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.Another difference: O Neill would not let his play be performedduring his lifetime.He didn t want to have to deal with the fallout.I was going to perform mine myself.And I knew I could be nukedwith a lethal dose of fallout from it.I had no idea at the time, but Spic-O-Rama was the first of whatbecame my family trilogy, followed by Freak and Sexaholix.It saysa lot more about life and family and love and hate than I was able tosay with Mambo Mouth.The family is where everything begins, forall of us.So much great stage literature is about family: Oedipus Rex,The Odyssey, Hamlet, Othello, Death of a Salesman, you name it.Ourfamilies make us all who we are, even when they re not as intenseand crazy as mine.We all have some wretched inner child who sbeen damaged or traumatized, and it drives all our lives.No one getsoff easy.I can see it now, someday Boogie will do her own one-womanshow about what a horrible father I was.The way I see it, my parentsdamaged me, but I forgive them it made me what I am today.SoI m-a damage my kids too.Nah, just kidding.I don t need my kids to be that successful.Es-pecially if they re just going to talk trash about me up on stage likethat.Ungrateful ingrates.The idea for Spic-O-Rama started with this guy I saw on the streetone day while I was doing Mambo Mouth.What a character.A youngLatin guy in army fatigues, obviously a Desert Storm vet, just hang-ing on the corner with his boombox.He looked like a character out Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends 105*of a Latin version of Waiting for Godot.I started wondering what hedid for a living, what his life was like.He reminded me of all the guysI grew up with who d gone into the service.When I was twelve or thirteen, there was this older guy in myneighborhood, Chouchi.Chouchi was a marine vet.He wore hisfatigues all the time, that floppy hat.And he was insane.Like all theguys I looked up to then, he was in a bunch of gangs, and I thoughthe was so cool.He had so much life experience compared to me andmy boring friends.Chouchi was the first guy I got drunk with.I was thirteen and wedid that thing where you steal a little bit of every kind of liquor in yourparents house everything on my mother s minibar, vodka, whis-key, rum and mixed it all together in one ridiculous drink, a trash-can.We got completely fucked up and started fighting.Of course heknocked me down and started beating on me, but I was laughingthrough it.The next day I was black-and-blue and sicker than I dever been in my life.My first hangover, at age thirteen.Too bad thatwas another lesson I didn t learn so well.I put Chouchi and that guy on the street together into the charac-ter Krazy Willie.He s the oldest brother in Spic-O-Rama s dysfunc-tional family.He s twenty-nine, back from Desert Storm, and he sdoing nothing with his life.Drinking beer, hanging with his burnoutfriends Chewy and Boulevard.And he s about to get married to hissexy little eleventh-grade girlfriend, Yvonne.And of course they refighting all the time, even on their wedding day, because he s anadult and a loser and she s a high-school tramp, and he still chasesgirls and can t afford to take her anywhere, so she s always bustinghis balls.He complains to Chewy, Why can t she just lower her stan-dards? I did. As the show began to fall into place for me, their wedding, thestart of what you just know is going to be a train wreck of a marriage, 106 JOHN LEGUIZAMO*became the centerpiece of the story, with all the other monologuesbuilding up to and commenting on it somehow.Then there s the youngest brother, Miguel Miggy. He s asmart and nerdy nine-year-old, cool and smart-ass funny, but alsoa dork and an egghead.He s one of the brainy kids.His best friendis a fat egghead like him, Ivan.Miggy does the Cabbage Patch andcheers Ivan on: Go chubby! Go chubby! Get stupid! Get stupid! Miggy s always sniffling and pushing his glasses up his nose, huffinghis asthma inhaler, breathing through his mouthful of buck teeth.There s a lot of me as a kid in him.Before my dad left and I startedacting out all the time, I went through my nerdy egghead periodwhere I had my hand up for every question in class.My friends wereall eggheads.While all the cool kids were forming gangs, we had astamp-collecting club.All the top nerds from school would meet upat my house, and we d always end up fighting.I d be pleading, Yo,you can t fight in here.If you break anything my father will kill me. We d wrestle and kung-fu on my parents nuclear-orange shag car-pet.We were nerds acting out in the privacy of our own home, beingthe tough kids we couldn t be out in the real world.Cuz out on thestreet we d get our dorky asses kicked.Miggy became the narrator of the show.He s giving a slide showabout his family for a class project, and that frames the rest of themonologues.Each of the family members he talks about comes aliveand I do each of their monologues in costume.Once I had Krazy Willie and Miggy down, the rest of the fam-ily fell into place pretty quickly.The second-oldest brother, Javier, isdisabled and in a wheelchair.He s based somewhat on my brother,Serge.Serge was a supersmart kid, did really well in math in schooland won tons of awards, then went to study premed at ColumbiaUniversity.But it s hard to come from an underprivileged back-ground and be in that world.You re so demanding of yourself, so Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends 107*afraid of failure, that you can drive your brain and your body toexhaustion.I think that s what happened to Serge
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