Rubber Balls and Liquor Read online

  Some nights, I killed. Other nights, not so much … I started hanging out with other comics, working at other clubs, working on my act. In fact, it wasn’t until this time that I even thought of what I was doing as an act. I was just telling jokes, doing impressions, trying to make people laugh. One night I met another comic who brought a tape recorder to his shows, so he could listen to his performance and make some refinements, and that seemed like a good idea. However, it also seemed like too much trouble, so I didn’t bother.

  I worked the New York comedy circuit before it could even be called a circuit. It was more like an unmarked trail. Most of the time, I’d go to some club and wait around until three o’clock in the morning before it even occurred to anyone that I hadn’t gotten on. More often than not, I’d wind up at Catch, which was what those of us in the know called Catch a Rising Star, which had quickly become the place for young comics to work on new material and hope like hell to get noticed by some talent agent looking to cast a forgettable sitcom—or, at least, that’s what the club owner told us to keep us working for free. There were a couple times at Catch when the emcee would be onstage, looking out across the club, desperate for another comic to step up to the microphone. There’d be like an hour to go before closing, and he’d be looking right at me and saying, “Jesus, folks, this has never happened before. We’ve run out of comics.”

  This was not a good sign, as far as my fledgling career or my flagging self-esteem were concerned, but fortunately for me and my tens of fans I was never any good at picking up on stuff like this. For example, I never thought it was unusual that I didn’t get paid on those nights when I actually did get to go on, because none of the comics I knew got paid for performing. It wasn’t really part of the deal. Once, a bartender took pity on me at some club, when he saw me waiting half the night to go on, and he came over with a glass of Coke, which I counted as my first piece of compensation. I arrived home that night just as my mother was getting up to start her day, and I very proudly told her of my first rush of success. “I got a free glass of Coke tonight,” I said, my chest bursting.

  It was hard to tell, but I believe the look I got back in return was one of enormous shared pride. After all, I was now one step closer to being able to support myself. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was, enormous shared pride. That, or it was something she ate.

  Another time, I was at the Comic Strip, where the emcee was also known to look right past me when he needed another few sets to close out the night. I was working with a comic who shall remain nameless in these pages—mostly because his career never amounted to anything and he did remain nameless. If I told you his name, you’d have no idea who I was talking about, even though it would amuse me and a few other comics who also worked with this guy. On this particular night, this particular comic got lucky and hooked up with a girl from the audience. This happened sometimes, I was told, although it never happened to me. Whenever a girl from the audience tried to throw herself at me, she’d turn out to have terrible aim. She’d wind up fifty miles away.

  This girl from the audience hung around until closing time, at which point she and this unknown comic started messing around onstage. (Talk about losing your audience!) While he was fucking her, the lucky comic was going at it with such wild abandon that his colostomy bag burst open.

  He told us the story the next night like it was the funniest thing in the world, but no matter how he dressed it up it came out sounding like one of those I-guess-you-had-to-be-there stories. If I had been there, two things would have likely happened. One, I would have stood in the wings with my digital camcorder and invented YouTube right there on the spot, because a thing like this, it should be shared with the entire universe. And two, I would have finally gotten lucky myself, or so I like to think, because all of a sudden I would have looked pretty damn good, standing next to a guy like this. I would have turned to this girl from the audience and said, “Hey, at least I won’t shit on you.”

  I still remember the first time I got paid for telling jokes, which in the end turned out to be a far more likely scenario than me getting laid for telling jokes. It was in the basement of some church. I could do no wrong that night, as I recall. I was on comedy fire. I was hot, hot, hot. In stand-up circles, we comedians have a phrase we like to use to describe one of those nights when we’re especially on, when everything seems to work and the audience catches every piece of cleverness and nuance in our material. It’s called one of those nights when we’re especially on, when everything seems to work and the audience catches every piece of cleverness and nuance in our material.

  I was like the Beatles at Shea Stadium, only you could actually hear what I was saying and I didn’t get laid afterward. All I got was seven dollars, which seemed to me like all the money in the world.

  I went back to that church a couple weeks later, when my seven dollars ran out, hoping for more of the same, only this time I bombed. This time, I was like the Mets at Shea Stadium—which, I’ll confess, is not a line that’s original to me. You see, I don’t know anything about baseball, so I bought that line from a guy at a comedy club who seemed to need the money. To be accurate, I didn’t actually buy the line from this guy, but I did give him half of my sandwich. (Okay, okay … if you really want to know the truth, I let him have two bites.)

  Just to clarify, I don’t know or care a thing about sports, except I seem to recall hearing that Babe Ruth was fat—which now that I think about it makes a whole lot of sense because he must have eaten a lot of his candy bars.

  (Gee, maybe I’ve been fooling myself, all this time. Maybe I know a lot more about baseball than I let on.)

  Some of my first gigs were so far off on the fringes of show business you could hardly recognize the neighborhood. Once, I worked at a synagogue event with a conservatively dressed lounge singer named Pat Benatar. She sang that song from Godspell, the Jesus Christ musical, the one about finding her corner of the sky. I always hated that song, because there are just too many people in this world and not enough corners to go around, but she sang it well enough. You could almost dance to it—or, at least, not puke to it. Still, I didn’t think she’d go very far in show business, because by this point I was a wise old veteran of show business and a shrewd judge of talent.

  Another time, I went out on a booking to an address I didn’t recognize and when I got there I saw that it wasn’t a club or a bar. It wasn’t even a church or a synagogue or a public meeting place of any kind. It was just an apartment building, which I thought was strange. But what the hell did I care? A gig was a gig. Money was money. So I rode the elevator to this giant, decrepit loft. It was dark and dreary and mostly empty. There were four or five folding chairs, and a few tables set about the room. On the tables were a bunch of pamphlets or flyers—from the looks of things, they could have been left over from an Eisenhower rally.

  A creepy-looking guy stepped out of the darkness to greet me. He said, “No blue material, kid. You go on at eight-fifteen.”

  It was about eight o’clock already, and it was just me and him. It was the same guy who hired me, a couple nights earlier, backstage at one of the comedy clubs, only in that setting he didn’t look so creepy. I thought, This can’t be good. So I made some excuse. I said, “Do I have time to step outside for a smoke, before I go on?”

  The creepy-looking guy said, “Sure, kid. But remember, no blue material.”

  I nodded—then I raced downstairs and never came back.

  I’d go anywhere for a gig when I was just starting out, even all the way to Canada. One of my very first shows outside New York was in a run-down club in Ottawa. It was during a ridiculous cold spell, which was even cold by Canadian standards. It was like a million degrees below zero—and that’s not even counting the exchange rate. There was no way to keep warm, and I was supposed to do three twenty-minute shows, back-to-back-to-back. There was no opening act, no emcee, no stage. There was a microphone set up in a corner of the bar area, at the same level as the co
ld, drunken Canadian patrons, but there was no way to tell if it even worked. Before my first show, a woman who could barely speak English stood on the other side of the room and introduced me. She just yelled my name out, and the people at the bar stopped talking for a moment.

  Surprisingly, some people showed up for my very first show, although it’s possible they had just stepped inside to get warm. It was just horrible. No one knew who I was—although this alone wasn’t so unusual, because even in New York no one knew who I was. I told a few jokes. No one laughed. It’s possible the microphone wasn’t working and they couldn’t hear me, but I kept going for twenty minutes.

  Then I stepped away from the microphone, to stunned silence, occasionally broken by shouts of “You suck!” I thought I heard some applause, but then I realized the people were just trying to keep their hands warm, clapping them together like that.

  A short while later, I started on another twenty-minute set—to the same roomful of people! I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think I’d have enough material to get me through a third set, so I started improvising. I got it in my head that I didn’t give a shit, which I learned was a great approach. I went a little crazy, and soon enough the audience was going a little crazy right along with me. The microphone was working, after all. The cold Canadians were warming up. They were laughing and clapping each other on the back and buying each other drinks and having a grand old time. Before I knew it, I looked up and saw that I’d been performing for about an hour and a half, so I stepped away from the microphone again—this time to somewhat more meaningful applause.

  Then, after another short break, I went back on and did fifteen minutes, thinking since I’d gone way over on that second set I was in good shape. I did another few jokes, and another few impressions, and thought I’d call it a night, only when the owner of the club came up to me afterward he didn’t look too happy.

  He said, “You owe me five minutes.”

  And then, to top off the experience, I got home and discovered that his check bounced.

  It was always a moment of great significance, back when I first started working in clubs, when a comic made it to the Tonight Show stage for the first time. It was like graduating one of our own. At every comedy club in the country, a television behind the bar would be tuned to Johnny Carson, and time would stand still for three or four minutes while the comedian performed. Even the waitresses would watch, and they’d jump up and down like they were receiving some secret message from the comedy gods—which, in a way, they were. Among stand-up comedians, this was the closest we’d come to a holy, religious moment.

  I never really bought into the whole Carson mystique, so I would always stand back at some remove from the scene, as the other comics read all these signs into what we were watching. If Johnny would play with his tie a certain way or tap his pencil on his desk a certain number of times, it was said to mean one thing. If he asked the comic to cross from his spot at center stage and join him on the couch, it meant that the skies had opened up and the heavens had parted and he was bestowing stardom upon this unknown person.

  Like idiots, or sheep, or quite possibly an entire flock of really stupid sheep, we convinced ourselves that if you did a good set on Carson you’d have a career, although in reality there were just a handful of performers who became stars after one successful Tonight Show appearance. It didn’t hurt, killing on The Tonight Show, but it wasn’t exactly a Golden Ticket to a long, name-above-the-title career, either. If you don’t believe me, just Google Daphne Davis—an Australian comic who was briefly in Carson’s favor, until she wasn’t, after which she changed her name to Maureen Murphy and tried to fool us into thinking she was an undiscovered talent. Me, I wasn’t quite there yet—and I wouldn’t be for some time. I had a lot of shit jobs to slog through before appearing on network television.

  I had another memorably crappy gig in Texas, early on in my career. This one was in a club that looked like it had been built with Scotch tape and cardboard. As the son of a hardware store owner, I knew a thing or two about construction, and I could tell this building was poorly constructed. This alone wasn’t saying much. Even if I was the son of a baker, it would have looked pretty bad. Really, the place was like a thrown-together shack. The offices and dressing rooms backstage looked like they had been built from the cheapest plywood, nailed to wooden poles. If you sneezed too hard, the walls would have come down. Plus, the walls didn’t even reach all the way to the ceiling.

  So there I was, minding my own business backstage, marveling at the shabby construction, when I happened to notice two Mexicans climbing up into the crawl space between the top of the walls and the actual ceiling. I thought this was a curious thing and wondered what they were doing. I guess the Mexicans could tell that I was looking at them, and wondering this very thing, because they smiled at me in Spanish and suggested I join them.

  Me being quite stupid, I said, “Okay,” which they didn’t understand. Then we all looked at each other in a confused sort of way for a while, until one of the Mexicans approached and helped to hoist me up to the crawl space, which the weight of a roach might have collapsed. Then we started crawling. With one wetback in front of me, and another behind me, we crawled like rats on these flimsy wooden beams. It felt to me like our crawling was causing all the rooms to shake like we were in the middle of a giant earthquake.

  Then we came to a stop. The Mexican in front looked back at me, his non-English-speaking smile wider than ever. He gestured toward some big pieces of cardboard, which had been laid out on the floor of the crawl space, covering the wooden beams. He seemed to want me to stretch out and relax on one of these big pieces of cardboard, so like an idiot I did just that, and as I did I could see that several holes had been poked into the cardboard every here and there. Then the Mexican who had been behind me seemed to indicate that I should look through one of these holes, very excitedly.

  And so, of course, I did. I had come this far, and these particular wetbacks must have seemed like very trustworthy fellows. So I looked through one of the holes—right down into the ladies’ room. It was like a scene out of a Mexican remake of Porky’s, and I treated myself to the sight of women relieving themselves on the toilets below. It was quite an eyeful. As I looked, my new Mexican friends started slapping me on the back, quite pleased with themselves. I still didn’t understand a word of what they were saying, but their smiles had grown even wider.

  After three hours of this, I realized that what they were doing was tasteless and immature. Not only that, I started to worry that the entire structure was about to collapse into dust, and I would fall to my death, crushing some poor woman trying to take a dump. The thought was just too much for me at that time. And by too much I mean too much of a turn-on, although now that I think about it, if I had my choice, it’s not such a bad way to go. Plus, it would have been a good career move.

  You’ll be happy to know that this very same club discriminated against men, in something like the same way. Also, it turned out to be Ground Zero for a stock line used by comedy club emcees all across this great land. You know how there are generic lines or jokes you hear over and over? You hear them so often, no one knows who came up with them in the first place. Well, at this particular club, when the emcee saw a girl stand up in the middle of a set to go to the ladies’ room, the emcee would say, “Oh, you’re going to the ladies’ room. Let’s turn on the hidden microphone.” Only here it wasn’t a joke. There actually was a hidden microphone in the ladies’ room, so you could listen to all these lovely cowgirls grunt and fart and empty their bladders in epic ways.

  Personally, I didn’t see the appeal. The peepholes through the cardboard ceiling looking down, I could certainly understand. Those had some redeeming social value. But hidden microphones? Some things were better left to the imagination.

  At one point, I had to go to the bathroom, and I asked someone who worked there, “They don’t have a hidden mike in the men’s room, do they?”

  He said, �
��No. Just the ladies’ room.”

  I asked, “Why don’t they have one in the men’s room, too?”

  He said, “Because our male customers carry guns and they’ll shoot you if they catch you listening.”

  Over the years, in between all of these odd, crappy comedy gigs, I worked at a bunch of odd, crappy regular-person jobs, to subsidize my stand-up habit. Do I really need to tell you these were odd, crappy jobs? It’s not like you’re thinking, after I stopped going to high school, that I somehow landed a job as a neurosurgeon but it just didn’t work out. I worked for a while as a messenger, until someone pointed out to me that I would have an easier time pedaling around town and making my deliveries without training wheels. For another while, I worked on a kind of assembly line at a factory that made antiburglary kits. It was an unusual product that somehow let those of us involved in the making of it delude ourselves into thinking we were working for the public good. One of the items in the kit was a tiny metal pencil that was meant to be used to scrape or scratch a special marking into your valuables so you could recover them if they were stolen. I sat at a table with a big carton of these metal pencils and a glass ashtray, and worked my way through the carton to see which pencils cut easily through the glass. The ones that worked, I put into the good pile. The ones that didn’t work, I put into the bad pile. After all the products were tested, we slapped a label on the kit that said “Tested by Skilled Craftsmen.” For years, I took girls up and down the aisles of stores that sold these kits and pointed to the label and said, “You see that, where it says ‘Skilled Craftsmen’? That’s me.”