Excerpt
Delete That
1
Wanna Hear a Joke?It was June 12, 2012. I opened my eyes and knew something was wrong. I looked around and could tell I was in a hospital, but I had no idea how I’d gotten there. And I couldn’t move. My arms, my legs, and my neck were all strapped to the hospital bed. I legit thought I was about to meet the Lord.
A nurse came to my bedside. She told me I’d been in a car wreck. My silver 1998 Honda Civic had been T-boned by a Dodge Ram—generally not a confrontation that ends well for the Civic. I’d been ejected through the passenger-side window and landed on the road. Hard. When I got to the hospital, I was having seizures, hence the restraints on my wrists, ankles, and neck. The nurse began to ask me questions. “What day is it?” Not sure. “What are your parents’ names?” I don’t know. “Who is the president?” No idea. Then I passed out again.
When I came to, the scene had changed. Instead of one nurse, now there were at least five doctors and nurses, all gathered around my bed, all looking at me. And they were laughing. I mean, dying laughing. I was like, “What is everyone laughing at?” One of the nurses said, “You told us you were a comedian, and you’ve been telling us all jokes!” Me. Strapped to a hospital bed. Telling jokes. Semiconscious! And, apparently, I was crushing.
Maybe that’s when I knew for sure I was on the right path in my life. I don’t know if I was born to be a comedian, but certainly, by that point, there was something so deeply ingrained in me that wanted, that needed, to make people laugh that I could do it without even being in control of my faculties. It was almost a primitive, involuntary reflex:
See people.
Make them laugh.
It’s not lost on me either that it was a room full of people laughing that snapped me back into consciousness. Laughter, to me, was not just a pleasant diversion. It may have literally saved my life. More on that later.
Thank You, Text
That was the summer of 2012. At the time, I had recently gotten dumped by the girl I thought I was going to marry, quit a good job in Colorado Springs, and moved to Denver to pursue comedy full time. You ever see that movie Failure to Launch? That film was based on that period of my life. Okay, not really, but let’s just say that when I saw that movie, I could relate. I was not exactly setting the world on fire.
The afternoon of the accident, I was on my way to a comedy club, the Denver Improv, to let them know my “avails”—essentially, when I’d be available to perform over the coming weeks. I was texting and driving, because, well, of course I was. Around that time, I even had a joke in my set about this: “You ever been texting at a red light and looked up to see that the light was yellow?” Meaning you were literally staring at your phone the duration of the green light and didn’t look up until it was too late. That was exactly where my head was back then: buried deep in my phone.
And not just back then. In truth, if there is anything in my life that operates with nearly the same kind of life-giving power and life-obliterating destructive force as comedy, it’s my phone. It is my one trusty companion wherever I go. In those early years of comedy, me and my BlackBerry were inseparable. (Yes, I just said BlackBerry. I don’t care what any of y’all say—back in 2010, the BlackBerry was a flex! The president had a BlackBerry. Can’t hide money! Well, technically my phone was purchased by the company I worked for, but still.) Anyway, me and that phone were like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn—minus the racism—traveling the country, exploring new worlds, and learning new things. Except instead of a wooden raft on the Mississippi, I had a Honda Civic with no air-conditioning.
That phone was my best friend. Really. When the affirmation that came with standing on a stage and making people laugh was not readily available to me—because it was, you know, two in the afternoon on a Monday—I could get a fix on my phone, through video views, Instagram likes, Twitter reactions, DMs with fans, or texts with friends. Little electronic shots of love (or what I thought was love). Me and that BlackBerry were in a burgeoning relationship: It was fun, new, and exciting.
Don’t think I don’t know how unhealthy this was, and not just because I’m about to get T-boned by a Dodge Ram in this story. My addiction to my phone, my desire to be the person I pretended to be on social media, my need to fill a hole deep inside me with the attention and approval of others, coupled with a belief that I had to live up to a vision of the perfect Christian that had been drilled into me since birth, would eventually help blow up my entire life in the most public and embarrassing way possible. (More on that later. I promise.) But back at the intersection of Tenth and Logan in downtown Denver in 2012, it was merely about to land me in the emergency room.
To this day, I still have no memory of the impact. They say the force of it knocked out some of my memory. Or maybe it was the force of the trauma. It’s all a bit blurry. Either way, a few days after the collision, I called the driver of the other vehicle, a guy named Lance. His phone number was on the police report, so I figured I’d ask him to tell me exactly what happened. When he answered the phone, I said, “Hey, man, it’s John, the guy from the car wreck.” He was surprised to hear from me. He had called around to several hospitals but couldn’t find me. He had assumed the worst, so he was relieved to find out I was alive. I asked him if we could meet back at the site of the accident, which was very close to where I was living, so he could explain what happened. He agreed, and when we met up, he reconstructed it all for me.
He had just started rolling through the intersection, when I blitzed through it, eyes on my phone, running straight through a red light. He hit the side of my car, which then spun out and struck a light post, knocking it to the ground. After I’d been shot out the side window of my Civic, he got out of his pickup truck, walked over, saw me bleeding on the pavement, and assumed I was a goner.
I was pretty bummed to find out from Lance that the paramedics quickly cut all my clothes off me—apparently, that’s standard if you’re having a seizure—so then not only was I bleeding in the street, but I was doing it naked in front of my neighbors. Yikes. Every night, I lay down to sleep and thank God for my family, for my health, and that those Ring doorbell cameras didn’t exist in 2012. Some people like to sleep with clothes on because of the fear that an emergency will force them to run out of the house naked in full view of their neighbors. Well, that essentially happened to me on June 12, 2012. Just add blood. They loaded me into the ambulance, and because I was having a seizure, the medical team worked on me right there, with the ambulance doors open, still at the crash site.
I’d always thought myself to be a much better Christian than I actually was. That’s why I was so caught off guard by what happened next.
As Lance recalled the scene to me at that intersection, just days after it had happened, I was still in a bit of a haze. Some of it may have been the painkillers they’d sent home with me from the hospital, but truthfully I felt touched by a certain grace, confident that God was really working in my life. I was going on and on about this to Lance. I told him that I believed God had a plan for me—that his grace sustained my body and that we’re all on this planet to glorify him. You know, all the Christian phrases I could slide in. Looking back, I probably should have told him I ran the light because I was reading the Bible on my phone, not texting. Anyway, I was going on about how I was a Christian and that I felt it was a genuine miracle I was still alive. He took it all in and nodded thoughtfully.
“You’re a Christian, huh?” he asked.
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“That’s interesting,” he said, “because when you were in the ambulance, I was standing right outside the back of it, giving my statement to the police. You were apparently in a lot of pain, and you were screaming the loudest, longest barrage of f-bombs I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”
Oops.
So, the two things I learned about myself from this car wreck: When my subconscious is on autopilot, I’m going to tell jokes, and I’m apparently going to cuss—loudly. Both of those things are deep in me on a primal level that I don’t totally understand, and as many other things in my life have taught me, we can’t hide from who we really are. But we sure do try.
