Free If at Birth You Don't Succeed by Zach Anner Page B

Catch Me If You Can , knowing that they wouldn’t be able to make it. I just needed it to look like I wanted people to come for the cameras. The only two people that I was actually comforted to know would be in the audience were my best friend Andrew and my old buddy Dave Phillips, who had moved to New York City specifically to do stand-up.
    Dave’s story was a cautionary tale. When I asked him how much material he’d developed over the two years he’d spent in the city, he said, “About twelve minutes of really solid stuff.” Let’s see, twelve minutes from two years of work, and I’m responsible for more than half that after a single lunch? That sounds promising! Even more encouraging, I learned that Dave hadn’t performed in almost a year and a half because of a scarring open mic night of his own. The experience was so unsettling to him that he couldn’t even think about getting up onstage again. If that happened to me, ALL of America would be watching. Or at least the small portion of America who had the extended basic cable package that included the Oprah Winfrey Network, were able to find the channel, and tuned in at eight o’clock on Monday night, the day after Christmas. 2
    With forty-five minutes before showtime, I headed into Carolines. I was humbled when I entered the club and saw the illuminated stage with its colorful background that looked like the kind of argyle sweater a clown might wear. This is the place I’d watched Louis C.K. perform material for his show Louie , and the club where Jerry Seinfeld tested out new material for the documentary Comedian . It was a stage that had seen thousands of established comics and helped rocket them to stardom. I’m sure thousands more had crashed and burned into a fiery pit, doomed to live out the rest of their days in much safer careers as unfulfilled life insurance salesmen. This is where so many people had finally realized that they were not funny.
    As I headed back into the green room, I told myself that if I could get one laugh and not have a nervous breakdown onstage, I’d count the evening as a success. I passed through a hallway lined with black-and-white photographs of the comics I grew up listening to, and hunkered down in the green room with Eric to get one last look at the jokes I’d written earlier that afternoon. He’d printed them out in an absurdly large font in the hopes that if I were to blank or start to cry, I could look down, find my place, and teleprompt my way to being funny. I didn’t have the heart to tell Eric that there was no way I’d be reading that text, no matter what point Helvetica he used, because, as it happens, I have not one but two lazy eyes that can dart and drift like pinballs but cannot collaborate well enough to do the simple things like track a line of text across a page or see the world in three dimensions. As I ran through the routine, my leg began to shake uncontrollably and even though I’d gone to the bathroom just twenty minutes earlier, a whole new bucket’s worth of piss showed up in my bladder. I could hear the other prospective comedians as they delivered their own muffled sets through the walls. The laughter was sparse and far from encouraging. Then, as I waited in the wings, I heard the worst possible opener for a joke.
    â€œSo I was just speed dating recently…”
    FUCK! Was I about to go and deliver the exact same joke? I didn’t hear his whole routine, but I picked out a few key words, enough to glean that, in his scenario, one of his dates had asked what he liked to eat, and his charming reply had been, “Pussy.” I could work with this.
    Perhaps noticing that there were four huge production-size cameras surrounding him now, the snarky emcee took a kinder and more welcoming tone for my introduction and said, “This is a guy, it’s his first time doing stand-up, 3 and he’s got his own show on the Oprah