“This is the second time I’ve ever been interviewed,” Tim Tracey tells me before going into a story about driving with friends around the U.S. post college. A local news station interviewed him about landing their van, which had to be abandoned, into a giant puddle.

I’m sitting in the living room of Tim’s modest Greenwood home. Above us is a large banner that reads, “Great With Child But Longing For Stewed Prunes.” The floors are unswept – to be expected since Tim and his wife, Malka, recently had a baby, Bertram Boaz Buckwheat Tracey. Malka bounces the infant on her knee as Tim, who’s about 6’4” and fills out his easy chair, sits across from her. His eyes squint behind black-rimmed glasses, Steven Jesse Bernstein-style. When excited, his voice reminds me of a large bird’s Caw.

Tim is a veteran of Unexpected Productions, the improv company headquartered in Post Alley’s vaudevillian Market Theater. He’s also a teacher of UP’s 300-level course and a regular performer, easily the group’s loudest, and one of only two with grey hair. He spits as he talks and his bald head shines underneath stage lights. Tim came late to the improv world, starting at 35 (he’s 47 now). A marketing contractor who works predominantly at home for Microsoft, he’s the unlikeliest of Seattle standouts.

Wednesday night the theater means “Duos.” These shows pair two players of various skill levels to act out improvised scenes in about five minutes. The shows can come across as practicing improv rather than performing it – an unfortunate reality of some of UP’s offerings – but the looseness is no problem for Tim, who lacks typical professionalism. I can hear his cackle from backstage during the introduction by Jay Hitt, UP’s Managing Director. When his scene begins, Tim comes out in trademark faded blue button-up, meaty hands in front pockets, standing oafishly. His partner, Leila, an actress with a thick Spanish accent, stands 10 feet from him, dressed in all black. They are quiet, then Leila shoots a gaze. Before the show, I’d been introduced to her during a conversation with Tim. There was obvious sexual tension between them. “Tim makes me nervoussss,” Leila clung to the last word as it left her tongue. On stage now, the flirtation continues. Tim’s character wants to know her name, wants her telephone number, but she denies him in language as her body gets closer. “Everyone shut up!” Tim booms, interrupting the scene. The house lights flood on. “I want to learn more about the audience!” A girl raises her hand and says she’s from Tucson, Arizona, home of the Wildcats. This word fuels the sexuality. The lights dim again and Leila touches Tim’s chest. “You’re like the Arizona desert, so dry and big,” she says, rolling her R’s. Tim honks, “You’re like Cleveland, you smell, you’re wet and everyone leaves you!” The audience hoots.

He and I meet on a sunny Saturday afternoon, three days after Duos. I’d mentioned the idea for the interview a week before. “It’s about time Seattle fucking learns about Tim Tracey!” he replied. Malka listens to us talk for about 15 minutes before taking Bert into the bedroom for a nap. He’d just spit a milky-white liquid onto the floor.

Tim, who grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, found himself an angry adolescent. “In high school and my early 20’s I was just pissed off,” he says. “I looked at people who had girlfriends, nice cars, who were athletic, and I looked at myself as a guy who was none of those things.” Tim had trouble with women, too, even once he’d made it to the bedroom. “I was in bed with this woman in college,” he recalls. “We were both naked, and I had this big yellow tumbler of beer on the nightstand – maybe three beers were in it – and I just got it in my head that she was going to pour it all over me. So, I just fucking splashed it on her. ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?’ she asked. I had no idea! It was just so fucking ridiculous and impulsive.” And mean, I might add.

It was on a lark during a semester off at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1987 that Tim decided to visit Seattle for the first time. He’d planned a trip to Europe but canceled it because he “sliced his finger off in a cheese grater” while working at a pizzeria (the finger was reattached and now looks like a witch’s boney index). He took a Greyhound to see a Seahawks game because he liked the team’s uniforms and their left-handed quarterback, Jim Zorn, though he himself is not left-handed. But just after getting off the bus he was conned out of all his money. “I gave this guy $100 and we were going to split a motel room. Before he went in to rent the room, he gave me a packet of cocaine as collateral. But he just split with the money and all I had was a bag of baking soda.” A friend wired Tim $100 that he used to rent a basement room in The Seattle Apartment Hotel, which no longer exists, by Pike Place Market, listening to bums and drunks fight in the alleys. “I thought to myself, ‘Fuck, I can’t wait to move to Seattle!’” Tim moved here permanently in 1990 after finishing school. But despite the change of location, his life remained much the same. He stayed in a “dead end phone job” for 14 years, played in a punk rock band called Patchouli Sewer, and continued to have trouble with women. “I remember being in a bar, Mo’s I think, and I noticed these beautiful women’s asses. They were perfect, but I couldn’t help but think: what if they all, at the exact same time, had diarrhea? And I said this out loud to the girl I was talking with at the time. No wonder that didn’t work out.”

It was when a friend recommended an improv class in Seattle at UP that clarity finally came. “I couldn’t say anything wrong on stage,” he says. “Everything I did in those classes was right.” His awkward, unruly energy finally had focus after 35 years. His broad, acerbic skillset was perfect for improv. Tim’s sharp as a dart, quick as one too, and he’s felt like shit most of his life, often from his own doing. These are his foundations for storytelling. 

Hearing his life’s stories, it’d be easy to pigeonhole Tim as only an off-putting figure. But getting to know him, I believe he’s something different. In youth, he seemed more bewildered than malicious, more unaware and insecure than cruel – beer drenching notwithstanding. Now, as a teacher and new father, he comes across rather nurturing. He talks about how tenuous life – and, more acutely, improv – can be. He wants to help and get a laugh. “We were doing this scene the other day with an audience member,” he explains to me, “and the prompt was, ‘How do you get people to like you?’ Each person said a word down the line and the sentence so far was, ‘All-you-need-to-give-them-is-a-’ and the audience member said, ‘rape’. The room totally deflated. But I followed him and said, ‘whistle’ and then everybody could laugh and, thankfully, it was okay.”