Nobody who played Koot’s came back without talking about—usually loudly complaining about—the band houses. These were three houses across from the club where the bands and comedians would stay. I explain this because I know I need to for some people. A band house is different from a comedy condo in the same way a comedy club greenroom is different from a band’s greenroom at a rock-and-roll club. Bands tend to destroy things, leave cigarettes burning on television sets or carpets, piss in trash cans and draw crude dick pics with Sharpies on the walls. The band houses at Koot’s were the worst of the worst. The furniture all looked like the stuff you see behind a Salvation Army where even the thrift store rejected it. The windows were so filthy you couldn’t see through them more than to tell if it was daylight. I loved it. It was drunk-convenient being so close and it was an endless source of material to ball-bust the club owner during the show. One night, to prove that I wasn’t exaggerating the filth, I brought a bar of soap onstage that had been in the shower. The soap itself was covered in black mold. That’s a whole deeper level of grime when you can grow fungus on an antibacterial product.
I swore that Bill Burr hated me for years for recommending the gig just because of the hideous accommodations. Glenn Wool got bedbugs from a newly installed couch probably salvaged from some Dumpster. When Sean Rouse played there I called ahead and told the bar to kibosh the imminent rounds of shots that would be sent to the stage. Sean has the tolerance of a fainting goat and tends to bite people for fun on his way down. The bar thought that my warning was sarcasm and doubled down. Sean had to be carried off the stage and took a header on the ice outside, tearing half his face off trying to get home. I’m sure the band house still wears his bloodstains as well as those of James Inman’s whiskey vomits. Ralphie May was the only comedian I knew of who weaseled a hotel room out of the notoriously cheap owner, Doran. But that was only because of Ralphie’s weight, well north of the four-hundred-pound mark. They didn’t think the decaying floorboards of the band house could handle the payload and that a hotel would be cheaper than the inevitable legal and medical costs, much less price of a rug to cover the hole.
On what would sound like a plus side, the club provided you with a band car. This was not because they cared about you. This was so they didn’t have to shuttle you to and from morning radio several times a week or pay for a taxi. Doran literally bought most of these cars for less than a round-trip cab fare. “The King of the Fifty-Dollar Car” was a common moniker for Doran and when you’d call him that, he’d be quick to boast of the time he talked a destitute speed freak down from fifty to thirty-five.
Early on in that first run, the radio station KWHL held a forty-eight-hour marathon for Toys for Tots from an RV in a mall parking lot. It was common for people to bring free shit to the station—donuts and whatnot—but now we were soliciting toys and beer. The toys were for those tots. By noontime we were shitfaced and pushing the envelope on the air. On my first night there, Trinka had pointed out a state senator in the bar that she’d gone on a date with who she said kept hounding her relentlessly by phone afterwards. At the time he was on the dance floor cutting a rug with what I assumed was a transvestite. I caught her alone later that night and made comment about her and the senator. She wasn’t shy.
“Oh Jesus! That guy has a huge dick and he knows how to use it but now he won’t stop calling me!”
I guess he had a pattern.
Pie-eyed in the RV, I told the story on the air and a dim lightbulb went off in DJ Bob’s head. He knew the senator’s secretary and got her to trick him into taking a call on the air.
“Hey, senator, are you a magician? Because we heard you had a big wand.”
“Who is this?” As we tried to stifle giggles like teenagers.
“Was your campaign slogan ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’?”
“Who am I speaking to???”
“You must have a pretty big office cuz we heard you have a huge staff!”
We got as many grade-school, radio-friendly dick jokes in as we could before he hung up and then laughed ourselves silly into an even drunker afternoon. All for the tots without toys.
Later that afternoon, Doran informed me that the senator was on a manhunt for me. He’d stormed into the club demanding to know where the comedian was, threatening alternately to either sue or kick the shit out of me. Doran reminded him that we’d merely referred to his giant cock and that would be a tough lawsuit. The senator was more upset about me referring to his stalker behavior. So upset that he was now stalking me.
After the show that night we were tanked and back on the RV marathon, shilling more Toys for Tots, a charity run by the Marine Corps. It so happened that there was a case looming in the news at the time of three marines accused of raping a kid in Japan. Somewhere my comedy brain connected these dots on the air and I said, “Hey, come on down to the Sears parking lot and drop off a toy for a tot! And if you don’t have a toy, maybe you can drop off a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl for the marines!”
I hadn’t even remembered this part of the adventure until I called Doran to fact-check some details of the senator story.
“Don’t you remember? I got a call at three in the morning saying that I have to get Stanhope out of there because the marines were there and gonna smash your teeth out.”
And the memory was rekindled in this call to Doran.
Oh yeah! The Okinawan girl joke! The fact that I told it after having given my exact location in the RV didn’t register until it was too late. Who knew that anyone was listening at that hour. Fortunately the Koot’s security had a corps of their own with a similar “no soldier left behind” policy who ferried me out in a hurry. I woke up in the band house with all of my big yellow teeth intact. For the remaining nights, I’d have to look over my shoulder. Like the formulaic movie where the guy finds a suitcase full of cash and next thing he knows, he has both the cops and the mafia coming after him, only for me it was an angry senator and the marines. And it was all over jokes instead of a briefcase full of money.
All of the fact-checking with all of the original Koot’s gang could not come up with the details of how the senator and I eventually made up. But I know that he came to one of the last shows on that debut Anchorage debacle and we were friendly. The band car that I’d been given by Doran had failed to start in the front parking lot of Koot’s so we spray-painted it with “Re-Elect Big Dick the Senator” on the side.
Koot’s made me feel like a king and also like I would be dead by the time I was thirty. There was a night that I got up hang-ball naked to do “Rapper’s Delight” with the band Clan X. I knew enough of the verses that I still had plenty left when security came to pull me off the stage. I told them that I was only naked so people didn’t notice that I couldn’t sing. Fortunately as they were escorting me to the door, we passed Doran. He asked his bouncers what the problem had been.
“He was onstage completely naked!”
“Really? Is that true, Doug?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, we can let him stay if he promises he won’t do it again. Do you promise, Doug?”
“Yes, sir.”
The security brutes were outraged but couldn’t do a thing but shake their heads. I was given absolute power and I was absolutely corrupted.
If this were just you and me in a bar conversation, I would go on and on with Chilkoot Charlie’s stories. I’d tell you about “Pipe-Bomb Barney” or Flounder and Longo with the 9/11 dildos. I’d tell you about the night with the nut butter and the liquid latex. I’d blather on about the mornings of waking up in that attic surrounded by a minefield of spent nitrous cartridges so deep that it looked like Flanders Field. There’s one story from years later about a vacuum cleaner salesman that sounds like bullshit because just the phrase “vacuum cleaner salesman” sounds like bullshit unless the story was from 1975. If this were a conversation, I’d eventually get drunk enough that I’d spill the beans about the night with the meth and the poppers and the p
ull-tab girl.
Fortunately you wouldn’t know her and fortunately this isn’t a conversation. It’s a book that needs to move forwards so I will move on to other stories about pulling out my dick onstage and in other inopportune places.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE
The first time I was naked onstage—at least at a gig I was getting paid for and risked losing—was at the Cap City Comedy Club in Austin, Texas, on a Valentine’s Day and it wasn’t very romantic. I’d headlined two shows that night. A third show was scheduled for late night called “The Midnight Blue Show,” where a bunch of the local comics could go up and clean out their notebooks of all the filth they could never do in their regular shows. I was scheduled to close out that show as well. The problem was that the majority of the audience were holdovers from my previous show who were told they were welcome to stay for free. The few who stayed sat through six or seven more acts doing their finest vulgarity before I was due up again. As though I had material even more obscene or dark that I’d been holding back earlier. I did not.
With nothing left in my act to top what was my normal level of “blue,” I just went up naked and started doing bad, hackneyed airline jokes until the manager rushed the stage and draped my overcoat around me. When the booking agent heard about it he canceled an upcoming week in San Antonio “on principle” and banned me from his clubs. I still defend my actions as appropriate under the circumstances.
A few months later at the Montreal comedy festival, the same booker was running a show at the fest called “The Danger Zone.” One of the nights he had comedian Craig Campbell going on naked to read a poem about circumcision. The festival wanted to make it a theme with other naked art. They got the legendary “Spoonman,” made famous by the song of the same name by the band Soundgarden. Spoonman would play spoons naked. Then the booker saw that I was in town and asked me if I could do any other kind of reading naked. I don’t know how many people had to decline before he was forced to come to me, the guy he’d just fired for doing the exact same thing. One day’s pink slip is the next day’s job offer.
Campbell did his naked poem to a packed house. Then I came out naked beside him and read a passage from Bukowski’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, where he talks about being more afraid of constipation than cancer and how sometimes he would try to suck his own dick to unclog his system. Bukowski goes on to a beautifully poetic, graphically judicious narrative about attempting such an act. At the conclusion of the reading, Craig Campbell and I laid on our backs with our knees at our ears, trying to suck our own dicks while Spoonman played his silverware in the buff. Mitch Hedberg, who I’d been naked in public with plenty of times but who had declined the offer to participate this night, had watched in the wings.
“Man, that shit was ridiculous.”
From what I know, nobody talked about that show ever again during the festival. What caused such a ruckus in Austin was a nonevent in Montreal. Not even water-cooler talk. Everyone talked about Hedberg and he got a half-million-dollar deal out of that festival, fully dressed.
If nothing else, that show put me back on the good side of the Austin booker and he gave me another week at Cap City. Again there was a late late show that went on after the bar closed. The same manager who had thrown my overcoat at me the first time I’d gotten naked on his stage now told me that it would perfectly legal for me to do it again, since this time there was no alcohol being served. I sent someone to the 7-Eleven to get a Bic razor. I went onstage and told some elongated road story sitting on a stool while the ticket-booth girl carefully shaved my balls. And this is where I got fired from the same booker again, this time taking the club manager down with me.
“But the manager told me to do it!”
From this point, I’d pull my dick out on- and offstage out of spite. It didn’t cause anyone any concern or heartache and is hardly intimidating. Then one night in Utah it went badly.
It all started back in Omaha with my old friend Dr. John.
Dr. John was a fine citizen of this earth and also a smut entrepreneur of unequaled integrity. He ran smut shops, Dr. John’s Lingerie and Adult Novelties in Omaha and then Midvale, Utah. Or at least he tried to.
I first heard of him when I was playing Jokers Comedy Club in Omaha where Dr. John was being brutalized and beaten down by a puritan city hall and its team of vice cop flunkies. Evidently making large rubber phalluses available to the upstanding folk of Nebraska threatened the wrong people in high places. They liked the fabric of their morality to be thick like their Carhartt dungarees. John had been arrested on a variety of obscenity charges and at the time was in the news while appealing a fifteen-month sentence in Nebraska… for selling dildos. I took up his cause on every radio station I did, as well as on the stage.
Dr. John could have opened sex shops anywhere but he liked to go to places where he could cause outrage. I’m sure that’s what endeared him to me and me to him.
We became friends in Omaha. He would give me free smut gear to hand out after shows to promote his shop. He even let me drive his rig. He had an old square-back ambulance with working sirens, lights and screaming PA system. He’d painted it with “Dr. John’s Love Unit #1” on the side along with “If We Build It, You Will Come!”
I remember banking a corner too sharply and having a “Door Ajar” warning light come on the dash. It was then I realized that one of the back doors had swung open and sent all the free dildos and butt plugs rolling across the street. The sight of me with my ambulance parked sideways across the street, running around and picking up double-dongers and the like must have been startling.
It was March and some guy I’d met at the club told me he was running the sound at the St. Patrick’s Day parade on that Saturday. He said he could get me and the ambulance into the parade. I doubted him, knowing how much Dr. John had been a pariah in the town and in the local news, but I showed up early at his place just on the off chance.
Sure enough, the guy weaseled us into the parade, right between the Vietnam vets and the Midland South High School band. Parents and their children with faces painted green stared gape-jawed as I went by, speakers blaring as I hit the PA.
“Come to Dr. John’s Smut Emporium—Seventy-second and Pacific—because those kids didn’t come from Immaculate Conception!”
“The Midland South High School has been drinking since six a.m., ladies and gentlemen. I watched the tuba player puke green beer through his instrument not one hour ago!”
“Look! It’s the grand marshal of the Omaha St. Patrick’s Day parade, a regular customer of Dr. John’s Smut Emporium—Seventy-second and Pacific!”
“Oh shoot, there’s a cop—hide your beer.”
All curveballs meant to stay above the heads of the kids, while amusing or disturbing the adults.
Dr. John opened another store in Midvale, Utah, another puritanical outpost with a glaring absence of vibrating latex or any other product that might make one remember that “sex” thing that has been so popular in other regions of the world.
I happened to play at a club called the Comedy Circuit in Midvale as well, where they put comics up directly across the street from Dr. John’s new shop. Utah didn’t take kindly to John there either and immediately started harassing him through any means possible, from fines to vice stings to general police harassment. I’d noticed that they had a cop stationed in the parking lot across the street every single night when I’d be coming home, no doubt to dissuade anyone who may have drunk away some of their Mormon-enforced inhibitions from risking a DUI in order to have something soft and lubricated to accompany their genitals.
On hearing about Dr. John’s Midvale arrival and subsequent molestation by the powers that be, I again took up his cause in my shows and on radio as I had done in Omaha. Dr. John had hooked up a cross-promotion with Spin, the owner of the Comedy Circuit, who would pass out all sorts of complimentary adult products from Dr. John’s during the shows. Dr. John was everything you’d expect from a smut peddler. Round, bald, bloa
ted, clammy and a bit high strung but really, really eager to please. Extremely generous as well. Every time I visited his “boutique” he loaded me up with any and every free item I could imagine. If my girlfriend might like it, if I could bring it onstage and make a joke out of it or if it might simply fit in my ass, he gave it to me and wouldn’t take a nickel.
I call it a boutique because it wasn’t a skeezy jack-off joint. There were no viewing booths or live nudes. It was a boutique. A boutique that sold remote-controlled vibrating leather underpants, but a boutique nonetheless.
The night John came to the show in Utah was a very special show, the tenth anniversary of the Comedy Circuit that promised to be, if nothing else, very, very long. Spin had brought in four headliners to fill out the bill for the big event. I’ll call the other three Carl, Lonnie and Lou. You wouldn’t know them anyway but I’ll just change their names now and have one less note from the lawyers. The show lasted over three hours. I couldn’t watch Hedberg, Jesus, Hitler and Brett Clawson do three hours if they were all back from the dead. All I want to do when I’m part of shows like that is apologize and go short. And let me add that Lonnie and Lou were no Jesus and Hitler.
Dr. John took us all back to his store afterwards for celebratory cocktails. The store had offices on the second floor that looked out over the front counter and part of the showroom. We all sat in one of the empty offices—Spin, Lou, Lonnie and Dr. John, along with a couple other Comedy Circuit staff and a few cases of beer—and we proceeded to curb-stomp our livers. All the while we are sitting behind a security window pane watching fine Mormon couples at the counter below discover lubrication and other brave new ideas. At one point, someone leaned over and banged on the one-way glass while an overweight girl and her boyfriend—who could have been the cop from any caught-on-tape shooting of an unarmed black guy—were stocking up on Anal Eaze or 3X crotchless orthopedic fishnets. Or something else that internal affairs and the church would certainly frown upon.
This Is Not Fame Page 9