by Paul Feig
One afternoon, after the freak girls had gotten rid of Mrs. Black for yet another year, Steve climbed onto the bus. He was wearing dirty elephant-bell jeans with big flowery patches on the knees, a peace sign T-shirt, sandals, and love beads. His hair was down past his shoulders and he wore a headband. Everyone fell silent when he stood up in front of us and gave us a big smile.
“Hi, everyone. Peace. My name is Steve and I’m your new bus driver. I know you guys have had trouble before with bus drivers and I can relate to that. I have a hard time with the Establishment, too. Adults can be a real drag.” He laughed. “I just want you to know that since we’re all almost the same age, I’m here to help you guys. If you ever have any problems with anything—school, your parents, your boyfriend or girlfriend—just come on up front here and when I’m done driving you home safely, we’ll rap and see if we can’t straighten your head out. Okay? That sound groovy?”
He gave us a sincere smile.
We stared at him in silence. Then . . .
“TAKE A BATH, YOU FUCKIN’ HIPPIE FAGGOT!” screamed Sue Clark. Then all the freak girls burst into gales of derisive laughter.
Steve’s face went blank, then he looked like he was going to cry. He slid silently behind the seat, started the bus, and drove us home. And for the next few weeks, Steve descended into Hippie Hell. The freak girls systematically destroyed everything Steve stood for, shouting insults ranging from “You were probably too much of a pussy to go to war” to “Get a haircut, you homo.” After two weeks, Steve was gone. To this day, I still feel depressed when I think about what happened to Steve. Looking back, he was probably the best bus driver we could have had. He probably could have even been our friend.
But I guess people don’t really know a savior when they see one.
But then again, saviors shouldn’t be driving school buses.
AND NOW A WORD FROM THE BOOTH . . .
One day, when I was in the eleventh grade, I found out the football team was looking for a new announcer. And I was very excited.
Ever since I was little, I’d always fancied that I had a great announcer’s voice. When I was seven, my dad gave me an old reel-to-reel tape recorder that quickly became my favorite possession. I’d spend afternoons talking into the mike, making up compelling in-the-field news dramas full of excitement and a testing of the human spirit.
“This is Paul Feig out in the battlefield where things look relatively calm after a . . . wait. What’s that?”
Like all seven-year-old boys, I was very good at making the sound of (a) a bomb whistling down out of the sky, (b) that bomb exploding, (c) machine-gun fire, (d) single-shot handgun fire, (e) the rumbling of a squadron of airplanes coming into range, (f) those same airplanes dive-bombing, and (g) any other mechanical sounds that involved war, death, and destruction. At this moment that I was recording my out-in-the-battlefield drama, I was performing a combination of sounds (a) and (e).
“Oh, my God. It’s a bomb. Run for your—” Sound (b).
“Oh, my God, they hit the tank! We’ve gotta get outta here!” Sounds (f), (a), and (c).
“We’re trapped! Quick. We’ve gotta get to that foxhole.” Sounds (b) and (c), with a few (d)’s thrown in for added mayhem.
“Argh, they got Charlie! My leg! They got my leg!” Riff on (g).
End ominously by simply turning off the tape, simulating the destruction of the tape recorder. Let your audience ruminate on the horrors of war.
Repeat. Endlessly.
My dad’s old reel-to-reel eventually led to my teenage purchase of a high-end cassette recorder and microphone, upon which I would perform my scripted radio shows in the sad privacy of my Steve Martin poster–covered bedroom. By this time, as I was making my way through the wilds of high school, I had left the art of war to the professionals and was dabbling in two areas of sound pastiche—the detective show and Ed Sullivan impersonations. Granted, Ed Sullivan had been off the air for many years by the time I started imitating him, but since I’d heard John Byner do a funny impression of Ed on the local Canadian TV station we received in Detroit, I was convinced that I could do it, too. What I planned on doing with it was a mystery, but at that time, I somehow assumed the media were clamoring for a sixteen-year-old doing imitations of a guy my peers had no memory of.
“Right here on our show, how about a big hand for President Jimmy Carter!” I’d yell enthusiastically into the microphone, as I hunched my shoulders up in a Sullivan-esque fashion. I would then continue talking like Ed Sullivan as I moved the mike away from my mouth, saying things like “All right, Mr. Carter, right this way,” creating the impression that Ed was walking away. When the mike was as far as possible from my mouth, I would go into my half-baked Jimmy Carter impression, which was simply a low-grade imitation of Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation from Saturday Night Live. I’d talk in a Jimmy Carter–like manner, thanking Ed Sullivan as I moved the mike slowly back to my mouth, simulating the approach of our thirty-ninth president. “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Sullivan. My fellow Americans, today I’d like to talk to you about . . . peanuts.” Neither my impressions nor my material were very good but my mike technique was outstanding. And so was my growing resolve that I belonged on the radio.
So, in my junior year, when the opportunity to be the announcer for the football team arose, I jumped at it with a gusto unseen in our school regarding anything except trying to get out the front door after the last-period bell. I marched down to the office of our vice principal, Mr. Randell, to offer up my services. Mr. Randell was a nice guy who’d received a very bad rap at our school. Not only did he have the misfortune to be our vice principal, a thankless job that invites all the abuse that students are too afraid to aim at the actual principal, but he was also cursed with the misfortune of looking vaguely froglike. In retrospect, he really didn’t look like anything other than an overweight guy with small features, a large fleshy face, and an underbite. But in the hands of our perennially cruel student body, whose main goal was striking out at any and all authority figures, Mr. Randell’s features all added up to the poor guy being assigned the nickname “Toad.”
I sat down in Mr. Randell’s office and informed him of the great fortune that was about to befall both him and the football team.
“Mr. Randell, I want to be the football announcer.”
“Oh, really? Excellent. I’ve always thought you had a good voice, ever since I saw you perform ‘The Parrot Sketch’ at assembly last year. I’m quite a Monty Python fan, too, you know.” No, I didn’t know, but I have to say that the Monty Python comedy troupe’s cool quotient took a near-fatal hit with that revelation.
“Oh, really?” I said, not wanting to let any negative energy get in the way of my being offered the announcing job. “They’re the greatest.”
“They certainly are,” he said, chuckling to himself, his mind taking a brief trip through their repertoire. Had he been my age, I could have easily launched us into a one-hour marathon of reciting sketches word for word but, since befriending the vice principal would only result in even more torment from my peers, I simply chuckled, too, and stuck to the matter at hand.
“So . . . is anybody else up for the job?” I asked.
“No, surprisingly. I thought we’d have a few more students interested in it,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “Do you know a lot about football?”
Without missing a beat, I looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.”
I knew nothing about football. I mean, I knew that announcers always said stuff like “he’s at the twenty, he’s at the ten, he’s at the five, TOUCHDOWN!” I could do that quite well, having loudly practiced it over and over the previous evening in my room until my father came in to tell me that he and my mother couldn’t hear the television. To me, being able to describe what I was seeing on the field would be a nonstop performance of making jokes, doing funny voices, and keeping the audience rapt as I called out the action of an extra-point kick. “There’s the snap. The kicker runs
up and . . . OOOOHHH! IT’S GOOOOOOOOOOD!” What more did you need to know about football than that? Nothing. At least not in my book.
“Have you ever been an announcer at a football game before?” Mr. Randell asked.
“Whenever my father and I watch football, I do the play-by-play commentary along with the TV.” It was scaring me how effortlessly the lies were coming out of my mouth. My father and I never watched football together, and on the few occasions that I would turn on a game, my “announcing” the play-by-play consisted of my simply repeating any of the announcer’s phrases that seemed fun to say. Phrases like “Ooo, that’s gotta hurt” and “Oh, brother, can you believe that?” were the extent to which I had ever announced a football game. But in my head, at this moment, that qualified me for a great career in the announcer’s booth.
This was not a new way of thinking for me. Unfortunately.
See, ever since I was a kid, I was always convinced that if the pressure was really on, I could do anything. I always imagined a scenario in which I was being held captive by some enemy soldiers who’d have a gun at my head. One of them would say, “If you can play Mozart on this piano, right now, we won’t kill you. If you can’t, you’re dead.” And then, because it was a life-or-death situation, even though I had no idea how to play the piano, somehow I’d magically be able to play Mozart. I don’t know why I thought this. Probably because there had been a lot of stories on That’s Incredible! lately about mothers who, when their children were pinned under cars, suddenly developed superhuman strength and were able to lift the autos with one hand. So, I guess I figured that if a housewife can lift a car, I could play a sonata. And at the very least, I had to be able to announce a stupid football game.
Mr. Randell gave me the job and told me my first gig was that Friday night. I left his office very excited. I foresaw great things in my future. From the Chippewa Valley Big Reds football games, it would be a straight shot to taking over for George Kell and announcing the Detroit Tigers baseball games. From there, it was a quick stroll to Wide World of Sports, where I would be standing in the field with Jim McKay, announcing downhill skiing as I wore my supercool yellow announcer’s sportcoat with the regal WWOS patch on the breast pocket. I knew I could say “and the agony of defeat” as well as anyone else out there. Big things were on the horizon and I owed it all to a guy named Toad.
I spent the next few days practicing in my room and in my car. I didn’t bother to read any books about football because I had convinced myself that I’d have a sidekick who would take care of all the details of the game. Every sportscaster has a color commentator, and I knew they weren’t just going to stick me in the booth alone. Even Mr. Randell had said there’d be people up there to help me. So what was the point of trying to fill my head with a bunch of mundane rules? Leave that stuff to the support team, I thought. I was there to entertain and enthrall.
My father was quite surprised when I told him about my new job.
“You’re going to be a football announcer?” he asked in the same supportive tone he’d used the time I told him I wanted to ask my school’s head cheerleader to the prom.
“Yeah, they gave me the job.”
“But you don’t know anything about football.”
“Sure, I do,” I said, indignant.
“Well, you sure as hell didn’t learn it from me. I can’t stand the game.”
It was true. My whole family had a strange aversion to sports. Except for my grandmother, who was fanatical about the Tigers. She always referred to them as “my Tigers” and would sooner give up her Social Security checks than miss watching a game on TV. According to her, she was always “suffering” along with her Tigers whenever they had a bad season. I’ve always wondered if it was my grandmother who made professional sports so unattractive to the rest of us. It’s like being around alcoholics. The more they get into the booze, the less cool booze seems. Being around sports enthusiasts makes me want to push an amendment through Congress banning all professional sports from our culture. The sight of people either celebrating a victory of their local sports team or getting really upset because their team didn’t win has always depressed the hell out of me. I don’t begrudge anybody for getting excited about the fortunes of the team they’ve decided to follow. It’s just when it really seems to affect their happiness and satisfaction with their lives that it makes me nervous. I’ve become enthused over certain play-off series and championships whenever my old Detroit teams were involved, but it was because I no longer lived in Detroit and was homesick for the Midwest. By living in Los Angeles and still rooting for Detroit, I was somehow reconnecting with my past, cheering not for the men on my team but for the place in which I grew up. And if my home team lost, especially to a Los Angeles team, it was as if my place of birth had failed, thus causing me to be a dud, a second-rate citizen put in his place by the bigger, hipper town in which he was now living. In these moments, sports were simply a conduit through which my self-worth passed. And so, for displaced people in this country, I can understand the allure of following your favorite sports team.
But if you’re living in the town that your team’s in and you’re going nuts all the time, then something’s gotta be missing from your life.
The night of the football game arrived. I got in my car and nervously headed over to the football field. I had spent the week imagining what my debut was going to be like. I had never been to one of my school’s football games, except in my sophomore year when I spent the homecoming game standing by the fence pining over Tina Jenkins, a pretty cheerleader whom I was planning to ask to the homecoming dance on the very day of the homecoming dance. And on that day, the announcer’s booth had been a faraway and mystical place to me, a small wooden house up at the top of the bleachers. I tried to remember what the announcer for the team had sounded like but couldn’t recall ever hearing one. I remember hearing the occasional announcement of a player’s name and the score, but beyond that my memory had failed me. I kept telling myself that, despite what the past announcers had done with their jobs, I was going to bring a whole new level of entertainment to the proceedings. I envisioned the people in the stands laughing uproariously at my humorous side comments. I couldn’t really think of what any of these humorous side comments might be, but I was sure that in the heat of the moment, I’d be playing that crowd the same way I’d be bashing out Bach’s Goldberg Variations if a gun were pointed at my head.
I pulled into the school parking lot, which was crowded with cars and families heading over to the field. Seeing them, I started to get a little nervous, but quickly made myself feel better with the realization that these people were all in for quite a treat. They didn’t notice me now, but after the game they’d be mobbing me, shaking my hand and saying “Funny, funny stuff” and “I never enjoyed football until tonight. Thank you.” The night air was cold and I hadn’t worn a warm enough jacket. However, I knew that once I got up into that booth, everything would be great. I had seen the inside of an announcer’s booth on an episode of The Odd Couple, when Oscar was doing play-by-play with Howard Cosell. The clean white room with the bank of recording and sound equipment against the back wall. The microphones mounted on stands, sitting in front of you on a white counter. The window that revealed your sound engineer, to whom you would confidently nod as you were coming to the end of a commentary so that he could deftly hit the music button just as your story reached its crescendo. I couldn’t wait for the game to start and my career to be launched.
I got to the bleachers and looked up at the announcer’s booth. I wasn’t quite sure how to get up there. I scanned around and saw that there was a rickety wooden staircase leading up to it behind the bleachers. I took a look back at the crowds who were heading to their seats. Moms and dads and little brothers and grandfathers were all decked out in red and white with the politically incorrect logo of our school’s screaming Big Red Indian emblazoned on their sweatshirts and jackets. These were the football regulars, people who came out every week
end night to watch their sons and neighbors clash on the gridiron. The world of high school sports and its supporters was as foreign to me as the backstage politics of the drama club was to these people who were now packing into the stands. Would they accept me and my new take on their world? Or would my vocal antics prove too revolutionary for them? Did they want their football straight up and sober, or had they been longing for an unorthodox messiah who would challenge the very way they enjoyed their sport? Unsure, I turned and headed up the stairs to the announcer’s booth, the butterflies in my stomach doubling with each creaky wooden step I trod. Whether they were ready or not, this crowd was just minutes away from the new world order, and I was going to be standing at the helm.
I got to the top and opened the door. I was immediately shocked. The booth was nothing like the one in The Odd Couple. It was nothing like where the announcers sat during Monday Night Football. It wasn’t even as nice as the shed in our backyard. It was basically a big wooden box that looked like it had been assembled by the Little Rascals. There were no lights in it, it was made entirely out of plywood and particleboard, and it had no glass windows. The counter where the mike stood was basically a couple of two-by-fours that had been nailed together and then hastily pounded into the wall. A bunch of men in their late forties and early fifties were standing around, wrapped in heavy coats and wearing aviator glasses. They all seemed to have mustaches. When they saw me, they gave me a look.
“Where the hell have you been? You’re the announcer, right?” said the biggest mustache man. These guys all looked like the deer hunters who always came into my dad’s store to buy bright orange clothes that were supposed to prevent them from drunkenly shooting each other out in the forest.