It's So Hard To Type With A Gun In My Mouth (9 page)

I run up to the buses where 358 people hate my guts because they had been waiting an hour for me. I get on the bus and it's like I'm radioactive... no one talks to me; no one makes eye contact. I'm a man without a country.  We get to the hotel in about 20 minutes. I get off the bus and it's then that I see we are not on the strip... we are like in Henderson or Elk Balls or some small town just OUTSIDE Las Vegas.... no shows, no dinner...nada.  I look at the hotel and it looks strange. What is it about this place? Holly Shit! It's under construction. They were putting us up in a brand new hotel that was under construction. I swear to God!

I enter the Casino and it's empty of all furniture and gaming machines, except on the wall is written, "Slots Here" or "Kino Board Here". At the end of this football field size room is check-in desk...with one man...one very...old... man. It looks like we have awaken him from a long nap...  Rip Van Winkle is checking us in. He's alone and 359 people check in at the same time... and he's all alone and slow.  He hands out the keys and, person-by-person, they leave the lobby. The line for keys stretched from the check-in desk, through the empty casino, out to the bus... guess where I am? Dr. Fortune has kissed me again; I'm tenth from the end. About this time I start to notice that people who have gotten their keys are now returning. It appears the keys were put in the boxes today and someone put them in "one slot off" so 359 people went up to their rooms and then 359 came back down. The keys didn't work.  Have you seen the pictures of the fall of Saigon? That's what this lobby looked like, people screaming and shoving, Asian women crying, small children hanging from helicopter doors. It was a living hell.

At 4:00 a.m. I get to my room.  Room? Ha! It wasn't finished. There was a bed wrapped in plastic and a phone. In the bathroom... a toilet no sinks.  At this point I am so exhausted I fall on the bed, plastic and all, and I'm out like a light.  Within 25 minutes the phone rings. "Wake UP call. The buses are leaving for the airport".  Ya know how some people can take a 20-minute catnap and are refreshed? I'm not one of those people. You wake me after a 20-minute nap and I'm like Terry Shiavo.  I can't focus, I can't walk, I'm incoherent.

I drag myself down to the lobby and crawl on to the bus. Check in at the airport is smooth; we're on the plane in 30 minutes...  and sit there for three hours. No food. No movie. Nothing... just my delusional self and my sleep depraved inner voice, "If I had a box cutter I could take over the cockpit and fly this fucker home".

Finally, after 28 hours, we land in LA. The flight attendant gets on the speaker and says, "Thank you for flying United. I know you have many choices and we thank you for choosing....  oh forget it.... let them fire me."  And the entire plane, including myself, screams with laughter and breaks into applause. 

I got 300 dollars for pain and suffering.

March 20, 2006
- MY LAST VEGAS GIG

Working in front of live audiences is what I live for. I love the work... LOVE IT.  I have more fun in those 45 minutes on stage than an alcoholic in a brewery. It's the other 23 hours and 15 minutes that make me want to hang myself from the room service cart.

I forgot. I just forgot what Vega was like. The whole city is one big "cousins who fuck" convention. I've never seen anything like it. Isn't anyone rotating the crops? Doesn't anyone exercise? If Vegas is a cross section of our country, we ARE the ugly Americans.

Let's start with the hotel room. I live in a big house. It's a house that was featured on HGTV, so modestly I say...it's nice. When I travel it's really important to me that I have similar accommodations. So I check in and ask the girl what floor I was on... "15" was the answer. I'm thinking view of the strip, I'm thinking neon lights at midnight, I'm thinking Billboard with my name on it. I'm really excited. She called it the "Luxury Tower". However, like everything else in Vegas, reality has it's own space and time. The hotel adds ten floors, to make it seem grander... so I was not on the 15th floor but the 5th. And as for Luxury, I was in the Warsaw Hilton. There was still blood on the carpets from the last guest's murder. It smelled like a carton of camels and I'm not talking about the cigarettes. Who picks out the colors, Stevie Wonder? Pink and green? I needed a motion sickness pill to go to the bathroom.  Still, I wanted to see what I could see from the 5th floor. I open the drapes and as God is my judge... on my father's grave... I swear to you there are six, 14 inch, air conditioning conduits running right across the window blocking 50% of the view. I am looking at pipes...huge, silver pipes. I can see the strip if I drag the table onto the bed and stand on it. The room sucks.

I unpack and head for the showroom where I discover the announcer has been fired the night before and a new one has been hired to make a tape loop for my introduction. Before I even hear the tape, I know what to expect. My name is pronounced Blue-stine like beer stein. The announcer on the tape is going to say... "Blue-steen" like Bruce Springsteen. And that was exactly what he did. "Can't we make another tape?" They look at me like I just shot the Pope. So every night when they introduce me, I'm backstage with my fingers in my ears going LALALALALALALALA, so I don’t hear my name sounding like some summer camp director.

The shows are great. I was working with Cathy Ladman and Steve Altman. These are two of my favorite people on the face of the earth. We drove up together (so my plane did not crash in the desert.) We had a great drive until Baker...where they are repaving the road... bumper to bumper, five miles an hour... for six miles. I could have gotten out and run to Vegas faster. Cathy has a small child and decides we should play car games. I check the glove box for a gun.

Cathy, Steve and I are like the 3 Musketeers. We do everything together. The most of which is laugh. Three comedians who like each other, this is like finding an Arab who wants to move to Shaker Heights. The hotel gives us free food at the Riviera Club. Sounds nice, no? It's the employee cafeteria...or as we called it...Death's Diner. The hotel sends down day old food from the "good" restaurants. The employees can feast on shoe leather chicken and cream of the day before yesterday vegetable soup. Since I can't cook, I don’t mind the swill. But the other two were very picky. "I want taste" " This is rubbery"... babies.

During the day we do what all comedians do on the road... we go to the mall. We usually spend about 6% more than we earn. I found a sports jacket to replace the one from J. Crew. "Take the security tag off, please!". Cathy buys enough children's clothing to keep China sewing for six months and Steve Altman went wild in Structure.

The week was like that... bad food, shopping, fat audiences, sleep. Sound exciting, no? Then yesterday it happened. What you were all waiting for. THE BAD THING. Sometime back I mentioned my L4 & L5 bone spurs. They are the result of Polio, which required a spinal tap as a child. (Oh how could I make this shit up...) And every so often, without warning, the spurs cause muscle spasms in my back that absolutely cripple me. One time I was out with my dog and had an attack that left me paralyzed on the sidewalk. I was on the ground for ten minutes unable to move, with the dog still attached to my arm via the leash. A woman walks up to me and straddles my chest. "Are you ok?" “NO! My dog is taking me for a drag."

So guess who has an attack in the hotel room.... alone. I'm in the room and I'm on the floor unable to move because the pain is that great. The maid opens the door and sees me lying there... "OH, I'll come back later." And she walks out. I'm screaming. About that time Steve Altman walks by and hears me. He gets them to open the door. He drags me to my bed. I have pills for the pain but I have to do a show. Cathy is out shopping...naturally. I call her and ask her to pick me up a back brace. Steve insists I take the pill. I do and do the show stoned out of my mind.

The next night we close. The shows sucked. Not because I was loaded, I wasn't. It was Sunday and the audiences were exhausted. It reminds me why I like writing so much. No one from South Dakota is in the room with me trying to figure out what I’m saying. We leave Monday morning... I take two pills to get me through the long drive home. But Cathy needs to stop at the outlet mall to return something she bought. I'm telling you we are serious shoppers. I am asleep in the car and wake up at the mall. I think we are in LA and get out. I realize that we are still in Nevada and decide to go inside and pee. I am flying like a kite. I get into the bathroom, remove my equipment and return it only to realize the plumbing had not shut off. I am now standing in the men's room with an 8 inch wet spot over my pee-pee and trying to think of creative ways to wet the rest of my pants and make it look like "It's supposed to be that way."

I am wearing a hooded sweatshirt and no undershirt so I can't even take my top off and drape it over the leakage. So I pull my sweatshirt down over my crotch and walk out with my hand in the sweatshirt pockets. I get to the car, where Cathy and Steve are waiting. "It's the perfect end to a perfect week.", I say and I lift the sweatshirt. Steve Altman is sipping a Starbucks and does the Danny Thomas spray take on the inside of the windshield. Cathy is laughing so hard she almost wets her pants. I crawl into the car like Quasimodo and Cathy heads back to LA with her two Steves.

We talk all the way home about a film we want do, about writing together. We just talk. We just love each other. We cannot wait to get booked together again. This is the best week we have ever had on the road! And it's then that I realize that back pain and the bad view and the ugly room and the horrible audiences and the mispronounced name really doesn't matter. What really matters is good friends and good times... and THAT I had this week!

I'm still in a back brace.

March 21, 2006 - 
THE NEW YORK TRIP  Part I

I know many of you think I am making this shit up so I want to start by swearing on a stack of bibles that what I am about to tell you is true, it happened and I am not making up a single detail. It all happened just as I'm about to tell you.  This story is long. I'm going to tell it in 3 parts... this is part one, the prologue.

THE SET UP

My good friend and publicist, Richard Gordon, called me and asked if I wanted to do a TV talk show that shot in NYC. They would pay airfare, limo, and food plus pay me 1500 dollars to do the show. "Are you out of your mind!!! Sure I'll do it."  Now I'm not exactly a household name... "Toilet" is more of a household name than I.  And so I thought it strange that they would offer ME this deal.  However, I was not looking a gift horse in the mouth and I took the gig.... but with a suspicious eye.

So the day I'm to leave they send a limo to my house. I had asked to fly on American Airlines to get the frequent flier miles. (The airline was offering triple frequent flier miles if you flew that month) And I got my wish, first class. I got to the airport and a woman was waiting for me, she escorted me to the first class lounge and waited until the plane took off. All the time I'm wondering when the hammer is going to drop on this farce of a gig.

I get on the plane and sure enough there is my seat. The flight is uneventful and we arrive at Kennedy. I step off the plane and there is a limo driver holding up a card with my name on it. He hands me an envelope and takes me to the hotel. The Plaza!  He tells me he'll pick me up at 8 a.m. tomorrow for an 11 a.m. taping. No problem. I write down his name and number... I'm having Interpol check him out.

The next morning I'm in the lobby at 8 a.m. sharp. No driver. No driver at 9, 9:30 or 10:00.  Ah-huh, this is what I have been waiting for!  I call the studio. "Is there some mix-up?" And what I learn is that the show has been cancelled. AH-HUH!  Here it comes. I'm going to be stranded in New York. But I'm told the driver will be over with my check and "Why don't you keep the limo for the day."  And now I understand exactly  what's going to happen... the check is going to bounce.  These people are full of shit. I’m sure of it.

The driver comes with my check and he takes me all over New York. We go shopping at Bloomingdales, we go to the theater, I see friends.... it's a whole day of me in a Limo in New York City. When he drops me off at the hotel, he tells me he'll pick me up at 11 tomorrow to take me back to the airport. I think, "Sure you will." 

The next morning I’m up early and call for a cab. I'm waiting for it when the limo driver shows up at the hotel. Now I'm starting to get worried. I see myself being kidnapped or wearing cement shoes in the East River. But no, he takes me to the airport. What the fuck is going on here? He tells me someone will be waiting for me in LA to drive me home.  Ah! That's where the murder will take place.

OK, I figure since there is no problem with the limo, it must be the airline tickets. I go to the first class window and sure enough there are my tickets. But I'm still not convinced. I board the plane. I'm not convinced. I drink the OJ. I'm not convinced. And then it happens.... "Excuse me, sir." AH EFFING HUH! Here it is!!!! This is what I've been waiting for...OK, honey, let me have it!  "We are sold out in first class and if you move back to coach I'll give you a thousand dollar travel voucher."  I just look at her. "OK...two thousand". I'm dumb struck. "Three thousand and not a penny more".