From backstage I watched the tape run for the last show’s introduction. I always assumed it was tape, even though it probably hadn’t been for years. Tape is a thing of the past, a relic, redundant—exactly how I should have felt at that moment. My time was up. I had done ten years, it was someone else’s problem now. I should have been sad, even just a little, a touch of bittersweet melancholy at least. I had certainly experienced those feelings on the run-up to the show’s ending, but in that moment I wasn’t sad, not even a little bit. It felt like the last day of my grim high school. I was elated. I felt the fog clearing. Finally I’d be able to see the horizon, get my bearings, and continue the journey.
The tape ended and both drummers thundered out the beat. I walked out, waved to the audience, and climbed on top of that fucking desk to sing the last song. I stomped in time, doing what I have always tried to do: attempting to follow the beat while trashing the varnish.
—
I have never thought of myself as a late-night talk show host. I’ve said that often to anyone who would listen, but I suppose it was a bit confusing, since all they knew about me was that I hosted a late-night talk show. The press was convinced that I was crushed not to be taking over for David Letterman when I left The Late Late Show in 2014, despite my public insistence since 2005, when I started in late night—often quoted in their very publications—that I didn’t want the job. I didn’t and I don’t. You can check this online if you want, although I can’t think why you’d bother at this point. Certainly nobody seemed to find it necessary at the time.
It seems to me people make up stories to fit their perception about you. They don’t just do it about me, of course. It happens to everybody. I do it to myself. I’m getting older now and the shadows are getting longer. When I look into them I see shapes move and stir and I think I remember what they are, but maybe I’m just making it up to suit a reality about myself that I find comfortable.
From January 2005 until December 2014 I hosted a late-night show on American broadcast television. I found it in turns rewarding, frustrating, difficult, easy, immensely satisfying, soul-crushingly dull, hilarious, and depressing.
Sometimes all in one show. Sometimes all in one monologue. Sometimes all in one “interview” (I have never really thought of myself as an interviewer, but if you talk to people on TV and the show title has your name in it then you are, by default, an interviewer, I suppose).
The strict traditional format the show was produced under demanded that each episode begin with a monologue. A late-night tradition dating back to the early ratpacky nicoteeny alcoholic madmen days of TV. My first stumbling attempts were the clumsy reading of jokes written in black ink on giant white cards that were held just off camera by a very nice man called Tony.
Tony’s job was holding up jokes for me to read out. It didn’t matter to him if the joke was good or bad, clever or stupid. He didn’t care, he passed no judgment. He was like a good undertaker, handling each case with professional detachment. He didn’t get involved.
I was expected to do the same. Sell the joke and move on, deliver the monologue. I tried but I was terrible at it, as the early reviews for the show gleefully and wickedly pointed out. I found myself saying mean and bitchy things about people or groups of people who I didn’t know anything about. By doing the task assigned to me, I found myself espousing the rage and questionable morality of whatever writer had been lucky enough to find favor with the producers that day. I found I had to defend myself about jokes I made on TV when I didn’t agree or even have much knowledge of the stance I had supposedly taken.
I vas just obeying orders.
It became evident to me that if I was to continue on the show, that if I were to espouse any rage and questionable moral judgment, it would have to be my own. Otherwise I was inviting a level of self-loathing that even an apostate Scottish Calvinist couldn’t survive.
I fired the writers I disagreed with and hired a few whose weltanschauung ran in tandem with or complemented my own. The monologue went from being a necessary chore to being a creative emotional outlet. When it was at its best it was more of an essay that contained the requisite amount of jokes. An op-ed column in a suit and makeup. Not every night, of course. Sometimes, like most people, I simply had nothing to say (hence the annual Latvian Independence Day monologue was born). On some nights, though, maybe a dozen or so per year, it all clicked and I made myself and a few others laugh or cry or think about things differently.
The monologue didn’t give me total freedom, of course. The concerns of the network or the FCC or the sponsors could be restricting at times. Performing stand-up in a theater or a comedy club with no cameras running is a more liberated vehicle of articulation, but it does require a certain singularity of purpose. It should be funny.
I don’t miss doing the late-night show, but my brain has become used to the format of these monologues/essays. So much so that the initial title of this book was going to be Mono-Logging. But I thought that it sounded too much like a sophomoric euphemism for masturbation—and maybe that’s what’s going on here, maybe I’m just pleasing myself.
Herein, then, is a collection of recollections and observations and—occasionally, in the spirit of poetic license—fabrications that don’t fit in any other format but this book’s. Not really monologues and not really essays, they have no agenda, not even comedic, although I’d like to hope every now and then they raise a chuckle or two. These are stories that I couldn’t or wouldn’t tell in any other way than the one in which I present them to you now. The timeline is not strictly linear because that’s not how I remember things, so you can start reading the book in the middle if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t. You’ll understand why when you’ve finished it.
I settled with the title Riding the Elephant because it’s the name of one of my favorite stories and also because it’s a slang phrase employed by potheads to describe being stoned in a foggy and confused way, though I’m not sure there is any other way to be stoned. Foggy and confused is just how I remember things.
It also seems to me that the phrase riding the elephant contains a perfect description for a life which seems to take any direction it chooses, paying scant attention to my instructions or commands. The big gray fucker just goes where it wants.
