Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 3

  I needed to reach the finish line. I needed to get out of that place.

  I also vowed to rid myself of this nasty little gambling habit—and attendant debt—I’d developed. The low point: taking my friend Scott into my walk-in closet, saying he could have whatever he wanted for fifty dollars. He took my leather jacket. So one day, I called my mother and divulged my bind. In an exceptionally calm manner, she gave me the stern maternal talking-to that I desperately needed. She then sent me a check to cover my debt. I paid it. And that was the last of my dealings with my bookie. Moms can do that to you.

  By now, I knew that graduating was less about getting the degree than it was getting my release papers from New Orleans. Pushing myself through my credit quandary would take more than will—it would take finesse. I hadn’t fulfilled my math requirement, mostly because it was the only course that had a mandatory attendance requirement. I had dropped it my first semester, my second semester, and my third semester. At the time, I remember thinking, By the time I’m a senior, I’ll have my act together, and I’ll pay attention. I know I’ll be a better student by my senior year.

  Yeah, right.

  So the last semester, I had to take math. If my Humanities professors thought I was giving them short shrift, this poor Chinese grad student whose job it was to instill in me the basics of precalculus got no shrift. He went shriftless. Going into the final, my last week of class during senior year, I knew less than the day the class started. My test-taking strategy for this, my last test of my woeful college career, was figuring I’m twenty-two years old. I’ve got to know more about this subject than the average fifteen-year-old high-school student.

  Wrong!

  The test had twenty questions. As is customary, they required correct answers. And to make matters worse, apparently they wanted me to show my work. After a look through the twenty questions, I noticed that the first was the easiest, and each question was more difficult than the previous one, so that the last was the hardest. After I stared at question one for about fifteen minutes, hoping that I would be inspired, waiting for the math muse, I realized that today was not going to be my day.

  I started to see my life passing before my eyes. I started to consider that maybe years of skating by, recklessly expecting everything to work out, had been exactly the wrong approach to derivatives. It was a big moment for someone raised on—and among—the trusty happy endings of Hollywood. Apparently, I realized, sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes you have to make it work out. Which means: maybe values do matter. I took a deep breath, stood up, walked toward the teacher, as the rest of the class scribbled away—and asked that he join me outside the classroom.

  I said, “Sir, I’m going to be frank with you here. I need to graduate. I have family and friends coming in from out of town tomorrow. We have reservations at Commander’s Palace. Failing this class is not going to serve either of our needs. Now, the way I look at it, I’m not going into a career in science or math. I think we can agree upon that. I’m not asking for your answer right now. I just wanted to put this into your head. Perhaps you could see my flawed humanity and allow for me to move on with my life.”

  Even though English was not his first language, he got the message. I called the next day and he gave me a passing grade in the class (a C–, I believe). In the end, I graduated with just above a 2.0.

  The next day, my parents and family friends, the Solovs, came to celebrate my graduation from Sodom and Gomorrah. At star chef Susan Spicer’s Bayona restaurant (delicious!), my academic career was toasted.

  Joanne Solov, my friend Larry’s mother, asked me, “So what are you going to do now that you’ve graduated?”

  With utter sincerity, I told the table, “Well, over the next year, I’m going to start trying to wake up before noon.”

  The next day was my flight back to Los Angeles, a Delta Airlines nonstop. And back then, they used to give a complimentary USA Today. I remember this because the above-the-fold headline was “Graduates Entering Worst Economy In Decade.”

  Terrific!

  Thankfully, with this American Studies degree, I knew I would have a competitive edge.

  As the plane took off, I envisioned myself, like the protagonist in a big-budget Simpson/Bruckheimer film, walking away from an exploding cityscape and not looking backward, not even for a second.

  From the earliest age, I had always had a profound sense of right and wrong. During college, however, I saw the world through the prism of moral relativism and grays, and my own personal standards simply went away somewhere. Okay, fair enough. I was young. But now, I needed them back. I didn’t consider this political, nor did I see this as theological. It just was my internal voice telling me I had to straighten up. Who knows where it came from—my parents, my solid upbringing, I’d guess. Perhaps coming back to Los Angeles, where my family and friends lived, I felt that I needed to return to the Andrew Breitbart that these people expected.

  In addition to that, my parents did what they probably should have done as I entered college: they cut me off financially. It’s hard to explain to the average person what upper-middle-class entitlement feels like, because when you no longer have it and you recognize how pathetic it is, it becomes a point of embarrassment. My work ethic in high school provided me goodies, the extras of life. Now I needed money to live. So I got a job waiting tables at Hal’s in Venice.

  When I got my first paycheck, when I got my first day’s worth of tips while waiting at Hal’s, and I had to apply that to rent, to shoes, to rice, to the basic necessities of life, I was in shock. How on God’s green earth did everybody do this?

  But buying my first pair of shoes with my own money was an Emersonian epiphany. That was one of the first baby steps toward embracing adulthood and maturity, something that being on the easy parental dole could never provide. I felt like Andrew Carnegie in those shoes.

  A second step toward self-actualization was the experience of waiting tables on friends from high school and college who happened in on my lowly afternoon wait shift. Twice, friends asked me with a look of great worry on their faces, “Why are you doing this?” The peer pressure that had defined so much of my high-school years in Brentwood and the mostly wealthy clique that I spent time with at Tulane meant that if I joined the club, I would be a member of the elite. To fall outside of the boundaries of that upper-middle-classness wasn’t merely unacceptable; it simply wasn’t an option. And here I was, waiting on my former peers hand and foot.

  I’d spent many years in Brentwood and at Tulane scoffing at my friends who fretted about their futures. Now here I was, watching those same people in law school, medical school, or working in jobs in buildings that I didn’t even know how to enter. Nothing like a dose of complete humiliation to make you realize how completely full of shit you are.

  But strangely, it felt good. I knew the only place to go was up.

  Instead of being deflated by the realization that my friends had the answers and had figured out how to get respectable jobs right out of college, I was just happy with the expectation that somebody was waiting for me to do a job. Baby steps, I told myself. My years in New Orleans began to appear more and more ludicrous to me. I’d thought I was some sort of standard-bearer, stumbling home at daylight every morning. It felt significantly less maverick to be informing my childhood friends what the soup of the day was. I was beginning to understand that my self-worth was in direct proportion to how hard I applied myself to productive pursuits. My values were returning from exile.

  Even as I was discovering the fulfillment I could derive from hard work, I was still a default liberal. Around this time, I watched the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings with the alacrity of a boxing fan at the Ali-Frazier fight. It was a major media event and a political heavyweight match. The way that the media had billed it, the Rocky Balboa was Anita Hill. She was the protagonist. The only people in Clarence Thomas’s corner were members of the Republican Party. And to me, they were the scolds, the hypocrites, the town
elders in Footloose, the people who represented the people who would give over their hard-earned money to Jim and Tammy Bakker in exchange for eternal salvation. My perspective on the political process was an inch deep. But my desire to see Clarence Thomas’s blood was immense.

  So when the opening bell rang, I was expecting Hill to deliver a relentless barrage of accusations and evidence about a man whose behavior around women was professionally unacceptable. I expected lurid details of intimidation, coercion, and harassment. But Hill and her allies described a workplace and a boss-employee relationship that seemed utterly unremarkable. To listen to the media commentators affirm the outrage of Democratic female harpies, parroting the overwrought cries of Anita as channeled by this driven core of Democratic officials, was infuriating—it was so obviously unjust. (Leading the questioning, by the way: Senators Howard Metzenbaum, Pat Leahy, Joe Biden, and Teddy Kennedy.)

  Now I may have been a Democrat. I may have been a liberal. But I was not stupid. Something was very wrong here. The melodrama did not come close to matching the lack of evidence that was being presented. They were accusing Thomas of spotting a pubic hair on a soda can, of asking Hill on a date. There was no “there” there. It was ridiculous.

  I was perfectly aware at the time that the Democrats were motivated by the abortion issue. And at the time, I was pro-choice. So when Thomas’s inquisitors pierced the sanctity of the “right to privacy” that is the hallmark of left-wing constitutional rights, flaunting that they had discovered through illicit means that Thomas had rented pornography, my mental anguish turned physical. I writhed in agony and actually threw a shoe at the television set.

  At the same time, it was impossible for me to not recognize that Clarence Thomas’s being black was part of the story. How in hell could white Americans Leahy, Biden, and Metzenbaum, let alone former KKK grand pooh-bah Robert Byrd and Chappaquiddick’s very own Ted Kennedy, so arrogantly excoriate this man whose personal narrative from sharecropper’s grandson to Supreme Court nominee embodied the American dream? A narrative that would send a clear signal to African-Americans that anything is possible in this country? Why were so many white Democrats in the media and in the political class working in concert to assassinate this man’s character and to stop that dream in its tracks?

  During this media feeding frenzy my eyes were opened, perhaps for the first time, to the fact that something was awry in American political and media life. What secret bit did Kennedy and Biden know about the NAACP, ABC, NBC, and CBS that they could grill a black man on such weak charges and know that those politically correct entities would not savage them? If the tables were turned and Clarence Thomas were a liberal Democrat, the NAACP wouldn’t have waited a second. Somehow, these white male senators of privilege knew that they could get away with it.

  My sympathy for Thomas was utter and complete. I wanted to stop the hearings. I wanted him to be issued public, formal apologies. I naïvely expected that the press would do the job of forcing those apologies. I could understand how the mainstream media could accept Anita Hill and Congresswoman Pat Schroeder at their word. But even if the accusations were true, they amounted to nothing. Certainly a hell of a lot less than what Senator Kennedy likely did to his female staff on any given Washington workday. This was, as Clarence Thomas perfectly stated, an electronic lynching.

  And the media aided and abetted it.

  Please note that I did not leave the Clarence Thomas hearings a Republican. I did not leave the hearings an originalist. But I did leave the hearings deeply cynical of media that I had thought were neutral and a Democratic Party that I’d believed was guided by principle. This was the beginning of the end of the self-deception that I was like everyone else around me. It would take a few more years to get there—to discover that I was a conservative—but this was the exact point where I realized that it was not just that I disagreed with the Democratic Party but, more important, that the media were its dominant partner in crime. The national disgrace that was the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, for me, changed everything.

  This is not the point in the story where we cue the montage of success.

  Based on the available evidence—that the only tangible skill set I had was that I could make people laugh, and that I was in Los Angeles—I took the first available job in Hollywood with the hope that I’d eventually become a comedy writer.

  Hollywood is anything but a meritocracy. So I thought I’d try to leverage some old friends to insert myself into the world that was the backdrop of my childhood. Through a friend, I got a runner position at a low-budget movie production company in Santa Monica. Over a period of a year, I put 22,000 miles on the Saab convertible that I’d bought when I graduated college. Its quality was a constant and painful reminder that I hadn’t earned the money for it, but in the exceptionally shallow town that is Hollywood, my boss took an immediate liking to me based on his false perception that I was of his status. With the $230 that he was paying me per week, I couldn’t afford my own car payments, let alone running around with his Hollywood crowd. But I learned that that was exactly what I had to do in order to get ahead in that business.

  For a year I delivered scripts around town, entering every single Hollywood office of note, including Michael Ovitz’s, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s, and Michael Eisner’s. It wasn’t long before I saw clearly what made Hollywood run. I realized that the town was about relationships, about ass-kissing, about groupthink, about looking over the shoulder of the person you’re having a conversation with to see if there’s somebody more important in the room that you should be speaking to. I just as quickly realized that this was not my world. I had spent the last four years of my life in college subordinating myself to a system that ran against my better instincts. I was not going to make that mistake again.

  So while the producer was incentivizing me to become production staff—he even gave me control over a project, Valley Girl 2 (thank God that was never made)—I did everything in my power to stay in my car doing the lowly runner job because I didn’t want to get sucked in further.

  And in my car was AM radio.

  My habit came about accidentally. My devotion to KROQ FM and San Diego’s 91X, trailblazing alternative rock stations, began to fade with the invasion of the grunge rock movement. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Blind Melon, Screaming Trees were replacing The Cure, New Order, The English Beat, Echo and the Bunnymen. It was like watching your youth get cancelled. And my hatred of grunge was visceral. The forced thrift-shop flannel look belied Los Angeles’s temperate weather. Who were these whiny, suicidal freaks? I didn’t want to know, I just wanted them off my car radio.

  So in an act of absolute and pure desperation, I flipped the dial to AM.

  As a social animal, I abhor sitting in a room by myself. I love the exchange of ideas. And in listening to talk radio, there was an artificial sensation that I was part of a conversation. I quickly discovered that I would do anything to listen to talk radio. When I would deliver a script out in Burbank at Disney Studios, I developed a technique where I could put an AM Sports Walkman on my ears in my car while I was listening to the radio, so that when I got out of the car to do my five- to ten-minute delivery, I could remain part of the conversation. I went out of my way to avoid underground parking. I even started jogging because it gave me an excuse to listen more. I listened to so much talk radio I was actually able to run in the 1994 Los Angeles Marathon. Four hours, for those wondering.

  My first forays into embracing a specific host were Jim Rome and Howard Stern. Both of them clearly used humor and strong opinion to engage their listeners. But it was during the 1992 election cycle that so much of the conversation on the AM dial was built around politics.

  In 1992, I certainly still considered myself a Democrat. Jerry Brown was my candidate in the primaries, and he really hooked me on his criticism of Gov. William Jefferson Clinton of Arkansas. People talk about the vast right-wing conspiracy being the origins of anti-Clinton rhetoric. But
Brown’s campaign was the prototype. He was talking Whitewater and pointing to the fact that this was a typical Arkansas Democratic machine, a political force, not a political reformer. I had experienced the colorful yet corrupt politics of Louisiana for four years—including the proudly corrupt politics of Gov. Edwin Edwards—so putting the chief executive of Arkansas, a state with a similar MO, in charge seemed to me an unwise choice.

  While working at this Roger Corman–esque production company, I was getting quite serious with my now wife, Susie. Not only was I working in Hollywood, I was dating the daughter of Orson Bean, an actor, comedian, and raconteur. Spending time at his house on the Venice canals (which to this day I still call Dennis Kucinich Bumper Sticker Country—where Clinton, Kerry, and Obama aren’t left enough), I perused his bookshelves. Not only was I attracted to Susie, I was attracted to Orson’s wit and depth of knowledge of everything. This guy had appeared on the Tonight Show couch seventhmost of any guest. His opinion mattered to me.

  One day I asked him why he had Rush Limbaugh’s book The Way Things Ought to Be on his shelf. I asked him, “Why would you have a book by this guy?”

  And Orson said, “Have you ever listened to him?”

  I said yes, of course, even though I never had. I was convinced to the core of my being that Rush Limbaugh was a Nazi, anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti–all things decent. Without berating me for disagreeing with him, Orson simply suggested that I listen to him again.

  While I was listening to Jim Rome and Howard Stern, the intensity of the 1992 election cycle warranted that I switch the frequency over to hearing about the horse race.

  This is where my rendezvous with destiny begins.