CHAPTER FOUR

Almost every time I’d juggle, somebody’d come up to me afterwards: “Wow! How long did it take you to learn that?” Always intended as a compliment. But by the end of the Victory Tour, with the answer now 10 years, I was starting to get self-conscious.

I kept expecting someone to say: “Wait a minute. Ten years? You spent an entire decade on that? What’d ya do in your spare time…master the spoons?

The weird thing was, I’d done what I set out to do. Boldly gone where no juggler had ever gone before. This tour was supposed to be my Neil Armstrong moment.

But I wasn’t feeling it. For one thing, you saw me, I was wearing parachute pants. It’s not possible to have a true peak experience in parachute pants, is it? Unless there’s an apartment fire on the way home from your break dancing class, and you rush in and rescue seven children.

The real problem was with my mission. I had indeed risen to the pinnacle of the juggling universe. But it turns out there’s not a whole lot to the juggling universe. Even at the pinnacle, it’s not exactly a heap you’re on top of – more of a small pile.

That point was driven home when my agent called right after the tour, all excited because a Vegas casino show had just offered me a yearlong contract to be one of their specialty acts. Good money, my name on the marquis, just below the 99 cent shrimp cocktail. Plus an option to extend if things went well. In short, the closest thing to job security a juggler and his agent could hope for.
And all of this, for just 12 minutes, twice a night, six nights a week, 50 weeks a year. That’s the exact same 12 minutes, 600 times annually. There was just one stipulation: I’d have to do it without blowing my fucking head off. Since I couldn’t guarantee that, I passed.

I decided instead to take my money from the tour and use it to buy time while I made the transition to stand-up comedy. I dove right in and got some club dates based on my concert credits. It wasn’t pretty at first, but I wasn’t stupid, I still closed with the juggling. You’d be amazed how five minutes of this (JUGGLE) can erase an audience’s memory of the 25 minutes of crap that preceded it.

Soon after I decided to move out here. If nothing else, my experiences had given me a certain confidence. If I could turn a party trick into a career, I figured I had a good shot to make it in an actual category of show business.

I was just getting settled when Doug came to town on business. In the sixteen years since the moonwalk, Doug the post-suicidal teenager had become Doug the exclusive North American representative for SSL, Solid State Logic, British manufacturer of the world’s first total recall digital recording consoles.

My fuck-up brother, who – by the way – didn’t even graduate from that experimental high school, was now internationally recognized as one of the foremost experts on the future of digital recording. What a prick.

We’d had a big falling out back when I was with Pamela. She’d baited me into a huge fight one night by insisting that Doug, who she knew was the one person I felt most connected to, was gay. I really unloaded on her. She did it just to push my buttons, and it worked.
Then, a few weeks later, I was over at Doug’s place. And he says he’s got something to tell me: he’s gay.

It was not my finest hour.

The first words out of my mouth were: “How can you do that? How am I supposed to visualize my own brother, involved in homosexual acts? It’s disgusting.”

He answered that what was disgusting was visualizing other people’s sexual acts. Said he would never dream of doing that with Pamela and me. What possibly gave me that presumption?

Since I didn’t have a good answer, I shot back that it was Pamela who told me he was gay to begin with. And to think that I’d been stupid enough to defend him!

He agreed, I was stupid. Then he ventured that the reason she said it was probably because he’d refused to sleep with her when she’d come on to him. Ouch!

Then he added the coup de grace:
“My mistake, man. I thought you were ready for this. You know, Chris, the only other person in the family who has a problem with it … is Dad.”

We didn’t speak to each other for months. Doug because, what could he say: “Hi Chris, I’m still gay, are you still an uptight asshole?”.
And me, because I was too embarrassed. Not by what he said about Pamela – I sort of knew that part. Apparently in our last life, I’d slept with all her friends.

But what he said about me and Dad …
Doug was right. I’d sounded just like one of my father’s famous pronouncements. And I don’t mean that he was some kind of right-wing bigot – not at all. I never heard my father utter a single word of prejudice.
But when it came to his own kids, acceptance was a one-way street. We were an extension of him, and a reflection on him, and we had to accept that.

When we didn’t, we could expect a confrontation, usually the same “indignant and offended” act I’d just tried. As if the real reason Doug was gay was that he was trying to make me look bad. Like I needed help with that.

When I finally did call him to apologize, after Pamela was gone, he told me to forget it. Even said he’d dated men just like her, and knew how they could fuck you up.

Over at his hotel, Doug welcomed me to L.A. with some words of advice:
“There are three things you need know about living here:
One: the best way to get people to notice you . . . is to let them talk about themselves.
Two, always wear mirrored sunglasses … so people can look at themselves while they’re talking to you.
“But most importantly, remember there’s only one thing that really counts in this town, and that . . . is sincerity.”