Almost Interesting (9 page)

Now I finally got to do my first TV stand-up. And it was on Joan Rivers’s newish talk show. I was of course scared shitless. I had my Guess brown button-down shirt with pearl buttons all laid out. This was the shirt I was sure I “looked good” in. I had no confirmation of this but was going by hunch (and mirror).

I got a call right before it that there was going to be a guest host that week. Joan was taking a vacation. (She was probably aware that the show was tanking and her vacation was meetings to plot her next move.) I was told that of course I would still go on; I really had no say in the matter. I was happy to know the guest host would be a comedian I had heard of named Arsenio Hall. So I prepped my set and brought my roommate down and pretty much crushed it. Bits went well, but one thing that stuck with me was I sort of blacked out in the middle, or I should say blanked out. One word in my act didn’t come to me right away and I quickly replaced it with a similar word. But that really got to me. It probably wasn’t noticeable but to me, it was a huge fuckup. I had done those bits a hundred times—how in the fuck could I blank? I have to chalk it up to the nerves of playing live TV. When you see a comedian on TV he’s standing in front of a curtain and looking great and you hear a polite crowd. That’s what I was used to! But when you
perform
on a talk show it’s totally different. You walk out and see the flip side. Brighter lights than I’ve even been in, like a police interrogation, that’s the first thing I wasn’t ready for. Then the crowd; all I could think was, Wow, it’s smaller in here than it seems on TV, and they are so far away. Oh look, that guy has a Hawaiian shirt on and he’s wearing shorts inside. THESE WERE MY THOUGHTS, NOT MY ACT, FOLKS! And there were four cameras with chubby bored cameramen behind them. “I wonder how much that guy makes?” THIS WAS IN MY BRAIN INSTEAD OF MY JOKES! This is called being spooked. Like a horse. It wasn’t what I was used to and I had to get my brain back on track in my five-second walk to my mark, which was a black X on the ground.

Wow, the stage is so shiny and polished . . . MORE SHIT TO UNFOCUS ME.

Luckily the show got a good reaction. My manager and agent were getting calls again. Nothing like before, but a few curiosity calls. This was good because I’d been trying to dethaw for months. Trying to get a smithereen of heat again. Two weeks later I was in Salt Lake City playing Cartoons (most clubs have dumb names) and I got a call from my manager. They wanted me back on Joan. But not to do stand-up—to guest host! WTF? I didn’t get it, I had never even done a TV show before, and that was my first one. How would I ever be able to host? But there was trouble at Joan’s show and they were sort of auditioning people. I didn’t really understand all that but I was floored they thought I could handle it or be good at it. I had just turned twenty-three that week. I ultimately passed on hosting for a night, which shocked everyone. I just felt like I did my best set a week before and if I did anything less or looked nervous I’d be dismissed and thrown in the scrap heap. I couldn’t erase any potential heat I had without thinking it through. So I passed. This perked up the ears of Fox executives, so they called me in for a meeting. I got to sit down with Garth Ancier and Barry Diller. Barry was the big boss and Garth was the new president. It went well. They said they were curious as to why I turned down something so big so early in my career. I said I didn’t want to fuck it up and I wasn’t ready for that yet, and that ultimately I wanted to be on a sitcom. They respected that and said they would keep an eye out for me. So now I was finally starting to inch back into the town’s good graces.

Every year HBO had a showcase to look for comics to appear in the annual
Young Comedians Special
. Getting onto that show was a huge deal for me, and a huge deal in general. This was the show that broke Sam Kinison, among many others. A slot on that show meant millions of people will know you.

Landing the HBO
Young Comedians Special
would be just the right thing to get me “hot” again. I knew it.
Hot
is a gross term used in Hollywood that I never say but it seems to make sense to people so I’m using it.

Even getting on the HBO showcase at the Improv to be seen was hard, but I squeaked through. The first year I didn’t make it from the showcase onto the special. It killed me. They said I was good but wasn’t ready, blah-blah. I was pissed, because I now had to wait another full year to try out again. I went back to the club scene, taking small television and movie scraps whenever I could get them. It’s so funny now to look back and see what could have been. During this time I got very close on two very different shows,
In the Heat of the Night
and
Full House
. For
Full House
I had several callbacks for Joey’s part, the role that eventually went to Dave Coulier. I remember the audition had some bit about socks and I had that fucker memorized. But in the end I didn’t get that part and I was so crushed because I felt I was letting everyone down, especially my mom, because back home there was a lot of mumbling about my career not exactly taking off and I know that was tough for Mom to listen to.

This stress was killing me. I was getting vertigo, which was probably from grinding teeth, which was from this town killing me. It happens to almost everyone. You think you can handle it and are ready for anything, like the parking tickets, the traffic, the no friends, but it’s the intangibles that get to you. The way people dismiss you when you do a bad audition, the time it takes for agents to call you back, etc. It’s a slow death (God I sound so dramatic, but that’s because I’m a pussy). On a cheerier note, I had a great audition for
In the Heat of the Night,
which was surprising to everyone because this was a serious drama, and I had to play a southern police deputy opposite Carroll O’Connor, who was a mega TV star. For some reason, I nailed it. I was so happy. I got a callback. Then a second. Then a third. I was this close to getting this part, only to lose it at the last minute. Looking back I realize everything happened for a reason, but you could not tell me that then.

I kept getting crushed by these close calls. But I would have been on either of these shows for seven years and my whole life would have been different. Look at David Coulier! If I had landed
In the Heat of the Night,
I would have been stuck in sweaty New Orleans for seven years with my nuts glued to my legs and no time for comedy. Back then, I just had tunnel vision to get the gig. Now I think of how lucky I am that neither of these happened.

So another half-assed year went by and here comes the HBO
Young Comedians Special
showcase again. And I whiff. They pass on me again. For some reason, slots go to already established comics at the time, like Richard Belzer. WTF, HBO? I’m ACTUALLY A YOUNG COMEDIAN, FOLKS! This was another near death blow, and I tuck the tail between my legs where it felt most comfortable and headed back to bit parts on
Alf
and
Baywatch.
(One of those was more fun than the other. You be the judge as to which.)

I also headed back out on the road, which by this point had become my life. Dallas, Cleveland, San Diego, New York . . . some were great, some truly sucked. But New York was by far the toughest. I had a buddy who was attending Columbia back then, so when I “wanted” to work the New York “comedy circuit” (I use quotes here because I didn’t want to take these trips at all, as you will see; this comedy circuit was more like a trip to the hole) I had to call my friend and ask to crash. And I had to call this dude Gary Grant (basically a booking agent). I don’t think I ever met him, but he was tapped into tons of random comedy gigs around New York and New Jersey. Mostly the gigs were just stupid one-nighters for seventy-five dollars a pop. Once I called Gary, the production began. I had to fly to New York, which was expensive. Then I would stay with my buddy at Columbia, where the only place he had room for me to sleep was on a love seat bent into a U shape, with my feet on an ottoman. (Great for the bad neck, folks! There’s a reason you don’t see this position in a mattress commercial.) I did this for a month and I was creaky and stiff as hell. But if I had to pay for a room, the paltry earnings I received from gigging would have disappeared.

When I did have a show this was the basic drill: I would suit up in my lame “New York” coat. (Being from Arizona, I really didn’t own a heavy coat, so I bought a wool herringbone coat from a thrift shop. It was referred to from then on as my New York coat and looked stupid on me.) Then I’d drag my mom’s small honeymoon suitcase of props down to the subway. (This was a feminine blue suitcase from my mom’s honeymoon with her initials on it.) It was sort of a “please mug and/or rape me” look. If anyone’s curious about the contents of my light blue “prop suitcase,” one of the props was a small toy xylophone from my killer
Jeopardy!
bit, which was super-reliable and a possible closer. Very solid bit. I also had a cardboard thing for a dynamite
Wheel of Fortune
bit (mixed results), and most cringy, I carried my Tom Petty top hat, which I got from a valet parker at a New Orleans hotel for my big Petty impression. It was so fucking embarrassing.

I would take the subway in the cold down to Forty-Second Street, walk another half mile to the Improv, and wait for some New York comedian with a car who was going to drive us to a gig outside the city. These one-nighters were between thirty minutes and two hours away. The guy who took me the first night I did this was thirty-six years old. I remember thinking,
Holy shit he’s old. If I’m still doing this crummy job at thirty-six, please blow my brains out.
I was about twenty-one. P.S.: I’m still doing this presently. And I’m a shade past thirty-five.

Once one of these dogshit gigs was eight hours away, in Watertown, New York. This meant that I had to stay overnight. I clearly wanted to be a comedian so badly that I was willing to drive with a total stranger, for eight hours, to a tiny town, making shitty small talk, for a shitty show, to stay in a shitty hotel, to shove off again the next morning. It was life on a hamster wheel, but it was what you had to do. There were no apps to see if this guy was a registered sex offender. It was the Old West (in the East).

One time when I got back to the Improv after one of these trips, two comics there asked me if I wanted to go smoke crack with them. I politely declined. Then they said, “You got seventy-five bucks tonight, what are you going to do with it?” I said, “Blow eight dollars on a cab to my friend’s pad, use some for food, and save a bit.” They laughed and then one said, mostly to his buddy, “If I ever wake up the day after a gig and there’s money in my pocket I know I did something wrong.” They both cracked up at this. I’m not sure why I remember that exchange so vividly, but it stuck with me. Those guys were just doing gigs to tread water. And buy crack, I guess. I wanted a life out of it.

The roughest thing about those New York trips was that I lived like a grimy little roof rat but still barely came out ahead. After a solid month back east, I would fly home to L.A. and only clear five hundred dollars. The experience was valuable, but man it was a lot of shit to eat for five hundo. Six months after I was home, I’d realize I had to do it again. Running low on funds and scraping by. My two twenty-eight-dollar spots at the L.A. Improv a week, and zero movie parts, weren’t exactly paying the bills.

One night I was hanging in the hallway of the Improv on L.A.’s Melrose Avenue dreading my flight the next day to depressing New York and who walks by but Budd Friedman. Budd was owner of the Improv and biggest cheese at the club. He could make or break you, basically. He could put you in showcases, give you great spots, or cut you out. Luckily, he was always very kind to me. He let me host at the Improv all the time, which to be honest was tedious because it meant that I only got to do a five-minute set at the top, and then had to wait by the stage door to introduce every act for the rest of the night, but it was a gift to just be in the mix, to meet and see tons of great comics. I developed a sense of who I liked and who I didn’t, and my style was sort of a research paper of all my favorites. Dennis Miller, Kevin Nealon, Steven Wright, they became my subjects. I liked the subtle throwaway jokes, and I gravitated toward that style and kept it.

That night, Budd stopped me in the hall and said, “Hello, David. Did you know we opened an Improv in Las Vegas at the Riviera?” I said, “No, I did not.” He said, “Do you want to play it this week? You’d have to leave tomorrow, but it’s five hundred dollars for seven days.” HOLY SHIT! Five hundred is what I clear after a month of shit gigs in crummy Jersey with thirty-five-year-old crackhead comics. Yes, of course I want to go to sunny, juicy Vegas, which reminds me of Arizona! But I just nodded, “Sure, sounds like fun,” even though I was totally stoked but that hallway was too tight for cartwheels. Five hundred dollars, here I come!

I canceled my New York trip and hopped in my car the next day heading for Lost Wages (I mean Las Vegas, lololololol). It’s a bleak drive but I didn’t care, I was playing the Strip! It’s a six-hour drive through the desert and you pass the strangest things along the way. There’s not much happening on that stretch of highway except a clump of fast-food places every fifty miles and maybe a random 99-cent store in case you need some yarn or thumbtacks.

So I got to my exciting Riviera gig. It’s summer so I was frying but I didn’t give a fuck. I’m a tough dude from the mean streets of Scottsdale, Arizona. I found out that I was opening for Jackie Vernon, who is sort of a comedy legend, or if not a legend at least well-known. (This was the status I was shooting for. Legend seemed a bit out of reach.) My name was on the marquee. A smarter kid would have taken a picture, but I didn’t, so I can’t show you. (It’s not like today, where I would have thirty pictures of my walk to the marquee and a Snapchat of me staring at it and narrating.)

The deal at the Improv was that everybody did a short set. On a regular road gig, let’s say the Dallas Improv, there is an MC/opener who opens the show and does about ten minutes, then a middle/feature act who goes on and does twenty-five to thirty minutes, and then the headliner, who does forty-five minutes to an hour. At the Riviera Improv it was scaled down. I was MC, so I did six minutes up front, then brought on another guy to do eight, and then another better guy does twelve, then the headliner does twenty-five. And we did this show THREE TIMES A NIGHT! THAT’S TWENTY-ONE SHOWS A WEEK, FOLKS! It was sort of brutal because as the MC, I had to be around for everything. I couldn’t drift off because I might miss bringing up the next guy. It was fucking tedious but way better than my little blue suitcase and guys pushing thirty-six in New York. I hung backstage with Steve Schirripa, who was the doorman at the Riv. He’s the big Italian guy who later went on to star on
The Sopranos
as Bobby Baccalieri. He was such a classic Vegas goombah. He told me when I got there to be on time, not fuck around, and keep my sets tight. One night I drifted off into the casino during someone’s set, and came back one minute late. ONE MINUTE! So the eight-minute guy had to bring on the twelve-minute guy. I didn’t think it was a big deal but Schirripa was pissed. He told me to leave! I had to go back to my room and “think about what I had done.” Like I was a kid. It was so stupid. I said, “Who cares, I’ll just bring up the headliner.” “No, you fucked up, get out of here.” What a walk of shame back to my room that was.