I'm Not High Page 3

  To this day, if anyone ever asks Mom about me, the first thing she says is, “All the doctors said that I should abort him.” Thanks, Mom. She makes sure to add that they also warned her that her baby could have physical or mental defects. Of course, many people I know think that the doctors were right.

  A lot of my early life was spent at the Rock Front with my dad behind the bar. It was just a local Long Island hangout, but to me it had a smoky Goodfellas mystique, with regulars who had names like Tricky Dick, Whistling Dick, Dan Dan the Oil Man, Shady Pete, Lucky Lucy, and Jimmy the Rat. Not the Jimmy the Rat, but close enough. While my dad slung them brandy old-fashioneds, vodka sours, and longneck Miller High Lifes, these guys taught me, at age four, to play pool and shuffleboard.

  And I taught them about the New York Mets. My love for the team came from my dad—baseball is one of the first things he ever shared with me. At the bar, the Mets games on TV and my baseball card collection were my babysitters when Dad got busy. He challenged customers to quiz me and I was rarely stumped. I knew the stats for any guy on the Mets’ twenty-five-man roster across a three- or four-year span. To me, it was unbelievable that these gods played their games just a few miles away and had a pitching staff with guys like Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Jon Matlack, and Tug McGraw.

  If I wasn’t at the Rock Front I could likely be found at the house of my sitter, an Italian American woman named Mary. She and her husband were a little older than my folks, in their fifties, and for a long time they were really like another set of parents. While my parents worked, I’d spend every afternoon with Mary playing army men, coloring, and helping her with household chores, and all the while she’d never stop singing, “Fairy tales can come true/It can happen to you.”

  Mary and her husband, Jimmy, lived in a modest house, not far from where life for me started out—the Fenwood Apartments, a low-income housing development in Valley Stream—and as I spent more and more time at Mary’s house, her singing decreased. Her relationship with her husband took on a new wrinkle—at least to me—and it confused me. Jimmy looked a lot like Uncle Junior from The Sopranos, bald on the top, with a little hair on the sides. At first, I thought he was great. I even called him “Grandpa” for a long time, but I eventually saw him transform into an animal. I’d be watching Chico and the Man on TV or playing Matchbox cars on Mary’s kitchen floor, he’d come home, and it would get ugly. He’d start chasing her around trying to slap her.

  “Get over here,” he’d yell menacingly, rolling up his sleeves, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth.

  “No,” she’d cry. “Wait! Not in front of little Jimmy.” She’d push him away and scoop me up and put me in a bedroom. Then she’d take her beating from him. The closed bedroom door didn’t do much to muffle the sounds and it scared the hell out of me.

  When he was finished, he’d scram, and Mary would do her best to pull herself together, even though she’d often have bruises all over her body. One day at school, my teacher, Mrs. Gerdick, pulled me aside.

  “Is everything okay at home?” she asked. I have no idea how I was acting, but I must have looked shell-shocked.

  “Yeah,” I said a bit too unconvincingly. She called my mom in for a conference.

  “Something’s going on with Jimmy,” Mrs. Gerdick said. “He’s seeing something somewhere, and he’s traumatized and sad from it.”

  I was too nervous to spill it there and then. I didn’t want to make trouble, ruin Mary’s life, or worse, get Grandpa Jimmy angry with me. But when we were driving home, I couldn’t keep the situation from my mom any longer.

  “He’s beating her, Mom,” I said. “Jimmy beats Mary up all the time.”

  My mom’s eyes welled with tears. “How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t know if I can stay there anymore.”

  “You don’t have to, Jimmy,” my mom said. She and my dad scrambled to find another sitter, and in the meantime, things were changing at Mary’s really fast.

  Eventually it came out that Grandpa Jimmy and a fat neighbor were having an affair. I found out because one morning, before my new sitter could start, I had one more stint at Mary’s. My mom was driving me over to her house, and as we turned onto her block, we saw it was filled with cop cars. We parked, got out of the car, and saw that the door to the neighbor lady’s house was open and had been hacked to pieces, like someone had taken an axe to it.

  We made our way through the police, who were coming in and out of Mary’s place, and went inside. I have no idea why the cops let us in, but we soon discovered Mary sitting at her kitchen table, with a black eye, shaking.

  “What happened?” my mom said.

  “I was going to kill her,” Mary growled. That was the only time I’d ever seen her out of control. “I brought my hammer over there and she wouldn’t come out. I’m going to kill her. I’m going to kill her.”

  That’s all she kept saying. Grandpa Jimmy went away for a year or two after that, and Mary began singing again. A couple years later, she and Grandpa Jimmy briefly tried to reconcile, and he wanted to hang out and be my friend, like nothing bad had ever happened.

  “Hey, Jimmy,” he’d say. “Let’s take a ride or something.”

  “I’m good,” I’d respond, no matter what he was offering. “No, thanks.”

  Eventually they split up for good and Mary ended up taking care of me until I was twelve. She became the lunch lady at my grade school, and afterward she’d take care of me until my folks were done working. I still think of her every day.

  When I first started seeing her husband beat up on her, I started having nightmares about dying. Not me dying, but everyone. It was typical kids’ stuff: What happened when you died? Where did you go? One night my mom heard me bawling and came into my bedroom.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Where do you go when you die?” I sat up in my Batman pajamas. “Are you just frozen? Do you have to lay in the dirt forever?”

  “You go to heaven,” Mom said calmly, sitting down on my bed. “God watches after you. Is that what had you so upset?”

  “I just wanted to know what happens,” I said, sniffling.

  “Well, that’s what happens,” Mom explained. “It’s peaceful up there. You’re with all the family members you love. And it’s okay to pray while you’re here,” Mom added. “Especially when you’re scared. But, really, you can talk to God anytime and he’ll listen.”

  She showed me how to kneel down by my little bed and pray. And that’s how my relationship with God began. Of course, we never went to church. No one ever cracked a Bible. I was never baptized, and I have no idea what all of the Ten Commandments are even to this day. But Mom just impressed upon me that God was watching over me, and she made sure I knew that God helped us all if we let him into our lives.

  At this point I should explain something about little Jim Breuer: I was eighty-two pounds in kindergarten. And I looked high. This could have been a recipe for a disastrous childhood. I guess Mary really knew how to feed me. I had cheeseburgers and fries four days a week at her house. Then, when I got home, I’d wolf down a bowl of ice cream, eat dinner, and then have something else for dessert.

  The only reason I knew I weighed exactly eighty-two pounds was because they made me weigh in at school. Right in the middle of class the nurses would come and take me out into the hallway, weigh me, and try like heck to introduce me to the food pyramid and give me some grasp on nutrition. The only fruit I was eating at that time was bananas, and that was always as part of a split. Thank God there were two other kids in my class who weighed in at about a hundred pounds each. If kids started teasing me, I could always turn to my two tubby comrades and say, “Well, they’re fatter.”

  I loved Batman, and in kindergarten, that’s what I really wanted to be for Halloween. It would be my first costume ever. So my mom went to the store to buy me the getup, which was a hot vinyl, one-piece thing with no separate pants. I was five ye
ars old at the time, but she bought me the age 6-8 size just to be safe. That was even too small, but I would not admit it. I put it on and went to school, but it was so tight I couldn’t even step up onto the curb. I had to be super careful about how I walked lest I split the thing. My mom tried helping me, and after four steps, she stopped cold.

  “You just can’t go in like this,” she said.

  “I’m going!” I shouted. I’d been waiting for this costume and I was going to wear it. I was on the verge of a full-on tantrum. “I’m Batman!” I shouted. So she followed behind me, trying to stuff my fat back into the costume wherever it was popping out. The mask didn’t fit, either—it was sticking straight out and dripping with sweat from my fat face. As I finally made it into the classroom, I had all of the kids’ attention. Everyone was staring at me. Muffled sounds came from underneath my mask. “Em Bhhhtmnnnn! Bhhhtmnnn!” I yelled. And as soon as I sat down in my desk chair, that sucker ripped from my ankle to the top of my thigh. For a while after that, my classmates serenaded me with a modified version of the Batman theme song: “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Fatman!”

  So yeah, not surprisingly, I was self-conscious about being fat. And I feared older kids. It’s not fun being called fat or told you have big tits at any age, and I got called every name in the book right from the start. For a while, I lived my life waiting for confrontation from strangers or bigger kids. In fact, that’s probably what made me start studying people and mimicking them, because once they detonated the “You’re fat” bomb, I had to bring a takedown quickly. By the time I was a second-grader, no one could beat me at psychological warfare. I’d start with their haircut, the way they walked, the way they talked, how they would write, anything. I was just waiting.

  My comebacks were two parts wit and one part meanness. So when someone said, “You’re fat,” I’d say, “You’re retarded. I can lose weight. You can’t lose your retardation. You know, it’s funny, because the teachers were just having a conversation about how stupid you are. They were talking about holding you back, but they’re so tired of taking time out of their day to catch you up to everyone else, they might just pass you to get rid of you.”

  And yet, at the same time, I had a lot of love around me. My friends never called me fat. Maybe it’s because they feared I’d throw them on the floor and sit on them. As I got closer to junior high, it dawned on me that chicks were not going to dig an obese guy. Eventually I started working out hard and burned it all off.

  So that’s little Jim Breuer: big in spirit and big in body. But let me tell you about Jefferson Avenue. When I was about five, we moved out of the Fenwood Apartments into our own second-floor apartment in a house on Jefferson Avenue in Valley Stream. A year or two later, we moved a few doors down and had a house all to ourselves. This was a big deal, a step closer to real middle-class life. It was me, Mom, Dad, my half sister Patti, and my half brother Bobby. Patti and Bobby were both a good decade older than me and total products of the early 1970s—they smoked, drank, and partied relentlessly. And they both did this nomad thing, where they went across the country on spiritual journeys and returned home changed.

  I looked up to them both, and I remember being really excited one spring day when I was seven, when Patti called. She announced she was about a day away from making it home to Valley Stream. My big sister was on her way. She’d made it as far west as Ohio, winding up at some crusty free-love commune, where when people weren’t having sex, they were tripping their brains out on acid. Sure enough, a mufflerless VW van dropped Patti in front of the house early the next morning. Mom greeted her at the door before I could scramble outside to hug her. I couldn’t see Patti, but all I heard was Mom shouting.

  “Holy cow,” Mom moaned. “What’s that hunk of metal stuck in your nose?”

  “It’s a nose ring, Mom,” Patti said. “Jewelry. Relax.”

  “Ugh, I’m gonna throw up,” Mom said. “We can’t let Jimmy see you this way.”

  But I saw it. She also had a Jimi Hendrix-style Afro to boot, which was pretty funny on a white chick who’d always had straight, shoulder-length hair.

  But that wasn’t all. Patti brought home guests. Little microscopic ones that lived in her underwear. Some escaped and set up shop in our house, which Mom now scrubbed hourly. In retrospect, Patti’s nose ring was a day off compared to the crabs. Mom didn’t bother explaining it all to me, she just pleaded with me not to sit on the toilet seat because of the crabs. I literally would look around the toilet for ocean life and think she was losing her mind. Crabs? It didn’t make sense. All of this earned my sister the nickname “Hurricane Patti,” which we still call her today.

  Mom and Dad had been through it all before and were sort of making new rules as they went along. They didn’t bother marrying each other until I was nine years old. And I only found that out because once Mom was watching TV and called out to my dad, “Hey, there’s the guy that married us.” And on the screen was a recently elected city councilman.

  My friends on Jefferson Avenue were like a whole other family to me, as strong as any other bond I had. Playing together out in the street with them is really where I came of age. This was my core gang:Phil—He looked like Ben Stein, the actor/political ideologue who famously played a teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—but with a leather jacket. He didn’t say much but when he did, he was often the voice of reason.

  Billy—A tall, glasses-wearing, brainy, unathletic nerd. We loved him, even though he was terrible at stickball and every other game we played. The flights in and out of JFK fascinated him, and he could tell you everything about aviation that you never wanted to know. (Now he’s an engineer at Northrop Grumman.)

  Jeffrey—The consummate Italian-looking Long Island kid. His hair was always slicked back, and he loved wearing mesh shirts and a gold chain.

  Chris—A blond, all-American, Wonder bread-type kid. Chicks dug him. He was unassuming and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  Tommy—He was five or six years younger than us and would happily jump off his Big Wheel without a second thought to sock kids in the face if asked. He was a maniac, and we loved him.

  Elmo—He had big ears, was really skinny, and was named Elmo. None of that made life easy for him.

  We lived outdoors. We played stickball all the time. When it got colder, we played street hockey on rollerskates. We’d also play asses-up handball. As guys got eliminated, they had to stand against the wall and the remaining players got to whip the ball at their butts. We built go-carts, forts, and obstacle courses, or just ghost rode old bikes (you’d get going fast on the bike, leap off, hope to land on your feet, and watch it go sailing) for distance. If it snowed, we played tackle football immediately, like it was a law. And we always tried to make each other laugh. This was where I tried out Bugs Bunny impressions, animal impressions, Pesci, De Niro, Nicholson, anything to get people laughing.

  Of the group, I was the oldest kid by two years and sometimes it was like Lord of the Flies on our block with me as the leader. I abused this role. There were kids a few years older than me milling around Jefferson Avenue, but they weren’t part of our core gang.

  If I said, “We’re going to be Mets fans,” we were Mets fans.

  If I said, “We’re only going to listen to Judas Priest,” we only listened to Judas Priest.

  But like all kids we got into arguments. Mostly our disagreements were easily solved or forgotten, mindless bickering about rules to games or whose turn it was. One time, though, Tommy’s twin cousins wandered over from their house about a mile away and took things to a deeper place.

  They were probably about nine years old. One twin had dark olive skin and was roly-poly with glasses and the beginnings of a starter mustache. The other was blond, white as a ghost, and frail. They both thought they were world-class athletes. In reality, they were both little punk know-it-alls who’d always challenge us to games and refuse to quit no matter how bad we were beating them.

  Their family was pretty religious. Catholics. On
e day, maybe out of frustration from getting trounced in a stickball game, one of them started ragging on me, right in the middle of the street.

  “So, Breuer,” the light-skinned one said. “I heard you never go to church.”

  Before I could even answer, his darker-skinned brother chimed in. “Yeah, are you even baptized?”

  My friends quietly circled, waiting to see how I’d respond. It was no secret that I never went to church. It wasn’t anything I bragged about, but I wasn’t ashamed, either. Up until now, no one had given it a second thought. Tommy must have told them about it and they thought they’d use it against me somehow.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Big deal. I never go. But I love God.”

  “It’s impossible to love Him if you don’t go to church,” the light-skinned cousin insisted.

  “Listen ...” I started to explain before I was interrupted with another question.

  “What’s Corinthians 11:14?” the dark-skinned one asked, pushing up his glasses.

  “Who gives a shit?” I said indignantly.

  “It’s a Bible passage, which you’d know if you weren’t going to hell,” the light-skinned one said.

  “You’re always cursing,” the dark-skinned twin added. “That’s the kind of stuff you have to say Hail Marys for.”

  “Why?” I asked. Was it really possible that these twins were more annoying arguing religion than they were losing at sports?

  “You say them to get forgiveness,” he said.

  “No, you say them to get forgiveness,” I said. “I just ask God for his forgiveness without doing some goofy drill. It’s like doing push-ups or something.”