by Ralphie May
“Look, I can’t really talk about it, but you’re going to love the results,” he said. “It’s going to make your career.”
That was the best news I’d heard all year. On top of it, all the money that I’d earned for doing the show started coming in as well. I celebrated by treating myself to something I’d heard a lot of adults raving about over the years but that I had never gotten a chance to try: health insurance. Besides the bus I bought for touring about ten years later, it would become the best investment I ever made.
The halo of buzz from being on the show wore off after a couple of weeks, and I went back to doing what I always did: performing a bunch of shows and smoking a lot of weed. The show had completely left my head when it first started to air, in part because the show was on Tuesday night and I was working gigs on Tuesday nights. I probably wouldn’t have watched it even if I could have, because I was nervous about the final shows. Besides, this was network television, there was no telling if anyone was going to watch this thing.
Two weeks later I was at a Shell station filling up my 4Runner when a guy stopped in traffic and started shouting superaggressively, “Ralphie! Ralphie May!” He left his car parked in the street and started my way. I had no idea who this guy was or if he was trying to carjack me. All I could think was Please, Lord Jesus, don’t let it be a crazy Mexican with a neck tattoo. I grabbed the gas pump with one hand and cupped my lighter in my pants pocket with the other. I hope he likes fried chicken, because he’s about to be extra crispy.
“Man, I love you on Last Comic. You’re so damn funny! Can I take a picture with you?”
That was the first time I realized something was happening with Last Comic Standing. Not much later, the Improv called and asked me if I wanted to go down and work Irvine as a headliner for a Last Comic Standing show they were doing. I was feeling myself by then so I tried to big-time them and ask for some superhigh fee.
“Sure, I can do it for three thousand dollars,” I said, convinced they’d work me down and we’d settle somewhere around $1,800.
“Done,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “No problem. See you Wednesday.”
We did nine sold-out shows. Afterward Robert Hartmann, the owner of the Improv, came up to me and said they wanted to work me all around the country. “Seventy-five hundred a week. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said. That was more money than I’d ever made in one week; the most since the weekend in Phoenix before 9/11.
My dream was finally coming true—I was making it big.
* * *
The final episodes were set for the end of the summer. A drawing was held to determine the order of appearance for our live sets.
But before that went down, Jay pulled me aside again. “Look, buddy, the way they’ve edited this show so far, it’s pretty clear they want Dat to win.” This made sense for NBC for a ton of reasons, but that didn’t mean I had to like any of them. “If you want any hope of winning this thing, you have to absolutely crush your set.”
Basically I had to blow the place up so completely that my victory had to be undeniable in the audience’s eyes. The way to assure that was to get the third spot in the drawing. Everyone wanted the third spot. It’s the traditional prime, headlining spot after the audience has been warmed up by the sacrificial lambs who had to go first and second. Nobody ever wants those spots if they have a choice. When you’re first, you face a cold and uncertain audience. When you’re second, if the opener somehow crushed or alternatively completely shit the bed, you’ve got an uphill battle to bring them to your side. In the third spot, you have a chance to read the audience mood and hit ’em with your best stuff.
I drew the first spot. How’s that for luck? I couldn’t get a kick in a stampede. In the past I might have let this little turn get me down, like the world was against me. This time I used it as motivation. Fuck them, I can do this thing.
Everyone got four minutes and forty-five seconds. By the second minute, my jokes were hitting so hard that the audience stood up and gave me a standing ovation. That may seem great, but it fucked with my head: How am I supposed to follow myself now? Maybe I just fucked my whole show up! I calmed myself down, then the audience, and brought home my set with two more huge laughs. I finished right on time, with another standing ovation and three thousand people in the Paris showroom chanting my name: “Ral-phie! Ral-phie! Ral-phie!” It was ridiculous, like out of a movie. This went on for seven minutes. Jay had to go onstage to try to quiet down the audience. It didn’t work. Eventually he had to come backstage and get me.
“Hey, Ralphie, can you go back out there and shut these people up so we can finish filming this fucking TV show, please?”
“Hold on, guys”—I looked at all the other comedians sitting around—“I’ll be right back.” I felt like such a big shot. Dat Phan had drawn the second spot, and sheer terror was in his eyes. I went out and thanked the audience again and encouraged them to give as much love as they could to the next comics coming up. When the taping was over, Jay said it would have been hilarious to throw all the other comics under the bus, kind of like Sam Kinison did to me back in Fayetteville almost fifteen years earlier. I kind of agreed with Jay, but I was still a Southern boy at heart, and I knew it wouldn’t have been a nice move.
The next week we were back in Vegas to do the reveal show, where we all did stand-up again. I was the only one of us who did a whole new five minutes of material. And I got another standing ovation.
After we finished our sets, we were all just sitting around talking, and Jay, in his capacity as host of the show, said, “Ralphie, do you think you’ve won?”
“Yes, actually I do.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, I was the only one who got standing ovations every time I performed, and I was the only one who did different material every time I performed. Based on that alone, I think I was the obvious winner.”
Jay the Host was setting me up for Jay the Producer, all for the sake of the show. And I bit, like a cocky bastard.
The final vote came down to Dat and me … and Dat won.
For the next I don’t even know how many months, everyone and their mother and their bluetick coonhound told me I was robbed. When Jeffrey Ross called me after the finale taping to see how I did, he couldn’t believe I came in second. When I went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show the night the finale aired (man, did that piss off NBC, holy moly!), he flat out said I was robbed. Bob and Ross called the same day from the Tonight Show offices and said they wanted me on that night. They were scheduled to have Dat on, but they knew having me on instead made for better TV since everyone knew “I was the real winner.”
It was all a huge ego stroke, and I started to believe what all these people were saying. I started to get high on my own supply, which made me bitter for a while.
Living through the 1980s and being a fan of pop culture, the greatest injustice I’d seen in the entertainment world was when Metallica got beaten out by Jethro Tull for the first heavy-metal Grammy in 1989. Metallica could have gotten bitter and resentful and taken their guitars and gone home. Instead, they went into the studio and created Metallica (aka The Black Album), which went on to be certified sixteen times platinum.
I realized that’s a little bit what happened to me—the first part, I mean. People weren’t used to seeing someone like me on a new type of show like this, so they went with something safer. The outcome made zero sense to anyone who understood how the business was changing, but those weren’t the people casting votes. I had a choice to make: Do I take my microphone and go home, or do I put the past behind me and go make my own Black Album?
* * *
The choice was obvious. Right away I got a five-month contract to play Vegas with money that went through the fucking roof compared to what I’d been making just a few months earlier. I had deals coming at me from all directions, for all sorts of things. It was clear to me, to Lahna, and to my reps, that people wanted me on TV.
&
nbsp; It was incredibly exciting. I just had something else to do first. I had to do something about my weight. Once the show was over, the implications of the stuff Jay was telling me behind the scenes started to land. My weight was making my career harder. The thing is, and I know this will sound crazy, it wasn’t making my life that much harder. Not yet, anyway.
I knew I was big—I’m not blind, I own mirrors—but I didn’t spend much time during the week thinking about my weight. I’d lived with it every day of my adult life and for most of my childhood. It felt sort of self-evident by then. I mean, you don’t forget that you’re fat, especially once it becomes one of the defining characteristics of your career as an entertainer—both good and bad. The main reason I didn’t think about it, though, was because, unlike those guys you see on TLC with giant scrotums, dressed in muumuus made out of bedsheets, I was still active and out in the world. No one needed to cut away the side of my bedroom wall to remove me with a forklift. I was still going places and hanging out with friends. I was doing what I loved, performing every night for packed audiences full of people just like me. I never felt the urge to sit around and cry big gravy tears about it.
Still, with the money I’d earned from Last Comic Standing and all the headlining gigs that had lined up behind it, I decided it was time to give gastric bypass a shot. When you want gastric bypass, they don’t just lift up a roll, cut a little hole in your belly, and wrap a scrunchie around your stomach. You have to put in some actual work, which is probably why most people my size don’t do it. Part of that work is losing a chunk of weight prior to the procedure to prove you’re committed. I scheduled the bypass for November to give myself some time.
The first step included figuring out how much I weighed. Easier said than done when most standard scales just kind of say “Fuck it” after 350 pounds. I ended up going to the post office just below Sunset in the seediest part of Hollywood, only a few blocks from where Lahna and I took our walk on her first visit to LA with me back in ’98. I slid tentatively onto the freight scale like a container of bulk mail with, God’s honest truth, no earthly idea what number it would display.
I was nearly seven hundred pounds.
If you have a hard time conceptualizing how much seven hundred pounds is, then clearly you haven’t spent much time in Houston, but let me make it easier for you: it’s roughly the size of a vending machine full of snacks. It’s twice the size of a giant panda. I weighed twice as much as something with the word giant right in the name.
Talk about a wake-up call. In the space of a few months, I had the biggest moment of my career threatened by my weight, and as a reward for surviving it, I got to suffer the deeply scary humiliation of going to the fucking post office to weigh myself.
By the time I made my debut on The Tonight Show in March of 2004 (with Snoop Dogg as the main guest, what-what!), I’d slimmed down to just over four hundred pounds. I had pretty much lost an entire other fat person. I was proud of that, and I felt better than I had in a long, long time. It’s weird how that works with chronic pain. When you live with it long enough, it becomes your new normal and you forget what it’s like to feel good, like objectively good. It was an amazing feeling that led to the happiest, most productive seven-year period of my life.
Later that year, Lahna and I bought a house together at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Hollywood Hills. On July 3, 2005, we got married. I figured what better way to ring in America’s independence than by locking up my dick for the rest of its life!
In 2007, my baby girl April was born. Three months later, realizing there was no way in hell we could babyproof our house for that adorable little monster, we renovated it and bought a nice suburban home in Nashville. I thought, hell, I was born in Chattanooga, and I’ve always had an affinity for Tennessee, why not? It didn’t hurt that Nashville was more or less equidistant to 90 percent of the venues I played as a national headlining act. Federal Express is headquartered in Memphis for the same reason: they’re within a four-hour flight of pretty much everywhere in the continental United States. If it works for them, it can work for me.
In 2009, April’s brother, August, came along. Somewhere in this period, Lahna’s parents also stopped hating my fucking guts. They agreed to accept me, as the father of their grandchildren, with only mild displeasure, like mealy okra in the gumbo of their family.
Professionally, things exploded. Between 2004 and 2010, I released a comedy album and two Comedy Central specials. I appeared on a bunch of other people’s shit, and I toured virtually nonstop, raking in that paper to make sure my babies were taken care of. If there was a club with three hundred seats, a stage, and a microphone, I found it and did a week of shows there. Sometimes I did it twice in one year. In certain cities I was filling theaters. I cannot tell you the immense feeling of pride I got the first time I headlined a venue that required a bona fide sound check and did not pay part of my fee with my pick from the bar menu. The only problem with this approach to my career was that in worrying entirely about taking care of my family, I forgot to take of myself.
PART 4
BACK DOWN TO EARTH: 2010–2017
16.
SIT, DOGGY, SIT, GOOD DOGG
In 2010 at the end of September, I did a string of nine shows all around the marijuana-growing regions of Northern California. Fall is harvest season in California, so at the meet and greets I do after every show, I was getting some heavy handshakes from a lot of my fans. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to leave a show with a half pound of weed and at least four ounces of keef 1 or wax or some kind of concentrate. I see other comics take pictures with fans who buy them shots or bring them cookies and make them T-shirts with their best punch lines airbrushed on. Not me. After nine shows, my fans gave me enough pot to hotbox a community college.
My last show was in Stockton, a city in Northern California that COPS and Sons of Anarchy put on the map for its gang violence and meth addicts. My people. I was playing the two-thousand-seat Bob Hope Theatre, which is the second-biggest venue in town behind the Stockton Arena, where Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube were playing that night. Because we had the same promoter, Live Nation, we ended up booked into rooms on the same floor of the same hotel. Actually, it wasn’t all of us. Cube took a plane back to LA after the show, but Snoop Dizzle—he parties, jack!
I don’t know if Snoop heard I was in the building, or if he just smelled me there, but I wasn’t in my room thirty minutes before his huge bodyguard knocked on my door and invited me down to Snoop’s room. We’d met briefly backstage at The Tonight Show several years earlier, so I knew Snoop well enough to say hello, but it wasn’t Jay Leno’s giant chin that would eventually bond us, it would be Snoop’s giant bag of reefer that we smoked the shit out of that night with Uncle Junebug—God rest his soul—and my opener, Billy Wayne Davis.
Conservatively, we smoked more than two ounces between all of us. Billy Wayne tapped out first, but I wasn’t far behind him, because I had to get up in a couple hours to drive back down to LA and catch a flight to Guam, where I was doing a week of shows. As a parting gift, Snoop put a half ounce of his killer weed in a smellproof bag and signed it:
To: My nigga Ralphie
Love: Uncle Snoop
Stockton is a five-hour drive to Los Angeles straight down the I-5. It’s mostly two lanes all the way down, with tractor trailers regularly doing 85 mph in the right lane, so if you have any sense in your head at all, you do that drive dead sober. I ended up getting a bit of a late start thanks to Snoop’s hotboxing my brain, so I drove straight to LAX and had Lahna and the kids meet me there, since we were making a family vacation out of it.
This was both a smart and a stupid decision. It was smart because if I missed my flight coming to pick up everyone at our house—which was an hour’s worth of LA city driving away from the airport—it wasn’t like we could hop the next hourly shuttle flight to Guam. You have to fly through Honolulu, with only three or four flights a day from there to Guam. If you miss your flight, you�
�re losing a day at least. By driving directly to the airport, I told myself, I was smartly playing it safe.
Stupidly, though, I was driving with two backpacks in the backseat that had a West Hollywood dispensary’s worth of marijuana inside them. Fortunately, I’d installed a bulletproof safe in my car (you sell enough weed in the city of Los Angeles and you learn a few things), so before getting out of the car in the airport parking lot, I took about $6,000 worth of products out of my bags and locked them in the safe: three and a half ounces of weed, an ounce of keef, and twenty grams of hash. All good shit.
With a week of big shows coming up, and two little ones to spend time with in between, on the heels of an exhausting stretch of California shows, I knew I needed to get as much sleep as I could during the twenty hours of travel ahead of me. I don’t like synthetic stuff like Ambien, so I grabbed a little packet of THC strips from the stash in the safe. These strips were great for the road. They looked exactly like Listerine breath strips, except whereas Listerine strips keep your breath smelling minty fresh, THC strips get the average person fucked-up for eighteen hours. As a 420-pound man with a high tolerance, I would get superstoned for a good twelve hours.
Ideally, this being a major international airport with significant drug traffic going through it every year, I would have taken a strip right there in the parking lot and left the rest in the safe, but these strips had an accurate forty-five minute fuse on them, and we wouldn’t be even close to getting on the plane by the time the THC in the strip detonated and put me on my ass. I had no choice but to bring them with me. I stuck them in my wallet, put my wallet it my back pocket like I normally do, and headed into the terminal.