Rubber Balls and Liquor (25 page)

 

13

The Air up Here

When you're starting out as a comic, you work a lot of shit jobs. I've certainly worked my share. I think I've even worked some of Bob Saget's shit jobs, but this was understandable because once he became a big television star someone had to do it. I mean, big television stars like Bob Saget just don't
do
Sweet 16s—the parties, I mean.

Birthdays, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, corporate events … those are the worst, but they come with the territory. In the beginning, they're low-end birthday parties and corporate events, or you wind up working in abandoned, decrepit lofts with a bunch of folding chairs for the audience, but as you move up that celebrity ladder the stakes start to change. The venues are a little nicer. There's more money. They send a car for you—or, sometimes, a first-class plane ticket.

The whole time, as you get going on your career, you like to think you'll reach a point when you'll develop a big enough name or such a big following that you won't have to take any more of these private gigs, but you never quite get there. Or maybe you do but there's so much money being waved in front of you that you can't help but grab at it. Or maybe it's just me who never quite gets there. Anyway, with me, I'll grab at pretty much anything. Put a dollar on a stick and wave it around in front of me and I'll do whatever you ask. Except
that
. That I won't do. Certainly not for a dollar. These days,
that
will cost you two dollars, at least.
This
and
that
and
that other thing?
That runs a little steeper.

A couple years ago, long after I'd hit it “big” as a movie star, not-having-sex symbol, celebrity game show contestant and fashion trendsetter, I did a gig at the “21” club in New York. It was a birthday party for one of the heirs of William Randolph Hearst. It sounded oddly glamorous, but it turned out just to be odd. I didn't know what to make of the booking when my agent called to tell me about it, but I took the job because I heard the hamburgers were good at “21.”

Again, maybe it's just me, but when I hear the term
heir
I start thinking the kid is five years old, only here the instructions were straightforward. The guest of honor was a big fan. He'd seen me doing all those Friars Club roasts, and he'd seen
The Aristocrats,
and he was said to have a really wild sense of humor. The guy really
got
me, I was told.

“Go crazy, Gilbert,” the heir's assistant informed me when he briefed me on the party. “This guy can take it.”

So I took the assistant at his word. You don't have to tell me more than once to go crazy. I never heard from the guest of honor on this, but the information seemed solid and I was good to go. If this guy could take it, then I could certainly dish it out.

When I got to the club it looked like a throwback scene from some Marx Brothers or Three Stooges film. All of the guests were old, old, old. And rich, rich, rich. The men were all white-haired, and tuxedoed, and the women were wearing long gowns, and everyone was sipping martinis. I think I even saw a few monocles. It felt for a moment like I'd been asked to perform onboard the
Titanic
, but then I checked and realized we were on dry land. Right away, I decided that all the clown-fucking jokes I'd written for the roomful of five-year-olds I was expecting would not be suitable. This worried me, at first, because I hadn't prepared anything else, so I decided to go with the clown-fucking jokes anyway. What the hell did I care if they were suitable?

Before I went onstage, a woman took the microphone to make a few remarks. I had no idea who she was, but the guests seemed to recognize her. She spoke only for a moment, but she made a passing reference to Rosebud, which of course was the name of the sled in
Citizen Kane,
which of course was said to have been based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the deceased newspaper mogul and relative of the guest of honor. If I was smart or clever, I might have made a couple of Rosebud jokes myself, but far be it from me to appear smart or clever. In any case, I'd been led to assume that such a reference would be no big deal, according to the
no holds barred
directions I'd been given by the assistant, so I was surprised by what happened next: people started booing. In fact, as soon as this woman made her remark, she was booed mercilessly—although to be honest I can't recall a situation where someone was booed mercifully.

The woman seemed surprised, as well. She couldn't get off the stage quickly enough, and I stepped up to take her place. It felt to me like I was taking a bullet for her—only it was a bullet being fired from a really, really old gun, so it wasn't likely to penetrate the skin. I didn't know enough to put two and two together after that surprising reaction, though. Or maybe I did, and came up with
five
. Anyway, I continued on in
no holds barred
mode. I'd learned, for example, that the guest of honor was really, really old, and really, really rich, and that he'd recently married a really, really young woman, so that was a place to start. I went into a whole bit about this guy's wife hoping to get rich off her geezer husband. I said, “Once she realized her name was in the will, she encouraged her husband to take an apartment on the fiftieth floor of their building. And she was always saying, ‘Hey, honey. To hell with the elevator. Let's walk up.'”

I said, “Sometimes, when he's sleeping, she'll come into the room and fire a gun in the air.”

I rattled off a whole bunch of gold digger jokes, each one louder and lewder and more inappropriate than the one before, and I don't think I noticed that no one was laughing. Or maybe I did notice, but I don't think I cared. The more inappropriate, I thought, the better. It was the “21” club, after all. They were paying me well. So I kept at it, and as I did the mood of the room became more and more uncomfortable. I looked out across the crowd and saw everyone's jaw hanging open—and it wasn't just to make room for those fat, juicy hamburgers.

Finally, I ran out of jokes. My time was up. So I stepped from the stage and crossed to the back of the room. No one would look at me. Everyone just sat there, all white-haired and monocled and stony-faced. Except one guy who came up to me afterward and asked if I'd like to meet the guest of honor. Just then, I didn't think this was such a good idea, but I remembered that the assistant had said his boss had a sense of humor, and that I should feel free to say whatever I wanted. He'd said this guy could take it.

So I said, “Sure, what the hell. Bring me over.”

My plan was to just wish the guy a happy birthday and get the hell out of there. He was paying me a lot of money, and I didn't want to appear rude, but when I walked over to him I noticed he wasn't all there. Actually, he wasn't there at all. Physically, he was in the room, but that was about where it ended for him. He was completely out of it. I seem to remember that he was in a wheelchair, but I can't be certain. He'd apparently just had a series of severe strokes. He was sitting with a woman who appeared to be his full-time aide, whose job was to wipe the drool off his face as he stared into thin air.

A lesser man might have been embarrassed or humiliated by this discovery, but as I have by now indicated there are no lesser men than me. Plus, the heir to the Hearst fortune didn't appear embarrassed or humiliated, so why should I? Instead, I was outraged because this seemed to me the sort of thing the assistant might have told me when he briefed me about my performance. I mean, this was information I could have certainly used in my act. I was dying out there. I had a whole bunch of gold digger–stroke victim–drool cup jokes I could have used.

Another time, I thought I was dying when in reality I was killing. There's a difference, you know. This was at a birthday party in Los Angeles—on Yom Kippur, no less. The holiest day on the Jewish calendar. This presented a problem, at first, until I told my agent that since the gig fell on the one day of the year we Jews were not supposed to work, I'd have to charge a little bit more.

The client was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who made the call to my agent himself. He was throwing his own party. He told my agent he was my biggest fan. (It's possible he meant he was my tallest fan, but he was certainly enthusiastic.) It would have been easy to say the same thing right back to him, the first time we met, but as I've written I didn't know the first thing about sports. I didn't even know the second or third things. The fourth thing, I happened to know, and it turned out that the fourth thing was that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was an exceptionally tall black man who played basketball.

That much, I knew.

I thought,
A birthday party for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on Yom Kippur … this I have to do
. If nothing else, I could get a chapter out of it for my book, and it seems we have all now stumbled across the very chapter where this particular story appears.

Usually, there are ground rules. Even when there are no ground rules, like the party for William Randolph Hearst's heir, there are things I should know going in. Here, Kareem's assistant called and told me I wasn't allowed to tell any jokes about being tall, which I could only assume meant no jokes about playing basketball, either. Or, having a name no one could pronounce. It was kind of like being hired for Dolly Parton's party and told to avoid tit jokes.

Yes, Gilbert, Linda Lovelace would like you to perform at her bridal shower. Just one thing, though. No blow job jokes.

I accepted the booking and promptly forgot about it, but then a few days later I answered the phone and a voice on the other end of the line said, “Hello, Gilbert. This is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”

I hung up, thinking it was a crank call. But after a moment it hit me what a coincidence it would be, getting a crank call from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a couple days after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar himself had hired me to perform at his birthday party. And even if I wasn't doing the party, what crank caller in the history of the telephone would ever call someone up and claim to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? It had to be way down there on the list of “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”–type gags.

Kareem called back a moment or two later and introduced himself again. This time, I didn't hang up. This time I said, “Sorry, I thought you'd sound taller.”

Jump ahead to the weekend of the party. I was flown out to Los Angeles and put up at a very nice hotel. When I got there, a woman was in the lobby, organizing rides back and forth to the restaurant where the party was being held, but there was a message informing me that Kareem himself would be picking me up. Then I got another message, telling me that when Kareem arrived he'd wait for me on the left-hand side of the lobby, just a few feet from the newsstand, which seemed to me an important piece of information, because of course there was no way I would have spotted a twenty-foot black man in the lobby of my hotel if he didn't tell me exactly where he'd be standing.

The party came and I did my thing and it felt to me like I'd bombed badly. Nobody laughed. Or if they did, they did so in a quiet, subtle manner, as if they didn't want anyone else to know. I performed for only ten or fifteen minutes, but it felt to me like three or four hours. I could only imagine how long it must have felt like to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his friends. The minute I got offstage, I grabbed my jacket and found the woman who was organizing the rides and asked her to arrange for a car to take me back to the hotel as soon as possible. Before she could make the call, a large shadow crept over me and I looked up and saw that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was now standing over me. I just about ruined my pants. I don't mean to suggest that I almost crapped myself. I mean that I almost came in my pants, seeing such a famous Muslim looming over me in such an up-close and intimidating way.

Kareem gently said, “Where are you going, Gilbert?”

I said, “Well, I finished my set, and I was just getting ready to go back to the hotel.”

What I meant to say was, “Well, I finished my set, and I was hurrying out of here before you could find me and beat the crap out of me for ruining your party.”

Kareem said, “Don't be ridiculous. A lot of people want to meet you. Come back and join the party.”

So I did. Call me crazy, but when a twenty-foot black man tells you to do something you should probably think about doing it, as I learned growing up. Kareem took me around the room and introduced me to his famous friends. Most of them found something nice to say to me about my performance, although a few tried to avoid eye contact with Kareem so they wouldn't have to meet me. This was just as well, I remember thinking, because most of Kareem's friends were big and black and I seemed to recall telling a few too many jokes about big black people in my act.

Quincy Jones was there, and he came over to shake my hand. I congratulated him for fucking that blond girl from
The Mod Squad.
He seemed to appreciate my enthusiasm.

Smokey Robinson was there, although I didn't see any Miracles. I guess they couldn't get a ride to the restaurant, which you would think might be something you could easily arrange if you were a Miracle. Smokey actually came over to say hello. He hugged me. Pretty tight, as I recall. I guess maybe he was trying to squeeze tears from a clown. So I started weeping openly.

A short while later, I found myself sitting at a table, in between Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Pamela Anderson, which I suppose would make an interesting three-way. These two majestic physical specimens would go at it, while I would sit quietly in the corner and try to come up with a specimen of my own.

At first, I was sitting at the table sneaking peeks at Pamela Anderson's breasts, but then it hit me: with Pamela Anderson, you don't have to
sneak
peeks so much as soak them in fully. Even she knows that's why she's there. Plus, even if you're only peeking, they're kind of hard to avoid. I mean, they're so
right there
.