Forever Nerdy

by Brian Posehn

  My comedy is so much about truth, but not in a cheesy way. I just mean that all my stories are true, they all actually happened. But I started comedy by lying. Lying to my mom to make a story better or to make her laugh, I would embellish things at first, then I would lie: I had a few fake girlfriends and one I completely made up—even her name, Sinea, was made up. Nice, huh? Very exotic sounding and pretty inclusive for the mid-eighties. She was a punk Edie Brickell I met in a Napa coffeehouse. And completely made up.

  I also lied to everybody at my new jobs in Sacto, rewriting my history like a sociopath. First of all, my mom and I had more money in my fantasy life. To explain the beater I drove, I had trashed my loaded Mazda RX7. In retrospect I aimed pretty low with my lie—a Mazda? Like everything I like, I had an obsessive period with comedy: I got onstage as much as I could and took any road gig that came up. I went to every open mic anywhere near Sacramento. I did an open mic in a suburban bar, and the crazy old lady who owned the place had a swear jar on the bar: if you cursed during your set, you had to contribute to the swear jar. I didn’t make any money that night.

  I made a few friends in the local comedy scene. One was an older guy named Maurice. I did a lot of shows with Maurice in that short time; we did comedy competitions at bars and dance clubs and drove to San Francisco to try to get onstage. One night Maurice asked a couple of us if we would do a show at San Quentin Prison with him. We all were obsessed with stage time, so we all said yes. A couple of weeks before the prison show we were all hanging out after our weekly Metro Bar and Grill show. We were at a friend’s house after the bars closed, and that was the last time I ever saw Maurice. I went home with a girl, because comedy had made me confident.

  The next morning I was at my job at Steve’s Place Pizza making and flipping pizza dough when a customer mentioned that cops had killed a local comedian the night before. I responded with a hearty “What the fuck?” Well, what the fuck was: Maurice was a rapist. While I was being consensually horny, Maurice had climbed through the window of a strange woman to rape her. She had managed to dial the operator during the struggle.

  Sacramento cops showed up as Maurice made his escape; they say he reached for a gun. We all believed them and actually pictured him faking the gun so he wouldn’t have to go back to San Quentin as a rapist. It turned out that he had scheduled the San Quentin show as a homecoming show to show off to his old prison pals his new comedy skills. And then he blew it and raped again like a rapist. How crazy is that? I still have yet to play San Quentin.

  While I was working at Tower I was the rap buyer, but I ran the counter a lot. That was super fun. I would crank my thrash heroes like Anthrax, Testament, Vio-lence, Exodus, and Death Angel and then make fun of customers. And boy, were they dipshits. One day a customer called, asking, “Do you have ‘Riding with the Monkey’ by Tony San Martini?” and I said, a beat later, “Do you mean ‘Surfing with the Alien’ by Joe Satriani?” “Yeah, that.” I should have won an award for that. I got what he was saying, and he only had two words right: “with” and “the.”

  And yeah, the metalhead kid was also the rap buyer. Nothing gets past you. When I was hired it came up that I was pretty knowledgeable about rap—I was actually a big fan of it at the time. Still am, of course, as I’m old my favorite stuff is from ’85 to ’95. I was/am into everything from Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys to NWA, Public Enemy, Biggie Smalls, Wu-Tang Clan. And I love A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. I am also a massive fan of California hip-hop performers Souls of Mischief and The Pharcyde. So there’s my rap cred—at the time it was enough. I wasn’t the only metalhead at my Citrus Heights Tower Records, but I was the only guy in our suburban neighborhood who knew the difference between MC Hammer and Too Short and would school anyone who asked. Or didn’t ask.

  I was fired several months later. Fired for attitude. From Tower Records. They hired me for attitude. But I soon got a job building skateboards for a place called Sacramento Surf and Skate, where my attitude fit in really well. My long-haired, Stussy-wearing hesher pals and I would lay grip tape and install trucks and wheels onto skateboard decks as per our job description. But most of our time was spent making fun of the suburban kids buying skateboards, trendy clothes, sunglasses, snowboards, and surfing gear from us. The irony was not lost on us that we worked at a land-locked surf shop. We were cool; the dudes and dudettes who shopped there, they were the “fecking posers.”

  In January of 1990 I left Sacramento and the job security of a skateboard shop for the comedy mecca, Long Beach, California, to make it in comedy. Then I didn’t. One thing I didn’t know when I moved to Long Beach is that it is kinda far from Hollywood—like, on a good day, a half hour away and usually at least an hour. It was such a dumb choice. But that was the year of a lot of bad choices. At least I had the support of my mom, though. She was impressed with what I had done with stand-up in two and a half years, so in January of 1990 she helped me load up a U-Haul and head down south from Sacramento.

  We should have known it was a bad move. It rained most of the way as we went over the Grapevine, this treacherous pass over the mountains before you get to Los Angeles where it’s super sketchy if you’ve never done it before and especially if you’re young and driving a U-Haul with your mom. And it’s harder to smoke pot and masturbate.

  I got sets at bars and comedy clubs all around LA and Orange County pretty quickly just by being the new kid who had a decent twenty minutes. I did the local open-mic night at the Long Beach Comedy Club and pretty quickly became a regular opener/MC.

  I opened for such dead comedians as Skip Stephenson from Real People; Blake Clark, a hilarious Boston comic who was also featured in a couple of Adam Sandler movies; and Vic Dunlop, who did every possible stand-up show in the late eighties and early nineties. It was cool to have a local venue where I could get tons of stage time in front of huge national acts. From that, the booker of the club, Francine, turned me on to other gigs, a couple of Improvs in the Orange County suburbs.

  One night I got pulled over coming back from San Diego in my shitty ’68 Bug. I’d already gotten pulled over in Sac for a possible 502—highway patrol code for drinking and driving. The San Diego one was brutal; they were total bullies. Sheriff: “Who do you think you are, Axl Rose?” Me: “Um, Axl Rose is a rock singer. I’m a comedian.” Shitty smirks all around. Sheriff: “You’re a comedian? Do you have any jokes about cops?” Me: “No, but I will tomorrow.” That guy actually smiled before he put me in the drunk tank, even though I wasn’t fucking drunk. I later got a letter from Orange County saying I wasn’t guilty. Turns out I wasn’t drunk. No shit.

  My friend Paige also moved down from Sacramento. She had broken up with Glen when she showed up at his house and caught him with another girl in his bedroom. He said, “I was just showing her my puppies.” (In his defense, he did have cute puppies.) Paige then crashed with us for a couple of months; she actually lived in my room with me and slept in my bed. I was so in love with her that I thought something would just organically happen. It didn’t.

  I tried to get a record store job but couldn’t lock one down. Instead, I delivered subpoenas and filed papers at different courthouses around LA county. Compton was intimidating, hip-hop reputation withstanding. I had a guy pull a gun on me when I stepped on his porch trying to deliver a subpoena; I put it in his mailbox when he wasn’t looking. Sketchy job. And I hated it. I was getting stand-up dates, but I needed more income. So I took a job as an entertainer for children’s parties. I was going to be in a Ninja Turtle costume. Pretty awesome job for a turtle, huh? But I would never get to put on that shell.

  That July a couple of friends were visiting from Sacramento, and the day started like any other. We got high and grabbed tacos. It wound up being one of the worst nights of my life.

  After fourteen hours of drinking and smoking and a little bit of blow we decided to keep it going when the bars on the trendy Third Street closed. We grabbed more beers, loaded up our backpacks, and headed f
or the beach. I would later wish I had died. We drank on the roof of a lifeguard tower. When we were leaving we all jumped off the tower. I went last. But I had no business jumping off of there. I broke my back.

  That’s how it works. I had a compressed fracture of the L3 vertebrae. And I walked home. Terrible idea. I got into a hot bathtub with Epsom salts because I thought that was what my mom would recommend. Why four twenty-three-year-old guys had Epsom salt in the house, I still have no idea. Anyway, I was sitting in the tub and realized I was paralyzed. I panicked. An ambulance came and threw me shirtless with soaking-wet Billabong sweatpants into the back. This was Long Beach—that probably happened all the time. I remember the cold sensation of the metal table in the emergency room on my back, but I really didn’t feel that much pain. Booze made the situation happen, but it also made it kind of better.

  A week later they moved me to a spinal cord injury clinic in Whittier. I had a compressed fracture of the L3 vertebrae, which led to swelling of my spinal column and paralysis. After meeting with specialists I was given the choice of surgery that would fuse my back together and I’d still probably never walk again or, because I was young, maybe let my back heal itself. I went with plan B, the biggest maybe ever. I was alone. My mom had freaked out when she heard about my injury, blacked out, hit her head on the bathroom sink, and broke her arm. It was a fucking nightmare.

  I came out of my paralysis ten days after my dumbass leap, but I wouldn’t walk for two and a half months. I was moved enough not to get bed sores, but I would be bedridden for the duration. When I was fitted with a hard-plastic brace that would hopefully heal my spine, they told me I was the only patient in the whole hospital who might ever walk again. It was essentially a giant turtle shell. So I guess I got to wear a shell after all—small victories and all that. While in Whittier I heard gunshots a couple times. Turned out that a gang kid who had been paralyzed was in the front of the hospital visiting with family members, and rival gang drove by to finish the job. They didn’t. Someone else died, though. Thankfully they soon moved me to an old folks’ home in Carson, scrappy neighbor to Compton. (Read in a sarcastic voice) Another really nice neighborhood.

  My new home/hospital bed was not in a fancy assisted-living facility like the docked cruise ship my mom currently lives in. No, this was an old folks’ home. It was super depressing. I wound up sharing a room with a very old, bedridden man who seemed to be hallucinating. I never found out his whole story, but I’m now guessing that he suffered from dementia, because later I would deal with dementia more closely.

  At the time the old guy in the bed next to me, Richard, was a constant annoyance. I don’t remember his last name. I feel like the nurses said it and he said, “Call me Richard.” Not in a cool way—he was super bossy about everything. You know how some old people are sweet all the time and some of them are bossy dicks? This guy was a bossy dick. The only conversations Richard and I ever had were about the same two things: he wanted to know what time it was, and luckily or unluckily, I had a swatch. Those were dumb. But I was super metal laying in a hospital bed wearing a plastic watch.

  Anyway, it felt like every twenty minutes the entire time I was there he would ask me what time it was. And he said it in the weirdest way: “Excuse me, what time do you have by your watch?” It wasn’t an old-fashioned expression. I don’t think anybody ever talked like that. I would tell him the time, and he would either say, “thank you” and fall quiet until he asked me again, twenty minutes later, what time I had by my watch. Or he would follow it by saying his wife was coming to get him in their Cadillac.

  The first time he told me that I believed him—why wouldn’t I? I eventually figured out, like, forty times later that she wasn’t coming. I don’t know if Richard ever figured it out. He died. Just kidding. Not while I was there. But I’m pretty sure he’s dead now.

  If you think that’s depressing, I also handmade a calendar detailing my two months I had to stay there. More? Okay, filling the pee cup became a game no one won. I had a sadistic running gag where I’d try to fill the pee cup to the rim, so whoever moved it would get pee everywhere. Oh, and yes, I know I’m an asshole. I knew it then. The only other person my age in the whole care center was this kid confined to a bed-chair because of spina bifida. He was also a crackhead and a gang member—spina bifida couldn’t keep him down. Well, it did.

  I didn’t have a ton of friends in Long Beach, so I didn’t have a ton of visitors, which definitely added to the depressing nature and relentless boredom of staying there. The booker of the Long Beach comedy club visited a couple of times. She also helped find a buyer for my VW Bug and brought me weed. Good friend. Paige, the Playboy model who slept in my bed and never, ever fucked me, sent her friend to visit me. She said Paige was concerned for me but would not be visiting me. There was a cool nurse at the senior care facility who took pity on me and brought me food from my favorite local Southern California joints, Taco Surf and In and Out Burger.

  In October of 1990, after around three months of hospitalization, I was released. I would still have to wear the turtle shell. Pete came and got me. With my Bug sold, I flew home to Sonoma to live with my mom one final time. In that year and a half, while living with my mom, I had two record store jobs, protested Desert Storm, did it with a cute punk chick a bunch of times, finally got a girlfriend, got her pregnant, and had both my grandpas die—all as I was concentrating on getting back on stage.

  One day I was working the register at Rainbow Records, high and full of Classic Coke and Skittles. I ruled that register with a snarky heavy-metal fist. I was probably mid-snark when my mom called to tell me that my Grandpa George had suffered a heart attack and we had to go to the hospital immediately. When we got to Santa Rosa Hospital an hour and a half later he was already dead. I still said good-bye to him, and as far as my interactions with dead bodies go, that was my least favorite. But Grandpa Ed died in a way more dramatic fashion. He was suffering from Parkinson’s and dementia when he first went missing. One afternoon he went on a walk and never came back. Boom. Stephen King.

  We looked for Grandpa Ed for almost two weeks. I spent a ton of time searching all over Sacramento for the poor guy. I put posters everywhere and followed up on sightings of him. He had been seen twenty-five miles away from his house, so my Uncle Mike and I expanded our search area. But the guy from that sighting wasn’t my grandpa. Turns out that ol’ Ed had never left the neighborhood. He had fallen off a cliff the day he went missing. In classic Boy Scout fashion, they found his dead body on some rocks down by the river. America’s Boy Scouts, finding dead bodies since 1908.

  I took losing both my grandfathers in one month pretty well—that is, until a year later, when I was on the road by myself in Montana and had a nervous breakdown. I was listening to a book on tape of Iron John when I lost it. It doesn’t matter really what I was listening to when I started crying; it could have been The Cure or Jovi. On the way to my next gig I’m cruising through the middle of nowhere, and I just started crying uncontrollably—just a realization that my biggest cheerleaders were gone. I had never ever felt so alone. When I returned to San Francisco I found a therapist.

  Grandpa Ed’s passing came with an inheritance, which enabled me to move to San Francisco. I only lived there two and a half years, but they were two and a half awesome years filled with road gigs, almost-nightly local shows, and a lot of partying. Oh yeah, I drank again after my dumb night on a lifeguard tower. During my short time there, I wound up meeting lifelong comedy friends Karen Kilgariff, Greg Behrendt, Patton Oswalt, Blaine Capatch, and Margaret Cho as well as out-of-town comics David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, and Doug Benson.

  One weekend I went to an open mic at a pizza place out by the ocean. We would get free slices for doing sets there, and after one set you learned not to get the pizza anymore. We were all starving comedians, and the food was even too shitty for us. One night there was a new young, edgy, dark comic in town. He was tiny and even younger than me. His name was Patton Oswa
lt. He was funny the first time I saw him. He did an impression of Spider-Man in Kansas, and Patton would just stand there, making the Spidey-hand, sadly looking around for a place to shoot his webs. It was super funny. And nerdy as shit.

  I had a joke at the time in which I referenced “Feck weed” from the eighties indie movie River’s Edge. (Dennis Hopper’s character was named Feck and sold weed.) Patton liked the joke, and I complimented him back on his Spidey bit. We ran into each other a couple of more times and started to become friends, but our friendship really took off when we both signed up for the San Francisco Comedy Competition in 1992. While we carpooled to shows with another guy, we would talk about serial killers, creeping out the poor Christian comic named Derik we were carpooling with. Patton and I soon cemented our pact with Satan and moved in together.

  Our apartment in the middle of the city quickly became a comic hangout; it was a handy quick stumble away from legendary comedy club the Holy City Zoo. It was a huge two bedroom with high ceilings and hardwood floors, a second-floor Victorian walkup on the corner of Fifth and Geary. And because I had dead-grandpa money, we had a decent TV and a killer stereo, and there was always beer in the fridge and Stoli in the freezer. It was a short, booze- and weed-fueled period of my life, but I cherish that time of living and breathing comedy with my super-cool, funny, crazy-talented friends.