A Shed at the Dump

I was born and lived my early life in a town in western Massachusetts named West Stockbridge. It’s a small town that’s about 20 minutes outside of Pittsfield, which is probably also too small for you to know where it is, but it’s the closest thing to a “big city” we have. It’s part of Berkshire County which you may know from hearing rich people talk about summering or taking a holiday ski trip there while describing towns like ours as “quaint” and “charming”, gleefully coming and then leaving without thinking twice about what happens there the rest of the year, which is mostly nothing.

The main thrust of towns like West Stockbridge is that they are set up to serve the throngs of vacationers who flock in droves to see Norman Rockwell’s home, or our “famous fall foliage” or the visit the local ski mountains and leave just as quickly. Growing up as a shy kid there wasn’t a whole lot to do in town. I was at the mercy of whenever my parents would feel up to driving me to the rink to play pick up hockey, which being 45 minutes away wasn’t that often. Truly the only things that are within walking distance were a pond infested with angry geese and snapping turtles, a library the size of a small 2 bedroom apartment and the dump. Being that I liked my toes and not getting giardia the pond was out of the question. I read a lot, so I was a regular at the Library but my favorite place always has been and always will be the dump.

If you’re not familiar with dumps, many small towns don’t have garbage pick-up so we’d have to load our trash and recycling up in to the trunk of our station wagon (in almost 40 years of my life, my family has only ever owned one car that was not a station wagon) and drive it to a tract of land that had a giant trash compactor, recycling bins and a shed for gently used items that still had usefulness. This shed is where I would find things like my first mountain bike, a vast majority of the board games I owned and a lot of my early cassettes that formed a very dumb taste in music that thrives to this day. In more recent years I’ve found a few small appliances, most of the pint glasses I own and a nice film camera and flash that I never used but has found a loving home with my good friend and talented photographer Mike. I loved and love that place, not just for the material goods I was able to rescue but for the extremely valuable lessons it taught me about valuing things others may overlook and that nothing is ever useless, no matter how much it may feel like it doesn’t quite fit in to the outside world’s definitions of worth.

This is a lesson that has informed every aspect of my life, from being a shy youngin’ in the woods of Massachusetts, to an trying to find myself as insecure preteen and teen growing up in East Harlem, bullied for being new, fat and generally not fitting the mold of my classmates and neighbors, to a my current iteration as a mildly depressed adult. My life has almost always been built around finding communities of people who don’t necessarily feel like they belong in the larger world and putting down roots. This informs my tastes, the friends I choose to be around, my work and the communities I seek creative release in. Hell, every cat I’ve ever owned in my entire life was a stray I took in, much to the chagrin of my parents and, later in life, my former girlfriend/ex-wife (you can text or DM me about that whole thing, it’s not the point of this essay). I would never, in a million years, call those in my life trash or anything of the sort, but the fact is, dear reader, almost all of us are misfits to some degree or another. The true value in a community is creating and demonstrating our own value and giving each other a new home that loves and appreciates us for the people we are, not necessarily measuring the worth of anyone or anything by any outside metric. We determine the amount of love, reverence and celebration that we and our community members deserve.

Missing the trips to the dump I would have taken this year, but was unable to due to not being able to travel due to COVID, has had me thinking a lot about places I miss, both completely gone or inaccessible, and how one of the reasons I miss the places I miss most is because in my eyes they hold up these communities of disregarded folks and put them on display, essentially the same as that dump shed. Places that celebrate things and people that others wouldn’t give the time of day for the simple sin of being a little outside of their comfort zone, a little worse for wear but all the better for having lived the experience that lead them to their current place. These are places like the punk and hardcore clubs I used to frequent in the city, now gone and replaced with condos and luxury item storefronts or long shuttered comedy venues where I found a home as someone who didn’t know where to find my footing and utterly alone. We all have places that mean so much to us that people viewing from the outside wouldn’t appreciate.

One of these places is Coney Island High, may she rest in peace. A victim of the quest to sanitize the dingiest parts of New York during the later days of Giuliani’s time as mayor. When I was an early teen, I was a ska fan, but what junior high-schooler in the mid-to-late 90s didn’t go through a ska phase? I still like it, that’s not the point though. The point is that one day this lead me to go see the Mighty Mighty Bosstones at Roseland Ballroom and opening for them were New York Hardcore stalwarts, Sick of it All. There are few memories from those days that I have so clearly etched in my mind as them coming on stage, playing It’s Clobbering Time and my mind immediately going “Oh, wait, this is what I like, ska is for babies”. It took one song that is less than 2 minutes long for all my tastes and allegiances to shift completely. I went from going to see peppy, upbeat, music that now felt so silly and disposable, to searching out how to get more of that music I connected so deeply with.

Through these searches, I found Coney Island High, a crappy looking venue, covered in peeling paint, stickers, graffiti and spilled booze. A place that I would never want to leave. The problem was I was 16 and most of their shows were 18 or 21 and over. I quickly found an easy fix for that as I answered a want ad for an “internship”. This meant that they would pay me 50 bucks a day to answer phones, give directions to lost bands, make sure the bar inventory was stocked and occasionally send me out in to a very seedy St. Marks Place with wads of cash to try to make change out of. These were all things that I should not be doing by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a paying job when most kids my age didn’t really have anywhere that wasn’t run by their families and far more importantly, I was allowed to go to any show I wanted to for free. I think they thought I would maybe check out a show or two a month, I was there at least 4 nights a week. Between the free drinks the bartenders would give me with a wink and nod and never paying at the door in the 3 years I worked there I was as close to a loss leader to a venue as one human being could be. So many firsts I could never tell my parents about took place in those dark, dank rooms. Despite all of the debauchery and craziness, I think the thing that I treasure the most, more so than seeing shows with line ups that would be considered legendary now, more so than having my first drinks, drugs and kisses, was the fact that everyone there, from the managers to the doormen, from the bartenders to the bands, welcomed me. It would be easy to be annoyed by a whippersnapper who was bumming around places he shouldn’t be, but nobody ever did because I was “part of the family”. It was my first exposure to a mentality that placed a higher value on who you were and how you supported your friends and peers than any superficial thing. A large reason for me being the person I am today, community-minded, caring and loving, is due to having conversations about being kind to the people who are in your orbit and always seeking to elevate your peers whenever possible. Does that mean that you wouldn’t get the occasional shit talking session or crew fight? It absolutely does not mean that. What it means is that you always look for a reason to celebrate and display your people with pride first. If people become too difficult to celebrate for whatever reason, then you need to evaluate whether that person has the same value to you as they once did or if maybe they might be able to find better use from someone else, and depending on your decision, you keep them around you put them back in the dump shed, ready for somebody who sees something in them that you no longer see.

Another place where I found a home amongst the misfit toys were some of the more alternative comedy venues in New York City. I started comedy a little over 7 years ago. I was the most alone and adrift as I had been in my life to that point. My relationship had fallen apart, my only friends had taken another friend’s side in a fight and jettisoned me and my family was wrapped up in the whirlwind that was my sister’s legal battles and addiction issues. I had nothing, and then I walked in to an open mic. At first I only went to the mic close to my apartment, because if nothing else if I failed I never had to see anyone again, I could just walk home and vanish. I didn’t even have to worry about running in to folks on the train or something like that. The thing was, instead of finding a hobby to keep myself occupied to stave off the dark thoughts, I found a community that valued effort and authenticity over almost anything all. The host of that mic would become one of my biggest cheerleaders and one of my dearest friends. He would encourage me to find the value in every failure, to learn through every bomb. At my request he would bury me at every mic, because I believed I didn’t want to take quality time around from quality comedians. It taught me how to wring laughs from dead energy but more importantly it taught me the value of mutual support. That’s not to say that all comedy is like that, hell not even all New York comedy is like that, I just got very lucky to find a corner that took joy in nurturing each other and pride in watching folks grow and achieve. We all had our damage we were sorting through, some fresher than others, nobody was pushed out because of it.

Through it all I’ve been in more than my fair share of comedy venues, from bar backrooms to run of the mill clubs to theaters and arenas and everything in between. Comedy has always been fascinating to me because even the most mainstream comedians are still folks who would occupy the outer rims of “normal society” and then things spin out in weirder and more inventive loops from there. It’s no secret at this point in the essay that my favorite places are always on the outer edges of the outer edges. As such none of the places I haunted have meant as much to me as the times spent at places that are now long gone like Over the Eight, Annoyance, Legion or even, as much as the recent past has muddied my relationship with the space and the people who called it home, The Creek and The Cave. These were places that celebrated things that others would turn their nose up at. They were places where you not only could experiment with whatever you wanted to try but you were fervently encouraged to. Any victory I have had in comedy has taken place in one of these rooms. Whether it be a great set, a new connection or a personal hero recognizing my growth and achievement. I can say, without a doubt that if it weren’t for rooms where things outside of the traditional mold were elevated and the weirdest and wackiest impulses were encouraged I would have quit a long time ago. Finding places and, in those places, people who built a community around building each other up and encouraging them to push themselves further in the bizarre has been the most important thing to happen in my adult life. I have been able to build, or rebuild in one particular case, my best friendships around alternative comedy. I have made relationships with people who I would otherwise be too intimidated to even speak to because in rooms like that we are all peers. I have cried out of happiness 4 times in my professional life. Once was the first time I got to see the finished version of a youth recreational center I had written the funding grant for, the other 3 were in Over the Eight. I’ve been paid compliments by people I had admired from afar, and progressively closer, for years. I’ve been asked to do shows and be part of projects by people who I wouldn’t ever think would consider me on that level. The reason that I can say any of that is because I lucked in to finding a home within a community that really celebrated the fact that while not everything might fit a predetermined mold, if you care about what you’re doing and due it from a genuine place, there’s room for it. Again, it’s all about looking at something that other people might not appreciate for whatever reason, taking the time to polish it a little bit and take pride in displaying it. What some corners of comedy might find inconsequential or pointless, others treasure and carry in the highest regard. Again, a real slow cooker of a person, brought home from the shed by people who would love and appreciate my contributions long and fully enough for me to believe them and recognize my own worth.

I think the point of this thing, besides liking to hear myself talk, is that in this season when people struggle with their places in their worlds, in a year where circumstances has made it even more difficult than usual to navigate feeling like a part of something bigger than yourself, there is always a place for you. Regardless of what you’re looking for in a home, we can find value and self-worth in communities of our own making. There are always people who are there to lift you up and honor you, regardless of what you think the rest of the world thinks, whether you be a wayward teen, an adult venturing out on the next chapter of your life, at home or abroad, or a toaster oven that just needs a little cleaning. The most important thing you can do with your dumb little life is spend it elevating and celebrating the people and things that make you feel most appreciated. So, this holiday season I may not be able to go to the dump and sort through the treasures to be found in that shed, but I will spend the time I would have spent there letting the people I care about, whether they be family, immediate or estranged, old friends, those I’ve lost touch with and those I talk to every day or new ones who have made a distinct imprint in a brief period of time, how treasured they are and I’d encourage you to do the same. We are always at our very best when we express active gratitude for what we have. We’ve all been reclaimed by people time and time again and there’s no shame in that. All we have in this world is our people and our communities. Celebrate the shared love that permeates our world and you’ll always find a place, no matter how long you feel like you’ve been sitting on a shelf in a shed.