I Had the Right to Remain Silent...But I Didn't Have the Ability

by Ron White

  Greg’s not there. Kathy’s coming up to me and rubbing my leg and whispering to me, and I’m thinking, “This wild woman is hittin’ on me.”

  The club had a little side room where they had music, and this James Taylor-sounding guy was playing there that night. He sounded great, the place was rockin’. And Kathy goes to request a song, and then she comes back and says, “I dedicated this to you, ’cause I’ve always thought you were hot.”

  One flirtatious remark leads to another. Just like one drink is leading to another. And we end up going into the women’s bathroom and making out up against the wall. She’s telling me she wants me to take her home.

  We walk out of the women’s bathroom. Guess who’s standing right there?

  Greg. He’s just come in.

  I know it looks bad. So I don’t even say anything. ’Cause I can’t think of anything to say.

  I’ve just been enjoying a taste of your girlfriend at her invitation, Greg, and seriously, man, my compliments. She’s really hot.

  I don’t think so.

  Well, nobody really says anything. We just kind of nod at each other, and I head on back to the bar. And I start talking to one of the waitresses, a girl named Alison. She has long black hair and she’s as cute as she could be, and I’ve also known her for years because of performing at this club. And I know for a fact that she hasn’t had a steady boyfriend for quite a while.

  That night she’s drinking a little at the end of her shift. I’m still drinking.

  And Alison goes, “Why don’t we go back to my place and watch TV?”

  I’m like, “All right! You’re goddamned right we’ll go watch TV.” I’m sloshed.

  We get back to this duplex apartment she shares with another girl. And I go upstairs to her bedroom, I take off my clothes, and I get in bed.

  I’m laying there waiting for this little treat to come get in the bed. She’s sitting on the couch downstairs talking to her mother on the telephone.

  I’m laying on the bed thinking, “She better get up here quick, cause I’m gonna pass out. Fuck it, I’m gonna go get her.”

  So I walk down the stairs naked. I probably weighed twenty pounds more than I do now, and I’ve got a hard-on. I say, “Hey.”

  She looks up and screams like I’ve got a chain saw and a hockey mask.

  Apparently, she wanted to watch television. It wasn’t code for anything.

  So then she says, “You’re going back to the club. Get dressed.”

  I say, “Oh, wait, I’ll be cool.” I’m still thinking I can fuck her. But I get dressed, and we go back to the club.

  Right next door to the club there was an Italian restaurant with a bar that stayed open late. Alison drops me off at the club, and I go over to the restaurant bar, and there’s the rest of the club staff having a few drinks before their day off Monday.

  Everybody’s there except for Kathy and Greg, and I figure they’re off somewhere arguin’ or makin’ up. I’m hoping it’s the latter.

  And I’m like, “I’m still in this game.” ’Cause there’s another cute waitress from the club there, and I take her home. And I do get to have sex with her.

  The next morning I’m going to the airport. Guess who’s driving me? Greg. And we have the most awkward ride. Finally Greg says, “Kathy said you kissed her in the bathroom.”

  I feel horrible, because I like Greg and I’ve known him longer than I’ve known Kathy. And I don’t know exactly what Kathy has said.

  So I say, “Yeah, I kissed her.”

  “You mean you just gave her a smooch? Or did you mash her up against the wall, stick your tongue down her throat, and put your hand in her pants?”

  I’m like, well, she told him everything. She just fessed up our whole little sordid affair and put it all on me.

  Greg was about to move with her to Portland. So I said, “OK, Greg, here’s the deal. We were both drunk, she was hitting on me—”

  “That’s not what she said!”

  “No, I’m sure it’s not.”

  The next day at the club, there are four people who have similar stories to tell, and they’re all about the same person: me. Kathy tells her story about me hitting on her in the bathroom, what a skunk. Greg, about me hitting on her in the bathroom, what a skunk. Alison, about me coming down the stairs naked with a hard-on, what a skunk. And the waitress I did fuck is saying, “I was third? What a skunk!” She’s madder than the rest of them put together.

  Not that I blame her. Finding out you’re third choice is flat offensive.

  Now, in Atlanta at one time there were three clubs called the Punchline, all owned by the same people. They had a number of Punchline Comedy Clubs throughout the South and Midwest.

  I was working the Underground Atlanta Punchline, during the same stretch of my career, and I was throwing too many substances into my body. But I was still doing the job. That’s the thing about stand-up comedy. Since you’re only working forty-five minutes to an hour a night, you can get into almost any amount of shit and still have time to recover to perform. Until you run into a stone wall with that behavior, and you either change it or it changes you—permanently.

  One of the too many substances was acid. They didn’t have a Sunday show at the Atlanta Punchline. And on Saturday night, when I was gonna do my last two shows of the week, I had two hits of blotter acid in my pocket that I had bought in Alabama.

  That same weekend, friends of mine were performing at the Sandy Springs Punchline, at the Comic Cafe up in Marietta, and at the Improv in Buckhead. And we all make plans to party together on Saturday night at this condo in Buckhead where the Improv put up its performers. The place was right off Atlanta’s MARTA rail system, which connects Sandy Springs, Marietta, and downtown. So everyone can get to and from the party safely.

  Now this really good friend of several of us—let’s call him Bob Hill—was going to be there. And Bob was always a good connection for whatever. Bob was going to get everybody else their acid. And I had the two hits of blotter acid that I bought in Alabama.

  We synchronize our watches and agree that after the second show, we’ll all eat the acid at the same time and then meet at the condo in Buckhead and trip together all night. I don’t have a show the next day, so I feel free to hoot, hoot, hoot.

  The Underground Punchline was in a beautiful Victorian 350-seat theater. If it was full, you could really beat it up. It didn’t seat a small crowd well, but it sat 350 well. Both my Saturday shows were sold out.

  After the first show I start thinking, “They’re all gonna be getting their acid from Bob Hill, who always gets the best acid. I got blotter acid from Ala-fuckingbama. I bet my shit is bunk. No great acid comes out of Alabama.”

  So I eat both hits right then, put ’em under my tongue, two hits, all I’ve got.

  Apparently this acid wasn’t made in Alabama. Apparently it was made in a very high-tech lab in California and shipped across the country. And some of it landed in Alabama.

  And some of it landed under my tongue between shows on a Saturday night at the Underground Punchline in Atlanta, Georgia.

  Twenty minutes later I’m in the green room on my back with the lights out, going “Uh-oh.” I realize I’ve made a serious judgment error. I should have thought to myself, “Maybe it’s great acid, and you shouldn’t eat it right before a show. Maybe it’s not a good idea to take it beforehand, because you haven’t tried it yet and you don’t know what it’s like.” Not looking before I leap again, just like when I was a kid.

  I know I’m gonna feel way worse before I feel better. I know I’m on the front end of a twelve- to fifteen-hour ride. Because I’m shocked it’s hitting me so fast.

  I’m laying there. I hear the show start. I think, “There’s no way I can do the show.” I’m just spinning. It’s just ugly. It hadn’t even become fun yet.

  The middle act had a didgeridoo, if you can believe it, that he blew onstage. You know, one of those long Australian aborigine instruments sounds like a foghorn
blowing underwater?

  I’m laying there and I hear that waaahhh vibration and feel it going right through my core. I hated that when I was sober, I thought it was a stupid thing, the guy didn’t make anything funny of it, he just played it.

  I hated it even more now. ’Cause it’s the end of the guy’s act, and I can hear ’em start looking for me.

  When I heard the didgeridoo, I knew my time was coming near.

  Finally somebody looks in the green room and finds me laying there in the dark and turns the light on: “What’s wrong with you?”

  I said, “I don’t feel good.” That was my only possible defense. Because I looked like I didn’t feel well, and I didn’t feel well. I felt like I had made a poor decision earlier.

  “Well, you gotta do this show. It’s sold out. We got 350 people out here waiting to see you.”

  I’m like, “Oh, fuck.” I had tripped onstage before. But I would do mushrooms, or I would take acid that I knew what it was like. Or I would eat it in the middle of the show as a joke to my friends and get off later. Taking it in between shows was a mistake of a whole ’nother magnitude.

  They lead me out to the stage. I think to myself, “Just stick to the show, Ron.”

  The one thing I’ve got going for me is that my act has been clicking lately, I’ve been working a lot, and I’m sharp, I’m in good practice. I do the first punch line perfectly. Boom, a big laugh. I do the next one. Boom, a bigger laugh.

  Then I start grinning. I think, “Fuck, I’m gonna beat these people to shreds.” I do the next punch line. Boom, another huge laugh.

  I can see the rhythm of the material. I’m flowing with it. Boom, boom, boom. Just that set you get every once in a while when you’re just snottin’ the room. The set was so good that the staff started to watch. “Fuck, Ron’s on fire tonight.”

  It’s the perfect combination of a comic who’s done a lot of shows, he’s on the top of his game, and it’s a great crowd on Saturday night. I’m just doing whatever I want to, bang, bang, bang. I’m having a ball.

  Remember, I’m up on a big stage in a theater with a sixty-foot ceiling. It’s not like I’m right up close to the audience in a club. So the people can’t tell that I’m pale, that my eyes are pinned and my zits are real pronounced. Because they’re not focused in on that, they’re seeing me as a whole.

  I run out of beer, so the staff brings me a fresh beer. For some reason I say, “Look at that. I make you laugh, they give me beer. Later, if I make you jump through a hoop, they’re gonna give me a bunch of blow.”

  Nobody laughs. And in the back, one of the bus-boys drops a load of dishes. I’m like, “What’d I say?” Now people start looking at my face with suspicion, and they see that I’m fucked up out of my gourd or I wouldn’t have said anything that stupid.

  I still have twenty minutes left. For the next twenty minutes, I was like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein trying to put out the fire, and nobody’s buying it.

  Now it’s Saturday night. I got no Sunday show. So I gotta get paid. The manager of the club, I’d known him for years. I go to his office and he says, “You were a little fucked up onstage tonight, huh, Ron?”

  I said, “I’ll take a check.” I had no story for him, and I saw no need to wait around for cash. But they still owed me money. People paid to get in; I did the show.

  I leave, get on MARTA, and go over to Buckhead. The other guys didn’t get their acid. Bob Hill, the great connection, didn’t come through. They’re not sober as judges or anything. They’ve been drinking.

  But I’m tripping my balls off, and I’d bought balloons on the way. I’m blowing them up and batting them against the wall and popping them, and they’re trying to watch sports. Their drunk is no match for my acid trip, and eventually they want to go to bed.

  They start giving me drugs to try to bring me down, ’cause I’m making so much noise. They’re giving me Quaaludes and Valium and Xanax, and nothing’s having any effect, I’m still behaving like an ape.

  MARTA doesn’t run in the middle of the night, so I couldn’t leave until it was light. But I had this nice hotel room in downtown Atlanta to go to. So come sunrise, I walk up the hill to get the bus to MARTA.

  All the pills start hitting me. I’m like a rhino that’s been shot in the ass with a tranquilizer dart. I start going, “Oh, no, what the fuck is happening to me?”

  I stumble to the bus stop, and some people help me on the bus. I get to the MARTA station and some people, maybe the same people, help me on a train. And I pass out. I’ve got a fever blister that’s broken and started bleeding. I am a mess, a genuine fucking pure D mess.

  I’m passed out on the train for hours, riding back and forth across the Atlanta metro area. Naturally no one wants to touch me to wake me up.

  Around two thirty in the afternoon I come to, and I don’t know where I am. I wonder, “Am I on an airplane?” It was dark, because we were in a tunnel. Eventually I figure out I’m on a train in Atlanta. It must be a MARTA train. “Which way am I going?” I’m going the wrong way. I get off at the next station and go back the right way.

  I get to the hotel and in my room, click, safe. I consider it a home run. I don’t realize the damage I’ve left in my wake.

  But soon enough I find out I’m banned from the Punchline. In fact, I’m banned from all the Punchlines. There were six of them, and they had been the first clubs to headline me. Not in the main room at first, but in the small rooms, and then in the main room.

  Ten years later, Foxworthy called them and said, “You guys gotta let Ron back in the Punchline.”

  “Do you know what that motherfucker did?”

  “It was ten years ago. You gotta give him another chance. He’s one of the funniest guys alive. You’ve got a club in the South, he’s a Southern hitter, how could you not have him?”

  “We always liked him. But then he fucking assholechumped us.”

  “I know. But as a favor to me, let him back in.”

  “All right. But he better not fuck us around.”

  “He won’t.”

  And I didn’t. I came back in and did a good job.

  6

  ONSTAGE: SET 3

  I had a great year last year. I got married to my wife, Barbara, a wonderful woman.

  When I met Barbara, she was Jeff Foxworthy’s interior designer. So not only was Jeff very instrumental in my success and my career, he also introduced me to the woman I’m gonna spend the rest of my life with.

  Which I think makes us even.

  Barbara is my age. A lot of people thought I would marry a really young woman. But you know what? I wanted to marry somebody that I could stand what they had to say. I’ve been with women that I just wished that they would shut up so bad, I wanted to hit ’em on the shoulder.

  And Barbara’s brilliant. She’s easy to get along with. And in a few years from now, if Barbara’s boobs start to sag a little bit, she can go to a titty doctor and have ’em put right back where they used to be.

  If her tummy gets a little big, she can have a tummy tuck, if she wants to. If her vision goes bad, they can do Lasik surgery, give her 20/20 vision at any age. If her hearing goes bad, they can put a device in her ear that’ll make her hear as good as the day she was born.

  But let me tell you something I’ve learned over the years, folks. You can’t fix stupid.

  There’s not a pill you can take, a class you can go to. Stupid is forever.

  My wife and I live in this new house that my fans bought me. Thanks, everybody. It’s just a beautiful, gigantic house in Georgia.

  Before this house, the most expensive house I ever bought in my life cost $65,000. This one’s more.

  In addition to the house itself, I paid all this money to have the landscaping done, and the pool done, and this, that, and the other thing done. But I don’t know shit about any of these things, ’cause I’ve never lived in that kind of house before. And all the people working on the house are just fuckin’ me for all they can get
.

  And the landscape guy, he became my best friend. And he does all this landscaping. And charges me money for it. And he gives me the bill, and I’m like, “God, no way. My old house didn’t cost this much.”

  Then all the plants started dying. And now I can’t get the guy on the phone. We’re not best friends anymore? What? Come on.

  And all I want him to do is do what he said he was gonna do, you know? That’s what I do. Do what you say you’re gonna do. In business or in your life, whatever.

  So I finally get this guy on the phone. I say, “These plants are dying.”

  He goes, “Well, I’ll come over and determine which plants are dying.”

  We’re going through the yard picking out these plants that are dead. And there are these two huge trees that you guys bought me. It’s September. The forest is abloom. And these two trees haven’t had leaf one on them since they put ’em in the ground. And I tell the guy, “Those two trees are dead.”

  And this is what the guy does. He goes over to one of the trees, and he scratches the trunk of it with his thumb. And then he comes back over to me and he says this, and I quote, “The core of this tree is still alive.”

  I said, “Let me tell you what I’m looking for in a fuckin’ tree. I’m looking for a tree you can tell is alive, even if you don’t know a goddamned thing about trees.” I don’t want to have to tell everybody that comes over to the house, “Those two trees are fine. If you go scratch the trunk with your thumbnail, you will find a vibrant core.”

  When I first met Barbara, she had a fifteen-year-old Scottish terrier she was trying to squeeze another year out of.

  Soon as I saw this dog I was like, “Oh, shit, this dog is about to die.” And I don’t want to go through the death of this dog with this woman. I just met her, and I’m not that sensitive.