by Ralphie May
Eventually it got to the point where we either had to move in together or stop seeing each other. I just couldn’t keep doing the long-distance thing like it was. It was distracting from both of our careers, and it was turning me into a bitter, angry person. Despite its being the nexus of all my misery, I even offered to move back to Houston because I didn’t want to lose her. She said no way, that if I moved back, she’d leave me. She reminded me that my career was taking off in LA and that I couldn’t give that up. She said that she would move out to LA instead.
What an amazing woman. I was in love. So was she. Her parents, not so much. Her dad would barely talk to me. When he did, we disagreed on everything. Her mom didn’t bother to use words around me; she just let her visceral hatred do her talking.
Lahna arrived with all her stuff in January 2001. One of my first memories of us together in that shitty little apartment on North Gardner was watching George W. Bush being sworn into office as the forty-third president of the United States.
“My dad likes him,” Lahna said as we cuddled on the bed watching the inaugural ceremonies.
“That guy stinks,” I said partly out of reflex, but mostly from a place of complete justification. “How in the world could we elect a man who traded Sammy Sosa?”
13.
1440 NORTH GARDNER
One of the first things I learned after moving to Los Angeles is that there isn’t one Los Angeles, there are seven or eight. Cities like New York and San Francisco and even Houston have distinct neighborhoods with their own vibes, but the cities are still self-contained and you can wrap your head around them. Los Angeles is so spread out and its boundaries bleed so confusingly into surrounding areas that you never know where LA starts or ends. Because of that, all these different areas in the LA basin have grown up to become their own places, sometimes literally becoming their own cities, such as Santa Monica or Culver City or Beverly Hills.
What that means, once you move here and try to get acclimated, is that you can’t paint the whole place with a broad brush. You have to feel your way through things. That’s hard to explain to out of towners, especially about Hollywood, where my apartment was on North Gardner Street. While most people know that Hollywood Boulevard is a filthy bum toilet littered with tourists and crazies and fat guys peeing on buildings, they also think that since you work in Hollywood, and Hollywood is glamorous, you must actually live in the glamorous part of Hollywood too. They think you live inside the Hotel California album cover.
In reality, Hollywood lost its glamour a long time ago. The western section I lived in those first years was a roughly coffin-shaped area bounded by Fairfax Avenue on the west, Hollywood Boulevard on the north, Highland Avenue on the east, and Santa Monica Boulevard on the south. When you walked through the area at any time of the day, it felt you like you were in the middle of a cemetery for broken dreams. Run-down apartment buildings, dilapidated Craftsman homes surrounded by chain-link fences, and Spanish-style duplexes with iron bars on the windows dominated. People meandered in and out of them who looked like they’d come to LA in the sixties and seventies to make it, failed, never left, and this is where the city shoved them in tighter and tighter concentration, like the western half of Hollywood was the giant trash compactor on the Death Star in the first Star Wars (the real one).
Smack in the middle of the trash compactor is 1440 North Gardner. The entire block, on both sides of the street, is still shit-box apartment buildings with the exception of the fire station directly across the street. With the prostitutes and the crackhead trannies starting their nightly runs only a few blocks down on Sunset, and the homeless constantly passing out at bus stops and getting hit by cars barreling down La Brea during the day, Fire Station #41 was busy at all hours.
It was an interesting place to be in those years. It was always just a little different from any other place my comedian friends lived. Stuff happened there that didn’t happen anywhere else. Like the time I got a knock on my door at four o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the week. I figured it was one of my comedian neighbors coming over to buy or smoke some weed. Four p.m. was about when most of them got up, and the building was access controlled, so if it were a delivery guy or a solicitor, they would have had to be buzzed in from outside.
I opened the door, and standing in front of me was a nice-looking black dude and a pretty white chick in some clothes that didn’t seem like they fit too well. The brother introduced himself as Alvin.
“Hey, big man, you want to party?” Alvin said.
“Huh?” I was so confused.
“Do you want to party?”
Somehow I was even more lost hearing the question a second time.
Alvin shook his head, looked up and down the hall both ways, and leaned in. “Aight, man, you want some pussy?”
I had two immediate thoughts: (1) I could not believe this was happening to a comedian of all people. A pimp and his hooker were cold-calling an entire apartment complex, going door-to-door selling pussy, and of all the gin joints in all the world, they stumbled into mine? The comedy gods were smiling on me. (2) These people were criminals. Her job was to trap your dick with her mouth or her pussy, like a Chinese finger cuff, until you paid. His job was to hold money, slap bitches, and cut people for nonpayment. Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!
It took me a couple beats to process what was happening. I’d taken a couple healthy bong rips of some bona fide indica a little earlier, so my brain was still floating a little bit. Alvin thought I was trying to stall him to drive a bargain, so he upped his salesman game.
“Aight, playa, normally a half-and-half is a hundred dollars, but I see you being hesitant ’cause you don’t want to spend all that. Aight, just for you, this week only, we runnin’ a special—seventy dollars for a half-and-half. What do you say? Come on, half-and-half! Seventy dollas! Got damn!”
You wonder why black guys make such good preachers? Forty-five seconds with Alvin and I was ready to testify! Then I realized, wait, this has now become door-to-door discount pussy, like he was trying to off-load a bag of day-old bagels and maybe make a couple dollars in the bargain.
What Alvin couldn’t see was Lahna sitting ten feet away behind the open door. Now, Lahna was a cool chick—we’d been successfully working through some of our lingering trust issues, and she’d brushed off the Tara Weissmuller run-in like a champ—but she wasn’t that cool. Lahna’s from the nice part of Houston, not the dirty part of Penthouse Letters. She was not so kosher with her man getting offered marked-down pussy at the front door. How many women would be, when you think about it?
So now I had danger all around me: a pimp in front of me and a girlfriend on my rear flank. One of them was almost certainly armed, and if I said the wrong thing and gave her enough time to go into the bedroom, the other would be armed too. Armies lose wars stuck in my position. I had to think quickly. I resorted to the one technique that had served me well my entire adult life: be stupid.
“Just a sec,” I said to Alvin, turning to Lahna, who he still could not see. “Um, honey, do we need some pussy? It’s on sale!”
Alvin got the picture. Lahna was finally as confused as I was when I first opened the door. And our boxer, Pimp, was pushing against my leg being superaggressive toward our guest, Alvin, the actual pimp. Lahna tried to get him under control while I talked to Alvin.
“Goddamnit, Pimp, get in here!” she shouted.
Alvin cocked his head and peered around the doorway, looking at Lahna with crazy eyes, like, Who is this white woman telling me what to do?
“Pimp, sit!” Lahna commanded.
Both pimps obeyed. The dog came to heel and Alvin stepped inside while his bottom bitch stood out in the hallway. I told Alvin I wasn’t interested, obviously, but I offered to sell him some weed for cheap, hoping to smooth his exit. He was interested, but he was low on cash (hence the door-to-door routine), so he tried to barter. Lahna put the kibosh on that one, and Alvin left without incident to try his hus
tle on all my neighbors.
* * *
By the time Lahna moved into 1440 with me at the beginning of 2001, I was slinging a ton of weed to pay the rent and make ends meet. The Comedy Store and the Laugh Factory spots were great, but they weren’t cutting it. The Latino rooms and the black rooms I was playing kept my head above water, but that was about it, and you can’t live in LA treading water like that for too long. Plus it’s not fun.
Selling weed solved that dilemma for me. Besides being tax-free, it had the added benefit of bringing a social scene with it. Nearly every comic I knew dabbled in the cannabical arts. Over time, my spot became the place to come and smoke, party, and flop for a couple weeks if you’d been evicted or you were coming in from out of town for pilot season.1 Comics were coming in and out of 1440 all the time.
Then September rolled around. I had just done a weekend of huge shows in Phoenix that paid me $3,000, which was the most anyone had paid me since I did a pilot earlier that summer for USA Network called Black Sheep. In this reality show two comedians live with a family and try to torture them like only comedians can, but if the family can endure it while abiding by a particular set of rules, they get their mortgage paid for a year. It was a fun concept. The network was offering $12,000 per episode with a six-episode commitment, but Jamie Masada, who was my manager at the time, was holding out for more money. I was so mad—that was more money than I’d ever seen as a working comedian. I desperately wanted to take it. Jamie was right, though. The show never went anywhere. I don’t even think they filmed more than the test pilot. That’s why Jamie is Jamie, I guess. He knew what he was doing.
I got back from Phoenix on Monday. The next morning I got woken up by the phone ringing. I looked at the alarm clock, it wasn’t even six fifteen in the morning. It was my mom.
“They’re attacking us!” she screamed.
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
“They’re attacking us! Aren’t you watching?!?”
I’d gone to bed after 6:15 a.m. more times than I can count since the last time I got up that early. I turned on the TV and flipped to CNN and just watched as they replayed over and over and over the footage of two planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers.
“Holy fuck!”
“They’re attacking us, Ralphie! They’re attacking us!”
“Let me call you back, Mom.”
I hung up and tried to collect my thoughts. Lahna was temping as an executive assistant at Sabon—a huge Israeli bath-and-body-products company—in a skyscraper over in West Los Angeles. There was no fucking way she was going to work that day. We didn’t know what was happening or how many more attacks there were going to be that day. We just sat there watching as the sun rose and more people on the West Coast started waking up.
When the banks opened, I went and cashed my $3,000 check from the Phoenix gigs. I bought groceries, filled up my gas tank plus two gas cans, got some shells for my shotgun at a sporting-goods store. I stocked up the car with water and canned food. Then, because I just didn’t know what else to do and because I’m Southern, I came home and started cooking. All these comedians started showing up. Thirty comics must have gathered at my tiny apartment over that day. I cooked all day, and Lahna fed everyone. It was the only thing that kept me from panicking and going crazy—not wanting to fuck up the food.
I don’t know why, maybe because our building was so close to an essential service like the fire station, but our landline phone never cut out or overloaded. We could call people all day; we even got through to New York City on a few occasions. My first call was to Jeff Ross, aka the Roastmaster General. Back then he was just hilarious Jeffrey Ross from New Jersey to me, a frizzy-haired comedian I’d met a few times when he came through the Houston clubs and who I’d been reintroduced to more formally in LA by my buddy, and fellow New Jerseyan, Jay Mohr. Jeffrey and I were fast friends, and he was always good to me. When I hit rough stretches and needed some extra money, he’d pay me $80 per week to clean his apartment in LA. He was kind of a mess and he needed it clean for chicks, so it was more than worth it to him. I would do it all—wash and fold the laundry, change the sheets. I was like Alice from The Brady Bunch, except with bigger titties.
I knew Jeffrey was staying at his place in New York City that week, and having stayed there a couple times when I was working, I knew how close it was to the Towers. I called his house phone to see if he was there. Thankfully I got through.
“Man, get the fuck out of New York immediately.” I didn’t even say hello.
From the way he answered the phone I knew I’d woken him up, which meant he hadn’t turned on the TV yet and had no idea what was going on. When he did, his reaction was a lot like mine. We hung up right away so he could make some calls to people he knew who were in New York. Jeffrey was a native, so he knew a lot of people.
I called him back a half hour later, and comics who couldn’t get out had started gathering at his place. Being a good Jewish boy from New Jersey, I’m sure he did for them what I was trying to do for the people at my place. Before we hung up again, Jeffrey asked me to get ahold of the people at the Brea Improv down in Orange County. He was scheduled to do a run of shows that weekend, and he wanted to let them know he wasn’t going to make it. Then he asked me to cover the gigs for him. Of course, anything I could do.
His first Brea show was Thursday, September 13. Probably one hundred people were in the audience. I have not experienced a weirder sensation in my career than going up on that stage for the first time after 9/11 and looking out at all those people. Did they already have tickets before the Towers came down and were just going about their lives? Did they buy tickets that day? Was there anyone there on a first date? Did any of that matter? It became clear pretty quickly that everybody was just stunned and numb and looking for laughter anywhere they could find it. That was a tall order, and it made me start asking questions of myself. How was I going to be able to pull off this show? How was I going to be able to keep it together? What was I going to say? I knew one thing for sure: no airplane jokes. I remember telling them the story of Alvin the Door-to-Door Pussy Salesman. I wanted to talk about what was going to happen now and how I was worried because the guy who traded Sammy Sosa was the guy with his finger on the button, but even I knew this wasn’t much of a baseball audience.
After the show a woman came up to me crying and explained that her brother worked on the eighty-fourth floor of one of the Towers and she hadn’t been able to reach him for two days. She still didn’t know if he was alive, but she wanted to let me know that I was able to make her laugh and forget all that, even if only for a few minutes, and that she was thankful.
That’s what comedy is about, I realized. Not all that other petty drama and egotistical bullshit, but people coming together to share a moment, to share laughter, to escape real-life bullshit. As a stand-up comedian, you are the one who gets to deliver it.
* * *
After a couple months, things returned to normal around 1440 North Gardner. The hookers got back to hooking, the comedians got back to doing spots and smoking all my weed, and the streets around the apartment building—of which I had a bird’s-eye view from my windows—got back to looking more and more like the contents of the Death Star trash compactor.
One afternoon I got a call from my neighbor down the hall telling me to look out my bedroom window, which overlooked the parking lot for a famous Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called El Compadre.2 To look at El Compadre from the front, you wouldn’t know it to be particularly good or noteworthy. It doesn’t have any windows, it seems more like a seedy dive bar at first than a restaurant, and it’s painted this mustardy-yellow color like a washing machine from 1975 that has been left out in the sun to fade for the last twenty-five years. Still, because of its parking lot hidden from the street and its discreet back entrance, a lot of celebrities will stop in to eat there.
This afternoon the acclaimed movie star and fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey w
as getting something out of his Porsche. I’d met him years before in Austin when he was a total unknown filming Dazed and Confused, but now, in the parking lot behind El Compadre, he was a huge movie star who had a couple years earlier been arrested for getting high and playing bongo drums naked and had now just begun a string of starring roles in romantic comedies to rehabilitate his reputation. I didn’t know that at the time, and I bet he didn’t either, but I figured it was probably a safe bet that he still liked to party. I thought to myself, You have weed. Matt likes weed. You have Cheerios. Fuck it, I bet Matt likes Cheerios. Maybe he’ll want to party with you.
I started screaming his name: “Matt! Maatttt! Matthew!”
“What?!” he screamed back, looking up toward the 1440 building.
“All right, all right, all right!” I shouted, which pissed him off I think. He’d finally gotten fed up enough from my shouting to acknowledge me, and this is what he gets in return? In my defense, he said “What?” in a really dickish way. I was going to invite him in for weed and Cheerios, the real Cheerios too, not the off-brand Costco kind. The least he could have done was be appreciative.
“Hey, I just saw your movie The Wedding Planner!” I yelled, trying to reel him back in.
He kind of perked up at the mention of his movie, which had come out right around the time Lahna moved to LA in January. He gave me the head tilt and the little wave, like he was assuming I was complimenting him.