDonald talk show and radio interviews on YouTube. My favorite comedian as of late had been Louis C.K., but, after finding the following two clips, the pendulum swung back to the brilliant, inarticulate Canadian.

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Los Angeles: City of Angels and Bats

AT AGE 10, I WAS SENT TO A SUMMER CAMP ON LAKE CHAMPLAIN IN NEW YORK. "CAMP Dudley." I have plenty to say about my experience there, but I'll save that for another place and time; right now, I just want to talk about bats.

Early on, camp counselors drummed into our heads the possibility that, while asleep in our cabins any given night, a bat might fly in through the chimney, and if that happened, everyone in the cabin would need a rabies shot. To drive maximum fear into our hearts about something we couldn't control, they told us the needles were the thickness of No. 2 pencils and would be inserted directly into our abdomen. I had to believe this was an exaggeration (or they'd mixed up the treatment for "rabies" with the treatment for "alien embryo"), but we heard about it early and often and it scared the hell out of us.

The funniest part -- looking back, not at the time -- was that the bunks were in these tiny alcoves that all had their own windows, and mine looked directly out at a tree branch where a bat slept every night. I watched him closely ("him," because I watched very closely, if you know what I mean), reasoning that if he was out there, I had nothing to worry about, but the moment I take my eyes off him he'd fly in. Ultimately, the bat never entered the cabin and the sleepless nights paid off; years later, I stayed up all night lying next to a girl I'd just started dating, talking and gazing into each other's eyes until we both dozed off. I was good at this because I'd practiced, at age 10, with a bat.

So I've always hated bats since then, more than most people, on a very visceral level.

And what do I see yesterday as I'm walking to the Laundromat? My old friend: "the bat." It had been a long time and I didn't recognize him at first; looked like a fuzzy, black frog, crawling somewhat spastically on the sidewalk to get under a hedge. Now, according to this children's website about bats, the ones on the ground are the ones to watch out for, because they are probably sick and have -- you guessed it -- rabies. But when I saw him, I did not bat an eye ("bat an eye" is a good figure of speech, because it's confusing in this context).

Why did I not bat an eye? I'd had a strange weekend, and lost count of all the weird animals I saw. And when I say "weird animals," I mean "celebrities." Of course.

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Rock Bottom, Top-Down Sales

(Back by popular demand -- but also new and improved -- the story of my first paid job in L.A.)

WHEN I MOVED BACK TO LOS ANGELES AFTER COLLEGE, I LIVED ON A FLOOR. NOT A COUCH, a floor. I didn't want to let myself get too comfortable, but I almost did anyway. I was staying with the two most accommodating friends I had: Nick and Quinn. I spent my days writing and reading (about 30 books in the month and a half I was there) while they went about their lives. All I had to do in return was pitch in for groceries (sometimes), wash dishes (sometimes), and not masturbate while they were in the room.

But I had no money. I didn't want to ask my family for help, so I lived off the cash I got back from my previous apartment's security deposit. I ate nothing but spaghetti, oatmeal, McDonalds double cheeseburgers, and the breakfast special at the hot dog place down the street. To avoid paying for parking downtown, which was and continues to be a ripoff, I left my car in a cul-de-sac near USC, 3 miles away, the only spot I knew that didn't have weekly street cleanings. Therefore, I only drove if I could get a ride to it (let me repeat that: if I could get a ride to my car).

Other concern: for all intents and purposes, I didn't exist. The building where we stayed charged per occupant, so it was technically illegal for me to be there without them raising the rent. Quinn and Nick got around it by telling the building manager that I had an abusive girlfriend and I was staying over temporarily for my own safety, but that lie could fall apart any moment. If they ever saw me alongside her -- 5'2" and sweet as syrup -- I was fucked (coincidentally, a rare occurrence for someone living on his friends' apartment's floor).

So I needed a more stable living situation. But first I needed a job.

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Scared Straight

THE FIRST TIME I WENT TO A STRIP CLUB WAS 8 MONTHS AGO, WELL INTO MY 23RD YEAR on this Earth.

That surprises a lot of people; apparently, it's a father/son bonding ritual in some circles, a rite of passage upon turning 18 or 21. That's simply unfathomable to me. The idea of my dad taking me to a strip club is as ludicrous as the idea of him buying a bunch of coke and showing me how to snort it. If you're the type whose dad did both those things, congratulations. Mine's never even mentioned sex to me. The closest he came was when my family went on vacation back in high school and I volunteered to house-sit. He knew my then-girlfriend would be coming over as soon as they left, and simply said, "Don't make a mistake."

But back around Christmastime, I was in the New York area to do stand up, see my family, and finally reconnect with my old friend Ted. He and I hadn't seen each other since we went to "CTY" together eight years ago. CTY is a camp for nerds, where you're admitted based on your SAT score in 7th grade and take a one semester college course while other kids in America use their summer to do shit that's fun. We were always the coolest people there, of course, but that's like winning gold in the Special Olympics (as the saying goes).

I drove into the city and met Ted around 10:00PM. We went to a bar to grab a drink and catch up, and we picked up right where we'd left off. It was great. Then, we went to a convenience store to buy beer. We drank it, then hit another bar. And another. It quickly became apparent that we were both overeager to show that we'd come a long way from our dorky past.

Ted suggested we try out a seedy strip club in his neighborhood called "XXO" ("kisses and a hug?"). I said I'd never been to strip club, and that made our going all the more urgent.

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“I totally think it’s terrible, but it’s not important to me that it’s terrible…”

ROUGHLY HALFWAY THROUGH A SET THAT LOUIS CK HIMSELF DESCRIBES AS "VERY FUCKED up jokes" -- everything from accidentally shitting on his father's face to 69-ing Hitler -- Louie rants about dolphins:

You ever go shop for tuna and it says "Dolphin Safe" and you kinda go, "Yeah, but..." like somehow you think it's not gonna be as good? "I wanna do the right thing, but it's probably kinda bland."

But here's the thing: why not kill and eat a dolphin? Why not? "Oh, because..."? Why not? I don't fucking get it. If you're a tuna, fuck you, we're eating you. So I really don't see the difference.

And I think it's wrong to eat dolphins, and tuna, and cows, and everything. But I eat them. I eat 'em all! Because I don't care that it's wrong. I totally think it's terrible, but it's not important to me that it's terrible. So what that it's wrong? It tastes good, and I like the way it feels when I eat it. So fuck it.

I must confess, I started writing this post as nothing but a string of Louis CK routines, one after another, but that would be cheating. It would also be a waste or your time and mine, because he's funnier to watch than he is to read. And finally, it distracted from the main point I was planning to make: Louis CK's attitude toward eating animals is exactly the same as my attitude toward music piracy.

Napster came on the scene back in late 1999. I was 13, and it changed my life.

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The More You Know

I WENT OUT WITH A GIRL LAST NIGHT TO A BAR IN LOS FELIZ TO PLAY BINGO.

The Bingo was free and the prizes were donated by drunks -- a typical "prize pack" included a can of green beans and a thong -- so it wasn't as much about the winning as it was the atmosphere and the conversation (can you tell we didn't win?).

First, the atmosphere:

The bartender had mutton chop sideburns and wore a boyscout uniform with a patch on the shoulder that read "666." For the Antichrist, he was surprisingly inattentive about serving us drinks. "How do we get the boyscout to notice us?" my ladyfriend asked. "You sound like a typical scoutmaster," I told her (a slightly-too-subtle wisecrack about child molestation).

A heavyset guy sat down next to us wearing a light blue t-shirt with an illustration of two unicorns fucking under a rainbow. He also had a box with him, half the size of a shoebox, made of metal and covered with technical writing. It looked like something you'd insert a pair of keys into in order to launch a nuclear strike. He told the Antichrist he wasn't interested in playing Bingo, yet ten minutes later he had not one but two Bingo cards in front of him. No one else had two.

The unicorn pornographer must've been a dangerous man.

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The Latest

THOUGH I JUST POSTED IT YESTERDAY EVENING, I WROTE THE PREVIOUS POST LATE LAST week. While everything about it remains factually correct, it's not quite as up-to-date on what's going on in my life as the following clip from Tommy Boy, a 1995 film where Chris Farley and David Spade go on the road to sell brake pads. Here, we see Farley complain to no one in particular at a diner that he always screws up his sales right at the last second:

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