by Dave Holmes
It wasn’t Michelle at all. It was Stacey, the woman who was subletting our vacant bedroom while our other roommate Brendan was on an assignment out of town. I hadn’t met her yet. I thought: Oh, do I have some exciting news to tell her.
And then I saw the TV. Wreckage. Confusion. Peter Jennings at his most serious.
“What’s…”
“Do you not…”
“What is that?”
“Do you not know?”
“What is happening?”
“The Twin Towers have fallen down” is all I remember her saying, and I remember hyperventilating and her hugging me and telling me everything that I had slept through, which by this time was everything. I got the whole story, all at once, while what used to be the World Trade Center smoldered two miles away: planes used as missiles, a terrorist plot, nobody is sure whether more attacks are planned, the towers burned for an hour or so before they fell, one after the other. And then, after we sat stunned and silent in front of the TV for a half hour or so: “Oh. I’m Stacey. I’m your roommate.”
“Oh! Right. I’m Dave. Hi.”
Our building had a roof deck with an unobstructed 360-degree view of the city, and Stacey hadn’t been up there yet. We went up and looked. There was a massive dome of dust downtown where the towers had been. Gray and growing. A lot of people were up on the roof, including a few of my neighbors who had just walked out of the cloud. They were covered in it. Like bodies from Pompeii. I don’t even know if they knew. (I do hope at least one of them got something close to a laugh at my expense. They had witnessed the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history and had the morning to process it and call their family, and then the dummy in 1C came up in his jammie bottoms in the middle of the afternoon, like: “Wait, what happened?”)
We went up and down like that for a few hours. Roof deck to TV and back. Just finding new places to say, “Oh, my God.”
The worst thing at the time was that you couldn’t help. Nobody was allowed anywhere near what they were just then starting to call Ground Zero, and word was starting to spread that they were turning away blood donors. They have enough, we thought. But that wasn’t it. They just didn’t need any. Anybody who wasn’t out wasn’t coming out.
Lee came home around 3:00, and I don’t remember which one of us suggested it, but it was decided that 3:00 was an appropriate time to start drinking. So we did. We went to 7B and began ordering whiskeys. It was absolutely silent in 7B, which it never is, especially when it’s crowded, which it was. Everyone watched the TV. Ned came to meet us there. So did my friend Kelly Sue from my improv days. We didn’t talk. We couldn’t talk. We had our arms around each other, tight.
Every few minutes, someone in the room would remember a friend who worked down there, and they’d pop up and run outside and try to reach them. You’d have to try your call a bunch of times before they’d go through. Sometimes people came back inside looking relieved, and sometimes they didn’t come back. You could see them get the bad news through the window, hazy with cigarette smoke. My friends were okay. Thank God.
By the early evening, the smell started to reach the East Village. I had never smelled anything like it before. None of us had. It was like an electrical fire mixed with gasoline mixed with burned hair. It was people and planes and buildings.
The story goes that we were united as a country in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but that was definitely not the case in 7B. Some people cheered when Bush spoke, some people hissed. When he recited that Bible verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, some people heckled. Kelly Sue heckled back at them: “What if this is giving someone somewhere some comfort?” When the newscasters speculated as to whether our military would retaliate, half the bar whooped and half pounded their tables and said “NO.” The bar was turning into a Parliament meeting, and we had heard and seen and drank enough, so we left. We walked up to Union Square, candlelit as the sun fell, where people were writing messages on the ground in chalk: “USA!” “INTIFADA!” “PATRIARCHY FUCK OFF!” Everyone was already claiming this thing as their own. It was already a mess.
We kept walking, and walking. The only things open in the neighborhood were the bars and the churches, and they were all crowded. Someone hung a huge American flag over Fourth Street. By the next morning, a few chunks had been pulled out of it.
We passed Bowery Bar, where “Beige,” the Tuesday night gay dance party, was actually starting, right on schedule. People were going about their business like normal, but in a state of shock, and so were we, so we walked in. The DJ opened his set with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Cities in Dust,” which we agreed seemed a little on the nose. We left.
Kelly Sue had just quit drinking a couple of months before, so she went home. Lee went uptown to be with Michelle. That left me and Ned. Again, I don’t remember who suggested it, but it was resolved that we should go try to get laid. (“Disaster Sex” ended up being a real trend in the city that week. All sorts of random hookups and unplanned pregnancies. Salon did a piece about it and everything.) We went to The Cock, because it seemed like the right place to go for such a thing. I think we both expected the place to be crowded, but when we walked in, there was only a handful of people at the bar, two people dancing to Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf,” and, on the periphery of the dance floor, smoking a cigarette and holding a rocks glass full of some flavor of white liquor, with a single, perfect tear going down his right cheek like the Native American in the litter PSA, Rufus Wainwright. We left again.
We didn’t know what to do but keep moving. By that time, people were starting to hang up signs with missing persons’ faces on them. Like lost dog flyers. Like they thought their loved ones had pulled themselves out of the pile and were wandering the city. Like they were just lost, with amnesia, waiting for a kind soul to point them home. You could start to believe that, too, if you watched these people hang these signs up, if you got a good look at their faces. You could make yourself think: It’s good that they’re doing this. It’s going to make it easier for everyone to find one another. It sobered us up. Ned and I went back to our respective apartments, alone.
The actual cloud reached the East Village the next morning. Everything was hazy, like it had a filter over it. A big group of us had dinner together that night, and someone in the restaurant dropped their fork, and everyone jumped. We all had private conversations about where we kept our weed and/or porn, so we could parent-proof one another’s apartments in case anything happened to us. I called one of the producers on Kidnapped out in Los Angeles to see whether we’d even continue doing the show, and he said we would eventually, though the set—a bombed-out warehouse space—would probably have to be rethought. We talked about the whole thing for a while and he said: “A bunch of us went out for dinner last night, and the waiter asked if we wanted dessert, and we all just went ahead and got some. This thing is really affecting everybody.”
The next day, I went up to the studio for the special TRL we did, and after it was over, I decided to get out of the city. There was nothing I could do but wander and sigh and feel heavy, so I just made the decision and was on my way thirty minutes later. I hopped on an all-night train to Chicago, walked to the first rental-car place I saw, and rented their last car, which was a red Mustang convertible. I drove it to St. Louis, hung around and hugged my family too much for a few days, and then drove the rest of the way out to Los Angeles. I had only the clothes on my back and my laptop, so I bought new shirts and jeans and underwear from Gaps along the way. John Mayer’s Room for Squares was re-released by Sony Columbia on September 18, so I picked it up in a Best Buy in Texas and listened to it over and over again. (“Your Body Is a Wonderland” is indefensible, but the rest of that shit holds up.)
When I got back to my place in Santa Monica, it was exactly as I had left it. I had bought a stack of newspapers the afternoon of the tenth. (I was either making a special effort to stay up on current affairs or just doing all the puzzles, but eithe
r way it was mostly to counteract whatever effect Shane was having on me.) I had the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today. And they were full of nothing. Stacks of pages of whatever we felt was important enough to talk about before all of this happened. They were like transmissions from another dimension.
I kept them. I thought: These will be valuable someday. These are the literal last messages from the old world.
I thought: we will never be this frivolous, this silly, this unserious ever again.
I think a lot of stupid things.
Rocky Horror came back after a few months, like the rest of the shows on Broadway did, and I had my eight performances, right after Cindy Adams, just before Sally Jesse Raphael. Sebastian Bach had his teenage son with him backstage a lot, and the kid had his nose in a book most of the time, and it dawned on me that that’s how you rebel against your dad when your dad is Sebastian Bach.
Right away, I clicked with one of the chorus boys, a gorgeous Irish-looking dude with a beautiful voice and perfect hair and teeth. We went out for an early dinner between the matinee and the evening show on Wednesday, and while we initially couldn’t get in at Ruby Foo’s, a manager came sprinting from the back and said: “Right this way, Mr. Holmes.” This had never happened before (or since, for that matter), and it could not possibly have happened in front of a better person. It was a sign. A new life really was beginning after all. And then we sat down and ordered our sushi and he told me about his girlfriend who was down the street performing in Seussical: The Musical. Even on Broadway, even doing a musical about the joys of bisexuality, I picked the straight chorus boy to have a crush on. (That chorus boy: Matthew Morrison.)
Kidnapped went through some changes, but it ran for a whole season. I went back and forth between New York and L.A., each time bringing more of my stuff west. It was the last year of my contract with MTV, and I could have tried to get another one, but I felt myself getting less and less busy. I saw the new kids getting more and more screen time, and I couldn’t bear to hear someone tell me that I was fired, so I said: “I think I’m just going to ride out the rest of my contract and then just move on,” and Rod said: “That sounds like a good idea.” A few months later the checks stopped coming and I didn’t work at MTV anymore. That’s the way it happens: your contract runs out and nobody knows it except someone in business affairs. You just kind of fade out.
I found someone to sublet my room for a while, and his temp job in the city went permanent, so he could stay as long as I needed him to. There was no work reason for me to be in New York City. Only my friends made me want to go back, and with T9 predictive texting, staying in touch with them was a snap. Everyone was pairing off and growing up anyway; where a few years before we’d been together in every spare moment, we were seeing one another once a week, then once a month, then less. We were on our way to becoming people who mean to see one another.
I had a brand new city, full of new people to meet and jobs to get; the weather was perfect every day; and most of my belongings were already in it.
I never made a decision or said goodbye to anyone. I just woke up one morning, looked around, and said: “Huh. I guess I live in Los Angeles.”
The first thing you notice when you move to Los Angeles, before the perfect weather or the traffic, is the enthusiasm. It is a happy bunch out there in L.A.; people have their little teas and go for their little hikes and they are psyched. There is nothing you can say to a guy in Los Angeles that won’t make him answer “NICE.”
“I’m going home to do laundry.”
“Nice.”
“Today is Tuesday, and tomorrow, it will be Wednesday.”
“Nice!”
“I wear shoes sometimes.”
“NOYCE.”
It is as phony as it can be, but it is inspiring in its way, because it is no less authentic than New York’s knee-jerk cynicism, and at least it makes you happy for a moment.
The hardest part about moving to Los Angeles wasn’t starting over socially; there were enough former MTV people making the move west, and I got back into the inherently social world of improv right when I got there. The hard thing was starting over professionally. MTV gives a person a decent amount of name recognition, but casting directors don’t like people with a decent amount of name recognition. Casting directors want to discover you, or they want to land a star. If you’re in between, you have a tough road. You go out for everything, and then you lose it, either to someone you don’t recognize who’s five years younger than you or to a legit celebrity—but either way you spend time in waiting rooms with Danny Bonaduce.
Along the way, you get all kinds of great advice. Producers in casting sessions will say things like: “Our audience is influencers, so keep that in mind,” or “Do it just like that, but better,” or “You’re talking like the audience is five feet away, I want you to do it like the audience is three feet away.” Those are all real, by the way, and in reply to that last one, I asked: “Am I too loud?” And the producer said, “No, it’s a relatability factor,” and I thought Oh, okay, you’re just adding more nonsense words to a thing that already doesn’t make any sense. I did it again the exact same way and he said “Perfect!” and I got a callback. I think Alfonso Ribeiro went on to book that job.
Once upon a time, I got a call from my manager. I was new to Los Angeles, I was new to having a manager and going out on auditions, I was just new. He said: “NBC wants to have a meeting with you now. Now! Go there now!” Of course this is happening, I thought. This is how it’s going to happen. I am in Los Angeles and I am going to be a STAR. “There’s a new reality show they want you to host, and they’re not telling me anything about it, but you need to get there now.”
So I went and had a very nice lunch with some guys who at least pretended to be very nice people. We talked, and they said, “We have a new reality dating show with a twist, and we can’t tell you what the twist is, but there is an element that you possess that is right in line with the concept of the show. We’d like you to consider hosting it.” This was in the months after the first season of Joe Millionaire, so every network had a reality dating show and every reality dating show had a twist. I said yes, yes of course I would.
The show’s twist is that it will be a funny show, is what I told myself. The thing that I possess that makes me perfect for this show is that I’m funny. Now, nobody had told me this. Nobody said anything remotely like this in the meeting or in any of the phone calls I had with my manager. I just decided that it was true, and so it became true. I rolled open the sunroof on my Jeep Liberty, turned up the first Phantom Planet album as loudly as I could without compromising sound quality, and drove back to my tiny one-bedroom in the Miracle Mile. On the way, I passed the line for the Tonight Show, all those people in pantsuits and golf shirts standing around all day for the chance to see Jay Leno up close. “See you all soon,” I said. I honked. I waved. I was ready.
I was a real asshole.
I had been warned that they had also been talking to “a name,” and that this name was interested but might not take the job. If the name didn’t take it, then it was mine. They didn’t say who the name was, and I didn’t push it. There is always a name. There is always someone who has had a successful run on a sitcom who would be happy to swoop in on your job and slum for a steady paycheck, and that’s the way it goes. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they go back to counting their money or designing their line of casual separates for QVC, and you get the gig. You never know what’s going to happen.
I did a little bit of digging and I found out that for this show, the name was Kathy Griffin. Great, I thought. She’s funny. Like me. She’d be a good choice for this show whose twist is that it’s funny, which again is a thing that nobody had ever actually said to me at any time. I would be happy to lose this gig to a Kathy Griffin. We had a history, after all.
When I actually did lose the gig to a Kathy Griffin, I was less happy than I had predicted, but still, NBC had called. NBC th
ought I was funny, and I knew that because I had hypnotized myself into believing it. Things would work out. Back to the drawing board.
A couple of months later, I swung by my place in the middle of the day to make myself some lunch and watch Passions, a show that you needed to watch for about five minutes a year, because they were at the same party they were at last month, holding the same birth certificate, and swearing they’ll tell everyone you bastard, dammit, they will. As I pressed a slice of bread onto the top of a ham sandwich, I heard the siren call that is Kathy Griffin’s speaking voice in the unmistakable boom of a network promo. I ran to the TV to see a teaser for the show I nearly booked, the show I was perfect for.
The show was Average Joe, a Bachelorette-style reality dating show in which a beautiful young single gal shows up at a Calabasas mansion to choose a mate out of a cast of hunks, except the shocking twist is that…
Oh, no.
The shocking twist was that the guys were actually all kind of homely. They were all dumpy or overweight or aggressively hairy or just generally average, and the twist was that our bachelorette would have to pick a suitable mate out of a bunch of ugly guys.
And I possessed a quality that was right in line with this shocking twist.
It hit me, right there in my living room, ham sandwich in one hand, remote in the other: NBC did not think I was funny. NBC thought I was ugly.
Oh.
I turned away from the television and walked to my window to feel the California sun on my face, to tell myself that no matter what this industry thought of me, I was going to succeed. I might have to work a little harder, I might have to be a little smarter, but I’m going to make it fucking work, dammit. I will.
I got to my window just in time to watch my Jeep Liberty get towed away for unpaid parking tickets.