This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  Hillary changed her name from Rodham to Clinton a year later, Bill won the gubernatorial election the year after that, and the rest is jizz-covered history. My mama told me that story after my granny passed away. Who knows if it’s actually true, or if Granny was the influence that put him over the top, but it was a great bit from my life that I could use to build topical material on top of.

  As I got better at identifying good topics and figuring out how to write topical jokes that fit my style, I realized that I could write fast. Something would happen on a Tuesday, I’d write a joke about it that night, and I’d be performing it on Wednesday at the Comedy Showcase. A lot of times they were good jokes too. They were rough, but the premises were strong.

  Make no mistake, the haters were not trying to hear that. Their hate came early and it came often. They’d be there at the Showcase on Wednesday watching, seething, judging, hating. Then one of them would inevitably perform a version of my new joke somewhere over the weekend, and come Monday, with everyone at the Laff Stop for open-mic night, some people would be saying they wrote the joke first and I was the one who stole it.

  Comics stumble into similar jokes all the time. We live in the same world, and most of us have points of view that are fairly alike. It’s impossible to avoid ruminating on the same ideas and not coming to similar conclusions. If you ask people who have been accused of joke thievery, this reality is at the core of a lot of the beefs in the comedy world.

  That was not at all what was going on in my case. Not only was I not the fucking thief—they were—but there were no great minds on the other side of this beef. There was also literally no time for me to have heard these new jokes before telling my version of them if they had, indeed, been told by someone else at the same time. Incidents like this happened four of five distinct times that I can recall. Just out-and-out fuckery. I remember sitting there in the club, dumbfounded, thinking to myself. I’m not Marty McFly. This isn’t Back to the Future. What are these assholes even talking about?

  Eventually I talked to Danny Martinez about it. Not to tattle like some prison snitch, more to understand why stuff like this happened. And more specifically, why it was happening to me. Danny is a wonderful human being, so he was not going to stoop to their level and sling shit, but he made me understand, by saying without actually saying it, that mediocre people often become angry failures, and when they do, they don’t like being around people with hope.

  My youthful dewy-eyed optimism and my enthusiasm for the work was a threat to their worldview and to the status quo. My early success, without any help from them, God forbid, was a threat to their survival. There is a saying that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. In stand-up comedy, success may have many fathers, but that’s because your mother was a whore and you were adopted. At least that’s what these shit stains will tell you when they can’t contain their jealousy and paranoia. If a few more guys like me showed up, after all, who was going to need them? I sure didn’t.

  * * *

  What really drew the stink eye my way and kept it there was my relationship with Sam. My having the audacity to reach out to Sam through the Laff Stop when he came to town after I first got to Houston was my first strike with them. They acted like I had breached some sort of etiquette, like there were rules for human contact that I needed to learn. If that’s how they were with other comics, I can only imagine what they were like with women.

  Wait, wait, wait. Do you mean to tell me that you met a girl, and you hit it off, and then you just … CALLED HER??? Like, on the phone?! Who the hell do you think you are, pal?

  That Sam vouched for me on the radio and it led to a regular paid gig that got me a lot of exposure was strike two. It must have pissed them off to no end. How could some fat, young backwoods hillbilly come into their town, take their laughs, fill all their radio appearances, and have a working relationship with the one man who was keeping them relevant? No, sir. I don’t reckon that’s going to work. It didn’t compute for them. Things aren’t supposed to happen like that. I hadn’t paid my dues. There’s a process—not the process Danny told me to respect, mind you, but the process by which these bitter drunks rationalized their failures. I realize now in hindsight that pay your dues was just code for “give up,” but back then their anger toward me stung.

  Unbeknownst to me, by even knowing Sam I had painted a bull’s-eye on my chest. When he came back to town a year or so after our KLOL appearance and picked me to open for him during his run of shows, that was strike three, and it just tattooed the bull’s-eye on me permanently. Sam was their compadre, their peer, and he chose me over them? This fucking kid had to go. They would run me out on a rail if they had to.

  Still, despite their obvious hostility, I tried to be friends to them. I couldn’t help it. It’s an unhealthy habit that fat kids and stand-up comics share: our insecurity combines with our black-sheep tendencies to make us want to be liked by everyone we meet.

  On the weekend of my twenty-first birthday a bunch of us went to the dog track to enjoy the weather and hopefully win a little money betting on the races. We spent the whole day there getting fucked-up. Being newly legal, I bought drinks for everyone like I was a boss and even scored some weed for us. Kill ’em with kindness, right?

  After the final race, we all decided to go to the Comedy Showcase to hang out. I was the last to arrive because I had some birthday stuff to attend to at home. When I got there, Danny’s wife, Blanca Gutierrez, met me at the door. One of the comics from our group was in the parking lot annihilated drunk, stumbling around pissing everywhere, crassly propositioning a girl he’d basically trapped inside her car. Blanca was imploring me to go rescue him because the girl’s boyfriend was a Harris County sheriff’s deputy, and he was on his way down to the club with handcuffs and a large stick.

  I was conflicted. This guy, who I will call the Asshole (I’ll be goddamned if he ever sees his name in print on my watch), had called me a hack and a joke thief on more than one occasion—many, many times actually. I had zero incentive to help him and every incentive to grab a lawn chair and some popcorn and watch him get his dick kicked in the dirt. I couldn’t do that. That’s not how my mama raised me. When you see someone in distress, you help them, even if they’re a god-awful cunt. It’s the Golden Rule. So I went outside and the Asshole was so fucked-up, you couldn’t even talk to him. I had to pick him up, sling him over my shoulder, and carry him into the club like a bag of dog food.

  Mostly I did it for Blanca and Danny because they’d been so great to me for as long as they’d known me. But I also did it for the Asshole. Getting arrested sucks, especially when you’re not in your right mind. There’s nothing worse than waking up in a jail cell and having no idea what you did to land yourself there. What was the harm in extending a little bit of humanity to the Asshole when he was clearly in a dark place?

  That was the last time the Asshole ever drank. He’s been sober since that very day. As a human being I feel good about that. Who knows what would have happened if the sheriff’s deputy got there before I did and put a baton across the base of the Asshole’s neck? As for the Asshole himself, he still calls me a hack to this day and has never made amends to me. I guess he was busy being a miserable piece of shit the day they taught that step in the program, but there’s nothing I can do about that, so I have to let it go.

  * * *

  Trying to be friends with everyone worked well enough with a few of the comics who hadn’t become complete sociopaths yet. We weren’t in the greenroom braiding each other’s back hair between sets or anything, but they didn’t openly hate me, so I counted it as a win.

  That all stopped in 1993 when Bill Hicks came back into town for a set of shows at the Laff Stop. Bill Hicks was the Michelangelo of stand-up comedy. The way he structured a joke, the way he used imagery, his wordsmithery, his articulation, the way he leaned into the audience when he was delivering an uncomfortable truth—everything was flawless.

  Bill was an artist
and a truth teller. The first time I saw him perform, I almost quit comedy altogether. I knew I would never be as funny as Bernie Mac, and I made my peace with that. But with Bill, I knew I could never measure up, no matter what metric you put in front of us, except maybe a scale. That’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re in any creative or artistic field. Part of what keeps you going is continually getting better at whatever your art is, but a part of you eventually always wants to be the best at some small aspect of it. When that no longer seems like a possibility, like it did with Bill, it’s gut-check time. Thankfully Danny Martinez (who was the best at smooth transitions) pulled me aside, bless his heart, and reminded me that nobody should compare themselves to Bill Hicks, in any way, shape, or form. Danny said there was nobody like Bill before and wouldn’t be another one like him for a long time, decades probably.1 That made me feel a little better, in the way that getting punched in the stomach distracts from the pain of getting kicked in the balls.

  I don’t remember if Bill had already been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when he came back to Houston, but I do recall that he was absolutely on fire. The year before, his Relentless album came out and crushed; then his Revelations special that he did in London followed it. Everything he was doing, he was cooking with gas. He was as sharp as anyone had ever seen him. The only problem with his recent round of club dates was that his openers were constantly fucking everything up. They were doing Bill Hicks for fifteen minutes before Bill Hicks had a chance to come onstage and do Bill Hicks. It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t doing it intentionally. Bill was such an amazing comedian that young comics who watched him would become overly influenced by his style. We called them Hicksians. The only reason I never became a Hicksian was because I was smart enough to know I wasn’t smart enough to pull off his kind of material. I was twenty-one years old, what the hell did I know about the world?

  Bill gave it a shot with whoever Sandy Marcus had booked to open for him. Like the others, this one did not pan out. The very first show, the opener was yet another young comic trying to emulate Bill, which just pissed him off, especially in the town where he got his start.

  I’ve heard people say stuff like “You should be honored” and “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” when I talk about joke thievery and style biters like the Hicksians. What those people don’t understand is that a guy like Bill Hicks dedicated his entire adult life and thousands of stage hours to figuring out who he was, what he felt about things, and what style felt authentic to his personality. The Bill Hicks who people saw onstage wasn’t just a person, it was a masterwork, like the statue David, meticulously chiseled from the mind and the hands of a genius. Yet here was this group of young guys coming up who saw Bill and wanted to become that kind of masterwork themselves, but instead of putting in the hours to find their own version of it, they tried to take a shortcut and sculpt their own version of him with some Play-Doh and duct tape.

  After the first show, Bill asked Sandy if she had anyone else who could open for him who wouldn’t step on all of his punch lines before he had a chance to use them. Sandy threw out my name. This was her pitch on my behalf (if you can even call it that):

  “Well, he’s young and all he does is himself.”

  “Perfect,” Bill told her, and so I opened for Bill Hicks on all of his remaining Houston shows.2

  I like to think I opened for Bill more than just once because he loved me and thought I was funny, but deep down I know that if he did love me, it was because I wasn’t trying to be Bill Fucking Hicks. And that was good enough for me.

  It was also good enough for the remaining friendly comics in Houston to effectively turn their backs on me. I don’t know what I was to them anymore, but I was definitely not a human being. As it turned out, all that animosity turned out to be just a prelude.

  * * *

  For a good stretch of time, I had a steady gig closing for a wonderful comedian (and an even better person) named Marty Schilling on the last weekend of every month. We played North Houston on Friday and Saturday nights, then Galveston on Sunday night. We’d stay the night in Galveston after the Sunday show, paid for by the club, and then wake up the next day on the beach. It paid $250 per show, so it was a $750 weekend for me, which I counted on to make rent each month after I moved out of my sister’s place and got my own apartment.

  One Thursday, right before one of my Schilling weekends, I got a call from C. W. Kendall. He wanted to know if I could do three shows down in Brownsville that weekend for $1,200. Brownsville is a port city 350 miles south of Houston right on the Mexico border. It’s basically the foreskin on the mushroom tip of south Texas. It takes six hours to get there by car from Houston. It’s not the longest hike C.W. has had me make for a gig, but it was up there. The $1,200 took a lot of the sting out of it. I hated to bail on Marty, but this was nearly twice what I would make doing her shows and I needed the money.

  I called Marty and asked to get out of the gig. Saint that she is, she said not to worry. She had someone on standby for situations just like this, so there was no problem. She was happy for me that I was going to be making more money and assured me that I could come back and do the Friday–Sunday shows with her next month.

  So I called C.W. back at the number he gave me and told him to book the gig. The next morning I hopped in my Dodge Dakota pickup and hit the road. Six flat, miserable, desolate hours later I pulled up to the address that C.W. had given me for the club, and it was closed. Not not open. Closed … like for good. I asked around and found out it had been closed down for weeks. I jumped back into the Dakota and drove to the address C.W. had given me for the hotel I was supposed to be staying in. It didn’t exist. There wasn’t even a building there.

  Something was royally fucked here. I was panicked. By agreeing to do this Brownsville gig I had not only passed up my regular $750 with Marty, but I’d also given up an additional $300 from the defensive-driving classes that I was supposed to teach at the Showcase on Saturday morning. It was the end of the month. I had no money. This was going to pay my rent—all my rent. I wasn’t sure what to do. There was no way I could pay for a hotel now that I was down here, that much I knew. But I wasn’t sure I even had enough money for gas. I had some weed on me I could sell, and I had the pistol I carried under the seat that I could try to move if it got really bad.

  I had two options: try to find a buyer for some of that weed and sleep in the cab of my truck overnight if I didn’t find one; or roll the dice and drive straight back to Houston, hoping I could find a gas station where I could steal some fuel or sell the weed to a cashier. I chose the latter. I already had a spot at the Showcase on Sunday. If I could make it back on the early side, I could get some sleep and maybe grab some spots around town on Saturday to make enough to pay my rent.

  I didn’t get back to Houston until Saturday night. I ended up limping into a truck stop about halfway home and off-loading my pistol to a trucker for barely enough to fill my tank and pay for some Whataburger. When I got to town, I went straight to the Showcase and found Danny Martinez to tell him everything that had happened. I needed advice on what to do. I was out twelve hundred actual dollars and it wasn’t my fault.

  “There’s no way C.W. would do that,” Danny said. “He may reroute you to God knows where, but he’s an honest man.” That’s what made no sense to me, because I agreed wholeheartedly with Danny. C.W. has sent me to the middle of West Texas to perform for what amounted to a bunch of dead armadillos on the side of a frontage road, but the gig was there.

  Sunday I woke up madder than a hornet’s nest, alternating between furious and frantic about paying my rent and my utilities and my car insurance. I called the number C.W. had given me to ask him what had happened and to give him a piece of my mind, but his phone just rang and rang and rang. I did my spot at the Showcase that night as scheduled, but instead of hanging out afterward like usual, I came straight home. I had too much anger and negative energy in my system to hang out at the club. The club
was my real home, and I didn’t want to contaminate that.

  The next night, Monday night, was the open mic at the Laff Stop. I showed up about 9:00 p.m., later than usual for me, because I picked up a defensive-driving class at the Showcase to make back some of the money I’d lost. A bunch of comedians—including a number of the really mean ones—were sitting around a table, and they started asking me how my weekend went. I told them that it was shit and that there was no gig and that C.W. had fucked me and that they should watch out for that guy because he might fuck them too.

  They let me finish my diatribe, then burst out laughing right in my face, making fun of me for being a sucker. C.W. hadn’t booked me in Brownsville. C.W. hadn’t called me at all. The guys at the table had gotten drunk on Thursday night and thought it would be hilarious if they called me pretending to be C.W. and sent me on a wild-goose chase. One of them had played the last Brownsville show before the place closed, so he knew it would be the perfect prank. Worst of all, the guy who impersonated C. W. Kendall called up Marty Schilling right after he spoke to me and took my North Houston/Galveston gigs. He was the guy she had on standby.

  It was one of the meanest, dirtiest, most hateful things I’ve ever experienced. It pretty much confirmed for me that I had to get the fuck out of Texas. Besides that realization, the only other thing I am thankful for from the incident was that I sold my pistol before I got home. If I hadn’t, I would have marched out of the Laff Stop that Monday night, grabbed the gun from my truck, walked back in, and killed every single one of those evil cunts. The rage inside me was so complete I don’t know if I, or anyone else, would have been capable of stopping me. You can push a man only so far before his dignity requires that he respond in kind.

  * * *

  During the year I spent in Baltimore before coming to Houston, I did a fair bit of crabbing and got to understand crabs pretty well. How they defend themselves, how they often seem to move as one, how they turn red when you put some heat to them. They remind me a lot of the miserable local comics I had to deal with all those years in the nineties.