What had possessed me that night to invite 35 people to come on stage and take turns spitting in my face one by one?

Showmanship! Plain and simple. The only guiding principle that I applied in my decision-making was to do whatever would blow the fucking roof off the place and make them walk out of there singing my name.

I was 23 years old at the time. I had been performing quote alternative comedy endquote for a total of three months and four and a half days, and I was relatively aware that I would have to go on struggling for maybe another three months before fame swooped down and scooped me up into her warm and happy fame-basket.

The concept of having a whole bunch of people come onstage and spit in my face came to me during a particularly lonely period of my life. It was not long after I left college, and I had very few friends and no social life of which to speak. My days were spent temping, and my nights were spent sitting quietly in the chair by the window of my apartment, a beer bottle in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other. At around 10:30 PM, the clank of the bottle slipping from my fingers to the hardwood floor would let me know it was bedtime.

Performing comedy was a godsend. After spending so many days at a time speaking to no one but coworkers, shopkeepers, and my very sullen roommate whose girlfriend had recently left him for a chick, the chance to talk to fifty people at once was like a dream come true. When I'd plan my sets, I'd try to think of what would make everyone in the room remember my name. What would make them want to approach me after the show and shake my hand? What would make them want to be my friend?

And then it came to me. A single file line. Every last member of the crowd waiting patiently. One by one they'll pull their heads back on their necks and send a big wad of saliva to splatter against my smiling face.

But wait for the flourish!

I will also compose a list of character flaws for myself. And each audience member will be invited to read one of the flaws from the list into the microphone, and then, that audience member will spit on me.

In a word, Gold.

They'll watch me up there, I thought, standing stock still and waiting for so many strangers to expectorate upon me and they'll think, "I get so angry when people use the word genius lightly and now I know why. Because no one has ever been in the company of genius who is not presently in this room, watching phlegm dribble from this young man's eyelids."

Audience members will grab hold of each other and cackle with joy into each other's faces. They'll shout, "Finally! Someone to shake things up and show us a world of theater that we never even imagined possible. Can you hear the conventions crumbling?!"

A mother who hasn't wept since her third miscarriage will discover her face to be wet with fresh tears as she waits on line to shoot a loogie at my nose.

A father who couldn't bring himself to join the line will watch his fellow audience members in awe. He'll shout at me, "You're a prophet!" Then he'll run to the nearest payphone to call the son he hasn't spoken to in sixteen years.

And when the set is over, so many in the crowd will think to themselves, "This man has left the stage, but I cannot let him leave my life. This man whose tee shirt is transparent and pasted to his skin with the blanket of spit that he welcomed unto himself, I must make this man my friend. As soon as he rinses the mucous from his hair, I shall invite him out for some tacos."

I have no choice, I thought. There is nothing else to perform. There are no other pieces. This is the piece.

My immediate priority was now to perform this piece in front of a live audience as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, since I'd only been performing for three months and four and a half days, the only venue that would have me was a Lower East Side open mic night that charged me three dollars to perform, and whose audience was composed entirely of other performers who also had nowhere else to go.

"Good enough!" I thought. "Let's get this baby on its legs!"

Inviting a roomful of paying audience members to spit in my face is one thing. Inviting a roomful of open micers to spit in my face is another animal entirely.

A paying audience member is likely to be employed. And the employed are required to keep themselves presentable. They must perform silly rituals like showering and sleeping indoors in the wintertime. They mustn't risk eating from public garbage cans for fear of being seen by colleagues. In other words, the employed have none of the freedoms that were indulged with abandon by the Lower East Side open mic comedian circa 1996.

This open mic looked less like a venue for aspiring performers, and more like someone had set up a microphone and PA system on a Brooklyn-bound D train at 3 AM. Instead of beginning their sets with, "How you guys doin' tonight," most of these performers would open by shouting, "I got something to say and I'm gonna say it!"

Which brings me to another characteristic of the employed: They are less likely to be crawling with disease. This has to do with the fact that when the employed get sick, they buy and ingest medicine. Conversely, looking out at the audience at this particular open mic, one was treated to a landscape of lesions and skin growths that changed shape with such speed it looked like they all had claymation characters growing out of their necks. I would see these damp brown growths ripple and dance when my fellow performers would work their throats to summon the phlegm they would send flying upon me.

But again, I had nowhere else to do this. And this had to be done.

There was quite a crowd at the open mic on that particular Wednesday. But my muse was smiling upon me and my name was drawn sixth in the lottery. With less than an hour before I was supposed to go on, I began to panic. What if I don't manage to shatter the conceptions of what live performance is supposed to be, and I just end up looking like a guy who's letting people spit all over him? What if they all had schwarma sandwiches for dinner tonight? That kind of food stays on your tongue for a while. And what if the spit starts to dribble down my torso and into my underwear? Oh dear Lord tell me what then?

I tried to distract myself by focusing on the acts as they came and went. The performers at this open mic used a great deal of physicality in their comedy, ie: they exposed their genitals for no apparent reason. It was like puppetry of the penis, if you were to do away with all that distracting puppetry.

The first act reenacted a scene from The Iceman Cometh using her bare breasts as puppets. The next act was a woman who pretended to be on the phone at work while she masturbated with a prop knife that spilled fake blood all over her legs. The man after her laid his penis on a table and pummeled it with repeated blows from a plastic hammer that squeaked.

While watching these acts, my confidence came back to me. "Prepare to see this envelope get pushed wide open," I thought.

Finally, my name was called. When I got to the mic, I asked for as many volunteers as possible. In a matter of seconds most of the crowd were out of their seats and standing in line behind me, the children to my Pied Piper of Hamlin, waiting for me to show them the way with my beautiful song.

"Check it out," I said to my children. "When you come up to the mic, I want you to read from this list of my flaws, then I want you to spit in my face."

And so it was done. The moment was set into motion and nothing could stop it. Nothing except for the host's egg timer, which would sound when I reached the six -minute mark.

As the piece began to play out, I wondered how I was supposed to feel. There is a great deal written on how people react when presented with a perfect work of art, but very little on what is stirring in the heart of the artist when he sends his masterpiece out into the world. I had expected some sense of elation. Or perhaps grief to finally see my little baby handed over into the custody of my audience. But I could not consider my own reaction too long before I was distracted by the sudden splash of Diet Sprite that stung my eyelids shut.

This is how they were playing it at first. Rather than spitting on me with the contents of their own mouths, the way you would spit on the grave of your father's assassin, they chose to gulp from their soda bottles and beer cans and release comedic spit takes into my face. This was disastrous. I felt like I was Da Vinci watching someone magic marker cocks and balls all over the Last Supper. It might be really really funny, but it wasn't my intended purpose.

The next spitter approached the mic and read from my list of flaws, "Bob quotes ideas from magazine articles in conversation as if they were his own ideas." He moved to drink from his Dr. Pepper, but I stopped him.

"Just spit on me," I said.

His smile turned to a look of trepidation. He looked at the bottle in his hand, then to the crowd waiting behind him. Then he parted his lips and squirted through his teeth a thin stream of clean saliva, the way kids in my high school used to expel their chewing tobacco. The stream rested gently on my right cheek with just a drop on my lower lip. The room gasped. Then the next spitter approached.

Now they were emboldened, and while many continued to spit soda and beer, there were quite a few who heeded my instructions and spit whatever happened to be sitting on their tongues when they finished reciting one of my flaws from the list. I was treated to all varieties of spitting. One man might thwak a glob in my eye like he was trying to win a bar game. The woman behind him would shoot a small puddle onto my cheek like she'd just found out I'd cheated on her. Yes, there were some that could not grab the momentum and sent their spit raining on my shoes. And yes, there were some that used phlegm.

Each time the spit landed, I was startled once again. Though it would soon be washed off when the next person in line spewed soda all over me, I could still feel where that last person's wad of spit had stung me. Their saliva landed warm on my skin and each time it hit me it felt like it had been shot out of a bee-bee gun. I wanted to scrub at my face with my hands but I refused. "I mustn't betray the spirit of the piece," I thought.

The piece ended with as much fanfare as can be found in the short ding of an egg timer's bell, and everyone returned to their seats. I lingered on the stage while the host made her way to the microphone. I was waiting for the rousing round of applause that was supposed to greet the piece's completion. The gratitude for having graced their presence with something so undeniably great.

The host approached me before going to the mic. "You're going to have to clean all this up," she said.

I looked down at the puddle of soda and saliva and phlegm and beer that had accumulated on the stage around my feet. I looked out at the audience. They were waiting anxiously for the next act to be brought up.

"Okay," I said.

"Now," the host said. "I'll do some time."

And this was my encore. While the host read something from her journal to fill the time, I knelt down on the floor to sop up the insides from everyone who'd just lined up to spit on me. The crowd grew angrier as the minutes passed, and I hurried. From my crouch on the floor, surrounded by bunches of drenched paper towels, I looked out at the crowd. Some of them looked back at me disinterestedly, others just stared at their watches or reviewed their setlists. These people had not been moved. They had all just seen me get spit on by a roomful of people and their worldview had not been altered in the slightest. It was as if I hadn't even performed. I carried my bundled of soiled paper towels to the trash can in the back, and there was only one word going through my head.

"Philistines."

My vision had been wasted on them. They hadn't deserved to see a minute of it because they had no eyes. I vowed then and there that when I finished developing my next piece, tentatively titled, "Everyone Pee In My Mouth And Then Call Me A Rapist," I would find another venue to host its debut.