Based on a True Story Read online

  The slam of the car door wakes me, and my dreams fall away as the facts of my life tumble back into my empty head. I’m alone in the car and look out to see that I’m at the edge of the desert, the Godforsaken desert where the snakes go hungry and die eating dirt. I see that Adam Eget is out there pacing around, agitated, a cigarette stuck to his mouth like always, like they must teach everyone to do at AA. And he’s cursing a sky that has no stars, so I ask him what the problem is.

  “This is where Kinison died, Norm.”

  Jesus, if that’s true Adam Eget took a detour off Highway 15 that’s gonna set us back at least an hour. I get out of the Challenger with the intention of giving Adam Eget a good old-fashioned beating, but then I realize, this is sacred ground, after all. I put one knee down in the hard sand, bow my head, and close my eyes. Sam, the last original voice in comedy, silenced forever when a drunk in a pickup hit him head-on. After the crash, Sam got out of the car, walked around, talked to his best friend, Carl LaBove, and then, finally, to God Himself. He had heard something out there that Carl hadn’t, and he seemed at peace with it as he lay down and his spirit rose into the cold desert air. It’s sacred ground, all right.

  “You knew him, Norm.” Adam Eget was kicking the hard sand as if the desert itself was to blame.

  I knew him, all right. When I first started out he was real kind to me. Sam wasn’t famous yet and couldn’t get much work in the States, but Mark Breslin, the fellow who owned all the clubs up in Canada and gave me my start, he wasn’t like a regular club owner. He hired Sam when no one else would, and that’s how I came to know Sam.

  “Did he kill every night, Norm?”

  “No. The fact was, he never killed at all. Mark Breslin had a bonus in Sam’s contract that Sam would get an extra thousand every time he walked a room. But every single person had to leave. I saw Sam do it twice. Boy, those were crazy days, Adam Eget, crazy beautiful days.”

  “Why didn’t he kill?”

  “How do I know? Truth was, it was a mystery, because he could shake a room to its foundations and the folks knew that something was going on, but they’d get up and leave just the same. Maybe folks don’t want anything new; maybe they just want to hear the things they already know. How the hell should I know?”

  “What was he like before he was famous, Norm?”

  “Oh, he was a sight to see. The rest of us, we all dressed in suit jackets and shoes like our dads wore, but Sam’s jacket was a long duster, and he always wore a bandana too. And when he talked, it was a wild shriek, but there was music in it. It put me in mind of a Pentecostal minister I’d seen once who hailed from West Texas and came up through the Ottawa Valley when I was a young boy—a man who handled snakes and talked unafraid. Sam put me in mind of him, and for good reason too. Turned out Sam used to be a preacher himself. Anyway, I was just starting out in comedy at the time, and Sam came through Ottawa and he took a liking to me. So he let me travel with him and open for him all across Canada.”

  “I bet you have good stories about Sam, don’t you, Norm?”

  “Oh, sure. I remember one time we were flying from Toronto to Winnipeg, Sam and I, and before we took off the captain came over the intercom, as is the custom on airplanes. ‘Good morning,’ the captain said. ‘This is your captain, Pat Johnson, and we will be flying—’ and Sam gave out a wild scream: ‘NOOOOOO!!!!! NOT CRASH JOHNSON! NOT CRASH JOHNSON!!!!!!!!! AAAAA­AAAAA­AAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!’ Well, it was about the funniest thing I’d ever heard, the idea that this captain had been in so many accidents that his nickname was Crash. That just busted me up and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Of course, nobody else found it funny at all—it caused quite an alarm—and Sam got himself a good talking-to by the girls that bring you the little drinks, but he didn’t care. He had me laughing hard, which I guess was the only thing he was after. He apologized to the girls, giggling the whole time. You know, that old Sam giggle.”

  “Yeah,” says Adam Eget. “I really wish I’d met him, but it was before my time. There are so many great Kinison stories at the Store. It’s so unfair that guys like Sam have to die so young and a sonofabitch like Nelson Mandela lived to be an old man.”

  “Nelson Mandela wasn’t a sonofabitch. He fought apartheid and they put him in prison for more than twenty years. And when they finally released him and he took power, he never exacted revenge on his enemies. Instead, he exacted forgiveness on them and brought his torn nation together.”

  “I thought he stole some diamonds.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t he steal a bunch of diamonds and then sell them back to the guy he stole them from?”

  “No.”

  “Who am I thinking of, then?”

  “Don’t know. Let’s get back in the car now. It’s cold in the desert.”

  I don’t like it in the middle of the desert late at night. I know this is when the creatures emerge. They spend their days hiding from the merciless sun behind rocks and cactus, and it’s when the sun goes down that they make their living. In the black of night I can hear them, hungry, scrabbling over the rocks. And I look over at Adam Eget but he’s looking down, lost, the way a man looks when there’s nothing but darkness around him and the only thing that will help is a deep, deep swig from a bottle. Of course, Adam Eget lost the bottle five years ago and now he has nothing. It makes me feel bad, sorta.

  “C’mon, Adam Eget, let’s move. We’ll stop at the border, at Whiskey Pete’s, and we’ll eat fried bread and molasses while I tell you the plan. How does that sound to you?”

  “You’ll tell me the plan, Norm? You’ll tell me what this is all about?”

  “Yeah, sure I will. If you want to know it, I’ll tell it to you.”

  “I want to know, Norm. I want to know the plan.”

  That makes me laugh. I don’t dare fall asleep in the car now. Adam Eget looks seriously unnerved, and the highway from L.A. to Vegas is scarred every few miles by black rubber—the last evidence of tumbling, burning cars. But I’m the passenger and my job is to keep the driver relaxed and happy, and that means telling him more stories. Stories from the old days.

  8

  STARTING OUT

  “You got boots?!”

  I suppose I had heard that line from Charlie a hundred times. He never looked up at me, though, so I don’t think he ever saw my face.

  “Yes, sir, I got boots.”

  I’d take a seat with the rest of the boys in the middle of the room and we’d play euchre or hearts—nothing too hard. I was convinced some of the boys, like Billy Saunders, weren’t there for a day’s work at all but just wanted company. I never heard the sound of Billy’s boots hitting the floor when Charlie called out a job for the day. That was all right, though. More work for me.

  I specialized in unskilled labor, and I was good at it. Skilled labor appealed to a different sort. It was for the thinking men. Men who liked to use their heads as much as their bodies. I didn’t like to use my head, but I loved unskilled, manual labor. That kind of work let my mind alone, let it be free. If my job was to shovel and shovel until eight hours had passed, then my body worked on its own. It had no use for my mind. So my mind would take off to a world of imagination. And that’s where stand-up comedy started.

  One morning I sat at the card table with the boys and told them a funny idea that had come to my idle mind as my body had been busy at the jackhammer. It concerned answering machines, and everybody around the table got a big laugh from it. From then on, as I worked I would let my mind flow toward a comic place, committed to making the boys at the card table laugh the next day.

  —

  I was twenty-one in 1984 when Mark Breslin opened Yuk Yuk’s comedy club in Ottawa. I was making $21.20 a day for Charlie, and Mark was offering fifteen dollars a set. A set took about five minutes and you could do two a night if you were lucky, so the decision was pretty easy. And never once did Mark Breslin ask me if I had boots.

  Mark owned branches of Yuk Yuk’s all across Canada, an
d Howie Wagman was, and still is, the manager of the Ottawa club. Howie helped me with the ins and outs of comedy. I’ll never forget my first line on a stand-up stage. “How many of you guys own answering machines?” To this day it remains one of my strongest lines.

  I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is that it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader and life is milk and honey. First off, everyone thinks you are God, so you get to tell them all what to do. Your followers bow down before you and give you all their worldly goods, which can really add up, even with a smallish cult. The best part is you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult, even the married ones. In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it.

  However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following just means that most folks hate your guts.

  9

  MY GREATEST GIG

  “Tell me another story, Norm! Tell me about the greatest gig you ever did.”

  “That’s easy, Adam Eget.”

  A comedian never forgets his greatest gig. But the details slip away with time. And the Devil is in the details and so is God. So I pick up a brand-new syrette and fill it with grains and grains of morphine and puncture the flesh between my middle and ring finger. I give myself a large dose because this memory is long in the past. When the drug hits hard, the present is gone along with the white Challenger, but there’s a red Datsun in its place. It is 1985 and I am a young man who’s done stand-up for only a year and I’m driving to a gig, all by myself. The beautiful opioid allows me to see this all as if it happened yesterday and not ten thousand yesterdays ago.

  —

  I had gotten a gig doing comedy at a hospital, for the patients. It didn’t pay any money, but that’s not why a comic does a gig like that. You take that type of gig just because you want to be a good person and receive eternal life.

  Sonofabitch, the drive was long. Why they built a hospital so damn far away from everybody, I couldn’t figure. It was way out in the middle of northern Ontario, where you have to pray your car doesn’t break down, and if it does, you have to pray you freeze to death before the timberwolves find you. Well, the people who built it must have known what they were doing. After all, they owned a hospital and I was just some guy in a car asking questions to myself. Suddenly, in the middle of nothing, where the infinite nothing of the sky meets the infinite nothing of the snow, I saw something. It was a small square blue sign—a sign indicating a hospital ahead. It may as well have read, LAST CHANCE FOR HEART ATTACK FOR 300 MILES.

  I was getting close and getting nervous too. Maybe it was the barbed wire around the perimeter or maybe it was the armed guards. What kind of hospital was I playing, anyway? I got my answer quick enough, because it was written on a big sign: HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE. My agent had never been big on details.

  It took me a while just to get into the place. First they patted me down and took all my weapons and my drugs. Then they looked up my ass and took those weapons and those drugs as well. But finally they let me go from the outside to the inside.

  “Take me to the warden,” I demanded.

  “This is a hospital, son; there’s no warden.”

  “Fine, then take me to the entertainment director!”

  We walked down a long corridor filled with howls of anguish and high wailing screeches.

  Every cage I passed had a guy in it, and every guy was acting odder than the last. The first guy was scratching his hair real hard even though it was shorn close, like he was trying to scratch inside his head or something, and he just kept saying, “I was at John D. Rockefeller’s funeral.” Then the next guy was just staring at me, stone still, and he had a big smile on his lips but his eyes were cold dead. I started laughing to beat hell.

  “How do you work with these characters all day and not crack up?” I asked the orderly.

  “Oh, you get used to it.”

  “What about the guy with the cold dead eyes standing there?” I asked. “What’d he do to get in here?”

  “Oh, his name’s Fred Henshaw. He took his mother out to the cold northern tundra where the sun never sets and he cut off her eyelids. That way she couldn’t sleep or even shield her eyes from the sun. Then Fred had her wander around, tripping in the snow, falling, getting back up, falling again. Every day Fred would take a hypodermic needle and remove a half a pint of blood from the old lady. After about a week, his mother just lay down on the hard snow. Then he sat down and waited. Waited for the crows to come.”

  “Oh my God, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. What about the guy before him, Mr. Itchyhead—what did he do?”

  “Oh, him? Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  These characters’ shenanigans became less amusing after I heard their backstories. I was starting to get real nervous about the show, thinking that maybe these guys wouldn’t be able to relate to my material. How could they be expected to understand the difference between cats and dogs or the difference between Los Angeles and New York if they didn’t understand the difference between right and wrong?

  I was shown into a room, where I met the entertainment director. “Listen, pal, I wanna do good and all, but I think this is a big mistake. When I heard this was a hospital, I imagined sick people, really sick people, the kind you want nothing to do with. Some of these fellows look healthier than you and me.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll do fine. We had the Gatlin Brothers last week.”

  The Gatlin Brothers? I couldn’t believe my ears. But then the guy showed me the room and it was world class, with steep stadium seating and perfect acoustics. I’d only seen such a fancy venue one time, and that was for a crowd made up of folks who’d never slaughtered a single man. It was like a broken calculator. It just didn’t add up. “How is it these monsters deserve such a fancy venue?”

  “Well, let me explain something, Norm. You see, technically, all these fellows are not guilty. Not guilty by reason of insanity. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Every one of these men has been found not guilty in the eyes of the law.”

  “Oh.”

  Well, that shed a different light on the situation. If these guys weren’t guilty of anything, then they deserved the best show I could give them. I guess I always kinda knew that deep down, but it took the entertainment director to make me realize it.

  Soon showtime arrived and I stood in the wings, peering through the curtains. The room was made to hold about five hundred, but I could see there were only roughly seven people assembled.

  “Where is everybody?”

  The entertainment director shook his head. “I can’t figure it. There’s not a single other form of diversion in this entire hospital for the criminally insane.” And then he looked at me mean, like it was my fault.

  “It’s not my fault,” I said.

  “When we had the Gatlin Brothers last week, we had to turn people away. Criminally insane people. It broke my heart. Well, get out there, you’re on.” And he pushed me toward the stage, really hard.

  I hit the stage to silence. “Good evening, folks. How many of you here own an answering machine?”

  “None of us, that’s how many,” answered one, and the other six grumbled in assent.

  “You got any complaints, Tuesday morning meeting’s the time to bring ’em up, Kowalski, you know that. Now, pipe down and let the man speak,” said a guard.

  “Anyhow,” I continued, “I got one, and they’re more trouble than they’re worth, in many ways. Now, say a man phones you and…” I just couldn’t go on.

  One of the criminally insane men had found his way onto the stage and had begun biting my leg hard, and the guard had begun striking him with the b
usiness end of a baton, but that just caused the criminally insane man to dig his teeth in deeper. I started shrieking, and the audience got a big kick out of that, so the other patients began to wander into the auditorium to see what the commotion was, and by the time they finally shed my leg of the criminally insane man’s teeth, the place was full, with everybody clapping and cheering and biting.

  It was the greatest show I ever had.

  10

  STAR SEARCH

  Star Search was a show where they searched for stars. The show had different categories such as junior dancers, spokespersons, singers, and comedians. Once a year they would do a special International Star Search, where they would gather up a bunch of foreigners and try to make them stars. That’s why they contacted me. I was a foreigner. The good news was, if I won, I’d go from a nobody to a star.

  Sam Kinison had told Dennis Miller about me—told him I was international—and Dennis, who is a very generous man, helped me, as he would many times in my career. Dennis passed my information on to the show’s host, Ed McMahon.

  Ed was famous for sitting beside Johnny Carson and laughing his deep, genuine laugh at all that Johnny uttered. If you’re the best at something, you become a rich man. And Ed McMahon was very rich.

  The show had four judges, one of whom was Robin Leach. The judges would judge you by giving you between one and four stars. These stars would be added together and divided by four, to yield your score. So if you were awarded four stars—that was the perfect score—that meant each of the judges gave you four stars, which I was pretty sure I would receive.