Time passed. I kept writing those monthly checks to my father and honing my new material. Finally, I got even with Dad, and had climbed to a new level of confidence as a performer.
But it wasn’t enough. By now, I’d been in L.A. for five years with not a lot to show for it. I couldn’t see how I was going to keep it up for another five years. I’d been lucky enough to get as far as I had, but I knew I could go farther, if only I could catch a break. I was starting to feel impatient for it.
And then, finally, it came.
4
* * *
THE PIZZA BAGEL
I met Andrew Dice Clay in the parking lot of the Comedy Store in 2002. I went outside after finishing my set one night and saw Wheels Parise, the guy who recommended me to Mitzi Shore. He was having a conversation with somebody. Taking a closer look, I realized it was Dice, Mister Hickory Dickory Dock. He had sold out Madison Square Garden twice, a rock star comedian. I couldn’t believe I was hanging out in a parking lot with a guy I listened to and loved growing up.
Dice was a very intimidating presence in all black, fingerless gloves, a big leather jacket, smoking aggressively. The look and demeanor said, “Don’t even think about talking to me.” I never want to impose myself on anybody. I typically wait until someone talks to me first and invites me in. I sure wasn’t about to launch myself at Dice with my hand out like a starstruck fan.
Wheels noticed me, called me over, and made the introduction. Wheels and Dice went way back. He had been Dice’s opening act in his heyday in the late eighties, early nineties, and they were still good friends.
Dice drew on his cigarette and tilted his head toward me. “Hey,” he said. “Caesare.” He pronounced it chez-a-ray.
I smiled and nodded like I knew what he was talking about, but the whole time, I was thinking, Who the hell is Caesare?
I’d heard that Dice gave everybody a nickname. Was he bestowing one on me so soon? What did it mean? I looked it up the moment I got home. Caesare is a character in the movie The Idolmaker. He’s a busboy who the main character, played by Ray Sharkey, turns into a Fabian-like teen idol singer. I was a waiter (not that Dice knew that), so it kind of made sense. Or not. Who knows? I was just meeting the guy for the first time. (He would continue to call me Caesare for the next six months.)
So now I was part of the conversation in the parking lot, not that I contributed much. It took about three minutes to understand that when you hang out with Dice, he dominates. When he said he’d seen my act and thought I was funny, I was so stunned, I don’t think I could have said anything anyway.
In the upcoming weeks, I saw Dice from time to time at the Comedy Store. He would come do a pop-in set and hang out for a while. One night, he pulled me aside and asked, “What’re you doing next weekend?”
It’s always funny when someone asks you if you’re free before telling you why. I prefer for someone to lead with the activity and then I can let them know if I’m free or not. If it’s “You want me to help you move?” then my answer is “No, I’m busy.” But if you have something fun and cool to do, then I got nothing going on!
“I don’t know,” I said to Dice. “Coming here? Working?”
“I’d like you to open up for me at the Stardust Theater in Vegas.”
Hmmm, let me think . . . take orders in the lounge or do comedy with Dice on the legendary Las Vegas strip?
So far, the biggest gig I’d ever had was in the Original Room at the Comedy Store. The Stardust Theater held a thousand people, and Dice was asking me to do standup there.
Something else also now made sense. Apparently, Dice had come looking for me at the lounge the night before. I went into work the next day and my coworker told me, “Andrew Dice Clay was here looking for you.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Gloves and all. I told him it was your night off.”
I said yes to Dice’s invite, of course.
My only tiny hesitation was that Dice and I hadn’t spent much time together. I didn’t know what to expect of him in Vegas, although I could imagine we’d be hitting clubs every night. My only lengthy social interaction with him so far had been after a set at the Comedy Store, when he said to me, “Let’s go to Canter’s Deli.” He’s got an Italian look and attitude, but he’s actually Jewish, and he likes a nice bowl of matzoh ball soup (who doesn’t?). So, at midnight, we went to Canter’s Deli. I intended to pick his brain about standup, but I didn’t even have to ask. We sat down, ordered the soup, and Dice regaled me with stories for an hour.
Another time, I’d just come home from a closing shift at the Four Seasons and my cell phone rang. It was Dice, calling to shoot the shit at 1:30 a.m. He’d never called me before, and I’d never called him. I had no idea how he got my number. I was still relatively new to Hollywood and to comedy, and a guy I’d watched growing up was calling me in the middle of the night to chat. It was surreal. As I got to know him better, I learned that Dice is a night owl. When the whole world was asleep and he was wide awake, he often reached out to people to keep him company on the phone. I was exhausted, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to talk; with Dice, you just listen.
THE STARDUST, AS you probably know, was a classy, Rat Pack–era casino. When you walked in, you could almost picture Frank and Dean walking through the place in sharkskin suits. By the time I performed there, though, it was kind of run-down—in fact, it would be demolished a few years later—but I didn’t care. I never would have thought I’d do a gig at the same place where Scorsese filmed Casino, or share a stage with the Dice Man.
The theater itself was a semicircle with hundreds of half-moon-shaped booths with black faux leather upholstery, the kind that hissed when you sat on it, set in rows like stadium seating. It sat a thousand people, but it still felt intimate. A runway off the stage shot right through the middle of the room, so if Dice, or Wayne Newton himself, wanted to go out into the audience, he had that option. At that point in my career, I didn’t even consider doing that. I was just happy to be on the actual stage itself.
I was thrilled about getting paid $150 per show, on top of the hotel room and a per diem for food. All I had to do was a fifteen-minute set to warm up Dice’s fans. For the same amount of earnings, I would’ve had to spend five to eight hours on my feet at the Four Seasons, serving beef sliders and dirty martinis.
When Dice and I first arrived at the Stardust, he said, “Check in, then come back out.”
Huh? I thought we’d spend the day by the pool, have a couple of drinks. But no. Dice had other plans. “We’re going furniture shopping today,” he said.
I was not expecting that. A nightclub? A strip bar? I could see those. But a furniture store? Sure enough, he took me to Kreiss, a high-end furniture showroom, and he made me sit on every couch they had. “What do you think? Lay down. Test it out,” he said.
“Dice, every couch is more comfortable than what I got at my fucking apartment. I pulled mine off the street. This one costs seven grand.”
Because Dice was performing regularly at the Stardust, he’d purchased a house in Vegas and it was completely empty. So I was brought on to be his opener, and his interior decorator. We looked at carpeting together, bathroom fixtures, rugs, and kitchenware.
Dice had a thing about asking salespeople for discounts. “What’s the Pro Deal?” he always asked.
The salespeople were as baffled as I was. “What the fuck is a Pro Deal?” I asked him.
It was the fame markdown. He even put the screws on a kid working at Foot Locker. The kid said there were no discounts, but Dice pushed it. “What do you pay for those shoes? The employee discount,” he said.
The sales kid was completely confused. “But you’re not an employee.”
He looked him in the eye and said, “I’m Dice.”
“I don’t understand—”
“I’m Dice.”
He was goofing on the kid, putting on a comedy show to get a laugh out of me. To him, it was a game to goof and mess with peopl
e.
Another time, we went to a grocery store and put hundreds of dollars’ worth of snacks and drinks on the conveyor belt. Seeing how big our purchase was, the cashier asked, “Do you have a club card, sir?”
Dice said, “How much?”
“With the club card, you can get a ten percent discount.”
“How much?” Totally deadpan.
“It only takes a minute to fill out the—”
“How much?”
The cashier didn’t get it, the people behind were complaining, and Dice just kept saying the same thing. I remember dying laughing at the chaos he could create with just two words. If anybody else came through with hundreds in groceries, they’d want that 10 percent off and would sign up for the card. But Dice didn’t need the discount. He didn’t need the Pro Deal on furniture or shoes. But he couldn’t resist busting someone’s balls and getting a laugh out of whoever he was with. He is a character. I think Dice sees the world as existing for his amusement, and he takes advantage of it.
And I took advantage of being in his orbit. Earning $150 per set was mind-blowing for me at the time. Just to give you an idea of how broke I was when I toured with Dice: The Stardust gave me a per diem of $100 a day for food and beverages. I’d buy a small lunch before the show, and then after the show we’d all go to a dinner, which got comped. So it wasn’t easy to spend the full $100. I had to come up with creative ways to maximize the per diem. So, in the morning, I’d call room service and order two eggs, bacon, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The booze would get me up to $100. I wasn’t going to waste a penny of that stipend. If I was in Vegas for five nights, I would order five bottles of alcohol in total. The room service guy would give me the eye, like, “Damn, you’re hardcore.” Then I’d pack the vodka, gin, and Jack into my suitcase, bring it back to L.A., and stock the bar in my apartment.
Surprise bonus of the Stardust: One night in Vegas, I met Mr. Warmth, Don Rickles. He did the early show and Dice was the late show. So there I was in his dressing room, talking to the guy I’d watched on Carson when I stayed up past my bedtime in the early eighties. I never missed Rickles on The Tonight Show. Every time he was on, it was like lightning in a bottle. His chemistry with Carson was electric. Rickles had the ability to make fun of everyone around him, and still make the person feel like a million bucks. There will never be another like him.
I OPENED FOR Dice for two years (not every single weekend, but very consistently), in Vegas and all over the U.S. Hanging out with him was like getting a doctorate in comedy. We would be doing casinos in the middle of nowhere, say, in Tacoma, Washington, and we had long, midnight discussions in his hotel room or the lobby bar about standup, what to do, what not to do. At the time, a lot of the people I’d come up with at the Comedy Store were getting TV shows and movie parts. Dice told me not to worry about what other people were getting.
“Just be patient and wait your turn,” he said. “You can’t compare your career to your friend’s career. Everybody’s on his own path. The only thing you have control over is your material and your stage time. The rest will take care of itself. It might come next week. It might come in twenty years. You don’t know when it’s gonna happen, but it never will if you get distracted by what your friends are doing.”
I took that advice to heart. I always felt like I was a step behind, or like everyone in my “class” of comedy was getting A’s on the test, and I was squeaking by with a C. (High school all over again.) I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know what I needed to do to get up to that level. And here was a guy who’d been to the top of the mountain, and he was telling me to stop worrying and run my own race. He was running his own race, too. Although Dice wasn’t as hot in 2002 as he had been in the late eighties—he drew crowds, but now it was theaters, not stadiums—he was still dreaming big. He wanted to get back to Madison Square Garden. He wanted to do TV and movies. No doubt, he’d get there.
Dice loved to talk, and he could go for hours at a time, and I soaked it all up. He knew a lot more than I did about the business, and I was grateful just to listen to what he had to say. I’ve always thought that you never learn a lot when you are speaking. But if you shut up and listen, you can pick up a few things, especially from the people around you who are more successful than you and have been where you want to go.
Sometimes, though, I had to sift through his advice to make sure his suggestions were right for me.
“I got an idea for you, Caesare,” he said once.
“Great. What is it?”
“I think you need a prop.”
“A prop?”
“Something that hypes up the audience, starts them laughing even before you say a word. Gets you a free laugh.”
“Okay.”
“You should put a sock down your pants. Just go out there with this magnificent cock. You don’t acknowledge it, you don’t say a word, and you go right into your Starbucks bit or whatever. The audience will go crazy.”
“You don’t think it’ll be distracting?” I asked.
“Who cares? It’s funny.”
“It is funny. I’ll think about it. Thanks.”
I did think about it. I even rolled up a sweat sock and stared at it, wondering, Should I? As a young comedian, for a split second, I thought, Wait, does he even know what he’s talking about?! It was entirely possible he was setting me up, too.
In the end I decided not to do it. My comedy wasn’t about bulging cocks. That was Dice’s style. Even with his crowd, at his shows, I still had to be me.
MY ARRANGEMENT WITH Dice wasn’t a formal thing. If he was going on tour, he’d call me and I’d drop everything and go with him. If I didn’t hear from him in a while, I would panic a bit and look up his schedule to see if he had anything coming up. Once you play those big rooms, it’s hard to go back to hundred-seat clubs. But it wasn’t only that adrenaline rush, and the money (and bottles of Jack), that I craved. When I was on the road with Dice, I was a working comedian. I was supporting myself doing the act. That had been my dream, and with him, I was living it.
During the downtimes, I could have called him up and asked about upcoming gigs, but I felt more comfortable waiting to be asked. When the call came in, I’d instantly do the math: Five shows at $150 each was $750, a fortune for me at the time.
I can’t say that every minute with Dice was sunshine and roses, though. I learned some lessons about touring the hard way. His fans were volatile, hardcore. There were some couples, but it was primarily men. There was always a lot of aggression in the room. Before the show started, the crowd would chant, “Dice! Dice! Dice!” Into this ocean of testosterone, I’d come out and do my fifteen minutes about Ross Dress for Less. Our acts were kind of similar in tone, but our material couldn’t have been more different. Usually, the crowd would just put up with me. The occasional insult was hurled at me, but nothing too bad.
One night, at the Silver Legacy Casino in Reno, his fans were outright hostile. As soon as I came out, they started screaming, “Dice! Dice! Dice!” at scary volume. The volume of their talking never died down while I was on stage. A bunch of them started shouting at me. It was too loud to make out any specific comments, but I got the idea. It rattled me and that only made it worse. You couldn’t show any sign of weakness to his crowd. They’d smell blood in the water like sharks and attack. At that time, I didn’t have the ability to go back at them. I just got nervous, cut my set short, and walked off.
I went backstage, and when Dice saw me, he started yelling, too. “What the fuck? Why’d you go off early?” he asked. He was pissed off.
I didn’t realize it was such a big deal to cut my act by five minutes. I was thinking, That’s it. I’m done. I’m never getting asked back to this again.
After the show, we hugged it out and he said, “You cannot bail early. Whatever’s happening up there, you have to handle it. You can’t let them rattle you. You have to be in control of your own act. I’m counting on you to get the crowd warmed up and to do a certa
in amount of time. I’m in the back thinking you’re going to do fifteen. If you get off after eleven, I have to go out earlier and that fucks me up, too.”
Now that I’m a headliner, I understand exactly what he meant. I have a pre-show checklist that I have to run through before I go out there. It’s nothing elaborate. I make sure I didn’t miss a belt loop. I have my tour manager Georgie shine a flashlight on my teeth to check for pieces of food. I have a Halls to soothe my throat. But I need to go through the ritual or it can mess up my rhythm.
If you’re scheduled to do fifteen, you do fifteen. You don’t chicken out and walk off because the crowd isn’t nice to you. If thousands of rabid fans are screaming “Get off the stage!” it does take epic courage to stand your ground. You are completely alone up there (so alone). You can try to convert them, or just get through it regardless, but you have to stick it out until the bitter end.
That night, I was mad at myself for letting the crowd shake me up. They got to me. It would be years before I mastered the art of dealing with drunks, hecklers, and people who shout during the act. Any rumbling in the audience is a sign that you’re losing control. And it can spread, too. If one drunk yells “You suck!” and most of the audience likes the show, they’ll drown him out quick. But if you’re not connecting from the get-go, and someone starts yelling, the whole crowd can turn on you.
If you have a minute, Google “Bill Burr Philadelphia,” and you’ll see an example of a comedian in a hostile environment, and people booing who would not cave. He stood up there, insulting the crowd right back, counting down the minutes until his time was up. He did not buckle, and kept a furious stream of vicious, hilarious insults flowing minute after minute. In the end, he won the crowd over. You can see what a seasoned pro he was up there.
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