Ep. 416: "Under Their Trucks"
Salesman of the month, salesman of the month, salesman of the month.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going.
It's early.
How are you going?
It's so early.
Good.
They keep running the streetcars, even though the streetcars aren't really running.
Really?
Nobody's riding them, but they... No, they're too popular.
Nobody goes there anymore.
It's like a look-busy policy?
I really don't understand.
I just feel I'm chasing because all that noise that you and the listeners hear is unnecessary, at least to my mind.
It's been buses, not streetcars, for months.
And the streetcars aren't coming back anytime soon, but they keep running them out of service back and forth.
Which makes me suspicious.
They say out of service.
Out of service.
Don't use it.
They're drug mules.
I thought the same thing.
Or maybe it's like some kind of courier service where you need to get something from Van Ness Station to the zoo or back.
It's a they live scenario where the trolleys aren't really trolleys.
Oh.
If you just had the right glasses.
I just got to go to the church and look in the walls.
All right.
That's a good movie.
The problem is you're not all out of bubble gum yet.
Yep.
40 famously has a 45 minute fight scene in it.
Robin Goldwasser's dad is in that movie.
Shut your mouth.
Is he one of the skeleton people?
No, he's one of the main characters.
Robin, you know, Robin, of course, like all of us people our age, really loved They Live.
She, you know, she went down, watched it.
some art house theater in the lower west east middle side back in the old days.
That's a great neighborhood.
Great views.
Yeah, the lower east west middle side.
But, you know, she didn't know without giving too much away.
Robin was adopted at a young age and didn't know her real parents.
Her birth parents?
Her birth parents.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
Pardon me.
And then discovered them and then discovered that her father was an actor.
Whoa.
And not only was he an actor, but a famous actor.
Whoa.
You're going to make me look this up, aren't you?
He's probably got a different last name, I'm guessing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she made contact and they became very good, very good friends, close friends, fast friends.
And then, of course, you know, he's a he's a Hollywood actor.
Right.
So you're going to.
OK, let's start at the beginning.
Is it a process of elimination?
Number one, call sheet order.
Here we go.
Is it Rowdy Roddy Piper?
No, wouldn't that be wonderful?
No, it isn't.
Can you imagine finding out your birth father is Rowdy Roddy Piper?
Kind of.
I can imagine that.
I would have to say, I'm going to circle back to this, of the wrestlers to find out is one's father.
Number one would be the Iron Sheik.
Because the guy's funny.
He's very funny.
Wouldn't that be fun?
He is.
He's funny.
So it's not Keith David.
I love Keith David.
I should say for our listeners, Robin is the wife of John Flansburg.
Among others.
things.
She's a playwright and a musician.
She's one of the most delightful people I've ever met.
I've met a handful of people, but she is legit in an uncanny way.
I don't know if she feels this way, but we've only hung out, I think, once.
But I have a very, very fond memory of that.
She's a puppet maker.
She's a puppeteer.
If you've ever experienced the They Might Be Giants puppet theater...
That's all her coctions.
She knows a lot about Jerry Lewis.
That's how I fell in love with her.
She does know a lot about Jerry Lewis.
She's just one of the smart ones, one of the bright lights.
And she's also an adoption rights activist now.
Oh, tell me what that means.
Like, write to get your records and kind of poke around?
Yeah, I think that she... I mean, I don't know the whole of it, but I think she found that it was more difficult than it needed to be for her to know the full story.
And I think she's, in general, sort of disfavors...
disfavors adoption as a kind of casual baby trading or whatever and thinks it should be I don't want to speak for her she has strong feelings about it and is for a long time was very active in the commentariat around adoption
yeah but uh but no she's a she's a she's wonderful and a and has been a close friend for a long time and you know i'm sort of telling her story here which i'm i'm not 100 sure is is all the way okay but it is you know she has been public with it i'll cut to the chase her her father is peter jason
Whoa.
One, two, three, four.
Whoa.
He's sixth in the credits.
Let me see if I recognize him.
You know, I wish my friends at IMDb would make larger photos.
I don't think it's just my eyes.
It's not a good website.
I need so much help.
Oh, my God.
That guy?
I knew that that would ring your bell.
Peter Jason.
Oh, my God.
You're going to know this guy.
He kind of looks like that rat king of actors.
You know, the famous rat king of, like, Charles Durning.
Maybe not Wilford Brimley, but, you know, there's those guys who all kind of look alike.
Dolph Sweet, maybe.
There's that kind of older big head actor with white hair.
But he's been in everything.
He was in 48 Hours.
He was in Streets of Fire.
He was in Karate Kid.
He was in Dreamscape.
He was in Arrested Development for four episodes.
Yeah.
Damn.
He's been in everything.
He was in Deadwood.
He had a funny mustache in Deadwood.
Was he a gambler?
I bet he was a gambler.
He was.
That's exactly what he was.
He was a gambler in Deadwood.
Oh, it's over at Cy Tolliver's place.
He was in the hunt for Red October.
Shut your mouth.
Was he American?
He looks like a general.
I could see him playing a general.
Yes, he was.
Is he the guy who meets with Harrison Ford in the room?
I bet that's him.
I don't remember exactly.
Murder, she wrote.
You know what, John?
This man, his name is Peter Jason, and he is a working actor.
This guy has a lot of credits.
Yes.
And he's a face you recognize.
He...
And he, yeah, it was, you know, there's adoption in my family as well.
And when we discovered, and by that I mean that the person who was adopted found us.
And we welcomed them back into our family and our lives.
And it was not uncomplicated.
I was going to say, to decide, I have to imagine, for one to decide to start poking around with people who, on the face of it, may not want to be poked at...
that's a high stakes.
I could see that being a very high stakes thing, depending on your, again, this is, I'm walking through a minefield here.
I don't have the experience of this, but it seems to me that it would not be unexpected to run into a woman.
For example, like you meet a woman in her fifties or sixties, who's really not into talking about being 18 again.
Right.
Well, in the case of our clan, um, the, uh, the, the family member in question is,
It was actually that when she reached out to her birth father, he was receptive, but his subsequent wife and two daughters were extremely not.
Oh, interesting.
Really, really.
Yeah, like we've already written three-fourths of the history for this family.
We don't want to see new characters introduced in the second or third act.
Yeah, and, you know, just a sort of violent rejection.
Uh, and, um, so on our side, you know, it was, it was, uh, we were thrilled, but of course it's more complicated than that.
Cause you have, you know, decades and decades of, of wondering and building up hopes and dreams.
And then I think, uh, I think
again, in the case of our family, there was a lot of resemblance and a lot of personality resemblance.
And so there was a natural feeling of like, wow, you know, this is amazing.
Like we just, we just, um, we just improved our family by one.
Yeah.
But I think there was also a lot of expectation built up like, oh, well now all, all questions will be answered kind of thing.
And the all questions will be answered part.
You mean there's just, there's,
There's no one thing that can happen in your life that explains everything and that makes everything better.
And so it was bumpy, not because there was anybody that wasn't thrilled that it was happening, but just bumpy because it was like, well, wait a minute.
Now that this has happened...
all past debts are absolved type of thing.
And that isn't, you know, that's not always the case.
It reminds me of a couple things.
One thing it reminds me of in a weird way is like a high school reunion or similar where I never went to any of mine.
And there seems to be a pretty consistent pattern with a lot of people going to these things.
My friends would contact me after, and we're like, oh, we're bummed.
You didn't come to the 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, whatever, any of those.
I'm like, ugh.
Nobody's going to like me.
Everybody's going to be mean to me.
Everyone's going to be more successful than me.
And everybody's like, no, actually, you know what?
It was really mellow.
And sure, there's always going to be somebody who has a perhaps very understandable chip on their shoulder.
But by and large, everybody's pretty cool.
Because that was a long time ago.
And you're different people now.
But that still wouldn't change my mind about wanting to go.
I don't know.
I'm just weird like that.
But I have to say the thing that really reminds me of is your feeling, your ongoing theme personally of...
Well, you talk, I don't know what you would call it, but the thing of like, we talked about this, I want to say last week or recently where you're like, I want to close the loop on this.
Like there's a thing that, that I know is an open loop that we, I think we should close.
We should talk about what happened in this relationship, that kind of thing.
But there's also those kinds of things that come up that you didn't know were even a loop.
Like for somebody who, you know, went through that process at a certain age and, you know, at the time, I think it was, I don't know, shield laws, I feel like it's called, but whatever the thing is where you say there is a, there's a firewall here that you can't get through.
You're not allowed to find out who these people are.
There's all kinds of privacy reasons and stuff like that.
But I wonder if part of that appeal for you is realizing there's an extremely interesting loop that
Not to say that it will close in a way that makes everybody happy for all times, solve all problems, but to find out that there was this loop nobody knew about.
You're like, oh, that's really cool.
Like, we would love if you would consider yourself part of our family.
Yeah, I love open loops and closing them down or closing them off or rather looping them around.
Yeah.
and tying them off loop loop the loop loop the loops that's not even always my well as you just saying it's a very recent um desire i was talking to hodgman a couple of days ago and he kept saying to me over and over like listen we are always trying to make a story out of everything and there doesn't always have to be a story yeah it's not always a story sometimes things just happen
And I was like, I reject that.
And he was like, no, no, no, listen to me.
Listen, listen, listen.
Can I just go to sleep?
We do this to each other.
We do this all the time.
You're always waiting for the third act.
You're always expecting that there's a twist ending.
And sometimes things just happen and then other things happen.
And he was saying it because he's...
Clearly, like, also thinking it or, you know, mulling it.
You're both storytellers, but different kinds of storytellers.
And I think it's very natural for people.
On the one hand, we're all raised in this abundance of literature about stories.
Yeah.
And, you know, the most basic story is somebody starts here, they ended up there, they encountered some resistance, and how did it turn out?
But where you decide to cut that off and call that the end of the chapter, or the end of the book, or the volume, right?
That makes all the difference.
Now more than ever, there's innumerable stories of, oh, I guess that loop was not as closed as we thought.
But, you know, it depends.
Are you thinking this is a snapshot or a flip book?
Right.
You know, talking about your high school reunions, like,
it had never occurred to me until you just said this, but I had the experience of going to the high school reunion.
I didn't go to my 10th, but I went to my 20th and I, exactly what your friend's,
we're describing i went there and it seemed like oh wow all these people that i weren't i i didn't know i wasn't friends with in high school but now i've known them for 25 years like i know exactly who you are and hey great to see you and i remember everybody's name and and it was a very positive experience but just as you said that i i had this image of the people standing across the
The steam shrouded gymnasium during the reunion, there was a little gaggle of people that I wasn't friends with in high school and I wasn't friends with now.
And I was ready to be friends with them.
Um, they were the, they were my arch enemies, I guess, even though I never had anything personal against any of them.
They were just culturally, you know, they were the socials or whatever.
And the socials slobs versus snobs, they were the socials that were the most diehard about it.
And in some ways, you know, it was the, it was the sad story of the social, which is that they were incredibly popular in high school.
And that was their peak.
And they were kind of over there in a huddle.
And I didn't have the... I mean, it was a very busy reunion.
And I was dancing and shaking hands and kissing babies all around.
And I didn't feel the need to waltz over there and say, Hey, Mike, how's it going?
Great to see you, man.
Put her there.
And it didn't happen by accident.
There's this guy who went to my high school named Mike.
I actually have his driver's license from high school because that's how I rolled at the time.
I was kind of like a serial killer.
I like to keep souvenirs.
You're a collector.
I did.
I had scalps.
I had scalps for a long time.
Oh, boy.
Ha, ha, ha.
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But he was this kid, rich kid.
His dad bought him a 57 Chevy and the license plate was, thanks dad.
Oh, I remember this.
Remember this?
Thanks, Dad.
I do remember this.
And then I think we speculated, was that something the kid requested or maybe more likely something that Dad ordered for him?
Something that Dad put on there and then, you know, like, I don't think that's what I would have asked for.
no so in addition to a 57 chevy he had a brand new chevy short bed pickup with glass packs and and jacked up you know he just had he had it and he was captain of the hockey team and he was all this stuff and um and we just didn't we had a confrontation one time early on in high school where he you know kind of
He never laid hands on me and I never did him, but he like got in my face in a kind of like, what did you say?
Kind of way about nothing.
It was just like teenage boys.
And I always backed down from that kind of confrontation and
And then I was the one that had the snide remark, right?
So I got in those confrontations because I would say, like, hmm, that's what she said.
And every once in a while, a guy would get over and be like, what'd you say?
Yeah.
And I would always go like, oh, hey, nothing.
I was just, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
There's a certain kind of boy energy at every age.
And it's just, you know, there's very much, I'm sure you've been around boys of the age, Jesus, really anywhere in childhood.
But there's a certain kind of restless boy energy, like I want to punch something thing or hit a tree with a stick or whatever.
That doesn't go away when you're 13 or 14.
It just takes a different form.
Yeah.
If you're having a bad day and somebody else is having a bad day, you may not appreciate the bad day that other person is having.
And then you're just like, you know, two young goats button up against each other.
I was always the tree.
Not the stick.
Are you the tree or the stick?
If you had a stick and you wanted to hit something hard and looked around, I was the one that looked like, I looked like the biggest tree.
But why I didn't, you know, like, I feel like, is that an open loop?
Is there going to be some 50-year high school reunion?
Not for him it's not.
It's only a loop for you probably.
What are you going to do?
You walk over and say, oh, now you're a Mr. Guy with your desk blotter.
Like, oh, how's that 57 Chevy with, yeah, what are you doing now?
It's all rusted out.
No, the thing is I got no beef with him.
I want him to be happy.
I want to be – I want to say like, hey, man –
we've known each other now for all these years and we've never ever really sat down and talked you know and i i don't know what i'm not going to get anything out of that probably or or maybe he's going to say i always loved you who knows i i tried this you were my favorite tree you were my favorite this this is so weird i was thinking about this the other day so
so you know in high school we called ourselves the going places gang my little gang and i talked about because you were going places well yeah because they because the socias called themselves the socias and they called themselves the cool kids and they called us the conserves and what is what is se hinton done to us we
My daughter had to read The Outsiders this year.
Oh, really?
She did her report on Cherry Valance, which was, I think, a fun character to do.
Oh, how cool.
I mean, everybody wanted to do Pony Boy, you know, but she wanted to do something a little more out there.
And her work has been heavily commended for covering Cherry Valance.
Hooray.
Well, stay gold.
Stay gold, Pony Boy.
I don't like fighting people who are hopped up.
That's my feeling.
Well, that's my feeling, too.
Yeah, and that's exactly right.
So was his name Mike?
Joe?
Jason?
Mike?
Well, so, yeah, he was one of the socias.
I always thought it was socks.
Yeah, right.
In eighth grade, when I read it, yeah, I thought it was socks.
We didn't like being called the conserved.
Somebody in our gang started calling us the going places gang.
It was tongue-in-cheek, but it was also not.
And...
And it was a thing we would never say to anybody.
We just whispered it sotto voce among ourselves.
Like, you know, the Going Places gang is going to show the socials how to make the 80s look like the 60s.
You did a lot of mumbling in high school is what I'm walking away with here.
But I talked about this story, you know, I think I talked about it at length with Dan one time.
And a certain group of the friends and fans of our shows, of all the great shows...
Started calling themselves the going places gang as a hyphenated going dash places.
Nope.
I think just just going places.
Okay.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Ralph Macchio.
Can you believe that?
Look at that.
Look at that.
Look at that.
What I've done is I sent.
Oh, my God.
I sent John a photograph of the cast of The Outsiders.
Patrick Swayze.
What's the name?
Matt Dillon, young Rob Lowe, young Tom Cruise, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, and Emilio Estevez.
Very cool Mickey Mouse shirt.
And I think that's exactly how the Socias pictured themselves, the boys.
Because although they were rich, they were... The Socias at your school, they weren't like the preppies from the rich kids camp?
No, that's the problem.
We were that.
You dressed like a preppy.
Yeah.
The Sochers, although they were rich, they thought of themselves as the cool blue-collar jockey.
That was the psychological tension.
That was the problem.
They did not think of themselves as the spoiled kids.
I get it.
Everybody wants to be the underdog in their story.
And they wore cowboy boots, and they had...
you know, and they drove pickup trucks.
It was, you know, like I drove a Fiat, right?
Like I was, I was embarrassing from an Alaska standpoint.
You drove a Fiat?
Your dedication to making life difficult goes so far back.
All the way.
Isn't a Fiat basically, I think there's a line and I want to say get shorty.
Isn't, isn't, isn't Fiat kind of notorious for,
fix it again tony they're notorious in every respect also it was a convertible okay there's there's no there i mean when i would pull into the high school parking lot and it was like chevy step side chevy short bed chevy short bed and then i mean i could drive my car under their trucks
But but again, they you know, they had they were the mullet wearers.
They were the acid wash jean guys.
They were the they were the yeah, they thought of themselves as the as the rock and rollers.
It's just exactly what what you see with the Trump
world now yeah where when you look at them and ask them who they are they say we're the fun ones we're the ones that can take a joke we're the party people we're the further that like you made us like this you you we're having fun with it because we have to have fun with it but it's all of you i guess the phrase is elites that have made it like this like i don't have the dignity of a lifestyle that my like parents had
And, like, I'm the perma-underdog now.
I think in our case, they could not make the case that they were the underdogs.
But they definitely saw that in America in 1983, the story was, the pride is back, America-USA.
morning in america but well i guess by that point was late morning in america but yeah and that was at the very beginning of the time when the word liberal became a dirty word and these i mean the socials weren't political but they were definitely like you know they were usa america before that even existed
But it is interesting, though, just in passing, though, we always see ourselves as the main character of our story, usually, for somewhat obvious reasons.
Nobody feels like an extra in their own story.
But it's also that to—I guess it's one—how do I put this?
I think it's—maybe at that time, maybe always, you can reject—
mostly reject the idea that, like, I have power because I'm a white kid in the suburbs.
Your narrative becomes more about, if I have status, it's because I've earned it with my behavior and my personality and my skills.
So you can still get to be – because who's the ultimate underdog of every story is, like, the Luke Skywalker of the Joseph Campbell thing, right?
Like, you're going to be the person who was a nobody, and then you really distinguish yourself.
It could be Jupiter Ascending.
Like, whatever it is, like, you're the person, like, Cinderella, basically.
And you came by it honestly.
And even though you're – as we used to say, ugly stepsisters are –
Technically and literally more high status than you like you're obviously the star of the show.
Otherwise, you know, you don't want to be the stepsister.
You want to be Cinderella Yeah, and I think I think we as the preppies
We imagined ourselves as the underdogs because we were nerds.
We were nerds and they kicked sand in our face.
Maybe a little bit like the mods.
Like we're a mod.
I mean, you could be the rocker.
But if you're the mod, like you're putting all the lamps on your scooter and the rockers are breaking your lamps, you know, and, you know, your ace face.
You know what I'm saying?
Like I think of mods being very much in that position where they're fancy, but they're still the underdogs.
They're taking speed and dancing in the middle of the day because that's the kind of thing an underdog does.
I think the primary difference was that the Sochas lived for today and the Conserves lived for tomorrow.
We put all our hopes in...
Um, the fact that we were going to go to college and get out of here and be and go out into the world.
And so what happened in high school was it was always prologue.
It's really, it's something to be survived, not to be celebrated.
I felt that very much at the time.
I'm one of those people.
I thought I was probably the first one, but I was very much one of those people who realized in situ that the thing about high school being the best years of your life might've been for somebody else, but it was very much not for
for us that this is i'm i'm like i'm tolerating this i'm gonna hopefully survive this i don't know what my future is but this is not a thing i mean it's like celebrating how long you waited at the dmv i i kind of i this is a question i ask people like what was your what were your peak years and i always get very surprising responses because it's kind of a loaded question from my standpoint because i don't
Think of it that way.
Like, I don't have peak years.
The older you get, the more stuff like that, I feel like.
Well, I mean, there is obviously the thing of, like, you know, I had to clean out the cat box yesterday, which entails getting down on my hands and knees and getting cat poop out of litter.
But that's my job.
And my knees hurt and my back hurt.
And I hit my head on the table.
That may not be the best years of my life.
Well, truth is, I'm super lucky to have what I have, but I can look back at a time and say, well, I wish my knees hurt less, but I don't know if that was my peak years.
And it depends on how you're going to meter this.
When I felt happiest...
When I felt most confident, when I didn't have a care in the world, there's all these different ways you could choose to meter the best years of your life.
But I don't know.
There's something a little bit empty about saying, well, I fell ass backwards into – I don't want to virtue signal here.
But if I fell ass backwards into being the person that I am –
And then, like, I did okay at sports.
I mean, is that really the thing you want, like, at first line in your obituary?
Is, like, I could run fast at 16?
Maybe.
I don't know.
I feel like those were the best years of my life is a very intuitive feeling for some people.
Like, if you ask them...
What was your peak?
They know immediately.
I think that not having a care in the world or similar is very much a part of it, usually.
Not having a care in the world and also like everything falls into place, right?
As soon as you leave high school, status, as you walk out into the world and you realize like, oh, wait a minute, I'm no longer like...
The second best person on the hockey team.
I'm just one more guy trying to find a job.
Yeah.
And then and maybe that feeling never goes away.
You know, maybe you're like, well, now I'm the second.
you know, I'm the assistant manager, I'm the assistant to the regional manager.
And it's still not better than having been the second best player on that hockey team because that was, I mean, everything was so clear.
What I realized the other day, and this is kind of exactly on this theme, and it's weird sometimes how we start talking about something and it's exactly what
Well, maybe it's not there's only two I'm with you.
I'm with you I it's funny how themes sometimes kind of like, you know, attach themselves to each other in a surprising way But I wrote my friends from high school and I said hey You know like I've got a fan group that is calling themselves the going places gang and
We made t-shirts for Dan Benjamin's show, you know, for Roadwork made t-shirts last year that said the Going Places Gang.
They were super cute.
We sold a bunch of them.
But now, you know, over this message board I started on Discourse.
Discourse?
Discourse.
Discourse.
So Discord is a thing, but Discourse is this open source thing.
message board software.
Oh.
D-I-S-C.
Oh, well, discourse with an E. Open source message board software.
You throw it up there and zippity zam, it's 2002 and you got a message board.
There you go.
There you go.
First.
This discourse community that I set up a month ago has become this super fun place.
Anyway, a lot of people posting fun stuff.
They sort of self-Christianed
the group as the Going Places Gang.
And then, you know, the guy from Meritocrates showed up and was like, hey, we should make Going Places Gang t-shirts for this group.
I talked to Dan about it.
He's fine with the idea, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
So I write my friends.
Did you feel the need to reach out to the original Going Places gang and get their approval?
Well, not their approval because they can go suck it.
But I did write them and say, all right, hey, Going Places gang, because we have a thread.
We have an email thread that we have.
that we talk to each other.
There's eight of us still in contact with each other.
Wow, good for you.
Yeah, we send messages.
They are largely a humorless bunch of people, right?
Like, well, hey, how's it going?
Good.
Here's some pictures of my kids and this, that, and the other.
And then I always will say something that will kill the thread every time.
I say, like, wow, that reminds me of the time that I, you know, remember that time?
Crickets, crickets, crickets.
Just crickets, crickets.
And, you know, when we were in high school, they weren't humorless.
But then when I think back, yeah, they were.
I mean, anyway, they're still some of my closest friends in the world.
And I wrote them and said, look, you're the Going Places gang once and forever.
But, you know, this message board community is going to make t-shirts.
And when we do, I want to send you each a Going Places gang t-shirt.
Oh, cool.
Because you're the original Going Places gang and you should be able to wear this with pride.
And a couple of the people were like, yeah, my kid will wear it here.
You can send it to them at Oberlin College or whatever.
They just don't want to play with you, do they?
They don't want to play.
But then one of...
And I said, I think I said in the thread, I was like, I have no idea who came up with Going Places Gang or what it means or where it came from.
But it's just one of those things lost to time.
Well, I get an email from Eric.
Eric is the kid who said, every time you look at the drinking fountain...
Same guy.
It's viral.
You know that's viral.
So now I think of you and Eric every time I see a water fountain, and I think I'm not the only one.
So his name's Eric Spurlock.
He said, every time you look at a drinking fountain sink filter, I want you to think of me.
And then he disappeared from my life.
I didn't talk to him for two decades.
Now he's on this thread.
He said the other day that he's getting ready to retire to
to Florida, to what are those things called?
The towns?
The communities?
Oh God, the Trump place?
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
There's that famous where everybody has a golf cart and likes Donald Trump.
Yeah, that, except now I guess there's a part of that that they are against Donald Trump and they've become... Over on the left side.
Yeah, over on the left side of the... They're called the ponds or the lawns.
They're the lawns, the yards.
Anyway, he's going to retire to the yards.
And he writes me and he says, you know, where that probably came from, the Going Places gang, is that John Gerald, who was his cousin, who was one year older than us.
So he was class of 85.
I was class of 86.
John Gerald was this guy.
He was the funny one in the class above me.
I admired him and feared him in equal measure because he had such a wit.
And he was so cruel.
It was that teenage boy cruelty.
He was so funny and so smart.
And Gerald had acne.
John Mulaney says about younger teenagers, they make fun of you, but in an accurate way.
100%.
He was...
And he was not, you know, John was not popular.
He was not, he didn't have a girlfriend.
He wasn't, um, liked, but he was feared and was a very prominent member of that class because he was so
smart and wicked and merciless.
And as a younger guy, when John was a junior and I was a sophomore, I mean, I had the good sense not to be an acolyte.
and to follow him around and be like, yeah, look over there, John.
You know, like I, but, but in my heart, I want to make fun of that guy.
Yeah.
Like, Hey, Hey, guess what?
But, but in my heart, cause you were butt in, in my heart, I just wanted to be at his elbow just to watch the master at work, you know?
And I, and I had to, I had, I was very studied in,
in being cool around John Gerald.
First of all, I didn't want his, I didn't want his dark light turned on me.
I love that phrase.
It makes no sense.
And yet it's totally true.
You just want to stay out of this person's dark light.
I don't want to be in your dark.
You know what I mean?
Like a band on the run, you know, like, uh, you know, uh, with the, with the spotlights there with James Coburn.
That guy's so fly.
Yeah.
But I also never wanted to miss when John Gerald, you know, was on.
And I remember one time, like John Gerald was there when I first got drunk.
John Gerald was, I remember sitting by the phone one night when, again, Eric Spurlock, who also, even though John was his cousin, Eric also was in awe of him and, you know, and also kind of tried to curry his favor while staying out of his dark light.
Eric called me one time and he was like, we're on our way over.
John, you know, John and Kevin and Rick and I are coming to pick you up.
And I, you know, I put on my best jacket and I sat on the stair in the entry hall waiting for them to come and they never came.
And I sat there all, you know, I sat there all night until whatever, midnight when I finally like kicked my shoes off and went, hung my head.
That's a horrible feeling, John.
It's terrible.
Teenagers, you know.
Yeah.
But so John Gerrold,
And the greatest moment of my high school years, John was a senior.
We were standing around in a group of seniors and I was a junior and had, you know, had kind of.
Already achieved so much by being allowed to stand in this group of seniors.
Oh, sorry.
Remind me again.
Are you a sophomore or junior?
I was a junior at this point.
It was very important for sub-seniors.
If you could be accepted by a pretty cool senior, that was a really big deal.
You might be 10 months apart in birth, but it was all the difference in the world.
All the difference.
I got to hang out for a while.
I was permitted to hang out with some cool seniors from the soccer team, which were the cool kids.
The legit cool kids.
They'd listen to the police and stuff.
And I loved that.
I almost got arrested for marijuana possession with them, but it was still a fun time.
Luckily, one of the other soccer players' dads was the cop that pulled us over, so he just let us go.
Oh, there you go.
Okay.
He shined his light dark on us Christy green came over to my house one time and Got drunk and Christy green was a very high status senior.
That's a very high status name Also, also redheaded.
Oh, come on man.
How do you get so many redheads?
You got more redheads than Joe Biden.
This is crazy.
No idea.
I have no Jesus Christ Okay, and I was like what you know Christy green is in my house that type of thing, right?
Yeah
Anyway, I'm in this group.
I hope I don't fart.
I say something to this group.
It stops the conversation dead.
And John Gerald looks at me across the group and goes, nice one, Roderick.
Whoa.
Like I said something that was so cold, such a cold-ass burn.
He kind of stepped out of character a little bit.
Well, and no one else in the group wanted to be the next one to speak.
It wasn't that they stopped dead because they were like,
how did this kid get in here it was more like and gerald fucking passed the torch he literally passed the torch to me well so so eric writes me and he says i don't know if you remember but one of gerald's burns was when people would
We'd be standing there watching people do something.
And it was, this was a, this was on a, because Gerald was, uh, he was at a level of status that was outside the normal status games, right?
He was not, he was not popular.
He was not wealthy.
He was not beautiful.
He was, but also he was not a loser and,
Because he was, in some ways, like, he was a rogue.
He was a rogue knight.
It reminds me a little bit of, see, this is going to sound like I'm talking about townies, which I think is a disparaging term.
But it's almost like he's almost like he is beyond the scope of high school evaluation.
Like he's playing, you know, a different game.
Playing a different game, but I think his power only was operative in high school.
Right.
It's another one of those things where if you graduated from high school as the funniest dude in the class and you went to work at a Meineke muffler dealership and you're the funniest guy there.
A lot of people regard me as the most likely to succeed at Meineke muffler.
You know, like it's a different, you know, to graduate to be the funniest guy in America, there's a long, dirty road there.
from being the funniest guy at your high school.
And that's the problem with being the funny guy in high school.
You immediately think like, well, now I'm going to go work at the Letterman show.
Yeah.
And, you know, when my high school voted me most humorous, I really did feel like, well, what else is there?
I mean, it's basically getting straight A's.
It's just that you're most humorous.
And I'll just put that on my application and I'll be, you know, I'll be a comedy writer.
And it's just like, nope, now you're thrown into the next group of
people that all were the funniest person in high school, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
But Gerald, one of his, one of his bits was someone would do something and it was, it was across the board.
Like if, uh, if one of the, like the richest socias did something stupid all the way down to like a total bozo, Gerald would sing this little song under his breath.
He would go,
Going places.
Got a nice bright future.
Going places.
And it was just his way of saying like, it was his way of calling everyone a loser.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
That might be where it came from, huh?
Well, so that's, so Eric wrote me this thing and he's like, that has to be where the going places gang came from.
We repurposed it from Gerald's
Super Burn, this little song that he would sing, anytime somebody did something and everyone looked, trying to figure out what was happening, what your hot take on it was, and Gerald would just go, going places.
And it was like, oh, devastating, right?
Because they're not going places.
And it was his.
I love the fact that it's sung.
It's a little song.
It's almost like because I have a similar anecdote.
I'll tell you later.
But there'll be like a thing where I think a lot of good inside jokes are like almost like proto memes in that there's some little line that reflects a sarcastic take on that person's interior world.
Right.
So when he sings Going Places, I think part of the implication is that that person is singing that song to themselves as in like, hey, look at me, I'm going places.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
That person is thinking like, check me out.
And Gerald in singing that song was also situating himself in the group of people for whom high school was prologue.
Right?
He... Yeah, the first episode of a TV show I love, Party Down, I've watched it many, many times.
We watched it again this week.
So it's basically about waiter, caterers, very funny cast, but they go to this very suburban...
household and the father in the household is, you know, that guy from Veronica Mars and Galaxy Quest, whose name escapes me.
But there's this really painful scene where they're like giving out all the awards for like best Christmas decorations, like mailbox of the year, all this kind of stuff.
And like you so know what it feels like to be in that situation where you're either super invested in hoping that you win
you know what i mean like best lawn or you're the kind of person going i cannot believe i'm sitting here listening to the nominees for best lawn and there's like you could be very like similar people but like you have to put up this front of being like i'm intensely interested in who has the best weather vein and that's a little bit like high school in some ways we're like you sure would like to be first of all most humorous that's tough class clown right and
Whatever.
Or most likely to succeed, you know, a senior or best senior couple or whatever.
And, like, you have kind of two minds, I think.
It's like us and the phony awards.
It's the only award we ever wanted.
We had to make it up ourselves, and our friend made us the award.
But, like, you're not invested in the mailbox, but, like, you still kind of hope you'll win.
I think that's a little bit what high school felt like.
I was technically two senior superlatives, so they can only give you one.
What's that?
What were your two?
See, first of all, this is a jam up because all my friends worked on yearbook.
But the one they gave me was most talented.
I'd also won class clown, but you can only win one and they give you the one you got more votes on.
The whole thing was a jam up.
It doesn't matter.
So I can sit here and go like, oh, it doesn't matter.
But I got my photo in the yearbook playing guitar as most talented senior.
Yeah.
I knew that was bullshit at the time, not least because one of the other people, my female counterpart, was on yearbook staff.
We were both just in the right place at the right time to get a meaningless award, but I was really excited that I got it.
That's not so different from life, but that's very much high school.
That's very much the homeowners association.
There's all kinds of stuff like that.
You know, nobody wants to be the person where their friends never showed up.
And then they just take off their shoes and go to bed at midnight.
That's a terrible feeling.
It's terrible.
I when and I think I've probably told the story when they announced the senior superlatives.
They actually read them out over the intercom.
Oh, my gosh.
It's the ultimate, ultimate, like, Carnation Day.
Well, and for the entire school, right?
So three whole classes, freshman, sophomore, junior, don't care at all.
And then 95% of the senior class also doesn't care.
I think the lower three do care in a way that they wouldn't admit, which is like it's mainly going to be either I hope somebody I like got this, even though it's bullshit, or I hope someone I hate got this because it is bullshit.
And that'll prove to me in a way that I can leverage into funny bits that this is absolutely bullshit.
All these people have the same haircut and, you know, a nice car.
I think when you're in high school, at least my recollection was that you do line up behind seniors.
Yeah, sure.
To use the word, I hope correctly, they're your champion.
That's right.
You know what I mean?
Not in the sense of the winner, but in the sense of I support this person.
I see this person as the head of my Game of Thrones house.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And Gerald was the head of my house.
John Roderick King in the North.
And when I was that person, I was absolutely the king of, you know, I was the king of a house for a whole group of... BMOC.
Of boys.
Yeah, right.
Sophomores and juniors and freshman boys that kind of sidled up next to me and wanted to, and, you know, and some of them were totally like, look at that guy over there.
And some of them were just like, who would do that?
Do the voice.
Do the voice.
Do the voice, exactly.
But so I wrote back to Eric, and I was like, I haven't talked to John Gerald or even thought of him since 1985.
And Gerald actually was the first person to get me into working out.
One summer he was like, came up to me, and this was a rare gesture of friendship, right?
He was like, and it wasn't even advanced as a gesture of friendship, right?
He said, you're out of shape.
You're worthless and weak.
Meet me at – what is this, a Twisted Sister pin on your uniform?
On your uniform?
He said, you've got to meet me.
Niedermeyer.
Meet me out at the Gold's Gym on Muldoon, and you better be there every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the summer.
And I was like, okay.
Okay.
You know, mostly just like, whoa, John Gerro wants me to hang out with him?
And I went to the Gold's Gym on Muldoon.
Eric was there, too.
And the three of us worked out.
We pumped iron.
And Gerald would stand there and be like, you know, you guys... In my mind's eye, I didn't see Gerald as a weightlifting guy.
He wasn't.
He was a skinny, pimply nerd until his senior year.
And I think he realized, I'm never going to not have acne.
I'm never going to be beautiful or popular or cool.
But I'm not going to be...
fat or, or skinny, you know, I'm not going to be, you're not going to kick sand in my face.
I'm not going to be make fun of me.
Right.
I'm going to be, I'm going to have muscles.
And so in his way, like Eric, his cousin was skinny and I was husky and he was like, I'm going to get you guys in the gym and you're going to, and it was, you know, it started a kind of lifelong, not relationship, but I don't mind going to the gym, you know, go to the gym and work on the things.
I never think to do it, but I'm not afraid of it, right?
So I wrote Eric, and I said, I'm going to write Gerald, and I'm going to remind him of this story.
I'm still trying to be Gerald's friend.
Of course.
I'm going to remind him of this story.
I'm going to send him a Go and Places Gang t-shirt.
And Eric writes back, and this is his first cousin, you know.
He says, Gerald ghosted me in 1986, and I haven't spoken to him since.
Whoa.
And I was like, what?
And he said, yeah, he got himself in to, he was working in a video store.
Gerald was.
And the manager of the video store said, we should become filmmakers.
Gerald.
applied to NYU film school and got it.
Whoa.
Really?
Wow.
Went to NYU film school and, uh, realized that he wasn't going to be, he, you know, he wasn't going to be a director.
He wasn't going to, you know, he wasn't going to spend 20 years in the trenches just so he could be a focus puller.
And he started to write scripts.
He spent, uh, whatever, how many, however many years it was writing, uh,
spec scripts for pennies living in his car.
And then he wrote the script, the screenplay, I guess they call it, for Romeo Must Die.
Whoa.
He wrote Romeo Must Die and then became like a Hong Kong action movie script doctor.
And now lives in Hollywood, teaches a class on, like, how to be a badass screenwriter.
You know, like, kind of that tough... He's still got that tough guy thing of, like...
You know, being a screenwriter is not for pussies.
Like an Elmore Leonard kind of like tough guy Bukowski thing.
Yeah.
And he wrote a book, and I think it's called Being a Screenwriter is Not for Pussies or something.
This is amazing.
You have so many connections with IMDb.
And he's still out there.
He's still alive.
He still probably is exactly the same.
He hasn't talked to anyone from high school.
Since the day he left high school apparently Wow and so for the last week was more committed to that bit than you probably realized He was really committed to it and I know I know a couple other people like this talking about closing the loop people who are gone Who left the left their old crowd a really good friend of my sister's about five years ago and
And he was like really tight friends with all of her friends.
Five years ago, stopped communicating with anybody.
It's not like he moved.
He still lives in Anchorage.
He still is doing the same.
He still works at the same job, still does the same stuff.
Just stopped communicating with all of his old friends.
Wow.
New friends now and won't reply to emails, you know, just like change, change of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But so I've spent the last week trying to figure out, basically searching my own feelings.
Is this a funny enough story to me that I reach out to John Gerald through his management?
to try and close this loop.
Mm-hmm.
Do I want... Ooh, that's a good question.
Right?
Because then you start asking, if you're me, you start asking, well, what do I have to offer this person, who at this point might as well be a stranger?
Like, what do I have to offer this person and...
And this is just my process.
I might be projecting, but this is my process.
Do I have enough to offer this person that this is worth doing?
And then the thing I really try to leaven that with is...
A previously named friend said, you know, it always hurts to ask, as opposed to it never hurts to ask.
It can be a burden that you put on people to ask for their attention, even with just an email.
And it's like, again, further leavening?
Are they having a terrible day?
Like, did his class get canceled?
Like, who knows?
You know what I mean, though?
Like, I do try to think about, like, do I really have something to offer this person?
Not in terms of status or whatever, but, like, am I ultimately, like, trying to get something out of somebody else?
Or am I trying to give something to that person?
And if I have something to give, like, then I maybe should do this.
But if I'm really trying to get something, that's a lot more complicated.
And what's interesting is that I'm a storyteller, and it turns out John Gerald is, too.
You can't be a screenwriter and not be a storyteller.
That's tough.
That would be tough.
And John Gerald always was a storyteller.
It was one of the things I admired about him.
So for me, to have somebody come out of nowhere, let's say a kid that was a junior in high school when I was a senior, one of the people that lined up behind my sigil...
To write me and say, an offhanded comment that you made.
You got your impersonal lady more.
An offhanded comment that you made in 1986 was a thing that stuck with me.
And now I have an active online fan community and they have named themselves after your offhanded remark.
And I would like to send you a t-shirt of that offhanded remark and duly credit you with it.
I would be so thrilled.
I would think that was the greatest gift for somebody to reach out to me with that story, closing a loop.
That's right in your wheelhouse.
That's the happiest kind of loop-closing surprise.
Love it.
I love that stuff.
One offhanded comment you made one time sparked this small thing in me, and 25 years later it made...
made this happen in the world and, and I, and I thought of you and I wanted to make, uh, make this gesture.
But if John Gerald has decided at some point in his life that he wants nothing to do with his past or nothing, you know, because he might think high school was incredibly painful time.
He might feel like he reinvented himself and he doesn't want to look back.
Um,
What I'm doing by writing him and saying, hey, John, you know, because I'm not a stranger to him, right?
I mean, like, hey, I haven't talked to you in 35 years or whatever, but I just wanted to.
You were responsible for a good one at one point.
You were responsible for a good one.
You know, there are a thousand people right now walking around with the T-shirt of a thing you used to say.
And I turned it into another thing.
And I didn't even realize I was doing it until I made the connection a week ago when your cousin told me.
that that's where it came from.
But what I'm doing really is sitting on the bottom step of my house, sitting in the entryway, waiting to get picked up.
Oh, Jesus, right.
And by sending that email, I'm basically setting myself up to sit there until midnight and then kick off my shoes.
You know yourself well enough.
You might steam.
Well, you know, I can't, there's nothing to steam because it's like, I can't be mad if Gerald doesn't want to receive this.
But it's an opportunity to, well, to say like, this is a story instead of just a series of things happening.
This is a story that needs an end.
It needs closure.
It needs to come full circle.
I need to write to John because this story is too good.
It's too good to not try and get it to him and get the...
The loop.
The resolution.
The loop.
Maybe this is the thing.
Maybe John Gerald writes to his cousin, Eric.
Maybe his heart will grow by three sizes that day.
That's exactly right.
Maybe now he's interested.
Maybe now he'll hang out a little bit and not be so, you know, Hollywood.
Sure, he gives the presents back to the who's.
You know, maybe this is it.
But there's a 98% chance that I'll write this to his management and his management...
He doesn't even send it to him, but if they did, that he would, you know, crumple it up, throw the... Throw it with all the others.
Yeah.
All the other reminders that a t-shirt has been made of his humor when he was 17.
He'd rip it out of the typewriter, throw it over his shoulder and go, sit, Ubu, sit.
Good talk.
Let's stop it there.
Well, probably.
So when I was first moving to San Francisco in 1999 for a long time, my friend Michael Ferguson, who's been so much of my life, Sherpa, let me stay with him, and he basically just kind of introduced me to San Francisco.
Anyway, long story short, he lived in the Western Edition, and we were just walking around one day, and we saw this man.
I feel like this was pretty near his place.
There was a guy in this very rumpled suit and he had a briefcase that was just like loaded with some kind of papers.
I mean, it could have been like, you know, Chinese real estate flyers.
And he looked, he looked very harried and he was just muttering, muttering to himself as he like organized this rat king of papers in his briefcase.
And
And Michael pulled a – Gerald, is that the guy's name?
Yeah.
Michael pulled a Gerald here.
And Michael leans over to me and he goes, Salesman of the Month, Salesman of the Month, Salesman of the Month.
Yeah.
We're like, that's Michael's version of what that guy says to himself all day long.
I'm going to be the salesman of the month, salesman of the month, salesman of the month.
To this day, over 20 years later, whenever I see somebody who's being very frenzied, a little bit manic as they participate in something that seems relatively low stakes, I'll just go salesman of the month, salesman of the month, salesman of the month.
It's so great.
That stays with you.
It stays with you.
I mean, one of the things about doing this show is that all of our offhand little bullshit
becomes a t-shirt yeah right a fucking t-shirt you could do it on red bubble we don't get a nickel hakuna matata it's so great thank you so great but it's also it's also weird you never i mean sometimes we say something and you and we know it in the moment like oh well that was a thing super train t-shirt yeah super train
But there are a lot of other ones where it's like, sure, take it and run.
Yeah.
I don't think John Gerald thinks that someone in the world right now is still singing Going Places.
John Gerald, if you're out there, man, if you're listening to this right now, just get with John.
Close the loop.
Accept the shirt.
Close the loop, John.
It's not too much to ask.
Yeah, you can wear it to your class.
Yeah.