Derrick Brown’s deathbed comedy hour

Derrick Brown is alive and well and already picking out the best bar for the upcoming Best Of Long Beach issue: Joe Jost’s, he says, and the best place to live is on a boat in the Long Beach marina, and after drinking all day, you can piss off the side of the boat at night. (He used to pilot gondolas around Naples; don’t ask if that’s actual past experience.) After a still-unexplained August collapse that tore a month out of his touring schedule, Brown—a former Long Beach resident and perpetual favorite son currently based in Nashville—is performing again with a riled-up spoken-word supergroup (Solomon Sparrow’s Electric Whale Revival: “Five love lazers aimed at your chest!”) and a newly realigned perspective on life. (“Why have I been thinking cynicism was cool?” he asks.) Final recordings from his band John Wilkes Kissing Booth maybe on the way, he says—for now, he’s in Buffalo, New York, fifteen minutes away from stepping back on stage.

So you’re all better.

Yeah, man. I was a little worried going out on tour because the doctors haven’t been able to figure out what caused the shutdown. The emergency room doctors thought it was anaphylactic shock, and they did all these brain tests and diabetes tests… but my other poet friends, when I run out of energy, will go on stage and say, ‘Well, Derrick is out of juice,’ and people give them clues. One person had been through the exact same thing—it was a potassium deficiency, and their whole body shut down. So they have to avoid carbohydrates—and I drink a ton of beers. So I have to check that out. If you’re like me and you don’t go to the doctor often, you see them as magicians. If anything goes wrong, you can show up and they’ve got a potion for you. But it’s so strange to go, ‘Well, shouldn’t I carry around a EpiPen if something happens?’And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, try that!’ They’re like you—‘We don’t know! Let’s try shit!’ That is fascinating! And freaky!

At what point in your life did you realize you would not be the first person to never die?

That was in the military. Before I went in the military—I thought by the time I was 24, I’d be married and have a house and wouldn’t be able to get an erection. I’d be old! I’d have to take medicine. And then I went in the Army and started paratrooping and I was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna make it til 23.’ That was the first time I felt like things might not turn out the way I thought—that I might not be here as long as I thought I would.

Was this the closest you ever came to death?

This was the scariest.

Scarier than jumping out of airplanes?

There were three I can remember. One is landing on a guy’s parachute. If you land in the middle, you get all tangled up—it’s called ‘going through the apex.’ And you slam into the ground. The other time was when a four-wheeler flipped on top of me. And this was definitely the most dramatic because I had weird steroids and drugs in my system, which made me cry and anxious. It was fucking me up! It wasn’t the kind of steroids that make you look good. I was wrecked from it. I wish I had a story like Nikki Sixx—like I left the hospital and went and got wasted at the Prospector.

Dragging tubes?

Can you put that in? That I brought my IV bag and said, ‘Fill it up!’

What did you learn about yourself by the way you handled this experience?

I feel like—I have a new sense of spirit and a hunger for living. For treating people better. Not a lust for life where I wanna go to India or do peyote in the desert and get my charkas aligned—mine is very subtle! Why have I not been telling people I love them? Why have I been thinking cyncism was cool? And the answer is—well, people and magazines and reviewers say ‘Derrick Brown is too sappy and sentimental and too on-the-nose to be taken seriously.’ So that was holding me back. And this really burst the floodgates. I’m still in a place where I’m not sure where this writing road is gonna take me. I’ve been pretty fortunate til now. But I definitely feel like I’m gonna try and do something worthwhile with it—besides picking up girls at the Prospector.

Is anyone on tour jealous of the prime poetic material this experience provides you?

They’re really watching out for me. And my lady has been checking in with them to make sure everything is alright. I don’t think anyone’s been generous.

It was a pretty insensitive question.

That’s alright.

What was the first joke you made after almost dying?

Some friends came to the hospital—they all came and brought me cigarettes and books, and I don’t smoke, and they brought a video camera and we did a skit called, ‘The Deathbed Comedy Hour.’ This was about a week after—in the hospital. It’s good to have friends with the same sense of humor as you. They thought that dark kind of joking would really bring me out of my depression, and it really did.

DERRICK BROWN AS PART OF SOLOMON SPARROW’S ELECTRIC WHALE REVIVAL WITH BUDDY WAKEFIELD, DAN LEAMAN, MIKE McGEE AND ANIS MOJGANI PLUS MINDY NETTIFEE AND MATT DEATH AND THE NEW INTELLECTUALS AND ARTWORK BY JENNIFER CELIO AND MATT WIGNALL | KOO’S | 530 E. BROADWAY | LONG BEACH | 90802 | MON., 7 PM | $8-$10 | ALL AGES | KOOS.ORG | AND ALSO ON THE BIG RED BUS POETRY BOOZE CRUISE | LEAVES FROM | {open} 2226 E. 4TH ST. | LONG BEACH | 90804 | TUES., 7 PM | $20 | 21+ | BIGREDBUS.COM.

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