I'm sitting in the Lab at the Hollywood Improv, waiting to be called at their weekly "showcase for the booker" open mic. The Lab is a notoriously hard room where even great comics will have dogshit sets. Tonight, it's as tough as ever; comics are a tough audience, the room is chock-full of 'em.
Kirk, a headliner I have become friendly with through my time as a door guy at the Comedy Store, strolls in, having just finished his set in the main showroom. He takes a seat next to me, asks how it's going. I tell him I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to say, because so far, nothing is working on this crowd. I want to give myself the best chance to keep the booker on my good side, even though she has yet to book me anyway, so there's not really any evidence that I'm on her good side to begin with.
Kirk is one of the calmest comics I have ever met, on or off stage. One time, when I fucked up putting in his avails while working phones at the Store, after I apologized, he waved off the inconvenience. These things happen.
I have long appreciated his Zen approach to comedy. He recommended that I read W. Timothy Gallwey's "The Inner Game Of Tennis," a book that I later learned is less about tennis and more about focus, attention, and getting out of your head. Remembering that you’re only trying to play at your best every single time your hit the court.
He seems surprised that I’m worried about what I’m going to say at an open mic. "It's just another room," he says. "These are all just rooms. Say what you want."
There’s a lot of jargon and slogans in recovery. Go to enough meetings, and it’s easy to pick up. Other alcoholics are Friends of Bill’s. Other Al-Anons are Friends of Lois. Newcomers? That’s self-explanatory. So is old-timers. Lots of people have heard of the 12 Steps, but you might not have heard of the 13th Step: trying to bang people who are new to your recovery program of choice.
Take it easy, but it works if you work it. Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. Just for today. We can talk about what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now. If you sponsor yourself, you’re sponsoring a fool. Would you rather be right, or would you rather be free?
The one little recovery-adjacent phrase I liked the most might be the simplest: the rooms. The rooms (and, thanks to Covid, the Zooms) are where we go to recover. I have claimed a seat in many.
A CrossFit gym in Costa Mesa. The ceilings are high. Everything smells like sweat. There is an American flag – so large that it would cover most of my living room – hoisted high on the wall. After the show, one of the comics and I message each other about how strange this big-ass flag is.
"Why does working out have to be 'Merican?" I ask.
"This is why I never work out," she replies.
A park in Edinburgh, Scotland. After unsuccessfully trying to find meetings at the Fringe Festival, a group of us start one up on the Meadows, next to a café where we regularly get soup and sandwiches. We sit on the grass in the summer sun, decamp to the chairs under the café’s awning during the relatively frequent rain. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable in ways that feel right. We occasionally get visitors from outside of our little group of ex-pats. The word about a good meeting spreads fast, I guess.
A bar in Silver Lake that has a law library inside it. The stage is perilously high off the ground. In the summer, it is a noisy oven, where the old clanking refrigerators and the street sounds from outside really do a number on the senses. But we pack a couple dozen people in there on a regular basis, and the comics and audience members seem to like what we do with the joint. Kris, the bartender gives the greatest bear hugs of all time, lifting you off the ground with ease that belies his wiry frame.
We'd heard stories about the bar's past as a leather bar. One night, a former regular of the bar comes in, confirms these rumors. His name is Tugboat. He tells us about the glory days of Cuffs, back in the day when John Wayne used to get fucked there. The words "slave toilet" scrawled on one of the bathroom doors make much more sense after Tugboat toots his horn.
A "community room" in a parking garage in West Hollywood. It is bare bones. Cement and folding chairs. String lights and battery-powered candles. Newcomers and old-timers. Solitude. When I was still more of a night owl, I loved this meeting, how it felt like an echo-y womb. On the day I get 18 months sober, I come to this meeting, because I need a meeting. I am asked to lead, and, to my surprise, wind up taking a chip for 18 months. I didn’t even know they made these chips. But at a point where I feel like there’s not much fanfare happening in my life, this small moment of celebration is meaningful.
The "secret" bar behind a bookshelf in an Austin hostel. It is a rough room. People are drunk and actively not paying attention. Not that I’m expecting much more from the audience at a bar show.
The comic before me is new, and does dark material. He is not skilled enough with the subject matter yet to make it all funny. I’d been there before, in that place where you think shock for the sake of shock is a valid enough reason to stick with a premise, not knowing how to turn it into an actual joke.
He is heckled, handles it poorly, bombs, leaves. I do the only thing that feels right as soon as I get on stage – some variation on "Wow, that guy just did my entire set!" – and gets a big laugh. The room doesn't stay reset for long, but at least I've bought some time.
The auditorium of a building on Fountain lovingly referred to as the "crack church." You can tell the building used to be beautiful. The stage contains set pieces from a pageant performed so long ago, the kids who were in it are probably in middle age. It is the second meeting I go to in Los Angeles, after no longer calling myself an alcoholic ironically. It is the room where I find my sponsor. It is a room that becomes my home group, even as we move from the derelict church to the senior center down the street. It is, proudly, home to the worst coffee I ever drank at an AA meeting.
A bar in Raleigh. The power goes out midway through our performances. The audience lights me up with dozens of little cell phone lights, turning me into a fleshy disco ball.
A small, triangular park in Silver Lake. Ten men sit in a circle because we can't get into the house down the street, where we usually meet around a fire pit, sitting in Adirondack chairs. It is weird to talk about your feelings with relative strangers in a park, but this is what I have to do if I want to stay sane.
The parking lot of a permanently closed electronics store. In the summer of 2020, when I am itching to tell jokes in front of people again, I make my way over to this drive-in open mic. One night, we realize it bumps up against an Army Reserve base, some men and women in camo lean against their trucks and listen to us work out pandemic jokes. We are thrilled to have even this tiny amount of audience.
A house in South Central. The audience is standing-room only. After the show, I am given incredible barbecue chicken cooked in a trash can smoker.
A strip-mall Alano club in my hometown that doesn't even have a proper address when I try to look it up. The “find a meeting” website just says it faces the cross street. It’s just past the electric scooter store, a few blocks down from my old optometrist’s office, the one with horrible bedside manner.
Inside, it feels like a cross between a church and a kindergarten classroom. I bring the average age of the room down by a good 20 years. But these folks are just like any other group of drunks: some are newcomers, some are old-timers. We’re all just trying to figure out this thing that plagues us together.
Part of me hopes I run into someone I know from high school here. Part of me is terrified at the same prospect. I never do. But I’ll keep coming back.
A rec room at a detox center in the Valley. An orderly must stay by the door, propping it open, or else you'll get locked inside. There is no lock on the bathroom. There is no art on the walls. There's free ice cream. There are never more than three "audience members."
People in detox do not want to hear stand-up comedy. Sometimes we can crack them, but more often it seems like they are just here to be out of their hospital beds, where they can watch something else besides cable TV. These are the toughest “crowds” I have ever performed for, in terms of making them laugh. But their genuine gratitude at being provided with a reprieve from the physical and mental pain of detoxing – expressed after we wrap up the show, no matter how well or poorly any of the comics did – is unmatched.
A nightclub somewhere in rural Arkansas, well past 1 AM. The DJ is playing the dirty versions of songs from my middle school dances. It’s the kind of bar that big-city nightlife impresarios would call “authentic,” then try to recreate in a gentrified neighborhood.
I'd performed earlier that night in a VFW Hall in Beebe, and since the locals were very nice despite watching three comics each do an hour of comedy back to back to back, it only felt right to go out with them. For the story, if nothing else.
After asking us about our lives as comics, they ask if we will go up again. There are people here who didn’t see the show at the VFW, after all, don’t they deserve comedy too? I am the first to oblige them, doing ten minutes of the material that I didn't get around to in their smoky VFW hall. The lighting is blue. The set, bluer. The crowd, appreciative. They offer me more drinks that I politely refuse. They've been offering them to me all night, despite continuing to talk about being sober, like I’m going to change my mind all of a sudden. But I appreciate their efforts. They’re just being nice in the way they know best.