Performance, Anxiety

Performance, Anxiety

(Originally published March 28, 2011)

FOUR WEEKS AGO I started taking an improv comedy class Saturdays at noon. When we all went around the circle and introduced ourselves, I said I came to LA to attend USC for screenwriting, and I’d performed standup on and off for six years but recently stopped. Last week a fellow student named Nick asked why.

“I didn’t really enjoy dealing with club bookers and owners," I said. "The business side.”
“That makes sense,” he said.
“I also never liked other comedians. People who are into comedy tend to be pretty irritating.”
“Huh.”
“And I hate being onstage. I hate being in front of people, being the center of attention.”
“Oh.”
“Basically I hated everything except writing jokes.”

I heard myself talking and realized that improv is basically standup but without the part I like. I also realized I was thoroughly alienating Nick, so I added, “But this is fun. I’m enjoying it a lot.”

What was I doing there? I didn’t know, and I didn’t have time to think about it. I had to get to Fresno.

My friend Clem had booked a three-hour solo acoustic show in Fresno, California – 240 miles north of LA – at a wine bar called The Tasting Room. He told me about it a week and a half prior, and spent the whole week and a half trying to talk me out of going. “You really want to drive 240 miles? I have no idea what the place is going to be like. It’s probably going to be nothing. Are you sure?”

Absolutely.

Clem was a year behind me at USC. He arrived for Freshman orientation during Fraternity Rush Week and Quinn introduced him as his “friend from upstate.” I took him to be shy, and tried to make him feel welcome by drinking as much liquor as I could in his presence. I’m not a heavy drinker in “real life” but something compelled me that night to ask strangers near kegs for refills, tell whomever was pouring drinks to “surprise me,” and finish several half-drunk red cups on tables, ledges, or floors. Frat Rush gave us each a strong impression of the other: I was an out-of-control drunk, and Clem was Quinn’s shy friend. So when I heard Clem had a band back home, I had to drive to Albany to see how “Quinn’s shy friend” would pull off playing rockstar for the night.

Various accounts of that show exist, none definitive. Quinn’s is the one I remember best because the reality he inhabits is the most exciting and dangerous. During the end of a cover of Pavement’s “Half a Canyon,” Clem’s picking fingers slipped and he sliced one of them on a guitar string, spraying blood everywhere. (Quinn: “On the guitar, on Clem’s clothes, his face…”) Clem bled and sprayed through several more songs – obscure, non-crowd-pleasing songs like “Half a Canyon” – and gave the audience a polite “thanks for coming” when finished. Truthfully, I don’t remember there being nearly as much blood as Quinn does, but over time my memory will conform to the story, and there will have been “buckets” that soaked “not just Clem, but the entire crowd.” The one thing I did know was that “Quinn’s shy friend” wasn’t. So Fresno was a given. Of course I'd be there.

I left immediately after improv class. It wasn’t a great one. The first class had gone well, the second a little worse, and the third kept the downward trajectory. I remember Clem having taken classes himself and having a love/hate relationship with improv – starting with love, ending with hate – so I was right on schedule.

The drive to Fresno took just over three hours.

When I walked into the Tasting Room, all eyes were on me. All eyes: Clem, the owner, a girl working the bar. It’s rarely a good sign at a concert when a single crowd member feels like an event. But this wasn’t a concert venue, it was a wine store. Clem had co-opted a table and some chairs to support his speakers and an extra guitar, and had moved the rest against a wall in the corner they’d set aside.

“I’m here to see Clem.” I pointed at Clem. “And to taste your wine and cheese.” (There was a big sign on the door about their cheese, and my improv training emboldened me to mention it.) Dave, the owner, shook my hand. He introduced me to Allie, the girl at the bar, who seemed to be in her mid 20s. Both nice. Later, Clem told me he’d made an offhand remark to Dave about “his wife” and Dave said, “Oh, no, no, no. Allie’s my son’s fiancé. But I’m flattered you think I look so young!” I guess Dave did look young; not young enough to make his hypothetical marriage to Allie not weird, but young enough it was weird that his son would be out of middle school. My improv training would've emboldened me to turn this absurdity into shtick.

First, Clem apologized again for telling me about the show at all.
“No, this’ll be fun,” I said. “But do you think there’s time for me to grab dinner before you start?”
Clem handed me a Styrofoam box off his guitar case. “I just bought this next door. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I was.”

There was a large quesadilla inside. I started eating, then felt bad. I didn’t want Allie and Dave to think I was just using them to eat other people’s food and listen to free music, so when Dave walked by I said, “I’d like to try some wine. Could you recommend something?”
“What are you looking for?”
“What goes well with a quesadilla?”
“What?”
“A cheese quesadilla.”
“I’d do a beer, personally. Wine… hmm.” He rubbed his chin.
I studied the quesadilla. “Actually, it’s not a cheese quesadilla. It’s got beef too.”
“A cheese quesadilla with beef…”
“And avocado.”
“A cheese quesadilla with beef and avocado…”
“Also, some pico de gallo. Tomato salsa.”
“A cheese quesadilla—“
“You know, I probably shouldn’t have called it ‘a cheese quesadilla.’ There are a lot of other ingredients, as it turns out.”

Dave brought me a green bottle with a cartoon skeleton doffing its cap: “Dead Nuts,” from “Chronic Cellars” winery. It went well with my "cheese quesadilla." Dave then asked Clem, “Do you want to start?” Clem looked around. Aside from Allie and Dave, there was one older couple browsing the wine racks in back, and me, four feet away, sipping my wine.

“Sure,” Clem said.

Let’s be clear, I didn't write this to tell you how many glasses of wine I drank while Clem played (six) or how much cheese I ate (a full platter) or how many people eventually showed up (close to twenty). The crazy part of the night was what happened after the show, not during. Let's go there now.

* * *

“Hey, great job,” someone called after Clem as we carried his equipment to his car. We put the speakers in his trunk and walked back to The Tasting Room, where that someone – a guy in his 50s with three friends – was standing outside.

“I think we’re gonna stay in Fresno for the night,” Clem said. “What’s there to do around here?”
“Oh, there’s a lot. Fresno’s an exciting place.” (This had to have been sarcastic.)

Clem went inside to thank Allie and Dave, who not only paid him but gave him a complimentary bottle of “Dead Nuts.” We asked Allie the same question, “What’s there to do in Fresno?”
“Lots. Do you guys know about the Tower District?”
“Nope.”
“It’s really cool. If you take a right out of the parking lot, follow it all the way down, take a left on Olive, there’s an area with a lot of theaters and clubs. There’s lights, like Christmas lights, strung from building to building. A lot of gay guys hang out there. My girlfriends go all the time.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll check that out.”
She walked away. I turned to Clem. “I think everyone here thinks we’re gay.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. I drove 240 miles to see you play a show.” (Also, I was wearing a yellow button-up with blue pinstripes. Not "LA outrageous" at all, but definitely “Fresno fabulous.”)
“Yeah… And I guess my guitar strap was pink,” Clem said.
“For the first part of the show, when no one else was there, you sang the songs directly to me as a joke, like you were serenading me.”
“Oh well. Let’s go.”

I left my car in the parking lot and we took Clem’s. The Tower District was a fifteen-minute drive through mostly residential areas. Fresno was dead except for a Target here or a Wal*Mart there, a Best Western or a Days Inn, strip malls of chain stores and restaurants.
“This is the fifth largest city in California,” Clem said.
“It reminds of Irvine.”
“Or Riverside. Actually, Albany, New York.”
“You know when you go into a hotel... I stayed in a Comfort Inn recently, and there was a sign in the elevator that said ‘2500 locations nationwide...’ You wonder where all the locations are. Second-tier shit cities like Fresno, that’s where.”

We finally turned onto Olive and saw the lights hanging for a four block stretch. Two bars on the left, a coffee shop and a tattoo parlor on the right, and finally The Tower Theater. No people, except a few bar patrons and one guy sitting alone reading a book in the coffee shop. We parked. Four teenagers in Dead Kennedys t-shirts and studded belts came and went, walking a tiny dog.

“This place blows.” “Should we just drive back to LA?”
(I didn’t ascribe those quotes to either of us because we felt the same way.)
“Well, if we do want to stay, there’s one thing we could do…” Clem pulled a small pouch from the compartment between our seats. Inside was a pot cookie and a frosted Rice Krispie Treat. I nodded somberly and took the Rice Krispie treat. Clem handed me a bottle of Powerade he’d brought for the road.
“There’s gotta be some strip clubs around here, huh?”
“It’s not like we were going to that bar to talk to real women.”

The closest club had 3.5 stars on Yelp. The GPS directions took us past a shopping mall and over some railroad tracks. Immediately before the tracks was a large aluminum-sided building with a sign that said “Ladies of Seduction. 11:00.”

“If the first place doesn’t work out, there’s always that.”
“Yep.”

The first place didn’t work out. We followed the GPS to a police barricade blocking the entire street – a three-lane highway – with road flares, two cars, and two police officers with arms folded. The GPS “destination dot” was immediately beyond the barricade. There were news vans with camera cranes parked on the corner.

“Maybe we should try that other place.”

I tried to direct Clem to “The Ladies of Seduction” but we kept driving past it. It was off a one-way street with only one entrance, and by the time we saw it we were already over the train tracks heading back toward the crime scene. It took three tries.

“Are we sure this is a strip club?” I asked. Right next to us, three guys exited a pickup truck and one of them said, “Yep!”

Inside, it took a moment for our eyes to adjust. There was artificial fog and disco lights and lots of pool tables for some reason. I couldn’t see a stage, but I did see a short guy standing with a tall women in fishnet stockings. Good. A heavyset lady in a cut-up t-shirt was seated by the door to collect the cover. I got in line. Clem found a huge salad bowl full of condoms. “What is this place? This is crazy.”

When it was our turn, the lady took Clem’s three dollars, tore off a raffle ticket and gave it to him.
“So the show’s at 11:00?” Clem asked.
“Yep. 11:00.”
“What kind of show is it?”
“A drag show.”
“What?”
“A drag show,” she repeated.
“As in, men dressed as women?”
“Yep.”

Clem nodded, then asked where the bathroom was. I had a split second to wonder whether the tall girl I’d been checking out was a man before the lady tore off my ticket too. I went to the bathroom and joined Clem at the adjacent urinal. We started laughing. “What do we now?” Clem asked.
“I guess we could play pool...”
Clem finished first and washed his hands. I washed mine too and followed him out. We found ourselves back in the parking lot.
“What the fuck just happened?”
“I don’t know. Let’s try this again.”

We never did find out what the raffle tickets were for.

The next club on the list was also close by. As I saw the GPS dot approaching, I told Clem to keep his eyes peeled. There was an insurance office, a dentist’s office, and a tutoring company – all dark and closed, because it was now 11:15 PM.
“Pull a U-turn. I think we missed it.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“It said it was just two blocks back.”
“No, there was no strip club there. That was a dentist’s office.”

Clem parked and took back his iPhone. “We gotta get serious.” He Googled “strip clubs Fresno CA” again.
One was the murder site.
One was the drag show.
One was the dentist’s office.
One didn’t have a physical address. By the user reviews, it seemed to be an escort service.
Further down the list, ten miles away, was a place called “Gold Diggers.” What sealed the deal was a review on “The Ultimate Strip Club List” – tuscl.net for short – by a user named “Drifting4tits”:

Clem typed in the directions and off we went!

I’d eaten edible marijuana treats twice before. The first time, I split a brownie with some other people and we walked around Downtown Disneyland at midnight. We started feeling crazy so we stopped at a map kiosk to collect ourselves. One person said we needed to “be cool,” but I said, “We’re probably freaking out for no reason. I bet we don’t look half as strange as we think we do,” as families with children took 90-degree turns out of their way to avoid us.

The second time I didn’t want to get too out of control, so I took just a tiny bite of a cookie. We wound up at Tommy's Burgers for what felt like hours, but was probably twenty minutes. There I proposed a plan to make us all rich: buy ourselves ample life and car insurance and drive off a cliff. Later that night, I got dropped off and stood in my living room doing involuntary tai-chi. I slept, woke up even higher, and spent the entire Sunday losing my mind with one brief interlude: a very challenging trip to Target to pick up spare Brita filters, where I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d get caught and sent to jail forever.

This time, I started feeling my Rice Krispie Treat as we drove past a series of warehouses and dirt fields. A roadhouse-style building emerged on the opposite side of the divided highway.

“GOLD DIGGERS.”

The lot was packed, so Clem parked in a wet ditch. We came to the entrance. “Four dollar cover. No cell phones,” the bouncer said, pointing at a sign behind him. A second, more intimidating bouncer flanked him. We walked back to the car.
“I wonder why no cell phones…” I said.
“If this were a movie premiere where they said ‘no cell phones,’ I would’ve just gone in,” Clem said. “But I don’t want to lie to these people.” We stuffed our phones in Clem’s glove compartment and returned to Gold Diggers.

Everyone inside was wearing black: biker jackets, heavy metal t-shirts, and lots and lots of leather. The guys all looked like Woody Harrelson. There was a big square stage to the left of the entrance with seats all around it, like a boxing ring.

I was growing less lucid, so I stayed next to Clem on our way to the bar. We passed a porn star sitting at a table with a black Sharpie and a stack of glossy posters of herself spread eagle on a lawn, like an author at a book signing.

Clem ordered two Bud Lights. I gave the bartender a twenty, to exchange for ones. While I waited, I looked to our right: a room full of couches, with four topless girls giving lap dances. They didn’t have curtains between them, but they were positioned so the guys wouldn’t see each other, and the moment could remain special and intimate. Maybe something like that would be in the cards, I thought. Then we sat by the stage, and I thought otherwise.

A petite Asian woman with large fake breasts was wrapping her legs around the face of the guy immediately to our right. I whispered to Clem, “I don’t know if I can handle this right now.”
“What? The club?”
“No. This.” I pointed at the dancer, now playing with the guy’s hair. Based on the few times I’ve been very high, I know I lose the ability to get physically aroused. My attention diverts easily to stray thoughts like “life and car insurance scam.” Strip clubs are mind-blowing at a visual and conceptual level but I can’t get turned on. I was paranoid this would draw attention to me, and I’d get in trouble. But when the dancer did come around, she put her head in my lap, gave me a little pinch on the inside of my thigh, then moved on. It didn’t do anything for me, but it didn’t for her either, so it was okay.

A Hispanic guy in his late 20s sat to my left. He’d been watching the girl “go down on me” with rapt attention, whispering, “Yeah… yeah. Nice.” Once she left, he yelled, “Asian pussy, bro!” and gave me a high-five.

The girl went to the back of the stage and changed clothes for another dance. I’d never seen this before; multiple dances from the same girl, the strip club equivalent of a radio “Block Party Weekend.” But Clem and I approved because we got to know the dancers’ personalities.

The next was a blonde with the best body I’d ever seen. (And obviously a terrific personality.) When she got to our corner, a man from outside the stage grabbed her and spun her around. I was scared for her until I realized it was the club photographer, a man of at least 300 pounds wearing a buffalo head hat with furry ear flaps. I guess we weren’t allowed cell phones because he was the only one permitted to take photos. Fine. But without phones, we didn’t know what time it was; though that too may have been part of their plan.

Another girl came out, a short brunette. Pale. A little thicker. “Alternative.” She had a Pedestrian Yield sign tattooed on the inside of her thighs. The image was only complete when her legs were closed, which wasn't often. Clem and I agreed she was the most talented. At one point, she grabbed her legs from behind her knees and “walked” around on the pole on her ass cheeks. Twice. Later, she put her ankles behind her ears and rocked back and forth around the pole. Once.

The audience got weird.

The "Asian pussy bro" had his girlfriend make out with this particular stripper two times during her dance, and some guy in a military jacket kept popping his head in to offer her bills from between his teeth. Meanwhile, the buffalo hat photographer kept snapping.

I needed a break. I went to the bathroom.

I was getting the sensation of “losing frames,” a term coined by some stoner friends from film school to describe how moments of consciousness go missing and catch up later. During my trip to the bathroom, I was standing in line for a stall, then saw two guys peeing, then was back in line. It felt like the multiple perspectives of a Picasso painting. I think what happened was that I checked to see what we were waiting for, then got back in line, but my memory misplaced the in-between moments. When my turn came, I started to pee and got disoriented. I snapped back to attention and saw I was still peeing. It happened twice more. I left the bathroom disturbed. “Watch out for me,” I said to Clem. “I’m afraid someone’s going to get hurt.”

“What?”

I kept envisioning the scene from Memento where Guy Pierce – suffering from short term memory loss – can’t tell if he’s chasing someone or being chased, then hears gunshots and says, “Oh. He’s chasing me.” I figured if I went to the bathroom again and seemed disoriented, some peeing biker would take it as me being gay – because apparently that was the vibe Clem and I were giving off that night – and I’d just start getting punched. Not just in the bathroom; anywhere in the club. If I looked at somebody wrong, there’d be trouble. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to articulate that. I could only express myself in short, cryptic sentences, like “someone’s going to get hurt.”

I became more and more afraid I was making a scene. I hate making a scene. I hate being the center of attention. Everything I’d told Nick from improv was true, and suddenly became very immediate.

The current dancer was doing a private dance for each guy on the opposite side of the stage. Whenever I blinked, she moved from one to the next. All of a sudden, I heard Clem and everyone in the room scream:

“Titty Time!”

He was laughing. I was scared.

“What?!”

He laughed louder. “Are you serious?!”

Yes.

“Titty Time!” He pointed at the stage. The dancer I’d seen skipping frames was now many frames ahead, topless on the pole.

I was now extremely scared. It happened the first time I was high and was happening again: the fear that this altered state of mind would last forever. The first time was worse, because I’d just finished William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and imagined myself as a drugged up, drooling idiot in a mental hospital. This time, the experience I pulled from was an interview on ESPN, where a boy who’d gotten multiple concussions had become completely incapacitated. Sitting beside his parents, the interviewer asked, “Do you think you’ll play football again?” After a long pause, the boy shook his head no, and for some reason everyone laughed.

I imagined myself in his spot:
INTERVIEWER: How’s your life, now that eating marijuana has made you retarded?
ME: …Not …Good.
PARENTS: Hey, he may be retarded, but he’s still our son!
[AUDIENCE LAUGHS. CURTAIN.]

Assuming things would only get worse, I turned to Clem and said, “Clem, I’ve been depressed. For months.”
“You have?”
“I think it’s why I started doing improv. I’m trying anything. I hurt myself back in January. Hurt my neck at the gym. Might have damaged a nerve. I don’t feel as much as I used to. And things haven’t been going well. I haven’t been able to write.”

It was hard to separate how I felt at that moment from what I’d been feeling before, but a few things I knew for sure:

When I got back to LA from New Years, I went right to the gym. Even though I'd taken two weeks off, I didn’t want to fall behind, so I squatted a ton and benched a ton but the pull-up bar was what got me. I tried to give myself momentum by jerking my head toward the ceiling, and a sharp pain shot through me. I spent the next few days in a daze, unable to turn my head. I self-diagnosed it as a “stinger,” a common item on football injury reports, and tried to forget about it. But I didn’t feel right.

During that time, I started work on editing for my movie. The hours were long and strange, and for weeks I didn’t eat or sleep well, and, in the end, the work I did didn’t matter.

I felt no desire to write. The juices weren’t flowing, so I passed the time reading. Then I stopped doing that.

Finally, I’d started taking Claritin because spring allergies were coming on, but I found that Non-drowsy Claritin made me “Non-drowsy” all the time, like when I wanted to sleep. After hours of tossing and turning, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, parched, having frightening dreams, sometimes waking up from one dream into another. Once I dreamed there was a demon’s face resting on my shoulder, and when I forced my eyes open to get out, the face didn’t disappear but merely drifted to the other side of the room.

Maybe it was the Rice Krispie talking, but it had been a rough few months.

I couldn’t tell Clem all this then. I tried to enjoy the show. Certain things – two girls bringing a kiddie pool onstage and pouring pitchers of water on their white t-shirts while rubbing and kissing each other – helped. After another successful trip to the bathroom in which I avoided being the subject of a mistaken hate crime, we left.

Clem wasn’t affected by his cookie the way I was, but we agreed we needed someplace to spend the night. First, we stopped at the Jack in the Box drive thru, where Clem ordered a burger and translated my nonsensical gurgling into words: “…And a ten piece mini churros, please.” We got to a Days Inn. Clem handled the room rental while I stood in the lobby and looked at a huge display rack of brochures for local activities, the whole time thinking, there’s no way there’s that much to do in Fresno.

Once we got to our room, I really lost it. I stuffed the mini churros in my mouth and squirted cinnamon filling all over the carpet. Embarrassed, I staggered to the bathroom for water and toilet paper to rub the stain out, like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I did my best to clean it up. Then I fell onto one of the beds and convulsed for awhile.

“Let’s go to sleep,” Clem said.

I agreed. Maybe I’d be better in the morning.

Miraculously, I was. A little groggy, but no longer insane. It was raining hard and I hadn’t brought a jacket, so I got soaked running to the car. That helped wake me up. A subsequent trip to a waffle restaurant helped too.

The drive home was the final test. It was still raining when Clem dropped me off at my car near the wine shop. The conditions were bad, so he told me to follow him and stay in view to make sure we both got home safe.

But I realized I was fine. Even as the rain got so heavy that everything beyond fifty feet was a white mist. Even as it came down hard enough on I5 that friends back in LA heard about it on the news and were texting me to check in, I was fine. Later, Clem got stuck behind a truck, so I maneuvered around him and got out in front so he could follow me for awhile.

I was fine.

Upon arriving home, I immediately emailed my improv class and proposed, for whomever would take me up on it, an additional practice, once a week, at my apartment. I closed with:

“The bottom line is that I’d like to be less bad at improv as soon as possible.”

Before I’d known things could get bad. Finally, I remembered, they can also get better.