Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (12 page)

“Papa”—Barry always called me Papa—“you want to be working with this man for the next year, he needs to see you as an equal, and an equal doesn’t go into a meeting with an autograph book and a camera. I don’t think you should take the picture.”

I felt foolish but also thought to myself,
What’s the fun of working with celebrities if you don’t get a picture to put in your apartment, so when you bring a random chick home from a bar, she gets to look at you in amazement and say, “You know Will Smith? What else do I not know about you? I’m starting to regret my hasty decision not to suck your dick. I think I need to reconsider.… Glarg, Glarg.”
But I ignored my feelings and agreed, just as the receptionist called me in. We both stood up and she said, “Just him.”

Pimp move right out the gate, I thought, as she escorted me down a hallway and into a large dance studio, where two steel folding chairs faced each other in the center.

“Mr. Kreischer, Mr. Smith will be here in a couple minutes. Take a seat.”

Mr. Kreischer? I was Bert.

She left me in the middle of the large dance studio surrounded by mirrors. The silence, however, was shortly broken by a hurricane of personality. It was Will Smith, by himself, larger than life, and in fantastic shape looking like Muhammad Ali. Although he had to walk nearly fifty feet to get to me, it seemed as if he made it in three steps. He leaned in and gave me the largest and longest embrace, like we were long-lost brothers.

“One love,” he said as we pulled apart. We talked for what felt like a minute but was probably more than an hour, as I babbled on about everything from Tupac, Biggie, Philly, my love of black people, how he was black, how his wife was black,
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,
how “A Nightmare on My Street” defined him to me. He smiled, laughed, and treated me like an equal, so his request at the end of our conversation didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Nothing.”

“You wanna go to the movies?”

“Sure.”

“Cool, cool, cool. Meet me at Planet Hollywood at seven.”

“Great.” I was
stoked
.

“Fantastic. Hey man, this was a great meeting. I can’t wait to see you tonight.”

“Me, too,” I said. He left the room and I headed back out to the lobby to meet my manager, Barry, and told him about our plans for that night.

“Did he invite me?” asked Barry.

“No, just me.”

“Wow, that is intimate. Just you and him watching a movie. He must really like you. I didn’t even know they had a movie theater at Planet Hollywood.”

I hopped in a cab and immediately called my dad, still reeling from my meeting.

“You’re going to see a fucking movie at Planet fucking Hollywood?”

“Yeah.”

“A celebrity wants you to go to Planet fucking Hollywood with him?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“To see a fucking movie?”

“Yeah. Why does that sound so weird to you?”

“It doesn’t sound weird to you?”

I took a moment to think about the proposition.

“Buddy, I think he wants to queer you.”

“What?”

“Sounds to me like Will Smith is a Mo-Dicker and he is inviting you to a place so he can get in your pants.”

“Seriously, Dad, I think you are way off. I just spent the last hour in a dance studio with him and I didn’t get that vibe at all.”

“A dance studio?”

“Yeah, but it’s not how it sounds.”

“It sounds like it sounds. Here is what you need to know: most celebrities are closeted homosexuals, that is how they become celebrities, and they find young boys like yourself and ‘turn them out.’ They call it the casting couch.”

“Dad, I think the odds of Will Smith being gay are slim.”

“Really? You tell me what is more likely: The fact that you’re so talented that six months into being a comedian, the biggest movie star in the world wants to develop a sitcom for you and pay you a ridiculous amount of money and take you out to the movies at Planet Hollywood. Or that Will Smith is gay and wants to fuck you.”

He made a convincing argument.

“Oh shit. What do I do?”

“Don’t go. Or go, and fuck Will Smith. Here is the deal, buddy: I could be wrong and we’ll laugh at this one day, or I could be right. Either way you are never going to know unless you go. I just want to prepare you for the possibility. You know what they say, ‘Eat shit, cash checks.’”

*   *   *

As the cab pulled up to my apartment, I saw my roommates walking out of the front door, excited to catch me before they had to go. I hung up with my dad and got out of the cab. I explained how great the meeting was, how everything was beginning to work out for me. But I also started to suspect that I sounded like a Texas prom queen telling her parents how much the Sultan of Brunei was paying her to live at his palace and attend parties.

“That’s great!” said my roommates. “What movie theater are you going to?”

“Planet Hollywood.”

“They have a movie theater there?”

“I guess.”

“Well, you gotta let us know how it goes. Call us the second the movie is out.”

I’ll call you before that,
I thought to myself.

I walked upstairs, starting to debate whether this was a good idea after all. The odds that Will Smith was gay were obviously slim to none, I thought. Since moving to New York, I had developed great gaydar, and he didn’t register with me at all. He seemed to me like a run-of-the-mill straight dude. And even though I’d been doing pull-ups every morning, the odds that a regular dude like him was attracted to
a guy like me,
gay or not, were beyond marginal. He saw “something” in me, it was that simple.

But what if it was that he wanted to see something
in me
instead? That very thought ignites a fear so primal in the average straight man that I shuddered. He was a big man, six feet plus, and in great shape, training to be Muhammad Ali. Could I fight off the champ? The facts were simple: If he wanted to see something in me, he would see something in me.

I considered simply calling him and telling him I couldn’t make it, but I was concerned about how that would sound to him—a lot like I didn’t want to make a sitcom, if it was my talent he was interested in. At 6
P.M.
, after much debate, I threw on an unflattering outfit and got in a cab toward midtown. If Will Smith was gay, I was going to find out the hard way.

Planet Hollywood was packed. Jam-packed with white people. I took a cursory look around and saw no black people, which gave me pause. As I walked up to the hostess, I realized just how ridiculous the question I was about to ask was.

“Is Will Smith here?”

“Yeah, I think he is in the back corner.”

Suddenly, I relaxed. Here I was, thinking he was gay and wanted to fuck the shit out of me, and in reality he was suffering fans while he waited for me at a table for two. I felt overwhelming embarrassment as I walked to the back of the restaurant, but when I got there I saw no one.

I walked back up to the front and told the girl I couldn’t find him.

“You mean like the mannequin?” she replied, assuming that I was the most die-hard Will Smith fan—someone who would only eat there if he could have a table close enough to his replica.

“No, the person.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Is Will Smith
the person
here?”

“Is the actual movie star,
Will Smith
, here at Planet Hollywood? Having dinner?
No
, he is not.”

“Do you have a reservation for Will Smith, for two … in a movie theater?” I tried.

“In a movie theater? Sir, we are an establishment dedicated to Hollywood, with mannequins of movie stars and memorabilia. The actual movie stars themselves do not hang out here, and we do not have a movie theater.”

I realized just how crazy I sounded when she spelled it out, but I wasn’t done.

“Do you mind if I sit here for a little while and wait for him?”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Knock yourself out.”

As I sat in the waiting room of the restaurant, I could hear the hostess and her colleagues mocking me. She asked a passing waiter if he had any tables with Will Smith at them, to which he responded, “Yeah. He’s sitting with Kevin Kline and Marvin Gaye.” That carried on for the next ten minutes until, from behind me came a six-foot-six, 350-pound black man. His eyes panned the waiting room until they met mine. “You Bert?”

I nodded yes and he motioned for me to follow him downstairs. All I could think as I followed him was, “I pray to God I don’t have to fuck this guy, too. I bet there is a lot of dick in those pants.”

He led me to the bottom of the stairs and showed me to a small room. “In here,” he said. I stepped into the small room to find nothing but the red velvet curtain that encased it, a folding table, and nine black men waiting for me.

My heart dropped.
I thought this was just going to be me and Will,
I thought. The idea of fucking one man I could wrap my head around, but fucking ten? I stood in the doorway with my mouth wide open. I offered a smile but was met with none in return. As I walked in, they stopped talking and started staring at me. The 350-pounder (I later learned his name was Charlie Mack) left without an introduction—not that I minded. I was too busy doing the math: nine black men, Will makes ten, and I’m sure he is bringing Jazzy Jeff, which makes eleven black men that I will have to fuck, all on a folding table.

We waited silently for what seemed like an eternity as I pondered how many yards of black cock would be passing through me that night. I stood motionless with my back to the wall not making eye contact, the way white people do when they are being stared at by black people.

Until, to my surprise, the Fresh Prince himself walked in with, you guessed it, Jazzy Jeff and three other friends that were, thank God, of smaller stature. By this time I was mentally lining them up in order of size and line placement for what would be the longest game of leaky submarine ever played.

Again, Will lit up the room—everyone smiled. He put his arm around me, announcing, “Everyone, this is Bert, the guy I’ve been talking about so much.”

My heart sunk as they smiled and began to move in on me. In panicked moments like this your brain thinks faster than normal. My brain whispered, “Get on your knees.” I figured I would definitely rather go for a clean-up-free, no-harm-no-foul blow job than a that-was-awkard-but-fun-sorry-you-are-crying butt fuck. I was about to ask Will if he wouldn’t mind going first and saving Charlie Mack for last, when I felt the curtains behind me brush my heels. They opened and everyone in the room moved past me. I turned to find the most impressive personal movie theater I had ever seen. Will, arm still around me, said, “Grab two seats, I’ll get us drinks.”

I grabbed the best two seats in the theater—middle row, center—and before I could say “Parents just don’t understand,” he showed up with two Long Island Iced Teas. He leaned over and whispered, “Crazy room for a hip-hop fan.”

“Huh?” I muttered.

“Biz Markie, Kool Moe Dee, Jeff, Charlie Mack.”

They were all there. They had been there since the beginning. I was too preoccupied with sizing up the lump in their pants to look at their faces. Will, in our dance studio meeting, had listened to me explain what a huge hip-hop fan I was and decided to pull some strings and get all the greats in one room for me to meet. I had been seeing more feet of cock to bear when in actuality I was living a hip-hop fan’s wet dream. As the movie started, I thought to myself,
I could have fucked Kool Moe
Dee?
”

The movie was
American Pie
and I laughed liberally, hoping that Will would think I was connected with what the youth of America found funny. When Jason Biggs put his dick in the pie, the room full of brothers groaned. Will leaned over to me and whispered, “You believe that?”

I whispered back, “I did that to a McDonald’s cheeseburger once.”

I regretted saying it until Will laughed. “And that is why we are doing this deal!”

At the end of the movie, we sat around finishing up cocktails and getting ready to leave when Will put me on the spot. “So Bert, what was your favorite part of the movie?”

I wanted to say, “The part where I didn’t fuck fifteen black guys.” I opted for, “The Stifler character. Every white guy knows a guy like that, and it was played brilliantly.” Biz Markie mumbled something about white people that I couldn’t decipher, but the others heard it and fell apart.

When we walked up the stairs, all I could think of was how badly I wanted that same hostess to be at the top. As luck would have it, we crested the stairs and there she was. When her eyes met mine, I nudged Will and said, “The hostess is a huge fan of yours.” Will smiled at me, slid over to her as only a mega movie star could, flashed his million-dollar smile, and said, “One love! One love.” Her mouth was agape. Before following him out, I whispered, “The movie theater is downstairs.”

*   *   *

A few weeks later, the deal was closed and we sold a show to FOX. We wrote it, and a year later they passed on it, as they do with most development deals. But I learned a lot from Will in that year. He taught me two of the most important lessons in Hollywood: how to take a general meeting and how to sell a TV show. He also validated my existence in Hollywood. Because of Will’s belief in me, CBS signed me the very next year to another development deal, and the cycle started all over again. This time I ended up shooting a pilot alongside Elliott Gould. Elliott and I got along really well. So well, in fact, that at the end of production I walked into my dressing room to find a note with a phone number on it that said,
CALL ME, ELLIOTT
. I called him and he said, “You are an interesting young man, very talented, we should get to know each other. Do you like seafood?”

I heard my dad’s voice. “I think he wants to fuck you, buddy.”

8.

A Honeymoon You Can’t Refuse