How Do I Un-Remember This?: Unfortunately True Stories

Introduction

Hi! Thank you so much for giving How Do I Un-Remember This? a read! Recently, I had some old family movies transferred to digital copies. When I showed them to my parents, my mother asked me five times if I had someone CGI the couches in the videos featuring our first house, because she doesn’t remember owning them. Transferring vintage VHS tapes to a digital file is already expensive enough, so I’m not sure why she thinks I have the budget to hire Lucasfilm to update the sofas we owned in 1996, but the point is that everyone remembers the past a little bit differently. In this book, I’ll tell some of the stories that shaped me the way I recall them, and hopefully you’ll find a laugh or two. I purposefully changed some of the names, locations, and other details so no one gets too mad at me, because as a certified Libra, people being mad at me is at the top of the list of things I hate the most—alongside rats, unprovoked caricature artists, and that Claymation holiday special where Rudolph’s nose sounds like a combination of a Furby with weak batteries and Fran Drescher stubbing her toe.

I’ve kept journals off and on throughout my life, so I’ve written about a lot of these things before, but just for my own eyes. I still have most of them, but there was one time I left one of my notebooks on a Chicago train, so somewhere, a Midwest vagabond is reading about the lingering trauma of the accidental erection I got in the fifth grade when my teacher let us watch Ed, the Matt LeBlanc movie where he plays baseball with a monkey. The first time I wrote in a diary was when I was a preteen, but I got consistent around twenty-one. That’s when my mental health struggles ramped up, I started inching out of the closet, and I began chasing my Hollywood dreams of becoming a writer/performer. I look back on that first adult journal and recognize now that it was truly an unhinged piece of work. On one page, you can see tear-soaked ink and a detailed essay about coming out to my parents, and the next page is filled with movie ideas, half jokes, and comedy routines that I was trying to work out as a young comedian. Many of those bits don’t make any sense, just disparate nouns posing as ideas. I pulled out that diary to prep for this book, and there’s an entire page that just says, Foghorn Leghorn is a less dramatic Tennessee Williams, and another where I simply wrote, Nikki Blonsky as Catwoman. I wasn’t even on drugs, I do declare; I had just seen Hairspray.

I have always been a mix of silliness and drama, with pop culture holding me together, and that love of entertainment runs deep. I’ve never had a second glass of wine that didn’t end with me on Allison Janney’s IMDB page. My mother is a similar blend, although not as deep of a movie/TV lover, but she did teach me all about the divas: the queens, icons, and legends of music. Whitney Houston, Céline Dion, Mariah Carey, Cher, Toni Braxton, and Gloria Estefan were all in heavy rotation throughout my childhood. Mom also has the best sense of humor and an infectious laugh that is my favorite thing of all time. There is nothing better than when she has the church giggles, laughing at all the ridiculousness around her. Otherwise, she’s all heart with some drama mixed in. I like to think I’m more emotionally stable than she is, but that time I listened to Shania Twain’s It Only Hurts When I’m Breathing on repeat six months after a breakup would beg to differ. My dad is a different concoction. He’s a hard shell with a soft center—a short temper that often masks his other sides. He, too, has a great sense of humor, but he prefers laughing at pratfalls and fart jokes rather than observing the absurdity around him. There’s a scene in Dumb and Dumber where the Jeff Daniels character is taking a very foul bathroom break on a date, and my dad still watches it with an uncontrollable, guttural chuckle and tears in his eyes, regardless of how many times he’s seen it. Fart jokes may be the lowest common denominator of comedy, but maybe we should all accept the laughs wherever we can get them.

All that’s to say: Welcome! Throughout these pages you’ll get to know my parents and some of the other people closest to me, like my brothers, friends, and grandma, who have shaped me along the way. I hope you’ll get to know me better too, but most importantly, I hope some of these stories will remind you of your own life and some of the funny memories you’ve made along the way.

A few years back, I started a podcast called Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino, where I recap reality TV and pop culture and interview celebrities about their work. Early on, I started sprinkling in these life stories. I’d be talking about The Real Housewives and then I’d say, Let’s take a little detour, as I segued into a tale about my childhood. Pretty soon, those anecdotes became the things most people asked me about on social media or when I’d see them out and about. I started to contemplate that word, detour, and everything it entails. The idea of thinking we’re on one path and then suddenly being forced to take another is such a heavy, relatable concept. No matter how old you are or what your profession is, I think we all have moments in our lives when we look around and realize things look different than what we had planned. There’s an old Lee Ann Womack song called I Hope You Dance, which is midtempo and not quite a romantic ballad suitable for slow dancing but also not really a party anthem that you would hear at a club. It’s almost impossible to dance to, yet I believe the message of the song is you should try to do it anyway. Attempt the impossible. Those new roads might not be easy or kind, but they’re part of the life ride.

So, without further ado, it’s time to embrace the silly and the sad and take a few detours. And always remember, I hope you dance.

Emotionally Streaking

I want what every man wants. Breakfast.

COYOTE UGLY (2000)

There’s an art to the adult slumber party, and no, I’m not talking about the sexual kind (although those also require a unique set of talents). I’m referring to having some friends over for a night of being basic: frozen margaritas, Coyote Ugly, inhaling every last crumb of a charcuterie plate, and gossiping until the sun comes up. The gossip part is where my skills really shine. I’ve been doing that ever since I was a closeted kid in Ohio, embracing the metaphorical tea with whoever was willing to spill it at my local pajama party. It wasn’t always easy to find other kids my age who wanted to chat about living, laughing, and loving in the ’90s, but fortunately there were moms for that, and there’s no one better than a mom.

When I was ten and under, slumber parties meant a movie, some pizza, me wrapped in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sleeping bag by 9:00 p.m., and then waking up early to talk to my friend’s mother before any of the other kids got up. Breakfast with the woman of the household was my favorite part of the experience. This all usually happened at my best friend Bobby’s house, an only child who always had the best snacks. His mom, Deborah, would sit me down in the nook and vent to me about her husband, Rick, and I loved the adultness of it. She didn’t look at me like I was a kid; she treated me like the therapist she should’ve paid good money for. By the time we sat together, Deb often looked defeated, like she needed five more minutes of sleep and two fewer Valiums to properly get ready for her day, but I was able to perk her up just by listening. I always assumed a.m.’s were most difficult for her since she was coming from spending hours alone in a bed with her nightmare husband. Deb would pour me a glass of OJ and tell me about Rick working late and not caring about her thriving herb garden, while I would wonder how anyone could not be enamored by this amazing woman. She would make her coffee, strong like an ox, as I sat beside her with a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart, ready to listen to her marital problems. I didn’t have all the answers, but I would remind her that she was strong like an ox, just like her coffee. And then, like clockwork, I would spot a lone tear cascading down her cheek before Rick interrupted our chat with some outdated demand, like that she needs to make him breakfast.

Make your own fucking breakfast, Rick, I wanted to say. If I could turn back in time, I would take a wrecking ball to the patriarchy of that household. But alas, there is no time-traveling DeLorean for me to hop into (yet).

As adolescence hit, the sleepovers started to get weirder and weirder. The tween years are a strange time for kids, with everyone growing up at different rates and having various degrees of body odor, hair, and hormones. When I was twelve, I still wanted to do the little kid things like play with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers action figures, while the other kids wanted to call up girls from our class and playfully flirt. Why would I want to talk to girls when there were grown moms who were so wise nearby? It was sixth grade, and I was not a boy, not yet a man.

Not everyone is on the same body-changing schedule in the sixth grade, but I remember a thin, dark mustache sprouted within a week that fall, and my voice would fluctuate between Kristin Chenoweth on helium and Bea Arthur with a cold. Hormones were flooding through my body, and blood traveled to my bottom half like a cascading waterfall anytime I saw Brendan Fraser on the George of the Jungle movie poster or walked down the underwear aisle at my local Kmart, but it wasn’t like I was out to anyone.

Speaking of undies, twelve is when I switched from traditional underwear to boxers. I’ll never forget receiving my first pair, which felt like a rite of passage into adulthood. Mom wrapped them up as a birthday gift alongside an art kit, and when I opened them in front of my other family members, I was so embarrassed. I started blushing when I saw that they were boxers, quickly moving on to the next gift. From my reaction, you would’ve thought she gave me a box of dildos, but it was just one pair of cotton underwear adorned with Taz from Looney Tunes. My birthday is in October, and it would be months before I would gather the strength to actually wear those boxers. Each day I would set them out on the bed, look at them for a moment, and then go back to my Hanes tighty-whities I was used to. That winter, I finally put them on, and a whole new world opened, a world where I was unrestrained and running free like Mariah Carey in the Butterfly music video or Nicole Kidman after she signed her divorce papers. Those boxers were the catalyst for me discovering my body for the very first time. It wasn’t just me; everyone is trying to figure out their bodies around that age, and that causes some very awkward group slumbers.

Bobby had most of the boys from our class over one night in the spring of sixth grade, well after I had started embracing my boxers and puberty. I had planned to transfer to public school the following year, so this was one of the last group events with my Catholic school buddies. Since there were so many of us, Deb and Rick let all of us sleep in their fancy basement. I felt like Ritchie Rich staying there, because their basement had carpeting and a big-screen television, while the basement I grew up in had a concrete floor, molded wood from a flood that was never properly dealt with, and my dad’s old train set from the 1960s that was also covered in (probably dangerous, possibly deadly) mold. Bobby’s house was suburbia goals.

The girls from our class were all having their own sleepover, so we spent most of the early evening calling them on Bobby’s second phone line. I hate to keep pointing out comparisons, but my family never, ever had a second phone line. Even when we eventually got the internet, we would inevitably get kicked off our Netscape Navigator every time Aunt Joanne called to discuss Erica Kane’s latest All My Children antics with my mom. When Napster came along, it would take weeks to download Lady Marmalade because the internet kept getting cut out, so I was always envious of anyone with an extra phone line that allowed them to listen to more than just Mýa’s verse.

Let’s take a little detour…

I loved spending the night at other people’s houses, particularly because they always had the good snacks like Dunkaroos or Gushers or Cheetos. We were an off-brand/generic junk food household, so we had treats with names like Cheezzzy Curlerz or Zandwich Cookiez. Lots of misspellings and z’s in the names instead of s’s, and the mascots for those foods were always ambiguous animals that looked like they were created by whoever animated Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. Very creepy. I never particularly liked cereal, but none of the brands we had in our pantry even came in a box. Our Crizpy Kookiez were packaged in bags, so by the time those snacks were put together at the warehouse, delivered to the grocery store, put onto shelves, carried home, and opened for breakfast, they were dust. If we were lucky enough to get one of the generics that came with a toy like their name-brand counterparts, it was usually a stale stick of gum or a supposedly temporary tattoo of a basic shape that never washed off. I had a circle on my forearm for the entirety of third grade courtesy of Cruncherz. Anywayz, I alwayz looked forward to staying at friendz becuz they were richer and had the good stuff in their pantriez.

The girls eventually grew tired of talking to us boys on the phone, and with Deborah and Rick seemingly asleep, we had to find something else to occupy our time. If we were fifth graders, we would’ve built a fort out of pillows and then pretended the floor was lava, but now that we were tweens with developing bodies, we looked for something more dangerous to do as a group.

A kid named Wes suggested streaking through the neighborhood. To be clear, my body confidence in the sixth grade wasn’t great (still isn’t). At pool parties I felt like a wet goblin, my T-shirt was firmly on while I was in the deep end, so the idea of taking our blouses off and running around in public was not sitting right with me. I was considered obese from ages nine to twelve, only losing the weight earlier that fall, shortly before the aforementioned slumber party. The word obese is often thrown around when it isn’t applicable, but I promise you that I was considered technically obese by my primary care pediatrician. When I went out for football that autumn, I was deemed too overweight to even play on the team. Most people think being heavy is a good thing when it comes to that sport, but the people in charge told me I couldn’t play unless I lost fifteen pounds before the first game. This is when my food issues started, and to be honest, they’ve never gone away. I have a very unhealthy relationship with eating/dieting/body image, and it all stems from this time in my life—when adults analyzed my body and made decisions for me based on what the scale said. I often think about how much more I could get done in a day if my brain weren’t so preoccupied thinking about food and weight.

When the streaking was suggested, I panicked. How could I get undressed in front of them when I wasn’t even comfortable getting undressed by myself? I think the other kids at the sleepover just wanted to see each other naked to confirm that what was going on with their bodies was also going on with other people’s bodies, so streaking at a boy’s night seemed like a great place to figure all that out. It makes sense, but I personally didn’t want to know what everyone’s body looked like at that time; I just wanted to watch a VHS of Brandy and Whitney Houston in Cinderella and then get a good night’s sleep so I could hang with Deb at our breakfast date the next morning.

Shouldn’t we go to bed? It’s almost eleven, I pleaded to the group.

Let’s streak! everyone countered.

My debate skills weren’t what they are now, so I didn’t have a whole lot of counterarguments. Plus, since it was not even 11:00 p.m., I knew we would have to find something to occupy the time until at least 1:00 a.m. because a slumber party is always considered unsuccessful if everyone goes to bed early. My dear grandma used to say I was full of nerves, and that was certainly the case when it came to group hangs. All the other boys seemed so carefree about taking off their tops and running down the road of a northeast Ohio suburban neighborhood, but my eyes went wide, my butt clenched, and I started to sweat by the mere idea of it.

Since we were all stationed in Bobby’s basement, the only direct way outside was through a window near the ceiling that opened to the backyard. In an effort to make this night as dangerous as possible, the group built a ladder made of mostly empty boxes that led to the window, and it was decided that we would each climb up the boxes, through the opening to the outside, where we would then take off our clothes, run to the stop sign and back, and then we would all jump around in the backyard without our clothes on like a bunch of giddy hippies. I can’t remember who decided on this exact itinerary, but everyone agreed that it was the best order of events for a successful night. One by one, the other kids traveled up that box ladder and out the window. Wes, Ryan, and Darnell all went out and disrobed as I sat fearing for my life, with my shirt firmly on. One of the kids, Jimmy, wore a brace that night after breaking his arm playing basketball. You would think he would sit this out, as he had an extra obstacle keeping him from full nakedness. Instead, Jimmy confidently removed his brace and hopped outside for some public nudity without a care in the world. Mad props to Jimmy, but I can’t imagine that’s how his doctor wanted his arm to heal.

Before I knew it, it was just Bobby and me left in the basement, the only two left to get naked and run to the stop sign. Bobby hadn’t hit puberty yet, but it was his house, so he knew he would have to join in even though he clearly didn’t want to take off his clothes either. By waiting until all the other boys went, he figured it reduced how much time they would see his bits. We looked at each other with fear in our eyes, and at that moment, I knew I had no choice but to complete the mission.

I tossed Bobby aside and carefully climbed the box ladder before him, determined not to be the last one left in the basement. As one of the final people to go outside, I noticed the cardboard on the box ladder was starting to give in as I approached the open window that led to the Narnia of preteen nudity. My foot slipped through the top and the cardboard fell to the ground just as I shimmied through the opening and into the outdoors. There was no safely turning back. Once out the window, I courageously removed my clothes and looked at the group of nudists already outside directing me to my stop-sign goalpost. They were all dancing like a scene from Midsommar without the white dresses and flower crowns.

At this point, I decided to give in to the fear. My anxiety slipped away with every article of clothing I tossed to the ground. The last thing to go were the Tasmanian Devil boxers, which signified my loss of innocence as they fell to the cold, wet grass. Endorphins flowed through my body, and the excitement of something daring took hold of my emotions. The adrenaline rush of running outdoors without any fabric clinging to my body was a high I had never experienced before and have been chasing ever since. All my cares were gone as I felt the Ohio spring night breeze floating through every crevice of my newly developed frame.

I sprinted from the backyard to the front, and then the streetlamps lit the way as I reached the open road. At first, I covered my privates with my hands, but I eventually threw caution to the wind and allowed myself to feel something other than nerves for what, at the time, felt like the first time in my entire existence. My smile went wide, I screamed with glee, and flailed my arms about