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Mitch Hedberg was a listless baby and a difficult kid. The first six years of his life were spent in and out of a University of Minnesota hospital for heart problems (''I don't think this heart will last forever,'' he would write in his journal as an adult), and he started staging sick-outs from school as early as first grade. High school was a disaster — Hedberg graduated only by the grace of a sympathetic principal. And the second he got his diploma, he was out of there.
''I got a call from Wendy, our daughter who is a year older,'' says his mother, Mary Hedberg, 61, who lives outside St. Paul. ''And she said, 'Mom, I don't know what's goin' on with Mitch, he's packing paper bags.' And I said, 'With what?' And she said, 'Clothes.' By the time we got home he was gone.''
Hedberg ended up on Florida's Atlantic coast. He slept on the beach. Smoked a lot of pot. Spent Thanksgiving at the local mission. When he called home it would be to ask for money and to issue a progress report on a pamphlet he was writing called The Drifter's Handbook, which was full of advice like how to get a free shower (sneak into hotel rooms just after someone checks out).
The vagabond life was perfect for a goofy 18-year-old with heavy metal hair and a wicked sense of humor. And it only got better in late 1989, when he met a kind, 20-year-old art student named Jana Johnson in a bar in Fort Lauderdale. ''By then he had an apartment, he and this guy Eddie,'' she says, laughing. ''They were ice-cube poor. This apartment had nothing in it — they were literally eating ice cubes. But he was happy, there was no doubt about that.''
Before long, Hedberg and Johnson were a couple. While she finished school, he held down distinctly unfunny jobs — from fry cook to early a.m. distributor of promotional fliers for a local drugstore — and started doing his first open-mike gigs, mostly at a club called Haggerty's in Boca Raton, Florida. He bombed, repeatedly. ''We were there for one of his first times,'' remembers Mary Hedberg. ''He was...okay...'' Hedberg's 64-year-old father, Arne, shakes his head and snorts: ''Try terrible!''
The work started coming, though. The late 1980s and early '90s were boom years for stand-up comedy, and before long, he hit the road, landing a job touring a chunk of the country not-so-affectionately known as ''the Spud Circuit.'' Hedberg adored it. It didn't matter that he got zero reception — his humor was way too odd for crowds weaned on sex jokes and airplane humor — he was doing what he wanted to do and getting paid to do it. Better still, he was constantly on the road. The heartland was filled with run-down bars and out-of-the-way corners, places that a man with an appreciation for a strong Jack and Coke and an eye for surreal detail could fall in love with. He would return from Spokane or Grand Forks or Great Falls bursting with stories for Johnson, who handled the bookings and bills while he worked the road and slowly improved his act. ''He was always painfully shy and socially awkward,'' says former Man Show cohost Doug Stanhope, who frequently played shows with Hedberg in the mid-'90s. ''I mean, 'pulling a Mitch' was sneaking out a back door at a party or a bar without saying goodbye to anybody.''
Success came slowly. A spot on MTV in 1993. Killing at the ''New Faces'' showcase in Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival in 1996. Booking his first Letterman. Then his second. And his third. In 1998, he made a glorious return to Montreal. His headlining set — a hilarious 10-minute ramble — left a theater of more than 2,000 people weeping with laughter, and as soon as the festival was over, he had a $500,000 sitcom deal with Fox. Mary and Arne Hedberg danced in their kitchen with joy when they heard the news. Hedberg just smiled his sheepish grin and cashed the check.
I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
Nothing would ever come of the sitcom deal. It wasn't for lack of trying — it's just no one could find anything that would work on Fox for Hedberg. But now he had some serious money. That, and a new friend named Lynn Shawcroft. The two had been briefly introduced back in 1996 at the New Faces showcase. By the fall of 1998 they were close, and soon Mitch moved out of Johnson's apartment and into the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. ''We were together nine years,'' Johnson says. ''We tried, but that October we broke it off completely.''
Hedberg had fallen in love. Shawcroft was adoring and a little wild — the perfect match for his brilliant, insecure, and sweet temperament. They married a few months later. ''It happened in February of 1999. We found out in November,'' says Mary Hedberg. ''I found out in an e-mail from another friend. She said, 'Well, now that Mitch is married...' I was at my desk and tears, lots of tears, just came flying and I said, 'Married? Mitch is married?' He didn't want to tell us. They told us later that they didn't want us to be hurt for Jana.''
The new couple hit the road. Whereas Johnson had kept a job at home, Shawcroft was more than happy to live out of rental cars and airport terminals with her new husband. They started traveling and didn't stop. Watching horror movies in hotel rooms. Ordering chicken burritos. Doing shows and then swiftly sneaking out the door. Shawcroft's job was to have the exit route planned and the car already started by the time Hedberg finished his set. They fancied themselves American outlaws, comedy's answer to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. ''He was into that whole romantic rock & roll Jim Morrison/Kurt Cobain thing,'' says Johnson. ''It was who he was.''
The duo became famous for flaky behavior, stuff like deciding to drive cross-country to gigs on a whim and leaving a van at the Phoenix airport for seven months at $16 a day. (''By the time we got it out,'' she laughs, ''the bill cost more than the van.'') ''Mitch and Lynn were together all the time,'' says Hedberg's longtime manager, Dave Becky. ''They lived in their own little world.'' And that world included drugs.
No one is quite sure when Hedberg started seriously using heroin, but Shawcroft says he had tried the drug before they met. From the outside, it was hard to tell what was going on. Hedberg and Shawcroft's relationship was startlingly opaque — Mary Hedberg estimates she and Arne spent a total of 24 hours with the couple over their six years of marriage — and the stand-up scene is filled with high-functioning drug users. Against that backdrop, he was the picture of professionalism. Despite rumors of heavy drug use, Hedberg would arrive, perform, and leave audiences happy.
''Mitch was a live-and-let-live guy,'' says Becky. ''When we would talk about [the drug gossip] he would always say, 'I'm fine, man. I'm writing jokes. I'm selling tickets. My fans love me.' He never would say, 'I have a problem. I'm in trouble. I'm unhappy.' We always tried to get to the bottom of what he was doing and he kept saying 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.'''
But the rumors were becoming too pervasive, too worrying. In the summer of 2002, Mary and Arne tracked down the couple in Texas and confronted him about substance abuse. The conversation did not go well. ''Lo and behold, they talked us out of it,'' says Arne, with a shake of the head. '''This is all just a big myth. Here's why and blah blah blah.' They teamed up on us. The truth is, they snookered us.''
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