The Todd Glass Situation Read online

  By the way, we should establish two things. First, that for me, “old” meant my parents’ age, which at the time was twenty-six. Way old, right? I remember an early bit I used to do with my older brother Michael, when I was maybe eight, pretending that we were talking on the phone in the future. “Hey, Michael, I’m fifty today.”

  “What are you going to do today, Todd, for your fiftieth birthday?”

  “Well, I guess I’ll just stay in the house and shit in my pants and yell at people to get off my lawn. I mean, I’m fifty, what else would I do?”

  The second thing, this being the 1970s, is that it wasn’t uncommon for a joint to get passed around at these gatherings. One morning I asked my parents why they’d been laughing so hard the night before. My mom tried to explain what was so funny, obviously without mentioning the fact that they were high.

  “Your father asked me, ‘How come they have an extra-large and an extra-small, but there isn’t an extra-medium?’ ” I thought it was a pretty funny joke, even if I didn’t understand that their laughter had been enhanced. Years later I would put the line into my act, where it would stay for a very long time.

  There were a lot of things I didn’t understand as a kid that make sense to me now. Like when my dad would come into the room in the morning and say, “Hey, do you want to go to work with me?” Adding, if I showed even the slightest hesitation, “Come on! I’ll let you sit in the backseat of the station wagon with the window open, just how you like. And we can get French fries at that place where you eat them with a wooden fork.”

  Later, I found out that these incredible acts of generosity from my dad were actually meant for my mom, who needed a time-out from listening to me. Because I liked to talk.

  And talk.

  I talked and I talked and I talked.

  When I say I talked a lot, I mean I never shut the fuck up. My parents, to their credit, never told me to shut the fuck up. “Why don’t you take a commercial break?” they would ask, in what even today feels like the gentlest and most creative way to tell me to shut up without ever once hurting my feelings.

  My childhood had more commercial breaks than the Super Bowl, but they never kept my mom’s mischievous streak from shining through. Sometimes when I got home from school, she would jump out of the coat closet as I opened the door, scaring the shit out of me. Years later, I asked her how she knew when I was going to walk into the house. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “At first I would run into the closet when I saw your school bus coming up the street. But when you got off, you’d stop and talk to every adult you passed on the way home.”

  She was right. The second I got off the bus, I was like a politician doing a meet and greet. I’d stop and make conversation with every neighbor who crossed my path.

  “Did you guys paint the garage? Who painted it? Why’d you choose that color? How many cars are in the garage? Are they new? Which one is new? What do you mean, ‘pre-owned’? How is that different from used? So if it’s used, why not just say ‘used’?”

  Looking back at it now, I can’t help but feel bad for my mom, sitting there in the dark, waiting for me to get home. Talk about committing to a bit!

  CHAPTER 2

  SCHOOLED

  Todd’s educational journey gets off to a rough start.

  I really, really didn’t want to go to school. On my first day of kindergarten, as my mom was about to walk me into class, I realized that I had only one option: to run like hell.

  So I did—off the school lot, across the street, into the “woods,” a scraggly patch of trees that had by some miracle resisted urbanization. My mom tried to put a good face on it, giggling and laughing as she chased me down and dragged me into the classroom. I, on the other hand, spent the rest of the year moping, sitting on a toy truck that I refused to drive in any direction except reverse.

  I already knew that I wasn’t any good at retaining information. No matter how patiently the pilot who lived across the street from us pointed out on a map the countries that he’d flown to, I couldn’t remember the names of any of them. Concentrating on schoolwork seemed impossible. I probably spent thirty minutes every day carefully breaking my pencil just so I could get up to sharpen it. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother breaking it; I’d just grind a full pencil down to a nub. Which meant that I needed a new pencil, which would also need sharpening. Every second I was sharpening my pencil was another second I didn’t have to sit in my chair and be bored out of my goddamn mind.

  I’m being serious here. One week into school and I was already lost. I used to stare out the window—just like every other kid, I figured. Who wouldn’t rather stare out the window? What was I staring at? Anything that didn’t have to do with what was going on in the classroom. There’s a bulldozer plowing dirt! Look at that janitor scraping gum off a bench! They all looked like things I’d rather be doing.

  I tried faking it. By first grade, I had developed a “thoughtful” look, scrunching up my face so it looked like I was really thinking deeply about whatever was being explained to me. Unfortunately, the more interested I looked, the more details my teacher, Mrs. Merriweather, would throw at me. “Thoughtful” eventually evolved into “fake understanding”—my face lit up in a way that screamed “I get it now!” Mrs. Merriweather could quit teaching, content that she’d done her job, and I could go back to staring out the window and imagining how much better life would be if I were driving that bulldozer.

  The only part of school that I enjoyed was making grownups laugh. By the end of first grade, I had it down to a science: Give me thirty seconds, and I could crack my teacher up. It turned out to be a surprisingly valuable skill.

  Mrs. Merriweather tried so hard to help me get through the school year that I almost felt bad for her. Every week she’d move me a little closer to the front of the classroom, hoping that it would help me to concentrate. By the end of the year, when my desk was literally two inches from hers, she would actually lean over and do all my work for me.

  Is it possible to fail first grade? I’m pretty sure I would have if my parents hadn’t decided to move to Sunshine Road.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE RESOURCE ROOM

  Todd learns that he’s different from all the other kids. (No, not like that!)

  Unlike our old house, which had more or less been in the city, our new home in Southhampton, Pennsylvania, was on a half-acre lot in the suburbs. We actually got to see them build it. Every weekend we climbed into my parents’ station wagon and drove up to watch the construction.

  The street was called Sunshine Road. There was plenty of sunshine, because the developers had plowed down almost every tree in the neighborhood to make room for the houses. Still, we’d been so starved for nature that even the smallest hint of life was enough to get us worked up. On our first day in the new house, my mom woke all of us up at dawn to show us a squirrel in the yard. My older brother Michael—who was maybe eight—ran back into the house to shake me out of bed. “Todd! Mom’s not lying . . . There is a fucking squirrel in the yard!”

  There was also a girl in our neighborhood who would sometimes walk past our house. Back then, most people used the word “retarded” to describe her. But we’d scream a different word when we saw her ambling up the street:

  “MONSTER!”

  Of course I was a kid and I didn’t know any better, but I still feel guilty and embarrassed when I think about it today—even as an adult, I hope she didn’t understand what we were yelling at her. It’s not a memory I’m proud of. It also turned out to be more than a little bit ironic, given what was about to happen next.

  The new home meant a new school and a chance for a fresh start. But as I started second grade at Davis Elementary, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that my retention skills weren’t getting any better.

  In case you haven’t already figured it out, I was—and still am—dyslexic. And to make matters worse, I also have severe attention deficit disorder.

  But I didn’t know any of this
back then—all I knew was that my attention span was shot to shit. It still is, by the way. I can’t sit still for more than a few minutes without sweating until I’m drenched or falling asleep. Forget about reading newspapers or following complicated movie plots. If I meet someone new and he starts telling me about his job, I’ll be checked out before he gets halfway through.

  “Come on, let me give it a shot,” the guy will continue, fully confident in his ability to explain mortgage annuities in a way that would make sense to a four-year-old. “So you know that banks make loans, called mortgages?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Now imagine you can take all those loans and combine them into . . .”

  Cue my thoughtful face. Now hold it . . . Hold it . . . Hold it . . . That should do the trick. Close with the “I got it” face and walk away before he asks me another question.

  What can I say? It’s worked since kindergarten.

  Some people have also told me that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I think that’s just because I like things to be neat and clean. If I seem a little OCD, it’s probably related to the ADD and the dyslexia—I don’t function very well in chaotic environments, so I do my best to get rid of chaos whenever I can. People sometimes are quick to label you OCD if you’re an organized person. I don’t think that’s fair. I know a lot of people who are messy and I don’t immediately assume they’re pigs. “You don’t like to do your dishes right after you eat? You must be a filthy pig!”

  Look, I know a lot of people think that kids today are over-diagnosed. Undoubtedly some of them are. But there are plenty of kids who are legitimately suffering and need help. Even now, dyslexia is not an easy condition to diagnose.

  When I failed—and seriously, folks, who fails second grade unless they’re suffering from some kind of serious issue?—I began third grade in the Resource Room.

  The Resource Room was a catchall for the students who couldn’t keep pace with the rest of the class. Today we try to act a little more enlightened in the way we treat our kids. We don’t lump dyslexics together with the kids who are suffering from Down syndrome or autism—each of these conditions has its own form of treatment. But in the 1970s, we were all grouped together.

  What the kids in the Resource Room did have in common is that none of us responded well to classroom teaching, so we spent a lot of time outside of the classroom. We were always walking somewhere on some kind of class trip, where we could at least get some kind of visual stimulation to keep us from tearing the room to pieces. When we passed the open doors of the other classrooms—past the kids who had been my classmates a year earlier—I tried to slip into the middle of the pack to make myself invisible. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one with that plan—almost every other kid in my class wanted to hide in the middle, too. So we pushed, we pulled, and we shoved, moving through the halls like the least coordinated marching band in the world. Needless to say, my efforts to avoid drawing attention didn’t really work out the way I had hoped.

  And kids being kids, well, now I was the one who was getting called names.

  To be honest, the names didn’t bother me all that much. While I didn’t know at the time that I was dyslexic, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t retarded. I might have trouble with reading and math or focusing on anything for more than twenty seconds, but I knew that I wasn’t as bad off as the girl who walked through our neighborhood, or even some of the other kids in the Resource Room. So the mean kids never really got to me.

  No, what made me break into a sweaty panic attack were the nice kids. The ones who weren’t in any way trying to be cruel, but were just curious about the mysterious, uncoordinated mob who seemed to be living totally outside of the normal school experience.

  “Why are you in that room?” they’d always ask nicely. “What are you?”

  I didn’t know. Neither did my teachers. Their overall strategy was pretty much the same for every kid in the Resource Room: They tried to figure out what underlying emotional problems kept us from keeping up with the rest of the class.

  Sometimes they’d bring in outside therapists. I remember one who had us draw pictures of life at home. Here was this guy who had never met me before, asking in his most pleasantly condescending tone of voice if the boy I’d drawn was happy.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. His parents beat him.”

  The therapist paused thoughtfully. “Todd, do your parents beat you?”

  “Of course not! You asked me about the kid in the picture. His parents are nuts.”

  Like always I tried to keep my teachers amused. During one of our class trips, I asked Mrs. Biazzi if she wanted to hear a joke.

  “I had a dream last night that I was in a room and there were all these clocks . . .” This was a joke I’d heard from my oldest brother, Spencer. I knew from watching him that I should try to keep my delivery natural. “There was this guy there and I asked him what all these clocks were for. He told me that every time a clock’s hands go all the way around, somebody has just jerked off.”

  Mrs. Biazzi’s jaw dropped to the floor, which I took to be a good sign. Time to deliver the punch line—I wanted to tie it to someone we knew, so I chose my classmate Dennis. “So I asked the guy in the dream where Dennis’s clock was, and he told me they kept it in the attic where they used it as a fan.”

  I still can’t believe Mrs. Biazzi let me finish the joke, although, looking back now, I realize that she was just out of college. What twenty-three-year-old isn’t going to let an eight-year-old finish a joke about jerking off?

  I don’t know whether my teachers thought I was “cured” or were just sick of my shtick, but in fourth grade I found myself back in a regular classroom. Once again, my teachers tried desperately to help me, doing everything they could to get me through the year. They used to give out awards to encourage kids to do well in school. It makes me laugh to this day when I think about them, huddling together in the teachers’ lounge, trying to figure out which award to present to me. Least Attentive? Excellence in Window-Gazing? Most Pencils Sharpened?

  My parents had the same problem—whenever they used to brag about their kids they would always struggle to find a way to say something nice about me. “Let’s see . . . Michael got straight A’s, Spencer is joining a fraternity this year, and Corey’s baseball team just won the championship. And look at Todd . . . What an appetite! He ate a whole pizza all by himself!”

  When I failed fourth grade, my teachers weren’t entirely sure what to do with me, but my parents saved them the trouble of having to figure it out by moving again.

  CHAPTER 4

  LUMPY MASHED POTATOES

  Todd learns a few valuable lessons.

  A few years ago my brother Spencer and I drove through Churchville, the neighborhood we moved to when I was eleven. I pointed to a modest mound of dirt that was almost hidden among the houses.

  “Wow . . . I guess they mowed down the old hill.”

  Spencer squinted at me. “What do you mean?”

  “That mound of dirt. That used to be the hill, that giant hill we used to play on.”

  “The hill hasn’t changed, Todd.”

  “No no no no no . . . They must have . . .”

  Of course Spencer was right. The hill hadn’t changed, I had. My eleven-year-old perception of the world had developed a lot since then. As it turned out, there were plenty of things that I thought were true back then that turned out to be misconceptions. Like, for example . . .

  EVERYBODY’S ON TO ME.

  The house was in a new development called Woodgate. Unlike our previous neighborhood, where anything green had been clear-cut to make room for the houses, whoever built Woodgate tried to keep the natural environment intact. We had trees and leaves and a creek that ran next to our house. Compared to Sunshine Road, it felt like we were living in the forest.

  I started fifth grade at Fred J. Stackpole Elementary, where all I wanted to do was to fit in. I wanted to be in a r
egular class. I wanted to make regular friends. I promised myself that I’d focus harder this time and really try to pass.

  “Hey,” one of my new classmates greeted me. “Didn’t you used to go to Davis Elementary?”

  “Yeah,” I cautiously admitted. “In third grade.”

  “So did my friend James Kirkland. Did you know him?”

  I immediately started to panic. I didn’t know his friend, because his friend probably attended regular classes. Now this kid was going to know that I spent the year in the Resource Room. Any chance I had for a fresh start was going to be gone before it even had a chance to begin. I shook my head “no” and quickly shifted the conversation to something else.

  If you smoke cigarettes, it’s kind of funny to look back on your first puff—how you didn’t realize it at the time, but you were beginning a habit that would go on for years. This little white lie was a similar moment in my life—the moment when I realized I could shift conversations away from topics I was trying to hide.

  And so a new habit was born. Over the years I’ve become completely ruthless in the ways I use it. I won’t think twice about faking an injury or spilling a drink on an innocent bystander if it will help me get out of a question that I’m too uncomfortable to answer. I’d pour hot coffee on your baby if you asked me when I was going to meet a nice girl and settle down.

  As it turned out, I was just being paranoid. This kid wasn’t trying to poke holes in my story. My fresh start remained intact. I gutted out the school year, faking everyone into believing that I was learning. And my plan probably would have worked, except . . .

  I FAILED FIFTH GRADE BECAUSE OF LUMPY MASHED POTATOES.