• • •
I’d been living at Cresthill for only a few days. I was off to myself in the Red Room and hadn’t even met all the other guys sharing the house. The idea was that we all had kitchen privileges, but I was the only one who cooked. One night I was broiling a chicken. I put on all the right seasonings so it was smelling great. In walked this guy who must have weighed 350 pounds, wearing nothing but a white wifebeater and his underwear. Face covered with a beard. Big cowboy hat on his head. Talked in a super-kicked-back slurry Midwestern accent.
“How you doin’?” he asked.
“I’m all right. How ’bout you?”
“Hungry.”
“Me too.”
“You that guy from Brooklyn?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
“I hear that you’re fucking Sandi Shore.”
“I can’t argue with that.”
“I hear that’s how you got in the house.”
“No, I got into the house because of my talent, and I got into Sandi ’cause I’m good-looking.”
“I like that. So you’re looking to be a star.”
“I’m looking to get done cooking this fuckin’ chicken.”
“You seem like a good guy. You wanna be buddies?”
“Sure. I could use a friend out here.”
“And I could use some chicken. Give me some of that paprika chicken and we’ll be buddies.”
“I’ll give you a wing.”
“How about two?”
“He’s only got two.”
“A wing and a thigh.”
“Okay, man, I’ll give you a wing and thigh.”
“And the breast. The breast is the best part.”
“This ain’t no negotiation,” I said.
“Hey, we’re buddies, remember?”
That night he wound up eating the better part of the chicken, but I didn’t care because I really did have a new buddy: Ollie Joe Prater.
There are a lot of great comics you never heard of, and Ollie Joe is one of them. He died of a stroke about twenty years ago, still a very young man. He never led a healthy life, but he was one funny motherfucker. This was a guy who’d work the main room of the Comedy Store by coming out and tipping back his cowboy hat, taking a beer bottle, popping the top with his teeth, and spitting it out. He’d slip the bottle into a holster strapped around his fat stomach and say, “That’s everything I learned in college.” He called himself the Last Renegade White Man. Sometimes he’d come out and not say nothing, just yawn, wait a few minutes and then say, “I’m exhausted. I got up today at three.” Then he’d break into his routine:
“They asked me to make an announcement. There’s a brown Pinto out front, Alabama license plates. You ain’t doing nothing illegal, but you’re making the club look real shitty. Move that hunk of shit. I think anyone who owns a Pinto should be forced to go with someone who owns a Pacer.”
Ollie had great flow, slow and funky. His thing was laziness, sloth, and drugs. He was a big party animal. Loved coke and booze. Chicks dug him. Strangely enough, little chicks dug him. He always got pussy and he always got laughs. He also stole everyone else’s material. He got away with it ’cause the other comics were too scared to confront him. He’d beat the shit out of you, and besides, he delivered your material better than you did. I loved the guy. He actually inspired me. If I was following him, he’d come off and say, “I didn’t leave nothing for you. I took it all.” But when I went on before him, he’d say, “Take it all. Don’t leave nothing for me.” His thing was, go for broke every time you go out there. Once Ollie Joe went out there stark naked. He was so fuckin’ coked up he left Cresthill wearing nothing but his cowboy hat and holster. That was a lot of blubber to behold. He didn’t give a shit. He walked onstage and did his beer-opening routine like he always did. The audience howled. Mitzi had to intervene because she was scared of getting busted for having a big fat naked comic onstage.
THE STORE
THE COMEDY STORE had great history. It used to be Ciro’s, once the most glamorous club on the Strip. Sinatra came to Ciro’s looking for Ava Gardner. Martin and Lewis performed there. So did Sammy Davis. You had Clark Gable and Tyrone Power coming by for a nightcap and Bette Davis getting drunk at the bar. The vibes were still there.
Mitzi secured the comedy club as part of her divorce settlement. She built it up into the premier comedy spot in the country and ran it with an iron fist. She knew comedy was a contact sport. If the fans didn’t fall down laughing, the comics weren’t worth a shit. She’d kick your unfunny ass out in a New York minute.
The Store was really three rooms—the original one sat about 175. That was my favorite. Very stark. Just a black curtain behind you and pin spots in your face. At three A.M., when there were only twenty people in there, it was the place for perfecting new material. On a Saturday night, when it was packed, the energy was explosive. If you killed, you were high all week. If you bombed, you wanted to run in front of a bus on Sunset.
The Belly Room—named, I supposed, ’cause it’s where you went for the belly laughs—was a small space upstairs with room for no more than seventy. That was used as a holding room for the customers looking to get into the main room, where, if you were lucky, you got to see Robin Williams or Richard Pryor. The main room held 450. The ultimate was to get on the lineup for the main room. Sometimes during the day I’d walk into that empty room and picture myself onstage. All of Hollywood would be in the audience. It would be the night that Johnny Carson would break his usual habit of going home after The Tonight Show and instead come to the Store to check out this new comic from Brooklyn.
In fact, one night the man who booked the Carson show, Jim McCawley, showed up and caught my act. I thought Johnny would love to see me go from Jerry Lewis to John Travolta. McCawley didn’t agree.
“Johnny likes monologists,” he said.
“Yeah, but Johnny also has guys who do impressions.”
“Not your kind,” said McCawley.
To this day, I’m convinced that if Johnny had seen my routine, he would have dug it. But it wasn’t meant to be.
FORGET SCHOOL
AS GREAT AS that routine was, I needed something more than the nutty prof turns into Grease. Like everyone else out in Hollywood, I was doing what I had to do to get by. Comedy was fine, but I figured that to be the big star I was born to be, I needed to become an actor.
I knew about the acting schools—Lee Strasberg and all the rest. I read about method acting, where you gotta go back and find some bad shit that happened in your childhood and apply that to the character you’re playing. It made sense, but it also seemed like something I could do on my own. Besides, I never liked school as a kid, and I had no reason to like school as a grown-up. The idea of hanging around a classroom with a bunch of wannabes was not appealing. Of course I couldn’t deny that I was also a wannabe. But I was a wannabe who figured I could do it on my own without handing over my hard-earned money to some schmuck teacher with a spiel about finding the fuckin’ “inner core” of a character.
At the same time, I was practical. When I met the lady casting director for Taxi who ran an acting class and suggested that I attend, I went to check it out. What I saw was a bunch of actors running through scenes who didn’t have a clue. She started talking to them in her teaching bullshit—how to “make this choice” or “articulate that feeling”—when she should have just said, “You’re talentless. Get the fuck out of my class.” If this was what she called teaching, I didn’t need it. I got up and split.
That same week I decided to call Bob Marcucci, a teacher/guru/manager I did admire. Marcucci was the guy behind Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Back in Brooklyn with my family, I’d seen The Idolmaker, the movie about his life. When I learned he was living in L.A. I made it my business to seek him out. He lived with his son in a little house in Westwood.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“What you did for Fabian and Frankie Avalon.”
; “I don’t manage anymore, but I like your chutzpah.”
“Then you’ll come see me at the Comedy Store?”
“Name the night.”
As it turned out, the night that Marcucci came, the lady from Taxi also showed up. After my show, Marcucci was beside himself. “Look, kid,” he said, “if I was still managing, I’d be handing you papers to sign. You got it. You really fuckin’ got everything it takes.”
As he was singing my praises, the Taxi lady came by.
“You do pretty good impressions,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.
Her backhanded compliment ticked me off. I reacted the way my mother reacted when she encountered bullshit. I got enraged.
“Is that all you see in me?” I asked. “Because if that’s the case, you can’t see real talent. And you should give the money back to those talentless students you’re robbing blind.”
I never got a job on Taxi.
ROLLIN’ WITH DICE
THE HOLIDAYS WERE coming, and I was feeling like I needed to go back home to the family. See some friendly faces and assess my situation. The Originals hunkered down over the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays as I told them what little I had so far figured out about Hollywood.
Natalie was home too, and one night after dinner we started going through old photos. Natalie grabbed hold of the album with my bar mitzvah pictures from nine years ago. There I was, looking handsome as the devil and enjoying being the center of attention. There were all the relatives. And there were all my buddies from Hudde Junior High. Everyone was smiling. Everyone was having a great time. I spotted my pal Jimmy D. Maria, the big redheaded Irish kid. It hit me then like a bolt of lightning.
“Natalie, I got it! I got the name. Dice. Andrew Dice Clay.”
“It is a good name,” she said.
“You don’t understand. Even if people forget my full name, they will remember the name Dice.”
I went to bed that night in my old room, whispering to the ceiling, “Ladies and gentlemen, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas is proud to introduce the man you’ve been hearing about. The man you’ve been waiting for. The one. The only. Andrew. Dice. Clay.”
• • •
When I got back to L.A. I tried out the name on the pros. Everyone liked it. With encouragement from comics like Mitchell Walters and Ollie Joe Prater, I also moved away from the nutty prof transition bit and developed a new kind of stand-up.
The first question was an obvious one: What is Andrew Dice Clay gonna wear?
There was no way in the world I was gonna look like the Paul Reisers, the Jerry Seinfelds, the Garry Shandlings, and the other good Jewish boys in their neat Ivy League sports coats. That look bored me to death. Besides, that wasn’t Andrew Silverstein or Clay Silvers or Andrew Clay. And it sure as shit wasn’t Andrew Dice Clay.
Andrew Dice Clay—soon to be known as the Diceman—wore leather. It would all begin with a leather jacket. Marlon Brando wore leather in The Wild Ones. James Dean was a leather guy. Elvis was all about leather.
Before I could afford leather, though, vinyl had to do. But when I got the call to do Don Kirshner’s TV show Rock Concert, I knew I couldn’t fuck around. Everyone from Leno to Letterman to George Carlin to Steve Martin had done stand-up for Kirshner. He was a rock-and-roll legend. When I did his show and he told me, “Dice, you’re a rock-and-roll comic,” that meant the world to me. I threw out my vinyl jacket and called my folks for a favor: loan me the money for a real leather jacket. They did me one better. They sent me a beauty from Wilson’s House of Leather in Brooklyn. It felt great to have Brooklyn on my back. I ended up hitting a home run on Kirshner, doing the longest spot in the show’s history, almost thirteen minutes.
Back at the Comedy Store, I had moved into this new creation, Diceman. I had an attitude that was fresh and unique. I’d come out onstage, I’d flick open my Zippo, I’d light my cig, I’d inhale, I’d exhale, I’d inhale again, I’d exhale again, I’d stalk the stage—all the time saying nothing. Looking up at this handsome dude in a leather jacket with a greased-back ducktail haircut, the audience didn’t know what to think. I’d smile. I’d wait a few more beats. And finally, when they were dying to know what the hell was happening, I’d say, “You know, I been up here for what? Three, four minutes? I haven’t done shit. Haven’t told a single joke. Just smoking this cigarette. And the reason I can do all this, the reason I can command your attention, ladies and gentlemen, is because I’m just that fuckin’ good.”
Because I’m just that fuckin’ good became my mantra.
When I became the Diceman and turned myself into a balls-in-your-chin Brooklyn street comic, Mitzi was sure that I was making a mistake.
“It’s not gonna work, Andrew,” she said. “That character is too tough. Too hard-core.”
I respected Mitzi because, when it came to stand-up, Mitzi was an old pro. But I respected my own instincts even more.
“You’re wrong,” I told her.
“I don’t think so, Andrew, but at least you got attitude.”
True. Onstage I did jokes like “I know what you’re thinking. Cute comic, but he’s got an attitude. So, fuck you. The second I was born, the doctor smacked me on the ass. I said, ‘Doc, you got a problem?’ I remember in school the teacher would say, ‘Dice’—we were on a first-name basis—‘Dice, what’s the difference between two-eighths and three-eighths?’ I said, ‘Teacher, you’re right, what’s the fucking difference.’ Ohhh! ‘Now get me a cup of coffee.’ ”
THE RED ROOM
MY NEW DICE persona not only helped my comedy, it also helped my chick-scoring abilities. Soon after I started gaining traction at the Store, I was at a party and saw this woman I’ll call the Widow Kelsey checking me out. I call her that because she was seventeen years older than me. But her body was slamming. She was wearing this sexy dress, tight on top, revealing a lot of cleavage, and flared out below, showing me her great ass. It was one of those summer dresses made of thin, nearly transparent material. You could practically make out the lines of her thong. She was unbelievably sexy without even trying.
When I saw her looking at me I saw her salivating. I saw her eating me up with her eyes. When I asked her to dance, she was all over me. I was dry-humping her to “That’s the Way (I Like It)” by KC and the Sunshine Band. That was all it took. She told me that she was recently divorced, and I told her I was recently a rising star at the Comedy Store. “As long as you keep rising,” she said. I assured her that I would. Next thing I knew we’re heading back to the Red Room. Before anything happened in the Red Room, though, I went for my mix tapes. I gotta have music with sex and sex with music. They go together like pussy and dick. The late seventies was disco time, and I fuckin’ love disco. I like all music styles, but disco really works with the hump-and-bump because the four-on-the-floor groove is a fuckin’ unrelenting beat, and as a drummer I know how to keep the beat. So I was mixing “Ring My Bell” with “Shake Your Groove Thing” with “I Love the Nightlife” with “Boogie Oogie Oogie” with “Bad Girls” with “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” I was turning the Red Room into a disco, and the Widow Kelsey was digging it. It wasn’t long after we were dancing hot and heavy that she started slipping out of her dress. Her thong showed me that her pussy hair was the same blond color as the hair on her head. I dig blond pubes. Before we fucked, though, she said she wanted to blow me. Well, okay, honey, if you must. She insisted on doing it with me sitting catty-corner on the edge of the bed while she went to her knees. By her moves, I could tell this chick was advanced. I estimate she’d blown at least a thousand guys. And the whole time she was sucking my dick, she was staring me in the eyes. That’s a turn-on. Another turn-on was that deep guttural sound she made in her throat. When I was about to blow, she stopped sucking and said, “Let it go in my mouth.” This is another distinct pleasure. I exploded like a volcano.
“Any chance you can go again?” she asked me after I came. “A good chance,” I said. And I did. With her knees pressed against
her gorgeous standout tits, I rammed her so hard she was screaming loud enough to wake up people in Pasadena.
The Widow Kelsey was the proverbial fuck machine. She didn’t want wine or roses or small talk or sweet-smelling candles. She wanted dick. She wanted to suck, fuck, and then go home. Every man’s dream. Even better were the words she spoke when she left.
“What I can bring you when I come over next time?”
“A carton of Marlboro 100s and a six-pack of Dr Pepper.”
So the pattern was set. Twice or three times a month the Widow Kelsey and I got it on hard and heavy. I had enough cartons of Marlboros to last me years.
One time the Widow Kelsey invited me out to her home in the Valley. This was a first. She said she wanted the thrill of my fucking her in her own bed. But when I knocked on the door, her teenage son opened it. This felt a little weird, since I was closer to his age than his mom’s.
“Your mom home?” I asked.
“She’s back in her bedroom.”
I went back, and she was wearing this purple velvet jumpsuit zippered down the front. The crotch was so tight I could see her pussy lips.
“Hey,” I said, “I don’t want to be fucking you when your kid’s around. That feels creepy.”
“He’ll be asleep in a half hour. He won’t hear a thing. He sleeps like a baby.”
“Still,” I said, “it don’t feel right.”
“Feel this,” she said, taking my hand and pressing it against the hard nipples of those break-your-neck tits.
That did it. We fell into our usual routine. A blow job first with her swallowing my load, followed by an 8.0-earthquake fuck. In the middle of the earthquake, I heard banging on the door. It was her kid.
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