The Todd Glass Situation by Todd Glass Read Free Book Online Page A

standing behind him to make sure it didn’t get knotted or caught on anything that might have required the boss to overexert himself.
    I wanted to be Comar. In the meantime, however, I had to settle for an after-school job at Dairy Queen in the Plymouth Meeting Mall. I loved that job. I was great at it, at least from the perspective of the customers. I made sure that people got as much ice cream as I could fit into whatever size they ordered—I’d stuff a small so full that it’d be larger than a medium. It brought me a lot of joy to bring that kind of happiness to others.
    The feelings of joy didn’t extend to the owners, who more than once had warned me to weigh the portions like everyone else did. But I knew I was doing important work. I wore a clean, pressed shirt to work every day, tucked neatly into my pants, and occasionally lied to customers about being the owner’s son. Unlike the other sixteen-year-old slobs working for minimum wage, I showed up an hour early to work to bring the place up to my personal (and arguably insane) standards. I stopped servingmilkshakes—man, what a mess—a half hour before closing; fifteen minutes later I’d put all the chairs up on the tables to encourage the last customers of the day to take their orders to go.
    I wasn’t sure that the owners would fully appreciate the extra effort it took to close early, so I doled out free ice cream to the mall’s security guards to buy their silence. Their loyalty was put to the test when, twenty minutes before closing time, I refused to serve a milkshake to Angie, a forty-year-old who still worked at the Piercing Pagoda kiosk, and she ratted me out to my bosses.
    The security guards came through for me, denying any knowledge of early closures, and the owners were happy to let it go. Not so much me—I didn’t want to do any damage that would be permanent, but I definitely had to teach Angie a lesson in the dynamics of power. I should explain that the Piercing Pagoda, being a kiosk, didn’t have its own bathroom, and I occasionally saved Angie the humiliation of using the public restrooms by letting her use our private toilet at the Dairy Queen. But that was before she decided to double-cross me. The next time she ordered a milkshake, I added three doses of Ex-Lax.
    Let me tell you, when you’re sixteen, there aren’t many things in life as pleasurable as watching a full-grown adult who really has to take a shit. The few minutes I watched her squirm were pure enjoyment. I never found out what happened next, because I closed early and went home.
    There was a bar next door to the Dairy Queen where musicians would occasionally play. For some reason—possibly because I was a sixteen-year-old who looked thirty—no one seemed to mind when I’d wander up to the stage after work, grab the mike, and break into my Rodney routine.
    I was just goofing off. While I knew there were famous comedians, I didn’t have any idea that “stand-up comedy” could be an actual job until the night I got a call from my old friend and neighbor Albert Nalibotsky, inviting me to check out a club he’d recently discovered.

CHAPTER 11
COMEDY WORKS
“Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher.”
    Comedy Works was on the third floor of a three-story walk-up, above a Middle Eastern restaurant on Chestnut Street. The stairs opened into a long, narrow room that held around three hundred people. A few minutes after Albert and I sat down, the room went dark. “Before we start tonight’s show,” a voice announced over the PA system, “if there’s a Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer in the audience tonight, a Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher. Other than that, everything’s okay. Five minutes to