You may not like him, but he really is a good writer. This is chapter 2 "A Debt Unpaid" from his book "Based on a True Story: a Memoir"

​

​

A DEBT UNPAID

​

​

I’ve been on the road a pickler’s fortnight and I’m dog-tired.

​

​

A great deal of time has passed since the girl with the bright-yellow hair and the bright-red lips told me that my writing a book wasn’t the worst idea she’d ever heard. Since then, I traveled all the way to New York City to meet with a publisher. The publisher is a girl, and it’s about time, I say. Her name is Julie and she has brown hair and red lips. She got me a secretary who’s good at typing and I’ve been working nonstop. I spent a month in New York to begin writing the book. I’m two paragraphs into my second chapter and I’m looking forward to being a bigshot author. And why not? New York City was the site of my great success. I made it there and then I didn’t make it anywhere else. I guess Frank Sinatra isn’t so smart after all.

​

​

I’m finally home in Los Angeles and I’m at the very back table of The World Famous Comedy Store. I sit alone, surrounded by black. That’s what I like about this place. The walls are black and the floors are black and the tables are black, and that suits me just fine. Everybody looks pretty much the same in the black. On my table sits a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 and there is a glass beside it. The glass is bone-dry—just there for appearance. The bottle is half full. There’s a guy up onstage and I think he’s saying some pretty important things, because people are clapping a lot and shaking their heads sadly.

​

​

“Why don’t you do a set?” says Adam Eget.

​

​

“Nobody wants to see me do a set.”

​

​

“Sure they do. They love you! They’ll get a big kick out of it.”

​

​

Adam Eget is the manager of The World Famous Comedy Store. As always, he has a lit cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, he shifts his eyes from side to side, and he looks like he wants to be anywhere other than here, all of which conspire to give him the look of a getaway-car driver. And he doesn’t know it yet, but soon he’ll be just that.

​

​

Adam Eget always wears a suit, the kind of suit a poor man thinks a rich man wears. He’s a man who acts like a bigshot but he knows I know what he is. He was a smallfry when I met him and he’s a smallfry now. I’ve known him for a right smart spell, since my days at SNL in New York City, New York. That’s where I found him, making a living underneath the Queensboro Bridge, jerking off punks for fifteen dollars a man. He said he was eighteen at the time, and he looked considerably younger, but he had a car so I made him my assistant. I figured I’d let him work at 30 Rockefeller Center, where his job was to do whatever it was I said—to make all my wishes real. He was good at it. Some men are just born to do other men’s bidding, and Adam Eget is such a man. It’s a gift that pocketed him plenty in the shadow of the bridge. And he can wear his big man’s suit and order around waitresses and busboys all he wants, but it doesn’t impress me one bit. Like I said before, I know what he is and he knows that I know it.

​

​

“Why don’t you sit down and have a drink with me?” I say.

​

​

“Norm, I’ve been sober for five years, three months, and twelve days. You know that.”

​

​

“Well, then it sounds like you’re due,” I tell him. And then, to punctuate my fine joke, I take a comically oversize swig from my bottle.

​

​

The plain truth is that Adam Eget is an alcoholic and that’s why he doesn’t drink. Me, I’m not an alcoholic and that’s why I do drink. Life sure is funny that way.

But my heart goes out to Adam Eget because an addiction is a deep hook, and sometimes the harder you wriggle to escape her, the deeper she goes. I should know, because I’ve got one of my own. I like to gamble—gamble money on games of chance. And some have said that it’s been the ruin of me.

​

​

“Go up and do a set. They’ll love you. They’re a great crowd.”

“So you’re saying they’re such a great crowd that they’ll even love the likes of me?”

​

​

“No, you know that’s not what I’m saying. C’mon, Norm, as a favor to me. I promise they’ll get a big kick out of it.”

​

​

There’s a lady up onstage now and she’s saying the most unladylike things, quite shocking. The folks in the crowd are looking at each other, astonished. They can hardly believe what they’re hearing and I can tell that they don’t know what to do, so they decide to laugh.

​

​

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll do a set.”

​

​

I shamble onto the stage. In stand-up, what you wear is very important. Some comics wear a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, trying to look like a regular Joe so the crowd will relate to them. Others take the stage sporting a ten-thousand-dollar suit, as a sign of respect for the folks who came to hear them. Me, I wear just the same thing I wear offstage: a Norm Show T-shirt, an SNL jacket, and a Dirty Work hat. I figure, in show business, it never hurts to remind the folks just exactly who you are.

​

​

I open with my surefire bit about answering machines, and the crowd doesn’t get a big kick out of it at all. I continue to talk and the words come out the same way they have for thirty years, but those words are only on my lips. In my mind a plan is hatching.

​

​

The plan has just somehow appeared in the emptiness of my brain, and in the black silence of the black room, this plan is bright as a sun. I don’t dare leave the cold, bare stage until the entire plan unspools. And when it finally fully reveals itself to me in all its Godmade glory, I thank the silent crowd and take my leave.

​

​

I stumble offstage to sarcastic applause, and some guy throws out his leg. I trip over it and go sprawling until my head hits something that’s harder than my head, and this whole scene gets a bigger laugh than any of my jokes onstage did. I stagger to my feet and think about slugging the sonofabitch one. There was a time when I would have too, but that was when I was young. Now the world is young and I’m a weak old man.

​

​

I spot Adam Eget in the shadows.

​

​

“Sorry, Norm, I thought it was a good crowd. Guess I misread them.”

​

​

“Gotta be able to read to misread,” I say, and laugh loudly at my own quick wit.

​

​

“Touché,” says Adam Eget.

​

​

I hate when people say “touché” after you say something funny. I don’t know what it means, but I know that I hate it.

​

​

“Anyway, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have convinced you to go up there.”

​

​

“Best thing you could have done, Adam Eget.”

​

​

“But they didn’t laugh at a single thing you said!”

​

​

“It’s not about what I spoke but what was spoke to me,” I say, and Adam Eget looks puzzled. I know I’m not making a lick of sense, but I’m happy and frightened at the same time, and I generally don’t like feeling two things at once unless they are very similar things.

​

​

“A plan came to me. Get the Challenger and bring her around. We’re going to Vegas tonight!”

​

​

“I can’t, Norm. I’m the manager here now. I’m an important man with responsibilities. I can’t just leave work.”

​

​

“They’ll have to find another chimp,” I say. “Get the car!”

​

​

“Norm, I’m not your assistant anymore. I’m my own man.”

​

​

“You don’t remember what happened on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, Adam Eget? It’s been some time but I thought you might remember.”

​

​

“I remember.” And that is that. Adam Eget just shakes his head and looks real sick. He’s certainly about to lose his job and everything he’s worked to achieve. The simple fact is, Adam Eget has a debt unpaid. It’s two decades old but I’m calling in my markers, so what choice does he have? He just nods his head a little and makes his way to the parking lot as I finish the bottle of Wild Turkey 101 and smile at the simple perfection of the plan. The plan that came from God Himself and revealed itself to me in the unlikeliest of places. Adam Eget pulls the car around and I get in. He drops me off at Sullivan’s Boarding House. I pack all my Norm Show T-shirts, Dirty Work hats, and SNL jackets while he waits in the car. Then we are gone, moving fast, tearing the tar off Highway 15 all the way to Las Vegas, Nevada, aiming the white Challenger directly into the blood-red moon like a snowball rolling straight to hell.