Failure Is an Option Read online

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Benjamin, H. Jon author.

  Title: Failure is an option : an attempted memoir / H. Jon Benjamin.

  Description: New York : Dutton, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017044297| ISBN 9781524742164 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524742171 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, H. Jon. | Actors—United States—Biography. | Conduct of life—Humor. | BISAC: HUMOR / Form / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. | PERFORMING ARTS / Comedy.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.B4275 A3 2018 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044297

  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, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For all of you failures out there. You CAN do worse. Also, for Amy, Judah, Howard, Shirley, and Jodi. I know I have failed you, but I wrote a book?

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE (the Preliminary Failure Before the Main Failure)

  CHAPTER 1 The Early Failure Years (or How I Failed to Have a Name)

  CHAPTER 2 How I Failed at Pretty Much Everything as a Kid (the Foundations of Failure)

  My Failed Children’s Book (for kids whose fathers have abandoned them)

  Failed Bands I’ve Been In

  CHAPTER 3 The Sleepover (and How I Failed to Have One)

  CHAPTER 4 The Robbery (and How I Failed to Stop One)

  CHAPTER 5 How I Failed to Do Anything Significant with My Disease

  CHAPTER 6 The Teen Years (or How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah Party)

  CHAPTER 7 Shelves (or How I Failed to Star in a Pornographic Movie)

  CHAPTER 8 The Threesome (or How I Failed to Quantify It)

  Failed Sexual Positions

  CHAPTER 9 How I Failed to Provide a Historical Example of Failure

  CHAPTER 10 Dee Har (or How I Failed to Move to France)

  Failed Pickup Lines

  CHAPTER 11 How I Failed to Study the Holocaust

  My Failed Book List

  CHAPTER 12 Getting High (and How I Failed at Being Gay-Bashed)

  Failed Weed-Strain Reviews

  CHAPTER 13 How I Failed to Sell a Pilot

  CHAPTER 14 Prince Edward Island (and How I Failed to Take a Walk in the Woods)

  CHAPTER 15 How I Failed as a New Father

  CHAPTER 16 How I Failed at Providing Some Historical Perspective on Failure Redux

  CHAPTER 17 How I Failed at “the Celebrity Favor”

  Failed Presidential Pets

  CHAPTER 18 Buying a Motorcycle (and How I Failed to Ride It)

  CHAPTER 19 Midnight Pajama Jam (or How I Failed at Launching a Kids’ Show)

  Failed Business Ideas

  CHAPTER 20 How I Failed to Have a Chinese Dinner While Visiting My Parents in Arizona

  CHAPTER 21 The Flood: a Waste of Waters Ruthlessly (or How I Failed My Rental Car)

  CHAPTER 22 How I Failed at Differentiating My Two Characters of Bob and Archer

  EPILOGUE My Failure Is an Option

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Acknowledgments

  Before we go any further, I have some things I need to acknowledge.

  I have let myself go. No doubts about it. I have been trying, but the pulling of time has rendered me soft and flatulent, like so much sour taffy.

  I smell. Aging organic form starts to take on malodor, like fermentation. I cover it with a variety of applied scents, but I still am starting to smell of what I imagine the seventeenth century smelled like. Like rotting food and manure with an occasional whiff of sulfur. If I pass by, light a match.

  Also, this book could have been better if any number of other writers, many who I know personally, would have written it.

  Some of the material in this book is most likely pilfered from other writers. Most likely Leopold Allen, a writing partner of mine who hopefully won’t sue.

  I am writing this at the dawn of the Trump presidency, particularly apropos of failure being an option. A very horrible and dangerous option in the case of an entire country’s future.

  I did initially want to call this book Hide This Book and print only one copy and then hide it. And then, if somebody found it, they would need to hide it again. And so forth.

  Prologue (the Preliminary Failure Before the Main Failure)

  Everything I didn’t do has gotten me to where I am.

  —H. Jon Benjamin

  All right! Here we go! My third sentence of my first book and I’m already really tired of writing, but I promise you, this will be worth it. And let’s face it—you probably paid very little for this. Based on how much you paid, this book might be one of the best bargains you have ever pulled off in your life and with no real negotiation. That’s what I did for you. I let the market decide, and that empowers you. A classic objectivist proposition. It is what makes America great again and again and again. And that isn’t just a cheap saying peddled by some psychotic charlatan with weird hair (but having said all that, it may be a good campaign slogan for Donald Trump Jr.—“Make America great again, AGAIN.” Thank me later, Donny Jr.), but, in my case a real promise.

  When I was saddled with the task of writing a book, I had to dig shallow to think about what it is I had to say to you, my gentle reader . . . and also you, my rough reader. Not enough attention has been given to all you rough readers out there. But I can assure you, I’m no Charlotte Brontë or Miss Manners. I’m gonna go for it, without any real sense of literary consequence. A true path paver. A pioneer, armed with a keyboard and a keen eye for “taking it to the limit.” Many will be confounded by what they read, many or all will be disappointed, but all of you will be part of this most exhilarating experiment in textual synergy. You and I together forever, locked in eternal struggle—writer and reader forever entwined. A twisted commingling of semiconsensual, transmodal logical consequence. I write, you read. A self-contained system, like a less scatological human caterpillar (I say less, because you may read this on the toilet).

  On that note, let me guide you, and I will try and take you to the end of the rainbow. A place that is cold but cordial. A place that is wai
ting for you, with faceless determination. The end. That is what we are here for—the end. Together till the end.

  What I am doing right now is single-handedly providing you with the means to a literal end. And I will give it, like a lightning bolt. And you will rejoice! And then you will rest in the afterglow all flushed and enervated, realizing that I fulfilled my promise to you: to end this book.

  (In French) Oh, darkness I wait for your embrace

  The death before death

  words choke my breath

  But the end is sweet relief

  Jon Benjamin’s book

  (Sorry, couldn’t afford a French translator)

  Anyway, what is this book? Well, in the simplest terms, all I have is my story. But looking at it with a critical eye, my story is something of a cautionary tale. It is the story of a failure. But by the same token, it is an aspirational tale, in that most failures never get to tell their tales. Who would listen? You know the old saying “History is written by the victors.” It’s like that. Failures are a voiceless mass of unrealized promise. Where would we be if this world was solely composed of failures? By nature, survival itself is a narrative imbued with a success imperative. I mean, science itself compels that argument. It’s survival of the fittest, not survival of the fattest. But that would be a good name for a game show: Survival of the Fattest. By no means, though, am I connecting fat with fail, it just happened to work as an alliterative.

  To be clear, this is a polemic in favor of failure. It’s an assertion that failure is an option and even, at times, a viable prescription for a better life, despite its long-standing stigmatization. Failure can be incredibly freeing and an end in itself, not just that tired platitude that it is a necessary step on the road to success. Despite my own success, I maintain that failure is my prevailing life force and my success has been a parallel and unrelated condition, not a consequence of my failure(s). If you’re not following, that’s because I’m a failure. Or because you’re a failure. But either way, that’s a good thing.

  Hopefully, this book will serve to give people prone to seek success more reason to pull back, and for those who already are failing, a reason to continue to do so with a sense of purpose. That said, unbridled failure can be a pretty overwhelming thing, and people do need mechanisms in place to use their will to fail reasonably and in good taste. There are limits, even with failure, and I don’t want to set any of you on a path toward sitting in a dark room with cardboard covering your windows and feces (yours) smeared on the walls and the floor—unless it is a clever version of a surprise party. The task at hand is to bring failure into your life, accept it, and then find the right amount that suits you. A failure balance, or an FB, if you will.

  I can’t claim this is the manual of failure, but maybe this is the story or stories that some future civilization will look at and use as the example of how civilization started to embrace failure—like a new bible for the inevitable dystopian future. If you think of this book in those terms, we are really onto something special here. Let me give you a quick example and then I’ll get to how I personally failed and how I represent all of us. It is a classic story of failure and it comes from the Bible, but my interpretation is more useful (sorry, Athanasius Kircher). It is the story of Noah and the Flood.

  As the story goes, humankind had become self-absorbed and wicked and turned their backs on the word of God, except for Noah and his family, who remained annoyingly righteous. God chose Noah as his emissary, to tell the people to repent or face the wrath of God. The people laughed hard at Noah (because they were wicked and most probably drunk) and his do-goody attitude. God then told Noah that, because the people failed to heed his warning, he would bring upon them a flood that would destroy humanity, only sparing Noah, his family, and a collection of animals. Noah sent the message, to which the people laughed hard in his face. And you know the outcome—God instructed the building of the ark, and Noah and his family were spared, to carry forward human civilization.

  Here’s the basic problem. As Noah failed to convince the people to bow to the will of God, God failed us by choosing Noah to get the word out. And here we are today, the product of a failed guy and, to a greater degree, a failed God, who trusted the wrong person to do his bidding and then punished humanity for his own faulty methodology. Basically, God was way too needy. This kind of attitude is all over the Bible: God always being mad at his creations and doling out disproportional punishment. It’s certainly not a fair fight, pitting humans against omnipotence.

  So here’s my assessment based on little to no research: basically “just wingin’ it” (great name for an airline, by the way) but in a thoughtful way. Humanity is now made up of primarily people driven by a complete repudiation of failure and, ipso facto, are compelled psychologically and sociologically to succeed. But because only a tiny majority can fulfill this due to the simple fact that more than 98 percent of the population are not qualified to achieve real success, we need to come to a general understanding that failure is good for society.

  Let’s take any simple job as an example: carpenter (since Noah was mentioned). It is my contention that more than 98 percent of carpenters are subpar at their craft. There are approximately one million carpenters in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so, based on my theory, there are only about twenty thousand decent carpenters. The rest, whether they know it or not, are bad but are likely pretending to be good (just wingin’ it). This theory can be applied to everyone: doctors, lawyers, bankers, cooks, therapists, personal trainers . . .

  Widespread self-knowledge and acceptance of one’s own biological inadequacies would set off a chain reaction that would help the successful be more successful and relieve those who outreach their given capacities, creating a huge uptick in happiness. In simple terms, be less driven.

  Soon enough, the path to failure would become a viable option. If a person doesn’t feel the need to succeed, then they won’t try so hard, creating a quasi utopia. And this would move our success-oriented culture toward a more natural lazy state for humankind. It’s like that old syrupy proverb “Teach a man to fish . . .” In my version, it would be “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime, but he’ll probably come to really hate fishing, so just give him a fish and teach him to fish.”

  With that, I will now regale you with some personal stories of failure in my life. I have failed in so many ways; it’s hard to tell all the stories. Failure is enmeshed in my DNA. For every single action taken, there are multiple, sometimes thousands of micro failures. And what might appear inconsequential to the naked eye, like a brief stammer or a quick sniffle, in my mind is a cascading and ever-expanding sandstorm of self-doubt and self-recrimination. Talk to me for even a minute and you’ll think, “Wow, nice guy,” but in my mind, the cobwebs of failure are spinning and proliferating like a cotton candy machine.

  It may be too late for little old me, but you, YOU! You can fail and be happy.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Early Failure Years (or How I Failed to Have a Name)

  I was born in a hospital. I was told that my mother was given nitrous oxide for the birth. As in, she was totally sedated. The whole labor, totally out of it. My father used to say it was used for the conception as well. Just kidding, he never said that. I just wanted to make a salty joke and blame it on my father. Anyway, they used strange methods back in the sixties. Maybe her sedation affected me. I do feel dizzy all the time, and I’m incredibly lazy, which might have all been connected to not having heard the agonized screams of my mother as I came into the world. Just entering the universe to a really quiet room, but for the nasal mutterings of a Jewish obstetrician complaining to a nurse about the cost of his landscaper, can have a lasting effect on one’s personality.

  The place of my birth was Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester isn’t known for its good hospitals, so I imagine I was misha
ndled. I don’t have any visible signs of that, except for two huge indentions in my skull. I assume forceps were used. I read once that the name Elliot became popular in the late nineteenth century because that was the name of the forceps used in childbirth: the Elliot forceps. Can you imagine naming your child after the steel instrument that pulled them out of your vagina? That shows a real lack of due diligence. When you name your child after a medical device, it is a pretty telltale sign of an unhappy marriage. Not many women naming their kids Eppy today, after the epidural. Just saying. Also, that will be the last time I will write “just saying,” based on how I cringed after writing it.

  I was named Harry Jon Benjamin. Harry after my paternal grandfather and Jon after the misspelling of John. It appears that there was some discord over my name, so an untidy agreement was made between my parents where they would maintain my first name on the birth certificate but call me by my middle name.

  The Harry has always been a buried secret, like an identity Easter egg, and that mystery has had its own odd effects as well, probably due to the fact that my dad’s father died at a really young age, so passing on his name would be like passing on a curse. But they still gave it anyway, with the caveat of deciding to never utter it. So, as a result, I am just subtly cursed by the ghosts of my ancestry. It’s a very Jewish tendency to honor and excise the past simultaneously. (Jewish voice) “He’s named after his grandfather, God rest his soul, a name that will never ever be uttered in this house, God forbid!” That’s what’s in my name. A real Jewish cocktail of guilt, pride, and necrophobia.

  Still, Jon is a pretty solid mainstream name, so I could blend in, until teachers read out the spelling. It’s never fun to get made fun of for the fact your name is spelled wrong. Like, “Your mom’s so dumb, she spelled John wrong.” Or “How dare you sully the memory of John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus and whose head was cut clean off by King Herod just ’cause his vindictive daughter asked him to!” Anyway, no one is ever completely scarred by a name, except for, maybe, that guy named Tiny Ichicock.