by Breuer, Jim
“Okay?” he said. He had no clue.
“I am Muammar Gaddafi!” I repeated loudly.
“How can I help you, uh, Mua . . . Muammar?” he said patiently, trying to get the pronunciation right. He had no clue.
By now, I had a few coworkers around me, listening to my end of the conversation, looking down the aisle, waiting to see what would happen.
“I have just sent six missiles to hit your Sears hardware department in Valley Stream.” My accent was so purposely hacky that I didn’t expect anyone to believe it.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“You heard me!” I yelled frantically. “You now have five minutes to get out!” I ended the call by shouting, “Long live the paint department!”
We watched as Jack hung up the phone calmly, without flinching, and simply walked away. He didn’t seem to have a care in the world. In fact, it looked like he was going back to organizing the screwdrivers. None of us could believe it. There was not much else going on, so a couple of us went and sat down in the break room, scheming about how else we could get him.
After a few minutes, we lost interest and started talking about the Mets and girls. We forgot all about Jack and Muammar. When we left the break room, we saw that the girl from the candy department was gone. The toy department people were nowhere to be found. There were no customers left on the floor. As we were looking around, wondering what was going on, an older security guard came racing out of the stockroom.
“Breuer!” he yelled. “What the heck are you guys doing here?”
“It’s called working,” I said cockily. “You should give it a try sometime.”
He ignored me and kept yelling. “You’ve got to get out of the store right now! The new guy from hardware just took a bomb threat.”
“What?!” I asked. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“They’re about to evacuate the whole damn mall,” he said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Then for dramatic effect, he added, “We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
Not thinking of the consequences, I said, “Wait, wait, wait. There’s no bomb threat.” I just wanted him to calm down.
“There sure is, Jim,” he said insistently.
“No,” I said. “I called this guy and said I was Muammar Gaddafi, the leader of Libya. I said I sent missiles. But I never said there was a bomb.”
“Oh my God,” the security guard said, turning pale. “You made that call?”
“Yeah, but any moron would have known it wasn’t a bomb threat.”
He looked down at his watch and unholstered his walkie-talkie. “False alarm! False alarm!” he shouted into it. “Don’t evacuate the mall!”
“Cops are already on the way!” someone chirped back through his speaker. This wasn’t going to end well. Or maybe it was. Two of my dad’s sons from his first marriage were cops in Valley Stream. The mall was Gary’s beat, and sure enough, he was on duty that day. Gary marched into Sears and huddled soberly with the security guard before walking over to me, shaking his head.
“Jim,” he said. “Stay off the phone.” I was lucky to get off without getting arrested, but an internal report was filed. And this report worked its way through the corporate bureaucracy, all the way to the top. I was soon notified that I had to meet with the president of Sears’s New York district at his office in Roosevelt Field, Long Island.
One week later, I showered, combed my hair, put on my only suit, and took the train to meet with the president. I sat down in front of his desk. He tried to appear stern, but I thought I could detect a smirk.
“Let’s hear your side of things,” he said, standing up and pacing his office floor. Looking back, I was very fortunate that there hadn’t really been any major bombings or school shootings back then.
I started to explain. “Well, I was done with all my work. I shouldn’t have made a prank phone call, but every once in a while I’ll admit that I call up other departments as a character, just to be silly. The fellow I called was being a little territorial about his store section. A little excessive, I felt. And I promise you, sir, with God as my witness, I said I was Muammar Gaddafi. Do you think that Gaddafi would really single out the Valley Stream Sears, go to the trouble of getting their phone number, then specifically contact the hardware department, telling whomever answered the phone that he was targeting it with missiles?”
The president scratched his chin and paced some more. “Yeah, I get that, Jim,” he said. “No one in their right mind would have bought this, but even still ...”
In the end, I didn’t get canned. I had to apologize in person to Jack, and about two weeks later, he quit, because pretty much everyone else who worked at Sears would walk by him shouting, “Muammar Gaddafi!”
Beyond those incidents, I have to say I was a pretty good kid. Maybe even na��ve, based on my age and where I lived. When I turned thirteen and kids at junior high and high school started talking about house parties, I had no idea what they were talking about. It was difficult to imagine. I was shocked they were willingly inviting people in to trash their parents’ houses. The stories came mostly from jocks who’d brag about it.
“Hey, Breuer,” one of the kids I played baseball with said one day after practice. He was tall and skinny, a popular guy, kind of the ring-leader of the bunch. A group of our teammates gathered around us. “When’s it gonna be your turn?”
“To what?” I asked.
“To start throwing parties,” he said.
“Like with beer and stuff?” I said. “Never. Fat chance of that.”
“You chicken?” he said, playfully taunting me.
“No. But why would you have a twenty-person party at your parents’ house?” I asked. “My God, if any of you numb-nuts knocked off even one wing off my mom’s Hummel figurines, I’d kill you.” I said that probably because I knew I’d never hear the end of it from my mom.
“Sure you would,” he said, and the kids laughed.
“Whatever,” I said. “You really have that little respect for your parents?”
“Well,” he said, “maybe you’re just not ready yet. Maybe it’s because you hang out with a bunch of younger kids watching Mickey Mouse.”
“You talkin’ about the kids from my block?” I asked. “They’re a lot cooler than hanging out with you guys, smoking pot and hanging out in your parents’ basement. That’s idiotic.”
Despite what you may have heard or think about me, I was completely straightedge until my senior year of high school. I didn’t drink or have a girlfriend until that year (though I had my first kiss a couple years earlier), and if that meant being a late bloomer, I was one, and happily so.
My mom and dad were pretty lax when it came to disciplining me, and I wasn’t going to ruin that by acting like a knucklehead. By the time I came into their lives, I figure, they’d seen it all. As such, my dad probably only intervened with me two or three times in my whole life, and that was only if I was doing something really bothersome or terrible.
I remember when I got a bit older and got my license, Dad had to step in. Remember that this was an era when it wasn’t completely uncommon to go out all night, have a bit too much to drink, and then drive home. It’s reprehensible, but it was a different mind-set back then. One morning after a night of drinking, Dad woke me up at five thirty A.M. before he went to work.
“Hey,” he said, leaning over my bed, shaking my shoulder. “Wake your ass up. What were you, all banged up last night? Did ya have a little too much to drink?”
“No!” I said, angry to be woken up.
“Yeah?” he said. “Horseshit! The front end of the car is in the bushes. Why don’t you get up and move the car before your mother wakes up, dummy.”
“I wasn’t drunk, Dad.”
“Okay. Sure thing, hotshot. Go move the car.” He’d never give me a whole speech. He’d just say, “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.” That was his favorite saying.
When I got to Valley Stream Central High School, I me
t a kid who blew my mind: Jimmy Sciacca. He was as much into music as I was into making people laugh. He was fearless about doing what he loved and I guess it eventually rubbed off on me. Every year, the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades would spend a week battling each other in sports, music, and sketches. When we were seniors, the theme of Sketch Night was for some reason the Bible. Jimmy was one of the writers for the event, and he approached me in the hallway one morning.
“Jim, you gotta be in Sketch Night.”
“I can’t do that, man.” I was back to being somewhat shy about showing off my gift onstage. It was easy for me to be funny when it was just me with a friend one-on-one, or with a group of people in an informal setting, but I’d gotten away from organized performing and hadn’t done any theater for a while. I didn’t fit in with the drama kids. “I’m not into that crowd,” I explained.
“Jimbo,” he said, “it’s not like that. Get off the sidelines. There’s no egos. You just gotta come down, hang, and see what it’s all about.”
Jimmy had taken Bill Cosby’s bit on Noah’s Ark and basically rewritten it. He showed me what he had done and said, “I think you’d be perfect for this.”
The bit starts while Noah is in his woodworking shop. God’s voice chimes in saying, “Hello, Noah?”
Noah says, “Who is this?”
“God.”
“No, really . . . who is this?”
“God. Listen, I need you to build an ark.”
“What’s an ark?”
That bit is so genius. I reluctantly went with Jimmy to a rehearsal and met the drama kids, and they turned out to be cool. They were in agreement that I should do “Noah’s Ark.” Still, I didn’t think I could make it funny.
“You like Eddie Murphy, right?” Jimmy asked me.
“He’s the best.” I had just seen him at the Westbury Music Fair and would copy his routine word for word while wearing a Walkman down in my parents’ basement, pretending I was onstage. He was a tremendous influence on my comedy career.
“So do it in his voice,” Jimmy said. “Imagine how he would do it.” This was easy because I basically spent my life imitating his laugh, the way he walked, the way he talked, and all of his bits.
So that’s how I practiced it, and that’s how I did it in front of the whole school. When God asked me to build the ark so many cubits by so many cubits, I said, “Say what? I don’t know no darn cubit!” Today it might seem racially insensitive, but as a kid growing up on Long Island in the early 1980s, it felt like the ultimate tribute. I even copied his laugh—the one where it sounds like rapid, deep little wheezes. The crowd went bonkers and I felt the same rush I did when I made the girl on the porch laugh, only this was ten times more.
The next day at school, girls looked at me differently, stopping to say, “You were sooo funny.” Guys who’d thus far ignored me said, “You’re a pisser, Breuer. We gotta hang out!” It was so popular that there was an encore performance of Sketch Night, and all the kids, knowing what was coming, started chanting, “Noah! Noah!” before I went onstage. And as I stood behind the curtain and peeked out into the crowd, I saw jocks, punks, nerds, and parents all harmoniously unified. It was a rush seeing them all brought together through humor. I told myself, “I have to be a comedian.”
I was voted class clown my graduating year, and that summer when Jimmy’s band played gigs at little clubs on Long Island, they asked me to warm up the crowd. I’d unleash my AC/DC and Ozzy impressions, and then I would say, “And now, for a band that needs no introduction . . . ,” and just walk off the stage without actually introducing them. By the end of the summer, I did my first open mic night at Governor’s Comedy Club. I had bits about city pigeons who are mad at humans, how people freak out about spiders, and about sneaking into the house drunk. The crowd was small, just my friends, my sister Dorene, and her friends. But still I was shocked when I was not approached by a Hollywood agent or manager after the gig. I was certain a five-picture movie deal couldn’t be far away.
Mom and Dad’s plans for my future included more than just jumping onstage at rock clubs on Long Island. To appease them, I enrolled at Nassau Community College in the fall of 1985.
“You should take some bookkeeping classes,” my mom said. My older half brother Eddie was a successful executive in magazine publishing in Manhattan. Looking at what he’d done, they didn’t see how being a comedian was a viable job. But I dreaded even contemplating a nine-to-five life. What I’d been exposed to my senior year had stoked a fire inside of me. No one was ever going to give me a standing ovation for my bookkeeping work or chant, “Accounting! Accounting!” to me in the parking lot as I showed up for a desk job.
As my first few classes dragged by, that thought kept racing through my mind. My accounting professor surveyed the classroom one morning and offered this frank advice: “If you think you’re going to fail this class, or if you don’t want to be here anymore, this is the very last day you can get a ‘withdrawal.’ After today, you’ll get an F if you don’t complete your work. So, if anyone here still wants a W, please get up and leave the class.”
He hadn’t even finished his sentence by the time I got up and started walking toward the door. The whole class started cracking up, but I didn’t care. In my heart, I had made the right decision. I went right over to the drama building and changed my major to acting. When I got home, I told my parents what I’d done.
“It’s the end of the discussion,” I said. “If you want me to pursue a higher education, then I’m gonna do it through acting.”
My mom was concerned, but my dad was supportive. “Do it while you’re young,” he said, shrugging. “Get it out of your system.”
The kids hanging around the theater department weren’t much different from the Sketch Night kids at high school, except many of them just seemed content to be able to say, “We’re in theater.” I was there to become a star. I was going to get discovered, because Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, and Robert Klein all went to this college. In the future, they’d be saying Jim Breuer went there.
I had a Judas Priest denim jacket, I wore a lightning bolt earring, and I could act. I carried myself in a manner that said, “I’ll be seeing you at the Oscars, or actually I won’t, ’cause you guys will be watching me at home.”
I got one of the leads in the play Wait Until Dark. My character was a thug who got stabbed to death while greedily rummaging through a blind woman’s apartment trying to locate some stashed heroin. You might have seen the movie version, which starred Audrey Hepburn. I was psyched, because I got to roll down a flight of stairs. The next semester’s play was When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? The lead had to be really solid, as there was a scene in a diner that went on uninterrupted for like an hour where the character takes the place over, mentally breaking down every person there. He gets a chick to suck face with him, then makes a musician sit and write a song on the spot and perform it.
The auditions were happening during the production of Wait Until Dark, and I remember my major rival, a guy named Bobby Mayor, feeling me out, seeing if I was up for the challenge.
“It’s a lot of work,” he said. “We’re so busy with this play. It’s going to be really tough.”
I think he was hoping I’d say, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m going to sit this one out.” But I wanted it. I even threw a chair in the audition. I was a violent animal in that room. And I won the lead role. It was my favorite play I did at school. In the middle of it, one of the characters, a woman, revolts against my mind games and slaps me in the face. I knew I had nailed the role because when we performed it the audience always exploded during that scene.
After I got the lead in The Glass Menagerie, one of the professors said I should focus on building sets because more students needed to get a shot at performing—they were becoming disillusioned. I was angry. I had no idea you could be too successful. Looking back on it, I wish someone would have just pointed me to auditions outside of the school and inspired me to keep pur
suing acting in some other way. Instead, I was blackballed.
Chapter 3
Florida Bound ... and Gagged
After I’d done about a year and a half at Nassau Community College, I got some unwelcome news. My parents decided they were ready to leave New York. They wanted to move to Florida. Our neighborhood was changing, they wanted to retire, and moving down there was the thing to do then.
When my mom told me they were going to look at homes in Florida, I thought she was kidding.
“She’s serious,” my dad said insistently. This was during the phase where my dad was doing whatever my mom asked him to. (Actually that phase has lasted about forty years.) But I fought them tooth and nail on it for a few days. I didn’t want to go. I was a kid from Long Island. What was I gonna do in Florida?
They went down there and started looking at houses. On the second day of their trip, I was sitting around our house moping, and the phone rang. I picked it up. My mom was freaking out.
“Oh. My. God!” she shrieked. I thought maybe my dad had gone missing or they’d been robbed or something.
“What’s going on?” I asked. I was panicking. I heard a shuffling of the receiver, then my dad’s voice.
“We were looking at houses,” he said, then he paused, like there was something he didn’t quite know how to tell me.
“And?” I asked. “What happened? What happened?”
“There was an alligator in the backyard,” Dad said, sounding perturbed. “This place is not for me.”
When they hung up, I was like, “Nice!” I assumed they were packing their bags and coming back home, and that would be the end of the Florida business. When they came home a couple days later, Mom was all smiles. I assumed she was happy about coming to her friggin’ senses.
“We bought a house!” she squealed in a singsong voice. “We’re moving to Florida!” She was wearing a two-piece velour sweat suit, typical Mom-wear. And as she broke the news, she did a Price Is Right-contestant dance, like when they get called down for the Showcase Showdown. She was over the moon. I guess she figured she’d play the odds when it came to alligator attacks.