I had done the worst gigs, made no money, stayed at the worst hotel, and nearly died. I was actually feeling pretty good. There was some part of me that thought, At least I’m in the way front. I’m driving up the Jersey Turnpike and I spotted a Roy Rogers. I stopped and had breakfast. It was the best Roy Rogers.
THE DEAL
When I was fifteen, my father forced me to get a summer job. I was spending a lot of time around the house. Every day he’d look at me for a moment, sum me up, and then shout in another direction, “This kid needs some goddamn reality testing!” I’m not sure who he was talking to, but I definitely heard him. He had a point—I hadn’t taken any steps toward becoming a professional break-dancer or a hip hop recording artist, so it’s possible that I did need a push. My brother Joe got me my first summer job, at a restaurant on Cape Cod. He had worked there the summer before as a prep cook, shucking oysters and deveining shrimp. Fortunately they needed busboys the day I walked in, because Joe’s job seemed kind of terrible.
I met Tyler, the manager, in the front entranceway of the restaurant and followed him back toward the kitchen. Walking into the kitchen of a big restaurant is kind of like going backstage at the circus. It’s all lit with fluorescent lighting, it smells funny, and everyone seems to be yelling at each other, often in languages you’re not hearing in the dining room.
Since I was Joe’s brother, the fix was in. Tyler asked me one question during our interview. Had I ever been a busboy before?
Of course I had. Joe had told me to say this. He had explained that the paradox of working at a restaurant is that you have to have previous experience working at a restaurant. Even if you don’t. Get it?
“Got it. So I lie?”
“Well, it’s more like implying.”
“What if he asks me follow-up questions?”
“He won’t. He doesn’t want to know the truth. He’s just trying to cover his ass.”
Tyler didn’t ask any follow-up questions and I got the job. The first thing Tyler did was give me some advice. Gesturing to the cooks behind the line, he said, “You gotta stay out of these guys’ way in the kitchen. Get in and out of here with your trays as quickly as possible, and do not talk to them unless you absolutely must.”
And since the kitchen was like 150 degrees and full of angry cooks, I said, “No problem.”
The only time I would be in the kitchen was to clear trays, and I will confess, I was one of the busboys who hid the beer bottles that only had a sip taken out of them. My busboy colleagues and I held these near-full green bottles up to the light like chemists, agreeing that the alcohol in the beer should kill any of the bacteria in the backwash. And I think we were right, because none of us died.
I learned a lot about restaurant hierarchy that first summer. Primarily that the cooks are the angriest, sweatiest, most-underpaid people in the restaurant business. These grizzled, Boston-accented guys worked long shifts in a 145-degree kitchen and I think some of them may have had the sneaking suspicion that fifteen-year-old busboys drinking backwash-laced Heinekens and eating wedding cake were making more money than them, and they weren’t amused.
But for some reason, I still wanted to connect with the cooks. To befriend them like they were some crazy stray dogs that just needed a little understanding and attention. To let them know that “hey, this guy at the garbage can eating the virtually untouched scallops wrapped in bacon was a real person too.”
One day the head cook, this guy named Dave Rubio, looked at me with his dead eyes and said, “How’d you get this job anyway?” This was my big chance to connect with my coworkers. It was almost like he’d invited me on a corporate retreat, except instead of trust exercises where we catch each other from falling from a forty-foot tree, we have a basic human conversation. I know it’s not much, but at the time it was huge. I was speaking to the cook. The Nic Cage of the kitchen, a guy who knew how to do more than just carry trays or pour sixteen ounces of beer into a sixteen-ounce glass.
And I said, “My brother Joe worked here last summer.”
And his eyes lit up. He goes, “Joey Bag o’ Donuts? Your brother is Joey Bag o’ Donuts?”
Now, what I should have said was “Why don’t I ask him and get back to you? I know for sure his name is Joe.”
What I did say was “Yeah.”
Dave turned to the rest of the kitchen and shouted out, “Hey! Get this! This guy’s Joey Bag o’ Donuts’ brother!”
This announcement was met by a chorus of approval, “All right!” “Yeah!” “Joe Bags’ little brother! You’re all right man!”
That day I went home and asked my brother, “Was your nickname at the restaurant Joey Bag o’ Donuts?”
And Joe said, “No. That was this other guy. That guy was awesome.”
For the rest of the summer, I had to live the lie that my brother was Joey Bag o’ Donuts. All the cooks, with their eyes lit up like I had been accepted in the Lit-up Eyes Society, would look at me and say, “How’s Joe Bags?”
And I’d say, “He’s great.”
One time one guy said, “Seriously, how much can Joe Bags drink?”
And I said, “So . . . much.”
The whole summer I felt this pit of fear in my stomach that one day the actual Joe Bags would walk in the door to that kitchen and they’d all put me on their shoulders and say “Joe Bags, we’ve been hanging out with ya’ brutha!” And Joe Bags would look at me and say, “That fag’s not my brutha.” And that’s when they would drop me into a cauldron of New England clam chowder.
Upon moving to New York after graduation, I realized that I needed money to pay for frivolous things like rent and bags of noodles. For my college graduation, my family bought me a thousand dollars’ worth of “Ask Jeeves” stock, which was immediately worth about three hundred and twenty dollars. I knew I had about six months to be successful. I lived for a month on my sister Gina’s couch in Brooklyn. She had a small one-bedroom, but was willing to trade me pizza for doing her laundry.
I didn’t have much luck getting stage time at comedy clubs, despite some somewhat clever marketing tactics. When I called bookers, they would ask for “dupes” of my tape. In order to get club owners familiar with you, you were expected to provide a demo tape of your work. My sister Gina worked at HBO so all the dupes had HBO stickers on them. It was a bit misleading.
“This Birbiglia guy has an HBO special? Wait a minute—this was shot on a hi-8 in the back of a comedy club next to a tray of clinking glasses! What the hell kind of HBO special is that?”
Calling club bookers is kind of like telemarketing, except you never have to say, “Is your mom there?” But you follow similar principles. Never leave a message. Always try and get a live person on the phone, and try to keep the conversation going. “Oh, you don’t want to book me this week? Okay, how about next week? Oh, you don’t like me in general? Well, maybe I could interest you in some hair care products?”
Only one club booker actually took my calls. His name was Lucien Hold and he was the manager of the Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Lucien was a New York comedy institution. He had been booking the club since the seventies and had supposedly given breaks to Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, and many others. He was a former ballet dancer who believed that comedy was an art form. He also believed in telling people exactly how he felt about their art, and he had a habit of talking at length. So not only would Lucien explain to you why he didn’t find you talented, but he would do so for a while.
Apparently on one occasion Lucien was in his closet-sized office giving notes to a female comedian, who was slightly overweight, and he said to her, “You’re overweight but it’s not comical.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
He said, “In other words, you’re not sexy enough to interest people with your looks and not fat enough to be a sight gag.”
She said, “Are you serious?”
Lucien said, “Oh yes. I’m not saying you can’t be a comedian. I’m
just saying you can’t be a comedian at this club.”
Lucien had some enemies.
But he was honest, and honesty was a quality that was hard to come by when I was cold-calling bookers. I respected honesty more than unreturned phone calls. The first time I performed for Lucien, he said, “You’re a cross between Jim Gaffigan, Jeffrey Ross, and Todd Barry, and those guys already work the club, so I don’t need you.” Then he just waited for my reply. But I didn’t really have one. I liked those comics too. So I just made something up: “But I’m young and I’ll get better.”
He thought about this and said, “That’s true, but there are a lot of younger guys. I mean, it’s not like you talk about particularly young topics.”
I was stumped. I said, “I talk about the Teletubbies.”
He said, “The Teletubbies are for babies. Infants. We don’t serve infants.”
I had found myself on the wrong side of a preposterous argument. I was somehow an advocate of infant drinking. Lucien decided not to “pass me” at the club. That was the term for being on the booking list. When you are “passed” you get a phone number to call and leave your weekly availability. I wasn’t passed, but Lucien told me to come back in the fall.
• • •
This left me with a lot of time on my hands and no real prospects for work. My brother “Joe Bags” had moved to New York a few years before me and he had some ideas for me. He got me a job as a focus group participant. Well, sort of a job. It’s kind of like jury duty, but instead of deciding the fate of some alleged murderer, you work with a team of equally broke New Yorkers to decide the fate of the newest Del Monte canned fruit cocktail recipe, which will be called either “Extra Cherries Jubilee,” “The Cherry on Top Cocktail,” or maybe even “The Very Cherry Explosion.” Your opinion can change history. And you get paid.
The first focus group I participated in had candy and sandwiches and lemonade in the waiting room. It was fantastic. But I got a little suspicious. Why are they being so nice? Sandwiches in New York cost eight or nine dollars. How did I stumble upon this sandwiches gold mine?
After eating two or three of the sandwiches, I was ushered into a conference room and seated with ten other strangers and an overly enthusiastic moderator. The entire wall behind her was a one-way mirror, which she asked us to ignore, as if that were possible. It was easy to imagine the young ad agency hotshots and their clients back there, trying to guess how many of the free Hydrox chocolate cookies I could possibly stuff down my throat. The answer: many. But I was happy because I was making fifty dollars an hour to eat cookies and babble like a drunk person about fruit cocktail. I was winning.
Focus groups seemed pretty great. They were like taking college courses called “Introduction to Fruit Cocktail” and “Breakfast Sandwiches.” And there’s no homework, there’s never going to be a test, and there are no wrong answers.
Sometimes my fellow focus room participants said things about advertisements and products that blew my mind. I saw a flight attendant scream, “I can’t stand all those goddamn cherries they put in those fruit cups!” I wanted to say, “Debbie, sit back and have a Hydrox cookie, you’ll feel a lot better.” Instead I just ate more Hydrox cookies. I may have even eaten some of her share.
But sometimes I was the idiot.
At one point I was at a focus group for Sam Adams beer, looking at and offering critiques for some new television ads. The ads were fine, and the moderator asked us what we thought of the beer, the Sam Adams brand, and Sam Adams the historical figure. And the young man on my left started talking about his impression of Sam Adams as an American patriot and Revolutionary War hero. And I have no idea why, but I tried to correct him. I jumped in and pointed out that Sam Adams wasn’t a patriot or a revolutionary, he was just a guy who made beer, a brewer. Maybe I was trying to show off for the people behind the glass. I knew they were behind there, mocking his ignorance, and I suppose by jumping in I thought I could differentiate myself, you know, pile on the dumb guy. I had to let those people know I was not with this guy. I was my own man, a man with cookie crumbs stuck in my eyebrows. I have no idea what I was thinking. I found out later that Sam Adams was the cousin of John Adams and is generally considered one of the foremost leaders of the American Revolution. The point is, they gave me fifty dollars.
If I could do these every week, I thought, I’ll be set. I’ll be the king of fifty-dollar bills in envelopes! When someone asks me to pay for a check at a restaurant, I’ll just ask, “How many fifty-dollar bills is that?” And then I’ll pull out one of my fifty-dollar bill envelopes, and unleash one of my crisp cincuentas. But I had a hard time qualifying for focus groups every week. Sometimes I wouldn’t fit the demographic they were searching for, so I learned to say whatever it took to qualify. Instead of truthful answers like, “No, I don’t drive a Mitsubishi,” “No, I don’t frost the tips of my hair,” and, “No, I don’t supervise an office of ten or more employees,” I opted for the “correct” answers, like “I drive a Mitsubishi Eclipse,” “I always frost my tips,” and “Of course, I manage our entire sales force on the Eastern seaboard.” Oh, and I also said I love NASCAR. That was probably the biggest stretch.
CALLER:
Mike, how many times a week would you say that you read NASCAR magazines? Zero to two, three to five, or six to seven days?
ME:
Oh, definitely six to seven days a week, definitely.
CALLER:
Great. And how many times a week do you email your friends about NASCAR races: zero to four, five to twelve, or, more than twelve times per week?
ME:
More than twelve.
The ad agencies and their clients try to cover their asses and weed out the fakers. They can’t have these focus groups be total catastrophes, so they try to nail you with the last question. Fortunately, the caller is paid by how quickly she can fill up these focus groups, so she’s on your side.
CALLER:
And finally, could you name your three favorite NASCAR drivers?
And you’d think, for a guy who reads NASCAR magazines six or seven days a week and emails his friends constantly about their progress and outcomes, this wouldn’t be too difficult a question, but somehow, I still struggled.
ME:
Sure, sure . . . ok, hmmm . . . is there a Dale?
CALLER:
Dale Earnhardt Jr?
ME:
Yes, him. And that guy Ricky, with the glasses and the hat, he drives really fast.
CALLER:
You mean Ricky Rudd?
ME:
Yes, Ricky Rudd, and of course, everyone’s favorite, Dick Trickle. He’s my third favorite.
CALLER:
(pause) Uh, he retired a long time ago. Can we just say Jeff Gordon?
ME:
Oh yes, I love him too. Jeff is great. Super fast racer.
So I qualified. And by this point in the call, I figured out that the focus group is going to be about some sort of NASCAR-themed technology, probably a website. So I thought, Oh, I’ll hang back in this focus group, and just focus on eating cookies. But when I arrived for the group, I looked around the room and there are all these other young guys who had also clearly lied their way into this focus group, and our grossly uninformed discussion about NASCAR began.
Somebody asked if NASCAR is the one with the low-slung pointy cars or the big road-type cars. There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but if you’re supposed to be a huge NASCAR fan, that is a dumb question. As I looked around the room at the faces of the other nervous Hydrox cookie eaters, it hit me, I know more about NASCAR than most of these people. The moderator proceeded to show us this really elaborate website all about NASCAR and NASCAR chat rooms and NASCAR stats, and then this other guy suggested that they build a website like this around baseball, because that’s his favorite sport. At this point everyone in the room, including the moderator, turned to this guy with this look, like, Are you stupid? They are giving us fifty-dollar bills and
Hydrox cookies to pretend we like NASCAR. You will not ruin this for all of us. Your favorite sport is NASCAR.
We all started to catch heat from the moderator. She was looking around at us like, None of you losers watch NASCAR, do you? But she couldn’t say it, because then the jig would have really been up. I felt for her. Who were these losers who had lied to this company so they could make some extra cash?
I looked in the one-way mirror and saw my answer.
With nothing going on in New York and my couch welcome at Gina’s wearing thin, I moved back home with my parents. It was more or less a full-time job in tech support and lawn care in exchange for being able to sleep in my childhood bed.
I spent my days roving the Internet on my parents’ computer for contests I could enter, kind of like the character Lazlo in the movie Real Genius. But while Lazlo’s strategy had to do with any contest, mine was comedy contests. In retrospect this strategy was kind of insane, it was like I thought, I just need to win a contest for my career to take off. Boy, I sure hope such a contest exists!
Fortunately, such a contest did exist. Comedy Central was holding a “Laugh Riots” standup comedy competition in major cities nationwide. The winners of these regional contests would compete in Los Angeles for a spot on a Comedy Central standup show called Premium Blend. When I told my dad that I was accepted into the semifinals, he asked me what it paid, and I said, “It only pays if you win. Because it’s a contest.” And he said, “Are you going to get a job winning contests?”
He had a point, and I didn’t win, but one of the judges named Michelle from Comedy Central told me I was “kind of funny” and gave me her card. I told her I’d be back in New York soon and I’d call her when I got there. I wasn’t planning to move back to New York, but now that I had this business card, it seemed like a worthwhile life choice. I’m kind of funny!
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