The Todd Glass Situation (15 page)

“No, Todd, I'll say it the way you want me to say it.”

Sure enough, someone complimented the setting at our dinner party, and Andrea gamely jumped in and took the credit.
We hadn't planned on one of Andrea's friends deciding to correct her. “Andrea didn't set it,” she blurted out. “Todd did! He just didn't want anybody to know.”

I froze. Chris jumped in and quickly changed the topic: “Why don't you tell everyone about the guy you fucked in the Jacuzzi in Florida?” he asked her.

I was still angry even after most of the guests had gone. “Why did she have to open her big mouth?” I complained to my friend Jimmy Dore, who had stuck around to help us clean up.

Jimmy just laughed. “Don't you hear what you're saying, Todd? You don't want anyone to know that you like pretty things!”

We didn't know how good we had it with Andrea until we got into situations where she wasn't around. When you live in Los Angeles, it's not uncommon for police helicopters to buzz past your house in the middle of the night, shining spotlights that always seem to be directed toward your yard. One night, in the midst of another routine helicopter manhunt, the police knocked on our door and wanted to know if they could continue the search in back of our house.

Obviously we were terrified—not because of the possibility that a dangerous fugitive was hiding in our backyard, but because the policemen might look around our house and get the impression that we were gay. Chris ran to “my” bedroom—the room that had become our storage closet—and started pulling all of the boxes and suitcases off the bed so that it could conceivably look slept in.

“Put those flowers away, they look gay!” Chris screamed.

“You know what looks gay?!” I screamed back at him. “Two men our age living together!”

Throughout it all, we laughed a lot. My personal life was finally catching up with my professional success. But keeping my personal life a secret all of the time not only felt wrong, but was proving harder and harder to do. I'd find myself wanting to share stories about the funny things that happened to Chris and me, so I tried changing certain details to make them fit our cover story.

Like the time Chris and I threw a party at the house and his mother, Pierrette, accidentally ate five pot cookies someone brought with them. My friend Gina, who had been chatting with Pierrette for a few minutes, came into the kitchen to ask me if everything was okay.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Chris's mom asked me if it was normal to do this . . .” Gina proceeded to wave her hands in front of her face, staring at her fingers as she wiggled them.

“Oh my God!” I yelled, realizing what had happened. “What did you tell her?”

“That it was fine?”

Five pot cookies would have put Willie Nelson on the floor. As the cookies kicked in, Chris's mom—who is French and speaks with a heavy accent—started to moan. We started to panic. Someone called 911. When we told them that pot cookies were involved, they sent an ambulance
and
a police car.

A few minutes later there was a huge scene playing out in front of our house. I should tell you that Pierrette is fine now—in fact, she was fine later that night, flirting heavily with a paramedic forty years her junior as they wheeled her into the ambulance. When she woke the next morning, Pierrette had already decided that the incident was amusing enough to share
with all of our neighbors. Needless to say, none of this was particularly amusing to Chris.

“Mom, they're gonna think you're some drugged-up whore!”

A few months later, I decided to tell the story to a group of comedians. For some reason I got worried that using Pierrette as a character might reveal too much about our,
ahem,
situation, so I pretended the story was about my own mother. Halfway through, I realized that I'd unintentionally given my mother a French accent.

So did Dave Rath. “Wait, Todd . . . Why is your mom French in this story?”

I started to sweat.
This is it . . . They're gonna find out . . . How am I going to get out of this one?
Luckily, Sarah Silverman—who by this time had become one of my closest friends and knew all about Chris—jumped in to rescue me. “Oh, that's just Todd being silly,” she said.

It worked—this time. But the moment of panic reminded me how exhausting it was to keep living two separate lives. Something had to give.

By
the time most people reach their early thirties, they've spent enough time in relationships to have picked up at least a few of the tools they need to get along with their romantic partners. Not me—I was starting from scratch. Despite our ten-year age difference, Chris and I were entering our relationship from a pretty similar place in terms of emotional maturity.

That place being “little to none.” There were bound to be a few speed bumps.

Like the way I'd always been attracted to straight-seeming guys. I'd always had issues with gay men who were more experienced than I was, probably out of jealousy that they were comfortable with their sexuality in a way that I wasn't. With Chris,
I found myself in the strange and unfamiliar position of being the (slightly) more experienced guy.

Eew, gross.

I didn't want to weird Chris out in the way I had been weirded out in the past, so I tried to avoid any conversation about my previous partners. But the topic inevitably came up from time to time and always caused a fight.

There were plenty of arguments over much simpler things. What car I was going to buy. How many weeks I'd be on the road. Which cities were okay for Chris to come visit me in, and which ones weren't. Every couple fights, of course, but neither of us knew how to have a productive conversation that could lead to a mature resolution. There was a lot of screaming. Many doors were slammed in anger.

We finally decided to get professional help. We heard that a local Gay & Lesbian Center offered relationship counseling to same-sex couples. True to form, we parked several blocks away from the therapist's office, near a YMCA, so if Chris and I ran into anyone that we knew we could tell them that we were on our way to the gym. (Because that wouldn't sound gay at all.)

The therapist encouraged us to take time-outs. Everyone thinks time-outs are for kids, but I get it now. They work. (And if they don't, you've got a pretty clear indication that you need more intense help.) I had my doubts at the beginning—
Okay, I'll take a time-out, but two hours from now I'm still going to be mad
—but was amazed to discover that just three minutes in another room and suddenly I was receptive to hearing whatever it was that Chris was really saying to me.

The listening part turned out to be really important. I discovered that I'd been taking a lot of things that Chris said
personally, as opposed to being able to listen to him and to figure out where he was coming from. Sometimes the person you're with just wants to be heard. They're not necessarily upset with you—they're just upset and you happened to be there.

We found out that almost every argument has an “over-reactor” and a “calmer-downer”—one person tends to get upset, leading his or her partner to try and defuse the situation by pointing out that whatever it is isn't worth getting upset about. Unfortunately this can sometimes make the overreactor feel like the calmer-downer is trivializing the issue.

So I came up with a way to defuse this dynamic: If the person you're with is upset about something, you just get more upset about it. In other words, the calmer-downer becomes the overreactor, forcing the overreactor to calm down.

“Can you believe we ordered forty-five minutes ago and our food still isn't here?”

“WHAT?! THIS IS TOTAL BULLSHIT! WE ARE SO FUCKING OUT OF HERE!”

“All right, all right. Calm down. It's not a big deal.”

“Oh, it's not? Okay, whatever you say.”

Or:

“Hey, did you remember to take the laundry from the washer and put it into the dryer?”

“FUCK! I TOTALLY FORGOT! I'M A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT AND DON'T DESERVE YOU! I'M GOING TO GO KILL MYSELF NOW BECAUSE I'M SUCH A FUCKING LOSER!”

“Jesus, relax! I'll do it.”

We slowly began to deal with our relationship issues in a way that started to resemble maturity. Our progress even gave
me enough courage to bring Chris back to Philadelphia with me where—because it was starting to get a little ridiculous—I finally opened up to my mother and her new husband. It may have taken me thirty-two years, but I'm happy to say that the experience turned out to be a positive one: Nobody said or did anything dramatic. After a lot of routine questions about our relationship (“How long have you been together? Where did you meet?”), Chris was welcomed into our family. I even managed to tell Katy, finally bringing our relationship to an honest place.

But to 99 percent of the other people we ran into, I introduced Chris as my “friend.” There was no way I was ready to add those three letters to the front of the word. I really don't know who I was fooling, or even if I was fooling anyone at all, but for now, this was the way it was going to be.

The bigger problem arose when I was onstage. Relationships are full of funny moments and hilarious insights—in other words, great material. I just needed to find a way to talk about my relationship without really talking about my relationship.

At first, I tried to disguise it, setting up jokes with lines like, “You know what I've noticed with my brother and his wife?” After a while, I felt confident enough to start using “my girlfriend” as part of my act.

“So,” I've had people ask me, “you had to make up all of those stories?” No! I may have taken liberties with gender, but I didn't make anything up. Every joke I told about my imaginary girlfriend was based on something that had actually happened between Chris and me. It's an experience that taught me something—two things, actually:

First of all, the issues that arise between same-sex couples
are almost exactly the same as the ones that come up between heterosexual couples. Granted, there may have been a few restrictions: A bit that started with, “So I'm peeing next to my girlfriend in the bathroom at the airport . . . ,” probably would have confused most audiences. But the stories I told always got laughs from what I assume were mostly straight audiences because, at the end of the day, the experiences aren't very different.

Which gets to the second thing I learned: We're all dealing with the same problems. Over the years, I've spent hours listening to men complain about their girlfriends (“You know what's wrong with women?”) and women complain about their boyfriends (“What is up with guys?”). Well, guess what? There wasn't a woman in my relationship, but I had a lot of the same issues that my guy friends had with their girlfriends . . . and a lot of the same issues the girls have had with their boyfriends.

The bottom line is this: There are fucked-up men. There are fucked-up women. Sometimes you end up dating or even marrying them. But in the end, the issues are the issues, and we're all trying to work them out. We all have baggage. The trick is making sure that it's carry-on, so we don't turn our partners into bellhops.

Most
comedians move to Los Angeles because they want to further their career. It's usually not until they get there that they realize what furthering their career really means: auditions.

As I mentioned earlier, auditions have always been very hard for me. There are plenty of reasons why, but most of them stem from my days in school. I still have a hard time reading. I have an even harder time reading when I'm supposed to be concentrating on something else at the same time, like staying in character or hitting my marks—I can't have two things going on in my head at once. I can barely keep track of one. The second I feel the pressure, I get nervous and sweat pours out of my body.

A couple of years ago I did an episode of
Louie
. It was a
simple scene—all I had to do was walk down the aisle of an airplane, talking on a cell phone. I'd spent the night before memorizing my lines (or, more accurately, my
line
) and felt like I was good to go. But as I was about to start, Louis said, “When you pull out the phone, can you cheat a little bit to the right?”

“Okay, cheat to the right.”

“And when you stop to talk to the other passenger, I know you're stopping where most people stop, because that's what you'd do if you were really talking, but I want you to stop around four feet away.”

Are you shitting me? I can't remember all that and still deliver my lines. Who the fuck could?
(Answer: most actors. They do it all the time. It's actually not that hard if you don't have ADD and dyslexia.)

Later on, I confessed my struggles to Louis. “It's funny you say that,” he said. “You remember the first time you auditioned for my show?” He was talking about his first TV show,
Lucky Louie
. HBO was looking for somebody to play Louis's costar, and someone suggested me.

When I get to an audition, the first thing I try to do is figure out a way to read my part sitting down—that way I don't have to worry about hitting marks and I can sneak a quick glance at the script on my lap if I run into trouble. It doesn't really matter what the audition is:

“Okay, you're a cop, and you're chasing the robbers on foot . . .”

“Great! You mind if I sit down for this?”

“In this scene you're jogging with your friend and talking about your date last night . . .”

“Got it. Let me just take a seat over here.”

“You're a waiter who keeps coming back to the table . . .”