Treehab

by Bob Smith

  “Now that is scary.”

  “In the morning I sent a note to another Peace Corps volunteer who lived a few miles away. Her parents were visiting. They had rented a Land Rover—an impossible luxury. ‘Hey Catharine, how is your parents’ visit going? I hope you guys are having a great time. Do you think it would be possible to borrow your Land Rover to go to Freetown? I got hit by lightning last night.’ She saved the letter. Back in Freetown, Dr. Zeller was very excited. He’d never had a lightning patient before. He ran home to get his camera. Click—he took my picture. The hair in my right armpit was burned to a stubble. I had a red stripe burned down the side of my body about the severity of sunburn. I had two red stripes down the inside of my legs, the hair singed off. He recommended salt-water rehydration therapy. That meant ‘Go to the beach and have a beer.’ There was nothing else to be done. He wrote a note on the photo: ‘Battle scars from the toughest job you’ll ever love.’”

  “Did you have a beer?”

  “I had a six-pack,” Rorie said. “Three weeks later I was lying in bed reading and Isatu came over. ‘Oh, Mr. Rorie.’ We laughed and I looked up, and from my mosquito net a snake was weaving through the air toward her head. I screamed. She screamed. We ran. Cidu and James charged into my house with big sticks. They bludgeoned the snake to death. It was very poisonous. I don’t know the species. I vividly remember looking at the fangs. The snake had slithered up the teef bar where it had been left propped against the window.”

  “Maybe it was suicidal. Hoping to be struck by lightning.”

  Rorie smiled and then said, “When I think about how tenuous life is, how unlikely the biological process of conception and birthing and breathing and eating is, I’m amazed any of us are actually alive at all. I really believe that we are all incredibly lucky. Just to be here today, an impossible number of things have to go right every single day. And amazingly, most of us defeat death day after day. I hope that I go on not dying for another thirty or forty years, maybe longer, and I hope that you do too.”

  I leaned my head on his shoulder. “I’m so happy you survived all that.”

  “Me too.”

  Rorie had found a hotel and restaurant in Haines Junction called the Raven. Rorie claimed the restaurant was gourmet. I didn’t doubt him. Rorie is a foodie. One time he visited me in LA after a visit to Scotland. He brought me a bottle of single malt scotch. It was delicious. I gave Rorie a drink of my scotch but shared it with no one else. The scotch was expensive or I would have become an alcoholic.

  Haines Junction is a village with a population of 589. The Raven restaurant is part of the hotel. We had an eight o’clock reservation. Having a restaurant reservation in the Yukon seems like an oxymoron. And yet, we did.

  As soon as we sat down, we ordered a bottle of red wine.

  “Rorie, how did you hear about this place?”

  “Every foodie in Juneau knows about the Raven restaurant.”

  Then we looked at our menus. We ordered the same first course: a salad made with organic spinach, strawberries, Brie cheese, and vinaigrette made with champagne and strawberries. Our main courses were slightly different. I had the venison shank pasta and Rorie had the venison strip loin. My pasta had portabella mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes. Sun-dried tomatoes in the Yukon? The Call of the Wild was replaced by the Call of the Domestic. The food was delicious. As good as a big city meal. Our dessert was tiramisu. We had after-dinner drinks since we weren’t driving. We wobbled back to our room and went to bed. Then we made out like salmon that had swam two thousand miles. Without the death part.

  We woke up early—no hangovers, since the food soaked up our booze. Rorie and I had coffee and headed for the Haines Highway. Another sunny day. We were going back to Juneau from Haines, Alaska. The Haines Highway borders the Canadian Kluane National Park. The park is connected to other American parks and is a thirty-two-million-acre UNESCO heritage site, sixteen times the size of Yellowstone.

  We left Haines Junction, and Kluane National Park was on our right. The traffic was negligible. Sometimes we drove for miles without seeing another car or truck. It’s hard writing about magnificent scenery; the words are like gnats trying not to be pests.

  Rorie would stop at viewpoints and we even hiked into the woods once. The forest was exhilarating because we might have run into bears. One stop there was a creek and there were sockeye salmon in the stream. We were in the mountains, and the salmon looked tortured swimming up a mountain. Fins were hanging on by a thread of flesh. There were open wounds on the fish. Damn. What they went through to get laid.

  Once we left Canada, we had the Chilkat river on our right side. There were a lot of bald eagles sitting in trees waiting for an unlucky salmon. Haines was bigger than Skagway: population 2,500. It has a square built by the military a hundred years ago surrounded by row houses on three sides. It’s Brooklyn in Alaska.

  We got on the ferry in Haines. When we got back to Rorie’s house, Jasper and Reuben ran out to welcome back their dad. Jasper gave him a big hug, and Reuben jumped on him. His laughter made Rorie and me smile. Their excitement made me realize Rorie had shared the Yukon with me. Once we were back in Juneau, I understood that our trip to the Yukon was the perfect mix of Call of the Wild and Call of the Domestic. It’s a combination I’ve been trying to balance my entire life. I always like to hike in the wilderness with friends who can crack jokes about any subject. I’ve often gone on solitary hikes, but I like hiking with friends better. It’s about sharing. Seeing my first lady’s slipper orchids in Provincetown, I was alone, but I made my friends come see them. Sharing something amazing is what great artists and great friends do.

  Silence = Death

  The Education of a Comedian

  Lou Gehrig’s Disease? I don’t even like baseball!”

  My best friend and fellow stand-up Eddie Sarfaty claims that was my initial reaction when he accompanied me to Columbia-Presbyterian in 2007 to receive my you’re-gonna-die-agnosis. I don’t remember saying it, but I’m convinced one of the reasons I’m still alive is that good comedians naturally respond to Pain and Death as if they’re hecklers trying to ruin our shows.

  Many of my oldest and closest friends in New York are accomplished and brilliant stand-up comedians, but we’ve made each other laugh harder offstage than with anything we’ve ever said in our acts. The morning after my sister, Carol, committed suicide, Judy Gold called to see how I was doing. When I broke down crying uncontrollably, Judy matter-of-factly inquired, “Bob, don’t you think you’re overreacting? It’s been almost twenty-four hours.”

  I didn’t stop crying, but I did laugh. I’ve known Judy for thirty years and our friendship has no boundaries. One time, Judy called about forty-seven times, badgering me not to be late picking her up at the airport. To get even, I stood among the limo drivers waiting at the gate holding up a sign that said bitch. I ignored the stares and whispers about my sign until I finally heard Judy laughing while simultaneously telling me to go fuck myself. Judy accusing me of overreacting is the perfect example of my belief that comedy is not frivolous but one of the most vital and serious aspects of being alive. Her making me laugh the morning after my sister’s death was like lighting a candle in a coffin.

  I’ve often been asked, “What stand-up comics influenced your work?” and I’ve always cited Woody Allen and Lily Tomlin, but once you start performing, your major influences are your friends who are also stand-up comics. Your influences get you to step out on a stage, but your friends help you develop into an artist who actually deserves to have a microphone. The friends who have most influenced me are Jaffe Cohen, Danny McWilliams, Eddie Sarfaty, Judy Gold, and Elvira Kurt.

  Not that my initial influences weren’t important. Woody’s stand-up act is a fictional autobiography, as is mine. Lily Tomlin is a more surprising influence since she’s primarily known for her characters and I’m the only character in my act. But I’ve always responded to Lily’s poetic precision, best illustrated by what I regard as the
perfect joke: “The other day I bought a wastebasket, and I carried it home in a paper bag. And when I got home, I put the paper bag in the wastebasket.”

  Lily was also instrumental in my realizing that I was gay. When I was thirteen, I read a letter about homosexuality in Dear Abby’s advice column and thought, That sounds like me. I had recently begun masturbating with the fervor that makes every teenage boy a willing victim of the most enjoyable obsessive-compulsive disorder. While patting myself on the front, I always thought about my classmate Kirk Gunsallus’s muscular arms, but decided to test my heterosexuality by thinking about a woman. But which woman? By chance, there was a magazine article about Lily Tomlin in our house. I headed to the bathroom with magazine in hand. A half hour later, my gayness was confirmed. If Lily Tomlin couldn’t get me off, then no woman could.

  Thirty years later I performed at an AIDS benefit in Palm Springs with the dream team for Palm Springs’ old queens: Lily Tomlin, Carol Channing, Lorna Luft, Jo Anne Worley, and Sally Kellerman. After the show, all the performers took a bow on stage and I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice I recognized immediately said, “Bob, you’re really funny!” After all that time, Lily Tomlin finally got me off.

  A great stand-up comic’s voice is as distinctive and unique as any great singer’s voice. Joan Rivers is our Maria Callas and Rodney Dangerfield is our Frank Sinatra. It took me ten years to find my voice, and I discovered it by moving to New York. In the summer of 1976, at age eighteen, I started performing in Buffalo and immediately got laughs with jokes like “Last year my family fought for weeks over whether to buy an artificial or natural Christmas tree. Finally, we reached a compromise. We bought an artificial tree, but we’re going to throw it out each year.”

  I was an English major in college, but stand-up appealed to me because there is no director or editor weighing your every word. It’s the most immediate of all literary art forms—and all great jokes are very short stories. Your work is judged by the audience; their silence is your rejection letter.

  In July 1986, I made my Manhattan debut at a comedy club in SoHo called Comedy U. A few weeks earlier my best friend Michael Hart looked through a stack of my 3×5 joke cards. “You know, these jokes about being gay are funny. You should do them.”

  At the time, there were no out gay comics in New York, though I’d read in the Advocate about a handful in San Francisco. But minorities and outsiders—Jews, African Americans, Latinos, and women—have always dominated stand-up comedy, so I figured it would only be a matter of time before gay and lesbian comedians broke through.

  I also knew I could soon be dead from AIDS.

  Rock Hudson died in 1985, the same year the family of Ryan White, an HIV-positive hemophiliac, began an eight-month legal battle when his elementary school refused to admit him. ACT UP was founded in 1987, and I, like most gay men, was angry about our government’s indifference and disgusted with the New York Times printing the word gay in quotation marks as if it were the final arbiter of our identity. I was also livid that at twenty-eight, I was dwelling on my mortality before I’d even decided what I was going to do for a living.

  In 1986, an “inconclusive” result on my AIDS test frightened me so much that when I was retested, I never picked up the results. I was determined to be an out comic in New York since it was the right thing to do, both artistically—a closeted artist is still an oxymoron to me—and politically.

  A month after moving to New York, I was walking down Third Avenue when traffic suddenly disappeared due to President Reagan’s motorcade. What fixed that moment in my memory was that people on the sidewalk—men in suits, women pushing strollers—stopped walking and booed as the president passed. I happily joined in. Our collective response made me truly love New York. I already loathed Reagan for willfully ignoring AIDS and for initiating the Republican-led assault against our nation’s environment. Standing on a comedy club stage as an out gay man during the era when gay was synonymous with AIDS was another way of raspberrying Reagan.

  I came out onstage at Comedy U with four gay friends in the audience: Michael, Sean, B.J., and Bruce. Within two years, Sean would die of AIDS. Back then, my friends were all young, handsome, and thickly muscular. The emcee that night proved my thesis that those who can’t do stand-up usually emcee. The nerdy comic focused on my friends— his eyeglasses outweighed his biceps—and actually remarked on how they weren’t laughing at his often homophobic jokes.

  Bruce said loudly with his very deep voice, “When you say something funny, we’ll laugh.” The audience chuckled, and the emcee shut up. It reminded me of the moment I lost my fear of homophobic bullies.

  In high school, I went to watch my friends play hockey. After the game, I was bantering in the locker room with my jock pals when someone I barely knew said loudly, “Smith, you are such a fag.”

  There was a hush, and everyone stared at me. Pat Connelly, the porky, moonfaced “athlete” with the big gut, waited to see how I’d react. It surprised me that I didn’t feel intimidated, just furious.

  “Yeah, Connelly, well, there’s a three-letter word that starts with an f that describes you, too.” I puffed out my cheeks in case the lummox couldn’t figure out what word I was talking about. The locker room erupted with laughter. Even the lummox laughed. I could see the joy, pride, and relief on my friends’ faces that I hadn’t backed down. Bill Silecky, the tall, handsome captain of the football team, said, “I could see the wheels turning and knew you were thinking of something good.”

  It was the first time I realized that getting the last laugh could triumph over the first insult. At Comedy U, I had prepared a line in case of homophobic heckling. If someone shouted “Faggot!” I would calmly respond, “Ex-boyfriends can be so bitter!” I never used that line because Manhattan audiences weren’t homophobic, which I regret somewhat, since it would have gotten a big laugh. All comics have bad nights performing, and I observed other comics have those nights, so I never blamed my lack of laughs on homophobia.

  The emcee introduced me, and I told a few jokes to establish credibility with the crowd before I said, “I come from a very conservative family—my dad’s a state trooper—and it wasn’t easy telling my parents that I was gay. I made my carefully worded announcement at Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Mom, would you please pass the gravy to a homosexual?’” (Years later when I appeared on The Joan Rivers Show, Joan added the brilliant tagline, “She passed it to my father.”) The entire room laughed. I followed with another gay one-liner: “My high school had a Head Start program for homosexuals; it was called ‘Drama Club.’” The room laughed louder, and I ended my set to enthusiastic applause. When I walked offstage, the two owners of the bar, both straight guys, came over and complimented me. They’d never done that before.

  I became a regular performer at Comedy U, and it was there that I met Danny McWilliams. While Danny wasn’t officially out, his signature bit was an impression of Bette Davis in The Wizard of Oz. His opening line, as he mimed taking a drag on a cigarette, was “Toto!” each o elongated. “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!” Danny spoke with Bette’s signature staccato pronunciation where each word sounded as if she bit it out of a dictionary.

  In 1987, Danny and I began performing together at gay and lesbian shows in the East Village (put together by a self-proclaimed straight comic) along with lesbian comics Reno and Sara Cytron.

  I’d heard about Jaffe Cohen from Danny and first met him on the night of the stock market crash of 1987 at the Crow Bar in the East Village. The show was canceled. No one wanted to splurge on a three-dollar cover during a financial calamity, but Jaffe and I were curious about each other’s material and performed for one another in the empty club. Later, we admitted we were relieved that each of us found the other funny. It was the first indication of how being funny was always the priority for Danny, Jaffe, and me.

  Over the next year, the three of us performed at occasional East Village gigs with terrible names like “Fruit and Fiber” until the sum
mer of 1988, when Jaffe was approached by Helene Kelly, the manager of the Duplex, about putting together a show for two weekends in September.

  Jaffe wanted to do an all-guy bill with Danny and me. We immediately agreed but needed a name for our show. Since personal ads were a big phenomenon then, one of us suggested parodying Single Gay White Male with Funny Gay White Males. (We quickly dropped white when we realized it sounded racist.)

  The Duplex at 55 Grove Street had been a cabaret since the late fifties—Woody and Joan had both performed there—but by 1988, it had the battered appearance and aroma of an ashtray full of cigarette butts floating in spilled beer. There was a dingy piano bar on the first floor and a dank sixty-seat cabaret on the second, where we performed. It had a tiny, narrow dressing room (ironically the size of a closet), and the two of us who weren’t performing would wait and listen while the third did his set.

  Our first shows got a rave review in Backstage—getting an unsolicited review in New York was as rare then as it is now—and the Duplex booked us for four weeks in November, then for all of February. Laurie Stone of the Village Voice did a full-page profile and review of our show, which resulted in us being booked every weekend for the next three years. We became a minor—but real—phenomenon in New York, attracting audiences that included gay celebrities such as Vito Russo, David Feinberg (he interviewed us at his apartment), Charles Ludlam, and Quentin Crisp. Laurie had noticed something significant during our interview: “The guys effortlessly finish each other’s sentences.”