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“We DARE you not to do drugs!”

“But I thought we weren’t supposed to do things we’re dared to do. If you dared me to jump out of a tree, I shouldn’t do that, right?”

“It’s just an acronym, son.”

“What is an acronym?”

It was confusing, but I still got a free DARE T-shirt, and the day before we were to receive our DARE certificates of completion, I took the chance that could ignite my fledgling rap career. I approached Sister Mary Elizabeth and proposed that my friend Eric and I perform a two-man rap song called “Bust Them Drugs,” a takeoff on Young MC’s popular hit “Bust a Move.” Originally there wasn’t going to be a talent show portion of the event, but I thought a parody rap song with all-new lyrics was in order, and for whatever reason, she thought that was a good idea also. Maybe she had the foresight to realize that twenty-two years later I would need a ridiculous anecdote for my book to demonstrate what an attention-starved delusional maniac I was, or perhaps she thought it would buy her another five minutes to sit in the back row with her eyes closed reconsidering her lifelong commitment to Christ.

If Young MC had happened to walk into the basement of St. Mary’s School on that spring morning and witnessed Eric Marciano and me prancing around with microphones, screaming our made-up lyrics to “Bust Them Drugs” over his 1989 hit “Bust a Move,” he would not have been impressed. We were a good three or four bars behind the beat, repeatedly referred to our notes for lyric reminders, and since we didn’t have the instrumental version, our lyrics collided with his actual lyrics, quite harshly. Even Eric and I, who thought we were pretty good, realized that our rap performance would have to be cleaned up a bit before we headed out on tour. We’d also need to get an instrumental version of “Bust a Move.”

To be a comedian you have to be delusional. I think it’s because the human brain can’t process the amount of judgment that an audience casts upon you when you do standup comedy. If you’re in a play and it doesn’t go well, the audience thinks, We didn’t like the script, or the set, or the costumes. In standup comedy, there are two hundred strangers in a room thinking, We don’t like you. All this stuff that you’re about—we’re not into it. To become a comedian you have to tell yourself it’s going quite well, otherwise you wouldn’t get on stage the next night. You’d just think, I guess human beings don’t like me.

I can’t even describe my first time doing standup. I was in a contest and it felt like I was under anesthesia. I came off stage and asked my friend, “How did it go?” And he said, “You’re gonna be okay.” I do remember the second time.

One of the judges of that contest was a comedy club booker/restaurateur named Evan. He asked me if I had a car. I didn’t, but my girlfriend Abbie did, so I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “I can set you up at a place called Fat Tuesday that will pay you $50 if you can perform thirty minutes of comedy.”

What I should have said was, “I only have about eleven minutes of material.” What I did say was, “Perfect.”

I drive Abbie’s mint-green Ford Taurus to Fat Tuesday, one of those days-of-the-week restaurant chains: T.G.I. Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday, Ash Wednesday’s, Holy Thursday’s. Fat Tuesday wasn’t as much a comedy club as it was a bar that had a comedy night. Frankly, “comedy club” is a pretty subjective term to begin with. To have a comedy club all you need is a bar and a wall of eight-by-ten photographs of comedians. Actually, they don’t even have to be comedians, just people in black and white looking zany.

I’m nineteen years old and I show up at Fat Tuesday. I look up at the wall of photos of people who may or may not be comedians and think, These people must be geniuses. How do I get my picture on a wall like this? I try to pick out the famous ones—the Chris Rocks, the Jerry Seinfelds, the George Carlins. They are not on this wall. It’s like being handed a stack of old baseball cards and flipping through them trying to find the Reggie