Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (17 page)

Now, this beer may have been free to me, but it was not truly free. It came out of
the fraternity dues that members paid their respective houses, all of which was put
into purchasing alcoholic beverages, and none of which was put into improving their
infrastructure or caring for their landscaping or hiring some kind of hazmat team
to spray out their biological hazard of a bathroom with toxic chemicals
Silkwood
-style. All of their money went to beer. The floors were sticky, the windows were
missing panes, and several brothers were missing teeth due to falling through broken
treads on the stairwell. But there was
always
beer.

And because non-house members knew this, we would sneak in at odd hours to slake our
thirst, or perhaps try to impress visitors from other campuses with the beer-soaked
wonderland that was our beloved alma mater. I distinctly remember doing this with
a visiting high school friend. “You can have beer anytime you want! At one-thirty!
On a Wednesday! Rich people are awesome!”

The houses got hip to this and started to lock up the taps, but this felt rigid and
un-American (and super un-fun), so they started to assign brothers to watch the taps
and make sure that the beer was dispensed fairly and properly, which is to say, only
to brothers, the friends of brothers, and any girl within a twenty-five-mile radius
who looked even remotely thirsty. If you were a female student at Dartmouth with most
of your faculties, you could be sure that a plastic cup of lukewarm beer would be
sloshed into your hand by an overeager fraternity brother the minute the previous
cup even approached empty.
Gee, thanks buddy! Can’t wait to choke down another eight ounces of Milwaukee’s least
finest!

But it was free. We’ve established how I feel about free.

The concept of tap duty started to dominate the social conversation sometime around
my sophomore year. You’d be talking to a guy, and if he wanted to get out of the conversation,
or seem important, or had to pee something fierce, he would say he had “tap duty.”
This quickly became a target of wide ridicule. “Tap duty” is not a job. Saying you
have “tap duty” is akin to saying you have to go home and wash your hair. It’s a non-activity.
You can
say
it’s important, and act like it’s important, and even tell yourself it’s important,
but really, it’s total bullshit. You might as well say you have to run home and finish
your needlepoint pillow. There are plenty of dudes to run the taps.
Beer
comes out of them. Trust me, there are always volunteers.

This annoying self-importance got to be so pervasive that I would make fun of it constantly.
No matter what was happening, tap duty was more important. Adopting a low timbre and
douchey facial expression, I would smolder in masculine fashion and wail to my friends
about how tap duty was eating my life. In the soul-crushing throes of a breakup with
your boyfriend? Can’t talk, I have tap duty. Parents getting a divorce? Would love
to talk you through it, but people need beer. Berlin Wall coming down? Sure, would
love to watch this once-in-a-lifetime coverage, but how will people get lager out
of those faucets without my expert supervision? Want to have sex? Man, I do love to
bang, but how can I make sweet, sweet love to you when tap duty calls, like a siren
in the night? Duty cannot be shirked.

Of course, when one of my friends was on tap duty, I took total advantage of it. I’m
no dummy.

After a while, we decided our singing group needed something to separate it further
from the other groups, an element that would distinguish us and make us special, or
at least more special than our workmanlike abilities and overweening earnestness had
done so far. We decided to do some comedy sketches in between songs, as a way to break
things up and increase the length of our shows (which to this point had been on the
brief side, as we were still building our repertoire). We worked on a bunch of less-than-SNL-worthy
ideas, settling finally on a bit built around this douche bag fraternity brother for
whom duty always called. And naturally, because I was the largest and most masculine
of the bunch, I would play him.

For my very first sketch character, I performed in drag, if drag meant that I put
on a baseball cap . . . and then turned it backwards. That was all it took to turn
me from delicate, feminine lady to giant, lumbering, grunting dude. Sadly, it was
not a big stretch at all.

We debuted the sketch at an outdoor concert on the main green one warm spring afternoon.
The sketch was poorly written and even more poorly delivered. I rushed my dialogue.
I missed my cues and bobbled my lines. I had poor posture and terrible projection.

I was
awful
.

No matter. The crowd loved it. This was a guy they all knew. Some of them
were
this guy. And at least a third of them (not all female) were sleeping with him. We
had hit the sweet spot of campus zeitgeist, and it was a damp and beer-soaked bullseye.

Despite my lackluster performance, I loved it even more than the audience. Getting
laughs was the most intoxicating sensation I had ever felt. It completely beat drinking
watery beer from a cup that only moments before held cigarette butts or chew juice
before being rinsed out by a lazy fraternity brother and reused; plus, no hangover.
I was hooked.

“Fratman” was a hit. It would become one of our signature bits, and my own signature
character, for the rest of my time at Dartmouth. It was my first foray into sketch
comedy, and I was completely in love. I didn’t know it at the time, but those early
laughs, so delightful and addictive, were like the start of a bacterial infection—the
spread of which would come to slowly and inexorably change my life forever.

Even though I wasn’t very good, I knew what I wanted. And I knew what I needed to
do to get it. Work harder. Train longer. Get funnier. Stop sucking so much.

And that’s what I did.

I performed. I studied. I practiced. I watched comedians. I wrote sketches. I performed
again. I started learning about comedy and how it works, and for the rest of my time
at Dartmouth, I made it an increasingly large part of my life. Even though my early
performances weren’t much to look at, I loved how they made me
feel
. And I wanted to feel that feeling more.

Because it doesn’t matter how badly you suck when you start. It just matters that
you
start
. And if you hit a speed bump, you stop, re-orient, and start again. And again, and
again, until the speed bumps feel like nothing.

In life, like in sport drinking, you boot, and then you rally.

( 19 )

The Time I Killed a Hobo

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
—
W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE

“This is
definitely
gonna leave a mark.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Calm
down. I didn’t actually kill a hobo. My big pile of middle-class guilt just made
me
feel
as if I did.

And as any recovering Catholic or cookie-stealing preschooler will tell you, guilt
is a dastardly bitch.

When I graduated from college, I returned immediately to the welcoming, familiar bosom
of my hometown. San Francisco, besides being perfect in every way, is a city renowned
for several things: hilly terrain, a killer food scene, and a kickass rotating army
of fierce gay fabulosity.
¹
What people may not know about SF (or what we self-obsessed natives call “The City”
²
) is that it is also the number one choice of residence for our nation’s unmoored
or, as demographists like to call them, the homeless.

Or as I often refer to them, hobos.

Wait for it.

I prefer the term hobo because it sounds jaunty and upbeat. A homeless guy smells
like pee and is struggling with mental illness or addiction. A hobo rides the rails
and roasts his baked beans and hot dogs on an open flame, harmonica ’tween his lips
and a song in his heart. This is, of course, a concept that dismisses entirely the
fact that most people on the street
are
struggling with mental illness and
do
need help with addiction. But it helps (me at least), put the hobo-pedestrian relationship
back on even footing, and gives the homeless person some transactional parity. Instead
of feeling pity or looking down on them as less fortunate, I choose to see them as
equals, with hopes and dreams of their own and a colorful, vagabondian history. Plus,
hobos get to carry that little stick with the gingham kerchief on the end. See? Jaunty!

I am not making light of homelessness. I grew up with very little, and there was a
portion of my time in high school when my father and I lost the lease on our apartment
and were without a place to live. Luckily I was able to stay with a friend’s family
and continue to go to school, study, and live life, for the most part, uninterrupted.
I was incredibly fortunate. That said, we had a working-class existence, living paycheck
to paycheck; there were moments when my father was in the grocery store with his last
twenty-dollar bill, wondering what to do next. So while I would never have claimed
to be in legitimate crisis, there were times in my youth when we struggled, and where
the line between us and the street seemed razor-thin.

So no, I am not making fun of homeless people or homelessness. It is no fucking joke.
The fact is, I grew up around homelessness, and spent a good part of my life seeing,
talking, and interacting with homeless people on a daily basis, in a way that emboldens
me to speak of them in brazen fashion, but definitely does not make me in any way
uniquely qualified to speak about them or on their behalf.

That does not mean I will not do so anyway.

Homeless culture is a part of life in San Francisco, unlike almost any other urban
city in the world. There are more homeless people in San Francisco per square mile
than any other American city.
³
When Ronald Reagan signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act into law as governor of
California in 1967, he dramatically altered the healthcare landscape for those struggling
with mental illness in the state. While seen as a great step forward in the movement
for patients’ rights (the law made it harder to commit and hold someone against their
will), the Act had another effect, which was to greatly reduce the facilities and
services available to people needing psychological help. For those who aren’t criminally
insane, but just good old-fashioned batshit crazy, the system was no longer welcoming,
and many people struggling with mental illness were catapulted into the street. That
single act, and the budget cuts that followed, unleashed a small army of the unmoored
that has since grown legion. And because San Francisco is such a bleeding-heart fruitcake
lefty hippie bastion of a godforsaken city, full of lovey-dovey huggers and soup kitchen
hipsters and people who live on quinoa and fermented flower petals, it is homeless
freaking Mecca.

The homeless seem to migrate to San Francisco, drawn by temperate weather and promises
of organic milk and fair trade honey in the streets. And they are
everywhere
. In city parks, bus stop benches, subway grates, street meridians, in doorways, down
alleyways, obstinately guarding the entrance to your favorite Starbucks like a bobbing,
nattering sentinel. They are numerous, they are perceptive, they are driven, and,
most of all, they are organized. The homeless are so organized here that San Francisco
has a hobo town, an organized tent city with hobo police and a hobo mayor and a tiny
hobo coffee stand.

I am only mildly exaggerating.

The homeless people in San Francisco are so focused and effective that several years
ago the city drafted a law to tell them where and how they could conduct their panhandling,
as they were loitering perilously close to ATM machines and hitting people up as they
stumbled away with their pockets full of Jacksons. This may have made the withdrawers
uncomfortable, but as a strategy, it was unimpeachable. It’s hard to tell a dude sleeping
on a piece of cardboard with a broken radio and a hairless cat that you can’t spare
any money when he just watched you pull a wad of green out of a magic hole in the
wall.

So if you live in San Francisco, you quickly come to the realization that interacting
with the homeless is a part of your life. This is not necessarily a negative thing.
Firstly, it brings you closer to your own humanity and the humanity of others. Living
in Los Angeles, as I do now, one can quickly become divorced from the reality of poverty
and suffering, especially when one is whipping around town in a Bentley doing blow
off the perfect ass of a reality-star-slash-hand-model-slash-yoga-instructor.
⁴
The homeless are not in evidence here, and even if they were, people in Los Angeles
are dead inside and feel nothing unless they are told to by a director, or unless
the feeling is surgically inserted into their chest under general anesthesia alongside
a couple of plump sacs of saline.

Living in a place where you don’t actually see poverty and its effects every single
day can have the effect of muting your response to it, and perhaps your compassion
as well. It can make you forget all about poverty, skew your sense of need and entitlement,
until you think it is perfectly normal to spend $200,000 on a car and $1,700 on a
bottle of wine that you saw someone drink in a rap video. People who live a rarified
life gradually forget than any other kind of life exists, especially if they never
have to confront it at close range.

You can see how the homeless could have a generally positive effect on people’s behavior,
if engaged properly.