So, like the Houston insurance salesperson hooker, I invented a fetish as a security measure and told her that I wanted to watch. She happily agreed and hovered high over the bowl while she urinated, making heavy eye contact with me standing at the door.
“Do you want me to piss on you?”
Nice of you to ask but I’m good right here.
All my shit was still there under the bed in the morning. It wasn’t until years after that I figured out I’d been robbed. I got a letter from a collection agency for an outstanding phone bill from PacSouth where they’d used my identity to set up a bogus account.
I’m sure that if they looked back now, they’d be sorry they hadn’t stolen Daniel Tosh’s identity instead. He’s worth quite a bit more nowadays.
The one time I made it to a legal brothel in Nevada was while filming for The Man Show for a couple of days. Brothel owner and grand self-promoter Dennis Hof was a fine host, as were all the gals who worked there. I was in a the kitchen one day between shoots and met a gray-haired older guy and we struck up a conversation. I’d always loved disappearing from LA when I had time off and just driving the vast, empty and endless back roads of Nevada and passing the small towns that dot them. Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely and Elko. He said he loved to do the same. He even ran out to grab me a book he had detailing the roads of Nevada. He was a regular guest—actually more of a friend—of the Bunny Ranch.
Later on Dennis Hof asked me if I’d met Bob Zmuda. Bob is the legendary coconspirator of Andy Kaufman and the founder of Comic Relief. I told Dennis that I hadn’t ever met him. He rushed me back to the kitchen to introduce me to the man I’d just spent forty minutes shooting the shit with. Imagine that. Fucking Bob Zmuda. I didn’t recognize him not dressed as Tony Clifton.
Dennis told Joe Rogan and me that he’d comp us any girl we wanted. He went on to tell us all these celebrity names of clients who frequented the place. Joe declined the offer. If nothing else, he didn’t want to be included in the list next time Dennis was rattling off names of famous clients. (Dennis later explained he only dropped names of people who themselves had publicly acknowledged being clients.) I didn’t mind my name being mentioned except that I had a lady at the time. The one prostitute I’d been hanging with the most while I was at the Bunny Ranch was the legendary “Air Force Amy” and she was a fucking riot. Somewhere between Roseanne Barr and Mae West and a veteran hooker. I could drink with her seven nights a week.
The last night as the crew was breaking down gear, we all hung at the bar, slamming drinks. Knowing that Dennis would pay for her time, I felt like I owed her for keeping me laughing for the whole shoot. I figured it wouldn’t be cheating if I just jacked off while she dildoed herself. It’s in the rules. I blew a festive load all over my T-shirt and we went right back to laughing. As for the shirt, that would be wardrobe’s problem. I walked back into the bar where a few people knew where I had been. One who didn’t know was Man-Dick. He was some assistant producer who we loathed and our working relationship was contentious on a good day. His last name was Mandrake or Mandrick but he became “Man-Dick” to us. I think he thought we called him that in fun. He was just passing the bar coming towards me, splattered in my own nad-matter.
I raised my arms.
“Man-Dick! Great shoot! Congratulations!” as I went in for a long bear hug. A couple of folks put it together when I started rubbing my chest back and forth against his, and their laughter made him jump back.
“Jesus… is that…? OH Fuuuuck!” and he sprinted out, pulling his shirt away from his body like he was on fire. We all cried laughing. Nobody liked Man-Dick.
The only other legal brothel I’ve frequented is in Costa Rica at the Hotel Del Rey. Light a cigar and picture Havana in the 1950s. I know. I wasn’t there either but you’ve seen it in the movies. The Hotel Del Rey has everything you want in Costa Rica except the beach. It’s got a fantastic bar, restaurant, full casino—antiquated in that the roulette is played with an old hand-spun bingo ball hopper instead of on a wheel, but quaint—as well as sixty to seventy prostitutes roaming the floors along with decent enough hotel rooms upstairs to take them.
I don’t remember who tipped me off to the place but I went there on my first trip to Costa Rica in 2002. I went on one of my most unbelievable roulette runs of all time, hookers draped on both sides. I couldn’t miss.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
Giant stack of chips on twenty-three red and it hits.
“Do you think it will hit again?”
She shrugs, the question probably beyond her grasp of the language.
“I don’t think so, either. Let’s move it to thirty-six. That’s Jesus’s number.”
Thirty-six red hits.
Avalanches of chips were coming my way. I waited for a pit boss to have me thrown out, as I was taking them for so much. I’m not really good with math and exchange rates. I was beating the knees out of the odds but basically all those chips were nickels.
But those stacks of nickels bought me four prostitutes that night, the first two at the same time and then two others between more rounds of roulette. Before that, my record was three in one night but those were escorts in the middle of a cocaine binge where I was too fucked up to come—or realize that fact, evidently. This Costa Rica barn burner was a straight-up Viagra binge and gambling has the same effect on me as coke except for the shrink-dick repercussion.
I had copies of my first two CDs with me and I had all four women pose holding them naked for my website. I apologize if those pictures being on the Internet have affected their later careers.
I’ve gone back to the Hotel Del Rey a few times since but only as a drinker, a gambler and a tour guide. It’s an astounding place. I brought my old gal Renee there shortly after The Man Show had started airing. We went directly to the bar after the long flight and chaos cab ride. We sank in and as our eyes adjusted to the darkness, a face across the wide horseshoe bar began to look familiar. When I was fairly certain, I yelled out.
“Bob?”
Nothing.
“BOB!”
Zero notice
“BOB ZMUDA!!!”
He looked up and said, “Oh hey! How you doing! Hey, you ever read that book I gave you?”
Fucking Bob Zmuda. Twice in two whorehouses.
Brothels existed fairly openly in Anchorage, Alaska, from the time I first played there in 1995 up until the early 2000s when they started shutting them down. They’d never been legal but a milky eye was turned away from them and they were all located within walking distance of the club I worked—Chilkoot Charlie’s—aka Koot’s.
When you are a young artist performing with your main objective being planting your dick in an unfamiliar place, having four or five whorehouses within a cold stroll takes the pressure off of actually working the crowd and having to try hard. I didn’t have to lie to a girl in order to bed her down. Instead I could be gallant and pay a girl to fuck me without having to be dishonest. Like a gentleman.
Koot’s is the biggest bar in Alaska, holding something like twelve bars under one roof, all the floors littered in sawdust and every room holding expectations of fistfight or strange pussy. Becker and I were about to do mushrooms. I didn’t want to be tripping and thinking with my dick in this cavern full of chaos. Your drunken dick makes just as poor decisions as your tripping brain. By my estimation, my best bet was to take the mushrooms and then duck out to the Ravenite—a whorehouse a block away at the time—dump my genetic instinct into a willing surrogate and then meet up with Becker at my hotel afterwards.
I got to the whorehouse just in time. They were closing soon at one a.m. Why the brothel would close three hours before the biggest bar in Alaska closed was unfathomable to me. Today as an old rummy who has seen a lot of last-call drunk dudes, it makes perfect sense.
I walked in just as the wobbly knees of the mushrooms started to wreck my confidence. The rubber legs were soon joined by the perma-grin smile. I was a
fraid to be there but at the same time was ready to connect with a girl. There were only two girls still working, as they were about to close the doors, and both were as attractive as they were ready to leave. I took the blonde.
She brought me into a room, disrobed and matter-of-factly asked if I wanted to go missionary or doggie style, the same way a waitress would ask how you wanted your eggs cooked. This might seem like a no-brainer to some of you kids. But there is math and physics involved that you only do backwards, after the fact.
Any young man who is not a veteran would say doggie style. It is a “style” as opposed to missionary, which is a “position.” Style counts. What you don’t consider is the person you are playing against. She is a tired prostitute who is just waiting to fill her last order so she can go home to the rest of the wreckage that drove her into this life to begin with. I hadn’t considered this either.
I hadn’t considered that she’d probably spent the whole day being plooked by fat, unwashed businessmen tourists from the lower forty-eight fresh off a week of salmon fishing or moose hunting, with her having little time or need to clean herself between rounds. I didn’t weigh in the fact that the mushrooms I’d ingested would have my senses piqued. I could’ve smelled a gnat fart from the corner of Northern Lights and Spenard. I didn’t even put together the basic variable that stink, like smoke, rises.
Doggie style was the equivalent to putting fire bellows into her and blowing out a long hard day’s worth of fuck-stench into my trip-aware olfactory. My boner collapsed like the controlled demolition of Building 7. It was still important to be polite. I blamed my erectile dysfunction on the alcohol, which would normally be the problem. I did not tell her that her gash stank of a mouth riddled with periodontal disease. I will tell you that with a last-call hooker who asks you to choose between missionary and doggie, treat it like a house fire. Stop, drop and roll.
There is a DVD that I put out in 2002 called Word of Mouth with bonus footage of me and Becker—by then tripping hard—in my hotel moments just after I’d arrived back from that debacle. It’s twenty-five minutes of bawling with laughter so hard that the conversation is mostly indecipherable but now that you know the backstory, you might be able to catch some references.
“I have hooker money and my life is still a shambles!”
KOOT’S
The first time I played Koot’s was December of 1995 and I got off the plane wearing a Santa hat and sporting two black eyes. You all remember that waiter in Tempe.
I’d been trying to play Alaska since I was an open micer. My old flame Jacquie Trinka from Vegas was a musician who played Koot’s. When she heard they were going to start doing comedy, she asked the booking agent to get me in and he did. I didn’t know him then but I do now. That guy was Greg Chaille.
I’ve been banned, fired or ignored by so many clubs across the country for any reason from vulgarity, drunkenness, or antagonizing the audience to simply pulling my dick out onstage. It was all of these behaviors that endeared me to the people at Koot’s. And to this day, the Koot’s folk are still the best friends I have, regardless of how often we—or even if we don’t ever—talk.
This place was wall-to-wall chaos. Trinka led me into a world of depravity that she only allowed herself to be on the outskirts of. Trinka was and is a good girl. Especially by the standards of Chilkoot Charlie’s. Doran the owner regaled me with tales of the old days of Koot’s during the 1970s when it was all oil money and blow, fistfights and gun play. The only difference I could see was that Ecstasy had joined the party. All the rest were still in the works.
Day drunks slopped over the bar in silence from the minute they opened until people who wanted to have fun started trickling in later on in the early evening. Smiling customers had a way of gentrifying the bar around happy hour. One of my first days there I was in early to watch Trinka play her solo lounge act during this changing of the guard. Some gurgling old rummy was pent up and angry about being cut off at the bar. He told the security guy that he was going to come back and kill everybody and such and so forth. He was shown the door without notice, as though threats of mass murder were a local way of saying goodbye. An Anchorage “aloha.”
Soon a group of Hooters waitresses just off work took up the main bar (“South Long” for the Koot’s folk) by the front door where Trinka played beside the door facing in. I remember Trinka playing “Lady in Red” when I saw the old drunk burst back through the door, eyes barely able to focus, with 9-mms in each hand. I was standing right in front of him ten feet away with only the door security between us. Security tried to calm him as the Hooters girls leapt over the bar for cover. The bartender leapt over the Hooters girls to back up security. I stood there smiling like an imbecile. Trinka yelled for me to get away but the drink had taken away any natural fear I should have felt. I didn’t want to miss the story. Security calmly motioned his arms up and down, palms down in a “just relax” fashion, until he’d inched close enough to grab both wrists, at which point the bartender bum-rushed into the guy’s ribs and tackled him. What happened to the guy between that and when the cops came I don’t remember, and nobody saw a thing.
Clan X was the house band doing disco covers during that run, so named for their rampant use of Ecstasy. Yes, I did Ecstasy back when it was called X and meth when it was called crystal. We tripped quite a bit and the “X party” became an annual Christmas tradition for years to come. (Although the first Christmas party I remember instead doing acid and mushrooms at the same time. Which seems wrong somehow. It’s like having a chicken omelet. Or a pie filled with cake.)
I was drinking at the bar on North Long after one of my first shows where we were usually followed by the band. A stripper who I had to assume worked only morning shifts or national disasters asked me for my Santa hat. I told her she’d have to blow me for it. I wasn’t being rude. I was responding in kind to the way she said it. I didn’t know she would do it right there and then. Nobody noticed, nobody cared. Every night was some new buffoonery.
Enter the midgets. I met more midgets in two weeks of Koot’s than I had in the rest of my life. To be exact, Koot’s beat life 3–2. Kenny and Dave were two of the dwarf regulars. I call them midgets because they called themselves midgets. They didn’t give a fuck. They bragged about being thrown out of a “little person” convention for whatever chicanery far more felonious than simply using the term “midget.” We became fast friends and eventually had them in black Santa hats selling my T-shirts table to table towards the end of the shows. Then we had them in the cages with the dancers while the band played at the company Christmas party. By the time I left they were neuvo-legend and were getting fucked in storerooms. Not long after, Koot’s built Kenny and Dave their own little bar to tend called Emerald City where they served little beers and little shots and had a yellow brick road painted from the front door all the way to the little bar. Doran even made them half-sized business cards. This was disbanded when it became rapidly apparent that the midgets were not responsible barkeeps. People would buy them shots and due to their diminutive size, they’d get shit-pummeled in two drinks and then they’d be trying to get girls’ panties off. That would have been the best episode of Bar Rescue ever.
DJ Bob pulled double duty. He was the morning show radio host at KWHL that sponsored the club but was also the DJ at Koot’s on the dance club side (South-siiiide!!!) during the week. I met some nice lady after a show and after having little to say, we went directly to fucking. It was a weekday and the Loft Bar above Southside was closed. I gave a nod and a smile to DJ Bob as I slipped us under the velvet rope to go upstairs. He kept the dance floor rolling downstairs as we made romantic love on a barstool above. At some point I noticed the midgets peeking with their big noggins three-quarters of the way up the staircase, giggling and giving thumbs-ups. Then the song would end on the dance floor below and I’d hear DJ Bob.
“Hey, is everyone having fun tonight??? Well some of us are having more fun than others!!! Go, Dougie, Go!!!”
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The midgets had been relaying the play by play from the stairs to DJ Bob the whole while we were dunce-fucking in a closed bar above but out of sight.
I knew DJ Bob would bring this up on radio the next morning and was happy to have something fun to talk about. What I didn’t know was that the girl had been the fiancée of one of the KWHL interns. Fortunately I was only doing a call-in. By the time DJ Bob had me on the phone he’d already told the story on the air, mocking his intern about it with the hackneyed cruelty that a morning radio jock treats a supplicant.
I played the diplomat and made the most apologetic fun of destroying a relationship as was possible. Everyone was fucked up all the time back there and then. You have to excuse some bad choices. Sometimes people drink and fuck and regret it. Sometimes a girl will fuck a guy just because he was onstage and sometimes a guy will fuck a girl just because she’s willing. I can’t explain or apologize for these facts. I heard afterwards that they got back together, got married and moved to Seattle. I wish them the best and thank you for the story.
But this is just the beginning of my first trip to Alaska.
I’d been booked for two weeks, the first to headline and the second just as the opening act to hang out longer through Christmas. I’d done so well that by the second week I had people coming back to see me, and others just on word spreading. I’m not bragging. My act was as dumb as the crowds were back then so I was destroying—to the great misfortune of the guy who was booked to headline on the second week. He was some poor fuck who’d been booked as a favor, some sad clean and sober guy, trying to get back into comedy after a hiatus. And I’m assuming that it was comedy that had taken the hiatus from him. He did political jokes of politics years gone by with references nobody remembered or cared about. I don’t even think he mentioned his cock one single time onstage. They hated him. He lasted two nights before the owner called an audible and switched the order. It was uncomfortable to say the least, as we were not only performing together but also sharing the band house for the week. Me all drunk and having the time of my life, him all dejected, demoted and desperately clinging on to his sobriety in this circus of depravity under the same sagging roof.
This Is Not Fame Page 8