Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (21 page)

It was in Cincinnati that Billy conceded the role of funniest comic to me.

“I’m not following you and your Yosemite Sam shit!” he said when we first met. He was referring to the fact that I basically had no rules when it came to doing stand-up. Shirt off, people on stage, group shots, calling my wife, answering my phone, all stuff that makes a live performance all that more live and makes a more act-based comic extremely frustrated. I would veer toward chaos at any chance possible. Billy did not.

I looked at this behemoth of a man. “But you close the shows.”

“Not tonight I don’t, I’m going third and you’re closing.”

I shared my concerns, my ego inflating a bit as Billy told me, in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t want to follow me.

“Look, you’re young, hungry, funny, and you want this shit. I’m an old man just looking for a paycheck. I’ll tell my little jokes, ease up a bit before I get off, pump the brakes, and then bring you up real nice.”

Done!
I thought. What a massive compliment, to be asked to follow a hard-core road killer doing his tightest twenty.

We had already done the business of figuring out the lineup. That was over. Now to the best part of being a comic. We sat in the greenroom for the next hour before Billy went up, gossiping about all things comics love to gossip about: who was funny, who stole, which comics hated each other, who we liked, who we couldn’t stand, where we started, who we started with, what our goals were. As long as I live I will never connect quicker or easier with anyone in the world than I do with other comedians. There’s a shorthand that can’t be understood by noncomics. You don’t get it from doing a couple open mics, and you don’t even get it by hanging around comedians. You have to earn it. And once you’ve earned it, you look for those like you who have earned it, too.

That night in Cincinnati, we sat in that greenroom with the door shut, drinking whiskey and talking, until the sound guy knocked to tell Billy he had just given Loftus the light, warning him that his twenty-minute set was almost up. Billy got up, just like an old factory worker getting off of the break bench. He put out his cigarette and punched in for the evening.

Billy proceeded to
destroy
the crowd with what I still consider the tightest twenty-minute set I have ever seen. When the sound guy gave him the light, I went back to the bar and grabbed a fresh Jameson, hastily returning to see exactly how Billy was going to slow down the insane momentum he had built with the crowd. I saw that his “pumping the brakes” wasn’t working out exactly like he had planned. It was more like he was spinning wildly down the mountain, giggling as the car careened out of control. I took a big swig of Jameson, listened to him call my name, and like most comics do in moments of fear, went in and went through the motions.

My set went well—well enough not to slow down the show’s momentum much. The crowd gave us a standing ovation as the four of us stood on stage for a mini curtain call. We went out that night and drank hard. We talked shit, boosted each other’s egos, and generally hit it off before stumbling back to our rooms, leaving Loftus and Danny to argue about the war in Iraq.

The next night’s early set unfolded exactly like the previous, only this time, Billy seemed to be pumping the gas a lot harder as his set wrapped up. I did my best to carry the momentum. I found myself with no choice but to bring a waitress onstage and have her sing while I did a strip tease. This pleased the crowd to no end—even the other comics enjoyed it. I stood almost naked onstage, with nothing but a boot covering my junk. At the end of her song, the other three guys rushed the stage, shots in hand. I was beside myself with joy. My work on stage was so moving that my peers felt the need to join me. No bigger compliment can be paid to a comic than to have the comics he respects watch him from the back of the room and want to share the spotlight with him. Billy grabbed the mic and proclaimed to the crowd, “We are the Jameson Comedy Tour and this wild man is our headliner, Bert Kreischer. Thank you guys for coming out.” We took our shot and he wrapped his big arm around me. He pulled me in close and whispered, “You got ten more minutes, asshole.”

My excitement turned to panic as they left me on stage and I tried to calmly and confidently redress, the crowd watching open-mouthed for me to top what just happened. I had mistimed the closing of the show, and Billy and the guys knew that. Now I felt like a fat stripper. Rather than sit silently by and watch me fail, they took pleasure in joining in, putting a sort of cruel icing on the cake. They knew that after that, I would have nothing but stale material to offer the crowd.

Backstage, before our second set of the night began, we laughed as we recounted my miscalculation. That’s when my phone rang. It was my wife. I was dying to tell her just how funny the moment was, and I quickly picked up.

“Hey babe, you’re never gonna believe what just happened.”

My enthusiasm was met with seriousness.

“I need to talk to you. Are you alone?”

“No, I’m with the guys. What’s up?”

“We’ve had an accident and Georgia’s been hurt.”

My heart sank, as did my face. The guys noticed and stopped laughing.

Women are amazing animals when it comes to drama. She had called ten months earlier while I was in Houston and I answered the phone to hysterical crying. Panic raced through me as I tried to decipher what she was sobbing out on the other line. Our kids were dead? She had been assaulted? My dad was dead? My sisters?

No, it was her fucking cat.

Click.

I hung up angry that she couldn’t have gone into the bedroom, pulled her shit together for a minute, and called and told me the news, rather than letting me guess like some scene in a horror movie.

This time she was cold and calculated, and that’s what scared me.

She went on to tell me the details: Georgia, our three-year-old, had been walking into our apartment lobby and had tripped in her Crocs. She fell face-first on the marble floor, landing on her top jaw, breaking it and her four front teeth, under the gum line. LeeAnn told me they had been to the hospital and had scheduled an appointment with an oral surgeon in Beverly Hills for the day after next. The last thing she told me, which she needn’t have, was that I was to get back to California immediately.

I hung up the phone and looked at my three friends.

“I have to go home.”

I relayed the events to them and, most of them having children, they sincerely empathized. That is when the club manager Rick walked through the doors of the greenroom. “I’m starting the music, you guys ready?”

Danny pulled him out of the room and told him the news as Billy and Mike rolled a zone defense on my mini-downward spiral. Danny came back in with four Jamesons on the rocks.

“I talked to Rick and told him what was going on. He gave me these. I’m no doctor but I do know that these usually make things better in the short term.”

We all grabbed a Jameson. Billy stood up and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Listen, your old lady said she is doing okay now. We’ll get you home in the morning, everything is gonna be fine. It could have been a helluva lot worse. Pull it together. We’ll all deal with this shit after the show, like brothers. But you’re still going last.”

The room laughed, as did I, and we did our shots. It was almost nice to know that there was no pressure following Billy this time. I knew I had to go onstage—I wasn’t going to go back to my hotel and stew in my thoughts. I called LeeAnn one more time after the show started and did some more investigation. LeeAnn was a lot lighter. Georgia seemed fine, she was playing in her room. The doctor had told LeeAnn not to make a big deal out of it. The schedule was firm, though, and they needed to get Georgia into surgery ASAP to make sure an infection wasn’t setting in. I guess so, anyway. I don’t know for sure since I was barely listening. Because what I had heard was they’d need to put her under, which could be tricky. I made plans to return on the first flight out the next morning.

I’d love to tell you that I pulled out one of my all-time best sets of comedy that night, while under duress. But I can’t. I went through the motions, and I don’t remember anything but the walk home. We were all meandering slowly, me and the other comics, respecting the gravity of the situation—not barhopping ourselves home as usual, Loftus and Danny getting along—when Billy again wrapped his arm around me.

“I’m not gonna tell you your business, you’re a grown man, but I think the worst thing you can do right now is run to a bottle.”

I nodded slowly.

“Having said that, you say the word and we will all sit with you and drink until your flight tomorrow morning.”

I chose the latter. We stayed up and drank Jameson until I was drunk enough to cry. They left me in my room to pack and shower. Before I took off in the early morning, Billy called to see if I wanted one more, which I did. I got it to go, hopped in my cab, and cried the entire way to the airport. My inhibitions were gone and my emotions ran free. Fear and anger were the most prevalent. I felt like I had been tricked into all these emotions I couldn’t control. For Christ’s sake, when I first met my wife, I had just wanted to fuck her, that was all. All I could think now was that I hadn’t signed up for this. I was cool with marriage and I was cool with kids. I sincerely loved having both. But these feelings of vulnerability—I was not cool with this.

I was angry with my wife. When we met, she said she had no intentions of changing who I was. The comedy, the drinking, the partying she was all cool with, and I believed her. But that had all been part of her diabolical plan. The guy she met back then, the old Bert, would have never sobbed uncontrollably in the back of a taxi for thirty minutes. The guy she met didn’t cry at all. But she knew, without a doubt, that the second she introduced kids into the picture I would inevitably, without my consent or knowledge, become a different man. It was like a heroin dealer who tells a new customer, “There are
a lot
of people who use it recreationally. The rumors about heroin’s addictive qualities are highly exaggerated.”

I cleaned myself up as we pulled up to the airport, watching the cabbie try to decipher the events that led to this awkward 4
A.M.
cab ride to the airport. I imagine he thought I must have been some scorned gay lover, who had spent the night tied and bound while the love of my life, who I had flown out here to see, had his way with me, not even letting me climax, only to be told at 3:30
A.M.
that I was just one of his many fuck buddies and that my plan to stay with him while he was at a conference in Cincinnati was in no way feasible, as he had his wife and kids coming in today. And to think that I had bought us tickets to the Reds game months in advance to watch that kid with the big arm pitch. But now I was on my way, heart broken, balls blue, to the airport.

That is definitely what he must have been thinking as I paid him with tear-soaked bills. But I didn’t care. I downed my roadie and made my way to the plane.

I held it together pretty well until takeoff when the anxiety of the flight, the booze in my system, and my goddamn bitch-ass vulnerability kicked in. The flight attendant approached me—my sunglasses on, covered in my hoodie—and inquired. I told her my daughter was hurt and that I was flying home to see her. She came back with a whiskey and asked no more questions. The next time she walked past me she handed me another.

By the time I hopped in a cab at LAX, the crying had stopped. I was making my way back to Hollywood when my phone rang. It was LeeAnn.

“Listen, when you get here, have your shit together. No crying, no dramatics.”

“Not a problem,” I promised her, as I motioned for the cab driver to pull over at a 7-Eleven. I hopped out, grabbed a forty and a coffee, and downed them in that order. I was set to be the dad I’d always envisioned. Probably the first time on record I had ever stepped up to be a great dad, needless to say, but I was ready.

I walked in the house like a soldier. I empathized, I played, I read books, we watched a movie, and Georgia eventually went to sleep.

That night LeeAnn broke it down for me. “I want you to eat a Xanax tomorrow before we head to the dentist. It’s going to be pretty stressful and I need you to be calm.”

Usually being told to take drugs means a good time for me, but this time it raised concern. “How stressful?”

“Putting a child under is not easy and can be dicey. They told me today the most important thing for us to do is keep her calm. They said if she’s calm, everything would be fine. So I can’t have you joking around, touching things, distracting people because you’re nervous. So I think you should take a Xanax and just relax. It’s all gonna be fine.”

That was all I needed to hear. I’d lube up early in the morning like a rock star heading to press, we’d roll in, they’d put her under, pull the teeth, set the jaw, and I’d be celebrating with a glass of Jameson that night, slow-rolling that early morning buzz. Done.

Our appointment was for 7
A.M.
and I had been drinking fairly heavily for three days straight. LeeAnn woke us all up at 6:30 and we made our way to the car. I popped a Xanax on Wilshire, halfway to Beverly Hills, and felt the tranquility set in. I was even more relaxed when I saw that LeeAnn, always very budget minded, decided in a moment of emergency to do the right thing and get Georgia a high-priced Beverly Hills oral surgeon with a shingle on Rodeo Drive. Had it been for herself, LeeAnn would have booked a hack in a strip mall on San Vicente. But she knew what was important.

When we walked into the empty waiting room, it was clear they were here for us. None of the formalities of signing paperwork, no waiting—they took us directly back to the chair like I was Hugh Hefner at Planned Parenthood. The surgeon and anesthesiologist introduced themselves and assured us that everything was going to be fine. My Xanax hadn’t fully kicked in but things were moving so smoothly that I felt silly for even taking it. The surgeon and anesthesiologist even went so far as to brag to us about how great the other was, basically sucking each other’s cocks for our benefit, which I appreciated.