Almost Interesting (7 page)

When school wrapped up that year I decided to head to L.A. for the summer, because I thought I might be ready for the comedy scene out there. My mom had gone to California to work for some multilevel marketing company. She was a writer for their magazine and got me a job there. While the whole thing felt like a big scam to me, I needed the dough. So from eight to five I spent my time filing stupid shit and plotting my comedy career. The only drug I could afford to numb my boredom with was Dexatrim. (For those of you under forty, Dexatrim was an over-the-counter medication marketed for weight loss. It was more like speed. Think of it as the Adderall of the Eighties.) Just so I could stay awake during boring filing. I know filing sounds glamorous but it’s actually shitty. Showbiz had to wait . . . at least from 8 to 5
P
.
M
.

I was aware of a few comedy clubs in town. The Improv and the Comedy Store were the most famous. There were some other places, but these were the biggies, the seven-nights-a-week places that I wanted desperately to crack in to. They each had an amateur night, too, and I decided the Improv was my best shot. I drove down to the club one night with my crummy little shoe box of props. (Yes, I was still using the props. I used them for my first two years as a full-time comedian, but at this point I had whittled the kit down from my mom’s old honeymoon suitcase to a shoe box.) I had decided that if I passed the audition, I could try to get maybe two or three spots a week and then I could afford to move out to Los Angeles permanently. I put my stupid name in a stupid hat, and waited. I sat in the back of the club, in my stupid outfit. (An old Batman sweatshirt, tight jeans, and Reebok high-tops. Batman signals comedy, I guess?) The booker would pull seven names at a time, and each time a name was called my stomach would tighten and I would sweat a little more, in panic that I would get chosen next. I sat there like a dope, waiting from eight to midnight, watching the crowd dissipate, and never got called, and then I had to leave because of the dogshit 8
A
.
M
. filing job. My first trip to the Improv was a total bust. I realized pro showbiz would have to wait a little bit longer.

I went back home with my tail neatly placed between my legs and did stand-up in Arizona again, and then hit the road for another few years to get better. That Improv disaster scared me off L.A. a bit. Then a comedian I had met named Fred Wolf got me a show at the San Diego Improv, opening for a comedy team called the Funny Boys with Jonathan Schmock and Jim Vallely. Fred was a comedian who was cool to me when he saw me go on in Arizona. He was a traveling road comic and threw me a bone because he liked my act. (We stayed friends. Later he worked on
SNL
and we wrote
Dickie Roberts
and
Joe Dirt
together.) The Funny Boys were great. Super-cool and hilar. They told me I needed to come back to Los Angeles ASAP and audition at the Improv. I listened to them because they were a great comedy team that had been on TV shows and even worked as writers on some (also; trivia alert: Jonathan famously played the maître d’ in
Ferris Bueller
). Jim even said I could crash on his couch for a while. My response? “Fuck yes.”

I drove out west in my crummy red ’72 Volvo a week later. I somehow ran into Louie Anderson soon after I arrived, and he told me he could get me an audition at the Comedy Store. Louie was an even bigger deal. He was a regular at the Comedy Store and had been on Carson as well as many other shows. So I was sitting pretty this go-round in the big city. I had three legit comedians vouching for me and all I needed was one of these places to say yes. Either one would have been a major step for me in terms of becoming a pro comedian. Since there was such a rivalry between these clubs, you didn’t get to play both unless you were a major pro. I wasn’t gunning for anything like that. One would have been just great, thanks.

So, this time I headed to the Comedy Store, a hallowed place famous for launching the career of Richard Pryor and so many others before me. The woman in charge there is named Mitzi Shore, and she is notoriously tough. Plus she’s Pauly Shore’s mom, but that’s beside the point. I thought I had a tight six minutes to showcase for Mitzi. I wasn’t as crazy nervous as I had been that time at the Improv a few years back. I had finally ditched the props (thank God). I was ready. Louie came up and told me that I was on in twenty, so I hit the bar to have a drink and get my set together in my head. Only now, the stress was starting to get to me and my head started pounding. I threw back two Anacin tablets (or something equally dated, maybe Bufferin). Now here’s where it gets interesting.

This situation was so stupid, yet I remember every detail. I had only about an inch left in my Greyhound (vodka and grapefruit juice) when I tried to chase down my dry old-school aspirins. Well, they didn’t go down. And I choked. Then I ran to get water. Then I tried to hawk it up because one was now stuck in my throat. That didn’t work, either. Then, somehow, the aspirin moved up into my sinuses and was burning. I sniffed and hawked and after a few minutes it came flying loose in a massive loogie. So disgusting, and such a project. Now I was exhausted and my heart was beating from fear of dying and my headache was twenty times worse. All of a sudden . . . I got called to the stage. For the first five minutes of my adult life I hadn’t been thinking about comedy. I was just trying not to die. Now I realize I lived through this fucked-up sitch, but at the time I had to change gears really fast and do the most important audition of my life.

You can probably guess how this story ends.

I did my dopey little act for Mitzi Shore before a modest crowd of forty or so and then scampered out front on Sunset to wait. Louie came out a few minutes later.

“She’s passing. Sorry.”

“Holy shit.” What a horrible feeling in my gut. Could I be way off? Do I suck? “I thought I did pretty good. No major fuckups.”

“She liked your stage presence, but she doesn’t think you’re ready. Sorry.”

Silence. I just stared. Then I said, “Cool. Cool. Okay . . . um . . . ya, well, thanks for setting it up, sorry it didn’t work.” (Trying to sound undevastated.)

I drove home in a daze. Holy fuck, one of the key puppeteers of my career just said no. What the hell was I going to do?

Turns out I didn’t have too long to figure it out. I had to go to the Improv. This was my second and last hope.

The Funny Boys had set up an audition so this time around I didn’t have to wait in line on amateur night with my props in a shoe box and my name in a hat. That meant I had to be ready to perform, because if they passed I couldn’t audition again for another six months. And when I did, I would already have a stink on me from getting passed over. I was staying on Jim Vallely’s couch, and every night I was quietly freaking out as my audition crept closer. I am overthinking my act completely. I couldn’t really practice because no one will put me on. So I said it out loud in the bathroom, in the mirror, and I can safely say, it wasn’t killing.

The night of my audition, we all headed down to the club. I was twenty years old, not quite twenty-one. I looked fifteen. The chalkboard outside the club included the name of the evening’s performers, and for the first time, my name was up there. I had gone there so many times to hang out, to have a drink and try to catch a glimpse of the great comedians I had seen on television so many times—people like Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin Nealon, and Dennis Miller. All on the lineup. They all seemed to be about thirty-five, which to me was the oldest age I could think of at that time. I thought my only chance was that I was twenty with long white-blond hair and a lot of my jokes were about looking young. That would set me apart because Reiser, Seinfeld, and Leno all had a sort of similar “comedian” look, in my eyes. So I tried to use my different “Arizona” look to help me stand out.

I think that night I opened up with “Hi, I’m David Spade and I’m ten.” That would usually get a laugh. Then I held up ten fingers and said, “That’s this many. My mom just dropped me off. She’s at Safeway. She’ll be back to pick me up at nine.” The set went well, and I went back into the bar super-adrenalized because I thought I had a chance of getting a weekly spot there. We sat at a big table and then one of the Funny Boys got word I passed, so we ordered a round of shots. Bruce Willis happened to be there that night and knew the guys so they invited him to join us. I was shitting my pants then because I was sitting with Bruce Willis. I almost forgot about making the Improv, until the waiter came back with the booze.

After he handed us the shots he said, “Wait, I need to see this guy’s ID.” This was the biggest needle scratch moment. Obviously I didn’t have it with me. I mean I did, but it said I was twenty. So in a major buzz kill move, he took the shot back. All the fun was sucked right out of the moment, and a heap of embarrassment packed on top. But on the bright side, I was going to be getting regular spots at the Improv now. Then it hit me . . . I was going to have to move to Los Angeles.

Shit was about to get real.

I flew home and told my mom. She had moved back to Scottsdale after the L.A. job wrapped up. She was happy for me, but scared about things like where I was going to live, what I was going to eat, you know, important issues that didn’t cross my mind. But the window was open for me and I had to go for it. And in a stupid move, I sold my car for the money that I would need to get started in L.A. In a
stupider
move, I sold it to my brother Bryan, who said he would send me the cash but never did. And in the
stupidest
move, I was now in L.A. without money or a car. All I have is two twenty-minute spots at the Improv for thirty-five dollars a pop. Jim Vallely told me I could stay on his couch again, and thank God. He also had an old girlfriend who rented me a car for eighty dollars a week. (I was already ten dollars over my budget.) The car was an old light blue Dodge Dart with three on the tree, which means it was a stick shift but the stick shift was on the steering column, so it was hard to drive. It had a crack in the windshield, the works. But I loved it. I ran out of money pretty much a week in. Jim told me I could have the change he kept in a jar so I took it down to Ralph’s for a rotisserie chicken. I went home and doused it in A-1 steak sauce. Yummy. The Improv would let you eat there on nights when you had gigs, but you had to sign for your meals, which meant that when check day came around I’d be looking at a grand total of five dollars. It was lean stuff, survival mode. But I was getting spots onstage, which was all that really mattered.

After I had spent another weekend on his couch, Jim had had enough of me, and told me that he had a friend going to England who would sublet me a studio down on Stanley and Santa Monica Boulevard. This, I found out later—and I was officially the last one to find out—was a very gay neighborhood. Being from Arizona, I would parade around down to 7-Eleven and back with no shirt and Quiksilver shorts. All day, every day . . . like a little Joe Dirt in training. There were a lot of wolf whistles that I certainly never picked up on. But my most memorable night in that studio was spent lying on the futon on the floor (no frills in this place) and listening to a woman scream bloody murder next door. I didn’t know if they were having sex or he was killing her. (I’ve never heard girls get loud during sex; whenever I look down at them they just say “Continue.”) I lay there missing Arizona, and all my friends hanging at my mom’s house. All I could think was, What if something happens to me? I don’t even know where a hospital is! I don’t know anybody and I don’t have health insurance. (I know, what a pussy.) The screaming escalated and I was terrified. I picked up the phone to call 911 . . . but I couldn’t do it because I thought they would know it was me and would come kill me. So I got a huge knife from the kitchen and I sat on the bed, facing the door and holding the knife. I was ready to kill whoever came in. I was also scared shitless. The sun came up around 7:30
A
.
M
. the next day and woke me up. I had fallen asleep on my side with my face on the knife. All that drama and I could have died by stabbing myself in the fucking face while I was sleeping.

One day, after a few sets at the Improv, they got a call from a casting director from
Police Academy 4.
They were looking for a wisecracking skateboarding kid and had been in the audience a week before and seen me perform. This was the best thing about the Improv. There was always someone in the crowd who could help you—a director, a casting director, an actor, a famous comedian, a studio executive, or just a friend of any of those people who tells them about you. So I went in for the “audition,” and the casting director told me there was no script. Those of you who have seen this movie can surely believe this to be true. My character was a new addition, and they were actually waiting for a new draft of the script. THANK GOD THEY DIDN’T HAVE A SCRIPT, because I haven’t mentioned this yet but I had no idea HOW TO FUCKING ACT! I’d never had a class, I’d never read a book about it, and I thought it was overrated. I sort of figured myself to be some kind of “natural” like Eddie Murphy. They put me in front of a camera and they told me to say some things a skateboarder might say to cops, and use some skateboarding terms. This was music to my ears. I’m pretty good on my feet for improvising and I had been skateboarding for ten years. So I talked about how I hurt myself during an
aerial axle stall
and fell from the
coping to the drain
and broke my wrist. I threw in some jokes. They asked a lot of questions, but thank God none of the questions were “Do you know how to act?” since I can promise you I never would have gotten that part.

Reading in an audition off a script, I found out later, was unbelievably hard. So I ship off to Toronto in shock that I have a role in a movie series I’ve actually heard of, starring the Goot! (Steve Guttenberg). I get to my hotel and only two of us from the cast are in this particular establishment—me and none other than Sharon Stone. Sharon was drop-dead gorgeous (of course) and a total sweetheart to me. She wasn’t a huge star yet (obv) or she would not have been anywhere near this movie. I quietly stared at her night and day throughout shooting, which was one very nice perk of working on a movie. Money was also a nice perk. I made $2,500 a week for ten weeks. “Run of the picture,” they call it. I was flying high.