My dad always used to say, “The best way to avoid getting punched in the mouth is to just never do or say anything that’ll get you punched in the mouth.” That was solid advice that I always followed, but some days I felt like an actual shit magnet. Trouble just followed me. No matter how much I kept to myself, minding my own business, not looking at anyone else’s girlfriend, someone always wanted to kick my ass.
Acton was a tough town. Everyone fought. You’d fight your own friends, for no real reason at all. Hell, I even saw a fight at a wedding one time. Growing up, I knew exactly how hard every girl I went to school with hit. That’s just the way it was: you’d say something shitty and you’d get hit. Sometimes in the back, or the chest, or the shoulder, or the side of the neck if they missed. The girls I grew up with hit fucking hard. They had to. It was a wild and violent place. But nobody ever held a grudge. None of it ever meant anything. By the time I was sixteen, I’d had my hand rebuilt twice. My baby finger on my right hand still has no knuckle, sits too much off to the side, and is about a half inch shorter than my left. It’s hard to notice, but if anyone ever does and asks what happened, my answer is always the same: stupidity. That’s all it was. Every broken bone and scar was the direct result of something stupid.
Fighting with my friends was never the problem. The real trouble happened any time I left town. Because I was so much taller than everyone else, and looking the way I did, people just wanted to hurt me. But these weren’t ever kids. These were men. Grown men who, because I was six feet tall at thirteen years old, thought it would be a fair fight. It never was because I was a child. Junior high in the ’80s was a different place than it is now. Fights were a weekly thing, sometimes planned out days in advance. Usually between two friends, just off school property, and always over something stupid.
In seventh grade I went to school with this one kid, Dale, who was so much smaller than everyone else. Word got out that there was going to be a fight after school, and that Todd, who was in grade eight, was really hot to kick Dale’s ass. When these fights were about to happen, we all found out through whispers and rumours. There was no texting. Every now and then one of these fight rumours would make its way to a teacher and they’d handle it whatever way they could, which at the time was, at best, pathetic. That day, our homeroom teacher stopped me and my friend Jason in the hallway after third-period gym. Jason was tall too, but not nearly as skinny as I was, so he looked bigger. Our teacher backed us up against the lockers, got right in our faces, and asked, “What’s going on with Dale?”
“Nothing,” I said. Jason said the same. “Nothing. No idea.” We were not narcs.
“Listen, I know that Todd wants to fight Dale,” our teacher said. “That can’t happen. I need you guys to make sure he doesn’t get ahold of him.” And that was that. Instead of calling a parent or getting the principal involved, that teacher just found the two biggest seventh graders he could find and deputized us. This was normal life in junior high.
Another hot afternoon right before the end of the school year, a massive crowd—kids from three different schools—gathered outside. In that part of town, just off Acton Boulevard, there was one corner that funnelled all the primary kids, the kids from my school, and everyone from the high school up the street. Everyone knew there was going to be a fight. My fight. That afternoon I stayed inside the school while most of the other kids left to join the crowd. I didn’t want to go out to fight another friend over something stupid, and I certainly didn’t want to lose a fight in front of high school girls. I remember standing inside the side doors by the gym when the woodshop teacher walked up to me, looked at the crowd outside, and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He looked at me again, then out the window again, then put his hand on my shoulder, opened the door, and said, “Good luck,” sending me out to fight in front of a hundred people. I was never great at asking for help, but that was one of many times in my life where I shouldn’t have had to. He knew I was about to get hurt and he let it happen. In front of high school girls.
The fights never lasted long, and besides a broken hand, black eye, or split lip, there was no real permanent damage. The real damage, the stuff that actually hurts, never happens on a street corner at 3:30 p.m. It happens in a closet with someone you trust.
When I was about nine, my mom and I went over to our family friends’ house. Their son was a little older than my brother, probably fifteen or sixteen at the time. Man, he was cool. I idolized him. He was never bothered if I wanted to hang out. We didn’t have anything in common, but if you asked me then, I would have told you we were friends. Proudly. He was everything I wanted to be when I got to that age. He had girlfriends, guitars, and a pin-straight mullet.
That day when my mom and I were there, he and his family had just moved into a new place, so there wasn’t much in it yet. There wasn’t any art on the walls, the TV wasn’t hooked up, and there was nothing for a kid my age to really do—so I hung out with him. At some point after running up and down their huge staircase chasing each other, and him giving me the grand tour, we wound up in his room, in his closet, out of breath and laughing. I don’t remember exactly what he said to get me in there, but that didn’t matter. I would never have said no. This was alone time with someone I idolized. Out of all the things he could have been doing that day, he wanted to spend time with me.
He was lying down and took his shirt off because, he said, he was hot. His closet wasn’t big enough for both of us to lie down, so I sat beside him, running my fingers through the plush carpet. I had never felt carpet so soft before. It was freshly shampooed and still had the lines running back and forth across it from an industrial vacuum. He started talking about girls, and his girlfriends, and what women like. How to kiss them, what fingering felt like, what turns them on. I didn’t know what any of it really meant, but I knew what sex was, and I was fascinated.
“If you want to make a girl horny, tickle her here,” he said. “Like this.” He put his hand around my small wrist and ran my middle and ring finger up from the top of his jeans to his nipple. He circled both, back and forth, and told me about how girls have bigger nipples, and that they love this. Then he slid my hand down so I was now tickling his stomach.
“Do it like that,” he said, as he let my wrist go so I could do it all on my own. Then he opened his pants. I didn’t know what was happening, but to be honest, I don’t remember caring. He started playing with himself and then he took my hand and put it underneath where his was. Now we were both rubbing him. Together. I don’t remember much after that. I don’t remember if he finished or what we did next, but at some point we were both back downstairs like nothing happened.
At the time, I remembered it happening. I remember wondering if I was any good, and how I couldn’t wait to try these techniques on girls for myself. I wondered if my dick would ever get as big as his. But I never thought about it as something that happened to me. It was always an experience, or more of a feeling. I distanced myself from it, like any other vague kid memory that you couldn’t explain at the time. Over the years this felt more like a story that was told to me, rather than one in which I starred. I separated that story into two people: the person it happened to, and me. I was almost thirty when it hit me: I always remembered that day happening, but then, for the first time in my life, I realized it shouldn’t have. I realized how closely that one day was tied to so many choices I’d made for the next twenty years. How that moment in a closet with someone who I thought was great affected so many things in my life. I thought about how I remembered things, blurring out pain and blacking out the rest. How I struggle to trust other people and why it’s still hard as hell to trust even myself.
I learned to push feelings and fear deep inside. I learned to try to make myself smaller. Even today, I want an audience but, weirdly, I don’t want to be noticed. I spent years hurting myself trying to do the opposite of being seen.
Not long after that day with him, I began a fight with my own body. A fight that continues to this day, a fight against the constant tics and tension that Tourette syndrome brings. My tics are all non-verbal—lots of eye-rolling, neck pulling, and forehead tensing. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was older, and when I was, it all made sense. But I kept it a secret. I never wanted anyone to fuss over me. I still don’t.
Most of my day is spent in front of cameras. Recorded, documented, and archived on YouTube, social media, video on demand, you name it. If I have a good day, there’s really nothing like it. But if I have a bad day, I fail in front of a million people—over and over and forever. Whether you see me on a good day or a bad day, you probably have no clue how hard I’m fighting to control my shit, or what it’s like to fight off tics. I’ve learned to mask them and make any excuse I can to turn my back to the camera or walk off set to my dressing room so I can let them out.
Tics themselves don’t hurt—not mine anyway. But that doesn’t mean I can’t hurt myself because of tics. I’ve had tics that have left me with blurred vision and a driving headache after rolling my eyes deep into the back of my head a few hundred times in the span of an hour. I’ve had to massage my own leg back to life because of a severe calf tic where I spent a full day flexing that one muscle, as hard as I could, over and over until I couldn’t walk. Tics are like an itch in a hard-to-reach place. You can feel it, it’s not going to ruin your day, but it’s there. When you scratch it, it feels wonderful—for a quick second, and then it’s back again.
The best way I’ve heard what it’s like to fight off tics is this: Hold your eyes open for as long as you can without blinking. While this is going on, that burn will be all you can think about. As your eyes start to dry out, you’ll start to get that feeling of incoming relief knowing all you have to do to make it stop is blink once—and when you finally do, the feeling is almost euphoric. Then do that same thing again. And again. That’s what tics feel like. I’ve hidden, disguised, and managed my tics every day of my life until now. I’ve never talked about them publicly. Even writing these two or three paragraphs has taken longer than anything else I’ve written so far. As soon as I think about tics…I tic.
But that’s me. That’s how it’s been for the last twenty years or so. Hide what’s going on and try not to look too big. Even though I talk with my hands like a maniac, I still try to occupy as little space as I can. I hunch my shoulders forward and always tuck my feet in. I never want to put anyone off or make them uncomfortable. I’m still hyperaware of the physical space I take up.
In doing hundreds of interviews over the years, I’ve used a lot of my own life to shape the way I ask questions. The rule I use more than any other is to never ask someone what they think about something, I always ask how they feel about it. It triggers a different part of the brain. Because that’s what it’s like for me. If you went through my story and asked me what I thought about things, then asked how I felt about things, you’d get two very different answers.