The Dad Who Was Afraid of Virginia Woolf

It's time to talk about moms. Difficult, one-of-a-kind, ride-or-die moms. Four-time Moth champ, memoirist, king of the one man show, and "Stories in High Heels" TikTok phenom Jamie Brickhouse is here to remember his Mama Jean, to work out why storytelling matters in our family relationships, and why we can't change until our stories do. We also talk about queer identity in families, growing up in East Texas, and our old friends addiction & recovery.

Get a copy of Jamie Brickhouse's memoir DANGEROUS WHEN WET (St. Martins 2015) or look to preorder his new memoir I FAVOR MY DADDY: A TALE OF TWO SISSIES here.

Follow his world famous TikTok series "Stories in High Heels" for more tales of Mama Jean, Earl, and Ron the Roofer here, and watch some of his top prize-winning Moth stories here.

Jamie tweets @jamiebrickhouse and socials otherwise at @jamie_brickhouse.

Lanford Wilson's BURN THIS is available in one of those fun little hardcore editions here. Read it if you dare. Please make sure your guests are taken care of first.

Edward Albee's masterpiece of the booziest toxic marriage in literary history, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, is available in book form here and in glorious film form (starring Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton) streaming at HBOMax and Amazon Prime.

Come to think of it, PODRE needs to do an entire episode on that play. God a'mighty.

Then head over to podrepod.com for more information about the show and to sign up for email updates so you never miss an episode or that moment in the near future when we blast out the special patented PODRE secret instructions for how to be the perfect dad.

New episodes every Monday.

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Transcript

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning, but what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Julian: Not everyone has a dad anymore. Like, maybe their dad died, like, had to go to war and died when the kid was a baby.

Chris: Yeah, that happens.

Julian: Or maybe they died and the kid was young or old and then the dad died in war.

Chris: There could be lots of reasons why someone's dad isn't around.

Julian: Or some people have two mummies. Did you know that? Yeah. And two dads.

Chris: Some people have two dads.

Julian: And Jameson and young and Aster are all brothers. There's three.

Chris: There you go. So families can look really different, right?

Julian: Yeah, of course they can look different.

Chris: What do you think about our family?

Julian: I think it's great.

Chris: Yeah, well, you have a really big. Role in it because you're the older. Brother and you're the first born son. Yeah, that's a big important I know.

Julian: Nico has a smaller role.

Chris: Well, his role is different from yours. Right? He's the younger brother, he's the second child.

Julian: But there's still a big role. But really the biggest role is mom and dad because they have to care. Take care of me, Nico. They have to take care of downstairs. And.

Chris: And Irie our dog. 

Julian: And Irie our dog. And they also accidentally let Sophie get cancer and died. Which they didn't do on purpose.

Chris: Right. It was an accident.

Julian: She got cancer and died. Poor Sophie.

Chris: We miss Sophie, don't we? She was a great cat.

Julian: She was a great, great cat. We miss her, but we still have a good time in our life.

Chris: Yeah, that's right. Life goes on, right?

Julian: Except when your whole family dies.

Chris: Yeah. Well, that's harder to move on from. If something like that happens. Sure.

Julian: And that would be in 100 years, probably.

Chris: Oh, I see what you mean.

Chris: Yeah. Growing up, my parents hated my best friend right from the beginning. Like in elementary school, they thought he was a cocky little ****. An arrogant, spoiled, godless little rich kid. They felt that under no circumstances would he ever acknowledge or bend to their biblical authority as my parents. And that if this relationship wasn't stopped in its tracks, I would become more and more like him. Harder and harder to control, and thus harder and harder to parent in the only way they knew how, which was in a no nonsense, top down dictatorial mode. And they were pretty much right about all that. So what did they do? They tried to obstruct the friendship from blossoming any further. By the time they started that agenda, it was far too late. And this friendship, I mean, by like, 6th grade, had become one of those crazy, intense childhood friendships. The kind that can conquer reality itself. We were blood brothers, man. I mean, no two people had ever understood each other in such a deep profound way. We had an exalted friendship. We were inseparable. We were a compound. A friendship can feel eternal at that age. And anything that aligns itself against it, whether that's a teacher or other kids or your parents, they're villains, man. It's good versus evil. So my folks, in what was increasingly a strategic blunder, would badmouth him or his mother, would make assumptions that were kind of off the mark about his family, which would only strengthen my sense of righteousness. But mostly they would put arbitrary limits on how much we could see each other in a way that seemed punitive and petty and cruel to a 13 or 14 year old. I mean, it was like these limits were just designed to just **** us off, to ruin the Friday night after the football game, we started calling them the Fun Police. My mom and dad and my best friend's mom was well aware of the wedge that existed between me and my parents, and she stepped on it with her full weight. And so I bonded to the two of them ever more closely. My best friend and his mother, she was a single mom, and they had a relationship unlike any I had ever seen between a parent and a child. They spoke to each other like equals. They yelled at each other. They used profanity freely around the house. And sometimes, as they were yelling at each other, nothing was ever out of bounds, no conversation topic or way of speaking. And yet they were closer than any parent and child I'd ever seen at that time. There was more affection. There was more mutual regard. And I thought all that was very advanced and very sophisticated and somehow realer than anyone else's. Deal. I wanted something like that. The best I could get was for her to kind of, like, quasi adopt me, so that's what I hungered for. And she, for the most part, obliged. She took me in. She treated me just like she treated him. And I loved it. And the more I loved being over there, the more I hated having to go back home with my parents and the more they seemed like the enemy. One day, I was off school. It was summertime. My parents were out doing some shopping or something, so I was home alone. I wasn't driving yet, but my best friend was. And he calls me up in the morning, and he says, hey, let's go to the beach. Let's go down to Galveston. I said, yeah. Great. Let me just ask my parents. So I called them, and they said, no. I said why? Let the whining begin. No. They said you just can't. You don't need to. I said, I'm sitting around here by myself all day. There's nothing to do. You guys aren't here. They said no. Absolutely not. You can't go. I knew that there wasn't a reason. Other than just, we don't want you. Hanging out with your best friend today. So I lost it. I told him what happened, and I said, Come get me. And he did. But see, up to that point, for all of my nascent rebelliousness, for all the defiance and fearlessness I'm trying to emulate from my best friend, I was still really scared to get in trouble, to incur their wrath. I had some sense of how bad things could get in our house, and I didn't want all that smoke. So for a long time, it was just bitterness and resentment between us. But that day, that summer day, finally, the caprice of it was too much, the way they just casually dismissed my need to spend time with my friend. And I snapped. I crossed the red line, and I directly defied them. I said they're not here. They can't stop me. And we bounced. We even left a note, this cheeky little note with multiple contact numbers, none of which we expected to be answered. And we went to the beach. We had a great day. And, yeah, they went apeshit. They called my best friend's mom. They yelled at her. I don't know how many people they they called and threatened that day, but they were they were helpless, really, and enraged over their own helplessness. But I felt triumphant. I felt liberated. Blasting down the Seawall Boulevard in Galveston with the windows down and the music up like, ha ha. I've broken the prison walls, and now there's no stopping me. Now I can live the life that. I want to live. And you'll see you'll see, mom and dad, that it's an even better life than the one you seem to have scripted for me in your own minds. There's this great moment in The Sopranos when Tony and Carmela are lying in bed, agonizing over their teenage daughter Meadow recent spate of defiance and the way she's acting out, and they're debating ways to punish her and realizing that the options available either aren't likely to be effective or else aren't feasible. And Tony, mob boss, says with utter conviction to his wife, she finds out we're powerless, we are ******. I had brought us to that point. I knew they weren't going to start beating me or denying me shelter or food. So once I called their bluff and realized there was nothing behind the threats and nothing enforcing the demands for perfect obedience under their roof, I won the game. I could opt out of the system. We're going to yell a lot and be mad at each other, but we were already doing that, so what's the difference? And that cynicism and rejection of authority or the viewing of all authority as illegitimate and kind of toothless that seeped into my whole worldview, that became kind of a cornerstone of who I was for a long time. The rest of my teenage years was drifting farther and farther away until pretty soon, my parents had no idea who I really was anymore, and it would. Be years before I began to feel. Close to them again. Many years. Now, what do I do with that. Little story, such as it is? How do I see this as anything other than a series of poor choices on on their part as bad parenting? There's got to be an analysis here that's evolved from how I saw it all when I was 15 years old. Our stories can limit us just as easily as they can help us live more expansively and humanely and joyfully. Learning to tell my own stories with more compassion and understanding and insight can literally change my reality for the better. But at the same time, I don't want to bullshit myself. I don't want to be delusional about who people are and what they did and what I did and why I did it. What I want is something like the truth, but a truth that's somehow richer and wiser, more deeply seen and felt, that lets in more light. To help me figure this out, I talked to my friend Jamie Brickhouse. Jamie is a four time Moth champion and the author of the critically acclaimed Dangerous When Wet: A memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother. His web series, Stories in High Heels, has millions of views and followers on TikTok, and he's the host of the weekly recovery show Sober Podcast. Jamie was good enough to come on PODRE and talk me through the way he tells and retells his stories in different forms and genres, always looking for that more compassionate, more vivid, more humane reality to live within. That's coming up right after this.

Jamie: Is the new memoir. The working title is I Favor my Daddy: A Tale of Two Sissies.

Chris: Love it. Well, I mean, that's the title, Jamie. We're done working on it. That's the title.

Jamie: And you know what? I'm good with titles. Dangerous and wet. That was always the title.

Chris: You nail it right out of the gate. Yeah, you got the titling thing down. And then so your first memoir, you turned into a one man show, which was wildly successful. And it sounds to me like you've already kind of gone through that metamorphosis with this second memoir because you're right now touring with your second one man show, I Favor My Daddy, which has the same title. Right. So I wondered if we could start by just kind of talking about that process that you have where you're writing literary memoir and at some point this turns into theater.

Jamie: Sure. Well, I was a frustrated actor and writer in that I really didn't pursue either of those seriously early on. And it wasn't until I got sober oh, God, now it's been 13 or so years that I started writing again. And I wrote that memoir, Dangerous When Wet, which was about my alcoholism and about my relationship with my over the top Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, and the writing led me back to performing. So before the book came out, I discovered storytelling and personal narrative storytelling and started telling stories and getting good at it about maybe a year before the book came out. And then after the book came out, I was telling a lot of stories adapted from it. And a year after it had been out, I thought, you know, I could turn this into a show. And I did. I took it to a lot of theater festivals, and now I'm getting it booked here in Mexico and Canada, et cetera. So meanwhile, I started writing my memoir about my father. The first one was about my drinking, my sexuality, and my relationship with my mother. This one is about my father's drinking, his sexuality, and my relationship with him. So anyway, I started writing it, and it was a little bit harder, even though having written one book doesn't make it easier to write the next book because you're not writing the same book. And I found it a little bit harder to get into my father because he was more enigmatic. And in some ways, what I've discovered is it was harder because I was too close to it, because I'm so much like him. And I knew that anyway. But I discovered that much more as I was writing it. And I thought, you know what? I'm getting blocked more often with this, but I'm feeling the stories and the performance part of this. So I'm like, I'm just going to go ahead and do the show. And it went really well. And so I started doing the show, and I did the show for a while, and then I went back to the book, and it's been a great process for me. So in other words, I've kind of flipped. The process dangerous. When we had the book came first, then the show. In this case, the show came first, then the book.

Chris: You were being modest earlier because you didn't just sort of dabble in storytelling, personal storytelling. You're a four time Moth Story Slam champion. You've told stories pretty much all over the world to great acclaim.

Jamie: But what I like about having parameters like that and having a time limit, it's the same way in writing, whereas you have to be economical about what's important to the story and what goes and what stays, and you got to.

Chris: Deliver the goods, right?

Jamie: Very much a part of storytelling, like, oh, but this joke is so great. And you're like, yeah, but you know what? It's not essential to the story. And in fact, sometimes maybe the joke takes away from the story. The stories I'm telling in these shows, of course, are very personal, and there's a lot of emotion there, and people are like, oh, my God, is it hard to perform that because it's not as if I'm an actor performing another performing a playwrights piece that's not about me. And then I just have to channel the emotions. But these are things that actually happen to me, and I live through all this. And it's the same with writing the memoirs. By the time it gets to the page, I process these emotions. So I'm writing from a scab, not a wound.

Chris: It reminds me of when I was in college at the University of Houston. Lanford Wilson came to teach in the theater department. He was actually filling in for Ed Albee, who was the kind of, Albee was the kind of main guy there, but every now and then. 

Jamie: Did you get to work with Edward Albee?

Chris: I did not. I knew him a little. I mean, I got to know him very casually, but I didn't work with him because I wasn't involved that really in the theater program, which I was friends with everyone who was in the theater department. But I didn't go over there and do work myself, which was a huge missed opportunity. But anyway, Lanford I got to know really well, mainly because one of my best friends was his driver and assistant, his sort of lackey for the semester or the year that he was there. So he ended up hanging out with us a lot, and he had come to the coffee shops and we'd go see movies together and just sort of hang out. He liked to be around 19 year old students. Yeah, he enjoyed our company. He was great. I mean, he's a really lovely guy, but I'll never forget him telling the story. One time of was it Burn This? Was that the big one? It was like the play that won the Pulitzer. And he was talking about talking about. Writing it, and he's like, I was at my house. I had people coming over for, like, a dinner party. And I was finishing the scene where, like and it was like a family quarrel. But he was drawing on this memory. He had had of him in a fight with his parents that was really, really painful. But, of course, it happened 40 years ago. And he's like and I'm writing this scene, and he's like I just start violently weeping. I'm banging on the typewriter, and then I'm rolling on the ground, crying and wailing and screaming, and my guests have arrived, right? But I can't stop writing, and I got to get to the end, and I'm just and I'm, like, tearing up my face and I finally get to the end of the scene, and I'm like, you ************. And I finish the scene, and I rip it out of the typewriter, and I just collapse in a ball, and I just go into the fetal position and weep. And we're all sitting around him as he's telling the story, and our eyes are wide, and we're like so that's how you do it. That's what writing it. Okay. We haven't gotten to that level yet. Lanford, how do we get there?

Jamie: Well, I have a bigger question. Did the food ever get cooked with the dinner party? He seemed to be cutting it close.

Chris: Yeah. I think he's like his partner or somebody was out there like, Lanford will be with us in just a minute, as he's, like, wailing behind the door. And I'm sure he was like I'm sure there's plenty of hyperbole in that story, but it stuck with me. The image of the writer gnashing their teeth and rending their garments and rolling around on the floor in agony, emotional agony over the scene that they're recollecting as they're in the act of writing. You don't hear that version of writing from someone as accomplished as Lanford Wilson very often. I think I think normally it's the sort of, like, recollected in tranquillity the emotional turmoil or storm right. That goes into the art. And I myself have never had that experience or anything remotely like that. Right. The most that's ever happened to me is, like, I wrote a poem and when I read it later, I kind of teared up a little bit.

Jamie: Yeah. I will say I haven't had it quite that I haven't had those kinds of histrionics when I wrote. But I certainly have had moments of sobbing when I was writing through something or not through something when I was writing something. And I also there was sometimes it was a moment of wasn't so much the reliving writing and reliving a particularly emotional or painful scene from my past, but in writing, when the writing brought me to a realization about those events. So I got an event that I've thought about, maybe even told about many times before. And then in writing about, I'm like, oh, my God, that's what it was about. Or that's why she was so angry. And I'd never thought about that. And that will just kind of stop me in my tracks. And even if I don't cry, it's as emotionally dramatic in some ways sure. As what you described.

Chris: Yeah. I've had that experience too. That sort of like writing to find out what I think about something right. Or how I really feel or to see something I had never seen before. And it's so strange how that can happen in the active writing.

Jamie: Yeah. I call that the revelation is in the writing.

Chris: There you go. Well, what about the idea of sort of like storytelling ethics? I mean, was there ever a moment where you hesitated, where you felt anxious about telling a particular part of your mother's story? Your father's story, your siblings, anything that you struggled with?

Jamie: I went through those hurdles with Dangerous When Wet. I mean, I don't think I would have ever written it had my mother still been alive. She was dead a year when I started writing it and my father was still alive. So I had to go through the hurdle of even though ultimately it's a love story about her but she was a difficult woman, a high maintenance woman, over the top, but she just loved me. With mother love at times, I went through the, oh, am I betraying her by writing about her honestly? So I went through that, but I had heard enough from other writers and read enough is that you have to get past that fear, or you have to put that fear aside, even if you don't get over it and just write it and then decide later about what you're going to keep in there. And for some people, I changed the names, and I didn't show it to them as I was writing it. I showed it to them once I had a manuscript that was in a good place, and maybe it gave them only their pieces and said, here, I've written this, and everyone was fine with it. But I went through hurdles also about what I was going to reveal about myself, and I thought because I was talking the first book is about my alcoholism, and I tell a lot of.

Chris: Flattering stories about yourself.

Jamie: Yes, exactly. Very flattering stories about my active alcoholism and very funny stories. And you know what I just realized? Yes. I held back on some aspects of my parents marriage and my father in Dangerous and Wet because my father was still alive, and I did it for him. And I don't think it detracted from the story that I told in Dangerous and Wet. I don't think it made it less of a book. And now that my father's dead, I feel more freedom to write about him more openly and about their marriage.

Chris: So it's going to go in the second book, but it didn't go in the first book.

Jamie: Exactly. There was one line that I did not keep because I thought it would hurt his feelings or would upset him, which was that I think my mother made me a surrogate husband because of her dissatisfaction with her marriage with him.

Break 

Jamie: I have two older brothers. My mother, Mama Jean, mama was married before my father to a man in the Air Force, and they had two sons, Ronnie and then Jeffrey. They're nine and eight years older than I am, and her husband died in a plane crash when they were toddlers, and then she married my father, and I am the only product of their union.

Chris: And this is Beaumont, Texas, correct?

Jamie: That's right. Where both my parents grew up and where I grew up.

Chris: Yeah. So far corner, the tip of East Texas on the border with southeast Louisiana right there off I-10. 

Jamie: And the Guff of Mexico 

Chris: By the Sabine Pass.

Jamie: That's right. Right in town.

Chris: What was that like?

Jamie: Hot and humid? Yes, in small town, my parents were very social, and since they'd grown up there, they knew everybody in town, so the grocery store trips took at least an hour plus, because especially with my daddy, who knew everybody, he was called mr. Beaumont. That was one of his many nicknames because he had these high profile, low paid jobs where he was just involved with a lot of civic activities. And he was the head of the Beaumont Convention and Visitors Bureau for many years and then head of public affairs at Lamar University, the local university there. So very social job, lots of shaking of hands.

Chris: Not a blue collar guy.

Jamie: No.

Chris: Professional?

Jamie: No, he came from a blue collar family, my mama and papa, his mother and father. Papa worked at Mobile Oil, and my dad was the only one in his family that went to college. He went to UT.

Chris: Hook em Horns. Yeah. It's company towns out there. I mean, Mobile Oil is Gulf Oil. Mobile Oil, that's what people tend to do. So your folks were a little different than most I'm imagining. What about your mom? What was her deal? Was she just did she stay at home or does she work?

Jamie: No, she worked well, she also went to college. She went to LSU, was a Chi Omega and did what a lot of women of her generation did who did work. She became a teacher, and she was a kindergarten, first grade and then kindergarten teacher. And then she stopped working when she had children. But then after she had me, she was not content being a housewife, and she went back to work, and then she wasn't content with my father's salary because she wanted and most of their friends all had more money than they did, and so they were in that. When we had parties in our neighborhood, in the house that I first lived in, which was kind of a modest neighborhood, built in the car garages, little ranch burgers, I call them. But when my parents had parties, all the neighbors would come out and gape because all the cars that showed up were Cadillacs and Lincolns, which they didn't see a lot of in that neighborhood. And my mother wanted all those things, so she became a realtor and started making a lot of money and became the breadwinner, and she always wore the pants in the family anyway. But then the power dynamics really shifted between my parents, and she hated cooking, and he loved cooking, and so he started doing all the cooking when she became a realtor, and then she became a stockbroker. She became a stock, yeah. Which in Beaumont in the late 70s, early 80s, for a woman to be I mean, there was a male dominated field anyway, at that time anywhere, but especially in Beaumont. Still one of two women. Yeah, exactly. She was one of two women brokers in that office. Wow. And the top two producers in that office were those two women. Anyway, so she started making serious money, and so they moved out of that neighborhood into a bigger, newer house. And then after while I was in college, then they built their dream house in Thomas Park, which was the exclusive neighborhood at the end of Thomas Road, and Thomas Road was the premier fancy mansion road in Beaumont.

Chris: What about your relationship with your parents when you were growing up? Were you closer to one than the other? What were they like? Was it a happy childhood?

Jamie: Yes and no. I mean, I was extremely loved and doted on. I was know, the only child of their union, the baby of the family. My father was very much a father to my brothers. They were the only father they knew since they were toddlers. When their father died, they really didn't remember their father. He didn't formally adopt them, but they called him dad. Although until Ronnie, Ron the Roofer. Ron the Roofer is the oldest of the two. Anyway, I'll go into him later. So I was very much doted on, and I was the only redhead in the family. My parents were both brunettes, as were my brothers, but there was redhead on both side, redhead jeans on both sides. So they were hoping for a redheaded brown eyed girl. And my mother used to say, well, we came close, but they both adored me, my mother more so and so I was closer to her growing up because she just kind of took up all the emotional space, especially when it came to me, so there was a little room for him. And she also, I think, as I was saying earlier, kind of in some ways made me a surrogate husband, even though the two of them, they did a lot of things together and as I said, were very social and they went out all the time and had lived their life together. But there was a lot of fighting. Back to Edward Albee, who you mentioned. My favorite play is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

Chris: It's a hell of a play. 

Jamie: Jean and Earl were of the George and Martha of Beaumont Texas.

Chris: Jamie! Really? It was that bad?

Jamie: Yeah. And anyone in town will tell you, lots of people and any of their friends will say, oh, I remember the time, because they would explode. They would explode into these fights in public.

Chris: Boozy fights? Was it boozy fights or just fights?

Jamie: Well, not to the level of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf booze, but, I mean, my father drank. My mother was a social drinker, meaning she could take or leave it and she would have a drink or two at a party. But my father drank a lot and was probably an alcoholic. That was a source of anger in their marriage, and they fought like that. And it was back to your question, was it a happy childhood? Yes and no. I mean, I was well loved, well taken care of. I got what I needed and most of the time what I wanted. But the fighting took its toll because I would hear a lot of parents where they would fight behind closed. Doors, you know, where they would never fight in front of the kids or in front where they would just erupt wherever. And so you just kind of had to live with it.

Chris: I mean, what makes that play what makes that play so disturbing isn't isn't necessarily the explosiveness of the fighting. Right? It's not Revolutionary Road, right, where there's screaming and throwing **** across the stage or the film set. It's the cold malice of the fighting. Right. It's the mind games and the abusive psychological warfare that these two people cannot stop inflicting on one that they're addicted to. Right. Like, that their whole relationship is bound up in this cold blooded need to kind of, like, destroy the other one's soul.

Jamie: It's a very codependent relationship.

Chris: Yeah. The last thing they're going to do is, like, let's take some time apart. Let's just separate a little while and see how it goes. That's not ever on the table with these two, right? Is that no.

Jamie: And you know that at the end. You know that the next morning they're going to well, it is the next.

Chris: Morning when the play, dawn breaks, and.

Jamie: They will continue as before.

Chris: Coffee? Oh, my God. Okay. Well, it sounds like your mother, though, must have had some sort of progressive ideas, at least about the possibilities of being a woman in Beaumont, Texas, in the 1960s and right. Did that translate to other parts of her sensibility, her mindset? Was she of sort of an outlier? This is a very conservative community that you're growing up in, but it sounds like your mother was a little different. Right.

Jamie: She was different in that way, but my parents were listen, they were a lot of fun. They had a riebald sense of humor and loved to tell jokes and loved to be witty and irreverent and were fairly tolerant, but they were also extremely conservative. Sure. They were both Catholic. I grew up we went to Mass every Sunday. They were both staunch republicans. And even though my mother did what she did and most of her friends didn't work or if they did, were certainly not the breadwinners that she was. She said she would never call herself a feminist. She couldn't align, even though she was very much a feminist and probably actually doing the actions more than some identified feminists, self identified feminists were, but that was too radical or too liberal for her to align herself with that. And she was still very much a Southern belle. You know, she liked, you know, all the formal entertaining and silver and china sets and and all that and and being the grand gracious hostess of the house and my father the same way. But here's the deal. They never turned their back on a family member or anyone that they loved or cared about a friend if they went against those, like, basically like me and my other brother Jeffrey, who was gay or he was at least bisexual, because he did end up marrying a woman for a while and went back and forth. But they never said, you can't be a part of this family.

Chris: Did you come out to your mother or your father or both at particular times, or was it a gradual process? How did that work for your family?

Jamie: I came out my freshman year, actually, it was through the writing. The revelation was in the writing.

Chris: There you go.

Jamie: I was in a play writing class my freshman year in college.

Chris: Where were you when you were in college?

Jamie: Trinity University in San Antonio.

Chris: San Antonio. Okay. So long days drive from home, but not across the country or anything.

Jamie: Yeah. And they wanted me to write, and and I got my writing talent from my father. I mean, he did a lot of writing in his jobs, and he was, you know, anytime my mother needed something written, he would do it and all that. So I got my writing talent from my father. I got my drinking talent from my father, and I may have gotten my homosexuality from my father if that's hereditary. My freshman year in college, I was in a playwriting class, and my parents were very excited about that, and they couldn't wait to see what I had written. And so the first assignment was a five minute scene. And I wrote this scene, and it was very much ahead of my time. It was kind of a Will and Grace questioning gay guy and his best friend who's a woman, the roommates in it, they get an apartment together. And so it was a five minute scene about them having their first party at this party.

Chris: It's the pilot of Will and Grace. I mean, you're really Jamie, you could.

Jamie: Be a I know, billionaire. Why didn't send it straight to Hollywood instead of sending it to my parents in Beaumont, Texas? It's beyond me. If I had just sent it so I printed it out on my dot matrix printer and mailed it to them in an envelope with stamps and all. And so my mother called, and she said, oh, we read your piece, and we just love it. We think it's wonderful. Oh, I'm telling you, you should be a writer. That's what you should be doing. And then there was this pause, and she said, but you don't have tendencies like that, do you? And at that point, I didn't have tendencies. I was full blown gay and had been for a few years. But I just told them, and I said, Well, I think so. Get on the phone. Jamie has something to tell us. And Earl got on the phone, and I told them that I'm gay now. All right. That is how I've always told that story. And I told that I tell it in the book Dangerous and Wet. And when my father read the manuscript, he said, I don't remember it that way. He said, I remember that. He was already on he said, I remember I was already on the phone. We were both on the phone, and he was the one who said, are you writing about yourself? Not her?

Chris: That's a big difference.

Jamie: And I remember it because she was a much more confrontational one and out there one, and she was always the one to just call a spade a spade and cut through the BS. But I think she was so blind to that in me more than he was, and now I think he saw it for a lot of other reasons before she did, and he even said, I think I saw it in you before she did. So in the book, I kept both versions of it in there, and basically, kind of the way I just told it now of, I remember it this way, he remembers it this way, and this is why I remember it this way, because in memoir, you're not talking about necessarily just the facts, but the emotional truth.

Chris: And is it still the way you remember it, or is it that's still?

Jamie: I'm not saying that he's wrong, but it's not like when he told me that, I thought, oh, right, that's right. Now I remember.

Chris: But there is a truth that you want to record, that your father remembers it this way, and that's what's true to him, and it's worth putting on the page. It's worth being part of the whole story. Yeah, that's interesting. So then what happens after that?

Jamie: After that? And my mother, histrionic diva that she was, cried buckets and oh, not another one.

Chris: Well, hold on, another one? Who is she talking about?

Jamie: Jeffrey. Meaning Jeffrey my brother.

Chris: He'd already come out to them?

Jamie: He was older than I. Yeah. And so he came out. He was still at that time, still gay, I guess, but he had come out when he was 19.

Chris: And how'd that go? Was that a little rockier for him?

Jamie: I think it was, yeah, because it was yeah, as he said, he he paved the way for me in that in that sense, but it was still emotional for them. And but my father, he took me, you know, also, this was in 1986, so the AIDS crisis was in full bloom and raging across the country, across the world. So they were also terrified that I could get sick and die. But my father, he took me out when I went home for Thanksgiving, he took me out to our first father gay son lunch, and he said, now, I do remember this. He said he said, Your mother and I love you no matter what you are, and I think I saw it in you before she did. And then he took a sip of his, like, second or third chardonnay, and he looked across the room, not at me, and he said, just be careful and don't march in any of those parades, which kind of sums it up for them of how the conservative side of them was like, okay, there's nothing we can do. You're gay, but just don't be one of those militant liberal radicals out there waving a flag in a G string. I did march in those.

Chris: I was going to say, whoops, sorry, dad. How did you feel it? 

Jamie: But not in a G string.

Chris: Really? Never? How did you feel about the reaction, his reaction?

Jamie: Oh, I felt embraced by that. I just thought thought I the parade part was funny. I wasn't thinking, okay, I'm not going to watch in those parades.

Chris: No, of course. But you felt like, this isn't I mean, it's pretty good for 1986, Beaumont, Texas, Catholic family. I got to say, that's not bad. That's not a bad coming out story, I guess. I mean, I'm thinking about, like, as you were telling the story with a phone call. It made me think of the amazing scene in Angels, right, in Tony Kushner's Angels in America where the Mormon character is calling, he's drunk. He's in the Ramble, right? And he calls his mother, the Meryl Streep role. Right. He calls his mother to come out to her, basically, and she refuses to hear him. Right. 

Jamie: Come here. Right.

Chris: She's saying, like, you're drunk. You're saying this to hurt me. And she kind of gaslights him. This is not quite the right word, but she just refuses to refuses to hear the truth.

Jamie: Yeah.

Chris: And it's just wrenching. It's such a more painful reaction than her even getting mad at him or calling him names or something. She just won't let him be himself to her in that moment, and it's heartbreaking. So it sounds like your parents, at least, were immediately coming at this from a place of acceptance, which had to.

Jamie: Have been yes, I think my mother had to they had to go through their own emotions, for sure. But what was beautiful about it is that there was never a question. They never said, we can't accept that in you. We don't want to hear that ever again. Fine. We love you, but you can come to our house, but just don't ever mention it again, or we're cutting you.

Chris: Off, or you just haven't met the right girl yet, or something along those lines.

Jamie: There was never a question here's what the beautiful thing is. No matter what their emotions or what their feelings on homosexuality were, their feelings for me and their love for me never changed.

Chris: That's it.

Jamie: And I knew that. And I'm very lucky because that's not true for a lot of people, and it's still not true.

Chris: I was watching one of your stories the other day, and it's the one about your mother took you to rehab.

Jamie: I bottomed out on a suicide attempt, and my partner Michael, now my husband, he called her, and when that happened. And when I came to in that emergency room gurney to the news that she was on a plane, I was like, no, stop her. And it was too late because I was hoping I was like, this is through alcoholic of not wanting to face things. I just thought, I don't want her in the middle of this because this really because at least without her knowing, I could have kind of swept this under the rug somewhat. But now that she was in on it and I realized now I didn't realize it at the time, why I was so afraid of facing her is because I'd finally have to face myself and face the alcoholism and that it had reached. She had always been on me about my drinking, and from the time I was in high school when I started drinking, and she said, you better watch it with the drinking because it's on your father's side. He and your grandfather, Paw Paw, liked it way too much, so she always saw it as a problem. But anyway, so she came when she heard that and terror struck to her heart, and Texas woman that she was, she slapped on her face. She never left the house, not looking camera ready, and came to New York. I was in detox ward of the hospital for a week, and you can't see anyone while you're there, but I could talk to them on the pay phone. And then when I came home to the apartment, she was there waiting where she had been, there had already been a mini intervention set up, and I had already agreed to go to rehab while I was in that detox ward. I was like, okay, fine. And so my insurance wasn't paying for wasn't going to pay for it, and she was footing the bill. Before she wrote that check, she said, your drinking days are over. And by the way, suicide is a mortal sin, so it's a **** good thing you didn't succeed, because if you had, you couldn't spend an eternity in heaven with me.

Chris: So it sounds like she also was pretty much immediately prepared to accept you as an alcoholic as part of who you were, and that was a non negotiable factor of your identity, right? Did she understand alcoholism? Was she one of these people that kind of got it, or was there a process of education?

Jamie: She kind of got it, and because she was convinced my father was an alcoholic, I remember her always saying alcohol causes a change in personality. And she said, that happens with your father. And I heard him in some of their fights, she would say that to him.

Chris: Your mother sounds amazed. Like, how is she? She gets all this stuff.

Jamie: Well, I guess she saw it, and then she did her research on alcoholism. And then when I was writing her obit with my father, we were writing it together, and we were pulling together all of her accomplishments and the different boards she sat on. And one, she was on the board of the Jefferson County Council on Alcoholism. And my father looked at me and he said, you know, your mother said I'm an alcoholic, but I'm not. I can quit when I need to.

Chris: I just don't want to. Yeah, I said that for a long time, too. I can quit anytime I want. I just don't want to. Why would I want to?

Jamie: And he could actually he would quit at times because they'd have some big fight do need to say with her. She was high maintenance and volatile, and a lot of people were afraid of her, and a lot of people felt sorry for Earl, like, oh, having to put up with her because she was so demanding and so over the top. But a lot of their worst fights happened when he was drunk, because often then that would give him the fire to really go at her. And so there were times they separated at least once after it was when he was drunk and got into a fight with my brother Ronnie, Ron the Roofer. They got into a food fight that turned ****** fisticuffs. It was harrowing, actually. And she kicked him out of the house after that and let him back in only after he stopped drinking. And then he would have other periods where they'd have a fight, and he would stop drinking for a while. But then he was a dry drunk because he never went to any sober meetings or got counseling, as far as I know. And so he was just kind of angry that he wasn't drinking.

Chris: Do you think that's because he never wanted to fully accept, like, first step stuff, he just didn't want to really accept that he was an alcoholic and.

Jamie: To get yeah, absolutely. I don't think he ever accepted it. I think for him, it was just proving like, I'm not an alcoholic because, see, I cannot drink, and he would not drink. But then, of course, he was in a terrible mood because he wasn't drinking.

Chris: But the story I heard you tell on stage was about your experience going to rehab and your mother's involvement in that. And then you had as just sort of a symmetrical experience because there was a point toward the end of her life where she needed help, and you had to kind of get on a plane and fly back home.

Jamie: Well, so as I said, she sent me off to rehab, and I went for 60 days on her dime, and that's when I started to get sober. But then about it was maybe two or two or so years after that, she started slipping away. Her mind and everything that she had been expert at making herself look pretty, making money, driving, started to deteriorate, and she drove her red Cadillac. It was her last car. She drove it through the wall of the bridge studio. She was retired then, and playing bridge all the time didn't kill anyone because she got there early, because she always wanted to get the best parking space. And then about a year later, she drove that car to the beauty parlor. But she drove, and she backed into a pole, but that wasn't the worst part. She drove there. Sans pants. So her priorities were in order, but the execution was misfiring. Turns out that we didn't know it then, but her mind was hijacked by Louis body dementia, and a lot of people don't know what that is, but it's like Alzheimer's, only it's a very horrible form of dementia, and it's like Alzheimer's, only weirder and worse. Robin Williams had it. Casey Kasum had it. And when she went completely haywire, my father had to hospitalize her. And she was in this geriatric facility near Houston and friendswood, and so I did what she'd done for me when I hopped on a plane and flew down to her rescue, and it felt like what she had done for me in reverse. And then that first visit, I'm not even sure if she knew me. At one point, she was just, like, all over the place and just kind of talking gibberish, and she was afraid that her worst nightmares were true. And seeing little babies in the corner and hallucinating like that, those are the symptoms of Louis body dementia. Some of the symptoms. And at one point, she looked at me and she said, would you pretty red hair you almost remind me of. And then she just trailed off. And everything she said that day, like the one thing she'd never lack conviction, which was so unlike her. And I turned away from her because I was just trying to get that image out of my head. Here was this. She had no makeup on, which was never her. Her hair wasn't done. Crushed bouffant nail polish was chipped. She was in an old nightgown that needed changing. And then she grabbed my arm in a vice grip, and I turned around, and she was pointing a red fingernail at me and glaring. Scared the **** out of me. And she said, You've been drinking. And I said, no, I haven't. She said, don't lie to me. And I said, I'm not. And I wasn't. And I was sober at that time, but I had been relapsing, and I've never since rehab, and I never told her that. And I thought, how could she know? And at that point, I had seven months sober, and I was struggling to finally get a year. And I said, Remember, Mama, that's all behind us. You don't have to worry about it anymore. You sent me to rehab. You took care of that. You don't have to worry anymore. And she said, okay, but promise me. Promise. And I thought, you know what? If you can't stay sober for yourself, do it for her. And I turned, and I looked her in the eye, and I said, you don't have to worry anymore. And she said, okay, but promise. I said, I promise. And that moment, it was the last time that she was herself. After that, she was never the mother or the person that I knew, and she died five months later, and I finally got a year sober.

Chris: Wow.

Jamie: And I've been sober ever since. And it was the last push I needed. And of course, you know, ultimately, you have to be sober for yourself. You can't do it for someone else or for a job or for anything else, but for it to remain sober, you've got to be sober for yourself and want it for yourself, which I do. But it was the last push I needed. I was like, okay, just do it for her.

Chris: Because we call them cliches in the rooms. Right. But in every cliche in AA, there's a lot of gray area. There's a lot of nuance to it. Right. There's always variation in the way that that truth manifests in actual individuals lives. And in your case, it did help it did help your recovery to have her beautiful. I mean, it's heartbreaking, and it's tragic, but it's also beautiful. Right. That you say it's the last moment that you really felt that she was herself, as if she kind of like, I got one more job to do in my life. Right. I have one more job. And what is it? It's to make sure that I can help protect my son. Right. I have one more job to do as a mother and as a person on this planet. And even though I'm slipping away, I'm going to find the strength in this moment to do this one last thing, and that's really powerful.

Jamie: Yeah. She was a fierce mother.

Chris: Yeah. I love the stories about your brother Ronnie. I've heard you tell them and just talking, just in conversation, but I've also heard a little bit of you talking about your brother on stage, and I love the story of your brother at your father's funeral.

Jamie: Yeah.

Chris: I guess there was a little anxiety about how Ronnie would be showing up to this gig.

Jamie: Yeah. Ronnie's this kind of Forrest Gump type who processes the world with a combination of childlike wonder and the brutal honesty of a drunk. And he's just a classic Southern Gothic character. He's a redneck, and he's a roofer, drives a truck, and he's always in his dirty roofer overalls. And he loves Yamaha motorcycles. He and my father always had a contentious, bickering relationship. Ronnie would pick on dad for being ***** whipped by Mama because she made all the money and called all the shots. And dad, in turn, was hypercritical of Ronnie's appearance. My God, Ronnie, you look like something out of Deliverance or Duck Dynasty.

Chris: Sounds like Ronnie's the only heteronormative one of the bunch here, right?

Jamie: Yes, I think you're right. Yes. He likes the gentleman's clubs over in Houston.

Chris: Oh, sure.

Jamie: When COVID was happening and I was trying to tell him, Ronnie, you got to watch out. There's this thing coming. He said, Well, I heard a little bit, but I don't watch the news that much. And then about a week later, he called me. He said, ****, you know that thing you were telling about that Coronavirus or whatever? He said, the titty bars in Houston are closed down. This thing is real. That's what brought it home to it.

Chris: For some of us, it was March Madness being canceled. For others, it was the establishments on Westheimer closing their doors.

Jamie: But by the way, March Madness, I used to think that was a white sheet sale at Macy's. But anyway, Ronnie, so we're asking about the funeral, about my dad's funeral. So the day of the Christian vigil, we called it the wake. It's basically a wake. It was happening that night. But earlier that day, at the private viewing of the body in the funeral home, Ronnie showed up in his roofer overalls, and my other brother Jeffrey and I are there. And I told Ronnie, I said, Listen, tonight we're going to be Jeffrey and I are going to say a few words at the vigil. Do you want to say anything? Not thinking he'd want to. And he said, yeah, I believe I will. Okay. And he looked down at Dad's body and he said, it blows my mind to think that he is up there in heaven with Mama and my father. He said, you know what? Your father and my father are going to have to take turns with Mama.

Chris: That's what you want to hear, looking over your father's body.

Jamie: And he said, you know what swingers are? I said, yeah, Ronnie, I do. He said, well, your father and my father are going to swing. They don't call it heaven for nothing. So I was very nervous at the Christian vigil that night when the priest announced, Ronnie will speak. And so we're in the front row queue, and all of Beaumont. 

Chris: He's already workshopped his material with you guys. So, I mean, what are you worried about? It's going to be great.

Jamie: All of Beaumont is there. And when the priest says, Ronnie will speak, you could almost hear the whole congregation **** their heads to the side and say, really?

Chris: Clutching their pearls?

Jamie: Oh, my goodness, yes. And so he got up there, and he's not in his roof or overalls. He was wearing his men's warehouse suit that Mama had bought for him 20 years earlier. So it's a little tight. And he has Mama Jean's Obit photo laminated and pinned to his lapel, which, by the way, he has another bigger version of that photo laminated and slapped on the side of his truck.

Chris: Oh, sure. Goes withoutthat saying on the side of the truck.

Jamie: Sure. He gets up to the podium, and he surveys the crowd like a Baptist preacher. Before he got up there, I leaned over to him and I said, no swingers. And he just smiled and winked at me, which really didn't put my fears to rest. And he gets up there and he looks at the crowd. He says, now that Mr. Brickhouse is up there in heaven, I remember he stopped calling him dad after they had that buddy food fight years ago when my mother kicked him out. And so he started calling him Bubba after that, and my dad's family called him Bubba, and my mother hated that nickname. So Ronnie it was kind of Ronnie.

Chris: Passive aggressive little move there.

Jamie: Yeah.

Chris: Downgraded from dad to bubba. That is a demotion.

Jamie: Yeah. So I thought, well, at least he's not calling him dad, but at least he's not calling him Bubba. Mr. Brickhouse is a little formal, but okay. He says, now that Mr. Brickhouse is up there in heaven, the first person to welcome him is going to be my father. And I thought, oh, God. And he's going to I said, don't thank Mr. Brickhouse for marrying my mama and taking care of her two little babies, my brother and me, and for giving us a beautiful baby brother. And I'd personally like to thank the man for all he's done for me and for always being a father to me. Well, at this point, holy ****. Like, the whole congregation is hanging on to his every word. They're, like, blown away because nobody thought expected this from Ronnie. And he said, and personally, the way I see it, I think the man just got a promotion from Earth up to heaven. And I was like, wow, I underestimated Ronnie. And I was like, God, if dad had only heard that when he was alive. Because even after Mama Jean died, dad never stopped being a father to him. Even despite their differences, he always made sure he was taken care of. And when his roofing business was in a slump, he paid his bills and made sure he was fed. But he was ****** off that he never got the gratification, the gratitude, or the respect that he thought he deserved.

Chris: Caring for him through, I would imagine, some gritted teeth. Right. Even as this relationship become contentious, when it really matters, you're there for him.

Jamie: Yeah.

Chris: When you tell stories about Ronnie, I feel like so often the sort of the interpretation that you give it is it's a very generous one, and it usually is to some effect of you having underestimated him in some way and him kind of rising to the moment. I mean, clearly that's what the funeral story is about. But I've heard you tell other stories about him where that also seems to be the case. And I just think it's interesting the way that when you kind of pour your life experience with this particular person into the. Kind of storytelling craft. The meaning that seems to rise up for you is the sense of like, this person is greater than the sum of their parts, that there's something about them that constantly surprises me. There's aspects to this person that I don't always immediately perceive or expect to come out. And I think that's really it's a really lovely way of seeing your brother. Of seeing people in general.

Jamie: Thanks. That's a great, very beautiful and apt and eloquent description of Ronnie.

Chris: There's a sweetness to the way that you tell the stories of your family, that even though the stories are body and there's dark humor and there's real pain and suffering in everybody's story, there's a sweetness and a lovingness that comes through in the way you talk about your family. And I think that it's part of what makes you such a wonderful storyteller, Jamie, and a great guy.

Jamie: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm going to have to get that in paper, get that in print.

Chris: You got blurbs. Whatever you want, man. I got it. I'm ready. Jamie Brickhouse, thank you so much for being here joining us on PODRE.

Jamie: Thank you, Chris. I'll just tell the listeners they can follow me on TikTok at Jamie Brickhouse and my website is JamieBrickhouse. You can find out what's going on bookwise.

Chris: At JamieBrickhouse.com 

Jamie: That's right.

Chris: All right. Thanks, Jamie.

Chris: Here's another version of that story I told you at the top. Growing up, I had two parents and they loved me with all their hearts. And because I was adopted at birth in a closed adoption and probably for other reasons, which I can't see as clearly. They were afraid from the first day I came home from the hospital that they wouldn't get to keep me, that someone or something would take me away from them, or that I would grow into someone who would reject them. That one day I'd say something terrible and take off and never return. There were other things going on in our family that took up a lot, maybe even most of their attention and weighed them down with stress and suffering. And I didn't like the way they handled any of those stressors. And we fought over that stuff, too, but mainly we fought over how much they wanted to control me, isolate me, keep me theirs. And then I made a friend who represented everything they resented most in the whole world. A cocky kid who didn't have an obedient bone in his body and didn't go to church and reeked of superiority and was rewarded for it at every turn. And that kid's mother, who had totally different values from them, a totally different manner and personality and parenting style that clashed with theirs, she went out of her way to bond with me. It's impossible to believe they didn't see and weren't wounded by my affinity for her and her son and the way they lived. The way they spoke, the way they moved through the world. And AHA, here it is. It's happening. I'm leaving them. And so they try to batten down the hatches even more, and that only makes it worse. And they lash out at my friend or his mom or at me. And that makes it worse, too. And every button they push or lever they pull produces the same effect. I grow more and more distant, more and more resentful, more and more secretive. See them less like my parents and more like an institution I'm trying to escape, but they never stop loving me, providing for me, showing up when I need them. They never kick me out of their house or send me away from them. Eventually, they even learn to suffer through encounters with my best friend or his mom with a kind of grim politeness or even a forced pleasantness. And I won't ever know how much it all hurt them or what else was involved in their emotional calculus during those years. I know that after college, when I left the country for Argentina without much of a plan or much money, and without a return ticket, I didn't have my luggage for about three weeks because the airlines lost it. And when it finally came, I was living in a hostel in Buenos Aires. And I opened up my suitcase and I found this envelope that my mother had slipped to me when I'd said goodbye to her back in Texas. And I opened it. I found a short letter and a $100 bill. She wrote that from the time I was a little child, she had always known that I would go on a long journey away from her, that my life would take me far from home, but that I should never forget that she was my mother and she loved me more than anything in life. And that would never, ever change, no matter where I found myself or who I became. And here's a little money that she saved and I should put it away and hold it in reserve in case I get myself into any trouble and need to reach out to her because she'll be there for me. Now listen, I took that hundred bucks and I promptly spent it on booze and cigarettes and wild nights in strange cities. But I've never forgotten that she gave it to me. And what it meant.

Julian: Who's the winner? Am I the winner? Are you the winner? Are you the winner? Are you the winner?

Chris: Seems like you know who the winner is.

Julian: Who's the winner? Or are you the winner? I mean, are you?

Chris: Maybe we were all the winners all along.

Julian: Maybe everyone's a winner. Ha! Cover your ears.

Chris: Okay, that's our show. No NATFITOIA Award this week, but you can write to me at chris@podrepod.com. That's chris@podrepod.com. Tell me about that father in your life who did something that wasn't terrible in at least one instance I'd love to hear about him in this particular triumph and maybe even confer on him the greatest and most prestigious award in global fatherdom. That's chris@podrepod.com. Be sure to also leave us many, many stars and reviews at Apple Podcasts or wherever you're downloading us and subscribe to the pod so you never miss an episode or an update. Join us next time when I'll be talking about gender, marriage, coparenting and the psychodynamics of family life with the literary critic Dr. Monika Gehlawat. See you then. PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks to Brad Franco and Julian and Nico Benz-Brunt.