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

by Bert Kreischer

  She went on to tell me the details: Georgia, our three-year-old, had been walking into our apartment lobby and had tripped in her Crocs. She fell face-first on the marble floor, landing on her top jaw, breaking it and her four front teeth, under the gum line. LeeAnn told me they had been to the hospital and had scheduled an appointment with an oral surgeon in Beverly Hills for the day after next. The last thing she told me, which she needn’t have, was that I was to get back to California immediately.

  I hung up the phone and looked at my three friends.

  “I have to go home.”

  I relayed the events to them and, most of them having children, they sincerely empathized. That is when the club manager Rick walked through the doors of the greenroom. “I’m starting the music, you guys ready?”

  Danny pulled him out of the room and told him the news as Billy and Mike rolled a zone defense on my mini-downward spiral. Danny came back in with four Jamesons on the rocks.

  “I talked to Rick and told him what was going on. He gave me these. I’m no doctor but I do know that these usually make things better in the short term.”

  We all grabbed a Jameson. Billy stood up and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Listen, your old lady said she is doing okay now. We’ll get you home in the morning, everything is gonna be fine. It could have been a helluva lot worse. Pull it together. We’ll all deal with this shit after the show, like brothers. But you’re still going last.”

  The room laughed, as did I, and we did our shots. It was almost nice to know that there was no pressure following Billy this time. I knew I had to go onstage—I wasn’t going to go back to my hotel and stew in my thoughts. I called LeeAnn one more time after the show started and did some more investigation. LeeAnn was a lot lighter. Georgia seemed fine, she was playing in her room. The doctor had told LeeAnn not to make a big deal out of it. The schedule was firm, though, and they needed to get Georgia into surgery ASAP to make sure an infection wasn’t setting in. I guess so, anyway. I don’t know for sure since I was barely listening. Because what I had heard was they’d need to put her under, which could be tricky. I made plans to return on the first flight out the next morning.

  I’d love to tell you that I pulled out one of my all-time best sets of comedy that night, while under duress. But I can’t. I went through the motions, and I don’t remember anything but the walk home. We were all meandering slowly, me and the other comics, respecting the gravity of the situation—not barhopping ourselves home as usual, Loftus and Danny getting along—when Billy again wrapped his arm around me.

  “I’m not gonna tell you your business, you’re a grown man, but I think the worst thing you can do right now is run to a bottle.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Having said that, you say the word and we will all sit with you and drink until your flight tomorrow morning.”

  I chose the latter. We stayed up and drank Jameson until I was drunk enough to cry. They left me in my room to pack and shower. Before I took off in the early morning, Billy called to see if I wanted one more, which I did. I got it to go, hopped in my cab, and cried the entire way to the airport. My inhibitions were gone and my emotions ran free. Fear and anger were the most prevalent. I felt like I had been tricked into all these emotions I couldn’t control. For Christ’s sake, when I first met my wife, I had just wanted to fuck her, that was all. All I could think now was that I hadn’t signed up for this. I was cool with marriage and I was cool with kids. I sincerely loved having both. But these feelings of vulnerability—I was not cool with this.

  I was angry with my wife. When we met, she said she had no intentions of changing who I was. The comedy, the drinking, the partying she was all cool with, and I believed her. But that had all been part of her diabolical plan. The guy she met back then, the old Bert, would have never sobbed uncontrollably in the back of a taxi for thirty minutes. The guy she met didn’t cry at all. But she knew, without a doubt, that the second she introduced kids into the picture I would inevitably, without my consent or knowledge, become a different man. It was like a heroin dealer who tells a new customer, “There are a lot of people who use it recreationally. The rumors about heroin’s addictive qualities are highly exaggerated.”

  I cleaned myself up as we pulled up to the airport, watching the cabbie try to decipher the events that led to this awkward 4 A.M. cab ride to the airport. I imagine he thought I must have been some scorned gay lover, who had spent the night tied and bound while the love of my life, who I had flown out here to see, had his way with me, not even letting me climax, only to be told at 3:30 A.M. that I was just one of his many fuck buddies and that my plan to stay with him while he was at a conference in Cincinnati was in no way feasible, as he had his wife and kids coming in today. And to think that I had bought us tickets to the Reds game months in advance to watch that kid with the big arm pitch. But now I was on my way, heart broken, balls blue, to the airport.

  That is definitely what he must have been thinking as I paid him with tear-soaked bills. But I didn’t care. I downed my roadie and made my way to the plane.

  I held it together pretty well until takeoff when the anxiety of the flight, the booze in my system, and my goddamn bitch-ass vulnerability kicked in. The flight attendant approached me—my sunglasses on, covered in my hoodie—and inquired. I told her my daughter was hurt and that I was flying home to see her. She came back with a whiskey and asked no more questions. The next time she walked past me she handed me another.

  By the time I hopped in a cab at LAX, the crying had stopped. I was making my way back to Hollywood when my phone rang. It was LeeAnn.

  “Listen, when you get here, have your shit together. No crying, no dramatics.”

  “Not a problem,” I promised her, as I motioned for the cab driver to pull over at a 7-Eleven. I hopped out, grabbed a forty and a coffee, and downed them in that order. I was set to be the dad I’d always envisioned. Probably the first time on record I had ever stepped up to be a great dad, needless to say, but I was ready.

  I walked in the house like a soldier. I empathized, I played, I read books, we watched a movie, and Georgia eventually went to sleep.

  That night LeeAnn broke it down for me. “I want you to eat a Xanax tomorrow before we head to the dentist. It’s going to be pretty stressful and I need you to be calm.”

  Usually being told to take drugs means a good time for me, but this time it raised concern. “How stressful?”

  “Putting a child under is not easy and can be dicey. They told me today the most important thing for us to do is keep her calm. They said if she’s calm, everything would be fine. So I can’t have you joking around, touching things, distracting people because you’re nervous. So I think you should take a Xanax and just relax. It’s all gonna be fine.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I’d lube up early in the morning like a rock star heading to press, we’d roll in, they’d put her under, pull the teeth, set the jaw, and I’d be celebrating with a glass of Jameson that night, slow-rolling that early morning buzz. Done.

  Our appointment was for 7 A.M. and I had been drinking fairly heavily for three days straight. LeeAnn woke us all up at 6:30 and we made our way to the car. I popped a Xanax on Wilshire, halfway to Beverly Hills, and felt the tranquility set in. I was even more relaxed when I saw that LeeAnn, always very budget minded, decided in a moment of emergency to do the right thing and get Georgia a high-priced Beverly Hills oral surgeon with a shingle on Rodeo Drive. Had it been for herself, LeeAnn would have booked a hack in a strip mall on San Vicente. But she knew what was important.

  When we walked into the empty waiting room, it was clear they were here for us. None of the formalities of signing paperwork, no waiting—they took us directly back to the chair like I was Hugh Hefner at Planned Parenthood. The surgeon and anesthesiologist introduced themselves and assured us that everything was going to be fine. My Xanax hadn’t fully kicked in but things were moving so smoothly that I felt silly for even taking it. The surgeon a
nd anesthesiologist even went so far as to brag to us about how great the other was, basically sucking each other’s cocks for our benefit, which I appreciated.

  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 corne
r 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.