The Comedy Club

note from the editor: this essay was originally written in January 2023, and contains information which, while sentiments may remain, is no longer current.

It’s the evening before my commencement ceremony. My girlfriend, dad, grandfather and I are sitting in a dimly-lit bar, small, loud, but not suffocating. The two men had just arrived earlier that evening, driving 180 miles from home a week before Christmas to see me walk across the stage and shake the university president’s hand (after sitting through nearly four hours’ worth of speech after tired speech) that next day. I figured I owed them a drink in anticipation and gratitude.

The band across the room’s just warming up, the guitarist passively soloing over a single, elongated synth chord set to a slow beat that seems to fill the room without our realizing. Monotonous, sure, but it’s been a while since I’d heard any live music and this is a welcome treat. Grandpa’s beaming as he listens to the sounds, strumming along with the air guitar that never leaves his side. Drinks arrive eventually, and somewhere after the initial cheers are had, his face changes, and he launches into one of the stories I’ve heard countless times from countless people over the years, but never grew tired of: the tale of how he followed his dream.

Like most grandfathers tracing their roots to the tail end of the Silent Generation, mine has lived a long and often very difficult life. His father, a veteran of the Great War who would pass in 1962 of complications from mustard gas exposure in the trenches, owned a pharmacy somewhere in rural Mississippi near Tupelo, and raised his two sons to one day follow in his footsteps. For a while, that seemed to be just where my grandfather was headed; stark white or olive drab.

That is, until.

Until one day he found his passion in pieces, wrapped in a brown paper bag and given to his father in lieu of payment for delivering a baby calf (apparently this was a relatively-common practice for pharmacists in the rural south?)

It wasn’t the looks that struck him. The thing was beaten to hell, likely hadn’t even been crafted that century, and desperately needed repairing. But rather, it was where he knew it could take him; the endless possibility of it all; the places he could go, the hearts he could penetrate, the raw power concentrated at his fingertips to speak or shout or scream when words simply fall too short. (Or, maybe he just had too much free time on his hands—who’s to say? I mean, how else is one to pass the time as a young teen out in the middle of Mississippi in the ‘50s?) If you’re wondering what on earth in that brown bag could have offered so much promise, I’m talking about a very old, very worn, and very consequential clarinet.

So what did the man do with this opportunity before him? He seized it, and ran for his life. By 14 he was playing in smoke-filled bars all across the south, now with a saxophone. By 22 he’d become a studio musician with Sun Records, occasionally crossing paths with the likes of Elvis and Otis Redding, recording Top 10 hits such as Barbara Lynn’s “You’ll Lose a Good Thing”, the works. Though he never really made the big-time himself, he still tours even today at 83 years old, albeit on a smaller scale, taking crowds all across the state on a two-set journey back to the nifty fifties with his band, the Belairs. And through it all, he never forgot where he came from, and the clarinet he had to thank for all of it.

For brevity, I’ll say I also have this clarinet to thank for so many things, among which include: my mother, who came as a result of Grandpa’s touring leading him to later settle in Ohio; my own passion for music today, over half a century later (first chair clarinet in the wind symphony by tenth grade, baby); and a lifetime’s worth of love, loss, struggles, triumphs and stories, which would all eventually lead to us there, in that bar in southeast Michigan, on that night in mid-December.

As Grandpa finishes telling us about the pharmacist, the calf and the clarinet, his eyes light up. Finishing his drink in a swift gulp, he exclaims,

“The point is: find what you love, and do it! Do the shit out of it!”

That was December 17, 2022. Three weeks and one car accident on Christmas Eve later, these words are ringing in my ears as I stare into what’s beginning to feel like an empty abyss of adulthood before me.

You see, I had an idea this was coming—whatever this is; the hyperbolic “next” that I guess I was meant to have spent the last four years of my educational career preparing for. I’d been bracing myself for this as much as anyone else, at least I thought. But that was before the car accident. Minor enough to leave everyone unharmed, major enough to have me needing a new vehicle. That was before the scramble to find that vehicle in less than a week, with a bank loan I hadn’t been prepared to take and a savings account I hadn’t been prepared to empty when I’d gone home for the holidays. That was before I saw the final number I owe in student loan debt. That was before my boss at my part-time job while in school asked me to join as a full-time worker at the end of the month.

That was before I graduated, and was offered a glimpse at how fast life begins to happen outside the classroom. It’s been three weeks since that evening in December, and I’m only now realizing I have no idea what to do.

I haven’t offered a definitive answer to my boss yet; we’re set to meet in a few days to talk things over. I think it’d be easy for me to say yes, of course I’d love to join full-time. It’s a small business, and after two years on the job I’d be one of the most senior members on the staff. But there wouldn’t be any benefits offered, save for PTO. The salary wouldn’t be great, especially for one of the most egregiously cost-prohibitive cities in the state. Once loan payments begin, I wouldn’t be able to do much saving at all. Moreover, frankly, the job itself is pretty brainless, and I know I wouldn’t be utilizing my degree in any substantive way. Overall, it’d be one of the most lateral moves I’ve ever made. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing—of course it would materially benefit me quite a bit in the short term, especially if I renewed my lease at this shit hole of an apartment I’m writing these words in now. If nothing else, it would offer stasis. But what I think I’m getting at is that really, I know I’m capable of more. That I’m better than this. That I didn’t envision my “next” being just more of this. The problem is, after getting this degree, I have nothing else to show for myself.

Before you call me entitled, just hear me out. In high school, I wasn’t a great student. If it hadn’t been for the eleventh-hour generosity shown by a teacher who’d caught me cheating on the final quiz of the year (pre-calc), I wouldn’t have gotten my diploma, and I would have had to repeat my senior year. I routinely skipped class, half-assed my way through every essay and assignment if I bothered to do them at all, hardly ever even opened a book. On game days, I’d show up for marching band either stoned, drunk, or both, tripping over my untied shoes and passing out in a practice room before I’d even finished putting on my uniform. The second I came home, I’d lock myself in my room, glued to either the Playstation or my guitar for hours on end. I had no real aspirations, no ambition, no money, no responsibilities whatsoever. But none of that mattered, because I had a lot of friends. I was a pretty popular kid back then. But who wouldn’t have been, being just about the only one in their grade with a solid weed hookup in the form of a college-dropout neighbor, and utterly desperate enough for friendship and attention to offer that weed for free to almost anyone? Adding to this, I was a sort of class clown, never afraid to offer some sarcastic remark in the middle of almost any teacher’s lecture. But fame comes at a cost, and mine came in the form of several, several appointments with the school’s vice principal, a few after-school detentions, a cumulative GPA of 2.6, and one long, very uncomfortable and very forced meeting (read: intervention) as a sophomore with all my teachers, the principal, my guidance counselor, and my parents.

Somehow, I made it out of there—RHS class of 2017. Rejected from my local university, the path I chose afterward was pretty typical for your average high school burnout in my town. I spent the summer slaving at a restaurant, belatedly obtained my driver’s license, then became a stockman at one of the town’s big-box superstores just down the road. Nine dollars an hour, forty hours a week. And at the time, I was totally happy with it. While the vast majority of my peers had chosen to continue their education, I’d finally arrived, living at home and only having to pay for gas, car insurance and weed. Sure, I still dreamed of becoming a professional musician like my grandfather one day. I’d record some garbage tune on my guitar that I’d conjured up at work, write some awful lyrics to go alongside, and think in the future I’d be able to play for a crowd. That day never came, obviously, but a boy can dream.

By the time I finally came around to the idea of going to college that next spring, I’d found a sense of purpose like I’d never experienced before. Maybe this coincided with realizing the complete futility of my chosen profession at the grocery store, or maybe it was more to do with the walls in my childhood bedroom seeming to shrink a little more each day. Regardless, I knew by then that the time had come for a major change. I was tired of this unrelenting desire to do something else, be something more. I was tired of this cycle I’d fallen into, going in and out of work each day feeling like a marionette, perfecting my technique at the most menial of tasks known to man, like breaking down boxes or hauling a pallet jack without hitting my Achilles. I was tired of driving this shit car in the winter, a 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee that wasn’t even mine to be tired of. I was tired of this sense of being an adult, but still living with my parents and feeling every bit a lost and confused child. I was tired of stasis. I was tired of this. And if I could just get accepted into a school, offered a chance at making that change a reality, I would seize that opportunity with every ounce of my being, and run for the hills as if my life depended on it. And in a very real way, when my only alternative was to continue on with more of this utterly meaningless mediocrity, I guess it did. And so that fall, I began my first semester as an undergrad at the University of Akron.

There’s a reminder set to go off at 7:00 each morning on my phone: “I will do well. I have no choice.” Over the years, it’s become a sort of mantra for me, a small means of keeping me focused, present, etc. I couldn’t tell you at what point I started ignoring that reminder, though I still see the words every time I turn on the screen. I first set this reminder on the evening before my first day of school, lying in a sleeping bag in the empty attic apartment I’d call home that first year. For a while those eight words would define the essence of who I became, and the results were immediate. By the end of my first semester, I’d made the dean’s list. A year later, now commuting from home, I attained a 4.0 for the first time since middle school. With my general education requirements out of the way, I declared myself as an English major. I was going to become a writer. A creative writer. A copywriter! I had no idea whatsoever how I’d get there, but that was the goal I’d set for myself. The dream, one of many. In the process, however, I began to obsess over another dream of mine—a dream I’d first had when I was just starting high school, when the world still seemed to accommodate the dreamers among us: being admitted at the University of Michigan, and getting the hell out of northeast Ohio. And so, setting my sights for that school up north, I submitted my application at the tail end of 2019.

By now I’d effectively reinvented myself, relatively drug-free (save for the old favorites, caffeine and nicotine), and every bit a “studious scholar”, as Mom put it. I became something of an introvert, I think. My time outside class was devoted almost exclusively to homework, writing essays on Chaucer, reading Milton, or studying Spanish in a feeble effort to compensate for my dad failing to raise his kids in a bilingual household. I’d lost touch with the majority of my friends from high school, but these were soon replaced with those of the academic peers I found myself sitting next to twice a week. The role of Friend became far more temporary, coming and going regularly with each passing semester. I’ll admit there’s more I could have done to prevent this, but I’ve since given up lamenting what could’ve been in that regard. How else was I to conduct myself while chasing this goal of mine? It was easiest to begin most relationships with an expiration date in mind. While this was alright for the moment, if I’d have known what was coming just a few months down the road, I would have done things differently.

You know that saying about hindsight?
It’s 2020.
It’s 2023 now, apparently.

Apparently.
Never before has any word in the English language so succinctly compounded the events of the last three years. I was accepted at the University of Michigan in February of 2020, apparently. Three weeks later, Akron ordered all students home before I’d even left campus for the day, apparently. My uncle passed away in April and I thought a good coping mechanism would be to spend the entirety of that first semester of online school drunk off Franzia, apparently. My girlfriend and I moved to Michigan at the end of that summer, believing I’d be doing anything other than spending my days on Zoom call after Zoom call after stupid fucking Zoom call, apparently. I believed I’d made the right choice, apparently.

Apparently, it’s 2023 now, and in the time I’ve been here I’ve done absolutely nothing. School. Work. Weed. Sleep. Repeat ad infinitum, the end.

Now I have a degree, apparently.

And beyond that, not one single thing to show for myself.

So what do I do? What do I do when every job I’d otherwise be qualified to apply for demands prior experience or a portfolio of work? How on earth am I meant to compile a portfolio if I have absolutely no free time to do anything other than get stoned and feel sorry for myself every evening, and guilty that I’d gotten stoned even though I’d told myself all day that I wouldn’t? If I accept this full-time offer at my current job, I’ll have just as little time as I always have, only now I won’t be able to justify that effort by telling myself that one day it’ll amount to anything more than a few extra dollars in my bank account each month. Even then, that’s only until I have to start repaying these loans I used to get this education, to work at this job where I don’t even utilize the degree that I took the loans out to pay for. I know I’m capable of something more than this. Better than this. But how do I get there?

As I’ve been considering this offer over the last few days, I realize my dad followed a similar career path; Full-time student (B.S., Psychology, Akron ’93), part-time worker (Olive Garden). After graduation he chose to turn that part-time job into a career, assuming a managerial role in food service for over 20 years until being laid off without notice. From there, he became an over-the-phone salesman for a cable company. Putting that degree to good use is a common theme in my family, as you can see. Fortunately, he actually is putting his education to use today. Only took 30 years.

Could the same be said for me one day?

Here’s why I don’t like the idea of hoping it will. We weren’t destitute when I was growing up, but we certainly weren’t wealthy. We had enough to get by, but only that and nothing more. The foundation on which my house sits is uneven and gradually sinking; apparently they didn’t have levelers in 1920. Until I was 12, rain would collect in our attic just above my bedroom, leaking down into a bucket placed near my bed. My ceiling would crumble and break off in pieces. One evening, a baseball-sized chunk fell right on my forehead while I slept, leaving me looking like I’d just been hit by a Looney Tunes hammer. And the pain? Don’t even get me started. Honestly, it was as hilarious as it was infuriating. Hilarious, because I was a kid and didn’t know any better. Infuriating, because I did know, before I’d seen my mother’s tears and my father’s somber frown, that my parents hadn’t ever wanted that kind of a life for me. That they too had thought they’d become something more than this, that they’d have more than this to offer their children. And so I told myself that one day, I’d get there for them. That I’d go far, further than they were able to, and that I’d bring them with me once I got there, and we wouldn’t ever have to worry about the ceiling falling in on us again.

As I stare into this abyss before me, I have no idea what to do. Nothing would make me happier than to follow those words my grandfather told me in December, to find what I love and to do the shit out of it. And I still could, with what little free time I’ll have left. For now, I’m taking things one day at a time, and learning patience every step of the way. My parents taught me that good things come to those who wait, but with the world being the way it is, with life seeming to happen faster and faster with each passing day, how much longer can I afford to keep doing this?