The Todd Glass Situation (10 page)

The irony is that my real life was playing out like
Three's Company
in reverse. That show mined a lot of humor out of a protagonist who, in order to live in an apartment with two beautiful women, had to pretend that he was gay. I would often stay over at Katy's house, pretending that I was straight.

Nothing was
happening
, of course. I wanted to tell her so badly that I was gay, that the reason I wasn't putting any moves on her had nothing to do with the way she looked or her personality. But I was still years away from even being able to consider that kind of honesty.

“Todd's shy around girls,” my mother told her. “Maybe you should be a little more aggressive.” My mom—who was just trying to be helpful—even offered to help me buy a wedding ring.

Being straight was turning out to be a lot harder than I thought.

I
was working as much as I could. Steve Young had me at Comedy Works almost every weekend. Andy Scarpati, the owner of six or seven smaller clubs in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware, also gave me a lot of work.

One weekend, Jay Leno returned to Comedy Works. We were shooting the shit after the show, and someone asked him if he'd ever seen an act that was so good he didn't want to follow it.

“Well, there is actually one guy, his name is Dennis Miller. When he connects with the audience, man, you don't want to be the guy going on after him.”

Steve hired Dennis a few weeks later, and everything Jay told us made sense—Dennis was on that night and absolutely annihilated. Pretty soon he was a regular sight at Comedy
Works, and I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with him.

One night, we were walking down Chestnut Street after a show. I made some joke about Philadelphia being the hotbed of comedy.

“If you want to make it in this business,” Dennis said, “eventually you gotta go to New York or L.A.”

I knew he was right. “But there are so many comedians in those cities,” I replied. “It seems like it would be overwhelming. Just another comedian moving to the coast.”

“Don't do that,” Dennis said. “There are a lot of people doing everything. There are a lot of carpenters in the world, too. But if you do what you do well, and you give it everything you've got, you'll be the carpenter who does well.”

That was the second-best piece of advice that Dennis Miller ever gave me. The best came a few months later. We were hanging out at a bar after a show and I'd just made some offhanded comment that got him laughing.

“This,” he said to me, “is what's funny about you. What the hell are you doing up there onstage?”

While it might have sounded like criticism, I could see the compliment. Nothing is more exciting for a comedian than to make other comedians laugh, especially if it's someone whose work you respect and admire. I'd been so focused on creating a polished act, I wasn't letting my real personality come out. Dennis's comment was only bad news if I didn't take it to heart. I wasn't about to trash my entire act, but I started using open mike nights as an opportunity to try out different angles, looking for something that felt more authentic to who I was.

Before moving on to the next chapter, let's take a second to stop and sit with the irony in that statement.

Okay, that's enough. You can turn the page now.

Some
nights, after partying at Smokey Joe's, I'd crash on Harrison's couch—Harrison, the bartender with the rich-sounding name, lived in a house with my friends Mick and John. After one stretch where I'd slept there for about three months straight, Harrison suggested that it might be easier for me to move in.

It was around this time when Steve Young told me that he was moving to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career. Lots of people, including Steve, thought it was time for me to make a similar move. I started talking about L.A. to anyone who would listen.

The topic came up one night with my friend Caroline Jones and her parents, who were in town from California to visit her at Villanova. “You could always come and live with us for a
while,” suggested Randy, her father. It was a nice thing to say, I thought, even if he really didn't mean it.

There were a few things I had to do before I could even think about moving. The first issue was cash: The move would cost a lot of money and I had none. Somehow all that Patti LaBelle cash was gone (shocker) and I was almost dead broke.

There was a waitress at Comedy Works who got a speeding ticket on the way to work. I mentioned it during my act, even passing around a hat to help her pay for it. By the time the hat got back to me, she'd made enough to cover the ticket and then some.

Which gave me an idea: “I'm thinking about moving to Los Angeles!” I announced a few nights later. The hat went around the room again, returning to me with a couple of hundred dollars. I felt like the smartest guy in the world until I got a call from Steve.

“You can't do that, Todd.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're taking advantage of the audience.”

I didn't like it, but knew he was right. We used the money to send flowers to a waitress who was in the hospital.

As the end of the year approached—despite having almost no money and no idea where I was going to live—I really felt like I was ready to go. But plans don't always work out the way you want them to. One night a policeman knocked on the door to Harrison's house. “Is Todd Glass here?” he asked.

“I'm Todd Glass.”

“We've been trying to call you, but there seems to be a problem with your phone.” There was a problem with our phone—it had been disconnected for lack of payment. The cop continued: “Your father is at Paoli Hospital.”

My dad had been driving on the highway when he began to feel ill. He pulled over to the side of the road and threw up. A passerby saw him lying by the side of the road, wisely recognized that my father was having a heart attack, and tried to give him CPR.

When I arrived at the hospital, the rest of my family greeted me with the news: my dad was dead. I let out something that sounded like a cross between a pained whimper and a primal scream. I turned and punched the wall.

But suddenly a peaceful calm settled over me. “We're going to be okay,” I said to my family. “We're all going to be okay. We're going to have Christmas, and it's going to be okay.”

A nurse asked us if we wanted to say good-bye to him. My younger brother, Corey, and I went in together. The room was cold and still. Dad's body was on the table. A few moments passed in silence before I quietly said:

“Should we check his pockets for money?”

For a second, I wasn't sure I'd said the right thing. But I got a great laugh out of Corey. It sounds so cliché, but you've got to have a sense of humor about this kind of stuff. If all you're doing is making jokes, you're probably not dealing with death very well. But if you're just crying, that's not the best thing either. Later, back at my parents' house, my brothers and I mock-argued over my dad's clothes, getting into a tugging match over a shirt that ended with the shirt being torn in half. We fell on the floor laughing. But later that night, I heard Michael throwing up in the bathroom, literally sick with grief.

Here's another cliché that's true: If you've got something nice to say about people, tell them while they're still alive. My mind raced back to a conversation I'd had a month earlier with
one of my dad's employees. My father could be gruff on the outside: I remember once when my friend Doug Doyle insisted on addressing him in an overly deferential way—“Nice to meet you, Mr. Glass . . . Can I get something for you, Mr. Glass?”—finally leading my dad to say, “Hey, son, fucking relax . . . What are you looking for, a handout?” But my dad was also one of the most open-minded and nonjudgmental people I've ever met. I described him to the employee as a cross between Ed Asner and Phil Donahue.

When the employee told my dad what I'd said, I was upset. “Why did you tell him that?” I said to her. “I can't believe you told him I said that!”

But now, seeing my dad on the table, I couldn't have been gladder that she did. I leaned down and whispered in his ear. “You did a good job.”

About fifty people came to a service at our house, including a lot of my friends from Smokey Joe's. We were used to hanging out and laughing and having fun. We'd never been around each other in a situation like this one. It was uncomfortable. No one knew what to say or how to act. But luckily we still had our twisted sense of humor. At one point during the service, my friend John slowly leaned in toward me, pointed to the yarmulke on my head, and whispered, “Jew!”

I thought that was about the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

The rabbi who married my parents and presided over my bar mitzvah gave a great speech. “We have a lot of different kinds of people in this room,” he began, “and I don't know what everybody's beliefs are. Some people think, we do this, we go there. Some people don't know what to think. Some don't think about it at all. But I can tell you something that's a fact, something that
we can all agree on no matter what our backgrounds are: He's not in pain. And our memories are real. Now obviously, we miss his presence, and that can't be replaced. But he's not in pain and the memories are real. We can find comfort in that.”

I still find comfort in the memories. I have an old sweater of my dad's. Even if it doesn't smell like him anymore, I still have a good cry every time I pull it out. But I can't help but wonder what our relationship could have been. I think he would have loved the comedy. Given how accepting he'd always been—toward his family, his friends, and his employees—I really think that he would have been okay with me being gay. Circle this cliché in red: Soak in the people you love while they're still here.

After the memorial service, my sister-in-law Meryl approached me with a look that managed to be both concerned and adorable. “Is it okay to say happy birthday?” she asked. Obviously my twenty-third birthday didn't seem that important on this particular day. But I appreciated the gesture and gave her a big hug.

As I'm writing this book, it's forced me to recognize some of the times that might otherwise have drifted past, times when people have acted kindly toward me in ways that were completely unexpected. A few days later, I got a phone call. “Todd, this is Randy Jones . . . Caroline's dad?”

“Sure, I remember,” I said. “How are you?”

“Actually, I'm a little upset. I told you that you could come stay with us in L.A. What's the matter, our house isn't good enough for you?

I felt a sudden burst of excitement.
If he's calling me on the phone, he must really mean it!
I still didn't have any money, but now I knew I had a friendly place to stay. My fears about Los Angeles all but disappeared. I was finally ready to make my move.

For
most twenty-three-year-olds with a car, a cross-country move means one thing: road trip!

Only I wasn't most twenty-three-year-olds. Driving long distance would require reading road signs, following directions, and, most of all, using maps. As you can probably guess by now, I was incapable of doing any of that, especially the part with the maps.

I remember the first time a history teacher pulled down a map of the United States. Just looking at it made me dizzy—all those lines and names! How could anyone in their right mind ever learn all that? It's still hard to admit some of this stuff sometimes, like when someone gives me directions: “Just get off the freeway and head south.”

“Is that a right or a left?”

“I'm not sure . . . It's south.”

“I don't carry a fucking compass with me! Right or left?”

It can get really bad at hotels, where desk clerks love to draw directions on their stupid little maps. I panic as soon as I see them reaching under the desk.
No no no! Please don't draw me a map! Just tell me the first two steps and, when I get there, I'll ask someone else how to go the rest of the way.

So a road trip was out of the question. Fortunately, my brother Corey volunteered to drive my car across the country with all of my stuff in it. I went to the airport with Harrison, Mick, and Katy. It was bittersweet—for the last few years I'd spent a lot of days and nights with these people—but when I looked at Katy, I felt guilty. There was so much I wish I could have explained to her.

A few hours later I landed in Burbank, California. I felt like I was exiting the plane into a giant indoor swimming pool where the temperature was a perfectly maintained seventy-two degrees.

This is where I'm going to live.

I took a cab to Steve Young's house, where I crashed for a couple of nights until Corey arrived with my Jeep. (God, do I miss the days when I could fit everything I owned into a Jeep.) Then it was off to the Joneses.

I was scared to drive in California. I'd grown up watching
CHiPs
—the classic show about how L.A. needed its own special cops just to deal with the highways—and I felt like I was stepping into the insane world I'd seen on TV. The Joneses lived about forty-five minutes south of downtown in a place called Anaheim Hills, so I white-knuckled it until I was sure I'd found the exit.

None of the houses I'd seen in California up to that point were built on spacious lots—even in the expensive areas, it felt like there were fewer than ten feet between you and your neighbor. But the Joneses lived on a huge property that you had to enter through gates. I pressed the buzzer and the gates opened—pretty spectacular, even if it lacked the Nalibotsky touch.