The Todd Glass Situation (6 page)

Having
friends made high school a lot more fun, but it wasn't like I was suddenly going to become a better student. When (big surprise) I failed tenth grade, I seriously considered dropping out. By then it was clear to everyone around me (and, most importantly, me) that college wasn't an option. We would have had to move to Mongolia to get away from my school record.

I probably would have quit out of sheer embarrassment if one of my teachers, Mr. Smedley, hadn't felt sorry enough for me to let me walk into assembly room with my eleventh-grade friends, allowing me to hold on to some small shred of dignity before heading off to repeat the same lessons that I still wouldn't be able to retain.

But my school days were coming to an end. What the hell was I going to do?

Fortunately, I had a dream: I wanted to be a landscaper like Comar.

Comar ran his own landscaping business, but he never seemed to have to do any of the backbreaking labor that should have come with the job. He'd pull up to a site in his $45,000 pickup truck, climbing out to survey the scene like a king stepping out of a royal carriage. His perfectly pressed shirt was always tucked neatly into his immaculately spotless pants. The few times I saw Comar pick up a hose, there were three guys standing behind him to make sure it didn't get knotted or caught on anything that might have required the boss to overexert himself.

I wanted to be Comar. In the meantime, however, I had to settle for an after-school job at Dairy Queen in the Plymouth Meeting Mall. I loved that job. I was great at it, at least from the perspective of the customers. I made sure that people got as much ice cream as I could fit into whatever size they ordered—I'd stuff a small so full that it'd be larger than a medium. It brought me a lot of joy to bring that kind of happiness to others.

The feelings of joy didn't extend to the owners, who more than once had warned me to weigh the portions like everyone else did. But I knew I was doing important work. I wore a clean, pressed shirt to work every day, tucked neatly into my pants, and occasionally lied to customers about being the owner's son. Unlike the other sixteen-year-old slobs working for minimum wage, I showed up an hour early to work to bring the place up to my personal (and arguably insane) standards. I stopped serving
milkshakes—man, what a mess—a half hour before closing; fifteen minutes later I'd put all the chairs up on the tables to encourage the last customers of the day to take their orders to go.

I wasn't sure that the owners would fully appreciate the extra effort it took to close early, so I doled out free ice cream to the mall's security guards to buy their silence. Their loyalty was put to the test when, twenty minutes before closing time, I refused to serve a milkshake to Angie, a forty-year-old who still worked at the Piercing Pagoda kiosk, and she ratted me out to my bosses.

The security guards came through for me, denying any knowledge of early closures, and the owners were happy to let it go. Not so much me—I didn't want to do any damage that would be permanent, but I definitely had to teach Angie a lesson in the dynamics of power. I should explain that the Piercing Pagoda, being a kiosk, didn't have its own bathroom, and I occasionally saved Angie the humiliation of using the public restrooms by letting her use our private toilet at the Dairy Queen. But that was before she decided to double-cross me. The next time she ordered a milkshake, I added three doses of Ex-Lax.

Let me tell you, when you're sixteen, there aren't many things in life as pleasurable as watching a full-grown adult who really has to take a shit. The few minutes I watched her squirm were pure enjoyment. I never found out what happened next, because I closed early and went home.

There was a bar next door to the Dairy Queen where musicians would occasionally play. For some reason—possibly because I was a sixteen-year-old who looked thirty—no one seemed to mind when I'd wander up to the stage after work, grab the mike, and break into my Rodney routine.

I was just goofing off. While I knew there were famous comedians, I didn't have any idea that “stand-up comedy” could be an actual job until the night I got a call from my old friend and neighbor Albert Nalibotsky, inviting me to check out a club he'd recently discovered.

Comedy
Works was on the third floor of a three-story walk-up, above a Middle Eastern restaurant on Chestnut Street. The stairs opened into a long, narrow room that held around three hundred people. A few minutes after Albert and I sat down, the room went dark. “Before we start tonight's show,” a voice announced over the PA system, “if there's a Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer in the audience tonight, a Mr. and Mrs. Schleinheffer, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher. Other than that, everything's okay. Five minutes to showtime . . .”

I laughed at that goddamn announcement for a month.

But that was just the beginning. The owner of the club, a guy named Steve Young, kicked off what was for me about to
become a familiar routine. He introduced the master of ceremonies—the emcee—usually a local comic just starting to work the clubs. The emcee did a few minutes of comedy before introducing the middle act, who tonight was the Legendary Wid, famous for using 250 props during his show. It was total mayhem—by the end of his act there were piles of one-off props everywhere. It was too huge a mess to clean up right away, so management threw a couple of blankets over the props so the headliner could begin—a rising twenty-year-old named Tom Wilson, who a few years later would play “Biff” in
Back to the Future.

To say that the night left an impression on me would be an understatement. I felt so exhilarated I couldn't contain it. I went back the following Friday. This time, Gilbert Gottfried was the headliner. His act was kind of a riff on comedic conventions, making fun of the generic routines that some stand-ups do. I felt like most of the audience didn't get it, but I did. I laughed so hard I almost hyperventilated.

I wasn't just hooked—I became obsessed with Comedy Works. I'd start talking about it every Monday morning at school: “Who wants to go to the Comedy Works? Who wants to go to the Comedy Works?”

Keep in mind that this was 1981. Comedy clubs were something that happened in New York or L.A. I couldn't believe that a place like this existed in Philadelphia. For five dollars, I got to see young, relatively unknown comics like Eddie Murphy, Steven Wright, Richard Lewis, Roseanne Barr, and Tim Allen, not to mention up-and-coming stars like Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, and Jerry Seinfeld.

I wanted to be in the front row at the first show every Friday night. After school I'd grab any friends I could find and
barrel eighty miles an hour down the Schuylkill Expressway to beat the traffic. If, after the first show ended, I happened to run into some more friends who were on line for the late show, I would shell out another five dollars to join them. One night, Steve Young pulled me aside—he'd noticed me moving back in line for a second show and let me in for free. I couldn't believe that the club's owner knew who I was. I was so happy that I nearly had a nervous breakdown.

At almost every show, Steve would make an announcement: “Hey, if you think you're funny, Wednesday night is our open mike night. Why not try your hand at comedy?” After about five months of weekly visits to the club, I decided I was ready. I dragged all my friends to the show . . .

 . . . and chickened out.

A week later, I got up the nerve to try again. This time I made it onto the stage. “I hate how they put the car horn so close to the windshield wipers,” I said. “You go to honk at someone and you end up washing your windshield. It would be scarier to throw yarn out your window.”

I may have been a sixteen-year-old spraying whipped cream at my brothers in the crowd and telling jokes about
The Brady Bunch
, but on that night, I killed.

Flush with success I decided to go back for more a week later. This time I invited everyone I could—and I bombed. I've talked to plenty of other comedians who have had the same experience, acing their first time onstage and flailing the next. I don't know why it happens—maybe your first time out, you have a certain sense of vulnerability that the audience can sense. Succeed, and some of that vulnerability is gone, making the laughs harder to come by.

But if you're meant to do comedy nothing will stop you. Comedy is like sex: treacherous. You have to hang out with people you normally wouldn't, doing things that take you out of your comfort zone hoping to impress them. Getting naked with strangers? If it wasn't for our built-in desire for procreation, I bet most people wouldn't dare going after sex. But that natural drive keeps us coming back for more.

I knew right away that I had a natural drive to do comedy. Bombing my second time out wasn't going to keep me away. After the show, another comic took me aside. “You were funny,” he assured me. “You've just got to calm down a bit.”

A few seconds after he walked away, the Legendary Wid—the man with 250 props—patted me on the back. “You don't have to calm down,” he said. “Just be who you are.”

I
was back on the Comedy Works stage just about every Wednesday night. High school became even blurrier—on the Thursday mornings I actually showed up, I got really good at forging my dad's signature on late slips. And by then I was already counting the hours to the next show on Friday night.

I was hanging around the club so often that Steve Young decided to put me to work. I did everything, from lights to sound to keeping the flow of traffic moving up and down the narrow staircase. Steve also let me use the PA to announce that the show was about to begin. One night I decided to try my hand at a joke, the same one that had cracked me up the first night I'd visited the club.

“If there's a Mr. and Mrs. Burke in the audience, a Mr. and
Mrs. Burke, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher.”

Suddenly I heard a woman's scream and a commotion in the audience as a terrified couple rushed for the door. It turns out the joke plays a lot better when you use a more obscure last name.

“I think you're funny,” the doorman, Tony Molino, told me one night after I finished my open-mike set. “You're going to get a weekend spot soon.”

That was nice of him to say, but getting a paid weekend spot was such a big deal back then that I remember thinking I wished he knew what the fuck he was talking about.

As it turned out, he did.

One afternoon, everyone was buzzing because Jay Leno was coming to Comedy Works. I'd grown up watching Jay do stand-up on
Merv Griffin
and
The John Davidson Show
. While he was still a few years away from subbing for Johnny Carson, there was no doubt that he was a legitimate star and that his show was a big deal, even for Comedy Works—tickets were selling for fifteen dollars instead of the usual five.

He was coming to Philadelphia from a club in New Jersey and someone had to go pick him up. I nearly shat in my pants when Steve asked me to do it. I borrowed my parents' station wagon and brought along two of my friends for moral support. “Whatever you do,” I hissed, “don't ask any stupid questions.”

Jay was friendly, but I was still incredibly nervous to have him in my car. I wanted to talk to him—about performing, about life, about anything—but I was seventeen and I was nervous and my mind went blank. The only thing I could think of was a piece of trivia I'd heard at the club: Jay always got paid in cash. “So hey,” I asked him. “What do you do with your money?”

“What, are you looking for financial advice?” Jay replied.

“No,” I tried to explain. “I mean where do you keep it? I heard you only got paid in cash.”

My friends in the backseat started cracking up. Jay looked puzzled, wondering why we were laughing at him. I sighed and explained that I'd made my friends promise not to ask him any stupid questions.

Jay gave me a crooked smile. “Well, I guess you lowered the bar for them. So where's Steve Young? Will he be at the club?”

I explained to Jay that Steve taught a stand-up comedy class at Temple University. Jay's face lit up. “Take me there. Right now.”

I strolled across campus with Jay. Everyone seemed to be staring at us. I didn't do a very good job of hiding my smile.

We got to Steve's class, where his students were taking their final exam. These kids must have been nervous enough having to do a five-minute set in front of their classmates—I can only imagine how much terror they must have felt when Jay Leno walked into the room. But Jay was incredibly supportive. He even bought a joke right on the spot from one of the girls in the class. (Which, thirty years later, I can still remember: “I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I tried it. I can't believe it's not car wax!” Maybe not that funny now, but back then it was very topical.)

When I got back home, after dropping Jay off at his hotel, there was a message from Steve on the answering machine. “Call me,” he said in a very low voice. “I might have something that would be fun for you to do tonight.”

I called him back immediately. “So how would you like to open up for Jay Leno?” Steve asked.

“Tonight?” My stomach started doing somersaults.

“All the shows . . . the whole weekend.”

I hung up the phone and did my best to contain my emotions. This was a big deal, a kind of validation I'd never experienced before. I sucked in school and I never scored a touchdown. But now I was not only doing something important to me, I was succeeding at it. Someone thought I was good enough to open for Jay-fucking-Leno!