My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (9 page)

I
GREW
up in a part of the country where the word “Jew” was often used as a verb. This is not something I am particularly proud of; it is just a fact. I heard the phrase “to Jew someone down” my entire life. I was in my early twenties galloping race horses at Belmont Park on Long Island before it was pointed out to me that this was highly offensive.

The thought had never crossed my mind.

I grew up in a religion that devoutly believed that the Jews had forsaken the Messiah and, sadly, all Jews were going to burn in an eternal lake of fire. I remember worrying myself sick about the poor Jews when I was a little kid. I also worried about the poor little children in Africa who had never even heard of Jesus. They were going to burn, too!

I remember that back in the 1970s there was a huge movement to get Jews to repent and accept Jesus as their personal Savior. It was called Jews for Jesus. Now, how silly is that? Judaism has been around a lot longer than Christianity. The Jews could have countered with their own movement. But I think the Jews were too smart to open that can of worms.

My friend Del Shores once told me a weird story. He knew a Jewish woman in Texas who answered her door one morning to find a neighbor lady standing there, anxiously wringing her hands.

“Honey, will you be my Jew?” she asked. “We’re having ‘Pack a Pew with a Jew’ day at church. We’re supposed to bring a Jew to church to sit in our pew and be saved and, hon, you’re the only Jew I know.”

The Jewish woman politely declined.

I don’t remember knowing many Jewish people when I was growing up. The Jewish people in the South really kept to themselves in those days. In my public school the only way we knew who was Jewish was during an annual event called the DDT (Devoted Daughters of the Torah) Candy Sale. I remember we were always surprised at who was lugging around boxes of candy.

“I didn’t know Debra Joy Goldstein was Jewish, did you?”

We grew up with so many misconceptions. One time someone told me the way you can recognize a Jewish woman is that she usually wears socks with her high-heel shoes. What was that about?

After the tragic death of my father, my mother had remarried, and we lived in an affluent area above Chattanooga called Missionary Ridge. There was a wealthy Jewish family in my neighborhood. The mother was a very powerful judge in the Chattanooga judicial system. And she rode a motorcycle to work.

You must understand that this was the early 1960s. We were barely out of the Eisenhower years. In those days, housewives rarely ventured out in anything other than housedresses. To see this grown woman in her daring pantsuit, straddling a motorcycle and flying down the road to work, was shocking.

It gave me the notion as a kid that Jews were a little wacky.

In 1969, I was fourteen years old and all I wanted out of life was to be a hippie. I felt so stuck in those Tennessee hills. It was just after the Summer of Love, the big hippie gathering in San Francisco, considered to be the birth of the movement (or, by many, the death). I’d gotten to know a lot of Jewish kids because they were more progressive than most of the kids in my town, and a lot of them already practiced the hippie ideals I was so desperate to embrace. The Jewish kids were the first hippies I knew. They all hung out at the bird sanctuary and smoked pot. I cannot tell you the crushes I had on those long-haired Jewish boys. You know Jesus was Jewish. And all those boys looked just like the pictures of Jesus we had on the walls at church. How sinful!

I read everything there was to read about the hippie movement. I devoured every word of
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
Joan Didion’s collection of essays about California during the 1960s. I especially loved the chapter about the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Back then I thought of San Francisco as Mecca. I wanted to run away and live there. I wanted to wear flowers in my hair! I grew my hair as long as my parents would let me and started locking myself in my bedroom, listening to the Grateful Dead.

My mother would yell, “What on earth is that racket?”

“Mom, it’s the Grateful Dead!”

“Well, I’m grateful they’re dead. Now, please cut it down!”

I read Jack Kerouac, too, with a vengeance. I would almost faint when there were slight suggestions that he might have been bisexual. He was so handsome. And if you read
On the Road
from the viewpoint of a little gay kid in Tennessee, it certainly sounded like Kerouac’s autobiographical narrator had a huge crush on that other guy, his idol Dean Moriarty, whose path he kept crossing. And let’s not forget that Jack Kerouac lived off and on with his mother till the day he died.

Sounds a little suspicious to me!

There were also rumors that Jim Morrison was bisexual. What a looker he was! He was without a doubt the prettiest hippie to ever walk this earth. I would pretend I was the only one who truly understood Jim Morrison. I read all of his poetry (which is basically just drug-induced babble). I pretended I knew what it all meant, even the parts about the dead Indian lying on the road. When Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure, just the very thought of him pulling his penis out of those tight leather pants onstage in Miami made me almost collapse. Oh, what a crush I had on Jim Morrison!

Many years later, in a trashy book about Andy Warhol’s Factory, there was a passage about Jim Morrison at a party, lying on the floor completely inebriated with his penis out, slowly playing with himself. He supposedly passed out with his flaccid member lying out of his zipper. This was in the days before anyone had heard the term “date rape,” so all kinds of people gave him blow jobs while he was passed out just to say they had sucked Jim Morrison’s dick.

Thrilling!

Actually, it’s kind of sad and definitely sick—but thrilling nonetheless! I wish I had been there, if only just to watch, of course.

I would sit for hours on end and daydream about Woodstock. I saw the documentary about nine times. I wanted so badly to be a part of all that was happening in California. I felt like the parade was passing me by. I find it interesting as a recovering addict and alcoholic that my idols back then were rock stars who are now all dead: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison.

It’s funny how life turns out. When I did make it to San Francisco, I was in my late forties and sober for over five years. I had been invited to speak to a huge recovery group and was being flown up from Los Angeles. I was going to speak at the Bill Graham Auditorium. My mother mistakenly thought I was headlining the Billy Graham Crusade. She was ecstatic! Finally, I was doing something she could tell all her girlfriends in Sunday school about.

I love my mother.

She is always hoping for the best.

One Passover, my manager, Bobbie Edrick, invited me to celebrate at a seder with her family in Sherman Oaks. She also invited James Earl Jones; his lovely wife, Cee Cee (Cecilia Hart); and their son, Flynn. We all congregated at the home of Bobbie’s uncle Aaron; his wife, Aunt Sarah; and Sarah’s sister, Aunt Ruthie. The three of them were in their eighties but had gone all out to accommodate us. It was my first seder, so I was very excited.

Uncle Aaron was at the head of the table with Aunt Sarah on his right and Aunt Ruthie on his left. As Uncle Aaron read the part of “the reader,” James Earl Jones responded with the part of “the participant.” When James Earl Jones began to read, everything stopped. It sounded just like rolling summer thunder in the Deep South. “We shall now dip our fingers into the salt water to remind ourselves of the tears of the Israelites.”

I looked around the Passover table and everyone was misty eyed. I got choked up and I’m not even Jewish. Something very special was unfolding. Can you imagine? James Earl Jones, reading ancient, sacred words from the Torah? It was a precious moment that I will always remember.

Then it was time for someone to open the front door, in case the prophet Elijah should want to visit and bless the home—a wonderful Jewish tradition.

“Ruthie!” Uncle Aaron hollered, as Aunt Ruthie was a little hard of hearing. “Do you want to do the honors?”

“What?” Ruthie hollered back.

“Do you want to do the honors?”

“Of what?!”

“WILL YOU PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR FOR THE PROPHET ELIJAH?”

“All right, already. Quit yelling.”

So Aunt Ruthie pulled herself up and took off toward the door. The conversation around the table continued until someone noticed the front door was open but Aunt Ruthie was nowhere to be found.

“Where is she?” wondered Aaron and Sarah.

“I hope she’s not loose in Sherman Oaks,” Bobbie said.

Everyone jumped up and headed for the door. Aunt Ruthie was standing on the porch.

“What are you doing out there, Ruthie?” asked Aunt Sarah.

“I don’t know.” Aunt Ruthie shrugged. “How should I know?”

“Well, come back in and eat,” Uncle Aaron said. “We’re at the part about the roasted egg.”

What a feast it was! I’d never had food that tasted so good and was so lovingly prepared. Aunt Ruthie may have forgotten little things like why she was out on the porch, but she certainly had not forgotten how to cook.

Then came a portion of the ceremony where the youngest member at the seder was supposed to try and find the matzo cracker, which Uncle Aaron had hidden under his napkin during the dinner. Since James Earl Jones’s son Flynn was the youngest person in attendance, he purloined the cracker when no one was looking.

“Who has taken the matzo?” asked Uncle Aaron, with fake astonishment.

The family gathered around Flynn and coached him to yell, “
I
have the matzo!”

“Oh, you do, do ya? Well, I tell you what, I am going to give you one dollar for that matzo cracker.”

The whole family coached Flynn to yell back, “Not enough!”

And thus began a very funny bargaining process to try and get tightwad Uncle Aaron to part with more money.

“Oh, so you’re gonna be a wiseacre, are ya? Okay, I’m gonna give you two dollars for the matzo.”

“Oh, please,” said some of the family members to Flynn, “the matzo is worth more than that. Tell him not enough.”

“NOT ENOUGH!” yelled young Flynn, really getting into the spirit of the game.

When Uncle Aaron finally hollered, “Five dollars and not a nickel more,” the family shrugged their shoulders and began to walk away.

“You need to take it, kid.”

“He ain’t going no higher, trust me on this one.”

“Nope, kid, take the five.”

When I was a little boy, my mother used to tell me that just because something popped into my head, it did not have to come out of my mouth. But I was enjoying myself so much, I piped up.

“No wonder Jews make good agents!”

I
HAVE
always prided myself on being an astute judge of human nature. I am saddled with the constant desire to try and figure people out. To see what makes them tick.

When I was little, every summer my family would pile into our big station wagon and head to Florida. Sometimes it was Panama City, sometimes it was Jacksonville or Daytona Beach, but always, always Florida. Daddy would throw a twin mattress in the back for my twin sisters and me to loll around on.

The Redneck Riviera!

My favorite thing to do in Florida was walk up to the boardwalk in the early evening with my mother and “people-watch.” We would sit for hours and watch all the people.

“Oh, look at these two,” Mother would exclaim. “I bet they’re up to no good. Look at the way she’s dressed. I cannot believe she goes out in public like that! And he looks like someone you’d see on the post office wall in a mug shot.”

“I guess some people don’t care if they look trashy,” I’d cluck, wise beyond my years. “Trashy” was my new favorite word. It was right up there with “tacky” and “common.”

“What do you think’s going on with that couple over there?” my mother would ask. “Why on earth would a woman that pretty be with someone so ugly? Low self-esteem, I suppose. Or maybe at one time he was a looker. But he sure has let himself go. Probably drinks.”

“Maybe she still loves him. She remembers when he was young and handsome,” I would pipe in, always the romantic.

Those were some fun times!

Now, Billy Bob Thornton is a conundrum that sparks the imagination. There is something about him that makes me want to study him, like a bug on a pin. In the early 1990s Billy Bob and I worked for several years on the situation comedy series
Hearts Afire.
The show also starred John Ritter, Markie Post, and Conchata Ferrell.

I could not figure Billy Bob out to save my soul. And bear in mind, this was years before
Sling Blade
catapulted him into stardom. He was just a working actor back then. He had written, produced, and starred in one feature film that had given him a little notoriety, but he certainly was not the household name he is today. But there was something intriguing about him.

One night, John Ritter, my twin sisters, and I were sitting in a booth at Jerry’s Famous Deli after the show, and John went off on this diatribe about Billy Bob’s phobias. It was hair-raising—something about not being able to eat around a black-and-white TV and some big fear of antique furniture.

John wanted me to hear about it straight from Billy Bob. He was always putting me up to something. John implored me, “You have got to find a way to get him talking. Once you get him started, he’ll go on and on. It’s really amazing. I can’t do it justice.”

“But how can I get him talking? If I walk up and just ask him about his phobias, won’t he think you put me up to it?”

“Tell him that you are riddled with phobias. And then ask him if he has any,” John suggested.

“What if he asks me to talk about my phobias first?” I countered.

“Then just make some up. Tell him you’re scared of spiders crawling out of the toilet. You have got to get him to talk about it. It’s mind blowing. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard.”

But no matter how many times I tried to broach the subject with Billy Bob, I would chicken out. I don’t know why. It just seemed too personal. It was like asking him about his masturbation habits. Or how many bowel movements he had each day. But after what John had told me, my fascination with Billy Bob grew even more. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.

Finally, I struck pay dirt. There was this one time Billy Bob somehow got stuck in Phoenix, Arizona, and would not fly home. Refused! He was deathly afraid of flying.

So we all sat around and waited while the higher-ups figured out how to get Billy Bob home in time for the shoot. I think they ended up sending a limo to bring him all the way from Phoenix. But that was part of Billy Bob’s charm. People were always willing to do things for him. Why, I’m not sure. There was something sweet and childlike about him. Something about Billy Bob made you want to pat him on the back and assure him that it was all going to work out.

Once we were shooting an episode where my character, Lonnie Garr—a forty-year-old virgin who lived with his overbearing mother, who was always making him go bra shopping at Sears—is allowed, after much coercion, to join the all-male club in town.

There was a scene where my character skips into the bathroom the night of his induction into the club, sidles up to the urinal between John’s character and Billy Bob’s, and announces, “I feel like Cinderella at the ball.”

Billy Bob’s character, a weary Vietnam vet turned journalist, was supposed to move down a few urinals and say, “I don’t pee next to men who say they feel like Cinderella. It’s just this rule I have.”

On the night of the shoot, Billy Bob, John Ritter, and I were standing at the fake urinals waiting for the lighting guys to light the scene. Billy Bob started doing this funny thing where he would stand close to the urinal, pretend to pull his penis out, and then thump the bottom of the urinal with his fingers. From the back, it looked like whatever Billy Bob was pulling out of his pants was so huge that it banged against the bottom of the urinal.

Hilarious!

He was getting huge laughs, so he did it again and again. Finally, the director came over and told him to stop doing it because the sound was being picked up. At that point, several of the actors who worked on the sitcom on the soundstage next door snuck in as a practical joke and took their places at the urinals. So when the director called “Action!” again, all kinds of shenanigans ensued. Put straight guys at a row of urinals and that’s what you get.

Right in the middle of the mêlée, John Ritter leaned over to me and whispered, “If Billy Bob really pulled it out, you’d fall in love.”

Now, please understand, there was not a gay bone in John Ritter’s body. Trust me. But he was the kind of guy who was so comfortable with his sexuality that gay men did not inhibit him in any way. That is what I loved about him. He was so gay friendly. And I must say I miss him desperately. I have always judged famous people by the way they treat my family. When my mother and twin sisters came to the set of
Hearts Afire,
John made the biggest fuss over them.

When John died, I was so honored to be asked to attend his memorial service. Everybody in Hollywood was there. When the entire USC marching band charged down the aisle and played John on to greener pastures, there was not a dry eye in the house. John Ritter was a national treasure and I miss him. I especially miss the way he used to tease me.

This brings us back to Billy Bob’s pecker.

I was taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“It’s really big,” John said.

“How do you know?”

“We went surfing at his house in Malibu and I saw it.”

I did not know whether to believe him or not. I could see the twinkle in his eye and I knew he was up to something. My eyes must have been big as saucers and my mouth was hanging open. John could not believe the response he was getting.

“How big is it?” I implored.

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“They why did you tell me I’d fall in love?”

“I was joking.”

“John, do not joke about these things. You cannot do this to a gay man. This is really important stuff.”

“Okay, okay, it was huge. It hung down like a
rope.
”

I almost hyperventilated. I thought I was going to pass out right there in front of the studio audience.

There is an old joke around the gay community that goes like this: There are two things I hate: a size queen and a tiny dick.

I do not want to go into all the ins and outs of being a size queen, but I will say that I have always been fascinated with large members. One time when I was in jail (more about that later), I had to shower with this big, nasty redneck who immediately warned me that he knew “what” I was and “there better not be any peter gazing!”

Guilty!

I’ve been up to that since I was a kid. It all began at church camp. I would make all kinds of excuses to sneak into the communal shower room. I would position myself at the mirror so that I could see backwards into the showers. Then I would pretend to wash my hands, comb my hair, brush my teeth, clean out my ears, trim my nose hairs, pluck my eyebrows, read my Bible—anything I could think of. I wanted to see the older boys lather up. They already had pubic hair! It was captivating beyond belief. I kept a mental register of who was hung and who wasn’t.

It changed my whole perspective on life. Everything became “Does he have a big one or not?”
How about that boy over there? He probably has a little tiny one. Or how about this one coming along? I bet he has a big, fat one.
It has kept boredom at bay for years. And I am still at it.

No one is safe from my scrutiny.

Not construction workers, policemen, lawyers, weathermen on TV, school principals, coaches, NASCAR drivers, four-star generals, other military men, a U.S. president or two (excluding Bush Jr.—
never thought about it could care less
), English heirs to the throne, all male movie stars except Tom Cruise (whose religious fervor bugs me), mayors (especially ones from San Francisco), and certainly no man who dares to venture out in those tight bicycle shorts.

They
are really asking for it!

A straight friend once complained to me about how gay men sometimes followed him into the locker room at the gym. He said they would stand around pretending to do things so as to watch him undress. I told him he ought to be flattered. He said it made him nervous. I told him maybe that was how most women felt when men undressed them with their eyes. How about them apples?

While he was contemplating that, I threw this at him: If there was a way that, without causing too much of a ruckus, he could wander into the ladies’ dressing room just to observe, would he do it? He told me, “With so much snatch running around the gym, I probably wouldn’t even be able to work out, I’d be wandering in and out!”

Touché! What’s good for the goose is good for the…gay goose.

Or whatever.

One time I was hired to do a guest spot on the television show
Lois & Clark,
starring Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. I played Resplendent Man, a fey little superhero who steals Superman’s powers. I had to wear tights! I was twenty pounds heavier than I am now, and this was before I got sober, so I was bloated from all the alcohol. I looked like a beach ball with arms. I was sent over to the Warner Brothers wardrobe department to be fitted into purple-and-orange tights. I had to stand in front of a three-way mirror as the wardrobe people all gazed upon my fat ass.

One of the ladies casually looked right at my crotch and said, “Do you think he’ll need what Dean needs?”

At least that’s what I thought she said. Did I hear her correctly? What did Dean need? I could not get her casual comment out of my mind. Was he so tiny “down there” they padded him?

I doubted that.

It had to be the other way around. Maybe he was so big “down there” that the outline of his penis showed, and they were afraid it looked obscene. Maybe they had to construct a special garment to keep everything in line and looking like a well-hung Ken doll, so the network wouldn’t get letters.

My mind began to wander. And wonder.

The first day of work, I showed up on the set determined not to “peter-gaze,” or at least not to get caught at it. I had to remain diligent. Dean Cain was no dummy—I had heard he was a Princeton graduate. When they introduced us, I kept my eyes on the ceiling. I looked up for so long I almost lost my balance. As I recall, he even glanced up to see what I was looking at.

Dean Cain was stunning, and the sight of him strutting about in his Superman outfit was truly magnificent. Because his outfit was polyester and did not “breathe,” he had a habit of taking his arms out of his Superman suit, rolling it down, and sitting in his chair shirtless, like surfer boys do with their wetsuits. It was the only way he could cool off between takes.

All I have to say is this: Thank you, dear Lord, for nonbreathable polyester.

I could not take my eyes off of him. He had that really lean, swimmer’s build. And he was not at all self-conscious about his God-given looks. In fact, he was totally unaware of the little fat queer in his purple-and-orange tights desperately trying to keep his wits about him.
I will not peter gaze…I will not peter gaze…

It was torture, pure and simple.

But I must admit, I peeked. Just several on-the-sly peeks. And I don’t think I got caught. I always picked the times he was fussing about Teri Hatcher. There was definitely something going on “down there,” and I do not believe Dean Cain “needed” anything. But…that is all I’m going to say on the subject.

Over the next year of filming
Hearts Afire,
Billy Bob and I became really good friends. I mean, I was never invited to his house in Malibu to surf, but we would hang out on the set. We have the exact same sense of humor. And Lord knows, we are both about two generations away from government cheese. Not exactly poor white trash but it’s in both our gene pools somewhere back there.