Almost Interesting (6 page)

So now my life consisted of four things—working at the clothing company with Andy and Kate, doing shitty stand-up gigs at night whenever I could, being an SAE pledge and eating shit at every turn, and last and what turned into least . . . going to school. The pledging, or as they called us, “being a funk,” took up 90 percent of my time. I had to report in and do chores around the frat house. (CHORES, FOLKS! LIKE I’M SEVEN!) By the way, you were not supposed to call it a frat house; you were not even supposed to call it a frat . . . the actives got very angry. They would always yell, “It’s a fraternity! You wouldn’t call your country a ‘cunt,’ would you?” That was their big line. It was sort of funny and logical actually, but I still called it a frat all the time. Don’t get me wrong, there were some pluses to being in a fraternity; it definitely forced you to make friends fast. And we were drunk most of the time. Plus, we went through so much shit that it was like we were bonded for life. We were brothers, like vets from Nam. (I wonder if people who were actually in the Vietnam War get sick of this analogy. I use it all the time. I go to a bathroom in a gas station and come out saying, “It’s like Vietnam in there.” I don’t think a bunch of spoiled Scottsdale boys running around with their shirts off, drunk, trying to fuck DGs, is an exact mirror image of seeing your three friends killed next to you in the real Vietnam War . . . but I’m going to keep using the analogy.)

The downside of being a pledge was that it sucked a lot of the time. My schoolwork was fading fast, my job was getting pissed at me for coming in drunk and/or super-tired, and the comedy nights were tough because I had classes at night, too, so I had to squeeze gigs in between. I pretty much felt like shit for five months straight. I didn’t live in the frat house, so it was even worse for me because the older brothers would get drunk and call us in the middle of the night to come down for what was known as a “lineup” or “work party.” I don’t like
party
being after the word
work,
ever. In this context, you’d get a call at 4
A
.
M
. and be told to go fetch river rocks from the dried-up salt riverbed and bring them to the house, or to come and do push-ups until they arrived. It was all such a mind fuck . . . but the biggest mind fuck of all was Oscar. We learned about Oscar our first day as a pledge. Oscar was a pig, and he was the SAE mascot. We were informed that the worst pledge of the semester would be fucking Oscar the night we became active. Yes. You read that right, folks! Fucking a pig! This was something I was
positive
had not come up during rush week.

To get assigned the Oscar fucking duty, which felt like a fate that could befall any of us, at any time, you had to be the worst pledge. That felt like a pretty easy task, based on the feedback we had received so far. At two in the morning, with beer being poured over my head, I would be screamed at for what felt like hours. “FUNK #1, you are such a worthless piece of shit! You know you’re going to get Oscar! You homo! You want to bone a guy, pig! You want Oscar! You dream about Oscar!”

And I would sputter out through a mouthful of Coors Light, “Yes, sir, sir active, sir.”

“What? So you want to fuck Oscar, Spade?”

I’d mumble in my drunken stupor, “No, wait, I didn’t understand . . .”

“Funk #1 wants to bone Oscar!!!”

And then all the actives would make pig noises. “Oink, oink, oink.” On and on it went. It’s sort of comical now, twenty years later. But when you’re on the front lines of Nam and you’re really in the (pig) shit, and you’ve got paprika on your head and baby oil all over your body and a spray-painted button on your chest that requires you to quote a certain line every time an active pushes it, all of this seems normal. My particular quote was “Lordy, I’m so tired, how long can this go on?” To answer my own question, it went on for the full semester.

Sometimes when we served them dinner at night (SERVED THEM DINNER, FOLKS!) the drunkest one would decide to get little Spade up on to the two-foot-high brick fireplace and say, “Do your fucking jokes, comedian. Dance for us, you clown.” And I would get up and do some sort of shitty act and they would bitch that I did the same act last time they asked me. And I would fire back, “I’m not exactly on a yacht in the south of France writing new material. Usually I’m in the shower trying to get paprika out of my pubes.”

You might be asking yourself where my brother Andy was during this hellish process. Well, he wasn’t exactly telling his brothers to go easy on me, his actual brother. In fact, he turned on me a few times while I was a plebe. One time I was in a lineup and all the pledges were drunk and beat-up from doing push-ups and getting screamed at as the actives walked around casually sipping drinks and barking out orders. Andy, who was an active, walked by me and whispered, “How you holding up, bro?” And I said, “Not great.” He said, “You want some ice cubes?” “Yeah,” I mumbled. Casually he turned and screamed to the entire room, “THIS PUSSY WANTS ICE CUBES. FUNK #1 THINKS HE’S SPECIAL. EVERYBODY DOWN, HE THINKS HE’S BETTER THAN YOU.” So everyone did push-ups while I sat there and ate ice cubes and felt their hatred.

The other time he burned me was the one-in-a-million time at a mixer when I got to leave with the prettiest girl there . . . a five-foot-ten DG who was featured on the ASU calendar. They called her “Wheels.” For some reason Wheels was flirting with me this particular evening, and I was freaking out about it. I thought this might be my one chance to get laid that semester, and we headed back to her dorm. Her dorm was about a hundred yards away, but being a gentleman I piped up with “I’ll drive us.” So, we got in my ’72 Volvo and pulled out of the SAE parking lot shitfaced . . . and got pulled over within five seconds. I gave the copper my ID, but he didn’t even bother, just pulled me out and cuffed me. I started begging. “This is my one chance with Wheels. I don’t know why I’m going to jail . . . please just let me slide this one time . . . please, let me catch a break.” Wheels waved and started walking home. The cop told me that I had a warrant out for my arrest, which was news to me. I went in and spent the night in jail and a comic bailed me out. Turns out that Andy had a pile of speeding tickets, to which he had signed my name whenever he got pulled over. Because
he
didn’t want to go to jail. When I called him on it, he didn’t even really care. Thanks, bro. I slowly started to realize that my only true chance of getting laid my first semester at ASU was with Oscar.

There was something great that came out of my SAE adventures. Every year there was a big show called “Greek Sing.” It was similar to Extravaganza, but bigger and better, and you had to be in a fraternity or sorority to participate. It basically involved big song-and-dance numbers, but in between the acts there were ten-minute breaks when a solo act would come out and sing, play the piano, or do something else. I decided that I needed to be one of those acts. So I gathered up the kit I had put together for my comedy gigs, which consisted of a Tom Petty hat, a little blue suitcase, a toy xylophone (for my
Jeopardy!
theme bit, aka hilarious!), my Casey Kasem impression, and the rest of my shenanigans, and auditioned for it. Yes, I was sort of a prop act at the beginning. I can’t keep hiding this fact. Anyway, when I found out I made it in, I was ecstatic . . . until the nerves kicked in. As the night got closer, I kept thinking,
What the fuck am I doing?
I was backstage, listening to the cheers for all the songs from the three thousand people in the audience, and I almost couldn’t take it. I felt super-sick. Every pretty girl in the Greek system was in the room watching. Every guy who hazed me, every person that I would see at any party for the next three years was out there, and in the next ten minutes they were going to decide whether I was cool or not. When I found out no one had ever done a stand-up act at Greek Sing before, I nearly left the auditorium. I went in the bathroom to wipe the sweat off before I went onstage, and I made a deal with myself. I decided that if I went out there and bombed, I’d quit comedy. My life was too hard at college as it was, and I couldn’t take the physical toll of worrying about this shit anymore.
If I bomb, I will stop.
That was my thought, and it made me feel better because in ten minutes I would be able to quit, because I knew I was going to bomb. And then . . . they introduced me.

“From Sigma Alpha Epsilon, David Spade.”

I got a polite smattering. The applause stopped before I got to the microphone. Bad sign. I think I used the old “How’s everybody doing?” to get things rolling. I heard one guy say, “Bad.”
Strike one
. Then I took the mic off the stand and said, “Can you hear me?” I hadn’t done a sound check and I didn’t realize that the crowd was absorbing most of the sound. I heard “No
.
” Shit. Already off to a rocky start.

I mentioned something about going to the DMV, how much I hate it, and some people laughed so I relaxed a little bit. I did my second joke and more people laughed and realized I was doing stand-up and the crowd decided to give me a chance. People stopped talking. The third joke killed and I was off and running. I probably did eight minutes that day, and they were the most memorable eight minutes of my life, because that was when I decided that I would do comedy forever. I got offstage and I was on cloud ten. I couldn’t believe how excited I was. I felt exactly 180 degrees opposite of before I went on. It was fucking great. I did something right.

From then on, everyone around town knew I was a comedian. People on campus started coming to shows to see me. Guys walking by me at school would give me a nod. That night was the single best thing that I got out of the Greek system. I see people now on the street who have read that I was in SAE, and it’s always funny because they like to stick their hand in from a crowd of people and slip me the secret handshake and give me the wink as if I’m going to let them and their ten friends backstage. They think it is the handshake that separates them from the rest of the crowd, and it usually does because I do give those guys a little extra time out of nostalgia; some guys are really, really into being an SAE brother. And some are actually very cool. Everyone gets something different out of the Greek system but it just didn’t resonate that much with me because once I went active they said, “You’ve made it through the hardest part; now you get to do it to the next guys.” And I thought, I don’t want to do it to the next guys, it’s too fucking mean. That was tough mentally and physically to get through—a job and school and pledging (I didn’t have money like the rest of them) so it wasn’t just a party. I had to get something out of school. I had nothing to fall back on and I didn’t have a dad and the family biz to fall into once I graduated. I wouldn’t do it to the next guys. I actually wound up dropping out of all of it right after that, and doing stand-up full-time. I have some fun memories of my time with that crew, but ultimately Greek Sing was the thing that meant the most and changed the direction of my life more than college itself.

So now I was a “comedian.”

CHAPTER SIX

GETTING SOME HEAT

I
had been doing stand-up, kicking around the clubs for about seven years, when I got my first and only appearance on
The Tonight Show.
With Johnny Carson. I somehow snaked on two months before he retired. In my business you hear a lot of stories about the lucky or big break that launches someone’s career. And those do happen. But for me, the whole thing was a lot more gradual, and this helped keep me sane. I hated the pace of my career at the time, because I’m super fucking impatient, but fast fame would be hard to handle. My slow, incremental rise to medium fame was easier to deal with mentally. I feel like people who get famous very quickly can’t deal with the plethora (is that a word?) of shit that comes their way. Money, how everyone treats you differently in public, how your friends and family act, etc. etc. etc. I’m not sure people like the Kardashians would be more normal if they hadn’t been on TV at a young age but they couldn’t be any more nuts so I’m guessing fame affected them. Also, if you are using a talent you have focused on your whole life you at least feel like it paid off and you deserve the success in a tiny way or at least some attention for your work. But when you’re on a show where the talent is arguing in the kitchen with your family, I’m guessing you feel like, Why the fuck am I a big deal? You have nothing to point to (except selfies). Now back to my story. I can’t pinpoint the one break that made the most change for me. I’m sure most people would point to
Saturday Night Live
. That’s obvious. But I wouldn’t have gotten to
SNL
without a lot of smaller things going right for me along the way. So, each of those mini breaks was very important at the time. And at the time of each one it was the greatest thing ever to happen to me in my life. So they all seemed huge.

T
he first break I got was when I tried to get in to the Los Angeles comedy club scene. This was after doing stand-up for about two years in Arizona. In Arizona, my big break had come when I got a slot in a bar called Anderson’s Fifth Estate when I was only nineteen. They had a comedy night every Tuesday, and I eventually became a regular. My friends would often come out and see me. I also won third place in a comedy contest at ASU one year. (I know. Third place. Where are those other guys, you ask? NOT making Hollywood films or sleeping with hot chicks!) I got a little whiff of micro-fame after my bronze finish. When I was packing up my Tom Petty hat and xylophone, a smoking ASU babe who was clearly out of my league was digging that I placed in this half-assed contest. She came home with me and boned me for no apparent reason. I don’t know if it was my UPS joke or my DMV bit that got her soaked but I do know that the downside was that this was also the first time I smelled a rank beaver. So brutal. I won’t elaborate but it was like a bug bomb went off in my room. It was super-uncool. Naturally, I never mentioned it to her, because I’m immature, and besides there’s really no way to break that news without devastating a woman. Hallmark hasn’t really cracked the code on this subject. Believe me, I scoured the aisles for the perfect card to deliver that news.