The heckler in the third balcony wasn’t being a smart-ass. He was drunk and completely enraged.
“Are yeeeyoooo fookin serious, mate??? You think we dooont feckin dream over here????”
The joke was written about you, not for you, sir.
The fact that the third balcony was still within a hurler’s toss of a pint glass was overshadowed by the glee that we’d sold enough tickets to have anyone up there at all.
We hung out with comedians Morgan Murphy and Greg Proops for a short while afterwards in the greenroom but couldn’t sell anyone on the bus station after-party. That was a low-key affair.
Low key until late night when Hennigan said something fucky to a drunken vagrant while I was outside smoking. Neither Hennigan, Henry, Bingo nor I can remember exactly what Hennigan said or what precipitated it but Hennigan responded to the guy with something along the lines of “Fuck off, you homeless cunt.”
This seemed to scrape up the gentleman’s dander. He spun into a rage that only left us seconds to flee inside the bus and lock the door. The drunken fellow proceeded to pummel the bus with his fists, demanding an apology in his thick Glaswegian accent with a heavy lilt of Buckfast caffeinated wine.
Most of what I could understand and clearly remember was him screaming, “I’m noot fucken homeless!”
Although we outnumbered him three men and a lady to one, we hid like children. Glasgow has a well-earned reputation for violence as much as comedians have a reputation for the opposite. Pacifists by default. I’m sure most comedians, given the skill, would be out smashing skulls rather than writing gags.
The pounding and screaming continued all around the bus as though he were trying to make it sound like there were more of him than just one. We turned off all of the lights and would peek through the blinds when it became quiet and we thought he’d left. These were just the moments where he was catching his breath. He wasn’t going anywhere. At some point, he’d evidently thrown his pizza at the bus and was demanding through every window to be compensated for the pie. Or else.
The bus had its own driver who we almost never saw. He was a brooding ogre who only came out of his closed front compartment sporadically to come back for coffee in the morning. On those rare and uncomfortable occasions he was always surly, complaining about previous acts that had been on the bus and what slobs they were. We knew these were indirect warnings to us. We never knew if he was even in the bus when it was parked. If he’d been on the bus that night, he wasn’t getting out to protect his vessel from this raging mutant. We were equally scared of both of them.
This siege went on for seemingly an hour but maybe only thirty minutes, as memory tends to exaggerate. To us it was Night of the Living Dead, in this case the dead being singular. Eventually I had to make the call to go out and reason with the man and pay for his pizza. Everyone was against it but I felt it was necessary. Probably because I had to smoke again or use the pay toilet.
The vagrant was shaking. He looked like Aqualung and when he yelled you’d think he was Joe Cocker singing. I told him that I was just the driver and that everyone on the bus was piss drunk and meant no offense. He calmed down and I paid for his pizza. He eventually asked if our bus was for Daniel O’Donnell—a popular Irish folk singer who was playing in town the following night. He said that a lot of people were camped out to see him and that he assumed this was his bus.
I explained that this was not the case, that this was a comedian’s bus.
He seemed let down that he’d spent all that time menacing a tour bus of someone he thought was famous. He wanted a story out of it as well.
The most enjoyable gig of that tour was in Inverness, Scotland. By the time we parked in the back of that city’s “arts centre” (arts centers, however they’re spelled, are always the worst places for comedy) all pretense of caring had gone. The venue was hosting a science-fiction convention during the day and the sight of miniature Stars Wars stormtroopers parading around and hanging out in the cafe bar only added to the sense of a mission gone wrong. I started drinking at breakfast. By the time the gig rolled around I was vehemently sideways. The show did not go well by the standards of the audience. I was having a hoot. By the time I got Henry back onstage to serenade the crowd with the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter (a show that no one in the UK knows, let alone its theme music), many in the audience had left or were in the process of leaving. Not that I cared. As far as I was concerned this could be my last gig ever. They could never hate me as much as I hated myself but it was kind of them to be showing the effort.
I was melting down and enjoying every minute of it. I even saw Bingo dying laughing as the show was going up in flames and that only encouraged me to go weirder. I stopped any real attempt to do any prepared material as the show wore on—singing TV theme songs certainly wasn’t on any set list ever—and I think I even lay down on the stage for a while, most likely threatening to keep rambling until everybody had left.
Eventually Hennigan came out and for the first and only time in my career, led me off stage to close the show.
Despite the indignant complaints of a number of ticket buyers, I’m pleased to say there were no refunds. The venue even tried demanding to be reimbursed for the debacle. Hennigan had to convince them that this was indeed my act and that we couldn’t be held responsible if people didn’t “get” it.
As the tour wore on, we were back in England, back in the Sprinter van. The paranoia was now at an all-time high because of my fear of being arrested for a Twitter war that I’d started at the beginning of the tour. I’ll get to that story later on. But let’s just say it was the icing on the cake—a cake that the British probably call pie and is cold and wet and probably cabbage flavored. The icing on a cake that was bleeding money, spiteful and now scared.
Hennigan left for part of the tour, immediately lightening the tension in the van that had become physically draining. We didn’t like it when Mommy and Daddy fought. The shows still sucked for the most part but at least we could now laugh about it all. To be fair, a few shows were monsters. Everybody in other cities had warned us that Wolverhampton was a shithole so I knew it was probably gonna be fantastic. They weren’t wrong about the condition of the town but the show was off the hook. Ridiculous high-energy crowd, roaring approval and a few violent ejections of rabble-rousers. That always brings the energy up. After the show, a massive brawl broke out in the front of the house. It was unrelated to the show but we didn’t know that at the time. We were hustled by security to a back door where the van and a few dozen fans had anticipated our exit. They swarmed Henry and me like we were rock gods. A few tried to jump into the van, a girl telling me that she was with her boyfriend but was still willing to suck my cock. They pounded on the side of the van as we pulled away, cheering in approval. Not demanding pizza money. A rare bright spot on a floundering tour.
The last four nights were in and around London so we stayed at the same hotel and shuttled back and forth in the van to the shows. My sock bag was nearly empty. The parting cruelty—aside from the financial gutting—was that the hotel we stayed at for those last few nights was right next to a runway at Heathrow Airport with a view of 767s headed home every few minutes. Some people might complain about the noise. I would have complained about the fence. It was perhaps the only thing stopping me from running in a panic into a rolling wheel well to get the fuck out.
Selling out the last show at the Hammersmith Apollo—my biggest show ever—was pretty overwhelming but didn’t make up for the dejection or the monetary squander. I’d have done better playing wormhole bars in piss-stop towns in middle America where they have A.1. Sauce and cocktail straws.
I’d told Hennigan weeks before the tour ended that I was done with doing stand-up comedy as soon as we got home. I meant it. I’ve told him from the plotting of my first book that I would never write another book as well. My word is worth the exchange rate of dog shit to bitcoin.
I’ve been compared to Bill Hicks quite often in the
later years of my career, almost exclusively and repeatedly in the UK where he is revered. At first this didn’t bother me. I was flattered and somewhat scared as though I had to somehow live up to and fill his big dead shoes.
It didn’t start to annoy me until I’d see people online shitting on me for thinking I was the next Bill Hicks. A wannabe Bill Hicks. And I was no Bill Hicks to a lot of them.
These were people who read lazy UK journalists who compared me to Bill Hicks and showed up for a Bill Hicks show. And guess who wasn’t there? Bill Hicks.
Don’t get me wrong, most people use the comparison as a compliment. But like most comedians, I don’t hear compliments. I only hear the assholes. And when hating them didn’t fill the gap, I started to hate Bill Hicks. It’s hard to do but I found ways. I could start and end with the fact that he was an AA guy but that would be too easy.
This fucking guy had lots of opinions and could draw you into some seemingly obvious logic that you might have otherwise overlooked but he had no person. You can listen to everything he’s ever recorded and there isn’t one iota of any real, soul-baring part of himself personally, nothing about his life experiences or him as an individual.
The guy died at thirty-two and while he was a wise soul, there isn’t a thing that drops his own pants. He had enough insight on the big issues that he might have kept Air America afloat for another year doing drive time but there was no person. Humanity but no human. There’s no reason he needed to be. But that is exactly where the likening of me to him made me callous.
Bill Hicks died from terminal pancreatic cancer and never deemed it important to talk about it in his shows while it was happening, preferring to trash the plasticity of Los Angeles instead. And you compare me to that guy? I’m the Goatse guy of comedy! My personal life has been stretched wide and wart riddled onstage for a long, long time. If I was diagnosed with cancer I’d open with it save for the fact Tig Notaro already stole that thunder in a special so spectacular that the entire disease seems spent, comedywise. Still, I’d be googling things like whether Hodgkin’s was cooler than non-Hodgkin’s and the etcetera.
It’s difficult for me to take compliments at all. Comparisons to the greats are much worse. The truth is that I didn’t even listen to a lot of the greats or get the ones that I did. I’m no comedy historian.
I never really got the small amounts of Lenny Bruce that I’ve heard. I wasn’t alive or cognizant when he was around. I tried to listen to him when I was older and well entrenched in comedy. He talked in a lingo that made the “jive” from the movie Airplane have clarity. I get that he went through a lot of bullshit arrests, court cases and eventually into poverty and that paved the way for future comics. I just didn’t understand most of the words.
I loved Richard Pryor when I was thirteen or so but by the time I was a comedian, he had been stolen from and replicated (poorly) so often that to go back and listen to him, he seemed like a hack.
Carlin was someone I didn’t much care for until I found his later stuff, when he was as bitter as I was trying to be. I was never a fan of the clever wordplay. “Why do we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway?” It wasn’t until I heard You Are All Diseased that I stole off Napster that I fell in love. Fuck Metallica.
I didn’t really get into Hicks until I was starting to become compared to him. Then, like Carlin, it was a guarded love where I was more concerned about not having the same bits as them than actually enjoying them. Then came the Internet and one too many comments about me not living up to the Hicks legend that moribund UK journalists were branding me with.
So I blame you and them. You ruined my love for a brilliant comedian, you Hicksophants. He was a slayer of sacred cows and then you turned him into one. Ultimate cunt move.
If I ever get famous after I’m dead—only because I am dead—please shit on the people who idolatrize me. Say that I was no Jim Jefferies.
If Hicks were actually available for children’s parties and had actually shown up for the one that Becker and I did, I bet he would have done what we did and run like a scared woman fleeing the lava of Pompeii. In that way, we are very much alike.
FLORIDA SEX OFFENDERS, PART ONE
People who say that I am trying to be like Bill Hicks have never heard Matt Becker or Andy Andrist. I’ve been trying to be both of them for too long to remember. I want Becker’s speed and content with Andrist’s style of wordsmithing. And if I lived either of their lives, I’d want a good lawyer.
Having done that private party at the lawyer Jay Kirschner’s house years before—no matter how much of a shit-apple I ate—was a small retainer to pay for the constant late-night haunting for legal advice we’d be pestering him with in the years to follow.
“My buddy just got a DUI for weed. What should he do?”
“I think I found that lady I married drunk in the eighties. You know a private investigator in Florida?”
“My friend ‘Danny’s’ wife is suing me for calling her a lying cunt. What are my options?”
When it came to needing legal help from Jay, nobody screamed “Pro Bono” as loud as comedian Andy Andrist. Andy is a touched individual who seems to be unable to stop himself fucking up. He is also one of the funniest people alive because of it. If even part of the reason that his insanity was due to being molested as a teenager, I call it collateral damage. If that old man fumbling around with his junk made him that hilarious on a daily basis, I say look at the big picture. And people think I’m always negative.
Andy and I have been best friends for years. When we’d tour together sometimes people would say that he’s trying to be like me when all the time I’m trying to be like him. Like Becker, Andy is legitimately one of the funniest human beings alive, where I am simply better at making funny into a sellable product. I hope they hate me for that as much as I hate them for being naturally far more funny.
For the many years I’ve gone on the road with Andy, one name always fell into his jokes.
Bo Y. Fondler.
Bo Y. Fondler, a name that you can assume has been changed by the lawyers of this publishing company who are gun shy to a fault regarding liability issues. This bothers me because let’s say I randomly change “Bo Y. Fondler” to “Frank Wheeler” for legal purposes. Now anyone named Frank Wheeler is under scrutiny. Couldn’t any Frank Wheeler sue me now? I could just use “John Doe” but knowing how many names I had to change in my last book, you’d wonder how this John Doe guy could have been in so many places at the same time.
I’ll refer to my publisher as “HarperCollins” or “Random House” from now on.
Just pseudonyms.
Fondler is the man that ALLEGEDLY molested Andy as a young teen. I have to say “allegedly” because I wasn’t there. Yet I can’t imagine such detailed memory of being coerced into sexual situations in trade for, amongst other things, some sweat suits that Andy favored as a kid. I won’t mention the specific brand without an endorsement deal. I know that the man is a real person and if Andy can come up with bits that funny over imaginary transgressions, he should apply it to the rest of his act.
“The worst thing is that my molester had hand braces. I realized later on that I could have just walked away. I didn’t even have to run. I don’t know if I was queer or just like helping people.”
It’s funny because it’s disturbing and disturbing because it is true. Allegedly.
One day, Andy called me to say that he’d actually found Bo Y. Fondler on the Internet—fortunately now living in the same state as our Florida lawyer—and Andy was formulating a plan to avenge Bo’s transgressions. Each call afterwards was filled with impossible Ocean’s Eleven details, none of which could possibly work but were hilarious in their retarded intricacy nonetheless.
All I know is that the plans in the final phone call included Andy swimming across the pond of a golf course to gain access to Bo’s gated community with a waterproofed backpack to keep his disguise of a cable guy dry for whatever came next. I laughed until he mention
ed the fact that he’d already bought plane tickets for him and a friend he’d talked into filming the whole thing. When I pictured Andy swimming across alligator-laden waters on a Florida golfing hamlet accompanied only by some clown trying to tread water with one hand while trying to film, I knew I had to cancel some plans.
Andy and his camera lummox were already there with an arsenal of gimmicks from boy scout uniforms to giant handmade signs saying “I WAS MOLESTED BY YOUR NEIGHBOR—ASK ME HOW!” that Andy planned to spin like a barker outside the entrance of the gated community. The plans were as harebrained and scattershot as Andy’s always were. I had to dial them back. Andy was clear in that all he wanted was an explanation as to why this man had done this shit to him and if the guy even gave a fuck that it had affected Andy. If Andy could have a legitimate dialogue, all of his absurd b-plans for revenge could be ditched. It’s trouble when I’m the rational guy in any given situation.
I found a hotel just outside of this douche’s enclave. Among the other things aside from Bo’s address and number that Andy had found in his Internet investigation was the fact that Bo had a daughter in college. I had a simple plan that didn’t require aquatic gear or alligator repellent. We watched football at the hotel bar, lawyer in tow, and waited until the alcohol dampened our nerves. With the camera rolling, I finally made the phone call. There was no answer. We waited a bit and had more drinks. I called again and there is still no answer. We made random guesses that maybe he’s not answering because of the blocked number or maybe they’re at church on a Sunday, and all but gave up hope of doing this the easy way with my plan. Eventually Jay the lawyer left and Andy went back to the room. It was just me and the camera flunky when I made one last futile attempt and dialed the number.
If I’d been drinking my cocktail when he answered, I would have done a slapstick spit-take. I tried to focus and calm myself as I hysterically motioned for the video oaf to start rolling. I told Bo that my name was Tim Heidecker—for some reason the first name to pop into my head was the co-star of Tim and Eric Awesome Show—and I told Bo that I was a private investigator who had some sensitive information about his daughter in whatever university she was attending. A simple plan. No matter how rotten a person might be, their children are almost always their Achilles’ heel. Even if they are fucking children. I was right. He asked what it was about and I told him that his daughter was not in any danger but that, as a parent myself, I’d prefer to give him the information in person. I said that I was at the hotel just outside his gates. I’d meet him in the lobby.
This Is Not Fame Page 19