OPEN ON: EXTERIOR, A CHICAGO STREET, FEBRUARY, 1983.
A young me is walking, determinedly, down Wells Street on the Near North Side of Chicago—a lively strip of bars, restaurants, and porn emporiums. The brutal wind whips, cold enough to hurt your face and your feelings. White snow blankets the street, gray slush devouring its edges. I’m twenty and in my fourth year of college. The great maw of my future looms. It looms like a maniac. Enough with the looming! I’ve been writing and performing comedy, mostly on the radio, at Southern Illinois University, with my madcap friend Tim Thomas. And after months—years, really—of cranking out short comic satires and curiosities, I am wondering: How does it work?
“It” being show biz. Hollywood. A career making television, movies, what have you. Seriously, what have you? I’ll take anything. It’s all such a blind guess at this point. It all seems so impossible, knowing what to aim for, what to commit to, where to step next. Nasty gray slush and potholes abound; in fact, forget what I said about white snow blanketing streets. There’s no white to be seen—it’s all gray, all foreboding.
So what was I doing on Wells Street? I’d used my college-radio credentials to get an interview with the great Joyce Sloane. Joyce was the den mother of Second City theatre, in Chicago. She shepherded lives and creative choices at that legendary comedy venue for decades, and she did it with a personal touch—like if your mom ran a theatre, but also if your mom liked theatre and if she merely rolled her eyes at the smell of pot. Joyce would one day give me my big break. Back in 1983, she gave me an hour of her time.
I sat in her office and peppered her with names, asking her to tell me about their paths to greatness: John Belushi, Joe Flaherty, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner. . . . I wanted to hear a story that sounded like something I might duplicate.
“Joe Flaherty? Joe was in Pennsylvania, and he packed himself a sack lunch and got on the bus to Chicago. He came right to the theatre and walked in and said, ‘Give me a chance,’ and we did, and he was wonderful!”
All the stories she told involved the performers’ innate self-confidence and undeniable talent. Success on this renowned Chicago stage seemed to have been a three-step process, at most:
- Enter Second City theatre.
- Ask to be put on the stage.
- Be gifted.
“John Belushi? He showed up to the theatre one day and said, ‘Put me on that stage right now!’ and I said, ‘You get up there, Mister!’ and he was absolutely a riot and just tore the house down!”
“Billy Murray? He was here with his brother Brian, and he was making everyone laugh, and we said, ‘Get on that stage right now, you!’ and he went up there, and we all said, ‘Yay!’ ”
“Wow,” I sputtered, as our time wrapped up. Inside, I was dying, thinking, “Shit. O.K., I can’t do this. I’m just a regular person. I’m not ‘gifted’ or ‘special’ or ‘worthy.’ ” After all, I’d been sitting in her office for an hour already, and no one had said, “You get up on that stage right now, Mister!” I thanked Joyce and tried to keep my chin up as I walked out into the February day that had somehow got even colder, grayer, more Chicago-y than it already was.
I walked down Wells Street, past a cigar store, past Zanies comedy club, with head shots of someone named Jay Leno, a standup comic with a prank oversized chin for yuks. I pondered my fate and the question of how cold a city should be. (Not this cold, I can tell you.) I ducked inside a bookstore because I liked books and there was less wind inside.
I browsed the Theatre section, not that I felt comfortable there—I was years away from feeling comfortable with “the theatre,” or with calling myself an actor without giggling in embarrassment. I thumbed awkwardly through books on something called “improvisation,” which, in my limited understanding, was related to sketch comedy, the thing young me loved most in this world beyond my brothers and sisters (all six of them).
At this point in my life I was in love with all things sketch comedy. And improvisation seemed a way into the world of sketch—a swift way in, by simply learning some exercises. A shortcut! I’d take it. Except I should give up on this whole thing—wasn’t that what the universe had just made abundantly clear?
I leafed through two books: Viola Spolin’s hefty tome “Improvisation for the Theater” and Keith Johnstone’s slimmer, idiosyncratic “Impro.” I was leaning toward the shorter, more soulful of the two when into the store ambled a jabbering mound of clothing with a human being inside. He appeared to be some kind of down-on-his-luck wizard, muttering incantations. And, actually, I would find out, the man was a witch, and he would change the course of my thinking and even my life on that very day.
A witch, ladies and gentlemen. He called himself that with pride!
The woman behind the counter called him Del. “No, Del, that book isn’t in yet.” “Yes, Del, you can use the washroom, but please try to hit the inside of the toilet.” I don’t remember exactly what she said to him, but she kept saying “Del.” Del . . . where did I know that name from? I’d seen it before, maybe twice. In the program for a Second City revue that I’d attended when I was fourteen, six years earlier. Or possibly as one of the final credits on the long scroll at the end of “Saturday Night Live,” where Del Close had briefly worked as an “acting coach.” I did not know what Del Close looked like, and I certainly didn’t know his legendary status as a guru of sketch-comedy performers, because that hadn’t happened yet.
Still, I stepped up to this unkempt, some might say seedy-looking, stranger and said, “Are you Del Close?”
“Yes.”
“Can I interview you?” I asked, waving my tape recorder in the air to show I meant business.
“Well, I just quit Second City, again, yesterday, and I just quit cocaine and heroin and ‘Saturday Night Live,’ too, so, fortuitous timing, this is a good moment to look backward, and forward, and . . . inward.” Then he laughed, which turned into a cough. He was always saying clever things portentously, and coughing. Del was at a juncture and I was, too, and so our junctures junctured.
Our next stop was a bar where Del ordered a Bloody Mary—a blast of nutrition after what he’d been putting in his body the past few years. Then we walked back up the wind tunnel of Wells Street and down an alley to his penurious digs, a smoke-stained one-bedroom, cluttered on the verge of hoarder-level. He talked the whole time. I listened, happily.
This Del Close fella, as I came to learn in his two-and-a-half-hour ramble, was a survivor of nearly every edgy comedy scene from the preceding thirty years: the Compass Players, in St. Louis; the Committee, in San Francisco; and an important decade at Second City, teaching Belushi and Murray and Ramis and everybody good. He was the grand master, the oracle—someday his name and legend would be known far and wide. He was also, by all appearances, in dire straits: out of work, his hobbit-hole apartment cluttered with books, pulverized furniture, rampant ashtrays, and picture this—the octagonal window in the front door lacked a pane of glass. In February, in Chicago.
“It was a jealous husband that broke my window, last year, January 1st, and I’ve left it open as kind of a memorial,” he explained to me (and this dialogue is verbatim, from my tape). “It was the coldest day of the year, twenty-six below zero, and I suddenly didn’t have a front window! So this is balmy compared to twenty-six below! But the cats like it, to get in and out of,” and then he laughed and coughed. As I sat, transfixed, turning down repeated offers of a wizened brown roach, the demon February wind grappled with the gasping radiator heat, and the wind won, and that’s the last you’ll hear from me on the temperature in Chicago in February. You keep bringing it up.
Del was only forty-eight at the time, but he looked much older because of drugs. The usual suspects: caffeine, pot, heroin, cocaine, peyote, LSD, psilocybin. But also—according to Howard Johnson, Del’s biographer—around the time he was in “Dr. Dracula’s Den of Living Nightmares,” a travelling show in the nineteen-fifties, Del would visit antique stores and pick up ancient, expired medicines and swallow whatever was inside the little brown bottles, ingesting random substances from the early nineteen-hundreds. He very likely ate polio. This regimen had left him a physical wreck, but his mind was as sharp and feverish as a college student on shrooms. I couldn’t have been more entertained by his scattershot ramblings if it had been Shakespeare himself spinning a tale. It was funnier than Shakespeare, that’s for sure.
Here’s Del, abridged a bit. I’ve edited out the coughing fits: “And the soberer I got, and the more successful Second City got, the more we all realized that we were just repeating ourselves over there, and so it finally came to a head—Bernie [Sahlins] has directed the last two shows over there. There has been a great—I mean for us, for the public, it’s a trivial little disagreement, for us, a great crisis of artistic vision, and it was mutually decided that, since I was so heavily into experimentation and the use of improvisation to find out more and more about what constitutes a human being, and Second City is more into success and auditioning for television, that I am no longer the director that they need over there.”
On and on. He talked about doing Off Off Broadway, about his sideshow beginnings, about the Compass, about the Committee and trying to create a long form of improvisation he called the Harold (which would ultimately be his greatest artistic legacy). He talked about drugs. He liked talking about drugs, almost as much as he liked doing them.
“I was taking a lot of methedrine in those days!” and “Tim Leary was saying that he’s going to send me some ketamine in the mail. I’ve gotten to know Tim in the last few years, and he says it’s great!”
And he talked about being a witch.
“I had been accused of practicing shamanism for so long—that’s what led me to practice witchcraft. They accuse you of practicing these things, so you figure, I’d better go out and find out how it’s done, and the only way to find out how it’s done is to do it. Shamanic journeys out of the body . . .”
You’d think that some of this might have put me off. Me, a fairly good, suburban Catholic boy. A Boy Scout, no less! Proud of it! I had good times in the Boy Scouts. So what was this witch doing? Putting a spell on me. A spell that drew me in and shook me by the collar and screamed in my face, “YOU CAN DO THIS! THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT!” I trembled in the presence of his galloping mind. This stinky old dude in this cluttered apartment—one entire wall stacked with books, which, he explained, he bought with the excess money he now had after quitting cocaine.
Del had wild gray hair, tangled and oily, and his short-term memory was shot—hence the repeated offerings of tiny, twizzled, turd-brown joints—but his long-term memory was astonishing. He was a gnarled, shaggy Sasquatch of a man, spouting a run-on sentence that Jack Kerouac would struggle to follow, but I loved it so much. And, understand this: it was reassuring. Del’s disconnected monologue made everything I secretly hoped for seem possible. I wanted lots of people and ideas and offbeat things in my life, more than I wanted to play golf or drive a big car or tell people to take their shoes off when they came into my house.
I’m from a very nice place called Naperville, which is what it sounds like: a small town in Illinois named after a determined white man with righteous self-certainty named (no kidding) “Joe Naper.” Nothing against the dude. He got a town named after him—good on ya, Joe. Every morning as I headed off to school, my mother would lean out the door and shout, “Be good!” And basically I still try to do that. Please do not send me ketamine in the mail. I think it’s illegal.
But here’s the thing: I’d never met a person anywhere near Del’s age (he looked sixtysomething to me, but, like I said, he was forty-eight)—anyway, an “old guy”—who talked with excitement about what he’d done in his life and what he was going to do next. Del was burning with inventive energy. He seemed wildly entertained by his own saga, even by his failures, of which there were many. He’d lived an unmoored, precarious, and sometimes genuinely dangerous life. But it was also full of new chapters, surprising moments, and now here he was, an abject wreck, but still in love with the possibility of something amazing happening tonight or next week.
In fact, he was right then planning a show for a club called CrossCurrents that would be his home for the next few years. “Signs and portents in the sky! Eclipses of the moon and fireworks!” he said. “I belong in struggling organizations, I’m just not comfortable with successful operations, and so the show at CrossCurrents is certainly struggling, I mean, it doesn’t even exist yet, it’s going to be a month-long struggle just to get the first half hour out, we’re going to have to figure out how to work together. . . .”
His words, plans, grandiose pronouncements, and hacking coughs continued to pour forth, filling my soul. I stared at his chattering head and thought, If I did everything you did, except for the drugs, I wonder where I might get to? I bet I could afford glass in my windows.
That night it was settled. I was committed. I left college at the end of the semester, three credits shy of a degree, and headed to Chicago to make my way writing, making funny things, and not doing drugs.
Me, in my most elemental form.
Del’s journey to icon status as a trailblazing improv guru was just beginning. He would inspire many, many others in the years to come—including, despite his legendary misogyny, some amazing female comic voices. And all while fighting demons few knew about, though they could be guessed at—self-hatred, frustration, resentment. A lot of hurt feelings inside that guy. As Janet Coleman, author of “The Compass,” a great book on those early years of improvisation in American comedy, told me, “You know what Del did that was truly amazing? He didn’t commit suicide. He figured out other things to do.”
This excerpt is drawn from “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama: A Memoir,” by Bob Odenkirk, out next month from Random House.
No comments:
Post a Comment