Usually any type of approval makes me bubble, but with this I had a bit of hesitation. “Hold on, I haven’t learned anything.”
He smiled. “My friend, you’ve learned the most important thing you need to know about this bear, and that is, he loves marshmallows. So if you feel like you’re in trouble, very confidently say ‘marshmallow.’ Two things will happen. Number one, the bear will think you’re getting him another marshmallow. More importantly, we’ll know you are in trouble and we’ll get you out of there.” He took a pause, looked over my shoulder, smiled, and said, “Alright, he’s ready. Let’s go.”
Sounded super simple. The bear was a creature of habit, just like me. For him it was marshmallows, for me it was the case of beer waiting in the cooler. There is no better feeling than finishing a day of work and cracking a cold one with a crew, who can finally take the gear off their shoulders and rest. The bear had the same ritual. Do your job, get a marshmallow, a pat on the forehead, and a slow walk to the cage. I found a moment of solidarity with the bear. We were compadres, coworkers, doing a job for our handlers, a job they couldn’t do.
I turned and immediately our connection disappeared. The bear was on top of me. He grabbed me by both ears and clutched tightly onto my head with his paws. I felt his claws—not even neatly trimmed, I might add—secure a grip on my head as I began to shout.
“Marshmallow.”
I could barely hear the words come out of my own mouth, mostly because his paws pressing tightly against my ears made everything silent. Also because my world became quieter with each and every one of his roars. He swung me back and forth several times before he slammed me directly into the center of his chest, practically motor-boating me into submission. To this day I have never felt more helpless than I did that day, gasping for air, sucking in bear fur, shouting “Marshmallow” into a bear’s chest. I thought I was going to pass out, when all of a sudden everything spun bright. The bear had accidentally, or maybe purposely, let go of my head with one paw, holding it steady to his chest with the other, when he got a claw stuck in one of my belt loops, and with absolute hilarity spun me into a bear hug, doggy style.
Now facing the crew and appreciating fresh air, I took a deep breath and very calmly said, “Marshmallow.” The crew broke out laughing, as the bear bent me over and held on tight.
Realizing I was killing, and feeling safe in comedy, I started hamming it up just a bit, with marshmallow as my punch line. I scanned my audience to see what part of the crowd I needed to focus on when I saw the look on the trainer’s face. While Tim and the others were howling silently, as a crew will do when they love what they’re shooting, the trainer was desperately trying to make eye contact with me. I saw the moment of discreet eye contact pass, and now he was shouting, “Go limp!”
Again, time slowed down, and I grew oddly introspective. I thought to myself, “Why is this the first I’ve heard of the ‘go limp’ thing? We’ve never gone over this. How limp am I supposed to go? A little-soft limp, drunk limp, look-unattractive-to-a-fat-chick-you-had-sex-with-in-college-and-now-she-wants-to-see-if-it’s-cool-if-she-spends-the-night limp? Or just play-it-by-ear limp? Come to think of it, I hope he’s talking to me, and not telling the bear to become unaroused. Is there bear cock climbing up my jeans, about to split the center seam?”
I quickly checked between my legs to make sure the trainer was talking to me—that the bear wasn’t DTF—and after that was confirmed, I went Xanax limp. I slid out of the bear’s grip and landed on my back. That’s the last thing I remember. Apparently, as I lay on my back at the feet of the bear, he “instinctually” sat on my face. This is what they told me when I came to in Tim’s lap under a tree and whimpered, “What happened?”
Tim smiled a big Midwestern smile and said, “You got raped and teabagged by a bear—and it was hilarious. Let’s go tame lions!”
I went on to tame lions that day, wash an elephant, and stayed the fuck away from the tiger. The show got canceled before the bear segment ever aired. The network wanted more story arc and fewer short, non sequitur (but hilarious) clips. Their feeling was that people wanted story, so we went back to them with a new version of the same idea, wherein I would take the most dangerous job in the world for an entire season: I would be a crab fisherman on a boat in the Bering Strait for one fishing season while a camera crew followed me. The network passed. No one, they said, wanted to see a bunch of uneducated guys fish on a crab boat.
As I sit here today, I guess I could be bitter that the show wasn’t a smash hit like Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, or that YouTube wasn’t around yet to help promote a show that, in hindsight, was basically making viral videos, and which might have made me famous then (or at least Internet famous). Or I could even be upset that we didn’t get the green light to make the Deadliest Catch, three years before the Deadliest Catch premiered.
Instead I sit here today grateful that my legacy wasn’t cemented that day. Imagine it: Bert Kreischer. On-air talent. Comedian. Got fucked in the ass to death by a bear on camera.
12.
The Importance of Being Soft
I’m not a really deep dude. I like beer, cheeseburgers, and blow jobs. I love parties, especially when they start in the afternoon, and as far as feelings go, I’m always up for the good ones and live with a constant fear of the bad ones. I sleep with my mouth open, I watch porn, I’ll smoke pot if it’s passed to me, and I love a good dick joke. I’ve been in love a couple of times and had my heart broken almost exactly the same number of times. I don’t speak to any of those women, they are dead to me. That’s how I operate. I’m fine with most artistic criticism and professional failure. I find that if criticism comes from a respectable source and ultimately facilitates more blow jobs, beers, and burgers, I can work through it. And as far as failure, it just comes with the territory of the business I’m in.
As a husband I’m okay. I kind of remember birthdays and try to talk, touch, and listen five minutes before sex, as I am told that is what women want and the best way to get what I want. I’m probably worse as a dad. To be honest, I had no idea that having kids was going to involve so much commitment. I thought it was going to be making a grilled cheese here, driving a road trip there, a kiss on the forehead, a tuck in at night, maybe a spanking, and we’re done. The idea that my kids would become my entire life, everything I work for and toward, and that their successes and failures would define my happiness, and that I would never have the heart to hit them, was well beyond me when I got my wife pregnant.
I remember the first night with my first daughter, Georgia. She cried and cried and cried, and I felt completely and totally helpless, praying, as I lay on a cot at the foot of my wife LeeAnn’s hospital bed, that my mom would miraculously appear and “take care of this noise.”
Slowly I realized, this is going to be me. Me, for the next thirty years plus, taking care of this child, raising her, grooming her for life so she didn’t have to cry and would be happy. But how do I make her happy? Panic struck through my heart as the nurse came in and told me exactly how. Hold her head by my heart, place my pinky finger on her bottom lip, and allow her to draw it in to “suckle,” which she did. She sucked on my finger like she was trying to rip my nail off, and she immediately relaxed. Panic struck again: Is this how you groom a whore?
“We are stopping this tonight. I’m not raising a daughter who chugs cock to calm down every time she gets freaked out!” I wanted better for my little girl.
Then the second daughter came and I had the same moment in the same hospital, my newborn crying her first evening cry. I tried to take in the beauty of the moment: my gorgeous wife, our healthy daughters, Georgia and Ila, the fact that this time around I wasn’t scared of the unknown. Instead all I could think to myself was, “Why the fuck did I do this again?” It must be how you feel when you wake up hungover with a brand-new face tattoo. I couldn’t wait to look at it, but the idea of living with it was overwhelming.
I love my girls. I also love whiskey, and
I come by both loves honestly. Jameson is my family’s whiskey. If you’re Irish, you’re faithful to one of two Irish whiskeys: Jameson or Bushmills. My family has always been a Jameson family. If there were ever any doubt about my allegiance to it, it ended in 2007 when as a father of a one-year-old and a three-year-old, the Lord kissed me on the forehead and I became sponsored by Jameson to go on the road with five other comics on a national tour.
It was amazing, especially for a group that my buddy and fellow comedian Billy Gardell called a “bunch of $900-a-week road comics.” Every week, four of us would fly first class to a different city, get picked up in town cars, driven to five-star hotels, do twenty minutes of stand-up each, and get paid eight times what we were worth. Our only rule was we had to drink Jameson before, during, and after the show. Oh, and once a year they would fly us to Ireland to hang out at the distillery, do a show, and do radio. Talk about being thrown into the briar patch. I was literally living in a dream. We comics were not only having a blast, but we were growing closer and closer every week. It was me, Steve Byrne, Danny Bevins, Michael Loftus, Pete Correale, and Billy Gardell.
Billy was the leader of our pack for many reasons. He was the largest, the oldest, and the strongest comedian, but mostly, he had been doing this the longest and had more wisdom to offer than the rest. Michael Loftus was a TV writer who was trying to get back into stand-up. He was the smallest guy of the group and always walked on his tippy toes. Most people will say size doesn’t matter, but in this group it was noticed, by us and by him. Loftus was easily the smartest of the group and the guy we all realized we’d be asking for a job from one day. Pete Correale smoked pot not just daily but hourly. He loved to laugh, loved to drink, and loved smoking cigarettes. He was a true comic in the cosmic sense—if you sent him in a time machine anywhere, anytime throughout history, he would have someone laughing, probably at some bar. Danny Bevins had rage circling inside him like a school of sharks. He was ex-military and when he started drinking, the fins of his rage started peeking out above the surface. Those fins made a beeline for Loftus, who was waiting on his tippy-toes for them, ready to start punching shark noses. Steve Byrne was half Asian and my oldest friend of the group. We had both come out of New York. We were the same age and had the same manager, the same sense of humor, and the same interests. He hated Loftus.
I, on the other hand, was just over the moon about getting free Jameson. I was always loud and never listened to anyone much. A few of us had kids, all of us had drinking problems, and each of us found himself in a similar boat: married to women who understood what kind of man could leave his family for a weekend and miss them genuinely, but who would miss the road just as much when they were home.
The first weekend I met Billy was in Cincinnati. Billy generally closed the show, but when he wasn’t there I did. Closing is a weird strength. It’s the one spot out of the night that has to deal with the waitresses handing the patrons their checks, which more often than not they do quite loudly and with no concern for you or your attempts at comedy. To say that the check spot is a difficult one is an understatement. It’s like being the last guy in a gang bang, charged with making sure the woman has had an orgasm. But to have the check spot after three headlining, success-hungry, Jameson-filled comics who are absolute killers on stage, doing their tightest twenty minutes, is a losing proposition. It calls for a skill set not every comic has. You have to be aware enough to notice that the room is changing. You have to be able to find the people that are listening and connect with them. You have to have thick enough skin not to let the fact get to you that 80 percent of the room isn’t listening. And you have to have enough material to roll with every- and anything that happens in that moment. You have to recognize when the room is done, and be able to pull out of that moment seamlessly, unfazed, and with enough respect for the crowd to close out hard and strong. All skills that are hardened with time and alcohol. It has nothing to do with being the funniest comic out there. But if you’re the guy willing to take that bullet, then you are the funniest of the lot for at least that one night.
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 Kreisc
her. 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.
Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child Page 16