Yesterday

Yesterday                             4040

Friday, June 13th, 2008-3:10 A.M.

My home club is dead.

The Comix Cafe in Rochester followed it's sister, the Buffalo Comix Cafe, into demise on Tuesday when the IRS came and locked the doors.

I tell people that I used to run the club, but in fact, I used to live there.

A few people have asked me what went wrong, why the club went away, and the closer to the club you were, the more apparent the flaws were.  The cracks in the frame of the place were obvious to everyone except the people who were in a position to fix them.

The Buffalo Comix Cafe closed last summer after a 20-year-run.  The club was opened by Ed Bebko and Rob Lederman, who together booked one-nighters throughout western New York back in the 1980's when the comedy boom was just getting started.  They booked the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Judy Tenuta and Colin Quinn when they were just starting out, barely names of any recognition.

Ed and Rob were partners in other businesses until they started booking comedy, and Rob had some success touring for the Funny Bone chain of comedy clubs.  Eventually, they decided to just open their own club in Buffalo, and it was successful for ten years until they decided to move into the Rochester market.

Rochester had strong comedy clubs in the 1980's and early 1990's, and eventually all competition was pushed out by one club, and then that club went under, a victim of it's downtown location (Rochestarians went downtown with great reluctance) and a flagging economy and a dearth of comedy on television, stanching the desire to see standup performed live, rather than whetting the appetite for more of the same.  When Hiccup's, the last full-time comedy venue in Rochester, closed it's doors in 1995 or '96 (I forget when it happened exactly), Ed and Rob made the decision to move in.  They opened the Comix Cafe's Rochester location in the summer of 1997, and after much study of the area, decided on a suburban location in the town of Brighton, south of the city and near the prosperous towns of Pittsford, Penfield and Fairport.

Ed and Rob's goal was to replicate the success they had in Buffalo with the club in Rochester.  Rob was the face of the Buffalo club, extremely popular due to his position on the 97 Rock morning radio show with anchor Larry Norton, and they needed someone to fill that role in Rochester.  At the time, the perfect man for the job was Tiny Glover.  Tiny had performed in Buffalo and gained Ed and Rob's attention, and they tapped Tiny to be the face of the Comix Cafe.  Using his busy schedule performing at schools, doing workshops and just generally getting out in front of people all the time, Tiny was able to "paper" the house until folks started coming out to the club on their own (paper in the comedy business meaning giving out free tickets or putting names on the "guest list").  Tiny hosted every Friday and Saturday, and was the perfect spokesman for the fledgling club.  He was popular, clean, personable, and loved by all.  The success of the club was due to his efforts more than possibly anyone else (Ed and Rob's efforts notwithstanding).

Along the way, Ed had acquired a telemarketing plan originally devised by Garvin's Comedy Club, which required a team of phone operators calling homes and business and offering free tickets to come to the club.  Ed wanted Tiny to head up the department, implement it, put it into place, but Tiny declined; his daytime schedule was too pressing at that time, and it would have been difficult to commit to.  Instead, Tiny contacted someone who he felt would be a good fit for such a position; and that someone was I.

I had just recently been downsized out of a position at WCMF in Rochester, where I headed up the Research department.  Our duties included calling residences in the area and quizzing folks about their radio listening habits as well as their musical likes and dislikes.  I worked in that department for about five years when the corporate axe fell, choosing to outsource the research department to a private consulting firm.  This left me available to take the telemarketing job, which I attacked with gusto, revolving it around my tour of duty with the George Carlin tour.  I eventually left the Carlin tour when I was offered the General Manager's job by Ed in February of 1998.  I started beefing up the telemarketing department and eventually the club expanded to include Sunday operations to supplement what we were already doing Wednesday through Saturday.  Our business plan was simple; offer free tickets to our comedy shows, get folks through the doors and sell them food and drinks.

Working at the Comix Cafe was the time of my life.  I enjoyed the opportunity to mesh my talents of management (previously relegated to retail endeavors) along with my love of comedy and my recently developed phone skills.  I developed an e-mail data base, even before I owned a computer, and did data entry and sent out newsletters from the public library on my day off.  Our shows were great and eventually, after the addition of Andy Clawson (an extremely good performer and eventual manager) in our telemarketing department, we didn't have an empty seat in our 250 seat showroom any of our nights of operation.  We had a dynamite mc group, consisting of Steve Burr, T.L. Johnson, Douglas Berryhill, and myself.  I wasn't able to start an open mic, which I thought was key to a club being able to develop a local talent base, but got around that by offering comedians guest spots on every show I could get away with.  I knew what it was like to be a comedian starting out, and didn't want the new talent to have to suffer the way I did.  I made a home for everyone, made my servers and bartenders money, put on great shows that our audiences enjoyed, and made Ed what I have to believe, after rent and expenses, was a good amount of money.  Everything was going great.

Then I went and fucked it up.

My health started failing.  I had an undiagnosed thyroid problem, I was overweight, heart disease, high blood pressure, and falling arches.  My diet was atrocious, consisting of whatever I could shove in my mouth on the run, and exacerbated by 12-hour days. I would run in the club at 3:30 in the afternoon and stay until the bar closed at 2:30, count the money and make up a deposit, and be home by 3:30 in the morning.  In addition, I was getting frustrated that the only stage time I could enjoy was hosting one week a month and the occasional fill-in spot.  I watched local comics move up and move on, I watched our out-of-town guest comics having great fun, and I wanted a slice of that pie.  Also, my wife never saw me; I only had Mondays and Tuesdays off, and that was if the refrigeration in the club didn't go on the fritz, or there wasn't a special event or someone rented out the room.  I needed to make a change, to get out of the club.

I went back on the road, formally leaving the club in June of 2001.  Ed had offered me ownership less than two years before, but I didn't understand what that meant and wasn't sure I would be up to it, financially or otherwise.  In retrospect, it was the biggest mistake of my life to turn it down.

When I left, the search was on to find a replacement for me, and the first attempt came in the guise of Paul Slater, formerly of the Buffalo Funny Bone.  At Ed's request, I stayed on long enough for Paul to get his feet wet, and a year later, he left and was replaced by J.J. Parrone.  This was the beginning of the end.

I didn't like J.J. from the start.  He once said to me that he envisioned Ed's money as "a big pile of leaves" and that his job was to stop them from blowing away.  Such avarice, I thought, would only be trouble, and the insistence that the leaves were blowing away, showed a lack of grasp on the situation.  The tree was healthy, and producing leaves every week!

J.J. started out as the General Manager, and eventually bought the club from Ed.  J.J. didn't know anything about comedy (he once bragged about being able to get Steinfeld to work the club), and his management style was to surround himself with weak individuals who could be either bullied or were so loyal, they would never say "no" to him.  Again, at Ed's behest, I stayed on to show J.J. the ropes, and J.J. went about putting the ropes around my neck.  He dismantled the bookkeeping system.  He eliminated the petty cash.  He started raising menu prices and cutting portion sizes, turning the club into a "clip joint."  He watered down the booze, or at least poured well liquor into top shelf bottles.  He stripped the telemarketing department of any incentive to do their jobs, took away Andy's commissions and eventually fired him.  He put security systems in place to micromanage minutiae that didn't need to be there; in a club that issued free tickets for a living, he maniacally demanded that the tickets be counted every night, suspecting that the box office staff was issuing free tickets for paid admissions and pocketing the cash.  And he neglected the club.  He became a ghost around the place, appearing only now and then to yell at the staff, on the sales floor, in front of guests.  I had to pull him off of Lisa Kyper, one of our servers, and plead with him to take her into the office or the kitchen to yell at her, but not in the main service aisle three minutes before showtime.  Every day, I went to work in fear of what was to come next; he hired five managers to do the work of two, and every day, it seemed like he had a new complaint about what I was doing wrong, or what I wasn't doing at all.  My chest ached just walking into the place, and so I removed myself.

My biggest complaint with J.J. was that he looked upon comedians as an obstacle; they were all greedy, looking out for themselves, and getting in the way.  If comedians were hanging out in the back of the room, watching the show and nursing a beer, they were poachers and needed to be swept out as soon as possible.  They were not welcome in any way.  And his judgment of touring comedians was asinine to say the least; good, crowd-pleasing acts were passed over in favor of comics who just happened to be Italian.  And J.J. had no problem being bullied around by big-name special acts who would talk him into booking their friends at outlandish pay-scales, which he would say "yes" to in order to appear savvy.  He booked talent that he personally liked, with no regard as to whether the audiences would appreciate them.

The business stayed healthy for a few years.  Every time I thought the place would implode, J.J. would resurface, flush with cash and a new lease on life.  Purported gambling debts (he opened a sat club in Syracuse allegedly first scouted on a trip to Turning Stone Casino) started draining the club of the ability to pay their debts in a timely manner, and the club's credit rating went all to hell.  Ed tried to put some checks and balances in place by installing Mike Glosek, a comic from Buffalo and a good friend of his for years, to help run the place, but it was too little, too late, and J.J. treated Mike like a spy anyway, and tortured him the same way he tortured me.

An attempted club in Aruba seemed to be an escape, a hide-out for J.J., and eventually closed.  The hotel was owed thousands of dollars, and threw J.J. out on his ear.

I'm leaving out a whole bunch of details and supportive evidence, but none of it matters; there's a long trail of bounced checks, employees who quit, stories of disaster surrounding the last days of the Comix Cafe. The club was mismanaged into the ground, the cash flow wasn't managed with any due diligence, and the leaves have blown away.  And this past week, the IRS came through and took all the stems and cut down the tree.

I have an aching in me that I'll never get rid of, that with a little more courage or discipline, that club would be mine today and a good place to perform (for the comics) or see a show (for the audience) or make a nice living (for the servers, bartenders, box office workers, telemarketers).  I allowed a monster to be unleashed on the world, and probably destroyed him, too.  He's almost certainly looking at bankruptcy at best and jail time at worst, for tax evasion or fraud or who knows what else if you believe what you hear on the street.  His sin was that of greed, but more than that, vanity.  He had a system in place, handed to him on a silver platter, and he thought we were nuts, that he could make it so much better.

And I'll bet you a big pile of leaves that he really believed it.

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY