I've been from St. Paul to San Diego to lovely Pasadena in just 2 short days. I am a jet setter. Within half a day, if you had the money you could be in Ireland drinking tea with some brown bread with that good Irish butter slabbed all over it. We live in a mobile age. We are constantly on the go.
That is of course unless your fuel pump goes, then your just screwed.
I woke up at 5:30 this morning so I could drive to Pasadena and audition for the Las Vegas Comedy festival at the Ice House Comedy Club. The night before I looked up the directions to the Ice House using Yahoo Maps. The fine people at Yahoo promised me an hour and 40-minute trek up a few freeways. Easy Peasy. Like taking candy from a baby. New Math kind of easy. The damn LIARS! Four hours and losing 3 quarts of liquid from sweating in the awesome 100 degree weather I arrived at the Pasadena Ice House. At first glance, the club looked closed. The blinds where closed and no comedians were hanging outside smoking and seeking attention from each other. I was just about to have a brain aneurism when I noticed the sign that said the entrance was in the back. Thank you sweet kind and merciful God.
It was dark and had air conditioning and the smell of desperate comedians filled the air. I filled out the forms that say I won't sue if I die on stage and was told I was on in 5 minutes. So much for taking my time to relax and go over my set. The comic who went on before me had been hot by a drunk driver years ago and only recently was out of his wheelchair. He was funny but hard to understand. I guess that is better than not being funny and really easy to understand. After he was done my name was called and I took the stage. Spotlights are particularly brighter at 10 in the morning than 10 in the evening. I looked out for a smiling face, a glimmer of hope and I saw one in a judge. I wished that we had gone to high school together and one day after school I had saved her life from a wild pack of dogs. Maybe vicious rabid Chihuahuas. She would have remembered this after not seeing me for over ten years and her gratitude would sway her to giving me a high score. But that didn't happen, so I just started telling my jokes.
There must be something in the water in Pasadena because those people just started at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. I saw on their faces smiles and open mouths, but I heard nothing. I didn't panic but in my head I did start to think about how when you are a farmer you never get rejected from your livestock. I bet llama farmers have the highest self esteem in the world. Every morning they wake up and the llama have come to them for food and love. Never judging them or frowning at them. Just loving them for what they provide for their existence.
People did laugh; don't get me wrong. But when you know that a joke gets laughs pretty much every time and now your just hearing the guy who use to be in a wheel chair breathing, it tends to throw even the most seasoned entertainers off their game. The judge who I didn't rescue from a pack of rabid Chihuahuas gave me international wrap it up sign so I ended with my Fargo Phone Sex joke, but what do people in Pasadena know about Fargo, much less phone sex. I got off the stage and collected my bag and walked out of the club - I then walked right back in because my bladder is that of an older man with a bad prostate. On the way out of the bathroom my judge lady caught my eye and said, "you did goo... well" Thank you? I knew she was about to say good job but decided "well" was a more accurate description. So close, yet so far. I went and got advice for the best freeway to get home. Really I was just savoring my time in the dark and cool club. I wasn't about to get back in that car for another four hours without the sweat from the first trip dry.
Back in the parking garage I called home to check in while starting my car; excuse me, attempting to start my car. It would start, cough and die. It was the locust I was expecting. I said a little prayer to the patron saint of old dying ford explorers and turned the key. It started and I gunned it for a few glorious feet until it died again. This happened for about 10 minutes. I called my dad and he had really good advice, "take it to a service station Jewd." That's why he gets paid the big bucks.
I could see a 76 station down the street, so I gunned it and prayed I would not stall on the main drag of Pasadena.
A guy came out right away and asked if he could help me. Yes, I am unemployed, single, I just bombed on stage, my car won't stay on and I want my mommy! He was an older Middle Eastern man (is that politically correct?). But his nametag said, Michael. That's not a real typical name for you're every day run of the mill middle Easterner. It is for a Mid-Westerner, but not so much in the East. "Hi can you please tell me if I will die a horrible death on the freeway if I attempt to drive this car home to San Diego?" He too looked at the lobsters crawling out of my ears. He said it sounded like the fuel pump. "That's a major thing to fix", he said. Thanks Michael, Happy St. Patrick's Day to you. He sent me to a garage down the street, to see Sean, no doubt part of an elaborate fraud scheme. I prayed the car all the way to the garage and meet Sean. You guessed it; Sean was also a Middle Eastern man. There is either a surplus of garage shirts with Irish names or these men's parents picked up BBC on their cable boxes.
So I told Sean that I needed to know if I could drive home without being horribly killed. "Sure we can tell you that, it's just $73 for an diagnostic test." Highway robbery I think the term is called. So I went upstairs to their waiting room and spent 2 hours reading People magazines from 2001 and 2002. Finally I was called downstairs to talk to the Irish guy. It was like when you bring someone into the emergency room at the hospital and they are rushed off into surgery. I had to give an oral OK for them to perform the life or death surgery. He said it would be $432; just like at the hospital, I don't care how much, I just want it to live.
Two hours later I am back on the 210 freeway, $400 dollars lighter, my temperature gauge says 108 degrees and I'm starting to think that perhaps the winters in Minnesota are not so bad after all. Maybe I'll try to find a llama farm on the way home.
