She was completely unfazed. “Oh, don’t you worry about it!”
Becker and I snuck a sigh of relief as she turned her back. We took that to mean that she understood why we couldn’t perform and that we were off the hook. But then she returned to the backyard, yelling for everyone to gather around, that the comedy was about to resume! Becker and I shit each other’s pants through mere eye contact. We thought she understood that our material was too rough for the kids. She was saying that she didn’t care.
What happened next was one of those beautiful and all too rare moments between close friends where Becker and I didn’t have to say a word. We were staring hard and open mouthed at each other having a telepathic emergency meeting, when the comic who’d brought us to this gig wandered towards us. Without any audible discussion, we pulled the kid by his shirt through the front door, yelled, “GO!” and started running. We ran like heap-footed fat convicts past the side of the house where the voices dulled from frivolity to confusion as they heard the trampling going down the slope, skidding in the loose gravel, our wheezing and giggling as we sprinted for our lives. Fight or flight in the absence of communication skills, only making the half scream, half laugh of girls on a roller coaster as we fled. I threw the key into the ignition before I even shut the door. As I jammed the Oldsmobile into drive and spit unnecessary amounts of rocks and dust into the air, I could see our hostess at the top of the hill standing with her arms wide, palms out, incredulous as to what had caused such a panic. She probably thought we’d stolen jewelry from her bedroom. She will never know that serious a fear. She will never know the need to run or the ability to trust your instincts in those situations, even if they would be deemed unprofessional or impolite.
So my advice to those who ask is to do all the stage time you want to do. Personally, with shit gigs for no money being involved I’d balance the story value against the pain threshold. A Klan rally or a swingers’ orgy have to be worth the risk just for the story. The company Christmas party for Dell computers will simply deaden you more and nobody will want to hear about it.
Private parties are for crashing, not performing.
PARTY CRASHING
Sometime after I’d just moved to Los Angeles, my neighbor told me she’d found out from an industry friend that Bill Maher—then the host of Comedy Central’s Politically Incorrect—was having his annual Fourth of July party and had gotten an address should we want to crash it. I wasn’t even that well known in comedy circles at that point. But I lived next to people who knew people who worked for people who represented some famous people and in LA—it’s all about who you know.
We’d crashed a few parties at that point. One was at some producer’s house where I stood next to Oliver Stone while he smoked a joint that I would have shared with him even though I don’t smoke pot. But he didn’t offer. I later went into a bedroom looking for a bathroom and walked in on Ellen Barkin and Howard Stern, who I hadn’t yet met at that point. Unfortunately there was nothing going on. They were just grabbing their jackets to leave. If they had been fucking I might have blackmailed them. Or some other harebrained scheme. In reality, I just stood around and apologized to nobody listening. Aside from some names to drop when I got home, it was pretty much like any other party back then. Stand around and nobody talks to you and if they do, you have nothing to say in return.
Around the same time one of our friends had found a flyer for a bondage-themed house party that was just a few blocks away from my apartment. We were already drunk at home when he brought it to our attention. I broke into a sprint trying to figure out what kind of slapdash, poor-kid-on-Halloween S&M outfits we could put together. I was breaking my arm patting myself on the back when I came up with my idea. Simple duct tape. I didn’t pause to think it through. By the time I’d covered myself from midthigh to near my belly button, someone else spotted the flaw in the theory.
“What happens when you have to piss?”
I paused waiting for the solution to appear like a lightbulb over my head. After those few fruitless seconds, I found none and proceeded to the bathtub and to the agonizing process of ripping duct tape off of body hair.
Crashing Bill Maher’s party required no special dress code and although I didn’t know him, I knew he was a comedian. I figured there’d probably be other comedians in attendance and if I knew another comedian there and I got busted crashing, maybe they’d vouch for me. Also, my manager had already been talking to Maher’s people about getting me on his show. So I had that. I was really overthinking it. I couldn’t have known it at the time. When you live and work in the industry, especially in television, you meet so many people that it would be impossible to remember them all, even the ones you should. Bill Maher probably couldn’t remember half the people he’d actually invited much less know who they were bringing as a guest or the ones like me who just came on a hot tip.
We walked into the party like we were walking onto a yacht. It was obvious that nobody was checking IDs against a guest list. No muss no fuss, no need for a fake mustache. In fact it was just the opposite. Nobody looked or cared. I made myself well acquainted with the bar and looked for familiar faces. The only person I remember seeing who even talked to me was Jeff Cesario, a comedian I didn’t know personally but was and is well respected, and I’ll always remember him for being friendly to me that night. Bill Maher hadn’t even shown his face before I was well torqued up on his liquor. Everyone else was seeming to pace themselves, sipping their wine and aw-shucksing at the offer of a second glass. I didn’t care for it. I bided my time waiting for comedians to take over the pace of the party. They never showed. So in a burst of genius, I shed all of my clothes, ran through the party and jumped into the pool.
These things have to happen sometimes. A lot of stagnant parties need one guy to set the bar by being the first to look like an idiot. Especially at an LA party where the talent doesn’t want to fuck up in front of the agents and the agents don’t want to fuck up in front of the execs. And everybody is afraid of the people they don’t know because they could be anybody. Then some asshole who is too drunk too early comes screaming through the evening air butt-naked and belly-flops in an otherwise empty and placid pool.
You see, what happens is that everyone can now relax and step it up a notch. Trade in the wine for that bourbon. Take off your jacket and spread out a bit. Tell a bawdy joke or salty anecdote. At least you won’t be the naked idiot splashing around and trying to drink beer underwater. You’ve rewritten the code of conduct to where they can get far more loose while still remaining in the middle.
I’d expected immediate results. I was imagining throngs of people following suit like I was the Pied Piper but I was still ignored. Yet as new people started to arrive, a few people started to filter into the pool, keeping a wide distance from me with my dink and berries floating free. But coming in nonetheless. One girl swam towards me. She evidently didn’t know anyone there either. I imagine Bill invited any random hot chick he ran across or could yell out a car window at. She was—get this—a Swedish flight attendant. And no, I didn’t steal that from Fonzie from an episode of Happy Days. He would have had Swedish flight attendant twins.
Soon after, Bill Maher made his grand entrance from upstairs, coming down in a ridiculous Apollo Creed–as–Uncle Sam costume, cocktail swinging in his hand, bringing the level up to ten. He went through the throngs of guests like a regular Hugh Hefner and after not too long he saw people in the pool and jumped in with a thousand lemmings right on his heels.
The pool was quickly mobbed and except for occasional forays to the bar for more drink, I stayed floating in a corner with the Swede. As the party started to wind down and people left the pool, she and I followed. Only we had no towels and by late night it was fucking cold. Yes, it can get really cold even in LA in July, especially when you’re wet and naked. So I beelined her into a bathroom with a shower and turned it on as hot as was possible. There was no fucking going on, just teeth-chattering survival. After
several minutes, Bill Maher came barging in, saw us and screamed, “Hey! No shower scenes in my house!” before slamming the door. He’d probably done inventory of the available hot chicks who were left and was then unpleased that I might have pilfered one.
I sheepishly walked out, grabbed my clothes and tried to sneak out, only passing him briefly where he shook his head in contempt and made some kind of “Not cool” utterance.
The next day, my manager at the time caught wind of my high jinks and castigated me for cock-blocking her efforts to get me on his show and suggested I send a letter of apology. I’m not big on apologies but I did send a letter with a key to my place inside saying, “Dear Bill. Thanks for the party. Enclosed is a key to my apartment located at 12—Avenue #9 Los Angeles, CA 90046. Feel free to stop by anytime, run around naked, drink all my beer and fuck up my stuff.”
I still haven’t heard back so many decades later but I did keep the “jump in pool drunk ’n’ naked” thing hip-pocketed for other similarly awkward events. I think my comedian friend K. P. Anderson and his new bride were a little pissed off at me for a brief while when I did it to break up the monotony of their backyard wedding, but a lot of their friends and family seemed amused.
The last naked pool-dive I remember was in The Man Show days at legendary producer Robert Evans’s grotesque mansion where he was hosting a premiere party for Comedy Central’s new-season shows. I guess he had some cartoon coming out on the network. I was with Andy Andrist and after Andy was loudly berated by the fully deranged Gary Busey for cutting the buffet line, we determined it best to just get shit-housed and find cocaine. Robert Evans was legendary for his admitted cocaine use back in the seventies and eighties. The problem was getting to him. He was seeing people by appointment only in the main room of one of his houses but only after some network geek came to find you and tell you it’s your turn to see him.
Our turn came and we were led in by our Comedy Central liaison. Robert stood in the foyer flanked by assistants and flunkies, a wax figure in the receiving line at a stranger’s wedding. Andy and I were introduced.
“Well hello, gentlemen. Welcome. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Yeah, thanks for having us, Bob, but let’s cut through the bullshit—where can we get some blow?”
“Ooh heh-heh-heh. Heh, I don’t mess around with that stuff anymore. But I’m really looking forward to a successful new season on Comedy Central for all of us!”
“Yeah, yeah, Bob. But seriously. Where’s the blow?”
He kept a vacant old-man smile and muttered something about how since his previous cocaine issues he couldn’t even get a speeding ticket. And with that, the mortified Comedy Central lady shuffled us off into some more-private party in the back. I found drinks and Andy found Craig Kilborn with a harem of ladies in a hot tub.
“Hey, Kilborn, got any blow?” says Andy.
Without getting an answer he followed up with: “C’mon Kilborn. You gotta have blow. These ladies ain’t with you cuz you’re funny.”
One of the gals took great exception to this and protested in a way that made us all the more certain that they must have had blow. We didn’t keep pushing.
We went back to the front of the main house where we ran into Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Gold mine, you’d think. But Slash said he was on the straight and narrow. He’d even quit smoking, which sucked because I was out of cigarettes. Andy asked Slash where one might find cocaine at that party and Slash told him: “I dunno. Try the bathroom.”
“Sure,” says Andy. “Maybe that works for you.”
As we were about to have our limo summoned, I noticed a pool up near where the valets come around. It wasn’t technically a pool. It was a fountain. A giant fountain the size of a pool. I dared Andy to jump in naked. He was only a writer on the show; how much trouble could he get in? He said he’d meet me halfway by jumping in with his underwear, which was meeting me none of the way for the dare of jumping in naked. So I had to strip to actual naked and jump in too—so as to not come off as lightweights. As our limo was coming—to the delight of most everybody there—I got dressed in the driveway while Andy went to the bathroom of a guest house to put on his clothes. I assumed it was his Slash-inspired last check of the bathroom for coke until I saw him awkwardly shuffle back out with an obvious square in his pants and hurry into the limo. He’d stolen Robert Evans’s graduation picture off the bathroom wall.
I used to get invites to Sarah Silverman’s notorious annual shindig, which always surprised me because I didn’t think she even liked me. But the invites came every year long after I’d moved to Arizona—and always when I was on the road so I couldn’t go even if I wanted to fly out to LA for it. A couple years back I finally got the invite on a year when I wasn’t working and I bought a plane ticket immediately. First I went to a party at Drew Carey’s house where someone—or seemingly everyone—offered me Ecstasy. I was reticent at first because I didn’t want to be too lit up and make an asshole of myself with the Silverman crowd. But I succumbed to peer pressure within three drinks and took it anyway. Sarah’s party was delightful and to the best of my recollection, I didn’t say anything off-putting, was well mannered so far as I know and had a wide-eyed, smiling good time. I didn’t steal anything or even think to jump in a pool naked.
And I’ve never been invited back to her party since. Maybe I wasn’t living up to my reputation. Or maybe she’d forgotten that she didn’t really like me.
FUCKING THE WAITSTAFF
I don’t know the temperature of the current comedy club landscape but I do know that for a while in my earlier years, most comedy clubs would try to implement a “no fraternization” rule between comedians and waitresses. That means “don’t fuck the waitresses.” The motivation for this rule was never clear. It may have been so that comics didn’t relentlessly hit on uninterested waitresses while they were trying to get their side-work done after a show. It may have been that the club owner was trying to fuck all of his waitresses himself and didn’t want to compete with talent. It may have been that they wanted to use a big word like “fraternization” in a sentence. I’ve done the same with big words in this book.
Clubs would always have a yellowed copy of these type of rules listed on the greenroom wall. I always took that as a list of dares. The list of comics who fucked waitresses regardless would be longer by far. Many of them are still together, some now with families. The rule might as well have included “don’t fall in love.”
I fell in love with a comedy club waitress in the mid-nineties. It didn’t work out. She’s now married to some other guy and they own a coffee shop together in Switzerland. Not that I still stalk her on the Internet like I did in person back then.
People are always quick to justify the aftermath of a bad relationship by simply using standard and somewhat empty words to describe intangible emotions. “I thought I was in love but it turned out I was just obsessed,” they’ll say, as though they’d just gotten the results of lab work done to pinpoint it. It’s a common cover story for the relationship that ended when she had to change her phone number to get away from you.
I’ll call this girl Krystal. She was one of those girls, one of those circumstances that I couldn’t be held responsible for. I was a victim of her beauty and her mystery, as mysterious as any girl could be at twenty-one years old. Mysterious and mischievous, the kind of girl who’d talk you into having sex in public only to walk away just in time for you to get caught all alone with your pants at your ankles, and then giggle while you were hauled off to jail.
I met her during a two-week stint at a comedy club in Minneapolis in the summer of 1994, after having lived on the road for a little over a year and a half. She was one of two out-of-my-league women who decided in the same week to show interest in me, leading me to buy my own press and suddenly dismiss a lifetime of being ignored by hot chicks as a fluke, a mere oversight on their part. I left town feeling like a pimp on navy payday and imagined both of these ladies crying into a
pillow at my absence. I never considered the possibility that they may have only shown interest in me because I was leaving town. It didn’t occur to me then, nor did it occur to me several weeks later when, on seeing an empty couple months on my calendar, I decided to return to my waiting angels.
My cockiness quickly ruined things with the other girl within a very short time of my arrival but it didn’t matter, as I was sure Krystal was the one I really wanted. For one reason, she was the one I hadn’t had sex with yet, and two… Well, there was no reason two. Reason one was plenty. And I was so sure she wanted me that I honestly hadn’t detected her obvious sarcasm when she’d said on the phone before my arrival: “Sure. You can stay with me. My mother will love it.” Now I was scrambling for a place to stay.
I wound up doing couch time at my friend Paula’s house and spent my days corrupting her thirteen-year-old son Jonathan. My car had shit the bed a hundred miles outside of town so I showed up broke, homeless and without a ride or a place to be. I was no longer the life of the party. Krystal would take me out and get crazy on occasion at best. One minute she was giving me a noncommittal and unsolicited hand job while we sat in her car and the next minute she’d go out of town for days with friends that she didn’t want to talk about. She’d fuck me and a week later deny to me that she ever had, straight-faced save for a devious sparkle in her eye. It drove me mad.
This Is Not Fame Page 3