Remembering The Sixties

My bloodline is an uneasy amalgam of the Riggs and Taylor tribes, two surly and paranoid lineages which stumbled from the mists of primordial time into the present, angry and confused, convinced that the entire rest of the world was stacked up on the other side of the fence plotting their extermination. This genetic tendency toward paranoia was good preparation for show business, which I've learned, unfortunately, is a cutthroat affair.

Not bothering to trouble themselves with actual knowledge, my family tended to make up facts to suit their delusional fancies, citing the Bible or other fictional sources when challenged on their more outrageous claims. Cracking an actual book never seemed to occur to them. My mom and dad spent long hours trying to out-BS each other. Their arguments were legendary; spinning off into complicated constructions rivaling Faulkner and Joyce on a good day. My mom always emerged victorious from these battles. Dad retreated into his bottle and his television sporting events; mom sought refuge in her romantic world of imagination, where our family was the center of the universe; the focus of conspiracies and envy.

In reality, of course, we were nobodies. Nobody cared what we said, did or thought.

In retrospect, I guess that illusion was always a way of life for me. Eventually I created an on-stage character that was everything my mother wanted our family to be: all-knowing, all powerful, on top of things. I didn't realize this until I was forty five years old – that my performing career was the apotheosis of my mother's vision of what we could have been if the fates were kinder to our clan. In light of the constant, lifelong struggle to make it as a performer, I've always been puzzled why I keep going. I think this is what has been burning in the secret furnace of my mind, the fuel that has driven me on since I was a small child: the determination to vindicate my mother's belief that we were something special, even if only through the make-believe magic of the theater.

As crazy and delusional as my parents were, I miss them. I think I prefer their imaginary world to the one I actually live in today. It seems that all the magic is gone, replaced by a dry technocratic cynicism. Maybe they had it right: perhaps being crazy IS the secret of happiness.

I remember the very moment I decided to become a full-time performer. I was around six years old. People used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I responded that I wanted to be a Wizard.

In East Tennessee, in the early 1960's this was tantamount to saying "Gee, I want to worship Satan and all his Imps. Thanks for asking." Since my family dabbled in fortune-telling, it was expected that I was to follow the Highway to Hell. To understand what a bold career decision this was you have to understand the religious and intellectual climate of East Tennessee in the
1960s. One anecdote will suffice:

In the fourth grade, I did a book report on The Origin of Species. I had recently read it, found it fascinating and wanted to share it with my classmates. I also knew a good controversy when I saw it, and I wanted to see the reaction I got when I dropped this intellectual cluster-bomb on my Southern-fried contemporaries. Bear in mind that I come from the part of the country that outlawed Evolution. Even though the ruling was overturned, it didn't matter. Along with the outcome of the Civil War, East Tennesseans never accepted evolution as a proven fact. We're still Rebels, and we stopped Evolving. Free spirits all, we yield not to the laws of government, man nor nature.

I never got to deliver my report. Unfortunately for my attempt to elevate the minds of my contemporaries, we had a Bible-Thumping zealot for a substitute teacher that day who was so appalled at hearing the name "Darwin" that she dropped her coffee cup, which dashed into fragments on the tile floor.

The Substitute Teacher, Bible in one hand and my ear in the other, hoisted me to the principal's office by that convenient jug-handle (in the mid-sixties teachers could still do that) whereupon the principle, a scary, iron-tough woman named Mrs. Gray, lectured me on God and Satan, demanding to know "What kind of family do you come from that allows you to read this kind of trash?"

Well, actually I got Darwin's heretical opus from the public library and my family would have no clue what it was about. And it just so happened that my family liked trash. The only books I remember seeing around the house involved racy cartoons and jokes I didn't understand until I was seventeen, in bed with my first female, when a light went on in my head and I said "Oh, NOW I get it!

However, Mrs. Gray soon learned what kind of family I came from--the dangerous kind to mess with. My mother answered Principal Gray's stern phone call in a manner I'm sure the woman hadn't anticipated. If the principal had been hoping for a kindred spirit, a partner in her determination to make me get with the program, her hopes were soon shattered into more fragments than Substitute Teacher's coffee cup. My mom burst into the office, eyes flashing fire, screamed over the principal's stuttering remonstrations, and threatened to run her over in the parking lot after school for daring to question the family integrity. Iron had met fire, and was rendered into slag in the forge of my mother's fury.

For two weeks, I am told, a fearful Mrs. Gray checked the parking lot for signs of my mother’s Chevrolet before fleeing to the modest haven of her Ford Sedan.

My family fought like cats and dogs amongst ourselves, but if an outsider so much as glared at any one of us, we banded together, sharpened our knives with gleeful passion, and took a break from our squabbling long enough to reduce the interloper to quivering rags. It's a Southern thing. I knew many things about my family. We were not normal, not sociable, perhaps not even sane – but I knew that if I got into trouble they would watch my back.