Autobiographical Sketch Part II

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So I was expelled from my high school during my sophomore year. I think I forgot to mention that. It wasn’t because of the drugs – I hadn’t started using yet. I wasn’t particularly bad and I sure as shit wasn’t violent – I hadn’t the strength or endurance to fight my way out of a used condom in those days. Look, here's the deal, it was a private Christian school, you could practically get expelled for farting too loudly. I’m not going to get into it because I’m tired of telling that story but suffice it to say that I was told I “didn’t want to be there” and that my behavior and grade point average proved that. They were right. I ask you, though, what fifteen year old wants to be in school? Especially a school where he can’t wear his pit-stained Bob Marley Legend t-shirt?

So now here I am, three years later, standing in line outside of some warehouse in LA, smoking cigarettes and happily accepting an offering of half a tab of LSD and some ecstasy. And for the first - and certainly one of the last - times in my life I danced like no one was watching. I ran in place. I bounced up and down. I did incomprehensible gestures with my hands. I was free of inhibitions and I now realize how important inhibitions are. I found myself at a number of these ridiculous functions for about a year or so. I think there even may have been a week or two in there wherein I smoked mentholated cigarettes. Oh the follies of youth. Well that was the midday of my drug period. A year and a half later dusk had fallen. Friends went to jail. Others had developed life-ruining addictions and I was becoming bored with being stoned.

I had this job the year I stopped smoking pot. The duties of the job included and were limited to sitting on a golf cart for eight hours. During this time I began to read. I read Hemingway. I read Hunter Thompson. I think I read William Burroughs too. Hold on…

…I’m going to backtrack a little before I finish that paragraph. Allow me to trouble you with a little interlude about jobs. I forgot to mention my various jobs I had during these years. My first job, at sixteen, was, appropriately, at a pharmacy called The Druggist. I was a stock boy and a delivery boy. Not much to tell about this experience except that I was so bored I masturbated in the bathroom and I stole a plush Raiders football from the backroom. I then got hired on at Blockbuster Video in Huntington Beach at the recommendation of a friend. This was right up my alley. Five free rentals a week. My own “employee recommendations” rack which I’m pretty sure included Brazil and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I don’t remember why I left. I think I just didn’t want to work anymore. Next up was a position as a delivery driver for a Chinese fast food joint called Wok Spirit. I burned a hole in my shitty paper Wok Spirit hat when the contents of my marijuana pipe were accidentally emptied on to it. I only worked there for three months. I worked for three days as an elevator attendant for Nordstrom. I thought it would be perfect. Sit and read while listening to my homemade mix-tapes. Not perfect. Nordstrom only had three floors. The elevator was in use every few minutes. I was horribly nauseous. I also worked as a flower delivery boy, a security guard (one day), and I once spent a week at a Christmas tree lot to make just enough money to buy a ticket to a rave, some acid, and Redman’s Muddy Waters record.

…so I had this job where I drove the golf carts. It wasn’t at a golf course but rather at a new and rapidly growing loan company. The offices were located in an industrial area and their employees were too many to fit in the parking lot so they had to park up and down the streets, sometimes many blocks away. My job, along with a friend of mine, was to drive the employees to and from their cars in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day. I was specifically ordered not to leave the cart. That left hours and hours of sitting-on-the-cart-and-smoking time. I started to read then.

I didn’t read much and I didn’t read well. I read the usual post-stoner beginner-intellectual stuff like the aforementioned Hunter Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. This eventually gave way to Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouack and of course Penthouse Letters. I went back to school around this time – I had an on-again off-again relationship with the Orange Coast Community College. I had been attending courses there since I was seventeen. I failed a lot of film and art classes mostly but I seem to remember dropping out of a writing class here and there as well. This is when my reading habit really started to pick up. I would go to the library and stock up on Sommerset Maugham, John Steinbeck as well as various screenplays and other sundry books on film theory. This led me to believe I was some sort of self-made scholar and I got it in my dumb head to drop out of school all together on the grounds that it wasn’t challenging enough and “what good is a degree in film anyway when it’s all about who you know in Hollywood, man!”

So I languished in self-made obscurity for the next half dozen years or so. I read a lot. I smoked even more, and I started to dress like a less cool Tom Waits. My interests in the arts hit their pretentious apex when I found myself almost exclusively watching movies from the forties, listening to world music from the thirties, and reading comedy writers from the twenties. Needless to say I had stopped watching television at that point. Not that there wasn’t anything at all good on television – once in a while you could catch an airing of the Threepenny Opera on the Classic Arts Showcase.

I think everyone probably has to go through some kind of phase like that if they fancy themselves an artist of any sort. Hell, some folks are still going through that phase. Some good did come out of it, of course; I would be remiss if I didn’t pay homage to a few of the great writers, musicians, and filmmakers I came across during my…Woody Allen period, let’s call it. It was then that I came across the likes of Preston Sturges, Ben Hecht, Kurt Weill and S.J. Perelman to name a few. The real upshot of all this is that I have more obscure shit to mine for jokes and I sound awful smart in the company of morons. It was also during this period that I secured a job at a coffee shop and that job has been secure for almost a decade now although I have changed coffee shops amidst my tenure.

Uncle Harry

“Uncle” Harry Housman says:

“…and don’t even get me started on microwaves! What am I, a scientist? Have you seen these things lately? There’s more buttons and dials on ‘em than in the cockpit of an An-124 Condor Long-Range Heavy Transport Aircraft from Antonov Aeronautical Scientific Technical Complex! You with me, folks? Sheesh. Tough crowd.”

Check back for more from “Uncle” Harry Housman*

*Harold G. Housman or Uncle Harry was a stand-up comedian, actor, singer and all-around entertainer whose career started in the late forties, peaked the week of December 14th, 1961, and went into a steady decline from then until February 1st, 1998, when Uncle Harry suffered a stroke in the middle of his Velveeta cheese routine. He was also my real life uncle and a kind of mentor to me. I’ve amassed quite a few notebooks worth of quotes, routines, stories and life lessons from my Great Uncle Harry. I’m currently working on turning them into a book tentatively titled Hey Numbnuts, Listen To Your Uncle Harry! Now and again I’ll post some excerpts from the work in progress.