A Story for (almost) Every Occassion

The day I stop having new stories to tell is the day I gotta pack it in.

The manager at my apartment building was out for a few days having surgery. I noticed he was back and asked how he was doing. I did not ask why he had the surgery but he volunteered the information in that hushed tone we use when talking about cancer or the racist epithet our uncle uttered when watching a basketball game.

“It was a [suddenly quiet] cyst.” He pointed at his left ass cheek.

“Oh, gawd. Those are worse than pregnancy.”

“Right? I couldn’t even stand up it hurt so bad.”

I launch into the tale I call Fat Man and Little Boy about the time I found two cysts on my nuts and used a heating pad on them until they exploded and left what appeared to be two bullet holes in my scrote.

“How are you recovering?”

“I’m mostly good but it’s agony to sit down.”

I spin the yarn about my back going out in London and, after a few days I could walk but couldn’t sit without explosive pain. Limping through the city and I have to take a shit. No public restrooms so I find a five hundred year old church (because it’s England and all their churches are at least five hundred years old) and try to leave a silent deuce to no avail, my screams as I sat and stood repeatedly terrorizing the locals in the chapel.

At this point in my life it’s likely that I have a story for almost everything under the sun except for parenthood or child birth. The closest I have for either of those is my many stories as a public school teacher and a truly graphic account of effectively squeezing out a solid tree trunk from my colon.

As the venerated Doctor Who once said “We are all just stories in the end.” I even have that statement (without accreditation) tattooed on my left shoulder. All eleven of my tattoos have a specific story behind them—at one point, I thought about doing a one-man show telling those stories. I realized for a Tattoo’d Man show I need a lot more ink and I’m not looking to continuing my work life as a career criminal, a meth addict, or a white rapper so I discontinued the concept.

I was listening to Literally with Rob Lowe and his guest was Bert Kreischer. They talked about Kreischer’s story of his time with the Russian Mafia (“The Machine”) and how he slowly developed that story over time. He describes it as just a crazy thing that he was involved in. He was in a set of extraordinary circumstances and did some things. He didn’t think that the story was worth telling. Then he started telling it. The more he told it, the more refined and fun it became. The more interesting, the more people wanted to hear it. He now tells this story as the centerpiece of his stadium shows all over the world and made a movie version of it starring Mark Hamill as his father.

Minus the stadium success and casting Luke Skywalker as your dad that’s how every great story goes. A thing that happened. The story is told and then told again and eventually it becomes something grander than the strict narrative. At some point, the tale has been refined and told so many times it’s hard to even know which parts are 100% true and which parts are exaggerations. When I told stories onstage in Chicago, I’d tell people my stories were 78% true.

There are drawbacks to living my life in the manner I’ve chosen. The rolling stone has few tethers to the concept of stability or long-term security but that stone has some amazing stories.

Performing for a crowd of homophobic truckers? I have a story about that.

Eating a fat sandwich gifted by a homeless Scotsman? Yup.

Being accused of forging a business license only to be exonerated but it didn’t matter? I have one for you.

You caught your spouse cheating on you? I can hold court telling you about playing trumpet at the wedding of my second ex-wife’s lover during a tornado or blow your mind with discovering my third ex-wife had a three-year boyfriend and was working as a prostitute.

You met a celebrity? Which one do you want—my phone conversation with Bill Clinton about fried chicken, sneaking Denis Leary out in the back of a bank so he could grab a smoke, or inappropriately complimenting Lorne Michaels’s penis in a public restroom?

The person with stories is someone who has chosen to live actively rather than passively. The people in my life whom I enjoy the most have great stories. My mom has great stories, My buddy and Amnesia Motel co-conspirator Charlie Newman can hold court with amazing, funny, heartbreaking stories for hours. My dad. My sister. Joe. Himmel.

I submit that rather than money or influence, the thing that will define a well lived life at the end, that moment just before one takes that final breath, it is the volume of stories one has that actually matters. The day I stop having new stories to tell is the day I gotta pack it in. Stories mean you lived and are living.

So.

Go out and create yourself a few stories.

Then tell them.