The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (4 page)

ROBERT BARRY, friend:

At school you always wanted to be around Chris. He was a blast, but his focus was always on you, talking
you
up, making
you
feel better. “This is my buddy Robert,” he’d say. “He’s all-state basketball.” He’s this. He’s that. He’s the greatest. It was never about himself.

We had the closest thing to what I would call a dream high school situation, where six or seven guys were as close as brothers and laughed their asses off every single day, and Chris was the glue that kept us together. He was such a pivotal part of our high school experience. Chris was the type of person who didn’t see social class, or ethnicity, or anything like that. He came from a lot more money than most of us, but you would never know.

One time I was visited by an old friend of mine from back east. He’d been a big football player, but he’d had this horrible car accident, and now he was in a wheelchair. A lot of kids could be uncomfortable around that, but Chris just embraced him. He spent the entire day making this kid feel welcome and totally at ease. And the thing is, he did it with no effort. His generosity was so commonplace that it was utterly unremarkable.

Chris made people feel good about themselves. Everyone was on a pedestal for some reason or another. He drew people together, naturally, and it was cathartic to be around him. To me, Chris would bat his eye and I would lose it laughing so hard my sides would hurt.

People ask me what it was like going to school with Chris Farley, and I say, “You’ve seen him on
SNL
, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, crank that up times ten.”

With the birth of the VCR, we memorized
Animal House
,
Stripes
,
Caddyshack
,
Meatballs
,
History of the World
,
High Anxiety
, and
Blues Brothers
. And I’m not talking about memorizing the lines. We memorized everything, every inch of footage. The foreground, the background, we memorized it all. And Chris pulled from that constantly.

One of Chris’s favorite bits to do was to put his arms out like Frankenstein and make this monster voice, “Urgggh duugggh!” That was from an obscure scene in
Meatballs
with Spaz introducing himself to the cabin where, in the background, some fat camper was doing that Frankenstein thing. The whole thing was maybe half a second of film, maybe. But even that we had down. Take the original cast of
Saturday Night Live
, add in Mel Brooks, and you have our childhood.

Every time you’d walk down to the cafeteria, packed full of three-hundred-plus kids, all you had to do was listen for the roar of laughter and you’d know where Chris Farley was sitting. As I remember, Chris didn’t really tell jokes. It was just who he was. He just
was funny,
being himself. People just liked hanging around him. I was his guidance counselor, and I liked hanging around him.

His antics were never mean or destructive. Chris did a lot of crazy things, but most of the stories of Chris being in trouble at Edgewood are, unfortunately, fabricated. I say “unfortunately” because they sound very entertaining many years later. There is one hilarious story about Chris and a nun that I know for a fact just isn’t true.

We had a geometry teacher named Colonel McGivern. He was a retired air force colonel. Back then we had a lecture hall where all the kids would go for these huge group lectures while the colonel did equations and theorems on this big overhead projector. Well, one day Chris gets down in the aisle and belly-crawls up to the front of the room. He gets to the stage stairs, waits for Colonel McGivern to turn back to the projector, and then sneaks up and around, behind the curtain.

Now, Colonel McGivern had this thing called the Groaner of the Day, a really bad, corny joke that he’d use to end each day’s lecture. He’d tell it, and the kids would all groan because it was so lame. So Chris waits, and just as Colonel McGivern delivers his punch line, Chris drops his pants and moons the entire audience, sticking his rear end out between two folds in the curtain. Well, the whole place erupts with laughter, and the colonel—who can’t see Chris—stands there scratching his head, going, “Jeez, I didn’t think it was that funny . . .” And then of course everyone really loses it.

Some sophomore girl gets offended, and she rats Chris out. I get a call from Joel Maturi, telling me that Chris has done this thing and needs to be punished.

“Nick, uh, are you familiar with the term ‘hung a moon’?” he asks me.

“Sure, Coach.”

"Well, that’s what he did, and we need to get his parents over here and sort this out.”

So I call Mr. and Mrs. Farley, and they come down to the office. I tell the Farleys about Chris hanging a moon and the colonel and the Groaner of the Day, the whole story. And Mrs. Farley just busts out laughing. She can’t stop. Then I start laughing. Then Mr. Farley starts losing it, too. So here we all are dying laughing, waiting for the dean of discipline to come down.

Now, Joel Maturi is a real straight-arrow, buttoned-down kind of guy. We all straighten up as he comes in with his yellow legal pad where he’s got the incident written down. “Mr. and Mrs. Farley,” he says, very businesslike, sitting down, reading from his notes. “Ahem. Yes, it would appear, Mr. and Mrs. Farley, that your son has ‘hung a moon’ in his geometry class.”

Mrs. Farley loses it again. She gets me laughing. Mr. Farley busts out again. And finally Maturi, as stiff as he is, he starts laughing. We’re all roaring in my office. Finally, Maturi takes the legal pad, chucks it on the table, and says, “We’re just going to forget about this one.”

It should have been a suspension, but he threw it out because, quite frankly, we all thought it was too funny.

Chris would show up in Room 217, the detention hall, on a fairly regular basis, and Coach Maturi always seemed to be laughing under his breath, saying, “. . .
dammit, Farley.
”

When Chris was sorry, he was genuinely sorry. He’d be so guilty and remorseful, and he would always take his punishment. He knew it was the price to pay for getting the laugh. But before that apology would come, he had to get a laugh and you had to admit that it was funny.

Chris’s bedroom was at the other end of the hallway from the bathroom, and lots of times he was just too lazy to get up and go. So what he did was he kept glasses in his bedroom. He’d pee in those, and then take them down to the bathroom and empty them out once he was ready to get up. Well, one time my mom found one of the glasses. We were all sitting at the dinner table the next day, and she had told my dad about it. Dad was so furious he didn’t know what to do. I mean, here was Chris peeing in our drinking glasses. Chris knew that Dad knew, and Dad knew that Chris knew that he knew, and there was dead silence at the table. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Finally, Dad reaches over to take a sip of his water, and Chris goes, “You’re not gonna drink out of
that
glass, are you?”

Chris knew what was coming, but he had to get the laugh first.

Chris was such a natural talent that he was always being asked by the teachers to try out for the school plays. But he wouldn’t have any part of it. “That’s for pussies,” he’d say.

Madison is sports crazy. They’ll watch anything played with a ball. It wasn’t cool to do drama. In a perfect world I think Chris would have been about six-foot-three and played in the NFL. I remember when we started freshman football. It was a big deal at Edgewood. You knew making the football team was a key part of fitting in. After one of those first practices I heard this voice behind me say, “Well, my brother told me that if I can start on ‘O,’ then I’ll probably start on ‘D.’ ”

I turned around, and there was Chris. He was already pretty overweight, and he was wearing these saggy gray wool socks with his football uniform. Everyone else was in bright white athletic socks, and here’s this chubby kid dressed kind of funny. I just thought, this poor kid actually thinks he’s gonna play? But he did. And he was great.

Chris would play noseguard, and because I was his brother he’d want to hit me pretty hard in practice. My God, he hit me good. A couple of times I think I practically blacked out. “God, you really nailed me,” I’d say.

“I know,” he’d say. “I wanted to.”

We were really competitive, and he was a really good football player. You couldn’t move him because his legs were so powerful and he was so low to the ground. He was a really good interior lineman. He just didn’t have the height or the NFL build that he needed.

Chris was like Rudy in that way, the kid in that story from Notre Dame. I mean that very honestly. He was all hustle. Chris would be the first one to jump into a drill, first one to volunteer for anything. We were not a great football program. I think his junior year we went 5-5, and his senior year we went 6-4. But Chris always thought the glass was half full. When other kids might have said something was impossible, Chris thought it was possible. He always
believed.
And that’s why you loved him.

Around Madison you played against teams with these huge, enormous guys who went on to Division One teams. They’d just steamroll right over you. It was so demoralizing. But with Chris on the field, you’d never let that get to you. He’d never let you forget about having fun, even when these future NFLers were grinding your face into the mud.

When we played football, all the guys would go in to take showers. And of course all these sophomores and freshmen were nervous about showering with the older guys. Chris would be in there, in the showers, buck naked, curling his finger with a come-hither look at these kids going “Want some candy?” It’d scare the crap out of them. It was always an interesting time when Chris would hit the showers. He had a reputation of, well, exposing himself. All the time.

He was naked a lot.

Wasn’t ashamed at all. So, junior year, I was sitting in typing lab, practicing, and Chris was sitting next to me. I said to him, “Chris, I dare you to whip it out in front of this girl here.”

I’m typing away, and Chris just pulls his pants down and lays it out. I don’t think twice about it. To me, I’m just like, “Jesus, what a sick bastard.”

And that was the end of it. Nothing happened. Then, about a month later, Coach Maturi says to me, “I understand that you dared Chris Farley to expose himself to this girl.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I said that.”

“Well, she’s been in therapy for about a month now because she keeps having flashbacks and has had a lot of psychological problems.”

A prank like that would normally just get you disciplined somehow, but this girl and her parents were making a real issue out of it. Chris wound up getting expelled.

Dad, typically, said the school was overreacting. It was the school’s fault, not Chris’s. So rather than demoting him down to public school, he was sent off to private boarding school, La Lumiere in LaPorte, Indiana, for the rest of the semester. Senior year they let him back in.

Chris was really, really pissed at himself, very disappointed to be leaving Edgewood. He’d do that thing out of nowhere where he’d smack his head and go, “Fuck!
Idiot!
Can’t believe I did that.”

When he would get into trouble, even as a kid, it was like something would take control of him that he couldn’t help but cut up and make people laugh, even though he knew he’d get in trouble for it. And he’d look back at whatever stupid thing he’d just done and be like, “Why did I do that? Why did I get myself in detention just to get a laugh out of Dan Healy?”

The thing is, he was accepted by his friends and the other kids without all the crazy behavior. Quite frankly, he didn’t need it. But he felt that he needed it. Someone at Marquette told me a story about a time on a Monday morning on campus. It was a dreary winter morning, and Chris all of a sudden just broke out running, dove into a snowbank, and started kicking his legs out in the air. Now, why would he feel compelled to do that?

He was always insecure about his weight. He’d project this attitude of not caring to everyone, but among the inner circle of guys, he talked about it quite a lot. He said it was the worst thing in his life.

At some point, Chris started getting into his share of fights. We were at a basketball game in Stoughton, Wisconsin. I was there with a girl, and word came up through the bleachers that Chris was down, just beaten and bloodied. Someone had called him a fatty, and that was enough for Chris to go off. We took him to the hospital and patched him up. Ruined my date.

He was always fighting his weight, and I mean bad. He wanted to get with the guys who were lifting weights, would play any sport. He just wanted that weight off him so bad. We were both big guys. One summer he was a cookie, working in the kitchen, and I was a counselor, and we went on this diet together. We lost a bunch of weight, thirty pounds or so. He looked great. Chris always wanted to be mainstream, getting a girl and all that.

I met Chris freshman year in high school. We had a lot of classes together, and we were pals. For Valentine’s Day, Edgewood would do carnation sales. You could buy them for your girlfriend or whatever, and sophomore year Chris bought me one and gave me a box of candy. I think, as far as high school goes, we were boyfriend and girlfriend then. I was a late bloomer. I didn’t have boys beating down my door, by any means, and maybe I felt safe to him. I’m sure that probably had something to do with it.