Comedy Sex God

indoor cat

THERE ARE TWO GREAT MYSTERIES IN THIS LIFE.

The first is what we’re all doing here. You. Me. Everyone. Each of us woke up into something none of us asked for, conscious and alive, aware of our shared predicament as we hurl through infinite space that’s expanding even as you read this, molecules stuck in the shape of humans eating other molecules stuck in the shape of noodles walking around other molecules stuck in the shape of a shopping mall. What the fuck? The root cause of existence, despite our best efforts, remains an enormous, itchy, unresolved conundrum.

The second great mystery of this life is how my parents, Jay and Irena, found each other, got married, and stayed together.

The story goes, they met in a bar in Cape Cod, and after dating for a few months in their late thirties, my mom told my dad to shit or get off the pot. My dad chose shit, and three years later I was born.

My father is a gregarious ham. Tall and loud, he’s an instant best friend and one man show to waiters, bartenders, cabdrivers, and elevator operators. He’s a great kisser of babies, a bringer of cakes, and he never, ever misses a funeral, no matter how distant the acquaintance. When my family went out to dinner, my father would loudly refuse to drink water because fish make love in it. He calls ketchup Irish gravy, busboys amigo, and has never, ever, had Chinese food without pretending that his fortune cookie says, Help, Chinese cook locked in kitchen.

As a kid, it was weird watching my father’s charms work on literally every single person in the world except my mother.

My mom experienced more than her fair share of stress as a child in Lithuania, having lost her brother to World War II, then living in a refugee camp for three years before immigrating to the famously-racist-even-to-other-kinds-of-white-people South Boston—where her father, who also happened to be her best friend, told her, No one in our family likes us, but at least we have each other—then promptly died in a mental institution, leaving her to fend for herself.

This trauma gave her a very different sense of humor from my dad’s. Let’s call it—to be polite—Eastern European. Some people have a waiting room in their brains where thoughts and ideas hang out to be analyzed before they’re released into the public. My mom has no such room. If she thinks your new haircut looks terrible, or that the gold-and-silver wristwatch you bought at TJ Maxx is gaudy and cheap looking, you will hear about it in real time. I once saw her go up to a hefty construction worker loading up on free cakes and candies and say, I think you’ve had enough. Impossibly, the guy laughed. Because of my mom’s particular mix of charm and beauty, she almost never offended anyone. And if she did, that was their problem. Can’t you take a joke? was a mantra in our family. Lighten up was another.

My dad was my hero growing up, but my mom was my best friend. I always liked mom stuff. Talking about our feelings. Napping. Gossiping. Plus, there’s a benefit to hanging out with someone who says exactly what’s on her mind, and it’s when she says she loves you, you know she means it. I knew my dad loved me, but he also loved his barber, and the hostess at Legal Sea Foods, and that kid he just saw wearing a funny green hat. My mom loved me, and apparently very few other people. It felt good, like getting a finicky cat that’s only ever scratched at people’s eyes to sit on your lap and purr. My dad, the dog, off somewhere, happily licking everyone indiscriminately.

My mom loved cats so much I became one. I saw how much our two twin tabbies, Clementine and Marmalade, calmed her down—walking on muted paws, pooping silently in a box in the laundry room, self-cleaning like high-end ovens—so I did my best to be like them and cause as little trouble as possible by simply remaining at home, eating a lot of tuna, and occasionally napping in a sunbeam. My mother hated not knowing where anyone in the family was at any given moment. She would have been one of the great abusers of Find My iPhone had the technology been available to her in the ’90s. I saw how much stress it caused her as my father routinely ignored her requests to come home in time for dinner while my brother was off somewhere being a normal teenager having girlfriends or going to parties or whatever it is that normal teenagers do. I wouldn’t know. I was an indoor cat.

My mom and I stayed in. We puttered around, we watched Murder, She Wrote. She would read mysteries while I read comic books like two middle-aged girlfriends on vacation in Florida. It was peaceful. If only the house was always like this, I thought, even pleading with my dad one day to give it a try, sitting him down and asking, Why don’t you just do what mom wants? He laughed, but I wasn’t joking. As much as my father liked making jokes—ending even serious phone calls with Keep in touch with yourself—underneath it all was an extremely driven, fiercely independent man who above all hated being told what to do. So much so, my dad once told me that at his funeral he wants me to stand up and tell everyone, He did it his way. That’s my dad. Even in death, it will be important for people to know that Jay Holmes didn’t take shit from anyone. Not that this stopped my mother from trying.

As you might imagine with cats and dogs, my parents fought a lot, a typical origin story for a lot of comedians. My mom wanted more than anything to be listened to, and my dad, as great as he could be, wasn’t really big into listening. I used to joke that you can’t spell Dad without ADD. His mind would always be somewhere else, on some project or job that gave us food and a Sega Genesis and a roof over our heads, but emotional availability wasn’t as big in those days as it is now.

My parents screamed at each other almost every night, and what’s weird is that neither me nor my brother thought it was weird. We both just sort of assumed all families had a nightly screaming ritual that, as we did, they just hid when company was over. It was routine. My mom would pick us up from school, take us home, and we’d spend a few happy hours relaxing in our rooms or playing video games until dinnertime, when we’d sit down to eat, the three of us trying to ignore the fact that my father wasn’t home yet, my mother giving herself indigestion eyeballing the landline.

My mom really, really wanted us to be the kind of family that ate dinner together. She didn’t work during the day (like a comedian), and she really craved attention (like a comedian), so dinner was like her big nightly show. After what I imagine might have been a long, boring day—with dad at work and the kids at school—the evening meal was her one chance to share and feel love, to feel appreciated. She liked feeding her family, but she also wanted to be seen and recognized. It was her nightly performance. It started at six thirty sharp, there were only three seats available, and dammit, she wanted a sold-out show every time.

My father’s thinking was that he worked hard—he did—and deserved to stop at the bar every night on his way home. My mother’s thinking was that no, he didn’t. So we’d sit, each of us dealing with the stress of his absence in our own way. Mom would drink white zin and radiate stress like a space heater; my brother would practically fold himself into his own body like a roly-poly; and I would eat—a lot, and quickly—trying to sedate myself into a food coma. I noticed that the more I ate, the sleepier I felt, which, of course, was good. I was looking for a downer, and each roll and glass of milk dragged me out of my higher, less pleasant emotions and into the more manageable stupor of digestion. This is why I was such a soft kid. People who grew up in families like this know that there are levels of tension that can only be sopped up with bread.

After dinner, my mom would clean while we watched TV until we heard the sound of my dad’s oil truck pulling into the gravel driveway. That was our cue. Without speaking, my brother and I would turn off the television and head upstairs, closing our bedroom doors behind us, feeling like townspeople nailing boards to our windows in preparation for a coming storm.

The next hour or so was a butthole clench. It started right away, and had a pattern to it, like a Slayer record. This was before noise-canceling headphones or white noise machines or financial freedom and the ability to call an Uber and go to a hotel for the evening. So I just listened, their yells bleeding through the walls, my dad’s voice the subwoofer, my mom’s voice higher, easier to hear.

On a particularly bad night, I broke protocol and went into my brother’s room, where I was surprised to find him doing exactly what I had been doing: standing motionless, head down, holding his breath, and trying to assess the level of danger. My parents’ fights never got physical—there were no plates breaking or bruises—but we were kids. To us, Greek gods were throwing lightning bolts downstairs, and we didn’t know what to do other than wait it out, frozen, like dogs waiting for fireworks to stop.

We knew the fight was over when my mom would come upstairs and my dad would turn the TV back on, loud, and we’d hear my mom go into her bedroom and cry. This wasn’t like a gentle weeping; it was full, heaving, dramatic sobs. Heartbroken, and with no one else doing anything, I would go down the hall and climb onto her bed and hold her until she calmed down. Just me and mom lying on the comforter, entwined, her kissing the top of my head and calling me her little peacekeeper.

IT MAKES SENSE, THEN—AS WITH A LOT OF PEOPLE whose early years were plagued with events like these, or by rubber bands on their braces, or by a voice so high people on the phone called me ma’am well into my late teens—that I found my way naturally into the warm, soft embrace of comedy.

I fucking loved comedy as soon as I found out it was a thing. Mad magazine, the jokes printed on the sticks of popsicles, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Weird Al—oh sweet Lord, Weird Al. That beautiful man in his Hawaiian shirts and blown-out curls rescued me from as many uncomfortable nights as bread did, whisking me away in the sounds of my Walkman playing his consummate Bad parody, Even Worse—he was my king. I rented his only movie, UHF, every single birthday from the age of ten until age sixteen, and I stopped then only because of peer pressure from friends telling me I should be into girls or basketball or some shit. But I only wanted to laugh and to study just exactly how these magical people were pulling this miracle off at will. I was obsessed, like Jane Goodall if she were only interested in the funnier chimps.

When I was nine and the New Kids on the Block hit the scene, I used my brother’s dual-cassette boom box to record a parody album of my own called Old Farts on the Street, proudly playing my reimagining of their hit single Hangin’ Tough—Swingin’ Weak—for anybody who would listen. When I was twelve, my parents bought a VHS camcorder, and I immediately used our Apple IIGS and dot matrix printer to write, print, and shoot a Terminator 2 parody starring Kermit the Frog called Kerminator 2. My best friend, Aaron, let me use his Kermit doll, and my mother sewed him a tiny felt motorcycle jacket that fit just right. I invited a few friends over one weekend to shoot it, even using stop-motion photography and tinfoil to mimic the T-1000’s liquid metal blades slicing through John Connor’s stepmom, played by me—the director’s cameo—wearing my mother’s wig from the ’60s I had found in the attic. After a fun Saturday of shooting, we’d circle around the VCR and watch it together, laughing, and everything at home was okay.

School was another story. In 1992, if you were really into comedy, nobody called you a comedy nerd, people just called you a nerd-nerd; or, for brevity’s sake, a nerd. Loving the Fletch movies and The Far Side didn’t exactly make you cool. Comedy was still a fringe activity—something your weird, single uncle Dan was really into—sort of like pre-Blaine close-up magic. It was still associated with gag shops selling windup chatter teeth and fake flowers that squirted warm, odd-smelling water. We were a rubber chicken people, still decades away from the fuckable comedy celebrity like Chris Pratt or Joel McHale. Being hard into comedy in the ’90s made me more of a Richard Kind type, or maybe an Emo Philips. It certainly wasn’t winning me many friends. So I was forced to try other things.

To compensate for my clammy-handed doughiness, every day I wore a button-up rayon dress shirt and sculpted my hair with Dep gel—level eight—sealing my pompadour in place with a generous spray of Vidal Sassoon’s environmentally conscious Air Spray, all of us having just been told what the ozone layer was. I was desperate to look like my hero Zack Morris. I would wear acid-washed jeans, bright white Andre Agassi tennis shoes, and a zebra-print slap bracelet I kept on for way longer than the trend lasted. Topping off the look, I’d spray and then walk into two pumps of Drakkar Noir before clasping into place a gold chain attached to a gold crucifix that some days I rocked on the outside of a black turtleneck, making me look somewhere in between Steve Jobs and a nun.

I was trying very hard—and failing—to fit in. I was loud, gap toothed, and awkward, the only boy in the class with a second chin like a pelican storing a fish for later and boob shadow. I wasn’t that heavy, but I was the fattest kid in my grade, which by junior high rules makes you the fat kid. So I was always searching for the next thing—the next pair of shoes, the next novelty T-shirt—that might get me in with the cool kids, who were off smoking, or fingering, or whatever it is cool kids are doing.

These are guesses.

I owned only two noncomedy cassette tapes at the time, Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl and a single of Ice Ice Baby. Not sure whose hairstyle I should mimic, I went with the Ice Man, and asked my mother’s hairdresser, Maxine—who, coincidentally, was also my hairdresser—to shave my name into the back of my head. Maxine was nervous, as none of her other clients were children, Vanilla Ice fans, or male, but after a few minutes of buzzing she was excited and proud to show me how well she had done, holding a mirror up to the back of my head.

Maxine had indeed shaved P-E-T into the back of my head in big block letters, but—and she didn’t even realize this until I pointed it out—she forgot the last E. P-E-T.

She had shaved the word PET into my hair.

Panicked and desperate, Maxine did her best to squeeze in that last, all-important E, but, despite her best efforts, we both agreed when she was done that it looked more like a lowercase f. I was shitting my pants, but I was too polite to complain. I said thank you, and I even tipped her with a five-dollar bill my mom handed me from her purse.

The next day at school all the students and some of the funnier faculty started calling me PET-F, a nickname that stuck for months even after my hair grew back. Always looking for a bright side, I comforted myself knowing that PET-F was an improvement over my previous nickname, Biter Shaft, which I earned the day after we learned the parts of the penis in health class. I’m still not entirely sure what it meant, but looking back—best guess—I think they were implying that I gave blow jobs but they weren’t that good.

With my homelife being fairly unstable, and schoolmates prank-calling and asking me what cup size I was, I doubled down on the best friendship I had going and started hanging out more with my mom. We would spend most weekends quietly going on walks, her reassuring me that one day girls would like me and that the bald spot on the side of my head from stress—the one just to the left of PET-f—would surely grow in. We’d practice sucking in our stomachs like ladies while she would quiz me on my multiplication tables, me pretending to be more winded than I was to buy myself time during the tricky 9s. When it was just her and me, everything was safe, and nice, me her little surrogate husband giving her the attention she so desperately wanted but wasn’t getting from my dad, she giving me the laughs and attention I so desperately needed but wasn’t getting at school. It was a safe space where we could both retreat from whatever it was that day that was giving us both such intense anxiety. We bonded hard over feelings, and emotions, and eventually our shared love of the one place we both had where people were kind and morally obligated to be nice to us. A place where no one yelled or drank, where everyone was too polite to call me Biter Shaft or to read the back of my head.

A place called church.

church

CHURCH WAS MY MOM’S IDEA, AND SHE ALL BUT CARTWHEELED into the sanctuary every Sunday. It was like a weekly Christmas for her. Fifty-two times a year, she would barge into my room without knocking, singing loudly and slightly off key, "Don’t you know it’s time to praise the Loooorrrrrd? / In the sanctuary of his holy peeeeooooplee."

By the second verse, I was in the shower.

My family would attend the 11:00 a.m. service, our Volvo station wagon sailing into the church parking lot unfailingly at 11:05, the bickering drowning out my dad’s Dan Fogelberg cassette. Pressed for time and with all the good parking spots taken, my father would park in one of the spots reserved for first-time visitors, plainly spray-painted with the word VISITOR, sometimes getting out and moving a cone to do so. My dad would brazenly wave at the greeter, Larry Brock, in his suit and name tag, and hurry us inside, leaving Larry with the difficult challenge of smiling a church greeter smile that said both I love you, welcome! and Jesus Christ, Jay, how many times are you going to pull this shit?

Inside, the church looked more like a convention center than a cathedral, its neutral beige carpet matching the pews and our church’s racial profile perfectly. There was no pulpit, no stained glass, no priest. Our pastor wore no ceremonial garb, no robes, no funny hats, just a shirt and tie or a sport coat with Dockers, looking more like a girls’ basketball coach than a member of the clergy. This was nondenominational Protestantism. The only overtly religious symbol in the sanctuary was a single large wooden cross—Jesus-less, unlike the kooky Catholics, who left their Jesus up there to suffer Sunday after Sunday. Ours had risen.

We sat in the second row, in equal parts for my mother’s fervor and my father’s unique blend of attention deficit and the bad hearing that comes with driving a rickety old oil truck for thirty years. Almost weekly, I would catch my dad tearing up at the music, but during the sermon he seemed as bored as my brother was, who spent his time picking at his fingernails or perusing the color maps in the back of the pew-rack Bibles. To pass the time, sometimes my dad would answer the pastor’s rhetorical questions, out loud and at full volume, to the great embarrassment of my mother. He’d repeat every memorable quote, and respond to every anecdote, with shouted comments like That’s true or That hasn’t been my experience. So much so, that one week the pastor stopped preaching midsermon to tell my dad, in front