Great falls mt, p.1
Great Falls, MT, page 1
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2023 by Reginald Watts
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Girl Watcher
Words and Music by Ronald B. Killette and E. Wayne Pittman
Copyright © 1968 (Renewed) by Embassy Music Corporation (BMI) and Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP)
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
TINY REPARATIONS BOOKS with colophon is a registered trademark of YQY, Inc.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
has been applied for.
ISBN (hardcover) 9780593472460
ISBN (ebook) 9780593472477
Cover design by Ben Denzer
Photograph of Reggie Watts by Sarah Pardini
Book design by Kristin Del Rosario, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
pid_prh_6.1_145137698_c0_r0
To Maman and Dad.
Thank you so much. You guys rule forever.
contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION: DAY ONE
chapter one
Shoehorns
chapter two
My Own Private Montana
chapter three
The Reggie-Matic Emotional Typewriter!TM
chapter four
The Weirdening
chapter five
Waistcoats
chapter six
Lover Boy
chapter seven
Ode to a Grown-Up Pippi Longstocking
chapter eight
The Kid Who Wouldn’t Give Up
chapter nine
Ben’s Fast Food!
chapter ten
The Way of the Belt
chapter eleven
Props to the Original
chapter twelve
R. Watts, Number 69
chapter thirteen
I Almost Forgot
chapter fourteen
Embracing the Darkness
chapter fifteen
Aerogel
chapter sixteen
A Family of Weirdos
chapter seventeen
The Nature of Time
chapter eighteen
Sophisticated British Love
chapter nineteen
Intermission
chapter twenty
One Guy Doing Stuff
chapter twenty-one
The Reggie Watts Comprehensive Glossary
chapter twenty-two
Using Up the Adventure
chapter twenty-three
An Idea for a Show
chapter twenty-four
The Ideal Seattle Simulation
chapter twenty-five
An Open Letter to Axl Rose’s Hair
chapter twenty-six
Fame . . . but the TV Show
chapter twenty-seven
Rocky and Bullwinkle
chapter twenty-eight
Moosetub, or Reggie Moose Goes Back to the Moo-ture!
chapter twenty-nine
My Plan for What I’ll Do When My Mom Passes Away, Which She Never Will
chapter thirty
Comedy!!!
chapter thirty-one
The Russian Jewish Ghost of Christmas Present Goes Shopping at Grocery Panther
chapter thirty-two
The Rififi Paradox
chapter thirty-three
Day One
chapter thirty-four
The End of the World (As I Know It)
chapter thirty-five
Great Falls
PHOTOGRAPHS
THE REGGIE WATTS COMPREHENSIVE GLOSSARY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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author’s note
[blank page]
[blank page]
Oh, hello!
I didn’t see you there.
You must be here to read this book. Forgive me. It’s my very first book, and I’m still getting the hang of these various formalities.
For example, this book is primarily a coming-of-age tale about growing up in the 1980s in my hometown of Great Falls, MT, then leaving to find my way in the world as a musician, comedian, and consummate weirdo, only to be drawn back again by personal, mystical forces that I finally try to come to terms with within these pages. This portion is what esteemed scholars and learned journalists apparently refer to as “narrative.”
But there is another portion of this book, and those same esteemed scholars and learned journalists have notified me that that portion is best classified as “a bunch of silly ridiculousness.”
I wear their pronouncement as a badge of copper.
Now, sometimes I may get confused about which portion is which. Which is real, which is imagined, which is more, which is less, and which is candy with peanut butter in the middle and also chocolate all around it. But that’s just fine. And potentially delicious.
Either way, I really hope you like my book. If you don’t, that’s okay. I still want us to be friends. Or at least nonthreatening acquaintances who respect each other’s personal space.
Thank you.
introduction
DAY ONE
My dad and I walked down the crowded streets of Madrid to his favorite bar.
Once inside, I soaked it all in. The polished wood, the smell of cigarillos in the air, the light glinting off the brown and green bottles of cerveza and vino. Of course, I was only three and a half years old, so I stuck with something a little lighter.
“¿Un jugo de naranja, por favor?” I said to the bartender, standing on my tiptoes.
An orange juice. My babysitter was Spanish, so not only did I know how to speak the language, but a lot of the time that’s simply what I spoke.
“I’ll take a cognac, please,” my dad said.
It was 1976. My dad, Charles, was a Black American air force serviceman, a Vietnam vet with big, soft brown eyes, a strong chin, and an easygoing smile. My mom, Christiane, was a strong-willed, hazel-eyed redhead from northern France. They’d met nine years earlier at a little joint in Verdun called Charlie Bar, just like my dad’s name, while he was helping decommission a base nearby. He’d picked up just enough of the local language to impress the attractive friend of his best buddy’s girl. Romantic gems like “enchanté” and “Désirez-vous du vin?” and, knowing my dad and his way with the ladies, something like “Le bar, c’est Charlie. Je suis Charlie. Coïncidence? Non!”
My mom asked him where he learned to speak such good French.
Cleveland, he replied.
She leaned over to her friend, her eyes locked on the handsome soldier from Ohio, and whispered, “Il est à moi.” He is mine. To this day, she insists he was absolument fluent.
Then there was me. I was already on my third country. Born in Stuttgart on the base hospital, lived in Germany for almost a year, followed that with a stint in Italy, and now Spain. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was born without citizenship to any country. Literally. I didn’t have American citizenship, or French, or German. I was legally a Nothing. That’s not something I technically understood at the time, of course—I was too young—but somehow, on some level, I absorbed the reality of my jumbled identity, and I embraced it. I was the consummate outsider. A cosmopolitan who lived in awe of the cool, colorful world that surrounded me.
So the conversation that led to my dad bringing me to my very first bar that sunny Saturday afternoon went something like this, with everyone speaking their preferred language:
MOM: Charles, j’ai beaucoup à faire dans la maison, prends Reggie dehors et joue avec lui.
DAD: What do you say, Reg? You wanna go exploring with me?
ME: ¡Sí, por favor!
At the bar, my dad offered me his hand and boosted me onto the stool. Our spot was right by a giant window, open to the air. Now I got it. We weren’t there for the drinks, not really. We were there for the environment, for the atmosphere. For the view.
We sipped away and gazed out at the teeming boulevard. The traffic, the cypress trees, the ancient cathedrals. But most of all the people. So many different types of people. Tall and short, heavy and thin, light-skinned and dark. Blue eyes, hazel eyes, blond, and brunette. Each person completely unique, each with their own quirks and man
And their voices. So many voices! Madrid was a truly international city, and I found myself engulfed by more languages than I ever knew existed. I let the sounds wash over me, fragments of sentences, of words, of conversations, like a strange sort of music.
“Was kannst du empfehlen?”
“—so che siete ai ferri corti, non me ne importa—”
“—naiz zu ezagutzeaz!”
“Το νυν εστι μεσότης τις . . .”
“—aus Würste, die einem in den Weg gelegt werden, kann man Schönes—”
“そうだね。また行きたいな!”
“Zuzen-zuzen jarrai’zazu . . .”
Then I heard another kind of sound. Actual music. My dad was humming something to himself.
“What are you singing, Dad?”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s nothing. Just an oldie from back in the day.”
“An oldie?”
He gathered himself, clearing his throat in mock seriousness, and sang in his deep voice.
I’m a girl watcher.
I’m a girl watcher.
Watching girls go by.
My, my, myyyy.
“Is that what you’re doing?” I asked, wide-eyed. “Watching girls?”
“Nah,” he said with a laugh. “Well . . . maybe a little bit. Your mother doesn’t mind. She knows she’s the only girl for me.”
I smiled. I looked back at the boulevard, at all the girls walking by. My dad was right. Even though I was only a boy, I could tell there was something special about women. Something that made them vastly more interesting than men. I didn’t quite understand what, not yet. But I sensed that it was related to the same swirl of voices and cultures and identities that made Europe feel so alive. Women possessed a style, a vitality, a creative force that represented everything exciting and mysterious about life. I can’t tell you how I knew that, how I felt that, but I did.
Sitting in a bar in Madrid with my dad, I experienced all of that for the very first time. We sang what became our favorite song as the mishmash of languages whirled around us.
Then, suddenly, it was over. Just like that.
I don’t remember any big talk. One day we were in Spain. The next day we were gone, and I found myself in a brand-new place. A brand-new world.
I didn’t know it then, but this place would become my first true home. It would shape me, mold me, help define my identity. Here, I would grow apart from the father I loved so much, even fight him, and turn to my mom as my protector and savior. I would make a new family of friends, a bunch of free-spirit, post-punk oddballs who did a lot of drugs and lived and died for each other. I would fall in love with women—all of them, and one in particular. I would play the violin and watch PBS and steal cars. I would follow my own rules, embrace society’s conventions, and then demolish them for the fun of it.
This place would lay the foundation for everything I would someday become. An eccentric. An artist. A connoisseur of weed and Robitussin and old James Bond flicks. A performer who created a constantly changing mélange of music and improv and technology and just-plain-fucking-around that’s so abnormal I still have no idea what exactly it is.
Most important, even now, after all these years of living in some of our country’s greatest cities, of traveling the globe and performing with massive stars in front of millions of people—even now, this place is still where I always come back to.
At the time, though, all I knew about this brand-new place was that it was big and open and wide. It was very white. It was very quiet. And it was called the strangest, most exotic word I had ever heard.
Its name was Montana.
chapter one
SHOEHORNS
The reason I love shoehorns is because I hate tying shoelaces so much.
A shoehorn’s design is so flawless, so efficient, so gloriously functional. You simply slip the curved horn into your shoe, then allow your foot to glide along its length, and—presto! Your foot has now been seamlessly, miraculously, simply slipped into your shoe.
It’s good for your foot, because it lessens friction. It’s good for your shoe, because it forestalls wear. It’s good for your soul, because it eases frustration.
And now they even make these cool new kinds with extra-long handles. You just walk over to your shoes, you stay standing, you hold on to the end of your shoehorn’s extra-long handle, and you guide your foot into your shoe effortlessly. They even make these little, like, hooks, so you can hang your extra-long shoehorn right by your front door.
My old shoehorn broke, so I got a new carbon-fiber shoehorn.
Sometimes I stop and I look at it, and I just think, Yes.
chapter two
MY OWN PRIVATE MONTANA
“Okay,” my dad said. “Here we are.”
Our car pulled to a stop, and I stared in wonder at the big, ugly square building.
“Maman,” I asked, “c’est notre maison?”
“Non, Reggie,” she said. “C’est un motel.”
It was one of those classic motor lodges you see on the outskirts of towns all around America. Two-story, pay in advance, every room’s door opening onto the parking lot. Perfect for road trips or illicit high school parties. And our very first stop at our new city, Great Falls, MT.
“Well,” my dad said, “for now, it’s the home we got.”
The air force was in the process of helping us find a house in town. My dad had been assigned to serve as a master sergeant in the military police on the Malmstrom Air Force Base, but my parents didn’t want to live on base. The military had actually given my dad a choice between relocating to Montana or North or South Dakota, and he and my mom chose Montana because they’d been impressed by the local schools. If my parents had to move to the States, they wanted to raise their son in a normal neighborhood, off base, with good schools, nice yards, and friendly neighbors. Sure, there would be other military families nearby, and we wouldn’t be far from Malmstrom, but my parents didn’t want the typical armed forces experience. They wanted Great Falls.
I got out of the car and looked around. I had just turned four—we had flown out of Madrid on my birthday, March 23, 1976—and even then, even at that young age, I was bizarrely . . . aware. Aware of everything around me, the sights, the sounds, the smells. And aware of myself. In any situation, no matter how sad or happy or intense, I would remove myself from the moment and start studying my response, observing my reaction like some kind of alien-watcher sent to Earth to figure these wacky humans out.
Like right now, even as I’m typing these words, and I’m enjoying typing these words, I’m thinking, Ah, I’m enjoying typing these words, and isn’t it interesting that people somewhere thousands of miles away from where I am right now who don’t even know I’m currently typing these words will someday read these words, and to them my now will become their now, even though it’s not really their now at all, it’s my now and their past? And all these thoughts are happening in my mind simultaneously in my current now, and maybe, just maybe, I’ve done too many perception-altering drugs in my life, except, no, I didn’t do drugs back when I was four—I think?—and I was like this back then too.
So when we arrived in Great Falls and I got out of our car and gazed around, at first I felt nervous, excited, and a little apprehensive, for maybe about five seconds. Then I became aware that I was feeling nervous, excited, and a little apprehensive, and then I started watching myself feel nervous, excited, and a little apprehensive.
Huh. How fascinating. So that’s how that feels.
I felt an odd emotional distance from both myself—and from the town. To me, this was just the latest stop in a long line of cities and bases. I’d spent my entire life on the move. It was a simple fact of life, something I was used to. So I didn’t know if I’d ever feel a real connection to this place. It definitely didn’t feel like my home. It felt like a giant nameless motel. Like a big blank slate. A nothing, kind of like me.
Everything about this place felt different from where I’d been before. Madrid had been dense, bustling, with people and buildings and languages piled all on top of each other. A city. A capital. Somehow this new space, Montana, felt both incredibly smaller and infinitely larger all at the same time.
