The Todd Glass Situation (5 page)

The teachers were all very nice. They tried desperately to find ways to connect with me and engage me in schoolwork. Most of them could tell I wasn't lacking intelligence, which made my academic troubles that much more frustrating for them.

One day, when I was acting particularly miserable, a teacher pointed to a sickly-looking plant on the windowsill. “Todd, what do you think is wrong with this plant?”

Now my mom had obviously told the teacher that I liked plants. This poor woman was just trying to find a way to connect with me. It's easy to see, in hindsight, that these were loving people who didn't know what to do. But the thirteen-year-old me was tired of being patronized. And besides, I didn't
even like plants—I liked landscaping. Not the same thing! I wanted to say. Not even fucking close.

“It's sick,” I said. “You should throw it away.”

“Are you sure?” my teacher replied. “What if we gave it some water?”

“No, that plant is sick. You better throw it away before it spreads whatever it has to the rest of the plants. It'll kill them all.”

“Maybe it just needs a little sun.”

“What it needs is to be put out of its misery.”

Outside of school, I desperately wanted to be friends with Albert Nalibotsky, who I saw as my in to becoming a part of their family. Albert and I didn't have much in common. He loved sports and would beg me all the time to go outside and toss a football. I hated sports. Whenever sports were on TV in our house, I wasn't allowed to talk, so you could forget about me being interested. Sports still represent two of my least favorite things in life: exercise and not talking.

Now stop.

I know what you're thinking.

Obsessive about cleaning? Check!

An eye for landscaping and design? Check!

Doesn't like sports? Check!

It all adds up. It was obvious, even then, that I was . . .

Bullshit!

A lot of people seem to think that being gay automatically means you're great at design, fashion, or throwing great dinner parties. This idea really bothers the hell out of me. Gay people aren't born with these particular interests or skills in their DNA; they have to learn them slowly over time, like any other interest
or skill. It would be like if you met an Asian doctor and said, “No wonder you're a doctor, you're Asian! You people are smart!” Oh yeah? What about the years of medical school and thousands of hours of work and study? Did you ever take that into account, you lazy piece of shit?

You'll sometimes hear that stereotypes exist for a reason: because they're true. I don't think that's right, either. I know a lot of straight guys who, if they pretended to come out of the closet, would have people falling all over themselves to tell you how they knew it all along. “No wonder he's a great dresser and has such a beautiful home! Now it all makes sense . . .”

The truth is that some guys are good at this kind of stuff; some are not. Gay or straight doesn't have anything to do with it. Most of our “stereotypes” are simple observations that don't have any connection to what's in your DNA.

Gay guys have style? They also have two incomes and no kids.

Asians love cameras? They're on vacation in our country, fuckface!

Jews are cheap? You're right, everyone else loves to overpay for shit.

So an eye for design and a dislike for sports didn't mean that I was gay. However, there was one small detail that might have hinted that something about me was a little bit different: I started to have feelings for guys.

Which, I've got to admit, sounds pretty gay.

Look,
discovering sexuality is hard enough for kids to go through when it's accepted by everybody. If a boy likes a girl, and he's thirteen and she's thirteen, dipping their toes (and whatever else) into a heterosexual relationship embraced by society, it's already so difficult. Holy shit are there feelings to go through. Feelings that are complicated and new and weird and exciting and terrifying.

Now imagine going through this process and also feeling dirty about it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

By the time I was thirteen, I
knew
. Sometimes I would see a guy and I'd feel a sense of attraction for him. I also knew enough not to say a word about it to anybody.

We're talking about the late 1970s. While I wasn't necessarily sure what my feelings meant, I was old enough to know that words like “gay,” “fag,” and “homo” were insults.

I should point out that I was a lucky kid in that none of these prejudices came from my parents, who socialized with people of every race, religion, sexual orientation, and economic class. But I grew up in the same straight world as everyone else did. If you could hide being gay, you did. And even if you couldn't, you still did. (One word: Liberace.) I learned that “normal” people got uncomfortable when they saw same-sex couples, so I did, too. Whenever other boys my age started to talk about the crushes they were developing on girls, I immediately clammed up. I was pretty sure that my own weird feelings would go away. I just had to hide them until that happened.

One night I stayed over at a friend's house. We were watching TV and our legs touched.

We didn't say very much after that. There wasn't any kissing, just a lot of groping. “Heavy petting” is the phrase that comes to mind—the kind of stuff you might expect a thirteen-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl to do. It felt good. It felt right.

And when I woke up the next morning, it felt dirty.

I can't say that I handled it poorly, because I didn't handle it at all. I went out of my way not to see him again. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when, a few months later, he moved away, so I could get on with the business of forgetting that it had ever happened.

I mean, what the fuck? I was failing out of school and didn't know what was wrong with me, met people who hated
me for being part of a religion that I hardly practiced, had been to five different schools in eight years leaving me with almost no close friends, and now I was going to have to be gay, too?

I must have been a real asshole in my past life to deserve all that in this one.

The
last thing I want to do is to make my childhood sound more dramatic than it was. While I might get a little sad or angry when I look back on it, at the time, life seemed pretty good. I didn't walk around depressed every day. Kids are resilient. I laughed a lot.

I always had a lot of fun with my family, and a lot of that fun revolved around comedy. My dad used to watch
Fernwood 2Night
—a show that was crazy ahead of its time—so he clearly had an evolved sense of humor. I didn't necessarily get all the jokes, but I loved Martin Mull and Fred Willard, who could sell all sorts of funny with an upturned eyebrow or a deadpan expression.

Later, my brothers and I became obsessed with
The Carol Burnett Show.
Michael and Spencer learned all of the Eunice and
Ed Higgins sketches by heart and would spend hours cracking me up.

Comedy was something I could relate to. I didn't have to read anything. Even if I didn't understand everything that the performers were saying, I liked the way they were saying it. They used their voices, going louder or quieter, speaking faster or slower, to create a mood and tell a story—it was a way of communicating that really resonated with me.

Every day I'd come home from school and watch
Mike Douglas
or
Merv Griffin
, two talk shows that usually ended with a stand-up routine, hoping to see comedians like Rodney Danger-field or Don Rickles. When Spencer got a George Carlin album, we played the hell out of it. Not only was Carlin hilarious, but it felt like he was talking right to us, telling the truth in a way that other adults couldn't or wouldn't.

Pretty soon, without even realizing it, I was starting to think like a comedian. I still remember the very first time I used irony to take a piece of information and turn it around in a way that highlighted how ridiculous it was. I was in the car with my parents and someone cut us off. “Sometimes I wish I had an old clunker so I could just plow into people,” my dad complained to no one in particular.

“Yeah, that's a great idea, Dad. You think if you ran someone off the road and they called the cops, the cops would be like, ‘Sorry . . . Nothing we can do about this one. He clearly has an old clunker. We're going to have to let him go.' ”

I knew I'd done well when I heard my mom crack up from the passenger seat.

Meanwhile, since we'd been in the same house for a couple of years, it was obviously time for the Glass family to move
again. This time we ended up in Valley Forge, which really felt way out in the country. The house was down a quarter-mile gravel driveway that led to a twenty-five-acre ranch—we lived on what was maybe two and a half acres on the back of the lot.

When you're living in the middle of nowhere and you're not into organized sports, it isn't that easy to make new friends. But I found one at my new school, a kid named Blake who let me copy from him when we were taking tests. He was so gracious. He never did what some people do, moving their hand to cover the page—as a matter of fact, he'd even move the paper closer to the edge of his desk to make it easier for me. The only problem, I realized pretty quickly, was that I was copying from a straight-D student.

I figured I should probably find some smarter friends. Taking a page from the comedians I'd been watching and listening to, I tried to use my sense of humor. It wasn't always successful. We were reading a book at school called
Hey, Dummy.
Later, while riding in the car with my brother, I saw one of my classmates and wanted to make him laugh, so I yelled at him: “Hey, dummy!”

When I ran into him at school the next day and saw how pissed he was, I panicked and denied that it was me. He panicked and punched me in the face. This was a great lesson in comedy: Know your crowd.

But I was starting to see how a sense of humor could improve my social life. My first impression of Joe Greco, the kid who sat behind me in my new homeroom, was that he was kind of a tough guy. One morning, my new homeroom teacher announced that they were still looking for the lead in the school musical. All of a sudden Joe chimed in, singing,
“I'llllllllllll do it!”

His delivery was perfect, but no one else in the class even
chuckled. I, on the other hand, fell on the floor laughing. I still laugh when I think about it now.

A few days later, Joe got the chance to return the favor. My current obsession was Rodney Dangerfield. I'd recently bought his album and had spent hours mimicking his routine until I felt comfortable enough to try a few jokes out in class, replacing Rodney's wife with my mother: “My mom is such a bad cook, in my house we pray
after
we eat. Guys, seriously, it's really bad . . . The other day I caught a fly fixing the screen door!”

And . . . crickets. Except for Joe, who gave me what I thought was a pity laugh.

One of my classmates sneered at him. “You think he's funny?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, in a voice that made the kid cower in the corner. “I do.”

And just like that, somebody my age thought I was funny.

What was amazing was that Joe wasn't the only person who seemed to think so. The most popular kid in my class, Dave Olsen, started acting like he wanted to be my friend, too. Everybody liked Dave—he was smart, friendly, and got along with all different kinds of people.

I didn't really understand why he was being so nice to me until years later, during a visit to his house, when his dad said, “Dave, don't forget—remember to be friends with someone who doesn't have any friends!”

“Wait a minute,” I said, looking at Dave. “That's
me
! You became my friend in high school because you felt sorry for me.”

Dave denied it, but I was smart enough to know what was up. And at that point, who cared? We'd already become friends, which still amazes me. A lot of teenagers use their popularity
for evil. But if you want your kid to be really, truly cool, teach him or her to use popularity for good, like Dave Olsen did.

I can't overstate how great it felt to have a friend like Dave. For the first time in my life, I was looking forward to going to school. I liked having friends. We had a good time doing the kinds of crazy things that high school kids did. My friend Jamie bought a used unmarked police car. It didn't take long to notice that the other cars on the road were slowing down when we pulled behind them. “Oh!” it finally dawned on us. “They think we're cops.”

So we started pulling people over. No one who looked dangerous, just kids about our age who were doing something erratic—there's nothing more fun than catching someone in the middle of doing something stupid. We'd flash the high beams and the car would pull over. Jamie and I both looked a lot older than our age; later we'd wear blue windbreakers and tuck them into our pants, just like we saw cops do, before we approached the driver. “How ya doing? You know, the reason we have unmarked cars is so we can catch people doing the kinds of things that you were doing . . .”

Look, as a full-grown adult, this is an embarrassing story—we were in it for the power and the fun. After we were done scaring the crap out of some poor kid, we'd get back into Jamie's car and giggle like no real cop ever would. It was a great gag, at least until it came to a screeching halt when, one day on the way to school, we accidentally pulled over the principal.

For the first time in my life, I was really enjoying school. I was having a great time with my new friends and there was no way I was going to mess it up. Any romantic feelings I had for guys got pushed into the back of my mind where I hoped and prayed that they'd stay.