If at Birth You Don't Succeed (8 page)

I wish I could tell you more details about this location, but I inherited my sense of direction from Christopher Columbus. All I know is that it was somewhere in the New York City metropolitan area and across from a Starbucks. The only reason I remember this detail is because that's where Andrew and I went to kill the two hours it took them to set up lighting in an intentionally dark bar. Andrew had a peppermint latte; I had a panic attack. Speed dating was a far more terrifying prospect than doing stand-up. This wasn't a mock wedding, this was actual dating, to be mocked later by a television audience. The speed at which I had dated women previously had been a spritely zero to three dates per twenty-six years. I had no suitable explanation for my lack of romantic endeavors, and Andrew had suggested that instead of explaining my lifelong drought, I simply say I was “between girlfriends.”

“Technically it's true,” he said, sucking his latte through a straw. “You're between zero and one girlfriends!”

Now I was about to date seven girls in a row for eight minutes apiece, with explicit instructions to become romantically interested in at least one of them. It was in the script and I had learned over the past few weeks of filming, the best way to make reality television was to follow the script to the letter. But if I couldn't calm my nerves, I'd be approaching these stilted rendezvous with all the charm of a sweaty serial killer. You know, the kind in those
Dateline
murder shows where they say, “On the surface, Zach seemed like a picture-perfect guy. But
something
was off when he was around women. Could it have been enough for him to …
murder
?”

When the lights were finally illuminating that bat cave of a bar, filming took two hours longer than scheduled. Instead of the standard eight minutes, I was given twenty with each prospective soul mate that were later edited to
look
like eight. I was cordial with each of my suitors but clicked with none. We were encouraged to split desserts and share intimate moments with just me, my date, the two camera guys, the sound guy, the director, the comedy producer, the matchmaker, the bar owner, and a very impatient and nervous producer, yelling over at the director, “We gotta hurry it up, guys. This is going on WAY too long.” The camera guys grinned—“Yeah, bitch, get me some more of that Oprah money!”—knowing we were now officially in overtime.

Over the course of my dating spree, I met a woman from Cape Town, South Africa, and another who intrigued me merely because she made her own ice cream. The most awkward encounter was with a girl who broke the ice by declaring, “I like dark Asian horror movies.” I sheepishly responded, “I like brighter things, like little romantic comedies,” which was followed by unimpressed silence. Our conversation was over and we still had to sit there for either six or eighteen minutes, depending on whether we're talking about reality or reality TV. This girl's name, as it turned out, was Caroline. I took this coincidence as an omen that I should expect a similarly cool reception from Carolines, the comedy club.

In the end, I picked a girl named Ella. Our deepest connection was made when I remarked, “Oh, Ella! Like Ella Fitzgerald?” and she replied, “Yeah.” A woman having the same name as a singer I sort of liked seemed as good a reason as any to date someone after a thirteen-hour shoot day. I also liked how Ella seemed to be the person least interested in the television crew: instead of checking her makeup outside and wondering how she was going to look on camera, she went and got a hot dog. As was preordained, I invited Ella to see me perform stand-up the next night, even though, at this point, it was akin to me saying, “Hey, I really like you. Wanna come to my vasectomy tomorrow?”

I was supposed to start writing my comedy routine after speed dating, but it was close to one a.m. by the time I got back to the hotel and we had to shoot interviews in the morning. In all likelihood I'd be performing my entire set for the first time, onstage, with no rehearsal. The next day there was just one break in the schedule, a two-hour window where I could talk through jokes with Eric and draft material. With the pressure bearing down, I sought a muse that had never failed me before: the Olive Garden, this one in the middle of Times Square.

The rest of the crew had abandoned Eric and me at the mere suggestion that we have lunch at the world's best restaurant, and their snobbery had given us the perfect opportunity to focus. We'd been tasked with taking the whirlwind of the previous two days and making something funny but still airable. We came up with a few icebreakers about my wheelchair and built from there. I'd gone on a helicopter ride over Manhattan on the first day, and the pilot had forced everyone to wear life jackets, then took one look at me and said, “Except you. You don't have to.” Why this distinction had been made was a mystery to me, and Eric and I wrote some material explaining that I was in fact a cripple and not a merman. We went on like this, bouncing ideas back and forth while I sipped a Shirley Temple and shoved breadsticks down my throat.

The closer for the act was perhaps the most difficult to pull off because it involved me ranting about speed dating and would be a largely improvised routine. I'd ask if anyone in the crowd had speed dated before and then I'd play out a scene with a random audience member, much like the mock wedding I'd staged ten years earlier. I'd ask her what her name was, and before she could even say “Cynthia” or whatever, I'd cut her off and say, “BOOM! We just dated!” Then I'd explain how the rest of our relationship would go:

“Maybe we realize we both like crochet and that we have the same Michael McDonald album. So we decide to just move in together for a while and give it a shot and see if we're compatible. Then in bed I have to confess to you that I have a belly button fetish, but when we're at Thanksgiving at your parents' house, you get a little tipsy and bring it up, which makes your mom feel awkward, and then I'm on the hook with your parents and we get into a huge argument. But we find out later that night that you're pregnant, and we're not really ready to be parents, but what are we supposed to do? Because you're Catholic and we've gotta have this baby! Then we've got to babyproof the house, we have the kid, and one night you're searching through my browser history and discover I'm into all sorts of weird shit and you kick me out of the house, and then we go into a co-custody scenario and decide that while we're good parents, we're just not that good of a match…” And then I'd pause and say, “And that's just the first two minutes!”

This ending monologue required rhythm and timing that took an amount of practice there wasn't any room for in the schedule. Everyone just expected me to wing it. It would be another three hours before I'd even get a chance to go through the jokes again because now, after only one Shirley Temple refill, I had to go out into Times Square and start inviting people to a show I was 85 percent sure would be a disaster. I even invited a few of the stewardesses from the Broadway production of
Catch Me If You Can
, knowing that they wouldn't be able to make it. I just needed it to
look
like I wanted people to come for the cameras. The only two people that I was actually comforted to know would be in the audience were my best friend Andrew and my old buddy Dave Phillips, who had moved to New York City specifically to do stand-up.

Dave's story was a cautionary tale. When I asked him how much material he'd developed over the two years he'd spent in the city, he said, “About twelve minutes of really solid stuff.” Let's see, twelve minutes from two years of work, and I'm responsible for more than half that after a single lunch? That sounds promising! Even more encouraging, I learned that Dave hadn't performed in almost a year and a half because of a scarring open mic night of his own. The experience was so unsettling to him that he couldn't even think about getting up onstage again. If that happened to me, ALL of America would be watching. Or at least the small portion of America who had the extended basic cable package that included the Oprah Winfrey Network, were able to find the channel, and tuned in at eight o'clock on Monday night, the day after Christmas.
2

With forty-five minutes before showtime, I headed into Carolines. I was humbled when I entered the club and saw the illuminated stage with its colorful background that looked like the kind of argyle sweater a clown might wear. This is the place I'd watched Louis C.K. perform material for his show
Louie
, and the club where Jerry Seinfeld tested out new material for the documentary
Comedian
. It was a stage that had seen thousands of established comics and helped rocket them to stardom. I'm sure thousands more had crashed and burned into a fiery pit, doomed to live out the rest of their days in much safer careers as unfulfilled life insurance salesmen. This is where so many people had finally realized that they were not funny.

As I headed back into the green room, I told myself that if I could get one laugh and not have a nervous breakdown onstage, I'd count the evening as a success. I passed through a hallway lined with black-and-white photographs of the comics I grew up listening to, and hunkered down in the green room with Eric to get one last look at the jokes I'd written earlier that afternoon. He'd printed them out in an absurdly large font in the hopes that if I were to blank or start to cry, I could look down, find my place, and teleprompt my way to being funny. I didn't have the heart to tell Eric that there was no way I'd be reading that text, no matter what point Helvetica he used, because, as it happens, I have not one but two lazy eyes that can dart and drift like pinballs but cannot collaborate well enough to do the simple things like track a line of text across a page or see the world in three dimensions. As I ran through the routine, my leg began to shake uncontrollably and even though I'd gone to the bathroom just twenty minutes earlier, a whole new bucket's worth of piss showed up in my bladder. I could hear the other prospective comedians as they delivered their own muffled sets through the walls. The laughter was sparse and far from encouraging. Then, as I waited in the wings, I heard the worst possible opener for a joke.

“So I was just speed dating recently…”

FUCK!
Was I about to go and deliver the exact same joke? I didn't hear his whole routine, but I picked out a few key words, enough to glean that, in his scenario, one of his dates had asked what he liked to eat, and his charming reply had been, “Pussy.” I could work with this.

Perhaps noticing that there were four huge production-size cameras surrounding him now, the snarky emcee took a kinder and more welcoming tone for my introduction and said, “This is a guy, it's his first time doing stand-up,
3
and he's got his own show on the Oprah channel. Please welcome to the stage … Zach Anner!”

The lights were like high beams. I felt like I was being interrogated by two hundred people for a crime I didn't commit, and in the absence of an airtight alibi, the only way to prove my innocence was to make them laugh. I opened with tried-and-true material—the cripple jokes.

“You may have noticed something different about me and I just wanted to get it out of the way … Yes, I do have a lazy eye.”

People laughed. This is a joke I'd used before in my previous (now expunged) stage performances.

“A lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Zach, we feel bad for you because you're in a wheelchair.' I don't understand why. I don't think these people realize just how comfortable sitting is!” Then, playing to the audience, I said, “You guys know what I'm talking about, right?!”

These weren't the greatest jokes in the world. They were easy laughs, but they served an important purpose—they gave the audience permission to laugh at a disabled man and let them know that nothing was off-limits, we were in this together. From those first two, cheap jokes, the audience was mine. I moved through the set fluidly, almost as though I'd rehearsed it for more than five minutes. I couldn't see a damn thing, but for some reason I remembered all the key beats. It was a minor miracle, but there was still the issue of how to introduce speed dating, a topic that the last guy onstage had just discussed at length.

“I
also
just went speed dating,” I said. “Unfortunately, I didn't eat any pussy with my speed dates. Must have been a different company or something. Gotta get the name of that one!”

The crowd erupted. When the other comic had delivered his punch line, there was little more than mild groans of distaste and scattered chuckles, but when I'd been introduced as “the guy from the Oprah Network” and had still been willing to go there, I earned some major street cred from the crowd. The last hurdle was that final monologue.

Even though I looked confident onstage, adrenaline forced every muscle in my body to tense up, which in turn affected my vocal delivery. When my adrenaline gets pumping, I'm still able to deliver jokes, but in a much shoutier, ShamWow salesman type of way. I don't know if it's an actual physical response, or if my strategy for getting over nerves is to push past them with sheer volume. But after every fifth word or so, I feel as though I need to sit down, take a breather, and have a juice box. When I started in on the closer, talking through the rambling relationship scenario, I could tell that it was falling flat. My energy was already at an eleven, and there was no place to ramp up to. The pace and the randomness required to sell the joke just weren't coming together, but we'd reached the point of no return. By now, I knew how this was going to end—in a sputter.