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Authors: Bert Kreischer

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (10 page)

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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As the guys dropped me off you could see the beginning of the end.

“What time is band practice tomorrow?”

“We’ll call you.”

We tried our best to keep our band together, but within a few months, Mark’s band was playing all the bars in Tallahassee, drinking all the free beer I thought would be mine. Eventually, we had no choice but to call it quits. And that was the last time I ever flirted with music.

A couple years later, I ran into Mark and some of his bandmates at a grocery store in Tallahassee, just as I was planning my move to New York. They were off to Gainesville, or Atlanta, or following some other trail that Sister Hazel had blazed before them. I wished them luck and they wished me the same.

I walked away from them that day and said to myself, out loud, “I doubt anyone will ever hear of that stupid band Creed.”

*   *   *

Years later, I was hosting
The X Show
on FX. In the meantime, Scott Stapp had stepped in to fill the role I’d once dreamed of. He was the front man to Mark Tremonti’s guitarist.
He
was the Jim Morrison I was destined to be.

I reached out to their manager, Smitty, a guy who I had gotten fucked up with a lot back in the day. I asked if we could get Mark on the show. I told him we could talk about what a fool I had been, drink a beer. I’d even play one of my originals, so everyone could have a good laugh. Mark passed. I was surprised but brushed it off. Another time I was driving down La Brea in Hollywood and noticed that the truck next to me was identical to my truck, a black Expedition. I looked closer and realized it was Mark and Scott. I waved wildly to get their attention but they ignored me and drove off. I was shocked but tried to understand. Even more recently, my buddy Cowhead, who has the number one radio show in Tampa Bay, ran into Mark at a party and, having heard this story a million times, asked him if he remembers any of it. Mark said no.

When Ben, John, Brackin, and I bring up Creed now, we laugh off our massive mistake—and their huge success. We’ve let go of our failures. And actually, I would like to tell Mark publicly, here and now, that if you’re still hung up on being forced out of Givin’ Out Spankin’s, please don’t be upset. We’re ready to take you back.

 

6.

American Transit

 

Eddie Fernandez is the funniest man I know, and I know the funniest men in the world. He’s not the kind of witty, smarmy, clever funny that puts hipsters over, not the kind of ironic funny that references obscure pop-culture figures. No, he’s the kind that would make a group of Navy SEALS spit beer out of their nose. He is the kind of unbelievable funny that guys love to tell other guys about and often duplicate. His jokes are usually meant for only the people he is with and his ability to keep you laughing is uncanny.

A lot of people might find his sense of humor childish, lowbrow, and inappropriate. Some people, my wife included, might argue that he’s not funny at all, that he’s bipolar, sociopathic, and outright offensive. And she’d be right—all except for the not-funny part. Those are the things that make him funny. Of course she met Eddie moments after he got a hand job behind a dumpster from a deaf girl he had met at an all-midget KISS cover band concert. I thought his recounting of the event was absolutely hysterical. My wife didn’t. I find all of his sexual conquests hilarious and have thought at times that he was only going through with them for my benefit. I can say unequivocally that one thing Eddie likes more than anything is to make
me
laugh.

There was the time, for instance, that I was Eddie’s unwitting accomplice when he “mock-kidnapped” a couple of very drunk sorority girls, who had the nerve to push their way into his car. Annoyed, and thinking I would find it hilarious, Eddie decided to take them on a ride they would never forget. They told Eddie to “get them high,” and rather than telling them to get the fuck out of his car, Eddie offered to oblige. He drove fast on back roads and quickly had them disoriented, and when they got mad, he started laughing. I started laughing, too, as I was the most confused person in the car. I knew Eddie didn’t have weed, didn’t smoke weed, and didn’t even know where to find weed. So when one of the girls demanded that Eddie turn his car around and take them back to the party immediately and Eddie told her she was in no position to make any demands, my confusion turned to fear. She replied with a threat of screaming, which made Eddie laugh hysterically.

“Scream as loud as you want, no one’s gonna hear you!”

I was shocked and made the mistake of saying Eddie’s name. Eddie started yelling at me to “Stop saying our
fucking names
or we’ll have to kill them.” I was just as scared as they were at the time. But I later saw it for what it was: Eddie’s attempt to teach a couple of dumb girls a lesson about manners and safety while getting his own brand of retribution. A joke, in short, though someone else might see it as a felony.

Eddie is an amazing judge of character and even better at finding the common denominator that unites people. And if what he sees bothers him, he levies justice—he’s a sort of cosmic con artist. One of his favorite things to do was walk up to arrogant hot girls in Hollywood and ask for their autographs. When they obliged, he’d look at them and ask, “Are you famous?” When they’d admit that they weren’t, he’d look back at them in disgust, throw the autograph at their feet, and say, “Then get over yourself. You’re not better than anyone in here.”

His prank calls were legendary, but not in a Jerky Boys way. In college, he would call a number at random out of a sorority directory, with upwards of ten of us listening in. He would answer the girl’s hello with “Hey, guess who it is?” Eddie would then be whomever they guessed it was and proceed to wheedle history, back story, and secrets out of the girl. By the end of the call, we’d be amazed at all the information he had mined out of his mark—who slept around, who her roommates were sleeping with, who
she
was sleeping with, who had STDs, who had drug problems. This skill proved unfortunate when he accidentally called one of his girlfriend’s best friends and learned that his girlfriend was sleeping with the star point guard for the FSU basketball team. Eddie was devastated. He decided to graduate early and move to L.A. to make it big, to prove to his cheating ex what a horrible decision she’d made.

Eddie was in L.A. both of my senior years at Florida State, and he was one of the first people I called after the
Rolling Stone
article came out. Oliver Stone’s company had optioned the rights to my life, I told Eddie, and I had my sights set on stardom. I wanted to live in New York, and I thought Eddie would be the perfect person to have there with me.

Eddie took a long pause after I proposed it. “I hadn’t really thought about it. But if you’re serious, I’ll sell all my shit out here and be there in a month.” I wasn’t too surprised to hear him say yes. Eddie loved chaos. And just like that, he walked out on his roommate and sold everything he owned.

We would be moving to New York as a team, and I couldn’t have been happier.

I moved to New York before Eddie, without a place to stay. But I still had fantastic social skills, so I came up with a plan. As night fell, I would head out to bars with a big bag of weed and seek out some dudes who looked like me. We’d have some beers, and I’d make them laugh and help them hit on chicks. (State-school kids are leaps and bounds more socially adept than private-school kids.) Then, as the night drew to an end, I would ask them if they wanted to get high. When they said yes, I would tell them that my roommate was a dick and had to be up early, so we should probably get high at their place.

I would plop down on the couch, take a couple hits, and pass the fuck out. Unable to move me, and stoned themselves, they would leave me be. In the morning I would get up, apologize profusely, tell them we should meet up again, and make my exit.

What can I say, it was an ingenius plan and it worked like a dream. I had been doing this successfully for about a week. Then one morning, after a night of smoking pot with this one dude, listening to Tool, hearing him talk extensively about how
My So-Called Life
was the greatest show ever on television, and passing out, I woke to find a guy looking down at me.

“Bert fucking Kreischer?”

Apparently the guy I had conned into letting me crash the night before was living with a high-school friend of mine from Tampa named John Beimer.

After getting over the surprise, John and I had coffee and I told him everything. It was nice to see a familiar face—someone I could trust and didn’t have to put on a front for. He had answers to all my problems.

“As far as a place to sleep,” he said, “you can crash on our couch until you find a place or until you get tired of hearing about
My So-Called Life
. And if you’re serious about this comedy thing, I can get you on stage next Monday. I’m doing an open mic at the Boston Comedy Club.”

John Beimer is the reason I’m working today.

I learned from Beimer that Dave Johnson, a friend of ours from Tampa, would be coming into town, and as luck would have it, Eddie’s flight was getting in shortly before our set, too.

Eddie arrived, and within minutes of seeing the city and John Beimer’s apartment, he decided New York wasn’t for him. Everything was expensive and old, and the people seemed to frown on state-school kids like us.

But that didn’t mean we couldn’t have a good time. We went as a group to the open mic, as Eddie started hatching an exit strategy. John went on before I did—and bombed. Actually, to say that he bombed is a glaring understatement. He got on stage and literally blanked and forgot all his prepared material. It was awkward, uncomfortable, and embarrassing for him. He jumped offstage and then immediately jumped back on stage to a big uncomfortable laugh, then blanked again. He froze for about thirty seconds and said, “Well, I guess that’s the end of my comedy career!” Afterward, Eddie, who John had only known for roughly an hour, sat down next to him to console him.

“Well, the upside is it can’t get any worse than that.”

John, staring off into the void, said, “It can only get worse.”

I had better luck with my own set, but after the show, when we went out to celebrate, Eddie stated the obvious.

“We should probably give him some space. I feel bad going back to his place after he bombed that bad.”

“Space is a luxury we don’t have,” I reminded Eddie.

“I talked to Dave. He said we can drive back to the Poconos with him and stay at his place as long as we want. He said he has plenty of room up there.”

I looked at John Beimer, who had just had his hopes of becoming a comedian gang-raped. Eddie’s plan suddenly didn’t sound so bad. So we hopped in Dave’s car and left the city.

*   *   *

The Pocono Mountains were the antithesis of the city. Lush, clean, full of vegetation, it was kind of like being back in a college town, and Eddie loved it. We spent the next two weeks in Dave’s mountain cabin with his huge group of friends. While he and his friends were busy working, Eddie and I would drink, eat laxatives, watch
Jerry Springer,
take hikes, and talk about Andy Kaufman.

With no worry of having to find a place to sleep, I was genuinely relaxing for the first time since my move to New York. It was a blast. At night we would hang out with Dave and his friends at the local bar—drinking, laughing, telling stories. For extra money, Eddie and I would post up at the pool table upstairs and run an old fraternity-house pool scam. Super simple: We’d set up a ball in each pocket and they’d have to run the table without missing a shot. They’d pay five dollars to play and would win thirty-five dollars if they could clear the table flawlessly. It looks easier than it is. So by the end of the week we had a pocket full of money (and fewer friends).

But I still didn’t have a home to go back to in New York. So when my cousin Abe from Philadelphia called and offered Eddie and me not just a place to stay but two free tickets to see Dave Matthews, we were sold. We decided to hop a bus to Philly the next day.

Eddie was trying to make it as an actor, but he didn’t have a lot of work lined up at the time. He had no stage to practice his trade. So he took it upon himself to “workshop” his craft every now and then. A workshop for Eddie usually consisted of approaching a stranger and lying to them until he got caught (which
never
happened). This was his way of keeping up his acting chops. His usual suspects were girls—moderately attractive, maybe a little overweight, and excited to be chatted up by a good-looking, confident Latin man. A Yankees baseball cap would lead to a story about rehabbing a torn shoulder, and the next thing you know, Eddie was the Yankees’ newly drafted starting pitcher, taking pictures at the bar with anyone who wanted proof they’d partied with him. Without the Internet access that we all so conveniently now carry in our pockets, these workshops could go on for days. They would evolve and get more elaborate. The next day he was not the rehabbing Yankees’ starter they met yesterday, but that guy’s twin brother, Mario, who’d opted to go to college and play ball at FSU. It was in good fun for the most part, and these workshops usually ended with everyone laughing about the hijinks that had ensued.

Anyway, we left for Philly early in the morning and were in the middle of the long bus ride out of the mountains, still in the foothills, when Eddie leaned forward in his seat, smiled, and suggested we get out and try one of his workshops. Bored from the ride already, I leapt at the opportunity. So we hopped off, threw our bags into a bus locker, and walked into the first bar we found.

It was like every dive bar you’ve ever been to. Dark, sticky bar to the right, jukebox to the left, and countertop touchscreen video games in the back. We ordered two beers and tried to strike up a conversation with the bartender who, it seemed, was in slow motion, still hungover from the night before. We looked around and realized that all the patrons were older white men, not exactly the talent pool we had been looking for. Had we been interested in advice on how to dodge the Vietnam War and cope with the guilt that followed, this would have been the place. But we weren’t, and the fact that it was still arguably morning made drinking beers in a dark depressing place that much less enjoyable. So we finished our first and only round and left, walking back toward the mountains and into a Mexican restaurant. As we opened the doors, Eddie said, “Follow my lead, and remember, the rule of improv is ‘Yes and…’” It occurred to me: I had always been a bystander to Eddie’s stunts, listening in on a phone line while he spun a web of deceit. Now I was part of the troupe.

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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