by Ralphie May
“What’s your name?” asked a state trooper manning a clipboard with the hotel’s guest list on it.
“My name’s Ralphie May.”
The statie’s face lit up. “Oh, man, that’s him!” he shouted to the other troopers in the lobby. They all rushed over.
“Hey, did you tell the vice president to fuck off?” one of them asked.
“No, but I did tell that asshole from the Secret Service to go tell him to fuck off.”
All the staties cracked up. They were high-fiving each other, jumping on their radios, letting the other guys out in the ring of patrol cars know what was going on in here. I was getting so swept up in the energy of the scene that I went in for a high five myself. When I did, when I raised my hand up above my head, a fat joint that someone had given me after the last show fell out of my shirt pocket onto the ground. I thought I was toast, but the staties circled the wagon around me so no one else could see.
“Look, don’t smoke it, just put it away,” one of the staties said. “Those Secret Service guys are looking for any reason to bust you.”
“Will do.” I scooped it up, hopped on the elevator to the top floor, and went to sleep in my presidential suite.
When I woke up the next morning, they were all gone. There wasn’t a trace of them anywhere, like it was all a dream. Which is fitting when you think about life on the road for a stand-up comedian. It’s a great gig that is an essential part of the path to achieving your professional hopes and dreams. It’s also an experience that could easily turn into a nightmare if you don’t figure out what you’re doing, if you don’t know how the world works, and if you don’t find your place in it. The way you do that is by answering the door every time opportunity knocks. Even if that opportunity’s name is Dick. And even if that Dick has a Cheney stuck on the end of it. Or worse, a butthole filled with mayonnaise.
9.
THE CHANNELVIEW HELL GIG
I became a headliner fairly quickly, all things considered. Doing spots all over town for a couple years, getting out on the road as soon as clubs would have me, and having a rabbi like Sam Kinison vouching for me early on gave me confidence that I could pull together a solid forty-five-minute headlining set, and it gave club owners and bookers confidence that I could topline a show that people would actually pay money to see.
Just as no two road gigs are the same for an opener, headlining gigs can be a little fraught when you first start getting them. What you have to remember is that all headlining means is that you are the main act, who comes out last, closes the show, and does the most time. What it doesn’t mean is that all your shows are now at the biggest and best clubs in the country with the most sophisticated and appreciative audiences. Eventually it can mean that if you stick with comedy long enough, but initially your headlining gigs are a total crapshoot.
Sometimes they’re just plain crap. Whether it was a half-empty lodge in the Catskills in 1956 or a corporate gig full of anxious tech nerds in San Jose in 2016, this has always been the case as long as there has been stand-up comedy. It was especially true in the nineties, however, when stand-up was at a peak and every bar, club, café, and American Legion hall wanted to have its own comedy night. These venues had interest and they usually had customers, they just didn’t have any money. Or if they did, they didn’t have the desire to part with enough of it to draw A-list comics like Sam or Bill or Thea. So what they did was call anyone they could—club owners, other comics, venue bookers like C.W.—and fished down the comedy food chain for a headliner until someone either old and desperate or young and hungry (like me) bit.
My buddy “Spooky” Dick Williams was one of the guys who these second- and third-tier venues would call. Dick was fucking funny, but Lord Jesus did he have a dark sense of humor. That’s not why we called him Spooky, though. He got that name because he was hairy and he looked kind of like a short werewolf. Plus he had crossed eyes that sat a little too close together on his face, but not so close that they were scary. Just a little spooky. It was a very Charles Manson–y look, minus the charisma and the swastika on the forehead.
Anyway, one time Spooky Dick booked me a gig headlining at a Holiday Inn in Channelview, Texas. If you’re not familiar with Channelview (and who is?), it’s a rough part of the Houston metro area that is also home to a lot of oil production. It’s not the kind of place that people go to see comedy. It’s the kind of place you end up against your will and sometimes comedy breaks out.
Three comics were on the bill for this Channelview gig. I was the headliner, a short-haired redhead named Jody Ferdig was the feature act, and a Mexican fella named Anthony Andrews was the opener. I shit you not, that was his real name: Anthony Andrews. I hadn’t seen something that brown named something so white since the last time I went to a Cracker Barrel.
The room we were playing had a bar and a dance floor with a big Lone Star flag painted in the middle of it. Tables and chairs were arranged around the room, and a couple of waitresses were busy delivering a nonstop stream of drinks to the guests. The guests broke down Law & Order style—into two separate yet equally important groups: Mexicans on one side and Dutchmen on the other. The Dutch guys were there on business from Shell, which is a Netherlands-based petroleum company. The Mexicans were there because this is Texas. The Mexican guys were being totally cool. The Dutch guys had been drinking heavily since 6:00 p.m. and were superloud. Nobody working there wanted to settle them down, though, because they all looked like the henchmen from Die Hard.
So Anthony goes up onstage to get the show started and completely eats a dick. He could not have done any worse if he had literally eaten his own penis with a knife and fork right there in front of everyone. Jody goes up next, and she doesn’t eat a dick right away, but the Dutch guys heckle her so much that they ruin every one of her punch lines—for thirty-five straight minutes.
Part of becoming a good comedian is learning how to control a crowd. Shutting down a single heckler who thinks he is part of the show is one thing; and most comics with a little bit of experience can do that. Getting a whole room of drunk people to turn their attention your way and focus is something else entirely. At the time, Anthony and Jody couldn’t do it.
Now it’s my turn to give it a try. I go up there, take the mic off the stand, wait a couple beats for a lull in the noise, and go right in at them.
“Listen up! If all you Hans and Franz motherfuckers are gonna do is heckle all night, then you can save us all some time and just get the fuck out!”
There was a brief record-scratch moment, and then one of the waitresses rushed to the front of the stage trying to read me the riot act before she was even within earshot:
“Hey, fuck you, pal. They’re way more important than you are, asshole!”
I did not take it well. First of all, if she thought any of these Euros were going to tip her for shit, she had another think coming. Second, it’s not like we just popped in to the Channelview Holiday Inn on a whim and decided to do ninety minutes of topical material for shits and giggles. Someone in this godforsaken place hired us to come here and tell jokes to these ungrateful motherfuckers.
This waitress had no flex. She came right back at me, which only pissed me off further. I’m not proud of what happened next, but there may have been some derogatory utterances directed at her by me that started with a c and ended with a t and rhymed with cunt. I don’t remember specifically, but knowing myself like I do, I probably said it one or two or three times.
All of the sudden, these Dutchmen stand up and try to drunkenly come to the waitress’s defense. That’s not good. Dutchmen are the tallest men in the world. They average six feet tall, and they’re built like swimmers. I’m five feet nine inches tall, and I barely float. Anthony, bless his heart, sees what’s going down and immediately yells, “What did you say about Mexicans?!”
Of course the Dutchmen hadn’t said a thing, but Anthony was bona fide Mexican and knew this would get his people in the bar whipped up into revolución. Sure en
ough, they turn and move toward the Dutchmen almost en masse, like one of those giant rafts of fire ants that come together during a flood. Before too long both sides are yelling and cussing and throwing shit at each other. I’m trying to keep the peace from onstage by using the microphone, but all I’m doing is adding to the sound of the yelling.
Finally someone calls the police. Eight squad cars with about fifteen cops show up. They immediately shut the whole thing down and drag a bunch of us out into the parking lot in handcuffs to figure out what the fuck is going on and who is to blame. You want to talk about a fat moment: they needed three pairs of cuffs to secure my hands behind my back. The most humiliating part was how unnecessary the cuffs were. I was well over four hundred pounds by then—where the fuck was I gonna go? What were they worried about? That I might just magically Carl Lewis my ass on out of there?
So there I am, standing in the shadow of a bunch of goddamn oil refineries, locked up like some kind of circus freak, trying to explain to one of the officers that I’m a comedian and we were hired to do a show, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s telling me that they’re going to pin me with inciting a riot and public disturbance. I’m madder than a wet hen and I’m trying to reason with the man, but I every time I think I’m getting somewhere, I get distracted by this blinding bright light coming from over the officer’s shoulder. At first I thought it was his partner doing that dickhead cop thing where they shine their Maglite in your face to mess with your sensory perceptions. But when I moved to the side, I saw that it was a film crew, and that the guy operating the boom mic had a COPS Windbreaker on. Are you fucking kidding me? You’re trying to jam me up on some bullshit charges and you want to put it on television?
I looked right into that camera and said, “Fuck you, I’m union! You gotta pay me scale or I’m not signing the release.”
That about sealed it for the officer questioning me. He grabbed ahold of the cuff chains and started duckwalking me toward a squad car. Just then a Harris County sheriff arrived on the scene, saw what was happening, and came right over. Turns out, he was a big fan who had seen me a bunch of times in South Houston over the years. This wasn’t even his regular patrol area, he was just filling in that night, but when he heard the words “public disturbance” and “large group of Mexicans and whites” over the radio, he hopped in his car. Imagine that.
Let me tell you: I have been butt-fucked by Lady Luck on more than a few occasions in my life, but every once in a while she does me a solid and gives me a reach around. This was one of those times.
The sheriff tells the officer to remove my cuffs immediately and then asks me to tell him what happened. I explain everything with the utmost factual precision that wouldn’t also get me or Anthony or Jody in trouble. When I’m done talking, the sheriff goes in and shuts the bar down for overserving intoxicated patrons, then pins public-drunkenness and assault charges on a couple of the flying Dutchmen who were being the biggest pricks during the show. When he came back out with those assholes in custody, I told him we also hadn’t been paid for our work. He turned around, marched back into the bar, and got our money.
That night I ended up doing six minutes of actual comedy and made $300. Anthony got his $50 for opening, and Jody got her $100 as the feature act. Anthony and I didn’t have any complaints, but Jody was so fucking mad. She had to go through thirty-five minutes of absolute torture to earn her money, and the two of us made out like bandits. Sure, Anthony bombed technically, but he only did five or six minutes. That wasn’t near enough time for those fucking Dutch assholes to zero in their heckles. Jody made me buy her drinks at the rest of our gigs that week—and I was glad to do it. As the headliner, you have to take care of your supporting acts. Even if one of them barely got a joke out and the other nearly started a race war.
I ended up learning a lot about being a headliner from that hell gig in Channelview, but if I had one regret, it was that my COPS footage never made it to air. What I would give now to have tape of me getting pulled out of some shit bar in Channelview, Texas, struggling against three pairs of handcuffs while screaming into the camera.
Hell, when I think about it like that, it would have been my first dramatic TV credit. Now that’s how you start a television career, jack!
10.
A BUCKET OF CRABS
By the second half of the 1990s I was firmly established in the Houston comedy scene as a serious headlining act. No more Holiday Inns for me, motherfuckers. It was DoubleTree or bust, now. I was headlining all the big rooms during the week. When huge national acts came through from Los Angeles or New York, I’d feature for them. I was even making meaningful friendships with some amazing comics like Doug Stanhope and Mitch Hedberg, who started in comedy around the same time I did. By most measures, mine was a pretty fast ascendancy, though not extraordinary by any means. It just felt that way at times because I’d come up in the third- or fourth-best city for comedy and I started (and looked) young. When you looked like I did and you found a niche in a town where people five to ten years older than you come from other parts of the country to get their start, you seem somehow exceptional to people who don’t know any better. If I’d started in Denver or DC, then maybe we could talk, but I just did what every other good comedian did: I wrote jokes, I got up, I went on the road, I said “Yes, and…,” rinse and repeat.
I would love to say that the trajectory of my career was due entirely to my movie-star good looks and God-given talent, but that would be total horseshit. Not only would it be a lie, but it would diminish the importance of hard work and the influence of all the people who helped me along the way by giving me advice, support, and opportunities. It would also diminish the importance of all the haters who drove me to succeed just to spite them. My haters were a lot like the haters in any thriving local comedy scene in that they were old, bitter, tired assholes who made fucking with young, ambitious comics their official pastime, if not their second career. (Though you sort of need to have had a first career in order to have a second one, but I digress.) What made Houston haters unique was that, with a few notable exceptions, their ranks were comprised of the hangers-on of the Texas Outlaw Comics from the Comedy Workshop days of the 1980s. Because they were inside at the bar having one more drink, these were the assholes who missed the success train when it pulled into town to pick up Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks.
They infested the clubs like bedbugs in a flophouse: they were so small you’d never see them, but you’d get up every day and they’d still be there, irritating the shit out of you. Some nights when we were on the same bill, I wanted to shove the microphone so far down their throats that when they farted you’d hear feedback. They were the kind of people who would begrudge every laugh you got because to their minds you were taking laughter that should have gone to them—like happiness and joy are finite resources. I guess for them maybe they were, I don’t know.
What was so sad about them was that they were fucking funny yet, considering how hot the comedy scene was and how long they’d been doing it, they were shockingly unaccomplished. Instead, they polluted an entire generation of young, hardworking comics by being god-awful cunts to them. Their sole claim to fame was knowing Sam and Bill once upon a time. Their prized possessions were old stories that they dined out on for as long as I lived in Houston. Their shtick never changed. Neither did their stories. Neither did they.
* * *
From the very beginning of my time at the Comedy Showcase, while these old-timey pricks were finagling free drinks at the bar and doing blow in the bathroom every night, I was sitting with Danny Martinez until 2:00 a.m. talking about comedy, trying to learn as much about the craft from him as he was willing to teach me.
One of the things Danny taught me about was topical humor. You don’t come flying out of the womb spitting Bill Hicks jokes about the human condition, and when you’re young, you don’t have enough life experience to have a well-rounded take on the world, so in the meantime the best way to come up with material
is to look around you at what is going on and figure out some interesting way to talk about it.
Shit, I can do that, I thought. All I did when I wasn’t performing was hang out at my sister’s house and watch TV. That made me one of the most observant motherfuckers out there, is how I looked at it.
For the first couple years, all I did was increasingly sophisticated fat jokes and topical humor. The early nineties were great for both. I was getting bigger, and the world was getting crazier. We had the Gulf War; Rodney King and the LA Riots (which sounds like a band name when you say it like that); President Bush puked all over the prime minister of Japan; the Soviet Union fell apart; they caught Jeffrey Dahmer up in Milwaukee eating people; the Dream Team killed everyone at the Summer Olympics in Barcelona; and my main man Bill Clinton ran for president—against two Texans no less.
Clinton’s candidacy and election were a real boon for me as a comic. As a fellow Razorback and a Houston resident, I got to make all sorts of jokes about Arkansas and Texas, and I got to tell the story of how when I was a little kid, Clinton went to see my granny after he lost his reelection bid for governor. Granny was a big swingin’ lady-dick in the Arkansas Democratic Party back then. Anyone thinking of running for office at the state level who wanted to win made a point of coming by Granny’s place and asking for advice, even if they didn’t need it. Clinton was no exception. He was the consummate retail politician. He knew what side of the biscuit got buttered. Boy, did Granny have some advice for him:
“Listen here, William. If you want to win another election ever again, you best have that wife of yours change her goldarn name to Clinton once and for all. This isn’t hippie-dippie California. This is Arkansas for petesake!”