Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (19 page)

We entered my greenroom, and I poured all of us cocktails. We sat and drank for half an hour, and for the first time I finally let this girl talk. She asked Slash all the questions she had always wanted to. They beamed back and forth at each other as Slash, historically silent, suddenly rambled.

I took pride as I sat back and truly listened for the first time in a long time, sipping my brandy. After one round of drinks she looked me in the eyes, expressing what I assumed was gratitude, and gave me that all-too-familiar smirk. She then asked me very politely where the restroom was. I told her, trying desperately to express the same gratitude back through my eyes, hoping I had repaid my debt—of not knowing she had cerebral palsy, acting awkward when I found out she did, lying about hot dogs, eating them even more often behind her back because it was fun, leaving her with Patrice, never calling again. She stood to exit, and as she did I realized just how prominent her limp was. How did I ever
not
notice it? Anyway, did it really matter? She was just a chick who wanted to be loved, like any other. As she left the room she grabbed the door with her good hand, reaching across her body, and shuffled awkwardly out the door.

As she left, Slash grabbed my arm. She exited, the door closed, and he looked me in the eyes and said, “She is absolutely perfect.”

I was shocked. He was
not
seeing exactly what I had
not
seen on the plane, and those first few nights of drinking. He was probably as drunk now as I was then. He set his coffee mug down in front of me, and whispered through his hair, “I’ll take one more.”

As I filled both our cups I could hear Patrice’s taunting, maniacal cackle in the back of my head. I imagined him howling with laughter. “Both you muthafuckahs didn’t see that shit? Damn, Bert! You as big of a drunk as Slash!”

11.

Hurt Bert

I realized two things about myself the other day in Omaha, as I was shooting Jäger Bombs with a bunch of frat boys twenty years younger than I am. One: I don’t like Jägermeister. Two: I don’t say no enough.

I’m like a ten-dollar hooker with a twelve-dollar-a-day habit. I rarely say no to anyone. It is one thing I consistently try to change about myself but never can. I’m sure my inability to say no is one of the main reasons I accrue crazy stories, and it is definitely the reason I am working in television today. Most of my comedian friends pick and choose their projects like prom queens picking shoes, and they will often tell you the most powerful word in this business is
no.
But I have always opted for the easy and comfortable
yes.

“Yes, I’ll slide down this snow-covered mountain at 60 mph with the legislative end of a shovel jutting between my legs. I’d love to. Just let me strap into this human slingshot first. Or better yet, why don’t I be the first paying customer to jump off the tallest building west of the Mississippi? These all sound like great ideas I just can’t say no to!”

I’m not going to tell you this is a rule for success—in entertainment or in life. In fact, I can look back and count dozens of times when I should have walked away. But this much is for sure: If I were the kind of guy who said “no” even once in his life, I would never have fought a bear.

Grappling with a bear was just one in a series of poor decisions I made when I said yes to filming a show called
Hurt Bert. Hurt Bert
had a simple premise. I would take dangerous jobs for one day with no training, insight, or preparation.

For the first shoot, I was an exterminator. All I knew about exterminators in Southern California was they sometimes ran up on rattlesnakes, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with rattlesnakes. What I hadn’t anticipated was that this job entailed wearing coveralls, a mask, and gloves (in the summer), and crawling under a house infested with rats. To hedge their bets, production made sure it was brimming with rats by hiring a handler who, I found out later, had crawled under the house thirty minutes before I did, and was literally setting rats on me. I was under the house for another thirty minutes while he made it rain rodents.

That was my initiation into reality television. What followed was a list of jobs that certain men are employed to do. Men with high blood pressure who don’t qualify for life insurance: pro football players, pro hockey players, dominatrix gimps, stunt pilots, mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters, great-white-shark photographers, and lion tamers. Each show consisted of five to six segments and we needed to fill six shows.

My production team, in hopes of an Emmy nomination, would prod the best performances out of my cast mates. So for instance, when I was an MMA fighter, they set me against the First Family of Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, the Gracies. Instead of fighting one of them, though, I fought four. Production mentioned subtly in their pre-interview that I didn’t care much for Brazilians, and that I’d said privately that they couldn’t choke me out. If it wasn’t fighters, they’d piss off the lions, antagonize the hockey players, or tell the stunt pilot to stall the plane long enough for me to grab my parachute and punch out.

One day we played Arena Football, and they set me up as the quarterback for the Los Angeles Avengers. Arena Football at that time had none of the trappings of Pro football—none of the infrastructure, none of the glam, and I’m sure none of the drug testing. These were hard-core dudes, some with very visible chips on their shoulders, who only knew how to play the game one way and that was head-first and hard. It was after practice one day that we joined them, and as we stepped onto the field I noticed the whole team watching me like it was my first day on the yard in prison. They were whistling, laughing, and pointing at me, as if they were figuring out the best way to have group sex with me. I assumed very quickly, and quite correctly, that the offensive line was not going to put up much of an effort in my defense. So, I took the first snap, took one step back, then ran up the middle through the defenders, into the end zone for a touchdown. As I ripped off my helmet and began an elaborate touchdown celebration, dancing as if I were at a powwow, I noticed the defensive coordinator throwing his hat on the ground and grabbing his linemen by their facemasks.

“This is why you’re all third-string defensive linemen!” His face grew redder and his voice started sounding German as I heard my execution orders being shouted in their faces.

“This guy is a stand-up comedian and he just blew your doors off. You better redeem yourselves and put this man on a stretcher or I will kick you off this goddamn team today!”

As I got back in the huddle, my wide receiver smiled at me. “I think we should do a passing play.” He then looked around to the rest of the offense and said, “What do you guys think?”

They all smiled and nodded.

“So just drop back four steps, take your time, and see if you can hit me across the middle.”

“How deep are you going?”

“I wouldn’t worry yourself with the details,” said a large offensive lineman, as he chuckled to the rest of the players in the huddle.

I dismissed them and we met back at the line, where I could hear phrases like, “We going fuck you up, Bert” mumbled through mouth guards. I called hike, took four steps back, and then everything went silent.

That is what a concussion sounds like.

I learned to distrust everyone I worked with. If I mentioned to a production assistant that I didn’t like heights, he would run off and tell the producers. Next thing you know, I’m a roofer, only blindfolded, perched atop a three-story house.

After four episodes, two concussions, lacerations from an attack dog, two broken ribs, a bruised shin from a errant hockey puck, a broken foot, a bruised elbow, and a left leg that wouldn’t stop shaking every time I yawned, I told them I thought it would work better if they simply told me what I was going to do so I could prepare some material or even some questions, rather than stand there like a crash-test dummy with a high-pitched squeal. So you can imagine my trepidation when, after taking my advice, they called and asked me, “Do you wanna fight a bear?”

“Who does that for a living?” I asked.

“You do, on Thursday.”

A few things should be noted before we move forward. I was getting paid handsomely for this show, and I felt like we were breaking new ground in TV. I was spending time with some extremely interesting and unique men, men with amazing stories and intriguing insights. Add to that the fact that I was the star, had my name in the title, and despite having no actual involvement in production was billed as a “producer” on the show, you can understand why I might be willing to give anything they came up with a shot.

Having said that, it should also be noted that by the time they asked me to fight a bear, I had already learned I didn’t enjoy working with large animals. Working with a large animal is like working with a porn star: you never know what kind of mood they are in, they don’t know how to act, and the next day someone will definitely be shitting blood.

Prior to that call, I had already been mauled by a bull. With absolutely no training beyond how to put on clown makeup, which, oddly enough, freaked me out, I was put in the ring with a one-ton bull as a rodeo clown. The bull left me with two broken ribs, a broken foot, and only fifteen seconds of usable footage.

And that’s the problem you run into working with animals. You can’t reason with them the way you’d like.

“We already got the shot, so you don’t need to break my ribs or my foot on the second take. Let’s just go half speed for coverage.”

Bull grunts his approval.

“Seriously, we get close, a few fly by shots at 40 percent will look 100 percent on TV. You’ll look majestic, scary, proud. Your agent will be happy. You’ll like the way this turns out, it’ll look killer on your reel.”

Bull grunts again.

“Alright, so let’s get it on its feet!”

The bull and I fist-bump and make it explode as we walk into position.

One time I worked with a chimp and everyone howled with laughter as the chimp sat on my shoulders and grabbed both of my ears. I started playing up my fear, going all wide-eyed and squealy for the cameras, when I felt the genuine strength of the chimp lock onto me. It felt similar to when a child is on your shoulders and you lean back and feel their muscles tense in panic, only I wasn’t leaning and this child had the strength of eight men. He wrapped an arm around my head and tightened his legs around my neck as if to suggest, “This head is mine if I want it.” I stopped squealing and went Helen Keller silent, which made everyone on the set laugh even harder as they saw real fear enter my eyes, the kind of fear that has a scream and panic right behind it. The trainer came to the rescue and I jokingly mentioned to him that I had gotten scared for a second. Emotionless, the trainer said, “Yeah, I noticed him starting to freak.”

“What would have happened?”

“Well, the first thing a chimp does is he bites off your fingers and genitals, then he goes for your face.”

I laughed at his joke, thinking this guy had a wicked imagination. “Good thing that didn’t happen?”

The trainer looked me dead in the eye, with no smile at all, and said, “Yeah, we were very lucky.”

My call time to work with the bear was early in the morning. Apparently, just like meth addicts and homeless people, that’s when bears like to fight. This far into the production schedule, however, I had accumulated a small hankering for Xanax, so mornings weren’t my strong suit. Xanax rolls credits about an hour after you take one, and if you follow it with a couple of brewskies (which is a fun word to say when you’re eating Xanax), the curtains don’t draw back for your next show until matinee time. I got picked up—early—and roughly forty miles away from Los Angeles. During the whole car ride, I kept thinking that I wasn’t so much getting closer to the shoot as I was farther and farther away from the best doctors.

As we pulled up to the location I was met by my field producer, Tim Scott, a cherubic man from Minnesota who dressed and acted like a character from
Fargo.
He was dry and had a wholesome look like a TV character from the 1950s, with a flattop to boot. He didn’t look or act like someone in show business, and he was the kind of producer who boiled a dozen eggs for the crew the night before a shoot instead of getting craft services. Tim and I were friends, despite his job of putting me in eminent danger daily. He was a soldier following orders, and I completely understood that. It didn’t help, however, when I saw him get excited about a segment, and today he was smiling from ear to ear.

“Do you think you’re allergic to bears?”

I took a second to think about it, “Gee, Tim, I don’t know. They don’t really test for that at the allergist.”

“I just think it would be funny if your face got all puffy and you couldn’t breathe.”

“Yeah, that would be a gas.”

“You gotta see this thing,” he said, bouncing next to me as we walked into the animal trainer’s compound. “The bear you’re gonna fight is huge!”

I couldn’t exactly share in his excitement as I started to take in my surroundings. This was supposed to be a first-rate Hollywood-animal training facility, but it looked more like a zoo inside a crystal meth lab. As we walked, we passed an ark’s worth of animals, ranging from a depressive elephant to an enraged tiger, finally approaching the bear. Tim explained the day’s events.

“So the guy is gonna let you do everything: fight the bear, tame lions, wash the elephant, and fuck around with the tiger if he can get him to calm down. It’s gonna be awesome, but I thought we would start you slow and let you fight the baby of the bear, before the bear.”

“Wrong,” I said. “Everything I know about bears tells me not to fuck with their kids. How about I just fight the dad and we move on.”

“Totally cool, I just thought it would make you more comfortable to work your way up.”

As we turned the corner I saw the crew, a couple trainers, and a six-foot bear on a leash. Tim called to them. “He just wants to fight the dad. You can put that one back in the cage.”