ALMOST FAMOUS BUT THIS IS WHERE I'LL STAY (PART 2)

Now, now. Where did I leave off? That's right. His film "Personal Velocity" had just won the Jury Award at Sundance. The jealousies flame was lit right then. But it wasn't evident to me until about a year and a half later. At this time, I was still performing comedy, at an even greater pace. I was performing around 4 or 5 nights a week. Not bad for a nineteen and a half year old. (I say this because I think it's a rule that you stop saying your age and a half or quarter or three-quarters at the age of twenty. So at this time it was accurate for me to give myself the half.) I hadn't heard much about Lou. He wasn't doing too much. I heard he landed a bit role in an HBO film with Paul Newman and he was in some movie with Keanu Reeves. Both of those didn't bother me at all. I mean it was Paul Newman now. Not Slap Shot Paul Newman and it was Keanu Reeves now. Not Bill and Ted's Keanu Reeves. It's so weird how I looked at things then.

Fast forward six months and that's when I saw what made my jealousy boil. I saw that for his film "Thumbsucker" he won SPECIAL JURY AWARD - ACTING at Sundance. Why, that's something I wouldn't mind winning. He won an award. I got mad and it's not even like he beat me for the award because I was not nominated because I was not in a movie that was really a movie. It's just so weird to see someone who you used to make little crappy movies with in your friends backyards be a success for doing what you were both doing at the time. That was definitely a run-on sentence. But for whatever reason from then on out I was a complete jerk about the guy. My parents would be like you should give him a call and I'd say "It's not even that good of a movie." To this day, I don't think it's very good. But he was the best part of it. See, I never mentioned that to my parents. I just focused on the parts that sucked, like the rest of it.

Then came the run-in. Remember the run-on sentence from before? No relation. I was working a dead-end job at a Best Buy while also being a comedian and he was jet-setting taking home many awards for his dramatic portrayal of a guy who goes medication to stop sucking his thumb and becomes a great debater. At least, I think that's what the story is about. But he came into buy DVD's around Christmas time and I was there working because it was around Christmas time. He came up to me and was genuinely interested in how I have been. Hollywood phony, I thought. But he kept talking to me and even offered to take a look at stuff I wrote. I don't want that. I didn't want that. I wanted him to be a bastard. I wanted him to be a douchebag. I'm the douchebag. I wanted him to be like "Oh man, do you know what it's like to snort oxycontin off of Scarlett Johannson's pussy?" and I'd be like "No" and he'd say "Pretty friggen' great. I mean, Pretty fuckin' great!" (In Hollywood, you only say fuck.) But he wasn't like that. It crushed me that my stereotyping (I think) was wrong. I hated that, because it's the first time stereotyping ever did me wrong. Yep, I'm a stereotyper. You can hear me out of the left & right speakers.

Lou Pucci is a great guy, I am not. But I mean, come on. Wouldn't you be a little jealous that you can't even be the most famous person you graduated with? I mean the class before us the most famous owns a wood company and the class after us, a guy killed another guy. If I was a year younger, or a year older I would be a shoe-in. But instead I'm second fiddle. You know what has never been good Second Fiddle. First fiddle isn't even that good because at the end of the day, you are still playing fiddle.