How I got the worst agent in New York

I had agents once. For about four months. This is how it happened.

I was walking down 21st Street when I saw a fellow comedian smoking outside with another man. The comic introduced me, and said I was funny. The man — let’s call him Jeff — was his commercial agent, Commercial agents get you auditions for commercials, a side of the industry known colloquially as “hell”.

Jeff gave me his card and said to come visit if I needed representation.

He worked in a shabby building off Broadway in the Flatiron district. Walking down the hall to Jeff’s place, I passed two other units: a cosmetic surgeon’s suite and a lobbying group called “Democrats for Education Reform”. Lobbyists, plastic surgeons, and agents: all the deceiving professions, living together.

I walked into Jeff’s office. It was 11:30am and he was chugging a 24oz can of Bud Light. He turned around and I got my first good look at him.

Jeff looked like a large bowl of shit. His face had that pink-grey, cat food complexion, shared by all lifelong smokers. His teeth were black, like trees in winter. He smelled like that beer was his third of the day (I saw the recycling bin later: it was his sixth). As he rose to greet me, I observed his khaki slacks. Each leg had a brownish stripe, right down the front crease. I realized this was a nicotine stain, meaning the slacks were usually folded, but hung in a room so choked in cigarette smoke, that this tiny strip of exposed fabric inhaled enough Camels to contract trouser cancer. It also suggested he’d owned his clothes for a very long time.

This was confirmed one nanosecond later, when I saw his shirt. His oversized blue button-down had holes at the elbow and the armpit. Not moth holes. Not torn seams. These were giant slashing holes. At one point, I saw nipple. I cannot overstate just how torn this shirt was. It looked like something the Hulk left at Goodwill.

On the other hand, he had great hair. I think that’s an agent thing.

He sits me down and proceeds to give me “the talk”. He’s a big deal. He works with people “who do all the Super Bowl commercials”. He used that phrase twice: “all the Super Bowl commercials”. I was so hurt, realizing what this phrase actually meant — “this guy looks dumb enough to believe that”. He’s unconventional, but he gets people work. He earns the 10%, my friend. He rambles. He knows this person. He knows that person. Do you know that person? That person is very important. Kind of an asshole, but hey, don’t get him started.

I’m frozen. My brain is broken. This an out-of-body show business experience. I want to walk out, but I also want an agent. I want to make fun of him for being so ridiculous, but again — I want an agent. I don’t know whether to be sincere or irreverent, to listen or to talk.

Then I saw the baby.

The office was being shared by another guy. He was a kind of all-round office assistant, but also a new father, who had brought his baby son to work. The kid lay in a crib to the side of his desk, and gurgled. I introduced myself to the baby (I met a lot of people that day), then turned back to Jeff, only to be faced with a pair of fake Ukrainian breasts, wrapped in skin-tight purple leather.

Jeff, the commercial agent, apparently shared this office with a guy I’ll call “Dave”, who was a legitimate theatrical agent. They get you “real” acting jobs on stage and screen. Dave stuck his head out from the next room, where he was “advising” this young Ukrainian singer/dancer/actress on the appropriate attire for her next round of headshots. This process meant the busty brunette had to walk back and forth through the tiny office to the restroom, trying on numerous outfits — like the purple leather bustier — each more revealing than the last. The baby just stared at her chest.

I sat there, paralyzed. Jeff clearly has a serious mental health issue. He is manic. He must have made 30 telephone calls in the hour I was there, and sent the same number of emails. When not emailing or phoning, he swung back on his chair to address me, brag about himself, or whip out his phone to show me pictures of women he claimed to be having sex with. If there were a museum for dirt-bags, they’d sell postcards of this guy.

Dave the theatrical agent was in his mid-60s, and the kind of fat that turns you into a perfect sphere. For some stupid reason, he got bored of looking at the Ukrainian breast lady and pulls me aside. He wants to know if I might need theatrical representation.

I walk into his office. There are shelves, floor-to-ceiling, covered in porcelain dolls of clowns. There were easily 1,000 clown dolls in this room. I ask, “what’s with the clowns?” He’s surprised, like I’m weird for asking. Apparently he got his start by running a clown booking business, and it helps him “remember his roots”. He then proceeds to tell me his life story, which contained several admissions of crimes and multiple pieces of disqualifying information for a potential agent: more red flags than Chairman Mao’s birthday party. The worst thing? Out of nowhere, Dave starts talking about what he did during Vietnam. Dave said he was an Army chaplain, and one of his jobs was to inform Army wives that their husbands had died in the line of duty. But he also had a second job — inform the Army if he suspected the marriage was not genuine, i.e. one of those “marry me before I go to Saigon… you live on the base for free, and we’ll shack up for a few weeks before I ship out” situations. Dave’s method for establishing this was TO TRY AND HAVE SEX WITH THE WIDOWS. And if they had sex with him, the next day he would report them to his superiors.

I just need to recap that: this man was bragging about attempted seduction of recent war widows, and describing the pleasure he experienced when reporting them to the military police.

So. I had met two reprehensible agents. One was clearly a semi-homeless drunk. The other was clearly a retired sexual predator. There was a baby right in the center of my field of vision. And there was a human-trafficked Ukrainian constantly asking if I liked her lime-green micro skirt.

Did I sign that day?

Of course I did.

They dropped me four months later. I never booked a single gig.

Show business!