by Dave Holmes
Copyright © 2016 by Dave Holmes
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Epigraph on this page courtesy of Frank Turner.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Holmes, Dave, 1971–
Title: Party of one : a memoir in 21 songs / Dave Holmes.
Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047486 | ISBN 9780804187985 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804188005 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Holmes, Dave, 1971– | Holmes, Dave, 1971– —Childhood and youth. | Comedians—United States—Biography. | Television personalities—United States—Biography. | Radio personalities—United States—Biography. | Authors, American—Biography. | Gay men—United States—Biography. | Coming of age—United States. | Self-acceptance—United States. | Popular music—United States—Miscellanea. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | HUMOR / General. | MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Pop Vocal. Classification: LCC CT275.H6446 A3 2016 | DDC 780.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015047486
ISBN 9780804187985
ebook ISBN 9780804188005
Cover design by Jake Nicolella
Photo credits: this page: © Getty Images; this page: © Jim Smeal
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Intro
1. Go Your Own Way
2. Hungry Heart
Interlude: Seven Pieces of Pop Culture That Prevented Me from Leading a Normal Life
3. Let’s Go Crazy
4. The Edge of Heaven
Interlude: Seven Fun Activities for When Your Crush Becomes Your Friend
5. Drifting, Falling
6. Everybody Loves Me but You
Interlude: So You’ve Had Your Heart Broken in the ’90s: A Playlist
7. Free Your Mind
8. I’ll Be There for You
Interlude: What We Talk About When We Talk About the ’90s
9. Show Me Love
Interlude: The Men Who Ruined Me
10. The Man Who Sold the World
11. Impulsive
12. Wannabe
Interlude: Notes on (Jesse) Camp
13. A Life of Possibilities
14. Too Close
Interlude: The Ten Most Important Videos from My Tenure at TRL
15. Unpretty
Interlude: All Right, You Jackals, Here Are a Few Shocking Stories About Famous People
16. Gotta Tell You
17. Any Little Town
18. Such Great Heights
19. Trying to Find a Balance
Interlude: In Which I Meet My Dream Man
20. Losing My Edge
21. I Wanna Get Better
Bonus Track
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To Dad, Mom, Dan, and Steve, for messing me up the exact right amount.
Life is about love, last minutes and lost evenings,
About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings,
And the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering,
They help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live.
—FRANK TURNER, “I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous”
Of all the epic stories, both factual and fictional, that we have passed down through history, I identify most strongly with the journey of the Bee Girl in Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video. If you didn’t happen to spend your life in front of a television in 1992, here’s the situation: a plucky, bespectacled girl, maybe nine years old, has dressed up in a cheap bumblebee costume that looks like it was made by a parent in a great big hurry—and all she wants to do is dance. Throughout the video, Bee Girl tap-dances her little heart out, giving everything she’s got to everyone she meets, and over and over she’s met with stone faces. Move it along, the people of the town seem to tell her as the song shambles on. Nobody is interested, but does she give up? No, she does not. I’ve got spirit yes I do, I’ve got spirit, how about…you? she wonders. Are you my people? Do I belong here? No, no, and no.
And then, as the song reaches its post-Nevermind, pre–Rusted Root, Woodstock ’94–bound crescendo, Bee Girl approaches the wrought-iron gate of a peaceful pasture, and with a look of pure amazement and joy swings the gate open to reveal a whole field of frolicking bee-people. Bee-people young and old, black and white, each united by their unfortunate costumes and love of dance. She is home. She has found her people. There you are, you imagine her saying with a sigh.
I remember seeing this video for the first time in college—miserable, half-drunk on Keystone Light, a Camel Light smoldering my mouth, about to desperately tap-dance my way through another social interaction—and saying out loud: “I fucking get you, Bee Girl.”
My name’s Dave Holmes, and I have spent most of my life being the odd man out. In retrospect the only bad thing about that is how much time I spent thinking it was a bad thing.
I hunted high and low for my place in this world. I changed myself around every which way to make myself normal. I tried to be each of the five archetypes from The Breakfast Club, all four of the Facts of Life girls, every one of the emotions inside Herman’s Head. I tore it up, you guys. It didn’t work, exactly, but if my unquenchable thirst for acceptance sent me on a long series of wrong turns, I’m exactly where I want to be now. I’m not going to tell you that I found my field of frolicking bee-people inside me, because then I would have to close my laptop, fill my pockets with stones, and walk into the ocean. But if you find you’re reaching that conclusion on your own, I’m not going to stand in your way.
I did a lot of embarrassing things and put myself through a lot of useless trouble on the road to accepting myself, and it would have been a much more painful experience had I not had access to the most powerful stimulant known to humankind: the music and popular culture of the last forty years. I came of age in the time of the Monoculture, when we were all watching the same three networks and listening to the same Top 40 radio stations. My identity was formed in the eras of Thriller, The Cosby Show, and Nirvana—all those stories ended well, right?—and when I felt like I didn’t have a friend in the world, they were there for me. I had intense love affairs with albums. I saw movies so many times I could direct them from memory. I spent so much time in front of MTV it finally gave up and invited me in.
In my younger days, my preferred method of communication was a mixtape (and then a mix-CD, and then, ever so briefly, a mix-MiniDisc). I could tell people I liked them, or that I wanted them to like me, or that I was breaking up with them, or that I understood they were breaking up with me (but if they could just understand how I felt, maybe they’d change their minds) in ninety minutes of music. It’s the way a nonmusician could make his own album, the way a kid too scared to speak his mind could get his point across.
It’s still my favorite thing to do, and you better believe I tried to sell my publisher on getting this into the marketplace as an Apple Music playlist, but these book types insist that you use words. So here they are: stories of the blessed and stupid life of a kid on the margins, and the music that moved it forward, in book form, which I figured I should hurry up and do before we start passing down our histories via emojis and GIFs of Rue McClanah
an. I put it together like an album, with a few interludes in between, like how hip-hop albums used to have skits. (But maybe they’ll, you know, age better.)
I hope you like it. I hope I bring back some memories or help you understand a beautiful time in recent history that is absolutely gone forever. And if you are in the middle of your own desperate tap dance right now, I hope that you can learn from my mistakes.
Just stay with me, and we’ll have it made.
I played for the St. Gerard’s first-grade boys’ soccer team because participation was compulsory, sports were a thing a boy was expected to take to, and I liked being where the boys were besides. They’d put me at goalie, which was a smart tactical move because I wasn’t very good at the running or the kicking or the remembering which way to go when I had the ball. I wasn’t into it. All the bewildering action was happening a world away in midfield, and I’d already done the thing where I tangled myself up in the net and pretended I was a Spider-Man villain; my work on the field felt done. And there was an audience right there: a bleacher full of parents and siblings, some from St. G’s, some from the opposing parish, Mary Queen of Peace—a crowd, I imagined, as starved for entertainment as I was. I knew where I was needed.
I walked over to the bleachers and shook some hands. “Good to see you, Mr. and Mrs. Gunn. Is that a new blouse, Mrs. Edwards? Lovely.” I could hear Coach O’Connor calling me back to my post, but I had put myself where I knew I could do the most good. “Can that be Angela, Mrs. DiNunzio? No. She’s growing up too fast.” My parents tried to get my attention and point me toward the field. “Let’s do a cheer,” I told my public. “How about ‘This Team Is Red Hot’—Do we all know that one? I’ll start.” The parents from Mary Queen of Peace got louder and louder, until they broke out into full applause and stood—which felt premature, given that I hadn’t even gotten into my impressions yet—but the ovation was not for me. I turned around just in time to see that one of their kids had sent the ball right into my untended goal. I clapped and whooped along with them. Scoring is good no matter who does it, I figured. It’s why we’re here in the first place. A few of the parents began to laugh, and I was too young to know it was at me. I just knew I was getting a reaction, and a reaction felt good. I’d never felt like I had much to offer out on the field, but this, this, was something I could do.
Coach O’Connor was a patient man, but he had his limits. “Hey, Holmes?” he called out to me, “Isn’t there somewhere you should be?”
Of course there was. I turned back to the bleachers: “Is anybody celebrating an anniversary?”
My family’s game was well in progress by the time I made it to the field—my parents had my brothers, Dan and Steve, a year and a half apart, and then exactly eight years later, me—so entertaining from the sidelines has always been my default position. Those who can neither do nor teach have a tendency to observe and make jokes.
Like any good St. Louis family, my family loves sports. They aren’t obsessed—they don’t wear jerseys or paint their torsos or perform strange rituals beyond some enthusiastic marching in place to the Notre Dame fight song—but they’re into it. We had season tickets to the football Cardinals in the years before the owner moved them to wherever they are now—boy, was that the talk of the town that I sort of half listened to—and while I loved going along, I never paid a bit of attention to the game. Who could, when there was so much else going on? When you could analyze the cheerleaders and try to determine which was the one the rest of them didn’t like? When the guy three rows ahead of you with the huge pink face got drunker and drunker on the ice-cold beers the vendor kept selling him, and his wife silently planned her escape? When you were scanning the audience for someone else who was looking at the world the same way you were, who also called the crowd at a football game an “audience”? Life was unfolding all around—who cared which team got the most points?
My family is also Catholic, which meant that we showed up at 11:00 Mass every Sunday, with breakfast at the IHOP after. Catholicism is supposed to contain and explain all the mysteries of an infinite universe, but you’re not supposed to ask questions. You’re supposed to sing along with the hymns, but not too loudly. You’re supposed to sit—and stand, and kneel, and genuflect—quietly in church, and if that’s hard for you to do, you’re supposed to give it as an offering to Our Lord Jesus Christ. (Affer it up t’Are Lard, Mom would whisper to us; you’re evidently also supposed to know what that means.) You’re expected to worship an invisible, unknowable being who made the whole world in six days and then rested for one, who sent his only son to die on a cross because of what you did or might someday do or might someday think about doing, all so that someday you can go live on a cloud with them and all your dead relatives and favorite celebrities for an infinite number of forevers. But you’re not supposed to be weird about it. When your main objective is to be a good kid, Catholicism makes everything extremely complicated.
Growing up, my brothers stood as two ball-playing, Catholic-etiquette-understanding examples of what boys were supposed to be. They were effortlessly athletic and personable, smart and charismatic. They were cool. Dan was in a Catholic high school in Midtown St. Louis that had a military option, which he chose voluntarily, in classic oldest-child fashion. Steve went to a different one in the suburbs with a good football program. Dan could do all kinds of drills with his rifle; he could tap me on the shoulders with the Wiffle-ball bat from the garage and make me a knight like he saw in Camelot. Steve could do all the Muppets’ voices and throw a tennis ball so high in the air it became a tiny speck and then I couldn’t even see it anymore. And I begged them to do it all again and again. It was the best show in town.
Where they could wrestle or race each other and be more or less evenly matched, either one of them could demolish me so easily there was no point in my even trying. When they tossed a baseball at each other, it would make that satisfying, forceful little pop when it would hit the other’s glove; my throws would make a sad little arc ending halfway to my intended target, an average of thirty degrees to the left. They knew how to talk to and win over kids their age; I gave up on my peers when I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to discuss Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
They were also skilled at the art of being good older brothers. It’s Steve who taught me how to read, when he was ten and I was two. We watched Sesame Street together, and after each episode he’d make flash cards to reinforce the lessons of the day. Because it meant more time together, I’d go over them again and again until I was reading whole sentences. I became a local celebrity: The Kid Who Can Read. I’d read the slogan of the local dry cleaner out loud—“If we can’t clean it, it can’t be cleaned”—and follow along with Father Shea from the missalette during Mass. If I didn’t understand what I was saying, I knew how people were reacting. They noticed me, and I liked being noticed. So I kept doing it, and by the time I was in first grade, I was reading way beyond my grade level. I promise I’m not bragging here; the reason two-year-olds tend not to read is that people tend not to teach them. It’s one of the pillars of Montessori education: you can pretty much teach a kid anything anytime; once he picks up a new skill, he tends to keep doing it until he gets really good.
The problem is that I didn’t go to a Montessori school. Here’s what happens when you show up for first grade at a Catholic parish school reading way beyond your grade level:
When it came time for first grade reading, Miss Streibel would stop everything and call out into the hallway for a massive teacher-in-training named Gary, who would take my hand in his sweaty palm and lead me to the priests’ lounge just off the gymnasium for one-on-one reading time. (I know where your mind is going. Relax.)
First grade reading coincided with sixth grade PE, and if there’s anything sixth-graders for sure do not like, it’s a younger child who can do something they can’t. So when Gary and I entered the gym for the long walk to the priests’ lounge, we would immediately be pelted with whatever the sixth-graders were
playing with: dodgeballs, basketballs, or, if they were just running sprints, their actual shoes. The gym teacher would blow her whistle, but it would be in vain; the people had spoken. This went on for weeks.
Like Markie Post in a Lifetime Original Movie, I kept my abuse to myself. I swore Gary to secrecy about the whole thing, and I made eye contact with the gym teacher as if to say: It’s fine, I’m asking for it. But the principal got wind of our problem and came up with a solution only a Catholic educator could love: for the rest of the school year, when Gary and I would enter the gym, the sixth-graders were forced to stop what they were doing—right in the middle of whatever game they were playing—and sit on the floor in silence with their hands folded in their laps as we walked the endless perimeter to the priests’ lounge. I can say this with a certainty that is hard-won: silent glares sting the face worse than dodgeballs.
But then I’d go home, and I’d read something for my parents, and I’d see how proud it made them, and I’d feel right in the world again. Being an early reader alienated me at school, but at home, I was safe.
I was different, and I liked it.
My folks pulled me out of St. Gerard’s after first grade, and during that between-schools summer, I did a lot of thinking about my former classmates. A lot of them I’d be seeing around the neighborhood or at Mass, but there was one whom I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again—and I was surprised by how sad the thought of it made me. His name was Donny, and he was an athletic, confident kid who seemed to just move correctly: chest out, shoulders back, stride confident. He was the first picked at soccer, always. When we were at recess and trying to decide what to play, everyone naturally glanced over at him for guidance. He was a real boy. I wanted to be him, or be near him, or just have him put his arm around me. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.