Comedians

I like comedians. They make me laugh. I would like to be one. My current favorite is Louis C.K. I like his standup, not his TV show.

There is a comedian I remember well from the Last Comic Standing TV reality show competition from a few yeas ago, Mike DeStefano. I remember him for two reasons. First, he was good and his humor was edgy, there was a darkness to it. Second, because he died suddenly of a heart attack shortly after the competition. He was 44.

About a year ago, I learned something new about him. His wife died earlier of AIDS. He himself was HIV positive. They both had a history of drug abuse and met as recovering addicts. Shortly before his death, in an interview he related how he visited his wife who was in an hospice. He had arrived on a Harley Davidson Motorcycle and she wanted to go for a ride. So he takes her, but she's hooked to a morphine drip with a bag hanging from a pole supported on four poles:

She’s holding the pole! Marc, it was a pole with four wheels on the bottom, and we’re riding around this hospice, and you could hear the goddamn wheels jangling and banging; it was insane.

And then I pass the front door, and all these nurses are standing out front, and they’re all crying. They’re watching us, and they’re crying. And I didn’t know why they were crying. I was like, Why are they crying? I didn’t get what they were seeing. I didn’t know. Because I was just in it; I was living it. I knew my wife who had suffered, she was a prostitute, she was a freakin’ heroin addict, she was beaten by pimps — this was her past — and then she ends up with AIDS, and she’s dying, and all she wants is a goddamn ride on my motorcycle.

It was the last thing he did with her. He thought the greatest thing that he had ever done was to care for his wife.