Jamie Brickhouse's Blog: Lagniappe - Posts Tagged "trinity-university"
Trinity Alumni Profile
Alumnus finally pens the story he’s been burning to tell
by Carlos Anchondo '14
Jamie Brickhouse '90: B.A. Communication
If his mother had her way, Jamie Brickhouse would permanently be five-years old.
For Mama Jean, as she’s nicknamed, five years was the perfect blend of cuteness, obedience, and maternal admiration. Brickhouse was her constant companion and grew to weigh the majority of life’s decisions against the approval or disapproval of Mama Jean.
Of course, no person can stay one age forever.
Brickhouse grew up in the coastal city of Beaumont, Texas, surrounded by a wide breadth of true Southern characters. Most notable was Mama Jean, the city’s very own Elizabeth Taylor. A local real estate maven, Mama Jean was simultaneously Brickhouse’s harshest critic and most ardent supporter.
During the fall of his first year at Trinity University, Brickhouse came out to his parents as gay. In his memoir, Dangerous When Wet, Brickhouse describes Mama Jean as “protective” and purposefully “blind” to his homosexuality, viewing his sexual orientation as a flaw. It became a source of tension between the two.
In the following summer of 1987, Brickhouse was back home in Beaumont. He recalls leaving for a date and, in a moment of honesty, sharing with Mama Jean that he was going out with a man. Exploding, Mama Jean rattled off about AIDS and types of intercourse. After the date, she laid into him for worrying her, for drinking alcohol, and not knowing “what love is.”
Living up to Mama Jean’s idealized version of him would be something that Brickhouse would struggle with for the remainder of her life, but Brickhouse always knew that Mama Jean was in his corner.
“Love her, hate her, or disagree with her, you could never argue that no one loved as fiercely and completely as she did,” Brickhouse says.
In writing his memoir, Brickhouse says that the “revelation is in the writing.” Looking back on that particular story, Brickhouse acknowledges that Mama Jean reacted that way because she was afraid, afraid of the AIDS crisis raging at the time, afraid of the lack of medication, afraid for the safety of her son.
At Trinity, Brickhouse majored in communication with a focus in journalism and minored in art history. Sacrificing a flair for theater in lieu of a major he considered more practical, he still regrets not adding theater as a second major. Of Trinity, however, he has no regrets.
“It was a great university for me,” Brickhouse says. “I absolutely loved Trinity and I still feel as though I got a great education despite not completely going with my passion.”
After graduation, Brickhouse fulfilled his lifelong dream of moving to New York City and took the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a postgraduate course in book and magazine publishing. This would be the start of a more than 20-year career in the book publishing industry.
In his time within the publishing arena, Brickhouse would work with Molly Ringwald, Sidney Poitier, Gloria Estefan, Mary Karr, and more. Prior to founding his own speaker’s agency in 2012, redBrick Agency, where he now serves as CEO, Brickhouse was vice president and director at the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, the first publishing house lecture agency.
Yet Brickhouse’s 1990 move to New York City also marked his gradual descent into alcoholism. What began as a way to enhance life’s pleasures slowly morphed into sneaking alcohol before and during work, a use of hard drugs, a loss of employment, contracting HIV, and ultimately, a failed attempt at suicide.
Brickhouse’s unsuccessful suicide led him to rehab in California and, at last, allowed him to right the ship. He became serious about becoming a writer, something he had always wanted to pursue after being surrounded by authors for all his working career.
Although he has written sporadically for various publications, including The New York Times and The Huffington Post, Brickhouse knew it was time for a book.
So he wrote honestly about what he knew: his sexuality, his alcoholism, and yes, Mama Jean.
“It was important for me to express myself artistically,” Brickhouse says. “This was a story that I was burning to tell. Writing, for me, has been so gratifying because I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life. There is a high which cannot be equal to any high that you would get from alcohol or sex or any other mind-altering substance.”
Today, Brickhouse is oddly liberated from Mama Jean. When he began work on Dangerous When Wet, Mama Jean had been dead two years and his alcoholism dead for one. And although he can now make life choices more freely without the rebuke of Mama Jean, he would still give anything to have her with him again.
by Carlos Anchondo '14
Jamie Brickhouse '90: B.A. Communication
If his mother had her way, Jamie Brickhouse would permanently be five-years old.
For Mama Jean, as she’s nicknamed, five years was the perfect blend of cuteness, obedience, and maternal admiration. Brickhouse was her constant companion and grew to weigh the majority of life’s decisions against the approval or disapproval of Mama Jean.
Of course, no person can stay one age forever.
Brickhouse grew up in the coastal city of Beaumont, Texas, surrounded by a wide breadth of true Southern characters. Most notable was Mama Jean, the city’s very own Elizabeth Taylor. A local real estate maven, Mama Jean was simultaneously Brickhouse’s harshest critic and most ardent supporter.
During the fall of his first year at Trinity University, Brickhouse came out to his parents as gay. In his memoir, Dangerous When Wet, Brickhouse describes Mama Jean as “protective” and purposefully “blind” to his homosexuality, viewing his sexual orientation as a flaw. It became a source of tension between the two.
In the following summer of 1987, Brickhouse was back home in Beaumont. He recalls leaving for a date and, in a moment of honesty, sharing with Mama Jean that he was going out with a man. Exploding, Mama Jean rattled off about AIDS and types of intercourse. After the date, she laid into him for worrying her, for drinking alcohol, and not knowing “what love is.”
Living up to Mama Jean’s idealized version of him would be something that Brickhouse would struggle with for the remainder of her life, but Brickhouse always knew that Mama Jean was in his corner.
“Love her, hate her, or disagree with her, you could never argue that no one loved as fiercely and completely as she did,” Brickhouse says.
In writing his memoir, Brickhouse says that the “revelation is in the writing.” Looking back on that particular story, Brickhouse acknowledges that Mama Jean reacted that way because she was afraid, afraid of the AIDS crisis raging at the time, afraid of the lack of medication, afraid for the safety of her son.
At Trinity, Brickhouse majored in communication with a focus in journalism and minored in art history. Sacrificing a flair for theater in lieu of a major he considered more practical, he still regrets not adding theater as a second major. Of Trinity, however, he has no regrets.
“It was a great university for me,” Brickhouse says. “I absolutely loved Trinity and I still feel as though I got a great education despite not completely going with my passion.”
After graduation, Brickhouse fulfilled his lifelong dream of moving to New York City and took the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a postgraduate course in book and magazine publishing. This would be the start of a more than 20-year career in the book publishing industry.
In his time within the publishing arena, Brickhouse would work with Molly Ringwald, Sidney Poitier, Gloria Estefan, Mary Karr, and more. Prior to founding his own speaker’s agency in 2012, redBrick Agency, where he now serves as CEO, Brickhouse was vice president and director at the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, the first publishing house lecture agency.
Yet Brickhouse’s 1990 move to New York City also marked his gradual descent into alcoholism. What began as a way to enhance life’s pleasures slowly morphed into sneaking alcohol before and during work, a use of hard drugs, a loss of employment, contracting HIV, and ultimately, a failed attempt at suicide.
Brickhouse’s unsuccessful suicide led him to rehab in California and, at last, allowed him to right the ship. He became serious about becoming a writer, something he had always wanted to pursue after being surrounded by authors for all his working career.
Although he has written sporadically for various publications, including The New York Times and The Huffington Post, Brickhouse knew it was time for a book.
So he wrote honestly about what he knew: his sexuality, his alcoholism, and yes, Mama Jean.
“It was important for me to express myself artistically,” Brickhouse says. “This was a story that I was burning to tell. Writing, for me, has been so gratifying because I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life. There is a high which cannot be equal to any high that you would get from alcohol or sex or any other mind-altering substance.”
Today, Brickhouse is oddly liberated from Mama Jean. When he began work on Dangerous When Wet, Mama Jean had been dead two years and his alcoholism dead for one. And although he can now make life choices more freely without the rebuke of Mama Jean, he would still give anything to have her with him again.
Interview with fellow Texan Memoirist David Crabb
Out in San Antonio
December 15, 2015
by Jamie Brickhouse
“You know how some serial killers are “returners” — they’ll go back to the scene of the crime to see their handiwork?” David Crabb asks me. “I’m not a serial killer, but I’m a returner.” I’m not a serial killer either, but like Crabb, I’m a memoirist, so by definition, a returner.
We are having brunch in Hipsterville, New York (aka Williamsburg, Brooklyn) but in our conversation we’ve returned to the North Star Mall food court circa 1990. It’s where a pivotal moment in his touching and hilarious memoir Bad Kid takes place. He was a freshman in high school about to shed his “lesbian employee of Blockbuster Video” look and go hardcore gay, goth and druggie. I could have been around the corner buying a mock turtleneck at The Limited, sporting my Simply Red look. I was a senior at Trinity University — as seasoned as your grandma’s iron skillet when it came to booze and drugs — and about to hit New York for a career in publishing and a deep dive into the bottle.
Crabb is a three-time Moth StorySLAM winner and hosts Moth events around the world. Bad Kid is his adolescent coming of age that takes place in early-1990s San Antonio. It’s based on his critically acclaimed, one-man show of the same name. My memoir, Dangerous When Wet, rose out of the ashes of my recovery from alcohol and drugs. It’s about my Beaumont childhood with my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, gay coming-out at Trinity, and the “high” life in New York.
Over eggs and virgin Marys, we became “returners” and traded stories about our favorite haunts in San Antonio, our mothers and the fine line of addiction.
“In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B.”
Jamie Brickhouse: I love that you called the Bonham Exchange “The Bottom Exchange.”
David Crabb: The Bottom Sex Change.
JB: Even better. It made me think of a Mama Jean story. My college friends and I were talking about the Bonham Exchange this and the Bonham Exchange that in front of her. She looked appalled and said, “The Bottom Exchange? I think I know what that means!”
DC: (Laughs) I loved going there. That was the first real club I ever went to.
JB: Me too. But you first went to FX and the Z clubs: Changez and Phazez. You nail the mise-en-scène of those clubs perfectly. Have you been back to the Bonham?
DC: It’s different. I went on a Saturday recently, and it was like a tourist club. That thing happened that us gays are so good at. We find a dilapidated neighborhood, make it lovely, and all the straight people come in. There used to be this giant Hispanic drag queen named Ramona, and she hated it when gay guys brought their straight girlfriends, and she’d look at their hair and declare, “Your tint is for filth.”
JB: I remember a tall, striking man dressed head-to-toe in black with a long, ebony ponytail. He was there every weekend, danced alone to every song and knew every lyric. We called him Miss Bonham. All was right in the world once we saw her.
In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B. Your acid-trip stories are both a riot and harrowing. I tripped on acid down the Guadalupe River and saw Nell Carter on a float.
DC: Really?
JB: No. It was the acid talking.
DC: Damn. I got so excited.
JB: But what I noticed about your drug and alcohol intake is that you didn’t seem to have the unquenchable thirst that I had.
DC: Yeah, I know. An addict has that little seed that’s waiting to be awakened, and for whatever reason I didn’t have it. I’m lucky. I loved the social experiment and the adventure of drugs (like watching fucking tulips grow). I feel like your book did a great job of showing what addiction is.
JB: Thanks. Did you ever think you were an addict?
DC: When I was a teenager I wanted to be one. Going to rehab was this sort of alt-youth rite of passage. “Guess what? Sarah went to rehab.” You know what I mean? I can’t do the heavy stuff anymore. I think if I did acid now, I’d want to call my accountant and ask where my 1099s are.
JB: I get that. Acid was the first drug that turned on me. I remember acid-tripping on the River Walk during Fiesta. I started freaking out about every bad thing — catastrophizing — that could happen. Someone could open fire from a riverboat! These cascarones might be hand grenades! I had to return to the safety of campus.
DC: I showed up with my friends at the Tower of the Americas on acid. We were already conspicuous because of our goth look. I straddled that line in the floor where it rotates and put one foot on either side until I was frozen in a full split. Um, I was asked to leave. Now when I visit San Antonio, I always go to the Tower of the Americas and have a cocktail alone to take in the city. It’s a ritual.
JB: You are a returner. I have to say that your book gave me blue balls. I kept waiting for you to get laid, but you didn’t — which is actually kind of sweet. When did you lose your virginity?
DC: It was college. Sophomore year.
JB: Wow. You were a late bloomer.
DC: But an early bloomer with drugs. I’m jealous of your hotel story.
JB: You mean when I was 15 and lost it in a three-way on the family vacation in Acapulco?
DC: Yeah. I was frightened of intimacy.
JB: Of sex? Of AIDS?
DC: All of that. For all my hedonistic boldness, I was very insecure and scared of intimacy. It took someone shaking me and saying, “Hey, can we do it?”
JB: Our mothers are very different, but I love how they were both cringe-inducingly confrontational about our sex lives: Mama Jean telling me there is no safe sex, only two kinds of sex (oral and anal); your mother Teri shoving condoms in your lap as you’re frantically trying to drive away from her. If Mama Jean were alive, I think she’d be proud of my book. How did your mother react?
DC: She’s proud, but she has this odd split ownership of stories about her. At my readings, she’ll turn to the person on her left and claim she never said X. Five minutes later she’ll turn to the person on the right and say, “Can you believe I did that?” But the book made us closer in ways we hadn’t been before.
JB: That’s great.
DC: So who would play Mama Jean with her big hair in the movie?
JB: I could see Christina Hendricks. But I’d really like Meryl Streep to play both Mama Jean and me.
DC: A tour-de-force. Who would play you?
JB: I’d like to finally be hot, so Eddie Redmayne. Bad Kid is perfect for the screen.
DC: I’m in the midst of writing a pilot for Bad Kid and have some meetings with television producers in LA later this year.
JB: Fantastic! I know you continue to perform Bad Kid around the country. Are you working on another book?
DC: I’m writing a comedic memoir about the gristmill of health issues. A big part of my life the last few years has had to do with my health — I was extremely sick a few years ago — and being a working artist with 11 jobs and dealing with Crohn’s disease. And you?
JB: A comedic memoir about my father, Earl, who died last year. Working title: I Favor My Daddy. Let’s do this again when our second books come out, but let’s be genuine returners and meet at the Tower of the Americas and sit and spin.
Jamie Brickhouse has been published in The New York Times, Salon and Out, guest blogs for The Huffington Post and is a Moth StorySLAM winner.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother
December 15, 2015
by Jamie Brickhouse
“You know how some serial killers are “returners” — they’ll go back to the scene of the crime to see their handiwork?” David Crabb asks me. “I’m not a serial killer, but I’m a returner.” I’m not a serial killer either, but like Crabb, I’m a memoirist, so by definition, a returner.
We are having brunch in Hipsterville, New York (aka Williamsburg, Brooklyn) but in our conversation we’ve returned to the North Star Mall food court circa 1990. It’s where a pivotal moment in his touching and hilarious memoir Bad Kid takes place. He was a freshman in high school about to shed his “lesbian employee of Blockbuster Video” look and go hardcore gay, goth and druggie. I could have been around the corner buying a mock turtleneck at The Limited, sporting my Simply Red look. I was a senior at Trinity University — as seasoned as your grandma’s iron skillet when it came to booze and drugs — and about to hit New York for a career in publishing and a deep dive into the bottle.
Crabb is a three-time Moth StorySLAM winner and hosts Moth events around the world. Bad Kid is his adolescent coming of age that takes place in early-1990s San Antonio. It’s based on his critically acclaimed, one-man show of the same name. My memoir, Dangerous When Wet, rose out of the ashes of my recovery from alcohol and drugs. It’s about my Beaumont childhood with my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean, gay coming-out at Trinity, and the “high” life in New York.
Over eggs and virgin Marys, we became “returners” and traded stories about our favorite haunts in San Antonio, our mothers and the fine line of addiction.
“In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B.”
Jamie Brickhouse: I love that you called the Bonham Exchange “The Bottom Exchange.”
David Crabb: The Bottom Sex Change.
JB: Even better. It made me think of a Mama Jean story. My college friends and I were talking about the Bonham Exchange this and the Bonham Exchange that in front of her. She looked appalled and said, “The Bottom Exchange? I think I know what that means!”
DC: (Laughs) I loved going there. That was the first real club I ever went to.
JB: Me too. But you first went to FX and the Z clubs: Changez and Phazez. You nail the mise-en-scène of those clubs perfectly. Have you been back to the Bonham?
DC: It’s different. I went on a Saturday recently, and it was like a tourist club. That thing happened that us gays are so good at. We find a dilapidated neighborhood, make it lovely, and all the straight people come in. There used to be this giant Hispanic drag queen named Ramona, and she hated it when gay guys brought their straight girlfriends, and she’d look at their hair and declare, “Your tint is for filth.”
JB: I remember a tall, striking man dressed head-to-toe in black with a long, ebony ponytail. He was there every weekend, danced alone to every song and knew every lyric. We called him Miss Bonham. All was right in the world once we saw her.
In the pages of our books we both ingest enough booze and drugs to fill an H-E-B. Your acid-trip stories are both a riot and harrowing. I tripped on acid down the Guadalupe River and saw Nell Carter on a float.
DC: Really?
JB: No. It was the acid talking.
DC: Damn. I got so excited.
JB: But what I noticed about your drug and alcohol intake is that you didn’t seem to have the unquenchable thirst that I had.
DC: Yeah, I know. An addict has that little seed that’s waiting to be awakened, and for whatever reason I didn’t have it. I’m lucky. I loved the social experiment and the adventure of drugs (like watching fucking tulips grow). I feel like your book did a great job of showing what addiction is.
JB: Thanks. Did you ever think you were an addict?
DC: When I was a teenager I wanted to be one. Going to rehab was this sort of alt-youth rite of passage. “Guess what? Sarah went to rehab.” You know what I mean? I can’t do the heavy stuff anymore. I think if I did acid now, I’d want to call my accountant and ask where my 1099s are.
JB: I get that. Acid was the first drug that turned on me. I remember acid-tripping on the River Walk during Fiesta. I started freaking out about every bad thing — catastrophizing — that could happen. Someone could open fire from a riverboat! These cascarones might be hand grenades! I had to return to the safety of campus.
DC: I showed up with my friends at the Tower of the Americas on acid. We were already conspicuous because of our goth look. I straddled that line in the floor where it rotates and put one foot on either side until I was frozen in a full split. Um, I was asked to leave. Now when I visit San Antonio, I always go to the Tower of the Americas and have a cocktail alone to take in the city. It’s a ritual.
JB: You are a returner. I have to say that your book gave me blue balls. I kept waiting for you to get laid, but you didn’t — which is actually kind of sweet. When did you lose your virginity?
DC: It was college. Sophomore year.
JB: Wow. You were a late bloomer.
DC: But an early bloomer with drugs. I’m jealous of your hotel story.
JB: You mean when I was 15 and lost it in a three-way on the family vacation in Acapulco?
DC: Yeah. I was frightened of intimacy.
JB: Of sex? Of AIDS?
DC: All of that. For all my hedonistic boldness, I was very insecure and scared of intimacy. It took someone shaking me and saying, “Hey, can we do it?”
JB: Our mothers are very different, but I love how they were both cringe-inducingly confrontational about our sex lives: Mama Jean telling me there is no safe sex, only two kinds of sex (oral and anal); your mother Teri shoving condoms in your lap as you’re frantically trying to drive away from her. If Mama Jean were alive, I think she’d be proud of my book. How did your mother react?
DC: She’s proud, but she has this odd split ownership of stories about her. At my readings, she’ll turn to the person on her left and claim she never said X. Five minutes later she’ll turn to the person on the right and say, “Can you believe I did that?” But the book made us closer in ways we hadn’t been before.
JB: That’s great.
DC: So who would play Mama Jean with her big hair in the movie?
JB: I could see Christina Hendricks. But I’d really like Meryl Streep to play both Mama Jean and me.
DC: A tour-de-force. Who would play you?
JB: I’d like to finally be hot, so Eddie Redmayne. Bad Kid is perfect for the screen.
DC: I’m in the midst of writing a pilot for Bad Kid and have some meetings with television producers in LA later this year.
JB: Fantastic! I know you continue to perform Bad Kid around the country. Are you working on another book?
DC: I’m writing a comedic memoir about the gristmill of health issues. A big part of my life the last few years has had to do with my health — I was extremely sick a few years ago — and being a working artist with 11 jobs and dealing with Crohn’s disease. And you?
JB: A comedic memoir about my father, Earl, who died last year. Working title: I Favor My Daddy. Let’s do this again when our second books come out, but let’s be genuine returners and meet at the Tower of the Americas and sit and spin.
Jamie Brickhouse has been published in The New York Times, Salon and Out, guest blogs for The Huffington Post and is a Moth StorySLAM winner.Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother
Lagniappe
Lagniappe (pronounced LAN-YAP) is the name of the most coveted Jr. League cookbook where I'm from, Beaumont, Texas. The nearby Louisiana border haunts Beaumont, so there's a heavy dose of Cajun or "co
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