The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (23 page)

“You must be Ron Jeremy,” he said with a giddy smile.

“That’s me,” I said, giving him the once-over. “And you would be?”

“The name’s Sam Kinison,”
**
he said, grabbing my hand and shaking it. “I have the funny feeling that you and I are gonna become friends.”

I
feel bad for those of you who never got to see Sam Kinison perform. His records and CDs are still around to give you some idea of what you missed, but none of it compares with the live show. It’s difficult to describe to the uninitiated. It was like watching a volcano erupt, drenching an unsuspecting town in hot lava. It happened that slowly, often without warning. Sam would begin his act by just pacing across the stage, clutching his microphone but saying nothing, until the audience began to grow restless. And then, out of nowhere, came that decibel-splitting, eardrum-shattering scream.

His screams were equal parts fury and pain, outrage and heartache. Unlike many of the shock comics of his era, who lashed out at anyone and everyone with a sense of smug superiority, Sam never came across (at least to me) like a bully. If he was angry, it was because he was sincerely hurt that the world wasn’t a better place. His screams were not born out of arrogance but frustration. While a comic like Andrew Dice Clay might make sexual jokes about women in general, Kinison saved his venom specifically for the women who had broken his heart. And he did it in a way that made you feel a part of the experience, like he was a pastor leading his congregation, helping you banish those dark demons that could be exorcized only with a good, long, primal scream.

Sam and I had some great conversations over the years. In particular, he enjoyed discussing my porn career.

“Do you remember that film
A Girl’s Best Friend
?” he asked me once. “There was the scene where you’re balling the maid in the kitchen while eating chicken legs.”

“Yeah, I remember it,” I said, a little embarrassed.

“You start listing off your favorite foods while you’re fucking her. You’re muttering, ‘Apples, plums, olives, flour.’ And then when you cum, you’re screaming, ‘Foood! Fooood!’ Oh man, Ronnie, I laughed so hard, I forgot to jerk off.

“And who could forget your timeless role as Sheriff Slater in
Bad Girls II
?” he snickered. “You’re fucking those three girls in the jail cell. Come to think of it, you were eating chicken in that scene, too. Y’know, Ronnie, it’s starting to make sense why you’ve gained so much weight. Have you ever done a sex scene that didn’t involve food?”

I once brought Jamie Gillis to Sam’s Fourth of July barbecue. Sam enjoyed asking him questions and, as he did so often with me, repeating back his favorite lines from Jamie’s films.

It was impossible to resist Sam’s enthusiasm for all things porno. When he asked to visit the sets, I couldn’t very well tell him no. In some cases, I even concocted a reason for him to be there, such as when I was cast in a movie called
Stiff Competition
, billed as “The Super Bowl of Suck-Offs.” The movie’s grand finale featured a blow-job contest in a wrestling ring, and hundreds of extras were needed for the crowd scenes. Sam brought a few of his comic friends, and during breaks in the shoot, they were easily coaxed into doing impromptu stand-up for the exhausted extras, to help the morale of the crowd. Though Sam’s face never appeared on-screen in the edited film, you could clearly see the back of his head, which delighted Sam to no end.

While Sam was renting Robin Williams’s house in the Hollywood Hills, he let me borrow his temporary digs to shoot a film. Though we tried to be inconspicuous, we learned later that we might’ve given Robin’s neighbor an unexpected gift. One of my actresses was given the wrong address, and after driving around the neighborhood for hours, she took a wild guess and walked up to the house next door. Now, I won’t swear to this, but I’m pretty sure that when she knocked at the door, she was greeted by a very surprised David Hasselhoff (long before his
Baywatch
days).
*

“Is this where the porno is being shot?” she asked.

Hasselhoff looked at the drop-dead gorgeous woman standing before him, thought about it, and then said, “Well, I guess it is now.”

Sam was always a loyal friend. When he skyrocketed to fame, he would bring me along during his concert tours, paying for my hotel rooms and giving me backstage access to all of his shows. Nothing really changed between us, other than that it was now
Sam
who was buying dinners and attracting hordes of autograph seekers. I also became friends with his brother Bill, his “Outlaws of Comedy,” his various girlfriends at the time, and Rick Jones, his bodyguard.

Sam would occasionally share the spotlight with me. I made a cameo in his music video for
Under My Thumb
.
*
And when the Fox Network asked him to host a New Year’s Eve special, he promised me a small part. In return, I provided ten female porn stars for the show. I arrived for the pretaping and waited around all day, watching as Sam filmed segment after segment. I was worried that he might forget me entirely. But at long last, Sam finally called me to the stage for our prescripted routine.

“So, what are your New Year’s resolutions, Ron?” he asked.

“Oh, I guess I want to be like you,” I said. “I just want to be a part of family entertainment.”

It was a funny little skit, and though I had only a few minutes of screen time, I knew it would be worth it. But as we performed several takes for the camera, I began to suspect that something wasn’t right. Crew members were already starting to wrap for the day. I could hear loud crashes behind me as set pieces were dismantled and carted away. The director wasn’t even paying attention to us, noisily conversing with his PAs and gaffers. It wasn’t the hushed atmosphere that one usually finds on a professional shoot. And that’s when I figured it out.

“There isn’t any film in the camera, is there?” I asked.

Sam shrieked with laughter. “Of course there is. What are you talking about?”

I peered at the camera’s blinking red light. It appeared to be rolling, but I couldn’t be sure. I had used the same trick once on John Holmes.

“You’re a fucking liar,” I accused him. “That camera is empty!”

Sam dropped to the floor and clutched at his sides. “You are such a paranoid freak.” He laughed. “Do you really think I’d do that to you?”

We continued with the skit, but I knew in my heart that none of it was being shot on film. And sure enough, when the New Year’s Eve special premiered, our scene was nowhere to be found.

I was upset, but it didn’t stop me from finding work for Sam. It wasn’t always easy. I got him a speaking part in the film
Lords of Magick
, but he lost it when he blew off his first meeting with the director.
*
Fred Asparagus got the part instead. Sometimes, though, it actually worked. I recommended him for a role in
Savage Dawn
, and he was perfectly cast as a born-again Christian barber who gets his throat slit after singing “Amazing Grace” to a rogue biker (played by Bill Forsythe).

By the late 1980s, Sam’s comedy career was bigger than ever. United Artists offered him a starring role in a movie called
Atuk
, about an Eskimo who travels to New York City. Sam promised roles to several of his comedy friends. He was going to try to find me something as well. But just weeks before the shoot was to begin, the project crumbled.

Sam didn’t care for the
Atuk
script and decided to rewrite it. I visited him at the Mayflower Hotel in L.A., where he and his writing partner pulled all-nighters to finish a new draft. When he submitted their revisions to United Artists, they balked and told him that they would be using the original script.

“I told them if they didn’t give me a little more creative control, I’d just walk through it,” he explained to me later. “I’d give a lousy performance on purpose.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“They pulled the plug.”
*

I told him that it might be a bad idea to clash with a major Hollywood studio and a man like Michael Ovitz. And sure enough, United Artists filed a lawsuit against Sam, and he and his manager, Elliot Abbot, parted ways. But he didn’t care.

“I’m not going to give my fans a crappy movie,” he said. “If it means I go back to sleeping on floors, that’s fine. You can just buy me dinners like you used to.”

Even if I didn’t always agree with his career decisions, I still joined him occasionally during his
Leader of the Banned
concert tour. I even introduced him to my former porn cohort, Seka. They dated for a while, and when he hosted
Saturday Night Live
, Sam gave her a nice bit in a skit with Dana Carvey (the Church Lady).
**
His eventual fallout with Seka was particularly brutal. (Supposedly, it had to do with Billy Idol.) Sam told me that during their breakup, he said to her, “If I ever want to see your face again, I’ll rent a tape.”

On April 10, 1992, I was at the Comedy Store hanging out with Jim Carrey and some of the other comics when we heard the horrifying news of Sam’s death. Earlier that day, Sam had been on his way to a stand-up gig in Laughlin when he was hit by a drunk driver in the Nevada desert. Sam had often predicted that he would die young. He told me that he just wanted to see the new millennium, and make it past January 1, 2000. I had always suspected that if Sam did meet with an early demise, it would involve a car crash.
*

How did I know? Because I was involved in one of those crashes.
**

Six years or so before the accident that would take his life, I was driving with Sam through New Jersey, on our way to Manhattan. Sam was planning to perform at Catch a Rising Star with Robin Williams. It was a rainy night, and Sam was driving erratically and far too fast for my comfort, but it was nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

We were talking about religion and death, with Sam arguing the pro-God agenda. He had been a Pentecostal evangelist long before getting into comedy, and he still held firmly to his beliefs.

“I
think
I believe in Him,” I said. “I
think
I speak to Him. I just wish I had more proof.”

“What does proof have to do with anything?” he said. “It’s not about needing proof, it’s about having a gut feeling that the universe isn’t random, that there’s some spiritual architect responsible for it.”

The rain was starting to come down in sheets, but Sam refused to slow down. He continued speaking to me, but I was too terrified to talk back. The road was just a blur, and I was convinced that he would lose control of the car before long.

And sure enough, as Sam tried to negotiate a corner, he skidded off the highway and down into an embankment. We flipped over and came crashing into a tree, shattering the windows and demolishing the car. We sat there for a moment, upside down, too dazed to do anything else, and I wondered if we might be dead.

“Are you okay?” Sam finally asked me.

“I think so,” I said. “How about you?”

We crawled out of the windows and staggered to our feet. Sam laughed as I gathered the pages of my phone book off the car’s ceiling. We picked glass out of our clothes and hair, and checked our bodies for broken bones or blood, but there was nothing. The car was totaled, but somehow we had survived without so much as a scratch.

We walked toward the highway in the rain, neither of us saying a word. If I was thinking clearly, I might have yelled at Sam, chastising him for nearly killing us. It was a miracle that we both weren’t mangled corpses. But I didn’t have the energy to get into a screaming fit. I was just thankful to be alive and walking upright.

“So Ronnie,” he said, “do you believe in God now?”

His face was drenched with rainwater, and he was laughing like some mad prophet who had just shared a life lesson.

“You really go out of your way to prove a point,” I said.
*

A few days later, upon hearing this story, Bill (Sam’s brother) and Carl LaBove sat me down, looked me in the eye and said, “It wasn’t Sam proving the point.”

C
omedians always seem to use me as a punch line for some of their jokes. Eddie Murphy did a great routine about me on HBO, as I mentioned earlier, which came very close to being included in his 1987 concert movie
Raw
. “It’s okay if Ron Jeremy sucks his own dick,” Eddie observed. “As long as he doesn’t cum in his own face or fuck himself in the ass with his own dick. ’Cause that would
definitely
be gay.”

Sarah Silverman had a hilarious bit that she’s used in her stand-up and on talk shows like
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
and
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show
. She noticed that whenever she saw me masturbating in a porno, I would always be lifting a pinky in the air. “I realized why that is,” she said. “It’s because he’s a classy guy.”

Dave Chappelle brought me on his Comedy Central show to do a skit about the Internet. He’s having a fantasy where he imagines that the Web is an actual place, a physical location that anybody can visit. He’s walking through cyberspace, and he bumps into me.

“Are you sure you don’t wanna see me have sex?” I ask him. “I do a great doggy-style.”

“Yeah, I know, Ron,” he says. “I got my stroke from you. Thank you, Obi-Wan!”

Drew Carey once referenced me in a routine about Brad Pitt. He’d heard rumors that Pitt has a large penis, which struck him as very unfair. God, he said, shouldn’t just pass out the large cocks to anybody. “If you’re attractive, you shouldn’t have a big penis, too,” he reasoned. “It should be one or the other. Look at Ron Jeremy. Now
that’s
fair.”

Yeah, it was kinda mean, but I don’t mind being insulted as long as it’s funny. And insulting or not, it brings a performer like me closer into the world of pop-culture status.