Thursday, April 13, 2006  

A Tour of Hell

I'm expecting an influx of eyeballs today, as the Globe has published a piece on Nagasaki, the bonus track on Scatterbrain.

So...welcome, Globe readers! If that article made you want to check me out, I can only assume you're the sort of person who has Faces of Death on their Netflix queue and might actually go to a cockfight. Not that I'm judging. Just getting all the cards on the table.

You want blood and guts, then, you bastards? I'll give it to you. In honor of the article, here, for your sick, voyeuristic pleasure, is my ALL TIME LIST OF HELL GIGS.

Tyngsboro, MA
This is the one on the CD. 300 big game hunters sitting down to their annual dinner while I bomb spectacularly. Listen to the track, and about 9 minutes in, you can hear someone call a toast in the back of the room by clinking his spoon on his glass. That's how aware they were of my presence. Meanwhile, a cute girl in high heels and a short skirt walked slowly through the room displaying the night's door prize: a camouflage-wrapped 12-guage shotgun.

Plum Island, MA
You've heard comics talk about not being able to follow each other? This was one such case. We were in some wretched town function hall, a grimy echo chamber of a room, and Tony Moschetto was up before me, and he killed like I've never seen anyone kill. He killed so hard that when his set was over, the crowd assumed that it HAD to be the end of the comedy show, so they all stood up and started putting on their jackets to leave. I was doomed from the start, because my intro was basically, "Wait! Wait! Where are you going? There's another guy! Sit down! There's another guy! Tim McIntire, folks!" 45 minutes of stone death followed. A woman in the front row hated me so badly she built a pyramid of Budweiser cans on her table in a naked display of contempt. She had a pronounced gap between her two front teeth. About 22 cans of Bud in, I finally snap on her and say, "Jesus, lady, we all know it's important to floss, but you gotta take it easy." That turns the crowd's apathy into anger, and the show is over soon thereafter. Said woman now owns and books a comedy club. Oops.

Junction City, Kansas
I'm a green, green comic in a tough, tough room. I'm the only caucasian as far as the eye can see, and I'm being heckled to death by this one guy in a red silk bowling shirt. I'm taking it in stride, just trying to do my time, but he won't let up. Finally I snap and tell him to shut the fuck up, that I'm not going to take that from a guy wearing the shirt Miles Davis died in. At which point, he rips off said shirt, revealing a physique not unlike Bruce Lee's. The crowd parts, he rushes the stage, and is scrambling up to beat the crap out of me when in a moment of panic I pick up the microphone stand and crack him on top of the head with it. He hits the ground, I yell, "Peace!" and I run to the back of the room, where I spend the next half hour apologizing to the headliner and the next five hours waiting for the manager to drive me back to my hotel so I don't get killed in the parking lot.

Bemidji, MN
I'm the opening act, and as such, it's my job to go onstage and announce to the packed room that we're turning off the Stanley Cup Finals to start the comedy show. In Minnesota. They boo me for 15 minutes straight (when they're not yelling, "shut up, faggot!") until the manager relents and turns the game back on. When I attempt to leave the stage, he makes me go back up and do my act, without the microphone, for my allotted time, while everyone else in the bar watches the game. Later, I end up drunk with said hockey fans, and somehow the couch from my hotel room ends up in the pool.

Butte, MT
Remember the chicken wire scene in the Blues Brothers? Bingo. I get to the club and the owner tells me they're going to throw beer at me. I try to laugh it off and tell him no, I'm pretty good, I think I can get them. He tells me that it has nothing to do with being good, they just like throwing beer at the comedians here. Rather than try to, you know, stop them, the club put up the chicken wire AND added new, cheap beer to the menu specifically for throwing (Schaefer's, I believe). If that's not a case study for Havard Business School, I don't know what is. And he was right - they whipped beer at me for a half hour straight. Sometimes at the gym, when the sweat is flying and the pilates cranking, I still smell like Schaefer's.

Enfield, CT
A week and a half after September 11th, I'm booked to do a gig at an Italian restaurant. The owner, who's Russain (not Italian) has this cockamamie idea that instead of the usual show where 3 comics do 90 minutes, he'll have 2 comics do 60, take a break, and then have a different 2 do 60 more. He's also petrified that someone will be rude to his customers. Me and the opening act go up, and it's deadly. The control to the lights is next to a drunk guy, who keeps turning them on and off the entire time. The entire time. And there are two big screen TV's next to the stage on which the news is still showing the planes crashing into the WTC over and over again. So every three minutes or so, it goes dark and all you can see is the second tower collapsing in a cloud of dust and fire. And me in the middle telling jokes. The show comes to a crashing halt when a guy in a yellow down vest stands up and starts heckling in earnest. He says he's gay and he's going to "rape me," and I tell him that I'll do whatever he wants if he'll shut the fuck up and let me finish the show. The owner pulls the plug and tells me to get offstage for being rude. Someone then informs him that the other 2 comics are stuck in traffic. I very generously offer to do the second show, too. He declines said offer and bans me from the premises.

South Shore Melody Tent
Someone got the idea to have me open for Martina McBride, which is strike one - her crowd is not my crowd. Then I find out it's in the round - totally wrong for comedy. Strike two. But I go up, and my first joke bombs. It echoes off the walls of the tent, it bombs so badly. Immediately thereafter, I discover that people have neglected to tell me about the most important feature of this venue: the rotating stage. Strike three. So for the next half hour, the stage slowly rotates and I die - in circles. I tell the setup to the joke here...and the punchline over here. Creaky spinning death in front of Massachusetts country fans.

Boston Music Awards
Brutal death in front of moderately famous people. I've been hired, with another comic, to host the show. She and I decide to open with a sketch, wherein she plays Cher and I play a recently deceased Sonny Bono. She comes out and tells the crowd that ever since Sonny died, things have been going great for her, so she's getting the band back together. That's the cue for the six pallbearers to carry me out in a coffin, open it up, and prop me up, limp, dead, and sporting one hell of a moustache. That's the plan. But the second the coffin hits stage, the place goes bananas with boos - and when you're being booed by 3,000 angry people at the Orpheum while lying in a sealed coffin, you know it's a bad gig. Interesting note: the only celebrity who was cool to me afterwards? Joey McIntyre.

Nashua, NH
Perhaps my most infamous. Performing at an upscale yuppie bar in downtown Nashua to a crowd that could politicely be described as drunkenly cruel. The opening act has gone down in a puff of flak, and I'm just trying to make my time when a large woman in the front row notices that my zipper is down a half inch or so. She stands up, points, and yells to everyone in the room to look at my lazy fly. Silence and stares. You can almost hear a jukebox needle skip. The only way I can salvage my dignity is to look her in the eye, raise the microphone to my lips, and say, loudly and slowly, "Hey, thanks for pointing that out...you chubby cunt." A near-riot breaks out, she and her friends leave, and my agent gets an hysterical phone call from the club owner. I did not get paid - turns out it was the woman's birthday. Her complaint to the club? I shouldn't have called her chubby.

There. That enough savage truth from the great American heartland, you sickos? Good. Now go buy my CD! I've earned it!