03.26
Don’t you hate it when this happens at the place where you work.
This photograph was taken last Friday night at The World Famous Comedy Store in Hollywood, California. The rotund man in the football jersey in the center is my friend Mark Hatchell. He is a comic and doorman at the club and it was his birthday on Friday. His present: several of the his fellow comics and co-workers held him down and staged a prison rape photo in the parking lot behind the building sometime around 1:30 am. The guy with his bare genitals up against Hatchell’s equally exposed buttocks is a comedian who has booked two different sitcoms on major television networks in the last year. Hence the pixilation of his face.
Hatchell is smiling in the photo and having a great time. There were multiple takes of the photo staged. The lot of us were repositioned several times to accommodate the guy taking the picture’s lighting needs and aesthetic sensibilities. It was like some really fucked up, bizarro world Calvin Klein campaign shoot gone terribly wrong (or, more likely, what actually happens at Calvin Klein photo shoots once the cameras stop rolling).
All of this is was just a typical, run-of-the-mill Friday night at the Comedy Store. No one was shocked by this photo being taken. Several other equally fucked up situations and scenarios took place with 45 minutes on either side of this picture being taken. At the end of the night two of the guys involved with photo ended up squaring off in front of one of the female bartender’s car’s headlights and staging a Cyrano De Bergerac style sword fight with their bare penises.
Earlier that evening two other employees got into a drunken argument in the main hallway of the building and nearly came to blows. To diffuse the situation I walked up behind one of them, wrapped the bottom of my t-shirt through its collar like a Daisy Duke bikini top, took my belt off and wrapped it around my left hand as if I were going to hit someone with it 1950′s greaser style, dropped my pants around my ankles, and reached into my boxer shorts and proceeded to vigorously shuffle my flaccid penis in my right hand in a display of faux public masturbation. I did this for a good 30 or 40 seconds until the two comics who had been screaming at each other turned around, shook their heads in disgust and realized that trying to fight each other was a moronic and pointless as what I had been doing.
Again, let me stress, shit like this happens every night of the week at The Store. No one thinks it’s bizarre or inappropriate or even illegal. The general public will never know the depth and breadth of the anti-social behavior taking place a mere 20 or 30 feet from the showroom in which they sit and watch a standup comedy show that they’ve paid 20 bucks and a two-drink minimum to see.
Last night an Asian man and black woman were sitting together in the front row during the employee portion of the show. One of the comics was having a rough set and bombing pretty badly. The black woman yelled out “you suck” and the comic proceeded to call her an “ape” and told her not to be jealous just because she was born with black skin and he wasn’t.
What he said was an awful, terrible, horrible thing to say to another human being. But I’ve known the comic for years and he isn’t a racist. He just got himself into a really shitty spot on stage and said something really, really stupid. I’ve said much worse to people of all rainbows of the epidermis spectrum on several different occasions. Sometimes things just go bad when you’re on stage.
The woman stormed out and spent over an hour complaining to the club’s general manager, talent coordinator, the comic who had said the awful things to her from stage as well as to other patrons and people walking past on the sidewalk. The woman threatened to picket and write about the incident in her MySpace blog.
It seemed like the night was pretty much broken and that no more comedy was going to be able to take place in such a toxic environment.
However, about an hour after the whole racial slur incident went down the guy who took the Hatchell rape photo showed up. He was scheduled to be the emcee for the second half of the show. The guy doing the “raping” in the photo was there as well and was slotted to go up second in the show. In his infinite wisdom the second half host brought a printed out 8×10 color copy of the rape photo on stage with him. He had the audience members pass it around to take a closer look and then held a mock rape trial. It was fucking hilarious.
One of the waitresses went on stage and posed as a sexual assault expert who claimed that she had been “raped many, many times.” She testified that from looking at the photograph that it was clearly a rape, albeit a “yummy” one. Then a comic who’s father is a doctor went up to read a forensics report detailing the contents of Hatchell’s stomach immediately following the attack — these items included a New Jersey state license plate, four dozen frozen Butterball turkeys and the mummified remains of world-renowned spelunker and treasure hunter Chester Copperpot.
At the end the testimony the audience voted on whether the comic was guilty of rape or not. By applause the comic was found unanimously guilty (except for one guy in the back was later disqualified from the jury for having most likely assaulted women twice Hatchell’s size on the property himself). In the end, however, the comic was found not guilty because when polled a majority of the women in the audience said that he was handsome enough that they wouldn’t mind being raped by him.
And that’s what happens at the place where I spend a majority of my nights in Los Angeles. On Friday night there can be anal rape photo shoots and penis cockfights being staged in the parking lot and then on Sunday night a potentially career-ending racial incident can be eclipsed by a mock kangaroo court rape trial that ends in acquittal due to the fact that the perpetrator “has nice hair” and “is on the tv.”
God bless America.
We are all doomed.
P.S. Racism and rape aren’t funny. You shouldn’t joke about them.
In case you thought that the universe let me off scot-free for dropping the c-bomb on that lady in the drug store, please let me assure you that it did not.
I like Fryman Canyon because it’s much less crowded than the other hiking locations around Hollywood. And this is great because I hate people and people seem to hate me. It’s really a win-win for all parties involved.
I hadn’t gay hiked since I quit smoking last summer so it’d been 8 or 9 months since I’d been back. When I arrived last Sunday afternoon I was shocked to find that the County of Los Angeles/City of Studio City/Denizens of the Fryman Canyon Homeowners Association had put up No Parking signs on all of the surface streets within a 10-block radius of the neighborhood. I imagine all of the people who lived there in million-dollar-plus homes were sick of power-walking soccer moms and cross-training would-be actors traipsing up and down their street at all hours of the morning, afternoon and evening. It was kind of a dick move on their part, but I can empathize with their prejudice toward the iPod Nano set invading their homestead.
Then I looked more closely at the ticket. It was for $65. Even if I had come across a magical stream filled with Skittles and met an enchanted unicorn that grant me 3 wishes and gave me a handjob there was no way that this gay hike was worth 65 bucks.
There it was in all its glory. A square iron post with a horizontal envelope dispensing slot and a vertical envelope receiving slot. I hadn’t even noticed it the first time when I had looked for it before my hike.
Okay, so I’m not exactly proud of this one. But, please allow me to explain myself.
So the following Saturday I went to see the second psychologist. She was a nice woman from Orange County who specialized in the personal coaching of people who had given up on life. She told me that I needed to exercise more, smoke less, eat better, get a more regular sleep schedule and find a hobby. She also recommended that I start taking multi-vitamins because I looked “pasty” and “like shit.”
I parked and ran inside the store to buy some laundry detergent, a bottle of Centrum and some Advil. Centrum is a multi-vitamin (like the psychologist suggested). Advil is the over-the-counter pain reliever that I was going to need after exercising because I am so out of shape.
I stood waiting in the original line hoping that the register would reopen but also ready to move into line behind the guy at the new register should he finish his transaction first. I could have moved over into line behind him, but I didn’t really see the point because there was no one in line behind either of us. Besides, I was kind of staring off at a pair nose hair clippers in the lucite case behind the counter and trying to decide if $12.99 was a reasonable price for an off-brand pair of clippers or if I should just wait to get a new pair at Target.
Anyway, the guy finished paying for his stuff and I took a step forward to place my items onto the counter. Suddenly, an emaciated cougar woman in a tan Capri pants sweat suit charged into me. I looked at her face and it was a roiling sea of wrap-around bubble sunglasses, sun damage and contempt.
With as much pathos as I could muster I said, “Ma’am, please don’t cuss me out and say awful things to me behind my back. If you have something to say to me just say it out loud so everyone can hear you. I’m more than happy to bask in whatever kind of jacuzzi of awkwardness you want to fill with your angry words.”
I spun around and made a quick scan of the other customers in line and shopping inside the Rite-Aid. No one appeared to be under the age of 15-years-old. It was on.
I paused and took in the features of her face for a few seconds and then replied, “You know, with that mustache, so do you, lady. Have a nice afternoon.”
In my never-ceasing quest to prove myself sane and to lead a happier life I took the 
The books came last week and although they were interesting I don’t think that I’ll be shaving my head, wrapping myself in an over-sized orange diaper and moving off to live in the foothills of Japan eating gruel and gardening/begging for a living like my Zen contemporaries any time soon. I’ve got way too many shitty road gigs coming up as well as Halo 3 being scheduled for release on the X-Box 360 later in the year.
Last Friday morning I took the 134, 101, 110 and 5 freeways over to the temple for a noon guided meditation class. The “temple” by the way was a converted duplex on a residential street next to an elementary school about 3 blocks from Dodger Stadium. Yeah, it was just like a temple in Kamakura, Japan.
The room reminded me of a medium-sized karate dojo. Like a small, more peaceful version of the Cobra Kai dojo in The Karate Kid. 
At that point the class instructor walked in. I had expected someone who looked like a cross between an emaciated Pat Morita and Yoda. To my dismay/surprise (dis-prise?) it was a 40-something-year-old white dude named John wearing khaki pants and navy polo shirt. He took a shoeless seat at a raised podium at the front of the room and spoke into a microphone with a large over-sized foam cover that reminded me of a 1970’s female porn star’s pubic mound. For the next 40 or so minutes he led us through our guided meditation exercises.
Unfortunately, the exercises didn’t amount to much more than a watered down sermon in which John extolled the virtues of finding a guru and giving yourself over to a Buddhist master. I didn’t know whether he meant him or the skinny 90-year-old monk dude in the photograph on the wall over my left shoulder. John also told us how beneficial it would be to take part in the meditation retreat to Joshua Tree the following weekend. Finally, he played a CD of some pre-recorded Buddhist chants that were in English and sounded like they were recorded by the surviving members of The Carpenters.