I went to the window and told her, “I’m busy.”
“I gotta talk to you,” said Polly.
“Not now.”
“It’s important,” Polly insisted.
Dollface was annoyed.
“You better go see what she wants,” said Dollface.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Dollface.
“Don’t hurry,” said Dollface. “I gotta be at work anyway. I’m leaving.”
“Meet me by the front door,” I told Polly.
Dollface got dressed and left.
I got dressed and met Polly at the front door. She was crying her eyes out. She said she was lonely for me. I said I was about to get into a relationship with Dollface. Polly said that didn’t matter. She didn’t want much. “Just hold me,” she said. “Just show me you care. Show me you’re my friend.” I held her. I showed her I cared. She showed me that she was wearing a thong under her short skirt. And that’s how two friends wound up fucking.
In spite of this little detour, I started dating Dollface, and she started introducing me to her friends as her “boyfriend.” I wasn’t quite that serious, but I didn’t mind. Call me whatever you like.
RONNY DOWNTOWN
THE RELATIONSHIP WITH Dollface had been going on for several months when I realized I’d been away from Brooklyn for too long. I missed Mom and Dad and wanted go home for a few days. I invited Dollface home to meet the folks. Mom took one look at her and said she was gorgeous. From the airport they took us out to a place they liked in Bay Ridge. It was a gambling hall, a well-lit, busy place with respectable Brooklynites playing very illegal poker, blackjack, and roulette. Mom wanted me to meet someone there.
“He’s a nice guy and good to know,” said Mom.
“How?”
“He can watch your back.”
“Why do I need my back watched?”
“Maybe not now. Maybe later. When you get really famous.”
The guy turned out to be someone they called Ronny Downtown. We met him only a few minutes after the four of us walked in. Maybe five or six years older than me, Ronny Downtown spoke Italian-Brooklynese—that’s the same as Jewish-Brooklynese except he used his hands more and his grammar was a little more fucked-up than mine, which is saying a lot.
“Finally get to meet you,” he said. “Your mother, she’s always talkin’ about you, and then we see you on that Don Kirshner TV show. You’s funny, ya heah?”
“Thanks.”
“I got all kinds of friends who are working as comics. Making good money.”
“That’s good.”
“I heah you’s got a good future out dere.”
“I hope so.”
“I heah you been to the mansion.”
“What mansion?”
“I heah there’s only one mansion out dere that count. The Playboy Mansion.”
“Haven’t been.”
“I got a friend who might be able to get you invited.”
Ronny looked the way a Brooklyn bookie should look: lean build, dark hair with too much hair grease, thin mustache, blue silk suit with more polyester than silk. He was all over me ’cause he saw me as a rising star. Naturally I liked the flattery, and I actually liked him. Like Mom said, he was a nice guy. It was only his name that gave me problems.
“Ronny Downtown,” I told him, “ain’t the right name.”
“What you mean?” he asked. “It’s been my name for years.”
“You got your fuckin’ name backward. If someone says, ‘Here comes Ronny Downtown,’ I’m thinking that Ronny is on his way downtown.”
“Ya heah, I ain’t had no problems with no misunderstanding.”
“But that don’t mean you won’t. All I’m telling you is to flip the script. Ronny Downtown don’t make no sense. But Downtown Ronny does.”
Whether Downtown Ronny heard me or not didn’t make any difference, ’cause I kept calling him Downtown Ronny, and having heard me, everyone followed suit. This was far from the last time I’d see Downtown Ronny, and later on when Dicemania really took off he was part of the group of guys who would travel with me. All characters.
The other thing I remember about that night was borrowing $50 from my dad to play blackjack. I lost it all, but something about the game kept me glued to the table. At the time I thought, No big deal. Without knowing it, the seeds of a very serious fuckin’ addiction had been planted.
KINISON
BACK IN HOLLYWOOD, me and Dollface continued to date. It wasn’t that the Red Room didn’t continue to attract chicks other than Dollface, but little by little I was starting to settle down. At least a bit.
Every week I was meeting new comics while working Mitzi’s circuit. One of the guys I liked the most was Sam Kinison, a crazy motherfucker—and the most insecure cat in the history of comedy—whose brand of insanity I found funny as hell. Sam and I became fast friends. As the last two acts at the Comedy Store practically every night, we hung out all the time. There might have been only fifteen people in the club—assholes too drunk to get up and leave—but Sam would carry on like there were fifteen hundred. I was the same way. Those times when we shared the stage were magical. Dice, the wiseass from Brooklyn, and Kinison, the preacher from the Midwest, were hysterical together. We broke each other up. And, as a matter of fact, I helped Sam get his timing down.
Kinison had a great opening line but didn’t know how to set it up. I showed him. I said, “Sam, I love your act. But you gotta put more theater into it. You gotta get out and play with your glasses. Put ’em on. Take ’em off. Then you light your cigarette. You take your time. You suck the audience in. You say, ‘How you doin’ out there?’ You wait for them to yell, ‘Great. We’re doing great.’ Then you say with a smile, ‘I bet you saw a lot of acts tonight that you liked. I bet you liked them enough to come back here. I bet you’ve had a great time.’ Now this is when your smile turns to scorn. This when you say, ‘Well, all I can promise you is one thing. My name is Sam Kinison and . . . ,’ big pause here . . . big fuckin’ pause . . . before you blow your stack and hit ’em with, ‘And you’re gonna wish to God you’d never seen me!!!’ ”
It was a killer opening that Sam used for most of his career. What made it great was not only Sam’s explosive raging fuckin’ anger but the originality of his material. As a onetime minister, he could invent shit about what it would be like if Jesus had to come home to a nagging wife who wants to know why he’s been gone so long. Only Sam could get Jesus to say something like, “Leave me alone, you fuckin’ bitch, I was busy with a little something called the resurrection.”
In this beginning period when we were still struggling comics riding down to La Jolla or out to Westwood, Sam and I had our own little two-man support group. Other people might have thought that I was too far-out, too outrageous or disrespectful, but not Sam. I backed up his balls-out nuttiness 100 percent, and he backed up mine. Many were the nights when we’d go to Ralph’s grocery store together, steal a bunch of pork chops, and head back to Cresthill, where we’d cook ’em on the grill. After dinner we’d do routines for each other. We wouldn’t mince words. When I thought he should push it further, I said so. And the same for Sam.
On one of those nights—this was when Sam was just getting into his ear-shattering scream—he yelled so loud that Yakov Smirnoff woke up out of a dead sleep and came running down the stairs, thinking some violent crime had been committed.
He took one look at crazy Sam, whose scream hadn’t stopped, and said to me, “What is this guy doing?”
“He’s killing me,” I said in all sincerity. “He’s absolutely killing me.”
• • •
Sam and I would watch the big stars run in and out of the Comedy Store. Those were the days when, on any given night, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, or Eddie Murphy might show up to try out new material. Eddie was an early fan of mine. Like me, he’s an Elvis freak and saw me as the Elvis comic. Eddie was always supportive. With his movie career taking off, though, going ba
ck to stand-up could make him nervous. A couple of times I found myself standing next to him and saying, “You’re the fuckin’ greatest. You’re Eddie Murphy. You got nothing to be nervous about.” He’d look over at me, smile, and say, “Thanks, man, I needed to hear that.”
Sam was an ass-kisser. He’d butter up anyone, including and especially Mitzi, to get ahead. I was too proud and sure of myself to ass-kiss anyone. For instance, when Robin Williams came into the club I never tried to get close to him. I left him alone. He was a superstar, and superstars need their space. One night I went onstage after him in the main room and was flattered that he stayed around to hear me. Afterward, Kinison, who was buttering him up, took him to a party at Cresthill. Robin came over to me and said, “Man, you buried me.”
“Believe me, Robin,” I said, “that wasn’t my intention. You’re where I wanna be one day. I give you nothing but respect.”
WHO WOULD HAVE THUNK?
I GOT MARRIED.
Yes. You heard me right.
I got fuckin’ married in the eighties when I was twenty-six. I got married in the middle of my Red Room crazy days. I got married when marriage was the last thing on my mind. I got married when I was out of my mind. I got married when I should have gotten a brain transplant. I got married because . . . well . . .
Dollface called me when I was home in Brooklyn. When I called her back, I was actually in a phone booth on Nostrand Avenue. She said two words that I wasn’t exactly waiting for: “I’m pregnant.”
My response was quick. “Then we’ll get married.”
I’d always wanted a family anyway, and besides, I’d been dating Dollface, I’d been loving on Dollface, and, according to my code of honor, if a girl you’ve been dating and loving says she’s pregnant, you marry her.
“You’ll come to Brooklyn,” I said. “We’ll get married here.”
No arguments. Dollface would have married me anywhere. I didn’t want no fancy ceremony, and neither did Dollface. My dad knew a hundred judges and picked the one he liked the best. So with my family around us, we went to the judge’s chambers for a civil ceremony. I caught it all on a cassette tape recorder.
That night we went to the Golden Gate Motor Inn on Knapp Street. I spent the extra ten bucks for the vibrating bed. We fucked liked bunnies and the next day drove out to Governor’s comedy club on Long Island, where I had a gig. Two days later we flew back to the coast.
When the cab pulled up to Dollface’s apartment on Havenhurst we both got out, but I told the driver to wait.
“I’ll help you with the bags,” I say. “Then I’m going back to Cresthill.”
“The Red Room?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I wanna see the guys and maybe go down to the Comedy Store and see if I can get on tonight. I wanna see if Ollie Joe and Kinison are around.”
“So you’re not coming in?” she asked.
“I just said I’m not coming in. I’m going to Cresthill.”
“And what about later? You’re coming back here tonight, aren’t you?”
“Depends. If I get to talking with the boys, it could be late—four or five in the morning. You gotta be up by seven to go to work.” Dollface still had her job as a receptionist for a Realtor.
All this time we’re out on the street, with the cab driver waiting.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You don’t intend on moving in with me, do you?”
“Well, to be honest, everything happened so fast—with this marriage and all—we haven’t really discussed it.”
“You don’t expect me to move into that awful house with that awful bunch of horny comedians, do you?”
“Of course not. I’d never ask you to do that.”
“Then you will move here.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
When she heard that, she threw down her purse. “I can’t fuckin’ believe this. We’re married, and you don’t want to live with me.”
“The marriage is something between us. Right now it’s nothing I want to broadcast.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My career. I got a certain image to protect. My comedy depends on the audience looking at me in a certain way—a guy on the loose.”
“I’m not believing this.”
“You’ll like the arrangement,” I said. “You’ll get used to it. It’s romantic. I’ll come to your place, you’ll come to mine. We got two different places where we can hang out. I see it as the perfect way to start a marriage.”
It wasn’t. I didn’t like staying at Dollface’s apartment. She’d go to sleep early and I’d get bored. I missed hanging out with the other comics at Cresthill, where something was always going on. It wasn’t that I was cheating on Dollface. I wasn’t. I just didn’t want to live there in a place that didn’t seem too exciting. Then came the night when I heard something I hadn’t heard before.
First it was crickets. There seemed to be a bunch of them chattering with each other. Couldn’t tell whether they were under our bed or out in the yard. Dollface had already fallen asleep, and all I could do was listen to these fuckin’ crickets.
A few minutes later I heard her neighbor—this short, stacked blond bombshell I’d seen around the complex—talking to some guy. They were outside and, because they were probably a little drunk, they were talking loud.
“Mind if I come in?” he asked her.
“I want you to come in,” she said.
Now my interest was up. Soon my dick would be up. By the sound of her voice I figured she had every intention of giving him pussy. My only prayer was that her bedroom and our bedroom shared a wall.
Their voices were distant but soon they got closer.
“Do you like doing that kind of thing?” I heard him asking her.
“I love doing that kind of thing,” I heard her respond.
My prayer was answered. Her bedroom did share a wall with ours. And even better, the walls were paper thin. Those cheap apartments were made outta tissue paper and glue. The way the couple was sounding, they might as well have been in the same room as us.
Not only did I hear their voices, I started hearing her making those sucking sounds that I know and love so well. Holy shit! With audio clearer than a fuckin’ Bose speaker, I heard her sucking on his cock like it was a lollipop. I heard him breathing heavy and I heard her moaning. I imagined her pussy was soaking wet. I looked over at the bed and saw that Dollface was turned over on her belly with her long blond hair flowing down her back and her panties riding high up into that plump corn-fed ass of hers. Dollface was looking good, while the couple on the other side of the wall had changed positions.
“Do me,” I heard Blondie telling the cat.
“I’ll do you good,” he said.
So I imagined him spreading her out and licking that clit until she went from moaning to screaming. The screaming woke up Dollface, who saw that I was out of bed, standing up straight, my dick standing up straight, a big smile on my face. I pointed to the wall.
“Listen,” I told Dollface.
She liked what she heard. The sound of Blondie getting sucked by the guy got her hot. She started licking my cock, and grabbing it, and sticking the whole head in her mouth. With Blondie providing the soundtrack, this was one of Dollface’s better blow jobs.
Meanwhile Blondie was screaming for dick, and boyfriend was about to bone her. The second the bone slipped in, we heard about it. Blondie was screaming, “Feel that pussy grab your cock! Fuck that tight pussy!”
Their headboard started banging and the wall started shaking and, looking down at my wife, I saw her pussy juice flowing like it had never fuckin’ flowed before. She wanted me to fuck her, and naturally I wanted to oblige, but I also wanted her to join in the screaming.
“Let ’em hear you scream,” I told her. “I want you to out-scream Blondie.”
Well, that had to be pretty fuckin’ loud, ’cause Blondie was hysterical and the walls wer
e shaking, but the second I slammed into Dollface she matched Blondie scream for scream, my balls slapping her thighs, her hands grabbing my ass to make sure I was thrusting the full cock deep into her box. She was lifting up, swaying side to side, but mainly she was screaming her head off about how good the dick was, and Blondie was screaming the same thing. Naturally the two women were hearing each other and were getting off on each other’s screams, and we were banging our headboard every bit as hard as they were banging theirs, and we wanted to keep banging ’cause we wanted to win this fuckin’ banging contest about who could bang and fuck the longest. I didn’t have a stopwatch on me so I can’t tell you exactly, but it had to be a good ten or fifteen minutes of solid rock cock-slamming fucking before—and this is the part that floors me—both of these chicks scream, “Oh shit, oh God, I’m coming!” at the exactly the same fuckin’ time.
Thinking back, this was the night that I fell in love with my wife.
The next afternoon, on my way out, I happened to run into Blondie in the parking lot. She was dressed in a prim-and-proper pantsuit as she unlocked the door of her Toyota Corolla.
“Good afternoon,” I said to her.
“Good afternoon,” she said to me. No smile, no nod, no wink—nothing to let me know that she knew that I knew that last night her boyfriend—and, by extension, I—had fucked her brains out.
DRUNK DICE
THAT WAS PROBABLY the happiest moment of my marriage. As it turned out, the sad moments outweighed the happy ones. One of those moments came early when Dollface said she had her period—a big surprise—so she wasn’t really pregnant after all. That made me stop and wonder.
By this time I’d made up with my old friend Neil, one of the original Nostrand Avenue Schmucks. On a trip back to Brooklyn, I happened to be revisiting Pips when I noticed Neil walking into Captain Walter’s, a big log-cabin bar in the middle of Sheepshead Bay. By then I knew that he and Sylvia were divorced; they’d been splitsville for years. I didn’t have hard feelings. I just felt bad that Neil had to learn about Sylvia the hard way. So I went in and had a drink with Neil. It was just like old times. He was happy to hear about all my success and said he’d love to visit me in California and meet Dollface. Wasn’t long after that he made the trip to L.A. That’s when he said it looked to him like me and Dollface were really in love.
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