My roommates are gone. They’re out to their car. I just grab a handful of stuff and a kitchen knife and I’m moving through this fucking apartment complex. We’re the only white guys that live at this apartment complex. It’s all Asian families. They’re all eating dinner and I’m crawling around with this knife looking for my roommates and end up getting into the parking garage. I get to my car, but my roommates’ cars are still there, and I was like, “Fuck, these guys, they haven’t got out. This is my responsibility. I got to go back for them.”
I’m looking for them. We all run into each other, scaring the shit out of each other. We got in the cars and literally left and never went back to that apartment for six months. We were paying rent there. All of our stuff was there, but we were so fucking scared, we just never came back there until we had to move because our lease was up. Even to that day, we were tiptoeing in, in disguise, trying to take things out.
TOM SCHARPLING—COMEDIAN, WRITER, RADIO AND PODCAST HOST
I was at Luna Lounge with my friend, and at that point I was working in a music store. My friend was writing for MTV, writing commercials. And there’s young Marc Maron onstage. I was already feeling not good about where I was in life, and you were telling some story up onstage there, and then you said, “That’s like the difference between someone who works at a music store versus a guy who’s working up at MTV.”
Literally, I was next to my friend, and it was that dynamic. I was like, “Oh, this is not good. I am not in a good place at all. Now people onstage are making fun of the hole I’m in, like using it as a demarcation point where I’m actually at in my life. My friend is literally working at MTV now, writing up there.” That kind of spurred me, I was like, “I have to change things.”
BIG JAY OAKERSON
I wasn’t getting enough work with the strippers, so I asked the boss, “Can you give me a little more?” He says, “Well, by day we send out people to kids’ birthday parties dressed up like characters, like Elmo.” He goes, “Would you want to do that?” I was like, “Sure.”
The costumes were awful. He bought like these generic ones. Not the real characters. It was like a brown Winnie-the-Pooh. The first one I ever did, I was Elmo, but the outfit had no feet coverings so it was just my Nikes sticking out. It was sweltering hot, there’s no AC, and these outfits are like a burlap sack, a costume made out of carpet. Rug art. You know like the hook art? It’s like that. I’m profusely sweating and miserable and the mom kept yelling for me to do the hokeypokey. That’s the only kids’ song she ever heard of. She kept screaming that and called me motherfucker. There were children everywhere. No one cares at all.
The guy gave me a tape of the hokeypokey and a costume and I don’t really know what in the hell I’m supposed to do. I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk. I’m familiar with Elmo. Not super familiar, but I just didn’t know if it was just dancing the whole time or playing with the kids or do I play a game with them. I had no preparation. He just told me, “Go be Elmo for an hour.”
I have a bag and an audiocassette tape.
The moment it started to feel good was like the little girl whose birthday it was, some of those kids were really shy, but she was affectionate. She hugged me and she said, “I love you, Elmo.” I thought she was a pretty cool child. It was pretty neat. I had younger siblings, so I’m good with kids.
Then the punk kids in the neighborhood showed up, fucking destroyed everything that I just built with this little girl. They started telling everybody that I’m not the real Elmo. One kid called out my sneakers, which really stung, because I was like, “Maybe this girl won’t notice I’m wearing Nikes.” He says, “If he’s the real Elmo, why’s he wearing Nikes?” Then he started looking through the mouth. He’s obnoxiously looking right at my face through this little thin screen and then when he realized that I was white he lifted the sleeve of the outfit and screamed, “Elmo’s white!” Like Paul Revere’d it, to the left and to the right. People really stopped what they were doing. Everything was sort of like the record scratching, everyone turning around. Like everyone was shocked that I was white. The kids didn’t like me anymore. It was so weird. I got awkward.
Then the kid goes, “Let’s see if Elmo has nuts.” I lost him in my vision because I had about a six-inch range and I remember my plan was just to start spinning in circles and I would see him, and then I wouldn’t and I’d try to go the other way. I tried to keep him in front of me and he kicked me from behind. He got behind me and fucking put a foot deep in my ball bag.
Because it was so hot I wasn’t wearing pants. I just wore my underwear underneath. It was the most flush shot I’ve ever taken. I went down. The mom just kept yelling at me to get up and it was hell. I felt that the stripper things were going to be the worst, but I’ve been equally scared at those kids’ parties.
LOUIS CK—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR
In the late 1980s, you could do ten sets a night at all the comedy clubs and they were fifty bucks each. I had a motorcycle then. A Honda Super Sport 750. I used to go on the FDR Drive doing literally a hundred miles an hour so I could get to shows quicker. I’d do two shows at the Boston Comedy Club in the Village, one at The Cellar, two at The Village Gate, and then I’d run screaming uptown to do Catch a Rising Star and The Comic Strip. We’d get fifty bucks a show. Pockets full of cash.
I remember one night I had done ten shows and I was like twenty-three years old. I parked my bike at my garage in the Village and my pockets were bulging with cash that I had made. You know, fifty bucks a show, ten shows. That’s five hundred dollars. Five hundred bucks for a night’s work, twenty-three years old. Then I’m walking to my Bleeker Street Village apartment.
I thought, “I have the greatest life in the world. I don’t even care if I don’t become famous or anything. This is the balls. I have the world by the fucking balls.” I had that thought that night.
The next night I was going down Second Avenue doing about seventy miles an hour and a car went through a red light going perpendicular. I never even touched my brakes. I just plowed right into this car. I flew over the car. I lost my sight, but I was still cognizant. The bike was in pieces. My sight came back and the bike was in pieces in front of me. I heard a woman scream. It was a nightmare. I got strapped to a board and taken to a hospital. After lots of CAT scans and tests and shit this doctor came to me in a hallway. He said, “You’re fine. You’re stupid, don’t ride motorcycles anymore, but you’re fine. Take it easy for a while.”