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lechased-blog · 7 years

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Two Dogs

Vinnie was curled up in the back of the kennel they were keeping him in at Lollypop Farm (the Rochester, NY arm of the Humane Society). My wife Katie and I were there one day just walking around looking at dogs because we’d just signed a lease on a house we were going to share. She and I had been long distance for almost 5 years before she moved home and she and I had the chance to finally live together. A dog was one of those things we always talked about having together, so we went and looked around to get excited.

There was Vinnie in the back of his kennel. Not moving. Not reacting to anything anybody said or did who came close. Right next to him was this fluffy white dog the size of a lion named Winnie. She’d come in as a stray. She was sweet and attentive and calmly approached us as we approached her. Katie and I looked at each other as if to say “I hope she’s still here when we’re ready to adopt.” I looked back over at Vinnie, the most beautiful dog I’d ever seen, and said “it’s too bad that one is so anti-social, I’ve always wanted a husky and he’s so damn handsome.”

We left the shelter. I took her home and went back to my dad’s house and started to pack up my stuff. The landlord we’d signed with said we could move in two weeks early and not pay extra, so I was hustling. I got most of my stuff in the house on a Sunday afternoon.

I went back to Lollypop Farm on Monday with the intention of adopting Winnie. I went there convinced nobody else would take in that gigantic stray dog with the floofy white fur and goofy face. I made it to Vinnie’s kennel, he picked his head up when I walked by, we made eye contact and I changed my mind.

I asked the staff if I could meet him. They looked at me like I was nuts. I looked at them like they were nuts. We all looked nuts, but eventually they realized I wasn’t kidding. I wanted to meet the husky nobody wanted to meet. They walked me to a big, gray room that had huge windows overlooking their play area outside. There was a single chair in the room. It was yellow and made of hard plastic and had shiny, silver metal legs that were bent at just weird enough angles to make sitting in it more of an academic procedure than anything else. The two volunteers were talking to me about Vinnie before they brought him in.

“He’s had some history,” they told me. “He used to live with a St. Bernard, who is here too, and one day their neighbor brought over a 3 week old labrador puppy to play with them and things got rough and the puppy ended up dying a couple of days later. The neighbors threatened to sue the owners if they didn’t give up the dogs or have them put down.” At this point I still hadn’t met Vinnie. He was still in his kennel. He was still laying there by himself sad as shit. I looked at the volunteers very nicely and said “why don’t I meet him before we talk more?”

A few minutes later Vinnie walked into the cold, gray room with the wonky chair and he couldn’t have given less of a shit about me being there. Or the volunteers for that matter. He was limping, though, because he’d spent so much time laying on his side in his cage that he was emaciated and sore and his muscles were atrophying. He was 3 years old. Born on September 9th. It’s important to note here, again, that my presence in the room had zero effect on him. “He’s very aloof,” the volunteer said. “So am I.” I said. “He can be a handful,” the volunteer said. “So can I,” I said.

The volunteers looked at each other nervously. They looked at Vinnie who was limply circling the room looking for a way to escape. “He’ll run away from you if you let him,” the volunteer said. “So will I,” I said. The volunteers seemed to be tense and it was throwing Vinnie and I off. Their stress was becoming my stress and Vinnie’s stress. I very politely asked if I could be alone with him for a minute, they very politely told me to I could not. I very politely asked if I could take him for a walk, they very politely told me that I could and it would actually be doing them a favor since nobody enjoyed walking him.

“Excuse me?” I asked. “He’s pully on the leash and not great with other dogs, the staff here are kind of nervous about taking him for walks.” I remember contorting my face in such a way that it made one of the volunteers look at me like I had a knife. “Look, get me a leash. I’m taking him for a walk.”

They brought me a flat, black leash and asked me to be careful. I smirked at them like “what’s the worst that could happen?” and they smirked at me like “you’ll see.”

They were wrong.

The second I had a leash on Vinnie and he I were walking together I felt this strange sensation of “this is my dog, I need to take care of him.” We walked around the property for 20 minutes or so and I walked back into the shelter and said “well, I love him, but I need to check with my girlfriend first, so I will probably be back in a few days.” The volunteers gave each other a dreadful look. The St. Bernard Vinnie had grown up with walked by and the top of his head was shaved. I understood what their look meant. Dogs with a history of violence don’t get a lot of second chances.

I took Vinnie home 10 minutes later without paying an adoption fee and carrying a bag full of food, collars, leashes, treats and toys. He and I were happy as we walked out of Lollypop Farm together. He kept looking up at me and smiling and I kept looking down at him smiling and then I realized I adopted a dog without telling my girlfriend who hadn’t even moved her stuff into our house yet. “Shit.” I said to Vinnie. “Awooof” he said back to me in a deep, odd bark. We made our way to my car and he jumped in the front seat.

3 minutes later he tried to jump out of the window as we drove down the thruway. I pulled over and pulled him back in and turned on the childproof windows and my heart was beating so fast I thought it would give out and then I looked over at Vinnie and he seemed to be laughing. “Well,” I said, “this is going to be fun.”

…

When Vinnie got sick last year he got really sick. It happened as quickly as a tower falling in Jenga. Or at least that’s how it felt. My strong, handsome boy suddenly became a ghost of himself. It lasted a few months. My wife and I were doing our best to care for him and make the last few days of his life as easy and happy as possible, but things don’t always work out the way we want them too.

Vinnie passed away while I was out of town for the weekend doing stand-up; which was my job at the time. I was featuring for a comedian named Josh Blue at The Comedy Club in Rochester, NY. It was supposed to be a nice, paying gig where I got to warm up before my friends and I went on a small tour of Oregon the following week.

Vinnie started to go south very quickly on a Thursday night. I had left that morning and the last thing I said to him was “I love you, don’t wait for me, if you need to go you need to go. I love you.” And I walked out the door trying very hard not to cry, because I knew what was coming. I saw it in my boy’s face. He was dying and I wouldn’t ever see him again.

The next day he crashed. It was pouring rain in Manhattan and my wife, the strongest person I have ever met, took him to three hospitals before landing at the ASPCA on the Upper East Side. It was there where all the test results came back. It was there where Katie had to face reality. It was there where she laid with him during his final moments and said the goodbyes I didn’t get to say. She called me at 4:30 to let me know he was gone.

I was getting ready to take a shower and I collapsed in the bathroom. I’d only ever felt like that once before when my mom died. The grief was … well you get it. I was staying at my dad’s because the gig was in my hometown and, thank god, my father was downstairs in his study when I found out. 20 minutes later I pulled myself together enough to leave the bathroom and go downstairs.

“Jimmy, you look … upset” he said to me as he stood up. “It’s Vinnie, dad. He got very sick and… “ I never finished the sentence. He was hugging me and saying “Oh buddy, he was your guy” and I started to bawl again.

The next few months are a blur both literally and figuratively. I’d been sober for a very, very long time, but that went out the window after Vinnie died. I spent about 4 months chasing away the demons by looking for salvation in the bottom of a bottle. It didn’t work.

I snapped out of on March 16th, 2016. Vinnie passed away on October 9th, 2015. The grief lingers inside me still. Our house is covered in pictures of our boy. I had trouble looking at them for a year. Our boy was gone. I didn’t know what to do.

…

One year and 19 days after Vinnie passed away Katie and I were watching TV on a Friday night. Cesar 911 came on and we didn’t change the channel. Vinnie used to love being in the room when Cesar was on TV. It was one of his odd personality quirks, but because of that I had a hard time watching Cesar 911 or The Dog Whisperer or any show that had dogs in it. That night was different, that night I felt okay with it and so did Katie. We watched 4 episodes back to back to back to back.

I dreamed of Vinnie that night.

It was a house party at our old house and we were surrounded by dogs and people. Friends and family were bringing in food and the dogs were playing in the backyard. I just couldn’t see Vinnie anywhere. I was looking for him everywhere, but he wasn’t there.

Right as dream-me was making the realization that Vinnie had died over a year ago, he trotted into my dream world and said hello. I know this sounds crazy, but it happened. I remember him walking up to me, sitting down in front of me and me bending down at the knees to say hello to him. He put his paw on my hand, looked me in the eyes and then he walked out of the sliding glass doors that went into our old backyard. I followed him to see him play with the other dogs, but he wasn’t there. I woke up that morning crying.

Katie and I started talking about dogs and how we missed having one and how there were so many that needed homes. We went onto the ASCPA website and looked around a little and this strange feeling of momentum started to come over both of us. “What if we went to the shelter and just looked around?” I said. “That’s a great idea,” Katie said, “it’ll give us a good idea what to expect.” “Okay,” I said, “but we can’t go in there thinking we’re going to adopt a dog just because we’re there.” “Of course, that’s irresponsible.” “Good…. they open at noon.”

We took a train to a bus and then walked a few blocks over to the ASPCA shelter and hospital on the Upper East Side. It was where Vinnie spent his last few hours of life. The dread of walking into the place hit Katie harder than it hit me, because I wasn’t there. The waiting room was full of people looking to adopt cats and one family surrendering their dog. They were bawling their eyes out talking about how good their dog was, but that they just couldn’t keep him anymore. My heart broke for them.

We were there to meet a dog named Piglet, a bulldog mix, I had seen on the ASCPA website, but the ASPCA is the type of place that smartly makes you fill out information about the kind of dog you’re looking for before they’ll even take you around to see what is available. They want to make sure their behavior profiles match up with the dog you want to see. Katie and I were surprised to find out that thanks to Vinnie we qualified as “experienced owners” and basically had no restrictions on any dog we wanted to look at.

I was deadset on Piglet. I’d always wanted a bulldog and that was about as close as I thought we’d ever get. Plus, Piglet was on the smaller side, hence the name (that I would’ve changed immediately). In my head I was doing the math on how much space she’d take up, how easy it would be to take her places and was already wondering if the chichi fancy pet store had winter coats for her.

When the volunteer came up to us and told us it was our turn to go meet the dogs, everybody was very excited. The ASPCA people seemed ecstatic that some people who actually knew how to be with dogs were there. I got the impression that didn’t happen a whole lot. The volunteer was super chatty and nice and encouraging as we rode the elevator up to the floor where the kennels were. “I know you want to see Piglet,” the volunteer said, “but let’s look at all the dogs along the way just to be sure we don’t miss anything.”

I barely paid attention to that. We passed a huge ass dog named Portland who was wearing the cone of shame because of a skin infection, but otherwise Portland seemed like an awesome dog. He was, however, the size of a small house, so we kept moving. (Happy Ending Alert: Portland was adopted to a forever home that day. Good job, Portland!) We made our way through a hallway of very tiny, very yappy dogs and some very lethargic looking mutts and Pit Bulls who looked sweet and nice but, I don’t know, didn’t click with us.

We turned a corner and there was Piglet. She had flappy bat ears and was white with black dots. She was smiling and pacing in her crate as I approached her. The second I squatted down to introduce myself she started barking and growling wildly. I looked over at the volunteer who looked embarrassed and, frankly, hurt that Piglet would stoop to such behavior in front of a potential adopter. The volunteer suggest I give Piglet some food. I tried to give her some food and she growled at me again. This time I looked at Katie who was giving me the “not in a million years” look and I knew we had to move on. Sorry, Piglet.

They took us up the elevator to another floor full of dogs. Most of them were tiny, yappy things that were driving me insane within a couple of seconds of being in their presence, but they had one small room full of two dogs in the size range we were looking for, so that’s where we headed.

The room was tiny, but big enough to have two separate kennels right next to each other. The lights were off, but the glass on the enclosures was clean and so was the floor and everything else. I noticed a wonky looking plastic chair in the corner of the room and got a wave of deja vu. “Huh.” I said out loud to nobody in particular. “What?” asked Katie. “Nothing. Nothing.”

I don’t remember the name of the first dog, but I remember he was a skinny, brown and white Pit mix that Katie was clearly enamored with. The dog was friendly and enthusiastic and you tell he was a lover not a fighter. Only problem was some health stuff the ASPCA was trying to deal with so the dog wasn’t technically up for adoption. There was another dog in the room, but she was so quiet I didn’t even notice she was in there. “This is Rhea,” the volunteer said. “Who is Rhea?” I asked. “This dog in here,” the volunteer said pointing to a fawn colored mutt laying in the corner of her kennel who didn’t move an inch when I approached. “Huh,” I said. “Who are you?” I asked the dog and her ears twitched a bit.

Rhea didn’t move. The volunteer looked embarrassed and suggested I try giving her a treat. “Gimme a minute,” I said. I squatted down in front of Rhea’s kennel right in front of where they had drilled a tiny hole just big enough for treats, but small enough so any fingers and hands couldn’t get through. I waited there for a few minutes. Katie was still looking at the dog nextdoor, who was putting on an “adopt me now” show. Eventually, after what felt like forever, Rhea stood up and calmly walked over to where I was squatting. She sat politely in front of the hole but not in the way that said “give me food now” it was more like “yes, you’re here, I see that, now what?” And I turned to Katie and said “hey, take a look at this dog.”

She did.

As we were walking out of the room Rhea stood up to watch us leave, her tail was wagging a bit and she was grinning. The volunteer apologized for their lack of options and asked if we saw any dogs we’d like to meet. “Rhea and Piglet” I said. Katie looked at me like “are you fucking crazy? Piglet wanted to bite you.” And I looked back at the volunteer and said “Okay, just Rhea.” The volunteer gave me a look like “you sure?” and my wife and I said “absolutely.”

They made us go back down to the waiting room until a behavior specialist was available to introduce us to Rhea. It took a couple of hours. I think it was a test to see how patient we are and what we were willing to go through for a dog. Not the hardest test, but a test nonetheless. Eventually, a very sweet woman named Addison came over to us and asked us to come with her. She took us to a table in the back of the main lobby and had a look on her face that was equal parts worried, discouraging and devastatingly warm.

I was looking around for the dog, but there was no dog. This was going to be a “talk.”

Addison laid out Rhea’s history for us right there at the table. She explained Rhea had been re-homed twice already. That she’d spent most of her life in the shelter. That her first home was garbage and her second home was double garbage. According to her, Rhea’s second family took her in without meeting their older dog. That older dog was a huge asshole who attacked Rhea all the time and the garbage people who adopted Rhea thought using a shock collar was the way to go. It wasn’t. Things got worse. Rhea was brought back to the ASPCA.

I’ll always remember Addison saying “so, after hearing all that, do you still want to meet her?” Because Katie and I looked at each other mystified. Why wouldn’t we want to meet her? It’s not the dog’s fault she’s been shit on in every home she’s had. “Of course we want to meet her,” we said. Addison’s face erupted into a grin and she asked us to wait, then changed her mind and asked us to follow her into the play deck they had on the fifth floor. “This will be better,” she said.

It was a gorgeous play deck. It was long and narrow, but wide enough to be comfortable. They had some exercise balls in one room that was closed off from the main room (alongside a treadmill and some other equipment), but the thing that struck me most was the view. You could see all these rooftop gardens and the old architecture of the upper east side surrounding you. The sun was shining brightly and the skies were blue. It was gorgeous. We waited there for 10 minutes or so and then …

… then Rhea happened. She burst into the room with a huge grin on her face and came over to us. Addison was letting us know how much she loves to play and that it was important we always had two of the same toy around because it made her easier to play with. At one point not long after Rhea entered the play deck, Katie knelt down and Rhea came over and started licking her face. Rhea came over to me, I asked her to sit and she did and I gave Katie a look and mouthed “pleasepleaseplease” to her and she mouthed back “yesyesyes” and that was it. That was the moment Rhea became our dog.

We waited a few more hours because while we were meeting Rhea the ASPCA got flooded with adoptions. We overheard somebody in management tell the staff that all the available dogs had been adopted. They turned around and said “even Rhea?” and the manager said “even Rhea!” and they all let out a small cheer.

The people there had bonded with Rhea over the course of the nearly a year she spent in the shelter. She’d been there 4 months by the time we arrived and had made friends with every volunteer and staff member in the place. Addison was telling us how she was the dog they most liked chilling with in the office. “She loves to just come plop and chew on her bone while we work,” she told us. “I’m so glad she found a home” was the overwhelming phrase that each and every single person working there that day said to us. Some of them even gave us hugs. I’m not sure they were supposed to do this, but they gave us extra food and two of Rhea’s favorite toys to take with us. “Always have two” Addison reminded us as she hugged us tightly and said “thank you” and then Rhea burst onto the scene again.

She wasn’t scared at all. That’s what I’ll remember about that day. Rhea just looked up at Addison as she handed over the leash and then she looked up at us with eyes that said “let’s go!” and we did. The ASPCA called a car service for us to take us back to our apartment. We took Rhea for a walk and then went home. She was nervous, sure, but the first thing she did was crawl into my lap while I was sitting in the chair Vinnie used to sleep in.

That afternoon, while Rhea was taking a short nap, we looked over her medical records so we could put down the important dates for her shots and what have you. That’s when we noticed her birthday. September 9th. Same as Vinnie’s.

…

That night I dreamed of Vinnie again.

It was the same situation. We were at our old house and it was a crowded party full of family, friends and dogs. I couldn’t find him and I started to get nervous. I called out for him and he didn’t come. I woke up screaming, according to Katie, and when I looked at the end of the bed there was Rhea, sleeping like a log.

I went back to sleep and the dream started over. Vinnie was nowhere to be found. I began to panic and then I heard his weird “awooof” bark and set out looking for him. I found him in his chair. I walked over to him and knelt down. He sat up so we were facing each other. I grabbed his big dumb head and pulled it close so our foreheads were touching. I said “I’m sorry, buddy. I miss you. I miss you so much.” He pulled away and looked me in the eyes, then he licked my cheek and put his paw on my knee. “It’s okay, daddy” I heard from somewhere in the dream. “It’s okay.”

When I woke up Rhea was licking the tears off of my face.

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lechased-blog · 7 years

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Quitter: The Advice

At the end of March 2016 I quit doing stand-up comedy after more than 7 years of absolutely believing it was the one thing I was meant to be doing. At the time I had no reasons other than “it was time to move on,” but after months of dwelling on it and trying to find a reason I still have nothing.

This series of blogs is me trying to make sense of my time in the comedy world.

…

Happy New Year, everybody!

Let me tell you about the worst advice anybody ever gave me.

If you’re thinking about starting out in comedy one of the most important skills you’re going to need is a bullshit detector. You’re going to meet so many fake assholes who try to sell you a bill of goods about their past that you’ll go insane if you can’t pick out who is telling the truth.

If you come from a smaller scene in a city like Rochester, NY you’re going to meet these bullshit artists whenever they stroll through town or deign to make their way to an open mic. These are the people who worked a lot in the 1980s when all you had to do was show up with a tie and blazer at one of the three comedy clubs in your city and suddenly you’d be a comedian.

It didn’t matter that they told street jokes. It didn’t matter that they were a terrible alcoholics who could barely stand up straight at the end of the night. It didn’t matter that they were a heroin addict, a wife beater or a reformed preacher with a cocaine habit and it especially didn’t matter if you were actually good at stand-up. The demand was too high in the 80s. The talentpool was too shallow.

A lot of these folks who lived through the glory days can’t ever seem to quit the business entirely. It is their one thing. They never take the hint that they’ve missed the boat of success and are now sailing in a dinghy around the murky waters of Neverwas. You’ll hear them on the radio a lot. You’ll see them headlining shows in Wherevertheshit, NY (outside of Albany) and when you run into them at open mics they’ll never shut the fuck up about what everybody else is doing wrong and how when they opened for Bill Hicks he said their joke about knucklefucking a chihuhaha was hilarious.

None of it happened, of course. These folks are broken. They are liars, sure, but more than that they are protecting their minds from shattering under the weight of the realization that they’ve wasted their lives and have nothing but fake or misremembered memories to show for it. They’re huge bummers, but they are part of every single comedy scene in the world and you’ve got to take them as they come. If you’re lucky they are very harmless and actually nice and you just have to listen to a story once in awhile.

If you’re unlucky they are pariahs that will try and suck the life out of your entire scene because they’re mad they’re not headlining The Coffee Shop Comedy Show you and your friends put together. These people, mostly middle-aged white dudes (surprise!), are who you need to look out for. I don’t have it in me to say they are willfully malicious or even smart enough to be willfully malicious, but there’s something about these crotchety old fucks that is poisonous. When you identify them, cut them right out of your life. Especially if you have any kind of talent whatsoever.

These dudes love to take talent and twist into nothing, because they feel like that’s what should happen because they feel like that happened to them. They never see the pattern or the cycle they’re apart of. You can, though, and you should, and when you do? Walk away.

They are an unavoidable part of the comedy world and you will have to work with them several times when you’re starting out and several more times when you’re established and even if you do make it you’ll run into them again and again. It’s a small world, comedy, but it gets even smaller when you start in a small scene.

Everybody is hungry for stage time, so when you get a call that you can drive 3 hours to do a 20 minute set for $150 you don’t ask too many questions. You say yes and just hope the headliner isn’t some asshole. Sometimes you even know the headliner is an asshole, and that you’ll have to spend hours with them in a confined space, but you need the money and, hey, you’ve never been to Sothisiswhatarecessionlookslike, NY (outside of Utica), so you take the gig.

A friend of mine and I got booked as the MC and feature for a show in a fire hall about 90 minutes away from Rochester, NY in a town I had literally never heard of before. This happened to me a lot when I first started taking road gigs. For the most part? I loved these shows way more than I should’ve. A lot of the time they were a struggle, but as I progressed and learned how to talk to any audience you put in front of me I learned to love these folks despite our massive differences.

You never knew walking in if these gigs would be packed to the rafters or just a smattering of drunk yokels crying into their beer waiting for the right chance to yell out their patented heckle. It didn’t matter to me, I loved them either way. By the time my buddy and I got booked on this show, I was good at handling whatever came at me (and if I wasn’t they had beer).

My buddy and I got to the show and it was clear this was going to be one of the packed to the rafters gigs. People were coming from everywhere in this little town in the middle of nowhere to drive their ATVs, trucks and family vans to the fire hall in the woods to see their yearly comedy show. I get jazzed up about this stuff. Anytime a group of people actually go out and see comedy on purpose I think it’s beautiful.

My friend got nervous. He’d never done a gig like this and I’d done a few, but I didn’t want to be “that guy” so I just told him he’d do great and went to see the man who was supposed to have my free beer. On the way over to the card table where the booze was, I saw our headliner and my stomach started to hurt.

The guy wasn’t and isn’t a bad guy. He’s not even a terrible comedian. The thing is, our philosophies about comedy couldn’t have been anymore different and this dude was prone to lectures and stories about “the old days” and he always, always threw me off my game when we’d work together. So, I did the brave thing and tried to avoid him until I absolutely had to talk to him.

It lasted a good 2 minutes.

“Jimmy!” I hear from behind me and I turn around and there’s our headliner with his arm around my buddy and they’re with another comedian I’d seen at a couple of open mics and my stomach started to hurt a little bit more. “Hello,” I said. “You’re hosting, right?” “Yes.” “Awesome, man. Awesome. Let’s all go outside and talk about what we’re going to do.” I shot my friend a look who shot me a look of horror back and I said “we’ll meet you guys out there in a second” just to give my friend a break.

I slammed two Keystone Ices in 3 minutes and then my buddy and I wandered around until we found the headliner and his new lackey standing outside by a makeshift fire pit talking about their craft. They looked startled when we happened upon them and gave each other knowing looks like they just shared the most important secret in the world. The headliner started talking.

“Okay, so Jimmy you’re going to do 15 up front?”

“Yep.”

“Great. The other guys are going to do 5 minutes and then 20 minutes respectively. Jimmy, you can do time between them.”

“Okay.”

“Now, I know Jimmy has done these gigs before so he knows what’s up, but I think it’s important that you all should hear this.”

“How many free beers do we get?”

“Not now, Jimmy.”

“Okie dokie.”

“I’ve been doing this a long, long time, fellas, so I know what these people expect and they expect to laugh.”

“At a comedy show?”

“Don’t be a smartass.”

“No problem.”

“And since you’re all relatively new to comedy, I wanted to let you know that if you get up there and your material isn’t working it’s okay to just do somebody else’s. Just make sure they don’t know the material already so it should be, like, one of the indie comics you guys like.”

“What?”

“It’s a road gig. Sharing jokes is normal. The important thing is they laugh.”

I walked away stunned but not shocked and my buddy got real quiet and real angry. We huddled in the corner away from the headliner and his stooge and we decided he was the ultimate hacky asshole and that we were never going to become that guy and we’d live or die with our own material. You know, like comedians.

The show went fine. My friend and I did well. The headliner’s lackey did terribly. The headliner, sadly, fucking murdered that room and he did it with a few jokes I recognized from other comedians in the area I’d done shows with and some I’d seen on Comedy Central.

I accepted my money in a paper envelope and didn’t shake the headliner’s hand and my friend and I bolted away. As we were walking out the headliner asked if we would get more CDs out of his van because he was about sell out. I said “no problem, buddy!” and we left without getting him his merch.

On the way home we texted the comedians we knew whose material we’d just seen lifted and let them handle it how they wanted to handle it. It wasn’t our jokes he stole, but we both knew that it was definitely something that would probably happen or has already happened.

We never worked with that guy again. Why would we? Nobody wants to see somebody do a worse version of other people’s material.

A few months later another friend of mine and I were doing a road gig with another older comedian. It was a 3 hour drive, 6 hours round trip. That’s a long, long time to be in a car with 2 people you don’t know very well.

We got to talking and I brought up the advice I’d been given about doing other people’s material. With a straight face this person who had made their living doing stand-up for the past 10ish years said “oh yeah, we do that all the time. It’s no big deal. It’s not like they’ll find out.”

That night I saw him do some of the same jokes the other headliner told months before.

That night I was several months sober and clear headed and very, very angry. That night I told myself it was time to leave Rochester. That I needed to be somewhere else. That I’d never escape people like that if I didn’t challenge myself to really make it where making it counts.

That was the night I started to hate comedy.

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lechased-blog · 7 years

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Quitter: The First Joke

This series of blogs is me trying to make sense of my time in the comedy world.

…

The chord of a Nintendo 64 controller was wrapped around my neck in a makeshift noose. It was sometime around midnight. I was 25 or 26 beers into the evening. My cat was sleeping on the couch in the part of our attic that my roommates and I used for poker games and late night cigarettes. There was a beam that looked sturdy enough to support my weight. It was my 24th birthday. I flung one end of the chord over the beam and started to pull it tighter and tighter and tighter.

There was too much chord. This was back before wireless controllers became the norm. I kept pulling and tugging on this god damn thing. I was getting more and more frustrated. I wanted out. I wanted to be sleeping forever. Instead I was doing wimpy pull-ups in my attic while the cat watched from a safe distance.

I started to laugh, crazily as one might assume, because by my count that was my 4th attempt at committing suicide and it was (by far) the most ridiculous and ill thought out of the bunch. I fucked every single one of them up.

The first one in high school was just dumb. I took I don’t know how many over the counter pills and I spent a day throwing them up.

The second one, later on in high school, was also dumb. I thought a piece of a terry cloth t-shirt would do the trick and make for one heck of a so-long rope. The thing ripped the second I let go.

The third one, this time after I failed out of college, was an entire bottle of Aleve while sitting in a bathtub. This time my family was around. This time I went to the hospital via a ride in an ambulance. This time the diagnoses and pills and doctors started to come in. This time was different and better. This time I had a path and purpose and a doctor’s note for my depression that said I was fine, just medically fucked in the head.

This brings me back to the Nintendo 64 controller with the too long chord.

I was massively depressed and had been for months and months, but I’d been hiding it by drinking until I passed out and waking up and going to work and coming home to drink until I passed out. At the time, my wife and I were broken up (this was 5+ years before we got married), my mom was dying of cancer, my friends were starting to make their way in the world and my development was severely arrested. I was floating in a tub of broken brained shit and starting to drown.

That chord, though. I think about this a lot. How different things would’ve turned out if I’d used the other controller with the normal length chord. This one was too long, and when the joke of it all washed over me and I started the maniacal laughing and insane crying jag I unfurled the shitty noose and sat down on the couch next to my cat and laughed some more.

I called a friend who gave me my wife’s phone number at the time and I gave her a call. It was almost 1 in the morning. We talked for hours and made plans to meet up at Thanksgiving. I didn’t tell her about the controller or the beam or the cat.

…

I’m 27 and I’m telling jokes about Obama being a good president or about how people don’t support marriage equality but make sure to Teevo Ellen every day. I’m far enough removed from the worst days to make myself believe they never existed. It’s all pap. It’s all bullshit. It’s all nothing that matters and just masturbatory “look how clever I am” twaddle nobody really wanted to hear since they could just watch The Daily Show or Colbert.

I’d started and stopped and sputtered by this point. After my first open mic I became obsessed with it. I stayed up that whole entire night fantasizing about my first HBO special; which I assumed would be released sometime in the next 6 months as long as they acquiesced to my demand for full creative control. I was happy and motivated and not at all prepared for what it would feel like to actually bomb.

Then I bombed the hardest I ever bombed before or since, and it was at the second open mic I ever did a place called The Otter Lodge. Long story short: I was so cocky I thought I could push about 3 pints of Jack Daniels into my body before getting on stage without losing my train of thought. “Heck, I hold court at parties while I’m way drunker than this!” I told myself, but then I got in front of the crowd and my brain went “ha ha, idiot, here you go, have some humble pie.”

I flinched after that bomb. I didn’t go back and do another set for a couple of months. I didn’t want to feel that way again, but I also didn’t realize just how completely and totally the stand-up bug had burrowed into me. Come June I was back lingering around the open mics and back to writing material and back to getting myself into it.

I kept thinking about the Nintendo Suicide Attempt. Something about that was coming back and saying “hey, idiot, this is something you should talk about. This is a thing you can make funny.” But I was too new and too raw and too close to it to really dive back into the topic with any kind of authority.

I’m 27 years old and I’m 7 months into stand-up and I meet a guy who tells me he runs a showcase at The Comedy Club in town (which is called The Comedy Club and is a great place in Rochester to see really good national comedians and local acts). We email a little and suddenly I’ve got a booked spot at a comedy club for the first time.

Up until then I’d been pretty quiet about doing stand-up when it came to telling people at work and my family. I knew deep down I didn’t have what it took to show myself off yet, but I got so excited about performing at a real club that I blabbed to everybody I knew. So of course I ended up bringing 12 or so people with me to watch me do this show.

So of course 2 days before it was going to happen I got poison ivy all over my face and upper body after doing yard work. So of course the doctor gives me steroids which make me swell up and get red. Of course.

This all led me to being in a state of absolute panic by the time the night of the show came. There were 12 people there to see me and they were the bulk of the crowd that Thursday night. I was set to go up first, since it was my first time, and I had been given 5 minutes.

I was off the stage in 2 and ½.

I walk off and I’m visibly pissed at myself because I knew I just ate it and ruined my chances of ever getting my friends and family to believe in me while I spent so much time and effort going after that dumb dream. Then the host comes over after he had to fill time because I bailed so quickly and he’s like “hey it’s your first time, nothing to kill yourself over.”

In that tiny little moment something in my brain went “oh fuck. OH FUCK.” and I realized that what I’d been missing in my writing was a personal connection, something to believe in. I was spitting out horrible jokes about topical tripe that didn’t match up to what was kicking around inside of me. I was so terrified about being relatable and likable that I didn’t stop to think about being honest.

I went home that night and my wife was very consoling and very supporting and I mentioned that I didn’t want to keep doing this old material and she kind of rolled her eyes at me and said “you don’t have old stuff, you’ve only been doing this a few months, all of your stuff is new stuff. You’re not married to any of it. Do what you want.”

I told her about the Nintendo Suicide that night. I told her I thought I could make it funny. I mentioned how once I realized I was doing pull-ups I started to laugh and felt better. She said “exercise is great for helping with depression.” “Can I use that?” I asked. “Use what?” She asked. “That line about exercise?” “Sure, why?” “You found the joke I was looking for.”

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lechased-blog · 8 years

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Quitter: The Beginning

This series of blogs is me trying to make sense of my time in the comedy world.

…

The first time I did an open mic was a week after President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, but I’d been thinking about doing stand-up since I was in fifth grade.

I love people, but I am terrible at talking to them one on one. I get fidgety and bored and my mind starts to wander to other things I’d rather be thinking about. It’s not their fault at all, I’m a weirdo or an introvert or one of those other words that describes a socially awkward dweeb. When I was really young all I wanted to do was read comic books or head off into the woods behind our house by myself and use my imagination to have fun alone.

Problem is, you sort of have to be able to socialize with other human beings if you want to exist. My family is very good at people. They make conversation and friendship look easy and fluid. I make it look like a broken radiator on the side of a dusty road. So, when I was 7 my dad signed me up for little league to get me to meet other kids and also to play baseball because that’s just what little boys did in 1989.

I got hooked on sports the second I heard the crowd of parents and siblings cheer for the first time. It was because I got a shitty little hit that landed me on first base, but the families in the crowd reacted like I just broke Babe Ruth’s homerun record. It was the best god damn feeling in the world.

I realized that for me to be able to function with any kind of certainty or ease in the world I had to put on a kind of act. People at my little league games seemed to love it whenever I’d showboat or goof around after doing something good, so I amped that aspect of it up off the field too. I became that annoying kid desperately trying to be funny and get people to like him, but I was also that overly sensitive kid who once locked himself in the bathroom of his second grade class for 6 hours because people made fun of me for having a crush on a girl named Amy. Hi, Amy, if you ever read this, your friends in second grade were huge assholes and I’m totally over it.

If I was around a group of people I was, in a sense, performing for them and it didn’t matter if it was my parents, my classmates or the congregation at church where I was an altar boy.

It was near constant stress before I even knew what the word meant. I was juggling so many different versions of me in my head I didn’t know who liked this or who liked that and all I really wanted to do was be in my room alone reading comic books because they made sense to me and never made fun of me.

But god damn it did I love game days. Hoooo boy those were the evenings I lived for. There was no act, no performance, it was just a completely unfettered version of me doing whatever it took to get that bump of adrenaline from a good shot and a few claps from the people watching. I was a junkie for the feeling. I needed it. I’d get antsy and nervous and scared leading up to every game, but then the people would show up and the game would get close to starting and my focus would narrow and all that ever mattered to me was making sure I was doing the best I could and helping our team win, because that’s how you got the big cheers. Winning meant louder, more. I had to have it.

The rush would be too much to handle sometimes. I’d have to flee the scene as soon as the game was over. I couldn’t accept any kind of post-game praise because it didn’t matter to me. The game was over. The important thing had happened. Time for comic books and if my dad was in a good mood a secret trip to McDonald’s to get a Big Mac and fries.

To survive in school I had to be an actor. To survive in sports I had to be myself. When I combined both of those things sometime around 5th grade, I probably became the most insufferable young man you’d never want at kids party. I was always doing impersonations and fucking around and making people laugh. That’s when one of my friends’ parents said “you should do stand-up.”

What a terrible mistake that person made.

My wife had heard me talk about doing stand-up for years. I explained I didn’t want to do it because my mom had made it pretty clear that she didn’t want me to do it. She made it clear I wasn’t supposed to do anything but be normal and go to work and not cause anybody trouble like I had during high school and the couple months I went to college. She didn’t get that I felt held back and angry and needed an outlet for all that. I needed the fix I got from sports, because after I stopped playing sports, my life went to shit.

So it goes, as a man once wrote.

When I was 24 my mom passed away after a 2 year fight with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. So it goes.

When I was 26, after a night of drinking bourbon and watching The Comedians of Comedy: The Movie with my wife I started going on and on about how I thought I’d be a very good comedian. She rolled her eyes and said “so go do it.” I rolled my eyes and said “but how?”

The next day she threw a copy of a local paper in my lap and pointed to a listing for open mics. One of them was down the street from our house at a place called The Mez. Katie looked at me and said “If you don’t go to the one next week, the one that is a 2 minute walk from our front steps, I never want to hear you talk about how you’d be good at stand-up again. You don’t know if you don’t try.”

I bought a notebook and started to write terrible, incredibly topical jokes that sounded like a mix between a bad Jon Stewart impression mixed with Zach Galifianakis. Yes, it was actually that bad.

I remember walking in and sighing heavily and happily when I saw they had booze there. I walked right up and bought the strongest beer they had; which was a blueberry something or other that had it’s ABV listed as 8.9%. I remember getting nervous about who was there. They all seemed so much older and wiser than me and acted like they were very important comedy people and I believed that to be true. I combed over my notebook and tried to memorize everything so I didn’t lean on it during my set (which was not a word I knew back then) and then a guy walked in who looked like Andy Warhol.

I couldn’t shake it. He was in my head. I thought I was having a stress based hallucination, but I was just seeing a weird looking dude who was out to enjoy some his friends’ comedy. It wouldn’t leave my mind. “This guy looks just like Andy Warhol,” I said to Katie. “Holy shit,” she said to me. “I gotta say something. I have to.” “Baby, no, stick to your jokes.” “I gotta say something.”

They called my name from the sign-up sheet. I walked up to the staging area, fumbled around with the microphone stand and getting the mic out and trying to look professional, and then the first words out of my mouth as a stand-up comic were:

“This is my first time doing stand-up comedy and I’m performing for Andy Warhol’s ghost.”

The guy keeled over laughing and his friends joined in. The rush of endorphins that entered my brain at that moment have yet to be matched for the sheer amount of joy it brought me. I felt like lights inside my head were turning on one at a time.

I felt like I found out who I was supposed to be.

I was wrong.

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