Reluctant Proletariat 12/04/04

Somehow the alarm clock going off at 5 a.m. is always a horrible revelation to me. It happens every day, but I still wake up as if a newborn blinded by the alien harsh cold of the delivery room. This tragic and endearing naivety fades quickly into the cynical reality of what is happening to me. And, knowing that I am not alone in this morning ritual torture doesn’t help.

I go to work on the train with a bunch of other people who, for the most part, hate their jobs too. Oh, some of them claim they love their position as marketing associate at ACME Corp.. In fact, they may even believe it. Somehow they manage to find finishing the promotion package for the new “line” rewarding; perhaps because, like politicians, they have lived and worked in that vague, spin, double-speak world for so long, they actually believe their own bullshit. They have to, or risk becoming aware of the empty futility of it all, and who am I to judge? But in the metal box propelling us towards the city center, such suspension of disbelief echoes hollow.

Now, as previously stated, I’m a waiter currently (besides my burgeoning comedy career). No, I didn’t play waiter with the other kids when I was little. Nor did I play fireman. I seem to recall playing mad scientist with a chemistry set, but to pursue a career in mad science these days is limited to stem-cell research and bio-weapons production (although I believe nuclear physics has been co-opted into this grouping). In any case, by the time I was a teenager, I had settled into a career as a mad pharmacist, more specifically, Dr. Jekyll, which has lead me here.

It isn’t just that “Work sucks. I wish I was rich.” It’s the quiet desperation most of us seem to accept as status quo. Yes, we have to pay the bills, and homelessness isn’t the bucolic, free-spirited, nomadic existence it appears to be. That myth is quickly overwhelmed by the stench of urine. But, I just can’t settle for this mediocre existence.

I suppose many of us opt to not see the forest for the trees. We do this one task well, take personal pride in it, but don’t step back and look at the giant mindless gear it is a tooth in. People at giant corporations that have fallen into universal disfavor, such as Enron, probably managed to separate their own role from the overall result in this manner. “I filed my paperwork on time every day. I brought donuts on Friday mornings. It’s a shame about the lying, cheating and stealing, but I was a good little worker-bee, and my desk was personalized with endearing knick-knacks.”

We have to do this all the time. If I look at the universe as an infinite conglomeration of energy and mass randomly bumping into itself in an endless chain of action and reaction, I’m gonna have a tough time getting up in the morning. So, I think, “I better get up, so I don’t get fired.”

Who am I to write so knowledgeably about the trials and tribulations of the working class?

Well, in my search for satisfaction in the labor force, I have explored many lines of work. In restaurants, I’ve been a busser, cook and waiter. I’ve picked fruit and avocados in Israel, where I also constructed an automated chicken coup and a gas-proof bomb shelter, sprayed a swamp for mosquitoes, worked at a cannery and as a bartender – all at the age of 17. I’ve worked construction, demolition and water treatment, once wading at the bottom of a raw sewage sludge treatment vat in hip-boots with a squeegee, scraping the snails off the walls, so they didn’t cog the filters.

I was a 1908 Otis Elevator attendant (The elevator was from 1908, not the work schedule) who rose through the ranks to head bellman at a Victorian style hotel. I’ve worked in offices as secretary, marketing writer, on-line futures brokerage computer help desk operator and medical record file clerk, the last being the closest thing to hell on earth I have experienced – yes, worse than the sludge vat. I’ve worked at a discount clothing outlet, putting the clothes nobody puts back on the hangers back on the hangers. I’ve been a golf caddy.

I’ve gotten a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter, photographer and editor; At one small-town newspaper, these were all the same position. I’ve been a Boy Scout camp counselor and a babysitter, pizza delivery driver and Chinese food delivery driver (People are more likely to answer the door naked and stoned to the former.). I was a drug dealer for years, partly to support my habit and partly because my habit made it hard to hold down any other job for long. (This is a bit of a running theme.)

I was web designer and multimedia director for the Chicago Improv Festival for two years, sold tickets at Improv Olympic Theater for one and interned at The Second City Training Center for six months. There were a few paid acting gigs, and I was once offered money for sex but turned it down, a move I regret, as it would make a nice addition to my resume. I had my own lawn-mowing and leaf raking business at age 13 and co-owned and operated a Hawaiian Shave Ice cart in Boulder, Colorado at age 25. I’ve also done some temp work. Well, It’s all been temp work, hasn’t it?

I am a knowledgeable about many things and well-versed in none, but for fuck’s sake, haven’t I done enough?

It’s not that I don’t have a good work ethic. I feel as unproductive and guilt-ridden as the next Puritan on my days off, but can I please not hate my job?


Now, more about the magical dream job that is comedy.

Since writing the previous paragraphs I went down to another part of Brooklyn, Carol Gardens, an affluent neighborhood directly south of Manhattan. I live in Williamsburg, east of Manhattan, an expensive neighborhood filled with people who are not affluent but are pretty sure they can paint. I went to Carol Gardens to perform standup at a bar. I went up after a beat/spoken-word/comedian/poet/actor reciting his work over jazz fusion and before a stripper. And I tanked.

I didn’t tank a little. I tanked a lot. I did the same jokes that killed a week before at a bar one block down the street and have consistently hit at bars around New York, but the crowd that had shown up to see a Burlesque show at the Boudouir Bar wasn’t having it.

Now mind you, this isn’t a strip club, and I’m not Lenny Bruce. It would be easier to spin it that way, and in 40 years, perhaps we can look at it through those rose colored lenses. This is a little bar that fancies itself a French nightclub out of the 1920’s. Burlesque, from my limited understanding involves women stripping out of men’s clothing, or slapstick in your underwear, or World War I era German soldiers in pith spiked helmets sitting in an audience and sipping Liebfraumilch while they pretend to be in on a joke, a joke that is apparently not to be laughed out loud at. I don’t know, but suffice to say it’s goddamned ridiculous. I like eccentric and am somewhat eccentric, but this place is deluded and sad. It’s cute when little kids try to act like adults, but when dumb, uneducated people try to pose as intellectual artists, it’s just pathetic and annoying - though often re-packaged as “kitsch”.

Then, get this. Really, fucking get this. I finish my set and walk off stage to the back, where I hit the stop button on my video camera. I will later be hitting the erase button. I go out and smoke a cigarette and come back in to stare at the floor so I don’t have to become a homosexual, because this could turn me off women forever. Then, when the act ends, the owner comes up to me with some guy who works there, who by-the-way put up a play before this show that we’ve been told is about “freedom”, using burlesque as a metaphor for “freedom” and who has a Bo Derek braid Mohawk and a sparkling sequined sports jacket on. She tells me I need the artist’s permission to videotape. Apparently I’m being accused of videotaping the naked lady.

I’m not sure what’s more offensive, that I’m being called a pervert at a strip show or that the chain-smoking, unhealthy looking 45-year-old woman who just did a poorly realized and overwrought striptease to Joe Cocker’s “Leave Your Hat On” is being called an artist. And let’s face it, while a naked body is nothing to be ashamed of, not every naked body is something to be particularly proud of.

I explain, that I only videotaped my set and stopped the camera after that. I go out and smoke a cigarette. Standing outside is a guy who spent my entire set sitting at the bar talking loudly with his boyfriend. He tells me he missed my set but his friend laughed at one of my jokes. He then proceeds to suggest that perhaps I should leave a little bit more time before my punch-lines, that maybe I’m rushing the joke. From what he caught, it seemed like it, he says.

I stare out down the street, waiting for the bus. I’m not taking the bus home. I don’t ride the buses in New York. It’s not that I have something against busses. I just haven’t figured them out yet. I need a bus though, because I’m going to have to shove this motherfucker in front of it. No bus comes though, so I just nod and walk back in to get my stuff.

Inside the staff are still giving me sidelong glances, obviously still suspicious that I am absconding with a digital recording of this sagging tit trainwreck. The other comic, a good comic, is on stage, fighting the fight. I can see the look in his eyes. As comics, we realize when the battle is lost, but running off stage crying isn’t a good career move, so you just march on, like the Australians at Gallipoli into Turkish gunfire. You switch subject matter a couple times to do a final check that it isn’t just that they’re not fans of subway jokes, perhaps keeping some vague hope in the back of your head that the tide can still turn. But for the most part, you know it’s over. Sometimes, as my friend suffering on stage likely did, you realize it before you even walk on stage.

This is an audience of people who came to see a sex show. They are embarrassed about it. They’re nervous about it. They’re having a hard enough time pretending they know something about the wine they’re drinking, pretending they’re not drinking it too fast, pretending they’re not a combination of disappointed and appalled at a plump girl with a mustache taped to her upper lip slowly removing a stocking from a pasty white calf. They’re not about to call attention to themselves by laughing out loud.

Every time he comes up between acts the poet/host keeps calling the audience “poetry fans”, a categorization none of us is particularly confident about.

I take the F train cuz the G train runs rarely at this hour. This will take me through Manhattan to get back to Brooklyn. One stop before my transfer to the L train, the conductor announces that the train will now run express and takes me two stops passed my stop, so I have to backtrack.

It takes me one-and-a-half hours to get home.

You know, it’s funny. It’s all so fucking funny.

Foie Gras

One month in, and the thrill of the subways and crowds has waned somewhat. I have come to New York to seek fame and fortune, or at least not to have to wait tables anymore. This is the capital of standup comedy, with more clubs, showcases, open-mics, auditions and television opportunities for aspiring comics than any place in the world. Yes, I have heard of L.A., but you have a lot of aspiring actors playing standup comics there. And, I’d rather live here. People in L.A. pretend to be nice. People in New York don’t. If you’re going to be an asshole, at least be honest about it.

I wake up each morning and ride the L-train into Manhattan to wait on the wealthy and powerful at a fancy French bistro. I tell myself that the more I hate this job, the more motivated I will be to rise through the comedy ranks and out of the hair shirt that is the day job. Insert obligatory witticism about “character building”.

We sell a burger for $32. It’s ground sirloin stuffed with braised short-ribs, foie gras and truffles. Three animals had to suffer so these pricks could chortle smugly, play at provincial-everyman and say, “Well I guess I’ll try the burger.”

For those who don’t know, foie gras is fattened goose liver. To produce it, the goose is force-fed with a stick and not allowed to move or exercise until its liver nearly explodes. Then, mercifully, they kill it and soak the liver in brandy. Sometimes I think the fabulously wealthy find it an empowering sense of entitlement to have their food tortured and humiliated before it shows up on their plate. I’m waiting for Mr. Witherby III to request that his salad be slapped and forced to beg for mercy before arriving at the table.

My customers are either arrogant, condescending pricks who think their wealth is testament to their greatness, wealthy Europeans (who fit the above description, but have and accent that makes it seem more aristocratic) or desk-jockey yahoos who want to play Manhattan socialite on the company dollar. There are a few lost tourists and retired elderly couples who have the naïve, un-cultured tendency to treat me with respect and say thank you with sincerity.
Somehow all of the above, with the exception of the last, seem to think that their presence in these ultramodern-hipster-French décor-confines reflects a level of refinement that gives their opinions importance and validity. I show up at tables to hear quick-fix solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, inner-city education and national security.

All this social-consciousness from people eating tortured fowl.

Let me grab a stick and help you with that burger…

I’ve decided to become a vegetarian. “Drugs and meat in the same year?” you say. Well, I’ve been feeling better, and every time my stomach fights an acidic battle with beef or pork, I think, “Why should I be part of the machine that inhumanely mass-tortures animals, screws up the environment and wastes valuable resources while perpetuating malnutrition and a national health problem.” And, frankly I’d rather have coffee after lunch than guilt.

Besides the supermarket in my area of Williamsburg, Brooklyn smells like cat shit, which changes the aura of the meat cooler dramatically. The reason it smells like cat shit is that there is a cat in the supermarket. I gather this is a solution to a rodent problem. Suffice to say I may start fasting soon.

Anyway, New York has enough ethnic variety and generally metropolitan market abundance to make vegetarianism a more viable option than it might be in rural America, where the local Beef, Bait and Guns Emporium is always flush out of tofu - although, I fully expect to find a Whole Foods inside of a Walmart in the near future.

So, I go through the motions at work, and walk out, leaving it behind me, go to the park and look down at the pigeons and squirrels, asserting my position in the social hierarchy…

O.K., hold on.

I’m not really this bitter. I love the pigeons and squirrels. I love the park, and I love waking up in the morning. I love my dog (who I need to walk more). I just hate pretense and dishonesty. I spent 15 years pissing away my potential, on liquor and drugs. I lied to everyone and myself about everything and nothing, and now I want to embrace life, be true to myself and make up for lost time, so if frustrates me to interact with the fake and shallow so intimately all day.
That, and if I write about fluffy clouds and the love energy that flows through all of us, this will quickly become a private diary. And, without an audience, I’m nothing but a lonely tree fighting a losing battle against gravity.

Comedy. The carrot on the stick. The goal. The light at the end of the tunnel. It rounds out the hard edges, makes it bearable… sometimes.

I go up every night I can. I go to open mics. I go to showcases. I bark on the street, promoting shows in exchange for stage time. I suffer through hacks, waiting my turn and fend off hecklers to protect my stage, my moment in the light.

It sounds so romantic when I write it romantically.

There are a lot of comics in New York. There are a lot of terrible comics in New York. There are a lot of terrible comics everywhere, on television, in the movies and at the dinner table. I am required to sit through it, and wait my turn. Most people can stay home and turn the channel to avoid another ironic comment about masturbation. Note: There is nothing ironic about a comic commenting on masturbation, because every hack on the planet talks about masturbation. In fact, for the most part, their entire act is emotional masturbation. Unfortunately, the audience is more likely to be receptive if you emotionally have sex with them. The bar is low, and I spend my evenings tripping over it trying to spin humorous analogies about existential angst, because I’m so friggin’ brilliant…

There’s a compromise involved here. You want to make the audience think and laugh, but you have to play to a certain level, or they’ll just “think” you’re not funny and start talking to their neighbor about sports. I don’t live in a vacuum, so I’m aware of the banal voyeurism that pervades popular culture. The trials and tribulations of eight self-centered, physically attractive twenty-somethings living the “reality” of being the voyeuristic object of the drooling masses is topping the Neilsen Ratings. I’m not going to get a lot of mileage pointing out the hypocrisy of Christian Calvinism… unless I couch it in a joke about MTV.

Fortunately, I realize my own hypocrisy; that I’m not always the sophisticated altruist I like to think I am, that I am weak and human, and that’s how you get ‘em. I’m the victim. I’m the drooling idiot. I’m the bleary-eyed sucker waking up from the propaganda. Now the audience feels it’s okay to look at their own foibles, because I’m standing naked in front of them pointing out mine. I mean, make no mistake about. I know I’m a brilliant martyr who will save the world despite being misunderstood, abused and under-appreciated. But, for ten minutes on stage, I’m the everyman giving voice to thoughts we all have; giving perspective on the absurd, making the pretty girls laugh…

Would you like pommes frites with your burger, sir?