John Mulaney
Lost in New York
Before I begin... Uh, young man in the third row up there. Uh, what's your name?

"Henry."

Henry? Okay, Henry. How old are we?

"Uh, 11."

Eleven. Okay, ha-ha, wonderful. You won't at all... be distracting me throughout the entire performance. Henry... Oh, man. Henry, do you... I don't mean this in a like, "Do you know who I am?" kind of way, but like, do you know, like who I am, or did, like a babysitter cancel, and suddenly you were like, in a van? You know who I am? Okay. Have you seen me do stand-up before?

"Yeah."

Okay. All right. Well, I appreciate you coming. So, um... So... the things that I talk about... tonight, that I did recently... I never say this, Henry. It's not... I don't say this explicitly, but don't. All right? Don't. You're in the sixth grade?

"Fifth."

Fifth? All right. Well, Henry, if you've seen me do stand-up before, I have kind of a different vibe now. When I was a younger man, I'd come out on stage and be like, "Hey! Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba!" And I wonder what caused that. Well, those days are over. That's it. That's over.

Okay. Here's what happened. December 18th, 2020. Henry, you were about to go on Christmas break... from the third grade. I, meanwhile, was loose in New York City, not doing well. Feral. That night, December 18th 2020, I was invited over to my friend's apartment for dinner. Exciting, right? No.

When I got there, it was a trick. There was no dinner. It was an intervention. For me. Interventions for me, are my least favorite kind of intervention. When I walked into my intervention, I knew immediately that it was an intervention.

Do you know how bad of a drug problem you have to have, if when you open a door, and see people gathered, your first and immediate thought is, "It's probably an intervention about my drug problem"? "There's no other reason people would be behind a door." This was my thought process, walking into my intervention that night.

"Going to dinner with a friend from college! Going to dinner with a friend from college! Going to dinner with a friend from college! What's Seth Meyers doing here? Fuck!"
Also, I was two hours late for my intervention. Well, I didn't know people were waiting on me. I wish I had. I would have been a million hours late. I was two hours late, so when I got there, everyone was mad-der at me. They were like, "And you're late." I was like, "Hey, if you wanted me here on time, you could have texted me, 'John, we have cocaine.'" I would have been a half hour early to help set up chairs.

I was two hours late, 'cause I was running two very important errands.

First errand, I went to my drug dealer's apartment. I'm ashamed to tell you all I was there to buy drugs. And I had to pay my dealer in cash, and I had to give him a bunch of cash for some drugs I bought a couple nights before because my Venmo was maxed out. Did you know? Did you know you can do that? You can max your Venmo out, on a weekly basis.

By the way, while I have you all here, allow me to say something about Venmo on behalf of the drug addict community. Venmo is for drug deals. That's what it was for. None of us in the drug world have any clue what all of you civilians... are doing on our app... with your public fucking transactions. What are you, in ye olde marketplace, 1555? "Hear ye! Hear ye! Look at me! I trade one fatted goose for ten radishes. Keep it to yourself."

The second errand I ran that night is very amusing to me. Dinner was scheduled for 7:00 p.m. So I went to get a haircut... at 7:00 p.m. And I truly believed I could make both work.

I went to get this nighttime haircut at Saturday Night Live, which is a TV show, not an all-night pop-in barbershop. But they have a hair department there, right? And I still had my badge from when I worked there. So, at 7:00 p.m., coked out of my mind, I went up to the eighth floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, walked into the Emmy-Award-winning hair department, and I said, "Hey, can I have a haircut?" And they said, "Oh, John, you're not hosting this week." And I said, "Ah, hey, can I have a haircut?"

You know that thing of when a junkie walks into your office and asks for a haircut and you're like, "Hurr, it'd be faster to cut the hair"? That's what happened.