Rubber Balls and Liquor (10 page)

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.”

It was a professional highlight, although I must confess that the kits seemed to prevent more than just burglaries. They also prevented me from getting laid or impressing any women.

The closest I came to landing an actual show business job was working the concession stands in Broadway theaters, selling T-shirts and drinks and overpriced candy. I got the job through another comic, who also needed to support his stand-up habit. The way it worked was that one guy owned the concessions in a bunch of different theaters, and we struggling comics or out-of-work actors would move from theater to theater, wherever we were needed. There were a lot of great shows playing on Broadway at the time, so I got another fine education. It was like taking an extension course, after watching all that television. There was
American Buffalo
, with Robert Duvall and John Savage. There was
Equus,
with Richard Burton. For a while, Richard Burton had to take a temporary leave, which I believe was what he did of his senses every time he married Elizabeth Taylor, and he was replaced by Anthony Perkins.

The best part about working the concessions at
Equus
was the show's famous nude scene. After I sat through the show a time or two, I had it all timed out. I'd go downstairs and relax in the lobby and listen for a certain speech, which was my signal to hurry back to my post in time to watch this girl take her clothes off onstage. This was another career highlight—for me, not the girl. My only regret was that I couldn't jerk off to it. There were too many people around, and the couple times I tried I came all over the overpriced candy, which I was told was bad for business.

(Who knew?)

For another stretch, I worked the concession at a show called A
Matter of Gravity,
with Katharine Hepburn. This, too, was a career highlight—once again, for me. Katharine Hepburn was one of the few Broadway stars who took the time to talk to us lowly concession workers. The routine was we'd have to get to the theater before the doors opened, and she would be there early before heading to her dressing room to get into costume, and a lot of times we'd all hang out in the lobby or at the foot of the stage, swapping stories, although by
swapping
I really mean listening to Katharine Hepburn's stories. I can't imagine she would have been all that interested in hearing about the time I came all over the overpriced candy at
Equus
or the time my buddy shit all over that girl from the audience while he was fucking her—and, tellingly, I knew enough not to bring up such matters of gravity.

Katharine Hepburn's big thing was to keep the theater properly ventilated. She hated that it was so stuffy inside that old theater, and insisted that we fling open the doors as soon as we arrived. We were all very much in awe of the great Katharine Hepburn, so we did just that. We were all so damn eager to please. Whichever one of us got to the theater first would make sure to open the doors and air the place out. She seemed to appreciate it.

Some days, I'd find myself heading to the theater a couple hours before curtain time, just for the chance to hang out with my new pal Kate, and shoot the shit about our mutual acquaintances, Cagney and Bogart and Tracy. She'd talk about them as intimates (and here it helps if you imagine me doing a pitch-perfect Katharine Hepburn impression): “Jimmy and Bogie and Spence.”

(It also helps if you add the lilt and quiver to Hepburn's late-in-life voice, although it's tough to bring across Parkinson's on the page—at least it's tough to do so with anything resembling good taste. Try this: hold the book a few inches out in front of you as you read, and then start shaking it like a rattle. Very briskly. Or, if you're listening to me in an audio format, turn the volume up and down, and play with the pause button. That should do it.)

James Cagney had just published his autobiography, and one day Hepburn came in and gushed, “Oh, you simply must read Jimmy's book. It's a wonderful book, Jimmy's book. It's just marvelous, Jimmy's book. It's so inspiring, Jimmy's book.”

And on and on …

A few days later, Kate was in a foul mood because we'd apparently forgotten to open the doors. She was a tough old bird, even then, and she flashed us looks that made us feel like morons. There's no denying that we were, in fact, morons, but we didn't appreciate being made to feel that way by such a legend of stage and screen. Then the great Katharine Hepburn stormed about the theater in a huff, making a big show of throwing open the doors herself, in such a way as to give off the impression that it was so very difficult to get good help these days.