I'm Not High by Jim Breuer Read Free Book Online

me.” If you didn’t move fast enough, he knew exactly where to grab the back of your hair so he could lift you up off your feet and march you out in the hallway and do God-knows-what to you. I hadn’t gotten on his bad side. In class, I was pretty docile. School was a place for me to just hide. But as Mr. Cooper listed the parts, I saw potential in one that remained—a doctor who rushed onstage from the audience to help the narrator through a coughing fit. But that role was pretty much spoken for by Chris Pascocello. He had curly hair and big nerdy glasses. Put a lab coat on him, and it was instant M.D.
    “The doctor will go to Chris if no one else wants it,” he said. “Anyone?”
    “I’ll give it a try,” I said. Twenty-five heads turned to me in the back row of the classroom.
    “Jim Breuer?” Mr. Cooper said, not skeptically but out of sheer surprise. “Okay, give us what you’ve got,” he added with an encouraging smile.
    I bolted from my desk and jogged toward the head of the class, saying, “Vat seemz to be ze prrroblem hee-ar? Zere iz a dohktor in ze haus!” (For some reason I thought it would be funnier if I played the doctor like a crazy German scientist.) The whole classroom howled. Mr. Cooper did a double-take. As I tried it again and again, he’d watch me with strange admiration and then laugh heartily. I had no idea where I got the balls to do it, but it was a relief taking those first steps.
    When the laughing died down, Mr. Cooper looked around the class and said, “Are we okay with Jim as the doctor?” I got a huge ovation. When it came time to perform the play, all the parents and the other kids from school gave me the same reaction. Then the narrator and I got even more laughs when we couldn’t find the opening in the curtain to leave the stage. People assumed we did it on purpose. After that I had the bug and would occasionally volunteer for other school plays, even taking on the role of the sergeant in South Pacific in eighth grade.
    If faced with a choice, though, I still enjoyed spontaneously doing impressions or characters I’d made up on my own. That stayed with me through my youth. After junior year in high school, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood one summer night when I came across a pretty girl I sort of knew, sobbing on her front porch. She was about my age, and I’d never seen anyone crying that hard unless they’d experienced some physical pain, like wiping out on their bike. And even then, those were younger kids, and their crying stopped as soon as their mom hugged them or gave them cookies and milk. This was a teenage girl whose sobs were filled with pure emotion, and it made me feel lousy to see her that way. I rode up onto the sidewalk and called out to her.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “My boyfriend broke up with me,” she said, looking down, shielding her olive-skinned face with her hand.
    “Hmmm,” I said, scrambling to offer advice. “You’ll meet others.” I’ve since learned that no one ever appreciates hearing that line.
    “We dated for five years!” She looked at me like I was completely clueless.
    I sat on the porch with her for a while and got nowhere. She continued to sob and wasn’t receptive to any of my clumsily offered generic advice.
    “If I can’t help you,” I said, standing up, “maybe I should just take off and give you some privacy?”
    She nodded quickly, then kept sniffling. Going down her walkway, I got an idea. I pulled the back of my T-shirt over my head, like some kind of shawl, and then turned around to face her.
    “Unless, you wanna tell Grandma what’s wrong, baby,” I said in a crackly, brittle old-lady voice. “You know Grandma’s heart is with you, child.”
    At first, she looked at me like I was nuts, but as I kept it up, a smile spread slowly across her face. Not a huge one, but enough to get her to stop crying.
    “Now, tell me, who is this boy?” I crackled on, hobbling toward her. “He don’t