Larry and the Whorehouse

 
Writer Larry L. King has passed away.  He'd been living and working for years in Washington, D.C.  But he was a Texan born and bred, and one of the great characters of the Lone Star State

Even if you never heard of him, you've probably heard of his most famous piece of work: the Broadway musical Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  He got a credit for the book on that one, but his history with this (mostly) true story went back to 1974, when he wrote an article about the closing of one of Texas's most famous whorehouses, the Chicken Ranch, for Playboy Magazine.

If you don't know the story, here's the basics:  while prostitution was illegal in Texas by the 1970s, there were still plenty of whorehouses around.  One of the most famous ones was located outside La Grange, Texas - halfway between Austin and Houston.  It was called "The Chicken Ranch" because during the dark days of the Great Depression, they would accept chickens or other livestock in lieu of cash.

Everyone seemed to know about the Chicken Ranch; it's clientele included football players from the University of Texas and politicians from the state capital, Austin.  In his Playboy article, Larry L. King claimed that many politicians could drive from Austin to the Chicken Ranch “without headlights even in a midnight rainstorm.”

But in 1973, a crusading Houston television reporter - KTRK's Marvin Zindler - broke the story on air.  Despite the support of the local county sheriff, the public embarrassment forced the government to close the Chicken Ranch for good.  When Zindler encountered that county sheriff, the lawman broke two of Zindler's ribs and tore off his white bouffant toupee!

(I lived in Houston for about seven years, and I recall Zindler well.  Every Friday he broadcast the Houston Health Department inspections of local restaurants in what Zindler called his "rat and roach reports."  He loved to bellow, "And there was SLIIIIME in the ice machine!")

In 1978, King's Playboy article on the Chicken Ranch was made into a very successful Broadway musical.  It was radically altered into the 1982 film version starring Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds.  King hated the film, but it helped make him financially independent.

Of course, these three events - the Playboy story, the Broadway musical, and the movie - took up only a fraction of Larry L. King's career.  (Four things, actually: King released a collection of articles on the entire affair in 1982 called "The Whorehouse Papers.")  I'll talk about the rest of his career in my next post.

We've Had Better Weeks...

It's a grey, depressing day to end a relentlessly depressing week.

Aside from some relatives in Florida and friends in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Houston, everyone I care about lives in the East Coast area hit by Hurricane Sandy.  Even a niece going to college in West Virginia, far from the coast, had to deal with a heavy, wet snowfall.

So let me turn to one of my favorite contemporary authors to depress us some more:

All this had to be accepted.  Living did not mean one joy piled upon another.
It was merely the hope for less pain...

- Lorrie Moore, "Referential," published in the May 28, 2012 issue of The New Yorker

Now, Lorrie Moore isn't a hopelessly depressing author.  On the contrary, many of her stories are very funny.  But she doesn't seem to do the literary showmanship she once did - putting in weird phrasings or constructions that take the reader out of the moment.  For example, in the collection "Self Help," the narrator, a woman, notes that her boyfriend is "stirring the spaghetti sauce but not you."  This construction is called a syllepsis or zeugma, and involves using a verb with multiple meanings to incorrectly modify two words.  I love those sorts of things, but they do tend to make the reader stop to figure them out.

But Lorrie Moore's "Referential" has no such grammatical leaps.  It's marvelously well done, but I defy you to read it an not be depressed.

Which makes it perfect for this day, and this week.

I Held Her While She Cried...

Back in 1988 (or thereabouts), I was managing a bar in Houston, Texas.  It was a fun setup: the owner and I were the only males.  All the employees were young, attractive women.  Just girls, most of them - they got carded when they went to other bars.

Of course, I had to do all the heavy lifting, from hoisting beer kegs to acting as the bouncer.  But it was a fun place to work.

Until the night that one of the girls was raped.

It didn't happen in the bar.  It was several blocks away.  This was long before cell phones, so we had no idea what had happened until she stumbled into the bar, bruised and weeping.

It was almost closing time, and I was doing the monthly inventory.  I put down my clipboard, went to her and helped her over to the sofa.  The owner wasn't present, but three of her co-workers (all female) were.

To this day, I don't understand why she wanted me to comfort her.  I was her boss, not her boyfriend. She told us she had been attacked by four Hispanic guys, who pulled their car over when they spotted her walking home alone from a friend's house.  They were forcing her into their car when another car drove by, slowly.  Caught in the other car's headlights, the men got scared and drove off, leaving her behind.  The other car never stopped to help, though.

So: she had just been attacked by four men.  There were three women, her co-workers and friends, there to comfort her.  Instead, she held onto me and cried for three solid hours.  To my way of thinking, she'd want to get as far away from males as possible.  But she choose me.

She wouldn't let us call the police or a rape crisis center.  At least I knew enough to tell her that it wasn't her fault.  And not to complain when she vomited on me and the sofa.  (I told the other girls to fetch the champagne bucket for her to vomit in, but they were too late.)

I also knew NOT to say what I was thinking.  I didn't ask why she was out alone, walking in a dangerous city after midnight, wearing a two-piece terry cloth outfit that looked like it didn't have enough material to make a decent wash towel.

When she calmed down, two of the other girls and I took her home.  She rented a room in a house owned by - I'm not making this up - a little person.  A dwarf, I suppose.  He had three young female boarders.  He, too, told her that it wasn't her fault.  Unlike me, he'd been through this before.  His other two boarders were strippers, and they'd put him though some unpleasantness.

The girl eventually did make a report to the police, and even showed up to work the next day.  She seemed to put the whole thing behind her very quickly.

What brought this incident to mind was an article on xoJane.com by Rebecca Rogers Maher titled "What to Say If Your Best Friend Tells You She Was Raped."  It's not exactly the same situation as the one I experienced, but I wished I had known SOMETHING back then, while I was holding a weeping woman and wondering what to do.

I hope you never need this information.  But better to know it and not need it, than to need it and not know it.

Goodbye, Ron

After an extended - and very public - battle with cancer, stand-up comic Ron Shock died yesterday.
   

I hadn't seen Ron in twenty years.  But from 1984 to 1986 I was the house booking agent at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas.  This made me the de facto agent for Ron Shock, Bill Hicks, Brett Butler, and a host of lesser-known comics.  So, for two years, I dealt with Ron Shock on an almost-daily basis.

The relationship between an agent and the talent he/she represents is often fractious.  Rightly or wrongly, if the talent isn't as successful as he/she wants to be, the agent is often blamed.
  

At the time, Ron Shock was stuck in the middle spot.  (For those of you who have never been to a comedy show, it traditionally has at least three acts: the MC, the middle act, and the headliner.)  Ron, of course, wanted to be the headliner.

Of course, I wasn't the owner of the Comedy Workshop.  I had a boss to answer to, and he felt that Ron Shock's long-winded storytelling act wasn't ready for the headline spot.  I agreed.

You see, Ron wasn't a conventional stand-up comic.  He didn't do the usual setup-punchline-tag sequence that most comics use.  He told funny stories.  Consequently, the laughs were further apart.

Later in his career, Ron learned to get the audience liking him in the first half of his act.  THEN he told his long stories, when they were on his side.  But in 1984 he hadn't mastered that.  Instead, he argued with me.  Sometimes he just came at me like a child, repeating the same demand, over and over.  It wasn't pleasant.  At one point, after he publicly excoriated my own stand-up act (yes, I was a performer, too), the Artistic Manager of the Comedy Workshop made Ron call me the next day and apologize.  Which Ron did, sincerely.

He must have had some respect for my talents, though, because he and Bill Hicks got together and asked me to become their personal, exclusive agent.  Hicks said that "the reason you're not promoting us enough is that you have all these other duties at the Comedy Workshop."  (Getting work for our stable of comics was secondary to other duties, such as booking acts into the Comedy Workshop's rooms in Houston and Austin.)

I politely declined.  In truth, I couldn't think of a less-secure income than trying to get booking commissions out of these guys.  This was the 1980s, when drugs were rampant.  Most of these comics were full-time performers, with their entire days free...yet they could barely get organized enough to meet for breakfast at a diner at 3 pm!  They didn't really need me; they had more than enough free time to book and promote themselves.  (Some of the more business-like comics, like Fred Greenlee, did just that.)

Eventually, I quit the Comedy Workshop and left Houston.  Despite some bad encounters with Ron Shock, I was pleased to find that, years later, he had made it to the headline spot.  I was delighted when Ron appeared on "The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson"—the last new comic to be introduced on the show during Carson's reign.

And now Ron Shock is gone, along with Bill Hicks and Johnny Carson himself.

But, in the photo above, you'll notice that Ron Shock is wearing a tee-shirt with a skeleton on it.  He had them printed up and sold them at some shows.  The logo - which you can't see - is "You're gonna die anyway."

Ron Shock was right about that, too.   

A Bill Hicks Story

Comics are always asking me, "what was it like to work with Bill Hicks?" (Hicks was a wildly-inventive, uncompromising comic who died young of pancreatic cancer). I was reminded of this story while setting my clocks forward when daylight savings time resumed two weeks ago.


I was the booking agent for the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas, between 1984 and 1986. This meant I was the de facto agent for all the comics who made that club their home base. This included such acts as Sam Kinison (who was before my time), Brett "Grace Under Fire" Butler, Fred Greenlee, and - of course - Bill Hicks.

Now, no one doubted the talent of Bill Hicks. I had no trouble booking him in other clubs - once. But they usually didn't want him back because of his behavior. Hicks was doing a lot of drugs at the time. He'd insult anyone who he felt wasn't worthy of his talent (audience members or club owners). And he wouldn't get off stage on time. Sometimes he'd go an hour long!

So, sometime in the spring of 1986, I booked Hicks in Oklahoma. I can't recall if it was Tulsa or Oklahoma City. It was a week-long booking, Tuesday through Sunday. In fact, I supplied all three acts: MC, middle act, and Hicks as headliner. I arranged plane tickets for all three acts, and told the Oklahoma manager what time to pick the comics up at the airport - sometime around 3 pm.

Hicks came into my office on Tuesday morning. I handed him his ticket. I told him, "Bill, it's getting so I can't get you booked back anywhere. Please, please try and get through this one week without pissing off the management."

Hicks smiled and said "Sure." And left.

Around 3:30 that afternoon I get a call from an angry manager in Oklahoma. "They weren't on the plane. Where are they?"

Frantically, I started making phone calls. This was long before cell phones; a lot of people didn't even have answering machines. I couldn't get hold of any of the three comics, so I called their friends. No one knew anything.

Around 7 pm I got another call from the Oklahoma manger. "They're here."

Hicks had convinced the other comics to turn in their plane tickets for cash, rent a car, and drive to Oklahoma. And he didn't tell anyone!

He'd managed to piss off the Oklahoma manager before he even got there!

He ended the week in the same way. Hicks and the other two comics forgot that daylight savings time began that Sunday. They all showed up to the club an hour late. With no comics there, the manager had canceled the show.


I resigned as booking agent of the Comedy Workshop two weeks later.

Surviving Opening Weekend

I know of few things more tiring than opening a new nightclub. Years ago, in Houston, I recall working for a week to get a nightclub called Nice 'n' E-Z open on time. We'd work until we just had to sleep, then we'd take a nap atop the pool table.

To make this opening more stressful, I managed to come down with a cold.

The new South Jersey Comedy Cabaret opened this past weekend. There was some chaos on opening night...people managed to enter from three different doors, and a waitress dropped a tray of drinks at my feet. But all in all, it went well.

The sound system needs work, but our sound guys are working on it tomorrow. (Why is it that you never know for sure how the acoustics will sound until you have a room full of people? It probably even makes a difference what time of year it is: a roomful of people in sound-absorbing winter gear will be different from people in summer wear.)

But it's open, and I survived. For more information, you can go to the Comedy Cabaret website and click on the South Jersey room.