HAPPY THANKSGIVING! YOU’RE GETTING FAT!

This Holiday Season, I learned something special: I’m getting fat.

This realization hit me like a ton of lard when my friend and mentor, Jamie Masada, owner of the world famous Laugh Factory said, “Hey buddy, you’re getting fat.”

After saying that, he pointed to Dane Cook onstage and said “You need to try to look like that, buddy.”

“Wait? Are you telling me Dane is richer, famouser, funnier, AND fitter?”

Jamie simply nodded.

I looked down towards my stomach. In my one-beer-in repose and in the darkened light of the comedy club, my belly was protruding ominously.

It was like ‘The Jaws Shot.’

If you don’t know what ‘The Jaws Shot’ is, let me explain: there’s a scene in the film ‘Jaws” where Police Chief Martin Brody (portrayed by the still breathing Roy Schieder) sees a shark attack in the water. The director, a young upstart by the name of Steven Spielberg, decided to steal a camera effect popularized by Alfred Hitchock, where the camera quickly dollies out, while the lens simultaneously zooms in on Roy’s freaked out face. The background shrinks away behind him, but Roy’s weathered and freaked out face remains the same size. Mr. Spielberg did it so well that the Hitchcock shot henceforth became known as the Jaws shot (take note, Mencia).

The effect, also known as a Dolly Zoom, gives the sensation of a sort of vertigo, a feeling of unreality that says to the audience this dude is having a ‘disturbing realization that is causing him to reassess everything he had previously believed.’ (Gee thanks, Wikipedia!)

That unsettling vertigo is what happened in my mind when I looked down and saw my gunt, my fupa, my stubborn lump of ‘What the fuck is that?’

I knew there was a semi-situation down there but I was always convinced I was one giant dump away from a flat stomach. I was CERTAIN I was always just one titanic turd away from the abs I had back in high school! I mean, I won Best Body for Senior Superlatives (true story), I’m not fat — I’m just post-meal, right?

Granted my stomach never became flat, even after the most fiber-and-peach laden log. Whenever I took an especially impressive bm — you know, the ginormous kind that makes you feel lonely afterward? — I would immediately swivel to the mirror and check out the six pack… which became I two pack…. which became a ‘flat stomach’… which became a ‘problem area.’

My first step was to go to one of thoese fancy organic food stores and start taking crap-inducing supplements like Apple Cider Vinegar tablets and Green Tea pills, and wheatgrass shots. All this stuff allegedly makes one… what’s the technical term?… oh yeah, ‘shit your face off,’ as one health food hippie informed me. After two months of poo that smelled and looked like bails of wet hay, it was clear that bigger dumps doesn’t equal flatter stomach. It only meant more public dookie dances to the nearest toilet. Wheatgrass tends to sneak up on ya.

Finally, even after my mom concurred with Masada, I decided to (shudder) join a Gymnasium.

Mind you, I hadn’t belonged to a gym. Ever. I used to teach yoga, which kept me fit, until I had the startling (and yes, somewhat Jaws-shot-ish) realization that I fucking hated it. I jumped headlong into MMA until two broken fingers and a broken nose later I realized maybe it was time for me to be a goddamn grown up. Hikes in Runyon Canyon were good ways to have quasi-dates with health-conscious chicks, but alas, they didn’t make me gutless.

Luckily, the visual of my pregnant stomach was enough to propel my lazy ass to walk through the doors of Crunch! fitness and sit down with a manager director and discuss my ‘goals.‘

The managing director, my friend Amita Balla, convinced me to work with a personal trainer to meet said goals and somehow, I found myself handing her my credit card to complete the transaction. And yes, handing her the credit card to pay for a personal trainer induced another Jaws shot in my head.

The next day, I found myself sitting next to my new trainer, Bruce, in a little side office with gadgets and scales and pseudo-scientific looking charts and papers.

“What are you here for?” he asked.

“I’m getting fat,” I said.

“So then what are your goals?”

“Uh, to not be fat?”

“Anything else?”

“A six-pack would be nice as long as it doesn’t turn me gay,” I dryly quipped.

Bruce looked at me like a dog tilting his head at the sound of a mysterious squeaking.

“I’m kidding,” I said. “But boy this place is pretty gay. They should change the name to Snap! fitness. What about those dudes on the machine where they open and close their legs? Are they bi? It’s like straight-gay-straight-gay-Brad Pitt-Kevin Spacey.”

He laughed about as much as a young, straight African-American man is gonna laugh at anything homosexual-related, which is admittedly not much.

“Is there a chance I’ll be on the elliptical one day and Adam Lambert is just gonna run up and make out with my face willy-nilly?”

“I don’t think so,” Bruce semi-chuckled, as he awkwardly went back to the computer grogram of ‘goals’ to type in my stats.

I was trying to use humor to distract myself from the claustrophobia brought on by the proximity of treadmills. Plus, I knew he was about to measure my body fat and the mere concept of him pinching my fat with forceps gave me severe agita. I decided to take a left off gay street onto race road.

“And what about these white dudes here with the tribal tattoos. I’m like ‘Really? What tribe are you in, Trevor? And who’s your leader, Ed Hardy?’ Haha. Get it?”

“Okay, stand up. Let’s see what’s going on here,” Bruce said, apparently not getting it. “Face towards the door.”

I felt like I was in prison. Bruce took the stainless steel pinchers around my body — my arms, my gut, my butt, and my upper back between the shoulder blades.

He then sat down, did some rudimentary calculations.

“Wow,” he said. “You’re at 20 percent body fat.”

I blanched, visibly and audibly. I probably would have reacted better if he had told me I had HIV. At least that would make sense to me.

“Really? Are you sure?”

I mean, he was a young black guy — I couldn’t be utterly convinced of his mathematics.

“Yeah, according to this chart.”

“20 percent fat? But aren’t humans like 80 percent water? That means the part of me that isn’t water… is fat?”

Finally, he laughed at loud. Fat jokes. I should have known. The problem with that was I was being completely serious.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said, “You’re not separated into fat and water.”

“So then it’s like a venn diagram, and some of my water is fat? Is that what ‘heavy water’ is? Either way, all I am is liquid and lipids. It’s fucking disgusting!”

“Well then, let’s get to work!”

And with that, Bruce stood up in a very positive, personal-trainery type of way and walked out of the medical examining room/janitor closet into the cacophony of spinning wheels and clanking steel.

This is going to suck, I thought… But then I looked at my 2nd trimester tummy and followed with a heavy (no pun intended) sigh….

To All the Bitches Out There…

Lately, I’ve been Internet Dating. And by that, I mean I’ve been dating the internet — last night, I totally fingered Yahoo. I almost banged Google, but you know how hard it is to fit a penis into a USB port?

Okay, that’s goofy, but in a way, it sums up my frustration with ‘dating’ in LA. It seems like nowadays, with the quasi-intimacy of facebook, ichat, and skype, all I do is have cyber-relationship where my ‘date’ and I message each other, watch the same youtube clips, and send each other emoticon’ed exclamations.

Pretty soon, it’s gonna be animated flowers and long e-walks on the Laguna Beach website. Will a woman be happy with a cartoon engagement ring?

Whatever the case may be, getting face-to-face with someone you haven’t thoroughly cyber-stalked is a rarity. Even when a date is set up, something invariably happens. Los Angeles seems to be the only town in the world where “Oh, I flaked!” serves as a legitimate excuse as to why someone shows up late or not at all.

All that aside, that’s not the REAL problem. The real problem in LA is the actual date. The reason these dates are usually awful is because they involve WOMEN.

Okay, that’s not really fair. The truth is men and women want completely different things out here from the start. Women will want to date a guy multiple times, and if it really goes well, they will then want to f@#k. Men will want to f@#k a girl multiple times, and if it really goes well, they will then want to date. And therein lies the rub.

Because women are testing both our ‘wallets’ and our personalities, they will want us to take them on a fancy dinner where they can ask us stupid questions at our financial and personal expense.

How do I know this? Because I’ve been dating in LA! So the following list is, mostly, for the ladies. Just a quick mirror up to, what I find to be, pretty shittastic behavior.

So, without further adieu, here are the TOP 10 WORSE QUESTIONS women ask men on FIRST DATES based on my personal experience since moving here in February (note — this doesn’t represent 10 first dates, some of these inanities were asked on the same date):

10.“How many women have you slept with?” While it is a valid question if you are out with a drug-using sex worker, it never does any good, and you will never get the truth. Whatever answer I tell you guys, double it. If the guy is wearing an Affliction t-shirt, triple it and add Herpes. If he’s Persian, you probably already have Herpes.

9.“What do you think of me?” and it’s retarded step-sister “Are you having a good time?” Hello, needygirl.com! Just assume he likes you and he’s doing swell! He won’t tell you anything bad, so it’s a pseudo-question that is really just you desperately fishing for compliments. Ask him if he thinks your jeans make you look fat while you’re at it.

8.“Do you believe in God?” At some point it might be nice to know if he is a high priest in a Satanic cult or a … shudder… Scientologist…. but save it for now. It’s an argument in the making. Worse still, a boring argument that won’t result in great hate sex.

7.“Do you like children?” Do I really need to explain why? Guys are still trying to decide how much booze they need to imbibe to get the courage to make a move on you. The idea that their buzzing sperm could result in a child should be avoided for at least… well, forever.

6.“What happened with your last girlfriend?” I killed her for asking annoying questions.

5. “Have you ever fooled around with a man?” Thanks for calling me gay!

4. “Do you believe in love at first sight?/Do you believe in fate?/ Do you believe in destiny?” Run for the goddamned hills if any of these are ever asked! I get the chills just writing it.

3. “What are you thinking?” Any guy who has had a long-term relationship before has 47 Samsonites full of luggage they carry around with them revolving around this loaded question. Stay away from it unless you want to witness him have a PTSD nam-style flashback or seizure.

2. “What type of car do you drive?” OK — guys: if, on the off-chance, you didn’t pick the girl up and she actually asks this, you are allowed only one feasible response and that is: “Oh, I have a black rape-van.” When she says, “Whaaaat?” Your response is “Sorry, a black non-consensual-sex van. The ladder in the back is to get a better view of playgrounds.” From now on, that’s the answer. Okay, guys?

1. “Do you ever want to get married?” Combine all of the horribleness of the above questions to form the ultimate first-date cockblocker on the planet. I’d rather hear about your yoga class and your kooky cats than to field that quagmire of a question.

When all is said and done, I’ve been trying to stick with my motto, which is BE MYSELF.

And yes, sometimes that is sort of vulgar and offensive, which can be a turn-off to some bitches.

And YES, when I pull up in my busted-up Honda that sounds like drunks midgets are fucking in the engine, I find that sometimes women in LA find that “Myself” apparently isn’t good enough to bring home to mama.

But that’s okay with me.

I think I’m gonna hold out for a non-gold-digger who can appreciate a car with character and a good old-fashioned fart joke.

CHOLO COMEDY

My heart was flopping around like a Sunfish in my chest cavity. Damn, I’m belted in Gracie jiu jitsu! I fantasize about putting vatos in flying heel hooks like a teenager dreams about twilight trysts with vampires! Why in the hell is my heart pounding like this? Don’t look at that table!

“Um… okay… Hey, my name is Bill… I’m white…. okay, moving on….”

My logical left brain kept trying to rotate my body counterclockwise, away from the seething mass of testosterone and tattoos.

“Hey, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!”

What? Were these cholos directing their epithets towards me? Why? I couldn’t understand it. I guess I can be pretty offensive to Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and any other variant of pigmentation on the planet, but I had barely said a word yet…. Was I about to get jumped onstage… again?

***********************

Offstage, about 5 minutes earlier, I had arrogantly planned to verbally lacerate the table of three rowdy and disrespectful cholos. They had not only been loud, but they had made thinly veiled threats to the two previous comics, terrifying half the audience in the process.

Not only were these dudes empirically scary-looking, but the symmetry of their positioning alone was daunting. At the head of the table farthest away from the stage sat the most colossal cholo. He looked like a Latin Jabba the Hut — a Jabba el Cabana, if you will. Flanking him on either side were two stoned-faced and rail thin thugs, faded prison tats on skinny necks, faces ravaged with either chicken pox or knife scars. To add to their mysterious gargoyle-like stillness, they had black baseball caps with ruler-straight brims pulled down low over their eyes. They looked like MLB pitchers hiding their tells in the bottom of the ninth.

From the safety of the wings of the club, I visualized myself getting onstage and acting out he following scenario:

“Hey guys, let me ask you a question…. You got any guns?”

“Nooooo.”

“You got any knifes?”

“Noooo.”

“Then shut the fuck up!”

The collective reaction, whatever it might be, would be immediate. Everyone in the audience (sans the three amigos) would guffaw and cheer. Or their collective sphincter would knot up tighter than an ice road trucker’s lug nuts.

Jabba was drinking a fruity blue drink, so then I would follow it up with this:

“Look at you, your face says ‘FUCK YOU!’ but your drink says ‘FUCK ME!!!’”

Then the audience would explode and I would be body surfed out of the room in celebration after such a swift dismantling of this awful heckler.

I cockily smiled to myself as I hid in the confines of the comedy club curtains.

Suddenly, Manny, the comic onstage, said something that didn’t resonate well with Jabba and I saw it…. a uniquely Mexican phenomenon — the “thousand yard smile.”

See, whenever you make most race-oriented jokes, the litmus for your standing is usually clear: a smile. Having spent my entire adolescence in a predominantly black school, I learned that once you get an African-American man to laugh, things are pretty much cool. You chuckled at my ‘Once you go pale, you never have to post bail’ joke? Awesome. Now please laugh louder to cue the uptight white people to laugh.

However, for many Mexican-Americans, the smile is a much more nebulous mode of expression.

For example, one night I was doing a 1:20am spot in Times Square. In the front row, there was a group of thick Mexican-Americans, plaid sleeves folded over their chests.

I went into my bit about the debatable ethnicity of Adam and Eve:

“Eve definitely wasn’t white — a white Eve would have said, ‘I don’t think that apple’s organic!’ …. and an asian Eve would have eaten the snake!” The cholos roared. Hey, it’s not that funny, but people seem to love to laugh at Asians, particularly Asians.

I was certain they’d love the tag:

“I’m not sure about Adam. Maybe he was Latino, fellas…. I mean, it was the perfect garden — somebody had to trim the hedges!”

Crickets.

The Latinos kept smiling, but their eyes stopped dancing, becoming beams of fixed and scary intensity. One of the guys in the front row, smiling Cheshire-wide, started in: “Oh, yeah, that’s real funny, Gringo. Hahaha. Yeah, we’re landscapers. Maybe you can make me laugh even more after the show in the alley.”

Why are you smiling? I thought, as I looked at him. It suddenly struck me that he wasn’t smiling at all, he was baring his teeth.

I shook off the comment and finished the show, but I closed up certain that I was going to be flattened into a tamale. Like a man, I hid in the bathroom afterward.

Remembering that moment, I studied the way Jabba was eyeing Manny at the end of his set. Jabba had the exact same pissed-off expression, that “thousand yard smile”….

The MC whisked Manny offstage and then, almost instantaneously, ushered me on.

I took one step onstage and the arrogance immediately flew out of my body (apparently it went outside to smoke filtered cigarettes and discuss Sartre). The bright spotlights from the grid overhead bore down on me as I made my way to the mike stand. Everything was making me feel very, very… white.

“Um… okay… Hey, my name is Bill… I’m white…. okay, moving on….”

“Hey, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!”

I flinched. I shouldn’t have said I was white, I thought. Was that racist of me?!

After my slight recoil, I glanced over at the table and noticed that the two skinny cholos were standing up and furious! And they were facing… each other?!!! Huh?

“Fuck you, cabron!”

There was a shove. The two cholos were fighting!!! Skinny cholo #1 slapped skinny cholo #2 in the face. Jabba stood up to mediate and/or referee and the three went off to the far side of the club, throwing furniture out of their way as they did.

“Anybody in a relationship here?” I asked everyone and no one. Maybe I was asking the universe. I’m not sure.

Groups of people started to quietly but swiftly flee the scene.

“I actually just got dumped by text recently. I got it while I was driving…”

I slowly sat on the stool onstage and looked out into the confused and semi-paralyzed audience members remaining as fisticuffs ensued in the wings.

“…She was in the passenger seat.”

One heavyset white girl 4 rows in tittered. That was all I needed. A modicum of validation was all I need, even as the slapping and yelling transpired not 20 feet away from my right ear.

More people got up to leave.

“She was right there!… She should have at least called like an adult.”

Another lone titter in the blackness.

Damn, I thought, a huge smile on my face, I love this job….

Hooters Girls

He was a big, black guy. That may sound like a bland description, but, in fact, the phrase ‘big black guy’ is potent and ubiquitous enough to induce fear in about 87% of all white people because, when used in a story around the watercooler, it usually precedes somebody getting hurt. So when said big, black guy approached me angrily with a clenched fist, I had to rethink my Jaeger-bomb-loosened lips’ word choices… once again. He raised his hand. There was going to be a bar fight….

As Dane Cook might say, let me ‘Tarantino’ this story a little bit.

On the last day of my tour for I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, I met up with Tucker Max at the Sandbar in Salt Lake City. After almost 2 months of continuous bars in contiguous states, I was probably, admittedly, at the end of my tether with women. Well, not just women, a certain TYPE of woman: specifically, sluts.

If you visibly blanched at that word, I don’t blame you. It’s a mean word and should only be applied to sluts, and their subset, skanks. (nota bene: A skank is a slut without money or class. How can a slut have class, you ask? Ask Angelina Jolie.)

When I arrived at Sandbar, Tucker was surrounded by three HOOTERS girls. I’m not exactly sure what it means to be a ‘Hooters girls,’ because the motley crew of 3 women — a little Mexican, a hippy bleach blonde, and an impossibly tall and busty brunette with, perhaps, an adam’s apple — didn’t seem to measure up to any discernible standard. unless slut is a standard. Well, technically, they work for tips, so they’re more like whores, but that’s a completely different discussion that might devolve into a debate on Capitalism.

I took a deep breath and introduced myself with a smile and a handshake. These three ladies had been sending MMS boob pic texts to Tucker all night in the finger-crossing hopes of being one of the thousand women to bone him, so my presence wasn’t really much concern to them anyway. The bleachie and the tranny were doing figure eights and peacocking for Tucker. Intermittently, they would walk away and text to ‘seem’ unavailable, but they’d swoop back and shimmy for Tucker then drift away, etc, etc.

Why did I come? I thought…. I have no interest in being in a bar in SLC late on a Tuesday and I definitely have no interest trying to convince a HOOTERS GIRL that i’m worth the walk back to my motel.

“Hey, you should buy me and my friend a shot.” It was the little Mexican girl, flashing a cute little smile that I instinctively knew had served her well over the years.

“What are you talking about?” I said, sincerely confused.

“Buy me and my friend a shot.”

“No. Are you out of your mind? I’m not some douchebag getting a boner because you’re talking to me. Why don’t you buy me a shot?”

That’s when I noticed her engagement ring.

“Holy shit! And you’re engaged. You are, in a nutshell, why men HATE women; trying to get me to buy you drinks when you’re engaged? Ugh.”

She coquettishly bit her lower lip and flipped her hair in that packaged shy way. For some reason, it angered me. Not because I almost fell for it — but because I couldn’t help but flashback to an alternate 22 year old BILL DAWES that would have fallen for it and ended up alone with Herpes 3-5 days later.

That’s when I noticed the tats and piercings on all three of the HOOTERS girl. I couldn’t help but notice the tats and the piercings on all these girls. It made perfect sense that they had them. I’m not saying that all tatted girls are sluts, but I’ve never seen the Chinese symbol for ‘Abstinence.’

However, I have noticed that message of the tattoo is almost always inversely proportional to how messed up the woman is.

A nice Christian sorostitute trying to break free from mom and dad might get a tattoo of a sexy panther or a dragon or maybe a scandalous Betty Boop pin-up tat. Look at me, I’m wild! she says to the world.

This engaged woman had a tat of a cross on her neck and sundry symbols of peace and enlightenment. Right away, I knew she was horribly damaged.

Often, when I see the girl with a sentence wrapping around her torso that says something like “peace and love and everlasting happiness in a rainbow of kittens and butterflies and puppies in a bed of roses,” the following conversation ensues:

“When you get that?”

“Oh, after my first abortion.”

Sometimes, the tats are a map of molestations, and the stories sound like a crazy game of Clue. “That was my Uncle in the living room with a Candlestick…. I’m not ready to talk about with happened with Professor Plum..”

At some point, drinks served their purpose and lubricated the cranky wheels of conversation and the little Mexican started talking a lot. Suddenly, she informed me her dad was an Indian chief

“Wait, you’re not Mexican?” I asked.

“No, I’m half Cherokee.”

“Be honest, you’re just saying that to be cool. I get it — you moved to Salt Lake and decided to reinvent yourself as some Featherhead Pocahantas because you didn’t want people to think you’re Mexican.”

“I’m not Mexican.”

“Tell your face that.”

“What does that even mean.” She was dumb. dumb enough to accept a small pox blanket and a bottle of booze for 50,000 acres dumb? Hard to tell.

“The closest your dad came to being an Indian was banging another Mexican dishwasher working at an Indian casino.”

Without warning, the girl started crying.

After much apologizing, she told me that her dad was in fact an Indian chief who had been horribly murdered ten years ago to the day. She even opened her purse and produced a wrinkled newspaper article detailing the horror. I felt like a speck of fly shit on a mound of horse dung. I bought her two shots. I made her laugh. I listened.

We had a nice hug and then I went to the bathroom… which is where the trouble started. The little Indian told her friend bleachie who told busty brunette who, in turn, told ‘big black guy.’ By the time I did my shake and shiver and walked back into the bar, there was a veritable posse about to run me out of town — the only thing missing was the torches.

The big, black guy was in my face first, hand raised, ready to strike. So I did what any man would do in that situation. I lied.

“What’s happening?” I said.

“You disgraced the memory of this poor girl’s father by making fun of his death.”

“Oh no, that wasn’t me, that was my friend — he’s outside. Let me get him.”

In the brief moment of confusion, I was outside on the patio, then outside on the sidewalk, then crossing the street, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

I promised, in that instant, NEVER to insult a woman, even unintentionally, ever again; the fission reaction they can set off with their tears can lead to the Enola Gay of beatdowns.

So never again… until the next time.