Money For The Band

If you've ever heard Suicidal Tendencies' punk classic "Institutionalized" or Frank Zappa's lyric banalities on Mothers of Invention tunes, you might understand what Tom Croley is up to when he grabs the mike at the Barking Spider. Croley has become almost as big a draw at the CWRU campus tavern as the musicians who play there. His gleeful improv atrocities - ranging from the ludicrous to the lewd - are the stuff of local legend.

Disheveled, courage poured in with an extended draught of house beer, he provides a comic sideshow twice on Friday nights at the ends of band sets. Taking a break from his bartending duties, with wild-eyed leer and nasal snarl he holds forth on adolescent sex angst, botched jobs, and parental attempts to steer him into adulthood. He ends each monologue with the signature "Money for the band!" before circulating the room with a coffee can to collect tips for artists who play at the rustic converted coach house.

On a recent Friday night, the 45-year-old landscaper vented his largely autobiographic spleen something like this:

"... I'm landscapin' again, the grass is deep, the rain is danciiiiiiiing, and the daffodils are singiiiiiiing.... But ironically it takes me back 20 years ago, when I worked in a ... gas statiooooooooon. [Dramatic pauses and drawn-out syllables are standard Croley devices. A rowdy guy in the crowd howls in wild encouragement.] I hated the gas station. Well this guy Frank, he used to come in every day, and Frank he was a brakeman on the railrooooooooad. Well Frank used to say to me, 'You stupid ass ... Hey you stupid aaaaasss, why don't you get a job like me on the railroad?' So this really pissed me off. I didn't like to see him, you know what I mean? [Venemously] 'Yooooooouuuuu stupid aaaaaasssss.' So one day Frank came in [guitarist sounds like Hendrix's climactic throes in The Star Spangled Banner; another guy in the audience yells "Fuck Frank!"] and he has knobs for fingers, all I could see were thumbs, and I said to Frank, 'What happened?' ... He said his wife was annoying him, antagonizing him, and he decided that he wouldn't stand it anymore because she wanted him to cut the ... hedgeeeeeeees. [Extended band riff. Then band stops cold.] So he says 'Goddammit I'm watching the baseball game! I got my sixpack of cold beer!' ... Well he had a brainstorm. He took his lawnmower and he looked at it and he decided to take the handles off the lawnmoweeeeeeeer.... So he took the handles off the lawnmower, started it up [weird guitar plunge], he started it up, he got that thing about to his fucking knees when his fingers went flying all over the yaaaaaaaaaard! ... He never called me a stupid ass again! ... Money for the band!"

An ample crowd hooted, whistled, cheered. Croley was besieged by backslappers and doting fans as he made his collection rounds.

The next Friday night, Croley's rant is about how his dad wanted to send him to Vietnam but his mother, citing her son's penchant for drawing naked ladies, suggested art school and a career as fashion illustrator. Then something about an attack by one of his Manhattan instructors.

In real life, his fashion-illustrator ambition was thwarted by anti-straight discrimination by a gay industry, according to Croley and his wife. Today, Croley paints dazzling watercolor portraits on a commission basis in the winter off-season of Oh My Achin' Back, his three-employee landscape company.

"The first portrait, he sold for a six-pack of beer," says his wife, Sara, a teacher in the Orange school system. "Since then, he's sold them for as much as $500."

After Croley's New York art career fell aground and he was well into the first tortured dozen of the 40-odd jobs he would hold in his lifetime (he sold leather coats to Saturday Night Live's Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner), he returned to Cleveland and became an illustrator for American Greetings. He was fired when he got caught drawing pictures of trademarked cute-and-cuddly greeting card characters engaged in sex acts.

Remembering this gaffe helped Croley win the first three rounds of a Barking Spider poetry slam after a poet didn't show up and owner Martin Juredine talked him into competing. Unrehearsed, working from notes inscribed only in his memory, Croley mowed over studied revisionists and practitioners before family and friends. He also impressed judges with his quintessential "Hiding From My Girlfriend's Mother Naked in the Closet."

Croley's microphone antics at the Spider began 10 years ago, he says, when nobody showed up to perform on open-mike night and Juredine told him, "I'm not paying you to tend bar, I'm paying you to tell stories."

"And if the story was real good, there better be a shot with that beer," Croley recalls.

Most of the Spider stories are true, though sometimes, for variety, embellishments, if not outright fictionalizations, are worked in. Croley actually witnessed the above-mentioned finger amputation when landscaping with the distasteful character. "I had to pick up the fingers."

A standup comic once wanted to take him on the road after seeing his Spider routine. People have tried to push him onstage at comedy clubs. But Tom Croley just wants to spin his youthful follies into anarchic humor for the same roomful of friends.

"Anybody could do the standup I do," he says. "Just get up and talk about your ridiculous life. I like to talk about the bizarre miscellaneous bullshit everybody notices when they're scrambling to pay their bar tabs and their rents, and getting all these stupid jobs."