I take Xanax regularly to sleep: .5 mg. A peach. I have a prescription for flight anxiety. I didn’t tell my doctor that a lot of that fear comes in the form of flying in my dreams, which is far scarier because you have no airplane when you fly in your dreams, just your body sailing through the air giving the finger to an angry mob of violent assholes chasing you on the ground. My regular flight anxiety as involved with traveling is mostly the fear of not being able to smoke or having some dullard next to me try to strike up a conversation. Xanax and ear plugs work for that as well.
One thing I’ve learned is that if you’re only taking pills to sleep, over-the-counter sleeping pills are completely underrated. Basic store-brand Sominex will put you down quite weIl. It can stay with you the next day for longer than you like, longer than the prescription shit but nothing that smoking a little meth won’t straighten out. I joke about the meth.
I used to have a prescription for Ambien, which I ditched because it can be dangerous when mixed with alcohol in that you can do really weird shit and not remember any of it. I can give you countless stories that I’ve heard from other people—taking Ambien with only a few whiskeys on his couch and waking up on someone’s lawn in a strange neighborhood or my former manager’s husband who took one on a flight with only a couple of drinks and almost had the plane grounded after a blackout tantrum over nothing. That’s a lot different than pissing in your suitcase after a bender and a Xanax. That’s where you wake up in your car in somebody’s living room with their kid under the wheel. Last thing you remembered was having a nightcap and an Ambien to fall asleep watching Intervention and now you’re in prison for twenty-five years.
My only story was that I took an Ambien (6.25 mg, I believe) at home when Hennigan was at the house when I was relatively sober and went to bed. But not long after, I got back out of bed and had long business conversations with him. In the morning I brought up the same subject and he told me we’d already discussed it. He said that I was completely lucid and alert and was dumbstruck when I told him I had no recollection of it whatsoever. Not a fantastic story but enough to make me stop taking Ambien.
Scary, but not “die in your sleep” scary.
That’s why it would be nice to know what kind of pills, dosages and combinations these scrip-heads were taking and what mixture killed them.
Greg Giraldo was—as someone pointed out to me on Facebook—smarter and funnier than I’ll ever be. I didn’t know him well but I was a huge fan.
The last time we spoke he said I looked like the reason he went to rehab. The last thing I would have said to him would have been: “Just take two of those. Two of those things is more than plenty.”
The worst he’d have done is pissed the couch.
Rock and roll.
THE DYING OF A LAST BREED
There was a moment where Dane Cook was referred to as a “rock and roll” comedian simply because of the amount of tickets he sold and the fervor of his mostly adolescent female audience. They could have called him the “British Invasion” if he were British. It was that kind of hype. I’ve never been jealous of his success but I will admit that it made me crazy when they called him rock and roll.
He was a bubblegum pop at its richest. I was rock and roll if only in comparison and in a time when rock and roll was no longer popular. It was a title that I only felt I deserved when I felt like he’d stolen it from me.
Dane Cook never drank alcohol much less did drugs. I had several bad shows from being pie-eyed and did drugs sporadically. Hardly Keith Moon but at the time, it was a rare occasion when you could find any comedian to do acid with after an ugly Sunday show, including kids who’d just want to do it with me for the story.
I doubt Dane ever left a hotel room untidy much less trashed. I trashed the same hotel twice, the first time so tamely that I was allowed back the second time. In Cincinnati, Ohio, they would put you up in some corporate mainstay that didn’t allow smoking. But the club allowed you to be waaay too fucked up to the point where you didn’t care about the rules when you got back to the room. And Cincy is fucking cold in the winter. I worked a week there and smoked every night in the room, trying to stay near the window. I was charged the two-hundred-fifty-dollar smoking fee and I fought it. The room smelled like smoke because I always smell like smoke. Take it up with American Express. It wasn’t until the next stay that I was eighty-sixed.
The next time I was booked there, the same hotel was remodeling and reeked of fresh paint and chemicals so badly that it kept setting off the smoke detectors. That’s how dense the fumes were. My cigarette smoke never did that. One morning, Bingo and I were woken up yet again to the fire alarm blaring at 6 a.m. My patience is thin in the morning. Very thin. I jumped up, grabbed the metal trash can and proceeded to smash the smoke detector off of the ceiling. I assumed it was the same removable type you have in your kitchen, the kind that goes off when the batteries are dying and wakes you up in the middle of the late morning. The reason you don’t have smoke detectors when you know you should.
This smoke detector was hard-wired and wouldn’t come off, only dangled like a piñata. It didn’t matter since every other alarm was going off in every other room as well as the hallways. I called the front desk and used every obscenity that I could provide while I told them I’d just smashed their scream-machine off the ceiling due to their negligence. I reminded them about how they tried to charge me two hundred and fifty clams for smoking and now they were poisoning me with chemical smells. As though the poor fuck working the front desk at dawn was the person responsible for the years-old charge. Real rock-and-roll guys don’t call the front desk to tell them they just trashed the room.
Shortly afterwards, there was a knock at the door. The fire department was followed by the police, followed by the front-desk person. I was informed of whatever severe penalty I could be facing for destroying fire safety equipment. Then they told me they were going to let us off easy by throwing us out of the hotel immediately. Bingo, who is always naked in any hotel room no matter who is present, asked me if she could have a moment to put on clothes in order to pack. I gave her the “no” sign with my eyes and a smile. She caught on and leapt out of bed, naked as can be and started arranging her luggage. All the authority figures spun into disarray, begging to step out and give her time to get dressed.
“No. You’re fine,” she said.
Fucking love that girl. We collected our shit and had to call a fan we knew locally as a last resort for a ride. We could have called a cab but we had no idea where we were going. She picked us up and drove us around until we found a Red Roof Inn one exit down. It was cheap and had smoking rooms. Sometimes trashing the room works out for everyone. It was very rock and roll.
I will never live up to my reputation as a comedy fuckup like my predecessors. I am only a strong horse in a weak field. There are no more Belushis, Farleys or Kinisons. For better or worse, that kind of lifestyle is no longer celebrated. It is pitied and intervened upon by people who die pious and boring. They now say comedians like Hedberg could have done so much more—if only—rather than acknowledge that they achieved what they had, at least in part, because of how they lived.
When the whole thing started it seemed like we were all drunk and ambivalent, ripping every moment into ridiculous affairs if only for the stories’ sake. Some comedians focused solely on their craft and their career and I tended to avoid those types. Which wasn’t difficult as they tended to leave right after the show to go back to their hotel and work on a screenplay or a television project or yell at their agent for allowing some vulgar miscreant like myself to be their opening act. By then I’d be wildly drunk with the fuckups and the staff, trying to talk a waitress into letting me beat off on her tits in a bar toilet. Or in her car in the parking garage. Wherever.
Then it all suddenly seemed to change. On some dime everyone turned sober. It wasn’t like rock and roll where corpses started showing up in hotel rooms and pools of vomit. A few did but for the most part it
seemed that everyone just stopped. Like someone yelled: “Last call.” They became ambitious. They got tired or scared or just plain bored with it all. They started to take comedy seriously, which seemed such a deformed way of doing comedy.
Then you’d get stuck working with the sober guy who spent the whole week bragging about how much harder he partied than you. “Shit, I used to have twelve shots of tequila lined up on the stage and I’d do ’em all before I told my first joke. Oh and hey, can you not smoke in the minivan. My wife will get really pissed off if she smells it.”
Everybody had their reasons. Some developed serious problems and had to quit. Others fell victim to kids or wives or a big opportunity to write gags for 3rd Rock from the Sun. Even in comedy there is a certain pressure that there is a time to grow up. I’ve ignored that for the most part. Others did not. They had aspirations to be better or bigger, prettier and healthier, to climb the ladder or hunker down and be decent husbands, wives or mothers or fathers. They wanted to become real adults, community people or captains of industry.
And at some point along the way, we all became the people we used to pretend to be.
Like when your mom said, “If you keep making that face, it’s gonna stick like that.”
Mine stuck.
Maybe smashing a smoke detector in a fit of anger mismanagement pales in comparison to Zeppelin hurling televisions through hotel windows down onto Sunset Boulevard. I’m only saying that it’s alcohol that fuels that ridiculous morning rage, which in turn fuels my act. A bundle package.
I smoke in hotel rooms because I’m a rebel and I thumb my nose at authority! And because I have two hundred and fifty dollars now that I call “Fuck you” money. Or at least “Buzz off” money.
Nowadays when you have to initial on the hotel receipt at check-in that you agree not to smoke under penalty of a fine, I always ask if I can pay that up front. This always causes a kerfuffle and I always keep the straight face.
“Can I just give you the two fifty right now?”
“No, no. It’s because you’re not allowed to smoke in the room.”
“But you just said I could for two hundred and fifty dollars. Let me just give it to you now before I spend it on something silly.”
“Um… let me get my manager.”
Then I tell them that I was just kidding. I’ve found with nonsmoking hotels or rental cars that if you leave a load of rotting shrimp or aged takeout Indian food inside overnight, they will never be able to detect any odor of cigarettes. Let them figure out how to make the symbol of a red circle with a line through it on a hotel door that translates into “No Old Curry.”
Brendon Walsh and I trashed a comedy condo in Louisville, Kentucky. We left a dead bird crucified on a cross amongst other egregious filth for the cleaning lady to find. We heard about it from several different people who’d heard it from the club. We still hear it. The thing is that we never did it. Not anything even remotely close to it. But we let that rumor flow. Most of rock-and-roll lore is bullshit. Dane Cook had no rumors aside from being gay. Maybe that’s because he didn’t just fuck as many chicks as possible without any discretion or human decency. So mainstream. So pop culture.
THE 2012 UK TOUR
Partying Like a Rock Star, Losing Money Like a Rapper
The 2012 UK Tour made me quit stand-up comedy permanently, if only for a little while. The success of my previous visits there had given Hennigan and the promoter an extremely overblown optimism in what we could do on a really big tour. I didn’t share their confidence but grudgingly went along with it. Either I’d make a lot of money like they were assuring me or I could rub the fact that I was right into Hennigan’s face for eternity.
The first problem is that I’d already played the UK in 2011. Generally I turn over an act in about eighteen months. It’s not written all at once by any means. It just evolves until I think it’s time to record it and start building again. And generally there’s a good percentage of any set that simply won’t translate in the UK. I need at least two years between tours there to have enough fodder to warrant the ticket price. I prefer three years. I was going back eleven months after the last run.
Usually I’d work alone overseas but knowing my game was weak, I figured I’d bring my comedian friend Henry Phillips as an opening act to bolster the show and for moral support. Bad beats and shit luck are Henry’s modus operandi and I could smell it on the horizon.
The next problem was the sheer scope and ambition of the expedition. Seven ugly weeks on that rock. I didn’t know they had that many cities. But they do and a lot of ’em are close to each other. I’d play a theater to a half-full crowd and then a few days later we were back at a bigger theater in a city that’s only ten minutes away from the first, wondering why there’s far less people. I mean if we couldn’t sell out the first one, why do you think booking across the river and upgrading the size of the box will pay off?
I didn’t know who sold who on the amount of people they thought I could draw or what they based these projections on but I’d been comfortably playing three- to four-hundred seaters in London or Manchester and now I’m out in East Bushwhistle-by-the-Sea in a two thousand–seat hippodrome playing to 150 people, all sitting as far apart from each other as possible.
If you wanted someone to blame, you could point to any seat in the Sprinter limo van that was initially our form of transportation. It had six seats in the back, three facing three, with a table between you and a storage compartment in the back large enough to hang sides of beef. I always sat in a backwards-facing seat as I felt I had no future.
Somehow this big a rig was necessary. There was Henry and me accompanied by Hennigan and Bingo, as well as a separate tour manager driving with the promoter or the promoter’s son riding shotgun on the wrong side up front. Henry and I should have done like Wiley Roberts and just found a sucker local comedian with a car.
Tensions rose with every unsold ticket. The tour manager hated Hennigan, Hennigan and the promoter hated each other and I assumed everyone hated me for not living up to the expectations I never had. It was all a very British hatred. Subtle and simmering, palpable while polite. Within the first few gigs we were already counting down the days like a prison sentence. I counted them in socks.
I’d packed my one black suit and an entire backpack with seven weeks’ worth of black, ankle-high Walmart socks. I can go an eternity without showering—I wrote this entire book in less than five showers—but clean socks are a must. Knowing that doing laundry in Great Britain is as simple as making paper out of a log, I brought a pair of burner socks for each day of the trip. Every day I’d leave a used pair in a hotel and every day the bag got a little bit lighter and we were that much closer to home.
The excess of touring costs only got worse. For the Scotland leg of the tour, they’d made the obvious decision to go from the Sprinter van into a double-decker tour bus with fourteen sleeping berths as well as a master bedroom, previously used to house Lady Gaga’s entire tour. Now it was available for our show with only two comedians and zero backup dancers or choreographers. So they grabbed it. It was more of an empty youth hostel than a bus. There was a viewing room at the front of the upper deck, past the coffinlike sleeping cavities, that had a tiny sliding glass window just big enough to allow one person at a time to smoke. Or perhaps the window was there to toss out any possible remaining profit after you added up the cost of this monstrosity. I’ve read enough rock-and-roll biographies to know that all the glitz and perks, every deli tray or bottle of booze in the greenroom, every comped ticket for a friend of a friend and every hotel room for every unnecessary head on the bus comes out of the bottom line. That’s why rock-and-roll bands would sell out stadiums and still come home broke. We weren’t selling out much of anything.
You don’t need to be in show business to understand that you don’t shit on a tour bus. You don’t even piss in it unless you’re trying to repel an alligator coming up through the toilet. Most shows we just parked at the loadi
ng dock of the venue and used their facilities. In Glasgow, there was no loading dock and no place near the venue to anchor the beast. Our only option was to rent a spot at the central Glasgow municipal bus station. If you’ve not had the experience of downtown Glasgow, imagine Detroit if people hadn’t fled when the auto industry died, only because it had been replaced by a burgeoning heroin trade. Now picture the public transit hub that would be the epicenter of that imaginary Detroit. There we sat, hanging out in our luxury liner right beside the 502 to Kilkirkmouth and all points north, with all the nocturnal stumblebums and drifters who missed the last fare out. Close your eyes and let your imagination create a vision of the toilets at this smeg-mecca of that inner-city bus depot.
Now smell that vision.
Now imagine that you have to pay for this privilege. In the coins of a currency you don’t understand.
Bus station pay toilets. The big time.
Henry was the first to find this out the hard way and kindly came back to our rolling chalet with a pocketful of coins, meting out correct dumpage change to each person on the bus with pity in his eyes. People were waiting in line for my show while I was waiting in line to take a shit. I should have scrawled “Lady Gaga Wuz Here” on the toilet stall door.
That show was part of a comedy festival and was actually packed. I distinctly remember a specific heckler. I had a rambling bit about how a lot of my material didn’t work in the UK like it did at home and, reading off of my yellow legal pad, asked if I could try some of it out.
“Okay, here’s one example. Um… Do you people ‘dream’ over here? I mean, like, at night? While you’re sleeping? Or is that just an American thing?”
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