This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  My first road gig was at the Funny Bone in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, maybe two years after moving to Houston. The owner of the club called Danny Martinez looking for a last-minute opener for the shows that weekend, and my name was the first one that popped into Danny’s head after the other three first ones he thought of who couldn’t do it. To be fair, those other comics were better than me at the time, so I couldn’t get too bent out of shape about it. I just had to say yes, and then hit the road.

  * * *

  For an opener, not all road gigs are created equal. Your headliner can go a long way in determining the kind of experience you’re going to have and the type of crowd you’re going to face. If the headliner is popular, then you can craft some of your material around the kind of audience that likes the headliner’s style. If your headliner isn’t particularly well-known, then how he or she meshes with the culture of the crowd is the big x-factor. Before Sam was Sam or Bill Hicks was Bill Hicks, for instance, when they went out on the road to a place like Des Moines, Iowa, or Asheville, North Carolina, with their respective brands of comedy, they could kill or be killed. They could burn the house down or they could run into an absolute buzz saw of Midwestern propriety or Southern gentility. They never knew which it was going to be from show to show, so guess how they figured it out: the opening act.

  The opener is the sacrificial lamb, the official food taster for the king. If the food is good, the taster gets a warm meal. If it’s poisoned, he dies. As the opener, if you find yourself with a good crowd, it reminds you why you got into comedy in the first place. If the crowd is poison, you end up fighting for your life the whole time, groping your way through all the pearl clutchers to find whatever laughs you can.

  When Danny Martinez told me about the Baton Rouge gig, my first question after “How much does it pay?” was “Who is the headliner?”

  Danny laughed. “It’s John Fox.”

  John Fox was a legendary road warrior and an absolutely filthy comic from Chicago.1 The only thing dirtier than John’s comedy was his personal predilections. He was known as a fall-down drunk who did every drug he could get his hands on and indulged in every vice you could imagine. Sometimes he’d be so drunk onstage that people in the crowd would just stand up and walk out.

  John usually wore some kind of sandy-blond mullet and a mustache, but beyond that, his physical appearance changed depending on how long he’d been on the road between stints at home—which became Los Angeles, I believe, by the time I met him. If he was fresh and rested after soaking up some of that California sun, he looked like Captain Kangaroo’s younger alcoholic brother. If he’d been on the road awhile, he looked like late-model Chris Farley. When he was at the end of a run, he liked to joke onstage that he looked like Nick Nolte’s mug shot. If you worked with John Fox on the back half of his club tour, you were in for a rough few days, because besides performing with him, you also stayed with him at the condo provided by the comedy club.

  That is the other part of the equation that determines how well a road gig can go. Pretty much every comedy club worth its salt has a furnished two- or three-bedroom apartment where they put up the comics when they come into town. We call it the comedy condo. It sounds like a nice gesture—a cool fringe benefit of the club circuit—but really, giving young comics who are typically broke a place to stay for two or three days is what allows club owners to pay African-diamond-mine wages to openers like me. In the end, it’s a win-win for everyone, so no one complains.

  Depending on how old and how successful the club is, the comedy condo can be nice and quiet and have clean beds, it can feel like a well-worn time-share unit, or it can look like the set of a bukkake gangbang where someone forgot the mop. No matter how the place looks, it always smells like stale cigarette smoke and moldy carpet, and the refrigerator never has more than condiments, coffee creamer, and maybe leftover takeout food from the comics who came through last.

  One of the most famous rumors that swirled around the comedy world while John was on the circuit was that, no matter which city you were playing, if you were staying at the comedy condo and there was a jar of mayonnaise in the refrigerator, you should not, under any circumstances, touch, open, smell, or eat from it. Because chances are that John Fox had jerked off into it, fingered out a dollop for lube, or stuck his dick straight in and fucked it like a pocket pussy. If you liked a good old-fashioned bologna sandwich after a show or if you were one of those sick fucks who dip their french fries in mayonnaise, you best be headed to the grocery store for a fresh jar straightaway.

  Baton Rouge is a dead shot east from Houston, 275 miles down Interstate 10. I got there in no time flat and stopped in at the club to pick up a key and directions to the comedy condo. It was good to get the feel of the room too since I’d never been there before. Every room is different. Any chance you have to get comfortable in new surroundings you should take, since the more comfortable you are, the better you tend to do.

  “How’s it looking for tonight?” I asked the manager, who’d given me the key.

  “Should be good,” he said, “but no nigger jokes, hear me? Baton Rouge is good people, we don’t like all that nigger stuff here.”

  I was still too young and inexperienced to have any halfway decent race material that didn’t come straight out of a Truly Tasteless Jokes book. Even if I had something, I wasn’t about to go nuclear on race in my very first road gig. That’s how you get labeled and pigeonholed.

  “Okay,” I said, “no problem.”

  I got to the condo about an hour later after getting gas and stopping at the store to pick up some groceries. I was excited, having never been to one of these places before, and a little nervous, not knowing what to expect. I was still living in a room at my sister’s house; this was going to be like having my own giant apartment, like a grown-ass man. I just forgot about the roommate part.

  I opened the front door to the condo, and there he was on the couch. John Fox. The legendary dirty comic from Chicago, with the mullet and the mustache, butt-fucking the maid. Cocaine residue was all over the glass coffee table in front of them. John didn’t miss a beat. He motioned me right over, reached out, and shook my hand.

  “Hey, I’m John Fox, the headliner!”

  “I’m Ralphie May. I’m the opener.”

  “Nice to meet ya!”

  I didn’t catch the maid’s name. She was too busy freaking out. I thought it was because I’d walked in on them. Then I realized John’s dick was still in her butt as he turned to shake my hand. That was probably not the best feeling in the world; though I cannot attest to that on a factual basis, as I have never had a pecker parked in my poop shoot like her. John started saying some other stuff, sniffing those postnasal cocaine sniffs the whole time, but I didn’t register any of it. Having heard the rumors about John Fox from other comics who’d come through Houston, all I kept picturing was this maid with a butthole full of mayonnaise—like the dip cup in the center of a veggie platter.

  I thought I was going to vomit. Not from the sight, but from the smell. By then, the scene had made its way through the visual and auditory cortex of my brain and finally landed in my olfactory receptors. The smells were overwhelming: sex, poop, sweat, stale cigarette smoke, the remnants of industrial bleach from the last cleaning. They combined into this gas that you could almost see with your eyes, like mist. It was like bear Mace.

  There was another smell too, faint and sporadic. But when I caught wind of it, it cut right through the fog of butt-fucking. I smelled it every time John moved. It took me a second to identify, but I finally pinned it down: it was mayonnaise. Cheap mayonnaise, warmed by friction.

  Mayonnaise is the cockroach of condiments. Leave it undisturbed in a dark, cool place and it will live forever. Only when you fuck with it and contaminate it does it grow into a disgusting monstrosity. Well, I can’t think of anything more contaminating to mayonnaise in the early 1990s than using a Cajun maid’s butthole and John Fox’s dick as a mortar and pestle.

&
nbsp; That image put my gag reflex over the top. I didn’t know what else to do, so I dropped the groceries, ran upstairs to one of the bedrooms, and hid until I heard them leave. Eventually, when it was time for me to head out to the club, I had to come back downstairs. The place was still a mess. Part of me thought, Hole-eeee shit, the legend is true, this is totally insanely awesome! The other part of me, the one raised by a good Christian Southern woman, looked on disapprovingly, thinking, Well, some maid she is.

  I bumped into John years later at the Zanies in Chicago, where I was doing a run of shows. We got to chatting between shows, and I told him this story. Not only did he remember it, he remembered the maid’s name too—Vera. He was laughing so hard when he found out it was me who walked in on him because for years he’d been dining out on this story with other comics, but he never knew who it was that came in.

  “You made the right move going upstairs,” he assured me. “Vera was a nice lady, but she had a sloppy butthole.”

  * * *

  One of the big benefits of being a young Texas comic was that I could get 80 percent of the benefits of going on the road without even leaving the state. The place is so goddamn big (larger than the entire country of France, where mime passes as stand-up comedy), when you hit the clubs in every corner of the state, you end up doing a lot of traveling and working some pretty diverse rooms. The vibe in El Paso (750 miles west of Houston), for example, is different from the college vibe in Lubbock (523 miles northwest of Houston), which is different from the college vibe in Austin (150 miles west of Houston), which is different from the roughneck oil-rig vibe of Galveston, Corpus Christi, or McAllen (all south of Houston). Texas was its own world from a comedy perspective.

  One of the main bookers for clubs around Texas at that time was an older white man named C. W. Kendall, based out of the Rio Grande Valley. C.W. wasn’t a comedian or even a promoter by trade; he was a piano player who’d toured and recorded with some of the most famous acts in the history of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s and 1960s—artists like Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sonny James, Roy Orbison. My guess is that he retired and fell into a side career as a booker since, having toured for thirty or forty years and played nearly all fifty states and two dozen countries, he probably knew every room in the country that had a permanent stage and a microphone.

  C.W. was real good about getting guys work who wanted to work. He just wasn’t too good about the logistics of it all. He’d call me up and book me into a Friday spot in Nacogdoches, which is way out in East Texas, then he’d say he had another great spot in Odessa the next night if I wanted it.

  “That’s great, C.W. Who’s working the Odessa gig?” I’d ask.

  “You are” was always his answer.

  First of all, Nacogdoches is this tiny little ant fart of a city that’s damn near in Louisiana. The place is surrounded on every side by giant forests that feel like they’d suck the whole damn town into their root system if no one mowed their lawns for a month. The entire town could fit inside the old Houston Astrodome—twice. To get there, I’d have to drive 150 miles north, through the Davy Crockett National Forest. A place literally named for the king of the wild frontier! That’s what I’d have to get through for this gig—a giant swath of unsettled territory.

  Oh, but then I’d have to get right back in the car and drive more than five hundred miles west to get to Odessa in time for the start of that show Saturday night. And of course as a young comic, the money was shit. Houston to Nacogdoches to Odessa back to Houston is seventeen hours in a car, and I’d have to do all of it in three days, all for $250.

  I started calling these weekends my “triple runs”: I’d go out to a club, then over to another, then back to Houston. It was part of the game, so I rarely said no, but all that driving busted me on more than one occasion. At times I had to steal gas from station pumps just to make it to gigs.

  If C.W. sensed that you were on the fence with the spots he was offering up, he’d sweeten the pot. He’d book you gigs Thursday through Sunday and tell you that the big money was the Sunday gig, but then when you got there on Thursday, you’d find out that, whoopsie, the Sunday gig had fallen through. You ended up making ten times less than what you thought you were going to make. So little in some circumstances that, had you known, you would never have taken the gig in the first place because the cost of gas and food was more than you were making. C.W. must have counted on that, of course. That’s why he never just put lipstick on these pigs, he slapped a pair of fake tits on them for good measure.

  To C.W.’s credit, he never lied about there being a gig to play, and he worked hard to get you booked, but it was too many weekends on the road just like these that, eventually, got me into teaching defensive-driving school at the Comedy Showcase three or four days a week and selling weed on the side. Not only did I have to pay rent and car insurance, I needed money to buy gas so I could drive to all these fucking wilderness gigs that C.W. booked for me.

  * * *

  In due time, I became a road warrior just like that good ol’ mayo fucker, John Fox. I’ve done at least 250 dates per year for longer than I can remember now. The more time you spend on the road, the more times you make the full circuit of clubs around the country, not only do you become a better comedian, but you also develop a lot of good long-standing relationships with fans, with club owners and managers, with restaurateurs and radio stations. When you’re in a new city every week, each in its own way has the power to make your life just that much easier if the people like you.

  Several years after leaving Houston for Los Angeles, I was working the Funny Bone in South Bend, Indiana, for a set of shows. I’d played that room a number of times over the years, and the general manager of the club liked me. On this trip, he booked me into the nice hotel in town and got me bumped up to the Presidential Suite. It had three bedrooms, a sitting room, a giant flatscreen TV, a Jacuzzi you could do laps in, and a whole mess of those cushiony things to sit on that aren’t quite chairs but aren’t quite couches either. You know what I’m talking about? They have like one arm and no back, and they’re always pressed against a desk or something. Anyway, I was living the high life in this place. I felt like John Goodman in King Ralph when he finally realizes he can get whatever he wants.

  The first night, I get a knock on the door and the room service people bring in this giant tray of food. The GM had ordered a spread of hors d’oeuvres for me to nosh on at my leisure. Not appetizers from the shitty late-night room-service menu, mind you, straight-up hors d’oeuvres from the restaurant downstairs. Canapés for days, jack!

  The next day I got another knock on the door. I figured they were back to pick up the old tray and replace it with the lunch tray. I opened the door and it was the GM and three guys in suits. Pretty fancy for a tray pickup, if you ask me.

  “Hey, guys, how are you?” I said.

  “Mr. May, these are agents from the Secret Service,” the GM said. “They’re here to do an advance sweep.”

  “For what?”

  “We’re with the vice president’s detail,” one of the Secret Service agents said. “There’s a chance Vice President Cheney may need to stay here tonight, so we need to get you off this floor.”

  I looked at the GM and the three agents and said, “Uh, no.” Then I closed the door. I could hear the GM laughing through the door as one of the agents started banging on the door again. I had half a mind to bring over the empty food tray and hand it to the agent through a crack in the door, but I knew that would probably be a bridge too far, so I just opened the door instead.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “Sir, maybe you don’t understand me,” the agent began. “The vice president of the United States of America is going to stay here tonight. I’m going to have to ask you to vacate this suite.” This dude had his serious-agent face on, for sure.

  “No.”

  “Why?” the agent said.

  “It says clearly on th
e door PRESIDENTIAL SUITE, not VICE-PRESIDENTIAL SUITE.” Then I shut the door again, which only pissed off the agent even more. He was banging on the door even harder this time, so I opened it right away.

  “Sir, are you going to tell the vice president of the United States of America that he can’t sleep here?” the agent asked, totally perplexed.

  “No, you are.” I shut the door again.

  I could hear the GM crying laughing out in the hallway. I could also hear him say something to the agents in a hushed voice, after which he knocked on the door instead of the agent.

  “Ralphie, let me in real fast.” I let the GM in and he said, “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “Man, I’ve got weed in here. I can’t be having those motherfuckers around me, all right?”

  “Okay, grab all your weed and put it in one of your bags and bring it with you. I’ll have housekeeping come in to clean the place real well, then they’ll bring the bomb-sniffing dogs in, and if everything is clear, you’ll be back here in your room by the time you get back from the club tonight.”

  So I packed up all my shit, went to a movie, went to dinner, did two shows at the Funny Bone, then came back to the hotel. Doing two shows when you’re the headliner takes a lot out of you, or at least it’s always taken a lot out of me. When you’re a big boy like me, you use up a lot of energy standing onstage, focusing your mind, reacting to the crowd around you. Plus, I go out in the lobby after every show and take pictures and sign shit. It’s exhausting. These shows were no different, so when I arrived at the hotel, I had completely forgotten about the Secret Service agents I’d run afoul of earlier in the day.

  Imagine my surprise when I came upon the hotel ringed with cop cars, three cars deep, all the way around. The place was on lockdown. I had to show my driver’s license just to get into the building. I had to go through a metal detector to get up to my hotel room.