by Marc Maron
If you don’t already know it, The Comedy Store is a dark temple of fear and pain that to this day I believe is built over one of the existing gates to Hell. Evil emanates up through the floors of the place and passes into the souls of all who work there. The good ones make it funny. I was thrilled to have that opportunity.
My first night at work I became enchanted. I felt like a part of me was home. Somewhere in my soul I knew the place. I could feel what had gone on there. The current that crackled in the air of The Comedy Store was the sentient residue of an arcane period of old Hollywood indulgence. The ghosts of dark fun occupied every inch of the place, and they welcomed me like a friend who had been lost.
The structure’s first incarnation was called the Clover Club. It was a drinking joint and illegal gambling parlor that was frequented by David O. Selznick and Harry Cohn. The vice squad shut it down in the late thirties. The most significant occupant of the building (besides the Devil who was always there) was Ciro’s. It opened in 1940 and it was the hottest club on the strip. Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday, Martin and Lewis and Mae West all performed there. After recovering from his car wreck, a pre–Satan-worshiping Sammy Davis, Jr., debuted his new glass eye in a comeback performance at Ciro’s. All of Hollywood’s royalty partied there: Bogart, Gable, and Cooper. There were rumors that both a murder and an abortion had taken place in a back room of the club and that the ghost of one, the other, or both was always floating about. There were also rumors of black magic and ritualistic sex. It was where what lurked behind the black and white stills I was obsessed with in my youth would come out and cut loose. Ciro’s closed in 1957.
The building lay dormant until a maternal Jewish succubus named Mitzi Shore joined forces with the Devil in a philanthropic joint venture and opened The Comedy Store in 1970. The Comedy Store is the Devil’s way of giving back to the world. He understands the pain of being alienated for being a smart-ass. He wanted to give others the opportunity to try to make it work for them. Through Mitzi, he provided a venue for that purpose.
The entire outside of the club was painted black and covered with names written in cursive in white paint. These were the names of the comics who had performed at the Store regularly throughout its history. It was like a goofy rendition of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., only the names on the walls of the Store had died a different kind of death, and it could be repeated anytime they’d get on stage. There was also a patio bar in front of the club, facing Sunset Boulevard. It was usually occupied by a huddle of comics waiting to go on and hangers-on waiting to get off.
The inside of the club was labyrinthine and done in a red and black theme with no other variations. There were three performance rooms with different seating capacities. I lifted the velvet rope in all of them at one point or another. The largest, called the Main Room, was a Vegas-style showroom with high ceilings and a large red stage with black curtains. The Original Room was smaller, box-like and black. Audience members were seated right up to the lip of the stage. This is the classic comedy club setup. The Belly Room was upstairs. It was a small red venue used for special shows. There were hidden rooms behind all of the stages, stairways, a kitchen, lighting booths, cubbyholes, and offices upstairs. The beautiful, Gothic, Deco tone of the original Ciro’s was eerily maintained. There were neon caricatures of old movie stars on the walls of the Original and Main rooms. The comic on stage in the Main Room knew it was time to get off when the bow in Fanny Brice’s hair lit up. In the Original Room, it was Eddie Cantor’s eyes.
The hallways were lined with the headshots of the hundreds of comics that had appeared there; some known, some unknown. A headshot differs from a portrait in that a good portrait captures the stature and spirit of its subject as a testament of who he or she is in the world. A headshot is a desperate cry for attention. It’s an image designed to mask the subject’s need for work and love with an attitude, gesture, or look that might be marketable. Since the headshots were all of comics, the collective neediness was hard to hide, to the point that I believed the photos on the wall were feeding on and draining the emanations of the club’s illustrious dark history. It was a gallery of broken dreams. They were the pictures of people who had tried to catalyze their pain into living mirrors with which audiences could reflect their own flaws back at themselves and laugh. They were the black and white images of broken hearts in the shapes of the faces of clowns.
I moved into a small Old Spanish–style mansion that sat up on the hill behind The Comedy Store. It was called Cresthill. Mitzi owned it and rented it out to comics. It had a dark vibe as well; not as insidious as the club, but Raymond Burr had once lived there, so it possessed its own unique weird residue. There were five bedrooms, all occupied by comics. There was a full kitchen that no one ever used. There was a gas-powered fireplace in the den. I lived in a small green room with its own bathroom that had once been occupied by Andrew Dice Clay. I had no furniture other than a futon on the floor. My clothes, books, notepads, and guitars were scattered around my bed. It looked like the nest of a large animal that scavenged for building materials at a college. There was nothing on the walls except a framed still of the cast of Tod Browning’s Freaks, which I had procured at a movie paraphernalia store in Hollywood. It hung over my bed.
Off the back of the house was a large balcony patio that was perched high over the club and looked out over the city. On mornings after long, sleepless nights of partying, some of us would piss over the balcony as the sun rose through the haze above Los Angeles. It was a glorious declaration of that strange feeling of victory that comes after surviving a night of indulgent insanity.
From here on in the story, I will be referring to the drug cocaine as “magic powder.” I don’t want you to judge me. I don’t want you saying, “The book was interesting, but he had a drug problem.”
It wasn’t a “drug problem.” It was the research and rituals of the religion of my choice. I was a high-level Beat adept doing deep inner-space exploration. I was journeying to the outer regions of the soul, out there where wrong lives.
At The Comedy Store I met many people with the magic powder. These weren’t the young, shiny, upper-middle-class white kids I knew in college. No. All I’m saying is that when you’re doing a lot of magic powder, generally you’re not hanging out with winners. My new friends were the dignitaries of Hollywood’s underbelly: Satanists, porn stars, hustlers, pirates—actual pirates—wannabes of all kinds, washed-up child actors, drug dealers, bikers, rock stars, and evil Buddhas. Sam Kinison was the reigning king of comedy at the time. I looked up to him (I always pick the wrong Daddy figures). This wasn’t a Bohemian crew. It was more like a coven of witches, or maybe the Manson family.
The first time I met Sam Kinison was at the club. I had seen him on television, but I didn’t think he was that funny. Sam had heard that I was a potential initiate from his friend Carl, who I had met days before. Carl told me that he and Sam had both been doormen at the Store. Carl took a liking to me when we met, and took off his watch and gave it to me as a gift, an offering, an invitation. When I met Sam, he knew I needed to be tested. We went back to Cresthill and went one-on-one for hours. I pulled the framed photograph of the cast of Freaks off my wall and Sam pulled an eight ball out of his pocket. He poured the magic powder out onto the glass that covered the image of the likes of Zip the Pinhead and Johnny Eck, the legless wonder. We sat at the large dining room table with a bottle of vodka, and Sam told me the history of Sam. He had intensely focused, beady eyes. At any point during the conversation, if he thought my attention was drifting he would say, “Look me in the eyes, Maron. I like a man who can look me in the eyes.”
Sam fancied himself a combination of Jesus, Elvis, and Satan. They were his heroes. He was a lapsed Baptist preacher with a bone to pick with God. He thought of himself as the Beast. You really had to see him live to get the full effect. He had the charisma and momentum of a human meteor. He was the comedic equivalent of pure rock ’
n’ roll. He elevated the frustrated suffering of the brokenhearted mortal man to anarchic hilarity. He could push an audience over the edge of their own moral parameters, throw them a line, pull them back, then push them farther off the second time. This was the technique that most interested me. It was the reason I became an aspiring adept in the Sam school. I wanted to hone the antisocial part of my personality into a craft that could earn me a living.
After about five hours of looking Sam in the eyes and listening to his bullshit, there was a lull in the conversation. So, he pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and asked, “You ever burned money, Maron?”
“No,” I said.
Sam gave me a one-hundred-dollar bill, took one for himself, and said, “Spark them up. This is great.” I set the two bills on fire and Sam and I watched them burn until we couldn’t hold them.
“Feels great doesn’t it?” he said.
It did feel great, but that might’ve been because it was his money.
About 4:00 A.M. we ran out of magic powder, and of course we needed more. We got into my car and drove through the Hollywood night. Sam was going in and out of consciousness as he gave me directions. At one point he bolted up in his seat and said, “I don’t even know you, Maron. You could kill me.”
In retrospect, he was much more likely to do that to himself.
We arrived at a modern apartment building in Crescent Heights. Sam rang the bell. After a few minutes of ringing, a groggy voice was emitted from the intercom. “What? Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Sam said. “Let us up.”
“Who’s us?” the voice asked.
“Me and this kid Maron,” Sam said. “He’s alright.”
The door buzzed.
We took the elevator up and walked down a hall, and Sam knocked on a door. It opened and there was a guy in a bathrobe standing in the doorway. He looked normal, long blond hair, mustache, wiping sleep out of his eyes.
“What the fuck? It’s four-thirty,” he said.
Sam barged in through the door and I followed him.
“Rick, this is Maron,” Sam said. “He’s the new doorman at the Store.”
“Hey,” Rick said.
“Hey,” I said apologetically.
I later found out that Rick was a hairdresser during the day.
“You got anything?” Sam asked as he started rummaging through the kitchen like an obsessed troll.
“Yeah,” Rick said. “You guys are insane.”
“Any booze around?” Sam asked, opening cabinets.
“Just come into my bedroom. Be cool. I don’t want to wake up my roommate.”
We went into his bedroom. Sam sat down on the floor and started passing out. I stood. Rick walked into his bathroom and came back out holding two Smirnoff miniatures. He gave them to Sam.
“Here. This is all I have. I stole them off the plane.”
Sam poured them, one after the other, into his mouth. He didn’t do it like someone drinking. He shot them down his throat like Orson Welles did in Touch of Evil. It was a dull, passive motion, a necessity, fuel for a dying machine. Then Sam went out cold.
It was an awkward moment, standing there in a stranger’s bedroom over the motionless, still breathing body of the biggest star in comedy, who I barely knew and who Rick knew well and sold drugs to. I assumed he would just crash there.
“I guess I better split,” I said.
“Fuck no!” Rick said. “You gotta get him out of here. I don’t want him to pull a Belushi on me.”
Rick handed me a bindle of magic powder, and we lifted Sam up and into consciousness and walked him out the door. I was holding Sam up in the hallway.
“He’ll pay me later,” Rick said. “Nice meeting you, Maron.”
“Yeah, you too,” I said.
Then Rick shut the door.
I got Sam back into my car. I didn’t know what to do with him. I didn’t know where he lived. We drove back up to Cresthill. I walked him into the house and he made his way to the den, where he lay facedown on the floor in front of the fireplace and fell immediately asleep.
I sat down at the table and poured some magic powder onto the Freaks, did a couple of lines, and went into my room. I hung the picture back up over my bed, lay down, and listened to my heart pound. I tried to assess where I was, what had happened, and my new friends as I waited to die.
Monday nights were “no cover nights” at the club, and they usually lasted until Wednesday morning. It was Sam’s night. The dregs of Hollywood would pack The Comedy Store and wait for Sam to take the stage in the Main Room. He would usually show up at about 11:00, but you could feel him coming at 10:30. The place would become electric with anticipation. Even the pictures in the hallways looked excited. Sam filled the void between the past and the present. When he was around, the engine of the Hell-driven laugh mill fired on all pistons and the building came alive. He was the Devil’s clown prince.
I eventually became part of the inner circle. Once Sam arrived, it was my job to get enough money from him to stock Cresthill for a party that could last anywhere from two hours to three days. I would go to the 7-Eleven on La Cienega and get two fifths and four pints of Jack Daniel’s, a fifth of vodka, five or six packs of cigarettes, a case of beer, cranberry juice, and some O.J. I would go back to the house and put two fifths on the table and stash the pints in different places around the house for those who stayed the course. Around two o’clock Sam would show up with the magic powder and a crowd of freaks.
There were the regulars. There was Jumpstart Jimmy Schubert and his gimp leg that he had crushed under a motorcycle. He was my only real friend. There was Todd L., known as The Todd, a heavyset Jewish guy who was sure he was heir apparent to Kinison’s throne. He had very little of his own material but plenty of everyone else’s. Todd had dated both Samantha Strong and Christy Canyon, the porn queens, so they were around. He broke up with Samantha because she had had sex with another guy, off screen. There was Steve K, who would wander around The Comedy Store asking people, “Was I on yet?” If the answer was “yes,” he’d say, “How was I?” There was Sparky, the angry little red-haired rich kid who had no patience for any of it but still showed up. There was Carl, Sam’s Red West. There was, of course, Rick the hairdresser, until he was expelled when Sam thought he was cutting the magic powder with pancake mix. There was Dave the Satanist who looked liked Christopher Walken. He had a pentagram tattooed over his heart; an eye in a pyramid—what he called “the mark of the Illuminati”—tattooed on his arm, and a “666” tattooed on his hand. He wasn’t a bad guy, really, just annoying. Sam hated him. Hassan, the Arab, replaced Rick. The story was that Hassan had fought against the Israelis in the Six-Day War and then moved to America, was drafted, went to Vietnam, and then moved to Hollywood to sell drugs. Hassan had a deep, creepy charm. He never seemed flustered. He was prone to answering almost every question by saying, “It’s only rock ’n’ roll.”
There were others that came and went, but they were mostly casualties stopping by on their way down, weekend-warrior types or half-innocent onlookers at the scene of an ongoing accident.
Physical liabilities aside, the magic powder made me feel more special than I already thought I was. Eventually comedy became secondary and the sacred rituals of magic powder became primary. My confidence grew into a mystical grandiosity that was fueled by sleep deprivation. I began to feel as if I had clairvoyant powers, that unseen psychic tendrils were emanating from my head and I could feel the souls of buildings and read the minds of people coming toward me. “Don’t speak. I already know!” I would say to any approaching person.
I began to believe I had a divine purpose and was working for some unseen mystical force; that I had been assigned to Hollywood to understand the evil that resided there. An evil that was there before the film industry, before the Spanish missionaries. The evil had always been there. It was in the ground, waiting to be born.
I would stand out on the patio of The Comedy Store and people would
walk up to me and I would say, “Have you seen the Hollywood sign?”
“Yeah,” they’d say.
“But do you get it?” I’d scream.
That’s where my head was at.
I saw Hollywood as a mystical Jewish city. It was like the anti-Jerusalem. Think about it. It was built on the same idea as the real Jerusalem. A small group of Jewish kings went into the desert with a crew of crack Jewish writers and created the kabala of the American myth. The movies!
They harnessed an almost Promethean power and it illuminated a sacred sequence of celluloid images run at a specific speed to generate an illusion and people would pay money to judge themselves against that illusion.
That’s a religious idea.
Then they built a factory to mass-produce the illusion. That factory became Hollywood. To this day, passionate, talented, charismatic, but very stupid young people fuel that factory. They go to Hollywood in hordes to try to become the mythic occupants of the illusion. Myself included. This machine, this factory, creates an exhaust that hangs over Los Angeles. That’s not smog. It’s vaporized disappointment. It’s like oxygen for the demons that live there.
I couldn’t share my insights because I saw myself as a mystic spy behind enemy lines and I believed Sam was onto me. He was getting annoyed. I kept saying things like “Tell me about the dark side, man.”
There was very little downtime between parties. I began hoping Sam would clutch his chest and fall facedown onto the cast of Freaks. I needed some sleep. Call me Judas. One Monday night the recurring Last Supper was under way. Some of the regulars were there, and sitting beside me was an incredibly drunken unidentified female object who had drifted in with one of Sam’s gypsy entourages that had come and gone. She was nodding off and babbling, “I’ve got to be in court tomorrow.”
“Why?” I said.
“Drunk driving homicide,” she said, her head falling back. I looked down and noticed that one of her wrists was bandaged.
