by Ralphie May
My mom would never say this, but I’m sure the last thing she wanted was to come to a brand-new town to get back into the teaching game for the first time in forever, only to drag a big, fat dummy along with her. Fortunately for both of us, standardized tests like these district placement exams always came easy to me. Which is why I wasn’t at all surprised when I tested out as “gifted and talented” in mathematics, science, reading, and history. What surprised me was that this designation actually got me something good besides just being the first bit of official evidence I’d ever had that I was smart.
And I have S&H Green Stamps to thank for it.
* * *
S&H Green Stamps were stamps you could collect at the supermarket or the department store as rewards for shopping there, then redeem them for a wide array of premium housewares from the S&H Green Stamps catalog. They were one of the first retail loyalty programs in the country—like airline miles except for stuff that breaks real easy. My mama’s mama didn’t raise no fool, though. Once my mama filled up one of her Quick Saver Books, she skipped past the pages in the catalog filled with flammable bedroom furnishings and children’s toys covered in lead paint and went right to the page with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Her babies were gonna know some shit.
For as long as I can remember, we had a patchwork collection of encyclopedia volumes in our house. Most people buy all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica together, as a set. I understand that. But when you’re poor and you’re picking up volumes on the back of your weekly grocery bill, not only do you not have that luxury, you also need to be strategic. That meant those two index volumes could fuck right off. If you don’t know how to spell the thing you want to know about, you don’t need an encyclopedia, you need a dictionary. From there it was all about prioritizing the letters. A through D were no-brainers, and I was a monster at those. I’d read those volumes cover to cover several times over by the time we got to Winslow. All of the Wheel of Fortune bonus-round letters were must-haves: R S T L N E. If the producers saw fit to give them to you right off the bat, you had to know there were some good nuggets in those letters. Ironically, I and Q never made the cut. Not until I was in my late twenties, stoned off my ass watching White Men Can’t Jump for the first time, did I learn from Rosie Perez that a quince is a fruit. Going into high school, I was pretty well covered up to N, then there was a little gap before I found my groove again with R, S, T, and W. Uranus, venereal disease, xenophobia, and yellow fever would have to wait until I made my own money. I didn’t know what a zygote was until I actually made one. My wife and I named it April.
Our encyclopedia set was a godsend. It started small when I was young and slowly grew over the years, like knowledge kudzu that I would wrap myself in every chance I had. Reading about aardvarks and the kingdom of Babylon was better than antagonizing my brother, Winston, and getting beat on, I’ll tell you what. And the more I read, the more I wanted to know.
The reading and the self-education (called autodidactism—I told you, I dominated volume A) finally paid off the summer after my junior year in Winslow, when I was accepted into the beginning-scholars program at the University of Arkansas. If my “gifted and talented” designation by the school district was my first bit of proof that I was smart, my acceptance into the beginning-scholars program was my first bit of evidence that I was capable of a lot more than I thought.
The goal of the program was to select gifted high school kids from all over the area and give them an opportunity to take real college classes for actual college credit. We’d get to live on campus, in Hotz Hall, have legitimate Razorback student IDs, and take classes with other college students. It was the first time in my life that school didn’t feel like school; it felt like learning. It made me want to study and do well, which I did.
The best part of the program, though, was that I made friends with some of the college kids in one of my classes. I’ve always been kind of an old soul, and I’ve always been funny. Those two qualities are a huge advantage when you’re trying to get in with an older crowd, male or female. Want to fuck a cougar? Take her out to dinner and tell her you like to handwrite letters and that your favorite Golden Girls character is Blanche. You’ll be coming before the check does.
My new friends brought me into their group by inviting me to be a part of their informal study group. We met once a week at the Shakey’s along Highway 71 Business to mow down large pizzas and drain pitchers of ice-cold beer. We were all underage, but nobody gave a shit back then. This was 1989, and the federal minimum drinking age of twenty-one was still pretty new, so a lot of servers and business owners either forgot or looked the other way, especially when things got busy. Plus, AIDS was the big deal in those days, not underage drinking, so as long as we weren’t gettin’ all gay with each other while we knocked back a few pitchers of Budweiser, those good ol’ boys could give two shits.
The impulse to get twisted with the rest of the group was strong. If this were Clarksville, I would probably have been leading the charge. But I recognized that it was a privilege to have the respect of older friends and to be in this scholars program, so I didn’t want to do anything to screw that up. Instead I stuck to getting fucked-up on big red cups of soda. I thank my stars every day that I didn’t drink with those guys, because if I had, there is a good chance I would have totally blown the opportunity that changed my life.
* * *
Late in the summer before my senior year, our go-to Shakey’s on Highway 71 hosted a multiround open-mic competition sponsored by the local radio station KHOG for the opportunity to open for Sam Kinison on the upcoming Fayetteville stop of his college tour. When you’re a young comic, opening for any headliner out on the road is a huge deal, but in 1989 there was no more popular working comic than Sam Kinison. He was a legend, a force of nature. Opening for him would be like doing five minutes on the hill above the Sea of Galilee before bringing Jesus out to deliver the Sermon on the Mount.
Here’s the thing: at the time I knew almost none of that about Sam, and I had no concrete designs on pursuing stand-up as a career. So when my study group walked into Shakey’s one last time before I went back to normal high school, and there were sign-ups for an open mic, all any of us saw was the $50 cash prize and complimentary food and drinks for the winner and his guests. Anyone who went to college or moved out after high school knows that free pizza and beer when you’re eighteen and broke is like finding a parka in the dead of winter with a $100 bill in the pocket. It’s a damn miracle. My friends immediately signed me up. Why me? I was the funny one of the group. Simple as that. What they didn’t know was that this was not my first rodeo.
When I was twelve years old, I told some jokes as part of the closing-night talent show at a Methodist youth retreat in Mobile, Alabama. This was one of those sleepaway camps where parents dump their kids during the summer to teach them about the evil of all the sins their parents were about to commit with three kid-free weeks on their hands. Most campers took their counselors suggestions when it came time to choose the talent they wanted to show. They sang hymns or played instruments or did a choreographed dance routine to some shitty Christian rock song, and they all got the same amount of phony applause from the counselors whose ideas they’d borrowed. It was one of those places where the counselors were bigger dorks than the campers, because the campers were there against their will at the command of their parents, and the counselors were there by choice, because they wanted to be of service to the Lord instead of their loins. Even at twelve years old I knew if I was going to have any chance of winning this talent show or not dying of boredom before it ended, I’d have to take a different path and do the only thing I’d ever been complimented for: being funny.
Five years later, and I was in the same exact position. After three decades in comedy, so much about this evening is a blur, but I will never forget the one joke that killed. It was about how Vanna White is the dumbest person on television because she basically cohosts a game of hangman, sh
e knows what the words are, and she still needs them to light up the letters for her so she knows which ones to turn. What’s funniest to me about this joke today isn’t that it was some kind of inspired comedic genius, it’s that things have only gotten worse for Vanna. They still light up the letters for her, except now she doesn’t even need to turn the letters! All she has to do is touch them and they appear. Dumb and lazy is no way to go through life, Vanna. But you did Playboy when I was fifteen, so I forgive you.
I won the first round of the open-mic competition on the back of my Vanna White joke. Ironically, the free food and $50 cash prize would be a close approximation to my daily wages for the next ten years.
Shakey’s had video games in the back, so after the results were announced and the prizes were distributed, my friends and I hung around for a while talking, laughing, and blowing through my prize money on the arcade games. It was just another fun late-summer night.
As I got ready to go, I noticed a group of college girls at another table. Some of them were cute. Not just late-night Shakey’s cute either. These girls were light-of-day, show-your-friends cute. And they were looking our way. Only one of them was unattractive, so of course I was her favorite. The realization that she was my only shot to score was my cue to leave.
I said good-bye to my buddies and exited out the back of the restaurant where I’d parked the gutless Cutlass. I didn’t even get to the driver’s-side door before she made her move.
“You were so great.”
“Thanks.”
“I totally laughed a lot.”
I opened my door.
“Is that your car?”
If I were older and more experienced I would have known that a question that fucking stupid really meant “Is your penis ready for touching?” Instead I said, “Uh-huh.”
“Can I sit in there with you?”
“Umm, sure.”
Once we got in the car, it took her all of two seconds to open up my pants and start blowing me. I didn’t even have a chance to turn over the engine or turn on the tape deck to distract her from the overflowing Dumpster we were parked next to. It didn’t matter. She was laser focused and I wouldn’t have heard the music anyway. My mind was elsewhere—on my immediate past and my long-term future.
In the previous two hours, I’d made fifty bucks, ate a bunch of free food, and now I was getting a blow job from a girl I’d never met. (A groupie, I guess you’d call her.) If I could get all that just for telling a few jokes, what was the point of going to college? Isn’t that the whole reason people go to college in the first place? I thought I just stumbled onto a better way. I mean, no offense to higher education, but no one ever sucked my dick for getting straight A’s or acing a test, so what good are you to me?
I realized right there onstage, after my first big laugh with the Vanna White joke, that everything in my life had felt wrong until right then. It just clicked. It was an amazing realization. For a few moments at the Shakey’s Pizza on Highway 71 Business, I was a king. My path forward was set from that moment on. There was zero chance that I would ever go to college.
* * *
I continued to fly high in the two weeks between my initial victory and the finals. I’d found my calling. I’d also made a much grander realization: I didn’t need to listen to anyone or anything that didn’t relate directly to my future in stand-up comedy. Why would I? Out of respect? Do you think any of those people would have respected my choice to pursue comedy?
One of my first decisions, with the blessing of my mom, was to move back to Clarksville to finish out high school. Winslow was great, but with a class that small, you can’t avoid scrutiny. If I was going to coast through my last year without getting kicked out for truancy, disrespect, or just plain not giving a fuck, I needed to go back to a much-bigger school, with my old group of friends, and teachers who had different (i.e., lower) expectations for me. If a high school could pass someone into college like Dexter Manley, who was functionally illiterate, so he could one day become a famous football player, surely a smart kid like me could find a way to game the system and get the fuck out of there.
Shortly after my first victory at Shakey’s, I moved in with Winston in our old house in Clarksville while my mom stayed up in Fayetteville working at Winslow High. Like any red-blooded guy in his midtwenties intent on tearing the world a new asshole, Winston was in and out, gone for days at a time. And like any high school senior with basically unlimited freedom, I followed right in his footsteps. It didn’t take long for the house to become equal parts ashtray, recycle bin, flophouse, and toilet. In many ways, our house perfectly reflected my attitude toward school and would be a microcosm of my living situation as a stand-up comic before really making it: me, a guy several years older who was going nowhere and living like a slob, and no one with enough interest to clean up or keep the refrigerator full.
A lot can change when you’re gone for a year. It’s out of sight, out of mind. So when I told my Clarksville friends what had happened over in Fayetteville and that I had the finals coming up that Friday, none of them believed me. They were like those dudes who believe the earth is flat because they can’t see the roundness with their own eyes. They hadn’t seen me perform, so it must not be real. I didn’t care. Let those small-town, small-minded fucks doubt me. It’s their loss.
When Friday came, I was a nervous wreck. After school, I went home and worked on my jokes in the mirror. I had what I thought were four or five good ones, with legitimate setups and punch lines, but I had no earthly idea if they were any good. None of my friends believed me, so I didn’t get to use them as an audience. This was totally untested material. I tried not to think about it too much. To ease my nerves, I beat off like three times, then hopped in the Cutlass and drove as slowly as I could to Fayetteville without getting stopped by state troopers or being late.
When I pulled into the Shakey’s parking lot, a big shiny black limo was parked out front. Holy shit, that’s THE limo. Somehow in my drive over, I’d completely spaced out on how Sam Kinison and his brother Bill were going to be in the audience at Shakey’s to help judge the contest and would then immediately take the winner in their limo to the show on campus only an hour later.
Thank God I’d beat off before I left, otherwise the sight of that limo might have made me nut all over my steering column. It might also have cost me the victory, because my calmness on the microphone combined with my Vanna joke as the opener helped seal the deal. I was the unanimous winner.
* * *
The ride over to the University Ballroom on the campus of the University of Arkansas was the first part of one of the most transformative experiences of my life. If my accident was a kind of fork in the road for aspects of my personal life, opening for Sam was a springboard for my professional life. It gave me a glimpse at what was possible.
It’s hard to describe Sam Kinison to people who weren’t aware of him when he was still around, because he was just too complicated of a man. But for the sake of this book, what I can say is that Sam’s limousine was a perfect reflection of Sam: black on black, full disco interior, cocaine on the bar, and rock ’n’ roll cranked to eleven. Which is to say, to a kid from Clarksville who’d never ridden in a limo, it didn’t feel like real life. And when Sam started talking to me, it all just felt like a dream.
“Hey, kid, are you nervous?” Sam asked.
I was pretty confident I had my material down since I’d practiced in the mirror, nailed it onstage, and beaten off three times. “No, sir. I think I have my jokes pretty well memorized.”
Sam smirked. “Kid, there’s gonna be thirty-five hundred people there, and none of them paid to see you.”
“Okay, I’m a little nervous.”
Sam knew what I would learn over the next God knows how many years. Memorization is one of the least important parts of comedy. It’s good to be able to do, but if you have no charisma or a bad delivery, then all you get from knowing your lines is that the audience knows clearly how muc
h you suck. I started to get visibly nervous, swaying back and forth on the side bench and sliding down the leather every time the driver went up or down a hill. It was a strange thing for Sam to have said, considering how young and wide-eyed I was. I think he could see how he’d rattled me and felt bad for trying to punk me like that.
To make up for it, he started asking me about my routine. “So run me through your set.”
Set?! I had, like, six jokes. I didn’t have a set. I hemmed and hawed, hoping someone might interject or shove cocaine in front of him.
“You got a closer, at least?”
“What’s a closer?”
“It’s a big joke to end your set with.”
In hindsight I did have a big joke to end my set on a high note, but at the time I didn’t know it.
“Nope, I don’t got one of those.”
“Okay, here’s one of my old ones you can use.”
I was all ears. This was like private office hours with a professor of comedy.
“In case you get into any trouble at all, like if one of your last jokes isn’t hitting, what you do is you just start screaming at the audience and cussing them out. The more you scream and cuss, the more they’ll love you. Then when you’re done, intro me real fast, drop the mic, and walk off. These are my fans, they’ll die.”
“Really?”
Sam assured me that it would work.
When we got to the venue, it was already full. It was my first time experiencing the buzz that hangs in the air when thirty-five hundred people are in a room to watch a show that’s just about to start. I haven’t done a lot of different types of drugs in my life—mostly just weed and alcohol and acid and ecstasy—but the addictive, intoxicating feel from that buzz is why I imagine so many guys like Sam did coke (to chase the high), then started doing heroin (to numb themselves from the crash).