The Todd Glass Situation (2 page)

“I saw a sign in my hotel room that said, ‘A towel on the floor means I want a new one—a towel hanging up means I'll use it again.' So I called down to the front desk and asked them, ‘What does a washcloth on my night table with a little bit of lotion next to it mean? I'm just asking, you seem to know what all the towel placement means . . . What? It means I'm lonely? Okay, thank you.' ”

Thirty-five minutes later, the set comes to an end. The second I leave the stage, so does the adrenaline. All of my energy just evaporates and I can't seem to catch my breath. I feel like I have a massive hangover. I think I have to throw up. I step outside for air.

I still can't catch my breath, so I stumble back inside, put my hands on my knees, and stare at the carpet. It is absolutely the filthiest carpet I've ever seen. I spend a couple of seconds thinking about how many other performers have stood on this rug, spilling beer and ashing cigarettes into the crusty fibers.

The carpet suddenly looks like the most comfortable resting place in the world, so I sink down into it, face-first.

Sarah kneels next to me. I can tell by the way she's looking at me that she thinks I'm just stoned. The truth is I smoked about a half a joint before I went onstage. It's not something I usually do—a couple of years ago I did the same thing before a show in Seattle and had a panic attack. Now that I think about it, the symptoms were almost exactly the same.

Sarah was there that night and remembers as well as I do. “Is Todd feeling nauseous?” she asks.

I let out something that's halfway between a grunt and a moan.

“Poor baby,” she continues. “Do you want some scrambled warm eggs? I can make them extra runny!” I bang the rug a couple of times with my hand. “Is that your way of telling me you think that was funny?”

It was. I'm glad that she understands because I seem to have lost the ability to speak.

Now Jeff Ross is standing next to her. “Let me take your shoes off for you,” he says. He slips the shoes off my feet and then pinches his nose in fake disgust. “Let me put your shoes back on for you.”

This time I let out a muted cackle. “Aww, look,” Sarah says. “He gave you a mercy laugh.”

“No it wasn't!” I manage to croak.

At this point I hear Jon Hamm screaming at the top of his lungs:

“Will someone call a goddamn ambulance? Or are we all just going to sit here and watch Todd die?”

Okay, Jon Hamm wasn't there, but give me a break: I'm just
trying to move some books. And by the way, if the imaginary Jon Hamm in my story cared so much, why didn't
he
call the ambulance? Like he doesn't have a cell phone? Typical Hamm—I love the guy to death, but he's always bossing people around. Anyway, he wasn't there, so let's move on.

There's something clearly wrong with me. But I know that it's not a heart attack. I'd be puking all over myself. Or unconscious. Trust me, I've spent a lot of time thinking about heart attacks. Heart troubles run on both sides of my family. My dad was forty-five when he died. Which is kind of funny when you think about it: I just turned forty-five a couple of months ago.

“Todd, I think we should call an ambulance,” Sarah says.

I'm probably just having another panic attack. In a few minutes I'm going to feel like an idiot for scaring the crap out of everybody. “No ambulance!” I say, worrying less about my health than my insurance plan's $5,000 deductible.

Sarah leans down and whispers in my ear: “Oh, honey, don't worry, we'll pay for it! But it will have to be your birthday
and
Christmas present, is that okay?”

I give her the best laugh I can, which at this point isn't much. I hear Jeff Ross telling Flanagan, the owner of the club, that an ambulance is on the way. Jeff is going to look pretty fucking silly when this thing passes and I'm back onto my feet.

Minutes later, an EMT is kneeling down next to me. “Why don't we get you into the ambulance and check your vitals, maybe save a trip to the emergency room,” he says. I'm not exactly in any position to argue. A small crowd has gathered around the exit, watching as I get wheeled out on a stretcher.

This is really starting to get embarrassing. A few minutes ago, I was performing for these people, feeling like I was in
charge of the room. Now I feel helpless and weak. I can't wait for the medics to finish up and send me on my way. Tomorrow the whole thing is going to seem hilarious. Maybe even later tonight . . .

“Sir, I don't want to alarm you,” the EMT says, “but you're having a heart attack.”

Okay, maybe not tonight.
I don't want to alarm you?
If he didn't want to alarm me he should have told me I was fine. Telling someone they're having a heart attack is very goddamn alarming. “We're going to take you to Cedars,” he continues. “Is there anyone we should call?”

Right. If I'm dying—which is suddenly starting to feel like a real possibility—I should probably tell the person I've been sharing a life with for the last fourteen years. I look through the faces around me until I find Sarah's. “Call
Andrea
for me,” I say, trying to wink. At this point it looks more like an involuntary facial tic.

Sarah winks back. “Don't worry, I'll call . . .
Andrea
.”

We both know that “Andrea” is actually Chris, my boyfriend. But there's no way in hell I'm going to say his name in front of everyone.

I mean, that might make people think that I was gay or something.

Here I am, forty-five years old, possibly at death's door, surrounded by friends—and I still can't be honest about who I am.

How the fuck did I get here?

It's
funny how many of the memories that stick with you—the ones that shape you and make you who you are as an adult—are things that you never thought were important at the time.

Once in a while, when I was little, my mom would fix up a bowl of icing. She placed it on the kitchen table with five spoons: one for her, each of my three brothers, and for me. Obviously, we loved this little family tradition, but we didn't understand why we were so lucky.

“When I was a little girl,” Mom explained, “I used to love to lick the icing off the beaters. But wouldn't a whole bowl of icing be better? And I thought, when I grow up, I'm going to give my kids bowls of icing.”

Children make promises all the time about the things they're going to do when they grow up, but how many of them really follow through as adults? My mom did. Even if it was just a bowl of icing.

It was 1970. We lived in a row house on Kilburn Road in Northeast Philadelphia. My parents were social people who loved to have friends over at night. Once in a while, when my brothers and I were tucked in bed upstairs, listening to everyone laughing down below, one of the adults would come upstairs to “check on us.” Occasionally this involved jumping up and down on the bed or playing some silly game with us. I remember being five years old and making a promise to myself, just like my mother did:
When I get old, I'm going to act silly, too.

By the way, we should establish two things. First, that for me, “old” meant my parents' age, which at the time was twenty-six. Way old, right? I remember an early bit I used to do with my older brother Michael, when I was maybe eight, pretending that we were talking on the phone in the future. “Hey, Michael, I'm fifty today.”

“What are you going to do today, Todd, for your fiftieth birthday?”

“Well, I guess I'll just stay in the house and shit in my pants and yell at people to get off my lawn. I mean, I'm fifty, what else would I do?”

The second thing, this being the 1970s, is that it wasn't uncommon for a joint to get passed around at these gatherings. One morning I asked my parents why they'd been laughing so hard the night before. My mom tried to explain what was so funny, obviously without mentioning the fact that they were high.

“Your father asked me, ‘How come they have an extra-large and an extra-small, but there isn't an extra-medium?' ” I thought it was a pretty funny joke, even if I didn't understand that their laughter had been enhanced. Years later I would put the line into my act, where it would stay for a very long time.

There were a lot of things I didn't understand as a kid that make sense to me now. Like when my dad would come into the room in the morning and say, “Hey, do you want to go to work with me?” Adding, if I showed even the slightest hesitation, “Come on! I'll let you sit in the backseat of the station wagon with the window open, just how you like. And we can get French fries at that place where you eat them with a wooden fork.”

Later, I found out that these incredible acts of generosity from my dad were actually meant for my mom, who needed a time-out from listening to me. Because I liked to talk.

And talk.

I talked and I talked and I talked.

When I say I talked a lot, I mean I never shut the fuck up. My parents, to their credit, never told me to shut the fuck up. “Why don't you take a commercial break?” they would ask, in what even today feels like the gentlest and most creative way to tell me to shut up without ever once hurting my feelings.

My childhood had more commercial breaks than the Super Bowl, but they never kept my mom's mischievous streak from shining through. Sometimes when I got home from school, she would jump out of the coat closet as I opened the door, scaring the shit out of me. Years later, I asked her how she knew when I was going to walk into the house. “It wasn't easy,” she said. “At first I would run into the closet when I saw your school bus
coming up the street. But when you got off, you'd stop and talk to every adult you passed on the way home.”

She was right. The second I got off the bus, I was like a politician doing a meet and greet. I'd stop and make conversation with every neighbor who crossed my path.

“Did you guys paint the garage? Who painted it? Why'd you choose that color? How many cars are in the garage? Are they new? Which one is new? What do you mean, ‘pre-owned'? How is that different from used? So if it's used, why not just say ‘used'?”

Looking back at it now, I can't help but feel bad for my mom, sitting there in the dark, waiting for me to get home. Talk about committing to a bit!

I
really, really didn't want to go to school. On my first day of kindergarten, as my mom was about to walk me into class, I realized that I had only one option: to run like hell.

So I did—off the school lot, across the street, into the “woods,” a scraggly patch of trees that had by some miracle resisted urbanization. My mom tried to put a good face on it, giggling and laughing as she chased me down and dragged me into the classroom. I, on the other hand, spent the rest of the year moping, sitting on a toy truck that I refused to drive in any direction except reverse.

I already knew that I wasn't any good at retaining information. No matter how patiently the pilot who lived across the street from us pointed out on a map the countries that he'd
flown to, I couldn't remember the names of any of them. Concentrating on schoolwork seemed impossible. I probably spent thirty minutes every day carefully breaking my pencil just so I could get up to sharpen it. Sometimes I wouldn't bother breaking it; I'd just grind a full pencil down to a nub. Which meant that I needed a new pencil, which would also need sharpening. Every second I was sharpening my pencil was another second I didn't have to sit in my chair and be bored out of my goddamn mind.

I'm being serious here. One week into school and I was already lost. I used to stare out the window—just like every other kid, I figured.
Who wouldn't rather stare out the window?
What was I staring at? Anything that didn't have to do with what was going on in the classroom. There's a bulldozer plowing dirt! Look at that janitor scraping gum off a bench! They all looked like things I'd rather be doing.

I tried faking it. By first grade, I had developed a “thoughtful” look, scrunching up my face so it looked like I was really thinking deeply about whatever was being explained to me. Unfortunately, the more interested I looked, the more details my teacher, Mrs. Merriweather, would throw at me. “Thoughtful” eventually evolved into “fake understanding”—my face lit up in a way that screamed “I get it now!” Mrs. Merriweather could quit teaching, content that she'd done her job, and I could go back to staring out the window and imagining how much better life would be if I were driving that bulldozer.

The only part of school that I enjoyed was making grownups laugh. By the end of first grade, I had it down to a science: Give me thirty seconds, and I could crack my teacher up. It turned out to be a surprisingly valuable skill.

Mrs. Merriweather tried so hard to help me get through the school year that I almost felt bad for her. Every week she'd move me a little closer to the front of the classroom, hoping that it would help me to concentrate. By the end of the year, when my desk was literally two inches from hers, she would actually lean over and do all my work for me.

Is it possible to fail first grade? I'm pretty sure I would have if my parents hadn't decided to move to Sunshine Road.

Unlike
our old house, which had more or less been in the city, our new home in Southhampton, Pennsylvania, was on a half-acre lot in the suburbs. We actually got to see them build it. Every weekend we climbed into my parents' station wagon and drove up to watch the construction.