A Pirate Looks at 50

“Let Me Entertain You”

"I'm a burning effigy of everything I used to be. You're my rock of empathy, My Dear."

Preface

The prologue to follow might feel familiar to long-time readers. It was originally paired with a piece titled “Religion & Politics,” which I penned, and published, nearly 2 years on now. “A Comic Looks At 50” is the second of three études chronicling my employment as a minstrel for US servicepersons stationed abroad.

Prologue

Some 16 years ago, I embarked on my first Armed Forces Entertainment tour. GIs, deployed to remote, perilous Hoth, Dagobah, and Tatooine-like posts, fall prey to depression, and suicide. AFE books comics, rockers, MMA fighters, et al, to keep those wolves at bay.

A Comic Looks At 50

Between 2006-2011, I embarked on 5 AFE (Armed Forces Entertainment) tours, always performing, sometimes producing. My travels abroad begat many aureus memories; In Djibouti, I neared a cheetah, drawing close enough to discern the length of its eyelashes. Where Iraq bends a knee to the Gulf, I flew inside a 'copter, its propeller mount somehow pissing orange oil into the cabin, and onto my skullcap.

Kyrgyzstan was our first official stop. Booking an AFE tour meant working 4-6 negligibly neighboring nations. Tours typically lasted 2-3 weeks; tour groups typically numbered 3-4 members.

Sal, my closest SoCal confidant, emceed. His clean, folksy humor held broad appeal. Sal had scores of stage plays, commercials, and industrials to his name. He was a natural-born orator, be it reciting lines, or improvising them. In short, Sal was to breaking the proverbial ice what a pickaxe is to breaking literal ice.

Sal and I were a creative yin-yang, two halves of a whole, sans friction, or subduction. Stateside, Sal’s remit enveloped all things computer. Be it song, sketch, or sendup, I’d scribe solo, we’d perform tandem, and he’d apply the finishing touches single-handedly. Sal’s work product surpassed my initial vision 10/10 times.

Lisa, a gifted chef, and Sal’s stalwart GF, baked brownies for him to nosh on when he wasn’t healing the world through humor. She even cling-wrapped the confection for transport.

Kyrgyzstan is the capstone astride Central Asia’s world-class natural beauty. Kyrgyzstanis were uniformly amenable to westerners, greeting us with a warmth too tangible to have been contrived. Kyrgyz women were, in a word, lovely. Their eclectic features, and characteristics, brought my libido to a boil. Skin deep, they were standard Southeast Asian fare, but their bodily dimensions defied orthodoxy, as did their leather, and lace, Russian accents.

Clearing FRU customs, Sal’s cling-wrapped contraband stumped the agent ransacking his rucksack. Thwarted by a double-bevel language barrier, the agent couldn’t ask the one question he needed answered, nor could we answer it.

Hoping to make headway, Sal mimed feeding himself handfuls of invisible food, summoned risus sardonicus, and moaned mock bliss. The Kyrgyzstani nodded, before peeling back one intercardinal point’s plastic seal, and sniffing the batch like a truffle pig plying its trade. Convinced the food was kosher, he waved us on.

Despite its brevity, and its inconsequentiality, the event dimmed Sal’s disposition by a shade. From one moment to the next, he wore the dour face of a man who can’t find something he placed in his pocket that very morning. What caused Sal’s sudden-onset of woe? As he sniffed Sal’s delectation, the mustachioed Kyrgyz’s nasal tip kissed its skyward facet. First in line, his sightline unfettered, Sal alone saw the smooch.

Debbie, a fellow LA-based standup, rode shotgun on 2 of my 5 tours. On the clock, she and I kept our private lives private. We forewent PDAs, even in private. Romantic-life radio silence was our indemnification against Uncle Sam’s embrace of modernity. Indeed, as our nation’s military was marching toward enlightenment, its starboard political party was declaring war on women, and minority voters. Every new tour straitjacketed my acts more than the last. By 09/11, my last global gallivant, a moral panic of sorts was plaguing forward operating bases (FOBs) from Africa to Asia. Said panic began when one comic crossed one patron’s capriciously drawn line…

Mitch Fatel, a funnyman of nominal national fame, had worked the same circuit a fortnight prior. By all accounts, the show was sailing along smoothly, right up until Mitch claimed to have grown so starved for sex with his spouse that he often fantasized about slipping her a “ruffie,” as in Rohypnol, more commonly known as "the date rape drug." A single Karen in the crowd complained.

AFE reacted promptly, and without pageantry. Working clean went from “a suggestion” to “sans exception.” Staff Sergeant A. Toney, our chaperone, ambushed us at our first foreign stop, lodged in adjacent rooms everywhere we stayed, and shadowed us to, and from, every show. Toney was a low-level functionary with an influencer’s egocentricity. Still, at day’s end, she was “only following orders.” So, when she blindsided us at baggage claim, I pledged my/our full cooperation.

Introducing myself to Toney, I tried to flatter her by joking that Beyoncé Knowles was the last person I’d expected to meet half a world away from home. Affecting an officious tone, she parried with her marital status. I bit my tongue ‘til I tasted Fe; I can't tell you how much I wanted to tell her that she couldn’t have passed for Queen Bey were she 10 years younger, I 10 beers drunker, and the 2 of us standing 10 feet farther apart.

Oman, the Arab World’s oldest independent nation-state, blossomed surprises. I’d pictured tawny sand on all sides, not prismatic stone stilettos. I hadn’t expected surf, much less surfers. The base’s behemoth arena was another good fortune windfall. 400+ soldiers sounded off after every punchline. The base's commander dressing Toney down before a crowd was the icing on the proverbial cake.

Post deplaning in Salalah, a dutiful SSGT in his early 20s ferried us to Thumrait Air Base in Dohar Governorate. We were nearly catatonic with jet lag. Once back to base, Dutiful backed the SUV up to a bevy of single-occupant flats. One by one, we plucked our bags from a pile. Toney snatched hers with an attitude that sprang from nowhere, before sassing the same soft-spoken sweetheart who’d just chauffeured us from a tarmac 45 minutes away.

At issue was Dutiful’s decision to “parade rest” while Toney gathered her gear. Despite being on the clock, dressed in Class Cs, and representing an entity that champions self-reliance, SSGT Toney behaved like a teenage nepo baby. What’s more, Dutiful shared her title! (While both branches employ staff sergeants, soldiers earn the rank one promotion later than airmen). Hell, our tour group’s sole gal hadn’t sought help from fellow group members, what shoulder devil talked Toney into debuting her Blanche DuBois bit for an Air Force counterpart she’d just met?! DSSGT, congenitally stingy with words, parried the barb with precocious tact, flatly affirming that he was only able to honor requests “once made.”

My dislike for Toney hypertrophied. Should her tantrums become routine, her conduct might taint my quartet by proximity. While I had some say over my hires, I had none over my overseers. I had no clue how, or to whom, a civilian contractor reports problematic GIs, assuming the option to do so even existed.

Luckily, our internal rancor resolved organically, and uneventfully. Spending every waking hour together for days on end, Toney came to see us as four dignified adults for whom clowning around was a living, not a lifestyle, and killed off the cunty character she’d portrayed at the airport for keeps.

I’d wrapped my half-hour set seconds earlier. I followed a shadowy passage in search of a shitter. Instead, I found a smoking patio hosting a show of its own: Toney, the star of said show, was being hand-fed a murder’s worth of crow by Thumrait’s commander. The surrounding crowd claimed default front-row seats. The base's commander had caught wind of Toney's hissy fit the previous night, and he was not pleased.

Thumrait’s top spoke through Toney, each word a brick heaved in slow motion. She’d clearly offended him on a level far deeper than that which met the eye. He stressed that, despite a superlative status, he’d never asked a subordinate to LARP a bellhop on his behalf. I watched, in real-time, as SSGT Toney’s ego, and stature, underwent a marked diminution.

Our most memorable stop was Dubai, home to Burg Khalifa, and Palm Jumeirah. There are few Gulf States wherein denizens can swap 103° heat for ski slopes by going to the local mall. There are few majority-Muslim, Middle Eastern nations wherein one can mosque-hop by day, and brothel hidden by false walls within the hotel-hop by night.

It was no secret that the hotel in which we stayed, and played, was ground zero for Southeast Asian sex workers. Having my own suite heightened the allure of on-demand sport sex, but sharing a floor with my girl, landlord, and coproducer made indulging said allure my bespoke white whale. That said, the prospect of sitting out such a "gimme" physically pained me. Wedged between a rock and a hard place, I decided to split the difference: I’d wait until Debbie was waylaid by her nightly contractual obligation to take in one of the house’s famous “massages.”

Debbie closed each show with her serviceable ¾-hour set. By then, we’d been an item for 3 years, cellmates for the last 2. Sex was a biweekly chore. Our emotional meld had fatigued to the point of fissure. Sure, she and I were intellectually incompatible, but disparate IQs didn’t do us in, how at home she felt at the kids’ table did.

Deb ran late daily, lost her purse daily, and pinched pennies as if they’d worn green on Saint Paddy’s Day. Deb, in her late 30s, had more sexual hangups than a Victorian-era virgin. Whether haranguing her to join me for a run, a standup set, or a writing session, I was always playing agonist to her antagonist. I burnt out in no time.

I wrapped my half-hour set, and returned the mic to Sal. Leaving the sodium light nebula behind, I waded through the silhouette forest, and surrendered to the showroom’s shadowy outskirts. I noted the time. A lift conveyed me to the hotel’s in-house massage parlor.

The lithe Asian masseuse was a decade, or two, older than I’d foreseen. That fact acknowledged, I’ll share a profound sage: “They say half a loaf is better than none, Jimmy, but, in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none.” In lay terms, youth is a fatuous concern to a red-blooded male mired in a near-chaste LTR with a middle-aged child.

Arriving at a conventional back rub’s natural end point, Madame Massuese pointed to the lone body part she’d overlooked, and inquired if I wished her to remedy the error. I stroked my chin, affecting the air of a Costco shopper pricing barrels of butter for the cheapest buy. I solicited the service’s sticker price from her. I promptly got “off the pot;” she charged for a high school hand jive what endemic street meat charged for “the works.”

I made it back seconds before Deb’s set ended. If not for the wife beater beneath it, residual massage oil would surely have bled through my oxford shirt, betraying my whereabouts.

Epilogue

That’s it for now, Dear Reader, but, take heart, this trip down memory lane won’t be the last I lead. I will free all beasts aboard my ark before Joe Black scuttles it. In due time, I’ll dish on the insurgent who remotely detonated an IED hidden inside his rectum mere hours before we alighted in Ryad. Next, I’ll tell of the time when, jet lagged, drunk on in-flight cocktails, and crippled by urinary urgency, I nearly defaced a prayer room in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I can’t promise you’ll laugh, nor can I promise you’ll cry. But, I can promise that you will be entertained.