An Excerpt

...from my soon-to-be-published Memoirs:

I remember my first day of kindergarten fairly vividly. I had turned five years old two months earlier and knew that if I wanted to have my Die Hard script taken seriously I would have to go through the rituals of school. My first memory is getting yelled at for pulling my pants all the way down to my ankles when I pissed. I have no idea why I did this, but that’s how I pissed back then. What the hell did I know? Hey what am I, a goddam doctor? I was standing at the john pissing, Toughskins at my ankles, when a teacher walked in and yelled at me for my pissing modus operandi. It’s very comforting to know that back then a teacher could walk in on a five year old whose pants were down at his ankles and stand there having a conversation with him. And I didn't even go to Catholic School!

Hey, does “Toughskins at my ankles” make you think of the “Calvin's in a ball on the front seat past eleven on a school night?” line from The Breakfast Club? Me too!

Mostly, I remember looking around and seeing a bunch of kids crying. Which I didn’t get; even at such an early age, I knew that the one thing any kid should want is to be out of his parents’ sight for a few hours at a time. I thought I’d show up and heeeeeey, some kids my own age, no meddlesome parents in sight, let’s do some cuttin’ up! But they were all bawling for “mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Christ. I’ve noticed this has become even more prevalent in the present generation, kids wanna be around their parents all the time. What the fuck is this? I had a woman in my office a few years ago, and she had two kids. One 13 years old, one 12. EVERY day, like clockwork, at about 3:30 the phone would ring and it’d be these two idiots, calling their mom and sniveling “when you coming home? We’re booooooooored, come home!!!” They actually wanted her to quit her job so she’d be at home all day for them!! Is this the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? “Gee, I’m bored. Hey, you know what would liven things up? Hanging out with a coupla 100 year olds…maybe they can give me some more lessons on right vs. wrong! Yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!” All my brother and I wanted when we were kids were for our parents to get the fuck outta the house. Which I would think was fairly normal. And when you’re a kid, one hour equaled approximately 4 days in adult time - nowadays if you tell me I have one hour to do anything, I just say “aw, fuck it” and sit in a chair waiting for the hour to be up. Probably thinking about Valerie Malone at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Or the generalized binomial theorem. But back then, if it was 4pm and your parents were coming back at 5pm you had plenty of time to build three forts, set up a pretend newspaper complete with printing press and editor and do a complete re-enactment of Star Wars, word for word. Mostly, you were just thrilled the adults were outta the house. We had an agreement with our parents when my brother and I were kids: they’d let us go out on our own all day long, and we wouldn’t tell them how close we had come to getting ourselves killed. Clean, simple, everyone was happy. Unlike today’s generation of pussies.