Excerpt
Let’s start with the essentials.
My name is Chick Best. Chick is short for Charles. I’m five-feet ten-inches tall and I weigh one-hundred-eighty-five pounds . . . okay, if you want to be picky, one-ninety-four—but I’m about to lose fifteen. I’m starting the Atkins Diet any day now. I’m fifty-five years old and I live in Los Angeles. My mother was named Celeste, my father was Chick Sr., so that means I was Chick Jr., until Dad checked off the ride on the Hollywood Freeway during my sophomore year in high school. He fell asleep and ran his silver Jag into a bridge abutment. People said he didn’t deserve to die . . . but he was drunk, so who else can you blame? Rim shot. Cue the strings. I’ll deal with that whole mess later.
That’s the birth and genealogy stuff.
I guess I should also give you a quick, personal history. Just the headlines though—I promise not to drag it out. After Dad died, I lived with my mother and my grandmother. They tried to see me through my wild years, through high school and junior college. For me, this period was pretty much a drug haze—my chocolate-chip period. Instant Zen, the Great White Light, a Sunshine Ticket to oblivion. My excuse is it was the seventies. If you didn’t get high, you didn’t get laid. I lost my student deferment from City College because I discovered drugs, got wasted, and got an incomplete in Western Civ. Missed the final. Uncle Sam was on me like puke on a wino. The chronology there was unremarkable, but classic: unlucky lottery number, induction, last acid trip, first train trip, Fort Ord, and then six months of pure, ass-kicking misery. I resurfaced half a year later as a buck private and ammo-humper for the good ol’ USA with a one-way ticket to Vietnam.
But I never saw combat. In fact, I didn’t even see Vietnam. I became a REMF, which in the military stands for Rear Echelon Motherfucker. Here’s the quick story on that. My dad had been a talent agent before he kamikazied out on the Hollywood Freeway. He booked comedians you never heard of into clubs you’d never go to. Dad’s old partner had a connection to Bob Hope’s USO Tour. He pulled a few strings and fixed it so I could stay stateside. I ended up in the chair-borne infantry booking USO shows for the armed forces—a post I defended valiantly, holding off talent managers and agents from my fifth-floor office on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. My joke back then was—I find comics that kill, instead of Commies to kill.
After I got out of the service I spent a kick-ass year on Maui. Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Of course, I’ve fired up my last blunt. I’m not beaming up on thrusters or bang anymore either. My acid flashbacks are finally history. I’m clean as the Board of Health and am now absolutely against drugs, which I’ve said at least two thousand times to my sixteen-year-old daughter, Melissa, who listens to these lectures with amused indifference, which is the same expression she wears at traffic court.
In the past two years Melissa has discovered more drugs than Dow Chemical. Every time I do my “Life Is a Choice” speech, she starts rolling her eyes like I’m the biggest excuse for bad behavior since Sigmund Freud.
