Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (14 page)

The emcee introduced me. The Kinks’ “Come Dancing” played as I took the stage. I looked out over the room. In the back, standing trim and happy in his sport-coat-over-T-shirt ensemble, Blazer smiled, lit by the blue light of the bar.
The Tonight Show
was forever gone, forever receded on his horizon. But he’d expanded his endpoint to take in every second of every day, and he’d honed his life down to pure reward.

In October 1993 I was a finalist in the San Francisco International Comedy Competition.

Because of this, I got hired by a club owner named Reed
^*
to headline his comedy club in Vancouver, Canada. Which turned out to be in Surrey, which is a suburb of Vancouver the way boredom is a lesser state of excitement. Sorry, Surrey—but I spent the shittiest eleven days of my comedic career in your town and surrounding environs in the immediate company of Reed, the human equivalent of rancid clam chowder.
^†

At the time, I couldn’t have been more excited. Headlining. In Vancouver. All of my friends gushed about the city, about the cool people and bars and music clubs and the chess players near Burrard Street. I’ve since visited Vancouver many times and love it.

I visited Surrey in the early fall of 1994, and I would return only if I was tasked to kill a demon to save the world. Maybe not even then. Sorry, Surrey. Sorry, world. Yay, hypothetical demon.

Reed meets me at the airport. He’s picking me up, taking me to the Smile Hole, his club. Where am I staying?

“I figured I could take you to the hotel after the show,” he says, sniffing wetly every third word.

I say, “Well, I kinda need a shower.”

“See, we haven’t sold a lot of tickets. We haven’t sold
any
tickets.
You
haven’t sold a single ticket.” Reed can deftly make a declarative statement and follow it with amended, directed blame. “You’ve got to go do some radio. There’s a bunch of drive-time shows that’ll go right up before showtime. How bad d’you need that shower?”

“I’d really like a shower . . . I mean . . . okay.”

This is my first-ever headlining gig. And I am still naive and paranoid enough to believe that every club and club owner is connected on an invisible “shit wire,” where they share stories of diva-like behavior. I think there’s a “don’t hire” list, always adding a new name, somewhere out in the ether.

We go to a radio station—actually, the second floor of a chewed-on-and-discarded-by-time-and-care office park, where four stations share the cramped second floor. Each “station” is enclosed in stapled-together soundproof sheeting, like gray, indoor teepees. During songs or commercials the deejays pop out like pasty gnomes and shake a soup bowl of sweat off their faces.

Reed greets the first confused deejay and it’s clear, instantly, that there never was a scheduled appearance. He’s bum-rushing the four stations, like a street barker, and me an exotic orangutan on a chain, hoping someone will let me near an open mike to screech, fling some poop, and say the name of the club. The first three deejays flat-out refuse—they basically back-announce songs—but the fourth bites. I’m pushed into his rock and roll lean-to, and he introduces me to the good people of Surrey.

“Got a funnyman here, going to be at the . . .”

He looks over at Reed, who never told him the club’s name. Reed mouths the words “Smile Hole.”

“The Wide Hole. Here he is—”

The deejay looks at me and pops his eyes.
Introduce yourself
.

“Oh, uh, Patton Oswalt.”

“Making ’em laugh over at the Wide Hole. But right now, the Divinyls want to
touch themselves
 . . .” Christina Amphlett’s throaty voice fills the teepee and the deejay thanks me for dropping by.

Reed gets lost on his way back to the club and apologizes for not being able to get me over to the hotel in time for a shower.

“Your bags’ll be safe in the car here in the lot,” he says as we pull up to the Smile Hole, the only thing open in an otherwise abandoned strip mall. “Or we can go over to my place, drop your stuff off there, get you a shower just fine. You never know what a hotel’ll charge you for, huh?”

I say I’m okay, let’s just go in the club.

The Smile Hole is a small lounge/waiting area, with a bar and a few tables. Double doors lead into the club itself, half again as big as the waiting area. No one’s waiting to go in.

The bartender is super-friendly and could not be more excited about the new “Ice beer” they’ve got. “Coors Ice Beer! It’s so tasty!”

At this time in my life I’m not really drinking. A combination of misadventures in college and a love of marijuana has caused me to temporarily abstain.

But I’ve never heard of ice beer, so I take a single sip from the freshly cracked can the bartender plops in front of me. Not bad, but it’s all I drink.

“
Iiiice
beer,” says Reed, swooping up beside me, with an inflection that makes it sound like he’s saying, “Rape’s kinda cool, huh?”

Eight people show up. The emcee is warm, friendly, and about as funny as
Shoah
. I take the stage to the sound of, my hand to God, one person clapping
once and only once,
and then I start into my act.

The audience of eight, clustered at two tables in the front, stares up at me with the faces you’d see on mourners at a solemn wake where one of the eulogizers took the stage and farted Wallace Stevens’s “The Sun This March.” During the course of my set, each of the eight audience members, one by one, gets up to use the bathroom. When they return, they sit down at the farthest table from the stage. By the end of my set, I’m addressing them across an empty room.

Reed takes me to my hotel—the Best Western King George Inn & Suites. My room is an underlit, cream-walled tomb dominated by a bed with a waffle-iron mattress. I take a spitting, resentful shower. I turn on the TV. There’s a Jerry Lewis movie dubbed in French. I fall asleep at dawn.

I wake up at noon.

I make a pot of coffee with the little coffeemaker that’s in the room. Now the room smells like a hot, wet hat. The coffee tastes like pants.

I turn on the TV and get my first look at a bizarre Canadian game show called
Acting Crazy,
which manages to make charades even more boring. The one fascinating thing about the show is that the celebrities and citizens play against a depthless, blank void like the prison in
THX 1138
or the in-between zone in
The Matrix
. The only celebrity I recognize is Jack Carter. Years later I’ll work with him on the pilot for
The King of Queens
. He’ll be replaced by Jerry Stiller once the show gets picked up.

I turn the channel and there’s a news report about an inmate who’s escaped from a minimum-security mental institution. The newscasters calmly remind everyone that the inmates are allowed to release themselves on their own recognizance. Why, then, do they keep going back to the notion that the inmate has “escaped”? The news report ping-pongs back and forth like this for two more minutes before I switch off the TV and go for a walk.

The walk from the hotel to the club, I discover, is a pleasant ten minutes. I make a note of this for later in the evening. The less time in confined spaces with sniffling, passive-aggressive Reed, the better. And taking in the cold Canadian air is like breathing pure ruggedness.

Thursday night’s show draws four people—a group of three, and a middle-aged woman who’s clearly been stood up on a date. I realize I take up 25 percent of the space in the universe that my audience takes. I get zero reaction from the crowd, except for a joke whose punch line involves Anna Nicole Smith.

“Cunt,” says the lone woman. She doesn’t yell the word, or snort it or mutter it. She says it calmly and flatly, like she’s politely reminding me of a word I left out of the joke.

I walk out of the showroom with the audience after I say good night. They head straight for the door. I get my jacket and notebook from behind the bar and do the same.

Reed is waiting at the bar, with an ice beer opened for me. “Oh, I’m good,” I say. Reed stares at me, goggle-eyed, like I’m leaving something obvious unsaid. I absolutely can’t read his rhythms and don’t have the energy to start trying.

I walk back to the hotel. The main road from the club to the hotel doesn’t have a sidewalk, and the shoulder is slim and soft. I take a darker side road that I discovered earlier that day, returning from my walk for a sandwich in the hotel restaurant. There are no lights on the sidewalk but I can see the wobbly pinprick of hotel light in the distance. I walk until it gets bigger, go into my room, watch
Chato’s Land
dubbed in French, and fall asleep at dawn.

“You have to stay and drink tonight.”

I’m sitting at the bar, rearranging the order of my jokes. I’m under the delusion that I’m having bad shows because of some cosmic misalignment of words, phrases, and ideas. I may as well have cast runes into a spirit bowl, hoping that the collective heart of the audience would open to my necromantic call. Maybe that’s how jugglers do it. Those guys never have shitty sets.

Reed leans closer in. His breath smells like he’s been eating Doritos and olives and drinking very little water.

“You have to stay and drink tonight.”

I say, “Here? After the show?”

“You just walked offstage last night, and then walked right out of here without hanging out.”

“Well, for one thing, the audience hated me.” I close my notebook. “And also, I really don’t drink.”

“You had ice beer on Wednesday!” Reed says, pointing an accusing finger—Hercule Poirot facing down the guilty passengers of the Calais Coach. “You had ice beer, so that means you
do
drink!”

“No, Reed. I tried ice beer.
Tried
it. I
really
don’t drink.”

Reed’s mouth hangs open. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does. I’d never had ice beer before. I wanted to at least know what it tastes like.”

And then—and I remember this so clearly—I stop myself from saying this exact phrase:

I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.

I almost said this to a cokehead in a
Poverty Sucks
T-shirt and acid-washed jeans in a comedy club called the Smile Hole. As if he would answer in kind. As if he wouldn’t immediately file that away and share it with his surly, equally coked-out staff. As if I wouldn’t spend the next two days hearing variations of “How’s your canvas expanding there, Leonardo Van Gogh?” This is the kind of pretentious, oh-so-punchable smacked-ass I still am, with five years of stand-up under my belt.

But I bite down on this and say, “So, uh, yeah. I, uh, wanted to know what it tastes like, but I really don’t drink. So . . . so . . .”

Reed said, “Friday night is Party Night number one.”
^*

“Okay . . .”

“So I need you, after the show, to stay in here and have a drink. We can make you a soda water or a ginger ale or something, and make it
look
like a drink. People see you drinking, then they’re going to want to stay and keep the party going. We’re not selling . . .
you’re
not selling enough drinks,” says Reed, reciting the preamble to his mission statement.
^*

The eleven audience members from the first show are trudging out of the showroom. I’m stationed at a central table, facing the door, a highball glass of soda water with a strategically placed lime wedge in front of me.

At least this audience stayed for the entirety of my forty-five minutes of jokes. They had the fortitude of a homicide detective combing endless perp photos in search of a lurid neck tattoo.

They each pause midstep as they notice me at the table on their way out. Each of them looks at me, glances at the bar, and then doubles their pace out of the club.
We would rather drink quietly somewhere, anywhere, else than imbibe a drop of alcohol anywhere near you and your horrible jokes.

The last audience member strides out into the bleak Surrey night. Reed slides into a chair next to me and says, “We’re thinking of hiring a different headliner for tomorrow night. Saturday night is Party Night number two. We’ve got to have good shows here.”

I suck on the lime wedge and try to imagine what, in Reed’s logic, would constitute a “party night” headliner. He’s already imagined that a room full of people burning with hatred (or cold with indifference) for me as a comedian would, upon exiting the show, suddenly think, “Hey, that unfunny asshole is having a drink in the bar! We should have drinks with and/or close to that unfunny asshole!”

I walk back to my hotel on the dim side road, muttering, “Somebody fucking
kill
me,” in time with my steps.

More news updates when I rise for lunch. The “escaped” mental patient is “not a danger to himself and, more importantly, the public.” But his family is making an appeal for him to at least contact them, as he’s prone to confusion and could himself be in danger.

I meet my replacement that evening when I arrive for the first show. “Oh hey, c’mere!” says Reed, hopping off his bar stool. He had been sitting next to a huge guy who looks like a beverage distribution agent.

I shake hands with the guy. “This is Gary. We’ve been . . . how long we know each other, Bo?”

Gary says, “Since this dude couldn’t get laid in high school.”

“Suck a bone!” says Reed, and they both crack up. Is this guy even a comedian?

“So, where do you get your jokes? Reed says he sees you writing them down in a notebook.”

I don’t know how to answer this. Gary, like a dispiritingly large chunk of the population, seems to think comedians get their jokes out of books. Does he think I transcribe them to help my memory?

“I write ’em down, too.” Gary takes a spiral notebook out of his backpack. Then he produces four or five paperback joke books and a few issues of
Playboy
. He opens the
Playboy
to where he’s got a few
Playboy
party jokes marked with yellow highlighter.