17 Years Ago

17 Years Ago

By Trevor Keveloh

Maybe I should title this, my age years ago, but lets not go too far back, I wouldn’t want to make this about me now would I… OK, fine, I do, cuz hell, it’s my shit…

17 years ago I first set out for this, journey as it is not so cleverly called. I was a young 20something with big eyes, a big heart and big dreams and boy, a big head of nothing. I moved to LA to work with my mentor on a feature film which eventually fell through. Bad timing led to a 2months stint of living out of shitty Hollywood motels and eventually crashing with a friend and his family for a few weeks. It only took the tail between my legs that started to crawl up my ass to pack my shit and head to Arizona where I spent 6 months partying, then working, then becoming very homesick and leaving behind a lot of great memories and a lot of good friends, whom I no longer speak to because of the poor choices I made. But that’s in the past..

Jump up a few years later and Im heading to LA again to tackle this dream of mine. While my time in IL, I had been through some, umm, interesting things. Between married women, strippers and all sorts of shit, I decided to pack my car up and head to LA to try and work with my mentor, again. He advised me that he didn’t have any work for me, but id I came into town and something came up, he would let me know. On my way to LA I had stopped in Vegas to visit friends, which lead to me staying in Vegas for far too long, a few months to be exact. It was a situation I got myself into that could have been handled better but it wasn’t and I learned from it. A summer in Vegas with some good friends lead to me finally getting my shit together and making my way back to LA. Which I did. Kind of.

I had been hired at a corporate recruiting firm in Irvine where I had worked for a few months. Between couch surfing, living out of my car and having my bank account drained, I was back to being almost completely broke and living on the streets, literally. Id really like to go into detail about some of that shit, but I don’t want too because there is more to this story rather than spending an entire weekend in a fetish club with 15 women of ummm all sorts of ya know….You get it…

When I was about 7ish years old I had walked in on my two older brothers watched, “Dynamite Chicken” starring Richard Pryor. They didn’t kick me out so I watched. And watched. And watched. And became fascinated by this guy. Who the hell is he? What the hell is he talking about? What does he keep saying “n word?” I didn’t know what that word meant, but I knew it was naughty so I never said it.

Jump up a few years later and Im at the Ogden 6 Theater seeing a movie with my dad, uncle and cousins. I get up to go potty and I hear this laughing, this loud crazy laughing from another theater down the way. I walk in and here is this slick black guy dressed like Michael Jackson. Sporting a red leather get up, cracking up the crowd he’s preforming in front of and the crowd in the theater. He was making both crowds laugh and I was absofawknlootly mesmerized by this. His name was Eddie Murphy and it was, “RAW.”

I had never seen something like this before, other than this other funny black guy that was crazy and was talking about things I had never heard of…Richard Pryor…

After that, I knew what I wanted to do one day.

A few years had gone by and I became addicted to Comedy Central, especially SAST (Short Attention Span Theater.) I watched this show all the time. I even went as far as to write down all the comedy clubs they listed on the heading of each comic where he/she was preforming at. Carolines, Two Drink Minimum, Zainie’s, The Comedy Store and so on. I thought to myself, “I HAVE to go to these place ones day. One day when I move to LA and go on that stage.” I had started to rent every stand up comics video at Movietime Home Video. For the entire summer by childhood best friend and I rented everything from Rodney Dangerfield, to Paula Poundstone, to Andrew Dice Clay to Gallagher… It was official, I had to move to LA one day and “do comedy” and try to be an actor too.

Haha…Yea, real fawn easy isn’t it?

Jumping back to my second round at LA, I lost my job as a recruiter and ended up, again, living on the streets of LA. I was broke, living in my car and couch surfing. My mom occasionally sent me money and I had told her I was staying with friends, which I did here and there, but not all the time. For some reason I thought it was the norm to move to LA and live in your car, I had heard, read and even seen so many of these stories, it became like normal to me. But after a few months of it and working at a small restaurant that never paid me, I flew home with my family to celebrate the holidays.

I never looked back.

I spent most of my life pursuing and digging into the nightlife/hospitality industry where I excelled from a part-time bartender, parking lot security guard, so a head bartender, AGM and eventually a GM. Sprinkle in a few month “project: in Vegas that was an enormous mistake and you have yourself a decade of my life.

But everyday, every night, not one 24hr period had gone by where I didn’t think about moving to LA..Again…With all the failed relationships, inner struggles, battling legal shit and being too connected to things that kept me from moving forward, I had been in touch with a close and dear friend for this whole time. I had made a deal with him when I was in my Vegas project that eventually came to light.

We had set something in motion years before it came to light and one day it did. We had talked early in the year about some things I was going through. A bad break up, my bar closing and my owner passing all happened with in weeks of each other. There was no greater and stronger sign from the powers at be to get my ass back on track and go where I belong.

I had taken a part-time bartending job so I could take care of my dad during the day and I worked and saved as much as I could. Six months of that and it was time to do it. Again. End of December came along and my mom dropped me off at the airport and said to me, “do it right this time.” We had a moment and I walked into the airport, one way to LA, two suitcases and again, big eyes, a big heart and big dreams. 

I landed in LA and met my buddy at the airport. We both flew back to LA the same time (he was in town visiting family for the holidays) We got picked up and our journey began.

This journey, I love saying journey because its so cute and cliche, journey. It was a rollercoaster of WTF. A lot of long nights, days and everything else, I finally was grasping the LA life. It wasnt the beauty you see on TV, movies and all that shit, it was an up and down place. A place of peaks and valleys. A place where one minute yer on top and the next, yer waaaaayyyy down below. But I didn’t care, I had to go at this… Then it happened again…

I had been battling with another inner struggle with my father and his health and had made a decision far before it was known to, once again, go back and care for him. But it was like no other time before. My father was in need of 24hr round the clock care and I couldn’t just watch and listen and read about how hard he was having it and especially my mother, my biggest fan, The one person in my life that has pushed me to purse my dreams since I was a lil guy calling me the “long lost Belushi boy.”

I took a leave from work, subletting my apartment, packed my bags, and headed back to IL to take care of my father and mother. And I don’t regret it one single bit. Not even the slightest. What I had to endure mentally, psychologically and physically was not easy, not easy by any means at all, but this was a calling from something greater than me. This was my parents in need of actual help. What they had been going through was not common knowledge, not even to the closest of people. When you are there, 24hrs a day, 7days a week, I understood why I made that choice, and I will be always grateful for doing that so I know what I did was right. To watch them go through that killed me because I felt it was unfair. It wasn’t right, but thats life.

I spent those eight months learning about a lot. Between my father and his past, my mother and her struggles and myself, I knew that everything happening was meant for me to endure and no other. I took those lessons, those times with them, everything we shared and I used them to rebuild this fire inside of me that had been burning since I was 7… It never blew out.

I left for the airport again, my mother dropping me off as she had done so many times, almost as if this was the norm. Build up the emotions, tell each other you love them, then get on a plane and chase a fawkn dream. Again. And again. And again. And again.

No wonder people laugh at me and think I’ll be back or won’t succeed. They’ve never tried this… For 17 fawkn years.

In those 17 fawkn years I had been doing stand ups all around. Not many, but enough to get it. I didn’t tel a lot of people about it because I didnt want them there. I spent a few years training at Second City in Chicago and had been writing and studying all the comics I could. 

Those 17 years, those sleepless nights, those battles I went thru. Being up till 6am just daydreaming about living in LA, becoming successful in my field, going after, meeting people, the right and wrong, being picked around, arguing with girlfriends and always thinking to myself “I don’t belong here, I belong in LA,” as we take out our own insecurities on each other, loving my job, hating my job, thinking back to those days on Chippewa when I would binge watch SAST, record ALL of them on VHS, then binge watch them again. 

I think about that shit today, right now. I look back a lot and remember everything and everyone that brought me to where I am. I am not living a glorious or sexy lifestyle, but I am finally, finally, finaFAWKNlly living and doing what I was intended to do. Im not as young and fresh and sexy as I once was, but goddamn it, Im better than ever! I get up on a stage and I just love it. Those 3-8mins make me feel normal, they make me want to do it all day everyday. There is something magical when you are doing what you honestly and try absofawknlootly love to do that involves a crowd of people. 

To be in the middle of a set and to pause for a slight moment and hear those laughs, those eewwws, those awwweesss, those mouths drop, open, close, laugh and get covered… It’s special. It makes me know why I am here right now, why I am thinking about all the shit Ive been thinking about lately and most importantly, how grateful and humble I have become knowing that the future is as bright as the tunnel I have lit up with my own sacrifices and pursuit. 

Ive been very fortunate to connect with the people I have been lately and I am honored to call some friends and other colleagues. I know whats in store for me and its finally happening. 

I look back at that summer day in Chicago when I crawled into a Uhaul with a friend and my brother… 

I look back at everything I endured on finally just getting to where I start to be…

I remember all of those fawkn half-off Miller Lites I sold on Sunday at The Lawdge…

I remind myself everyday… Here I am…

17 years later… Finally doing it.