Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (20 page)

My heart sank as they walked the bear that was my height and only four times my weight off set. “That’s not the dad?”

“No, that’s the baby. There is the dad.”

I looked where Tim was pointing and saw my opponent, a mound of what looked to be nine feet and roughly one thousand pounds of adult male bear, minding his own business, sitting casually on a park bench.

My first instinct was to walk right up to the bear and let him sniff my hand, to let him know I was a trusting kind of guy. But the trainer flipped the fuck out.

“You’re breaking protocol!”

Tim pulled me aside and told me that, just like a rock star, there was a special way you had to meet the bear. The trainer then came over and handed me five marshmallows.

“When the bear’s not looking,” he said, “take one of the marshmallows and put it in your mouth, then casually walk in front of the bear, show him the marshmallow, and allow him the opportunity to engage with you and take the marshmallow out of your mouth with his mouth. This way he will learn to trust you.”

I very politely nodded, smiled, then looked at both the trainer and Tim. “Fuck that! Are you out of your fucking mind? It’s a nine-foot bear and you want me to make out with him?”

“Yes,” said the trainer. “Five times.”

“Look,” Tim said, pulling me aside, “he has been doing it all day and the bear is cool with it. You’ll be fine, trust me. Plus, the bear has to trust you if you want to fight it.”

“Tim, I want to trust the fucking bear before he trusts me!”

“Trust needs to go both ways.”

“What are you, a fucking minister? We are talking about a bear, Tim.”

“You’ll be fine.”

So, knowing no better, I took this man’s word as truth and grabbed the five marshmallows. I then casually walked behind the bear, praying to God this would work. I took a marshmallow and slipped it into my mouth. Then, like a hooker, I casually walked in front of the bear, showing it to him. At first the bear didn’t notice me, so, like any good ho, I buckled down and worked my corner. This worked—too well in my opinion—because the bear hopped to his feet quickly and in one fluid, semienthusiastic motion, slammed his face into my face and sucked the marshmallow out of my mouth. I assume we are all on the same page when it comes to a bear’s oral hygiene: it’s nonexistent. Raw meat, bits of fur, plenty of saliva. Basically, I was making out with a homeless person, five times. And by the fifth time everyone was smiling, all for different reasons. The trainer was happy that the bear trusted me, my crew was happy their overpaid host just got tongue-kissed by a bear, and the bear was happy because he just met the marshmallow man. The trainer slapped me on the back, smiled to my crew, nodded to the bear, and proclaimed, “We’re ready!”

Usually any type of approval makes me bubble, but with this I had a bit of hesitation. “Hold on, I haven’t learned anything.”

He smiled. “My friend, you’ve learned the most important thing you need to know about this bear, and that is, he loves marshmallows. So if you feel like you’re in trouble, very confidently say ‘marshmallow.’ Two things will happen. Number one, the bear will think you’re getting him another marshmallow. More importantly, we’ll know you are in trouble and we’ll get you out of there.” He took a pause, looked over my shoulder, smiled, and said, “Alright, he’s ready. Let’s go.”

Sounded super simple. The bear was a creature of habit, just like me. For him it was marshmallows, for me it was the case of beer waiting in the cooler. There is no better feeling than finishing a day of work and cracking a cold one with a crew, who can finally take the gear off their shoulders and rest. The bear had the same ritual. Do your job, get a marshmallow, a pat on the forehead, and a slow walk to the cage. I found a moment of solidarity with the bear. We were compadres, coworkers, doing a job for our handlers, a job they couldn’t do.

I turned and immediately our connection disappeared. The bear was on top of me. He grabbed me by both ears and clutched tightly onto my head with his paws. I felt his claws—not even neatly trimmed, I might add—secure a grip on my head as I began to shout.

“Marshmallow.”

I could barely hear the words come out of my own mouth, mostly because his paws pressing tightly against my ears made everything silent. Also because my world became quieter with each and every one of his roars. He swung me back and forth several times before he slammed me directly into the center of his chest, practically motor-boating me into submission. To this day I have never felt more helpless than I did that day, gasping for air, sucking in bear fur, shouting “Marshmallow” into a bear’s chest. I thought I was going to pass out, when all of a sudden everything spun bright. The bear had accidentally, or maybe purposely, let go of my head with one paw, holding it steady to his chest with the other, when he got a claw stuck in one of my belt loops, and with absolute hilarity spun me into a bear hug, doggy style.

Now facing the crew and appreciating fresh air, I took a deep breath and very calmly said, “Marshmallow.” The crew broke out laughing, as the bear bent me over and held on tight.

Realizing I was killing, and feeling safe in comedy, I started hamming it up just a bit, with marshmallow as my punch line. I scanned my audience to see what part of the crowd I needed to focus on when I saw the look on the trainer’s face. While Tim and the others were howling silently, as a crew will do when they love what they’re shooting, the trainer was desperately trying to make eye contact with me. I saw the moment of discreet eye contact pass, and now he was shouting, “Go limp!”

Again, time slowed down, and I grew oddly introspective. I thought to myself, “Why is this the first I’ve heard of the ‘go limp’ thing? We’ve never gone over this. How limp am I supposed to go? A little-soft limp, drunk limp, look-unattractive-to-a-fat-chick-you-had-sex-with-in-college-and-now-she-wants-to-see-if-it’s-cool-if-she-spends-the-night limp? Or just play-it-by-ear limp? Come to think of it, I hope he’s talking to me, and not telling the bear to become unaroused. Is there bear cock climbing up my jeans, about to split the center seam?”

I quickly checked between my legs to make sure the trainer was talking to me—that the bear wasn’t DTF—and after that was confirmed, I went Xanax limp. I slid out of the bear’s grip and landed on my back. That’s the last thing I remember. Apparently, as I lay on my back at the feet of the bear, he “instinctually” sat on my face. This is what they told me when I came to in Tim’s lap under a tree and whimpered, “What happened?”

Tim smiled a big Midwestern smile and said, “You got raped and teabagged by a bear—and it was
hilarious.
Let’s go tame lions!”

I went on to tame lions that day, wash an elephant, and stayed the fuck away from the tiger. The show got canceled before the bear segment ever aired. The network wanted more story arc and fewer short, non sequitur (but hilarious) clips. Their feeling was that people wanted story, so we went back to them with a new version of the same idea, wherein I would take the most dangerous job in the world for an entire season: I would be a crab fisherman on a boat in the Bering Strait for one fishing season while a camera crew followed me. The network passed. No one, they said, wanted to see a bunch of uneducated guys fish on a crab boat.

As I sit here today, I guess I could be bitter that the show wasn’t a smash hit like Mike Rowe’s
Dirty Jobs,
or that YouTube wasn’t around yet to help promote a show that, in hindsight, was basically making viral videos, and which might have made me famous then (or at least Internet famous). Or I could even be upset that we didn’t get the green light to make the
Deadliest Catch,
three years before the
Deadliest Catch
premiered.

Instead I sit here today grateful that my legacy wasn’t cemented that day. Imagine it: Bert Kreischer. On-air talent. Comedian. Got fucked in the ass to death by a bear on camera.

12.

The Importance of Being Soft

I’m not a really deep dude. I like beer, cheeseburgers, and blow jobs. I love parties, especially when they start in the afternoon, and as far as feelings go, I’m always up for the good ones and live with a constant fear of the bad ones. I sleep with my mouth open, I watch porn, I’ll smoke pot if it’s passed to me, and I love a good dick joke. I’ve been in love a couple of times and had my heart broken almost exactly the same number of times. I don’t speak to any of those women, they are dead to me. That’s how I operate. I’m fine with most artistic criticism and professional failure. I find that if criticism comes from a respectable source and ultimately facilitates more blow jobs, beers, and burgers, I can work through it. And as far as failure, it just comes with the territory of the business I’m in.

As a husband I’m okay. I kind of remember birthdays and try to talk, touch, and listen five minutes before sex, as I am told that is what women want and the best way to get what I want. I’m probably worse as a dad. To be honest, I had no idea that having kids was going to involve so much commitment. I thought it was going to be making a grilled cheese here, driving a road trip there, a kiss on the forehead, a tuck in at night, maybe a spanking, and we’re done. The idea that my kids would become my entire life, everything I work for and toward, and that their successes and failures would define my happiness, and that I would never have the heart to hit them, was well beyond me when I got my wife pregnant.

I remember the first night with my first daughter, Georgia. She cried and cried and cried, and I felt completely and totally helpless, praying, as I lay on a cot at the foot of my wife LeeAnn’s hospital bed, that my mom would miraculously appear and “take care of this noise.”

Slowly I realized, this is going to be me. Me, for the next thirty years plus, taking care of this child, raising her, grooming her for life so she didn’t have to cry and would be happy. But how do I make her happy? Panic struck through my heart as the nurse came in and told me exactly how. Hold her head by my heart, place my pinky finger on her bottom lip, and allow her to draw it in to “suckle,” which she did. She sucked on my finger like she was trying to rip my nail off, and she immediately relaxed. Panic struck again: Is this how you groom a whore?

“We are stopping this
tonight.
I’m not raising a daughter who chugs cock to calm down every time she gets freaked out!” I wanted better for my little girl.

Then the second daughter came and I had the same moment in the same hospital, my newborn crying her first evening cry. I tried to take in the beauty of the moment: my gorgeous wife, our healthy daughters, Georgia and Ila, the fact that this time around I wasn’t scared of the unknown. Instead all I could think to myself was, “Why the fuck did I do this again?” It must be how you feel when you wake up hungover with a brand-new face tattoo. I couldn’t wait to look at it, but the idea of living with it was overwhelming.

I love my girls. I also love whiskey, and I come by both loves honestly. Jameson is my family’s whiskey. If you’re Irish, you’re faithful to one of two Irish whiskeys: Jameson or Bushmills. My family has always been a Jameson family. If there were ever any doubt about my allegiance to it, it ended in 2007 when as a father of a one-year-old and a three-year-old, the Lord kissed me on the forehead and I became sponsored by Jameson to go on the road with five other comics on a national tour.

It was amazing, especially for a group that my buddy and fellow comedian Billy Gardell called a “bunch of $900-a-week road comics.” Every week, four of us would fly first class to a different city, get picked up in town cars, driven to five-star hotels, do twenty minutes of stand-up each, and get paid eight times what we were worth. Our only rule was we had to drink Jameson before, during, and after the show. Oh, and once a year they would fly us to Ireland to hang out at the distillery, do a show, and do radio. Talk about being thrown into the briar patch. I was literally living in a dream. We comics were not only having a blast, but we were growing closer and closer every week. It was me, Steve Byrne, Danny Bevins, Michael Loftus, Pete Correale, and Billy Gardell.

Billy was the leader of our pack for many reasons. He was the largest, the oldest, and the strongest comedian, but mostly, he had been doing this the longest and had more wisdom to offer than the rest. Michael Loftus was a TV writer who was trying to get back into stand-up. He was the smallest guy of the group and always walked on his tippy toes. Most people will say size doesn’t matter, but in this group it was noticed, by us and by him. Loftus was easily the smartest of the group and the guy we all realized we’d be asking for a job from one day. Pete Correale smoked pot not just daily but hourly. He loved to laugh, loved to drink, and loved smoking cigarettes. He was a true comic in the cosmic sense—if you sent him in a time machine anywhere, anytime throughout history, he would have someone laughing, probably at some bar. Danny Bevins had rage circling inside him like a school of sharks. He was ex-military and when he started drinking, the fins of his rage started peeking out above the surface. Those fins made a beeline for Loftus, who was waiting on his tippy-toes for them, ready to start punching shark noses. Steve Byrne was half Asian and my oldest friend of the group. We had both come out of New York. We were the same age and had the same manager, the same sense of humor, and the same interests. He hated Loftus.

I, on the other hand, was just over the moon about getting free Jameson. I was always loud and never listened to anyone much. A few of us had kids, all of us had drinking problems, and each of us found himself in a similar boat: married to women who understood what kind of man could leave his family for a weekend and miss them genuinely, but who would miss the road just as much when they were home.

The first weekend I met Billy was in Cincinnati. Billy generally closed the show, but when he wasn’t there I did. Closing is a weird strength. It’s the one spot out of the night that has to deal with the waitresses handing the patrons their checks, which more often than not they do quite loudly and with no concern for you or your attempts at comedy. To say that the check spot is a difficult one is an understatement. It’s like being the last guy in a gang bang, charged with making sure the woman has had an orgasm. But to have the check spot after three headlining, success-hungry, Jameson-filled comics who are absolute killers on stage, doing their tightest twenty minutes, is a losing proposition. It calls for a skill set not every comic has. You have to be aware enough to notice that the room is changing. You have to be able to find the people that are listening and connect with them. You have to have thick enough skin not to let the fact get to you that 80 percent of the room isn’t listening. And you have to have enough material to roll with every- and anything that happens in that moment. You have to recognize when the room is done, and be able to pull out of that moment seamlessly, unfazed, and with enough respect for the crowd to close out hard and strong. All skills that are hardened with time and alcohol. It has nothing to do with being the funniest comic out there. But if you’re the guy willing to take that bullet, then you are the funniest of the lot for at least that one night.