My post on the corner led to my first real friendship with a homeless guy (if you're a comic, sooner or later you will either befriend, financially support, or become a homeless person). His name was James, and he would walk me home at night through Washington Square Park. On one of these nights he said, "You know who you look like?" I assumed he was going to say Barbara Eden. Seriously, I used to get Barbara Eden a lot because I wore my hair in that I Dream of Jeannie kind of deal. Instead, he said, "Ken Wahl. From Wiseguy." I was half insulted, half bewildered--where the fuck was this guy watching TV? He sleeps outside of a restaurant in a deconstructed cardboard box.
James and I ride the subway.
James treated me like a princess. One time my parents' friends Arnie and Alice Goldstein came to see me perform at Boston Comedy Club, and as they approached the place, James was vigorously sweeping the sidewalk. Arnie said to him, tickled, "Look at this, very nice," to which James replied,
"I'm making it perfect for my Sarah!"
I had me a nice little family going there on that corner.
There was another comic named Franz Cassius who also passed out flyers for the club. His were green and mine were orange. This system enabled Barry, the club owner, to calculate our weekly bonuses by determining exactly how many customers each of us was bringing in. Barry had bailed Franz out of Rikers Island and given him this job as well as letting him do occasional stand-up spots at the club. It was a while before I realized that Franz was just fucking around all night until right before each show when he'd infiltrate the line and trade the patrons my flyers for his, explaining, "These flyers are better."
Over the weeks and months of working that corner I began to understand English's impulse to bury knives. I was just dealing flyers, not Schedule I narcotics, and still found a fair amount of trouble. One night I noticed a dead-eyed homeless Vietnam vet in full battle fatigues marching straight toward me. I did the only thing I could think of: I extended a flyer to him and chirped, "Free comedy?" Without a word or break in stride, he leaped at me and wrapped his hands around my throat. Passersby pulled him off me almost instantly--what is that Tennessee Williams line about depending on the kindness of strangers?--and though I was shaken, not ten minutes later I was back to my barking duties.
I shared the corner with another flyer-hander-outer--the mascot from Pluck-U Chicken, a nearby fast-food establishment. You might scoff that puns don't whet the appetite, but that place was insanely popular with NYU students. The mascot was an Asian kid my age in a giant chicken suit. To do that job shows tremendous ambition. Not because it leads anywhere, but because it means he was faced with the questions: What is it worth to you to go to college? What are you willing to do to afford the best education possible? Would you put on a chicken suit and stand on the meanest corner the weekend has ever seen? His answer was, Yes. Yes, he would.
Weekends were the worst time to be on the corner because it was packed with Bridge and Tunnelers--in this case, mostly seventeen-year-old guys from Jersey who were drunk and scarier than any junkie crook or deranged vet.
One unfortunate Saturday, a group of these boys took interest in the Chicken. They started throwing beer from their 40-ouncers onto his feathers as the Chicken tried to defend himself with meek, sottovoced "Don't"s. One of the guys started pushing him. He was a tall, skinny, blond douche bully. I got between them and said to the guy, "Hey, hands off." Note that this was not bravery or heroism, it was just me really overestimating my cuteness; in a million years it didn't occur to me that I could possibly be harmed. But the next thing I knew, I was knocked off my feet with a blow square to the temple.
I came to, encircled by strangers. My head hurt, I was freaked out, and I just burst into tears like a baby. Franz Cassius ran over, demanding a description of the guy who punched me. He was totally jazzed at having a good excuse to beat the shit out of a white boy. "White, thin, tall, blond, carrying a forty-ounce," I told him, and Franz took off without so much as a "How are you?" or a "Can I help you off the ground?" If I were a betting man, I'd say there was probably more than one white, thin, tall guy who met Franz's fist that night.
* * *
Forced to Choose Between Earning a Bachelor's Degree and Handing Out Pieces of Orange Paper to Strangers, I Do the Sensible Thing
* * *
Up to this point, I'd always been a good student. But because I was working from 4:00 p.m. till 2:00 a.m., I was finding it almost impossible to keep my eyes open in class. I was a drama major, so most of my courses were fairly easy to negotiate even in a state of unconsciousness, but not all of them. With those that required any semblance of sentience, I was having trouble. Still, giving up my sweet gig on the corner wasn't an option. Had it occurred to me that for the price of two years of my education at NYU, I could have bought Boston Comedy Club, I might have succumbed to futility and quit. But that's the whole trick when you're starting out as a stand-up comic--not to succumb to futility.
Anyway, it wasn't entirely futile. I began to make progress. I passed an important comic's milestone: I got to go onstage without having to barter two paying customers for the privilege. I did open mikes all over the city and soon reached another milestone: I "passed" at the Comic Strip. Meaning that after the owner, Lucian, saw my open-mike performance, he said I could call in regularly to leave my availability for the week and wait to hear if I landed any spots. The comics were paid ten dollars a set on weeknights, fifty dollars on weekends. I worked as much as I could. If I didn't have a spot, I would just hang out and try to get on.
In that era, the comics who got all the stage time included Mark Cohen, Dave Attell, Ray Romano, Kevin Brennan, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, Susie Essman, Jay Mohr, and Jon Stewart, among others. Jay would skateboard from set to set. Jon hadn't been at it long, but he was great right away. Mike Sweeney, who became the head writer at Conan O'Brien's show, was also amazing. I was so in love with him. He mostly worked around the corner at the Comedy Cellar as the emcee back when emcees were the stars of the show. Mike rarely bothered with prepared material. He just talked to the audience and was hilarious. Mike Royce, who went on to write and produce Everybody Loves Raymond, was another regular. After finishing their sets at the Comedy Cellar, Royce and Romano would sit in a booth at the restaurant upstairs going over their jokes and sets. They were so studious. Jeff Lifschultz, now Jeff Ross--Comedy Central's reigning "Roast Master"--and Todd Barry, soft-spoken and brutally hilarious, started out around the same time as me, so we spent many nights together in the backs of clubs, hoping a scheduled comic would cancel and one of us would get on.
After freshman year, I decided to take the next year off. I wanted to pursue stand-up more seriously. I also wanted to remember what it was like to sleep in a bed rather than in the back of a classroom at the cost of, let's say, thirty dollars a minute. It was a solid year of writing jokes, having sex, and doing all sorts of psychedelic drugs.
One night, after hanging out at the Comedy Cellar and trying to get on stage, we went upstairs to The Olive Tree, a restaurant where all the comics hung out after their sets. It was 1:30 in the morning and I was sitting with my buddy Dave Juskow, whom I had met through my then-boyfriend Dave Attell. An old hippie guy came in and handed us two tabs of acid. I honestly don't remember how this happened, but without a thought, we popped it in our mouths. For the next thirteen and a half hours, Dave and I went bananas. We wound up hanging out with semihomeless strangers in Washington Square Park, experiencing every possible emotion. It happened to be the third of July and already firecrackers were going off everywhere; we were convinced we were at war. About five hours into it we decided we didn't want to be tripping anymore, we wanted to go through the motions of normal life. Not that this was up to us.
We walked to Dave's car, got in, and pulled out to the street. As we sat at a red light, Dave realized he had forgotten how to drive. The light turned green and we both panicked, paralyzed as it turned to yellow, red, and back to green again. Luckily, it was early in the morning
and we were on a side street, so there were no cars yet behind us. I switched seats with Dave, but as it turned out, I didn't remember how to drive, either. We were sure that a cop was going to pull up beside us any minute. I popped out of the car, went to a phone booth, and dialed the one number I could remember--Louie C.K.'s. Louie was usually up all night and into the morning--not experimenting with drugs so much as teaching himself Russian or how to play guitar. He picked up the phone and calmly talked me through.
"You know how to drive. Don't think about it, just let your body remember. You are fine and you can do this."
I got back into the car and, as mindlessly as I could, parked it. Dave and I decided that Louie was God as we walked back to my apartment, the city now beginning to hum with early morning commuter traffic. We made it to my little room and played my roommate's Squeeze Singles album over and over. Then, fully clothed, we went into the shower and turned on the water. In movies, people trying to get sober were always taking cold showers in their clothes, so it seemed like the right thing to do.
My year off was filled with a lot of these nights. Not all of them involved LSD trips, per se, but they were all, as the '70s would say, "pretty far out." I won't go so far as to say that these experiences are necessary rites of passage on the way to a well-rounded adulthood, but I figured they had to be more enriching than snoozing in the back of a classroom.
When it was time to register for my sophomore year, I decided to change my major from drama to arts and sciences. My dream was still to be a comedian and an actor, and in pursuit of that, I decided I would have more to glean from academic classes than the voice and movement-type classes that made up the bulk of the drama curriculum.
Two weeks before the fall term started, Dad called and made me a proposition. He said, "I wouldn't do this with any of my other girls but I feel like you know what you want to do, and it doesn't take a college degree. I believe in you, and if you wanna drop out of school, I'll pay for your rent and utilities for what would have been your sophomore, junior, and senior years. That way I save twenty grand a year and you get to pursue your dream full time."
Needless to say, I'm very glad he did this, but sometimes, in quiet moments, I wonder: At what cost to the world? If I'd stayed in college, and been really inspired by, say, a biology class, I might have become a world-renowned entomologist. Right now I could be saving the Rocky Mountains from pine beetle devastation. But instead: fart jokes and blasphemy. Smooth move, Dad.
My roommate Beth Tapper naked and in front of our refrigerator
For most of my time in New York, I lived at 129 Second Avenue between 7th Street and St. Marks Place on the fifth floor of a six-floor walk-up. My roommate Beth and I were lucky--we had our own toilet, whereas many of the apartments shared a padlocked bathroom in the hallway. One resident on our floor had recently gotten out of prison, which I knew because the day he moved in, he looked at me and said, "I just got out of prison!" with the joy one would say, "I'm going to Disneyworld!" and the crazy eyes with which someone might say, "I just stabbed a hooker in the face!"
I didn't see him much, mostly because I made a point of waiting to leave my apartment until any sign of life in the hallway vanished.
One night, as Beth and I were heading down the long winding stairwell, he and a friend were walking behind us. We didn't think much of it until he dropped what was evidently an enormous box of bullets. The steel cartridges poured down the stairs and through our legs down to the landing, making a loud, rhythmic tap tap tap, like the closing number from STOMP (which coincidentally was playing across the street at the Orpheum Theater). Beth and I kept walking like nothing was happening. As if there were no bullets smacking our heels or tripping up our steps.
* * *
Honoring the Deal with My Father, I Get Serious--but Also High and Naked
* * *
College seems to be as much about making friends and connections as it is about actual learning. I've heard that at Oxford there's very little structured academic life; it's mostly just people drinking beer at pubs, engaging in all manner of intellectual exchange. If that's true, then this was my Oxford period. Except that instead of being brainy Rhodes scholars passionate about knowledge and destined to lead the world, we were comics passionate about dick jokes and destined for a spot on Premium Blend. But like our counterparts at Oxford, our lives were consumed with experimentation and exploration.
One of my best friends during that time was Louie C.K., then and now a brilliant and prolific comic. Louie lived in a building on Bleecker Street called the Atrium--and it was one. The apartments looked down onto the first-floor lobby. He owned almost nothing. His belongings consisted of a bed, a record player, and a computer. He used the walls for making notes; they were covered with scribbled reminders to himself, various lists, and people's phone numbers.
At about 2:00 a.m. one night we started daring each other to throw our clothes over the balcony down into the atrium. I don't remember who tossed the first article, but from there we took turns removing a single piece of clothing, dropping it into the void, and watching it float down to the lobby, sometimes catching on the branches of indoor hedges. Each round became more and more daring since we were less and less covered, until we were both naked. Totally naked. And just when you think you can't get more daring than that, we climbed into the elevator and rode it down to the lobby, giggling with terror at the possibility that the elevator could stop at any floor, or that once we got to the bottom any number of residents could be walking in. The doors opened at lobby level, and we scrambled to gather our clothes and manically get dressed. We rode the elevator back up to Louie's floor, and as we approached the safety of his apartment, a shirt flew past his head and over the balcony. He turned to see me, shirtless again, wearing just a bra.
We wound up doing eleven full cycles of this. We laughed harder each time because, in addition to the obvious risk of getting caught, there was the absurdity of the fact that we were doing the same fucking thing--chasing the same high--over and over again. This must be why people bungee jump.
The stunt was emblematic of our lives during that period. When all of your friends are comedians and you spend your life in a club hearing and telling jokes, it becomes ever more challenging to make each other laugh. I imagine it's like working in porn--after a while, missionary just doesn't cut it anymore. You need a midget and a monkey and a bottle of Head & Shoulders to get any kind of boner.
Once, Louie and I were standing on the corner just outside my apartment, making each other laugh. I had just woken up and thrown on a skirt and T-shirt to meet him for breakfast at the Waverly Diner downstairs. I said, "Louie, look down." He looked and I peed straight onto the sidewalk. Just a tiny bit. One single staccato, creating the onomatopoeia Bloop.
I was pretty convinced I was adorable.
Beth and I lived two floors above Todd Barry, who would frequently show up at our door, not quite to borrow a cup of sugar, but instead for the neighborly request of, say, shaving the back of his neck. Todd is a hilarious comic with no real quirks in his onstage persona, but offstage is famous for his random verbal tics. For years, the word "AIDS" popped out of his mouth in a nonsensical, quasi-Tourettes-like manner. "What's up? AIDS." Over time "AIDS" was replaced with "Apologize."
"Wanna get coffee?"
"Sure."
"Apologize."
Todd had a long-standing fake feud with Louie C.K., which manifested in verbal-tic phrases such as, "Louie's not funny." "Louie's the mayor of unfunnytown," and a chant he orchestrated with Beth and me:
TODD: I fucked Louie's mom.
US: You didn't. You didn't.
TODD: I fucked Louie's mom.
US: You didn't. You didn't.
TODD: I fucked Louie's mom.
US: You didn't. You didn't. You didn't fuck Louie's mom.
TODD: Louie's not funny. He's bad at what he does. He's bad at stand-up comedy and everything he loves.
No one loves this song more than Louie
.
Todd Barry and I ride the subway to our show at Carnegie Hall, November 7, 2007.
Life at that time was all about who would push it the farthest, who could be the most uncivilized just for a laugh. Brian Posehn was a comic who moved to L.A. from San Francisco, armed with a soon-to-be-classic bit in his arsenal--not a stage bit but one just for comics. He called it "Accidental Blowjob Guy." It went like this: If you're laughing at something another comic said, you turn the laugh into a sudden, gagging faux blowjob of that comic. That one spread like wildfire among us. At a wrap party for the second season of HBO's Mr. Show, while Brian and Mark Cohen were standing around cracking each other up, they both simultaneously went in for the blowjob and smashed heads, resulting in something ten times funnier than the bit itself. Mark broke his nose on the back of Brian's head. HE BROKE HIS NOSE GIVING A FAKE BLOWJOB. Holy shit. I love that story with every part of me.
By now, just as the Oxford crowd has left the pub to take up their stations in the highest echelons of world power, my comic friends and I have grown up. Only not.
MAKE IT A TREAT
* * *
My Guide to Drugs, Alcohol, Sex, and Other Things That Have the Potential to Be Gross