by Todd Glass
To laugh often and love much. To win the respect of intelligent persons, and the affection of children. To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—This is to have succeeded.
CHAPTER 17
SMOKEY JOE’S
Todd discovers a friendly bar.
When I got back to Philadelphia, the city felt like a ghost town. My friends had all graduated school and gone on to college, where they were partying and growing up and doing all the things that college kids get to do. I wasn’t jealous—I mean, I was playing Broadway, right? Okay, maybe I was a little jealous. Not having them around meant a huge void in my social life. I knew that if I wanted to continue to grow, not just as a comedian but as a human being, I needed something more than stand-up. I had to get out of my comfort zone and make some new friends and experiences to talk about.
A few of my friends came home that summer. One night we decided to go to Smokey Joe’s, a popular bar on the Main Line. I didn’t bother to bring my ID, because I already looked thirty and hadn’t been carded since the ninth grade. Except this time. While my friends got to go inside, I had to drive all the way home to retrieve my license.
When I got back an hour and a half later, there was a different guy at the door. His name was Jimmy Ryan, and he was one of the owner’s sons. “Hey . . . I’ve seen you before,” he said. “You do stand-up comedy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great! Come on in!”
On the one hand, I was happy to be recognized, but the feeling was soured by the fact that, had Jimmy been there earlier, it would have saved me the drive (and made me look really cool in front of my friends). But his bar was awesome and, later that night, I told him so.
“We hang out here almost every night, after hours,” he said. “If you ever want to come by, just knock on the side door.”
One night, after doing a couple of shows at Comedy Works, I decided to stop by Smokey Joe’s to see if what Jimmy said was true. I knocked on the side door. Sure enough, around ten or fifteen people, mostly employees, were sitting around a fireplace, drinking and having fun.
Smokey Joe’s quickly became a substitute for my college experience. I found myself surrounded by people my age who all came from different backgrounds and were always up for a late-night laugh. I bonded with everyone I met there and still keep in touch with most of them to this day.
I got to know the friendly bartender, even if I never could remember his name. (All I knew was that it was something rich-sounding—“Harrison!” everyone would always remind me.) We got drunk and did stupid things, like the night Jimmy handed out shot glasses, which we downed and smashed against a brick wall. We got drunk and did really stupid things, like the night I tried the same trick with an empty vodka bottle, forgetting for a critical moment that I sucked at sports, and missed the brick wall, throwing the bottle through the plate glass window at the front of the bar.
As soon as it left my hand I knew I fucked up. The giant window shattered, spilling broken glass into the street. Everyone fell silent. I was devastated. We were having such a great time and I was the asshole who took it too far. I’m the guy who got sloppy and now they’re all going to have to answer for this. “I’m so sorry,” was the best I could think of to say to Jimmy.
He must have seen how badly I felt by the expression on my face. “Todd, I don’t care. I swear.”
It was sweet of him to say, but I knew he didn’t mean it. I just threw a fucking bottle through the front window of his father’s bar.
“It’s really okay,” he insisted. “Want me to prove it to you?” And with that he swiped every glass and bottle still on the bar onto the floor. Most of them broke on impact. I hate to admit it, but it worked: Just like that, we were all laughing again.
The next morning, Jimmy told his father that someone had driven by and thrown something through the window. “That makes total sense, Jimmy,” said his dad, a twenty-year veteran of the bar business. “It’s just that all the glass is broken on the outside.”
But there was a new window in place by the end of the day. No one ever panicked or got mad at Smokey Joe’s and the place ran like a well-oiled machine. It was fun to be a part of it.
CHAPTER 18
FAKING IT
Todd finds a soul mate. (Almost.)
So there was still that one pesky problem, the one I had started referring to (in my own mind) as my situation.
It was inevitable that my new group of friends at Smokey Joe’s would have questions about my personal life, so I came up with a plan: I picked the hottest girl who came to the bar—a girl who was so hot that even I knew she was hot—and told everyone I had a crush on her. “Fuck!” I’d say like I was trying to pull out a splinter. “She’s way out of my league.”
Good plan, right? Sure, until the night my friend Mick walked over to me and said, “Todd, you know that girl you have a crush on? Well, guess who wants to talk to you?”
Now, reader, I want you to picture a twelve-year-old kid whose voice is cracking from puberty when I say that I replied, “Oh . . . Great . . . Awesome . . . Good news!” Are you fucking shitting me? I thought. I picked the hottest girl in the bar and then ignored her night after night. Why the hell would she want to talk to me? (Of course, that’s how little I knew about women.)
It only got worse when she walked over and started talking to me. It was time for Plan B, a strategy that I’ve used many times since to avoid certain awkward situations: I drank. A lot. It was basically a race to see if I could get drunk enough to black out. I’m not saying it was healthy and I’m certainly not proud of it, but most of the time it worked. As an added bonus, sometimes I’d hear a story the next day about how I was hanging all over some chick the night before. I was sure it never went anywhere—pretty sure, anyway—but I was happy for everyone else to draw their own conclusions about what happened.
Sometimes I got really lucky, like the night a girl at the bar told everyone that she spent the night with me. “You never hooked up with her, did you?” Mick asked.
“Who?” I replied, checking to see if she was cute before I (fake) confessed. I mean, come on—at this point I had a (fake) reputation to uphold. I had (fake) standards. “Well . . . maybe. I don’t kiss and tell.”
I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was—if this girl wanted everyone to think that we were fucking, I should have been paying her. In that moment she was like a saint to me.
Here’s a funny thing about being gay: It doesn’t leave a mark, not one that you can see, anyway. When you’re black, people tend to go out of their way not to say anything around you that could even remotely be construed as racist. But nobody knew that I was gay. I was like a secret agent, privy to all kinds of conversations where people would say what they really thought without any fear of offending me.
I remember one night at Comedy Works, as the AIDS scare was growing, there was a debate over whether or not you’d feel comfortable drinking from the same glass as a gay person. “I don’t think you can even get it that way,” someone said.
“But I still wouldn’t do it, would you?” someone else asked.
That conversation alone probably threw me back ten years in terms of becoming open about my sexuality.
As funny as my efforts to hide might seem in retrospect, at the time, I really, really wanted to be straight. Maybe there was still time to change. But how? I couldn’t walk into the library and get a book on the subject (or even read that book if I found one). How would I even ask? “Hi! Do you have anything on not being . . . I think that I’m . . . I’ve got this situation on my hands . . .”
So I improvised: I would still think of guys when I started masturbating, only now, in an effort to change millions of years of evolution, I would force myself to think of women when I finished.
Needless to say, it didn’t help me become any less gay, although I did masturbate a lot less often.
Blacking out drunk, lying about sexual partners, and forcing mysel
f to have straight thoughts helped me get through my day. But none of that prepared me for the complications that arose when I met someone who felt like my soul mate, a person who could understand me on every level. There was only one problem:
She was a girl.
Katy was a regular at Smokey Joe’s. From the moment I met her, I loved everything about her. We had the same sense of humor. We liked the same things. I started to crave her company. I didn’t care what we did, as long as we were together. If she had errands to run, I’d come along and hang out all day while she drove around the city. Sometimes we would get sandwiches and just sit in the car, people-watching and talking about everything. (Or almost everything.)
Once we even pretended we were married.
Comedians often get hired to do corporate events. It’s kind of like working a comedy club, except that instead of playing to an intimate room full of people waiting to be entertained, you’re in a some hotel banquet hall in front of four hundred IBM employees who aren’t necessarily there to laugh. Corporate events are also different from the clubs in that they pay really, really well, which is the reason why you do them.
For my first corporate event, a company Christmas party, the hosts added an extra layer of difficulty—someone had the brilliant idea that, instead of introducing me as a comic, I would pretend to be the new corporate VP. I figured it was better if I didn’t tell them that I was barely literate and had failed to graduate high school. It’s not like they were totally forthcoming with me, either: No one at the company had bothered to tell me that the old corporate VP I was supposedly replacing had been fired and that several in-house employees had been passed over for promotion. To put it mildly, there was probably a little animosity toward the twenty-three-year-old kid eating dinner at the president’s table.
I brought Katy with me for moral support, telling everyone that she was my girlfriend. We might have been young, stupid, and totally clueless about the company I was supposedly working for, but we figured that as long as we stayed at the table and didn’t talk to anyone, we could probably pull it off.
But being young and stupid, we inevitably decided to leave the safety of the table for the bar, where we downed a few shots. “I’m feeling a little nervous,” I whispered in Katy’s ear.
Three women—our new pretend coworkers—immediately turned their attention to us. “So what are you two whispering about?” one of them asked.
I started to sweat, fumbling for a response. I hadn’t counted on Katy being even more nervous than I was, so I might have done a literal spit-take when she replied:
“I’m pregnant.”
What the fuck?! Talk about an overreaction. Everyone’s eyes seemed to gravitate toward the empty shot glasses on the bar. “It’s okay!” I said quickly. “We were going to get married anyway.”
I should mention here that while I was twenty-three, I probably looked like I was about thirty. And that Katy, who was about the same age as me, looked like she was maybe nineteen. I was trying to drag her back to the president’s table, the sanctuary we never should have left in the first place, when I heard the PA go on: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our new vice president, Todd Glass!”
As I stepped up to the microphone, I could see the three women we met at the bar whispering to their coworkers, spreading the word, no doubt, about the new thirty-year-old VP who’d knocked up his teenage girlfriend. It’s bad enough playing to an audience that isn’t looking for comedy—this group was glaring at me with hatred in their eyes. I wanted to launch into my routine, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to break character yet. I scrambled to improvise.
“Look,” I said. “I get it that no one here is a big fan of mine right now. I’m sorry. Maybe there’s something we can do that will bring us all closer together. Do you guys know how to sing the theme to The Brady Bunch?”
If you happen to be a real corporate executive, you might want to take note: Everyone loves to sing. The hard part is finding a song that everyone knows the words to. But in those days, everybody knew the words to The Brady Bunch. Within seconds I had the whole room laughing and singing along. I’m sure I would have been the world’s shittiest VP, but tonight I’d won over the crowd. “I know this is going to be a fun year,” I finished. “Thank you!”
The president took the stage and—finally—told everyone that I was a comedian. I took the microphone back and shared the story with the group. “You guys ever watch Three’s Company?” I asked. “The situations you see on Three’s Company don’t happen in real life. But tonight they just did.”
The irony is that my real life was playing out like Three’s Company in reverse. That show mined a lot of humor out of a protagonist who, in order to live in an apartment with two beautiful women, had to pretend that he was gay. I would often stay over at Katy’s house, pretending that I was straight.
Nothing was happening, of course. I wanted to tell her so badly that I was gay, that the reason I wasn’t putting any moves on her had nothing to do with the way she looked or her personality. But I was still years away from even being able to consider that kind of honesty.
“Todd’s shy around girls,” my mother told her. “Maybe you should be a little more aggressive.” My mom—who was just trying to be helpful—even offered to help me buy a wedding ring.
Being straight was turning out to be a lot harder than I thought.
CHAPTER 19
TWO PIECES OF ADVICE
Todd gets some wisdom from a comedian he looks up to.
I was working as much as I could. Steve Young had me at Comedy Works almost every weekend. Andy Scarpati, the owner of six or seven smaller clubs in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware, also gave me a lot of work.
One weekend, Jay Leno returned to Comedy Works. We were shooting the shit after the show, and someone asked him if he’d ever seen an act that was so good he didn’t want to follow it.
“Well, there is actually one guy, his name is Dennis Miller. When he connects with the audience, man, you don’t want to be the guy going on after him.”
Steve hired Dennis a few weeks later, and everything Jay told us made sense—Dennis was on that night and absolutely annihilated. Pretty soon he was a regular sight at Comedy Works, and I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with him.
One night, we were walking down Chestnut Street after a show. I made some joke about Philadelphia being the hotbed of comedy.
“If you want to make it in this business,” Dennis said, “eventually you gotta go to New York or L.A.”
I knew he was right. “But there are so many comedians in those cities,” I replied. “It seems like it would be overwhelming. Just another comedian moving to the coast.”
“Don’t do that,” Dennis said. “There are a lot of people doing everything. There are a lot of carpenters in the world, too. But if you do what you do well, and you give it everything you’ve got, you’ll be the carpenter who does well.”
That was the second-best piece of advice that Dennis Miller ever gave me. The best came a few months later. We were hanging out at a bar after a show and I’d just made some offhanded comment that got him laughing.
“This,” he said to me, “is what’s funny about you. What the hell are you doing up there onstage?”
While it might have sounded like criticism, I could see the compliment. Nothing is more exciting for a comedian than to make other comedians laugh, especially if it’s someone whose work you respect and admire. I’d been so focused on creating a polished act, I wasn’t letting my real personality come out. Dennis’s comment was only bad news if I didn’t take it to heart. I wasn’t about to trash my entire act, but I started using open mike nights as an opportunity to try out different angles, looking for something that felt more authentic to who I was.
Before moving on to the next chapter, let’s take a second to stop and sit with the irony in that statement.
Okay, that’s enough. You can turn the page now.
CHAPTER 20
LEAVING PHILADELPHIA
Some funny (and not so funny) things happen on the way to Los Angeles.
Some nights, after partying at Smokey Joe’s, I’d crash on Harrison’s couch—Harrison, the bartender with the rich-sounding name, lived in a house with my friends Mick and John. After one stretch where I’d slept there for about three months straight, Harrison suggested that it might be easier for me to move in.
It was around this time when Steve Young told me that he was moving to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career. Lots of people, including Steve, thought it was time for me to make a similar move. I started talking about L.A. to anyone who would listen.
The topic came up one night with my friend Caroline Jones and her parents, who were in town from California to visit her at Villanova. “You could always come and live with us for a while,” suggested Randy, her father. It was a nice thing to say, I thought, even if he really didn’t mean it.
There were a few things I had to do before I could even think about moving. The first issue was cash: The move would cost a lot of money and I had none. Somehow all that Patti LaBelle cash was gone (shocker) and I was almost dead broke.
There was a waitress at Comedy Works who got a speeding ticket on the way to work. I mentioned it during my act, even passing around a hat to help her pay for it. By the time the hat got back to me, she’d made enough to cover the ticket and then some.
Which gave me an idea: “I’m thinking about moving to Los Angeles!” I announced a few nights later. The hat went around the room again, returning to me with a couple of hundred dollars. I felt like the smartest guy in the world until I got a call from Steve.
