Well, if we were, the love didn’t last. The love hit a big speed bump that I didn’t see coming. While I was out working the comedy club circuit, Dollface was out fucking someone else. I can’t say that I didn’t deserve it. The guy she was fucking probably didn’t even know she was married, because we kept that fact to ourselves. My fault. But strange as it may be, even though this was an unconventional marriage and even though I’m an unconventional guy, I really had fallen for Dollface and started getting crazy when I realized she was cheating. Ironically, that’s because it happened at a time when I was being loyal.
One night I left the Red Room at Cresthill and went to her apartment, only to discover she’d gone out. Like a nut, I went looking for her. I found her at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she was at the bar with her girlfriend whore—they always got a girlfriend whore—and had some guy leaning over her.
“Hey, pal,” I said to the guy. “I’m gonna assume she didn’t tell you that she’s married.”
“You assumed right.”
The guy, seeing that my eyes weren’t right, wisely moved away.
“Don’t make a scene,” said Dollface.
“I ain’t gonna make no scene,” I said. “I’m just gonna drink.”
I went to the end of the bar and downed four shots of Jack Daniel’s on an empty stomach. This was one of the only times in my life when I drowned my sorrow in booze. I got plastered.
I got up and, ignoring Dollface and her girlfriend whore, went to the Comedy Store, where I walked into the lobby of the main room. Mitzi was standing right there talking to some people. I lurched a little and leaned on her shoulder.
“You’re drunk,” she said. “I can smell it. That’s not like you, Andrew. You’re no drinker.”
“I need to talk to you. Let’s go outside.”
We went to a quiet spot in the parking lot.
“Why do you think I want to make it?” I asked her.
“Money,” she said. “Everyone wants the money.”
“No, I wanna make it for my family. I wanna make it for my mom and dad back in Brooklyn—that’s who I wanna make it for.”
“Fine,” she said, trying to placate me.
“No, it ain’t fine. It won’t be fine until I make it. Which is why I got to know the truth. Why do you have a problem with me, Mitzi?”
“I don’t.”
“You do. Or you wouldn’t put me on at one thirty in the fuckin’ morning in front of nobody.”
“I do that because the other comics complain that they don’t wanna follow you.”
“I gotta be punished for that?”
“It’s no punishment. Do you know how many other comics would give their last nut to have that late-night spot?”
“Lemme tell you something, Mitzi, and remember I told it to you. I’m gonna be the biggest stand-up who ever walked through the doors of your club. Now, maybe you can slow that down a little, but I’ll find my audience. I fuckin’ promise that I will find my people.”
Tired of talking to a drunk Dice, Mitzi just walked away. That was fine with me, ’cause I needed to sit down. My head was spinning. I was feeling sick. I walked to the front of the club, where there was a little porch and a couple of stairs. I sat down, put my head on a table, and threw up all over myself. As if on cue, Dollface came driving up in the 1970 green Caddy convertible I’d just bought her.
“Get in,” she said.
I don’t remember what happened after that. I just remember waking up the next morning alone. Dollface had gone off to work.
KAMIKAZE COMIC
THINGS KEPT MOVING along. No big breaks, but steady progress. In 1984, I was cast in Making the Grade, starring Judd Nelson. I was able to convince the director to name my character Dice. I had a plan: even though I was only getting bit parts, using the Dice name could be a way to build up some recognition for my comic character.
A year later I appeared in Private Resort, which was filmed in Key Largo. During the shoot, the producer, an Israeli named Ben Efraim, took three of us actors aside and said, “I don’t know how big this movie will be, but I know that all three of you guys are gonna be superstars.”
The other two were Rob Morrow, who went on to star in Northern Exposure and Quiz Show, and Johnny Depp, who went on to become Johnny Depp.
• • •
Back in L.A., when my audience didn’t come to me, I came to them. And I don’t mean small audiences. I mean big ones.
I was crazy enough to go to the giant movie theaters in Westwood, the suburb of L.A. by UCLA, and jump onstage before the film started and go right into my shtick. I’d be up there having the audience howling for at least three or four minutes before the manager came to pull me offstage. By then the crowd was loving me and hating to see me go.
I remember that during one run of Prizzi’s Honor, I was so fuckin’ on at this huge Westwood theater that the manager actually asked me to come back. I was happy to—free of charge. My thinking was that maybe some big-time producer or his kids were in the audience. You never know.
I was so outrageous that one of the local papers sent a reporter around as I ran out on the stages of the movie palaces all over L.A., fearless about facing audiences who—until I started talking—hadn’t planned on listening to some crazy comic. The writer called me a “Kamikaze Comic.”
One night, late, I was at Ben Frank’s, trying to convince a young William Morris agent to represent me. I could tell he was impressed by my confidence and ambition, and he promised to check me out at the Comedy Store. But one thing I know for sure—never let a waiter or an agent leave your table, or you’ll never see them again. I looked around the restaurant—it was three A.M. and the customers were your basic late-night coalition of pimps, hookers, punk rockers, and out-of-work actors. My kind of people. I decided to go all Kamikaze Comic on them.
“Watch this,” I told the agent. I grabbed a cig—you could smoke in restaurants in those days—lit it up, and stood up on the soft cushion seat of the booth. “Hey, everybody, how you doin’?” I said, loud. The customers stopped eating and talking and looked over at me.
I went into about five minutes of my material, turning Ben Frank’s into a comedy club. The customers went berserk. I did a few jokes and then I started heckling this couple the way I do in my act. “So, what’s your name, honey?” I said to this guy’s date. “Any idea?”
The whole place went nuts. But then the manager of the restaurant, a nervous little fuck with a bad comb-over, came over and told me to cut it out and sit down. I took a little bow and sat down to insane cheering. A few minutes later, thanks to the douche-bag manager calling 911, six cops showed up. No lie. Six fucking cops. With the customers booing and shouting “Attica!” I left Ben Frank’s on my own recognizance. Outside the cops told me I was banned from Ben Frank’s for life and then went off to solve a real crime, and the young agent from the Morris office, convulsing with laughter, said he’d sign me.
I still worked the crowd in other restaurants. One was Larry Parker’s, a fifties-type diner done up retro style on South Beverly Drive. I knew Larry, the owner, who let me get on the loudspeaker at one A.M., where I’d blast everything from Roy Orbison to Kool and the Gang before doing my thing. It got around town that the Diceman was performing at the diner, and soon I had a cult following.
One night I was at Larry’s cracking ’em up when who should come up to me but Tommy Lee.
“I dig your comedy, man,” he said. “You’re very rock and roll.”
That’s all I needed to hear—this compliment coming out of the mouth of the drummer of Mötley Crüe. I was flying. I was telling him that I played drums too, and he said, “I can tell by the way you lay down the beat.”
“Listen, Tommy,” I said, “if you ever think of having a comic open for you guys, it would be the honor of my life.” I almost said, I’ll pay you, but I didn’t.
“How can I get in touch with you?” he asked.
“Easy,” I said. I gav
e him a card and wrote my dad’s phone number on the back. “My dad’s back in Brooklyn and he’s booking my big gigs. Call my dad.”
My dad never heard from Tommy, but I didn’t get mad. Tommy was a busy guy, and besides, to have him say that I was very rock and roll was enough to keep me happy for another six months.
• • •
The Kamikaze Comic kept rolling, and after a while the Morris office came through, getting me to play myself, or at least a version of the Dice character, in a couple of movies. One was Night Patrol, a cop drama parody, with Linda Blair and Pat Paulsen. I also got cast as a bouncer in a John Hughes movie, Pretty in Pink, with Molly Ringwald and Harry Dean Stanton. All this was fine. But in terms of big-time showbiz, I hadn’t broken through. I needed to go further. I needed better material. I needed to go where no comic had ever gone before.
HICKORY DICKORY DOCK
THE LIMERICK BIT began in a small way. Howie Mandel used to play the Comedy Store around the same time as me. He had this rhyme thing that he used to do. Like if a girl in the audience had a birthday, he’d say, “Roses are red, violets are blue, today’s the day that you became you.” Of course this wasn’t original with Howie, but it was part of his act. I changed it around and said, “Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m a schizophrenic, and so am I.” That got a laugh, but not from Howie. Howie got pissed that I was stealing his shit. Well, I liked Howie, so I apologized and forgot about it until I realized that no one has a copyright on rhymes. People have been rhyming since fuckin’ Mother Goose. And that got me to thinking.
I thought of Little Miss Muffet sitting on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider who sat down beside her and said, “Hey, what’s in the bowl, bitch?” That got a big laugh—something as simple as that—so I bought the Mother Goose nursery rhyme book to see what else I could turn upside down.
The guy who helped me string together the jokes was Neil. I had started calling him Hot Tub Johnny. The name really didn’t mean a thing. It was just something I picked up from Elvis. Elvis had his Memphis Mafia. I had my Brooklyn Buddies, all guys I used to be pals with from the neighborhood. One night me and Hot Tub Johnny were drinking a few beers, and I broke out the Mother Goose book. We started riffing together. I’d say, “Little Bo Peep.” He’d say, “Fucked her sheep.” I’d say, “Blew her horse.” Hot Tub would say, “Licked his feet.” I’d say, “She ate his ass so very nice.” He’d say, “Tongued his balls not once but twice.”
By the end of the evening, we must have put together twenty rhymes. You know, “Jack and Jill went up the hill both with a buck and a quarter, Jill came down with two fifty . . . fuckin’ whore!” Or “Old Mother Hubbard went to her cupboard to get her old dog a bone. When she bent over, Rover took over . . . and she got a bone of her own.”
The other big piece I added to the Dice act that ended up bringing me a lot of laughs and even more heat came to me when I was jogging. It happened during Halloween. I threw on my jogging shorts and tank top and went out for a run. When I run, I clear my mind and get all kinds of ideas. Running is a very fuckin’ creative thing for me. When I’m running I think of shit that wouldn’t ordinarily occur to me. I think of situations or, seeing funny people, come up with funny lines. So there I was, running down Santa Monica Boulevard, when I saw this horde of people coming toward me. They were way off in the distance so I couldn’t make them out at first. They looked like an invading army. The closer they came, the more I could see they were an invading army—an army of queers. It was the West Hollywood boys out on a Halloween run dressed up in tutus and skirts and short shorts and makeup. There were queens in leotards and musclemen with handlebar mustaches and fruits and fairies and every variety of rectal pioneer known to man. That’s where I got the idea that gays come from their own planet—Fagotron. It was funny, and it was a perfect thing for Dice to latch on to. It pushed me to the edge.
DIRTY, DIRTY JOKES
I WAS PLAYING the Laugh Factory on Sunset, working out my new material. In between sets I would walk next door to Greenblatt’s Deli to get my bagel with butter and bacon. One day I was sitting with my pal Mark Carducci, a screenwriter, when this guy came up to me. He had long scraggly hair, a big bushy beard, and baggy sweatpants. He looked like a homeless guy. He gave me the idea that he wanted to sit and talk. I was about to give him a few bucks and send him on his way when Mark whispered to me, “Do you know who this is?” I didn’t. “He’s Rick Rubin,” said Mark. “He’s the guy who invented rap.” Turned out Rubin was the producer of Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys.
“Just wanna tell you that I’m your biggest fan,” said Rick. “I saw your first set, and I’m going back to catch the second. One day I’d love to make a record with you.”
“Cool,” is all I said.
• • •
Redd Foxx always worked on the edge. He was one of the first guys to work blue—and didn’t give a shit. He knew dirty was funny, and unlike prudes like Cosby, he didn’t have a snobby attitude about what’s correct. I also admired Redd for how he made the transition to the mainstream with Sanford and Son. So when he asked me to be one of the comics on his Dirty Dirty Jokes video, which came out during the mideighties VHS rage, I jumped at the chance.
It was shot at Foxx’s comedy club in L.A. and included other people, like Bob Schimmel. Bob was one of those rare comics who never judged his fellow comic. He didn’t operate on jealousy. He was his own man, and he worked as blue as me. He’d open by saying, “The other day I heard you could make money donating sperm to a sperm bank. Well, that aggravated me, because I realized that in the last year alone I let five or six hundred dollars slip through my fingers.”
Unlike me, Bob dressed conservatively, in a sports coat and button-down shirt. But unlike the conservative comics, he wasn’t scared of telling pussy and dick jokes, even if he did look like a young professor teaching freshman English. He had a deadpan, dry-and-wry delivery and came out of the tradition of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, smart-ass Jewish boys who saw the world in their own twisted way. The fact that I came out of a whole ’nother tradition—rock and roll and Elvis—didn’t faze Bob. He respected the differences between us.
There were some similarities. Schimmel also saw humor in queer jokes. He was the first guy I heard who asked the question “When do people decide they’re gay? Do you happen to be walking down the street one day and say, ‘I think I want a dick up my ass’?” Schimmel wasn’t scared of bathroom humor. He’d say, “You ever take a shit and look at the turd and realize that it looks like someone you know?” Then he’d ask, “Then did you ever tell that person, ‘Hey, you look like the turd I just shit out’?”
I saw Schimmel as a brother in arms. He had the guts to make fun of everyone and everything. He encouraged me. He’d say, “Fuck those people who say you’re disrespectful. Disrespect is the essence of good comedy. Let the rest of the world live by those goody-goody rules. The only rule of comedy is make ’em laugh. If you’re afraid of bad taste, don’t be a comic. Be a rabbi or be a priest. Priests say, ‘Excuse me,’ after they fart. Wouldn’t it be better if they said, ‘Look out,’ before they did it?”
Schimmel was something of a nerd, but he never made you feel dumber than him. He just had your number. He knew us men are worried about the size of our dicks, so he made dick jokes. “Ever see John Holmes’s cock? It doesn’t look like a cock. It looks like a ride at Magic Mountain.” He knew women like to come, so he made come jokes. He talked about buying a giant vibrator for his wife that took twenty D-cell batteries so powerful that when she came he used her to jump-start his car.
Schimmel had a rough life. He got bad cancer and had to go through hellish chemotherapy. He beat it and wrote a great book called Cancer on $5 a Day. Just when he got well, though, he was riding in a car with his kids when the car flipped over. His kids survived, but he didn’t. He died at sixty, way too young. Bob helped me to understand that I had to keep fighting—no matter what. And when I got my big break in 1986,
Schimmel was the first guy to congratulate me. I’ll never forget him.
BUSTING UP, BUSTING OUT
I KNEW DOLLFACE was still banging someone else, but I didn’t wanna admit it. By then we had made a couple of moves. We tried living together at Cresthill, but Mitzi found out and nixed it. Mitzi didn’t want her comics shacked up with broads. So me and Dollface found a cool apartment on Laurel Canyon just above Sunset to try to work it out. But every time I went out of town and called home, no one answered or the line was busy. There was only one reason why I couldn’t get hold of Dollface. And that’s ’cause she had gotten hold of someone else.
I was in Texas when I realized I had to stop bullshitting myself. I had a New Year’s Eve gig at a comedy club in San Antonio, a converted old movie theater, and I wanted Dollface there to ring in New Year’s Eve. I’m romantic that way. We had it all planned. But then the came the call. It was December 30.
“Sorry, but it doesn’t look like I’m gonna be able to make it there by New Year’s Eve. But I can get there the next day.”
“The next day!” I exploded. “The whole goddamn point is for us to spend New Year’s Eve together.”
“Well, the people where I work—”
“Fuck the people where you work. You’re my wife.”
“But it’s my job.”
“Quit your job.”
“I can’t.”
“You gotta.”
“Okay. I’ll try and be there for New Year’s. I really will.”
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