Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (15 page)

Dawn, despite having the body of a stripper, had children almost our age. She steered the conversation all over the place, hopping from subject to subject at high speeds. She mostly talked about her psychic abilities and the fact that she knew our child was going to be a boy and a Gemini (it was neither). I talked at great length about myself, and Danny seemed sincerely interested. He loved comedy and loved the fact that I knew the material, off the top of my head, of all the comics he loved. I was so excited to be hanging out with them that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was drinking, or how fast I was drinking it. While LeeAnn kept the same small glass of Cristal in her hand, I was juggling beers, champagne, rum, and now Johnnie Walker Black like a bear in the Russian circus. We talked so seamlessly and effortlessly that we didn’t realize how much time had passed until Dawn looked at her watch.

“Oh shit, we’re gonna miss dinner.”

“Fuck it, let’s go. You guys want to eat with us tonight?” Danny said.

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll go down and get changed.”

“Fuck that shit, were going like this.” Danny stood up. If Danny wasn’t concerned with the dress code, then neither was I. I looked to LeeAnn, who shrugged her shoulders.

“Fuck it,” she said.

There are three moments in my life, now as a forty-year-old, that I wish had been videotaped. My first home run. The first time I did stand-up. And the moment, that evening, when I walked into a five-star restaurant with Danny, Dawn, and LeeAnn, wearing board shorts, flip-flops, and a tank top. Slow motion, a mismatched foursome who looked like they were straight out of Daytona Beach central booking. Oddly enough, I was the nicest dressed of the bunch. LeeAnn was in little more than a cover-up, from having been at the beach all day, Dawn was still in a bikini top and jean shorts, and Danny was wearing black shorts, a wifebeater, and house slippers. Before the maître d’ could say anything to us, Danny slipped a hundred-dollar bill in his hand.

“Table for four,” he said.

The best part was the look on the faces of the couples we had been interacting with all week as we walked through the restaurant. They were dressed in suits and ties and dresses, and here we came like a group of shipwrecked sailors who had stumbled onto their island paradise. As we passed the couple we had been boating with the day before, their eyes lit up with excitement. We had cracked the code. I could tell instantly they wished they were with us. The couple we had talked to on our way to the island was appalled, by the look on the wife’s face. It was as if we had spit on their food. But best of all was the woman who had reprimanded the chef. On the way to our table, Danny lazily stopped at theirs to find out what was on the menu for the evening.

“Oh shit, Bert. It’s fucking steak,” he yelled across the restaurant.

I matched his energy. “We’re eating like fucking kings tonight, Danny!”

I was already drunk when we sat down at the table, but the first thing Danny did was order shots. Of all the times I’ve been drunk, this night would rank in the top five drunkest. (Just so you have the rest, in no order: pledge night for ATO; camping in eleventh grade; the night I discovered Southern Comfort; my oldest daughter’s fourth birthday.) LeeAnn was noticing. She kept pulling on my shorts and telling me to slow down. But I was with Danny. I was a made man, and the people on this island knew it. Anyone that served our table got a hundred-dollar handshake. The waiter came over more that night than any previous night. The chef came out and Danny greeted him with a hug, then slipped him a hundred-dollar bill and told him he wanted two of everything.

The night was just getting better and better. When LeeAnn went to the bathroom, they would go on and on about what a great woman I’d landed, and when I’d go to the bathroom, Danny would come with me and on the way we’d get a drink and a shot at the bar, and he would explain the importance of tipping. He would point out the people he didn’t like and he’d tell me why. And from what I could see from his insights he could have worked at a fair doing this.

“See a guy like that right there? He holds his fork like he is nine. Guy’s got no fucking culture. Guarantee you his parents were drunks.

“See that tall guy in the tan suit, with the fat wife. A guy like that—with this kind of money, in his kind of shape, his kind of height—doesn’t think the rules apply to him. He fucks around on his wife. Look, you can tell by the way he’s not listening.”

He credited his insights to years on the street, and having to be able to read people in a second. He was shocked at how good I was at it, although my skill didn’t hold a candle to his.

One of the four or five times we stopped at the bar, the husband from the sunset cruise approached Danny and me to buy us a drink. But before he could even say hello, Danny was gone.

“How are you guys hanging out with them?” he asked me.

“They invited us down for a drink.”

“And the restaurant let you guys in dressed like that?”

“Yeah, I can’t believe it either.”

“What’s he like?”

“Cool as shit!”

Before we could finish, Danny was barking my name from across the restaurant.

“Yo, Bert! Our fucking steaks are here!”

And just as promised, I found two steaks waiting for me.

Danny decided to take our drink game to the next level. It started with a three-hundred-dollar cognac that to my shock even LeeAnn wanted to try. I downed mine and Danny ordered me another. This is when everything gets real fuzzy. Apparently I started to tell everyone that someone was trying to kill us—me, specifically—which Danny found hilarious and I found even funnier. When I get really drunk I get really giggly and Danny took great pleasure watching me giggle myself into fits of laughter. I took fifty-dollar sips of cognac. Danny laughed harder than I’ve ever seen a human being laugh. Which obviously made me laugh. His face was red, his belly jiggled, and he kept yelling at the top of his lungs, “I fucking love this guy! I fucking love this guy!”

In a way, this is what I’m about, the urge to get someone who I don’t have much in common with to laugh. It’s one of my favorite things to do and it was the highlight of that night. I was sitting among a bunch of self-important millionaires, and I was not only hanging out with the most interesting man on the island but cracking him up beyond belief. I don’t know exactly how long our night lasted, but I can say that LeeAnn cut it off just in time to get me outside of the restaurant so I could throw up—which I did the entire walk to our cottage. She took me upstairs and put me in my beloved outdoor shower where I puked up two steaks and a bar’s worth of liquor. I howled under the running water with more laughter and vomit like a drunken Tarzan until my body gave out and I was put in bed.

Our phone rang continuously that night. Danny wasn’t done with me. He and Dawn had fallen in love with us and wanted to spend more time together once I was done throwing up. LeeAnn politely declined on our behalf.

The next morning I woke up feeling like I was coming directly out of intestine surgery. I walked out onto our porch to find not only our breakfast and a Key deer, but our bill for the weekend. As I opened it, I was a bit nervous, but also curious to know how much money my dad had saved us. I stepped inside to hand it to LeeAnn, then headed back out for my last outdoor shower.

She came out with the same look she had on her face the day she told me she was pregnant.

“We could’ve bought a car instead of coming here?”

“What?”

“It’s $15,000.”

“That’s got to be wrong,” I said. “We got a deal.”

I heard Danny’s voice in the back of my head.
Ain’t no deals on this island, kid.

“Did they charge us for last night’s drinks?”

“No, Danny paid for all the drinks.”

“Then there must be a mistake.”

LeeAnn got on the phone and called the front desk back on the mainland and found that there had
not
been a mistake. In fact, there had never been a deal. My dad simply booked the reservation for us and assumed they’d give us a deal because we were on our honeymoon.

I called my dad and explained the situation. From where I stood, I would be paying for this honeymoon for the rest of my life. Most couples get married and take a while to accrue this kind of debt, but LeeAnn and I managed it in five days. My dad told me not to worry, that he would call the hotel and take care of everything, and to enjoy our last morning. It was tough to enjoy the place knowing now how much it cost. I went out to my beloved outdoor shower, but it just wasn’t the same, I could see the water bill rising with every extra second I took. The beach seemed even worse when you considered the free ones out on the mainland. They were just as nice and you didn’t have to jockey for seats. I went to the bar and asked for the first time how much my Gumby Slumbers were.

Fifteen dollars. I got a bottle of water (five dollars). And to think I had been using those to wash the sand off my feet like the other patrons.

So we packed up our belongings and left. I contemplated packing up one of the Key deer and selling it on the mainland—surely you could get a couple grand for it—but I couldn’t find one. (They always knew when it was time to hide.) LeeAnn called Dawn one more time to thank her and Danny for the spectacular dinner the night before, and to apologize for my behavior, but Dawn seem to think my behavior was the best part of the night.

“Are you kidding me? We love you kids! You gave us the most fun we’ve had the whole time we’ve been here.”

We took the boat back to the mainland and I gave the concierge my credit card, telling him to charge as much as he could on it, explaining that my dad would be calling him shortly to deal with the rest. But he told me it had already been taken care of.

My heart dropped.
Had Danny paid our bill? Was I now indebted to him?
I saw it all unfold in front of my eyes. He’d call me one day and ask me to drive a truck full of cigarettes from L.A. to New York, and I wouldn’t be able to say no. He’d be subtle, like, “You just dropping them off like the boat guy from Little Palm Island … you remember Little Palm Island, don’t you, Bert?” Next thing you know, we’d be chopping up a body in the basement of his buddy’s mom’s house in Jersey, and I’d be asked all the time to recite Sam Kinison bits to all his friends.

But as I got in the car to drive back to Tampa to catch our flight home to L.A., my cell phone rang. It was my dad. He apologized for booking me into a hotel that cost more than I’d made the year before and said that he had put it on his credit card and would take care of it. LeeAnn and I thanked him profusely and I asked if he needed me to do any “favors” for him. He declined. Just drive safely, he said.

To this day, if you ask LeeAnn or me about our wedding, there are three things we bring up. First, the incestual inquiry on our marriage certificate. Second, how expensive our honeymoon was. And last but certainly not least, our dinner with Danny and Dawn. I’m not sure what Danny is up to these days—if he’s still in concrete, or if he is in fact
in
concrete. If he’s still with Dawn, if they got married, or if they both moved on. I hope he’s seen one of my TV shows and I’ve made him laugh a little, the way I made him laugh at dinner that night.

More than anything, though, I hope he doesn’t remember me. And that when he saw me on TV, he would say to Dawn, “That kid is funny; I bet we’d get along with him and his wife.” Because if he remembers my name and LeeAnn’s, and if he’s reading this and is in any way insulted, I’m afraid I may wake up one morning to find a Key deer in my bed.

9.

Shermfest

The night I met Tracy Morgan, I got hit by a bicycle. It wasn’t a chain-around-the-chest, hot-roddin’ bike messenger, but a flowery-basket-on-the-front, ring-ring type of bike driven by an attractive brunette. I was working at the Boston Comedy Club, standing out front “barking,” trying to bring people in to watch our comedy show, when I took a step into the street. I had checked the traffic headed one way, in the direction of West Third and saw nothing. Then
wham.

She had slowed down enough not to kill me, but not enough to
not
knock the living shit out of me. I got up, and as you’d expect in New York, she began yelling at me. Still a bit dazed as I got up off the ground, I said nothing, and eventually she left.

I spent the next ten minutes overwhelmed by two observations. One, that
she
was pissed off at
me
. I was the little fish in this scenario, getting muscled by the big fish, and the big fish just told me to go fuck myself like an abusive husband, and I was the battered wife who took it. Two, that our paths had started twenty odd years ago in completely different places—different states, maybe different countries—and we had spent our last two decades weaving our ways to this point on West Third Street. Always a romantic, I couldn’t get past the serendipity of it. How we traveled, struck one another, and continued our traveling.

None of this would have occurred to me if she had been fat. Funny how meaningful an event can be when the person you have it with is attractive. Had she been a fat chick, I probably would have been in the hospital but seen no hidden meaning. Regardless, I spent the remainder of the time before that night’s show focusing on how I could turn this bit of kismet into a kismet bit.

My focus shifted when I saw Tracy Morgan walk up to the club. At the time, Tracy was just beginning his reign at
Saturday Night Live
and he had the strut of a fourth grader coming back from the principal’s office. The comics at the club said he looked healthy, which seemed odd to me because he didn’t, but apparently this was an improvement. They also told me he was hilarious, which I believed because just watching him interact was comical. His mouth would purse, he’d laugh loud, then stop suddenly and stare at the person, lift up his shirt and rub his belly, then embrace the person and walk away. He walked right past me into the club. Within minutes, he was back on the sidewalk, holding court with some black comics, one of them my friend, Tony Woods. Tony was older than me, and a much more seasoned comic. He was the guy I spent every night with—drinking, deconstructing life, talking comedy. I felt honored that Tony had taken an interest in me. It was well known that ten years earlier he had taken another comic under his wing, and that comic was Dave Chappelle. Tony definitely rubbed off on Dave stylistically. They were
very
similar on stage. The difference was that Tony remained the same person offstage. Dave did not. And as Dave shot to stardom, Tony remained behind, in the trenches.