[A drunk in the audience yells, “They’re grrrrrreat!”]
Just perfect . . .
1991
Blazer: Pee . . . !
“Wild” Willy Strumston: Wee . . . !
“Topical” Tommy Tantrum: Okay, first off, his name is Paul Reubens, not “Pee Wee Herman,” which is a fucking character he plays. I guess the entire country screeches to a halt when—surprise, surprise—an adult male is caught masturbating in a public theater. I mean . . .
[Jokes about the Soviet storming of Vilnius to stop
Lithuanian independence, the Visegrad Agreement,
and the Milosevic demonstrations in Belgrade;
one thrown bottle later, Tommy stomps offstage.]
1992
Blazer: Yeah, so. How’re you folks doing? Let’s get a round of applause for those Redskins, huh?
Man, Carson retiring, huh? Gonna leave The Tonight Show. What’s he got, three weeks left there? What do you think, you still think I have a shot? [Heavy sigh] So yeah, so Bush, huh? Puking all over the Japanese prime minister like that? Look, if you don’t like their trade proposals, say it, don’t spray it. And . . .
[Pause]
Of course, next week that joke’s going to be a dinosaur. What else have I got here? Mike Tyson raping that chick, something something . . . I think the punch line was going to be something about being “saved by the bell.” Oh hey, here’s a bunch of stuff about Amy Fisher and Mary Jo Buttafuoco. “I hope this affair doesn’t blow up in my face.” Well, that’s Joe Buttafuoco saying that, now Mary Jo. Who cares anyway, right?
[Sits on stool]
Man, five years ago, the people who made the news seemed to be world leaders or talented people. You know what they should call the nightly news now? Tonight’s Biggest Asshole.
[Crowd laughs]
Right? Sometimes, I’m walking down the street, and there’s a guy with half of his ass showing, screaming at pedestrians. I want to say to him, “Hey, if you’d drop those pants all the way, set one of your turds on fire, and throw it at a baby, you could bump the president off the news tonight.” Ah, it’s all bullshit anyway.
“Wild” Willy [to the tune of the Newbeats’ “Bread and Butter”]:
He likes thighs and eyeballs
He likes brains and cheeks
That’s what Hannibal Lecter eats
Every day of the week . . .
“Topical” Tommy: Well, I don’t have a guitar like “Wild” Willy, but if I did? And after hearing that bullshit Rodney King verdict? Man, I’d play “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” This is just typical racist mistreatment of blacks by—
[A black guy, drunk and only half-listening to the show,
looks up at the stage and yells, “Don’t even go there,
motherfucker!”]
No, listen, I’m saying that those white police ass-holes . . .
[The black guy yells again, “Nuh-uh!”]
I’m on your side, goddamnit!
[They go back and forth for ten minutes, the crowd siding
with the black guy, before “Topical” Tommy, shaking, walks
offstage, giving the black guy a wide berth.]
1993
Blazer: . . . and another thing about divorce . . .
“Wild” Willy [to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”]:
Bill Clinton president
Intel’s making Pentiums
Showdown at Waco
Bills lose the Super Bowl
[Tries to rhyme “Don’t ask, don’t tell” with “Monica Seles,”
cracks up, and says, “I’m still working on that one.”]
“Topical” Tommy: Hey, I’ve got my problems with the government—that fucking Waco thing? They burn women and children alive and then say they were doing it to protect children? Yeah, right.
But these religious extremists, bombing the World Trade Center? People, we’ve got to wake up to what the fuck’s out there. Yeah, we’ve got some things here need fixing but if we let a few nut jobs who worship some bullshit desert god scare us into surrender, we’re going to find ourselves under sharia law. You know what that is? Well, I’ll tell you . . .
[Audience groans. One guy shouts, “U! S! A!”]
1994
Blazer: So, about a year ago, I was at the lowest part of my life. At least I thought I was. Then I found something worse. Dating a Goth waitress . . .
“Wild” Willy: Yeah, so, uh . . . I know I do a lot of silly-ass songs up here and all, and we have fun, right? We’re all partying together.
But I was, uh . . .
That Kurt Cobain, blowing his brains out like that? I mean, the fact that he could articulate so much pain in his music, you’d think that’d help him through it. And then you see something like that, where you realize, “Man, sometimes having a creative gift like that does nothing to alter your reality.” I mean, if he could write songs like that, and that didn’t help him, what fucking hope do we have? Sorry . . .
[Does a shockingly beautiful cover of “About a Girl”]
“Topical” Tommy: NAFTA? Are you fucking kidding me?
1995
GARVIN’S NOW UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT
WILL REOPEN IN SPRING OF 1996
1996
I went back to Washington, DC, to work at a new, national chain club in the summer of 1996.
The first morning I was there I did “Wild” Willy’s morning show. We joked on the air about the old club and the weirdos who used to come in for open mikes. Off the air, he told me how he was married now and couldn’t believe how much he loved the routine of getting up in the morning, doing his show, and then being home in the early afternoon to bring his daughters home from school. He’d stopped writing song parodies years ago, but he hosted regular all-ages shows in Georgetown. He really loved the local band scene. “Can you imagine how cool it would’ve been to be up in Seattle in the late eighties, instead of slugging away in those shithole comedy clubs?” I couldn’t quite agree with him but agreed that Tad, in their heyday, must’ve been something to see.
I drove around that afternoon in my rental car, visiting friends and seeing the sights. I flipped around the AM dial and found “Topical” Tommy’s right-wing radio show. He’d lost none of his anger but, now that he only had to remember six or seven catchall phrases that were guaranteed to set his listeners frothing, he spewed them with a venom that Ian MacKaye would’ve envied. Maybe all those years of silence, and stares, and dismissal from the crowd had secretly eaten away at him, and now he loved knowing he’d always get a positive response. At the mid-point of the show, he and a caller agreed, angrily, about how the blacks had blown all their chances for social justice and reform after the Rodney King verdict.
“I used to do comedy, and I remember trying to reach out and say how disgusted I was with that verdict, and this idiot in the audience was too stupid to know I was agreeing with him! Started shouting at me and threatening to kick my ass . . .”
The caller said, “That verdict was totally fair! They didn’t beat that guy enough!”
“Thank you, exactly,” said Tommy. I wanted to call him and bring up the Time-Warner merger, but my cell phone wasn’t getting a signal.
That night at the club, the manager came back to see me in the greenroom.
“Hey, Blazer!” I said, jumping up and hugging him.
“You want any kind of special intro music?”
I said, “You pick something. Your taste is better than mine. You turned me on to the Kinks back when I was an open-miker.”
He showed me pictures of his new wife and kids. The son and daughter were athletic and coltish, respectively. The wife was cute, in a sunny blouse and slacks, a tattoo of an ankh on her wrist. The tail of a larger, more elaborate tattoo barely peeked out from the collar of his shirt. The picture was taken at a soccer game in the suburbs.
The emcee introduced me. The Kinks’ “Come Dancing” played as I took the stage. I looked out
over the room. In the back, standing trim and happy in his sport-coat-over-T-shirt ensemble, Blazer smiled, lit by the blue light of the bar. The Tonight Show was forever gone, forever receded on his horizon. But he’d expanded his endpoint to take in every second of every day, and he’d honed his life down to pure reward.
The Victory Tour
In October 1993 I was a finalist in the San Francisco International Comedy Competition.
Because of this, I got hired by a club owner named Reed* to headline his comedy club in Vancouver, Canada. Which turned out to be in Surrey, which is a suburb of Vancouver the way boredom is a lesser state of excitement. Sorry, Surrey—but I spent the shittiest eleven days of my comedic career in your town and surrounding environs in the immediate company of Reed, the human equivalent of rancid clam chowder.†
At the time, I couldn’t have been more excited. Headlining. In Vancouver. All of my friends gushed about the city, about the cool people and bars and music clubs and the chess players near Burrard Street. I’ve since visited Vancouver many times and love it.
I visited Surrey in the early fall of 1994, and I would return only if I was tasked to kill a demon to save the world. Maybe not even then. Sorry, Surrey. Sorry, world. Yay, hypothetical demon.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1994
Reed meets me at the airport. He’s picking me up, taking me to the Smile Hole, his club. Where am I staying?
“I figured I could take you to the hotel after the show,” he says, sniffing wetly every third word.
I say, “Well, I kinda need a shower.”
“See, we haven’t sold a lot of tickets. We haven’t sold any tickets. You haven’t sold a single ticket.” Reed can deftly make a declarative statement and follow it with amended, directed blame. “You’ve got to go do some radio. There’s a bunch of drive-time shows that’ll go right up before showtime. How bad d’you need that shower?”
“I’d really like a shower . . . I mean . . . okay.”
This is my first-ever headlining gig. And I am still naive and paranoid enough to believe that every club and club owner is connected on an invisible “shit wire,” where they share stories of diva-like behavior. I think there’s a “don’t hire” list, always adding a new name, somewhere out in the ether.
We go to a radio station—actually, the second floor of a chewed-on-and-discarded-by-time-and-care office park, where four stations share the cramped second floor. Each “station” is enclosed in stapled-together soundproof sheeting, like gray, indoor teepees. During songs or commercials the deejays pop out like pasty gnomes and shake a soup bowl of sweat off their faces.
Reed greets the first confused deejay and it’s clear, instantly, that there never was a scheduled appearance. He’s bum-rushing the four stations, like a street barker, and me an exotic orangutan on a chain, hoping someone will let me near an open mike to screech, fling some poop, and say the name of the club. The first three deejays flat-out refuse—they basically back-announce songs—but the fourth bites. I’m pushed into his rock and roll lean-to, and he introduces me to the good people of Surrey.
“Got a funnyman here, going to be at the . . .”
He looks over at Reed, who never told him the club’s name. Reed mouths the words “Smile Hole.”
“The Wide Hole. Here he is—”
The deejay looks at me and pops his eyes. Introduce yourself.
“Oh, uh, Patton Oswalt.”
“Making ’em laugh over at the Wide Hole. But right now, the Divinyls want to touch themselves . . .” Christina Amphlett’s throaty voice fills the teepee and the deejay thanks me for dropping by.
Reed gets lost on his way back to the club and apologizes for not being able to get me over to the hotel in time for a shower.
“Your bags’ll be safe in the car here in the lot,” he says as we pull up to the Smile Hole, the only thing open in an otherwise abandoned strip mall. “Or we can go over to my place, drop your stuff off there, get you a shower just fine. You never know what a hotel’ll charge you for, huh?”
I say I’m okay, let’s just go in the club.
The Smile Hole is a small lounge/waiting area, with a bar and a few tables. Double doors lead into the club itself, half again as big as the waiting area. No one’s waiting to go in.
The bartender is super-friendly and could not be more excited about the new “Ice beer” they’ve got. “Coors Ice Beer! It’s so tasty!”
At this time in my life I’m not really drinking. A combination of misadventures in college and a love of marijuana has caused me to temporarily abstain.
But I’ve never heard of ice beer, so I take a single sip from the freshly cracked can the bartender plops in front of me. Not bad, but it’s all I drink.
“Iiiice beer,” says Reed, swooping up beside me, with an inflection that makes it sound like he’s saying, “Rape’s kinda cool, huh?”
Eight people show up. The emcee is warm, friendly, and about as funny as Shoah. I take the stage to the sound of, my hand to God, one person clapping once and only once, and then I start into my act.
The audience of eight, clustered at two tables in the front, stares up at me with the faces you’d see on mourners at a solemn wake where one of the eulogizers took the stage and farted Wallace Stevens’s “The Sun This March.” During the course of my set, each of the eight audience members, one by one, gets up to use the bathroom. When they return, they sit down at the farthest table from the stage. By the end of my set, I’m addressing them across an empty room.
Reed takes me to my hotel—the Best Western King George Inn & Suites. My room is an underlit, cream-walled tomb dominated by a bed with a waffle-iron mattress. I take a spitting, resentful shower. I turn on the TV. There’s a Jerry Lewis movie dubbed in French. I fall asleep at dawn.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1994
I wake up at noon.
I make a pot of coffee with the little coffeemaker that’s in the room. Now the room smells like a hot, wet hat. The coffee tastes like pants.
I turn on the TV and get my first look at a bizarre Canadian game show called Acting Crazy, which manages to make charades even more boring. The one fascinating thing about the show is that the celebrities and citizens play against a depthless, blank void like the prison in THX 1138 or the in-between zone in The Matrix. The only celebrity I recognize is Jack Carter. Years later I’ll work with him on the pilot for The King of Queens. He’ll be replaced by Jerry Stiller once the show gets picked up.
I turn the channel and there’s a news report about an inmate who’s escaped from a minimum-security mental institution. The newscasters calmly remind everyone that the inmates are allowed to release themselves on their own recognizance. Why, then, do they keep going back to the notion that the inmate has “escaped”? The news report ping-pongs back and forth like this for two more minutes before I switch off the TV and go for a walk.
The walk from the hotel to the club, I discover, is a pleasant ten minutes. I make a note of this for later in the evening. The less time in confined spaces with sniffling, passive-aggressive Reed, the better. And taking in the cold Canadian air is like breathing pure ruggedness.
Thursday night’s show draws four people—a group of three, and a middle-aged woman who’s clearly been stood up on a date. I realize I take up 25 percent of the space in the universe that my audience takes. I get zero reaction from the crowd, except for a joke whose punch line involves Anna Nicole Smith.
“Cunt,” says the lone woman. She doesn’t yell the word, or snort it or mutter it. She says it calmly and flatly, like she’s politely reminding me of a word I left out of the joke.
I walk out of the showroom with the audience after I say good night. They head straight for the door. I get my jacket and notebook from behind the bar and do the same.
Reed is waiting at the bar, with an ice beer opened for me. “Oh, I’m good,” I say. Reed stares at me, goggle-eyed, like I’m leaving something obvious unsaid. I absolutely can’t read his rhythms and don’t have
the energy to start trying.
I walk back to the hotel. The main road from the club to the hotel doesn’t have a sidewalk, and the shoulder is slim and soft. I take a darker side road that I discovered earlier that day, returning from my walk for a sandwich in the hotel restaurant. There are no lights on the sidewalk but I can see the wobbly pinprick of hotel light in the distance. I walk until it gets bigger, go into my room, watch Chato’s Land dubbed in French, and fall asleep at dawn.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1994
“You have to stay and drink tonight.”
I’m sitting at the bar, rearranging the order of my jokes. I’m under the delusion that I’m having bad shows because of some cosmic misalignment of words, phrases, and ideas. I may as well have cast runes into a spirit bowl, hoping that the collective heart of the audience would open to my necromantic call. Maybe that’s how jugglers do it. Those guys never have shitty sets.
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Page 9