My family lives a life where saying ”Hello, how are you?” is about as close as they get even in their own house. My mother couldn`t have babies and they decided to adopt me. God knows why-to ruin my life, I guess. No. They wanted to look like they had four wonderful people living in a house: ”Now we can look like everything`s fine and we`ll be able to pass that off.” It was tremendously frustrating.
My older brother didn`t feel the frustration as much-although looking at how he turned out-if I were to be a judgmental type, I wouldn`t be pleased with my life if I were like him. I mean, he`ll spend an hour on how many threads a particular screw has and why, and how it fits with the other parts, and how the manufacturer doesn`t really understand, and oh boy. He`ll speak about the most mundane things, because he cannot be human at all.
That`s the way my whole family is; that`s just the way they are and it was a horror growing up. I don`t know how come I grew up different from them, you know; it almost speaks to inherited characteristics.
My parents adopted me when they were 50 years old. Sometimes I think, you know, I`m not particularly appreciative that I was adopted. And I know how that feels, in this culture, it feels like ”what an ingrate.” But I feel, maybe if I`d grown up differently, I would have been able to stand on my own two feet a little earlier than 30; get it together, you know. Because I was not prepared for nothing.
After I graduated from high school, I ran around the country, went to colleges, fooled around. I spent my 20s getting into fights on streets and avoiding anything determining. I sort of accidentally bumped into anything I did. I met a guy called Joe Papp, who was a producer at this thing called the New York Shakespeare festival, and I met him and he said, ”You should be an actress.” I said, ”Forget about it.”
At that time, I was just hanging around New York, working as a cab driver. I did that for quite awhile on and off. Driving a cab was great. The first time I did it, when I was a 19-year-old kid, it wasn`t bad, because I sort of lived my life by scams and there are certain scams you can pull in a cab. You fooled around with the ignition so that you could drive around even though the meter was not on, and therefore you just pocketed the money.
I don`t do that kind of thing any longer. Now I don`t have to blame the world for who I am, nor do I have to take care of the world. I can just live my life-and hopefully use my morality constantly in all of my affairs, not just selectively. I used to have ideas like this person works for that kind of group, therefore he can be (used), whereas these people were the good people; I couldn`t (use) them. And I don`t think like that now.
I was a mess. I looked around and other people didn`t appear to be having quite as much trouble. I would look at people who walked on the street and they seemed somewhat satisfied or peaceful, and I wanted that.
I had this huge burden on my mind and body, all the time, just making sure everything was okay. I would smell conflict. I would say, ”Oh, there`s a man beating up this woman on Broadway and Vine Street. I`d better run over there.” I mean I`d get involved in everybody else`s stuff, and a lot of times, I would be a much more angry advocate than the people who were going through it. Not to mention the fact that I was looking for a fight.
And it wasn`t a friendly way to live.
I was antisocial and also the kind of person who was mother`s helper. If the kid`s mitten fell, I would run three blocks, because I was always trying to prove that hippies were nice people. In a discussion with a cop, I could see how I could go home free that night. But I would take the other side. Because I hated. I was barking up the wrong tree. I didn`t see that I couldn`t take care of the ills of the world by arguing with one cop. I was so self-deprecating, and at the same time acting like a crusader.
I had to let go of the idea that I was the most important thing walking down the street and that if I didn`t put myself into other people`s lives, they wouldn`t be able to live. It was an enormous, controlling, fascist urge from such a freedom-loving person.
And what a sicko combo it was. It made me crazy. I was in and out, in and out of relationships. When it dawned on me that I could simply channel some of the things I did somehow understand, then it worked. Luckily, I`m silly, and at the same time, I have these thoughts, accidental insights, that seem to make sense to people.
My work is from my gut. I`m very verbal. I`m not very articulate or succinct, but when I get my emotions behind what I`m saying, people respond. That is some kind of a liberating thing for people who can`t do that themselves.
But it is a double-edged sword, because particularly in this country, in this time, people are living their lives through people like Oprah Winfrey and whoever`s in the Enquirer and Roseanne Barr, and I really think that`s not good, which is why I try to eschew the cult of personality stuff.
Wanting to live others` lives is something everyone has. When I was growing up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Long Island, my father was an electrician and my mother was a housewife. We had some money; electricians in New York made good money.
But I would walk down the street when I was a kid and look at other people`s houses and think in despair, ”I`ll never have a house. What do you do to get a house?” And that was when everyone had one.
I started doing underground theater in San Francisco in 1979. It was very tentative, crazy, kind of surreal, dada. Then someone asked me to be in a play that turned out to be a big hit and the National Endowment gave it money and it went around California and the Midwest. I was the lead, and every night it was the same; I never studied for it, never took the steps. Every night, the only time I actually felt good was when I stepped off the stage. After awhile, I realized that was too anxiety-producing, to get up every night without any technique or method.
Then NYU (New York University) gave me money to come back to New York and study. I met all these kids there who were very clear about their ambitions to be on soap operas. There is nothing wrong with that if you need a job and want to be an actor, but to pretend that that is important work, the highest! So I left.
A director friend of mine then said to me, ”You are a stand-up comedian and if you don`t get up on stage, I will not have any respect for you.” She helped me and sort of pushed me to sit down and write things. Finally I got up one night and did it. I had five minutes and I got up on stage and none of it made any sense, because I was swirling.
The next morning I called Woody Allen`s producer and manager. He told me to go back to school, which I did.
It wasn`t until 1985 that I started going up on stage regularly. I started out playing on the Lower East Side. I was performing around, still having this devil-may-care attitude, taking nothing seriously, so I wouldn`t have to take responsibility. As I started to attract attention, the Village Voice wrote about me. And that`s when it dawned on me that I was going to have to become a part of the community. Which I always wanted but was afraid of.
I realized I ought to stop fooling around, make a bigger effort. It gave me the impetus.
I was a drug addict and alcoholic for many years. One way I turned away from living was-it was three o`clock in the afternoon, and I would say, ”Oh, time enough; I`ll have a drink.”
Everything happens accidentally and because it`s meant to, in a way. It wasn`t until I was a certain age that I could do my work and find I am a capable member of society. Therefore, I don`t really need to get rich, and that`s really not a motivation.
Before last year, I`d had no dealing with producer-types. I found that, truly, what these people understand is that my work is going to sell. They may worry that I`m controversial, that I`m not like anyone else coming down the pike. But that`s also the selling factor, you see.
HBO put $500,000 behind me when no one knew who I was. To me that meant they wanted my ideas, or the ideas that are coming through me.
The truth of it is there`s this big machine for people who don`t want to go out in the world, who stay at home and watch TV. Which is a horror, and I`m in it.
They need ”product,” as they say, and I`m somewhat sellable. It became clear to me when they started talking about how I looked: your style.
They kept talking about what I looked like. I had never analyzed what people do to public people. It took a while to dawn on me. The reason why they were talking about what I looked like was because they want to sell me.
I was kicked out of the Improv in New York City forever. One night, I went onstage and the man before me had just stirred up the audience into a fever pitch of war whooping.
He was making fun of this guy in the front row wearing a bow tie, who`d told him his name was Brad (and the audience joined the heckling. Every time the comedian said Brad, the audience screamed a profanity at him).
My turn was next. I was talking about how I`d burned my bra so some 24-year-old broad could turn Judas on Wall Street. Then I did a bit about how different I was treated when I was wearing a penis. The joke is about wearing one around New York to see what it`s like to be a man. The joke has a real feminist point of view, obviously.
So here, the audience had watched this guy do this hate-mongering thing. The guys in the audience could easily have created mayhem that night. And for doing this joke, I was kicked out forever.
