From the upcoming meta-"memoir" "Based on a True Story," to be published by Spiegel & Grau.

It was 1985 and I was a young man who'd done stand­up for only a year and I was driving to a gig, all by myself. The gig was doing comedy at a hospital, for the patients. It didn't pay any money, but that's not why a comic does a gig like that. You take that type of gig just because you want to be a good person and receive eternal life.

Sonofabitch, the drive was long. Why they built a hospital so damn far away from everybody, I couldn't figure. It was way out in the middle of northern Ontario, where you have to pray your car doesn't break down, and if it does you have to pray you freeze to death before the timberwolves find you. Well, the people who built it must have known what they were doing. After all, they owned a hospital, and I was just some guy in a car asking myself questions.

Suddenly, in the middle of nothing, where the infinite nothing of the sky meets the infinite nothing of the snow, I saw something. It was a small square blue sign—a sign indicating a hospital ahead. It may as well have read, "Last Chance for Heart Attack for Three Hundred Miles."

I was getting close and getting nervous, too. Maybe it was the barbed wire around the perimeter or maybe it was the armed guards. What kind of hospital was I playing, anyway? I got my answer quickly enough, because it was written on a big sign: hospital for the criminally insane. My agent had never been big on details.

It took me a while just to get into the place. First they patted me down and took all my weapons and my drugs. Then they looked up my ass and took those weapons and those drugs as well. But finally they let me go from the outside to the inside.

"Take me to the warden," I demanded.

"This is a hospital, son; there's no warden."

"Fine, then take me to the entertainment director!"

We walked down a long corridor filled with howls of anguish and high wailing screeches.

Every cage I passed had a guy in it, and every guy was acting odder than the last. The first guy was scratching his hair really hard even though it was shorn close, like he was trying to scratch inside his head or something, and he just kept saying, "I was at John D. Rockefeller's funeral." Then the next guy was just staring at me, stone still, and he had a big smile on his lips, but his eyes were cold dead. I started laughing to beat hell.

"How do you work with these characters all day and not crack up?" I asked the orderly.

"Oh, you get used to it."

"What about the guy with the cold dead eyes standing there?" I said. "What'd he do to get in here?"

"Oh, his name's Fred Henshaw. He took his mother out to the northern tundra where the sun never sets and he cut off her eyelids. That way she couldn't sleep or even shield her eyes from the sun. Then Fred had her wander around, tripping in the snow, falling, getting back up, falling again. Every day, Fred would take a hypodermic needle and remove a half a pint of blood from the old lady. After about a week, his mother just lay down on the hard snow. Then he sat down and waited. Waited for the crows to come."

"Oh my God. That's the worst thing I've ever heard of," I said. "What about the guy before him, Mr. Itchyhead—what did he do?"

"Oh, him? Trust me, you don't want to know."

These characters' shenanigans became less amusing after I heard their backstories. I was starting to get really nervous about the show, thinking that maybe these guys wouldn't be able to relate to my material. How could they be expected to understand the difference between cats and dogs or the difference between Los Angeles and New York if they didn't understand the difference between right and wrong?

I was shown into a room, where I met the entertainment director. "Listen, pal, I wanna do good and all, but I think this is a big mistake," I said. "When I heard this was a hospital, I imagined sick people, really sick people, the kind you want nothing to do with. Some of these fellows look healthier than you and me."

"Oh, don't worry. You'll do fine," he replied. "We had the Gatlin Brothers last week."

The Gatlin Brothers? I couldn't believe my ears. But then the guy showed me the room, and it was world class, with steep stadium seating and perfect acoustics. I'd only seen such a fancy venue one time, and that was for a crowd made up of folks who'd never slaughtered a single man. It was like a broken calculator. It just didn't add up. "How is it these monsters deserve such a fancy venue?" I asked.

"Well, let me explain something, Norm. You see, technically, all these fellows are not guilty. Not guilty by reason of insanity. Do you understand?"

"No."

"Every one of these men has been found not guilty in the eyes of the law."

"Oh."

Well, that shed a different light on the situation. If these guys weren't guilty of anything, then they deserved the best show I could give them. I guess, deep down, I always kinda knew that, but it took the entertainment director to make me realize it.

Soon showtime arrived, and I stood in the wings, peering through the curtains. The room was made to hold about five hundred, but I could see there were only roughly seven people assembled.

"Where is everybody?" I asked.

The entertainment director shook his head. "I can't figure it. There's not a single other form of diversion in this entire hospital for the criminally insane." And then he looked at me mean, like it was my fault.

"It's not my fault," I said.

"When we had the Gatlin Brothers last week, we had to turn people away—criminally insane people. It broke my heart. Well, get out there. You're on." And he pushed me toward the stage, really hard.

I hit the stage to silence. "Good evening, folks. How many of you here own an answering machine?"

"None of us—that's how many," one answered, and the other six grumbled in assent.

"You got any complaints, Tuesday morning meeting's the time to bring 'em up, Kowalski. You know that. Now, pipe down and let the man speak," a guard said.

"Anyhow," I continued, "I got one, and they're more trouble than they're worth, in many ways. Now, say a man phones you and . . . " I just couldn't go on.

One of the criminally insane men had found his way onto the stage and had begun biting my leg hard, and the guard had begun striking him with the business end of a baton, but that just caused the criminally insane man to dig his teeth in deeper. I started shrieking, and the audience got a big kick out of that. Soon, the other patients began to wander in to the auditorium to see what the commotion was, and by the time they finally extracted my leg from the criminally insane man's teeth the place was full, with everybody clapping and cheering and biting.

It was the greatest show I ever had.