Comedians in Ditches, Taking Pisses

The road has always been filled with a lot of craziness. Sometimes you leave early for your destination only to wind up running late due to unforeseen circumstances. And other times you leave late only to realize you messed up the time zones and you’re in fact early for the show. Sometimes you load up on continental breakfast so you don’t have to pay for meals the rest of the day, and other times you stop at 8-different gas stations buying shitty food at each and every one of them. Sometimes you perform for a sold out room where the seats have been replaced with sticks that are stuck up everyone’s ass the whole show and nobody laughs, and other times you play for 5-people who laugh so hard at everything you say that you almost think they are mocking you because there’s no possible way they believe you’re that funny. One thing is consistent on the road, nothing!

My drive to the show

Back on February 14th, 2014 I found myself driving from Sault Ste. Marie, MI to Wausau, WI. This is just over a 6-hour commute that takes you over the top of Lake Michigan. Sault Ste. Marie has never been a fun city for me to play in and throughout these blogs you’ll see quite a few stories that stem from my time there. This particular show the night before (February 13th) was no different. I remember being on stage counting down the minutes until I could get the fuck off and get back to my room where I could be around only one person that hated me…me. Anyway, that show was behind me and it was time to hit the road for my Friday night Valentine’s Day show. My wife has always been understanding and realistic about this stuff. Valentine’s Day is a good money-making day in comedy and she was fine with me doing this show on Friday so that we could enjoy a date night back at home on Saturday the 15th when restaurants would be less crowded anyway. She shares my disdain for inconvenience and that helps our compatibility. Anyway, about an hour into my ride I was coming through a small town over Lake Michigan and saw the red & blue’s flashing behind me. I looked down to find that I was doing 60mph in a 25mph. Now, before you think I’m just a reckless fuck, this was a situation where the speed limit was 55mph, and then it shifted to 25mph where the cop sits right behind the sign to look for anybody with IL license plates to pull over. This is done because they know I’m not going to drive back up from IL to protest this ticket in court, so there they sit, handing out tickets like Mexicans on the strip in Vegas. Anyway, the cop comes up and was like “you’re driving a little fast huh”, to which I said “it seems faster than it is when you’re completely stopped”. The cop kind of chuckled as I said it with a great deal of charm. He asked what I was doing up there and I explained that I am a comedian. This is always a gamble…I’ve heard a lot of horror stories of other comedians getting pulled over, sharing they are a comedian, and then having the cop ask for them to tell a joke. If that happened to me, I would just ask for the ticket. I just bombed my balls off in front of a packed house in Sault Ste. Marie, I don’t need to get heckled by the rural patrol at this point. Luckily, this cop thought it was pretty cool and just asked a couple of questions about it. I can’t remember, but if I had to guess, I probably shared that I bombed on stage the night before. This would humanize me and hopefully gain some sympathy. The cop came back with a warning ticket and told me to slow down because being from Illinois, I had a target on my back up there. That was nice! I pulled back out onto the road, hands at 10 & 2, checking my mirrors and blind spots, putting my turn signal on to merge back into traffic and drove 24mph on cruise control out of there.

My show at the City Grill Bistro in Wausau, WI

I had been on the road for over 5-hours at this point and was closing in on the home stretch of my show. I don’t remember what town I was in, but if I had to guess it was probably Tomahawk or Pataka or Meskwaki, or some other name that was robbed from an Indian tribe that we stole the land from. I was trying to drink a lot of water at the time and I remember guzzling a few shaker bottles of 26 ounces of water on the way. I passed a gas station thinking “I really have to piss”, but then saw that I was only like 25-miles away from the show/hotel where I needed to be. For some reason, on the road, I don’t like to stop. It makes me feel like a pussy if I can’t control my bladder and hold my piss. There is no logic to that feeling at all, so yes, I know I’m an idiot. Anyway, I keep on the road until I can’t hold it anymore, probably about 10-miles away from my show. I was on a back road at this point until I got to my destination and there was no good place to pull over. I didn’t want to piss out in the middle of public, get caught, and then have to register as a sex offender all because of my pussy bladder. However, I also didn’t want to piss my front seat like a two-year old (I know two-year old’s don’t belong in the front seat, fuck-off and appreciate what I’m trying to say). I make the decision that I’m going to pull over and take the chance. I’ll just get on the shoulder, open my front door and back door on the passenger-side of the car, stand between them to shield myself, and go. Well, I pull over to the shoulder of the road only to realize that there was in fact no shoulder. See, 2013/2014 had a lot of snow in the Midwest, and apparently this back road had a shoulder of about 6-inches that turned into a ravine after that. Well, the snow plows had to plow so much snow for the year that they filled up the ravine full of snow so that it was practically even with the rest of the road. When I pulled over my tires grabbed the snow/ravine and flipped my car practically 90-degrees so that my passenger door was now sitting on the snow. At the time this happened, I was talking to my wife on the phone and in a panic I said “I just drove into a ditch” and I hung up the phone on her. She called back probably 10-times in a row, and I didn’t answer. I wasn’t trying to be a dick by not answering, I just had to pee so bad and the panic of my car turning over kicked that urge into high gear.

The weather in Wausau, WI on 2/14/14

I was afraid to get out of the car to try and piss because I wasn’t sure if any movement would topple my car further. So, I took my shaker bottle and made the decision to piss into that. As I’m about to get started, I hear a car horn and look up. My car wasn’t completely at 90 degrees, so I still had some visibility of the other cars. As I look up I see a school bus full of kids right next to me checking up on me to see if I’m ok. All my worrying about not wanting to register as a sexual predator was taunting me as I sat there with my dick out in a bottle talking to a bus driver while the kids pressed their faces against the window to taunt me. You could imagine my panic when the bus driver said “I’ll wait here until the police come to make sure you’re ok”. To which I said “no, I’m fine, please leave”. I finally got them to leave and then had to have an inner-dialogue with myself to get my wiring to calm down and finally start peeing. I filled up the bottle once and wasn’t done, so I had to roll down my window and dump my piss down the side of my car in 10-degree weather. As I was filling up the bottle a second time, a cop came up to my car to see if I was ok. As fast as I could, I had to explain to him that I drank 60+ ounces of water, I have to pee, there’s no other option, I am pissing in a bottle and dumping it down the side of my car, please give me a minute and then he can arrest me if he needs to. He chuckled and let me finish doing what I had to do. He helped me get out of my car and ensured me that my car wouldn’t tip. I sat there talking to him while waiting for a tow-truck. He asked me what I was doing out there and I said “going to see a comedy show”. No fucking chance I was telling him I was a comedian because then I’d hear “is this going to go into your act?”

My towing cost of $131.88

The tow truck got me out of there about an hour later. What ended up taking the tow truck only about 3-minutes of work, cost me $131.88. If only the cop over the lake would’ve just given me a ticket, it would’ve only cost me $75 and would’ve delayed me another 15-minutes. That 15-minutes would’ve been the difference in my bladder filling up like a water balloon by that gas station versus 15-miles later on the backroad. I could’ve saved myself $56.88 by just getting a speeding ticket. Now, I still had to get back on the road and get to a show. I originally thought that I was going to be about 1.5 hours early, it turns out now that I was almost going to be late for the show. I get to the show and hear people in the audience talking about the guy who held up traffic on Highway 52 by being in the ditch. All these fuckers drove past me and none of them stopped to help me. The first thing I did when I got on stage that night was light them up and tell them the story of my day. The second thing I did was pitch my merchandise to the tune of $131.88. I did my show and went to bed for the night. When I got up the next morning I walked out to see that my car-door had a solid layer of piss-ice frozen to it from the night before that I chisel off to get in. That’s the road!