Medallion Status Read online

  “Oh, fine!” she said. She looked past me as she spoke. “I’ve spent the past fifteen years of my life standing at the bottom of this driveway, and I have nothing to show for it,” she said. “How could I be better?”

  I didn’t know what to say or how to account for this sudden knifelike candor that cut us both, somehow. Was she confiding in me? Was it because I had earned her trust at some point that I had not noticed? Or was it because I was nothing to her? As I was no longer a regular at the Hotel, she might as well have been talking to a shadow on the wall. Or maybe she was punishing me, and everyone, for believing in the castle of lies in the first place.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  But then a young, famous couple arrived. She smiled and kissed them on their cheeks. “Have fun, kids,” she said. I went in after them. Dinner was fine.

  When I got back to my little fake home there was no one to greet me. I did wash the sheets, of course. As far as I could tell, I had not fouled them in any way, and I felt lucky.

  Before I left, I wrote a note explaining what had happened with the bed and the hangers. I propped it up on a set of cocktail trays I had got them as a gift. You might say, Trays? That is a terrible gift. But they were nice, modern, geometric nesting trays. They were nice enough I felt I had to write on the card, “Please know I bought these for you a long time ago. They are meant to say thank you. Not I am sorry I shat your bed, which is a thing that DID NOT HAPPEN.”

  I think they believed me. They still use the trays, and I still stay with them from time to time. Home is where they have to take you in. I just made up that line because I am a famous poet.

  Chapter Five

  RACKING UP MILES

  During this time I was also racking up MQMs as I flew around the country performing my imitation of stand-up comedy. I never felt comfortable calling myself a stand-up comic, and I don’t think stand-up comics liked me calling myself that either, so I stopped. Stand-up, like acting, is a very special performance skill that I also never trained for. And also, a stand-up’s job is to be funny no matter what. I can tell funny stories onstage, but sometimes I don’t want to be funny, and sometimes I’m just not. I never could find a big closing joke to blow away the house at the end of my act. But dressing up as Ayn Rand and singing “We’re in the Money” with a ukulele covers a lot of sins. I guess technically that makes me a prop comic. In any case, sometimes people bought tickets to see me do this, and so I would fly out to meet them.

  Once I spent a week in Portland, Oregon. Portland is a nice city. Right from the moment you get there, you see how nice it is. The Portland airport is clean and small and manageable. There is a piano in the middle of Concourse D that anyone is welcome to play. When I arrived, it was late at night. A young man in a custodian uniform sat down at the piano and just suddenly started playing beautiful classical music. I don’t know what piece, because I am not a custodian in Portland, but that’s the kind of city it is: one that values art and civic virtue and the hidden talents of its citizens.

  The people of Portland are nice. They all ride bicycles and scooters and make hand signals before they turn. If you go to a rock show, people at the show will not just go to the bar to get a beer. They will form a line, perpendicular to the bar, with great vacant stretches of bar on either side. They wait their turn, one after the other. And the rock show doesn’t happen in an empty crowded basement shoved full of people who are likely to die in a fire. Instead, the rock club looks like a ski lodge, like the Overlook Hotel, with vast woolen carpets, leather banquettes, and a roaring fireplace. And when the show starts, when people in other cities will stand up and move closer to the stage to see the act, a person in Portland will sit down, on a quilted ottoman, with a hot toddy, and that person will get angry at anyone who is not sitting down in the rock club, which is to say everyone else, and that person will grab your jacket, or I should say, my jacket, and tug on it. And then when you turn around, she will literally hiss at you and say, “I can’t fucking see.” So you see, it’s not merely that the people in Portland are nice: they are nicer than you and everyone else in the world, and so they deserve clear fucking sightlines, and you don’t.

  If this happens, do what I did. Just say, “Excuse me. If you would like my attention, just tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me.’ Don’t tug on my jacket. Treat me like I am also a human being. After all, I am from Park Slope, so I also deserve whatever I want at all times.”

  I don’t know why I make fun of Portland. Every joke about Portland is a cliché at this point. And if you want clichés about Portland, Portland is more than happy to offer them for you.

  And the truth is, I had a lovely time there. I did a lovely show. And the audience was great. I made sure everyone could see me. After the show I was amazed to see my old friend Patrick in the audience. Patrick and I had once worked together at a video store when I was in college. I had not seen him since then, and only the week before had mentioned onstage that I missed him. And now here he was. Patrick and I caught up. We talked about the video store and the time the very famous actor came in looking for adult movies. I will tell you about that later. Patrick makes beer and cider and polishes geodes. Portland is a good place for him.

  When I left the next night, I passed that piano again, which really is lovely, and this time, an older man in his seventies was playing some other kind of classical music, as an older woman who I presume was his wife or girlfriend listened. It was the second most magical thing I saw in Portland after the conjuring of Patrick.

  After Portland I went to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is called “The City of Brotherly Love,” which is a lie. Philadelphia is not a nice city. I am allowed to say this because my mother was from there, and I love the city, and I think it feels OK about me. But you can’t be sure. Even Philadelphians will tell you that there is a lot of angry energy there. Even the young oddballs who like my imitation of stand-up comedy get ruinously drunk at my shows and often have to be asked to leave. It’s one of the only places I’ve been openly heckled, and that guy was wearing a Doctor Who scarf.

  Sometimes when you do a show in a city, they will send a car to your hotel for you. I used to like to stay at the Radisson because it was across the street from a twenty-four-hour diner called Little Pete’s. When I arrived this time, I only had a short while before the car was supposed to pick me up, so I threw my bags on the bed and ran across to Little Pete’s to eat scrapple and eggs as quickly as possible.

  Then my driver came. Philadelphia, like Boston, is the sort of city where if you get into a cab or a hired town car and the driver is a white person, he will presume that you are also racist. As my driver steered me to my show at Temple University, he kept trying to let me know, in coded language, that this was a very different part of town. He would say subtle things like, “You have to be careful in this part of town,” and “It’s so dirty here. Why don’t they take care of their own neighborhood?” and “Look at all that trash,” and “The people who live here are not as good as white people.”

  Well. Not that last one.

  “Do you get what I’m trying to say?” he asked.

  I got it. It never occurred to him that I might be offended. Maybe because I look like Hitler, or maybe because I just stared straight ahead and said nothing.

  The students at Temple were amazing. It was probably the most racially mixed crowd I had ever performed for. I worried that my brand of esoteric-privilege comedy, honed for a decade in front of countless audiences of white people in their thirties and forties, might not work in this room. So I did some advance pandering research. I learned that the sports teams at Temple are called the Owls. Their rivals, I also learned, are the Penn State Nittany Lions. I said that I hoped the Owls would devour the Nittany Lions, and then regurgitate them in a compact little bolus of pelt and bones, and they enjoyed that, proving once again that owl biology jokes cross all class and race divides. The students also en
joyed my impersonation of Ayn Rand, but maybe more because I had to get naked in front of them to change into my Ayn Rand dress. Anyway, the show was great and it reminded me: racist cabdrivers are wrong, and you know that even when you’re in the cab and you can say something about it. Or you can just get out of the car and walk the rest of the way. That neighborhood is fine.

  After the show I went to a bar called Dirty Frank’s to meet a bunch of listeners of my podcast. I had just recorded an episode in Portland two days before with a young couple named Drew and Lindy, and now they were here in this very bar. Philadelphia conjured them for me. Drew showed me his Philadelphia Flyers tattoo and I talked about extinct hockey with him. At the bar, no one lined up, and the bartender took her time no matter how much you tipped her, and a young guy accepted a beer I bought him and said, “So what’s it like to be famous, George?” His girlfriend reminded him that my name was John, and he said, “Great. I fucked up the famous guy’s name.”

  And then I went to Little Pete’s by myself at 2 a.m. and ate my second helping of scrapple in five hours. No one talked to me and no one played piano, and I thought this is a nice city. And even though Little Pete’s is closed now, I still think that’s true.

  Here are some other nice cities I visited when I was flying all over the place performing and acting and chasing Medallion Status, and some of the things I learned from them that might be helpful should you visit them.

  AKRON, OHIO

  Akron is called Rubber City because it is the home of Goodyear Tire. They make and house blimps there, but you will not have time to see them. They have a nice modern public library with a stage where you can make all the blimp jokes you want, finally, and the audience will really laugh and get it. Then a guy will start telling you from the audience the difference between an actual blimp and what Goodyear is building now in nearby Suffield, which is a technically a semi-rigid dirigible. You won’t mind this interruption. It’s interesting, and it kills time. If you ask them, the audience will make the sound of a semi-rigid dirigible passing overhead (a sound they have all heard) and the whole room will hum. After the show there is a bar on South Main Street called The Lockview that serves grilled cheese sandwiches and slices of deep-fried pepperoni, which is good. The man who brings you there will tell you about how he used to play in showcases with DEVO back when they were starting out, but now he works at the library.

  BURLINGTON, VERMONT

  If you are backstage at the Higher Ground Ballroom in Burlington, Vermont, you may be asked if you want to meet Mike Gordon. You probably know who Mike Gordon is, but I didn’t. When I said I didn’t know who Mike Gordon was, people got confused and upset. It was like I had denied ever seeing the sun in the sky. It turns out that Mike Gordon is the bassist for the band Phish. People are very passionate about Phish, especially in Burlington, Vermont, which is where Phish was founded.

  Once I was set straight I said, yes, I would be happy to meet Mike Gordon. I was brought to the outer dressing room where Mike Gordon was munching on some catering. I shook his hand, and we tried to make conversation. He’s only a little older than me, and also a dad, and I got the feeling that he wasn’t sure exactly who I was either, or why he was out on a cold weeknight to see me. I didn’t know that he was from Boston and his dad owned the chain of Store 24 convenience stores where I used to buy Moon Knight comics and chocolate milk. I didn’t know he went to Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, just like a fellow clarinetist I knew from my high school chamber music days, Charlotte. I didn’t know Mike Gordon and I shared a birthday.

  I mean I didn’t know these things until today, years later, because I Googled him just now to make sure I had remembered his name correctly. (I hadn’t. I thought it was Phil.) I wish I had known all these things. I could have asked him if it was true, as Charlotte once told me, that all the kids at their school called it “Drinkin’ Drugsbury Reasonably High School.” But still, he was very nice, and I enjoyed meeting him. When you’re in Burlington, and a member of Phish drops by, you have to pay your respects.

  This goes for any town and any member of Phish, or that town’s Phish equivalent. But you don’t have to accept marijuana from the club employee who tells you that everyone refers to him as Captain Weed. Even though it makes him sad, you can politely decline. That time in your life is over now.

  CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA

  The best part about touring is of course meeting the audience after the show. Sometimes they bring you little gifts. Some of these are easy to accept and transport to the next city. They are flat, like zines and comics, or soft and light and packable, like a crocheted hot dog that reads “this is not a sandwich.” Other gifts are heavy or breakable. Sometimes they bring you a bottle of very fancy gin that you do not want. They don’t understand that you are going to get on a plane in five hours, and that you cannot waltz into the airport with a bottle of gin under your arm no matter what your Medallion Status is. Also, they always bring the fancy super-botanical gins you don’t like. They are just being kind, and it’s part of the happy price you pay for being a public figure who talks about gin all the time without specifying a brand. For your reference, Plymouth is great, but Beefeater is also fine.

  But being a middle-aged imitation stand-up comedian on tour is not the same thing as being an attractive musician on tour. The outlier of Captain Weed aside, no one in any of my audiences has ever offered me drugs, for example. Even during the height of my brief, middle-aged fascination with marijuana edibles, people would not take the hint. The hint being me onstage saying, “GIVE ME MARIJUANA PILLS.”

  But after my show at the beautiful Carolina Theatre in Raleigh, something happened. A young man and woman shyly approached me in the lobby. The young woman looked over one shoulder and then the other. She pressed an envelope into my hand. It was suggestively lumpy.

  “This is just a little gift for the road,” she said.

  It was happening! Drugs were happening! My neck got hot. I tried to be cool. “Thank you!” I said as I shoved the envelope deep into my pocket. Then I signed her book and they left.

  I was afraid to take the envelope out of my pocket. I got to the restaurant where my friends David Rees and Phil Morrison were waiting for me, holding a table. David is a cartoonist, TV host, and artisanal pencil sharpener who was performing and traveling with me, and Phil had directed the series of computer ads that made me famous enough to be both an imitation stand-up comedian and imitation actor. They’re both from North Carolina, and they love it there.

  “You guys!” I whisper-screamed as I sat down. “Someone gave me drugs, I think!”

  They were not as excited as I was. I think they were worried about me. I took out the envelope and opened it carefully. Inside there was a very nice letter and no drugs. It was just a bunch of prepackaged lens wipes for my eyeglasses.

  “I thought you could use these on tour,” she wrote.

  I pushed the lens wipes away from me in panic and disgust, as if the envelope had been stuffed with a mummified cat’s paw or something equally inexplicable. How could she have misunderstood what I was asking for? How could I have misunderstood her obviously shifty demeanor? Was she playing a joke on me?

  It would be the same if she had said, “I have a very special cigarette for you. But don’t smoke it here. Take it back to your hotel and then unroll it, and you will see it’s actually a fifty-foot-long microscopic crossword puzzle!” Or: “Come into this back alley and inhale something from this paper bag with me. It contains the dying breath of Thomas Edison!”

  But a gift is a gift. The truth is, I did not need drugs. I certainly needed lens wipes, and I used them for the rest of the tour. And she knew this somehow. Thank you, whoever you are.

  By the way, the restaurant we went to was Lantern in Chapel Hill, and you should go there. It’s wonderful and it stays open late.

  COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA

  In Cocoa Beach, Florida, there is
a hotel that has a whole surf shop in it. If you do not know what a surf shop is, it is a shop in a strip mall on Cocoa Beach that very rarely sells surfing supplies, but mostly sells clothing to cool young kids who want to stop looking cool and instead look like young Guy Fieri, and old dudes who do want to look cool but will settle for looking like weird dad Jason Mraz. I fell into the latter category. Every now and then, usually while traveling, I figure I will try again and see if I look good in electric blue polo shirts or swimming trunks or jeans. It never works, but you have to keep trying.

  When I say this hotel had a surf shop, that is backward. The surf shop had a hotel. The shop was this huge, lofty, warehouse-style retail space, and they had some extra room, so they just took a corner of it and put a Four Points by Sheraton in it. It was as if Costco had built a bed-and-breakfast in a full Victorian mansion in the back, over by the kitty litter pallets.

  Half the rooms in the hotel had windows that looked directly into the surf shop. That was their view. These were mirrored, one-way windows, so I could not see in. But I knew the people behind them could see out, as much as they probably didn’t want to. Behind every window I could picture a person calling down to the front desk.

  “Yes, hi,” they would be saying, “Do you have any other rooms available? Any other rooms in the world? . . . No? I see. Well then, can you please send up a paintbrush and a can of black paint? That’s right. Pitch-black. Because I would rather paint these windows black than look at this surf shop. It is depressing enough to look at the surf shop during the day. But at night, when all I have to look at is the security guy getting high in the flip-flop aisle, it makes me sad. It makes me feel like, between the two of us, he is making the better life choices. Oh, but who am I kidding? I do not know if it is day or night because I live in a surf shop and time has no meaning anymore. So never mind the black paint. I’m just going to smash open the window so I can jump out of it. I would rather plunge to my death than spend another minute here. Tell my family they can look for my body in the decorative tank of moray eels just below me in the Sharkpit Bar and Grille, which is also in the surf shop, next to the Starbucks.”