One time whilst I tried to make the love with her on Paula’s couch, she became bored and said, “Just rape me.”
“Whu???”
“Rape me!”
Spindly as she was, I couldn’t even pin her arms. She’d just throw me off of her and onto the floor. I’m the worst fuck alive.
She blew me off a few times on plans we’d made and started to become more distant. I became stalkery but in inventive and entertaining ways. She had a day job as a secretary for some classified ad circular. I got a job there telemarketing for a day, just to see the look on her face when I punched in for work. I put on a big fawning display of bullshit in the interview and the boss couldn’t have been more impressed. Krystal hadn’t seen me come in but was at her desk when I walked out with her boss—perfectly timed—telling me: “Well, we look forward to seeing you first thing Monday morning.” I put on an over-the-top, cheese-dick smile, looked right at her and said, “Oh, believe me, I’m looking forward to working here, too!” She tilted her head back, rocked it sideways and yawn-laughed in defeat. It was funny until I had to do telemarketing for a few hours that Monday. As soon as Krystal went to lunch and the joke had run its course, I went permanently AWOL.
It was clever but eventually that type of nonsense wore thin. Krystal told me she had another boyfriend and that I should, in so many words, fuck off. I was devastated.
I had gigs coming up out of town and got myself together to get back to life on the road. The night I was set to leave, I took out the trash at Paula’s apartment complex and noticed an enormous box next to the Dumpster filled four feet deep with brand new stuffed animals. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would throw them away. So I got the bright idea and headed off to the club where Krystal was working. I found her car, a tiny old Honda Civic, unlocked, and as my parting romantic gesture, I filled it to the walls with stuffed animals, covering every inch but the driver’s seat. I called her drunk late the next night after a gig in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. She seemed mildly amused at the stuffed animal gag, only because I had left town more than likely. But the conversation wound up in one of those sad, slurring “I loved you and you didn’t care” diatribes where you could hear her eyes roll. She called me a psycho and told me not to call again. I’m sure I did a few more times till she took the phone off the hook. I woke up with that familiar stink of shame and left it to actual road miles to distance me from the embarrassment.
About a year later I made contact with Krystal and we went out for lunch.
“Remember how ridiculous I used to be back when I was young last year? Ha-ha, those were crazy times.”
Eventually conversation turned to that night with the stuffed animals. After several minutes of “Oh my Gods” and light histrionics, it finally came out that she had driven around for weeks with the stuffed animals in her car only to have her and her boyfriend wind up catching a vicious case of scabies from them. Scabies are much like pubic lice that crawl down into your hair follicles where they party and lay eggs. She said they were everywhere—heads, eyebrows, everywhere. She said the boyfriend still had scars in his genital region from scratching so much. She’d thought I’d done it on purpose. I wished I had. I just couldn’t understand why anyone would chuck out perfectly good stuffed animals like that.
She used to come out to shows now and again after that when our paths crossed and we always had fun. She had the greatest laugh and she somehow always made me a thousand times funnier.
I haven’t heard from her for several years and finding out she married another guy in the Alps on Facebook, I’m not sure that we’re ever gonna take our friendship to the “next level.”
Love and obsession are the same emotion, only love requires the obsession of both parties to lay claim to the title. Being obsessed with someone who is obsessed with you, fleeting as it may be, is quite possibly the best feeling in the world. Being in love with someone all by yourself and unreciprocated just ends up making you feel like a chump.
Still, I may fly to Switzerland and apply for a job at her coffee shop. It’s only funny if you actually do it.
The first time I worked at the Improv in Tempe, Arizona, was December of 1995 so the Santa hat I’d taken to wearing year round didn’t look as ridiculous as it had in July. The staff were cool and let me in a football pool of some kind. A cute waitress was grandstanding and gloating about having won the pool the week before so, under the pretense of “chicks don’t know dick about football,” I made her a side bet of something deviant in nature, which she laughingly but not seriously agreed to.
This wasn’t too long after I’d had similar success with Bobbie. If you are new to my work and don’t know that story, I’ll gloss over it quickly. Bobbie was a girl I’d met after a gig in Minneapolis and ended up going to a Twins-Red Sox baseball game with, each of our home teams. After some shit-talking when my team was being crucified, I made her a bet that would require that she put out if she lost. And she lost and she put out. That is the quick and unfunny version. The full story, however, to this day remains my most downloaded track on iTunes. Go have a listen.
I kept that “talk shit and then bet her” move up my sleeve from then on, as though it was the move itself that worked rather than an idiot’s luck.
This time I just lobbed the wager out there like it was a joke, as it was in the presence of other staff, one of whom I was to find out later was her boyfriend. She didn’t tell me about the boyfriend at the time of the bet because they were keeping their relationship a secret. Evidently that club had a “no fraternization” rule that applied to interoffice love as well as with the talent. The waiter wasn’t really taken aback by the bet, as it was all done in a jokey-flirty manner and, you know, I’m a comedian. Of course I’m kidding.
The drink policy for comics at the Tempe Improv was that you were assigned a member of the waitstaff each night and you would order through that person rather than going to the bar yourself. That night this same guy had been assigned as my waiter and when I tried to tip him a buck for a beer, he’d politely refused my gratuity. Yeah, it was only a buck but I wasn’t rich and with as much as I drink, a buck a beer will add up. But he wouldn’t take my money so I knew he wasn’t pissed off about the hitting on his girl thing. Just a joke, see? But I still thought I might be able to fuck her.
After the last show of the week, a Sunday, the three of us met up with some other staff to go to a disco night at some dance club and started in on the Goldschläger pretty heavy. At one point in the evening the boyfriend was out dancing while the girl and I were talking about road trysts. She asked me, hypothetically, that if she were to sleep with me, if I’d respect her in the morning. She actually used that 1950s cliché. And I’m sure that it may have been strictly hypothetical but at the time, in my saturated head, it meant she was going to blow off her boyfriend and fuck me. We stumbled out at last call and they drove me back to the comedy condo, the boyfriend driving her car with me in the back trying to focus, somehow thinking I could still pull this off.
They dropped me in the parking lot and I said goodbye and thanks to the boy and then leaned through the passenger window and gave the girl a big sloppy kiss good night, smiled and weaved my way inside. I stood in the condo laughing for a few minutes listening for the car to drive away, part of me actually thinking she might leave him with her car and come inside. I could still hear the car running after a while so I walked back out to see what was going on. The boyfriend was standing outside of the car, yelling through the open window to his lady: “… no, he owes you an apology!”
I went over and said that if anything, I owed him an apology but I’m sure I said it in a way that insinuated that I didn’t owe her an apology at all since she wanted to fuck me.
This seemed to rile him up even more, who’da guessed, and after a long exchange of words he grabbed me by the throat and slammed me into a car. The girl dragged him off of me (probably leading me to believe she wanted to protect me, her secret love) and tried to cool him down.
I went back over, full of adrenaline and beer-bravado and after another few heated words, head-butted him in the mouth. This was another poor choice in a long night of them but the ensuing scuffle was brief and again, she pulled him away, sat him on the curb and tried to calm him down while, perhaps, devising a plan to give him the slip and come fuck me.
Now, as he sat enraged on the sidewalk, I had a hilarious idea to diffuse the situation. I walked over and said, “So hey. I guess you want that dollar now.” This set him off completely.
He sprang from the curb breathing fire and chased me as I ran airplane style around parked cars, adding in a few Three Stooges Curlyesque “Woo-woo-woos” before quickly running out of gas and falling down in the parking lot, where he promptly began delivering a well-deserved ass-beating.
I’ve always had a problem with nervous laughter, one that’s gotten me hit by any number of girlfriends in the heat of an argument. The more you yell at me, the harder I laugh. I can’t help it. I wished I could at this point because, as the waiter sat on top of me punching me in the back of my head, I continued to laugh. Which only seemed to goad him into hitting me harder, which made me laugh more, etc. And he was really beating the fuck out of me.
Finally somebody came along and tried to get him off of me, to which he replied, “He tried to beat up that girl!” It was akin to me tapping out in MMA and having my opponent tell the ref that I was still good to fight.
The passerby chimed in with: “Oh, you like to beat up chicks, huh?”
I managed to squeak out: “No I didn’t, go ask her!” The passerby asked the girl and she of course denied that I’d tried to beat her up. The pummeling stopped just as the police showed up. They separated us and sent us on our way, him with the girl (who after seeing how much punishment I could take, most certainly wanted to fuck me) and me with a broken nose, chipped tooth, various contusions and a commitment never to drink Goldschläger again. Brand-shaming.
The next day I talked with the manager of the club after he’d spoken with the other two and I found out that the only punch I’d landed in the fight aside from the head-butt was a nice closed-eyed roundhouse that struck right at the point when the girl was leaning in to break us up. It had landed on her head, not his.
I’ve never been anything near a fighter and probably wouldn’t have done any better sober, aside from not getting myself into that position in the first place. The manager asked if I wanted to take any action against the waiter and I told him no, that it was certainly a beating I was asking for. In fact, when I look back over the years, I’m surprised that I didn’t get my ass kicked a lot more often. One heavy-handed trouncing in all these years of being an asshole is pretty good odds and I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
The beauty of the story was that when I returned to LA with two black eyes, everybody asked me if I’d gotten a nose job. In a way, I had. When I’d tell them the truth, that I’d been a drunken dick and somebody stoved my head in, they felt sorry for me. Sorry that I was too embarrassed to admit that I’d gotten a nose job. It was like being a girl in a town full of wife beaters, trying to convince everybody that I really just fell.
COMEDY STILL ISN’T PRETTY
If you follow your dream of fame all the way to Hollywood like Becker and I did, you may find out that you are too ugly for television. This is far more likely to happen if you are overwhelmingly considered unattractive by most people. Statistically.
It is widely reported that the media is responsible for what men find attractive in a woman. I’ve always contended that my dick tells me what I find attractive in a woman and that I’ve never woken up to find my dick reading a Cosmopolitan. We are also repeatedly told that women are more attracted to a man’s personality than his physical attributes. So where a lady might find herself too fat, I should find myself too uninteresting.
More than that, we have always been told that there is someone for everyone. I’ve met too many people who have never found anyone much less the right one and they are far too old to have hope. Maybe we should stop listening to what people tell us we are supposed to believe.
Becker and I—with new confidence since my “nose job”—went to an audition for a rebirth of the game show The Dating Game. If you are too young to remember, it’s a game show about dating. Figure it out.
This was a big show in the seventies and now in the nineties they were trying to bring back an updated version. Updated usually means “less funny.” We tried to make it more funny.
The cattle-call audition had roughly twenty to thirty people in a large room that started with all of us filling out a questionnaire about ourselves. It was very tense. Becker and I being the only comedians felt undue pressure. You know, because ladies like personality. We were lacking the Hollywood looks. And there was only one girl who you would need to bank on personality over looks. She was a Sasquatch she-monster, six foot at least if she could ever straighten her spine.
Then they called people up one at a time to answer questions from the producers like when you had to speak in front of your middle-school class. Becker baited the waters of the questionnaire with a joke I’d heard him riff before.
In the “Previous Accomplishments” part of the questionnaire, he’d written that he was the winner of the “Hydrocephalic Comedy Competition.”
That was the bait.
The producers bit on it like starved carp.
“It says here that you won the… Hydrocephalic Comedy Competition???”
With perfect beat and false humility, Becker says, “Yeah. But I’m trying not to get a big head about it.”
I was the only one who laughed. Again. Hard laughing. Banging the table laughing like I might choke up puke. It was the same odds as Becker pulling up a trophy marlin on one cast of a night crawler on a bobber. I apologize for the comedy-meets-gambling-meets-fishing references. But that’s how it was.
The questionnaire part was only the first round of many. Only Becker, the Bigfoot lady and me were politely excused after the initial questionnaire round. Sometimes you find out that you are ugly, uninteresting, unfunny and unwanted all in the first cut of one game show audition. Or so they tell you without actually saying it.
YOU ARE NEVER TOO UGLY FOR GAY PHONE SEX
The reason I got a job doing gay phone sex was not that I needed a supplemental income, not a job I had to take when I was struggling to make ends meet. Not even for the free, hot, gay phone sex. I took this job to make a point and also because it sounded like it would be hilarious.
The problem started with the fact that I lived in LA and my apartment soon turned into a youth hostel of friends migrating there to take their own blind haymaker at fame. And none of them would find a job to support themselves while they made a campsite of my couch. My friend Big Fat Ron Putnam stayed for three or four months and he wasn’t even trying to get into show business, much less find work. He had no reason to be there. Towards the end of my rope I was giving him shit one day for not seeking employment. He responded in all seriousness and without taking his eyes off the television that he’d called about a job as a bounty hunter and was still waiting to hear back. He must have been answering ads out of Soldier of Fortune magazine.
It got to a point where I’d be looking for jobs for my friends. Usually while they napped on the couch. The one job I always saw in the classifieds was for gay phone sex. It’s the job I would have taken if I needed a job. It paid enough, was nearby and required no skills other than the ability to bullshit and the sense of humor to actually do it. My friends had the “no skills” in spades and they could have used their experience in squatting on my couch for free as a reference for “ability to bullshit.”
None of my friends ever bit. I thought they were assholes and I thought they were crazy for missing out on what good material it would make. At some point during a bout of exasperation I said, “Fuck it. I’ll do it.” Just for the story as much as making the point. I went down and applied for the job and, of course, got it. There wasn’t a
heavy vetting process, no calling previous employers nor did they ask where I saw myself in ten years. They were going to start me on graveyard shift, which worked out perfectly as I knew I’d be liquored up by then. I also had a bag of mushrooms I’d kept in the freezer for the last few months waiting for a special occasion, and this was it. I went to the Coach and Horses, had a few drinks and choked down the mushrooms before Big Fat Ralphie May drove me down to the job. I was certainly too drunk to drive myself.
The first night was a complete anticlimax (scuuze da pun) where they had me stuck on some monitored trainee line where I only got about six calls in six hours, mostly hang ups, and the mushrooms never quite kicked in.
Not the good story I was looking for, although I did gain a sincere respect for people who work for a living when I got yelled at for taking thirteen minutes on a ten-minute smoke break. Evidently there are people out there who want their cocks mock-sucked now, not later! This kind of shit for six bucks an hour. Six bucks an hour was just the base pay. You made your money by keeping them on the line. Even the name of the company was something to the effect of “Premium Hold-Time.” Subtle.
The other thing that was surprising to me was that I was not allowed to talk about graphic sex on a 900 line. I don’t know if 900 numbers even exist anymore but back then in the late nineties, if you wanted hard-core phone sex you had to have a credit card and call in on an 800 number, the theory being that it will keep minors from getting through. The suckers who called 900 lines can say anything they want, but the operator is supposed to steer them away from sex talk while keeping them on the line as long as possible. Ask them questions like “What do you look like?” and “What are you wearing?” As though you’re about to start talking nasty but you never do. A complete fucking scam. No jacking off without proper credit. What a country!
This Is Not Fame Page 4