Party of One (24 page)

The next day, I went up to the studio for the special
TRL
we did, and after it was over, I decided to get out of the city. There was nothing I could do but wander and sigh and feel heavy, so I just made the decision and was on my way thirty minutes later. I hopped on an all-night train to Chicago, walked to the first rental-car place I saw, and rented their last car, which was a red Mustang convertible. I drove it to St. Louis, hung around and hugged my family too much for a few days, and then drove the rest of the way out to Los Angeles. I had only the clothes on my back and my laptop, so I bought new shirts and jeans and underwear from Gaps along the way. John Mayer's
Room for Squares
was re-released by Sony Columbia on September 18, so I picked it up in a Best Buy in Texas and listened to it over and over again. (“Your Body Is a Wonderland” is indefensible, but the rest of that shit holds up.)

When I got back to my place in Santa Monica, it was exactly as I had left it. I had bought a stack of newspapers the afternoon of the tenth. (I was either making a special effort to stay up on current affairs or just doing all the puzzles, but either way it was mostly to counteract whatever effect Shane was having on me.) I had the
New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times, USA Today.
And they were full of
nothing.
Stacks of pages of whatever we felt was important enough to talk about before all of this happened. They were like transmissions from another dimension.

I kept them. I thought:
These will be valuable someday. These are the literal last messages from the old world.

I thought:
we will never be this frivolous, this silly, this unserious ever again.

I think a lot of stupid things.

Rocky Horror
came back after a few months, like the rest of the shows on Broadway did, and I had my eight performances, right after Cindy Adams, just before Sally Jesse Raphael. Sebastian Bach had his teenage son with him backstage a lot, and the kid had his nose in a book most of the time, and it dawned on me that that's how you rebel against your dad when your dad is Sebastian Bach.

Right away, I clicked with one of the chorus boys, a gorgeous Irish-looking dude with a beautiful voice and perfect hair and teeth. We went out for an early dinner between the matinee and the evening show on Wednesday, and while we initially couldn't get in at Ruby Foo's, a manager came sprinting from the back and said:
“Right this way, Mr. Holmes.”
This had never happened before (or since, for that matter), and it could not possibly have happened in front of a better person. It was a sign. A new life really was beginning after all. And then we sat down and ordered our sushi and he told me about his girlfriend who was down the street performing in
Seussical: The Musical.
Even on Broadway, even doing a musical about the joys of bisexuality, I picked the straight chorus boy to have a crush on. (That chorus boy: Matthew Morrison.)

Kidnapped
went through some changes, but it ran for a whole season. I went back and forth between New York and L.A., each time bringing more of my stuff west. It was the last year of my contract with MTV, and I could have tried to get another one, but I felt myself getting less and less busy. I saw the new kids getting more and more screen time, and I couldn't bear to hear someone tell me that I was fired, so I said: “I think I'm just going to ride out the rest of my contract and then just move on,” and Rod said: “That sounds like a good idea.” A few months later the checks stopped coming and I didn't work at MTV anymore. That's the way it happens: your contract runs out and nobody knows it except someone in business affairs. You just kind of fade out.

I found someone to sublet my room for a while, and his temp job in the city went permanent, so he could stay as long as I needed him to. There was no work reason for me to be in New York City. Only my friends made me want to go back, and with T9 predictive texting, staying in touch with them was a snap. Everyone was pairing off and growing up anyway; where a few years before we'd been together in every spare moment, we were seeing one another once a week, then once a month, then less. We were on our way to becoming people who mean to see one another.

I had a brand new city, full of new people to meet and jobs to get; the weather was perfect every day; and most of my belongings were already in it.

I never made a decision or said goodbye to anyone. I just woke up one morning, looked around, and said: “Huh. I guess I live in Los Angeles.
”

The first thing you notice when you move to Los Angeles, before the perfect weather or the traffic, is the enthusiasm. It is a happy bunch out there in L.A.; people have their little teas and go for their little hikes and they are
psyched.
There is nothing you can say to a guy in Los Angeles that won't make him answer “NICE.”

“I'm going home to do laundry.”

“Nice.”

“Today is Tuesday, and tomorrow, it will be Wednesday.”

“Nice!”

“I wear shoes sometimes.”

“NOYCE.”

It is as phony as it can be, but it is inspiring in its way, because it is no less authentic than New York's knee-jerk cynicism, and at least it makes you happy for a moment.

The hardest part about moving to Los Angeles wasn't starting over socially; there were enough former MTV people making the move west, and I got back into the inherently social world of improv right when I got there. The hard thing was starting over professionally. MTV gives a person a decent amount of name recognition, but casting directors don't like people with a decent amount of name recognition. Casting directors want to discover you, or they want to land a star. If you're in between, you have a tough road. You go out for everything, and then you lose it, either to someone you don't recognize who's five years younger than you or to a legit celebrity—but either way you spend time in waiting rooms with Danny Bonaduce.

Along the way, you get all kinds of great advice. Producers in casting sessions will say things like: “Our audience is
influencers,
so keep that in mind,” or “Do it just like that, but better,” or “You're talking like the audience is five feet away, I want you to do it like the audience is three feet away.” Those are all real, by the way, and in reply to that last one, I asked: “Am I too loud?” And the producer said, “No, it's a relatability factor,” and I thought
Oh, okay, you're just adding more nonsense words to a thing that already doesn't make any sense.
I did it again the exact same way and he said “Perfect!” and I got a callback. I think Alfonso Ribeiro went on to book that job.

Once upon a time, I got a call from my manager. I was new to Los Angeles, I was new to having a manager and going out on auditions, I was just
new.
He said: “NBC wants to have a meeting with you now. Now!
Go there now!
”
Of course this is happening,
I thought.
This is how it's going to happen. I am in Los Angeles and I am going to be a STAR.
“There's a new reality show they want you to host, and they're not telling me anything about it, but you need to get there now.”

So I went and had a very nice lunch with some guys who at least pretended to be very nice people. We talked, and they said, “We have a new reality dating show with a twist, and we can't tell you what the twist is, but there is an element that you possess that is right in line with the concept of the show. We'd like you to consider hosting it.” This was in the months after the first season of
Joe Millionaire,
so every network had a reality dating show and every reality dating show had a twist. I said yes, yes of course I would.

The show's twist is that it will be a funny show,
is what I told myself.
The thing that I possess that makes me perfect for this show is that I'm funny.
Now, nobody had told me this. Nobody said anything remotely like this in the meeting or in any of the phone calls I had with my manager. I just decided that it was true, and so it became true. I rolled open the sunroof on my Jeep Liberty, turned up the first Phantom Planet album as loudly as I could without compromising sound quality, and drove back to my tiny one-bedroom in the Miracle Mile. On the way, I passed the line for the
Tonight Show,
all those people in pantsuits and golf shirts standing around all day for the chance to see Jay Leno up close. “See you all soon,” I said. I honked. I waved. I was ready.

I was a real asshole.

I had been warned that they had also been talking to “a name,” and that this name was interested but might not take the job. If the name didn't take it, then it was mine. They didn't say who the name was, and I didn't push it. There is always a name. There is always someone who has had a successful run on a sitcom who would be happy to swoop in on your job and slum for a steady paycheck, and that's the way it goes. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes they go back to counting their money or designing their line of casual separates for QVC, and you get the gig. You never know what's going to happen.

I did a little bit of digging and I found out that for this show, the name was Kathy Griffin.
Great,
I thought.
She's funny. Like me. She'd be a good choice for this show whose twist is that it's funny,
which again is a thing that nobody had ever actually said to me at any time. I would be happy to lose this gig to a Kathy Griffin. We had a history, after all.

When I actually did lose the gig to a Kathy Griffin, I was less happy than I had predicted, but still, NBC had called. NBC thought I was funny, and I knew that because I had hypnotized myself into believing it. Things would work out. Back to the drawing board.

A couple of months later, I swung by my place in the middle of the day to make myself some lunch and watch
Passions,
a show that you needed to watch for about five minutes a year, because they were at the same party they were at last month, holding the same birth certificate, and swearing they'll tell everyone you bastard, dammit, they
will.
As I pressed a slice of bread onto the top of a ham sandwich, I heard the siren call that is Kathy Griffin's speaking voice in the unmistakable boom of a network promo. I ran to the TV to see a teaser for the show I nearly booked, the show I was perfect for.

The show was
Average Joe,
a
Bachelorette
-style reality dating show in which a beautiful young single gal shows up at a Calabasas mansion to choose a mate out of a cast of hunks, except the shocking twist is that…

Oh,
no.

The shocking twist was that the guys were actually all kind of homely. They were all dumpy or overweight or aggressively hairy or just generally average, and the twist was that our bachelorette would have to pick a suitable mate out of a bunch of ugly guys.

And I possessed a quality that was
right in line with this shocking twist.

It hit me, right there in my living room, ham sandwich in one hand, remote in the other: NBC did not think I was funny. NBC thought I was
ugly.

Oh.

I turned away from the television and walked to my window to feel the California sun on my face, to tell myself that no matter what this industry thought of me, I was going to succeed. I might have to work a little harder, I might have to be a little smarter, but I'm going to make it fucking work, dammit. I
will.

I got to my window just in time to watch my Jeep Liberty get towed away for unpaid parking tickets.

Having just come out publicly, I got a few auditions to play the gay best friend in romantic comedies and Lifetime original series. I got many, many opportunities to call the lead character “girlfriend” and tell her to
do herself.
These characters spoke entirely in catch phrases and had no emotional life of their own. They were to the aughts what the token black character was to the '80s and '90s. Once in particular, I went in for a sassy best friend role in an independent movie. My audition monologue was a speech the gay guy delivered to the main character about embracing her inner diva and getting
fierce.
The scene was to take place in the women's bathroom of a restaurant, just after the lead character saw the boy she liked having dinner with her rival. In the middle of this sassy tirade, another woman walked into her gender-appropriate bathroom—to use it, like a human being might—and my character said to this woman: “
Excuse
me, girlfriend, but we're on
official business here,
” and then shooed her out. Like:
The ladies' room is for troubled women and their neutered friends only; deal with your natural bodily functions somewhere else.
Hateful.

I showed up to this audition, and it was a sea of skinny guys in vests and bow ties. It was a crowd I could not out-queen. I would have to change up my approach. I went in, I told the camera who I was and what role I'd be reading for, and when it came time in the script for the hapless woman to make the error of using the bathroom to void her bladder, I said “EXCUSE ME GIRLFRIEND, WE'RE ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS HERE!” in a blind rage. A deafening, terrifying, Vincent D'Onofrio in
Full Metal Jacket
conniption. Listen, you have to make choices as an actor. I didn't get a callback on that one, but I still think a sassy gay friend who goes into rage blackouts when women want to use their own bathroom for its intended purpose is a character in search of a movie.

Eventually I got a semi-regular gig playing a gay stereotype on Comedy Central's
Reno 911!,
and just before cameras rolled on my first day of shooting, Thomas Lennon—in mustache and tiny khaki shorts—assuaged my fear about playing such a character: “Just remember, Dave, we are all playing terrible, terrible people.” It is the most freeing thing I have ever heard on a set, bar none.

The audition process for
Reno 911!
was, without a doubt, the most fun you could have in an audition, which I understand is not saying much. I begged my manager to get me in the room, and he did, and I prepared a character and a situation, as the casting director told me to do. When I arrived, the person at the desk asked me only one question: “Did you call the police, or did the police call you?”
Are you a perp or a victim?
was all they needed to know. I told her—
victim
—and she told them. And then I went into the room, in character, and the entire cast was there, in character, and we improvised a half-hour-long scene. It was a dream.