Read My Lips (or "The Heart is a Lonely Ventriloquist")

During the fall of 1978, my brother announced that he was going to become a ventriloquist.

This isn't the sort of news a parent wants to hear from their 8 year-old son. I will never forget the look on my father's face. Our family was gathered around the kitchen table, having a hurried breakfast before fleeing our separate ways, and my dad was trying to read the morning paper in peace. My brother and I sometimes blurted out whatever wild notion happened to pass through our prepubescent heads, just to get a rise out of our parents.

"If Indiana Jones can climb under a moving car," we'd wonder aloud over our Boo-Berry cereal, "I don't see any reason why I can't".

Our dad was smarter than that. He knew we were just trying to get his attention. So he smiled and nodded at our every outrageous suggestion and muttered something noncommittal like, "Whatever you think is best."

But when he heard the word "ventriloquist" trickle out of my brother's mouth, he somehow sensed that this was different. He couldn't have looked more disturbed if my brother had said, "Some of the guys and I have been experimenting with bondage, and I think I'm a sub/bottom. Can I use my allowance to buy one of those leather masks with zippers for eyes?"

There are a lot of very valid reasons not to reproduce, but the one they never tell you is this: You may, at some point during your child's life, need to talk them out of a career in ventriloquism.

KEEP ON READIN'! OR DON'T, NOBODY'S HOLDIN' A GUN TO YOUR HEAD.

My father, wise as he was, couldn't find the right words to explain exactly why this was a bad, bad, bad idea. What could he have said? "Well, son, you know how some of the boys at your school get teased for doing things that the other kids think are uncool? Well, those are the nerds who beat up ventriloquists! Seriously! Do you want to die alone?"



He didn't say that, of course. He just listened to my brother and rubbed his chin and frowned without being too obvious about it. I'd never seen him look so flustered before. The only time he'd been this unsure of himself was when he tried to tell us that Darth Vader was a racist stereotype.

We'd dragged him to see Star Wars for the sixth or seventh time, and on the car ride home, he started ranting about how all the negative propaganda against the so-called "Dark Side" of the Force was just a thinly veiled attack on Harlem and Vernon Jordan. We tried to explain to him that it was dark as in night, not dark as in dark-skinned.

"I wish I could believe that," he said, furiously slapping his hand against the steering wheel. "In that final sword battle with Obi-Kenobbiwon, whatever his name is - who, by the way, has a white beard and an Aryan complexion - I expected that Darth fellow to drop to one knee and start singing Mammy!"

He wasn't going to make the same mistake again. This time, he was determined to think before he spoke. There were a lot of negative things he could say about ventriloquism - I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes - but he wasn't going to do it. He'd learned the hard way that when you're living in the same house with two boys with very long memories, anything you say out loud stays on your permanent record.

"You do what you want," he finally said, returning to his newspaper. "Just don't bring it in the house."

I was stunned. Not by our father's unwillingness to stage an immediate intervention, but that my brother was spending his hard-earned money on a plastic dummy. We'd spent the last few weeks obsessing over the Johnson Smith catalog, our one-stop shopping source for x-ray specs, fake vomit, and ultra-realistic monster masks (with real human hair!). We had a limited income and some difficult decisions to make. Personally, I was still torn between the Build-Your-Own Hovercraft and the Motion Activated Fart Alarm. I relished the opportunity to make my enemies flatulate from a distance (the perfect crime), but how could I resist a product that combined my two favorite pastimes, hovering and transportation? And if I went for the hovercraft, I'd have enough left over to purchase a Life-Size Frankenstein Monster or the World's Smallest Harmonica. Or, if I could scrap together the extra nickels, both. Oh sweet lord, can you imagine? My very own golem with a mouth full of tiny harmonicas, wheezing some Muddy Waters tune? It was like the Johnson Smith Company had recorded my dreams, turned them into reality, and then made them available at prices affordable for a pre-teen budget.



My brother had his reasons for being lured to ventriloquism, they just weren't good reasons. It had something to do with an episode of The Love Boat, which featured an African-American ventriloquist act named Tyler and Lester. It was troubling enough that my brother was taking social cues from The Love Boat, but what really disturbed me was that we were allowed to watch The Love Boat at all. Isn't there a point when parents walk into a room, realize that their children are looking at Gavin MacLeod in short-shorts, and smash the TV screen with the closest blunt object? And then, if you know anything about parenting, you sit down with your child for a heart-to-heart talk about nautical safe sex and male camel toes.

I suppose it was for the best. Better my brother get seduced by a saucy and afro'd dummy prone to calling white people "jive-turkey" and not the other sub-plot in the very same episode, in which a pair of identical twin sisters decided to swap fiances. The Love Boat was many things, but it was not a wellspring of prudent life lessons.

There was no talking my brother out of his choice. He'd even picked out his dummy, carefully selected from a diverse selection of three. It came with a monocle and a top hat, and vaguely resembled Charlie McCarthy, if Charlie McCarthy had made some major career missteps and ended up doing dinner theater in Michigan and developed an addiction to pain pills.

Its most noticeable feature was a smug sneer unlike anything my brother and I ever seen before. It was the kind of arrogant expression that, as time and experience would teach us, usually indicates an utter lack of confidence masked with an obnoxious superiority complex. (And really, what else could you ask from a comedy sidekick?) Every time I looked at it, I thought it was saying, "Hey, good news, I talked some underage girls into coming backstage after the show. I got dibs on the brunette. (Flicks tongue obscenely.)"

Of course, if my brother decided to do something, I had to imitate him. Never mind that I was two years older, and long past the age when an interest in ventriloquism, however casual, could be easily dismissed as "just a stage he's going through." Not wanting to be too obvious in my plagiarism, I picked the next most appealing dummy in the Johnson Smith catalogue: a freckled redhead named Danny O'Day, dressed in a plaid jacket and bow-tie. One look at Danny and you already knew his entire backstory. He was probably the manager of a Cinnabon at his local mall, and he enjoyed playing the French Horn, chaperoning church social hay rides, and crying himself to sleep. He'd kissed a guy once, but it was in college and he'd had too many wine coolers so he didn't think it counted. His favorite karaoke song was "Playground In My Mind", he'd seriously contemplated growing a mustache, and he'd eventually die in his mid-40s after a botched attempt at erotic asphyxiation.

Our friend Mike, who lived down the block, also caught the ventriloquism bug. (Apparently hack vaudeville routines, at least during the late 70s, were as contagious as Chicken Pox.) But by the time he got his hands on the catalog, there was only one dummy not yet claimed by my brother and me: "Drunk Clown". We assumed, rightly or wrongly, that this was just the dummy's stage name, and Johnson Smith wasn't seriously selling children a plastic doll with a history of alcoholism. To his credit, Mike never complained or cried foul. He just smiled and pretended that the only thing he'd ever wanted in the world was a midget best friend covered in clown makeup and stinking of whiskey.

(Footnote: My brother is convinced that ads for the Drunk Clown dummy also described it as a "Child Molester". Neither Mike nor I have any memory of this. My brother is adamant that his recollection is accurate, and will concede only that the pederast subtitle "might have been in parentheses." It is also unconfirmed by Mike, who refused to answer the question, whether he ever engaged in sodomy with his puppet, either as a "catcher" or "receiver.")



When our dummies arrived, we devoted ourselves to learning the craft of ventriloquy. I figured out how to make the doll's mouth move, which really wasn't all that difficult. You just stuck your hand into the gapping wound in its back and pulled the string. As for the whole "lips not moving" part, I was clueless. My brother tried to give me pointers. "Say 'v' instead of 'b' and 't' instead of 'p'," he told me. I just stared back at him like he was speaking Latin. I didn't have the time or patience to learn another language. I just wanted to perform comedy for my peers and win their respect and unconditional love.

I locked myself in my bedroom every night for weeks and rehearsed with my doll, mastering an exciting and innovative new form called Almost Entirely Mute Ventriloquism. Some of my soon-to-be classic routines included "What's the matter, Danny O'Day? Are you choking?!" and "Okay, fine, be like that. I'm not talking to you either until you apologize," and the crowd favorite, "I think Danny's trying to tell us, with a series of winks and nods, that he's being held hostage and there's somebody standing behind the door with a gun."

My brother was the first of our threesome to go public. He performed for a 4th grade talent show, and by his own admission, it did not go well. He didn't get a single laugh, not even a pity laugh. In hindsight, his show business shunning may've had less to do with his ventriloquist skills and more with his comedy material. His entire act consisted of jokes that ended with the same uninspired punchline: "Don't ask me, I'm made out of wood." A careful observer would've noticed that his dummy wasn't wood at all, but rather constructed out of cheap, low-quality plastic that melts at room temperature. But the inconsistencies aren't what killed him. His gags were ultimately too sophisticated for his audience, who had bowl cuts and ate their own boogers and preferred less intellectual and more observational humor; like, for instance, "Hey, did you hear how that kid in Mr. Henderson's class crapped his pants during recess? What's up with that?"

After his shameful debut, my brother threw in the towel in disgrace. His dummy was put into permanent retirement, and because Mike and I considered him our cannery in a coalmine, we abandoned our performance ambitions. Mike seemed especially relieved, as he was having trouble sleeping. As it turns out, sharing a bedroom with a clown with yellow teeth and bloodshot eyes isn't all its cracked up to be.

But while the tide of popular opinion had turned, I opted to hold on to my ligneous companion. I had no interest in ventriloquism anymore, but it was still nice to have the company. I liked coming home from school and finding my red-headed cohort waiting for me. Sometimes, if I thought nobody was listening, I'd sit on my bed and tell him about my day.

I never mentioned Danny to my family. He was a secret, and I didn't expect them to understand. Actually, I didn't understand. I was a little too old to be playing with toys, much less a toy that resembled an adult male with emotional problems. Forget the inanimate object part of it, he just wasn't an appropriate best friend. But he was a good listener. And it was easy to feel superior to him. I may've been an insecure and painfully shy 11 year-old kid, but Danny was a grown adult living in a boy's bedroom with no discernable source of income. Obviously he didn't have a lot going for him.

"So what'd you do with yourself today?" I'd ask Danny every afternoon. "Watched a few Sanford & Son reruns? Made some mac-and-cheese for one? Don't worry, man, things are gonna pick up. Maybe you should update your resume. Okay, okay, don't get defensive. I'm just trying to help."



Have you ever noticed how some pet-owners start to resemble their dogs? The same thing happens when you live with a ventriloquist dummy for too long. I never wore a plaid jacket or bowtie, but as the weeks and months went by, I noticed that we had the same haircut and facial structure. Sometimes I'd glance over at Danny and it felt like I was looking in the mirror, staring at my myself 20 years in the future.

I never had the courage to get rid of Danny. That ugly task was left to my parents. They didn't make a big deal of it, thank god. That would've been unpleasant and awkward for everybody involved. I think my father would've been more comfortable sitting me down and saying, "Okay, son, it's time you learned about masturbation. I'm going to show you the correct way to do it. Drop your drawers and grab that hand lotion." That would've been less mortifying to him than saying, "Listen, uh... wow, there's no easy way to put this... That puppet you're so fond of? Yeah, it's starting to creep everybody out. Maybe you find a friend who's more age-appropriate... or real."

So they did what any loving parent would do; they waited until I went to school and then got rid of the doll. When I came home, it was gone. When I asked them about it, they just shrugged and feigned ignorance. There were no long talks about how "this hurts me more than it hurts you" or "we took it to live on a farm." They just laughed and said, "Oh, that old thing? I didn't even know you still had it. Hey, tell us again about that girl at school you think is cute."

Their poker face was exquisite. It was if Danny never existed at all. The mafia hadn't been this subtle when disposing of Jimmy Hoffa's body. I mourned my plastic sidekick, but I eventually moved on, forgetting that I'd ever had an enfeebled, aphasic pal.

Until ten years later...

(To read part two, go here.)