I'd Like to Play Alone, Please

by Tom Segura

Days before he passed, he asked me if I knew what happens after someone dies. “What?” “The world goes on.”

I believe we all control our own destiny, and if you put something out in the universe with love and good intentions, some version of what you’re looking for will come to you.

But what I really took from the whole encounter was put yourself out there. If you love barbecue, tell the world. If you love tennis, tell the world. If you love dressing up like a dog and having a dildo that’s made to look like a tail inserted into you rectally, tell the world. The world hears you. You’ll see.

The students kept yelling out questions, and I kept firing back. Finally, a student called out that he had a question, and the teacher told him to ask. The kid yelled out, “How many times a day do you masturbate?” I was certain that the teacher was going to annihilate this kid. Instead he looked at me and lifted his head as if to say, “What’s your answer?” “Si pienso en tu madre, llego hasta siete. A mí me dicen ‘mano muerto.’” I spat it out so fast it was like the universe answered for me. It wasn’t even me. “If I think about your mother, I can do it seven times. They call me dead hand.” That is a Hall of Fame level answer for a twelve-year-old speaking his second language. Seriously. I crushed that room so hard that the teacher came over and hugged me. I had won over the kids in the class. It was like a movie. You know those movies where there’s some weird kid and people are mocking him, but he joins the soccer team and scores eleven goals in a game and then people are like, “Wow, he’s really good. We should stop being such a dick to him.” It was like that, but instead of soccer I had words.

Use what you have. That’s the real lesson. If you have looks, exploit those to your advantage. If you’re big and strong, intimidate people and maybe physically assault them if you need to. Me? I’m going to talk shit if you press me. Sometimes I’ll come up short, sometimes I’ll go too far. But sometimes, like in the classroom that day, I’ll fuckin’ nail it.

I had decent size and speed, but more important, I was making plays. I loved playing defense and was regularly in on a bunch of tackles. Now, I should make it clear that my team was bad. Beyond bad—like, really terrible—but I was a good player on this really shitty team. If I remember correctly, we went 1–9. My dad was so invested in my playing on this epically dreadful team that he delayed our family’s move to Florida until late November of my freshman year because he didn’t want to disrupt my football season. Seriously. The whole family was ready to move and begin a new chapter of our lives, but my dad told me I couldn’t abandon my “platoon,” as if we were at war.

You know how crazy Florida is, right? Insane shit basically is the norm in Florida. Every other news story with an out-of-this-world headline has a good shot of coming out of Florida. “Man Chews Off Other Man’s Face.” “Woman Gets 7th DUI While Shaving Her Pubic Area.” “Magician Zip-tied to Lamppost during Drug Deal Gone Awry.” These are all from Florida, and they are all real. I didn’t make them up. Do you get it? They’re out of their fucking minds down there.

South America and specifically Peruvian culture is one of my favorites in the world. I am the person I am today because of my time there, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. I told my coach that my parents wouldn’t let me stay, and he asked me to do one thing while I was gone: gain weight. “Coach, I got you.” Boy, did I. Before I left, he handed me a large plastic tub of powder. On it, in marker, was written, “Protein & Carbs.” It looked like he’d made it at home, all of it. The powder, the jar, the writing. I left for Lima around 180 pounds. When I returned in August: 210. Yup. A sophomore in high school who looked thirty-five. Yes, he asked me to gain weight. For a two-and-a-half-month stretch he was probably thinking ten or fifteen pounds, not thirty. You could see it in my shoulders and chest, but you could definitely see some of that new weight in my belly too. You know how people in their thirties and forties sometimes say, “My metabolism just changed. I can’t eat how I used to.” That happened to me at fifteen. My first day at school I saw some jaws drop. That summer I was drinking two of his “homemade” shakes a day and not working out nearly as hard as I should have. I didn’t even realize I had gained too much weight until I saw the coach who had given me the powder. “Damn, son. How much did they feed you down there?” “Not much, Coach. Your shakes did the trick.” “You know you have to move and not just drink shakes, right?” Yeah. I was still fairly str...

But when Serena Williams asks what you do, you tell her the truth. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but in this case, her asking me questions was welcomed. I was cool, but not too cool with it. “I’m a comedian.” Her reply? “Anywhere I can watch you?” I mean, that is the perfect response. And I had the perfect reply. It was about a year after my first one-hour special had come out. “I have a special on Netflix called Completely Normal.” She smiled and, get this, she wrote it down on her notepad. Then I spelled my name out and watched her write that down too. It was a pretty cool moment. When we landed I asked her for a pic, which she was very sweet about. “I mean I don’t have on makeup and we just flew, but… okay.” I was extremely pleased with myself as I walked through the airport toward ground transportation. I imagined Serena Williams would be watching my special Completely Normal that night. Fuck! At that moment it hit me. In that special I actually talk about Serena Williams! And what I say is exactly this: “Oh, my God. I do think about death. I just want it to be justified, you know? Like, if I die violently, you know, maybe I have, like, Serena Williams sitting on my face, and… I don’t know, Venus is polishing me off, and they’re trying to fit a racket in my ass or something like that. Then my wife comes in, boom, and I’m, like, fucking done.”

And Louis CK’s Shameless was effortlessly hilarious and honest. He articulated observations that I’d never heard in stand-up before, like hating a friend who has dumb questions like “What would you do if you had a time machine?” And the way he broke down “suck a bag of dicks” with genuine curiosity made me realize how genuinely examining even a crude insult can result in hilarity.

In November of 2013, I shot Completely Normal, my first one-hour special. I chose to shoot it in Minneapolis because it had always been a great comedy city to me in the times that I had been there before. A couple months later—after the horrific process of watching myself, and editing, and color correcting, and mixing—I got a phone call while I was driving up La Cienega and I pulled over. My manager at the time told me, “You have an offer.” I got excited. Comedy Central must have seen the special and realized they should have made it. I braced myself for a triumphant moment. “Comedy Central passed.” Fuck. Really? I said, “Dude, they already said no.” “I know, but this time we sent them the special and they passed again.” You know how that girl said she didn’t like you? I called her for you and she said she still doesn’t like you. “Why are you telling me? I only knew that they had said ‘no’ once and that was enough. You’re double confirming the ‘no’?” Then he said, “HBO passed.” “We sent it to HBO?” “Yeah, we sent it to everyone.” I was legitimately excited that someone at HBO had even seen it. “Well, you have an offer.” My heart was racing, my breath got short. I needed to compose myself. “Where?” “Netflix.” “Netflix?” It might sound crazy as you read this, but it was not the same as getting that phone call now. Netflix had just started coming out of their business of mailing DVDs to consumers and was trying this new “streaming” thing. It was definitely a letdown. My manag...

It felt like no time had passed, but it was almost 8:00 a.m. and I needed to take Ellis to school. I had everything ready to go—his backpack, lunch, water bottle, keys, wallet, phone—but I was forgetting my most important accessory for leaving the house: sunglasses. I mean it. I’d rather not eat for a week than not have sunglasses. You see, Jesus loves me. I know this because he gave me blue eyes. Blue like the heavens above. And yes, you might get lost staring into my dreamy, water-hued eyeballs, but you should know that they only despise one thing: bright lights.