by Ralphie May
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Table of Contents
About the Authors
Copyright Page
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my family most of all, for putting up with me. My babies, April and August, this book is for you. The Comedy Showcase. All the comics along the way that I’ve met—the friends and not so friendly. Jamie Masada, JP Williams, Comedy Central, Netflix, UTA, CAA, WME, and Levity Entertainment Group. Andrew and Brian Dorfman, and Aaron Distler—the Protector of Good and Defender Against All Evil. Jay Mohr, Jeff Ross, Doug Stanhope, and Joey Diaz. Thank you to the clubs, the theaters, and the promoters. The DJs—specifically, John Holmberg, Mike Calta, Paul Castronovo, and Mancow. Lahna Turner. Mitzi Shore and the Comedy Store. The Laugh Factory and the Improv. Bob Read and Ross Mark at The Tonight Show and, of course, Mr. Leno and Jimmy Kimmel. Also, thanks to Nils and Anthony Mattero for putting up with my shit, and Kevin Currie, who dove in and researched everything I’ve ever done or recorded to help put this book together.
PART 1
ARKANSAS: 1977–1990
1.
MY MOM KILLED SANTA CLAUS WITH A PAIR OF SHOES
Comedians come in all shapes and sizes. We have different backgrounds and different upbringings, but the one thing we have in common is that we are all skeptics. None of us take as gospel what we are told by teachers, parents, employers, politicians, media, anyone in a position of power. We approach all of it with a healthy dose of caution—actually, cynicism—including when it comes from the audience. Especially if the audience is shitty.
This attitude touches every part of life. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Milk does a body good. Pork is the other white meat. Every time I see a slogan like those, my first thoughts are “Really? Says who? How do I know? Which lobbying group paid for you to say that?” And sure enough, it’s always some organization with a name like Cereal Producers of America or American Dairy Council or America’s Greatest Pig Fuckers.
I’m not saying that I am Neo from The Matrix after that scene when Morpheus gives him the option to take the blue pill and return to his normal life or take the red pill and fall down the rabbit hole to see what the world is really like. But stand-up comedy is the only profession I can think of where everyone involved has chosen the red pill. You can’t really even get in the game until that pill has made its way through your system and replaced your entire blood supply; because comedy, if it’s any good, is about trying to see the world as it truly is. It’s about spotting the bullshit and the lies, then seeing behind them at what is really there. It’s about asking Why? And then making fun of whatever the answer is.
This isn’t a natural way to live your life, with the constant need to ask why. The truth is painful. If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that most people will do anything to avoid pain (including causing themselves a lot more of it in the long run). I’m a fat guy with a Southern accent who grew up poor, now living in Los Angeles who grew up poor. How long do you reckon a fella like me might want to hold on to the belief that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”? Avoiding the pain of those hard truths is why some comedians come to the red pill (and therefore, comedy) later than others. And once they do, they gulp it down and chase it like a drug. They don’t just swallow it, they crush it up on the tray table and snort it like the plane is going down.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the comics we’ve lost to drugs and suicide over the years started in comedy in their twenties, while those of us who started in our teens or were obsessed with comedy growing up are still kicking. Those comics who got started when they were older endured more pain under delusions for longer than we did. They had bought into the system more, and it made the truth on the other side of the red pill harder to deal with. That extra experience gave them more reasons to regret their choices, while we didn’t have to choose the red pill at all—it was chosen for us.
We have known our whole lives that pretty much everything we’re told is total bullshit. Authority figures sounded like frauds, rules were totally pointless, and doing things because “that’s the way you’re supposed to” drove us crazy. We rebelled for spite and because we enjoyed seeing the look on their faces. We’d get slapped with labels like depressive or antisocial or problem kid. When we asked “Why?” too often, we’d be told “Because I said so” by parents and guidance counselors who were popping blue pills like blueberry Tic Tacs.
Most of us can trace our awareness of the real reality to some kind of traumatic event in our childhood that ripped away our innocence—that shoved the red pill right down our fucking throats.
It happened to me when I was eight years old.
The year was 1980. The world was in flux. The Iranian Revolution had gone down the year before, and a bunch of students had taken fifty-two Americans hostage. Global oil production plummeted, and gas prices more than doubled, creating an energy crisis across the country. We were boycotting the Summer Olympics in Moscow that year too because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan like a bunch of idiots, and Ronnie Reagan was kicking Jimmy Carter’s dick in the dirt up and down the campaign trail as a result.
Despite all that chaos, life in the May household hadn’t changed much. We were still poor, my mom was still working two jobs, and I was still a kid with no other responsibility besides being a kid. We lived in the little town of Clarksville, Arkansas, about an hour and a half southeast of Fayetteville, where the university is located. My mom was born and raised in Clarksville. I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but we moved to Clarksville when I was five years old, so really, Clarksville is my hometown too.
That summer I didn’t do anything different from what I did any other summer growing up. I rode my bike around town with my friends, we made up games, we played in the woods along the banks of the Arkansas River, getting filthy, coming home when the sun went down. It was like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, except with BMX bikes and nobody had any money to pay me to paint their fence. And just like good ol’ Tom, most days you couldn’t tell where the tan skin ended and the dirty skin began on any of us. No one cared. That’s what kids were supposed to do.
Today we lube up our kids with Purell and carry them around in an invisible BabyBjörn, but back then summer was one long unsupervised playdate. Except for dinner or trips to the water park that required a car, we didn’t see our parents for days at a time. They were generally useless until the week before Labor Day, when it was time to load up on school supplies and figure out how you were going to come correct in the one area more important to a child than the freedom of youth: pimp-ass new school shoes.
* * *
Every kid has to start the school year with a new pair of shoes. It’s a civil right. It’s a tradition. As parents, we can’t ask our kids to roll into their new classroom on the first day of school wearing some busted-out sneakers from the previous year with those little thingies on the ends of the laces all crac
ked and frayed. We sure as shit can’t ask them to wear their church shoes to make a good impression on the teachers—not unless we want their classmates to put those shoes in a trash can, with our kid still in them. They have to be on point the first day, with their shoelaces tight and white, just like their first girlfriend. (I’m kidding, they can also be Velcro.)
As a kid, this is easier said than done when you are poorer than the dirt you rolled around in all summer. First you have to be smart, because your feet are still growing. You have to get a pair that’s at least a half size bigger, otherwise you’ll be short-toeing it all spring. Then you need to be strategic. Your parents are obviously going to push you down-market to a nonpremium brand, but you can’t let them make you go straight generic because then everyone will know you’re a charity case. This limits your options and is where things get tricky. Cheaper brands try to use flashy colors and gimmicky designs to imitate the quality of the premium brands. It’s easy to fall for this ploy. More than a few kids I knew came home with the neon-green plastic hightops with blinking lights in the soles. Some of them pulled it off. Others, who lacked the appropriate swagger, spent the next nine months enduring enough torment to put anyone into psychotherapy. The safest play for a poor kid in the new-shoe game is to find something understated, nondescript, and clean. Shoes that no one will notice, good or bad.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I started third grade in the fall of 1980, but I would learn it the hard way by the time the year was over.
A week before the first day of school, my mom sent me to Mr. Brown’s shoe store to get my new pair for the year. We didn’t have much money, but Mr. Brown and my mom grew up together, so he let her have a credit account that she could pay off over time. As the father of two young kids, I recognize how crazy that might sound to anyone born after 1990 or so. I just don’t know what the craziest part actually is: that there aren’t local shoe stores anymore, that lines of store credit still existed in 1980, or that a responsible parent would send an eight-year-old out to do his own shopping. Regardless, my budget was $35.
As an eight-year-old, I had no idea what $35 meant. What kind of shoes could I get with that? How much coolness could I buy? Michael Jordan was still in high school and the Air Force 1s were still a couple years away, so Nike wasn’t on my radar screen. Adidas and Puma were doing some cool stuff. Reebok too. There was always Converse. As I rode my bike downtown to Mr. Brown’s, I felt like I had a lot of options. Then, as I turned across Cherry Street and pulled up in front of the store, all those options disappeared from my consciousness.
There, staring back at me from the other side of the storefront window, sat the most epic shoes my little eight-year-old eyes had ever seen: burgundy-on-burgundy, velvet-on-suede KangaROOS with two-strap Velcro and a zipper pocket on the side. Hotness, personified. I was transfixed. I dropped my bike, marched inside, pointed to the window display, and announced to the entire store, “Those! I want those!”
I was never a lucky kid, but this one time the spirits aligned for me. Mr. Brown not only had a pair in the back that was a half size up, but the shoes were in my price range too.
“How much money are they, Mr. Brown?”
“Don’t worry, son, you have enough.” My mom had called ahead to give Mr. Brown a heads-up and let him know my budgetary constraints. She wasn’t worried that I would try to pull a fast one on Mr. Brown, she just didn’t want me to get my hopes up, so she made sure Mr. Brown was prepared to steer me toward the more reasonable options if my eyes got bigger than my stomach. Maybe that’s how the ROOS made it into the front-window display in the first place. They were a deliberate diversionary tactic to draw my attention away from the expensive shoes. I can’t be sure. All I do know is that when Mr. Brown slid those shoes on my feet and I stood up in them for the first time, I felt like Fonzie pulling on his leather jacket. They were velvet-plated coolness.
The first day of school was a few days later. But it wasn’t just the first day of third grade; it was also our first day at a brand-new elementary school. In God’s continuing attempts to prevent Arkansas from learning how to read, the old elementary school had been blown away by a tornado the year before. In a completely new environment, where lunch tables and benches and spots on the playground had not already been claimed by hardened and grizzled fifth graders, the social stakes were especially high.
All those times I had peed my pants or cried like a little girl or finished last in a race could be erased. This is no small thing. This was my chance at “cool.” The reputation you create for yourself in elementary school sticks with you until you get pubes in middle school. That’s when you start making a name for yourself in entirely new ways; when the stuff you can’t stop from coming out of your pee hole changes from yellow to white and stinky to sticky. If you’re a girl, it’s a little different. Your reputation starts to hinge not on what comes out of your pee hole, but what (or who) goes into it.
I was as aware of all these social pressures as an eight-year-old could be, and I handled it by treating my new shoes like they were made of glass until school started. I wouldn’t put them on. I just stared at them and touched them like an antique book that might crumble into dust if I yanked the Velcro too hard. I visualized every detail of what the first day of school was going to look like. I was like that crippled Stark kid from Game of Thrones who has visions every time he touches a weirwood tree.
What actually happened was better than anything my third-grade imagination could create. Full of confidence, I walked into this new school like John Travolta carrying that can of paint in the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. The opening song played in my head like it was my own theme song:
Music loud and women warm,
I’ve been kicked around
Since I was born
Kids from every grade level stopped and stared. Every day for a month I would go up to my friends for the high-five/low-five combo with that song playing on a loop. I would do a bunch of Electric Slide run-stops on the linoleum floor of the hallways, pointing down at my shoes as I hit the brakes and made the screeching sound effect with my mouth. Sitting in class, I’d quick-pull the zipper back and forth like a hip-hop DJ scratching a record. I’d play with the Velcro straps and lean over nonchalantly to whoever was sitting next to me: “Velcro. NASA invented it. That’s space stuff, betchu didn’t know nothin’ ’bout that, huh?” And they’d be, like, “Whoa, oh my goodness, you’re so cool, will you be my friend forever?” Everybody loved my shoes and told me all the time how awesome they were. I was boy king of third grade. Kiss the zipper, bitches!
The burgundy ROOS were my own ruby-red slippers. Dorothy clicked her heels and got to go home. I did a couple run-stops and I got to make out with third- and fourth-grade girls. A few zipper pulls and I even got a couple of fifth-grade girls to touch my wiener. I was a smooth operator, playing girls against each other, movin’ and shakin’. These shoes were so pimp Kanga still sells the exact same shoes in kid sizes, like a Lil Baby Baller starter kit.
In the thirty-five years since I got those shoes from Mr. Brown, I have shared the stage with legends, been nominated for an Emmy, made millions of dollars, been certified four times platinum, and done three Netflix specials. And still, that first month in the burgundy ROOS was the coolest I’ve ever felt in my entire life. When I’m going through a rough patch or feeling down about myself, I don’t think about the fame and the fortune to pick myself up, I think about the sound of Velcro straps and wicked run-stops in an elementary-school hallway.
* * *
Two weeks after Halloween, all those run-stops caught up with me. The foam soles began to rip away from the fabric body of the shoes. The tearing started at the toes, where the room from being a half size larger gave my feet space to jam into the seam with extra force. The separation grew along the seam, like a fault line, until I was basically wearing high-top flip-flops. It was miserable. I tried gluing them back together, but that lasted for exactly one run-stop. They
blew out again like a retread tire on a tractor trailer and I nearly face-planted into a water fountain. I went from Electric Slide to Electric Slip & Fall. So glue was out.
I tried duct tape next. Duct tape is the penicillin and Ctrl+Alt+Del of redneck DIY home repair. It’s not pretty, it might ultimately do more harm than good, but in the interim by golly those silver sticky strips are going to hold everything together. The duct tape lasted until morning recess my first day wearing it. Not because it wasn’t holding, but because everyone started calling me Robot Feet and Franken-Fatty. It was humiliating. All my coolness evaporated just as quickly as I had earned it. I was Icarus, and I had run-stopped too close to the sun.
I was not equipped to handle such a violent fall from grace. I needed someone to blame. It couldn’t be my fault, I was just a kid. Knowing nothing of globalization and the poor quality of sweatshop labor, I turned my attention to the shoe store. They’d taken advantage of a poor child by putting these shiny, shitty shoes right there in the window, priced to sell. What was I supposed to do, not buy them? Eight-year-olds don’t have that kind of self-control. Hell, eighteen-year-olds don’t have it either. It was Mr. Brown’s job to steer me in the right direction. Instead, he had taken me like a grifter.
What I really wanted to do was take the shoes back to the store and tell Mr. Brown, “These here shoes are pieces of shit and I want my mama’s money back and a new pair of Adidas for my trouble,” then maybe take a steaming shit in the middle of his sales floor. But I couldn’t do that. Southern politeness would not have allowed me to come at Mr. Brown this way. Plus, I didn’t have to poop and I’d worn my ROOS into the ground. I’d abused them like a Filipino maid. Covering them in duct tape, I think, was my biggest mistake. Suede does not mix well with duct tape. It’s like jerking off with honey. It works for a second, but the longer you keep it on there, the more likely that soft smooth surface ends up ripped and rough.