Tonight is Wednesday night in Las Vegas, which means Scott Thompson has to become Carrot Top a little earlier than he does most nights. He has Tuesdays off, so yesterday he didn't have to be Carrot Top at all if he didn't want to be, except he left the serenity of his house to have lunch with his friend Nicolas Cage, who was wearing a white leather suit. Cage, knowing that a white leather suit has a way of changing everybody in its presence, had asked in advance whether it was okay for him to wear it, and Thompson agreed to provide the necessary counterweight. Perhaps feeling on a roll, Cage has just texted Thompson with another proposal. The rodeo is in town, and tomorrow Cage wants to go to a western-themed gift show called Cowboy Christmas to buy Thompson a pair of chaps. This time last year, Cage and Thompson stumbled into Cowboy Christmas, and Cage came out the other side in full cowboy getup, including his own pair of chaps and a southern accent that took him a long while to shake. Cage was transformed to his soul that day, and now he wants Thompson to join him in league with the horsebreakers. So tomorrow: chaps.

But first comes Wednesday. Six nights each week, 240 nights each year, the fifty-year-old Thompson appears as Carrot Top down at the Luxor, playing between Menopause the Musical ("The Hilarious Celebration of Women and the Change!") and a burlesque show called Fantasy ("The Strip's Biggest Tease"). And on three of those nights—Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Mondays—Thompson has to arrive early for a preshow meet and greet. His most fervent admirers pay an additional forty-nine dollars on top of their seventy-one-dollar tickets to chat with him in the theater's lobby, take pictures with him, and get his autograph.

When Thompson surfaces from his dressing room, his personal assistant—a deeply loyal and connected forty-eight-year-old man named Jeff Molitz—is at his shoulder, as he almost always is. Molitz, nicknamed Porno Jeff because of some work he does on the side, is short and bearded, with a long ponytail and a closet filled with Carrot Top–branded clothing. "It's the uniform," Porno Jeff says. They met through Porno Jeff's local Mail Boxes Etc. franchise, which Thompson sometimes used to ship his trunks of comedic props, including what he calls Hugh Hefner's walker (it has a big dildo taped to the front of it) and Rosie O'Donnell's buffet tray (there are five of them). Nine years ago, Porno Jeff became Thompson's full-time assistant, and he has since evolved from Man Friday into celebrity-by-proxy. He hosts a Super Bowl party at his house that has become massive enough that Monster Energy drinks and Kraft Nabisco sponsor it; he calls up a picture on his phone of the more than two thousand packets of Kool-Aid that arrived earlier today.

Six fans are waiting in the theater lobby. Three are a family from Kansas, in Las Vegas to celebrate their daughter's twenty-first birthday; one is a man who has come by himself; and the last two are Zoe, just out of her teens, and Dan, a middle-age man. Zoe has a carrot broach pinned to her lapel.

"I thought you'd be taller," she says to Thompson when he appears.

"I thought I'd be taller, too," he says, and Zoe laughs herself into a swoon. "You're gorgeous," she says when she recovers, which leaves Porno Jeff looking sideways at Dan. Their relationship is unclear and nobody wants to ask about it, because every possible answer has its complications. He seems too old to be her husband, too handsy to be her father. But they are in some kind of union, at least in their drunkenness, and Dan doesn't seem especially pleased that Zoe is about to spring a leak for Carrot Top.

Jeff Minton Esquire

"I think I'm pretty funny," Dan suddenly announces to the room. This isn't unusual. Thompson's public life is peppered with impromptu auditions by strangers who see in him a chance to validate their self-belief. How hard can funny be? The way tough guys chest up to boxers—Thompson has seen such idiocy around Mike Tyson, another friend—amateur comics feel compelled to try to make him laugh. He is excellent at pretending to laugh. Only a few hours ago, he was in a sporting-goods store and an old man started shouting an off-color joke in his general direction. It involved an equally elderly man hiring a prostitute.

"Are you ready for some super sex?" the hooker asks him.

"I'll take the soup," he says.

"You can use that in your show," the old man told Scott Thompson—the same Scott Thompson who has made a millionaire's living as a comedian for nearly thirty years, who has sprawling homes in Las Vegas and his native Florida with a Mercedes-Benz G-Class SUV parked in each driveway, who once played for stadiums and countless late-night TV audiences, and who now performs those 240 shows for eighty thousand people in his nineteenth year in Las Vegas—just in case Carrot Top needs "I'll take the soup" to kick-start his career.

And now here's Dan, who also thinks he's pretty funny. "Here's my story," he says before he launches into some drunken ramble that, paradoxically, sounds as though he's rehearsed it in front of a mirror. Zoe is mortified. She elbows Dan out of the way. "You're so wonderful for this city," she says to Thompson. He thanks her, but with a hesitation born of doubt, the way a diner waitress might handle a hundred-dollar tip. He is that rare comedian who has been the subject of nearly as many jokes as he has told, and compliments are so often the setup for a barb. This time, however, there is no joke. Zoe is genuine in her allegiance to Carrot Top. She asks to put her hands through his signature red hair, asks him to sign her new Carrot Top T-shirt, asks him only for the things he can provide and gives him only love in return.

Just before Zoe melts into a puddle, Porno Jeff moves to wrap things up. They have a show to do. Thompson says goodbye and opens the door that leads to his dressing room. Halfway through, he's stopped by a cry from Zoe. She has one last request. "Can I have a kiss?" she asks. Thompson gives her a hug and a peck. She purrs in his arms. "You've just made an eleven-year-old girl very happy," she says.

"Oh, shit!" Thompson shouts, and he throws his hands off her as though he were electrocuted. "You're eleven?"

Everybody laughs—everybody except Zoe and Dan. Zoe looks down and blushes. "Oh, God, no, that's not … That's when I first fell in love with you," she says. Dan is a different shade of crimson when he teeters up to Thompson, still trapped in the half-open door. "You tell me, Carrot Top," Dan says, his pointed finger the only part of him that's dead steady. "Why can't I be the funny one?"

Thompson's greatest fear is standing on a stage and hearing silence. He's entertained in some capacity since he was a child. After his parents divorced when he was twelve, he decided his job was to tell his mother jokes to cheer her up—the way another child might take out the trash. He can remember her waking him to do his Jimmy Carter impersonation for her bridge club, and today there remains something vaudevillian about his act—a relentless, physical, almost pathological eagerness to please. He is not wry or aloof. His comedy is not intellectual; he's not Louis C. K. or Chris Rock making light out of the dark. One of Thompson's biggest current laughs involves Bill Cosby and ether, but mostly he tells joke after harmless joke, with no larger purpose than making families from Kansas laugh.

There are his trunks of props, of course, but over the years they have become less the foundation of his act than its curtain walls. There are also hundreds of musical and video cues, an elaborate duet of comedic timing that he conducts with a former stand-up named Lee Lorren, stashed with a soundboard in the back of the house. (For nearly two decades, Lorren has also set up the trunks before each show; every prop has its place. "How do you put that on a résumé?" he says. "What have you been doing with your life?") Thompson, with Lorren's invisible assistance, is expert at making things look improvisational, riding on the edge of chaos. Only repeated viewings reveal that the laughs that seem like accidents have been planned out like cities.

Thompson in his dressing room at the Luxor, with a few of his prop trunks behind him. Jeff Minton Esquire

On Thompson's best nights, the laughter turns into a cascade. People haven't recovered from his shot at Delta ("Don't Expect Luggage To Arrive") before he hits them with Ellen DeGeneres's coffee mug (it has a pair of Barbie-doll legs spread open on its rim). "I'm not proud of some of this," he says midway through his show, but the cumulative effect of his delivery is undeniable: One woman interrupted a recent performance by shitting her pants. His show is never shorter than sixty-five minutes, but on most nights it lasts closer to ninety—"I sit around all day waiting to do this," he says—setting what must be some kind of land-speed record for punchlines.

Only once, in the middle of his set, does he go longer than a few seconds without a laugh or a stab at one. He stops and tells a story. It took him years to find the courage to tell a story, to be closer to his genuine self onstage. (He used to wear costumes up there, polka dots and bowling shoes; now he just wears jeans and a T-shirt.) He tells a lot more stories these days. Most of them are very short, and most of them are some version of the truth: the woman who told him that he looks just like Carrot Top, "no offense"; the child in a P. F. Chang's who asked him whether he was the real Carrot Top and not an impersonator. "A Carrot Top impersonator?" he roars from the stage. "How fucking sad is that?"

But the story in the middle isn't like the others. The stage is darkened, his trunks of props disappearing in the shadows. He is cast in a green glow, leaving him stripped even of his red hair. If only for a moment, he is just another stand-up, a man with a microphone, and he begins to speak. This story is also mostly true, about a run-in he had at the Canadian border, a case of mistaken identity involving a different comedian named Scott Thompson, who deals in a different kind of funny. The whole bit is maybe three minutes long, and it yields a couple of small laughs and ends with one big one. For some comedians, that's an enviable math, but for Thompson, for Carrot Top, it presents as agony, a painful test of self-discipline and restraint. For him, it's almost like practicing a martial art.

And there's Carrot Top, standing naked in Shania Twain's hot tub, sipping champagne.

Before his show on Friday night, Thompson gives a tour of the more usual frenzy inside his head. Alas, he is not wearing chaps; Cage had to bail on Cowboy Christmas. He rents out a warehouse in sight of the Luxor's black-glass pyramid. It's not a storage unit; it's a damn warehouse, maybe twenty feet high, with rows of metal shelves stacked to the ceiling. The shelves are filled with boxes of props, virtually every one he's ever built. One of his first was a Neighborhood Watch sign that he stole to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of neighborhood watches. Some small crowd somewhere liked that, and everything else just spiraled from there. Thompson's father, Larry, was a rocket scientist at NASA, which, besides being good for a laugh, makes a twisted sort of sense. Both of them found expression through machines.

Some of the props—like Bill Clinton's presidential podium, with the back of a woman's head bobbing out from behind it—have been retired for years. Others are rotated in and out of circulation as current events dictate. One shelf, for instance, contains every NFL helmet, each rigged so that it can hold a box of tissues, depending on that week's results. There are welding masks and piles of spare parts, a pair of mannequins, and a black-and-white movie clapperboard. This one has a small black rectangle hovering maybe a foot over it on the end of a thin stick. It doesn't make much sense until Thompson picks it up, looking like a child rediscovering an old toy. He holds the clapperboard in front of him and the black rectangle ends up under his nose—Hitler's mustache. "I need Mel Gibson to direct again," he says, throwing the clapperboard back on the shelf. Nearby, another box has been labeled in black marker: BOX O'COCK. It does, in fact, contain many facsimiles of the human penis. One of their thick-veined brethren is back at the Luxor, where it appears nightly as Elton John's microphone.

Jeff Minton Esquire

Most of Thompson's jokes, however, are aimed squarely at himself. He is well aware that for every Zoe, there is a Dan. In 1998, he starred in a movie called Chairman of the Board—probably the apex of his national ascent—that is best remembered for a disastrous appearance by his costar, Courtney Thorne-Smith, on Conan. Norm Macdonald was sitting next to her. "If it's got Carrot Top in it, you know what a good name for it would be?" Macdonald asks at one point. "Box-Office Poison."

By then, Thompson had already become an easy target, a chance to define which side of the 1990s you were on. He won best male stand-up at the American Comedy Awards in 1994, but for the late Bill Hicks, he represented some terrible modern instinct toward baseness: "Carrot Top: for people who didn't get Gallagher," Hicks famously ripped. Even in friendly Florida, a woman named Vicki Rouss-man asked him to perform at her Orlando workshop for aspiring comedians. When he finished his set, she got up and announced to the students: "Now, this is what you don't want to do." By some unspoken consensus, Carrot Top had become the Creed of comedy—wildly popular but disrespected almost because of his easy mass appeal.

"If you read what people say about you, it will kill you," Thompson says. "Don't do that. But I know some people say I'm hideous, the most disgusting, ugliest guy in the world. And then some people say, 'Oh my God, he's fucking beautiful.' I've always been love or hate. That's fine. Thank God I've had more love than hate."

He still tries to beat hate to the punch. During his show, Thompson plays a clip of his loss on Star Search in the early nineties to a comedian named Bob Zany: When Ed McMahon announces the scores, the picture freezes, FUCK superimposed over it in big block letters. He shows another clip, from Family Feud: "Name an annoying celebrity you wish would just go away." "Carrot Top," a contestant shouts. He jokes about why redheads are apparently going extinct ("Because nobody's fucking us, that's why") and the rumors that he's had plastic surgery ("Wouldn't I look better if I'd had a face-lift?") and that he's gay (after showing a picture of him and Lance Bass from 'N Sync, he says, "And I'm the one wearing the mesh tank top"). In his never-ending search for material, he has become his own principal prop.

After the trip to the warehouse, after he makes the long walk from his reserved parking spot to his dressing room, Thompson is quiet. Strangers often ask him if he's feeling okay, because when he's not in the company of white leather suits, he isn't anything like how you remember him from TV. "I guess I save it for my performances," he says. He lights scented candles and puts on his usual preshow music: Queen is essential; Freddie Mercury is his patron saint. He fiddles with a pair of jeans he's been festooning with patches cut from children's clothes he picked up at a thrift store. Next, he starts bedazzling a new pair of sneakers with glitter. He's always trying to make things different from what they are. When he was a kid, he hated his red hair and begged his mom to bleach it. Denied, he rearranged his bedroom furniture every six weeks. He still spends a lot of time in his garden with his beloved leaf blower (you can tell it's his because it has Carrot Top decals on it) or planting flowers. A few years ago, he was maniacal about bodybuilding—steroid use being another of the rumors that's chased him; he says he just worked out constantly, bored by sitting around all day—but now he's a runner, down to 145 pounds. He insists that he hasn't had a face-lift, and in the flesh he doesn't look as though he has, but he gets Botox and has had his eyebrows and eyelashes tinted. "If I looked fifty right now, I'd probably kill myself," he says.

He looks up from his sneakers and tells a story. When he first came to Las Vegas in 1996, landing at the MGM Grand, he played six days a week, twice on Saturdays. George Carlin also worked at the MGM Grand, and he asked Thompson why he did the twin Saturday shows. He said it gave him a second chance if he bombed the first time around. Carlin stepped right up to his face.

"Don't ever give the audience the upper hand," Carlin told him. "If they get it, they get it. If they don't, that's on them. You don't get a second chance. They're getting a second chance."

Preparing a prop backstage (a negligee with kitchen timers, intended to guide men during lovemaking). Jeff Minton Esquire

"I took the advice," Thompson says, "but I never could live by it. I still think I had something to do with it."

Thompson heads to the stage. This audience will not need a second chance, and he knows it the instant he steps out into the lights. They are his. Even when he trips over a punchline or misses a mark—even when an accident really is an accident—they are with him. He feels that elusive cascade under his feet, and he knows that everything he hopes for will come true, and he knows that the explosion of streamers that ends his show with a bang will launch the first standing ovation of his week. He seizes the chance to thread some new material into his act's second half, testing out some bits before an audience that will let him be whatever he wants to be. He tinkers. He ditches a couple props, adds a couple stories. One of them involves an old man shouting a joke at him in a sporting-goods store.

"I'll take the soup," he says.

After the show, Thompson says he wants to see a friend of his at Caesars, and he and Porno Jeff walk through the bowels of the Luxor back to his parking spot. A showgirl wearing only a G-string runs past them, her perfect tits late for something. They stop at Spago, where they are regulars and are greeted warmly. Two pizzas appear. Thompson tucks in, or at least he performs his version of tucking in. He has a twenty-eight-inch waist; every last one of his meals ends with a takeout box. He looks different than he did before the show. He's crackling, as though his circuits have been more properly connected. His skin has a pale glow, and his eyelashes look especially dark. He's pulled up the collar of his black coat—designed by Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe, pure rock 'n' roll—and it meets the bottom of his glorious hair, framing his flashing blue eyes and quick smile. Right now he's Carrot Top, and he is fucking beautiful.

"Shania just texted me," he says, and he and Porno Jeff walk to some predetermined location. They are met by a waiting black SUV and driven to a secret, sacred part of the hotel. A giant bodyguard lets Thompson and Porno Jeff through a door into another world. It's one of the villas at Caesars, and it's something like eleven thousand square feet of gleaming opulence, a quarry's worth of marble polished into form. The hallway that opens in front of them is big enough to hold a billiard table—not metaphorically; there's a billiard table in it—and there's a movie theater with massage chairs to the right, and straight ahead, several chandeliers away, Shania Twain is dancing to music streaming from invisible holes in the ceiling. She waves over her friends.

Tomorrow, Saturday, Twain will give her last Las Vegas performance, the end of her two-year residency at Caesars. Fred, her Swiss knight of a second husband, is here, and Carrie-Ann, her sister, has made it down from small-town Ontario. There is also an odd trio of young Swiss German-speaking men dancing around her. One of them is introduced as Bastian Baker, "the John Mayer of Switzerland"; the other two are on-the-rise musicians trying to make it in America. They are dressed like the Lost Boys, like vampires, with black leather jackets and motorcycle boots. They are each cool and shining. Then there is Twain, pocket-sized and gorgeous, dressed in black, her black boots with gleaming steel heels reflected in the floor. She embraces Thompson and Porno Jeff—one more of this town's strange circles complete.

Thompson and Twain met when she came to his show, just another spectator laughing in the dark. "The funniest," she says. He kept his jokes about her in it—he still takes aim at her penchant for starting songs with cheerleader-chant intros, Let's go girls and Kick it—and she liked that he did. "I'd nail her again if I had the chance," he deadpans during his set each night, and even his biggest fans laugh at the ridiculousness of Carrot Top and Shania Twain occupying the same sentence, let alone the same bed. But in truth, he gathers famous friends like a collector, each one more proof that he belongs in the company of the others.

Everybody heads outside into the cold night, pulling patio chairs into a tight huddle beside the private pool. Fred cracks open bottles of champagne, and the music keeps playing over the sort of earnest conversations that take place on the dock at summer camp. A sad Matthew Koma song, "Suitcase," comes on, and for a while it pushes the mood into more bittersweet territory. "I'm just so grateful," Twain says, wearing Fred's jacket against the chill.

Thompson before he was Carrot Top, age thirteen.

Las Vegas was where she found her confidence after her voice and first husband had left her—the last city in America where you can always be what you were. Donny & Marie still play here. So does Olivia Newton-John and Jeff Dunham and David Copperfield. Like Twain, like Carrot Top, they know too well the half-life of celebrity, but out in the desert, sheltered from irony, their names can still be on the side of buildings. If only in Las Vegas, here, under the dome, they can be A-listers for as long as they want.

Thompson looks at his friend and smiles a little sadly, maybe because she's leaving, maybe because he's not. One of the Swiss musicians decides that it's time to ramp things back up with a swim, and he strips down naked and jumps into the pool. His fellow vampires move to join him and Thompson does, too, until they realize that seizing the moment is sometimes just a way of freezing your ass off. They tumble instead into a Jacuzzi, and there's Carrot Top, standing naked in Shania Twain's hot tub, sipping his glass of champagne, his still-considerable shoulder muscles wet, his hair backlit by the Strip, a picture of defiance to so many things. When he made it big, he sold out an auditorium in Orlando on Halloween night and made sure the once-scornful Vicki Roussman was there. "I can still see her," he says. "She was wearing a purple dress."

Now everybody wraps themselves in white towels and bundles back inside, tucked between roaring twin fireplaces. The Swiss guys start talking about their borderless dreams and how close they sometimes feel to them.

"I used to be the youngest guy in the room," Thompson says. "Now I'm the oldest."

"I swear the whole world is a trap," Twain says.

And so it goes, two, three, four, five o'clock in the morning, and by then the wine is out and soon the sun, and with it hazy discussions of fate and genetic testing (Twain is part Japanese, Fred part Yakut) and the temperament of horses—Twain rides one onstage, Fred with his heart in his throat every time—and entertainers and their entertainment. The Swiss boys continue to talk about the pulse that radiates off crowds and their yearning to feel it. Twain and Thompson look at each other across the fire and make a silent agreement to counter. They know that beyond a certain measure, the numbers become meaningless, and not just because you can't see past the lights or hear above the screaming anymore. You stop cultivating distance and seek to close it instead. You start picking out a single happy face.

Back when he was working at the MGM Grand, Thompson would watch George Carlin from behind the curtain at the side of the stage. Like a lot of artists, Carlin had the rituals that give performers facing unpredictable rooms the illusion of control. There was a vending machine backstage, and one of Carlin's tics was checking the change-return slot each time he went onstage and checking it each time he walked off. There was never any money in it. So one night, Thompson decided to slip out of his hiding spot and plant a quarter in the change-return slot. He watched Carlin finish his set, check the slot, and beam

when he found the quarter. "It's funny," Thompson says. "It was the smallest thing."

Most Sundays, he goes to the Red Rock Casino, a locals place closer to the desert. He watches football in the sports bar with his friends. This Sunday, he goes for lunch beforehand with his mother, Dona; his longtime girlfriend, Amanda; and his teenage niece, Megan. (Thompson's older brother, a pilot for Southwest, also calls Las Vegas home.) They all tell stories about what it's like to love Carrot Top.

Megan's friends are always asking to meet her uncle. "I don't know," she usually says. "Can I meet your uncle?" Amanda talks about how much it hurts her when someone hurts him—she worries that some of his friends only pretend to like him. "He's too nice," she says. Dona remembers the night she was certain of what her son would become. He had quit comedy after college for a year or two, shucking oysters in an Orlando restaurant. Then he was asked to play a New Year's Eve party and she went, the way she always went to his shows, and she watched him change before her eyes. "He was just so happy up there," she says, and her eyes grow misty at the memory. "I just …" and she blows a kiss into the air. That was it. Dona worked at Citibank, and she had a picture of her son Carrot Top in her office. Lots of people would look at it; not many people would ask about it. Even if they did, she never made clear their relationship. She just let everybody think she was a really big fan.

That reminds Thompson of a story. He was jogging near his home in Florida when a UPS driver waved him down. "I'm so sorry to stop you when you're running," the driver said, "but I've been looking for you all over the place. You have some crazy stalkers living near you." The driver went on to describe a house where he was always making deliveries. Two women lived in it. They had Carrot Top posters hanging from every wall. They were usually wearing Carrot Top T-shirts. There was carrot paraphernalia in every corner of the house—a kettle with carrots on it, carrot magnets on the fridge. "Straight psychos," the driver said.

Thompson asked him where the house was. The driver had been so shaken by the sight of these wild-eyed obsessives, he remembered the exact address—which also happened to be the address for Thompson's Florida headquarters, based in a bungalow. The women, like Porno Jeff, were two more of his unusually devoted employees.

He moves to start another story, this one about Charlie Sheen and the long-ago night they both played The Tonight Show, but he's interrupted when the check comes. Thompson pulls out a tiny Visa card the size of a stamp. Megan rolls her eyes. "What?" he says. "I'm a prop comic!" He gets what's left of his lunch to go and heads over to the sports bar with Amanda. Porno Jeff is waiting for them. There's a booth, a bucket of champagne already chilling on the table. At its center is Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe; he's wearing sunglasses and a Miami Dolphins pullover. His girlfriend, Rain, sits beside him; former NFL quarterback Bob Hewko and Michael Politz, the publisher of Food & Beverage Magazine, are also hanging out. (Politz, a gregarious Las Vegas fixture, is the one who brought Mike Tyson into this unlikely fold; they met years ago in jail.) They make room for Thompson and Amanda. Neil buys them a drink.

Neil and Hewko spent the morning evaluating players at open tryouts for the Las Vegas Outlaws, their new Arena Football League team. They tell Thompson that they want to sign him to a one-day contract, but only if he agrees to appear in a game. Thompson seems divided by the idea. He doesn't especially want to die on an arena football field, but he and Neil are close friends and he doesn't want to disappoint him. Along with Nicolas Cage, they are the only members of something they call the Gold Jacket Club. Cage bought them each a shimmering gold Tom Ford jacket, which they wear out together on the town. Politz suggests they're all friends because they have each built their own universes—the actor, the singer, and the comic, separate but equal. In the zero-sum game that is entertainment, no one has stolen from any other. Thompson thinks it's something simpler that binds them. "We're all missing something in our lives," he says. "We're all missing the normalcy that other people have."

So what was that about Charlie Sheen? Thompson's nervous to tell the story, but not for his usual reasons. He's nervous because he doesn't want Sheen to be mad at him—he hates the idea of anyone being mad at him. But that includes people who want to hear his stories, and he relents.

After The Tonight Show taping, Sheen asked Thompson if he wanted to go out that night in Hollywood. Of course Thompson wanted to go out that night in Hollywood. He arrived early at a club called the Roxy and told the bouncer he was there to see Charlie Sheen. The bouncer laughed at this ginger dork in front of him, but Sheen soon pulled up and hauled Thompson past the dumbstruck bouncer.

They retreated to a private room. A TV was on, tuned in to The Tonight Show. Sheen and Thompson were watching their performances when Sheen spilled out a pile of cocaine and quickly and expertly chopped up three fat lines. Thompson's chest went tight. He'd never done coke before. He'd never even seen it. Surveying the snow-capped ranges in front of him, he thought it might be enough coke to kill a first-time user. But Thompson was soaring in the middle of this intoxicating moment of arrival and membership, and he didn't want to end it by refusing to do coke with Charlie Sheen. He would rather be dead.

Sheen bent down and inhaled the first line. Thompson tried to act casual but watched him the way an apprentice studies a master. It was like following a skilled magician—the coke just vanished. Thompson began rocking back and forth in his seat, trying to time his own leap into oblivion. Just before he was set to dive at the tabletop and sneeze cocaine all over the room, Sheen gobbled up the second line.

Thompson felt a little better. At least there was only one line left. He could do one line, right? Before he had a chance to move on it, Sheen snorted it back, leaving flecks of white powder and waves of relief in his insatiable wake. A few minutes later, Johnny Depp popped in and joined the party. Thompson shook his head in wonder. Now this is fucking showbiz! he thought.

When the football's over—he'll be using the Browns helmet tonight—Thompson heads down to the Luxor to do his show. His contract is up at the end of the year. At the moment, he's thinking that he'd like to sign a new ten-year deal, play till he's sixty. He likes the roundness of those numbers. Maybe by then he'll have stripped himself down to his core; maybe he'll shave his head and burn down his warehouse, a real-life Birdman, and Scott Thompson will tell stories, not jokes, to his rapt and silent audience. "I don't think of 'prop comic' as an insult," he says. "But someday it would be nice to be called a comic." He thinks a lot about his continued metamorphosis, about corrections, the way he used to rearrange his bedroom furniture, the way he still thinks about making another movie, the sort of movie that would knock Norm Macdonald on his ass. "I'm still human," he says. "I still feel it."

But then he worries that he's just being selfish, that his vanity and desires will leave him lost in some lonely middle, betraying the love, unmoving the hate. The line between reinvention and self-parody is so fine—Metallica with the orchestra, Michael Jordan with the baseball glove. Sometimes your life chooses you, and Carrot Top has given Scott Thompson a lot to lose. He makes people laugh for a living. He has money, fame, faithful friends, and 240 chances to earn a standing ovation every year.

After Sunday's show—he has another good one, a dream night for just about any other comedian, anywhere else in the world—the Swiss musicians crowd into his dressing room, still wearing their leathers. Fred insisted they come. The deejay Steve Aoki has also shown up, as well as his towering young girlfriend. "You're only as old as the person you're fucking," she says.

Porno Jeff has some news. Vinnie Paul's going to swing by tomorrow. It will be the 285th time the Pantera and Hellyeah drummer has seen Carrot Top. Vinnie Paul loves Carrot Top. Britney Spears also wants to come down for a show, Porno Jeff says. She's taken up residency on the Strip, across the street from Caesars. Maybe she could use some new friends.

"That would be awesome," Scott Thompson says. That would make a funny story.

--

Published in the March 2015 issue

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