by David Spade
I eventually woke up, but for one solid hour I was laid out in the nurse’s office at school, with no idea who I was. We’re talking major concussion, people. By the way, when you get hurt in my family there’s sort of an unwritten rule that you don’t complain. You don’t even say anything. When we were kids it was like we weren’t allowed to get hurt, you know what I mean? I don’t know if we even had insurance (we didn’t) but around our house we had a “you’re fine” policy. If anything at all went wrong, my mom just said, “You’re fine.” I’d go, “My stomach hurts . . .” “You’re fine.” “I fell off my bike . . . ‘You’re fine’ . . . but the bone is sticking out . . .” “You’re fine!” “Maybe I should see a doctor this time . . . ?” “YOU’RE FINE, DAVEY. A little Bactine will fix that right up!” Bactine is fake medicine, in my opinion. It just numbs things and bought my mom more time to think.
So, knowing I can’t complain and may even actually get in trouble if I do, I was in a tough spot. I was in the school nurse’s office and I didn’t know what day it was, or who I was, for that matter. Then they brought my mom back, along with a doctor from the house. I didn’t know my mom’s name, but I sort of recognized her. Finally the old man doctor chimed in. “Well, he’s a bit shook up.” And I go, “Is that all you have? Are you from Gunsmoke? That doesn’t mean anything! I have a category 200 concussion. I have amnesia! If I was in the NFL right now they would stop the game and chopper me out of the stadium. All the guys on my team would be down on one knee, freaking out. Even the other team would be on their knees like fake worried . . . Aw man, is he okay? Who cares, I’m going to rest a bit. (Pant, pant.)” (Even with a concussion I was doing bits.)
So the doctor looks at me again and this time said, “He’s a bit rattled. Yeah, he got his bell rung.” These are not medical terms, motherfucker! Finally, he said something that makes sense. “You better take him right to the emergency room.” Well, Mom is a great actress. “Oh my God, of course!” Then the old doc scoots out and my mom leaned over and said, “Davey, do you want to go to the hospital or . . . PIZZA HUT?!!!” Oh my God, Pizza Hut?! They have Asteroids!!
So I never went to the hospital. I pushed all my teeth up in the right direction, so they felt even, and then put my retainer on (as painful as it sounds). Then months later the black paint fell off. So now if you ever see me on Kimmel and I’m wearing something that looks like a pukka shell necklace, now you know it’s all Percocets. And I’m secretly chomping on them during commercials, “gnom gnom gnom, yummy fake puka . . .”
For the next year’s Extravaganza I was even more ready to go. I had written more sketches this year. I had found that I was into this comedy thing, and I had spent the year since my unfortunate face-plant brainstorming ideas. This year things went better, save one tiny pratfall. The “Extrav,” as we called it, was the Super Bowl for drama losers and wannabe comedians (and people who didn’t roll their eyes when saying the word Extrav). The night of the show my friend and I had concocted a bit about two guys discussing fashion. One was dressed as a Lacoste alligator and the other as a polo player. They were onstage arguing over which brand was better, until the end, when I walked by in shorts and casually said, “Hey dudes, what’s going on?” Then the other two guys yelled, “Oh no! It’s the OP man!” and chased me off. (Hilarious? Maybe?) When we did it live, the polo guy swung his real wooden mallet at me and nailed me on top of the head as I ran offstage. By the time I got to the wings there was a dime-size dent in my noggin and blood was running down my face. I packed on the ice, but damn, it hurt. Didn’t help the neck down the line, just so you know. But it got laughs so I wasn’t mad about it. A lot of stuff we did in that show worked, which made me get even more into it the following year. At this point it never crossed my mind I’d be doing this shit forever. I never dreamed you could make money at these shenanigans. There was too big a gap between me and people on TV, so I wasn’t even picturing that as an option.
The Extravaganza my senior year was a smooth ride. My friend Dan Minton and I wrote a ton of stuff, and a lot of it worked. Our friends called the show “Extrava-dave-and-danza” that year, which was a burn but that was fine because I didn’t get hurt and I was on to something with this comedy biz. I had the bug. (Turned out to be Ebola.)
But then the year was over, and everyone was leaving for college. Shit. What do I do now?
Mini Spade needed a plan.
CHAPTER FIVE
JOINING A FRATERNITY
The time had come to think about college. I’d been putting this off forever. All my friends had a plan. I was literally the only one who didn’t have some idea what to do after graduation. It wasn’t like my mom had the time or the energy to sit me down and say, “Now Davey, you need to study for those SATs so you can get into the Ivy Leagues.” She was too busy working to pay the light bill. My brothers and I had to take matters into our own hands. So, at the end of my senior year, I waltzed into the office of my guidance counselor (whom I hadn’t talked to in years) and said cockily, “I’m torn between going to Princeton or UC Santa Barbara. Help me pick.” These were the two schools I had been thinking about back in seventh and eighth grade, back when I was killing it in every class and was king of the nerdlies. At this point, I haven’t even thought about college since I saw Animal House freshman year. But I’m still fully confident that Princeton and Santa Barbara are on the table and waiting for my nod. The guidance counselor looks at me and says, “If I pull some strings I might be able to get you in the community college across the street.”
Ummm, not the answer I was expecting . . .
In my head I was thinking, WTF, lady, I’m a genius. I’m not going to some dogshit community college. It’ll kill my game! Not to mention my mom would quietly cry because I had the one chance in the family to break out of the hood with a real school. (Hood being the section of Scottsdale for folks who made less than $150,000 a year.)
So I got into Scottsdale Community College. You knew it wasn’t Princeton because our mascot was named the Artichokes. It would be funnier if I hadn’t gone there. Everyone else had scrammed across the country and I was stuck driving three miles away to a college on an Indian reservation. It was a little bleak for the kid who read forty-seven books in sixth grade. The first thing I did as a college student was to sign myself up for early classes to make sure I didn’t party too hard: 7:30 A.M. classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If I was going to go to community college, I was going to be the top community college student ever. It was time to get serious again. Time to start a self-discipline plan. What a fucking mistake that was. Way too aggressive. I dropped that 7:30 class within three weeks. I was already worried less than a month in that my GPA wouldn’t be as robust as I wanted it to be. I was smart enough to take tennis at night, and I did pretty well in that, except I couldn’t picture any future employers getting excited over that class. “I read here on your résumé that you get your first serves in a lot . . . you’re hired!” None of my high school friends were around anymore, and this was a real wake-up call for me. You get spoiled in high school because there are always ten people around to meet up with or have lunch with or hang out with. Suddenly it’s just crickets, because everyone I knew who was with me at this crappy community college was not someone I wanted to hang out with, and I’m sure they were thinking the same thing about me. (It was like the old Woody Allen joke, “I’d never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”)
Early on in my first semester, I made a small blunder. (Not to be confused with the old robot sitcom Small Wonder.) I’d head back over to high school and sit on the wall by the cafeteria after my classes ended for the day. It didn’t occur to me how desperate that was, until one day a few of the seniors came over and started chatting me up. “Hey, dude, what’s going on? Don’t you have class to go to? In college?” “Dude!” I replied. “I picked my own skedj, and I made sure I was tapped out by eleven thirty A.M. It’s perfect because I can make it over here for lunch.” The guy was
like, “Remember how Perkins and Stiller used to come back and sit on the wall after they graduated and we thought it was kind of a loser move?” I would chuckle, “Yeah. A bunch of those losers did that. Get a grip, guys, move on, high school’s over.” And then I just stared at the parking lot oblivious to the fact that they were trying to tell me something.
One night I was randomly looking through the local newspaper and I saw an ad for a comedy night. I thought it might be cool to go watch. Then I noticed that they also hosted an amateur night. I sort of missed the old Extravaganza days, so I thought maybe I could write up a little comedy act and give it a whirl. So I went down and watched the amateurs a few days later, and they were horrible. I had the confidence that I could be just as horrible. So the next week, I got some balls and went down and tried five minutes. I was eighteen and terrified. I had only seen comedians perform on Johnny Carson’s show or cable specials, never in person. I didn’t really know what “club” comics actually did. At first I figured I could go out onstage and just repeat jokes I had seen Eddie Murphy and Billy Crystal do, because I memorized their HBO specials. It never crossed my mind that that would be considered stealing. To me it was just like being in a cover band singing the hits of Journey or the Rolling Stones. I was simply paying homage. But I decided against this approach. I went down to that club with my crummy scribblings.
I was the youngest guy who hit the stage that night. I looked about eleven. Some of my killer jokes included, “You know when you walk barefoot over someone’s yard and it is made up of gravel and rocks?” (Believe me, in Arizona this is a real thing. There is very little grass around. It is all just cactus and small rocks.) “Well, here’s my impression of someone walking across that yard.” And then I’d walk daintily, lifting my hands in pain and say, “Ow! Fuck! Shit!” (Cue silence.) Later I changed the joke to, “You know when you get a small rock in your shoe and every time you take a step, it moves to a different part of your foot so that the people see you walking going . . . ‘Ow! Fuck! Shit!’ ” (Sort of the same joke, but better premise.) “You know when you squirt mustard in your liverwurst sandwich and the first four gallons are yellow water? I’m like gross! Where’s the mustard? Good night, folks!”
It’s a shame I wasn’t discovered that night, with such solid material. The club manager came up to me at the end of the night and said, “Your material was shitty, but what you said in between jokes was funny. Do more of that. You can come back.” This guy didn’t realize it but with one passing comment, he sort of summed it all up and really nailed it. The rest of my life, the best stuff for me would be those throwaway jokes. That’s what would keep me alive in comedy. But it took me a while to figure it out. This dope nailed it in four minutes.
I started hitting all the amateur nights around Scottsdale. Some would even slide you twenty dollars’ gas money at the end of the night. I quickly did the math and thought, if I could get four paying gigs a week, I’d have eighty dollars a week. Then I could quit my job, quit school, and become a pro comic. Full-time!
In between amateur nights, I went to a club called Chuckles and saw my first actual, professional headliner, a guy named Barry Sobel. I couldn’t believe how fucking funny he was. He was so fast and had such tight material. I knew that if I could ever pull together an hour of material that good, I’d be on my way. Right now, that was sort of beyond my comprehension, an hour of good shit. So maybe quitting school wasn’t the best course of action after all.
The following year I got into Arizona State University. See you later, Shitty Community College; let’s stay friends! I had no money, a crappy car, and a room in a bleak little apartment. I had a job at a clothing store where my brother Andy and his girlfriend Katy worked. Andy ran the men’s side. Katy ran the women’s. Later they would start dating and create KATE SPADE handbags and get rich and famous. (That’s another book . . . a better one.) But for the time being, we all had these normal jobs and lives in Arizona.
Getting into ASU was a huge upswing in my social life. Andy, my cool brother, was in a fraternity called SAE. Sigma Alpha Epsilon. This was the preppy, douche frat on most campuses but at ASU this was the coolest one. They glommed on to me right way, because I was Andy’s little brother, and asked me to join. I was so flattered. I went through rush week getting my ass kissed. I had a hunch this was too good to be true and yet, I still fell for this act. All week they were telling me that I was special, that they’d be honored to have me as a brother. Like a moron, I believed it! So, I signed on to be a pledge. This was a mistake. The second rush week was over, all of the pledges were gathered into a room where the brothers began screaming at us, telling us what losers we were and that we were to address them saying, “Yes, sir, sir, active sir” at all times because we were pledges or “plebes” and they were the almighty “actives.” I did this bullshit for six months. It was shocking at first, even though I sort of should have known it was coming. I’d seen every fraternity movie and they always treat the pledges like shit. I had been thinking that these were the greatest guys I’d ever met. I got so bamboozled. Where were the cool guys who were kissing my ass? I sort of wanted to pull them aside and say, “I get the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine but it’s a little tired and frankly a bit corny so maybe let’s get back to that rush week attitude and why don’t you fetch me a beer?” These are the kind of comments I was too scared to say to the actives but would whisper to the pledges.
Eventually, the whole fraternity found out I was sneaking off and doing comedy nights around town. This gave me a tiny bit of coolness factor, especially when we had mixers with the sororities. My favorites were the DGs (the dick grabbers), Gamma Phi Betas (the Goo-Foo-Boos), the Gamma Phi’s (the grab-a-thighs), and the Alpha Phi’s (the all-for-frees). They were all hot in my mind, and during rush week I had been told I could fuck any one of them if I just pointed at the one I wanted. An active would simply bring her to me. Of course, the story now was that none of the sisters would ever sleep with me because I was a loser pledge and besides, I wasn’t allowed to talk to them, and P.S., go scrub the toilets you plebe fuck.
So now my life consisted of four things—working at the clothing company with Andy and Kate, doing shitty stand-up gigs at night whenever I could, being an SAE pledge and eating shit at every turn, and last and what turned into least . . . going to school. The pledging, or as they called us, “being a funk,” took up 90 percent of my time. I had to report in and do chores around the frat house. (CHORES, FOLKS! LIKE I’M SEVEN!) By the way, you were not supposed to call it a frat house; you were not even supposed to call it a frat . . . the actives got very angry. They would always yell, “It’s a fraternity! You wouldn’t call your country a ‘cunt,’ would you?” That was their big line. It was sort of funny and logical actually, but I still called it a frat all the time. Don’t get me wrong, there were some pluses to being in a fraternity; it definitely forced you to make friends fast. And we were drunk most of the time. Plus, we went through so much shit that it was like we were bonded for life. We were brothers, like vets from Nam. (I wonder if people who were actually in the Vietnam War get sick of this analogy. I use it all the time. I go to a bathroom in a gas station and come out saying, “It’s like Vietnam in there.” I don’t think a bunch of spoiled Scottsdale boys running around with their shirts off, drunk, trying to fuck DGs, is an exact mirror image of seeing your three friends killed next to you in the real Vietnam War . . . but I’m going to keep using the analogy.)
The downside of being a pledge was that it sucked a lot of the time. My schoolwork was fading fast, my job was getting pissed at me for coming in drunk and/or super-tired, and the comedy nights were tough because I had classes at night, too, so I had to squeeze gigs in between. I pretty much felt like shit for five months straight. I didn’t live in the frat house, so it was even worse for me because the older brothers would get drunk and call us in the middle of the night to come down for what was known as a “lineup” or “work party.” I don’t like party being after t
he word work, ever. In this context, you’d get a call at 4 A.M. and be told to go fetch river rocks from the dried-up salt riverbed and bring them to the house, or to come and do push-ups until they arrived. It was all such a mind fuck . . . but the biggest mind fuck of all was Oscar. We learned about Oscar our first day as a pledge. Oscar was a pig, and he was the SAE mascot. We were informed that the worst pledge of the semester would be fucking Oscar the night we became active. Yes. You read that right, folks! Fucking a pig! This was something I was positive had not come up during rush week.
To get assigned the Oscar fucking duty, which felt like a fate that could befall any of us, at any time, you had to be the worst pledge. That felt like a pretty easy task, based on the feedback we had received so far. At two in the morning, with beer being poured over my head, I would be screamed at for what felt like hours. “FUNK #1, you are such a worthless piece of shit! You know you’re going to get Oscar! You homo! You want to bone a guy, pig! You want Oscar! You dream about Oscar!”
And I would sputter out through a mouthful of Coors Light, “Yes, sir, sir active, sir.”
“What? So you want to fuck Oscar, Spade?”
I’d mumble in my drunken stupor, “No, wait, I didn’t understand . . .”
“Funk #1 wants to bone Oscar!!!”
And then all the actives would make pig noises. “Oink, oink, oink.” On and on it went. It’s sort of comical now, twenty years later. But when you’re on the front lines of Nam and you’re really in the (pig) shit, and you’ve got paprika on your head and baby oil all over your body and a spray-painted button on your chest that requires you to quote a certain line every time an active pushes it, all of this seems normal. My particular quote was “Lordy, I’m so tired, how long can this go on?” To answer my own question, it went on for the full semester.