I met Rick in Boston at an open mic. At the time, I lived in western Massachusetts, but ventured to Boston once or twice a week. Two hours there, two hours back. The drive to Boston always made me feel the kind of excitement only the naive have access to, their nerve endings yet to be ground down by years of disappointment. My mood on the drive back from Boston would vary depending on how my set went. If I did well, my head would be swimming with fantasies of becoming a professional comedian. The thought would soak in my brain like a narcotic; not a good narcotic, but one of those awful homemade ones like krokodil or jenkem. The euphoria was always tainted by its delusional basis.

I was not good at standup at the time, so when I did well it was generally due to an overly receptive audience--a type of audience that does far more harm to a young comedian than a hostile one. When an audience is mean, you may feel bad for a few days afterward and consider quitting, which is as healthy to a young comedian as a brisk jog is to a marathon runner. When an audience is too supportive, and you're showered with waves of ill-gotten laughter, you risk wandering through the bowels of open mic comedy for the rest of your life. You will become a derelict bottom feeder, shambling from stage to stage with your tawdry material, trying to get laughter out of crowds like a man tries to get nicotine from cigarette butts on the sidewalk.

If my set went poorly, I would always have a mind-numbing, soul-deadening drive back to Amherst, Massachusetts. The scattered rows of tail lights in front of me would blur and grow into orbs of red like the auras of twin demons, and my thoughts would sink into hopelessness and suicide. These weren't the kinds of suicidal ideations that would make a therapist concerned, they were just the defense mechanism of an artist who wasnt quite there yet in terms of talent. It was my brain saying, "well, either we have a lot of work to do, or we could kill ourselves…and doesn't the latter sound easier?" Every time I’ve seen a therapist, they always ask, "have you ever thought seriously about harming yourself or others?" and my answer is always something along the lines of, "Obviously…but not really." I wonder if there is a single person on earth who answers that question with a simple "no." Maybe the Dalai Lama, but if I had to wear that robe every day I might have some second thoughts about the everlasting tranquility of mindful existence.

The night I met Rick in Boston was an anomaly, because I had a bad set, but I still drove home with that buzzing narcotic feeling that usually signaled success. My success that night was not on stage: it was in the parking lot of a bar called "Tavern At The End Of The World," when I made Rick laugh.

That night, I had shown up late and was number thirty five on the list. Luckily, my friend Killian was there, and he introduced me to a group that would become my friends for the year and a half I lived in Boston: Zack, Jack, Kitra, and Rick. I was intimidated by all of them, but none more than Rick. I had seen him crush in a way that up to that point was unthinkable--by just being naturally funny. I clung to written material, and wouldn't dare deviate from it. Rick wrote jokes, but didn't need them. He had this ability to stand onstage, seemingly completely comfortable, and turn whatever the crowd gave him into something funny.

"Where are you from?" Jack Burke asked me cordially.

"Oh, western Mass. Not much of a scene out there, but there are a couple of good mics. Well, not 'good' like the mics out here, but they have a lot of normal people in the crowd. Well, not 'normal,' like you guys aren't normal or something. The scene out there is fun," I said, flinching and recoiling at each inane word that dropped out of my stupid mouth.

"Cool," Jack said, kind of being an asshole but also just moving the conversation along. Jack, Kitra, and Zack kept talking, but I noticed something to my right and turned. There was Rick. He was slight and wiry, with an intelligent, almost reptilian smile. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Western Mass, lots of Oxycontin out there."

"Yeah," I replied, a little uncomfortable that someone was actually choosing to speak to me.

"You know, the thing about Oxycontin is, it's great, but you always keep having to trade these sexual favors for it."

I laughed, not just at what this strange, small man was saying, but at the way he was saying it. He was in his mid twenties, but sounded like a grandfather at the sweet spot of senility where he can still form thoughts and sentences, but is no longer fettered by the social contract.

"Yeah," I said when I looked up. "And when you want more than one pill, you have to use both your hands."

"Or your feet."

"But not your mouth," I said, "You need your mouth to talk and remind everyone that you're straight."

Now he laughed. Hard. Too hard for what the joke was, but God knows I was happy to take it. "I'm Rick," he said, extending a frail hand.

"Dan," I replied, shaking his hand with extreme care, like I was handling a rare bird.

Then, Rick turned to the group, interrupting them mid-conversation. They were happy to stop talking. I gathered that they respected Rick and wanted to know what he had to say. "Hey, this is Dan," Rick said.

I waved awkwardly, and they returned the greeting with warm smiles.

"Dan just said something really funny..."Rick said, and proceeded to recant our conversation to the group as I stood there awkwardly. As I expected, the punchline about using my mouth didn't hit as hard with them as it had with Rick. "...Well, I thought it was funny," he concluded, then turned back to me.

We talked until the sun went down and the streetlights clicked on with their buzzing, yellow glow. Shabby men with thick coats began to congregate outside the liquor store next to us as if drawn by some natural internal compass, like salmon returning to their spawning ground. Rick told me about other mics I should go to, and which ones I should avoid.

"Tomorrow at six, you should really check out Ed's basement. It's...really cool, lots of cool people go. It's like a salon of expression, or some other dumb shit like that," Rick mused, in his tone that was simultaneously sarcastic and sincere in a way I have never heard reproduced by another human being. I then followed him back into the tavern, which was loud and boisterous in a way that harkened back to a time where bars were for construction workers and alcoholics to blow off steam, and not built to appease tech job lackeys in Patagonia vests who have one and a half IPAs and call it a night. I would come to learn that Boston had several premiere mics with the same set-up the tavern had: a stage simply placed in the middle of an extremely loud bar. Can't get the attention of the alcoholics in the first fifteen seconds of your set? Welcome to hell, where you are resigned to perform three-to-five minutes of standup comedy to a room of people who seem completely unaware of your being there. I don't know what it feels like to be a ghost, but I do know what it feels like to look at a table full of people directly in front of me and ask them, "Hey how are you guys doing?" while my voice is amplified by two separate speakers, and not have a single one of them look up.

Rick was completely unfazed by this set-up. He got everyone's attention milliseconds after taking the stage, and held it for the duration of his set as he talked about suicide and 9/11 (in millennial alt comedy, those are now looked at as two deeply hacky premises, but back then they were still on the table.)

Watching this little man entertain a room full of people who seemed to be nowhere near his target demographic was incredible. After my set, where I managed to lose just about everyone in the room, I hopped in my car and drove the two hours back to Amherst. I already knew I would be driving the same route back to Boston the next day, to find out what was going on in Ed's Basement.

Every famous scene that had a significant cultural impact had an equally-famous central meeting spot. The comedy boom of the 70s and 80s had the Comedy Store, the American punk explosion had CBGBs, and pedophiles had Epstein's Island. What is talked about less are the equally-fascinating meeting spots for scenes that never had a cultural impact. These scenes rise with the intention of nurturing a new generation of talent, and wither and die without seeing the light of day. Nevertheless, people's individual lives are forever changed by incubation in said scenes, and for me and about thirty other people, that scene was Ed's basement.

The following night, I drove into Allston at about 6 pm, cruising slowly through its tangled, illogical streets to try and find parking. In 2017, Allston was in a transitional phase. It had a reputation for being a grimy enclave for would-be artists, which it wore with pride. Old brick buildings, standing three or four stories, housed the unshaved, unwashed future bass players of a generation. But prices were going up, and many of the dirtbag writers and musicians who would have lived there were relegated to other more obscure parts of Boston.

For a few years, before almost everyone without family money was pushed out, there were two predominant camps of young people who lived there. Either college students whose parents could pay their rent on a halfway decent apartment, or real, honest-to-goodness city rats willing to hunker down in soon-to-be-condemned apartment buildings. The rich kids were numerous, and generally pleasant. They were young men who would try their hand at painting until they realized a job at their dad’s hedge fund might suit them better, and young women who wanted to be poets until they got treatment for their BPD and realized they just wanted to be happy. They lived similarly to everyone else, with one or two incongruities that you would figure out pretty quickly after meeting them. Why does this guy who wears a tattered beanie and sells percocet live in a two bedroom on Beacon Hill? The answer was pretty easy to come by, and it wasn't that he was really, really good at selling percocet.

Then there were the city rats, who were living on top of one another, cramped to the point of claustrophobia, but somehow always willing to have a friend stay on their couch. They always found ways to out-do each other with the absurdity of their living situations. One lived in a kitchen, one rented a small walk-in closet, many couch surfed, and somehow all of them traversed the city with no car so expertly that you would think they could teleport. They would all mix together at bars, comedy venues, or the shabby domiciles of those stupid enough, or kind enough, to open their doors to a bunch of 24-year-olds who will most likely leave them far worse than when they found them.

Alston was the perfect place for the experiment that was Ed’s basement, a subterranean comedy venue below one of the most reprehensible dwellings I've ever seen. You would enter through a side gate, and walk into an alleyway which was always packed tightly with open mic-ers who were taking a break from filling their lungs with the dust and asbestos of the basement, to fill their lungs with every kind of tobacco available to the general public--and some which were not widely available. Ed, the man who was the namesake of the basement, once told us that he was taking part in a medical experiment on tobacco, and produced a pack of cigarettes that had the emblem of Harvard university on it.

"We're not supposed to smoke anything else during the study, but I think this is the placebo so I'm cutting it with real tobacco," he once said, slicing open one of the laboratory loosies and sprinkling in some American Spirit.

In the alleyway, you would usually pass the same characters. There was Tim, the polyamorous plumber, who was married, but you couldn't tell because he wore huge silver rings on every finger. There was Vincent, a former Marine who now had a pot belly to go with his shockingly-broad shoulders, making him large in every dimension. Everyone loved that Vincent left his life in the military to pursue comedy with a bunch of dirtbag kids, until we realized he had a family with two children he was responsible for. And there was also Cammy, a rail-thin, deeply kind woman who looked and spoke like an art teacher. She would yelp and shriek in unpredictable outbursts, but her many Tourette’s-like noises during shows and mics were politely tolerated.

After passing through the puffy, cumulus-like smoke in the alley, you would walk up three wooden steps and reach an absurdly flimsy door, the honor system was the only thing keeping anyone out. It was shrewd to not pay for repairs on the door. Any would-be burglar would take one step inside the house, look right to the living room where the couch was propped up with cinder blocks and the glass table in the middle was so scratched up by the process of cutting and distributing coke that it looked like a disgruntled cat had exacted some sort of revenge on its surface, and immediately leave, realizing he could find more valuables in the alleyway. What a burglar wouldn't know was that if he took a left, and followed more flimsy wooden stairs down, down, down, he would find a space that would’ve made him think he was transported to a strange alternate reality. The basement had been outfitted with a stage, a sound system, and about fifty fabric hiking chairs with mesh cup holders. They were made to be portable, but were completely stationary for the year and a half I would hang out at Ed's.

I showed up to the mic that first night about thirty minutes before its scheduled start time. I soon realized that the start time at Ed's basement was more of a gentle suggestion--the mic could potentially start at 6 pm in the same way a tsunami could potentially hit Cincinnati, Ohio. I stood outside, stiff and uncomfortable, clean cut among the grungy beards and denim jackets, which could’ve been either predistressed or distressed by honest means (you had to get to know the owner before making a judgement.) No one talked to me or even acknowledged me until Rick showed up. He was greeted like the beloved mayor of a very loving and stinky town, and the alleyway became completely blocked due to the surge of people around him. Finally, he walked into the house, passing me and saying hello in an "oh, you showed up," sort of way, before pied-pipering all of us down to the basement to start the show.

The host that night was one of the city rats. He did abstract one-liners during his opening set, which were at best amusing, and at worst, awful. He said stuff like, "Did you hear about the ghost who threw a stick that would always come back to him? It was called a BOOmerang."

Then a few other comics went up, and some of them were really talented. John Paul Rivera, with his delivery so large and animated it felt like his jokes were being told by a cartoon bear, made me laugh to the point of convulsion. I learned later he was one of several comics who also worked for historical tours in Boston, where they would dress in outfits befitting the 1700s and scream at tourists. Some really awful comedians went up next, doing their versions of "alternative" comedy, which basically just meant lazily cycling through tropes made popular in the mid 2000s like singing their punchlines and ending their jokes with quirky phrases like "so...I guess that's normal."

Rick went up next, and he crushed once again. He definitely got a lot of inspiration from Norm Macdonald, but I didn't hold that against him, because his jokes were original and refreshing. When I finally went up I decided to break out a joke I had written months ago but had never found the venue to try it at. It was a true story about when I was 8 years old and I tried to commit suicide with my karate white belt. The punchline was something like, "if my parents had found me, they would be really surprised at my dedication to karate, and my level of honor." The crowd at Ed’s loved it. I could hear John Paul Rivera and Rick laughing above the rest of the audience as I drove home, and I felt like I had found something I had been looking for ever since I started comedy: a scene. I still look back fondly on my early times in the basement, even though it ended in gut-wrenching heartbreak, for me, and everyone else who descended.

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