TURKEY STICK IN THE SKY

By ALLEN SALKIN

I had a lucky quarter once for six hours even though I don't believe in luck. Some people have a rabbit's foot or a lucky marble or a shrunken head carved out of an apple that they keep on a shelf because they think it's good voodoo. None of it makes a difference. Besides being born somewhere rich like in 20th century Western civilization and not in medieval Russia where people had to saw off their own feet for something to eat when they were hungry, I don't think luck plays much of a role in 99 point nine nine nine percent of our lives. Fuck luck. But I do endorse gambling. Smart gambling, gambling that in and of itself can yield the good life. This gambling has nothing to do with luck or with money, It's about living well through the act of chance-taking.

I am willing to admit that luck can play a part in this if it wishes, but not as lucky luck, just as a character, a ruse, an especially shiny quarter. We all need fantasies. But luck should be watched warily, lest it rot and swell up and delude with it's bloated whispers of glory and riches. Streaks end. Luck should be an acquaintance to have a few laughs with now and then, not a best friend, certainly not a friend to trust, for God's sake.

Now gambling, that I can snuggle right up close to. I know how to handle that. A couple of voyages I've made recently show what I call gambling for the good life. The formula is: Win or lose, the gambler still comes out far ahead.

I?ve flown National Airlines twice in the last two years. The second and most recent National Airlines flight was their '9-11 Heroes Salute' fare special: One dollar plus tax for any flight taking off September 11, 2002, the one year anniversary of the horrible day. The airline surely figured that most people would take one flight for a dollar and then take a return flight home on another day for the regular fare. I bought a roundtrip to Los Angeles from Newark including plane changes in the airline's Las Vegas hub, that would take me coast-to-coast in the morning and return me, departing L.A. at 8:40 p.m. the same day, on the red eye back to New York. Two dollars plus airport taxes made the total cost for ten hours of flight and eight hours on the ground thirty-four dollars and fifty cents, I would get to see my 14-month-old niece Alexandra and my brother and my sister-in-law. I had also arranged for my mother to pick me up for a couple hours at the beach, and for my father to take me back to the airport with a stop at In and Out Burger for a double-double, fries and a chocolate shake. A complete visit home, all bases touched, cheeks kissed, indigenous delicacies consumed.

This was a gamble, risking my money and my time and my comfort, hoping that it would all somehow add up to a good time. I wasn't only, of course, gambling the two bucks and the time on the flight. I was putting my body into a winged tube of aluminum, polyester, toilet disinfectant, foam, cranberry juice, petroleum and pressurized air that would travel at hundreds of miles an hour 40,000 feet over hard earth with hundreds of other bodies. So I was gambling my life, too. Plus the two bucks. Plus tax.

I know some people won't fly rinky dink airlines like National. Who ever heard of National Airlines? But I've checked them out. They fly about 300,000 passengers-a-month on a fleet of 18 Boeing 757s, not many compared to the millions and millions a month United and American fly, but a decent enough amount that they seem able to pay repairmen and capable pilots. No crashes so far. Odds seemed excellent.

I was treating it like adventure travel, the transportation experience an integral part of the voyage, like riding a horse to see the sunrise at Mount Bromo in Indonesia. The volcano was interesting, but so was that horse ride. The horses are small and bony there, the saddles tiny. The horses are more suited for slight-of-build Indonesians than for we hefty Occidentals. I had to squeeze my thighs around the poor beast to hold on and my legs burned and ached and chafed. I gave up before the halfway point between the truck drop where I'd mounted and the volcanic cone we were heading towards. I dismounted and walked the remaining mile on my own legs. I watched other travelers, blond-haired Englishmen with steak and kidney-pie fattened guts and six-foot-five Norwegians, stay on their suffering mounts the whole way, groinbones grinding painfully on hardened horse spine. But the Indonesian cowboys had promised them a sunrise trip to the volcano by horse. It sounded good and those tourists were going to stick with it even though it wasn't actually good. The next day their genitals and assbones would feel like burned sate meat. Amusing, but I was happy to have learned a lesson, which was: sometimes, if it really sucks, see reality and get off the horse.

But a lot of people never get on the horse to start with. When I got to Newark airport that morning at sunrise, the tarmac was a parking lot, golden orange rays gracing lifeless jets, the monorail whirring empty to the terminals. The only airline counter with a line was National's. It was not unlike the first time I had flown National, almost a year before.

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That was late September 2001. This was National's 'Get America Flying Again' special: 99 dollars one way plus a dollar for the return flight. To get an idea what a good deal this was, consider that I paid a cab $40 for the 15 mile drive from the Lower East Side to Newark, which comes out to a rate of 2-dollars and 77 cents a mile. My coast-to-coast ticket came to two-cents-a-mile, more than 100 times cheaper.

Of course, flying in September 2001 was being treated by everyone like a big gamble. When I checked in at 5:45 in the morning, I had to show the ticket guy my nail clipper to demonstrate there was no little file on it. He said the files could be used to stab someone. I think I had seen that happen on a Three Stooges once. The stooge didn't seem badly hurt. He recovered fast and stuck a cream pie in his attacker's face. Nobody asked me if I was carrying a cream pie. I wasn't, but maybe I should have brought one. The flight itinerary said the four-hour leg to Vegas only included a snack. I didn't know what I was going to eat for breakfast and I like pie. Then again, a cream pie is messy and they might be worried you were hiding a hunting knife in it. They might make you put it through the x-ray machine and it could scrape up against the side and smear. Food is complicated hand luggage.

The official security personnel at Newark airport three weeks after September 11 were worried about more complicated threats than cream pies. My computer bag was selected to be specially scanned for explosive traces.

The last time I can remember handling any explosives was when Mike Manabe who lived on my street when I was 14 came home from a trip somewhere where the selling of firecrackers was legal. He had so many little firecrackers, thousands of em, that we got more and more bold as we spent hours lighting them off. We tried burying them in little holes and creating explosion craters. We put one in an apple. Then we started lighting them and throwing them in the air. The trick was to hold them in your hand until the last possible second before explosion, so that when you threw them, they'd blow apart in a bang of gunpowder and red shreds of paper. But no two had identical length fuses, so you didn't know how long to wait before launching them. Mike and me kept taking more and more risky gambles, until I held one so long, watching the fuse fizz that BAM! the thing went off in my hand and suddenly I couldn't hear anything in my right ear or feel anything in my right hand and my head hurt. I felt like I'd been hit flat on the face by a physics textbook traveling lightspeed. Bad gamble. I got the feeling and the hearing back by the next day, but that was enough to cure me of playing with explosives. So here's a rule to attach to the principal that low-risk, high-reward gambles should be pounced on. Don't get involved in bets that involve explosives or gunpowder in any way

Anyway, back to Newark airport, 2001. After I passed security, a guy in a black jumpsuit was checking ID and boarding passes again. He was asking a young man in front of me for his immigration papers. I noticed a QUARTER on the ground that someone had dropped. I worried for a moment that it was a trick quarter, something dangerous. A quarter-sized bit of plastic explosive or a coin smeared with anthrax. It looked like a regular quarter. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Nothing happened.

I stopped to buy a newspaper and a cinnamon granola bar. It was 90 cents for the granola bar. I could travel 45 miles farther on National Airlines for 90 cents. But then I'd end up in the Pacific Ocean because LAX is right on the beach. I took the money out of my wallet and did not spend that quarter.

A hour into the flight, they served us the promised snack: A packet of Le Petit Fromage spreadable cheese, four breadsticks, a Quaker Fruit and Oatmeal Apple bar, a Ghirardelli mint chocolate square and an O'Brien's Premium Honey Cured Turkey Stick which said on the label ?No MSG? and 'Taste The Magic' next to a drawing of a leprechaun. Ingredients: 'Turkey, Honey, Water, Salt, Brown Sugar,' not a bad start, but then 'Dextrose, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Sodium Nitrate and Lactic Acid Starter Culture.'

I ate the apple bar and then the breadsticks with the spreadable cheese. I left the leprechaun alone. I read once that in real Irish folk tales leprechauns aren't smiley little guys who give out pots of gold, but vicious, shrunken misers who play tricks on the greedy and never willingly part with a single coin. We were well on our way to Vegas at that point and my cheap flight was going fine. I didn't want to take any chances with any evil leprechauns. Plus I had no desire to put lactic acid starter culture into my gut. It might make my intestines fizz like one of Mike Manabe's firecrackers. Maybe lactic acid starter culture is what made rich Medieval Irishmen shrink into Leprechauns. Or maybe this whole cheap flight thing was a ruse by a joint FDA-FBI task force to experiment on a group of suckers about what happens to humans at high altitude when you feed 'em lactic acid starter culture. Maybe there was no Vegas in our future. Maybe the chemical would transform us into half-breed cows and we would end up on a ranch in Utah calving fast-maturing pea-brained beef-human bi-peds the government could use to fight in the war against terrorism. Cow, turkey, whatever. No, I wasn't eating the meat stick. Moo. MOOOO!

I looked around at the other people on the flight, many of them practice-dealing themselves blackjack hands. Most of the conversations I heard snatches of were on two subjects: where the cheapest hotels were in Vegas and how much they all hated the sound of a baby that was occasionally crying. One old woman had suggested binding the child's mouth shut with electrical tape. I was on a planeful of losers. These are the bad kind of gamblers. Most of them were gobbling down the turkey stick happily.

Some gambles are not worth taking, some are.. We hit turbulence as we crossed into the Rocky Mountains near Denver. I'm sure even business class passengers on Delta would have had a bumpy ride in that air pocket. I don't think the turbulence had anything to do with the fact that my ticket only cost $62 each way. Like Led Zeppelin said, 'On us all, a little rain must fall.'

After we landed in Vegas, I had to wait an hour to make the connection for my flight to LA, 250 miles away. In the airport terminal, I saw a bank of slot machines and then that quarter I'd found in Newark started burning a hole in my pocket. Of course, It didn't actually start burning, because it wasn't a special plastic explosive quarter and as far as I can tell so far, it wasn?t carrying any virus that might cause the metal to get super hot or to infect me. It's just that I started thinking maybe I'd found that quarter for a reason. Maybe it was going to be a lucky quarter! It had been with me for six hours and nothing bad had happened.

The banks of slot machines were winking and chiming and flashing huge numbers, hundreds of thousands of dollars in jackpots. Even anti-luck I couldn't resist the fantasy. Maybe God had put that quarter on the ground for me to find. Maybe, I thought, I was going to get rich with it, win a million and then hit a streak and win tens of millions more and not have to work for money anymore and I could just focus on writing and improving my knowledge of Olympics trivia by buying the complete box set of Bud Greenspan Olympics documentaries: I fingered the quarter in my pocket and said out loud: 'HELSINKI 1956. PAAVO NURMI IS SEEKING TO BECOME KNOWN AS THE GREATEST RUNNER OF ALL TIME. BUT HE HAS A FORMIDABLE CHALLENGER IN THE ONE HUNDRED METERS: AN AMERICAN NAMED AL OERTER.'

It was a wonderful sensation, that dream of luck. It reached back and retrospectively graced every moment of the six hours since I'd found the quarter, like maybe I was on some predestined magic ride the whole time, living some beautiful saga, every moment of which would be worth savoring and retelling to friends and hangers on from the comfort of my sitting parlor at my villa on Santorini when I was rich man.

I went to put the quarter into a progressive slot machine, one of those in a big bank of machines under a display showing a steadily growing jackpot that was already at $112,000.05. But then I saw that unless you played THREE quarters at once, 75 cents, you couldn't win the big jackpot, even if you pulled the arm and the machine displayed the required three jackpot bags stuffed with money. My odds-sense sharpened and took hold. You?d only win like $500 on a single quarter bet. They wanted you to be playing 75 cents a pull -- which was $1.50 for two pulls and could, within minutes, become $62 for 83 pulls.

No, there was no way I was going to risk coming up three jackpots and not being able to collect the $112,000.05. And it didn't feel right to play my lucky quarter with two other regular quarters. Lucky wanted to play alone. So I found a slot machine where one quarter could win a full jackpot. It was a smaller jackpot, $12,000, but if I hit the right combo, I'd know it was all mine for sure. I placed lucky in there. He dropped down. I pulled: Blank. Blank. Blank: Believe it or not, three blanks is a winning combo. I'd won. My jackpot was one quarter. I think it was Lucky who the machine spit into its steel tray. Maybe it was a sign, I thought. Maybe I should take Lucky and play him elsewhere.

I was thinking like a real believer in luck there, looking for signs, feelings. Every intelligent person knows it's just a matter of odds with these games, odds that are always well against the gambler, especially in the airport, legendary for bad-paying slots that have subsidized numerous terminal improvements and expansions. One machine is the same as another, the odds the same with each pull. So I put lucky back to work right then and there. If everything had lined up once in those little windows, the next time it could be three jackpots lined up. Pull:

Blank. ???

Seven.??

Bar. A loser. Lucky was gone.

I thought about lucky during the rest of that weeklong trip to LA. I had actually gone to LA for Cosmopolitan magazine to interview a female sex crimes detective who had solved a rape case by tricking a suspect into leaving his fingerprints on a straw during a lunch she'd invited him to at Taco Bell. A good gamble on her part that paid off with the evidence that got him convicted.

Cosmo would have reimbursed me for a more expensive flight. I had taken the National Airlines flight because I thought it would be an adventure. If I'd flown United or American non-stop like I have five dozen times before, it would have been the same old thing. No turkey sticks. No Lucky. No HELSINKI 1956. That quarter had given me a lot of play. He will always be Lucky to me even though he was a loser. Because like Tom Petty said, 'Even the losers get lucky sometimes.'

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So come forward with me now. It is a little less than a year later and we're on National Airlines again. I didn't pay as much attention this time to all the little security tweaks and bizarre snacks presented along the trip. I did take note that the leprechaun turkey stick was no longer among the offerings. But I had been through most of it before. This gamble was about risking the discomfort of ten hours in the air for the payoff that the few hours in LA would be a fun and bizarre thing to try. Those hours turned out to be more satisfying and pleasantly transporting than some of my more exotic vacations.

The best part was when me and my brother Doug were at the beach, bodysurfing. We were bobbing over the small rollers, waiting patiently for the next big wave to come, the sun growing lower over the water and my skin felt light from the cold saltwater. Stripped down to a bathing suit, my feet no longer moored to the continent, This was the good life. A wave grew behind us and we swam like hell to catch it, hoping we'd shoot across its whooshing face like dolphins, but knowing we might get caught in the wash and be sucked under and pushed into the hard sand. But even if that happened, I knew we'd just float up a few seconds later into the fresh air, happy just to breathe in and out, simple. Win or lose on that wave, it didn't matter, we were fully alive. We would have tried. There is no luck involved in that at all.

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STANDUP AND HOME EQUITY:

A Frustrated Journalist's Life in Standup Comedy.

By ALLEN SALKIN

On a cold Friday this November, I arrived outside Madison Square Garden at 5:30 a.m. because the organizers of the Aspen Comedy Festival were having open tryouts. Starting at 10 a.m. the first 100 standup comics in line would have 2-minutes each on stage to impress scouts. I was number 30.

We were let into the Comedy Garden, a lobby area of the Theater at Madison Square Garden that is filled with a semi-circle of 300 chairs and fronted with a mike.

The funniest joke before my turn was said by a guy leaving the stage after his act had won laughs from the judges and the other 90-or-so comics waiting their turns. He said, "Thanks. I promised myself I wouldn?t bomb during Ramadan."

I was ice-cold-sweat nervous. I knew I had little chance of making it to Aspen, the HBO-sponsored event running for a week starting February 26 that showcases 6 comedians-a-year and can launch careers. After four months as a standup, my act still wasn't that sharp, although I had been practicing and improving since my debut. But I wanted to see if maybe, just maybe, I was a freakish genius and would make it to the top without paying my dues. So, boom, it was my turn on the stage: I dashed up there and began: "I'm a frustrated journalist." This would set up my character fast.

"It's hard. I was at the paper the other day and this story comes in off the wire about some Italian kid made out of wood who keeps telling his father Geppetto: 'I want to be a REAL boy! I want to be a ree-ee-ee-al boy!' This kid, Pinocchio or something, made me mad. Does something need to be made out of flesh and blood to be considered real?

"Just because he's made out of wood, if he can think and speak, is he not real!?!"

"I went home and told this to my marionette, the Countess -- we were sitting in my closet, both of us naked and smeared with Vaseline."

(I had changed this from baby oil. I think Vaseline is funnier than baby oil.)

"I said, 'Countess, you?re real to me, amiga.'

"But then the next day at work, well you probably read about it, Pinocchio gets turned into a 'real' flesh and blood boy. Yeah, good for him. And my editor assigned me to write the story for the paper, which I did. That's my job. But I was so frustrated that when I was done, I stood up on my desk and just screamed: 'I like it! I like A LOT of it!'"

It was pretty loud, screaming high-pitched and weird into the mike, louder than it had been at the rinky-dink open mikes where I'd performed previously. I heard someone up front exclaim, "Are you kidding?" which probably meant I'd caused physical pain in the eardrums of my fellow comedians and the judges. Great. Well, whatever. There were still 45 seconds left to fill. I floundered on and finally the judges shined a flashlight in my eyes. Two minutes up.

I didn't get a call back. No Aspen this year.

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Why, in the first place, did I think I could do this? I had taken a few turns at open mikes awhile back practicing a different art form. It was in 1992, when I was 25 and living in San Francisco. Nirvana's Nevermind was a new release and no recent college graduate around me had a decent job. I was telemarketing 12 hours a week, living on burritos, and scanning the 'zine rack at City Lights Bookstore every three days looking for places to send my poems and terribly written short stories to, hoping they'd be printed.

My Macintosh LC did not have a modem. But every café and music club and bar in the Mission district had open mike poetry nights and poetry slams where cargo-pant-wearing Lesbian videographers, meathead-looking donut deliverymen and scrawny, curly-haired Jewish 20-somethings would mount the stage and mouth their frustrations and dreams into the microphone. Mostly we sucked. One of my poems was called "Like a Simile Persecuted by Orange Furniture." Pretty much the same thing was happening in the East Village, or so we heard. And by the mid-1990s this bohemia-blip was over. The characters from Douglas Coupland's "Generation X" were running their hotel in Baja, most of the rest of us had resigned ourselves to trying a real career or, at least graduate school (Me: NYU J-School, 1995), and the new recent college grads started finding what seemed like cool jobs designing web pages and the like. Then this summer, barely a day was going by that I wasn?t getting emails from friends laid-off from internet jobs, people I'd met in fiction workshops, and journalism colleagues, writing, "Come see me do my standup comedy act at ... some place or another.

I went out to see them and started getting this feeling that something interesting was happening. It felt like the kind of ripe creative ferment one hopes will take hold in less hyperactive economic, like the fertile artistic underside of New York many bemoaned losing over the last decade of $12 sake-tinis and $3,000 studio apartments was sprouting from its dormant place. People were up there going for it, baring themselves. I put pen to paper and began working on my own act.

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These days, one begins one's standup comedy career at a place not unlike the places we did poetry in the early 90s, a place like Brewsky's, a run down, closet-sized beer hall on East 7th Street. It was a Monday night in July. As I had walked to Brewsky's from my apartment, tourists at a sidewalk cafe had pointed at me and giggled like they'd never before seen a man in a lime green cotton Italian suit, a flowery Balinese batik shirt and a fishing hat with his name airbrushed on it from a gift shop in South Carolina. The ha-has were flowing my way early. So I had every reason to be hopeful I'd succeed except that I had no idea really what the hell I was doing.

Allegra Barnett, 22, a graduate of Clown College in Sarasota Florida, and her boyfriend Billy Idol, Jr. (no relation to the singer), 23, were running the open mike at Brewsky's.

I wrote my name on a slip of paper and put it into a jar and waited for Barnett to call my name.

Between acts, Barnett took the mike and practiced her material on the crowd of 30 people, most of them rat-poor other comics without the five bucks needed to buy a beer.

"I don't like clowns," Barnett quipped, right hand on her forehead, "I really don't. Because they don't like to cuddle after sex. They always say stuff to you afterwards like 'I have to get back to my wife.'"

She paused for the laughs, which came.

"That joke is truer than you know."

When my turn came, I bounded towards the mike. I had six minutes before they would sound a bicycle horn and usher me off. The pressure gave me tunnel vision and I lost all sense of time. I did get to what was my favorite part of my act at that early stage: "I think the reason I went into such a stressful business as journalism is that I never got a properly-sized portion of chocolate pudding as a child."

I know I stank because if I'd done well I don't think I would have been able to hear the sound of foam settling on the top of a newly drawn beer (someone actually had money to buy one) right after I'd delivered a punchline.

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So I went home from Brewskys, slept off the nerves and the bourbon, and, over the course of the next few weeks, continued to accumulate more joke ideas.

Once I woke at 3 a.m. believing my dream about rich people flying around town in inflatable airplanes and refusing to deflate them when they bring the planes into restaurants, bumping peoples' heads into their soups and noses into martinis, had to be written down immediately. Golly that'd be funny. Inflatable airplanes and spilled fish broth. Ha.

A few days after that dream, I was at a party and a friend said the new guy she's seeing, a professor at Brown, told her he likes the way she enunciates:

'You speak with a Kantian precision,' he had told her.

I thought that was a pretty pretentious thing to say, comparing your girlfriend to a bearded 18th century German philosopher. It sent me to a quiet corner of the party where I started scrawling in a notebook. But I changed things a little. The scene, as I wrote it, was set just after she'd performed oral sex on him. That's when he, spent, says: "You give head with a Kantian precision."

The more I wrote, the more I came to like "I like a LOT of it!." It was something different and new that was also in the tradition of some old, great signature lines. It would be my parody of today?s immediately past cultural moment just as Steve Martin?s 1978 "I am a wild and crazy guy" was a parody of the culture which was just becoming uncool then, the funky hedonism of the sex, drugs and disco era.

"I like a LOT of it!" is what might be said by the tax-evasion Tyco guy surveying his art collection, the gals at Daily Candy cooing over a roomful of designer shoes, the founder of Kozmo dot com at the Grey-Goose-and-Red Bull-fueled party celebrating the company's plan to go IPO weeks before the NASDAQ crash, Martha Stewart snarkily accepting insider-trading advice. A lot, folks, is too much.

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In September, a friend invited me to a story-telling event in the backroom at the Parkside Lounge on East Houston. The scheduled performers had finished reading their works and the host announced he was opening the mike up to anyone who wanted to tell a story.

I had nothing memorized, but I had spent much of that day mentally stewing over some stuff. I walked up there, grabbed the mike, and stared through the spotlight to the 50 people seated at little round tables.

"I want to tell you about my home equity loan," I began. "Citibank. Big company, yeah. Multinational."

They were laughing. I think it was because of the idea that some guy thought there were comedic possibilities in his home equity loan. Good start.

"Well there's all sorts of problems. Like all this ridiculous stuff about how before they give me tens of thousands of dollars, they want to make sure I'm actually going to be able to pay them back. So every time I fax them another credit card statement or tax return document, I call up to see what the next hurdle is before I get the money -- which I need because I want to, um, eat. You know, buy food?

"Anyway, I started noticing that every single time I called, the customer service person would be someone with an Indian name: Jawaharlal, Ravi, Mookie, Sari. Then I remembered some article I'd read about corporations out-sourcing telephone customer service to the third world. So the next time I called, I asked, 'um, Ham-jeev, where are you?' He said, 'My soup-pear-visor eees in Oh-roar-ah, Illinois.'

Aurora, Illinois.

"'Um, yeah, but where are YOU, Ham-jeev, where are YOU?'

'Bangalore, India,' he replied.

"Bangalore fucking India. Now, I mean no disrespect for those hard-working people in Bangalore. Ham-jeev was doing his best. But I had to wonder what had brought me to this point where I'm haggling over a home equity loan with some man sitting in the middle of the night, because of the time difference, 13,000 miles away?

"I mean, you wouldn?t know it to look at me, but I'm considered very successful as a freelance writer. People call me up all the time asking for career advice and stuff. I write for lots of impressive places like, the Times, and, um, uh, well, the Times."

I rambled on for a little longer, until the evening's musical guest was prodded by the host to blow his didgeridoo to let me know my time was up. People laughed. Yeah, big laughs for the Aborigine instrument and for my pathetic writing career.

Which brings me to my point.

I've been working my ass off to make it as a freelance journalist and it is goddamn hard. I work six days a week, have bylines in major league places not just the Times, and last year before taxes I earned $41,050. Take out expenses for stuff like internet, phone, and health insurance and my salary is around $25,000. And I only made that much because I was willing to write about starting a small business for an office supply store's in-house magazine, and about a celebrity's security blanket for the now-defunct Talk magazine; not exactly the dream assignments I envisioned when I set out on this career course.

I want to write more of what I want to write, more of the type of stuff I dream about writing when I scrawl in my notebook: funny observations, frustrations, bizarre ideas, profiles of interesting people who aren't movie stars or criminals.

Where is the venue for this stuff in a business where magazines are using less words, more photos and newspapers are using more wire copy, less original material?

Where? Well after a few more times on stage, I knew where. Here -- the Tuesday Night Train Wreck at the Parkside, Big Fun at Bar None, the Great $5 Comedy Night at the Gershwin Hotel, etc. -- was somewhere I could go, after hours, and let it fly. And get instant feedback. The people laugh, I got wheat. The people stare, I got chaff. Simple.

It's not for the money. I'll sell a book idea someday soon or get a staff writing gig somewhere and I'll do fine. I don't even really care if anyone laughs, although it is awfully nice when they do. For me, it's that this is how I always wanted New York to be, a place where any day, any night of the week you can change everything and start chasing a new dream. It's tough to make it in anything, but here you can at least try making it in everything. This is me. This is how I am, a dreamer, maybe, a suburban kid who always dreamed of being in Henry Miller's Paris, Bob Dylan's Greenwich Village, a wannabe bohemian who is living the actual life of a starving writer 2003-style and realizing it has its downsides and requires credit card debt to do it -- but that, hell, it's pretty damn fun, too, this town, this life, taking these chances. I?m going to keep trying. I like A LOT of it. Some things, it's okay to like a lot of. No joke.

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