Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (9 page)

Sometimes a much later time. Klein would pass us as we stood in what we called the “bullpen”—where we would gather before taking the stage—and say, “I’m just going to do a quick ten.” Thirty minutes later he’d still be on, wailing away.

Every evening beginning about 7 o’clock, I would do seven to ten showcase gigs, ten to fifteen minutes each, running from the Improv on the Lower West Side to Catch a Rising Star on the Upper East Side. I walked, I took the subway, sometimes I jumped in somebody’s car, sometimes Brenner would pay for a cab for us.

At each place I and every other comic struggled to get a spot. Fifty acts or more might show up every night for those precious twenty slots on each stage. Not only did we perform for free, but we also paid for any food or drink we bought, just like any other customer.

On some winter Saturday nights the performers, not the customers, at the Improv were the ones standing outside in line. We usually waited in the bullpen holding area next to the showroom. But when it was snowing hard, Budd would let in the audience for the second show as soon as we finished the first show. The club would get so crowded that the audience would spill into the bullpen.

“Grab your coats, guys,” Budd would tell us. “Go outside.”

We weren’t getting paid or fed, and now we were standing outside in the snow. We kept telling ourselves, “We’re paying our dues.”

Every now and then at a club a customer would see me standing around and offer to buy the comic some booze. When that first happened, because I don’t drink, I said, “No, thanks.” Then club owners clued me in: “If you’re offered a drink, take it! And order something expensive, like Crown Royal or a brandy. The customer pays for it. So I get the money. You don’t have to drink it. Just bring it back to the bar.” In other words, Jimmie, just like at a party, if you are not drinking, that means there is more for everyone else!

The first showcase club to give us free food and drink (not alcoholic) was Catch a Rising Star, run by Rick Newman. After your set you could get a hamburger or hot dog with a soda or, if you did really well, a bowl of pasta. That forced Budd to throw a free soda our way every once in a while at the Improv.

After our night of shows the comics would all meet at about two in the morning at the Camelot restaurant at 49th Street and 8th Avenue. We would hang out, have breakfast, throw jokes back and forth, tear apart everyone else’s act, and talk about our experiences on stage.

I probably learned as much about comedy at the Camelot as I did at the Improv. One late night/early morning I ordered my usual orange juice (the fruit thing again!) and a fly landed nearby. Brenner swatted it away. Then he took out a piece of paper and started writing.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I have an idea for a joke.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I swatted a fly.”

“What kind of joke is that?”

“I don’t know, Jimmie, but there’s something funny in there. Like, you never see flies die of natural causes. We’re always killing them with something. Maybe that’s the seed of a joke.” Brenner later did expand that idea into a killer routine in his act. When it came to observational humor, anything might be the beginning of a joke—even the flies at the Camelot.

After the Camelot we would get a cab to drive Brenner to his apartment at 69th Street and 3rd Avenue and then drop me off at 85th Street, where I could catch the subway. But it was hard for black people to hail cabs in Manhattan. The cabbies, afraid of getting robbed, did not want to go to the ghetto. They would ignore you and drive past. So Brenner would wait on the sidewalk and signal for one to pick him up. When the taxi stopped, he would open the door and I would run out of the dark and jump in with him.

“When I host the
Tonight Show
,” Brenner told me one day, “I’ll have you on and we can do a joke based on the cab story: ‘Cabdrivers don’t want to go to places like the Apollo at 125th and Lenox. But Jimmie and I got a cab and I told the driver, ‘We’re making two stops: First, 69th Street and 3rd, and then 125th and Lenox.’ When the cab stopped at 69th Street, where the white people lived, Jimmie got out. ‘Now,’ I told the driver, ‘take me to Harlem.’ The cabdriver thought we were nuts.’”

Okay, David, whatever. At the time he was nowhere near hosting the
Tonight Show
, and I could only dream of being a guest. But that was Brenner: He had a plan and he would be ready.

Jerry Stiller and his wife Anne Meara were probably the biggest act playing the Improv, having appeared on the
Ed Sullivan Show
thirty-six times in the ’60s and ’70s. He was Jewish, she was Irish, and thus domestic stand-up comedy from a married duo. They were the only comics I know who successfully pulled that off.

Maybe the reason they were able to stay married in real life is that off stage they did not act like celebrities; they were more down to earth than anyone in their lofty position. If I said something nice about seeing them on
Sullivan
, they deferred to me, saying, “Thanks, but that was a funny bit I saw you do the other night.” When Anne was cast in a summer replacement sitcom called
The Corner Bar
, she said she was going to put my name in to play the black cook. I told everyone that my big break had arrived—I was going to be on a TV series! Next thing I knew,
The Corner Bar
was shooting without me. You learn to get used to disappointment if you are going to survive in show business.

However, success could also strike out of the blue. The Improv had a house piano player who had been on the road forever and would play for singers as well as Andy Kaufman for his Tony Clifton lounge character. Performers who were new to the Improv would come in and ask, “Are you the piano player?”

Insulted by the anonymity, he would answer, “I’m not ‘the piano player.’ My name is Raymond J. Johnson, Junior. I happen to play piano.”

During an improvisation sketch Billy Saluga of the Ace Trucking Company comedy group imitated him on stage, exaggerating Raymond’s annoyance by saying, “My name is Raymond J. Johnson, Junior. Now you can call me Ray, or you can call me J, or you can call me Johnny, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junie, or you can call me Junior. You can call me Ray J, or you can call me RJ, or you can call me RJJ, or you can call me RJJ Jr. But you doesn’t hasta call me Johnson!”

Saluga made the character bigger and bigger, adding a nasal voice, then a cigar, then a zoot suit. Then he pulled the character out of the sketch to spotlight him even more. Audiences loved Raymond J. Johnson Jr., and Saluga took off, becoming a national sensation on television, everywhere from variety shows to commercials. But the real Raymond hated it!

Among those Raymond J. Johnson Jr. accompanied at the Improv was Bette Midler. I first saw her at the African Room when she billed herself as Midler of Fiddler because she was performing in
Fiddler on the Roof
on Broadway. After she began appearing at the Improv Budd became her manager.

One night a customer approached her about working that weekend at the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse that he owned. There would be a lot of gay men sitting around in towels, but he would pay her $500. She happily accepted. But Budd was not pleased. He needed Bette to work those nights as a singing waitress. “You go sing at the Baths, don’t come back here!” he threatened. Bette held her ground. She pointed out to him that she was a singer first, a waitress second.

Naturally, she asked Raymond J. Johnson Jr. to be her piano player. He knew how talented she was and that her career would take off. If he ditched the Improv and committed to her, his life would change.

“I was on the road thirty years,” Raymond told her. “I’m not going anywhere anymore.”

So Bette enlisted Raymond J. Johnson Jr.’s substitute piano player at the Improv, a guy named Barry Manilow. She left the Improv as well as Budd as her manager. Not too long afterward Midler became a major star, as did Manilow.

I never played a bathhouse, but I performed anywhere someone wanted me. A dance studio at 96th and Broadway regularly hired comics from the Improv for $50 for a twenty-minute set to entertain senior citizens. But Budd refused to recommend me, saying he didn’t think my humor would go over very well in front of that elderly white crowd.

One night the guy in charge of booking their entertainment saw my act. He told Budd, “Geez, I’ve never seen him before. Let’s have him perform next week.”

The dance studio was filled with old people—really old people. I just did my thang.

I’m thinking of moving to the suburbs. Riverdale. Scarsdale. Get myself a house with a black picket fence. Have a little white jockey on the front lawn. Maybe put out a fluorescent watermelon. I want to let my neighbors know I’m in the neighborhood!

I killed! The old people loved it. Even today people are stunned that with the material I have that I get laughs from senior citizen audiences. What they don’t understand is that some of those old people are hipper than the young audiences at comedy clubs. They have seen and been through a lot of life. They don’t look like they know what’s happening, but they do. Their outside covering may be shaky—having the walkers and the thick glasses—but what’s inside them is solid. They take a minute to get settled in and there is a percentage not completely aware, but most of them will be right there with you. They are old enough to appreciate that you can have too much of some things in life but you can never have too much laughter.

Obviously, I did not lack confidence. I knew that if I did not believe in myself, no one else would. I pushed for more gigs, more stage time, more money, more everything. Because if I did not, no one else would. After I opened a few nights for the Jimmy Castor Bunch, right after their massive hit “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” at the Cellar Door in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, I asked owner Jack Boyle for more stage time. He ignored me.

That didn’t stop me. I saw on his schedule that O. C. Smith, who had hit with “Little Green Apples,” would be coming in soon. I had earlier opened for him in Chicago.

I exaggerated my status and told Jack, “I’m the opening act for O. C. I don’t know why I’m not on that bill.”

“So?”

“If I’m not on with him, O. C. won’t be happy,” I bluffed.

He added me to the date. When I arrived, again I asked for more stage time. Again Jack ignored me.

So I went on longer than I was supposed to. Jack came up afterward and told me to cut down my time. I told him that not only did I want more time, I wanted more money too! He looked at me and said, “You are the most arrogant ‘nobody’ I ever met!” I didn’t get either the time or the money.

But I opened for O. C. Smith many times after that, including in front of thirty-five hundred prisoners at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois. I had material for that audience too.

Take a black holdup man. He ain’t making no money. He ain’t got enough money to ride a cab to work, he gotta ride a bus. He gotta stay in that dark, damp alley, catching rheumatism in his knees. Suffocating ’cause he’s got his wife’s stocking over his head. Just to hit you in the head for four dollars. I mean what’s the use of having a black brother on the Supreme Court if we blacks can’t do crimes classy enough to get here.

That wasn’t the first time I had a captive audience either. During that period I opened for B. B. King at New York’s Sing Sing penitentiary. Also on the show were Joan Baez and the Voices of East Harlem, a singing-dancing “positive message” group of teenage girls and boys I knew from gigs with the Last Poets.

Sing Sing was imposing, stark, and forbidding. We had been talking and joking, but when they slammed shut that large iron gate behind our bus, there was a little fear in all of us that we might never get out. We fell strangely quiet. I promised myself that I would never take my freedom for granted ever again. I was so nervous that I barely ate any of the chicken and mashed potatoes they fed us. B. B. and his band had no problem—they were used to playing prisons. The guards counted the knives and utensils before we left the dining room, just to be sure we did not bring the inmates anything potentially dangerous.

The hall where we were to play was cold and bare except for a stage and rows of folding chairs. When the Voices of East Harlem rehearsed, the prison officials stopped them. The girls, they told them, could not dance how they were dancing. Their movements were way too suggestive given that some of the prisoners had not been with a woman in a long, long time. The girls had to throw on some more clothes and tone down their dance moves.

As usual, I killed. Of course, some in the audience had also killed—literally.

We got to learn how to be like all those white folk and use that little pen and paper and write down that $500,000 embezzlement. Meanwhile we’re in the parking lot shooting it out for a quarter. We’re spending more money on ammunition than we’re getting away with.

The inmates jumped up, shouted, and laughed hard. The reviewer in the
Village Voice
slyly said I “stole” the show.

After the performance a guard said two prisoners wanted to talk to me. Earlier, B. B. had met with a few inmates who had guitars and he gave them some pointers. I figured these were inmates who thought they were funny guys and wanted some advice about comedy as a career.

The guard put me in a detention room and brought in two prisoners chained on their wrists and ankles. I knew them! We grew up together. Though we weren’t friends, I knew their families, hung out with their brothers. They were happy to see me. I was shocked to see them—at least at Sing Sing.

They were both in for manslaughter from separate incidents. One said he had been with a friend who decided to rob someone. The robbery went bad and the victim was murdered. They got away with seven bucks. He told me he had no idea there was going to be a robbery let alone a murder. He was sentenced to ten to thirty years and had already served four. The other guy I knew from the neighborhood had been in and out of jail since he was sixteen years old. He had spent three years in prison for robbery when he got into a jailhouse gang fight and killed another inmate with his bare hands.