How to American Read online

  They would always team me up with the girls during sparring exercises because I was the smallest guy in class. What’s the fun in this? I thought. I’d have to take it easy on the girls, but I soon realized that the girls were actually much stronger than I was, and they twisted me up like the kid working at Wetzel’s Pretzel. Once I was paired with a really attractive blond girl. It sounded awesome on paper, but it turned out to be my most embarrassing jujitsu experience yet. Before I could even think about flirting with her, she tucked my head under her shoulders and put me in the familiar guillotine choke. The rest of the class looked on as my face turned blue. I barely managed to tap out before I passed out. Then we’d start again and I’d get caught in another submission. Five minutes into this utter humiliation, things got even worse. I got a boner. This rare physical contact with the opposite sex was more action than I’d gotten in a year. Instead of looking like a pervert with a BDSM fetish, I immediately tapped out before she could notice my boner. I was TKO’d by my own dick. I rushed over and grabbed my gym bag to cover my boner and then sidestepped out of the gym. I never went back ever again.

  The only female contact I’d gotten lately was getting my ass handed to me in jujitsu. I was destined to be unemployed and play Madden with Phil at my dad’s for the rest of my life. And that’s when I googled “local open mics.” When people google “local open mics,” they are one step away from googling “What’s the least painful way to kill myself?” It’s the last frontier before giving up on life.

  My search results led me to the HaHa Cafe Comedy Club in North Hollywood. It was the only legitimate comedy club in LA that had an open mic every night at six before their real shows. The catch was I had to pay five dollars to get five minutes of stage time, only to perform in front of five other open-mic comics who were impatiently waiting their turn. Sounds terrible? It totally was. But as bad as it was, it was still better than wasting my life away. My life was so lame at that point that paying money to embarrass myself at an open mic was somehow an improvement. Almost every comedian I’ve met started doing stand-up after some kind of crisis in his or her life. Sometimes it’s a bad divorce, a bankruptcy or a third DUI arrest. For me, it was getting a boner at jujitsu class. The next day, I drove to the Haha Comedy Club and paid my five dollars to get onstage for the very first time. I wasn’t nervous at all. I mean, what did I have to lose? My dignity? That was left behind on the jujitsu mat.

  So many of my favorite urban comedians and all of my favorite rappers went by stage names: Cedric the Entertainer, Bruce Bruce, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z. I thought I needed my own catchy stage name. So I signed up on my first open mic as “Lowball Jim.” I had seen that name in a Texas hold ’em instruction guide online, where there were two players facing off, Highball Phil and Lowball Jim. I thought it’d be funny to get introduced as a shady-sounding Lowball Jim and this little innocent-looking Asian kid would pop up.

  “Our next comedian, Lowball Jim!”

  I jumped up onstage and got my first chuckles.

  “What’s up, North Hollywood!” I learned that from BET Comicview: always start by shouting the city you’re in. The crowd responded with a few mechanical claps, and by crowd I mean the five other comedians who were waiting their turn to get onstage.

  I then rambled on with five minutes of masturbation jokes, the gold standard for all new comics who haven’t learned the meaning of the word hack. And my closer was yet another masturbation bit:

  “I was jerking off to porn on my computer and watching ESPN at the same time. And right when I was about to finish, Michael Vick scores a touchdown and I turned around to the TV and came. So basically, I jacked off to Michael Vick.” With a few pity chuckles, the legend of Lowball Jim was born.

  All the comedians hung out at the bar after the shows and talked about our sets. Everyone was giving each other tips for their bits; it reminded me of writing rhymes at Chris’s house.

  A fellow open-miker came up to me. “Yo, that Michael Vick bit was funny. Can I give you a tag?”

  I didn’t know what tag meant but, “Sure.” Apparently, tags are additional funny lines tagged after the punch line.

  “At the end of the bit you can say, ‘So now every time Michael Vick scores a touchdown, I cum a little.’”

  I laughed. This was brilliant. I didn’t think anyone would care for the stupid Michael Vick jerk-off joke. But this guy was actually analyzing it and helping me improve on it. I felt like I was welcomed into a secret society of comedians. This new world where jerking off to Michael Vick was considered an art form was exactly what I was looking for.

  Even though stand-up was a one-man sport, it was a community of hilarious people. There were comedians from every background: black, white, Asian, Latino, twenties, fifties, rich, poor, single, divorced, red-blooded Americans and immigrants. Comedy doesn’t care about where you are from; it cares about how funny you are. Comedians are some of the most cynical and judgmental people, but we judge each other on the content of our jokes, not the color of our skin. Martin Luther King would be proud of the stand-up community. As long as you’re funny, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, Nigerian or Chinese, skinny or fat. Funny is funny. Stand-up comedy is one of the only places where all the outsiders truly fit in. It is like a secret society for the disenfranchised. It’s the only place where the weirder you are, the more interesting you become. Stand-up comedy was one of the only places I felt like I truly belonged.

  THE GODFATHER

  When I went back to San Diego to finish my shameful fifth year of college, I went to every comedy club in San Diego in hopes for some stage time, and everyone told me: “If you want to do stand-up in San Diego, you need to talk to Sean Kelly.” Who is this mysterious Sean Kelly character? Is he a comedy club owner? Is he Dave Chappelle’s cousin? Everyone seemed to know him, but nobody wanted to tell me where to find him. I needed to hunt him down if I wanted to be part of the San Diego comedy scene.

  I went home and did some research on Sean Kelly. Through a Google search, I found that Sean was the owner of a public-speaker agency where you could hire anyone from Bill Clinton to Scottie Pippen. I was enamored by all the celebrities I saw on that website. At that point, the only celebrity I knew was Kevin Sorbo. Then I saw Sean was performing at the Comedy Palace in San Diego that weekend, so I went down there and stalked down this mystery man.

  I told the doorman at the Comedy Palace I was a comedian, and he let me right in free of charge. That’s the secret to any comedy club; just say you’re a comedian and they’ll let you right in. And if you say you’re “industry,” meaning an agent or manager, the doorman might actually pay you to come in. Everyone in a comedy club wants to get signed. It’s the training ground for desperate artists.

  I finally got my first glimpse of Sean when the host introduced him. He was an unassuming middle-aged bald white guy who definitely wasn’t Dave Chappelle’s cousin. But he was funny as hell. I waited for him backstage like an excited fangirl at a Justin Bieber concert. Finally, he walked past me and I saw my chance to introduce myself.

  “Hi, Sean. I saw you owned a public-speaker agency. How does that work?”

  And just like a mob boss, Sean said, “Take a seat.” My research paid off. He started dropping some serious knowledge on me. He told me:

  “The speaker agency is a side thing I started. You can make money doing stand-up, but you can make a lot of money being a public speaker. We should all do both. Comedians don’t think about that. We are already great public speakers.”

  Sean was a master businessman. I learned that the Comedy Palace was a Greek restaurant during the day called the Greek Palace. Business was slow at the Greek Palace, so Sean convinced its owner to let him run a comedy show there at night. Eventually, that turned into a full-fledged comedy club with its own staff. Sean told me, “Instead of begging for stage time at other comedy clubs, I started my own comedy club.”

  When other comics were talking about jerking off, Sean was talking about busine
ss plans. Whenever Sean talked, he captured your full, undivided attention. Some people can sell ice to an Eskimo; Sean can sell a Home Depot utility belt to Batman. And his ultimate gift was helping others discover their story.

  “Where are you from?” Sean asked me.

  “I went to high school in LA, but I was born in Hong Kong.”

  “How old were you when you came to LA?”

  “I was thirteen. I couldn’t really speak English yet, so I learned how to speak English by watching BET,” I jokingly told him the truth.

  Sean didn’t laugh, but he took it all in. “That’s what you need to talk about in your stand-up. You have a great story and you have a different point of view. Talk about that in your set. Then once you have all your stories written down, you can even write a book.”

  And here I am, writing that book. I’d never met anyone who had such a high-caliber creative motor within a clever business mind. I hung on to everything Sean said. He became my mentor and my comedy godfather.

  Along with his many talents, Sean was also a licensed auctioneer. He did charity auctions, police impound auctions and storage unit auctions. He’d later use his skills to pitch the reality show Storage Hunters, where he played the auctioneer. To many in the US, Storage Hunters might be the lesser-known version of Storage Wars, but Storage Hunters eventually became one of the biggest reality shows in the UK.

  Sean and his wife, Lori, would eventually move to the UK where strangers stopped him every two steps to take a selfie. Not only was he selling out shows as a comedian, he had made himself a celebrity in the UK. We’ve become family over the years. Lori once asked Sean, “Can we just adopt Jimmy?” And Sean said, “I’m pretty sure Jimmy has real parents. And he’s way past his prime adoption age.”

  FIRST JOB IN SHOW BIZ

  The Comedy Palace became my new hangout. It became my fraternity that I never had at UCSD. We had a hundred new people coming to watch our sets and we drank on the house every night. We even had a waitress that used to work as a stripper at Cheetahs. I mean what more can you ask for in a fraternity?

  I was hanging out at the Comedy Palace so much, they eventually hired me as the doorman. I seated the audience members in exchange for ten minutes of stage time and two hours of minimum wage. It was always a challenge to seat the audience and then try to be a comedian onstage. Everyone in the audience was asking themselves, Hey, isn’t that the kid who just sat us? I guess they just let anybody do stand-up here. I took on the challenge. It was so much sweeter when I made them laugh after they thought I was just a doorman. I got paid fifteen dollars a night as the doorman, but I got paid nothing for my sets as a comedian. I was just happy to get some legitimate stage time that wasn’t an open mic.

  One of my favorite comedians at the Palace was Tarrell Wright. Tarrell was a hilarious black dude from Detroit. His brother Kool-Aid was a famous urban comedian that used to be on BET Comicview. Needless to say, I looked up to him. Tarrell was so funny that nobody really wanted to follow him onstage, so he always went up last at the Comedy Palace shows. He was just as funny offstage as he was onstage. He’d always give me old-school player dating advice that his dad had passed on to him. “If you fuck her mind, you fuck her all the time.” I didn’t even know what that really meant, but it sounded cool as hell.

  Then there was Guam Felix, who’s literally from the US territory of Guam. Imagine if my name was Hong Kong Jim; that would actually sound way more gangster than Lowball Jim. Guam was a forty-year-old veteran comedian who was a former strip club DJ. His goal in life was winning the lottery. He’d preface everything with:

  “When I win the lottery…” But he didn’t even have ambitious goals for if he did win the lottery. He’d always tell me:

  “When I win the lottery, dog, we are all going to HomeTown Buffet.”

  “Guam, you don’t have to win a fifty-million-dollar lottery to go to the HomeTown Buffet, it’s eleven ninety-nine.”

  “Yeah, but we can go there every day!”

  Tarrell once said, “Guam is the ghettoest motherfucker I’ve ever known.” That speaks volumes coming from a guy who grew up in the hood, in Detroit.

  All of the comedians helped out in the club. Every week, we folded envelopes with promotional mailers in the back room of the Comedy Palace. I never minded the extra work; I got to hang out with some of the most hilarious people in the city. We were late on sending the promotional mailers one week and all the comedians stayed up to pull an all-nighter in the back of the Palace. Tarrell, Guam and I along with five other comedians were tediously folding envelopes like a bunch of Chinese sweatshop workers. It was four in the morning and we were trying our best to keep each other awake. Guam asked Tarrell:

  “Hey, T, how many girls have you slept with?”

  Tarrell tried to do some math in his head but quickly gave up. “Phew, I don’t even know.” Either he had amnesia or it was so many he simply lost count. I couldn’t imagine a day where I would lose count of the women I’d slept with. At that time, I could count on one hand; honestly, I could have counted with one finger. Guam continued:

  “I’d guess it’s probably around the same number as me.”

  Tarrell: “Probably. How many for you?”

  Without skipping a beat, Guam answered:

  “One sixty. Half of them were strippers when I DJ’d at the strip club.”

  Holy shit, is that even a possible number? I’d never even talked to a hundred and sixty women, and definitely not eighty strippers! My mind couldn’t comprehend such an astronomical number. What was even more surprising was that this seemed completely normal to everyone else. Nobody flinched or asked any further questions. They just nodded in agreement. Tarrell calmly acquiesced: “Yeah, that sounds about right.” So I kept my mouth shut and acted like everything was normal, while my brain melted with shock and envy.

  Guam then turned to Robert, a shyish comedian on the other side of the table. “Yo, Robert, what about you?” Okay, maybe Guam and Tarrell are just crazy. I’m glad to hear a normal guy like Robert’s perspective. Given that he was forty and fairly handsome, I was guessing eight.

  “Man, I lost count after, like, sixty.”

  What the fuck?! Robert too?!

  Guam casually pressed on: “It’s gotta be over three digits though, right?”

  “Yeah, I think around there, I don’t know. One time a girl came up to me and said, ‘Hey, remember me?’ And I had no idea who she was. Apparently I had sex with her before.”

  Did everyone have sex with a hundred women but me?

  Everyone laughed as Guam reached across the table to give Robert a high-five. I sat there, shell-shocked. For me, the thought of having sex with a hundred women was like thinking about the vastness of the universe; it’s unfathomable for a meager human brain. And just then, Guam pivoted to me.

  “Jimmy, what about you?”

  I looked up at him in a confused panic, like the soldier who was holding his own severed arm in Saving Private Ryan.

  “Me?” I stalled. “Ummm, like…”

  I pretended to count in my head.

  Guam started laughing. “What? Like six?”

  Everyone cracked up.

  Six is six times more than my real number. And they are laughing at that?

  I broke out in a cold sweat. My number was so off, I didn’t even know how to lie. I just nodded and agreed. “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Yo, we gotta get Jimmy laid!” Guam screamed out.

  “Shit, Jimmy don’t even know what pussy is yet,” Tarrell added.

  That night I felt like I needed to crawl under my bed and reevaluate my entire life and have a real heart-to-heart with my penis. I wanted to be cool like Guam. Even though he was dreaming to win the lottery, I looked up to his sexual prowess. Hong Kong Jim wanted to DJ in a strip club just like Guam Felix.

  Stand-up comedy was my first experience with the real world after being institutionalized in school my entire life. What’s normal in the stand-up comed
y world was far from normal in the real world. Going to sleep at three in the morning, waking up at noon and dreaming of becoming a strip club DJ. Even though I knew something was off about this world, I wanted to fit in with my frat brothers. The Comedy Palace was my only escape from my lousy real life, and I was loving every moment in this alternate universe. I’d show up during the day to take reservations on the phone, seat the audience in the evening and then fold envelopes at night. If they had let me sleep there, I’d have fully moved into the Comedy Palace. I even brought my Xbox to the back room. I’d call Tarrell during the afternoon, five hours before the show.

  The boys from the Comedy Palace. Tarrell Wright (left), Guam Felix (right) and Lowball Jim. I looked like an aspiring scumbag.

  “Yo, Tarrell, wanna come get your ass kicked in NBA 2K?”

  “I’ll see you at the club, bitch.”

  Reality always strikes when you’re having too much fun. I was finally finding some meaning to my life at the Comedy Palace, but I soon realized my sixty-dollar weekly paycheck wasn’t paying the bills. I was living way below the poverty line, even for a comedian. I ate instant ramen with a ninety-nine-cent can of Vienna sausages five nights out of the week. I’d save up enough money to go to either Denny’s or pig out at HomeTown Buffet once a month. Maybe Guam was right about trying to win the lottery. I was praying for a car to plow into me so I could get some insurance settlement. My dad was right all along: “Pursuing your dreams is for losers. Doing what you love is how you become homeless.”