Waiting for the Punch
Page 28
I thought, “I have the greatest life in the world. I don’t even care if I don’t become famous or anything. This is the balls. I have the world by the fucking balls.” I had that thought that night.
The next night I was going down Second Avenue doing about seventy miles an hour and a car went through a red light going perpendicular. I never even touched my brakes. I just plowed right into this car. I flew over the car. I lost my sight, but I was still cognizant. The bike was in pieces. My sight came back and the bike was in pieces in front of me. I heard a woman scream. It was a nightmare. I got strapped to a board and taken to a hospital. After lots of CAT scans and tests and shit this doctor came to me in a hallway. He said, “You’re fine. You’re stupid, don’t ride motorcycles anymore, but you’re fine. Take it easy for a while.”
I hopped off of this table and I thought I’m just going to go home. The threshold to which you need to be hospitalized is still pretty high, but I really fucked myself up. I could barely walk. I hadn’t broken anything, but my whole body had bruises all over the side of it that grew as the weeks went by. For two weeks I was in bed. I was a fucking wreck and my motorcycle was gone. I slept that night and I just felt really terrible. I think I peed myself. It was just a really bad, humiliating experience. Then I looked in the mirror the next day and I was balding. I saw it for the first time that I was losing my hair.
Within that week Catch a Rising Star closed. Catch and The Improv went down like one-two. They both closed and things started getting really bad. Things immediately started getting bad and the 1990s came and all the clubs started closing and I couldn’t make a living anymore and I couldn’t pay my rent. That night was a huge, instant turning point. Everything from that night on in my life went badly for like three, four years.
STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY—ACTOR
I was in graduate school and I was a versatile actor. I always played the old men. I was playing, like, an eighty-year-old man in this play and I was spraying my hair with streaks and tips as opposed to wearing a gray wig so I wouldn’t look like a huge transvestite. The last day of the show, I went back to my little apartment and I washed my hair, and as I’m washing my hair, huge clumps of hair started coming out in my hand. I mean, gigantic clumps, like I was around radiation or something.
I don’t remember if I cried, but I felt like I cried for a month. I felt like it was the end of all my dreams. This is the end of me being a star in show business, this is it. From that moment on, in the shower that afternoon, I could look and I could see I was going to be one of those guys that looked like I was balding. I was devastated. I didn’t know what I would do, and I think I was in kind of a denial, really, for months.
I didn’t see a woman after that that didn’t look up to the hairline and go, “Oh, okay, bad DNA. Okay, we’ll move on.” Every casting director smiled at me and then the little eyes kept going up, saying, “Okay, maybe a professor or teacher down the line.” It just happened that I didn’t quit, I guess.
DANNY MCBRIDE
I substitute taught for a while. When I moved back to Virginia, I was bartending at night and substituting in the daytime. I was making an honest living. The first day I was a substitute teacher, I was in there and I was just feeling weird.
The first group of kids came in. I had written my name on the chalkboard, doing the shit that I remember people would do when I was in school. I just started unraveling with the first kids. I was introducing myself, and then all of a sudden, I found myself having to justify to these kids why I was a substitute teacher and just tell them, “I got real plans. This is a fucking stop on the block for me. I’m on my way back out to LA after I save up some money.” These kids are just looking at me, like, “We don’t give a shit. We’re not even listening.” These were probably ninth or tenth graders.
I needed to justify it. “Hey, this isn’t my full-time thing.” All they cared about was like, “Mr. McBride, you smoke weed?” All they cared about was if I smoked weed and what kind of car I drove. “What kind of car are you driving?” I’m like, “A Hyundai Elantra.” They’re like, “Pssh.”
TERRY GROSS—RADIO HOST
I taught in the toughest inner-city junior high school in Buffalo, New York. Eighth grade. This would have been 1972.
I wanted to be the teacher who I wanted to have when I was in junior high, so I foolishly went to school dressed in my purple corduroy pants and work boots. How am I doing?
It was terrible, it was so stupid. I probably did my fair share of weeping the first day. It got worse as things went on, because it just fell apart. The first day they’re testing you. Then they realize how weak you are, how bad at this you are. I couldn’t keep the students in the classroom, I couldn’t teach them a lesson, I couldn’t do anything.
Marc
You were a teacher with a personality of a substitute.
Terry
I was a child. I was twenty-two. I was shorter than they were, and I didn’t know how to be the authority figure.
I got fired in six weeks.
People say there’s no way of firing teachers. Well, they fired me. I’m living proof.
This is a really chaotic, violent school and one day one of the students took out a knife and dropped it just to see, what is Ms. Gross going to do?
Marc
What did Ms. Gross do?
Terry
Ms. Gross watched. Ms. Gross acted like she was in a movie and she went oh, a kid just dropped a knife, I don’t know what to do. I felt like they’ve written this really interesting movie and they cast me in it and they forgot to give me the script. I had no idea what to do.
Thank God I got fired. The principal observed me and the administration graded me. They’re like, “Okay, you’re from New York City, so we’re going to give you a high grade in culture.” And they gave me below average in dignity and self-respect. What the hell does that mean? Who is measuring this?
But what gets respect in inner-city schools was not something that I had. In other words, you have to be tough, you have to be the authority, you have to draw the line, you have to meet certain challenges. I’m the opposite, I’m shy and introverted and use self-deprecating humor. How does that go over when you’re teaching? Not good.
BILL BURR—COMEDIAN AND ACTOR
I live in this old building. There’s no insulation in it whatsoever. I’ve been sitting on my couch late at night and feeling like I’m the only person in the world. All of a sudden you hear somebody clear their throat and they sound like they’re on the couch with you, like the place is fucking haunted. They’re literally across the courtyard. I don’t know if it’s the acoustics. I don’t know what it is. Everything’s fucking loud as hell in there.
We live above this old guy, the classic old guy you don’t want to be. Living alone, no pets, blinds pulled. You don’t even know what the fuck he does. He’s always really sarcastic. If you drop something because there’s gravity, you just hear him muffled downstairs, “Do it again!” He’s doing that. “Keep it up!” He does that. I think it’s funny. If he says, “Do it again,” I do it again. I don’t give a shit. My girlfriend, maybe because it’s a guy, she feels bullied by him. Two months ago she tells me, “You really need to go down there and talk to this guy.” What am I going to do? I’m going to go down there and what’s going to come of this? I don’t want to do this shit.
Two or three days ago it’s the end of Christmas. I’m dragging my Christmas tree down. It’s like ten in the fucking morning. Legally I can start building a house at 7:00 A.M. I’m bringing a tree down. He comes out and sarcastic as hell to the point I didn’t even get it, but he just had this bizarre look on his face and yells, “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Yelled that. I was looking at him like, “What the fuck? Is this guy out of his mind?” I realized he’s being sarcastic. He heard the tree coming down. I’m like, “Whatever.”
I go in the house. My girl’s like, “He was yelling again. Go down there and talk to him.” I’m like, “Fine. You want me to
talk to him.” I go down there to talk to the guy. As I start walking up his walk he’s sitting there. I see this little kind of look of fear on his face. I didn’t go down there to have an argument. I was just like, “Listen, man, you’re always yelling up there. What is the problem?” He goes, “It sounds like she dropped a brick!” He just starts screaming at me. I say, “Look, we have hardwood floors. I came down here to work it out.” He says, “What does that mean? What is that, some sort of hip, new saying?” I swear to God.
I kept my cool. I kept saying, “Dude, I’m just coming down here to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” He just kept yelling at me. At one point he made a reference to my bad guitar playing. As sarcastic as hell, he says, “How’s your band? Ha, ha, ha.” Laughs.
I swear to God, if there is an afterlife I want kudos on this because I immediately wanted to be like, “How’s your fucking life? Really. Is this what you dreamed of? Huh? Who’s your last roommate, fucking Larry Fine? You fucking asshole.” But I have a line. I don’t yell at old people. I don’t.
“How’s your guitar?”
It really hurt my feelings because that was outside the realm of comedy. I don’t have musician walls built up. He got in. He fucking gave me an uppercut right to my feelings.
TOM SCHARPLING
There was a point where the toilet was leaking, and I’m just like, “I can fix that. I’m not going to call a guy at $150. I’m just gonna learn about this, do it,” and I did it, and I was way too proud of myself.
Then another toilet started doing it, like a year later. I tried to fix it. It was something different, and I’m just like, “Oh, boy. I’ve hit the ceiling.” The bar was very low on my ability to fix a toilet. I couldn’t. “I can’t get this chain. It’s still running. Oh, come on. I thought I had this aced. Fine. What’s the guy’s number?”
STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY
I think a thing that helped me a lot, and it’s a weird thing to say, was sports. I loved sports a lot. The thing that helped me as a character actor is that I was a very poor basketball player and a very poor football player, but I knew from sports what it meant to be on a team. That sometimes you score, sometimes you play defense, sometimes you throw the ball out of bounds, but you have different roles to do.
Marc
Also, in sports sometimes you lose. My biggest regret in life is I was not taught some sort of reasonable sense of competition. For me, losing or being rejected is life threatening. If you like sports or you played sports, even if you weren’t good at it, I think the most important lesson is that losing is not the end.
Stephen
I think it was, and I believe it was Eugene O’Neill who said, “I hope always to have the courage to push on to greater failures.” I think it is important to understand that failure is not part of the bad stuff. Failure is actually a building block of the good stuff, if you have the courage to keep going.
But it can break you.
JOHN OLIVER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, TELEVISION HOST
There are moments in sports, especially when you’re a kid, that really hurt. I remember missing a penalty when I was twelve years old in a local competition and it probably took me three years to get over it. I just felt like at that point it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, even though it wasn’t.
A penalty shot is all built around individual failure. You are the person who has lost it in that single moment, that single kick of the ball. It absolutely broke me.
My only redemption for that was that years and years later, at the Edinburgh Festival, there was this charity football match that I played in, and I had to take a penalty, and I scored it, and I nearly burst into tears. There was an internal closure. No one knew, and they were probably concerned as to why in this equally meaningless game there was a guy who doesn’t cry, visibly on the edge of tears.
I scored another goal in that game and we won, and my dad was watching. My dad always wanted me to be a footballer more than he wanted me to be anything else. And as a joke I took my shirt off. Sometimes footballers do that celebration, so I took my shirt off and I ran up into the crowd and gave it to my dad as kind of a joke, and he was actually moved. I’ve never really seen him moved much in his life, and I think he realized, this is as close as I could give him to the son that he wanted.
I went as hard into sport as I could, but I wasn’t good enough. I can’t even believe I’m saying that out loud now, but I wasn’t good enough. I was never going to make my career as a professional footballer.
Marc
Exactly what year did you realize that?
John
Probably about three years ago.
TOM SCHARPLING
I mean the fear of success is not the thing for me. I think the fear of failure is almost all of it for me. I feel that looming. I’ve always thought it’s like, the amount of geniuses that are out there, there’s like five of them, maybe. Like Paul Thomas Anderson, that guy is on a different plane than all of us.
Then there’s the bottom 20 percent that’s like the Rupert Pupkins of the world that are just completely talentless and they have to learn that when the cards get dealt, that, “Okay, it wasn’t for me.”
That middle stretch, all that separates the people is just how hard you work and if you kind of keep your head in the game.
I was just like, “I can do okay in that mix. I know I’m not a genius, but I’m pretty sure I’m not like Rupert Pupkin, like I know I’m not a fraud.” It’s like if I do the best that I can do, then that takes care of a certain amount of it. I’ve always kind of operated with that in mind.
BOB ODENKIRK—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, COMEDIAN
The things that I’ve focused on and tried to do, even some of the ones that failed, I feel proud of them. I feel proud of the work I put into them, and the fact that I brought a certain personal vision to that.
The pride that I take in that, and the amount that I let that define me, is a little cockeyed, because it just doesn’t really matter what you do. It’s just what you do. You can only get a certain amount of appreciation from the public, or from the industry or your peers, and that’s wonderful, but it doesn’t sort of really satisfy anybody. You should pursue your goals, you should want people’s respect, you should want to respect your own work, but that isn’t who you are. Who you are is not what you do, and it’s not the accolades you get, it’s not the pride you take in your work, it is not your work.
The hardest part is realizing like, “Wow! Just so much of me is wrapped up in who I am.”
Marc
What do you feel when you’re actually able to detach from all of that?
Bob
Emptiness. Utter emptiness. Right? Complete loneliness and emptiness. I do think having a family and having kids is a really, really deeply rewarding thing, but I don’t think it’s the sole hole-filler. It is not. You absolutely are on your own, man. I don’t care if you have kids and you are a wonderful dad and mom, that’s great and you should be happy, but you still have your own journey and you have to fill that hole yourself and figure it out.
I think one of the big things I’ve done in the last year is just allow myself to just change. Just really stop getting on the same treadmill every day, it just isn’t getting anywhere. Whatever that is, do some things with yourself, with your day, that just are not what you’ve always done. Whatever that thing is, just move on from it.
CHELSEA PERETTI—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
When I was young, I used to tell everyone everything, and then as I got older, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to keep more to myself.” If I used to have a project in the works, I never would tell anyone about it. I used to be like, “If it doesn’t go, I don’t want anyone to ask me about it at a party.” I really had this fantasy for a while of printing up a bullet point list of what’s going on in my career so when I go to parties I have these little slips that I can just hand to people.
If I meet a confident person, I’m just searching for where they’re not
confident so I can relate to them. Are they human? If someone just seems really together and confident, I’m like, “Come on.”
TOM SCHARPLING
Once in a while, my father would say, “Look, if you would have been a garbageman and that’s what you wanted to do, that would have made me happier than anything as long as it’s what you wanted.” Look, I’m not putting down garbagemen, but I kind of had a skill set that was making itself pretty clear at an early age, and it should have taken garbageman off that list.
DAVE ANTHONY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I’m a self-sabotager because my father was an alcoholic and he wanted me to succeed and the way to get back at him is never succeed.
In San Francisco, one of the club owners was like, “You’re the next Jon Stewart, I’m going to give you the fucking keys to the city here, I’m going to give you all this time onstage, blah blah blah,” and I moved to New York. That’s the kind of shit I did, like, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to set you up.” Thanks, see ya.
Marc
You say the sabotage is to disappoint, I really think it’s to protect ourselves, I think that our parents were so emotionally inconsistent, that the risk was actually to get into the situation where they either said we were doing a good job or they took it away from us. I feel like we’re programmed to sort of make sure that we don’t just do a great job. Then the risk is that the old man is going to go, “Yeah, it’s not as good as I can do,” or some version of that. “Oh, you think you’re good?”
Dave
What’s crazy about my dad is, he’s still alive, he’s really, really drinking now, but over the years I would just think, “Well, he doesn’t really give a shit about my stand-up career,” but I would find out he would tell other people that he thought I was awesome, and the comedy was great, and he’d watch this and watch that, never a word to me. “Hey, how about some acknowledgment? This is why I can’t succeed!” It’s crazy-making.