I'm Not High (5 page)

Their family was pretty religious. Catholics. One 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.”

They simply continued on, deaf to my reason.

“Oh, you’re so backed up on Hail Marys, it will take you’til you’re sixteen to even get caught up on them. And that’s if you stop swearing now forever.”

“I don’t need to say any Hail Marys,” I said. “What you little retards don’t know is that I talk right to God. I don’t need church or commandments or any little made-up Bible stories. You should try just talking to him sometime. It’s pretty freakin’ simple.”

“But only priests can do that,” the light-skinned cousin said.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You bananas are morons. Let me show you something.”

And then I looked up at the sky and just started talking.

“Hey, God,” I said. “Can you believe these goofballs? You love me, right? And I love you. And I don’t walk around judging people for how they worship. Isn’t that whole don’t-cast-the-first-stone thing in the Bible? Can you believe people would waste energy arguing about you when they could just be talking to you?”

“That’s not how you do it!” the light-skinned one yelled.

And then Phil raised a more important question. “So,” he asked, clearly bored by it all, “we gonna play stickball or anything?”

Jefferson Avenue was lined with simple residential houses up and down the block, and at one end of our street was the border between Nassau County and Queens. We didn’t have much, but there was a real disparity between what we had and what the people in Queens had. That was my first real exposure to race and to how the system plays out in America. Our side was all white. Their side was all black. On our side the road was nicely paved, and the Queens side was all potholes. We had a candy store, they had a liquor store. Racial tension was high, if somewhat incomprehensible to me at that age. I never felt like there was going to be a brawl, but a black guy crossing Ocean Avenue/Hook Creek Boulevard and walking down our block was a rare occurrence, and if one did walk down our street, it was like a wild bear was loose. When we saw a black guy on our street, we started shaking in our boots. “Oh my God, what are we going to do? He’s rampaging. He can go in our house. He can do whatever he wants. We’re helpless!” As you might imagine, we never went on their side of the street.

But it wasn’t black people we were most terrified of. That honor belonged to the Rizzo brothers. (I’m not going to rattle their cage by giving up their real name here. You’ll soon understand why.) There must have been a half dozen of them and they were always in and out of jail. The oldest was in his early to midtwenties at that time, and the youngest was probably all of nine years old, and the kid would burn up and down the streets on a loud moped, wearing jeans and no shirt with a lit Marlboro Red dangling from his mouth.

One summer night my dad took our little elderly miniature poodle, Duffy, out for a walk. I was probably twelve at the time, up in my room, goofing off. I heard Dad come back inside and didn’t think much of it. He fell asleep in his chair in the living room. I could hear him snoring and the sounds of the TV, and a while later I heard a heavy beating on our door. I was sure the glass was going to break; there was anger and urgency in the knocking. It sounded like the police. I raced down the stairs and to the door. I looked out the window and nearly crapped my pants. It was the five oldest Rizzo brothers. Dad was just coming to, rubbing his eyes and sitting up in his chair.

“Get your father, we wanna talk to your father!” one of them said, dropping his cigarette and stamping out the butt on our porch. I started crying immediately. I thought I was going to see my dad get beat to death. They were there to hurt him.

I scrambled to lock the door while trying to yell to my mom to call the police, but no sound would come out of my mouth. I felt something behind me. My dad yanked me from behind and pulled me out of his way, then went right out the front door.

“You went after our little brother,” one of them said. “And we’re coming after you.”

“Get in the house, Dad,” I said, whimpering. “The cops are coming.”

“Just go inside and shut the door,” my dad said disgustedly. And he turned back to the Rizzos and asked calmly, “What do we got? One, two, three, four, five of you? Against one little old man? It’s gonna take five of you to kick my ass?”

He paused and they didn’t respond. They just stood there looking ready to smack him. They weren’t going to leave our front steps until something happened. The whole block was dark and quiet. And I’ll never forget the look on Dad’s face. It went from incredulous to almost giddy.

“Well, guess what?” Dad said. “One of you is gonna go down with me tonight. You may beat the shit out of me. Stomp me to death. But I’ll take at least one of you with me.”

One by one, they sucked their teeth, sneered, and puffed out their chests.

“Do you guys get it?” my dad asked, smiling. “I don’t care if I die tonight. All I know is if I do, I’m taking one of you with me. So, which one of you is it going to be?”

Then he looked them all in the eyes. “Is it gonna be you? Is it gonna be you? Is it gonna be you?” Right down the line. He had a look in his eye and a sound in his voice that I knew that none of them could identify with. He was coming from a completely different planet. I didn’t realize it then, but I know now that it was the war coming out. When you’d spent years fighting in infernal jungles knowing you could die at any time, five punk kids in Long Island aren’t really going to faze you.

Not one of the Rizzos initiated any physical contact. One by one they all backed down and just seemed content to talk it out.

“Weren’t you walking your dog tonight?” one of them stammered.

“Sure,” Dad said. “The dog’s gotta crap like everyone else.”

“Well,” the oldest one said, continuing on. “Our little brother says you hit him with a chain.”

“A chain?” Dad asked, then started laughing. He turned back to face me and gave me a little nod. I opened the door a sliver, then tossed him a tiny leash. “You mean this? I’ve got an eight-pound toothless poodle. I don’t need a chain to walk him. Some cretin kicked at him tonight and I barely snapped this leash in his direction.”

The Rizzos began placing the blame on their little brother, who had by now joined them.

“This is what you made us come down here for?” one of them said angrily to the youngest brother. Then they started apologizing to Dad and said they’d never bother him again. He had scared the crap out of them. He scared the crap out of me, too. I’d never seen a man just not care if he lived or died, and smile about it to boot. That was about as heated as the neighborhood ever got and about as nuts as my dad ever got. He was generally happy just to keep one eye on me and one eye on the newspaper as I played out in the street. Dad never hit me. He never yelled. He never said, “I love you.” But that’s who he is. The most important thing is that he was always there.

My mom was the one with the emotions. She yelled, screamed, cursed, cried, blamed, laughed. She was very protective of me. Little did Dad and Mom know what the next few years would bring.

Getting the Bug

Impressions came naturally to me as a kid, and I would hone my craft at school, since there was an unlimited supply of people to mimic. I also got a lot of pleasure out of writing and creating things that would make my friends laugh. For some reason, every day in fifth grade, I’d draw a comic strip of my classmate Anthony Campo and bring it in for him to read. It was called
The Adventures of Campo and His Guido Mobile.
I turned him into a superhero with a magical muscle car that people kept messing with. It wasn’t exactly flattering, but he really got off on it and kept bugging me to churn out more. For weeks, every day he’d walk in and say, “Hey, Breuer, where’s
The Adventures of Campo and His Guido Mobile
?”

Anthony was bored at school and the comic strip was enough of a distraction to make the place interesting for him. This encouraged me. Throughout my childhood, humor and wit got me attention and set me apart from my peers. It was my social calling card, and I was good at it in ways that other kids are good at figure skating or math or whatever. And, like I said earlier, it helped prevent kids from making fun of me for being such a lardass.

Despite the thrill I got from making people laugh, I avoided any and all dramatic productions in school. My long-standing policy was that plays were for fairies. Maybe a tiny part of me feared getting up in front of a bunch of people and making myself vulnerable to their criticism. But I’d still claim it was fear of looking like a fairy. One spring our teacher Mr. Cooper sorted out roles for the end-of-the-year play, and I experienced an awakening. As he described the roles for the play, I could now see a purpose for being funny—somewhere I could use it for good.

“We have three parts left, kids,” he said. He was known for the “Cooper Clutch.” If you got out of line in his class, he’d look you right in the eyes, wiggle his index finger, and say, “Come with me.” If you didn’t move fast enough, he knew exactly where to grab the back of your hair so he could lift you up off your feet and march you out in the hallway and do God-knows-what to you. I hadn’t gotten on his bad side. In class, I was pretty docile. School was a place for me to just hide. But as Mr. Cooper listed the parts, I saw potential in one that remained—a doctor who rushed onstage from the audience to help the narrator through a coughing fit. But that role was pretty much spoken for by Chris Pascocello. He had curly hair and big nerdy glasses. Put a lab coat on him, and it was instant M.D.

“The doctor will go to Chris if no one else wants it,” he said. “Anyone?”

“I’ll give it a try,” I said. Twenty-five heads turned to me in the back row of the classroom.

“Jim Breuer?” Mr. Cooper said, not skeptically but out of sheer surprise. “Okay, give us what you’ve got,” he added with an encouraging smile.

I bolted from my desk and jogged toward the head of the class, saying, “Vat seemz to be ze prrroblem hee-ar? Zere iz a dohktor in ze haus!” (For some reason I thought it would be funnier if I played the doctor like a crazy German scientist.) The whole classroom howled. Mr. Cooper did a double-take. As I tried it again and again, he’d watch me with strange admiration and then laugh heartily. I had no idea where I got the balls to do it, but it was a relief taking those first steps.

When the laughing died down, Mr. Cooper looked around the class and said, “Are we okay with Jim as the doctor?” I got a huge ovation. When it came time to perform the play, all the parents and the other kids from school gave me the same reaction. Then the narrator and I got even more laughs when we couldn’t find the opening in the curtain to leave the stage. People assumed we did it on purpose. After that I had the bug and would occasionally volunteer for other school plays, even taking on the role of the sergeant in
South Pacific
in eighth grade.

If faced with a choice, though, I still enjoyed spontaneously doing impressions or characters I’d made up on my own. That stayed with me through my youth. After junior year in high school, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood one summer night when I came across a pretty girl I sort of knew, sobbing on her front porch. She was about my age, and I’d never seen anyone crying that hard unless they’d experienced some physical pain, like wiping out on their bike. And even then, those were younger kids, and their crying stopped as soon as their mom hugged them or gave them cookies and milk. This was a teenage girl whose sobs were filled with pure emotion, and it made me feel lousy to see her that way. I rode up onto the sidewalk and called out to her.