I hopped off of this table and I thought I’m just going to go home. The threshold to which you need to be hospitalized is still pretty high, but I really fucked myself up. I could barely walk. I hadn’t broken anything, but my whole body had bruises all over the side of it that grew as the weeks went by. For two weeks I was in bed. I was a fucking wreck and my motorcycle was gone. I slept that night and I just felt really terrible. I think I peed myself. It was just a really bad, humiliating experience. Then I looked in the mirror the next day and I was balding. I saw it for the first time that I was losing my hair.
Within that week Catch a Rising Star closed. Catch and The Improv went down like one-two. They both closed and things started getting really bad. Things immediately started getting bad and the 1990s came and all the clubs started closing and I couldn’t make a living anymore and I couldn’t pay my rent. That night was a huge, instant turning point. Everything from that night on in my life went badly for like three, four years.
STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY—ACTOR
I was in graduate school and I was a versatile actor. I always played the old men. I was playing, like, an eighty-year-old man in this play and I was spraying my hair with streaks and tips as opposed to wearing a gray wig so I wouldn’t look like a huge transvestite. The last day of the show, I went back to my little apartment and I washed my hair, and as I’m washing my hair, huge clumps of hair started coming out in my hand. I mean, gigantic clumps, like I was around radiation or something.
I don’t remember if I cried, but I felt like I cried for a month. I felt like it was the end of all my dreams. This is the end of me being a star in show business, this is it. From that moment on, in the shower that afternoon, I could look and I could see I was going to be one of those guys that looked like I was balding. I was devastated. I didn’t know what I would do, and I think I was in kind of a denial, really, for months.
I didn’t see a woman after that that didn’t look up to the hairline and go, “Oh, okay, bad DNA. Okay, we’ll move on.” Every casting director smiled at me and then the little eyes kept going up, saying, “Okay, maybe a professor or teacher down the line.” It just happened that I didn’t quit, I guess.
DANNY MCBRIDE
I substitute taught for a while. When I moved back to Virginia, I was bartending at night and substituting in the daytime. I was making an honest living. The first day I was a substitute teacher, I was in there and I was just feeling weird.
The first group of kids came in. I had written my name on the chalkboard, doing the shit that I remember people would do when I was in school. I just started unraveling with the first kids. I was introducing myself, and then all of a sudden, I found myself having to justify to these kids why I was a substitute teacher and just tell them, “I got real plans. This is a fucking stop on the block for me. I’m on my way back out to LA after I save up some money.” These kids are just looking at me, like, “We don’t give a shit. We’re not even listening.” These were probably ninth or tenth graders.
I needed to justify it. “Hey, this isn’t my full-time thing.” All they cared about was like, “Mr. McBride, you smoke weed?” All they cared about was if I smoked weed and what kind of car I drove. “What kind of car are you driving?” I’m like, “A Hyundai Elantra.” They’re like, “Pssh.”
TERRY GROSS—RADIO HOST
I taught in the toughest inner-city junior high school in Buffalo, New York. Eighth grade. This would have been 1972.
I wanted to be the teacher who I wanted to have when I was in junior high, so I foolishly went to school dressed in my purple corduroy pants and work boots. How am I doing?
It was terrible, it was so stupid. I probably did my fair share of weeping the first day. It got worse as things went on, because it just fell apart. The first day they’re testing you. Then they realize how weak you are, how bad at this you are. I couldn’t keep the students in the classroom, I couldn’t teach them a lesson, I couldn’t do anything.
Marc
You were a teacher with a personality of a substitute.
Terry
I was a child. I was twenty-two. I was shorter than they were, and I didn’t know how to be the authority figure.
I got fired in six weeks.
People say there’s no way of firing teachers. Well, they fired me. I’m living proof.
This is a really chaotic, violent school and one day one of the students took out a knife and dropped it just to see, what is Ms. Gross going to do?
Marc
What did Ms. Gross do?
Terry
Ms. Gross watched. Ms. Gross acted like she was in a movie and she went oh, a kid just dropped a knife, I don’t know what to do. I felt like they’ve written this really interesting movie and they cast me in it and they forgot to give me the script. I had no idea what to do.
Thank God I got fired. The principal observed me and the administration graded me. They’re like, “Okay, you’re from New York City, so we’re going to give you a high grade in culture.” And they gave me below average in dignity and self-respect. What the hell does that mean? Who is measuring this?
But what gets respect in inner-city schools was not something that I had. In other words, you have to be tough, you have to be the authority, you have to draw the line, you have to meet certain challenges. I’m the opposite, I’m shy and introverted and use self-deprecating humor. How does that go over when you’re teaching? Not good.
BILL BURR—COMEDIAN AND ACTOR
I live in this old building. There’s no insulation in it whatsoever. I’ve been sitting on my couch late at night and feeling like I’m the only person in the world. All of a sudden you hear somebody clear their throat and they sound like they’re on the couch with you, like the place is fucking haunted. They’re literally across the courtyard. I don’t know if it’s the acoustics. I don’t know what it is. Everything’s fucking loud as hell in there.
We live above this old guy, the classic old guy you don’t want to be. Living alone, no pets, blinds pulled. You don’t even know what the fuck he does. He’s always really sarcastic. If you drop something because there’s gravity, you just hear him muffled downstairs, “Do it again!” He’s doing that. “Keep it up!” He does that. I think it’s funny. If he says, “Do it again,” I do it again. I don’t give a shit. My girlfriend, maybe because it’s a guy, she feels bullied by him. Two months ago she tells me, “You really need to go down there and talk to this guy.” What am I going to do? I’m going to go down there and what’s going to come of this? I don’t want to do this shit.