Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Great Roast of Bill Simmons, The Podcasting GOAT

Note: Bill Simmons has many gifts, but none more enduring than his ability to take a perfectly good idea and turn it into a totalizing worldview. Chief among these is his obsession with “who gets the keys,” a concept that began as a useful shorthand for late-game NBA hierarchy and has since metastasized into a governing principle for all human activity. In Simmons’ hands, the question is no longer who closes Game 7, but who closes anything: marriages, movies, bands, revolutions, and possibly even the Enlightenment. It is a framework so elastic that it explains everything and therefore, in a quiet and almost admirable way, explains nothing. Yet Simmons returns to it again and again, like a man who has discovered fire and insists on using it to cook every meal. The result is less analysis than ritual: a familiar incantation that reassures both host and listener that control exists, that someone always has it, and that identifying that person is the highest form of understanding. Whether this is insight or compulsion is an open question, but in the meantime, Simmons has the keys—and he’s not giving them back.

I. The Obsessive With the Keys

Bill Simmons is a strange and singular figure in American media, a man whose greatest innovation may have been to take the interior monologue of a slightly obsessive sports fan and publish it wholesale, unfiltered, and then slowly convince an entire industry that this was not only acceptable but essential. He is not quite a journalist, not quite a commentator, and not quite a comedian, but rather a hybrid form: a “Sportish Guy,” as Cousin Sal once put it, who treats every game, every movie, and every stray anecdote as part of a single, ongoing argument about how the world works. Central to that argument is his enduring fixation on control, on agency, on the question he returns to again and again with the devotion of a man checking the locks before bed: who gets the keys?

It is tempting to dismiss this as a bit, and in some sense it is, but like all of Simmons’ best bits, it has metastasized into something larger and more revealing. What began as a useful shorthand for late-game NBA hierarchy—who has the ball, who takes the shot—has expanded into a general theory of human behavior. Quarterbacks have the keys. Movie characters have the keys. Entire bands, dynasties, and historical figures are evaluated based on whether they had, lost, or never quite secured the keys. That Mark Sanchez could, for a brief and inexplicable moment, be discussed in these terms tells you less about Sanchez than it does about Simmons’ commitment to the framework. He does not particularly care if the fit is perfect. The system must be applied.

This is what makes Simmons both compelling and faintly ridiculous. He is, at heart, a “who’s on my team” guy, a loyalist who rewards proximity, familiarity, and shared history, sometimes to a fault. Former colleagues have occasionally noted that he can cool on people once they leave his orbit, a tendency that reads less as malice than as a kind of emotional sorting mechanism: you are either in the ecosystem or you are not. Some, like Kevin O’Connor, speak warmly of early generosity—gifted shirts, guidance, a foothold in Los Angeles when money was tight. Others have been less charitable, and the occasional critique, including a much-circulated piece in The New York Times, has tried to frame Simmons’ blind spots, particularly around race, as more systemic. These critiques are not wholly without merit, but they often feel slightly overdetermined, flattening a personality that is better understood as idiosyncratic rather than ideological. Simmons himself tends to respond not with grand rebuttals but with motion—hiring voices like Van Lathan, insisting, plausibly, that such moves were already in progress, and continuing on as if the conversation will resolve itself over time.

There is also, undeniably, an ego in play. Simmons has built an empire—Grantland, then The Ringer—largely on the strength of his own voice, and he is not shy about asserting it. Stories persist, as they do in any media ecosystem, including the long-running rumor that he played a role in Magic Johnson’s exit from NBA Countdown, a claim Simmons has repeatedly and emphatically denied. More verifiable is the moment that effectively ended his ESPN tenure: a live broadcast of NBA Countdown in which, after a colleague spoke at length, Simmons leaned in with heavy, unmistakable sarcasm—“Oh, is it my turn to talk now?”—a line that was funny, revealing, and, in the context of corporate television, fatal. It was the voice of the columnist breaking through the format, the irrepressible instinct to comment on the comment, to seize the keys even when the structure said otherwise.

What makes Simmons unique, and worth writing about at all, is that these contradictions—generous and insular, insightful and reductive, earnest and performative—are not bugs but features. He is a weird obsessive who has turned his obsessions into a career, and in doing so has given us a language that is at once clarifying and absurd. He loves the game, he loves the conversation around the game, and above all he loves the feeling that somewhere, in any given moment, someone has the keys.

II: The Bits That Ate the Brain

If the keys are the theory, the bits are the practice. Simmons has always understood that repetition is power: say something often enough, with just enough conviction, and it graduates from joke to canon. Thus “greatest stickman,” a phrase that should have died in a driveway, becomes a legitimate category, and suddenly Burgess Meredith is being floated as an all-timer. “Sal, Sal, BM was the greatest stickman of all time. Every lady wanted a ride.” It is ridiculous, obviously, but also irresistible. The specificity disarms you. The confidence sells it. The framework expands.

This is the Simmons trick: take a private-language riff and run it until it becomes a public one. It does not matter that no one else has ever considered ranking “stickmen.” What matters is that Simmons has, and that he will return to it, again and again, until you find yourself half-convinced that you, too, should have an opinion. It is analysis as inside joke, inside joke as analysis.

III. The Ecosystem

No system survives without a supporting cast, and Simmons has assembled one of the most durable in podcasting.

There is Cousin Sal, the indispensable counterweight, quicker and often funnier, whose primary function is to puncture Simmons at exactly the right moment. The Vegas trips are their shared masterpiece: two grown men insisting, year after year, that this time they will behave differently, and then not. Simmons, improbably, claims that he only smokes in Vegas. No one believes this. The morning-after pod is the payoff—hungover, frayed, the truth leaking out in fragments. “I only had three cigarettes last night,” Simmons offers. Sal, without missing a beat goes: “Yeah, more like three lighters.” It is the kind of line that ends the discussion because it cannot be improved.

There is Joe House, lawyer by day, chaos agent by night, who turns every appearance into a small act of self-destruction. “House Eats” remains a high-water mark: an adult man consuming Chinese food until he vomits, captured and distributed as legitimate sports media content. It should not work. It works perfectly. Drunk House—slurring, swearing, denouncing Daniel Snyder with operatic intensity—is not a bug but a feature. Simmons does not rein him in; he amplifies him. The ecosystem thrives on this permissiveness.

And then there is Nephew Kyle, the quietly essential, publicly baffling producer whose qualifications are, at best, opaque. The nepotism is acknowledged, even embraced. Simmons does not pretend otherwise. He does not have to. The show goes on. The levels are sometimes off. The energy is always on.

IV. The Interviews: High Risk, High Variance

Simmons as interviewer is a study in range. At his best, he is disarming, patient, and genuinely curious, capable of extracting moments that feel both candid and consequential. His conversation with Al Michaels is a case in point: Michaels, relaxed, recounts the day of the O.J. chase, including the now-legendary call-in where a supposed eyewitness punctuates his tip with “Baba Booey.” The co-host takes it seriously. Michaels does not. “It’s a joke, dude,” he essentially says, and in that moment you see the difference between professionals. Simmons knows enough to step back and let the story land. It is radio as it should be: a master talking, a host listening.

The interview with John Skipper is another apex moment. Post-ESPN, Skipper speaks with a level of openness that borders on the shocking—cocaine use, morning routines, the normalization of behavior that would end most careers. Simmons guides rather than pushes, and the result is a “huge get,” the kind of conversation that justifies the entire enterprise.

At the other end of the spectrum sits the Denzel Washington interview, a minor classic of mismatch. Washington arrives as if for one kind of conversation; Simmons is clearly expecting another. The opening is awkward, the rhythms off. To his credit, Simmons does not retreat. He leans in, tries to find common ground, and eventually does, or at least something like it. It is not a triumph, but it is revealing: the limits of the format, the limits of the host, the persistence of the effort.

V. Homerism as Method

Simmons’ greatest cultural contribution may be the legitimization of homerism. Before him, fandom was something to be managed, disclosed, occasionally apologized for. With him, it becomes the point. He is, unapologetically, a Boston guy: the Boston Celtics are not just a team but a lineage, a narrative, a near-mythological entity anchored by figures like Larry Bird, whose legend grows incrementally with each retelling. The takes are, at times, outta control. They are also, in their way, coherent. Simmons is not pretending to objectivity. He is offering a perspective, and trusting that the audience will meet him there.

This approach extends beyond basketball. Baseball, once a central obsession—AL keeper leagues, granular analysis—fades over time, dismissed as too long, too slow, no longer aligned with the rhythms of his life or his listeners’. Basketball remains the core competency, the area where his knowledge is both deep and defensible. Everything else orbits around it.

VI. Family and Formation

The personal mythology is never far from the surface. Simmons’ father, a longtime Celtics season-ticket holder, is both character and audience, the origin point of the fandom that would become a career. The pride is evident, even when unspoken. The access—courtside seats in the 1970s—becomes part of the narrative, a credential as meaningful as any byline.

His mother, less present on the pod but frequently referenced, provides another axis: a love of movies, a different kind of cultural literacy that feeds into Simmons’ broader interests. The recurring mention of being a child of divorce functions as a kind of grounding note, a reminder that the voice, however confident, has origins in something more fragile. He seems, by most measures, to have come out fine.

VII. Drift and Discipline

As the empire grows—Grantland, then The Ringer, now under the umbrella of Spotify—Simmons changes in ways both subtle and obvious. He fades certain voices who no longer fit the evolving brand: Adam Carolla, once a regular presence, becomes less so; Michael Rapaport, similarly, drifts out of the rotation. The official reasons are varied—tone, fit, the simple passage of time—but the underlying dynamic is familiar. Simmons is, at heart, a “who’s on my team” operator. The team changes. The roster turns over.

And yet, it is hard to shake the sense that the affection remains. These are not clean breaks so much as quiet reassignments, the byproduct of a system that requires a certain level of control. Spotify money, corporate expectations, the need to maintain a particular tone—these exert their own pressure. The outta-control energy that defined earlier iterations of the pod is still there, but it is managed, channeled, occasionally held back.

VIII. The Countdown Moment

If there is a single scene that captures Simmons in miniature, it is the one that ends his ESPN tenure. On NBA Countdown, a colleague speaks at length. Simmons waits. And waits. And then, with a level of sarcasm that is both unmistakable and, in context, disastrous, he interjects: “Oh, is it my turn to talk now?” It is funny. It is honest. It is, within the rigid structure of live television, unacceptable.

He is removed not long after.

The moment endures because it reveals the core tension: Simmons the columnist versus Simmons the employee, the impulse to comment versus the requirement to conform. He cannot quite suppress the former, even when the latter demands it. He reaches for the keys, even when they are not his to take.

VIII. Conclusion

Bill Simmons is the GOAT podcaster, full stop, and it’s worth saying that clearly at the outset because we only roast the ones we love. Bill Simmons has given us an entire language—keys, stickman, Vegas nights, Sal lines, Drunk House—and if you’ve been along for the ride, those bits don’t wear out, they compound. They get funnier with time, richer with context, a kind of private shorthand that becomes, almost accidentally, a shared culture. You either hear “three lighters” and laugh immediately or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s not much point explaining it.

This is part of what makes Simmons both beloved and, in certain circles, a little contentious. He has clearly made enemies—inside ESPN, across the broader media landscape, and occasionally among former employees—and while it’s easy to chalk this up to ego or looseness, the better read is that the looseness is largely performative. Underneath the hangout vibe, the teasing, the Nephew Kyle chaos and the Drunk House indulgence, there is a very real set of standards, and Simmons enforces them. He is, at heart, a “who’s on my team” operator, and the team matters. People drift out. Some of that isn’t pretty. Most of it, however, is consistent with how he’s always operated: loyal, selective, and ultimately in control of the room.

At the same time, there is a sense now that Simmons is, if not slowing down, then at least rounding off the sharper edges. He talks openly about retirement in a way he didn’t a decade ago, and you get the feeling that he is aware, at some level, of the limits of the bit. Will he be seventy-five, still ranking stickmen and assigning keys? It’s hard to see it. He’s a boss now, a central figure inside Spotify, with responsibilities that extend well beyond the pod. The insurgent has become the institution, and while the voice is still there, it’s necessarily more managed than it once was.

There’s also the simple fact that Simmons is no longer a writer in the way he once was, and he knows it. The old columns—the mailbags, the trade value pieces, the obsessive digressions—have given way to the pod, to conversation, to rhythm. He jokes that his fingers don’t work anymore, and like most of his best lines, it’s funny because it’s partly true. The Book of Basketball stands as the monument to that earlier phase: long, ambitious, slightly out of control in the best way, complete with the famous pyramid (Jordan at the top, Magic above Bird, a decision that still tells you everything you need to know about him). But the shift from writing to talking isn’t a decline so much as an evolution. Simmons was always more voice than text anyway. The medium finally caught up to the man.

If and when he does step back, what we lose is not just a podcast or a brand but something rarer: a genuinely original voice that bent an entire corner of the media world toward itself. Plenty of people analyze sports. Plenty of people talk about culture. Almost no one has managed to fuse the two into a single, durable, endlessly riffable system the way Simmons has. The keys, for all their absurdity, are real in that sense. He found them early, used them often, and built something that will outlast the bit itself.

And if he eventually decides to set them down, or even just hold them a little more loosely, it will mark the end of a run that, for all its contradictions, was unmistakably his.

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On the Cultural Field Around St.Georges School and Spokane, WA

Epigraph:

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, “Still a Cage”

I. — Launch vs. Escape

I didn’t understand Spokane’s sexual landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was secretly wild and not so secretly wild, a place where desire slipped between the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and everyone knew more than they admitted. St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving toward other things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s real wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. It was erotic energy humming under a conservative façade, the kind that starts as a pulse under the collar and ends in the kind of self-destruction people call “mistakes” years later. The city pretended to be a grid of churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, and Rotary breakfasts, but the truth lived in back booths, river pullouts, dim bars off Division, and the long shadows of marriages that weren’t working. People were hungry. Not for sin—Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that—but for escape, for intensity, for feeling anything sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a diet. And because the city couldn’t admit that hunger, it acted it out sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, private shame masked as judgment, the moral guardians always the ones who ran the hottest at night. And threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and then vanished for weeks, living with the kind of unashamed freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I only caught the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult investigator returning later, it became obvious: the cage wasn’t made of rules, it was made of denial. And denial is the most erotic fuel a city can generate.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it pretended to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge. I didn’t learn about Spokane from St. George’s; I learned about leaving from St. George’s. The city taught the rest. And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that used to feel like separate worlds, and I can see the seams of the place with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The old stories fall apart under scrutiny, but the architecture remains. The church parking lots. The dim bars. The hills where people walked off their secrets. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to investigate it. And once you see the truth of a place, you can’t unsee the way it shaped you—even after you’ve run as far as you can from the cage you didn’t know you were inside.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the big, cinematic pieces people imagine. It’s the little house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies — the kind of small domestic details that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t a fantasy; it was texture. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up. And those drives with my dad to Foothills — Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then it was still just Foothill Park — the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That’s the part that gets me now: how effortlessly belonging felt there. You didn’t have to explain yourself, or hide anything, or decode a system of silences. You just drove up into the hills and the world opened without consequence. Spokane had its wildness, but California had a kind of spaciousness that felt like permission. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. It’s not that I necessarily want to move back — it’s that a part of me never really left. California became the template for what openness feels like, the first geography that suggested freedom wasn’t an escape but a way of being.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college — me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, taking the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself. In the picture, Ian’s in front, already carrying that air of someone who had strong, fully-formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half-becoming himself. That version of me had no understanding of cages. He just assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line hits the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time — I heard it as geography. That’s Spokane for me: a place I ran from without realizing I was running, a system I slipped out of long before I understood the bars. It wasn’t trauma; it wasn’t exile. It was something quieter and stranger — a recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit. California taught me what openness felt like. Japan gave me the life I wanted. But Spokane shaped the part of me that investigates, the part that reads cities like case files, the part that knows desire and denial can live under the same roof for decades without ever breaking stride. When I hear “Still a Cage,” it’s not about being trapped. It’s about understanding, finally, the architecture of the place you outgrew — and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But the line only lands when you come back years later, driving those old streets like an investigator, realizing the cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you see the silence for what it was, the lock falls open, and you know for sure you’re never going back.

Epigraph

“…yeah I got out,
but it’s still a cage.”
—after Ryan Adams, Still a Cage

I.

I didn’t understand Spokane’s emotional landscape until years after I left it, and by then it was already too late to pretend it had ever been the clean, conservative city adults insisted it was. The truth was simpler and messier: it was a place where desire moved quietly through the cracks of churches, cul-de-sacs, river pullouts, and private-school parking lots, and where people knew more than they said aloud.

St. George’s launched me academically, but it did nothing to contain the currents running just outside its gates—the coded parties, the silent scandals, the hookups that lived like rumors, the older stories whispered by kids who shouldn’t have known them. What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t leaving Spokane away from anything. I was leaving towardother things—Japan, NAU, a life that moved. Only later did I understand I wasn’t going back.

II. — The Erotic City

What I didn’t see as a kid—but can’t unsee now—is that Spokane’s wildness wasn’t teenage at all. It was adult. Not theatrical or decadent, but quiet and unresolved, an erotic energy humming beneath a conservative façade. The city presented itself as orderly: churches, schools, tidy neighborhoods, Rotary breakfasts. But the real emotional life lived in the margins—in dim bars off Division, in river pullouts, in the long shadows of marriages that had settled into routine.

People weren’t hungry for scandal. Spokane isn’t interesting enough for that. They were hungry for intensity, for escape, for moments that felt sharper than the soft monotony the town served as a daily diet. And because that hunger couldn’t be named directly, it surfaced sideways: affairs disguised as mentorships, judgment masking private confusion, moral certainty coexisting with private longing.

Threaded through that landscape was Brookie, the wild boundary cat who drifted into our yard for weeks and vanished for weeks, living with a freedom the rest of Spokane pretended not to want. As a kid I caught only the edges of it, like smoke under a door. As an adult returning later, the pattern became clearer: the cage wasn’t made of rules. It was made of denial. And denial, more than rebellion, is what gives a place its quiet erotic charge.

III. — SGS (Light Touch) and the Return

St. George’s sat just outside all that, or at least it seemed to. The river, the quiet paths, the small classes—SGS was the aesthetic of order laid gently over a city that hummed with contradiction. It launched me because it was designed to: college essays, seminar rooms, teachers who pushed hard without ever naming the broader ecosystem we were all standing in. It was a runway, not a refuge.

I didn’t learn Spokane from St. George’s; I learned leaving from St. George’s. The school offered direction without interpretation, preparation without excavation. The city supplied the rest.

And when I go back now—if I do—it isn’t to recover anything. It’s as an investigator walking his old beat. I drive past the river, the schools, the neighborhoods that once felt like separate worlds, and the seams of the place become visible with adult clarity: who lived double lives, who never left, who couldn’t leave, who escaped and reinvented themselves entirely. The stories shift, but the architecture remains. Spokane didn’t change so much as reveal itself the moment I had enough distance to see it.

IV. — Palo Alto

When I think of California, it’s never the cinematic version people imagine. It’s the small house we lived in in Palo Alto and the Whole Foods with the organic cookies—the quiet domestic textures that register as safety when you’re young and don’t yet have a name for that feeling. California wasn’t fantasy; it was atmosphere. Light off the sidewalk. Air that felt like it was already holding you up.

And those drives with my dad to Foothills—Foothills Nature Preserve now, but back then simply Foothill Park—the private reserve only Palo Alto residents could enter. That detail lands differently now: belonging there felt effortless. You didn’t have to decode silences or manage contradictions. You simply moved through the hills and the world opened without consequence.

Spokane had its wildness, but California offered spaciousness, a geography that suggested freedom didn’t need to be disguised. Even now, I miss it with an ache that catches me off guard. Not because I want to return permanently, but because a part of me never fully left. California became the first place that suggested openness wasn’t escape but orientation.

V. — Cameo (Ian)

Sometimes, when I need a reminder of who I was before I understood any of this, I think of a photo from just after college—me and Ian and Matt Thornton in New York, staying way uptown in a borrowed flat, ordering pizza three times a day, probably getting high, riding the train like we were immortal. I grabbed the prime sleeping spot and held onto it, a small personal victory in an era when I rarely asserted myself.

In the picture, Ian stands in front, already carrying that air of someone with strong, fully formed opinions about every band on earth. I’m behind him in my dark brown leather cap, looking like someone still half becoming himself. That version of me had no concept of cages. He simply assumed the world was big.

VI. — Still a Cage

Maybe that’s why the Ryan Adams line lands the way it does. “Yeah, I got out, but it’s still a cage.” I didn’t hear it as confession the first time. I heard it as geography.

That’s Spokane for me: a place I left without fully understanding why, a system I slipped out of long before I could see its contours. It wasn’t trauma or exile. It was something quieter—the recognition that the place that formed me was also the place I could never fully inhabit.

California taught me openness. Japan gave me the life I wanted. Spokane shaped the investigator—the part of me that reads cities like case files, that sees how desire and denial can coexist for decades without ever openly colliding.

When I hear “Still a Cage,” it isn’t about entrapment. It’s about understanding the architecture of a place you outgrew and how long it takes to see it clearly. You can leave early, leave clean, leave without resentment. But clarity arrives only later, when distance converts memory into interpretation.

The cage was never the city itself. It was the silence. And the moment you recognize the silence for what it was, the lock falls open. Not with anger or triumph, but with quiet certainty. You understand that leaving was less an escape than a translation—and that some places shape you most profoundly precisely because you cannot return to them.

Dedication

For Brookie

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Scenes from St. George’s Part III: Mr. Dreyer, French Teacher Extraordinaire (with a cameo from Richard Marx)

When I was in middle school I took French from one Monsieur Dreyer. I had already been studying (the verb is used loosely) French for a couple of years, and had some of the basics. In Mr. Dreyer’s class I learned a little more, and could actually kind of hack it in French there for a bit. But any actual language learning that took place in Mr. Dreyer’s class was seriously secondary to the excellent action that took place around his class.

I wasn’t first introduced to Mr. Dreyer in middle school, however. In fact, I first met him when I was in elementary school around the time he began teaching at the school where my father taught, and I attended, in the early 1980s. I remember going to the apartment he shared with his wife, who is Japanese, when they had an exchange student called Atsushi from Japan staying with them. Atsushi was my age, and he showed us how to make onigiri (rice balls). Making rice balls is not all that tough, just rice, water, and salt. Still, I thought onigiri were pretty exotic and Atsushi pretty cool. Some time later Mr. Dreyer and his wife must have come up a bit short of ready cash, because they lived in a tent in my family’s front yard for a while. This seems a little strange looking back, but it wasn’t then. I have no idea what the bathroom or shower situation looked like, but something must have happened.

(My brother Mike also lived out in a tent in the front yard during the summer for a number of years. Maybe it was the same tent. Mike would run an extension cord out to the tent and play his boombox. This was a few years after the Dreyer clan was tenting it, and Mike was deep into the singer Richard Marx. I thought Richard Marx was alright, but he didn’t seem to have a lot of songs. This mattered not at all to Mike who played the same Richard Marx tunes over and over again.

Today Richard Marx is, strangely enough, bigger than ever. But not as a musician. He runs a popular Twitter account where he is a big liberal and also pretty funny. Marx is like Rex Chapman but less problematic. Rex Chapman is super-problematic. I’m not sure exactly how, I just know he is.)

Mr. Dreyer also played a little chess with my father, although my impression is that both of them were pretty bad. Certainly they were not pulling out a lot of “hard-to-find” moves. At that time, I knew Mr. Dreyer was a French teacher, but didn’t know if he was in fact French. Today I believe it to be the case that he is not French, is in fact from California, and just somehow became proficient in the language. Good for him.

Even before I took his class, I was aware that Mr. Dreyer was, let’s say, a different sort of fellow. He liked to tell a story about his brother who lived on a massive contour map of the San Francisco Bay area. The map was located in an enclosed structure that hung under a bridge in Oakland or something. And his brother just chilled there full time, so the story went. So Mr. Dreyer, apparently, was the normal one in his family.

(I remember Mr. Dreyer talking to me about John Lennon one day as well. This was maybe when I was taking his class, but I think it might have been before that. “John Lennon’s assassination was really sad,” he said, “he was just starting to put his life back together.” I had heard of John Lennon but at that time knew nothing of the circumstances of his death. And I certainly didn’t know about his ups and downs in the 1970s. Mr. Dreyer must have been a Lennon fan though, and wanted to tell me about it.)

In any case, when I got to middle school I was assigned Mr. Dreyer, as mentioned. Mr. Dreyer wore a mustache that looked pretty Frenchy to me—maybe that’s why I kind of thought he was a French native. There were also a number of the Tintin books in French on a shelf in the back of the room. I had read most of the Tintin books in English by then, so it was fun to browse the French versions and take in some of the action from a new lens.

In Mr. Dreyer’s class everyone got a “French name,” and I was called “Philippe.” I don’t really care for all these fake names in language class, although I recognize that some people do adopt them as a kind of alter ego. I mean, if a Japanese gal called “Sari” wants to go by “Sally” in English class that’s great. Makes sense. But my actual name sounds nothing like Philippe, so it just seemed kind of random. In any case, little Phillippe was not a bad French student, but he was a restless one. Mr. Dreyer’s classroom opened from the back door onto a kind of grassy area, and for reasons passing understating Philippe would leave class in the middle of the lesson and then try to crawl back in through the back door and up through the room, hoping to escape Mr. Dreyer’s attention. Mr. Dreyer did notice, of course, but he was pretty cool about it.

“What you doing there Philippe? Sneaking back into the room again? Welcome to French class si vous plait.” Something like that. I wasn’t trying to aggravate Mr. Dreyer or anything because I really liked him as a teacher, I was just doing what 12 year old boys do. However, Mr. Dreyer did not view every student as leniently as myself. One of my classmates was a guy we’ll call “E.P.” E.P. was a trouble-maker, and was known to pull the fire alarm in the middle school there on a regular basis. His parents were called, repeatedly, but he didn’t care. He loved pulling that fire alarm. E.P. would also prank call mothers of other students for whom he somehow had phone numbers from the school phone and talk dirty to them in a fake voice. So, yeah.

One week, E.P. and some other students had started throwing wadded up pieces of paper toward a metal garbage can located at the front right corner of Mr. Dreyer’s classroom. Mr. Dreyer let this roll for a few days, however one day before lunch he decided to crack down. “Mr. E.P.,” he said, “I’ll make you a deal.” “You can have one more throw of a paper at that trash can. If you make it, you can go to lunch. If you miss, you have lunch detention.”

Now this struck me as a pretty fair deal, because E.P. didn’t have to accept the challenge. He could have just passed and gone about his day. That, of course, is not what happened. Instead, E.P. wadded up yet another piece of paper and lobbed it at the trash can. He missed. This was the last straw for Mr. Dreyer who, instead of keeping him in detention as promised, took matters a step further. He grabbed the trash can (which was about three and a half feet high) and carried it over to where E.P. was sitting.

“You like garbage!” he shouted. “I’ll show you garbage.” And sure enough Mr. Dreyer, onigiri expert, former tent dweller, and French teacher extraordinaire, emptied the whole thing right on top of E.P.’s dome. Now you might think this was some bad action, and from today’s perspective sure, it probably was. But for us middle schoolers it was hysterical.

“Did you hear what Mr. Dreyer did?” we whispered for the rest of the week. “He dumped a full garbage can on E.P.’s head.” This was the biggest thing to happen all month, and we milked it, obviously. Again, if this happened today, Mr. Dreyer might have faced some kind of sanction, but the 1980’s were not like that. E.P. had been dumped on, and life moved on.

Mr. Dreyer eventually left that school and moved to Kyoto where he taught for a while at Kyoto International School before ultimately moving back to California where his brother lived on a map. Years later I reconnected with Mr. Dreyer on Facebook, where he regularly posts groaningly bad, yet still somehow funny, visual puns. “Cyrano wins by a nose” with a drawing of Cyrano crossing the finish line in a foot race, that sort of thing. Anyway, I wanted to get his perspective on the whole the garbage can situation so I sent him a message. What did he recall of the incident?

He didn’t remember it at first, but then he said “oh yes, that was with a student called “J.”

“No,” I replied, “it was with E.P.”

“No, no, no,” he replied, it was “J. JFK.”

Now I knew that Mr. Dreyer is prone to making some strange jokes, and at first I thought he was making some kind of oblique assassination reference. Was he suggesting that there must have been a second shooter?

“This was not JFK related,” I said. “It was some E.P. action. I‘m sure of it.”

Mr. Dreyer was not sold though, and it occurred to me that there may have been more than one dumping. This may, in fact, have been Dreyer’s go-to-move. After all, his treatment of E.P. was, in truth, pretty unfair—the deal was advertised as sink the shot or detention. Dumping was never mentioned. Was Dreyer moving about the globe and dumping full garbage cans on students left and right? It was a possibility. Maybe I was smart to stay low to the ground after all.

These days, Mr. Dreyer is living in California where he enjoys the warm climate. And he reads this blog. Hey there Mr. Dreyer baby, you’re a cool guy but that garbage can move could maybe use a little reflection. E.P. was a troublemaker, sure, but dumping just wasn’t part of the deal.

to be continued…

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On John Innes, the Fabulist (with cameos from Bruce Innes and Hunter S. Thompson)

John Innes is a high school English teacher in Oregon. He works at a Catholic School there where he also coaches basketball, and probably does some other stuff. His players call him “Coach Innes,” and I think they respect him. And this is reasonable enough. Innes is a good coach, and good teacher, and most of the time a pretty good guy. He used to be a good golfer, but I think he lost it. Too much water on the elbow, can’t control the slice. But teachers show one side of themselves in the classroom and another outside of it. What John Innes has kept hidden from his students and players is that he is big old fabulist.

I know this because Innes, probably to fill the time when his lesson plans peter out or something, is known to tell stories to his students about the days when he and I were in high school and university together. And these stories are all completely bonkers. Innes will tell his students a story about me throwing people into the Little Spokane river back in high school. But I would never do that. I mean the Little Spokane is cold, and what kind of person would toss a fellow student into a cold river just because? Also, to get to the Little Spokane, which ran by our school, you had to cross a super long bridge. I’m not dragging some chick or dude across a super long bridge just to get them wet. Doesn’t make sense. I don’t know where Innes gets this stuff. It’s totally ridiculous. Innes is big old fabulist.

In another of his little “stories,” Innes claims that during university at Hamilton College I snuck into the chapel there on campus and climbed up into the bell tower. Now, there might have been a chapel at Hamilton, sure. There might have been a lot of things. Hamilton has some pretty old buildings, and it’s not impossible that a chapel would have some kind of bells in it. But I’m not gonna go climbing up there. Innes fancies himself a “literature” teacher, and maybe he’s mixing in some part of a Dorothy Sayers plot or something. Also, Innes may be extrapolating from the notion that I generally may attempt to access certain spaces that might seem “off limits.” That’s possible. I mean, if I see a “Members Only” sign on the door of a club, I’m gonna think “hey there pal, I’m a member. In fact, I’m a permanent member baby” and I’m gonna go right on in. I have also noticed that in buildings where there may be some public spaces and some private or closed spaces, if you are dressed nicely, as I can, and are pretty tall, as I am, you can sometimes just wander wherever and people will, by and large, just let you, especially if you wear some kind of lanyard around your neck. But this doesn’t mean I’m going to go poking around a bunch of bells. It’s totally ridiculous. Innes is a big fabulist, and he needs to get over it.

Innes tells another story about me graduating from university in linen. What’s he even talking about? I mean, I did graduate and have a piece of paper somewhere I think, but linen? What a bizarre thing to say. And for that matter, what if I did? Linen is a cloth, clothes are made from cloth, I was presumably clothed at graduation. So what? I think what may be going on here is that the water from his elbow is migrating up to his brain. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and what I do recall is that I wore a little purple flower in my hair at graduation and some dude from the newspaper took a picture of me and this ran somewhere. Innes may have remembered the flower thing and then imagined a whole bunch of other nonsense around it. Linen. It’s totally ridiculous. His fables are just getting out of control.

So Innes apparently thinks it’s funny to spin a bunch of nonsense about me. I don’t know exactly why he does this, but he may come by his mendacity honestly, so to speak. Innes has a father called Bruce Innes. Bruce Innes is a Canadian, and a pretty interesting guy. He used to be in a band called The Original Caste, and they had a hit called “One Tin Soldier.” The song is still pretty well known to a certain generation, which is cool. That band split and Bruce Innes must have drifted around blowing his money for a while, cause he ended up in Spokane in the late 80s, which is when I met the fabulist John Innes. I went to Bruce Innes’ house sometimes in order to crush John Innes at a video game called “R.B.I. Baseball.” I don’t play a lot of video games, but it doesn’t matter. I crushed John Innes at Sega Hockey a few years later as well and he whined about it for weeks. Guy has water on the elbow from way back.

Anyway, Bruce Innes’ Spokane house was pretty large and had a fully soundproofed music studio in the basement. I’d never seen anything like this and assumed that he must have some serious cash. But I don’t think this was actually the case. Like I said, I think Bruce Innes had spent most of his money from his music heyday by this time. My brother Mike, who remembers some stuff and forgets other stuff, told me recently that Bruce Innes made his living around this time by writing jingles for an audio and video store in town called Huppins. I don’t remember anything about this, but it’s too specific not to be at least a little bit true. It can’t all have been Huppins though, right? He must have done other stuff. Bruce Innes ended up leaving Spokane and moving to Sun Valley where he became the go to guy to play music sets at rich people’s parties. Then he moved to Oregon. I don’t know where he lives now. So yeah, he’s had an interesting life.

Back in the days when Bruce Innes was high on the hog with his music royalties he ran around with some famous folks. He met Leonard Cohen, and told me one time that Cohen was a total dick. Leonard Cohen is a legend of course, and is now remembered best as a genial older statesman, but this doesn’t preclude the possibility that back in the 70’s he may have been a dick. Doesn’t preclude it at all. Mr. Google says that Bruce Innes also knew Joni Mitchell. More well known though is Bruce Innes’ association with the writer Hunter S. Thompson. Most people of a certain age will remember Thompson, the “gonzo” inheritor of Hemingway and a pretty major figure in American literary history. Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in which he relates a funny anecdote of bonding over college football with President Richard Nixon in the back of a car sometime, despite the fact that Thompson hated Nixon. Thompson also wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I also have read. This is the book that the Terry Gilliam movie is based on, the one where Benicio DelToro plays Thompson’s sidekick and always advises him “as your lawyer…,” a phrase that has entered popular culture and is still widely used.

This is also the book that features Bruce Innes and some story about a monkey. I’m not sure if this next part is in Las Vegas or not, and in fact I think it isn’t, but another story is that Thompson and Bruce Innes were hanging out in Colorado somewhere and decided they would run for political office on the same ticket. Thompson would run for sheriff and Bruce Innes would run for something else. Now, Thompson’s run for sheriff is a well known piece of his mythos, and he did actually have a platform under the umbrella of “Freak Power,” but I imagine that whatever this run really entailed, Thompson exaggerated it pretty dramatically in later telling. I’ve heard Bruce Innes talk about this as well, and he makes it sound like the two of them were actually aspiring politicians for a time. But I don’t believe it. I’ll bet you what happened was these two guys were hanging out and getting stoned, and thought it would be funny if they “ran” for office. They probably got a poster or two made and hung them up around town, told all their friends about it as a lark, and talked a bunch of BS for a while. Bruce Innes is a great guy, but I think he and Thompson are kind of full of it. So like I say, John Innes probably comes by it honestly.

Whatever the source of John Innes’ struggles with the truth, one time after he had told some of his usual whoppers about me, one of his students found these stories interesting and wrote me a request for more information. He actually wrote it in verse, which was pretty creative, so I wrote him back in the same style on a flight out of Adelaide. The poem basically attempts to correct the record that the fabulist John Innes so regularly distorts. It also touches on some of the lowlights of my college career, including my fondness for writing excuses for students who needed extensions, the fact that I sported a tan trench coat for much of my first year, and my inability to get a steady girlfriend. John Innes, the fabulist, is referred to as “J.I.” in the poem. In the interest of having some of my “b-sides” back in print, I am re-posting this guy in its original form. It’s called “An Open Book,” and I gotta say, it’s still pretty good.

“An Open Book”

Not really in the mood
but you’ll think me quite rude
if I don’t make a reply
around me on the plane
folks eat, are entertained
no one’s writing save I

So I’ll take a look back
to days at the dog track
where I ended up by mistake
thought we could beat the odds
just silly teenage sods
there was no money to make

I know not if J.I.
has spun a pack of lies
concerning my personhood
Yes, I wrote poems for girls
who told me they were pearls
ah–but they weren’t any good

About a cold river,
and the rest of his quiver
of myths and exaggerations
well if someone was shoved
it was done out of love
or congratulations

So to upstate New York
in a trench coat–what a dork
but the world took pity
the life there was fine
but naught was on the line
should have gone to the city

I did two things quite well,
needing something to sell
I wrote brilliant excuses
‘bout ridiculous capers,
couldn’t finish my papers
I claimed aces, held deuces

My second great skill
is one I hold still
I fell for crazy ladies
locals, Russians, and Turks
they all drove me berserk
with a boatload of maybes

Four years in the dorms
and countless reforms
led to little of note
I left sans a sob
a plan or a job
and without my trench coat

Dedication: For John Innes, the fabulist. You know I won that Sega game, but I confess I may have tried to get up in that bell tower. So let’s call it a tie there baby.

Postscript: Since this piece was first published, Bruce Innes has sadly passed away, I believe in Vermont. As I said in the piece, Bruce had a fascinating life, and he was also a genuinely sweet guy. I really liked him. RIP Bruce, maybe you can win an election or two up there in heaven.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy “An Open Book,” also about the character known as John Innes. You can find that here.