This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  Still, she was my wife. I loved her and I wanted her to be happy, so I agreed to participate in the documentary. One of our first shooting days was in Madison, Wisconsin. I was on the road for a fairly long stretch, living out of the tour bus we bought off Dave Matthews back in 2012, and she wanted to capture what that was like. It sounds romantic in the literary sense, but it’s a constant high-wire act. The logistics of travel, ticket requests, morning radio spots, and merch sales are enough to drive anyone nuts; but I had the additional psychic load of dealing with my health. Eating right, sleeping enough, getting some exercise, were all important for my health, and difficult to accomplish day to day.

  Wouldn’t you know it, the day before Lahna and the kids came out, I got sick again with an upper-respiratory infection. That did not sit well with Lahna, who had hired a personal trainer to come out to Madison to help with the exercise part of my health regimen. The personal-trainer bit didn’t sit well with me. What the fuck is that about? I’ll tell you what it’s about: she was trying to manipulate me to lose weight. She thought she could play to my vanity by sticking a camera in my face. How could I possibly respect that?

  I’m sick as a dog in the middle of Wisconsin. I’m with my wife, two kids, a trainer, a documentarian, my tour manager, and my driver on my tour bus. I’m wearing six hats at once, and all I should have been doing was resting, not spinning all of these plates. It was too much. I couldn’t process everything that was happening, and I was getting increasingly agitated with everyone around me. Before I knew it, it had descended into a huge knock-down, drag-out fight, which was the last thing I needed, because I had to get some rest before my shows started at 8:00 p.m. Finally I retreated to the bedroom in the back of the bus and closed the door, but she wouldn’t let it go. She woke me up at 5:00 p.m. and then a couple times after that. Eventually I snapped on her and told her to leave me the fuck alone, but by then there was no chance I’d get back to sleep. I was too heated. I had to hop in the shower for a little bit to cool myself off mentally.

  When I was done with my shower, it was close enough to showtime that it made sense to get ready. I was starting to brush my teeth when I realized we were out of potable water for the sinks, so I asked Lahna to hand me a bottle of water, and I’ll got from her was this shitty look, which set me off again. That was all it took for us to be at each other’s throat again.

  In the car on our way to the gig from the parking lot where we parked the bus, Lahna pulled out her phone and called my assistant Aaron. Right in front of me, she asked him to change her flight to the next morning. She was leaving town early. I was absolutely livid. Not just because she was my wife, not just because she was the one who hauled this fucking documentarian out here, but also because she was my opener!

  I made my tour manager stop the car. I couldn’t be in the same car with Lahna in that moment. I got out and walked back to my tour bus. I would rather take a cab to the venue, that’s how much I could not be around her anymore. It wasn’t over, though. When I got to the club, the hits just kept on coming. Lahna decided she wasn’t going to perform that night. She was going to leave the club and go back to the bus. Instead of leaving right away, though, she thought it would be better to stay in the greenroom for a while to continue chewing me out.

  While she read me the riot act for the litany of crimes I had committed and we had litigated over and over the last three or four years, I watched the fill-in feature act, a local female comedian, on the CCTV mounted to the wall in the greenroom.

  “Lahna, while you’re bitching at me, that girl is working in your spot! Why don’t you worry a little less about me and a little more about your own work? You’re fucking around missing your set? I don’t believe this.” I was at my wit’s end, at a complete loss. “I’ve never done this in twenty-five years of stand-up, but I have to fire you. You cannot cause a bunch of drama, miss your gig, and cost us repeat work. I can’t believe you did this. You’re fucking fired.”

  I’d reached my breaking point. Then I pushed beyond it. I grabbed her guitar and threw it on the floor.

  “You see this five-thousand-dollar guitar? I should stomp this thing to pieces. Why not? I paid for it. You don’t want to use it and I damn sure don’t play. You probably don’t even give a shit.”

  I couldn’t stay in the bus that night. It would have crushed me. I didn’t have another place to stay, so I just sat up in the car all night looking at the bus. Wrapped in black, with my name and my big stupid face plastered all over it, the bus represented pretty much everything that I had worked for—that we had worked for.

  I stayed up until 7:00 a.m., when my tour manager was scheduled to drive Lahna and the kids over to Milwaukee to catch their rescheduled flight home. Right at seven, the door to the bus flew open and my kids came over and hugged me and started crying. They didn’t want to leave. Lahna didn’t want to hear it. She had snapped in her way, like I had snapped in mine.

  “You can’t be around me or your kids right now. I’m sick of this shit. I’m going home.”

  Madison, Wisconsin, is a beautiful pastoral town in the late spring, but in that moment it was the ugliest place I had ever been. I have never felt so much despair in one place, at one time. I finished the week in Madison, but it fucked me up so much that I canceled the rest of the gigs on that leg of the tour, sent the trainer and the documentarian home, and went back to Nashville.

  A few days later I spoke with Lahna and delivered an ultimatum: if she wanted to stay together and make this thing work, she had to leave Los Angeles and move out to Nashville with me. This was not new ground for us. We’d taken a ride on this merry-go-round more than a few times. No matter how fast I got it spinning, it always stopped on one thing: Lahna thought moving to Nashville would be bad for her career. I couldn’t have disagreed more. LA is one of the most undesirable places to live for a comedian in my shoes and a comedian in Lahna’s shoes. I’m a salt-of-the-earth Texas comic and a headlining road warrior who fills big clubs and theaters. LA couldn’t be more inconveniently located in relation to the places I do best in. As a musical comedian trying to get as many reps as possible when she was not busy being an awesome mom, LA clubs were not the venues where she was going to get to flex her comedy muscles the way she needed to.

  But all of that work stuff was beside the point to me. We never wanted to raise our kids in Los Angeles. For all the good things that big cities have going for them, raising kids isn’t one of them. I wanted us to move to Nashville so we could have as close to a normal life as possible. I wanted the kids to grow up in a place with seasons. I wanted them to go to good public schools. I wanted them to have a big vegetable garden where they could experience the pleasure of eating something you’ve planted and harvested. I wanted them to learn how to respect religiosity instead of ridicule it. I wanted August to develop a Southern accent like me, and I wanted April to learn how to say “Bless your heart” when she really meant to say “Go fuck yourself.” I wanted to be a real family again.

  Lahna said no. Two weeks later I filed for divorce.

  20.

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  The conference room at a divorce lawyer’s office is a lot like the room at the animal hospital where the veterinarian brings you when it’s time to put the family pet to sleep. It’s claustrophobically small. It feels like sadness, and it stinks like death. For all the good times you’ve had, this is where you’ll have your last moment together. For some reason, it is always right off the reception area in full view of people anxiously waiting their turn, hoping for good news but preparing for the worst. It’s like they do it on purpose, the way kings and tyrants used to string up traitors and liars right outside the gates of the castle, as a warning: do what we say or you might end up here too.

  For a year I dreaded walking into that room and sitting across from Lahna as we negotiated our way apart from each other. Don’t worry: I won’t go into too many details. Not only is it plain impolite, but no one wants to hear the play-by-play o
f someone else’s divorce. It’s like narrating the demolition of an abandoned building that has finally been officially condemned. Just let me know when the dust has settled, the rubble has been cleared, and it’s time to rebuild.

  I read once that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. I saw it on Twitter, so it’s probably scammy clickbait, but the more I thought about it as the divorce inched along, the more that statement felt true. If you don’t give a shit about someone, it’s virtually impossible to muster the energy required for hatred. So if you do hate them, it must mean you still care. In a divorce—one you never wanted—that realization can be intoxicating because it feels like a glimmer of hope. Lahna was full of vitriol for me. She said and did a litany of spiteful, hurtful, unnecessary things. For a while, thanks to Twitter logic, my brain told me, Boy, that must mean she still cares a whole hell of a lot.

  There was only one problem: by the fall of 2016, I was the one who didn’t care. Let me rephrase that: I cared deeply about our kids, about my life, about my work and my happiness—all the important things. I just didn’t care anymore about how Lahna felt about me. I was indifferent, and it was completely liberating. The only times in my life I’d ever felt this free were in the moments right after Thanksgiving dinner each year when I changed into sweatpants.

  They say that when God closes a door, He opens a window for you. (I saw that one on a pillow.) If it’s true, when God closed the door on my marriage, the window He opened seemed to look right out onto the bright lights of the Las Vegas Strip.

  * * *

  The older I get, the more Las Vegas reminds me of my own stand-up career. By many accounts, it has no business existing, let alone thriving—especially when you consider how it began—yet there it stands year after year, getting bigger, continuing to draw people from all over the country looking to have a good time.

  I’ve always had an interesting relationship with Las Vegas. From the outside, with its glitz and ostentatious displays of wealth and excess, a guy like me doesn’t seem to fit in a city like Las Vegas. Mine is not a face you expect to see on a fifty-foot-high marquee as you ride from the airport to your hotel. Yet all you have to do is take one look beneath the surface to realize that the heart of Las Vegas is made up of my people. Whether it’s the cocktail waitresses and pai gow dealers who live and work there, or the college buddies and married couples who come in for their annual trips, the people who keep Vegas ticking are the same people I see at my shows all across the country. You can only come to that understanding after you’ve both toured the country multiple times and played Vegas enough to see the overlap with your own eyes.

  The first person to bring that to my attention was Damian Costa, who booked me at the South Point Hotel Casino and Spa for a number of years when he was their director of entertainment. Damian is a great guy, and after shows we’d grab a late dinner and shoot the shit about comedy and the golden era of the Vegas lounges. We’d lament that no comics were doing what the all-time greats did back in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, when Las Vegas was still just a small collection of hotels with names like Last Frontier and Desert Inn. Guys like Milton Berle, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, George Burns, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and the great Don Rickles would come into town and do five or six shows a night, six days a week, for weeks at a time. Rickles, especially, was famous for starting his first show just after midnight and going until five or six in the morning, each show just getting meaner and dirtier (relative to the time, obviously). Those Vegas shows made Rickles’s career. Most people think it’s because that’s where he met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and the rest of the Hollywood set who made sure Mr. Warmth was always taken care of. But that wasn’t it at all. Buddy Hackett explained it to me one day:

  “The great thing about Las Vegas is that America comes to you, you don’t have to go to America.”

  What he meant was, the coolest of the cool would come out there, they’d see Rickles’s act, then they’d go home and tell all their friends about him. The beauty is, Las Vegas is like Disneyland: no one has ever come back home having lost money or had a miserable time, at least not according to the stories they tell their friends. In reality, the trip may have been a hot, sticky hell on earth full of vomit and rejection and poor decisions—and that’s just Disneyland—but who wants to hear a story about that? I’d rather hear you talk about your divorce! As a result, by the time the lounge era ended in Vegas, Rickles was a legend.

  One night in late 2012, fresh out of rehab, I was having dinner with Damian after a show, and he made the point that no one does anything like those Rickles shows anymore, and they haven’t for a long time. A bunch of lounge acts impersonate the guys from the golden era, but nobody is doing their own version of it, which meant a huge opportunity was just sitting out there, unrealized. Over the next couple hours, Damian and I came up with a show called Dirty at 12:30. It would be toplined by me and my buddy Gabe Lopez, it would be every Friday night in the main lounge of the South Point, it would be free, and it would be fucking filthy.

  Dirty at 12:30 opened in May 2013 and was an immediate success. Just my luck, as its popularity grew, my marriage started to fall apart. Before long, I had to step away from the show and hand it off completely to Gabe. Earlier in my life, having to do that might have pissed me off and I would have looked for people to blame, but I was good with it when it came time to pull the trigger. Gabe was too funny to be living in some shitty little apartment and working a real job to make ends meet. This was a chance for him to stand his career up on its own two feet and give it a real go. Joey Medina had done something similar for me when I had to get the hell out of Houston and he vouched for me at the Latino Laugh Festival and then gave me a place to stay when I got to Los Angeles. Besides being the right thing to do, handing off the show in its entirety to Gabe was a chance, finally, to karmically return the favor and pay it forward.

  * * *

  My relationship with Las Vegas did not end with the Dirty at 12:30 move. At the end of 2016, I threw away the condoms and we moved in together. That September, just as I was mentally coming through the other side of all the divorce stuff, I was in town and had dinner with Damian Costa again. In the years since he’d inked the Dirty at 12:30 deal with us, he’d moved up the strip to Caesars as their vice president of entertainment operations. Our conversation meandered like it always does, landing on the familiar topics that we could talk about until the whiskey bottle was dry, and this time I was the one who brought up a point that had been gnawing at me.

  On the ride in from the airport, I’d noticed something about all the billboards and marquees: almost no stand-up comics. The ones whose names I did see were only there for the weekend. Otherwise, all the way from McCarran to South Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road, it was magician, magician, naked dancing men, nightclub, nightclub, day club, “illusionist,” Britney Spears, magician, Muppet (Celine Dion), Blue Man Group, Cirque du Soleil, Cher. The only comedians with a permanent presence in town were Carrot Top and Jeff Dunham—both funny guys, but with their cases of props and ventriloquist dummies, respectively, not traditional stand-up comics. It was time, I argued to Damian, for a real stand-up comic to have a real Vegas residency.

  “Put me to work!” I said.

  “I don’t think lack of work is your problem, buddy.”

  Damian was missing my point, and so was I frankly, until I took a beat to think about it. I didn’t need this residency, I wanted it. I’d forgotten what that felt like. Recently, for the first time in my life, stand-up comedy had felt like a job-job. Like something I had to do, rather than something I loved to do. The idea of a residency was as invigorating to me as a forty-four-year-old as the prospect of moving to Houston was when I was an eighteen-year-old.

  Damian was into the idea. A month later we had contracts for a full residency at Harrah’s, a Caesars property just across the street from the Palace. My first show was January 26, 2017, and it was fantastic. The cliché thing to say here
is that I had massive butterflies; that I was just as nervous for this show as I was for my first set at the Comedy Showcase in Houston or opening up for Sam Kinison in Fayetteville; that this was the first night of the rest of my life. None of that is true.

  What is true is that my first show at Harrah’s felt much more like starting over than it did finishing up—which is how a lot of people think about residencies of any type, whether it’s in Las Vegas, the Poconos, Branson, or Atlantic City. That’s where careers go to die, conventional wisdom says. Well, what about my life or my career has been conventional? Sure, a Vegas residency is not the most likely place to pick for a fresh start. But then, Clarksville, Arkansas, is not the most likely place to find a comic. A Shakey’s Pizza is not the most likely place to find your first mentor and your first big break. The first season of a reality competition show is not the most likely place to get your biggest break. I could go on.

  The point is, for me, the Harrah’s residency was the rebirth of my spirit. The darkness lifted, the weight of it all fell away, and the buoyant, energetic good ol’ boy with the foul mouth and the baby face was back. Who knew taking a ride in the wayback machine for a little old-school Vegas comedy inspiration would be just the thing I needed? I sure didn’t, but I am definitely grateful.

  * * *

  I’ll tell you, for somebody who came of age in the world of comedy, there sure has been a ton of drama in my life. That used to grind my gears. It felt like the world was aligned against me. Eventually, though, I realized that drama is the lot in life of the comedian. Just as there is no hot without cold and no light without dark, there is no comedy without drama.