Here Comes Trouble (5 page)

“Hey man,” he said, holding out his hand to shake mine. “I’m sorry I called you that name. You’re right, I don’t really know anything about you. But the fact that you just stopped and talked to me after I called you that—well, that’s got me thinking—I really didn’t know you. Please accept my apology.”

I did, and we shook hands. There would be no more disrespecting me or threatening me—and it was
that
attitude that made me safe, or as safe as one can be in this world. From now on, if you messed with me, there would be consequences: I may make you watch one of my movies.

A few weeks later I was back on
The Tonight Show
for the first time in a while. When it was over and I was leaving the stage, the guy who was operating the boom microphone approached me.

“You probably don’t remember me,” he said nervously. “I never thought I would ever see you again or get the chance to talk to you. I can’t believe I get to do this.”

Do what?
I thought. I braced myself for the man’s soon-to-be-broken hand.

“I never thought I’d get to apologize to you,” he said, as a few tears started to come into his eyes. “And now, here you are, and I get to say this: I’m the guy who ruined your Oscar night. I’m the guy who yelled ‘ASSHOLE’ into your ear right after you came off the stage. I… I… [he tried to compose himself]. I thought you were attacking the president—but you were right. He
did
lie to us. And I’ve had to carry this with me now all these years, that I did that to you on your big night, and I’m so sorry…”

By now he was starting to fall apart, and all I could think to do was to reach out and give him a huge hug.

“It’s OK, man,” I said, a big smile on my face. “I accept your apology. But you do
not
need to apologize to me. You did nothing wrong. What did you do? You believed your president! You’re supposed to believe your president! If we can’t expect that as just the
minimum
from whoever’s in office, then, shit, we’re doomed.”

“Thank you,” he said, relieved. “Thank you for understanding.”

“Understanding?” I said. “This isn’t about understanding. I’ve told this funny story for years now, about the first two words you hear when you’re an Oscar winner—and how I got to hear a bonus word! Man, don’t take that story away from me! People love it!” He laughed, and I laughed.

“Yeah,” he said, “there aren’t many good stories like that.”

Crawling Backwards

T
HE FIRSTBORN OF MY FAMILY
was never born.

And then I came along.

There was another baby on the way, a year before me, but one day my mother felt a sharp pain and, within minutes, Mike the First expressed second thoughts about his much-anticipated debut on Earth, shouted “Check, please!” and was out of the uterus before the audience with their applause decided who was Queen for a Day.

This sudden and unfortunate development greatly saddened my mother. So to console her, my grandmother took her on a pilgrimage to Canada to beg for mercy from the Patron Saint of Women in Labor, the mother of the Virgin Mary herself, Saint Anne. Saint Anne is also the patron saint of Quebec, and a shrine had been built in her honor at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in the province of Quebec. This holy site contained some of the saint’s actual bones plus other holy items encased in the Holy Stairs on the grounds of the shrine. It was said that if you climbed these stairs on your knees, the mother of the Blessed Virgin would help you do what virgins don’t do, which is to conceive.

And so my mother ascended each of the twenty-eight stairs on her knees—and within weeks, as sure as God is both my witness and fertility specialist, I was conceived on a hot July night, first as an idea and then… well, the rest I’ll leave to your imagination. Suffice it to say that within nine months the fertilized egg grew into a fetus and that eventually became an eight-pound-twelve-ounce baby boy that was born with the body of a linebacker and the head of Thor.

They knocked my mother out cold so she wouldn’t have to experience firsthand the miracle of life. Me, I wasn’t so lucky. They poked and prodded and pushed and, instead of letting me get around to the business at hand in my own goddamned time, they grabbed me and yanked me out into a world of bright lights and strangers wearing masks, obviously to conceal their identity from me.

And before I could feel the love in the room, they gave me a serious 1950s old-school wallop on the behind. Yeow! “WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!” That
fucking
hurt. And then, get this—they severed my most important organ—
the feeding tube to my mother!
They just cut me right the fuck off from her! I could see this was not a world that believed in prior consent or my necessity for a nonstop 24/7 supply of
fundamental nourishment.

After permanently separating me from the only person who ever loved me (a good and decent woman who was drugged, then mugged, and was still out cold a half hour later), it was now time for the comedy show. The nurse joked that she thought I was “big enough to be twins.”
Laughter!
The doctor remarked that at least five of those nearly nine pounds had to be in my head.
Huge guffaws!
Yes, these guys were a
riot!

I’ll admit I had an unusually large-sized head, though this was not uncommon for a baby born in the Midwest. The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow should we ever have a chance to learn anything outside of our rigid and insular lives. Perhaps one day we might get exposed to something we didn’t quite understand, like a foreign language, or a salad. Our extra cranial area would protect us from such mishaps.

But my head was different than the other large-headed Michigan babies—not because of its actual weight and size, but because
it did not look like the head (or face) of a baby!
It looked as if someone had Photoshopped an adult’s head onto a baby’s body.

The hospitals in the 1950s saw themselves on the cutting edge of post-war modern society. And they convinced the women who entered their establishments that to be “modern” meant to
not
breast-feed your baby—that breast-feeding was passé and trashy.
Modern
women used
the Bottle!

Of course,
modern
was the wrong word. Try
evil.
They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle—or a can or a box or a cellophane bag—then it was somehow
better
for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature. There we were, millions of us in diapers and blankies, and instead of being placed on our mother’s breasts, bottles were inserted into our mouths, where we were expected to find some sort of pleasure from a fake rubber nipple whose coloring resembled that of a loose stool. Who
were
these people? Was it really that easy to con our parents? If they could be fooled so easily on this, what else could they be convinced to try? Creamed corn in a can? Chemlawn? A Corvair?

An entire generation of us were introduced in
our very first week
to the concept that
phony
was better than
real,
that something
manufactured
was better than something that was
right there in the room.
(Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable).

I spent a full week in the maternity ward at St. Joseph Hospital in Flint, Michigan, and let me tell you, from some of the conversations I had with the other newborns,
no one
was digging the fake rubber nipple—and this made us a miserable, cynical bunch, with most of us looking forward to the day when we could strike back at this generation with our long hair, crazy-massive amounts of premarital sex, and Malcolm X. The Bottle created Woodstock and flag burning and PETA. You can quote me.

On the day of my release from St. Joe’s, I was taken outside for the first time and the sun hit my face and it was good. It was a rather warm day for Michigan in April, but I didn’t seem to mind, all wrapped up in a comfy new baby-blue blanket, content to be in my mother’s arms. She and my dad got into the front seat of their two-tone 1954 Chevy Bel Air sedan. My dad started the engine. My mother said she was feeling “too hot.” Me, I was fine.

She suggested that he open up the fresh air vents to cool down the car. And when my dad obeyed, all the gunk that had built up during the winter came spewing out of the vents, and a black, sootlike substance spread all over my baby-blue blanket and me. My little face was now blackened, and I started to cough and wheeze and cry.
Take me back to the hospital!
My mother let out a yelp of horror, and my dad quickly turned off the fan and began to assist in my cleanup.

Within twenty minutes we were at my first home, a tiny, two-bedroom apartment upstairs over Kelly’s Cleaners, a dry-cleaning establishment in downtown Davison, Michigan. Davison was a small town, five and a half miles from the city limits of Flint. My mother’s family had lived in the Davison area since Andrew Jackson was president—in other words, since pretty much before anyone, save the native people. Hers was one of the first families that founded the local Catholic parish. My father, who came from an Irish-American family on the east side of Flint, enjoyed the quiet, homespun nature of Davison, a far cry from the hardscrabble existence he was used to in the city. His only prior experience with the town of Davison was when his Flint St. Mary’s High School basketball team came out to play the Davison High School Cardinals, and the crowd started taunting the players with anti-Catholic slurs (“Hey, fish-eaters!” was the main insult being hurled by the Davison fans). That was enough for Father Soest, St. Mary’s pastor. He stood up, pronounced the game over, and hauled his team out of the gym and back to Flint. Other than that, my dad liked Davison.

The store that housed our apartment was owned by my mother’s father, my grandfather Doc Wall, who, for a half century, was known as the “town doctor” of Davison. Doc Wall, and his wife, Bess, lived in the two-story white house that my mother was born in, just two doors down from us. Every day the good doctor would climb the twenty-one stairs up to our apartment to see how his grandson was doing. I think he was also intrigued by the new device sitting in our living room: a Westinghouse nineteen-inch television set, and he would spend the occasional hour or two watching it. My grandmother would comment that I was already taking after him, and he liked that. He even had his own name for me—“Malcolm”—and he would make up songs and sing them to me (
“He’s a nice little fellow, and a fine little lad, and we fixed up his buggy, with a nice little pad”
). He would pass away before my third birthday, and I have only two vivid, but wonderful, memories of him: him building me a tent made of blankets in his living room, and the lively music he played for me on his Irish fiddle while I was perched precariously on his bouncing knee.

It has been reported that my first few hours in my new home were uneventful. But as the evening wore on, so did I, and thus began a nonstop crying jag that, despite the best intentions of my mother to comfort me, did not cease. After an hour or so of this, she became worried that something might be wrong and phoned over to her parents for advice. Grandmother Bess came right over and, after inspecting the crying baby with the adult-sized head, she asked, “When was the last time you fed him?”

“At the hospital,” my mother replied.

“Why, that was hours ago!
This baby is hungry!
”

Thank you, Grandma Bess, for saying the words I did not yet possess in my vocabulary.

My mother found the baby bag they gave her at the hospital and looked inside for the bottle—but there was none to be found. No bottle, no formula. But, wait a minute…
isn’t there a breast in the room?! Helllooo!