There was a resident named Mr. Engler who wore a wig on top of his hair like a hat. He came downstairs once a week to get his Meals on Wheels, which were left with me. I developed a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest style of professionalism. I’ve always been a Zelig that way. I’m the jerk who starts to drawl when talking to Southerners and I get very butch very fast when playing organized sports.
“Here we go! Hands on knees, ladies!” So when it came to the weird residents at the Y, I leaned right into the role of respectful, put-upon caregiver.
“Mr. Engler, your meals are here.” He would say nothing and make no eye contact as he slid the containers toward himself with his Howard Hughes fingernails. “You have a good day, sir.” I would go back to folding towels with stoic dignity, like Michael Learned on Nurse.
“Sir, may I see your room key?” I’d bark across the lobby like a young Betty Thomas on Hill Street Blues. The residents weren’t allowed to have guests up in their rooms, and every now and then a guy would come in with a friend wearing a big coat and a hat and you’d realize it was a woman. These borderline-homeless guys were sneaking women up to their rooms, which only goes to show that women continue to corner the market on low gag reflex.
Not all the residents were catatonic. There was Joe the mail guy. Joe had a big white mustache and a friendly Daffy Duck speech impediment from missing teeth. He straddled the worlds of the residence and the office because he had a part-time job sorting the mail. “Morning, Joe.” I’d smile like Marilu Henner in Taxi. “Whath’s up, kid?” Joe would fire back. We’d goof on our coworkers and laugh it up at the members who gave us a hard time. All that was missing was the studio audience and an eighty-thousand-dollar-an-episode salary.
Donna worked the phones. A heavyset redheaded gal with no makeup and big fleshy hands, Donna was harder to play opposite. Generally, if she was complaining about some work situation, you could pass the time by agreeing with her, but it had to be done in a specific way. All the complaining had to be done with very few words and no dramatic flair. To rant and rave would be too show-offy. Donna would never “hold court” and you shouldn’t either. Her complaints were like little WWII telegrams of bad news.
DONNA: They’re making us work on Thanksgiving.
ME: No way. Are you kidding me?
DONNA: Members want to work out.
ME: That sucks. Weren’t you gonna go visit your daughter in Indiana?
DONNA: Postponed.
But do not try to get ahead of Donna and initiate the complaining, no matter how sure you are that she’ll agree. Because Donna will leave you hanging every time.
ME: Can you believe they’re cutting our lunch down to half an hour, lowering our pay by ten percent, taking away our insurance, and making us eat dirt?!
DONNA: I don’t go to doctors. I like dirt anyway, so… fine by me.
Donna was an enigma wrapped in bacon wrapped in a crescent roll.
One Monday, Donna came in and said that her husband had had a heart attack over the weekend. And, by the way, she didn’t open with this. She slipped it in about twenty minutes into her shift. She said her husband started having chest pains on Saturday. On their way to the ER, he made her stop at Burger King because he knew once he got to the hospital “they’d never let him have that stuff again.” She didn’t say anything else about it, but I covered the phones for her a couple times that day while she went to the bathroom, presumably to cry.
That’s the main thing I learned in that job—how to be a considerate coworker. Cover the phones for someone so they can pee. Punch someone’s time card in for them after lunch so they can stop and buy a birthday card. Help people when their register doesn’t add up. Don’t be a tattletale.
I’m the kind of person who likes to feel like part of a community. I will make strange bedfellows rather than have no bedfellows. In high school I had this friend for a while named Dawn. We were sitting around my house watching MTV one day when a Tina Turner video came on. On the stage behind Tina Turner was a set of giant letters spelling out TINA.
DAWN: Wow. Can you even imagine seeing your name that big?
ME: Yeah, well, that is my name.
DAWN: What? Oh. Yeah.
We could rap like that for hours.
The point is, I liked the YMCA job at first because I wanted so desperately to like it. My day wasn’t wall-to-wall grimness. The members of the gym were perfectly nice yuppies and young moms.
There was a gorgeous redheaded baby I called Big Head Bob who brightened my day whenever he came in for “Toddler Gym N Stuff N Mommy N Thangs.”
The Y had a preschool attached to it, and the parade of little kids coming over to swim was adorable and life affirming. I developed a crush on a shoulderless young preschool teacher named Eli.
He was a complete nerd, but he had big brown eyes and he was great with the kids, and remember, when you work in what is basically a cage that you’re not allowed to leave, your choices are limited to what strolls by.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t have any other options. I was “hit on” by a resident once. He was a forty-something white guy who was only there for a week or so. He told us all that he was in town scouting locations for a movie. I don’t know what kind of movie would put their locations scout up at a YMCA, but if I had to guess I would say it was not Titanic. Anyway, this guy seemed almost normal until he walked up to me at the front desk, handed me a little cardboard box, said, “Voulez vous couchez avec moi?” and walked away. In the box was a packet of SweeTarts and two used Linda Ronstadt tapes.
Needless to say, we married in the spring.
Eli the Preschool Teacher—which is what he’d be called if this were Fiddler on the Roof—was also an aspiring actor, so I invited him to come see a staged reading of a play I was in. He said yes and then showed up with his girlfriend, who was a doctor. She had about as much personality as he had shoulders.
I settled into a daily routine. Wake up at 4:40 A.M., shower, get on the train north by ten after five. Punch in by 5:30. I learned how long a morning can be. If you’re at work at 5:30 A.M., five hours go by and it is 10:30 in the morning. (I didn’t experience that again until I had a newborn baby. It does make you feel like an asshat for all those college years when you slept until 12:45.) At my lunch break, I’d buy a sandwich from the machine in our vendeteria. Apparently it used to be a real cafeteria with
“the greatest fries,” but then someone decided that wasn’t quite sad enough and it was grim-ovated into a room full of vending machines.
On Fridays I might treat myself to a greasy slice of pizza and onion rings at Giggio’s down the street. I’d try not to think about the fact that my seven-dollar meal was basically an hour’s wages. On my way back and forth I might encounter Gregory. Gregory was a fixture around Evanston, well-known for stopping anyone on the street and telling them his story, which went like this: “Hello, my name is Gregory. I used to be an accountant. I had a lovely wife and family. I had a big house. One day I had to go to the store, but my wife had the car. I took my bike, but I didn’t wear a helmet. I got hit by a truck. I suffered a head injury. I still have difficulty walking. I lost everything. My wife left me. I lost my job. So when you ride your bike, think of me and always wear a helmet.” His injury had also destroyed his short-term memory, so he would tell you his story every time he met you.
When Gregory wasn’t walking around town telling this story, he was coming to the Y for his daily swim. I met him every day for several months.
The people who worked upstairs in the offices would breeze by the front desk to pick up their messages. Returning from their hourlong lunches in restaurants, going to the bathroom whenever they wanted, the office people had it made. A guy in boxer shorts never screamed at them that the resident lounge TV was broken. They never got reprimanded for peeling an orange while working. Our only power over them was that we had to “buzz them in” to the front desk area, and sometimes Donna and I would buzz it too short so they’d push on the
door and it was already locked again. The small joys.
The guy in charge of the residence was a big doughy bald guy whose last name had more consonants in it than I have in this book. I always thought he had the hardest job. He had to deal with all of these gentlemen and whatever their complicated, depressing backstories were. He seemed to have a lot of compassion, but he also had to be tough and kick people out sometimes.
Unlike the women who ran the fitness program or the child care program, he experienced zero point zero fun in his day-to-day work. Even at Christmas, when other departments were doing crafts with kids or having Secret Santa with their coworkers, Mr. Mczrkskczk had to organize a holiday dinner in the basement for all the men who had nowhere to go.
When I took the job at the front desk in early November, I had stipulated that I had to have off a few days around Christmas because I had already booked a flight home to see my family. This being my first Christmas after college, I was used to having a month off over the holidays, and cutting that down to a three-day weekend already had me weepy and depressed. I’m sure that I in some way screwed Donna over by doing this, and she probably ranted and raved to her husband, “Gotta work Christmas.
Stop.”
The twenty-third came. I punched my time card and headed out, excited to see my family and enjoy some middle-class comforts. On my way out of the building, I passed the Men’s Residence Christmas Dinner. If you’ve ever witnessed a school bus accident or a dog trying to nudge its dead owner back to life, then the sight of this dinner probably wouldn’t affect you. But for me, it was easily the third-saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
The residents were at a long table in the basement, and Mr. Mkvcrkvckz was wearing a Santa hat with his dingy suit. There had been some kind of turkey dinner, because the place smelled like gravy, and they were just opening their presents. A tall goony kid named Timmy held up a pair of tube socks.
There were tube socks for Mr. Engler. Opening tube socks over here, boss! They all got tube socks. It wasn’t the tube socks that got me. It wasn’t knowing that these guys would get nothing else for Christmas. It was the thought of Mr. Mvzkrskchs at the dollar store buying forty pairs of tube socks that set me weeping all the way home. This was compounded by the fact that Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” was constantly on my FM Walkman radio around that time. I think that made me cry because I associated it with absolutely no one.
After a visit to civilization with my family, I found the front desk harder to take.
There was a rich old guy named John Donnelly who must have donated a bunch of money. He had forgotten his member card one day, and when I tried to explain that it was a four-dollar fee to enter without a card, he went batshit. “Don’t you know who I am, goddammit?” I had never seen him before.
“Do you know who I am?” I wanted to say. “Then how could I know who you are? We don’t know each other.” My boss pulled me aside and told me to just give him whatever he wanted no matter how much of a prick he was. I found he usually wanted a free guest pass for whoever was with him instead of paying the six bucks. This chiseling behavior helped me realize that most gym fees are a scam and only suckers pay them. I found myself pocketing the occasional guest-pass money and treating myself to some Giggio’s. What was happening to my moral compass?
One day sweet goony Timmy came down to the lobby with a dark look in his eyes. He was pacing the lobby, ignoring us. “Heeth off his medth!” Joe Daffy-Ducked from the mail room when he saw him. “Heeth off his medth!” Joe’s Daffy Duckism spread into his body as he flitted around in a panic. By the time I figured out that Joe was saying “He’s off his meds,” as in “off his medication,” it was too late.
Sweet Timmy had rushed up to a young mom in Lycra workout pants and blurted, “I wanna squirt it in your mouth.” Poor Tim, he was in big trouble. Mr. Mrkkkzzz had to be called in early. The young mother was beside herself. That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms.
I started to see a pattern at the Young Men’s Christian Association. It was a power pyramid. At the bottom were all these disenfranchised residents who had to be taken care of like children, above them were a middle class of women who did all the work and kept the place running, and above them were two or three of the least-useful men you ever met. There was our comptroller, Lonny, who never once entered a room without saying, “Are we having fun yet?” He never went anywhere without food on his face. And his exit line was always “There’s a million stories in the naked city.” There was the program director, who talked exclusively in nonsense business language: “We are attempting to pro-activate the community by utilizing a series of directives intended to maximate communicative agreeance.” At the very top of the pyramid was Executive Director Rick Chang, who had no idea who anyone was or what anyone did. He’s the one who reprimanded me for peeling an orange at the front desk.
I heard from Donna that an office job was opening up in the office. “Vicky’s assistant’s going back to school. Stop. Think I’m gonna go for it. Stop.” I was happy for Donna. Getting a job in the office would literally change her life.
I continued to be strung along by Eli No Shoulders—which is what he’d be called if this were a Native American folktale. He now claimed to have broken up with his girlfriend. I sat through a lot of Hal Hartley movies. He described his plans for a one-man show about Charlie Chaplin. Nothing came of any of it.
By the end of January, I had started taking improv classes at night. I was making new friends, actual friends who were not from planet Grim. But the classes cost money, and my 4:40 A.M. wake-up was getting harder and harder. One February morning was so cold that they closed school. There wasn’t any snow; they just closed school because they didn’t want kids dropping dead at the bus stop. I waited for the train at 5:10 A.M. wrapped in multiple hats and scarves so that only my eyes were exposed. By the time I got to Evanston, all the blood vessels around my eyes had burst from the temperature. I ran into Gregory. He told me his story and I assured him that I always wore a bike helmet. When I finally punched in, one of my coworkers at the front desk was giggling about something. He told me that Daffy Duck Joe was telling people that he and I were “doing it.” That’s what I got for engaging in simple pleasantries? A sixty-year-old hobo jerking it to me upstairs? Before I could get too worked up, Gregory was now at the front desk. As I swiped his membership card, he introduced himself to me, told me his story, and suggested I wear a bike helmet. Rising to an Irish boil behind Gregory was John Donnelly, who could not be kept waiting. “Take my card. Do you know who I am goddammit?”
Enough was enough. I was going to have to steal that office job from Donna. And that’s where my college education finally gave me the unfair advantage I’d been waiting for. I wore jeans to my interview with Vicky. It was easy. Did I have basic computer skills? Sure, I was twenty-two. Did I have a good temperament on the phone? Sure. What were my career goals? “Do this job to pay for improv classes.” Good enough. I went back downstairs to relieve Donna on the phones. “You’re up,” I told her.
As I watched her nervously trundle up the steps to her interview, I knew it was no contest. Poor Donna had been at the front desk too long. You could smell other people’s grimness on her, like my roommate’s BO wafting out of the blue suit.
Donna would have thrown herself into that office job with deep commitment for the rest of her life. I stayed less than a year and bailed when I got a job with The Second City Touring Company.
That makes me sound like a jerk, I know. But remember the beginning of the story where I was the underdog? No? Me neither.
The Windy City, Full of Meat
The most fun job I ever had was working at a theater in Chicago called The Second City. If you’ve never heard of The Second City, it is an improvisation and sketch comedy theater in Chicago, founded in 1959 by som
e University of Chicago brainiacs. There’s a Second City theater in Chicago and one in Toronto, and between the two they have turned out some mind-blowing alumni, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chris Farley, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert. I could go on, but my editor told me that was a cheap way to flesh out the book.
I moved to Chicago in 1992 to study improv and it was everything I wanted it to be. It was like a cult. People ate, slept, and definitely drank improv. They worked at crappy day jobs just to hand over their money for improv classes. Eager young people in khakis and polo shirts were willing to do whatever teachers like Del Close and Martin de Maat told them to. In retrospect, it may actually have been a cult.
I had studied legit acting methods in college—Stanislavsky, Meisner, Cicely Berry’s The Actor and His Text—but any TV critic will tell you that I never mastered any of them. Improvisation as a way of working made sense to me. I love the idea of two actors on stage with nothing—no costumes, no sets, no dialogue—who make up something together that is then completely real to everyone in the room.