My show sucked but nobody seemed to be bothered by it but me. I figured I could just riff every easily consumed dick joke I’d ever written but turns out I forgot how most of them go, so there was a lot of me staring at my shoes in between bits or ending them midway when I couldn’t remember the payoff. You know… that place I get to when I usually scream at the bar for more alcohol.
Afterwards while Bingo was getting email addresses, the inmates presented us with gifts including T-shirts—the prison has their own T-shirt which is cool as fuck—and a large card handwritten in perfect calligraphy that said:
Dear Doug Stanhope
Our initial idea of showing you our gratitude for you visiting us prisoners at Litla-Hraun was to give you a t-shirt with the inscription “I went to prison in Iceland and all they gave me was this lousy t-shirt which they gagged me with while f***ing me in the a**.” This was deemed inappropriate so you get this nice card instead.
I still haven’t gotten around to getting it framed. But it’s on the very long list of things I have to do.
I wish I’d had more time to hang out and find out more about the guys and how the whole system works. Prison fascinates and repulses me. Prison on any level sucks shit but Iceland—like a lot of Scandinavian countries—seems to have a way to make it rehabilitative instead of just cruel and even more damaging to society at large. Next time maybe I’ll stay a while, have some pasta and fuck the Asian kid with the PlayStation.
We left the prison and went back to Reykjavik to His Majesty Jon Gnarr’s home for sushi with his lovely wife, Joga, and family—including his small redheaded child who, although he was only about six years old, may very well be in Litla-Hraun today in Hannibal Lecter restraints. We ate and went through most of the vodka we’d brought before we’d even taken a nap. I probably said the wrong thing more than once but hoped it would be chalked up to the very slight language barrier. Thank goodness we could smoke in the house.
The next day we met up at city hall and were given the full tour and were introduced to some of the other members of the Best Party including Einar Benediktsson, formerly of the Sugarcubes, who thankfully smoked cigarettes and thankfully was with the Sugarcubes so I could google the spelling of his name. I forget everybody’s name anyway, but when they have Icelandic names I never really got ’em to begin with.
We then held our Official Meeting at the Hofdi House where twenty-five years previously Reagan and Gorbachev held their famous summit meeting in 1986. We posed for pictures in the same chairs they had posed.
The woman who ran the place greeted us and commented on how much she liked Bingo’s shoes, a pair of knee-high black Converse Chuck Taylors. Of course Bingo immediately demanded that the woman have them. She took them off, put them on the woman and laced them up for her. Bingo happily went home in a pair of plastic shoe-condoms given out to tourists so they don’t muddy up the carpet.
In return, the woman gave Bingo a gift basket of things from the house to take home with her, one that kinda took us both off guard. Wrapped in tin foil and palmed to Bingo with a smirk was a large bundle of dried mushroom stems.
“You know what this is?” asked the woman.
“Ooooh yeah!” said Bingo.
And with a wink and a nod we were off.
It was mushroom season in Iceland. On the drive to the prison they pointed out people on the side of the road and in the median picking them like dandelions. They’d told us we could get psilocybin anywhere like they were bored with it, like the cab driver in Vegas who is tired of people amazed that you can walk down the street with an open container. But to be given narcotics here during an Official Meeting at the Hofdi House? Fuck, it’s too bad Reagan and Gorbachev didn’t go tripping during their failed attempt at working shit out.
We spent the next few days just hitting bars and meeting folks in town. Everything in Reykjavik is in walking distance, a beautiful village of a city with great sushi and unassuming folks and lots of things on menus that I didn’t dare eat. We also spent a lot of time curled up in bed the way a vacation is supposed to be.
On the last night we still had the mushrooms and still had to meet up with Frosti and his friends. We weren’t really in the mood to trip but sometimes you have to push yourself. How often will we have the opportunity to tell a story like this?
Bingo crushed them up and wrapped them into moist bread balls—saying we could just swallow them like a pill, as though you could eat a pill the size of a fat man’s thumb. I chewed it down gagging the whole way like I was eating a cricket on a dare. We waited for both Frosti and that first seasick agonizing wave of the mushrooms.
We saved some for Frosti. We aren’t animals. When he showed up, they were crushed up on a plate and Bingo offered it to him.
“There’s not much left but if you want some mushrooms…”
Frosti looked at it oddly, touched it and smelled it.
“That’s sage.”
“What?”
“That is sage, not mushrooms.”
“What the fuck is sage?” I ask.
“Sage. It’s like uh, you know… like potpourri.”
We had just choked down bread balls full of potpourri thinking that the mayor’s office had given us hallucinogens as an Official Welcome Gift.
We had a fantastic night. Frosti and I made drunken plans to get gay-married to obtain dual citizenship. I called his father the mayor to ask for his permission and it was so granted. We would make it a grand affair with a parade in Reykjavik in fashion with the British royals.
We never got around to it.
Bingo and I shit potpourri the whole way home and nobody seated near the airplane bathroom complained at all.
BREAKDOWN LANE
Bingo gets a glazed, dead-fish look in her eyes when she’s going under the weather of a mental break. It can come on quick, even before the waitress has time to bring her the Pancake Puppies or whatever the fuck she ordered.
She’d gone shitty the night before after a show in Omaha where we had to carry her out of the van in a pink princess gown at some shit-box motel with construction crew guys still grilling and drinking beer in the parking lot. Four of us hoisting a seemingly passed-out chick into a motel room. They looked on like they might be able to overpower us for the carrion.
Rock Island is one of the “Quad Cities,” a quadrant of the worst possible places to be that all share a city border. I always try to eat before I drink and I always drink before a show, no matter how much that show means to me. I am professionally unprofessional in that way. Somewhere in between Bingo ordering her food and it being brought to the table, her eyes went charcoal black with her lids fluttering like a silent-film projector. I knew where we were going.
It was still light outside when she was gone and her meal lay untouched in front of her. I knew the drill but still went into my futile default of trying to preach logic at insanity.
These spinouts didn’t happen on a regular basis but were not uncommon over a course of years. In a Denny’s in some hayseed town, hours before showtime, her timing sucked. We’d been traveling together for enough years that I thought she should have some professionalism with her mental illness the same way I did with my alcoholism. Go full-retard on our day off.
It was probably two hours that I spent trying to talk, reason and beg Bingo into coming out of her state. The entire time she was thinking that I and everything else around her was an invented offshoot of her imagination, daring her to die. I can’t explain it nor understood it when she explained it to me later. But I understand “bad trip.” Same rules apply.
As showtime came closer I called Chaille, told him the problem and explained that the problem didn’t seem like it was going to end anytime soon. There was no way I would risk having her put into an institution in the Quad Cities—not any of them under any circumstances. We were a group of fuckup comedians but we were more equipped to take care of Bingo than anyone in these bum-fuck towns.
We were renting a white-panel van a
t the time, the kind that work-release prisoner crews use when picking up trash on the side of the highway. Brett Erickson and Geoff Tate were on the tour and in the van, along with Brett’s gal Kerry and a local friend of theirs. I told the Denny’s manager what was about to happen only minutes ahead of time. I didn’t want to give him any time to panic and call the authorities. I believe he would have, based on his reaction. Too late. Chaille swung the rape van in front of the Denny’s. Geoff and Brett rushed in and picked up Bingo out of our corner booth by her legs and underarms, carried her through a now crowded restaurant and chucked her into the back of a white van, engine running in front of the entrance. I feebly announced, “Fraternity prank!” to nobody listening.
Nobody looked. Nobody cared. This catatonic woman who had clogged up a corner booth for hours had just been physically removed by a mob of street urchins and nobody sees a thing. Like white-trash mafia. After Bingo was heaved into the van, someone noticed that her coat was left behind in the Denny’s booth and ran back in to grab it. The people in the booth beside ours were leaning in to eat her dinner that she’d been ignoring for hours in a psychological failure. I keep forgetting to never play there again.
She started to come around a bit on the way to the show. She noticed and pointed out someone in the van that she did not recognize, the local friend of Erickson’s. Then she asked if other people could see him as well. We were too wiped to see the funny in saying that we didn’t. We didn’t find the gag until it was too late.
My show sucked. I can’t not open with what just happened and what just happened didn’t even yet make sense to me. And then I get angry when people are waiting for the payoff. The tour continued. It probably never came up onstage again. We all had our own problems to deal with on a daily basis. We triage situations and then get back to our own garbage once the present problem has been solved. The next night may have been Geoff Tate being jumped for playing too much Bob Seger on the jukebox or Erickson nearly losing a finger trying to break it up. Or maybe that was the night before. It’s always something.
Even without psychological breakdowns, Bingo doesn’t travel well. Especially through customs.
I’ve said it onstage and I’ll say here again, I’d be more confident crossing through customs at an international border with bricks of hashish taped to my body than simply getting through innocently with my Bingo. For someone who has flown about half a million miles with me to twenty-some countries on four different continents, I still wouldn’t be surprised to catch her using her passport as a coaster or forgetting to take off a metal jousting helmet before passing through the scanner at airport security. (This not something she has actually worn on an airplane but something that wouldn’t be out of the question.)
The idea of her traveling by herself is even more distressing.
I stood at the international arrivals gate at London’s Heathrow Airport. Bingo was coming to join me in the middle of a run at the Soho Theatre. It was her first time flying alone internationally and even though I’d given her a thorough woodshedding on the dos and don’ts, I wasn’t at all confident. And with every planeload of people that washed through without her, I became even more agitated.
Eventually a woman’s voice came across the PA system with that calm British accent.
“Would the party meeting Amy Bingaman on Delta flight from Atlanta please pick up a courtesy phone and dial…”
Fuck. I was not calm.
The first thing they said when I reached them was “Yes, Mr. Stanhope. First of all, don’t panic. The paramedics are looking at her right now.”
Panic.
Bingo had evidently piled way too much Xanax on top of her usual buffet of psyche meds, which alone already knock her out and make her goofy. This, lubricated with plenty of free in-flight cocktails, left Bingo unable to get out of her seat on the plane or make words that made much sense. The paramedics of course didn’t know what the hell she was on nor could she function well enough to explain. They told me to sit tight.
I sat tight as fuck for an endless amount of time, myself still not knowing what had happened.
Finally the voice came back on the loudspeaker and I was back at the courtesy phone. They’d gotten her off the plane and I explained that she was on medication that could be the culprit.
The problem now was that she wasn’t able to fill out the immigration forms. How long would she be there? Where would she be staying? These were questions she probably wouldn’t know how to answer on a lucid day. All she knew was to meet me at baggage claim. They let me answer the questions over the phone to fill in the form and she evidently could manage to scrawl her signature.
Shortly afterwards, she was trucked out in a wheelchair by three flight attendants. Her eyes looked in every direction away from each other and focused on nothing while she laughed like an idiot. She was wearing an absurd green-and-white-striped poodle skirt with a T-shirt that our comedian friend Brendon Walsh made depicting a crude cartoon of a man defecating in a trail whilst exclaiming, “No problem!” The flight attendants were laughing as well, seemingly with her and not at her. She must have created an adorable scene. At her worst she still finds a way into your heart.
I’d come to the airport with Hennigan, who’d scheduled his exit with Bingo’s arrival. Hennigan is always at my side when I’m in Europe. Without him I am lost and terrified and still don’t know how to dial a cell phone internationally. He’d had me put up in an apartment walking distance to the theater so I didn’t have to think. But I’d agreed that I would figure out the “tube” to get Bingo and myself back to central London from the airport. He gave me simple directions that did not factor in Bingo being a swaying, jabbering half zombie. You can only take the wheelchair to the airport door. Then you’re on your own. Next I was pulling her bags and trying to keep her up on her feet while I navigated my way to this unfamiliar subway fucking thing that was so simple. I would’ve broken down and taken a cab but the thought of London traffic even on a Sunday gave me the shit-shivers even worse.
Once on the train or the tube or the subway or whatever those cunts call it, I sat opposite Bingo, who sprang up somewhat upright and told me she was hungry. I told her we’d be home soon but she insisted that she had food in her backpack. And indeed she did. She’d packed some cheese sandwiches for the trip, like she was going to the park for a picnic. Accounting for the time she’d had to drive from Bisbee to the airport, wait for flights during layovers, be detained by immigration and now on a train, the sandwiches had to have been sitting in a hot backpack for at least twenty hours.
I was wearing the one black suit I’d packed for the entire three-week run in London. I looked like a proper person on a noontime train. Bingo looked like Courtney Love spiraling into the abyss. People stared like I was some kind of interventionist, counselor or perverted opportunist. Bingo had a wet sandwich that her vacant eyes strained to focus on but failed. The sandwich would ebb and flow, flip and flop with each jerk of the train as though the train itself had comic timing, zigging to make the sandwich fold backwards over itself just as her mouth fell in to zag.
Before you tell someone to take a Xanax on a long flight, explain the difference between a bar (2 mg) and a peach (.5 mg).
Bingo’s fucked-up arrival came towards the end of an already miserable time in London. I’d been doing quite well on my tours of the UK in the early and mid-2000s but that didn’t mean I liked being there. The more the audiences liked me, the worse I felt for hating being in their country. Or countries, however it works. I’d take sleepers right after the show to fall right down and in the morning I’d take another with more vodka and a nice citrus to sleep again through the day. There is no reason to be awake in London.
At some point Hennigan came back and by then my whole day and probably my entire act consisted of how much I hated London and was terrified of dying on that horrible island. Everything sucked, from the food to television to the bars and mostly the bars. The years I’ve put into drinking have mad
e me very particular, a snotty cunt if you will. I could give a shit about a brand name; the more plastic the jug, the better. I just want to sit there with my cocktail, mind my own business and get drunk. Pubs in the UK rarely have stools at the bar. You stand. For hours. They rarely have a proper rocks glass. The glass is very important. I don’t want a vodka-soda in a tulip glass. They almost never have cocktail straws. I like cocktail straws. I have big ugly teeth and I don’t like ice cubes bashing against ’em when I drink. Not a problem, Doug, because in the UK they dole out ice like it’s caviar and the few cubes they’ll part with are hollow and melt in seconds. Then they have the audacity to charge you separately for both the booze and the mixer, both insanely overpriced.
I now travel with my own cocktail straws and my own glass. Next time, my own ice maker.
On a previous UK tour, we showed up just days after the death of our good friend Russ Dunn. I’d had a lot of friends and family die by then but Russ hit especially hard because he lived in Bisbee and was part of our daily lives. One day he sat down on his couch, had a rum and coke and an aneurysm and then he was dead. Landing in London already depressed amplified the misery by ten. Bingo and I shuffled onto the train, wedged our bags into the always too small shelves and put our duty-free liquor and cartons of cigarettes under our table, fighting off the leftover drink and downers still in our blood from the long flight.
We finally unloaded our shit into the aparthotel near Leicester Square, thinking we’d finally made it there safely, when a wash of horror came over me. We’d left the duty-free on the train. In a city where you can pay seventeen dollars for a single, measured screwdriver. Where you pay fifteen dollars for a pack of cigarettes. All left behind on public transit underneath a table like an Easter egg for a vagrant. I never thought of Russ Dunn again the entire tour. I still mourn the loss of those bags to this day.
This Is Not Fame Page 13