“I’m not gay.”
Silence.
“Umm . . . okay.”
“Yeah, I’m not gay, so this is a problem.”
“But I got you from a gay escort service?”
“Yeah.”
“And I told you about the bit, so I assumed . . .”
“Well, yeah, but now that I’m here”—he pointed at Luan—“I’m not comfortable with this. I’ll dance with him, but I’m not doing stuff with him.”
I was a little stumped, and the show was in like ten minutes, and slightly panicked, because without the live gay sex part, it wasn’t much of a bit. And it didn’t seem like a sustainable plan to completely refuse the job you’re hired to do, but how do I negotiate with him considering the nature of it? It was a real crocodile’s dilemma, or, in this case, what is referred to now as the gay escort paradox. How is a gay escort not gay if he is a gay escort? I asked Luan if he could call anybody he knew, and he scolded me. “I told you, you should have gone through the agency.”
“Maybe for two hundred extra I would do it,” Frank chimed in.
So Frank, who I had grown to trust over the course of these few days, finally showed his true colors. I knew it was too late to stop now.
“One hundred dollars,” I countered.
“Deal.”
The bit went off and was a real litmus test to the idea that people do not like to be surprised with live sex acts. Many people walked out, and as for Frank not being gay, it was never established, although him performing oral sex in front of fifty people certainly looked gay. Maybe I was being scammed all along. I did notice they glanced at each other during our pre-meeting in a way that made me think they knew each other before and had schemed the classic “I’m not gay” gay escort con. On the financial side, however, the bit ended up costing $500 and I made $10 back, so this speaks directly to my financial prowess. Always in the red.
So you can imagine the motorcycle purchase on eBay didn’t go smoothly, either. After I won the bid, I read down the page for the details others might have noticed first: that the bike would have to be shipped to me, and that this would cost $400, because it was coming from Iowa. Iowa is in the Midwest and a great distance from New York.
* * *
—
I like to involve my sister, Jodi, in most of my “deals,” so I decided to have it shipped to her house, outside of New Haven. A few weeks passed, and I arrived in Connecticut to welcome my dirt bike from Iowa. An eighteen-wheeler pulled into my sister’s driveway. This was semi-exciting (pun). Then the driver got out and unloaded a pallet with not one but two dirt bikes. I tried to figure out how someone could accidentally send someone an extra motorcycle, but the driver of the truck didn’t want to discuss it. Later, the owner would email to explain that he decided to throw in an extra, nonworking bike for parts to fix the working one. It was a fixer-upper’s dream.
Unfortunately, I can’t fix anything. Also, I know nothing about motorcycles. Also, neither bike worked.
With the reluctant help of my sister, I found a local handyman to see if he could get either of them running. He couldn’t, but he said that for a small sum, he could truck one of the bikes to a New Haven dealership for repair. Now, two months after my eBay victory, I was in for an additional $400.
Then the dealership called. They had it working—another $150.
I went back to Connecticut to pick it up. I was excited. Soon, I would be on my iron stallion. As I paid, the repair guy informed me that I couldn’t ride the bike because it was not “street ready.” It needed signal lights, headlights, etc., which would cost in the range of $300 more to install. I didn’t want to spend any more money on it, so I called the handyman, and for some more money, he trucked the bike back to my sister’s. I was now hovering around the $1,800 mark, and I had yet to ride my vintage eBay dirt bike.
Not long after, I went to my sister’s for Passover. I decided I didn’t care if the bike was street ready. It was a motorcycle. It was Passover. It was time to put the rubber to the road. I started it up and put it in gear and rode to the gas station to fill the tank. For all my money spent, here was the reward. That unparalleled feeling of man and machine, entwined in singular purpose. I gassed it up, got back in the saddle, and pulled out of the station, directly in front of a police car. I pretended not to see it, feigning confidence. But the cruiser abruptly made a U-turn and hit his lights. I rode, dejected, the one hundred yards or so to my sister’s driveway. The cop wrote up the $200 ticket as my family and girlfriend all glared at me from the window.
That was the last time I rode my vintage dirt bike that I won on eBay and waited three months for. Total rubber-to-the-road time: forty-five seconds. The only positive thing to come of it was that I made the crime blotter in my sister’s small-town paper for driving an unregistered motorcycle without a license, with an additional charge of riding without the proper signals. In a town like my sister’s, that makes me infamous. I’m sure families are still gathered around their tables retelling the story about the mysterious stranger on the dirt bike. In the end, I guess I will think twice before bidding on eBay again, although I am interested in buying a submarine.
CHAPTER 19
Midnight Pajama Jam (or How I Failed at Launching a Kids’ Show)
Not everything in my career has been successful. But sometimes failed endeavors hold the best memories. In comedy, as with everything, there is so much out there, unheeded, left aside, millions of moments just drawn and forgotten. Every piece of comedy, a stand-up set, a homemade sketch, a cartoon drawing, or a notebook of ideas—all that which lives on some abandoned corner of the internet or in some cardboard box, it will probably never be seen. It’s what makes it special. It’s a piece of personal history.
Back in the early 2000s, I was in a bit of a rut. I had just had a kid (the shit eater), and I was essentially out of work, except for a few acting roles here and there. At this point, with Amy’s help, I came up with a concept for a TV show: a late-night talk show for kids called Midnight Pajama Jam. The goal would be to air the show around eight thirty or nine, around the time young kids go to bed, and make it like their version of The Tonight Show, except with absurdist guests.
An artist friend made two puppets, a purple octopus and an eagle, and I tapped comedian Jon Glaser to play the sidekicks—except instead of any puppeteering, he would just hold the two puppets up on his fingers and do the voices for both, unconcealed to the audience. The eagle, named Lumpy, had a gravelly tough voice and said “Raaaaaaaahr” a lot, and on the index finger of the other hand was the octopus named Scott Fellers, who had an effete accent, like Gore Vidal if he were an interior decorator.
The dynamic was that Lumpy and Scott Fellers disliked each other very much and would openly bicker all the time. As far as guests, we would come up with characters, a mix of random oddballs who would do traditional interview segments, but improvised based on an outline of some particular comedy conceit. It was a bit Pee-wee’s Playhouse–ish, in that it completely ripped off Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
We first set out to do a live test of the show in a small theater in Midtown in the afternoon to cater to an audience of mostly kids. We had a house band and three guests. One of the guests was a character called Pit Stain. He was a fictional “neighbor” who would drop by the show uninvited and tell mundane stories, with his hands always raised behind the back of his head, exposing the namesake pit stains. Next was a segment called “Vanity Plate,” in which two guests who ostensibly had the same vanity plates on their respective cars come on. The plates read HOT-STF; the man had it because he thought he was attractive, and the woman had it because she owned a bakery.
Everything in the show went fairly smooth until we presented a guest called Wyatt Trash, which was a bit where the actor Matt Walsh, dressed in overalls, sang a song with a Southern twang, with lyrics that went as follows . . .
I’m Wyatt
Trash, I’ll kick your ass
I fucked your best friend’s wife
Eat a can of beans, drive to New Orleans,
Now I’ll try and suck my own dick.
Then, he dove on the floor, and, awkwardly and with great effort, tried to contort his body to give himself oral sex. I don’t know how we felt that this was okay, but it was, in retrospect, a glaring oversight, bordering on child abuse.
The upside was that most or all of the kids were too young to decipher what was happening and just laughed hard at a man writhing wildly on a floor without context. The problem was that the parents were not children and understood very clearly the context. So it was a bit of a moral conundrum. In hindsight, it was a show that adults and kids could enjoy together, as long as the kids didn’t understand auto-fellatio.
* * *
—
As we developed the show, we phased out the kid angle and adapted it to be more strictly for adults but kept the puppets and the loose, wacky concept. This involved losing the full band and replacing it with my friend Gary behind a keyboard in a C-3PO mask, who’d mimic playing John Williams’s theme from Star Wars as the CD was played over the sound system. We would still bring out fake guests with different comedy concepts and kept the improvisational nature of the show.
The odd thing about a failed venture is that, while you’re working on it, you have no idea it’s failing. I think we all thought at the time that we were on the cusp of something. At the onset, the show was exciting to do, despite audiences that topped off at about ten. When there are more people in the cast than in the audience, it makes for an odd dynamic.
We initially performed the show at midnight at the original UCB Theatre in New York City. The first show there had about eight people in the audience, and our guest musical act was the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who were a real family musical group (mother, father, and daughter) who wrote songs based on slides they found at estate sales, which they projected behind them when they sang. The daughter, who played drums, was around eight.
Gary, our C-3PO-masked bandleader, had taken acid that first night and got it in his head that the mother and the father were holding the daughter captive and making her play drums against her will, so during their performance, he tried to stop them by sticking his head through the curtain and trying to get the daughter’s attention so he could free her from playing. Fortunately, he never ran out and grabbed her. I guess even on acid, he was respectful of boundaries.
When we started to do the show weekly, we performed it at the UCB Theatre in Chelsea, right around the time it moved there from its original location. That theater had about one hundred seats and had taken over the space from a small repertory theater. The most interesting shows were the ones where the audience (for our show) was split between a smattering of friends and then a few older couples who thought they’d be seeing a show staged by the previous repertory theater and never checked that the theater had changed to an improv comedy venue. I’m not certain which I enjoyed more: the disdain from children’s parents or the disdain from confused old folks wondering why they were seeing Wyatt Trash and not Hedda Gabler. Although there were parallel Freudian themes.
As we kept doing the show, our audience didn’t exactly swell. It more just smoldered. Typically, with this kind of project, you see some returns for your efforts, as word of mouth would start to spread and audiences would start growing in size. And I’m not saying there wasn’t incremental progress, but on the whole, most shows were not well attended. But this wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory.
Once, when I was in a sketch troupe in Boston called Cross Comedy, we came to New York City to do a run at a small theater in a Midtown black box theater, and the first show’s audience consisted solely of my aunt. Literally, only my very Jewish aunt Marion, sitting at a front-row table basically touching the stage. The rest of the room was empty.
We noticed this only moments before the show because we were all in the green room, and then one of the members of the group went to check out the crowd and returned to say, “You all will want to see this.” When we discovered the empty theater but for the older woman in the front, and I recognized that older woman as my aunt Marion, I begged them to consider canceling, but we were rehearsing for an industry show (to present to television executives) so the rest of the group insisted on doing it.
The comedian Dave Attell was the warm-up act, and he had to go out and do ten minutes of stand-up exclusively for my aunt, who, by the time we started our show, was eating a Reuben sandwich with a glass of red wine at her table.
After the show, she said stolidly, in her very Jewish voice, “I liked the comedian.” So not only did we just perform only for my aunt, but she ended up not even liking it. So yes: I’d had some experience with dismally attended shows.
Sometimes, in comedy or any other endeavor self-promoted and self-sustained, just sticking around is half the battle. So many unbelievably funny people dropped out of doing comedy, simply because it’s a zero-sum game at a certain point. I just happened to be lazy enough to not get out of it. Basically, I hung around long enough.
But Midnight Pajama Jam was wearing out its welcome, so Jon Glaser and I did the natural thing and decided to gather enough money to make a DVD despite strong public disinterest. It was like the Producers scheme except everybody, including us, would lose money. I got donations from friends and family, and we staged a show taped at a small theater called the Marquis in downtown NYC.
The show went well. We had Matt Walsh back as Wyatt Trash. The comedy duo Slovin and Allen came on portraying two fundamentalist pastors who travel the country warning kids of the evils of pornography from the back of a van. Also, Eugene Mirman came on dressed in period costume as a “gayhunter,” in the spirit of Van Helsing, but instead of vampires, he hunted gay people. Also, comedian Sam Seder, who happened to have really huge and muscular calves in real life, held up a curtain, with his back to the audience, and set a spotlight toward the bottom of it and, as music came on, raised the curtain to reveal his oiled-down calves, like some fetish striptease. If nothing else, we finally captured the essence of a show that we had worked on for the better part of three years.
It was a bit of a mess, but it was a creative, ambitious mess. And the taping gave us hope that we could sell the show to television so we could get a bigger audience on board. That would pay back our small investors (my sister, Jodi) and put us in a position to achieve bigger goals. We couldn’t wait to get to editing the footage we had.
In fact, our editor Bill Buckendorf called the next day and told me to come over to his apartment as soon as I could. Apparently, he was as excited as I was to get this show together. Bill did all the videos for Midnight Pajama Jam. He lived in the East Village on St. Mark’s in a six-story walk-up, so I was never excited to go over there to edit, but knowing we had done a good show overshadowed my hatred of climbing six flights of stairs.
I got there and sat down at his desk in his small bedroom, where he edited. He looked a bit sheepish, as if something was wrong. I asked if he was all right. He gestured to the monitor and said that I “should see for myself.” He played down the raw footage of the show’s opening and there was no sound, so I told him to turn it up.
He said, “It is up. There’s no sound.”
“On the whole thing?”
“No, not the whole thing.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“The sound kicks in at the very end.”
“At the very end of all the footage?!”
“Yeah.”
“FUCK!”
“I think the sound guy forgot to press record until the very end of the show.”
After all this, our record of the Midnight Pajama Jam show is basically a silent movie until I come out to say good night to the audience. I suppose it was a poetic climax to a show that maybe was never meant to be, and a testament to the ide
a that some of the best memories are the times leading up to the grandest failures. I’m sure that’s how the guys at Enron felt, but, in our case, all we did along the way was lose money. We were poor but happy. Well, not exactly happy.
Failed Business Ideas
Jon Benjamin’s 911
Instead of calling 911 directly, call me first and let me be the first voice you hear in an emergency situation. I will assess, take notes and listen to every detail, and then immediately pass on your info to the real 911. Despite it taking a little extra time in a potentially time-sensitive crisis, it will be worth your while to be comforted by the molasses-y smooth tones of my rich and soothingly soulful voice.
White Coffee
The most expensive coffee in the world is called Kopi Luwak. It is coffee that has been collected after being eaten and digested, then expelled (as in shit out) by the civet, a wild cat indigenous to Indonesia. It sounds disgusting, but supposedly it adds to the richness and complexity of the taste. It costs around $50 a cup. My concept is based on the Indonesian model, but Americanize it. Take standard beans, have American-born white children eat them, digest them, and shit them out, then process them to make White Coffee. The difference in taste and pride and the even more unusual production process really puts this cup above all the others. Based on the small batch of white children used to make White Coffee, the cost of a cup would be around $250.
Slide-oos
Shoes that slide. Slide-oos are shoes with specifically designed carbon fiber sheets attached under them to make walking less leg intensive. Most of walking involves lifting the legs, but Slide-oos change all that by just adjusting the design. With Slide-oos, you shuffle and slide more and walk less, expending less energy and creating more fun. Sliding is more fun than walking. It’s always been. And Slide-oos are built to slide. How many people out there would rather slide to work every day than walk? I bet a lot. Think back to when you were a kid. One of the best things to do after a big snowstorm was get up early, go out, and slide on the ice. Slide-oos let you do this anytime, anywhere, and in any weather.
Failure Is an Option Page 13