And he kept learning.
Toby’s act consisted of parodies of popular songs, imitations of Gable and Grant and Bogart and Cagney, and material stolen from the big-name comics who could afford expensive writers. All the struggling comics stole their material, and they bragged about it. “I’m doing Jerry Lester”—meaning they were using his material—“and I’m twice as good as he is.” “I’m doing Milton Berle.” “You should see my Red Skelton.”
Because material was the key, they stole only from the best.
Toby would try anything. He would fix the indifferent, hard-faced audience with his wistful blue eyes and say, “Did you ever see an Eskimo pee?” He would put his two hands in front of his fly, and ice cubes would dribble out.
He would put on a turban and wrap himself in a sheet. “Abdul, the snake charmer,” he would intone. He would play a flute, and out of a wicker basket a cobra began to appear, moving rhythmically to the music as Toby pulled wires. The snake’s body was a douche bag, and its head was the nozzle. There was always someone in the audience who thought it was funny.
He did the standards and the stockies and the platters, where you laid the jokes in their laps.
He had dozens of shticks. He had to be ready to switch from one bit to another, before the beer bottles started flying.
And no matter where he played, there was always the sound of a flushing toilet during his act.
Toby traveled across the country by bus. When he arrived at a new town he would check into the cheapest hotel or boardinghouse and size up the nightclubs and bars and horse parlors. He stuffed cardboard in the soles of his shoes and whitened his shirt collars with chalk to save on laundry. The towns were all dreary, and the food was always bad; but it was the loneliness that ate into him. He had no one. There was not a single person in the vast universe who cared whether he lived or died. He wrote to his father from time to time, but it was out of a sense of duty rather than love. Toby desperately needed someone to talk to, someone who would understand him, share his dreams with him.
He watched the successful entertainers leave the big clubs with their entourages and their beautiful, classy girls and drive off in shiny limousines, and Toby envied them. Someday…
The worst moments were when he flopped, when he was booed in the middle of his act, thrown out before he had a chance to get started. At those times Toby hated the people in the audience; he wanted to kill them. It wasn’t only that he had failed, it was that he had failed at the bottom. He could go down no further; he was there. He hid in his hotel room and cried and begged God to leave him alone, to take away his desire to stand in front of an audience and entertain them. God, he prayed, let me want to be a shoe salesman or a butcher. Anything but this. His mother had been wrong. God had not singled him out. He was never going to be famous. Tomorrow, he would find some other line of work. He would apply for a nine-to-five job in an office and live like a normal human being.
And the next night Toby would be on stage again, doing his imitations, telling jokes, trying to win over the people before they turned on him and attacked.
He would smile at them innocently and say, “This man was in love with his duck, and he took it to a movie with him one night. The cashier said, ‘You can’t bring that duck in here,’ so the man went around the corner and stuffed the duck down the front of his trousers, bought a ticket and went inside. The duck started getting restless, so the man opened his fly and let the duck’s head out. Well, next to the man was a lady and her husband. She turned to her husband and said, ‘Ralph, the man next to me has his penis out.’ So Ralph said, ‘Is he bothering you?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Okay. Then forget it and enjoy the movie.’ A few minutes later the wife nudged her husband again. ‘Ralph—his penis—’ And her husband said, ‘I told you to ignore it.’ And she said, ‘I can’t—it’s eating my popcorn!’”