Based on a True Story Read online

  “Tell me another story about Lily Tomlin, Lorne,” I blurted out. I figured if he could tell me another funny story, I could start laughing again, and we could go back to those great times we were having a few moments ago. But no dice.

  Then he unsmiled his lips and got real plural on me. “We’ll let you know,” he said, and he looked down at a blank piece of paper on his desk. Well, you’d think he was a generous hatter and I was the tallest man in the whole wide world, the way he gave me the high hat that day.

  I staggered to my feet, sweating hard, and chugged down the last of the Coca-Cola as Lorne meticulously studied that blank piece of paper the way I’d imagine a sculptor might study a mountain of rock. I had to think and think fast. But that’s not easy for me. I think slow. Real slow.

  I felt like I was back in first grade and I’d just failed, as I always did. But that made me think of something else. You see, a lot of times, when I hadn’t finished my homework, I would bring the teacher a shiny red apple and present it to her. It would always work, of course. What would a teacher rather do, read scribbled nonsense from a five-year-old or eat a shiny red apple?

  But I wasn’t dealing with a first-grade teacher here. This was the legendary Lorne Michaels, and he wasn’t known for changing his mind once it was made up. Was there a chance I could redapple the old man? I didn’t know. But I did know I was lucky enough that day to have a shiny red apple in my back pocket.

  Well, I didn’t have an actual shiny red apple. That would have been perfect. But that’s not how things work in this here life. I did happen to have the closest thing to a shiny red apple in my back pocket. My actual back pocket.

  “Listen, Lorne, I do have one character I’ve been working on, and I think it’ll be a big hit. The biggest. But I don’t want to do it down in the studio, where some bum might steal it and take it for his own. I want to do it just for you, right here and now.”

  Lorne looked up at me with that stare of his that passeth all human understanding. “Go ahead, Norm.”

  I reached inside my back pocket and pulled out a bag containing seven grams of government-grade morphine and two brand-new syrettes and tossed them on his desk.

  “I call this character ‘The Connection.’ ”

  “Norm, I confess that your antics are near amusing, but this is not what we at the show refer to as a ‘character.’ Do you know what we call this at the show, Norm?”

  “No, sir. What?”

  “A recurring character.”

  I was in.

  2

  A DEBT UNPAID

  I’ve been on the road a pickler’s fortnight and I’m dog-tired.

  A great deal of time has passed since the girl with the bright-yellow hair and the bright-red lips told me that my writing a book wasn’t the worst idea she’d ever heard. Since then, I traveled all the way to New York City to meet with a publisher. The publisher is a girl, and it’s about time, I say. Her name is Julie and she has brown hair and red lips. She got me a secretary who’s good at typing and I’ve been working nonstop. I spent a month in New York to begin writing the book. I’m two paragraphs into my second chapter and I’m looking forward to being a bigshot author. And why not? New York City was the site of my great success. I made it there and then I didn’t make it anywhere else. I guess Frank Sinatra isn’t so smart after all.

  I’m finally home in Los Angeles and I’m at the very back table of The World Famous Comedy Store. I sit alone, surrounded by black. That’s what I like about this place. The walls are black and the floors are black and the tables are black, and that suits me just fine. Everybody looks pretty much the same in the black. On my table sits a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 and there is a glass beside it. The glass is bone-dry—just there for appearance. The bottle is half full. There’s a guy up onstage and I think he’s saying some pretty important things, because people are clapping a lot and shaking their heads sadly.

  “Why don’t you do a set?” says Adam Eget.

  “Nobody wants to see me do a set.”

  “Sure they do. They love you! They’ll get a big kick out of it.”

  Adam Eget is the manager of The World Famous Comedy Store. As always, he has a lit cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, he shifts his eyes from side to side, and he looks like he wants to be anywhere other than here, all of which conspire to give him the look of a getaway-car driver. And he doesn’t know it yet, but soon he’ll be just that.

  Adam Eget always wears a suit, the kind of suit a poor man thinks a rich man wears. He’s a man who acts like a bigshot but he knows I know what he is. He was a smallfry when I met him and he’s a smallfry now. I’ve known him for a right smart spell, since my days at SNL in New York City, New York. That’s where I found him, making a living underneath the Queensboro Bridge, jerking off punks for fifteen dollars a man. He said he was eighteen at the time, and he looked considerably younger, but he had a car so I made him my assistant. I figured I’d let him work at 30 Rockefeller Center, where his job was to do whatever it was I said—to make all my wishes real. He was good at it. Some men are just born to do other men’s bidding, and Adam Eget is such a man. It’s a gift that pocketed him plenty in the shadow of the bridge. And he can wear his big man’s suit and order around waitresses and busboys all he wants, but it doesn’t impress me one bit. Like I said before, I know what he is and he knows that I know it.

  “Why don’t you sit down and have a drink with me?” I say.

  “Norm, I’ve been sober for five years, three months, and twelve days. You know that.”

  “Well, then it sounds like you’re due,” I tell him. And then, to punctuate my fine joke, I take a comically oversize swig from my bottle.

  The plain truth is that Adam Eget is an alcoholic and that’s why he doesn’t drink. Me, I’m not an alcoholic and that’s why I do drink. Life sure is funny that way.

  But my heart goes out to Adam Eget because an addiction is a deep hook, and sometimes the harder you wriggle to escape her, the deeper she goes. I should know, because I’ve got one of my own. I like to gamble—gamble money on games of chance. And some have said that it’s been the ruin of me.

  “Go up and do a set. They’ll love you. They’re a great crowd.”

  “So you’re saying they’re such a great crowd that they’ll even love the likes of me?”

  “No, you know that’s not what I’m saying. C’mon, Norm, as a favor to me. I promise they’ll get a big kick out of it.”

  There’s a lady up onstage now and she’s saying the most unladylike things, quite shocking. The folks in the crowd are looking at each other, astonished. They can hardly believe what they’re hearing and I can tell that they don’t know what to do, so they decide to laugh.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’ll do a set.”

  I shamble onto the stage. In stand-up, what you wear is very important. Some comics wear a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, trying to look like a regular Joe so the crowd will relate to them. Others take the stage sporting a ten-thousand-dollar suit, as a sign of respect for the folks who came to hear them. Me, I wear just the same thing I wear offstage: a Norm Show T-shirt, an SNL jacket, and a Dirty Work hat. I figure, in show business, it never hurts to remind the folks just exactly who you are.

  I open with my surefire bit about answering machines, and the crowd doesn’t get a big kick out of it at all. I continue to talk and the words come out the same way they have for thirty years, but those words are only on my lips. In my mind a plan is hatching.

  The plan has just somehow appeared in the emptiness of my brain, and in the black silence of the black room, this plan is bright as a sun. I don’t dare leave the cold, bare stage until the entire plan unspools. And when it finally fully reveals itself to me in all its Godmade glory, I thank the silent crowd and take my leave.

  I stumble offstage to sarcastic applause, and some guy throws out his leg. I trip over it and go sprawling until my head hits something that’s harder than my head, and this whole scene gets a bigger laugh than a
ny of my jokes onstage did. I stagger to my feet and think about slugging the sonofabitch one. There was a time when I would have too, but that was when I was young. Now the world is young and I’m a weak old man.

  I spot Adam Eget in the shadows.

  “Sorry, Norm, I thought it was a good crowd. Guess I misread them.”

  “Gotta be able to read to misread,” I say, and laugh loudly at my own quick wit.

  “Touché,” says Adam Eget.

  I hate when people say “touché” after you say something funny. I don’t know what it means, but I know that I hate it.

  “Anyway, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have convinced you to go up there.”

  “Best thing you could have done, Adam Eget.”

  “But they didn’t laugh at a single thing you said!”

  “It’s not about what I spoke but what was spoke to me,” I say, and Adam Eget looks puzzled. I know I’m not making a lick of sense, but I’m happy and frightened at the same time, and I generally don’t like feeling two things at once unless they are very similar things.

  “A plan came to me. Get the Challenger and bring her around. We’re going to Vegas tonight!”

  “I can’t, Norm. I’m the manager here now. I’m an important man with responsibilities. I can’t just leave work.”

  “They’ll have to find another chimp,” I say. “Get the car!”

  “Norm, I’m not your assistant anymore. I’m my own man.”

  “You don’t remember what happened on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, Adam Eget? It’s been some time but I thought you might remember.”

  “I remember.” And that is that. Adam Eget just shakes his head and looks real sick. He’s certainly about to lose his job and everything he’s worked to achieve. The simple fact is, Adam Eget has a debt unpaid. It’s two decades old but I’m calling in my markers, so what choice does he have? He just nods his head a little and makes his way to the parking lot as I finish the bottle of Wild Turkey 101 and smile at the simple perfection of the plan. The plan that came from God Himself and revealed itself to me in the unlikeliest of places. Adam Eget pulls the car around and I get in. He drops me off at Sullivan’s Boarding House. I pack all my Norm Show T-shirts, Dirty Work hats, and SNL jackets while he waits in the car. Then we are gone, moving fast, tearing the tar off Highway 15 all the way to Las Vegas, Nevada, aiming the white Challenger directly into the blood-red moon like a snowball rolling straight to hell.

  3

  MY FIRST FIVE YEARS

  It doesn’t take me long to understand I should have waited a little before this drive to Vegas. Adam Eget worked all night. Setting off in the smallest morning hours for a five-hour drive with a clown at the wheel who refuses to take the magic pills that keep you awake is just plain stupid. But there’s something about Las Vegas that makes you want to be there right now. The white Challenger is having trouble staying in its lane and Adam Eget has a heavy-lidded look to him. In front of us a semi full of trembling logs weaves close, and as its tail takes a swipe at the Challenger I yell and Adam Eget gives his head a quick shake.

  I know I’d better tell him a story, give him something to focus on. That’s the job of a passenger in a car on a long road trip, after all. So I pull out a vial of liquid morphine and sink my cigarette in it. The narcotic dries fast, adhering to the tobacco. I light up and inhale deeply, listening to the wondrous crackling as the fire hits my lungs and the smoke hits my brain. Then the smoke clears and in the place where it was is now a picture.

  The picture is of a tough old farm, a hundred acres of Godforsaken hard and unyielding soil, with a broke-down house and a barn that’s in even worse shape—red paint is peeling down its sides like dried blood. There are thirty head of dairy cattle, fifty chickens, five hungry hogs, and one obsolete mule. And there are seven hicks there as well.

  There, in the field, I see my father, scythe in hand, sweating hard as the hay falls before him. He works from sun to moon, stopping only for moments to wipe his already soaked handkerchief across his ruddy brow.

  At the well, my mother is pumping water from a hundred feet below the earth and filling buckets that should be too heavy for such a slight young woman. On the porch of my home, my grandmother is sitting in a hardwood chair with an ax in her hand, and dancing in broken circles with a roaring fountain of blood where its head should be is a Dominicker hen. Tonight’s dinner.

  I turn my head toward the car window but I see no desert. I see the north forty, where Old Jack, the hired hand and the best man I’ve ever known, is driving a tractor twice as old as he is. The tractor has an orange triangle on its back and it bounces over the uneven earth. It’s plain to see that the small hard seat is hurting Old Jack. In the wagon behind the tractor is my younger brother, Leslie, squealing delight in a carnival of hay bales.

  Walking down the lane, with long arms full of short logs, is my older brother, Neil. Neil is the only one of us kids who has to do chores. He is nine years old. My grandmother says he’s between grass and hay.

  I see the cat, who’s licking himself and swatting horseflies with his tail as he lies beneath an improbably large maple tree that is blighted and dying. I look up the tree and see there is something up high too, hiding in one of the crooks of its reaching branches. Something that is watching.

  And the back of my head hits the headrest as I see that the thing in the tree is me.

  I look to Adam Eget and see that he is beginning to drift away, and I understand that I have been silent this whole time. I take a long drag from my magic cigarette, close my eyes again, and a new and brighter picture displays itself before me. I begin to speak what it is that I see.

  —

  When I was young I was in great shape. I was in my peak physical condition back when I was one. Man, I looked great. I even looked good for my age. Strangers would always approach me, smiling, and they’d say, “Look at you, little boy, what are you, zero?”

  “Oh, no,” my mother would giggle. “He’s one.”

  “Well, I’ll be danged. He doesn’t look a day past zero.”

  “No, he’s one.” She’d blush proudly. My mother did all my talking for me back then because I hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet.

  Back then my best friend was the cat, who only knew one word, “meow,” but at the time it was one more word than I knew. I thought the cat had it all figured out. While my mother and father raced and chased through the world, the cat luxuriated on the hard wooden floor. His eyes were green and shone like the moon. And when the cat rubbed up against my belly, I could feel his purr deep inside me, as if I was the one purring, and this made me feel just as happy as a cat.

  Those were sweet days, I’m here to tell you. Mostly on account of the way everyone was so mightily impressed by anything I’d do. And I mean anything! I’d walk into the room, holding a grape.

  “Look who has a grape! Aren’t you the smartest boy in the whole wide world?”

  Sometimes all I had to do was show up.

  “Look who it is! Did you come out to see what was going on in here? Aren’t you the smartest boy in the whole wide world?”

  Truth is, everyone had to be somewhere and I was there, that’s all, just as they all were, but I wasn’t gonna turn down any of those compliments. They thought I was pretty special, all right, and that was fine by me. It seemed like life was gonna be nothing but swell, with me spending my time doing what I damned pleased and everybody else spending their time being impressed.

  All that changed one day when I was about three years old. I came busting into the parlor, where my folks were sitting with my grandma, and in my hand was a grape.

  “Look here,” I said, just as proud as sin. “I found another grape.”

  “Then eat the damn thing,” said my father.

  “You’ll do no such thing!” my mother told me, and then turned to my father. “There’s no telling where he found it.”

  I was frightened and confused, because I sensed something had changed irrevocably. As I l
eft the room I heard my grandma say, “Is there something wrong with that boy?”

  I loved my grandmother. Everything she did had to do with the making of food for the rest of us. I would lie on the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor and watch her work. My favorite was when she’d reduce vinegar. When vinegar is reduced, it becomes its own essence; all that is not necessary evaporates. And my grandmother said that all it takes for that reduction to take place is time. Just time.

  There was a picture of my grandmother on the kitchen wall, a picture of her as a young woman, and I would look between the picture and my grandmother and be unable to recognize each in the other. In the picture she was plump and large. Outside the picture she was thin and shrunken; there was no fat on her at all. I could see the way her flesh draped over her bones and sometimes I would shudder.

  And of course there was Old Jack, who to this day is the most unforgettable fellow I’ve ever met. My father once told me how he had come to be hired. Seems Old Jack just showed up one day and asked if there was work to be had.

  “Plenty of work,” my father replied, “but can’t afford you.”

  “Then I’ll work for nothing,” said Old Jack.

  And so he did. Old Jack lived in a toolshed way back in the north forty, and for his work he got three squares a day and that was it. But I think he got more than that—because Old Jack never mentioned family or home, and so I think he got that in the deal too.

  My favorite times were in the evening when my father would have company over. That’s what we called it back then—company—and the old men would show up at the house and take a chair and a beer and they’d cracker-barrel the night away. My father was old when I was born. He was two generations before me. Years before he met my young mother, he had served in the war. All our neighbors were my father’s age, so I was always around old ones growing up, and that suited me just fine. There was Bill Delaney, who could fix anything needed fixing. And Tommy Jackson, the town barber. One time he had a hippie from Cornwall come in for a trim but Tommy forced a proper haircut on him. There was Angus Macgregor, and he was a fine fellow for the most part, but when he hit the jug too deep his words would start to get obscene, and then profane, and then my father would lay a cross look on him and Angus would lower his eyes and make his words clean. And, of course, there was always Old Jack.