And he did. The Night Café, painted in September of 1888. While George Eastman made it possible to forever trap reality on paper, while Jack the Ripper carved, in flesh wounds, a ragged peephole into the twentieth century, van Gogh painted from memory. And it destroyed him.
The first time I saw The Night Café was in college, during a psychology class. We were watching a slide show about the artwork of schizophrenics. About how certain characteristics appeared, over and over again, in their work. Distorted perspective. Faceless figures. Light sources with what appeared to be cartoon “stink lines” emanating from them, as if the painter could see (or feel? or hear? or smell and taste?) the beams of illumination cutting through the darkness.
And in the middle of the slide show of crude, crayon-on-construction-paper renderings, saved from the trash bins of countless mental hospitals, there clicked into view van Gogh’s The Night Café.
It kicked me in the head. Even looking at it from the middle of a lecture hall, a distant, projected transparency on a classroom screen, the menace and magic of that painting grabbed me. Tendrils of glistening paint whipped out, snagged my eyeballs, and held fast.
Go look at The Night Café, if you have any access—art book, Internet, anything. This was van Gogh’s memory of the Café de la Gare in Arles. Probably a seedy place, but not unpleasant. A room where drunks and derelicts could rent a chair against the cold of night for the price of a glass of brandy. Could, perhaps, sleep off a day’s self-abuse on the crook of an arm on a tabletop. Gauguin painted it, later, in much sunnier tones.
But that’s not how van Gogh remembered it. Or saw it. Or saw all of life, it seems. Whatever piloted his body from inside the blue-eyed skull of van Gogh rarely saw a pretty planet.
Look at The Night Café. See the red walls, like the color of butchered meat, or the inside of a carcass during an autopsy? See the lines coming off of the yellow lamps on the ceiling, almost as if they’re screaming? The way the pool table seems to crouch, like some badly constructed hell-beast, about to lurch out of the drawing at you? The faceless waiter, in his spotless whites, struggling to stand upright and human while surrounded with the hunched-over gargoyle figures of the café’s denizens? And finally the overall, claustrophobic architecture of the room, of the building, like evil itself is outside, softening the building’s timbers with hot saliva and warping the framework inward through need and rage. George Eastman’s camera filmed garden parties and bridges. Van Gogh’s paintbrush captured, like a Q-tip swabbing a germ-filled throat culture, a sample of the dirty darkness loose in the air at the end of 1888. There it is, on the canvas of The Night Café. Murder-vibe tentacles, coiling out around your eyes and muddying your heart.
Van Gogh entered a room in his mind when he painted The Night Café. He acknowledged his damaged (and worsening) psyche and, in acknowledging it, made a deal. He would be able to take newer, more original artistic conceptions out, would be able to capture them in paintings. His psyche found the deal acceptable. It let Vincent leave the room—the Night Café—with vistas and visions he hadn’t come close to before in his career. But something followed him out, and latched on to him like a virus, and he was never the same.
He was a better painter. A transformed one. Masterpieces flew out of him like pigeons from a condemned cathedral. Starry Night over the Rhône, The Yellow House, Bedroom in Arles, Les Arènes—all before Christmas of 1888.
Of course, by Christmas Eve Vincent was battering his head against the walls of the Old Hospital in Arles, having severed his ear and given it to a prostitute named Rachel. By February of 1889, after he’d been released from the Old Hospital a second time, the townspeople of Arles circulated a petition, demanding that Vincent be confined permanently. Van Gogh fled to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (and the Saint-Paul asylum) shortly thereafter. One year later, in the summer of 1890, Vincent ended his life with a gunshot wound to the chest. It took him a day and a half to die. That sort of profound insanity pays dividends—in hideous endurance and terrible tenacity.
“I told you that story to tell you this one.”
That’s Bill Cosby, again, off of his Revenge album. I know it seems like I’m taking a roundabout way to explain what I mean by Night Café, but everything I just laid out was to get you ready for the fact that I’ve had six of them.
None of them drove me mad. I still have both ears. My chest cavity is bullet-free.
But the concept of the Night Café—the room you enter, and then leave having been forever changed—is an abiding, repeated event in my life. Six times, so far, it’s happened to me. All of them had to do with my creativity, and my imagination, and how I saw the world and my place in it. Here are the first four:
The Tustin Library in Tustin, California, 1974
I’ve written about this, at length, in my last book, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. So here’s a quick summation.
Nineteen seventy-four. Halloween. Five years old. Kids’ day at the library. Ghost stories and pumpkin cookies and witches made out of construction paper. And a movie!
With zero malice on their part, the adults who organized the afternoon showed F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu. They closed the blinds on the windows and projected it against a bare wall. Eight-millimeter film, clattering projector, that faint burning smell as the projector bulb ignited the microscopic dust particles. Dust particles are mostly flakes of dead human skin. So, when I was five, I watched Nosferatu with the atavistic, pagan odor of simmering flesh corkscrewing itself into my memory. The optics are dream-logic, ratman vampire imagery. The perfume is cannibal cookout. That little square of light took over that darkened room, and while I and the other kids around me screamed and cried,I I wanted onto the other side of that screen. By hook or by crook (as it turned out, by stage and by book), I’d do it.
At five years old, I left my first Night Café. With nightmares and a pumpkin cookie.
Garvin’s Comedy Club, 1988
Yes, that room full of overpriced potato skins, puerile dick jokes and watered-down drinks was my second Night Café. I went in thinking stand-up comedy would be one of a dozen things I’d try before I settled on what I would do with my life. During that summer I also worked as a sportswriter (under my own name) and a columnist (under a fake name—“Hartman Dreadstone”) for a small, local paper. I worked as a paralegal trainee during the day. And a party deejay on weekends. Any one of those paid better and gave me more positive reinforcement than the four minutes of silence and one single laugh at Garvin’s that night. But I left changed. Another Night Café. I wanted to be a comedian. I wanted to hang out with comedians. I wanted to be lunar, not solar. A tiny step toward the other side of that screen I’d seen when I was five.
The Holy City Zoo, May 1992
Another comedy club. Like Garvin’s. Except not at all like Garvin’s. The polar opposite. Between Garvin’s in Washington, DC, and the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco, California—somewhere on the highway I drove west across the United States on in 1992—there was a magical portal. Tornado or tollbooth, wardrobe or rabbit hole. I have no idea. But I’m glad I tumbled through it.
By the summer of 1992 I’d been doing comedy four years and was jock-confident about my skills and progress. That first night at Garvin’s? One laugh? Well, those days were long behind me. I was starting to feature—and in some cases, headline—at some of the finest comedy clubs on the East Coast and in the eastern Midwest. Sir Laffs-a-Lot; the Shaft in Norton, Virginia; and Slapstix (the “x” meant “brace yourself for ‘x’-citement!”). I had surefire bits about tampon commercials, movie theater popcorn, farts, superheroes farting and shooting things out of their ass, and masturbating. And farting. Four years into my career and I was pulling in a hefty $7,000 a year—and these were 1992 dollars! Yeah, I’d moved back in with my parents after a year in Baltimore, but that’s only because I wanted to save money for my big move to the West Coast. Once I made it to the shores of the Pacific, my
surefire brand of chuckle-making would rocket me straight onto an HBO special. A sitcom would follow. How could it not? Patton Pending? Generally Patton? Oswalt My Gum?
That’s the attitude I had on Wednesday, May 6, 1992, when I first entered the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco. I’d moved there the day before. My wheezing Volkswagen Jetta had dropped its water pump onto a mountain road outside Truckee, California. All of the money I’d saved by moving back in with my parents went toward getting it fixed. I was moths-in-pockets broke, sharing an apartment with two other comedians. My room was the living room. My bed was a futon on the floor. One of my roommates, Carlos Alazraqui, was destined to be the voice of the Taco Bell Chihuahua. I was destined to go onstage at the legendary Holy City Zoo, my second night in San Francisco, and announce myself as the new gunslinger in town. Hadn’t I done my time in the countryside, training like a duelist, quickening my draw and honing my aim until all enemies fell when I slapped leather and fanned the hammer?
Oh, the cheap, cinematic victory I replayed over and over in my head as I walked down Clement Street that night, notebook under my arm.
I was dressed for battle, too. I learned, from my four years walking the giggle-shack latitudes, how to dress. Sport coat, ripped jeans and sneakers. Years ago, in Philadelphia, a comedy club owner told me, when I dared to go onstage wearing a Flaming Carrot Comics T-shirt, not to “ever wear anything that can distract from your jokes.” Sage advice from a man who always slayed with the exact same twelve minutes the entire four years I knew him. I streamlined my act along the same lines, as well as my wardrobe. Now, tonight, for my crushing debut, I had a blue polka-dot shirt from Eddie Bauer; a bolo tie with a muted, abstract, brick-red scorpion as a clasp; and silver aglets. My jeans only had a few tears in them, and I wore black Chuck Taylors. I mean, how could anyone who even glanced at me not recognize this avatar of awesomeness they shared the planet with?
When you walked into the Holy City Zoo, you passed through two swinging doors into a room that had “vertical” and “narrow” to spare. “Wide” and “spacious”—not so much. A tiny bar to your left, a postage-stamp stage immediately beyond it. Seating for an audience of fifty, if it was packed. And, as if put there as a prank, an opera-style pair of elevated box seats to stage left. They held two people. Anyone who sat there drew more focus than anyone who was onstage.
The Holy City Zoo did comedy every single night of the week. Not just the Tuesday-maybe-Wednesday open mikes, with booked, professional Friday and Saturday shows like the clubs I worked, first in DC and then up and down the East Coast. Every single night, there was something at the Zoo. Open mikes Mondays and Tuesdays and, like tonight, sometimes Wednesdays. Other times Wednesdays were taken up by sketch or improv groups or . . . something. Friday and Saturday, sometimes Sunday—the pros, making money, drawing crowds of fifty. I was sure I’d be headlining those nights before 1992 was over.
Hey—it was looking pretty crowded. Lot of people there. They looked like civilians, too. Not comedians. Jeans, T-shirts. Maybe a button-up shirt over the T-shirt. They were probably waiting to get drinks before they sat down. I couldn’t wait to rock their worlds. Hadn’t I done that already, to sold-out crowds at Charlie Goodnight’s in Raleigh, North Carolina? I mean, the show was sold out because I was opening for Bill Hicks, sure, but I proved I belonged up there, killing it with my no-fail closing bit about the Cookie Monster if he were gay. Hadn’t Bill been gracious and polite to me, even speaking to me once between shows? He recognized a future great when he saw one, sure. No way was he trying to fill the awkward silence as I stared at him over my free-for-comedians soda, wondering how he slaughtered using a third of the energy I was so desperately putting out.
None of the crowd at the Holy City Zoo was taking their seats. Oh, wait. Well, those three people did. A young couple and a strange-looking older man with a bag of peanut M&M’s that he ate, robotically, while staring off into space. Hopefully, more people would sit down before the show started. I found the sign-up sheet so I could add my name— Oh, hold on. There were already seventeen names before mine. Where were all the comedians? Were you supposed to come in early? Did they sign up hours ago and then go to get dinner or something? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
I added my name to the list and found a place at the bar where I could lean and check my notes and watch the show. The bar was crowded and most of the audience still hadn’t taken a seat.
It took me a moment to realize that almost all of them were taking out notebooks, jotting down jokes, getting ready.
These were the comedians.
They were dressed just like they’d dress in real life. Flannel shirts, blank T-shirts, work boots. Like they’d walked, midconversation, from the sidewalk to the stage.
Blaine Capatch sat down at the bar beside me. We’d driven out a few weeks apart. The year before, Blaine had traveled out to San Francisco and returned to the East Coast with tales of wonder. Stages everywhere! Comedians our age, getting work! Cheap rent! Cheaper food! Strong coffee! Bookstores and sushi and fog and weed—right there for the taking, instead of in odd, out-of-the-way Baltimore neighborhoods or a single block in DC. The few pockets of strangeness that we took hummingbird-like sips from back home were simply part of the everyday scenery in San Francisco. I dreamed of standing at the corner where Miles Archer takes three slugs in the belly at the beginning of The Maltese Falcon, sipping an espresso machiatto and thinking deep thoughts in the chill mist.
“Isn’t this place great?” said Blaine. He was dressed in his usual all black, looking the way every New Wave keyboard player wished they looked. Blaine had a Zen mind inside of a switchblade body. He fit right in. I already resented him.
“Yeah. I feel like the ghost of Lenny Bruce is going to walk through the doors.”
Blaine said, “You’re thinking of the Hungry I.”
I winced. “You’re right.”
The show started. Every comedian was young. A few were “older” than me, in that they were twenty-three or twenty-four.
They did jokes in a way I’d never seen comedians do jokes in my four years of comedy. At Garvin’s, on an open-mike night and even when I went pro and started working weekends, the only thing that mattered was the end result. If someone got laughs, and got rebooked, and made money? That was the end of the aesthetic argument. There was no such thing as “hack” comedy back where I started. There was only “working” and “not working.” I remember very clearly, one night in 1990 during a comedy competition in Newport News, I pointed to a comedian on the cover of a magazine. I opined that maybe she wasn’t the funniest person currently doing comedy. Every other comedian in the room turned on me. I was suddenly a rare steak in a hyena cage. “I don’t see you on the cover of a magazine. She’s on the cover of a magazine. So she’s funny.” There was no comeback for me—at least, not in my addled, mulleted, twenty-one-year-old head.
Now I was sitting in a dark, narrow chamber, an odd room that felt like a tiny, hidden lobe of the world’s brain. Incarnate on the tiny stage, of that tiny room, was every retort and answer to that Newport News assault. Every answer to why it doesn’t fucking matter if you get rich or famous without the funny was up on the stage that night, enjoying being comedians. No HBO specials on the horizon, no sitcom dreams, not even mainstream club headlining gigs. They wanted to do comedy for the sake of doing comedy. I hadn’t seen that yet, in my career. I’d seen little glimpses of it, within my tiny circle of friends back on the East Coast. Blaine, and Mark, and Dave, and our friend Jeff Hatz. And me. But we were treated like mutants. We thought we were mutants, and for whatever few moments of genuine risk and weirdness we allowed ourselves, we also had our sights on fitting in and thriving in middle-of-the-road, mozzarella-sticks-and-comment-cards comedy clubs. We could at least argue that we belonged in the Hang since we were earning the Money, getting the Bookings.
Now I saw the perfect antithesis of that, comedian after co
median, at the Holy City Zoo. Jim Earl and Barry Lank, a comedy duo with Bob & Ray’s genialness, channeling Carl Panzram’s murderous misanthropy. Greg Behrendt, doing an extended riff about Jimi Hendrix’s secret sideline as a pastry chef that made absolutely no sense and absolutely cracked my shit up. Laura Milligan—who was Nancy Spungen with Gore Vidal’s brain. Greg Proops, a snide superego who could make you piss yourself simply with the way he said the name “Adolphe Menjou,” like a dirty in-joke both of you were sharing in a foxhole. Warren Thomas (RIP), as shocked and delighted by his own seat-of-the-pants improvisations as the audience was. Kurt Weitzmann—casually, breezily blasphemous. Maybe you know some of these names. Maybe you don’t. They were all—and still are, to me—crucial.
The comedians would finish their sets and sit or lean against the wall or huddle at the bar and watch the rest of the show. There was an energy in that room I never got to experience at any East Coast open mike—a feeling of delight in the silence as much as the laughter. If I’d become a junkie after my first open mike at Garvin’s, four years ago, then I was now hanging out with steel-skinned freebasers.II
Blaine went up. Pretty good. But something was wrong. His more esoteric references and odd non sequiturs got way bigger laughs than his killer “A” material. I was confused for a moment, and then allowed myself a shimmer of smugness that came more from the fear that he’d eclipse me and leave me behind in this new city. I told myself, He’s just not delivering his jokes with any real conviction. He’s not selling them. I’m a headliner. A headlining comedian. I know how to sell a solid set, no matter what the audience.
Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film Page 3