I was Steve Yerrid and I was there to promote the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game that night where they were having some kids with cancer event during an intermission. Like Johnny Rotten, I played the interview vaguely straight. At some point the lady DJ complimented Bingo on her bald head, ignoring the robe and bare feet. I told her that Bingo had shaved her head out of solidarity for the kids with cancer. The lady thought that was admirable. She continued on that not a lot of ladies could pull off that look.
“Well, our kids with cancer can.”
I said it with a damp contempt and let the awkward moment fester.
We wrapped up with the plugs on the one-sheet and nobody was the wiser. But now “Steve’s” liaison was trying to take us to yet another station while we were trying to get to our actual station that I was afraid we might have already missed. We somehow ditched her and found the place that I, Doug, was just in time to do.
I rushed through an explanation to the new jocks of the gag we’d just pulled and was almost in the clear when the PR lady found us in studio. By now she’d realized our ploy and was very upset. I laughingly begged my way out. I reminded her that her guest hadn’t even showed up and, without me promoting it for him, those kids with cancer might as well be dead. I did have a point. She eventually relaxed a bit except for the thought that she might be rightfully fired for being stupid and late.
The next day we got reprimanded softly by the club for fucking with the radio spots. Turns out that Steve Yerrid was a fat-cat attorney who sponsored kids-with-cancer kinda shit. He’d fucked up which day he was supposed to be there and had done his interview later. No idea if they ever mentioned my interview as him from the day before or why he was there to promote last night’s hockey game. But we googled him. His claim to fame was that he’d won the biggest lawsuit against Big Tobacco in US history. And his PR woman believed that I was him, in a group of derelicts, in my pajamas—smoking cigarettes.
So far as my target audience goes, no radio is worse than country-western. Now imagine having to promote my show on the top-rated c-w morning show in Shreveport, Louisiana. On the day after the second election of George W. Bush.
I was with my friend comedian Brett Erickson. The station was seriously concerned due to our reputations and we were repeatedly warned by the club that this was tight-ass conservative radio, that the station was very important to their livelihood and to please not go too far. We chose to, instead of toning it down, just go in the opposite direction. We’d go hardcore in favor of the hosts and the listeners. Hard right wing and wiping it in the nonlisteners’ faces.
“George Bush won so just suck it up, liberals! Kiss my butt, Michael Moore! Accept the fact that YOU LOST!” We wiped our asses on the Hollywood leftists and all but blew the troops who were dying for your freedom.
We kept pounding away on that course for the entire show. They loved us and we knew their audience loved us. And they showed up in droves. You’d think we were Jesus and Larry the Cable Guy on the same bill. We, of course, stuck to our regular acts once these minions had paid the cover charge. They would have walked out on Erickson’s act alone if he’d told them the entire radio show was a ruse. It should have been obvious by the content of his material. Maybe they were confused and thought he wasn’t the guy who had been on the air and that I—their Republican Hero—would be coming up next to save the show.
I would go into my regular set until I could see the tardive-dyskinesia twitching ripple across their faces and then I’d wait for them to fully convulse.
“By the way, if you heard us on the radio, that whole ‘Yay, George Bush’ thing was all bullshit. Fuck that guy. I just figured that if you’re gonna hate me, you should pay for the ticket first. I don’t want you to get to hate me for free on the radio. It was just a bait and switch scam. Like when the cops tell you that you won a free television and then they bust you for a warrant when you show up to claim it.”
Then the walkouts started.
“Have a nice night. No refunds.”
It was hilarious to us the first night. But we had five more shows to do that week. Crowds of people hating your guts night after night, show after show will wear you down, no matter how much you tout yourself for not giving a fuck. By the end of the weekend we were miserable.
Erickson and I were at a bar late night on the Saturday after the two last shows of agony and we were grinding our axes with alcohol. Fuck all these people. Brett was hanging with some stragglers from the staff and I’d somehow gotten into a conversation with some military guys expounding my views on the war and 9/11. Needless to say, we had differences of opinions. Two shows of shit that night weren’t enough. I had to start a third. Plus, they were only air force, which in my porous mind meant I could take them.
If I had a case to be stated, my mouth couldn’t seem to put it together. If I’d been more sober, I probably would’ve been beaten immediately. You know, for my freedom. Instead these guys were encouraging my stumbling diatribe. Even that drunk I could tell they were just goading me to talk more shit so that when they did eventually hammer me, all of America and the cops and bar staff could feel it was justified. I was going along for the ride and kept pushing the issue.
At some point Erickson caught wind of what was happening and about to happen. He walked up to the table, politely excused the interruption, stepped in, tilted my head back and plunged his tongue deep into my mouth for an extended period of time.
“Sorry, guys. I think that means it’s time to go.” I smiled.
Shock and awe. Nothing stops sadistic military guys cold in their tracks like raging public acts of homosexuality. They sat there dumbstruck and we walked out without another word spoken.
The old Allen Park Inn in Houston had everything a comedian could ask for except porn. They had a bar, restaurant, room service, a pool. Perfect save no in-room porn. This was in the prehistoric, unthinkable days before the Internet. So for a young comedian to beat his meat after a long hour’s work, he’d have to use his imagination that he’d already used up onstage. I had early morning radio the next day and needed the sleep that beer and a porn yank could deliver.
They did have HBO and Trading Places was on. I remember thinking that I could possibly time a jack to the sensational three-second tit shot of Jamie Lee Curtis. If I were thirteen years old, maybe. In the movie she plays a streetwalking prostitute who happens to be hot as fuck. So I blame the media for my decision to grab the weekly and dial up a hooker on that lonely night.
Escorts in the classifieds didn’t have pictures, so you’d go based on descriptions. And you believed what you wanted to believe. If it said “Blond, 5’ 2”, 125 lbs.” your boner would imagine those stats in the best possible light. You don’t think, “Well, it doesn’t say if she has arms and legs or skin or anything.”
The woman who showed up at my door was blond, 5’ 2” and probably 125 pounds. She had arms and legs and skin. Otherwise I would describe her as “hard to market.”
She looked like an insurance agent. She was my mother’s age. She wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. Without it you’d picture her on a porch in West Virginia with a Pall Mall staining her creased upper lip yellow. She excused her garb saying that she dressed in business attire so that the front desk wouldn’t suspect she was a prostitute. If she were dressed exactly like a Halloween stereotype hooker you still wouldn’t suspect she was a hooker. You’d think it was casual Friday at the insurance agency. I was flummoxed. There was no possible way I could have sex with this woman, nor could I be rude and tell her so. I was stumped for an exit strategy. She started to get undressed and her midsection seemed the casualty of a dozen fat babies. Laid back on my bed with my pants off, I could only sit and pray that she was really a cop.
She crawled up on all fours and started to blow me, her breasts hanging like leeches on a dog’s belly. I tried to look at the television. She crawled up with intentions of mounting me. I stopped her, thought quick and said, “You know what I’m reall
y into? I want you to sit on the other bed and watch me jerk off.”
I’d gone from not wanting to jerk off to Jamie Lee Curtis to jerking off while pretending this woman wasn’t in my room. Through some act of transcendental flight from reality I was able to deploy an adequate amount of seed that would fulfill my side of the bargain and sum up our transaction. Thanks for coming by and be careful on your way out. But she didn’t leave. She told me that I had plenty of time left for the hour rate and she started to chat. If you haven’t had experience with prostitutes, this doesn’t happen. Hookers try to make you cum as quickly as possible and then get the fuck out, hence their popularity. This gal wanted to tell me about her problems. And I listened, happy just to have our clothes back on. Eventually I told her I had an early meeting and had to get to sleep.
The next morning on the radio I launched into the story on the air. At first they thought it was a bit that I was doing, but eventually they realized I wasn’t kidding. I told them that I had the number for the escort service that sent her and wanted to call them live on the air to confront them about quality-control issues, like the nightly local news guy who busts shady businesses. They were up for it but before we could, the program director shit-canned the idea and said they could get sued. Getting sued by a prostitute for slander—surely unprecedented in the halls of justice—would be a much better story still and no jury on earth would believe this woman could have gotten paid to have sex.
HOOKERS
As I’ve said onstage, I think a lot of women look at hookers like scabs crossing a picket line. “You can’t just go out and sell it! We’re holding out for so much more!”
I still believe that. I see nothing wrong whatsoever in a woman’s choice to take that career path. The moral conundrum lies in why she chose that road. When I used to get a lot of escorts, I wasn’t fully aware of how many were doing it through coercion or to feed addictions—how many had to do it. I imagined them all to be savvy self-made businesspeople who had figured an easy way out of the daily grind of the nine to five, sleeping on barrels of cash in the mattress, saving up for that trip to Tahiti and that degree in mechanical engineering.
I even had the hubris to think they’d be really happy to fuck me. I imagined that most of their calls were hairy, corpulent men who sweat a lot and treated them like litter. Won’t she be thrilled when I open my hotel room door to find this pleasant, young, long-haired kid offering her a seat and a cocktail! I had one escort in Seattle who I was so sure had fully enjoyed our time together that I sent her off with an autographed copy of my first CD, Sicko, which had just come out. Like a parting gift, so she knew she had fucked someone famous. I told her excitedly that there was a good hooker story on it she’d really like. I imagined her and all of her hooker friends at the hooker dispatch station sitting around listening to it and laughing and coming to my show the next night. Hookers are never happy to fuck you. You just have to hope they can act like they are.
The only exception to this rule that ever happened to me was when I was in my early twenties living in North Vegas in an extraordinarily skeezy trailer park. It was the only time in my life that I’d occasionally play around with meth, which back then was called crystal and you only snorted it. Or that’s all I knew to do with it. My neighbors were a couple and were hardcore tweekers, staying awake for five and six days in a row on that poison and telling me about their shared hallucinations. They would see the same elves on fence posts. They were also where I scored meth. Right next door.
On an afternoon after work—I was still a telemarketer back then—I had plans to drive to Pahrump, Nevada, to visit my first-ever legal brothel. I was very excited and told my neighbors about it over some bumps of crystal. You’d think I was talking about going to see my favorite band, I was so anxious. They asked what it was gonna cost and I told them I figured I could get outta there for under a hundred and fifty bucks. He looked at her for a beat or two and said, “Well, shit. You don’t have to drive all the way to Pahrump. She’ll do it for fifty bucks.”
The fact that I’d already been drinking and doing meth made this sound like a grand idea. Plus I could continue drinking and doing meth without having to worry about driving. Win-win. I took her back to my trailer and pooned her in short order. It didn’t feel wrong until after I came. You know the feeling. I didn’t want to go back and have to look at her husband after that. So I stayed alone in my trailer doing meth and drinking beer. Later that night there was a timid knock on my door. It was the neighbor lady coming back for seconds. This one would be on the house, she told me. I banged her again but somehow felt a little ripped off. If she had done it for free to begin with, I kinda wanted my fifty bucks back.
Some prostitutes were kind. My second-ever escort offered a “twenty-minute quickie” deal for sixty bucks, which was most of what I had to my name. I was twenty-two or so and not very astute in the ways of the call girl. She came in, peppy, friendly and talkative, wanting to know all about me. She took a beer, used the bathroom for a bit and then came out and slowly got undressed—real slowly—making a show of it.
By the time she got down to her crotchless fishnet onesie as I was literally inches away from plundering her, she pipes up with: “Oh I’m sorry, baby, your twenty minutes are up.” Bu-bu-bu whaaaaa??? What a scam! After I begged and pleaded and told her that was all my money, she took pity on me and allowed me the seven to eight seconds I needed to finish and be simply ashamed instead of both ashamed and bamboozled.
Another lady of the night years later in Florida who only did in-call at her house cost me nearly a seventy-five-dollar cab ride to get to in the wee hours. I hadn’t known quite where I was at the time in comparison to her town. She was sweet and let me stay the night. Unheard of. I walked the beach for a long while in the morning before getting a cab back to the condo. I almost wrote “back home” there. I’ve found myself saying that about random hotels or comedy condos over the million years on the road. Back home.
Sometimes we’d call escorts just for fun with no intention of having sex with them.
Not long ago, my podcast co-host Chad Shank was on tour with me and Chaille in Montana when we tried to get an escort, only this time it was strictly as a podcast guest. She could be completely anonymous, talk about real-life stories from her career and get paid the same money, plus tip, for the hour. We couldn’t get a single girl willing to do it. They’d suck your dick for money but an honest conversation—like kissing on the mouth—was out of the question with a Montana hooker.
Andy Andrist and I were somewhere on the road in Tennessee when we crossed paths with Henry Phillips, who was also in town on a shared night off. According to Henry, Andy and I evidently ditched him at some biker bar close to the hotel by miscommunication or by design just to fuck with him. Regardless, we all met up back at the hotel and the talk turned towards calling an escort. I probably started these conversations. I was the only one with disposable hooker funds at the time.
The joke conversation turned into a knock at the door. We’d answered an ad for a “dancer” who was available for 24/7 out-call services. You know, in case you have an event where nobody will dance at two-thirty in the morning. The joke was that we just wanted her to dance. We set up a hidden video camera, poorly camouflaged on a nightstand. She showed up and we told her that we were big fans of dance, an art form largely overlooked in this part of the country. We asked what type dance she excelled at, what was her passion. Salsa? Swing? The Forbidden Lambada? She waited for us to break face but we did not. We wanted dancing. Just what she advertised. She would have been less trepidatious if we said we wanted to triple-team her bung-pipe.
Stymied and stuttering, she finally fell back on the excuse that she had no music. No music? What dancer has no music?
No problem. We put on the radio from the shitty alarm clock radio on whatever station came in the clearest. I would have asked her to dance to Coast to Coast AM George Noory conspiracy talk radio. Whatever we played, she did the best she co
uld do under the circumstances. At some point either Andy or Henry let loose with the fact that I was currently the host of The Man Show and lied that I was auditioning gals for the show’s end segment, “Girls on Trampolines.” She went from dancing poorly to jumping up and down on the bed.
“Nice. We’ll be in touch.”
She left with a story that probably nobody would believe if there was anyone she could tell it to. Good stories for comedians aren’t the same as a good story for a prostitute. I don’t have to hide the fact that I’m a comedian.
The “let’s call a prostitute as a joke” drunken conversation can wind up with the joke being on you.
I was working with Daniel Tosh in West Palm Beach back in the late nineties when the idle, late-night perusing of adult classifieds turned immediately into action when Tosh said, “I dare you.” Tosh hadn’t believed that I’d actually called and ran to barricade himself in his bedroom when she arrived. Being aware of how drunk I was—one of the primary keys to longevity in being a thriving drunk—I’d already hooker proofed the place, hiding any valuables under my bed.
I was paying by credit card so, from the front room, she was the go-between on the phone with the service. She asked for the Visa number and then repeated it into the phone. She asked for the expiration date and then repeated it into the phone. She asked for the Social Security number and it wasn’t until she repeated it into the phone that I realized they don’t need to know your Social to pay for a call girl. I made a mental note to cancel that credit card in the morning.
Now she told me that she needed to use the bathroom. The problem was that the bathroom shared doors from both the hallway and the master bedroom where I’d hidden all my stealables.
This Is Not Fame Page 7