From legendary character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, comes a collection of memoiristic pieces about life, love, acting, and adventure, told with a beguiling voice and an uncommon talent for storytelling.
The Dangerous Animals Club by Stephen Tobolowsky is a series of stories that form a non-linear autobiography. Each story stands on its own, and yet there are larger interconnecting narratives that weave together from the book's beginning to end. The stories have heroics and embarrassments, riotous humor and pathos, characters that range from Bubbles the Pigmy Hippo to Stephen's unforgettable mother, and scenes that include coke-fueled parties, Hollywood sets, French trains, and hospital rooms.
Told in a vivid, honest, and wondrous voice, Tobolowsky manages to render the majestic out of the seemingly mundane, profundity from the patently absurd, and grace from tragedy. This book marks the debut of a massively talented storyteller.
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Stephen Tobolowsky has appeared in more than 100 movies and 200 television shows, including unforgettable roles in Mississippi Burning, Groundhog Day, and Memento. He is the author of The Dangerous Animals Club and My Adventures with God. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and sons.
5.
THE ALCHEMIST
WE DON’T CHOOSE our memories. Our memories choose us. Why certain thoughts rise to levels of importance and others vanish is not entirely obvious to me.
I will always remember the night in Boston when my father punched a bus. People could remember their fathers for lots of reasons. Dad taught me the alphabet. He would give me a different letter on a small chalkboard every day on his way to work. Then I would ask for something that became known as a “puffed cheek kiss.” He would fill his mouth with air and puff out his cheeks, and then I would kiss his cheek while he let the air out with a sort of expelling-air-but-not-quite-farting sound that made me laugh. And then I would demand that we do it again. And again. And again. Until he protested that he “had to go to work.”
When I was ten, Dad took me to the Lions Club midget go-cart races and put me in charge of the concession stand. I was ten! In charge of a concession stand! Talk about having the fox watch the henhouse. It may have demonstrated questionable judgment on his part, but it was great. There I was, unsupervised, in charge of taking in money and dispensing candy bars, popcorn, corn dogs, unlimited cola, and soft-serve ice cream. I went through half a box of soft-serve cones within the first hour. I was my biggest customer. And I was free.
The head of the event came over, red-faced, and scolded me. I don’t remember ever having been scolded by an adult other than my father or a teacher. It was a good preparation for television directors, but I didn’t know that at the time. He told me he was going to “count cones on me.” If I was short, I would have to pay him for each ice cream eaten.
Dad was embarrassed. I let him down. I was scared. I was ashamed—for about seven minutes. Then I figured out I could get around the prohibition on eating ice cream by just avoiding the cones altogether and dispensing the soft serve directly into my hand. No cone. No trail. No problem.
But if you were to ask me at a party what event I remembered most about my dad, it would be the snowy night in Boston. We were crossing the street. A bus waiting for the light inched forward into the crosswalk and Dad whirled around and punched it. He punched the bus. To the bus’s credit, it stopped. Not from the force of the blow but from the shock of the bus driver that some man would give a right hook to his bus’s grill.
Now why has that memory chosen me? Out of all the little, and the big, and the wonderful, and the sad moments I could remember—why this one?
Bertolt Brecht in his book Development of an Aesthetic wrote about creating the gestus for a character in a play. The gestus was the character-logical gesture. It was the single external act that represented the character’s hidden inner life. Maybe the swing at the bus was my dad’s gestus. Possible meanings of the gesture could be: he always felt he was fighting against something bigger than himself, his willingness to protect his family at any cost, his hatred of mass transit. Who knows?
The Talmud, the set of Jewish holy books second in importance to the Bible itself, suggests that you have to use great care in interpreting some dreams, that often the explanation of a dream is more powerful than the dream itself. The interpretation can become true, even if it is wrong. Using that as a caution, I will refrain from trying to divine why the memory of the bus and Dad is so important to me. It is enough to say that it is.
I have two strong memories of my mother. The first was on my twenty-seventh birthday. I was still depressed from the death of Bubbles, the pigmy hippopotamus. I was in Los Angeles where I was doing a children’s theater production of California’s Spanish heritage for the public school system. I took off the sombrero for a few days and flew to Dallas for the big celebration.
We had a sort of ritual for birthdays. The birthday boy or girl would pick his or her favorite restaurant. Like most families, we went to a narrow range of eateries. Our family was enamored of “all-you-can-eat” restaurants. Texas was big on all-you-can-eat. The idea is similar to the cattle trough. You come in, pay one price, and eat until you rupture your peritoneum. There was The Shed, which was all-you-can-eat steak. Pedro’s was another favorite, which was all-you-can-eat Mexican. And Big Chinese Restaurant, which was all-you-can-eat Chinese.
The Shed was rumored to serve what the waiters called retreads. These were steaks that were on other people’s plates but were not eaten. Rather than waste food, they put the slightly used steak on your plate, rewarmed it, and wha-la, retread. That was the risk you ran if you went to The Shed. I never thought the idea of getting retreads was that bad. It was like eating at home. You would just wait until your sister got up from the table to get something to drink and you would take something off of her plate and eat it before she got back. No harm, no foul.
Pedro’s was worse. They got busted for serving dog food in the enchiladas. We had to stop going there. With the temporary closure of Pedro’s and the bad rep of The Shed, all of the all-you-can-eat diners headed for Big Chinese Restaurant. They were swamped. What good is a big Chinese buffet if your access to the egg rolls is blocked by several three-hundred-pound people in front of you? It was like playing against the Green Bay Packers without a helmet.
I decided to buck tradition. I decided I would not go to an all-you-can-eat for my birthday dinner. I chose Vincent’s Seafood Restaurante. Vincent’s was as swanky a place as I had ever eaten at in Dallas.
Slight digression. My father never gave me the “sex talk” when I was a young man, but he did give me the “restaurant talk” about what restaurants to avoid because they will overcharge you. The list went something like this:
Avoid:
1. Any restaurant with linen tablecloths.
2. Any restaurant where the waiters wear jackets.
3. Any restaurant with an e at the end of the word “restaurante.”
4. Any restaurant where they charge for refills of iced tea.
Vincent’s had them all. But what made Mom almost choke on her saltine was when I ordered an appetizer. I could have been the first Tobolowsky in history to order an appetizer. The appetizer was bread at all-you-can-eat places. They gave it to you for free and kept it coming. At Vincent’s I ordered a half dozen oysters. On the half shell.
As far as Mom was concerned, this was not the act of a rational mind. I’m sure she chalked it up to my being an actor or the corruption that comes from living in California. And she was probably right on both counts. They brought the oysters on a bed of rock salt. I offered Mom one. She looked at me as if I had handed her a bucket of snot. She declined.
I ate my oysters, dipped in red sauce, in silence. As we waited for our main course, Mom reached over and started grabbing the empty oyster shells off of my plate and stuffing them in her purse.
I almost choked on my Tabasco. The following conversation happened in a tense, rapid whisper:
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“I’m taking the oyster shells.”
“Why?”
“I’m taking them home. If we are going to pay five dollars for what amounts to a plate of salt, I’m not going to waste the shells.”
“What do you mean, ‘waste the shells’? You can’t use the shells. Nobody uses the shells. They have oyster liquid on them. How are you going to use the shells?”
“I can make a soap dish out of them.”
“Soap dish? We don’t need a soap dish. Nobody takes the shells home to make a soap dish.”
“I can make buttons out of them.”
“Buttons! Who makes buttons? You’ve never made a button in your life. Don’t you need some kind of button-making machine? You just buy buttons at the dime store. Leave the shells. Mom, if you take the shells everyone will think you’re crazy.”
She returned the shells to my plate of salt, grudgingly.
Mom was the epitome of wackiness in a good-hearted way. My brother, Paul, told me about the time he had a one-hour layover at the Dallas airport. Mom drove out to see him. In the brief meeting, she brought him out to her car, tied a tablecloth around his neck, gave him a haircut, fed him his favorite dinner (pot roast), and pulled out the family cat for him to pet before he had to rush in and be on his way to Austin.
A second memory of Mom. It was twentysome-odd years later. I was lucky. I got a job shooting a movie in Dallas. I decided to bring our youngest son, William, with me so he could hang with his grandparents. William was five. Mom volunteered to do baby duty while I worked. At this stage of his life, William loved turtles. He loved turtles more than about anything, so Mom decided to take him to Turtle Creek where the chances of seeing a turtle were high.
When I got home from the shoot that evening, I walked into a lot of excitement. Mom ran up to me and said, “Stephen, we had such a good day! We were walking through the park along the creek. It was so beautiful and there were so many ducks and swans and—we found an egg!”
Mom led me around the corner. She had converted our breakfast area and part of our living room into a makeshift hatchery. She had pulled a little table from the garage. She found a small basket and filled it with newspaper and strips of soft cloth. She took Dad’s reading lamp and had it tilted into the basket for warmth. I took a peek. Lo and behold, there was an egg.
William was watching the egg with fascination. He whispered that its mother had left it. It would die unless we gave it a home. Mom said that it seemed like the only right thing to do.
William instructed us that we had to turn the egg to help it hatch. Mom explained she had been turning the egg every hour. William nodded with authority. That was right. You had to turn the egg. We all took turns turning the egg that evening.
I was shooting the film for about a week more. Seven days. Seven days spent in egg turning, egg checking, egg speculating. Mom would get up throughout the night to turn the egg. I would lie awake at night certain that one morning we would wake up and find some kind of mallard on the breakfast table.
William talked about the egg constantly. He said we had to make certain that when the baby was born we didn’t touch it because that would put “human smell” on it and no other birds would come near him.
I asked him, why in God’s name did they take the egg in the first place? Taking the egg from the creek put “human smell” on it. And now we were stuck. If it hatched we would have a human-smelling bird that would be lonely all of its life or Mom and Dad would be stuck taking care of a wild bird in the backyard. Dad piped in quietly, “Or eating it.” That didn’t help. William was upset. Mom felt guilty.
I took Mom aside and told her that there was one solution. We had to get the egg back to the creek before it hatched so its mother could find it and take proper care of it (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
Mom and William came with me to the creek to pinpoint the area where they discovered the egg. It was a busy day. There were lots of picnickers, lots of hand-holders, lots of bike riders. Very few birds.
Mom and William became unsure of the exact area where they snatched the egg. William was now upset that if we just put it on the ground, the mother would never find it. It was tantamount to bird murder.
We drove home with the egg. It went back into the nest and for our final days in Dallas the routine continued. William felt sure that the egg moved. I don’t think it did.
The day arrived when we had to go back to Los Angeles. William wanted the egg to go back with us. Mom hinted that it was probably the best thing to do. I called my wife, Ann, at home and told her we were bringing back a charge. She wanted to know if it was alive. “Sort of,” I said.
When we got back to Los Angeles, Ann took over from Mom and built a makeshift incubator using my older son Robert’s reading lamp aimed at a small basket filled with shredded cloth and newspaper. William explained about turning the egg and “human smell.” Ann sighed and went to look up the gestation period of various ducks and geese to get an idea how long this period of our lives could last.
Time dragged on. After five weeks we were both sure that the egg was a goner, but we were unsure as to what to do. We decided to throw the egg away. If there was a crisis, we would tell William that we took the egg to the Los Angeles River where we saw a family of ducks, and we put the egg by the water and when we left the ducks were waddling toward the egg. In other words, we would lie.
But on the way to the trash bin, the egg was dislodged and it fell onto the concrete driveway. It cracked. And to our amazement—we discovered—it was a hard-boiled egg from someone’s lunch.
For six weeks we had guarded, warmed, turned, protected, took field trips with, flew cross-country with, spent sleepless nights fretting over someone’s lunch.
I called Mom with the news. She took it in stride. The time she spent protecting the dream of her grandchild was time well spent.
I have no idea why the thousands of days and troves of far more significant moments graciously recede before this memory of my mother, William, and the egg.
If I were a reader of dreams living in Talmudic times, I could venture a guess. I would say that both of these memories of Mom show the common thread of a woman who had a close relationship to the miraculous: someone unafraid of making buttons out of oysters and wild birds from picnic baskets. For my brother, Paul, she could turn the front seat of an Oldsmobile into a family home complete with a cat and a pot roast. She was an alchemist who maybe, on occasion, could spin common cloth into gold.
I AM ALWAYS amazed and confused when the government appoints a committee to get to the bottom of something. In the political world there is comfort in putting what we call “certainty” in the hands of someone else. It’s understandable. Sometimes everything you know is wrong.
My son William attended a co-op preschool. It was outdoors in a fenced-off area of a city park and all of the parents took turns being teacher’s assistants. In translation, that meant washing hands, taking to the potty, and keeping the little ones from hitting each other with folding chairs.
There was one five-year-old boy who had a regular routine. He would arrive at school. He would run into the toy shed and emerge five minutes later in a dress, feathered hat, and pearls. He would sling a purse over his shoulder and start pushing a baby carriage around. The teacher never said a thing about it. None of the kids said anything about it. They just kept running around throwing dirt at one another. None of us “teacher’s assistants” said anything, either. We would just look at each other. And through that eye contact—in a millisecond—entire volumes were exchanged. And in that exchange came the precious commodity called certainty. We were certain we knew all about this little boy—his past, his present, and his probable future walking the runway during Fashion Week in New York.
One day the little fellow was in a corner of the yard trying on some new jewelry and a pair of heels that matched his purse, when his mother sat down on the bench next to me. She smiled and sighed. Her voice filled with emotion: “It’s so dear. Look at him. It’s amazing.”
“Yes. Amazing,” I said.
“He’s our miracle chil...
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