Near the entryway, there was an official-looking little old man wearing a navy blazer seated at a wooden podium. I walked up to him and proudly announced, “Jim Breuer for the eleven P.M. spot.”
He dragged his index finger down the clipboard, then reached up and adjusted a little banker’s light above the clipboard, looked down the clipboard again, and said, “Nope. Don’t see ya.”
“Hey,” I said, my heart starting to pound faster. “I’m pretty sure that it’s confirmed that I’m on at eleven tonight.”
He pulled out a pair of glasses and went down the clipboard again. He kept flipping pages, putting them back in order, dragging his finger down each page, then flipping them back again. He finally he took a deep breath and let out a sigh.
“Says here you go on at twelve fifteen.”
“Twelve fifteen? ” The place was going to be dead by then. And I wasn’t sure if Eddie would want to hang out that late, then drive all the way back to his house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in the middle of the night.
“Any chance I could go on earlier? ”
“No,” the little old man huffed.
I thanked him and started walking dejectedly into the club when he called out for me again.
“There’s a gentleman waiting at the bar for you.”
It was Eddie. I sat down next to him. We reconnected and checked out
a lot
of comedians. Eddie laughed hard at their stuff, but by the time I went on, there were only four people left in the room to whom I wasn’t related. I am sorry to say that I did not crush at Dangerfield’s. The lack of laughs coming out of Eddie’s mouth confirmed as much. After the set, I walked Eddie to his car. As he got in, he said, “Jim, I gotta level with you. Have you ever given anything like the National Guard a thought? ”
For months afterward, whenever I’d see him, Eddie would laughingly recite jokes by the other comedians from that night at Danger-field’s and then remind me about signing up for the National Guard. He was certain that it was a worthwhile safety net for me. To add insult to injury, two days later, my manager called me into the city and dumped me. He said he was just too busy, and wasn’t ready to manage me yet.
“I can still book shows for you, though,” he said. “And by summertime, who knows what could happen? I might be able to take you on full-time.”
I felt like I was totally screwed. My ego was kicked more than anything else. To me, this validated the opinion of family members like Eddie. Devastated, I took the train back to Phil’s place on Long Island.
I woke up the next morning with Phil nudging me, phone in hand. “It’s your mom,” he said. “Wake up.”
I grabbed the phone. I could tell by the way my mom sang, “Good morning,” she was anxious and excited to learn how my meeting went with my manager.
“Hi, Mom,” I said groggily.
“So how was last night? ” she sang again. “How did it go with your
new manager
? ” She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. And then she started getting choked up. “You said you were going to do it, and you are! I can feel it.”
I had a choice. I could tell my parents I was going back to the drawing board—which would mean Dad would have to go to his friends at the Elks Club and tell them that his son wasn’t going to be a TV star anytime soon—or I could lie to her and spare her feelings.
“Mom,” I said, “it’s going amazing. My manager is really psyched. He’s putting a plan together.” I thought this would buy me more time, but all it did was set off an avalanche of congratulatory follow-up phone calls from my sisters, brothers, and friends, and they all wanted specifics.
Telling more lies and not returning phone calls sank me lower and lower. Phil knew something was up, though, and eventually I confessed to him what had happened. After I came clean with him, he reminded me of all the offers for gigs I’d gotten from the tapes I’d made and sent out on my own. He was right. I’d gotten knocked down, but it was up to me to come back with a vengeance and control my own destiny.
I started booking my own clubs and soon had no problem getting gigs. I began to think that maybe a manager was a distraction more than anything else. I worked out in Phil’s basement, did my shows, and now that my journey was taking a more circuitous path, I figured I finally had time to call Dee back. I told her I’d entered the Make Me Laugh Contest at a bar out in Bohemia, Long Island, and asked if she’d come along. To me, it was a win-win. I’d collect some cash at the contest and hopefully get her to stop calling so much.
She agreed and we decided to meet at a gas station, then ride to the contest together. (Classy, right?) Well, I got to the gas station, parked, and got a bag of corn nuts. And I waited. And waited. Here she was calling me all the time and now that I finally wanted to get together, Dee was MIA. When I’m meeting up with someone before a gig, I can’t stand it when they’re late. I have to work, and if you mess with my schedule it’s disrespectful. You might as well pee on my door-step. So I waited a couple more minutes before saying, “Screw it.” I made it a hundred feet out of the parking lot before my driver’s-side window malfunctioned and slid down into the door. When I stopped and tried to fix it, I realized that I was almost out of gas, so I went back to the gas station. As I filled my tank, this goofball in coveralls came out of the garage and started doing a dance across the parking lot.
“Jimmy Breuer!” He was shouting and smiling. “Jiiimmy Breuer!” As he got closer, I realized it was Charlie, a skinny, high-energy dude I’d met in the theater department at Nassau Community College. Back in school, our thing was impressions from the old
Batman
TV show, so right in the gas station lot he started yelling, “Do King Tut! Do King Tut!”—a villain from the show—then he pretended he was the Riddler.
“Come on in the garage and hang for a while,” he said excitedly.
“Hey, thanks,” I shouted. “But I’m running late, Riddler. I gotta gig to go to.”
“That’s cool, dude,” he said. “Why don’t you just come inside quick so I can write down your phone number? ”
I realized there was no point trying to be on time, so I followed him into his office, then he sat down at his desk and wrote down my number.
And then he looked over my shoulder and asked, “Can I help you?”
I turned and just like in the movies everything went into slow motion, and there she was. This wasn’t the Dee I remembered, the frazzled teenage girl in Florida who would ask me to buy her beer when she cut school. She had a presence. I lost my breath for a second as her eyes twinkled and smiled. It hit me like nothing before in my life. Still in slow motion, I heard a voice inside of me say, “This is my wife.” Not girlfriend. Not someone to date for a while. My wife.
The ride to the club was really awkward. Dee had been calling for a reason, and the attraction was obviously mutual. I remember telling her, “Wow, you really grew up, Dee,” in my astonishment and also in an attempt to strike up a conversation. That night I won the contest. Ripped the place to pieces. On the way home, it was just as awkward in the car. But
good
awkward. We reflected on old friends like Kristen and the whole evening that had just played out. She was blown away by my confidence in the room that night and that made me feel good, because back in Florida she’d always seemed confused by my pursuing comedy as a career choice.
Anyone reading this can say, “Wow, what a coincidence that you’d meet up with Dee in Long Island!” I don’t see it that way. She calls my home out of the blue the day I leave to move to New York. My mom tells her where I am headed. Dee moves from Florida to live near friends in New Jersey. She meets a guy who lives on Long Island, starts dating him, then goes to live on his boat. That falls apart and somehow she calls me and wants to meet. I don’t give it much thought one way or the other, but we set something up. And she’s late. So I leave the gas station, but my car window breaks, so I have to go back there. And at that moment, my old friend Charlie shows up and delays me just long enough so that I actually meet Dee. Sorry, bro. To me this is way, way more than a coincidence.
When I got back to Phil’s basement that night, I sat down on his couch and he said, “How’d it go tonight? ”
“Great,” I said. “I won.”
Phil looked at me with a half scowl. “Are you kidding me? Who is she? ”
“What are you talking about? ” I said, laughing.
“You’ve got this look like cupid nailed you right in the ass, dude.”
“Oh, you mean Dee?” I asked, trying my best to downplay my giddiness. “She’s just a friend.”
“You came up here to do stand-up and get on TV,” Phil reminded me indignantly. “You’re here two weeks and you’re in love.”
For the next month Dee and I were inseparable. We could talk for hours without repeating ourselves, boring each other, or running out of things to say. We’d sit in diners late at night, drinking pots of coffee and talking. I was convinced that Dee was the one, but I was reluctant to make a move for fear of ruining the great friendship we were developing.
Maybe my slowness to act caused Dee to reconsider her feelings or wonder why I hadn’t made a move, because one night, after we’d gone to see
My Cousin Vinny,
we were sitting in my car, and I finally found the courage to kiss her. I leaned in, puckered my lips in anticipation of the big moment, and nothing happened. At the last second, Dee had backed away.
“What’s the matter? ” I asked.
“Nothing,” she whispered, then repositioned herself in her seat, farther away from me.
“Oh man, I can’t believe
that
just happened!” I said. I felt like a fool. I leaned back and looked out the window.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Dee explained, touching my arm. “It’s just that—”
“No,” I said, cutting her off. “You don’t understand. When one person goes in for a kiss, and the other backs away, it’s over!”
“We can still hang out!”
“No way!” I said. “Now it’s forever going to be out there that I’m into you, so it’s not going to work, hanging out as friends.”
We drove to her place in silence. I was confused. She tried calling me for a couple of weeks and I completely shut her down. No calls back. She started leaving pleading messages for me: “Please! I really wanna talk. I need you as a friend.”
I finally agreed to meet her at Friendly’s in Valley Stream, where we’d often get ice cream. In my mind, I’d give her one more chance, and if things got weird, I was out of there. Over a banana split, I laid it all out for her. “Dee,” I said, “ever since we met at the gas station, I felt like we were on the same wavelength. And the signals I was getting were that you were into, you know, being with me, so hanging out as friends is going to be dicey.”
“I know, I know,” she said sheepishly. “I was just scared. Give me some time. I love being around you.”
Deep down, I was sure Dee was into me, and even though it might sap my energy to get jerked around while she figured that out, I had to give it another shot. I was glad I did. After two weeks, she came to her senses and we kissed. We’ve been together ever since.
One night at a diner, we decided to let all of the skeletons out of our closets. My thinking was that if Dee and I were going to be together forever, I wanted her to know everything, to lay it all on the table, because I never wanted anything from my past to come back to haunt me or derail us in the future. Dee offered to go first, which was fine with me. I ordered some apple pie with whipped cream and another coffee and settled in. As Dee spilled the beans about different guys she fooled around with, I got to thinking, “Maybe I’m not gonna put
everything
out there.” See, Dee’s confessions were rated PG. Whereas my confessions were NC-17, involving stuff I decided I should probably sit on, like drugs and things like, well, use your imagination. I was on the road as a young hot comic at the age of twenty-two. I was cocky, with a New York attitude and accent, playing one-nighters in places like Kentucky. Tennessee. Ohio. Alabama. I felt like and acted like a rock star. That’s all I’m gonna say. You figure out the rest.
In the end, I told her my PG stuff and tossed her one risqué confession—taking ’shrooms in the woods—and she didn’t judge me for it.
“I think that’s amazing that you did that,” she said.
Despite not unloading all my baggage on her, the connection I felt with Dee was stronger than I’d ever had with any friend. This sounds corny, but about a month after we kissed, we were sitting on the sofa in her apartment and we both just started sobbing in each other’s arms over the intensity of being in love. Maybe that’s just drama that goes along with being two youngsters in our twenties, but we were both astonished and relieved that we’d found each other. And if that makes me gay, so be it.
At the same time, as Dee and I got closer, her parents were giving me the cold shoulder. They were living in New Jersey now, and when Dee would take me to see them they’d ignore me and ask about her old fiancé.
After getting the freeze-out from Dee’s parents for what seemed like forever, I finally brought it up with them one night over dinner at their house.
“I feel like you guys don’t like me,” I said as casually as I could while ladling some gravy on my roast beef.
“No,” her dad said, scoffing. “No. Come on, Jim.”
But Dee’s mom waved her hand, cutting off Dee’s dad. She offered a different take on the situation. “Well, Jim,” she said softly. “Dee went from being engaged to a man who had a good head for business to going out with a guy who spends most of his time in bars.”
“What? ” I said, letting the ladle crash into the bowl. “A lot of my gigs take place in
clubs.
But I’m not a big drinker, and it’s not like I’m there just hanging out.”
“We know, dear,” she said. “It’s just that—”
“We’re happy together, Mom.” It was now Dee’s turn to interrupt. “Remember, not so long ago, you were the ones telling him to ask me out.”