Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture Page 2

  My talking was legendary among my extended family as well. Once I talked for two days straight in the backseat of my uncle Stanley’s station wagon as it careened toward the west coast of Florida. I was probably fourteen, on a road trip with my sister Em and our cousins, and in my boredom, I came up with the brilliant idea of using Em’s hairbrush, with its clear plastic handle and black bristles, as a microphone into which I did a constant play-by-play of the trip, with no commercial breaks. I sang pretty much every mile marker—“mile marker two-hun-dred and sev-en”—from Missouri to Georgia. I did the weather, monitored goings-on in other cars (“Hairy man in pickup truck to our left is picking a winner! Does he have a problem?”), and interviewed the other passengers. I “reported” on various tidbits of information I’d picked up at Camp Nebagamon that summer, like the rumor that Diana Ross was actually a bitch to the other Supremes.

  There were plenty of other things I could have done in that car besides broadcast the station wagon news. I had the new Go-Gos cassette and against my mom’s orders had brought my favorite book, a history of I Love Lucy, which I’d checked out of the public library (again) at the beginning of the summer, each renewal more and more upsetting to my mom. I thought it was great that I was showing an interest in something—even if that something was Lucy’s offscreen relationship with Vivian Vance. (According to this book, Lucy demanded that Vivian be twenty pounds heavier than she during the run of the show. That didn’t seem like a friendship to me!) My mother had told me she never wanted to see that pink book in my bedroom again. It wasn’t pink, it was salmon, but I instinctively resisted the temptation to correct her. After all, I was the boy who, just a few years earlier, used to go door to door in my neighborhood with a broom and ask if I could sweep people’s kitchens.

  Back to the car trip. I kept on talking. And talking. I honestly thought everyone was enjoying my commentary, until the truth came out at a Ruby Tuesday’s off the highway in Georgia. My aunt Judy expressed her displeasure not by saying, “Shut up, stop talking into the hairbrush!”—which I totally would’ve understood. No. My aunt—my own flesh and blood by marriage—dumped an entire pitcher of iced tea over my head! Okay, maybe she had asked me to shut up for the love of God once or twice before that. But maybe she should’ve said it more like she meant it. Anyway, I was shocked.

  I sat and sulked in the backseat for the rest of the trip to Sarasota. My bitterness was accompanied by a growing panic about the TV situation that awaited us at the condo. Every year before one of these trips I’d make my parents triple-check that there’d be two TVs in our condo, but sometimes the condo owners lied. Here was the awful problem: Not only was my aunt Judy the type of person to douse me with beverages, she was also the type of person to watch Days of Our Lives, and my cousin Jodi had inherited that defective gene. Days came on at exactly the same time as All My Children. How could we watch both our shows when they were on simultaneously? I knew I would be outnumbered, forced to watch a daytime drama of inferior quality, at peak tanning hour, no less. For the life of me, I didn’t understand the appeal of Days. It was all fantasy and improbable plotlines. I hated NBC soaps. And Days looked especially weird to me, like the tape was old or gauzy or something. (You do NOT want to get me started on CBS soaps—so dark!) ABC soaps, in case you care, were bright and urban and smart—at least that’s what I preached.

  I don’t even remember what happened that year when we arrived at the condo. Maybe there were two TVs and everything was fine. Maybe I missed an entire week of AMC because I was moping in my room, or because my aunt drugged me with Dramamine even though we were no longer driving. I’m not saying she definitely did, I’m just saying everything is a blank and I wouldn’t put it past her.

  I do know that I probably spent some time enjoying the company of my cousins, because we were close and we shared a certain passion. Jodi and I wasted a solid year and a half portraying Donny and Marie in her parents’ bedroom. We danced in unison routines, performed witty banter, pretended to skate around the room like the Ice Angels, and sang “I’m a Little Bit Country” and “May Tomorrow Be a Perfect Day.” Her brother Josh was a drummer and Em played a supporting Osmond. I loved doing impersonations. My specialty was the Reverend Ernest Angley, who wore a white suit and a big toupee and healed people. I often took my Reverend Angley act out onto the street and “preached” around the neighborhood. From my perspective it was a big hit, though now I wonder what people thought of the screamy little Jewish boy pretending to be a Bible Belt preacher.

  Lording over the remote in what looks like a moment of deep pubescent rage

  Donny and Marie were perfect brunette Mormon smiling Barbie dolls and I dug their happiness, purity, and glitz. My uncle indulged me, and several times successfully blew my hair straight and parted it in what looked like a cross between Donny and Steve Schiff, the local anchordude on TV.

  My devotion to the Osmonds peaked around the time all us kids collected “pics,” which were precisely cut celebrity photos curated from Tiger Beat and Teen Beat. Pic collecting was sport for Emily and Jodi and me while we schlepped all over the Midwest to watch Josh’s soccer and baseball games. The pics were mainly of the Charlie’s Angels (though I also had a weird fetish for the Captain and Tennille). The electric blond luminescence of Farrah seared through the pictures; flanked by Jaclyn and Kate, she only glowed more. Whenever I got myself into a situation where I was “playing” Charlie’s Angels, which was never often enough but always exciting, I would invariably wind up playing one of the brunettes. Always a Kate, never a Farrah.

  Back then, each year came to a thrilling biannual climax in what was my very own version of the Super Bowl, Battle of the Network Stars. (In case you’re wondering, I did have one interest that didn’t scream G-A-Y: the St. Louis Cardinals.) Battle of the Network Stars was, I now realize, my first reality-show extravaganza, a pop culture Olympiad. It was an incredible gathering of every major TV star of the day—Farrah! Joyce DeWitt! Chachi! Gabe Kaplan! Valerie Bertinelli! Loretta Swit!—all wearing as little as possible (my lifelong appreciation for a fine Speedo and headband can be traced to this moment) and divided into teams by their network affiliations to compete in swim races, tennis, relays, and the infamous tug-of-war. I had a fierce devotion to ABC and was physically ill any time NBC won, which usually occurred under the “leadership” of (in my opinion, very unsportsmanlike) team captain Robert Conrad—probably best known from his roles in The Wild, Wild West and Eveready battery commercials. In this pre–Entertainment Tonight era, Battle of the Network Stars presented something completely original: celebrities being themselves, interacting with other celebrities in inconceivable combinations. (I loved a crossover then, and I still do. When Mork had Fonzie set himself up on a date with Laverne, I’m pretty sure I had an accident in my pants.)

  For as much escape and delight as television provided me, there were times when it also became a difficult mirror—and not just when it was off and the glass was dark. I’m talking, of course, about CHiPs. When CHiPs premiered, I was suddenly all too happy to forswear my hatred of NBC programming. On the surface, this might not seem unusual. After all, CHiPs was made expressly for boys my age. It had motorcycles, exciting chases, and lots of cop-talk. But for this ten-year-old boy in St. Louis, it had Mr. Erik Estrada. When Emily and Jodi and I were trading pics, I paid special, trancelike attention to any pic of Señor Estrada. He was like Donny Osmond on Mexican steroids with exploding genitalia. Actually he was nothing like Donny, it’s just funny to juxtapose them now. Estrada’s entire presentation was captivating, his walk, smile, super-white teeth, jet-black hair, and the air of possibility that he was going to completely burst the seams of his tan pantsuit.

  The Estrada trance was different from what I felt when I looked at Farrah. She made me feel happy and clean, but he made me feel dirty and excited. I had flashbacks to the way I’d felt in my dad’s tennis club locker room. In the back of my mind I knew what was happening, but I didn’t really allow myself
to go there. I continued to hold out hope that Farrah and I could have a future. In my mind, that was the only real option, anyway. (Well, not marrying Farrah Fawcett—I wasn’t that naïve—but marrying a woman. A woman who looked and acted exactly like Farrah Fawcett. And was possibly named at least Farrah, if not Fawcett.)

  * * *

  When I tell people I grew up in St. Louis, their first reaction is usually either Susan Lucci’s (“There are very bright people from the Midwest!”) or “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Here’s what: apology not accepted—or needed.

  I loved growing up there. Little dramas due to my talkativeness aside, I was in a cocoon of happiness and simplicity, untouched by any real societal or domestic problem (blackouts, race wars, robbery, divorce) that could get in the way of a happy childhood. What I wanted to be was a latchkey kid like I’d seen in after-school specials—that seemed so urban and self-sufficient. A tragedy did come for me in 1978, when my parakeet, Pork Chop, died suddenly while my sister’s nasty old bird, Perky, soldiered on for years. I held a funeral, invited all the neighbors, and read a eulogy encouraging mourners to go to the neighborhood candy shop and buy Pork Chop’s grieving “master” some sweet nibbles. The only sour note to the whole affair was when Mom took pictures of the entire thing. I was furious. This was a solemn occasion! No paps!

  In the rearview mirror, our family life seems like something out of a fifties television show. Em and I were a team, and our biggest arguments may have related to wanting to listen to different records on the massive wooden phonograph (with wicker speakers) that lived in the hallway. How Beaver Cleaver do I sound when I tell you that I even had a freaking paper route when I was ten? I went to office buildings in “downtown” Clayton after school, dragging around a cart with the afternoon edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Remember the days when big cities had an afternoon paper? Or two competing papers? How much news was there to report? And how did Pork Chop’s death not get any coverage?) It bums me out that today it wouldn’t even be possible for a ten-year-old to roam city streets the way I did, in my first official news gig. After school I’d usually hang out with my friend Mike Goldman and watch TV and play board games. Sometimes we would tape ourselves playing a board game, then listen to the tape and marvel at how mind-numbingly boring it was. I guess it was our version of early reality radio. My favorite days by far were Wednesdays and Fridays, when our housekeeper, Kattie, came to our house. Okay, weird but true: Kattie’s nickname was Blouse, and my sister, cousins, and I call her Blouse to this day. Her moniker came about when we kids, at a very young age, became enraptured to the way she ebulliently pronounced the word “blouse.” I’m sure this is funnier if you are listening to the audio edition.

  On the days I didn’t see her, Blouse and I communicated through notes we left each other in my room. Hers were punctuated everywhere with “Smile” in quotes and parentheses, sometimes both. And when I got them, I did.

  But on the majority of Wednesdays and Fridays, I came home, made myself a snack, and stuck to Blouse like glue. I would join her in the part of our basement that was unfinished, next to the garage, with my snack and something for her, too. The radio would be blaring KMOX and she would be ironing and interrupting herself to maneuver clothes in and out of the laundry machines. I didn’t lift a finger and didn’t stop running my mouth. What did a twelve-year-old Jewish kid and a thirty-nine-year-old African American cleaning woman talk about for hours on end!? A lot. But mainly:

  1. Soaps. (She was a CBS devotee, so it was a stretch for both of us to meet in the middle, but we made do.)

  2. Diana Ross. (She wasn’t a fan and I was—so it was a debate. She was on Team Gladys.)

  3. The family. (She worked for my aunt and uncle, too, and told me every damn thing that went on at my cousins’ houseful of chaos and dogs and cats and a real ice cream parlor, all gossip that I would report to my family at dinner.)

  4. The mailman. (What on earth could we have said about Mr. Collins? No clue, but I know he was a major subject.)

  From the basement, I would follow her upstairs, room by room, as she put my family’s clothes away. Occasionally I would carry the laundry basket up the stairs for her. I did try to keep her entertained, so that was something.

  Though I rarely lifted a finger to help Blouse with her housework, I wasn’t a totally spoiled kid. Every summer, my parents sent us to work at the family company, Allen Foods. While Emily and my cousin Jodi thrived and later went on to work there, I was terrible at every task I was given, from driving a forklift to, in my schlemiel, schlemazel moment, working on the assembly line screwing bottle tops. One summer I made deliveries and most notably delivered cheese to a hospital and forgot the cheese. Still, it was fun being around my whole family, all of whom paged each other over the loudspeaker incessantly. My dad was always a relief to the eyes, strolling around the manufacturing plant making gentle conversation with ungentle forklift ladies—Large Marge types—looking to me like a model in a Ralph Lauren ad. No matter what the job, we always went to lunch at Steak ’n Shake with my uncle and Grandpa, who would completely tear the waiters apart. For about twenty-five years straight, Gramp ordered a small salad in a large bowl at Steak ’n Shake. As soon as it came, Evelyn’s father would bark, “YOU CALL THIS A SALAD!?” He was out the door and back at his desk in thirty minutes, ever more respectful of being on the clock than I. The family business was always a tremendous source of pride, but what I did there never felt like a real job because I knew that I couldn’t get fired and that I wasn’t going to spend my life in the food industry.

  * * *

  To be clear, I’ve been gay since the day I was born, but even though I knew it somewhere in my head, I didn’t want to face the facts of what that meant. Biltmore Drive wasn’t exactly Christopher Street, and I didn’t know anyone who was gay, unless you count the waiters at a few St. Louis restaurants. My mom always doted on such men—she called them “cheerful.” But I didn’t have any faith that her love of cheerful waiters would translate to her son if I ever admitted that I, too, was … cheerful.

  Things weren’t much better on TV. This was pre–Real World and Will and Grace and Bravo, so basically you had Paul Lynde being a mean queen in the center square and Charles Nelson Reilly kibitzing with Brett Somers on Match Game—hardly role models for a kid. So, like many a young gayling, I gravitated toward strong, outsized female personalities—on-screen and off.

  As I got older, more and more of my close friends were women. I got involved in their friendship falling-outs and stirred up plenty of shit between them. Jackie Greenberg and Jeanne Messing were pre-Housewives boot camp for me. They were my training wheels, “Li’l Housewives” if you will—lots of entertainment and flash and turmoil packed into training bras and junior high botherations, and I was happiest hanging out with—and in the middle of—them. I was constantly putting my foot in it, telling one something that the other said about her, getting involved where I shouldn’t in plans and invitations and parties, and then, when I tried to keep secrets, I’d be punished for favoring one over the other.

  At the prom with the Li’l Housewives, Jeanne and Jackie

  In the junior high school social landscape, I was Switzerland, pleasantly popular, and had a self-preservative skill of deflecting attention away from myself by getting involved in other people’s conflicts instead. No one, upon no one, knew that I had my own intense drama roiling just under the surface of my skin. At least that’s what I assumed.

  One Sunday in eighth grade, I went over to Jackie’s to play Atari with her. Her mom gave me a ride to Glaser’s Pharmacy and I was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street as she and Jackie sat in the car at a red light. I was leaning on the lamppost in an apparently unmasculine way.

  Jackie looked at me and turned to her mother and said something. They laughed. Sensing that I knew exactly what they were chuckling about, I walked over to the car and asked what was funny. Jackie didn’t want to answer at first but then hesitantly responde
d, “I think that when you grow up, you are going to be a homosexual.”

  The light turned, they drove off, and I just stood there in traffic. I realized that my friend had only said something I already knew was true. I also realized that from that minute on, nothing would ever be the same for me. Because now, ready or not, I actually was what I was afraid I was. I was overcome with anger that I had to deal with this truth. That my life was now destined to be clandestine and covert. I didn’t blame Jackie. Being gay was a secret I had kept from everyone, including myself, like a lock without a key. Jackie had merely shown up with a set of verbal bolt-cutters. It’s ironic, of course: All that trouble my motor-mouth caused me, all the annoyance it caused others, and the biggest disturbance of all was caused by what I wasn’t saying. In those days, and at that age, it was not freeing to know that I was gay. It was tragic. Even at that age, I had an inkling of the tough road that might lie ahead for someone like me. At that point in our culture, there were black heroes, women heroes, Latino heroes, but there were no homosexual heroes. Even Paul Lynde was in the closet. (Of course, we hadn’t seen anything yet; AIDS was still around the corner.) I walked home, sobbing my heart out the whole way.