Hell Gig

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

When I first got into stand-up comedy in Philadelphia in the 1980’s there was already a fairly active comedy scene that had been going on for several years. There were three full time clubs in the city, The Comedy Factory Outlet, The Funny Bone and The Comedy Works . There were several weekend clubs at the big hotels on the outskirts of town run by a booking agent named Andy Scarpati, and at least thirty one-nighters within driving distance of the city. There were a few full time comics who made their living without hitting the road, but the majority of the acts you’d see if you went to one of these venues were the open mic level up and comers.

Philadelphia didn’t have the kind of scene that New York City or Los Angeles did with most of the clubs geared toward the television type set; five or six minute performances that would work on the late night shows like Letterman or Carson. If you worked the open mic scene the booking agents wanted you to develop fifteen and thirty minute sets so that you could round out a show as either an opener, or as a feature act who could handle a solid thirty minutes in the middle of the show. Headliners were the guys who closed shows with forty five minutes to an hour of material and were almost always booked in from some other city, guys who’d worked the road long enough to build up a solid set or people who’d already found some measure of success in New York or LA and had television credits.

They’d fly in for the weekend and make the real money while the rest of the comics that made up the show took whatever was offered, usually $40 or $50 to open the show, and a hundred bucks to middle. If you were hungry and really wanted to work you could find a stage four or five nights a week, and on the weekends- depending on how well you got in with the local booking agents who managed the one-nighters- you could cobble together enough work, in some cases driving from one venue to the next over the course of a weekend to do half a dozen spots so that you could actually survive off of what you earned. For the most part the guys who were up and comers as opposed to the hobbyists established a toehold locally that allowed them to branch out and perform on the road, if not nationally, at least regionally.

There were a host of booking agents in the cities to the north and south, guys like Keith Gisser in Central Pennsylvania who controlled a dozen weekend gigs in hotel lounges from Harrisburg to Cleveland, and Chip Franklin that dominated everything south of Baltimore and D.C. all the way down into Virginia. It wasn’t unusual to start a Saturday night at a spaghetti house in Frankford, run out of the club and hightail it up to Pottstown for another show and wrap up the evening in Reading before heading back to the city to maybe catch a guest spot at the Funny Bone on South Street for the late show and wind up with a couple of hundred dollars and a hell of a road buzz from all the driving.

Performing that many sets at that many venues offered you a chance to work out more material in one night that even the most competent performers in NY and LA couldn’t do in a week. There were a lot of other types of gigs you could catch if you knew how to schmooze, were reliable and more importantly had a car. Most of the out of town headliners, for example would fly in and be stranded in a hotel or comedy condo- the cramped and often shabby apartments that clubs rented as a place to store their comics between shows- and were dependent upon the local openers and features who fawned over them and lapped up their stories of life on the road.

I was an anomaly in the business at that time because I already had a steady job with a good company where the hours never overlapped. I was a construction superintendent for a mid-sized firm in Philadelphia that specialized in commercial and light industrial projects; auto dealerships, SEPTA stations, Wawa stores. My day started at 4 am when I’d drag myself out of bed and head to whatever remote corner of the city I’d been assigned to and manage a series of subcontractors through the phases of a project and hold the hand of the guys who were footing the bill.

Most of it was pretty simple once you had a good crew of reliable subs. That was the key to your success on each project, making sure that the right guy was in the right place at the right time so that the pace of the job matched the phase of completion. If you’d scheduled the guys who did the terrazzo you knew that they wouldn’t begin their work unless the concrete flat work was completed to their satisfaction and everything removed from the floors, and that if it wasn’t up to their demanding standards you’d lose them to another job and the whole thing would gum up the works for the trades that followed in their footsteps.

Some of the crews were artisans and some of them were a lot closer to a band of drug addled outlaws and you had to be able to deal with each one in a way that they worked with you. The guys who do hot roofs were almost to a man ex-cons who’d shoot up meth in their trucks during lunch, while the Irish form workers who prepared for the concrete pours spoke a brogue so thick and were so clannish in their behavior it was best to simply avoid them until their work was ready to be inspected. I kept a large butcher paper schedule up on the wall of the construction trailer and would block out each scheduled phase in colored magic marker and then run a flat black line through each one as they were completed on a timeline that was always within a day or two of the projected closing.

I made a fairly good income for a single man in his twenties, with solid benefits, but what I was always shooting for was the completion bonuses that my employers hung out there like a carrot on a stick to keep the projects humming along. Since most of our contracts were tied directly to someone making serious coin if we finished up early, they’d put a dollar figure on each job for early occupation. On one particular assignment, a Ford dealership in Marple, Pa. I’d been offered one thousand dollars for every day I could trim off the job. At that time I was driving a beat up Dodge van I’d owned since I got out of the Army and I wanted more than anything to drive something that wasn’t packed full of tools and didn’t smell like sweat and diesel.

I worked that job like a mule, from the pile drivers to the final finishes and I managed to bring it in two weeks ahead of schedule. I had been making a solid wage, but I never had a big payday before in my adult life. The prospect of having my boss, a guy who looked like he golfed for a living and didn’t know a pry bar from a circular saw, hand me that kind of payout had a profound effect on my performance. For the last week that I’d been pushing towards a certificate of occupancy he’d been haunting the job site, nervous I thought, always in some hushed conversation with the guy who owned the dealership.

I made a point to keep my head down and make sure every warrantee and inspection permit had been signed, sealed and was ready to hand over. On the afternoon when we were all done, after the cleaning crew had finished polishing the plate glass showroom windows and the furniture had been delivered, assembled, and arranged around the showroom floor I stood there with my employer and held out my hand in the universal sign of ‘pay up’.

I was justifiably proud of my work, the client was already moving salesmen into their new office spaces and everyone, it seemed, was all smiles. Don, my boss, shook my hand, and then he put his beefy arm on my shoulder and walked me out to the parking lot, steering me towards the back of the dealership. I don’t remember how he put it but he held out his other arm in a Ceasar-like ‘Behold!’ gesture indicating the sea of brand new cars and trucks and said- “Pick one.”

His act of generosity, I eventually realized, saved him several thousand dollars in bonus money, maybe more if he’d worked out something with the dealer in advance, but in that moment it was one of the single greatest gestures anyone had ever made to me. A brand new car at no cost and all I had to do was choose. If it was me today I’d have immediately gone for an F-350, but back then, at my age I picked the baddest looking car I could find and it fell in love.

A hell gig, in comedy, is one of those experiences that happens to everyone. It doesn’t have as much to do with the club or the one-nighter where the performance takes place. It isn’t dependent on the audience being good or bad one, although they always play a major role in how it shapes up in the re-telling. It’s not even about the comic having a bad night, but rather a confluence of all that and more. To comics, particularly the road guys, there is an almost equal sense of pride in having gone through a hell gig as there is in killing in a packed house.

Sure there are always indications that lead up to it, you’d have to be blind not to notice the similarities and patterns. One of the patterns is a certain air in the air, a sour, metallic offness that permeates the atmosphere from the moment you arrive. The sound system is tinny and too loud, there’s no stool onstage and the bartender ignores you from the moment you walk in. There is vibe and it isn’t a good one. The re-examination in the hours after expose a host of red flags and warning bells, but until you are in the moment, there’s just no way to tell. You can feel great about the show leading right up until you get there or you can be as sick as a dog, a feature that adds a unique despair to the unfolding of your imminent doom.

You can study them afterwards, go over the details in your head for years after the fact to try and unwind the tangled chain of events, but you can not avoid them. They are the blow-out on the expressway during rush hour/Cancun sun poisoning/near death experiences of the entertainment world. There isn’t really an equivalent in music or acting other than falling into the orchestra pit. Only in the world of stand up comedy can a person suffer the way you can in a public humiliation that must come in at exactly 45 minutes in length, no matter how deep the abyss. Comics, in their off-time, love to regale one another not with the stories about opening for Carlin or Pryor, but in how bad they ate it at a private show for a biker gang in the swamps of Louisiana that ended with a missing tooth and a two-day lock-up in Natches.

Suffering is the gas that runs the comedy car and the more cruel and unusual the story, the higher the octane. There are few memories in my life that have borne such a lasting impression as listening to the horror stories of guys like James Gregory, a slow, overweight, seemingly ignorant, southern hack who nonetheless could weave stories so astounding you couldn’t believe they were true, but were in fact understatements. Bad shows are one thing, everyone has them and there’s no way to become a good comic without the feedback of an audience full of people who just don’t find you funny. At all.

Of course even a crowd like that can give you something to work with and some of the best lines I ever wrote were the result of trying to provoke a room full of people with their arms crossed over their chests looking like they wanted to kick my ass. Hell gigs, on the other hand, invoke all of those images and then hockey stick it into the rafters. They are deeply painful and disturbingly personal, but they are character building, and strikingly similar to surviving a grenade blast. They make you sit up and take stock of your commitment to comedy, to your life choices, to your purpose for living- if executed well by everyone involved.

In the Summer of 1989, I was doing a run of one-nighters for Keith Gisser, a booking agent from Cleveland, Ohio. His runs had you playing a series of Holiday Inn bars in Altoona and Clarion, and shot and beer joints in towns like Oil City, Punxsutawney and DuBois. He paid a hundred bucks a set and on the weekend you finished up at an actual comedy club that had two shows on Friday and three on Saturday. The one-nighters were a crap shoot, they were always bringing new ones into the rotation as the old ones would fold up.

It was the nature of the beats back then so you didn’t take it for granted that you’d ever see the same one twice again. Some of the ones you’d write off as doomed would wind up packed on your second go round and vice versa. You had to go in to everyone with the same attitude, the same projection of confidence and professionalism no matter how bad it looked and you had to mesh with the other comics- an opener or MC and a feature in the middle- in a never ending variety of combinations. One night there’d be a guy with a guitar who did impressions from at least two decades back, “You guys like Nixon?”, and on others a fat act or an open mic local, you never knew what you’d get.

If you were smart you’d watch them closely to see what worked and what stepped on your own material in terms of topics. You could take little pieces from their act and later when you’re onstage you could make clever references back to the last comic. Most people in the audience were under the impression that we all knew each other, toured together, shared a big house like in that show with Bob Saget and Dave Coulier when we’d almost always just met at the bar over a flat beer and an intro scribbled onto a cocktail napkin. On this particular run I was returning to the Lounge at the Bloomsburg Comfort Inn, a venue I’d performed at before and where I’d done fairly well although that memory is gone today.

All I can remember about that last show was just how badly I had done, it was baked in to my memory the way a childhood dog attack might be and it haunted me for a long time after I’d walked, no, slinked offstage at the end of my interminable set. I just remember coming in with an overblown confidence thinking that the room itself was a good room and that the audiences were good audiences and that I was a good comedian and that would be enough. I can still see the room, the bar running along the far wall about halfway to the stage and the way the room had been set, the four tops along each wall and the center of the room with long banquet tables that ran from front to back right from the lip of the stage.

There was a small stairway an the left-hand side and the lighting was blinding to the stage but for the center row of banquet tables and the audience where they sat. The deal with the booker was this- you got to the gig on time, you followed the rules if the owner of the place had any, and you did your time. If you were being paid to close the show, it was 45 minutes minimum, you could do an hour if the crowd was good, but you had to do your time. The opener would warm them up, tell them about the drink specials and encourage them to tip the waitrons and if he could get a few laughs, close his set at fifteen minutes. The feature would follow him onstage and try to rev the folks up with a tight thirty minute set and then bring on the headliner, he’s appeared in clubs and colleges all over the country, ladies and gentlemen…

Once I had the car everything changed.

Most of the comics I ran with in the early part of my stand-up career lived in Philly. That meant that they didn’t own a car. I lived across the river in South Jersey. I had a nice little condo with an extra room, a solid job and a brand new car. As an open mic level performer most of my time was spent networking the guys who’d been doing it longer. There were a lot of different cliques; the road comics who’d roll back into town to do guest sets that always rocked because of their experience away from the city. Most of them were feature acts, but we had a couple of local headliners like Bob Saget, Dom Irrera, and the Legendary Wid who’d drop by the clubs in every time they were in town.

The younger comics would always haunt their space hoping to catch some tip or piece of advice and if lucky hear a great story from the road. You have to remember that unlike most jobs there are no schools for stand-up, no way to learn how to get up on a stage and make people laugh other than climbing up on a stage and actually making people laugh. From the moment your name has been announced to the time you take the microphone into your hand and begin to speak there is a kind of conviction that everything you say is every bit as funny as you think it is. And on their behalf it’s safe to assume that almost everyone seated in the audience shares the same expectation, after all they paid their cover charge and are now obligated to buy their drinks and sit in the dark looking up through the smoky haze for ninety minutes.

These distinctly separate entities- the crowd and the comic- share a covalent bond that help to animate the very essence of comedy, a shared sense of what is funny. It isn’t until you open your mouth that you discover the truth. And so the new guys, the ones without experience or the sense God gave a squirrel, would haunt the older more experienced guys hoping to unlock some hidden mystery or uncover a hidden clue that would lead them to success. Of course that’s not how it’s done. As everyone who has ever mastered a task understands, it is only though constant repetition and the endless application of time and talent that anyone achieves competency in a discipline, even one as obscure as stand-up comedy.

You stand in the back of the room nursing a soda and reviewing in your head the set list you’ve developed. It’s dark in a club, except for your time onstage where it is so bright you are lucky to be able to see much further than the first few rows of tables. In that pre-set gloom you stare out across the heads of the crowd trying to pick out the location of the people with the best laughs, you watch the waitresses glide in and out with trays of drinks, oblivious to the comic onstage as they crouch down to place a cocktail napkin on a table and then the cold beer or frozen margarita. You wait for the MC to finish up his announcements about drink specials and a reminder to tip the waitresses, but please don’t knock them over, and finally get around to your introduction.

Everyone got a generic intro during the early stages of their career- The next comic coming to the stage is a funny guy, playing clubs and colleges all over the country, give a big hand to…fill in the blank! You were lucky if they got your name right and a lot of the house MC’s made a point of screwing it up just for fun. Some guys got pretty wound up over their introduction, especially the headliners, as if the audience really cared or took note. Most comics would write it down on a 3×5 note card or scribble it on a paper napkin and if you were bringing them up you tried to do it flawlessly- if they were someone you admired or could do you a solid- or intentionally screwed it up if they were a friend or someone you despised.

Too much information, a list of recent television appearances or a list upcoming shows in some far off city usually went right over the audiences head. If they’d seen you on television they already knew it and if they hadn’t what difference could it make? Most people didn’t know your name when you walked into the room and they wouldn’t remember it when they left, four Margaritas into their weekend. The smart move was not to care, or if you could, to craft something even the lamest opener could recite without too much difficulty that would get a laugh or make them raise an eyebrow of interest.

My own introduction came around a year into the game when I’d discovered that telling people a little something about your background outside of comedy was a better hook than a recap of your last three cable appearances. Before comedy I had served in the military, built things, and had on occasion written for some periodicals I pray that my children never discover, magazines like Playgirl Magazine. My intro was short and conflicted and I liked the way it got a laugh before I even hit the stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, your headliner tonight is a former sniper in the US Army and a current writer for Cosmo, please welcome to the stage, Marc Moran….

You have to come in confident, that much is an absolute. Of course there were guys who made an entire act out of being timid and insecure; guys like Emo Philips or Bobcat Goldthwaite, but they believed in their character completely and so their conviction and authority allowed them to seize the room immediately. Come on hesitant, fail to grab them immediately and your fate is sealed. It is nearly impossible to dig yourself out of a self-imposed grave. Having a solid opening line that you can hang a hat on right from the get go is the key to holding the audience.

Chip Franklin’s nod toward the spotlight focused on him with a purposeful squint followed by the deadpan delivery of, “We need to wrap this up quick and get that light back to Arbee’s before the chicken gets cold” was always one I admired for it’s efficacy and the almost poetic cadence. And chicken is just a funny word. I used the audience applause from the introduction to offer my opening line, “please keep it going for my good friend Kevin James,” and a sweep of my arm to indicate the guy who’d just walked off stage. They’d applaud even louder for a moment until I’d finish with, “He’s not here tonight, he’s just my good friend.”

That always got the first laugh of the set when they realized they’d been tricked- no one ever remembers the comics names- and that I’d simply used their momentum, the applause, against them. It was a form of narrative jiu jitsu. Once you’ve established that you are both clever and possibly armed and a good shot, they give you some latitude that you can begin to build upon. A really practiced comic will try to follow up with his A material and run through as many of his best short bits right up front in order to cement the perception of competence in their minds. You hammer them with one joke after another trying to build up the triggers- I speak, you laugh- until it becomes a routine.

If you’ve got them on your side and they roll with the material, you can begin to work in the more complex bits, the ones that require longer set-ups for more effective punchlines. You note the jokes that work best and then call them back for greater effect later in the set. For example if a joke about an injured opossum named Stevie gets a laugh the first time you tell it, the crippled Stevie returning to another joke later in the show will get twice as many laughs. If you manage to find a way to bring him back for a third cameo near the end of your set harnessed in a wheel chair, more the better.

One of the greatest parts of the whole comedy run I made during that time was the road itself. In the era before cell phones and the Internet, when people were still wearing pagers and using phone calling cards it was easy to get lost in this country. I don’t mean by not knowing where you were, but rather that no one else knew. Once you’d wind up a run at The Funny Bone in Pittsburgh and your next gig was three days away in Kearny, Nebraska you’d hit the road and head west. No one set your route, there were no Garmins back then, just those telephone book sized Road Atlases that you’d buy at the truck stops, two page spreads for every state, every town and road marked, the Interstates in red, the secondary highways in blue.

You’d just pull out of the hotel parking lot, everything you owned packed in the trunk or the back seat and start driving. I built up a decent collection of cassette tapes to play as I drove, and the case was set in the passenger seat for easy access. I always filled the tank and checked the oil, tire pressure and wiper fluid before each departure, a leftover from my days of maintaining jeeps in the Army. It allowed me to keep that car on the road my entire career, nearly eight hundred thousand miles by the time she was retired, and with few exceptions- like a broken timing chain on my way out of Akron in ’94, and a dead alternator on my way to a college gig in West Virginia three years later- I never broke down in all that time.

There were plenty of other repairs; ten or twelve sets of brakes, half again as many clutches, a few mufflers, failed headlights and tail lights, batteries and thirty sets of tires, but because I was keeping an eye on it daily, changing the oil religiously and driving every single mile I ever put on it, it was always something I could handle before it became a problem.

It changed the way I thought about cars, how lucky we were to have such an amazing degree of freedom because of one technology made up of so many interlocking systems; fluid and electrical, mechanical and internal combustion, sound systems and suspension, traction and vision- systems that mimicked the way animals are designed, a place to put fuel, a way to exhaust waste, the nervous system and the electrical system, hydraulics and vascular, skeletal system and H-frame, so that the entire interlocking system, to suspend and convey us, ergonomically designed to be just like us. Caring for that car was an extension of caring for myself. The better shape it was in the more useful it was and less likely to fail when I needed it.

When you walk onto a stage in front of an audience something happens to you that’s impossible to control; you put yourself into the hands of a room full of strangers. Sometimes it’s great, like winning a race or taking a ride on a roller coaster. It’s exciting, and there’s feedback, immediate and cacophonous. You’re in the lights, but even then you can look out at their faces, and see into their eyes, listen to the sound of laughter coming off them in waves, bodies rocked back in their chairs. Sometimes it’s not great. Sometimes it’s the polar opposite. The thing that separates the two is the way you remember it.

Maybe it’s a trick of the mind, Nature’s way of protecting you from ever doing something like that again, in the same way that you recall the moment of a serious accident much more vividly than a perfect meal. No one should have to endure the psychic damage of having a show go bad. Yet there you are, microphone held in a white-knuckled death grip, as if it were a lifeline, staring out at a room full of strangers, their arms folded across their chest, lips fixed in a horizontal grimace, eyes filled with seething hatred, and nothing behind it but the sound of silence. Your mouth goes dry, your scalp begins to sweat, your scalp.

Suddenly the words you’ve said a thousand times before, all the well written bits and clever taglines, the little alliterative riffs that never fail suddenly manage to lock up in a mental log jam right between the thought process and the spoken word. And you still have forty-three minutes to go.

I don’t really remember walking up on that stage on that night except in some fuzzy edge of a memory. The room was dark, the stage lights bright, I remember that. I remember the way the big tables ran back from the stage and how the audience was packed into them, a huge party of much older folks, white hairs in mismatched outfits crammed in like sardines. I remember the bar was on the left of the room because I spent a good part of that show looking back towards it, looking for the friendly face of the bartender. I remember being confident because I’d done well before and I was going to do even better tonight.

I was wearing my blue jeans and black cowboy boots, a black Gap pocket T and a thrift shop sport coat with an American flag lapel pin before it was cool. I even had an opening line I’d just come up with, something to include the audience, something fresh. The applause continued long enough to give me even more confidence as I shook hands with the MC and took the microphone then smiled into the darkness at the back of the room. Waitresses moved in and out crouching as they passed the cocktails and baskets of nachos from their trays to the tables. “Thank-you.” I said, as I always did. “Thank-you.”

And then I did my opening bit directed to the middle of the audience, the huge party dead center, right up front, maybe two dozen of them, now that I had a better look, slightly befuddled, wearing handmade sweaters, the ladies purses slung from the backs of the chairs as big as mailbags.

“How about a big hand for some very special guests tonight.” I implored the audience, my arm held out palm up to indicate the 30 elderly people who made up the center of the crowd and who looked suddenly vulnerable, sympathetic, innocent, and kind, like a flock of sheep or a room full of well-loved teddy bears. I bet that there was a voice inside my head that tried desperately to stop me even as I began to speak, I know how my conscience works.

I loved my own grandparents and would never think to say a cruel word to them, but there in that room in that moment I was convinced my opening line would get a big laugh and I’d already committed myself with my first words. “A big hand for the cast reunion of the Clapper commercial.” I said confidently and then I did the clap-on-clap-off-clap-on-clap-off-the-clap-per! thing with my hands, loud, right into the microphone followed by a complete and overwhelming stillness, like deep space.

I know enough about comedy to know that I got a laugh from the rest of the crowd, but I didn’t hear it. I was looking right at the swarm of blue-rinsed hair teased up in the kind of styles that were popular in the mid-sixties, the deeply lined scowls of the men whose bald domes shone in the edge of the stage lights, faded blue tattoos on their forearms with names like USS Arizona blurring on them. In that moment between my last clap and whatever laughter I couldn’t hear coming from the rest of the audience, there was an implacable and deafening silence that rose from the entire middle of my audience.

Whatever confidence I’d hit the stage with left without saying good-bye. Time, as it always does in moments of pure terror, seemed to stretch out and thicken, a palpable distortion of reality that nonetheless seemed very authentic. I could hear myself swallow, thick and dry, a clicking sound from the back of my throat. I wasn’t aware that saliva could dry up that fast, like eating an unripe persimmon. I stood there looking at them as their anger rose in unison as if they were connected by some imperceptible hive mind, all of their eyes wide with indignation and then narrowing with white hot hatred, lasers focusing on me like a Jap on Tarawa.

What I had said was supposed to be funny, not insulting, but it wasn’t taken that way, not at all. I thought it was accurate and of course so did they; there would be no accounting for their reaction if you didn’t take that into account. They were mad because it was true, although that thought didn’t come to me until I was old enough for my doctor to give me advice that ended with the words “…at your age.” It probably didn’t take the rest of the audience very long to catch the drift of what was happening. I was fixed on the sixty sets of rheumy eyes glaring at me only a few feet away and the deafening silence that sucked the energy out of the room.

As the rest of the room came to an uncomfortable hush you could hear the sound of my breathing through the audio system, rushed and gasping like I’d just finished a 5K. Then there was the long echo of a chair scraping across the parquet dance floor, a prolonged SCREEEEEEEEEE!!!!! that seemed to increase in volume the longer it went on. I quickly focused on the left hand side of the table as I saw a large figure begin to rise from his seat. He was one of those old guys who just seems to get bigger and bigger the older they get yet never look fat, just an eternal expansion outward like the Universe. I could tell he was a vet just by looking at him, and he made sure to give me his best fix bayonet stare he could muster.

He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with blue stripes and it was neatly pressed. This was over a quarter of century ago and I can still see him in my mind’s eye. When he reached his feet you could tell that the entire attention of the audience had left the guy standing onstage with the microphone and the bright lights, and was now riveted upon the barrel shaped survivor of some long forgotten death march, standing alone in the darkness. I could see that everyone in his party had turned to look back towards him with respect and admiration. Suddenly the years seemed to fade away from their faces. The women were all young and dewy again, the men upright and erect, flat tops bristling in the glint of the stage light.

And then he spoke.

I was still in my twenties back then, physically fit with a 300 watt a sound system to back me up. The man standing in the middle of the room was probably 80 and on his own, but his voice carried through that unnaturally quiet room when he addressed me, slow and deliberate, but with a tone of rage that was just this side of contained. He lifted his beefy arm and pointed his sausage shaped finger at me like it was an M-1 Garand and said-

“I don’t have to sit here and take shit from some smart-mouthed punk like you.”

The ceiling fans swept in these big lazy arcs above everyone’s heads making a nearly imperceptible swish-swish-swish in the funereal silence that filled the room. No one else said a thing, not a sound. I stood there gulping air like a goldfish staring at the man as he suddenly seemed to diminish before my eyes, he reached around behind his seat and pulled a cane from the darkness and then a windbreaker. And slowly, one by one, the entire party began to rise from their seats, the women gathering all the accessories they’d brought with them, the tatted hankies, the clasp purses filled with used Kleenex and bottles of Coumadin.

Folding walkers were snapped into the locked positions, the old men held chairs for their elderly wives. They shuffled and dragged their orthopedic footgear, fumbled with change purses, took last sips of sloe gin fizzes. The process was both riveting and interminable. In real time it probably took just a few minutes, but in the middle of a set, three minutes is slightly longer than all of eternity. I stood there like a dickless mannequin in the middle of a department store, frozen, neutered. I may have gulped at my bottle of water but I don’t really remember, I was too deeply buried in shame and regret and too focused on watching the world’s slowest train wreck unfold before my eyes.

By the time the last of them made their way far enough back through the crowd and towards the exit, the first couple of faces had turned back towards me, all of them white with shock, mouths agape, bystanders at a house fire. I stood there with my face frozen in a grinning rictus that just screamed COMEDY! and tried to get my bearings. I’d had bad sets before, bombed in big clubs with important people watching, but I’d never actually stopped a show and emptied half the room before. That was a first. The bartender and the waitresses would not make eye contact with me, the audience just stared up at me like they expected me to kill a puppy with a coal shovel for my next bit.

The ceiling fans continued to mock me with their incessant whish-whish-whish. And right there in front of me was the accusatory finger pointing back at the stage, an empty space the size of a living room, dead center in what was left of my audience. A black hole the size of my career.

As bad as that verbal horse whipping was, what followed made it pale in comparison. It’s one thing to upset some random old crank and his bridge partners, quite another to have to stand in a roomful of their friends and neighbors and try to make it seem like it didn’t just happen. As the group had made it’s very deliberate and painfully slow exit to the back of the room every head in the place followed along, a sea of dim faces looking forlornly at the geriatrics shuffling out of the club as if they were watching that last scene in Old Yeller.

When the last of them disappeared from view and the door latched behind them with a loud CLACK!, every face turned back towards me. I was the narrator in Poe’s Telltale Heart, Raskolinikov in Crime and Punishment, and like Howard Beale facing down Arthur Jensen in Network, I had to atone. How can a man who has just been delivered such an audacious pantsing at the hands of one of the town elders recapture the audience he barely had a moment to connect with? I have no idea, nor did I in that moment, but I will be damned if I didn’t give it the old college try. First I attempted to make light of it, but my voice was barely audible above the sound pit of thirty empty seats and the vacant tables they attended and I didn’t have enough spit in my mouth to put out a match, never mind articulate myself professionally.

I may have requested a glass of water or the bartender may have just taken pity on me, but a waitress handed it up to me as if her participation was compelled by force. She held her head to the side and offered the glass to me in only a general manner, arm held aloft towards the stage waiting for me to reach out for it. I took a drink and then in what I considered a moment of brilliance poured the rest of it over my head slowly. The plan was to try and recapture some of the humiliation everyone felt I’d directed towards the retirement home day trippers, and in any other venue it should have worked, would have in fact if it had been somewhere else.

But not that night, not that night. I was now just a soaking wet stand-up who’d pissed off the room and who hadn’t made anyone laugh a dismal five minutes into my set. That was record breaking stuff for someone with only a few years in the business. Years later when I’d been at it for better than a decade I would have never lost them to begin with. I’d seen too many guys pull out of a dive and go back on the attack leveling kill shots at the backs of unhappy customers to raucous laughter on more than a few occasions, had in fact done it myself more than a few times to varying degrees of success, at least long enough to win them back over, but there, in that room, that night the only thing that was going to save me was another thirty-nine minutes of self-abnegation and servile wheedling, one sad joke after another.

If time slowed down when they walked out of the room, it came to a standstill while I remained on that stage. I went through everything I had ever said that was funny in my entire life trying to find something, anything to get a toehold and to end my misery. You could hear an occasional throat clearing, the bartender polishing a glass, someone sipping a gin and tonic through a straw. They watched me as intently as the crowds of Smoothfield regarded William Wallace, a vacant curiosity absent all sympathy. I was robotic in my delivery because in stand-up comedy, the response makes it human, the give and take. Up there with nothing but the hiss of the ceiling fans for feedback it was all rote, joke, joke, joke each one falling flatter than his brothers before him. Forever.

I dragged myself to the end with nothing to show for all my efforts but the $150 that the bartender slid across the bar to me as if it were cursed. He commiserated as much as he could without letting anyone else in the place know he was talking to me and he made me a very strong drink which I gladly downed in a single gulp. I slunk out of the club with my proverbial tail between my legs, walked up to my room and laid on the bed for a long time wondering if this was really what I wanted to do. I had no one I could call, no one to share my story with, nothing but the hotel television mocking me in the dark.

In the morning I awoke to find my socks draped over the bedside lamp and my clothes in piles on the floor. I dressed myself, checked out of the hotel and after a cup of coffee and a fresh tank of gas I headed back out of town to the next gig in Houtzdale, a one-nighter in a carpet store with another two comics I’d never seen before. As I drove onto the highway I turned on the radio and thought to myself, “Tonight’ll be great. I killed in that room the last time I was there.” And then I changed the radio stations until I found something upbeat and relatable and found myself singing along with Taylor Dane as loud as I could, the wind rushing through the windows on a beautiful new day, the passion so complete, it’s never ending.

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