I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy's Golden Era by William Knoedelseder Read Free

money so I can buy some drugs.’
    “I didn’t even have a checking account in those days,” Boosler went on, “and I had $75 in cash to my name. But for some reason I got in my car and drove there, and he was standing by the curb.
    I rolled down my window, he reached in and took the money, and I drove away. Years later his punch line to me was, ‘You handed me $75 when you didn’t even know who I was . . . so I consider you an enabler and the reason that I have a drug problem today.’”
    Miller’s drug consumption was conspicuous even among this drug-experienced crowd. Quaaludes were his favorite in the early days; he preferred prescription Soma in later years. It was the dope as much as the leukemia that killed him because he’d get so high that he’d forget to take his life-preserving medicine. Dreesen, Letterman, Gary Muledeer, and Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada had tried to stage an intervention with him in the months before he died—to no avail. Letterman flew to Los Angeles to be there, but when Miller saw them all together, he said, “Oh, this is that intervention shit, isn’t it? We’ll I’m not going for it.”
    “George, you have to get straight,” Letterman told him. “You have to get well or else.”
    “What does that mean? ” Miller shot back nastily. “That you’re not going to put me on your show anymore? ”
    For Letterman it was like a sucker punch to the gut. He left hurt and angry, and he and Miller didn’t talk to each other for weeks afterwards—the only time in their long friendship that had ever happened.
    Naturally, none of this was mentioned at the memorial, where one of the biggest laughs of the night was prompted by Kelly Montieth’s drug-referenced quip, “George probably doesn’t know he’s dead yet.”
    When it seemed for a second that Dreesen was steering dangerously close to sentimentality, saying, “I’m going to miss George’s 1586483173 text_rev.qxd:Layout 1 5/19/09 1:54 PM Page 7
    I’m Dying Up Here
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    criticism of me,” Elayne Boosler pulled him back from the brink by calling out, “I’ll fill in for him,” to which someone in the back of the room added, “And when she dies. . . . ”
    The exchange kicked off a volley of high-spirited heckling, with insults and put-downs caroming around the room—“Yeah? It won’t be the first time you’ve used my material”—all goosed along gleefully by a beaming Leno, dressed as of old in well-worn jeans and a rumpled denim shirt and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike Binder, with whom he’d had a painful parting of the ways more than two decades before.
    In that moment, they all seemed transformed. The years fell away. Suddenly, it was the mid-1970s. They were twenty-something, bubbling with ambition and bursting with dreams. No one was rich; no one was famous. No one had been to rehab; no one had died.
    Dave and Jay were still pals. They were all having the time of their lives. And no one had any inkling of what was about to happen.
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    Blood Brothers
    Richard Lewis was scared. On a cool April evening in 1971, he was on the way from his apartment in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, to midtown Manhattan, driving through the Lincoln Tunnel in his silver Chevy Vega, a car with more electrical problems than he had neuroses. No mechanic could figure out what was wrong with the car. Typically, the tape deck would begin to slow down, causing the high-pitched vocals of Procol Harum to drop to the deepest of bass, and then the headlights would dim, alert-ing him to the fact that he was a mile or so from hell, when the engine would die. Which could be a big problem in the tunnel.
    But that’s not what he was afraid of. Earlier in the day, Lewis, a twenty-four-year-old Ohio State graduate with a degree in marketing, had finally decided what he wanted to be in life, what he had to be: a stand-up comic. And that