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

by Bert Kreischer

  The school day went just fine, as I remember it. I distinctly remember not being nervous but excited. Funny, too, because now, as a professional performer, I always get nervous. But that day I was stone-cold confident: I was going to murder.

  Then, suddenly, it was time for the talent show. Mrs. Thompson allowed my classmate Brian Callahan and me to go to the bathroom to take care of my hair and makeup. Ten minutes later we were back, and I was Gene Simmons. The class circled me admiringly. I couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces after my performance. I’d be a god.

  We left as a class for the auditorium, and I split off with Brian, who had now assumed the role of tour manager. We learned that I’d be performing in the latter half of the show. So I settled in, waiting for my cue as Brian made his way back to sit with the class.

  The show consisted of a predictable assortment of gymnastics, piano, comedy, and juggling. It wasn’t until about halfway through that I saw him. A fourth grader with a violin—dressed as KISS lead guitarist Ace Frehley. My heart sank—this kid had stolen my act. He walked up to me and nodded.

  “Which one are you supposed to be?”

  “Gene Simmons.”

  “Nice. What are you going to do?”

  “‘Rock And Roll All Nite.’”

  “No, what instrument are you going to play?”

  I looked at him like he had started speaking in Swahili. “Nothing,” I told him.

  “Nothing? What, are you … just going to dance?”

  “Kind of.”

  He started laughing and walked away. It wasn’t until I saw my act in this light that I realized how ill prepared I was for this talent show. I didn’t really have a talent, per se. All these people were dazzling the masses with actual skills they possessed, had been working on, crafting. My only real talent, as I saw it, was that I liked KISS.

  Panic set in as I watched Ace Frehley take the stage. Just seeing his makeup was enough to set off the crowd. Great, my one sure bet and he just stole it. Ace then banged out a semirecognizable version of “Shout It Out Loud.” He closed with a mock guitar strum on his violin. The place went nuts.

  He passed me without a word as he left the stage, then went over to the other fourth graders and slapped them five (high fives weren’t around yet). A couple of kids went on in between us and as they did, I felt the pressure mounting and my confidence wilting. I had no act, my costume looked ridiculous, my makeup was suspect. And I realized that I had somehow completely overlooked the “hair” portion of my hair-and-makeup routine.

  But there was no time to do anything about it. It was showtime. I had them start the music before my entrance, just as I would do with my uncles. But with no instrument to show for myself, the crowd was more confused than anything. I can only imagine they were trying to figure out what this mini drag queen had in store.

  It’s moments like these that define a man—when he must choose between risking major, public humiliation or admit that he’s been outclassed. I took that moment to sprint and then slide onto my knees up to the very edge of the stage.

  I then proceeded to air-guitar the fuck out my song for the K-through-Five set.

  The build started at the back, the fifth graders who I’m sure had been rolling their eyes at the kid with the violin. After all the pianos, violins, and jugglers, to then have a first grader crank a song they all knew and loved and get weird as fuck on their asses—it must have been a treat. I jammed for the whole song. Students sang along with me as I belted out the lyrics as loud as I could.

  I don’t remember too much of what followed. There was the looks on their faces. The sounds of their cheers. But mainly I remember the elation of having been on stage. When my parents picked me up at school, I wasn’t the same kid who had been dropped off that morning. I didn’t enter the talent show the next year, the year after that, or any other years at elementary school, but one thing was for sure: the bug of performing had bitten me.

  * * *

  They haven’t all been beauties. For every beauty, there are a dozen beasts. Fast-forward to 1993, Florida State University.

  By this time in my life I had begun to make a name for myself as a Funny Guy. I would write comic songs on my guitar about our friends, I was quick with a joke or a comeback, and was the go-to dude when our fraternity needed to put together a sketch or a skit. People would introduce me as one of the funniest guys they knew, and every once in a while, someone would pull me aside and tell me in all seriousness that I should try my hand at being a comedian.

  It sounded beyond unattainable, so I stayed in my small circle, continuing to make my friends laugh. My fraternity was the one place I knew I could always draw an audience. There were a few times a year when all 180 of us would gather, and one of those was elections. Guys would prepare a speech, put on a coat and tie, draw up bullet points on poster paper, and go around the room trying to sway votes in their direction.

  The more ambitious among us saw this as an opportunity to grow, network, pad a resume. I found it an ideal time to mock those guys. You got ten minutes to win votes. These were my ten minutes to entertain, my first brushes with stand-up. The first year I sang a song, got huge laughs—and lost. The second year, I gave a very sincere ten-minute speech, completely naked. At first I got laughs, then very uncomfortable eye contact as I strutted around the stage pretending not to be naked. My platform was, “I have nothing to hide,” and despite my command performance, I lost again.

  The third year I hadn’t prepared anything when I saw that Josh Young was running uncontested for the position of Worthy Keeper of the Annals. I had been taking myself really seriously at the time. I was in a band, plotting a path away from Writer-Comedian and toward Brooding Artist. But old habits die hard. My bandmate, John Dacre, leaned over to me and whispered, “Are you going to run against him?”

  “No.” One.

  “Are you going to run at all?”

  “I don’t think so.” Two.

  “Well, you can’t let him run uncontested, you gotta go up there naked again.”

  “To be honest my stomach is kind of bothering me; if I did go up there, I would probably just shit all over the place.” Three.

  Having heard only the last half of the conversation, our bassist and John’s best friend, Brent Brackin, chimed in. “That would be hilarious! You have to do that!”

  I looked to Dacre, waiting for somebody to back down, but his eyes had widened.

  “Yeah, you’re doing that!”

  And just like that it was decided.

  The two stood up and, in unison, said, “We nominate Bert Kreischer for the Worthy Keeper of the Annals.”

  “Bert,” our president said, “do you accept?”

  I reluctantly nodded. The three of us headed back to the bathroom to prepare for my speech.

  Worthy Keeper of the Annals, the unfortunately titled office I was running for, was fairly low on the ballot, which meant it came early—and that we had very little time to plan anything. Lucky for us, the speech as we conceived it required very little preparation. I stripped nude, Brackin found a tie for me, and Dacre, in a moment of genius, pulled an empty pizza box out of the garbage. The president came back to the bathroom to see if we were ready. We were.

  We walked in toward the end of Josh’s speech, for which he was wielding a laser pointer (brand-new technology for the early 1990s). He was in a suit and tie, and closed with something to the effect of, “And that is why I think you should vote for me.”

  Josh took a seat as Brackin walked into the room and began to speak on my behalf, the kind of endorsement every candidate was required to have.

  He started solemnly, “Guys, as you know Bert can be something of a jokester, a prankster if you will. But ever since we started our band, I’ve seen a very different side of him. And I think tonight, if you look past the Bert you have come to know, you, too, will see a different side of him. With that said, for the position of Worthy Keeper of the Annals, our brother, Bert Kreischer.”
/>
  Dacre discreetly slid the pizza box into place. I revealed myself to the crowd, wearing only a tie. Like last year, they went nuts. A little lightheartedness was welcome, in what had come to be very serious and sometimes unhealthy campaigning. I walked up to the pizza box, butt cheeks clenched, and waited for the crowd to calm down.

  “I would like to show you all a very different side of me,” I said, turning my back to the crowd, facing the previous year’s council. The audience laughed at what they thought was a simple joke: my ass. But as I let go, I heard a gasp.

  It was the sound of the last breaths of fresh air in the room behind inhaled.

  The council, sitting at their designated table, seemed confused at first. I started peeing at their feet. (As we all learned that day, you can’t go number two without a little number one.)

  The smell was absolutely atrocious. The room cleared out in a matter of seconds. People literally jumped out of the windows, piled out of every door, began violently dry-heaving. The council lost their minds and demanded that I go back in the room and clean up my mess, which I did (and directly after, threw up). I’ll spare you too much description except to say that my aim for the pizza box was balls-on accurate.

  We gave the room a solid ten minutes of aerosol air freshener, assumed our places, and waited for everyone to vote. Ballots were collected as Josh and I stood at the front of the room, listening as people chuckled over what they had just seen. As the votes were tallied, I heard a rumbling of dissent from the members.

  “You guys have got to be fucking kidding right now.”

  We answered with curious faces.

  “There is only one vote for Josh. Bert won in a landslide.”

  The place went fucking bananas. Josh walked over to the ballots and confirmed what the council had told us, that everyone had voted for me … except for his own vote, for himself. (I had opted to abstain, as I found both candidates incompetent. I instead wrote, “Mills Sucks Pole” on my ballot.)

  The council congratulated me as Josh began to shout. “You’re not really gonna let this happen are you? The guy shit on a pizza box! I have a plan and a laser pointer. I wore a fucking suit.”

  “He won fair and square,” said the president.

  Josh looked at his brethren and shouted, “This is fucking bullshit!”

  An unknown brother piped back, “No, it’s bertshit.”

  * * *

  If these two stories, the beauty and the beast, form my legacy as an entertainer, then so be it. I hope to keep growing artistically, and I think these stories suggest I have. But if, at my funeral, the only people to speak are my makeup artist Brian Callahan and my bandmates John Dacre and Brent Brackin, and they share these two stories with the friends and family in attendance, please know that I will be smiling from up above. Naked. In KISS makeup. Rocking the fuck out.

  2.

  Alcoholism, Vandalism, Drug Use, and Other Ways to Have a Good Time

  Fraternities take a lot of flak, and rightly so. Mine was something of a breeding ground for racism, sexism, alcoholism, vandalism, homophobia, and drug use. I know that anyone with a liberal blog is about to lose their mind and get those angry butterflies that inhabit enraged chests, but my goal here is not to anger, but to show you how much fun racism, alcoholism, vandalism, homophobia, and drug use can be for a young man. Maybe shine a light on a secret part of society, the way a disco ball sparkles in a dorm room at 3 A.M. when you’re blowing up on X. No one ever meant too much harm. We were a bunch of simple-minded boys who were desperately trying to find out who we were before entering the big wide world. There’s a part of me that wishes I had been strong enough as a young man to carve my own path, rather than following in the footsteps of so many. But it was a whole lot of fucking fun if you were a guy with six years to kill. One thing I can say for certain, I would do it again completely.

  I pledged along with my roommate and best friend at the time, Jeff Hartley, in the fall of 1991, the first semester of my freshman year, the year grunge meandered its flannels onto the music scene. We rushed a couple fraternities but gravitated toward the one that was populated mostly by guys who had gone to our high school in Tampa. Pledging a fraternity is a mindfuck of an activity. They wine and dine you to get you to join, then allow you a two- to three-week grace period, just enough for you to get comfortable. It’s the kind of grace period an abusive husband or a sociopath might give you. You’re comfortable, you’re confident, then when you least expect it, you are hiding in the closet because you’ve overcooked dinner. The first time it happened to me was also the first time I heard the N-word used unapologetically. I was so appalled I almost stood up and left. But no one else was leaving, and considering that the group of older boys yelling at us was looking for someone to single out—and standing up and protesting, “Language, gentlemen,” would do exactly that—I held in my liberal rage until we were alone.

  After the meeting my pledge class sat around in a circle drinking beers, collecting our thoughts. I waited for the right moment to voice my concern.

  “Can you believe that guy said the N-word?”

  “Grow the fuck up,” said one of my older pledge brothers, who had gotten hazed beyond belief and would later de-pledge because of it. “He didn’t mean it as racist. He wasn’t calling a black person a nigger. He was calling us niggers; it’s not racist if you call a white person a nigger.” Although I cringed every time he said the word, you couldn’t argue with his logic.

  Another pledge brother chimed in. “Yeah, it had nothing to do with race … you dumb nigger.”

  Everyone laughed, and I left my longhaired liberal outrage behind. And that is how complicity to racism happens.

  It made sense in a way. They were constantly trying to shock us. In that climate, you kind of fell into line quickly and you were never comfortable. Anytime you felt relaxed, it was because they let you feel relaxed so you could slip up just enough that they could haze you. They were giving you the rope to hang yourself. They’d let you show your ass and then call you on it. So when they did haze you, it was for those things that you’d done—like admit which brother you thought didn’t belong in the fraternity, or who had the hottest chick you’d like to fuck, or better yet who you thought might be gay. The proper reprimand would always involve ratting you out and lots of screaming.

  To say that our house was a place of hazing is like saying that Guantánamo Bay is a residence for independent-thinking Middle Easterners. There were one or two guys that got hazed worse than the others because people had personal beefs with them. I got hazed because I was gullible, likeable, and something of a moron. I’d be walking into the house in the early morning to clean the up head and pass Pete Whalen, a guy I’m still friends with. He’d see me walk in, tired and hungover, and grab hold of me.

  “Hey, at 6 A.M. I need you to wake up Brother Siminson.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, he asked me to do it, but I have to leave.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “He’s a heavy sleeper, so he said to grab a hammer and bang on his door until he gets up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certain. And don’t make me say it again, pledge. You got a dip?”

  Dip was the binding powder that brought us all closer to each other. Ground-up tobacco that you pinched and placed between your bottom lip and teeth. Your safety as a pledge was dependent on two things: if you dipped, and what brand you dipped. The only two acceptable brands were Skoal mint and Copenhagen. Copenhagen was for the guys who owned trucks, had been hit by their fathers, drank whiskey, and said the N-word. Skoal mint was for the softer boys, who usually came from country clubs, private schools, and veered away from racial slurs. Pete and I were Skoal men, as was Siminson. I pulled out a fresh can, handed it to Pete, and he took a big morning-sized dip, as did I.

  “So, I’m safe leaving my responsibility in your hands?”

  “Safe!”

  “I don’t want to get fucked on
this one!”

  “You won’t, I promise.” We both spat and walked in separate directions, me to clean the up head, and Pete to economics class.

  Come 6 A.M., there I was with a framing hammer outside Siminson’s door. I started soft, but after a short while found no result. My soft taps then turned into harder bumps, grouped in machine-gun spurts. Still nothing. Slowly I could hear other brothers in other rooms waking up, shouting for the guy with the jackhammer to stop, but still I heard nothing from my intended target. Finally, I decided to pull the stops and began taking Paul Bunyan–sized swings at my target. The dip juice seeped between my teeth as I swung at the door with all my might. I remembered thinking at one point I should probably pull back a bit or I might just knock the numbers off, when I finally heard movement in his room. Excited, like a fisherman who feels a tug on his line and wants to set his hook, I banged out a few murderous booms for good measure, and with that Siminson was at the door, in a rage.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “You have to wake up.”

  Siminson looked still asleep but shocked, like someone had just lit him on fire in the middle of his slumber. He grabbed the hammer out of my hand and slammed the door in my face. “Motherfucker,” I heard him yell from the other side of the door.

  Part of me wanted to make sure he was up, and the other part of me realized Pete had most likely been fucking with me. The question of which part of me was right was answered when I ran into Siminson at lunch in the mess hall.

  “I’m gonna make your life a living fucking hell this semester.”

  “But Brother Siminson, Brother Whalen—”

  “Shut the fuck up before I go to my room, get that hammer, and shove it up your ass. You got a dip?”

  I handed him my can of Skoal, he put it in his pocket and walked away. That was the way it worked. Brothers fucked with the pledges, and if they could ricochet it so that fucking with us meant fucking with a brother at the same time, even better.