by Todd Glass
“That’s not a bad idea,” Mike replied.
We were still talking about it at three in the morning. Most shows center around some kind of meeting place that brings all the characters together—why couldn’t it be a guy in a coma? His family could visit. Friends would tell stories about how they met him. We’d make up anything we wanted about his life pre-coma and just tell it through the eyes of the people coming to visit him. Mick Jagger could show up and say, “Bloody shame—he used to be a roadie for the band.”
We decided to shoot our own pilot. By now, video cameras had become a lot more affordable and, with the right computer software, you could edit the material yourself. We’d recently added a fourth roommate, Steve Rosenthal, who brought a diligent professionalism to the project we’d started referring to as Todd’s Coma. We reached out to the people we wanted to help us make it. I asked Sarah Silverman. Steve emailed the famous jazz musician Herb Alpert, who had just done a Gap commercial—we convinced Herb to play a nurse who denies that he used to be Herb Alpert. Another friend of mine played softball with Fred Willard, whom I’d been obsessed with since watching Fernwood 2Night with my dad. And Chris, well . . .
We were at a party together when we saw Ben Stiller. I’d been introduced to Ben years earlier by Judd Apatow—the three of us wound up doing Don Rickles impressions all night—and I thought that Ben might remember me. “Go talk to him,” Chris said. “See if he’ll do Todd’s Coma.”
“I’m too embarrassed,” I confessed.
“Hey, Todd,” I heard Chris saying a minute later. “You know Ben, right?”
Oh Jesus.
“Tell him about your idea!” Chris added.
I wanted to punch Chris in the face. I felt like a little kid being pushed by his proud parents to recite a poem for their friends. But the pitch wasn’t complicated so I just started talking, pausing every two minutes to give Ben an out.
Ben could see that I was uncomfortable. “Do I look like you’re bothering me?” he said every time I paused. “I’m going away in two days, but FedEx me a few of the ideas you want me to do.”
Two months later, I was lying on a mattress in the middle of my living room while Ben Stiller, Fred Willard, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Pardo, and Herb Alpert rehearsed around me. It was surreal, to say the least.
We pitched the show to a bunch of production companies, but nothing happened until, about six months later, the comedian Nick Swardson noticed our video gathering dust on a shelf in Adam Sandler’s office. Nick encouraged Adam to watch the show. With Adam’s help, we sold the pilot to TBS.
Almost overnight, I had offices on the Sony lot and a million-dollar budget. I was pulling in every day through the gate, just like I’d seen in the movies. I got to hire Steve Rosenthal and Mike Koman—Adam’s theory was if these were the two guys who helped you create it, why wouldn’t you want them on board? We met with production designers and wardrobe stylists.
I remember driving to the shoot on the first day, getting off the 405 and seeing big signs with arrows that said Todd’s Coma. There were caterers and cameramen, police officers on motorcycles blocking traffic so we could shoot a scene in the middle of the street.
All because I was bad at acting and didn’t want to audition anymore.
The show never got picked up. (You can still find it on YouTube, if you’re interested.) While I obviously wished it had been a huge success, I still look back on the experience—no bullshit—as one of the most amazing opportunities I’ve ever had. (Thank you, Adam Sandler!) I didn’t have anything to get bitter about: My new relationship, new roommates, and new professional opportunities had me overflowing with confidence. For the first time I was beginning to feel normal and secure in my whole life, not just the part that I was showing to the world.
CHAPTER 28
TODD’S SITUATION
Thank God for Andrea.
It didn’t take long for my relationship with Chris to escalate. We were spending nearly all of our free time together.
I was getting ready to go to Dallas for a gig when he surprised me with a suggestion.
“What if I came with you?”
As much as I wanted him to, I was also terrified. What would I say to the other comedians? None of them had ever seen me with a female companion; in fact, I’d go out of my way to ignore any woman who approached me after a show. Now there was a guy staying in my room with me? They’d have to know, right? I held off saying yes for as long as I could, but in the end, my desire to spend more time with Chris and to share this part of my life with him won out over my fears.
We had a great time. Even better, no one seemed to be the wiser about our relationship. Feeling more confident, I started bringing Chris with me to other clubs.
We had to tell people something, so we said that he was my brother. To be honest, we probably didn’t spend as much time as we should have thinking through our cover story. When Chris’s dad—who is Chinese—came to our house to visit, we found ourselves scrambling to come up with a coherent story to tell our friends. After that, Chris became my stepbrother.
When people talk about hiding “in the closet,” I don’t think they really know what that means. I like to say it means everything you’re not thinking. It’s like keeping plates spinning in the air, all day, every day. Staying closeted isn’t a black-and-white issue—it’s full of nuances and moving parts. We had to keep track of who knew about us. Who didn’t. Who did but wasn’t saying anything. We felt like undercover cops trying to remember which cover stories we’d shared with what people. In retrospect, with all the lies and the stories and the hours and hours we spent trying to stay in character, it’s pretty amazing that I don’t have a better acting career.
Which is why we were so lucky to have Andrea.
I met Andrea after one of my shows. Besides being tall, stunningly beautiful, and smart, she was hilarious. Chris told her about us very early on—Chris was usually more comfortable telling women about our situation, while I was generally most comfortable telling, well, nobody. But all three of us felt comfortable spending lots of time together. In fact, the three of us became so tight that we decided to buy a house together. Andrea was a teacher and secured a low-interest loan through her credit union; Chris and I scraped together the down payment.
People knew we were looking for a new place to live. “Have you and Chris found a house yet?” they’d ask.
“You mean me and Chris and Andrea,” I’d instantly correct them. “Yes, me and Chris and Andrea are still looking for a house.” Andrea. AndreaAndreaAndreaAndrea. I’d say her name so many times that it would spin people around, getting them so dizzy they’d stop asking me questions.
But panic set in whenever Chris and I were spotted running errands together. Especially if those errands were at a place like Bed Bath & Beyond. One day we were there buying stuff for the house, when a comedian friend of mine walked over to say hello. “Todd! What are you doing here?”
I looked at Chris, who was maybe five feet away from me. Oh shit! We can’t be seen at Bed Bath & Beyond together. It looks so . . . gay!
Chris didn’t have to read my mind—we’d already worked out a protocol for situations just like this one: He quickly walked away without turning back. “Oh, just looking for some stuff,” I replied. “I just bought a house with my friend Andrea and she wanted me to buy some things and AndreaAndreaAndreaAndrea . . .”
Our new home was a duplex—Chris and I took the ground floor, while Andrea took the upstairs—and we set about creating our own little world. Andrea was always down to play someone’s girlfriend. She got a dinner, drinks, a free night on the town, and, at the end of the evening, no one tried to fuck her. It didn’t always work though—after all, Andrea was a beautiful woman and once in a while she forgot what her role was. Like when Chris took her to a wedding and she wound up getting drunk and making out with some random guy: “We’re not exactly dating,” Chris had to explain nervously to the confused people at his table. “We’re more like f
riends with benefits.” After that we kept Andrea to a three-drink maximum, checking in with her periodically to make sure she was still in character.
But Andrea was always a good sport. One time we were renting a cabin with a group of our friends. We stopped on the way to load up on groceries for a big dinner we were planning. Chris wanted to get flowers for the table, but was embarrassed at how that might make him look to the others, so he casually tossed them in Andrea’s basket.
“Who bought the flowers?” one of our friends inevitably asked when we got to the counter.
Thank God for Andrea. “I did!” she said, just like we asked her to.
But Chris overcompensated. “I can’t believe you bought fucking flowers,” he said dismissively.
Andrea’s eyes looked like they were going to burn a hole right through him. It was absurd what we put her through. When we had dinner parties and wanted to set a fancy table, we would sit Andrea down beforehand and prepare her like she was about to start an undercover sting operation.
“What are you going to say if someone asks who set the table?”
“I’m going to say that I did it.”
“Good. And you’re going to say it just that way, right? Not like the other time, when someone asked and you said, ‘Oh, I did it, but it was no big deal—it only took me a minute.’ ”
“No, Todd, I’ll say it the way you want me to say it.”
Sure enough, someone complimented the setting at our dinner party, and Andrea gamely jumped in and took the credit. We hadn’t planned on one of Andrea’s friends deciding to correct her. “Andrea didn’t set it,” she blurted out. “Todd did! He just didn’t want anybody to know.”
I froze. Chris jumped in and quickly changed the topic: “Why don’t you tell everyone about the guy you fucked in the Jacuzzi in Florida?” he asked her.
I was still angry even after most of the guests had gone. “Why did she have to open her big mouth?” I complained to my friend Jimmy Dore, who had stuck around to help us clean up.
Jimmy just laughed. “Don’t you hear what you’re saying, Todd? You don’t want anyone to know that you like pretty things!”
We didn’t know how good we had it with Andrea until we got into situations where she wasn’t around. When you live in Los Angeles, it’s not uncommon for police helicopters to buzz past your house in the middle of the night, shining spotlights that always seem to be directed toward your yard. One night, in the midst of another routine helicopter manhunt, the police knocked on our door and wanted to know if they could continue the search in back of our house.
Obviously we were terrified—not because of the possibility that a dangerous fugitive was hiding in our backyard, but because the policemen might look around our house and get the impression that we were gay. Chris ran to “my” bedroom—the room that had become our storage closet—and started pulling all of the boxes and suitcases off the bed so that it could conceivably look slept in.
“Put those flowers away, they look gay!” Chris screamed.
“You know what looks gay?!” I screamed back at him. “Two men our age living together!”
Throughout it all, we laughed a lot. My personal life was finally catching up with my professional success. But keeping my personal life a secret all of the time not only felt wrong, but was proving harder and harder to do. I’d find myself wanting to share stories about the funny things that happened to Chris and me, so I tried changing certain details to make them fit our cover story.
Like the time Chris and I threw a party at the house and his mother, Pierrette, accidentally ate five pot cookies someone brought with them. My friend Gina, who had been chatting with Pierrette for a few minutes, came into the kitchen to ask me if everything was okay.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Chris’s mom asked me if it was normal to do this . . .” Gina proceeded to wave her hands in front of her face, staring at her fingers as she wiggled them.
“Oh my God!” I yelled, realizing what had happened. “What did you tell her?”
“That it was fine?”
Five pot cookies would have put Willie Nelson on the floor. As the cookies kicked in, Chris’s mom—who is French and speaks with a heavy accent—started to moan. We started to panic. Someone called 911. When we told them that pot cookies were involved, they sent an ambulance and a police car.
A few minutes later there was a huge scene playing out in front of our house. I should tell you that Pierrette is fine now—in fact, she was fine later that night, flirting heavily with a paramedic forty years her junior as they wheeled her into the ambulance. When she woke the next morning, Pierrette had already decided that the incident was amusing enough to share with all of our neighbors. Needless to say, none of this was particularly amusing to Chris.
“Mom, they’re gonna think you’re some drugged-up whore!”
A few months later, I decided to tell the story to a group of comedians. For some reason I got worried that using Pierrette as a character might reveal too much about our, ahem, situation, so I pretended the story was about my own mother. Halfway through, I realized that I’d unintentionally given my mother a French accent.
So did Dave Rath. “Wait, Todd . . . Why is your mom French in this story?”
I started to sweat. This is it . . . They’re gonna find out . . . How am I going to get out of this one? Luckily, Sarah Silverman—who by this time had become one of my closest friends and knew all about Chris—jumped in to rescue me. “Oh, that’s just Todd being silly,” she said.
It worked—this time. But the moment of panic reminded me how exhausting it was to keep living two separate lives. Something had to give.
CHAPTER 29
FIRST RELATIONSHIP
Where Todd learns that men are from Mars, but also from Venus.
By the time most people reach their early thirties, they’ve spent enough time in relationships to have picked up at least a few of the tools they need to get along with their romantic partners. Not me—I was starting from scratch. Despite our ten-year age difference, Chris and I were entering our relationship from a pretty similar place in terms of emotional maturity.
That place being “little to none.” There were bound to be a few speed bumps.
Like the way I’d always been attracted to straight-seeming guys. I’d always had issues with gay men who were more experienced than I was, probably out of jealousy that they were comfortable with their sexuality in a way that I wasn’t. With Chris, I found myself in the strange and unfamiliar position of being the (slightly) more experienced guy.
Eew, gross.
I didn’t want to weird Chris out in the way I had been weirded out in the past, so I tried to avoid any conversation about my previous partners. But the topic inevitably came up from time to time and always caused a fight.
There were plenty of arguments over much simpler things. What car I was going to buy. How many weeks I’d be on the road. Which cities were okay for Chris to come visit me in, and which ones weren’t. Every couple fights, of course, but neither of us knew how to have a productive conversation that could lead to a mature resolution. There was a lot of screaming. Many doors were slammed in anger.
We finally decided to get professional help. We heard that a local Gay & Lesbian Center offered relationship counseling to same-sex couples. True to form, we parked several blocks away from the therapist’s office, near a YMCA, so if Chris and I ran into anyone that we knew we could tell them that we were on our way to the gym. (Because that wouldn’t sound gay at all.)
The therapist encouraged us to take time-outs. Everyone thinks time-outs are for kids, but I get it now. They work. (And if they don’t, you’ve got a pretty clear indication that you need more intense help.) I had my doubts at the beginning—Okay, I’ll take a time-out, but two hours from now I’m still going to be mad—but was amazed to discover that just three minutes in another room and suddenly I was receptive to hearing whatever it was that Chris was really saying to me.
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br /> The listening part turned out to be really important. I discovered that I’d been taking a lot of things that Chris said personally, as opposed to being able to listen to him and to figure out where he was coming from. Sometimes the person you’re with just wants to be heard. They’re not necessarily upset with you—they’re just upset and you happened to be there.
We found out that almost every argument has an “over-reactor” and a “calmer-downer”—one person tends to get upset, leading his or her partner to try and defuse the situation by pointing out that whatever it is isn’t worth getting upset about. Unfortunately this can sometimes make the overreactor feel like the calmer-downer is trivializing the issue.
So I came up with a way to defuse this dynamic: If the person you’re with is upset about something, you just get more upset about it. In other words, the calmer-downer becomes the overreactor, forcing the overreactor to calm down.
“Can you believe we ordered forty-five minutes ago and our food still isn’t here?”
“WHAT?! THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT! WE ARE SO FUCKING OUT OF HERE!”
“All right, all right. Calm down. It’s not a big deal.”
“Oh, it’s not? Okay, whatever you say.”
Or:
“Hey, did you remember to take the laundry from the washer and put it into the dryer?”
“FUCK! I TOTALLY FORGOT! I’M A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT AND DON’T DESERVE YOU! I’M GOING TO GO KILL MYSELF NOW BECAUSE I’M SUCH A FUCKING LOSER!”
“Jesus, relax! I’ll do it.”
We slowly began to deal with our relationship issues in a way that started to resemble maturity. Our progress even gave me enough courage to bring Chris back to Philadelphia with me where—because it was starting to get a little ridiculous—I finally opened up to my mother and her new husband. It may have taken me thirty-two years, but I’m happy to say that the experience turned out to be a positive one: Nobody said or did anything dramatic. After a lot of routine questions about our relationship (“How long have you been together? Where did you meet?”), Chris was welcomed into our family. I even managed to tell Katy, finally bringing our relationship to an honest place.