Don’t Call Him Dave, It Takes Away His Id
I admit that no logic applies to the following statement, but many of the men I love most in this world are named David. The two uncles I usually find myself chatting with at family functions? Dave and David. The one step- or half-brother I keep in touch with? A Dave. Middle school best friend? Rhymes with slave. Just now created middle name of my stuffed pig? Hamlet David Harrison-Friday. Okay, I’m getting silly. Stop being so on brand, Me!
But a host of the incomparable guys who’ve shaped me as a writer (Sedaris), a thinker (Foster Wallace), a laugher (Attell and Larry/last names count), a viewer (Lynch), an analyst (film critic Kehr), a listener (Byrne and Berman), and an eater (Chang) lay claim to the same name of the man who played a secret chord to please the lord.
For years I denied the existence of heroes, at least as it concerned my relationship to them. They were influences or inspirations, but not heroes. How lazy was it to anoint one’s mother or father as his hero, I thought. Yet there has been one figure throughout the years who has had such a deep sway over me that in recent times I couldn’t help but deem him the word that inexplicably frightened me. In New England, we eat grinders, not heroes.
David Cross is my hero. Not the violinist from progressive rock band King Crimson, to be clear, but the bald, bespectacled Jew who several people have said I resemble. During a three-month tenure working at the music chain Strawberries, a co-worker named Jake loaned me a copy of a stand-up album. “There’s no way you won’t like this guy,” he told me. “I can’t believe you don’t know his stuff.”
That album, Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, became my comedy bible as a nineteen-year-old. It was only equaled when I got my hands on DVD copies of Mr. Show several months later, a sketch comedy show I loved so much that when I studied overseas and my mother came to visit, she asked if she could bring me anything from home. “The fourth season of Mr. Show is being released on DVD a week before you get here. That’s all I want.” I was as happy to see her as I was Bob and David on the cover.
Predictable obsessive-compulsive behavior ensued: worshiping Arrested Development as it aired on Sunday nights, tracking down every movie and TV show on DVD I could find with Cross in the cast, buying books and magazines containing his interviews, tirelessly quoting him, checking out bands and novels he recommended, even purchasing my first pair of prescription eyeglasses to resemble his signature Buddy Holly-esque frames. When I informed people that I took my favorite person out to see a movie one Valentine’s Day, the self-loathing joke being that I went alone, my best bud Moore zinged me: “How did David Cross enjoy it?”
Skipping Yankees playoff games was normally forbidden, but missing game three of the 2009 American League Championship Series to see Cross do stand-up for the first time? A no-brainer. Not long prior to the show, I learned that the man’s third stand-up special was being filmed at the Boston venue, the lone time I’ve attended a live taping. You will never convince me that Moore isn’t the one heard loudly laughing after a particularly dark Anne Frank joke.
I saw Cross again as part of a stand-up-slash-sketch performance with Bob Odenkirk and Brian Posehn, two fellow Mr. Show heavy hitters, and once more on the night of Sue’s father’s wake, which she permitted me to leave forty-five minutes early. “If it were anyone but Him, I wouldn’t even ask,” I said, but to her credit she understood before sarcastically adding, “I wonder if Madonna will play around here the night your mother dies.”
Two years later, I received a presale email from Cross’s website alerting me that he was playing a show in New Haven. I bought second row tickets and my friend Connor said he’d wear a MAGA hat to see how it played out. Unfortunately, too many seats went unsold, and the show was cancelled, my cue to soil then toss the inexpensive red hate cap I’d already eagerly grabbed.
In March, a fresh email from Mr. Amber Tamblyn arrived revealing a show in Northampton, Massachusetts, the place where I’d last seen him. Upon accessing the presale, I happily and hurriedly paid a hundred and sixty dollars per ticket for dead center front row seats. However, as I read the details in my email more closely, I realized that the inflated cost wasn’t just because they were premier seats. It was because they included a fucking meet and greet!
After telling a few people for years that I worried Cross might be a dick if I met him, now it was happening. A return email from the box office regarding the specifics divulged that it would be an unorthodox setup where he answered questions, signed memorabilia, and took photos with VIP members following his set. Nine days before the show, a new email disappointed me as the performance was rescheduled to October.
Every couple weeks I checked the venue’s website to see how many tickets were unsold, worried the show would ultimately be cancelled. Cross had a show booked the night prior in Poughkeepsie, but the weeks before and after were empty on his calendar, leading me to indulge my worst fears until several days in advance when he promoted the weekend appearances on social media. A new wrinkle developed when Connor said he had a previously scheduled appointment and likely wouldn’t arrive until a half hour before the start time. Anxiety fought like hell but could not conquer me.
Luckily, Connor arrived an hour sooner than planned, we caught up while sharing six excellent plates of Taiwanese food, collected physical tickets from Will Call, and took our seats in the first row. Cross was in fine form: he ridiculed selfish cunts for pretending their dogs are service animals, referred to his spouse as his “current wife,” riffed on his last visit to Northampton (Connor convinced the woman sitting next to him that night that the odd smell in the building was quiche; she left a half hour into the set, a confused and inebriated Arrested Development fan who was unaware of the man’s flamethrower stylings, a fact Cross elaborated on later when a mouthy couple walked out by yelling back to them, “All you had to do was Google me, assholes!”) and said how it seemed like a town people knowingly chose to move to when they wanted to become homeless, and concluded the set by declaring God the World Abortion Champion for all the globe’s miscarriages, pondering if the Almighty enjoyed the taste of his own semen prior to the “Immaculate Conception,” and ended the unholy trinity by drowning a four-year-old Jesus in a river while castigating the boy. My hero.
As humanity has become increasingly desensitized to the world’s horrors, in large part due to the Internet’s unfiltered accessibility, I find Cross endlessly refreshing because ninety percent of people would certainly be offended by something he said during his hour and change onstage. I was cry-laughing by the second minute, overjoyed when he asked Connor and I directly if we got a joke about the fearmongering state of Florida potentially censoring the lyrics to The Flintstones theme song (maybe a dozen people in the building laughed), and stirred when he spoke of being judgmental since he was a kid along with considering himself an empathy autist until one person (his daughter, not his dog) revealed that he was capable of unconditional love. These were two significant disclosures I’d never known, a pair of traits we eerily shared.
Moments after he exited the barren stage, a voiceover informed VIP ticketholders to wait in their seats, and after a corpulent security guard confirmed our names on his list, we regrouped in the lobby. As the forty-five or so people awkwardly waited, nearly all of them younger than Connor and me, free drinks were gifted by the concessions worker until the voice of the caramel M&M himself casually entered the room holding a handle of tequila. He poured shots into large-sized bathroom cups and said he would sign whatever people wanted signed, answer any questions, and take photos.
One man referred to seeing him earlier in the day and asked if Cross recalled the encounter (“Uh, yeah, it was this afternoon, I remember”), another guy puzzlingly acted as if he’d never taken a selfie with his phone as D.C. graciously waited for the right angle to be selected, and a younger man missing one front tooth spoke first to me then to Cross in such an unintelligible manner that neither of us could grasp a syllable he uttered, which I joked to Cross about. Due to a strong fear I’d miss my chance to meet him, Connor kept insisting that the room was going to clear shortly — guests were asked to exit via the side of the building once John Hancrosses and photos were acquired — and his prodding made me finally summon the courage to approach the man.
“I have a couple things for you to sign,” I timidly said, earning a warm “Sure.” He wrote “Huh?” on his forehead on the Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! LP cover and “Now this is funny!” with an arrow pointing to the title on the first page of Naomi Odenkirk’s Mr. Show: What Happened? book. I’d written a list of ten questions earlier in the week but chose only to ask the one Connor thought was most interesting, determined not to spend the rest of my life recalling how I disappointed the man who would presumably forget me moments after we met.
“What the hell happened to Jay Johnston?” I said about the Mr. Show alum who was arrested for participating in the January 6th riot. “Your guess is as good as mine,” Cross said, “but he should be in fucking jail!” Small talk on the subject persisted until Connor then pressed him for the names of a famous and insufferable Brooklyn couple he wouldn’t reveal during his set (“I can’t tell you,” Cross said after a complete stranger who Cross had no reason not to trust with such sensitive information swore he wouldn’t confess). Connor took two photos of me with The Crossman holding a can of beer, getting him to laugh when he said, “Well…smile” after my depressing J6 sidebar. We both shook his free hand and said thank you afterward.
Connor went to take a leak as the meet and greet concluded. As the man walked by me, I forced myself to tell him one last thing. Years prior, I’d read how much he loved the movie Salò, arguably the most repulsive movie ever made, and one that made me so curious I ordered a dubbed VHS tape from an eBay seller and watched it alone in my dark basement bedroom. Another friend had gifted me a tee shirt with one scene from the film captured on the front — fascists controlling enslaved nude teens on all fours in dog collars and leashes — to mark meeting Cross.
“I wore a Salò shirt,” I blurted out as I raised my hooded sweatshirt.
“Nice,” Cross said as he glanced at it, took two steps, then paused. “Let me see that again.”
I raised my sweatshirt a second time.
“So sick!” he added while briefly scrutinizing it before walking through the doors to return to the empty theater.
I desperately wanted to tell him how he was my hero and how much he’d meant to me for two decades. I wanted to give him a hug and ask if Tom Kenny, another Mr. Show veteran, had ever improvised filthy rants in character as SpongeBob SquarePants, the character he voices. But I listened to my better impulses, focusing on the inevitable future shame I’d force myself to endure if I blew it. It’s often right to simply exist, to let things unfold as they do, to not attempt to manifest and instead let be be. They, the asshole they who we regrettably permit to impart false wisdom, are all wrong though. Meet your heroes. They are the only proof we have that gods are real.