Stream Of Consciousness
(read with caution)
The last thing I want to do is write a boring blog. I don’t want to be boring in anything I do, actually, but writing carries a greater responsibility, a justice issue: It’s not fair to bore you when you don’t have the opportunity to bore me right back.
So I’ll skip the stories of the tape recorder and the hundreds of routines I memorized, the embarrassing things I did to get practice in front of an audience and ultimately the hopelessness of it all.
In 1979, I went to Los Angeles to be a stand-up comic.
I was 21, legal enough to walk in the front door of the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, but I didn’t know and I went first to Westwood. I had a nice audition but no one cared, no one had any power to do anything but open the mike on Monday nights for wannabes. There was no job waiting in Westwood.
I stayed after my set that night and watched Sandra Bernhardt. She’s disappeared lately, but Sandra would be hot in the ‘80s and seeing her live in 1979 went a long way to showing me why. She was wickedly funny, taunting and teasing her audience, breaking into song time and again with a lovely voice and then torturing a college boy who was sitting too close to the stage. This was real comedy. I was in awe.
A week later I went to Sunset. I waited with the rest of the group, men mostly but some women, and one by one we got five minutes on stage to see if we belonged there.
I didn’t, as it turns out, looking back, but I fooled everyone that night. I had a good act (my only one, it would be) and I ran over my time and nobody stopped me. I killed them that night, a full house and they were rolling, wiping tears away and howling, and at some point in my monologue I glanced over my shoulder.
This is apocryphal, but I swear there was a window, and as the audience laughed and clapped I saw the lights of Hollywood behind me and knew I’d made it. Find your dream, go for it and get it; I was on my way. I was a hit.
A guy in red suspenders grabbed me and said, “Mitzi wants to see you.” Mitzi owned the place and sat at a table in the back, jotting notes and holding court, and that night she hired me.
A boy, maybe 10 or so, wandered around. I assumed it was her son, jaded by what celebrity he saw and probably bored with the whole thing.
“Cool Jack Nicholson voice,” he said to me.
So he would have been the son of Mitzi. Mitzi Shore, former wife of Sam Shore.
Mother of Pauly.
That may be an apocryphal story too. But it’s what I remember and I’m sticking to it.
And that’s essentially it. I went to work, getting 11 p.m. slots on Tuesday night at the Westwood club, trying to make four drunks laugh with Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone impressions. Sandra Bernhardt had moved up and our paths didn’t cross.
If you can make those people laugh, the theory is, you can do it anywhere and at any time. If you can’t, you find out soon enough, and you pack your stuff into your Mustang and drive back across the desert to Phoenix and the rest of your life, sadder but wiser.
I was sad for most of a year after that, but not because of my comic relief episode. I went to L.A. to find something out, and I did. It was just that it had been a dream, and I felt the lack after that for a while. Eventually I got other dreams.
This story has been hanging around now for a bit, waiting for an opening, but I woke up with it this morning and I think I know why. It has something to do with dreams, and everything to do with a boy.
He turns 14 today, 6’1 and 195 pounds, with a deeper voice than six months ago and boy-whiskers that are about ready to face the blade. I think I’ll give him my electric razor to go along with the new X-Box that sits beside my desk as I write, waiting.
His mother was up until 3 last night, painting his bedroom, undoing the blue that his sister lovingly labored over for him a few years ago but that was just too intense for a boy whose senses are ravaged every day by things the rest of us can’t see. Mom muted it down some, just a tad.
We will eat calzone tonight, and watch “Say Anything,” because that’s what he wants. He loves that movie, loves the teenage romance and passion. He would like to be John Cusack. Hey, me too.
He’s still more boy than man, but I can see where he’s looking. We are different, we have to be, but I remember. I wish for him only good things, even knowing what I do about him and about life, but mostly I wish him dreams.
We ran into his aide from school at the store yesterday, shopping with her daughter, and once again I got to see John through another’s eyes. There was affection there, and concern, and a little bit of love. I’m used to this by now. For all of his goofiness and odd behavior and overall weirdness, I’m not at all self conscious about noting that there has always been an aura of goodness around my boy. He’ll need that shield, all things considered, which may be why he has it.
He knows about my dream turning into dust in La-La Land. He doesn’t have a lot of interest; the past, particularly mine, is abstract to him. I can’t tell the story more than two minutes before he wanders off. That’s okay. Sometimes I tell it anyway.
I also tell him about the night he was born, the drive to the hospital, the movie his mom and I watched while we waited, the phone call to Grandma when he was two minutes old, his sister’s first words on awakening that morning, the snow that fell the day we brought him home to that very same room he sleeps in now.
And someday, when he’s ready, I’ll tell him about dreams. I tell him what I’ve learned, that they have to be activated before you can use them. That there are more where those came from. That they never die, but just mutate a bit. That they’re always worth exploring. That they’re fun, and sad, and part of life.
And maybe, if I can get him to sit still, I’ll tell him that there are beautiful mysteries out there, when life gets tangled up in knots and it takes years to unravel and then you just sit back and marvel at the wackiness of it all. I’ll tell him there are connections in everything.
I’ll tell him how, when his mother was very pregnant with him, she went to visit a dying friend in the hospital, in the last stages of AIDS. His name was Daniel, one of my wife’s first friends when we moved to Seattle. He was a charming, friendly, caring man who now had lost his eyesight and was planning his funeral, and he wanted Julie to sing. He couldn’t see the swelling of her belly but he could imagine it; it made him laugh.
They talked for a while, and he told her that his best friend, a childhood playmate, was in town to be with him for the end. She had stepped out but soon came back, and she met Julie and talked for a bit. She and Daniel had grown up together, had gone to Israel together. He moved to Seattle, and she went into show business.
I’ve lost you here, I know. It’s all a jumble in my mind, and I wrote it down, and now it makes no sense. I should say, Happy Birthday John, and be done. I have no discipline today.
It was just on my mind, that’s all. The story of my adventures in comedy. My son turning 14. Dreams.
And the day my wife went to visit Daniel in the hospital before he died, and met his best friend Sandra Bernhardt, and how I don’t understand that but somehow this morning it makes me smile.
(You can read more about John here. It’s much shorter, I promise).
7:56:11 AM 
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