11.03
A couple of weeks ago I went down to the La Jolla Comedy to do standup with my two friends Mark Ellis and Nick Youssef. The three of us got to stay at the beachfront Comedy Store condo in Pacific Beach. After the show at the Comedy Store we stayed out drinking on Garnet Avenue at a place called Club Tremors (and, yes, it was just as bad if not worse than its name sounds) until 2 in the morning. Not surprisingly, none of us got laid.
I don’t mean “none of us got laid” in a bad way like I think that all comedians should be getting mad rockstar pussy after shows. I have a girlfriend so that isn’t even an option for me unless I want to pack up all of my stuff and start living out of a U-Haul. It’s just funny that when I was younger I always thought doing a road gig with to other comics would involve drugs, sex, fast cars, fast women, etc. What it actually usually entails is sitting around a dingy condo with two other dudes all afternoon watching Sports Center and trying to find the nearest Chili’s via the Internet because you neither trust nor are tempted by the local cuisine. Standup comedy is the least glamorous occupation in the entertainment industry.
That night at club Tremors Ellis spent the night talking to two really attractive girls from Temecula who lived in Long Beach who enjoyed his conversation but in no way were going make out with him or let him see their boobs.
Nick and I spent the night wandering around the bar’s myriad of rooms (it comprised three night clubs, each one creepier and more rapey than the previous one) while I attempted to shut down my liver, kidneys, and central nervous system with $2 pints of Fat Tire and shots of Maker’s Mark. Nick seemed to particularly relish the fact that I had a girlfriend and that it prevented me from even being able to suit up and venture out onto the playing field of seeking out sloppy handjobs from drunken SDSU coeds. Even though Nick was single, he didn’t fare much better. He spent most of the night talking to some skanky wannabe gutter punk chick with a bunch of metal shit in her face while intermittently pausing to point at me, laugh, and say, “You’re old. Ha ha ha.”
I hope Nick dies in a car fire someday in front of his children and pets.
As nature, luck and the will of mighty Allah would have it come last call the three of us found ourselves at the Denny’s restaurant down the street stuffing ourselves with disgusting food.
Here’s Ellis gorging himself a taco composed of a pancake wrapped around the contents of a chef salad pork bowl with ranch dressing.
Nick opted to bring in his own meal from the 24-hour Mexican food joint down the street. And then he still ordered an appetizer sampler platter and ate that, too.
I’m sure I ordered and consumed something equally revolting but I was too busy trying not to watch them eat their meals to document what type of gastro-intestinal bowel grenade I ingested.
When we finished our feast the check came and we realized that we had spent all of our cash on drinks. Ellis was kind enough to pull out his checkcard and volunteer to pay for the meal as long as we bought him breakfast or lunch the following morning.
Here’s when the trouble arose.
In his haste to pay the bill and escape Denny’s and the memory of what he had just done to his lower intestines Ellis handed me the card and got up to wait outside on the sidewalk. Seeing as how I am a comedian I always carry a pen on me because you never know when I might want to ruin an entire load of laundry by forgetting it in a pocket. This proved to be an unfortunate circumstance for Mr. Ellis.
As I was waiting for the waitress to take the card I noticed that Ellis had neglected to fill in the signature portion on the back of his card. So I took the liberty to do this for him.
The waitress got a big kick out of this as did Nick when I showed it to him on the way out the door.
You know who didn’t get a big kick out of it? Ellis.
He went completely apeshit and started yelling at me for doing it and at Nick for not stopping me from doing it.
This argument continued all the way back to the Comedy Store condo. And into the condo. And for another 15 minutes after that inside the condo.
Eventually I gave up and told Ellis, “Here, if you’re so goddamned upset about it. Look, I’ll do this. Now my card says something worse that yours.”
The fact that I now owned a checkcard reading “I LOVE DONG!” somewhat appeased Ellis, but that didn’t stop him and Nick bickering for another 45 minutes about whether he had a right to be mad at Nick for not preventing the vandalism in the first place.
By this time I was in curled up in my sleeping bag in one of the adjacent bedrooms yelling, “Go to sleep, you’re drunk. You’re not going to accomplish anything tonight. What you are doing is gay and pointless. Talk about it in the morning when you’re sober.”
They ignored me and continued to yell back and for another 10 minutes.
At this point I said to myself, “You want to see gay and pointless. I’ll show you gay and pointless.”
I marched past them through the living room and into the kitchen where I filled a cereal bowl with hot water. I set the bowl on table near the front door a few feet from where they were arguing. Then I went into the master bathroom and returned with my Excel twin-blade razor and a can of travel shaving cream. Then I pulled my testicles out of the left side of my boxer shorts, dipped them into the hot water, lathered them up and walked over to where Ellis and Nick were fighting and started shaving my balls standing between them while they continued to argue about the checkcard thing.
It took them 15 or 20 seconds to realize what I was doing. Then in unison they both shrieked, “Dude, what in the fuck are you doing? That’s fucking gross.”
And I replied, “Well, you guys persisted on doing something completely gay and pointless that was keeping me from being able to go to sleep, so I decided to show you what a truly gay and pointless activity looked like. And, as far as I can tell, neither one of you is going to top me shaving my balls standing between two grown men tonight, so go the fuck to sleep.”
Both of them just kind of stared at me in horror and then went into the other bedroom to continue their argument for another couple minutes until it finally petered out and everyone went to sleep.
I had forgot about this incident until earlier today when I was at a Starbucks and found myself without any cash on me and I handed my checkcard to cashier to pay for my coffee.
It was a Starbucks in West Hollywood on Melrose Avenue that’s constantly chalk-full of Japanese punk rockers and Russian/Latina pre-op transsexuals who work at the trashy Euro fashion boutiques down the street.
The guy at the cash register looked at my signature and barely seemed to notice or care.
I imagine that he would have reacted the same way if I’d pulled out my dangly sorrow sack and started shaving it right there at the counter.
I’ve officially decided that I need to a.) Grow The Fuck Up and b.) Order A New Checkcard.
Considering how dumb and lazy I am I’ll probably put off doing both until it’s much too late for either to be cute anymore.
Getting fired from your job sucks. At first, you’re like, “Yeah, fuck them. I’m going to have so much more time to get shit done. It’s going to be amazing. I’ll probably start writing a novel and wake up early each morning to jog and teach myself karate via the Internet.”
The audition was for a car insurance company. All I had to do was slate my name and speak normally into the camera for about 30 seconds. The lady outside at the lobby sign-in stable was nice. The camera guy was a cool, mellow older guy. No militant Prius-driving lesbians or dudes dressed like one of the Ed Hardy-clad clipboard wielding doormen at LAX or Hyde who spend 20 minutes acting out the entire commercial half a dozen times during the group explanation of the storyboards. It was just two ordinary people who let me read for the part and then leave and get on with my life. It was great.
Then I drove over to Best Buy to drop off my digital camera that got broken earlier this week. It happened on Halloween night when my girlfriend dragged me out to a bar to hang out with some of her friends from work (who are actually really nice people and the only non-comedian people that I have interacted with at night in at least six months). At some point in the evening we handed a stranger dressed as Harry Potter the camera to take a group photo of us and the drunken dipshit dropped it. My girlfriend was super upset over this but I really wasn’t that mad. I’ve been the drunken dipshit who’s dropped a stranger’s camera on several occasions and there was no sense at having a goddamn heart attack because a device that I use mainly for taping my standup sets in dive bars and for taking pictures of truck stop gas stations for my blog got busted.
Besides, I had an extended warranty for it. When I went into Best Buy this afternoon I had a whole bullshit story about how the camera broke while my elderly mother was using it on a hot-air balloon ride last weekend in Temecula and how there was no way she could have dropped it because it would have plummeted to earth and shattered and/or killed someone. As it turned out I didn’t even need the overly dramatic and extravagent alibi. The guy at the Geek Squad department in the back of the store was super cool. He just took the camera, had me sign a work invoice and sent it out to get repaired for free under the warranty. I should have the camera back in two weeks.
This cheered me up because I figured that getting canned from my job on Monday and having my camera break was all part of God’s punishment lightning that he was shooting me in the wiener with for trying to kill the English guy with a bat last weekend at our Halloween party. Apparently the universe’s Higher Power and me are cool now.
Tuesday night my girlfriend wanted to go out for Halloween. I was against this idea because I had just been fired from my job and we had just finished cleaning up from a party that we had at our house just a couple nights before. And by “we had just finished cleaning up” I mean my girlfriend cleaned up most of the house while my roommate went to Starbucks to write and I hid downstairs in my room playing Warcraft III on my PC.
I didn’t really like the fat Batman costume that I wore to our costume party but it was the only thing I had laying around so I threw it on at the last minute. I certainly didn’t want to wear it again, especially not out on Halloween night to a bar with my girlfriend’s co-workers. The costume made me look chubby, slow and a little retarded. Regular sunlight and indoor lighting does a fine job of that on its own so I figured why help it.
