Read Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child Online

Authors: Bert Kreischer

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (22 page)

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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I was all smiles until they went to put Georgia under. That’s when hell broke loose.

Georgia didn’t want to be in the chair by herself. This was a deal breaker in her eyes. Kids can be real douche bags about getting their way, and in this moment, Georgia was no exception. Her demands were that Mommy and Daddy be in the chair with her. I remember when I was a kid getting stitches above my eye and saying the same thing. My mom held firm, said no, and then strapped me to a backboard like a lunatic getting an emergency circumcision. We held a hard line, then drew her attention to the other side of the chair, as we motioned for the anesthesiologist to do his dirty work with the needle. But to our dismay, this overpriced fuckface “couldn’t find a vein,” which is a gentler way of saying that he stabbed my daughter in the arm with a needle ten times as she wailed and writhed uncontrollably. I could see that we were failing in our mandate to “keep her calm.” That’s when the anesthesiologist pulled me aside.

“I’m gonna need you to put her under.”

My jaw almost broke, too, as it hit the floor.

“I spent seven years in college. I cheated on my driver’s license exam. I’m not sure I’m the guy for the job.”

“Listen,” he said intensely, “we need to give her the gas, and I need her breathing evenly. This is very important. It’s better if you do it. She trusts you.”

“And I trusted that you would be able to do your job, yet here we are.”

“You are her father and you need to do this now.”

I looked to LeeAnn and I could see that for the first time since Georgia fell two days ago, she was starting to fall apart. She had been the mother every person dreams of and the wife you could only imagine, but the sight of her daughter screaming in pain, scared and alone on a chair, was too much for her. This is a woman who raised herself and has never shown me she was scared, yet there she was, standing like I had, the day she gave birth, south of the gurney, when I learned what an episiotomy was.

So I manned the fuck up.

I walked over to the chair and knelt beside Georgia. “Hey, baby, here is the deal. We’re not gonna do the needle anymore.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

“I told that guy no more needle, not on my little girl!”

“Thanks, Daddy, they really hurt.”

“Yeah, I had no idea he was going to do that, he’s a real jerk and I’m gonna put him in a time-out after this.”

She leaned up to hug me as I watched the rest of the room collectively roll their eyes—all but the anesthesiologist, who eyed me to hurry things up.

“Here’s the deal. I got this sweet-smelling gas. You just got to sniff it and you’ll go to sleep. Then they can fix your teeth, and,
bam,
we go home and get ice cream!”

“I’ll go to sleep?”

“Yup, just like that and then we get ice cream!”

“What if I don’t wake up?”

My heart sank. I realized that was the question that had been haunting me this whole time. What if she didn’t wake up? How was I supposed to deal with that? How was I ever going to know joy again? My life would be fucked. Surely I would never be able to find humor in anything ever again, so what would I do for a living? Work at Home Depot? And from a practical standpoint, what would we do with her body? Would we take it home with us? I definitely couldn’t leave it in Beverly Hills with a bunch of strangers who I’m sure would just put it in a closet until the coroner came to get it. I’d need it with me. Would they let me take it home or would I have to sneak it out casually? And how would I sneak her body out of a dentist’s office—down an elevator and casually wait at valet with it as they brought my car around?

As all these thoughts flooded my head, I looked my daughter in the eyes.

“Good question. Let me ask.”

I walked over to the doctors. “What if she doesn’t wake up?”

The anesthesiologist said, “Listen, Dad, you need to do this now.”

I may have my shortcomings as a father and as a human being, but if nothing else, I take direction well.

I did an about-face, walked directly to her chair, grabbed the mask, whispered, “I love you, this is gonna be fine,” and then smothered my daughter like Lenny from
Of Mice and Men.
She fought me for a couple of seconds, but my 220-pound frame was more than she could handle. I could hear the dentist jokingly say to the anesthesiologist, “That’s one way to do it,” as her body went limp. They pulled me off her and went to work. I looked over and saw LeeAnn crying. In my head all I could hear was a voice whispering, “She is crying because she watched you kill your daughter.”

And that is when the floodgates reopened. I began crying a “first night in prison” cry, which seemed to be acceptable, until it escalated into a “first rape in prison” cry. The nurses escorted me out of the room, for fear that my crying might wake up my daughter, and into a bathroom. There it only got worse. It seemed so silly to me, the idea of facing myself in a bathroom mirror and crying, that I began laughing while I was crying, which must have sounded from the outside like someone was stabbing a clown. The idea of laughing at this moment pissed me off, but I couldn’t help it. Watching myself cry in a mirror looked hilarious. I looked so absolutely foolish. It was as if the old, childless Bert was looking at the new Bert and laughing back at him. I could hear him saying to me, “I told you, bitch. You’re weak, son!”

But the fact was that childless Bert was history. There was only me now, a man who loved his family so dearly that he gassed his own daughter, possibly killing her in the process.

I left the bathroom, and the man laughing back at me in the mirror, and walked into the waiting room. Apparently in the time it took us to get her under, the office had opened for business. As I took a seat next to LeeAnn—still in tears, both of us—I saw a boy to our left tug on his dad’s coat sleeve, and whisper something to him. I’m sure it was about my crying. Something to the effect of, “I thought you said this wasn’t going to be that bad.”

Directly across from us was a black woman who I could tell desperately wanted to make eye contact. For a second I entertained the thought; after all, black women have an innate soothing sense in times of need (see
The Matrix
). But my eyes were too filled with tears to make eye contact with anyone. The room was a blurred mess.

This is when the Xanax really kicked in.

The good and bad about Xanax is that it makes you very comfortable in not-so-comfortable situations, which could mean that, say you were crying in front of a bunch of strangers, your discomfort might subside, and suddenly you look and feel absolutely fine. Or, it could take away the shame you felt about your crying, and the discomfort that you were putting others through, and allow you to just let the waterfall flow. That’s what happened to me. I’ve done a lot of awkward things on Xanax—bragging at Thanksgiving dinner about a blow job I had gotten, holding a stranger’s hand in turbulence and realizing only afterward that he was not cool with it. That day I cried like no one has ever seen a man cry. Openly, honestly, and fearlessly for ten fucking minutes. I sobbed out phrases like, “I’m a daddy,” “I love her,” and “We need to take her home, I want her body” so intensely that when the door opened and the dentist came out and discreetly said to us, “She is okay. You can come back and get her,” the room broke into applause. We walked the few short steps from the waiting room. Georgia was still sound asleep in her room, bloody gauze hanging out her mouth.

“She did great,” they said, which I found to be a bit insulting considering I did all the hard work. She had done nothing but lie there unconscious. But I didn’t argue. LeeAnn picked her up and they sent us to a recovery room to let her wake up naturally.

In the recovery room I realized exactly how expensive this dentist was going to be. They had a leather couch, candles, and music playing in the background. I slid the curtain to close off our corner of the room and exhaled. I looked at LeeAnn and I saw her like I had never seen her before. It was a different version of the woman I met, a different version of sexy. This wasn’t just a guy checking out a chick, but a man looking at a woman and all the traits she possessed, in awe. How had I been so lucky? I stared at her in silence, hoping in some alternate universe, by way of some small miracle, she saw in me what I was seeing in her.

That’s when I heard the curtain open and saw the shock on LeeAnn’s face. It was the black woman from the waiting room.

Whitney fucking Houston.

She gave me a hug and whispered, “It’s hard being a daddy.” She then sat on the couch with LeeAnn and Georgia, stroking Georgia’s hair, and talked to us both about parenthood—the spoils that are promised and the heartache it came with. She sat with us for about ten minutes and we said nothing. She looked absolutely stunning as she filled the room with her words of wisdom, none of which I can remember—I was too busy hoping she would start singing to my daughter. (She didn’t.) She gracefully left, wished us luck, and we sat in silence as she closed the curtain behind her.

LeeAnn mouthed to me,
“Whitney fucking Houston.”

We took Georgia home, put her in bed, and took naps ourselves. That night LeeAnn told me the tooth fairy needed to get himself to the toy store and get some gifts. This was a big deal and, in this situation, a quarter just would not do.

I went to the store, and as I walked up and down the toy section, I felt a pride I had never felt before. I had been through the thick of a difficult situation and made it to the other side. I had two healthy, happy children despite one being almost toothless, and a woman who was the best partner since Clyde met Bonnie. I could provide for my family on the road, but also step up and be a man and a father when the situation demanded it. I had cried in front of strangers but was cool with it. I was vulnerable, and I was cool with that, too. I was a dad, first and foremost, and no amount of partying, drinking, or touring would ever change that.

But there was one takeaway that was more important than the rest, and that was this: I met Whitney Houston. And that would have never happened if I hadn’t become a dad.

 

About the Author

 

 

Bert Kreischer is a stand-up comic who performs to sellout crowds across the country. He is a regular guest on
The Joe Rogan Experience
and
The Rachael Ray Show
and has appeared on
Late Night with David Letterman
and
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
He is the host of the Travel Channel’s
Trip Flip
and previously hosted
Hurt Bert
and
Bert the Conqueror
. He is the host of the
Bertcast
podcast. And his one-hour special
Comfortably Dumb
appears on Comedy Central.

 

bertbertbert.com

@bertkreischer

 

 

LIFE OF THE PARTY.
Copyright © 2014 by Bert Kreischer. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.stmartins.com

 

Cover design by Rob Grom

 

Cover photographs by Jeff Katz

 

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

 

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

 

ISBN 978-1-250-03025-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-03031-3 (e-book)

 

e-ISBN 9781250030313

 

First Edition: June 2014

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
6.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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