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

by Bert Kreischer

  I realized just how crazy I sounded when she spelled it out, but I wasn’t done.

  “Do you mind if I sit here for a little while and wait for him?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  As I sat in the waiting room of the restaurant, I could hear the hostess and her colleagues mocking me. She asked a passing waiter if he had any tables with Will Smith at them, to which he responded, “Yeah. He’s sitting with Kevin Kline and Marvin Gaye.” That carried on for the next ten minutes until, from behind me came a six-foot-six, 350-pound black man. His eyes panned the waiting room until they met mine. “You Bert?”

  I nodded yes and he motioned for me to follow him downstairs. All I could think as I followed him was, “I pray to God I don’t have to fuck this guy, too. I bet there is a lot of dick in those pants.”

  He led me to the bottom of the stairs and showed me to a small room. “In here,” he said. I stepped into the small room to find nothing but the red velvet curtain that encased it, a folding table, and nine black men waiting for me.

  My heart dropped. I thought this was just going to be me and Will, I thought. The idea of fucking one man I could wrap my head around, but fucking ten? I stood in the doorway with my mouth wide open. I offered a smile but was met with none in return. As I walked in, they stopped talking and started staring at me. The 350-pounder (I later learned his name was Charlie Mack) left without an introduction—not that I minded. I was too busy doing the math: nine black men, Will makes ten, and I’m sure he is bringing Jazzy Jeff, which makes eleven black men that I will have to fuck, all on a folding table.

  We waited silently for what seemed like an eternity as I pondered how many yards of black cock would be passing through me that night. I stood motionless with my back to the wall not making eye contact, the way white people do when they are being stared at by black people.

  Until, to my surprise, the Fresh Prince himself walked in with, you guessed it, Jazzy Jeff and three other friends that were, thank God, of smaller stature. By this time I was mentally lining them up in order of size and line placement for what would be the longest game of leaky submarine ever played.

  Again, Will lit up the room—everyone smiled. He put his arm around me, announcing, “Everyone, this is Bert, the guy I’ve been talking about so much.”

  My heart sunk as they smiled and began to move in on me. In panicked moments like this your brain thinks faster than normal. My brain whispered, “Get on your knees.” I figured I would definitely rather go for a clean-up-free, no-harm-no-foul blow job than a that-was-awkard-but-fun-sorry-you-are-crying butt fuck. I was about to ask Will if he wouldn’t mind going first and saving Charlie Mack for last, when I felt the curtains behind me brush my heels. They opened and everyone in the room moved past me. I turned to find the most impressive personal movie theater I had ever seen. Will, arm still around me, said, “Grab two seats, I’ll get us drinks.”

  I grabbed the best two seats in the theater—middle row, center—and before I could say “Parents just don’t understand,” he showed up with two Long Island Iced Teas. He leaned over and whispered, “Crazy room for a hip-hop fan.”

  “Huh?” I muttered.

  “Biz Markie, Kool Moe Dee, Jeff, Charlie Mack.”

  They were all there. They had been there since the beginning. I was too preoccupied with sizing up the lump in their pants to look at their faces. Will, in our dance studio meeting, had listened to me explain what a huge hip-hop fan I was and decided to pull some strings and get all the greats in one room for me to meet. I had been seeing more feet of cock to bear when in actuality I was living a hip-hop fan’s wet dream. As the movie started, I thought to myself, I could have fucked Kool Moe Dee?”

  The movie was American Pie and I laughed liberally, hoping that Will would think I was connected with what the youth of America found funny. When Jason Biggs put his dick in the pie, the room full of brothers groaned. Will leaned over to me and whispered, “You believe that?”

  I whispered back, “I did that to a McDonald’s cheeseburger once.”

  I regretted saying it until Will laughed. “And that is why we are doing this deal!”

  At the end of the movie, we sat around finishing up cocktails and getting ready to leave when Will put me on the spot. “So Bert, what was your favorite part of the movie?”

  I wanted to say, “The part where I didn’t fuck fifteen black guys.” I opted for, “The Stifler character. Every white guy knows a guy like that, and it was played brilliantly.” Biz Markie mumbled something about white people that I couldn’t decipher, but the others heard it and fell apart.

  When we walked up the stairs, all I could think of was how badly I wanted that same hostess to be at the top. As luck would have it, we crested the stairs and there she was. When her eyes met mine, I nudged Will and said, “The hostess is a huge fan of yours.” Will smiled at me, slid over to her as only a mega movie star could, flashed his million-dollar smile, and said, “One love! One love.” Her mouth was agape. Before following him out, I whispered, “The movie theater is downstairs.”

  * * *

  A few weeks later, the deal was closed and we sold a show to FOX. We wrote it, and a year later they passed on it, as they do with most development deals. But I learned a lot from Will in that year. He taught me two of the most important lessons in Hollywood: how to take a general meeting and how to sell a TV show. He also validated my existence in Hollywood. Because of Will’s belief in me, CBS signed me the very next year to another development deal, and the cycle started all over again. This time I ended up shooting a pilot alongside Elliott Gould. Elliott and I got along really well. So well, in fact, that at the end of production I walked into my dressing room to find a note with a phone number on it that said, CALL ME, ELLIOTT. I called him and he said, “You are an interesting young man, very talented, we should get to know each other. Do you like seafood?”

  I heard my dad’s voice. “I think he wants to fuck you, buddy.”

  8.

  A Honeymoon You Can’t Refuse

  My wife was pregnant when we got married. We hadn’t planned on it, but upon hearing the news we were both elated. We were in our thirties and well past the time where something like that was truly an accident. I knew LeeAnn was who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and now she had to. We found out she was pregnant the day after we moved in together—the same day, coincidentally, that I had convinced her to take a Xanax and down a pitcher of margaritas with me while we painted the living room.

  We told the doctor on our first prenatal visit and she smiled at us. “As long as that’s not a lifestyle type of thing your baby is going to be fine.”

  For who? was my first thought. That was exactly my lifestyle at the time. But my wife, who rarely drinks and hasn’t taken a Xanax since, heard that as a mandate, and thankfully so. What I heard was that I had a designated driver. We told our friends that night, she told the girls, and I told the boys who responded by handing me a glass of absinthe.

  I took no part in planning our wedding, not because I didn’t care, but because I am suspicious of any man that does. Weddings are a woman’s dream, honeymoons are a man’s. She wanted to get married in her hometown so we were getting married in her hometown, which was so small and so Southern that question four of our marriage license application was, “Are you blood relatives?”

  The only time I did step in on planning was when my wife asked me whether we wanted to dance or to drink at the wedding.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “We can’t have both because in my hometown they believe that the two together lead to sin.”

  “What is this, Footloose?”

  “We gotta pick one.”

  My answer came quickly. “I pick booze, ’cause I’m dying to see them stop me from dancing.”

  Like I said, my focus was the honeymoon and considering I was already partying for three, I paid great attenti
on to the planning. I didn’t want to fly—I knew a flight would cause more anxiety than necessary, on one of the most anxious days of my life. Our wedding was in her hometown of Bowdon, Georgia, which meant our options were even more limited.

  There was also the fact that I was close to broke. LeeAnn didn’t quite know it yet—that was information I’d share after our commitment ceremony—but all the TV money I had been gifted as a youth was running close to dry. I scoured the Internet looking for honeymoon options and came up with nothing. But my concerns were lifted at the eleventh hour when my dad called.

  “Buddy, I got the place for your honeymoon.”

  He had been talking about my honeymoon situation with a friend, and this friend said he had just been to the most amazing, quaint resort. It had blown his mind. We could get a discounted rate, he added. My dad told me he had already taken the liberty of booking us a place at the resort, so as not to lose out on the opportunity. We were locked in. I asked him what the price per night was, and he said it was around thirteen hundred a night regularly, but with the deal he was getting for us, it was going to be a steal.

  Once we heard the details, we were sold. There were only thirteen rooms on the island, and every room was a treetop bungalow with its own outdoor shower. Everything, he told me, was included—booze, food, activities. All you had to do was show up and you would be taken care of every step of the way. It sounded too good to be true.

  I told LeeAnn, who was shocked at the thought of paying $1,300 a night. She had already paid for our entire wedding, which cost $5,000. So a honeymoon that outspent that amount was no small thing. But I assured her with my dad’s hookup, which was almost half off (I was guessing), and not having to buy plane tickets, it was a totally affordable plan. She conceded, I called my dad, and it was done.

  Our wedding was beautiful, a true testament to redneck ingenuity. It was like CMT and TLC had teamed up. We were married at the church across from her grandparents’ house the day after Christmas. It was catered by everyone who loved her. LeeAnn’s grandfather smoked several hams for pulled pork. Her granny and aunts put in at least eighty hours in the kitchen, making potato salad, Brunswick stew, and cole slaw. We had two wedding cakes, one made by her cousin and another made of Krispy Kreme donuts and Moon Pies. My dad ate himself sick and my mom danced like it was her wedding (LeeAnn’s dad got special permission from her small Baptist town for us to both drink and dance).

  The next morning we said good-bye to our families, hopped in my mom’s car and drove south toward the Florida Keys, hauling ass and excited, like we were picking up a kilo of coke. Our destination was a place called Little Palm Island.

  Many hours later we pulled up to the valet at Little Palm. As a joke, I asked the valet if he had ever met a famous person before, thinking he might be curious or even stunned by my question. He was not.

  “Yes, they come here all the time,” he said as he reached for the keys to my mom’s car.

  “But who is like the biggest, though? Because, you know, I’m on TV. I don’t want this stay to be awkward.”

  “Evander Holyfield was here last week.”

  “The prizefighter?”

  “Yeah, the prizefighter. And you just missed Debra Messing.”

  My wife laughed as he took my keys. “We’ll keep your car on the mainland,” he said. He left us at check-in holding our bags with me holding my dick in my hand.

  We both suddenly felt out of place. If what the valet had told us was true, then this place was obviously a five-star place, and here we were in shorts, flip-flops, T-shirts, and sunglasses we had gotten at a gas station earlier that day. Our bags didn’t match. To top things off I was holding a case of Budweiser under one arm like Uncle Eddie from Vacation.

  But as we approached the front desk from the valet, I still beamed with excitement. There’s nothing I love more than starting a vacation and this was a big one, the kind prizefighters and movie stars took, and I was getting it for half off.

  I lowered my sunglasses and like a true sophisticate announced to the man behind the counter that this was our honeymoon. He forced a smile, congratulated us, and offered us the island’s signature cocktail, called a Gumby Slumber. I’m not sure exactly what was in it—rum, juice, bean shavings, coconut, perhaps. I grabbed both, gesturing toward LeeAnn. “She’s pregnant but I’ll take hers.”

  Within moments we were checked in. But I was confused. Where we had pulled in was just off the main highway that takes you from Miami to Key West, and all around I saw nothing that resembled a five-star hotel. No treetop bungalows in sight. That is when the clerk motioned us to a dock.

  “The boat out there will take you to the hotel.”

  “The hotel isn’t here?”

  “The hotel is on a private island, sir.”

  “A private island.”

  “It’s very nice. You won’t be let down, sir.”

  We left our four mismatched suitcases at the front desk and walked out to the dock, where we found a boat straight out of the 1920s waiting for us. I secured the Budweiser under my arm, grabbed LeeAnn’s backpack, and we hopped on.

  Just as we were about to take off we heard someone from the check-in area call out to hold the boat. The captain obliged, and we waited until on the dock appeared two of the most uptight, upscale, white-bread New York socialite-yuppie types I had ever seen. They had matching pastel sweaters tied around their necks, brand-new Birkenstocks and Revo sunglasses, and both held armfuls of designer bags from what looked to be an extensive, recent shopping spree.

  They literally did a double take when they saw LeeAnn and me. They actually turned their noses. This was a couple we would never hang out with. They were the complete and total opposite of everything we stood for.

  The two sat directly across from us. Short introductions were made before they took great pleasure in telling us everything we needed to know—that he was an investment banker, she was an art dealer, that they badly needed this vacation because things were absolutely hectic for them. It was so hard, they said, to really take time for themselves these days. They had, in fact, been shopping in Key West and spent way more than they expected, but why do you make the money if not to spend it? It’s a vacation, right? After listening to their résumés for half the boat ride, the woman asked us about ourselves. I took the bull by the horns.

  “I’m a comedian and she manages the apartment building we live in. Which is great because we don’t have to pay rent. We just got married. Oh, and she’s pregnant.”

  That was the end of that. They looked at us as if we were a couple of Somali pirates who had just hopped on the boat, then went through the spoils of their shopping spree, always keeping a careful eye on us. I cracked open a Budweiser and we all enjoyed the silence.

  When the boat pulled up to Little Palm Island, I nearly tripped over LeeAnn’s jaw. A new concierge had come to greet us at the dock and give us a tour of the island. It was amazing, possibly the nicest place I have ever been. Manicured lawns, treetop bungalows, a gorgeous pool, a private beach, a top-notch fitness center and spa, a library, and a restaurant. Everything was private and everything was over-the-top. The tour couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes—the whole island was only five acres—but with every turn you took, something new impressed you. I kept waiting to see a prince or a president.

  The concierge directed us to our bungalow, which overlooked the ocean and was set twenty feet up in the trees.

  When we got to the door LeeAnn grabbed me and whispered, “They’ve carved our name in the door.”

  She was right. These rooms didn’t have numbers, they carved your names into the fucking door. He let us in and it was absolutely gorgeous. Dark teak wood floors, white, plump couches, and a huge California king bed set upon a frame made out of reclaimed lumber from a shipyard, with a mosquito net draped over it. Big, slow ceiling fans spun in every room, but I didn’t listen to a word the concierge said after I passed the outdoor shower. There is something absolutely mag
ical about bathing yourself outside, and to me the idea of hot water in the cold morning air was something you only read about in books. I was naked before he even left the room, singing in the treetops as I cleaned every inch of my body. I cracked another Budweiser and walked in from the shower to find LeeAnn inspecting the room.

  “This is going to be expensive.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “My dad got it hooked up. We’re paying next to nothing for this. Zilch. Zero.”

  “The guy that showed us around said that khakis and collared shirts are mandatory for the men at dinner along with close-toed shoes. Did you bring those?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He said the menu is set by the chef and you eat what everyone else eats. He also said if we’d like he can set a table up in the ocean.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what he said, but you have to pay for it.”

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  It was getting close to dinner time so I threw on my khakis, a collared shirt, a pair of shoes, and walked with LeeAnn over to the restaurant. As we made our way to our table and I sized up the other guests, I could tell beyond a doubt that we didn’t belong. We were not only younger than the average guest, but I assumed from the fact that some of them were in suits and evening wear that we were in a considerably lower income bracket. I remember being obsessed with the fact that it looked like they had all just showered. It seemed odd to me, this must have been some kind of rich-person behavior, considering I don’t usually shower when I’m on vacation. As I saw it, the beach was a shower, as was the pool. Maybe they were as obsessed with their outdoor showers as I was. Anyway, I may not have been like them, but I sure as hell could smell like them. My only saving grace as a broke comic walking around a room of upper crusters was that my new wife was banging hot. I dumped all my insecurities into that fact.