Which would secretly mean “interrogate.”
It would have made sense if I’d been dodging the questions, but having no idea why I’m being detained, haven’t been accused of anything and having just come in hung over from a wedding when I’d sworn I’d never go to another—it was terrifying. These were the people in the movies who bring you into a dark room and beat you with phone books. Your guilt would not be in question. It would just be batting practice for these crazies.
I was brought back to the baggage area where they’d pulled our bags off the plane and were now waiting for us. They began to go through everything including the most awkward things—one was a ridiculous televangelist hairpiece that I’d brought for the wedding as a joke but now made me look like an entry-level spy with obvious disguises. Then they started going through my notebooks. They were scrutinizing each page without having anything but a cursory knowledge of elementary English—and then I am watching an officer find an old set list that he went back to twice.
It was all cryptic bullet points that would read like song titles. If you know my act, you can imagine this list.
“Stinkless Pussy”
“Spinning Dildo”
“Dominatrix Health Care”
“Abortion Is Green”
I hoped his reading of the language was as poor as his speaking it. He asked what it all was and I tried to explain that I was a stand-up comedian, which is difficult to pantomime, especially in a country where stand-up comedy doesn’t exist. I don’t even think they have laughter native to their culture. They only hear it from tourists.
Looking back I’m glad they were confused by this. If it had been clear to these third-world people—eking out a merciless existence by terrorizing tourists for pennies a day while their daughters work the bench in a brothel, sleeping in huts made of coconut shells and using every part of the goat—that I made my living just by talking into a microphone, making jokes based on all of those subjects, in fact, they may not have been able to contain their hatred. As it was, Hamidou was still leaning into me with his nostrils flaring, all but cracking his knuckles for theatrics. The plane was getting ready to leave and I couldn’t see Bingo. And I really had to shit. So badly that I might have even taken a plea bargain.
Right then, Slap-Happy the Check-in Narc brought Bingo back around and told us we were free to go. No apologies, no conciliatory upgrade, no explanation as to why we’d been stopped and menaced by these barbarians in the first place. Other than Bingo looked sleepy. Now she looked confused and terrified. I wanted so badly to launch myself on Hamidou and bite out his eye that I looked him square in his block head and apologized for any confusion. They followed us all the way onto the runway—they don’t have jetways in open-air airports in destitute, rogue terrorist nations, only rolling, rusted staircases like on Fantasy Island—and they continued to mad-dog us all the way onto the plane like they might change their minds at any moment.
We were indeed the last people on the plane but it wasn’t like anyone was waiting on us. Everyone was still milling about. Thank fucking Christ. Our seats were in the back half of the plane, two rows behind bathrooms in the middle. I launched my backpack onto my seat and prayed to any god listening that the toilet wasn’t occupied. If it had been, it would have been a long, wet, pungent ride back home.
Time slows down when you’re attempting to yank your pants down just enough so that the arc of your loose, streaming stool doesn’t catch the back lip of your belt loop. Time slows enough that you can even calculate that, in an airplane bathroom, you’ll be close enough to lock the door after you’ve hit the shitter, saving a precious second that could have been your doom and your telltale dripping stain.
Even on the runway, an airplane has enough white noise that I wasn’t concerned about anyone hearing what I was doing to that lavatory. But I immediately knew that the odor might have the entire flight grounded. You always know when you think you’ve destroyed the toilet air for others but it’s rare when it actually sickens you. On a plane, you already have less air than in a casket and that air was immediately filled with an eye-watering stench that was almost acid infused. Like nervous sweat, there are nervous shits. It wasn’t a long process but for the short time I was on the bowl, I poured like a broken faucet. It stung my skin. Hog slop. Chernobyl. Rotting citrus. Like someone had cut open a blister on the corpse of a skunk on the side of a New Mexico highway. In the summer.
And now I’d have to leave and resume my seat for take-off.
I slunk out and took my seat two rows back. I withered and waited. After a short pause, I watched all three seats in front of me—the people right behind the befouled toilet—fumble for their overhead air vents as though it were synchronized.
The flight attendant was coming down the plane shutting the overhead compartments and slowed in front of the bathroom I’d just ruined. Her face turned in and wrinkled like a raisin. She made eye contact with the people in front of me and sniffed the air.
She leaned her shoulder into the closed bathroom door—as though somehow it could be closed even more—and said, “Whoever done that coulda done it INSIDE the AIRPORT!”
I almost jumped out of my chair to shriek:
“I WANTED TO DO THAT INSIDE THE MOTHERFUCKING AIRPORT BUT I WAS BEING HELD FUCKING PRISONER BY THOSE FUCKING ANIMALS!!!”
I shut up and got home.
Instead, to this day, I just spread bad rumors about Costa Rica such as their penchant for raping white women on their honeymoons as a fertility ritual, using the vomit of child slaves as a lubricant. Their cocaine is anthrax and the faucets run with raw sewage. The surf teems with MRSA and body parts at high tide. Their major export is anal lice, which they breed like trout farms in hotel pools. The sunsets are in black and white and you can only watch them through a pinhole in a cardboard box or you will leave as blind as their cab drivers. All of which I can’t help but believe are true.
Costa Rica actually does have an “exit tax” of twenty-nine dollars per person. You have to pay to leave. You know how they can get away with that? Because they know it’s worth it.
FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT
On a separate occasion coming back from Costa Rica through US customs, I was in my usual morning mood. Angry and irritated by the long line, with some travel drinking since the Liberia airport floated on top.
The customs agent fell into his First 48 interrogation routine, waiting for me to slip up. Sober, I would usually feel like I am about to fail a test even though I’ve done nothing wrong. I would be afraid of getting caught for things I did years ago, possibly behind the back of a girlfriend or maybe cheating on a test in middle school. That morning I was drunk and having none of it.
“Where are you coming from?”
I wanted to say that it isn’t any of his business but I didn’t. I wanted to go home. I told him where I was coming from.
“What was the purpose of your travel?”
I internalized the same and answered, biting the inside of my lip.
“Where did you stay?”
Eat your hate. Swallow it and become full.
Finally he asked me what I do for a living.
“I’m a stand-up comedian.”
I said it with a disdain that showed my cards, that expressed my true feelings. This question had nothing to do with my citizenship nor was it any of his business.
He lit up like we were having a conversation at a hotel bar.
“Really??? A comedian? Like all over the country?”
With all of the sarcastic reserve of Jerry Seinfeld and the cockiness of Dice Clay, I rolled my eyes and broke into him: “C’mon! I’m DOUG STANHOPE, man!”
As though anyone on God’s dying earth would not know who Doug Stanhope is and that he’s being a shitworm by pretending not to know me.
And it worked.
“Oh. Uh… I’m sorry. I don’t have TV.”
He shrank in embarrassment and waved me through. I choked down my laugh until I got around
the corner.
The problem with visiting other countries is that, like bars, it’s usually mostly the doormen who are the dicks.
ICELAND, THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE
Our friend Shawnee came over to the house one day and randomly said that he thought Iceland might be a fun place to go to for Christmas. He knew that I often fly anywhere around the world at the end of the year to achieve airline status. I agreed if only to get out of a morning conversation. Yet it happened that I’d just read a news story about a comedian who had run a joke campaign to be the mayor of Reykjavik—the only city in Iceland—and had accidentally won.
After the economic crash of 2008, Jon Gnarr decided to start his own political party—the Best Party—and run for office along with a handful of other rogues and artists. At the time he was a well-known comedian there and star of an Icelandic television series called Night Shift. Long story short, the joke backfired and he was now the mayor and his party held six of the fifteen seats on the city council.
The story was compelling enough that I tracked him down with a search of “mayor of Reykjavik” and although the website was all in a foreign tongue, I could figure out that a link was to the mayor.
I sent a missive.
To The Honorable Jon Gnarr,
My name is Doug Stanhope and I am the greatest comedian of all time, according to a recent email from a fan. It is my intention to come to Reykjavik on a diplomatic mission on behalf of, but without the consent or interest of, my town of Bisbee, Arizona.
As this will be my first venture being a foreign dignitary, I’d like to inquire as to what time of year is the best fit for your schedule, how you should be addressed (and should I do that thing where we kiss each other on both cheeks) as well as maybe the name of a good sushi place.
I feel that this meeting will be of paramount importance to the future of the world as we know it so I will bring my camera. I also feel that it would be good if we could sign a document (of your choosing) together at the end of my stay for historical sake.
Please contact me at your earliest convenience if this is in fact your correct email address. I found it on a page that was written in a foreign language but your photo was at the top so I’m taking a stab in the dark.
Yours,
stanhope
A roll of the dice. In short time, I received an email back.
Dear Stanhope
I was very pleased to receive your letter. I must say I was quite surprised, to say the least, because I just recently discovered your work and really enjoyed it. I have seen you on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, bits on youtube and No Refunds. The weird thing is that I have been talking a lot about you lately and introducing your stuff to my friends. I believe in coincidence. (Hope that´s not a problem.)
Last week I was in NY. There I met a cab driver from Ghana who used to live on a remote island in Iceland. When I got to the hotel I googled your town and read about the gays and Paul Newman. I have only once been to Arizona. It was on my way from LA to Boston many years ago. I spent 3 hours at the airport and bought a lot of cactus candy. But I once was a pen pal with a girl who was doing time in the Arizona state prison for women. I lost contact with her after she got released and went back on the road with her friends in Hells Angels. Her name was Kathy Sparrow. I have not talked to her for over 20 years.
I would be more than happy to meet with you. Maybe we could have our meeting in Hofdi House where the Reagan and Gorbachev summit was held in 1986? Wouldn’t that be appropriate? It’s the 25 year anniversary this year and about time for something historical to happen again
I know my secretary has been in contact with you but here’s my private email.
Best wishes
joN gnarR
This trip had been Shawnee’s idea but fuck him. I was goddamned famous in Iceland, at least to the mayor. I couldn’t wait until Christmas. I had to go as soon as was possible. You can call a comedian out for stealing your bit but you can’t castigate your friend for ripping off your vacation idea.
I wrote back and told the mayor that we should indeed have an official meeting at Hofdi House and sign important documents, perhaps even officially declaring Bisbee and Reykjavik “Conjoined-Twin Sister Cities.” I suggested that although Icelanders speak perfect English, I should still hire an interpreter for the event, only having him repeat the mayor’s accented English into English without the accent. I told the mayor that I’d also been pen pals with a prisoner, mine having been on death row where they can never leave you. I misquoted Dostoyevsky and wrote: “Someone smarter than me once said that you can judge a society by the conditions of its prisons. I don’t know if it’s true but that could be a fun venture in Iceland. Anything besides eating that rotted shark’s head surprise.”
I signed off with “Let’s Get Drunk and Go Whaling!”
Let me explain that this sign-off came from a tour of Norway, where I had made it our battle cry.
“Let’s Get Drunk and Go Whaling!”
I would continuously bellow this on- and offstage like an insane Viking until one night when it went a bit too far. I’d made the mistake of drinking Asahi beer at lunch with sushi, where we did coincidently eat whale. The mistake was drinking at lunch. You get a taste for continuing to drink all day. By showtime I was space debris. I was so confidently drunk that people viewed me more as an exhibit from an exotic faraway land than a comedian.
Nonplussed, I continued to cry out my catchphrase at the bar after the Trondheim show until I actually convinced myself that this was the right course of action. Now I only had to convince the others. I finally pressured the opening act, Dag Soras, and some fan to go out with me to try and steal a boat from across the street at the marina. I leapt up and over the chain-link fence with such amazing athleticism that Dag and I had to stop and talk about it. If there is retard strength, there is also drunken prowess. It was that well executed that it is still vivid in an otherwise mostly blacked-out night.
Now that we’d made it inside the marina, it was just a question of which vessel was the most attractive. Like going to a car lot with an unlimited budget. I knew nothing about boats or how to drive them. Those were things we’d figure out afterwards. What I had not considered is that a people as kind and civilized as the Norwegians would see any reason to lock things. I assumed every one of these yachts must have the keys in the ignition, but you couldn’t even get inside of them. What do these people have to hide? I should have figured that out by asking why they had that fence that I vaulted so magnificently.
Fortunately we failed at my whaling adventure. I don’t know anything about boats or whaling so it wouldn’t have ended well for anyone save for the whales.
When I signed off with “Let’s Get Drunk and Go Whaling!” to the mayor of Iceland, he responded that he was a vegan and against whaling. I told him that Bingo was a vegan as well, that she would never kill a whale unless it was in self-defense and that I hoped our journey wouldn’t come to that. But he did say he had made arrangements to not only have us tour but also perform at Iceland’s only maximum-security prison. I hadn’t wanted to muddy up the vacation with doing gigs but a prison gig had always been on my career bucket list and if it sucked, I wouldn’t have to worry about running into any of the audience afterwards at the bar.
I announced the show on my website and that since the show was just for prison inmates, the only way you could gain admittance is if you found a way to get sentenced to it. The intention was to create what would become known as the “Doug Stanhope defense” where defendants claim they only committed the crime in order to get into my gig.
The Honorable Jon Gnarr met us coming off the plane at arrivals in Iceland. He was with his elder son, Frosti, and they wore monkey masks, holding a sign with our name. We only had time for a few breakfast cocktails, a shower and a few more beers on the hour-long drive to the prison. Thank fuck Frosti let us smoke in his car. I was nervous, not because I was going into a prison but because I’d have to do a show w
ithout drinking.
The Litla-Hraun prison only houses eighty prisoners out in the middle of some endless, rolling lava-tundra and seems more like a summer camp for underprivileged teens in a place where summer sucks anyway. Some of the gates that were opened for us couldn’t hold my dog Henry if he saw a rabbit on the other side.
Before the show we got a guided tour—not until later did we find out that our guide was a prisoner himself—and got to hang out with a lot of the guys in one of the cell blocks.
When I say cell and cell block, think dorm and dorm room. I’m writing this now from a Motel 6 in Sierra Vista, Arizona, that is far more decrepit and certainly more dangerous.
At the front of the cell block there was a rec room of some sort with a small Asian kid on a couch playing Tiger Woods golf on a PlayStation and a full kitchen to the left where the inmates made their own food from scratch—just like Mama used to make when she did hard time in Iceland.
There was a metal culinary table in the middle of the kitchen where large knives stuck magnetically to the edges. The knives were on wire cords like a bank pen; if you wanted to stab a fellow inmate in an Icelandic prison, you had to wait until he’s rolling out the fresh pasta. At this Motel 6, I’m surprised the remote control isn’t similarly fashioned.
Everyone was cool as shit. One guy saw me fumbling with a cigarette, looking for a door to go outside to smoke.
“You want to smoke? Come with me!” and we went into his cell. You couldn’t smoke in the common area but you could smoke in your room. All the doors to the dozen or so rooms on the wing were open. He showed me his books and pictures and told me how he—as well as many other inmates—was working on a university degree online. A few more smokers came in and we shot the shit while Bingo made best friends of everyone outside.
Then I had to do the show.
The show was in a small, half-court gymnasium with folding chairs—again better than a lot of the venues I choose to play—with I’d guess thirty or forty inmates. His Highness Mr. Jon Gnarr opened in Icelandic for ten or fifteen minutes while I waited in the wings wishing I’d actually put some thought into what the fuck I was going to say. I’d planned on just throwing out the greatest hits—it’s not like they would know it’s all old material—but I was having a hard time placing exactly what those hits were anymore.
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