The guy was wearing a handgun openly on the small of his back, more than likely just for the trip to the porn shoppe.
“Okay, baby, we’ll go get you a nightie,” he’d probably said as he loaded a fresh clip, “but if any faggots in there look at me…”
They looked around self-consciously after the glass-banging, as anyone would do in this place, wondering who was secretly watching them. I stood there, behind mirrored security glass as they both stared up, dropped my pants and pressed my cock against the glass. They continued to look around like cows and we all had a little chuckle.
None of us ever gave it a second thought as we continued getting piss-ugly trashed. Not another thought until a sweaty and wide-eyed Dr. John came running in, half laughing, half screaming.
“What the hell are you doing showing your cock to the customers?!?!”
Evidently what I’d assumed to be mirrored security glass was not that at all. It was good old-fashioned, see-through, clear-as-day, squeaky clean and well-lit glass that I’d smashed my lunch against. I’d been a naked Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate to the horror of this pair of bazzoons at the counter. I told John that I’d thought it was one-way glass and he told me not to worry about it, that he’d given the guy his order on the house to placate him. We carried on and soon I got as drunk as one man can get on 3.2 beer without bursting from the quantities.
The party started to break up as we went downstairs. Lonnie and Lou went into a back storeroom with Dr. John to pick up some complimentary smut videos while Carl and I took the opportunity of being alone to do some shoplifting. Dr. John would have given us anything we wanted for free but sometimes it’s more fun to steal. Besides, there are some things you don’t want a guy to know you’re using. So while they were still in the back, we went out the front door with our booty.
Carl’s “booty” consisted solely of a pair of silky panties that he was now wearing over his shaved head. I had my plunder under my black overcoat and we headed for the car. We sat down in the backseats to wait for Lonnie and Ludo when three police cruisers pulled into the lot, parked and headed into the store. Afraid that the state legislature had made some late-hour ruling against rubber vaginas that was now going to be enforced by all available officers, I waited for the cops to go inside and then ran across the street with my wares, back to the condo we were all sharing. Carl went back inside the store.
About twenty long minutes later, Carl returned, still wearing the panties on his head as he had done throughout his entire conversation with the Midvale police. They had come, not to raid the place, but to investigate a report of a man in a long black overcoat who had exposed his penis!
That gun-toting piece of shit had taken his free goods and called the cops anyway! What the fuck is that? That’s like getting a free meal for finding a hair in it and then proceeding to clean his plate regardless.
And he called the cops because he saw a dick in a smut shop?
If there is one thing you can be guaranteed to see in a smut house, it’s DICK! Pocket pussy, maybe. Anal beads, perhaps. Big Rubber Fist, on a good day. But DICK? Every shelf, every direction. Dick. At what point had he seen too many?
“Well, what do we have here? Dick, dick, dick, dick dick, dick, double-dick, black dick, pink dick, strap-on dick, dick, dick… Hey, what’s that? Look up there! It’s a diiiiiiiiiiiiick!!! Hello, 911? Hurry, quick, there’s a diiiiiiiiick!!!”
Fortunately I’d been out the door when the cops got there. That was the good news. Even more cops had shown up after I left, six or seven total, leaving me with the impression that the size of my cock must have been really blown out of proportion in the report. The bad news was that Lonnie had made the poor fashion choice of wearing a long, black overcoat just like mine and had been promptly and viciously detained by Midvale’s finest. And to hinder him even further, he was piss-drunk and only got surly with them, refusing at first to even show them any ID or cooperate in any fashion. He did not know what had happened; he must have stepped out during my pants dropping. All he knew was that he didn’t do shit and didn’t care for these pigs saying that he did. It had, by all accounts, gotten very ugly, with Lonnie barely avoiding arrest.
He didn’t know that it was me all along. He would have turned me in if he had. Only afterwards did he find out and now Carl was warning me that I may want to hide under a bed or something, cuz Lonnie was violent, drunk and looking for a fight. I could hear him from the parking lot when he got there, screaming and hollering to his wife that he was going to kick the shit out of me, and his wife threatening to kick his ass if he did. Finally I went out and told him to just come up and kick my ass quietly in the apartment so the neighbors could sleep.
He came in the apartment and continued to slur and fume. He’d drink a beer and start to calm down but then he’d do more coke and get mad all over.
“Well, what the fuck?” he’d stutter and half yell. “You pull out your… your fucking dick? What is that? I don’t get it?” As though there were some deeper meaning.
“You got me arrested, you fuck!!!”
I pointed out that he hadn’t gotten arrested.
“Ya, well, they wrote down my fucking name, man!”
I continued to apologize just to shut him up but it only irritated him further. I decided not to argue and let him sleep it off. The guy was burned out, washed up and in bad shape anyway. I knew as drunk as we both were, it was best to go to bed. Who could be mad about something so ridiculous the next day?
Lonnie could. Still just as angry the next day. Having his name on a notepad in some cop’s pocket somewhere had turned this man into a hysterical housewife. I apologized again and he said that he appreciated the apology but he was still angry and would continue to be angry.
“I still don’t get it. You… pull your dick out???” He was saying it as though I’d thrown a baby in a sewer drain on a lark. I was at a loss for words.
I’d already been warned by the city of Midvale after my first appearance at the Comedy Circuit eight months earlier. At the end of the show, Spin, who would sing and dance in his act as the house MC, would bring out the comics to take a bow. Then he would do a little dance move and point at you to do a little dance move in return. Not being much of a dancer, I decided instead to just pull my dick out. Spin found that inspirational and had me do it at the end of every show for the rest of the week. When I returned months later, he had a letter from Susan B. Shreeve, the city’s business license wonk who had gotten a complaint about my exposure and threatened to pull his beer license should it happen again. I’d spend all of that week reading the letter onstage, trashing her mercilessly. I still keep a framed copy on my wall like a diploma or a commendation.
Ironically, her husband was a sergeant with the Midvale police and was the one trying to take Lonnie downtown that night at Dr. John’s. Coincidence? Conspiracy? Or Cock-Haters?
Eventually I started writing material that upset people by challenging their beliefs or ideals rather than just yanking my cock out of my pants. Some nights I did both.
THE SECRET TO HIS SUCCESS
The year after my failed self-fellatio and Mitch Hedberg’s half-million-dollar deal in Montreal, we found ourselves together again at the Chicago comedy festival. This time we had swagger. Hedberg was now rich and I’d tried to blow myself onstage. I don’t know if we felt that we had nothing more to gain but we carried ourselves that way. We’d done bigger festivals and knew how they worked. Industry gets trucked in, let their guard down and get sloppy drunk with their peers and the comedians pretending to like them. Most industry have no sense of what is funny, much less important or translatable. They just listen to other people talk about which comics are hot properties, what comics are the “buzz.” Every comedy festival had a comedian who was the buzz, one that everyone was talking about. Hedberg and I came up with the idea to try to create a fake buzz about a comic randomly. We poked through the “New Faces” section of the festival program and deliberated. Out of a dozen or
so comedians and based on nothing concrete, we chose D. T. Tosh.
For the whole long weekend, anytime we found ourselves at a bar, in the hotel elevator or anywhere in earshot of any kind of a network suit or an agent, we’d complain loudly that this D. T. Tosh was blowing up the whole festival, how we deserved it more and how the whole festival is bullshit. Nothing spells “rising star” to industry more than bitter rival comedians grousing.
By the end of the festival, sure enough D. T. Tosh—or Daniel Tosh as you now know him—was the Queen of the Ball. I have no idea how much our shenanigans played a part but I knew we were secretly high-fiving and taking a lot of credit at the time. On the last night—the wrap party essentially—while Tosh was walking on the sunshine of all the greasy attention, we told him how we’d orchestrated this whole ploy, putting more effort into getting him recognized than any work we’d even put into our own shows. Daniel was pissed off initially, as though we’d stolen something from him, but eventually he came around to see the funny.
DT and I would go on to share that hooker story in Florida. Hedberg would go on to be dead. DT would go on to change his name back to Daniel, the way his adoptive parents wanted him. Renamed.
And look at DT now. He’s a brilliant gay millionaire and I’m a drunk loser. He sometimes brings me back on his show the same way Steve Martin put his derelict father in small roles in a couple of his later movies, hoping still to somehow gain his love. I always loved D. T. Tosh. I just never knew how to show him. But I would still bust his balls that he wouldn’t have been where he is now without me and Hedberg. We made you and we can break you.
MILLION-DOLLAR IDEAS
Daniel Tosh had a million-dollar idea with Tosh.0 and he ran with it. That’s because he’s gay and detests women. Power-gay. He rapes priests and murders any woman who was witness. Lawyers will have no problem with this as Tosh will happily admit it. It made him a millionaire.
Women ruin million-dollar ideas just on vanity. I know. I was a victim.
Becker and I once had a million-dollar idea and our lady friend Luker ruined it. Or she saved our careers. You be the judge. We were all out at dinner with the Alaska folk and the subject of Bumfights came up, a video series that was then all the uproar and anger in that new age of Internet fame. It featured some Girls Gone Wild–style abusers, coercing homeless people into all sorts of fucked up things, from violence to self-harm, in return for cash or booze with the producer shitheads filming it and mocking them openly. After deciding to track the hosts down and kill them—we are idea men but rarely closers—the conversation turned to how much money they had made from selling those videos. As the wine poured, we started pitching a friendlier version of the same kind of video. Pranks without the exploitation, without the evil. The ideas got better with every glass as ideas tend to do. And then the million-dollar idea came up. Turns out that Koot’s owner Doran had a dog that was scheduled to have his leg amputated. I assume because his leg was fucked up. I’m sure that it wasn’t cosmetic surgery. One drink leads to another and the plan was in play.
We would pretend to be a documentary crew and ask to film the amputation for a television documentary. Then we would cut to a shot of Becker in a chef’s hat on the set of a cooking show, breading the amputated leg in a pan. Becker would give cooking directions, tell you how to spice it appropriately and how long to bake it. Then we’d cut to Becker removing the dish fresh from the oven, garnished and presented like a Zagat guide meal.
Then Becker would feed it to the three-legged dog.
Masterpiece.
You know for a fact that a dog would eat its own leg. We were so sure that this could be the centerpiece to a newsworthy, controversial Internet video that we were—in that drunken moment—committed. We thought it through and debated the morality of it. The dog was losing his leg regardless. A dog eats anything and wouldn’t care if it was eating it’s own balls after being neutered or chewing on your used tampon that he pulled from the trash. A dog eating its own leg would appear cruel and unimaginably distasteful while actually victimless and fucking funny. A win-win. We could figure out the rest of the content later.
The problem was that Doran couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut and he told Luker. She went appropriately batshit and said that there was absolutely no way she would allow that to happen. Doran—having cost us a million dollars with his big mouth—picked up the dinner tab and we went home.
I went back to LA but Becker didn’t give up. He sidestepped Luker and actually tried to accompany Doran to the amputation with a video camera. The vet told Becker that there was no way he would be allowed to film the surgery. Our million-dollar idea died again at the veterinarian’s doorstep.
I will still battle the morality of the fact that our idea would in no way have hurt the animal. Those cunts that made Bumfights probably thought they could justify their torment as well. Our argument would have won easily over theirs should it have gone to an Ivy League college debate. But the general public may not have seen either side as anything less than memorably deplorable. I looked up the Bumfights fucks online while I was writing this and went back to plotting their murders for fun. It passes the time.
Luker might have been wrong logically but she was right in the long run. We could have been famous for the Dog Eats Own Leg video. Bumfights famous. Way worse than karaoke famous or never even being noticed at all.
AND THEN YOU ARE THE DICK
After twenty-five years on the road, week after week, town after town, I have met and made more great friends in short spurts than is imaginable. Or feasibly sustainable. Comedians, fans, club owners, bar staff who make your night or weekend fantastic. At some point you realize there is no way you will ever be able to keep in touch with all of the people who’ve made the best parts of your life so memorable, no matter how blurry or absent the memory. Even if you made it your life’s work, you couldn’t keep up.
And then you feel like a dick.
Horse was one of my first “fans,” someone who had heard my stuff on the Internet before ever seeing me live and drove a lot of hours to a show because of it. I’ve never felt comfortable around fans and for the first several years, that was never a problem I would even know. Those were years that the audience came to a comedy club to see comedy. Not a particular comedian. No specific genre, no certain style. Just comedy. You’d have bachelorettes or company Christmas parties or a simple date night, all assuming that you were gonna be like that one comedian they fell asleep to on late-night network television. To most of the pedestrian audience, comedy was all as interchangeable as soy sauce, where brand doesn’t matter. Until it was something odd and distasteful like my brand. Then it was my fault for ruining the noodles.
With no other art form would you do that.
Nobody would say they wanted to go to a concert because it had music without asking what type of music. Comedy is different in that people will say, “That isn’t comedy!” simply because they don’t find it funny. You wouldn’t say that music wasn’t music just because you didn’t like the category and you would still call a sculpture a sculpture even if you hated that specific piece. Bagpipes are still considered music even if you showed up hoping for hip-hop. People will say that it’s not comedy because they didn’t laugh. But no one will say bagpipes aren’t music because they didn’t dance. And nobody goes to the opera hoping they’ll stop the show to pick on the birthday boy.
Sure, over the years I’d filter some people out of any given audience who were really into my act and those who you went out with after a show to get liquored up and cause a ruckus. A lot of those would keep an eye out for when I was coming back and those were generally few enough that I’d usually remember them.
Eventually someone made me a website with a mailing list so people would know when I was coming back to their town. Then someone else made a forum for my site so that not only could I interact with my audience, but now they had a place to call each other vicious, awful things and post pictures of inordinatel
y oversized objects stuffed into ill-suited orifices. The Internet was made for my people. And soon enough, these people started coming to clubs to see me. Not just arbitrary comedy.
In the days before the fall of Napster as their court case was winding down, someone showed me how to steal music and download it onto CDs. I don’t really listen to music or enjoy it unless I’m completely fucked or generally melancholy, but given a deadline and the last chance to get free shit, I jumped on the last-call of Napster. I spent full days trying to remember songs I liked and putting them on CDs. After that, I started stealing comedians and spoken word. I even enjoyed Henry Rollins for a minute. On top of that, I was starting seeing a lot of people downloading my own stuff. I’d made a few CDs of my own by then to sell after shows and was happy that people were finding them and actually showing interest in pilfering them. I’d message them to thank them for stealing.
Napster’s home page had a list of categories and just before their courtroom demise, they finally added “Comedy” as a category. I was the first and only comedian highlighted in the featured Napster comedy section—a coup pulled off by a fan who worked there—before they were smashed into obsolescence by the legal system. Napster was at the time the most popular site on earth. They were eradicated within days of adding my name to the home page. I’ve sworn ever since that if that runny little fuck drummer from Metallica ever ventured into my show, I would have him loudly removed for spearheading the lawsuit against Napster. Metallica only became known through people copying and sharing cassette tapes of them. They were all for it. No mainstream radio would play them. Now that it became easier to share recordings and they were famous, they flexed and defecated on my own personal parade, the same parade that built them in the first place.
This Is Not Fame Page 10
