by Dave Reidy
“Do you think Hurricane Cameron is a better name for a heavyweight or a lightweight?”
“Lightweight, I guess.”
“That’s what I’d say, too,” he said. He turned the page, folding the full-format section in half. Then he chuckled and glanced at me. I recognized my father’s pleasure at having come up with a line and his sheepishness at having found it so amusing. He held the newsprint up to give me a clear view of the page’s top headline. “‘Machine Gun Sales’ isn’t such a bad name, either.”
At eight-thirty, when the emcee introduced the first open-mike performer or opening act, my father would fold up his newspaper, pat me on the shoulder, and leave without a word.
I was still in bed that Friday afternoon when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I checked the clock. My father wasn’t due to arrive for another two hours. I crawled on hands and knees into the corner of my bedroom. As the footsteps reached the landing outside my door, I shut my eyes and sank my teeth into my forearm. A moment later, the intruder walked back down the stairs.
I peeked around the bedroom doorframe to find a pale blue, rectangular piece of paper lying on the floor by the front door. Sunlight revealed the swath it had cut through the dust as it slid across the hardwood. As I reached down to pick up the paper, blood trickled out of a tooth mark on my arm.
It was a flyer from Basement Laughs, good for one drink and free admission to a show. Walking toward the trashcan, I skimmed the lineup of comedians for the coming weekend—Tony’s name was in tiny print at the bottom of Friday’s bill, just above the flyer’s heavy black border.
I could only assume that he had been asked to fill in for a local opener who’d had to cancel. But how, and why? Had the Basement Laughs booking manager seen Tony at another club’s open mike? Had Tony dropped off video of a good set? The whole scenario was incredible: Tony was returning to Basement Laughs that very night—with a paying gig!
I called my father and asked him not to come over. I told him the truth: a favorite comedian of mine was going on early that night and I would be too nervous to be good company. Perhaps, in the short pause he took, my father wondered if nerves accounted for my having rarely been good company of late. If he wondered, he didn’t do it aloud.
“Enjoy the show, Jim,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
For the first time in weeks, I showered without coercion. I hadn’t had many big nights of late, and I wanted at least to be clean for this one. After toweling off, I stood in front of my closet and stared at my lone pair of dress slacks. In that moment, I considered going downstairs. Twenty-five steps. Twenty-five steps and I would be watching Tony’s triumphant return to the Basement Laughs stage. And my presence might actually do some good. Most of the people seated in time to see Tony would likely have no interest in him—he was the low man on the bill, after all. They would have arrived early simply to secure a good seat for the headliner. They would order drinks and whisper as Tony performed, enduring his set instead of enjoying it. Tony needed someone in the audience who was actually there to see him.
What he didn’t need, however, was someone running for the door in the middle of his set and throwing up in front of the bouncer. And that, despite my best intentions, would be all I had to offer.
So I put on a button-down shirt and my dress slacks—it was still a special evening—poured myself a glass of water and settled into my recliner. Waiting for Tony to be announced, I leaned forward and fidgeted with my cuffs, buttoning and unbuttoning them.
At eight-thirty on the dot, the music faded and the emcee took the mike. “Good evening, folks, and welcome to Basement Laughs.”
The audience applauded dutifully.
“We’ve got a great show for you tonight, so we’re going to get right to it. Our first comic is new to the professional ranks, though if you’ve been to open mikes around town, you might have caught his act in media res, which is Latin for ‘when it sucked.’”
The line was good-natured and it got a laugh. I imagined Tony just offstage, probably nervous as hell, managing to crack a smile.
“How about a big hand for Tony Cascarino.”
Tony took the stage to polite applause. I heard an amplified thud—he was pulling the mike out of its stand. Good, I thought. He isn’t trying to hide behind the mike stand.
“All right, everybody how we doin’ tonight?” he said. “That’s great. Glad to hear it. So my brother calls me a month or two ago and tells me his eleven year-old kid wants to play football.”
Tony had barely taken a breath between the salutation and the setup. He was rushing. I leaned further forward. Anxiety tightened my stomach like a drumhead.
“Not flag football.” Tony said. “Full-pad, full-contact football for kids. Like the NFL, but more intense.”
The juxtaposition earned Tony a light chuckle he pretended he didn’t want.
“No! This Pop Warner shit is serious. It’s supposed to be a recreational activity for kids. But these coaches are crazy. Parents, you put complete control of the minds and bodies of your children into the hands of these men, and they bring the shit from their jobs, from their dads, from their own playing days, and lay it on the size-small shoulder pads of your little Mikey, a hundred-pound running back who runs a seven-four forty.”
That laugh sounded different than the previous one—not louder, but somehow deeper. Then it hit me. Only the men had laughed.
“What the hell were our parents thinking dropping us off at the park with these guys and just taking off? I mean, when I played Pop Warner—any of you guys play football when you were kids? Before high school?”
A smattering of applause. I started to worry. If Tony thought he could have a good set speaking only to the men in the audience, he was wrong.
“OK, some of you did, too. Did any of you guys have to do what they call an ‘Indian Run?’”
Tony inhaled sharply through clenched teeth, seemingly aping the reaction of those audience members who had done an Indian Run.
“Yeah. Brings back memories, doesn’t it? For those of you whose parents weren’t idiots, an Indian Run”—he spoke right over the chuckles—“involves lining up a whole team of players—thirty, forty kids—single file and starting them on a slow jog around the perimeter of a football field. The maniac coach stands at the fifty-yard line and blows his whistle every thirty seconds or so. When he does, the guy at the back of the line has to sprint from the back of the line to the front. And what’s he got to do as he runs up there, fellas?”
A man shouted Hollywood Indian war whoops. The audience laughed.
“That’s right,” Tony said. “Relax, everybody. The wagon train’s safe. You can go back to sleep, all right?”
The audience laughed again. I realized then that Tony’s Italian city kid was different. He was smarter now.
Though the laughs were coming from men and women now, I was still worried. Tony was mired in the setup. He clearly had a story to tell, but he hadn’t started telling it yet and he was five minutes into a fifteen-minute set. No wonder he had rushed at the top.
“So you got a bunch of kids running around whooping like Oglala Sioux warriors. Now, those of you who haven’t heard of the Indian Run before, I know what you’re thinking: dwarf tossing would be a less offensive way to get in shape. Maybe some of the entrepreneurs in the audience are thinking of sponsoring a politically incorrect pentathlon: Indian run, dwarf toss, anorexic javelin ...”
I smiled and rearranged my haunches on the seat cushion as the audience laughed. Tony was employing a technique of the masters. He had invented audience members—the entrepreneurs—and pinned the politically incorrect material on them. With the straw men to bear the stigma, Tony could tell whatever joke he wanted and the audience would be free to laugh. But the jokes still had to be funny.
“Pole vault and broad jump wouldn’t even need new names.”
The laughter gave me a jolt, as it must have Tony. The audience was laughing despite itself. Most of them had paid the cover to enjoy
that loss of control, but they probably hadn’t expected to enjoy it before they had finished their second drink.
Though the pentathlon tangent had worked, the pressure to pay off the football setup was building.
“My Pop Warner coach had a name, but none of us knew it,” Tony said. “To his face, we called him ‘Sir.’ Outside of earshot, we used the nickname his assistants had given him: ‘The Colonel.’ The Colonel wore jeans, a white t-shirt, and an army jacket. Every night. When the Colonel raised his arm to point out a defensive formation, you cursed yourself for being five feet tall. Taller would’ve been great, but shorter would’ve been fine, too. Anything to get your head out of the pits of that jacket.”
Tony had found a rhythm. The audience was laughing—quietly, but in all the right places. More importantly, they were listening to the story. Tony had them. I hoped he knew what to do with them.
“The Colonel’s service in Vietnam—where, by the way, there’s no way he was a colonel—played out across every part of our football team. He called the starting offensive and defensive units ‘platoons,’ and special teams were ‘special ops.’ The Colonel called a long forward pass an ‘air strike.’ Everybody already called a long forward pass a ‘bomb,’ but apparently that wasn’t good enough for the Colonel.
“And what did he call the drill that every other football coach in the Midwest called the Indian Run?” Tony paused for effect. “‘The Ho Chi Minh Trail.’” Tony plowed right through the laughter. “We’d line up single file and start jogging. The Colonel, standing at the fifty-yard line, would yell ‘Ambush!’ and the eleven year-old in the back would sprint to the front screaming Asian gibberish.”
Tony was playing it straight, almost deadpanning it, but the audience was laughing hysterically.
“The kid who played left cornerback for us was named Panh Nguyen. He didn’t seem to mind much, but I bet his parents would’ve preferred we call it the Indian Run. But it makes sense, if you think about it. The Colonel fought in Vietnam, we ran the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Who coached you Indian Run guys, General Custer?”
Tony allowed himself a brief laugh along with the audience. I checked my watch. About seven minutes left.
“It was the Colonel who told me I’d been wiping my ass all wrong.”
Though only a setup, the line got a laugh.
“Seriously. I was a wide receiver, and on the Colonel’s team, everybody except the quarterback got into a three-point stance. One day in practice, I ran out to my spot and stood up during the snap count, like the receivers do in the pros. The Colonel blows his whistle, I look over, and he’s staring right at me. ‘Cascarino!’” Tony growled into the mike. “‘Get down in your stance! Son of a—do you wipe your ass standing up?’”
Tony milked the nervous silence. When he spoke again, he sounded like an addict finally able to admit he has a problem.
“I don’t know why I wiped my ass standing up.”
Understanding—indicated with laughter and applause—seemed to move over the audience like a wave.
“Until the Colonel asked me that, I thought everybody did it standing up. I must have learned to do it that way when I was so small I would’ve fallen into the bowl if I’d tried it sitting down and then, you know, old habits ...”
He trailed off beneath the laughter. Despite the results, I was a little disappointed that Tony had gone scatological. I had been around long enough to know that stand-up was a gritty art form, and that bodily functions were fair game. But for me, aesthetically speaking, scatological humor didn’t work unless it was an integral part of a larger story’s arc. To me the ass-wiping material felt more like a detour for an easy laugh. It felt cheap.
Tony had five minutes left. It was enough time to tie the scattered set together, but I reminded myself that, at this stage in his development, Tony probably couldn’t close. I marveled at how quickly I had raised my expectations and ratcheted them back down.
“So anyway, my brother decides to let his kid—my nephew, Jerry—play football. I say, ‘Tommy, you didn’t play Pop Warner. These coaches are crazy.’ And my brother starts telling me that Jerry really loves football, all his friends are doing it, it’ll keep him out of trouble—he gives me every justification in the book, and I’m like, ‘Tom, if you want out of your Saturday morning chores, take up golf.’ But he doesn’t listen, and he drops Jerry off at the first practice.
“That same night, my brother calls me up and tells me Jerry’s psyched because the coach told him he’ll be playing quarterback, and that the kid went to bed cuddling a football because the coach said that’ll improve his hands. And I say, ‘That’s great, Tom,’ you know, ‘Great news.’ Then Tommy says, ‘Whaddya call that drill they do at the end of practice?’ ‘What drill?’ I said.”
It was a phone bit. He’d listened to the Newhart albums! But Tony was giving the audience both sides of the conversation, probably because the brother was more convenience than character.
“‘The one where they jog single file and the kid in the back runs to the front.’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘and they make Indian noises?’ And Tom says, ‘They don’t sound like Indian noises.’”
Tony took a pause here, and someone—it sounded like a woman—giggled and clapped. At least one person had guessed where the bit was going.
“‘Well, what do they sound like, Tom?’ And Tom says, ‘Like Ewoks.’ ‘Like Ewoks, Tom?’ ‘I don’t know, they look like Ewoks who joined the Marines.’ ‘But what do they sound like, Tom? What kind of noises are they making?’ Tom, to his credit, took a second to think about it. ‘They sounded . . . Asian.’”
With everyone in on the bit, Tony went nuts.
“He was still coaching! I mean, can you believe it? I returned my pads to the park district almost twenty years ago! And now he’s coaching my nephew? I mean, how old is this guy? Hadn’t anybody complained? Why hadn’t my parents said anything? Why hadn’t Panh Nguyen’s parents said anything? Hadn’t anybody put it together that only kids who’d played for the Colonel showed up at high school calling opposing players Gooks?”
Tony had energized the room. I could feel it through the floor.
“So I tell my brother it’s the Colonel, that he should do whatever he’s got to do to get Jerry on another team, and that if he can’t switch teams, he’s got to quit. My brother calls the league commissioner, asks if his son can switch teams, the guy says no, league policy, blah-blah, so my brother does the tough thing—the right thing—and tells the kid he’s gotta wait until next year.”
The audience expressed its sympathy.
“I know,” Tony said. “How do you think I felt? It was partly my fault. If it weren’t for me, the kid would be out there playing quarterback, barking signals at the line like a second lieutenant calling in strike coordinates.”
The Vietnam stuff was still playing, but it wouldn’t play forever. I hoped Tony wouldn’t overdo it.
“The kid was upset, and knowing the Colonel as I did, I knew my nephew wasn’t the only one. He’s quick, big for his age, and he can throw pretty well. The Colonel had told the kid he was going to play quarterback after one practice, so I knew he’d noticed. But what did I care?” Tony was defiant. “I’m 31 years old. I’ve got a life of my own, and my nephew’s welfare to think about. I can’t be worrying about some lunatic coach’s hard feelings over an eleven year-old quitting his team.
“Then the phone rings.”
The audience laughed and clapped in anticipation.
“Hello?”
Pause.
“Speaking.”
Pause.
“Who?”
Pause.
“Yeah?”
Pause.
“Do I know you?”
Then Tony snapped to attention.
“Yes, sir, I remember you now.”
Pause.
“Did they call you that, sir? I’m not sure I ever heard that.”
The audience laughed approvingly.
“No, sir, I never
called you that.”
Pause.
“Not once. Not ever.”
I knew then that Tony had gotten the albums, and that he had studied them. Just for a moment, I tore myself from the world of Tony’s act, looked up at the walls of my apartment, and enjoyed an awareness of my present: I was listening to Tony Cascarino do a one-sided phone call, a conversation between two full-blooded characters who were part of a compelling story. And it was killing.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
Pause.
“Yes, sir, I know him. He—he’s my nephew.”
I heard more than the character’s nervousness in Tony’s stammer. I heard a conscious homage to Newhart.
“Yes, sir, I heard he left the team.”
Pause.
“No, what reason did he give?” Tony managed a nervous laugh. “That was the reason my nephew gave?”
Pause.
“No, no.”
Pause.
“No, of course, sir, I believe you. I just can’t picture my nephew saying he had to quit because his Dad’s a pussy.”
Pause.
“Something to that effect. OK. I see what you mean.”
I didn’t know the Colonel well enough to play him as I would have played Lincoln, but I could get in a room with him. I watched undetected as the Colonel sat in an old recliner not unlike my own, his right wrist perched on an old wooden end table, the smoke from his cigarette carrying up through yellow lamplight.
“Excuse me, sir,” Tony said, “but I—I’m wondering why you called to tell me this.”
Pause.
“You want me to convince him to rejoin the team.”
Pause.
“I don’t think I can do that, sir. I’m not his father.”
Pause.
“Well, that means I can’t tell him what to do.”
Pause.
“I realize that, sir, but you were in the army, and he outranked you, sir.”
The biggest laugh yet! But then Tony took a pause so long that the laughter died out completely. A chair scraped across the floor. A woman coughed. I felt my toes curling under themselves. Had Tony forgotten his place? Was he searching for the next line?