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

know you like I do, girl. Let Grandma come and sit with you a spell. Oh, my hips is achin’. Do you know where I set my Metamucil, girl?”
    She started laughing. Hard. “Stop,” she said, laughing even harder. “Stop it.”
    “You can’t get Grandma to stop her love, baby. I’m sorry,” I said.
    I continued on for ten more minutes, just acting like a kooky old grandma.
    “You’re from somewhere else. This was the worst day of my life and you’ve made me forget all about it.” She looked at me like I’d performed a voodoo ritual. Then she gave me a hug. “You have no idea what you’ve just done. Wow!”
    Satisfied that she’d stopped crying, I got up to leave. “Grandma’s got to try to ride this rickety bike and go fetch some marmalade now.”
    I pedaled home, feeling like God had given me a gift. I had the power to make people laugh. I could use it to communicate and help. If this was my “mission” from Him, I accepted it, gladly. I never forgot that day and how the girl recognized something deeper in me.
    All of my life humor had been a natural default operating mode for me. If there was trouble? Go to humor. Pain? Go to humor. Sorrow? Go to humor. Depression? Go to humor. Anger? Go to humor. To this day, it’s how I get out of arguments with my wife, and if my kids are crying, a little slapstick and humor gets them right out of it.
    Sometimes Grandma and other characters would just emerge out of boredom. And they wouldn’t always be so benevolent. When I was in high school I worked in the paint department at the Valley Stream Sears, and I had plenty of time and unwitting participants on whom I could really craft my material. Some of my coworkers thought I was crazy, and others were drawn to it. There was an older coworker, kind of a bully, who’d wander over to my department and say gruffly and insistently, “Do Grandma.”
    This usually meant jumping on the internal house phone and prank calling another department. Coworkers nearby would stand next to me and listen while I phoned Sporting Goods or any department that was super busy. The rule at Sears was that you answered the phone politely no matter what was going on. So “Grandma” would call and fire off the most annoying questions ever: “I understand you’re selling a new Wilson basketball? Well, how round is it? Have you had much trouble with them being defective? Could I get a rain check on one? I’m going to be taking the bus, do you have anyone who could come out and help me get off of it? Well, could you write my name on the box? And could you write my grandson’s name on the ball? My script is a little shaky.” And I’d just go on and on until the person on the other end of the phone quit or turned into a shivering pile.
    When the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls got really popular, on the day of a new shipment, I’d go and hide them all on different shelves in other departments and watch the mayhem as the doors opened up and customers looked futilely for the dolls in the toy department, then stumbled on them placed next to microwaves or women’s skirts.
    Sometimes that older coworker would come by and tell me to do “the bully and the popcorn.” So I’d play two characters—right out on the open floor of Sears—a bully selling imaginary popcorn, and a kid who didn’t want to buy it. Then I’d proceed to beat myself up.
    “Wanna buy some popcorn?” I’d say really fast with a moronic lisp.
    “Nah, I don’t care for any,” I’d reply meekly.
    “What did you say?” I’d ask, sounding tough, then smack myself. “Just buy the freakin’ popcorn. Three boxes, five dollars.”
    “Ouch,” I’d yell. “Lay offa me!”
    Pretty soon a crowd would gather around, with guys from other departments cheering me on like it was a real boxing match. “Come on, hit him. Hit him again,” they’d yell. I’d throw myself into the paint cans or trip over lawn mowers. Then I’d start cowering or protecting myself from myself,