On this next trip I’d nursed all the duty-free I’d brought and then the duty-free that Hennigan and Bingo brought until I finally had to buy the UK local overpriced shit vodka a few days before I left. Brian and Bingo left before me and my meltdown was happening alone in a small apartment I’d been sitting in for far too long.
Coming home after the show I pulled the vodka out of the freezer to drink myself down only to pour an icy vodka slushie. It was half frozen. It was the final kick in the pants, a cocktail of insult with a splash of injury. I didn’t know whether to blame the veracity of their shitty booze or their archaic appliances, a freezer so ridiculously cold that it froze the bottom-shelf antifreeze I’d purchased. I had to run the bottle under hot water to thaw it because the microwave—like the dishwasher and laundry machines—employed undecipherable characters instead of words. A Star of David, a rainbow, an ankh. Nothing that is obvious. You shouldn’t microwave vodka anyway. It removes a lot of the nutrients.
Many months later at dinner with people, I recounted this tale of frozen vodka in one of my many diatribes on why I loathe the UK. Hennigan was there and burst into his hideous, soprano squeal of a laugh and it was minutes before he could get out the fact that he’d watered down that vodka before he’d left London, concerned I was drinking too much.
THE GRASS IS ALWAYS BROWNER
For all the traction I was gaining in the UK audiences, I was at the same time slipping in my own wet piles at home.
Joe Rogan and I had taken over the hosting duties for the jock-popular, feeble-tainment Comedy Central series The Man Show. In short, Joe and my sense of humor didn’t fit the mold for the show’s ingrained audience.
I’d already been protested at a stand-up show in Madison, Wisconsin, just before the airing of our first Man Show episode but still while it was being heavily advertised. Not for being a shitty replacement, but for being on the show at all. An agent had booked me in a theater and they had great expectations of a big turnout based on those ads alone.
I’d come in early to sound check—always an unnecessary obligation unless you’re working with a guitar act—when the booker told me we were going to be protested. I never considered him to be serious. We’d only sold about 150 tickets for a place that held at least six hundred. The only person I could imagine protesting was the guy who gave me an inordinate guaranteed fee.
But sure enough, as the first trickle of audience started coming in, a dozen or less protesters showed up with signs. They were calm, almost complacent. Maybe they were, like the booker, expecting more people to be there.
Regardless, I was staining my pants with excitement. I couldn’t ever imagine having anyone care enough about me to take the time to picket, much less for some dumb show they considered sexist. The protest was the result of a post on a campus feminist newsgroup. I was touched by their sentiment. I ran out with my camera and sheepishly asked if they would mind if I took some pictures. I was braced for a verbal barrage of hatred and didn’t care. In the words of Steve Martin in The Jerk after finding his name in the phone book—“I’m somebody now!”
Nobody gave a shit about me taking pictures. No one said a word to me. They just stood there bored with their signs.
“Sexism Is So Funny… Says the Bigot!”
“Keep Your Jokes Off My Body”
“Doug Stanhope Is a Dope!”
It was funnier still in that, like my shows, it was more dudes than women. Yet nobody would engage me. The more pictures I took, the more I laughed until one of them told me that this wasn’t a joke. They told me that they were serious, that sexism wasn’t funny and that I shouldn’t go watch this garbage.
They had no idea I was the guy they were protesting. I had to break it to them gently and then give them a moment to get their game faces on to give me shit. It’s tough to look that foolish and then jump straight into your original game plan. We had a civil discourse where they rode their preplanned bullet points that The Man Show leads to rape, eating disorders and every other problem women endure. I wanted to explain to them that The Man Show wasn’t even really that good to have such effect. If that shitty TV show could ruin the lives of women, the protesters certainly would have had far more problems had they seen my live show. They’d still have problems.
I hung out with them for half an hour or so and I tried to be a diplomat. We found common ground on other shit that sucked in the world. They were nice enough kids and if misguided, they were still just kids. I’m sure that when I was twenty I believed things I was taught rather than things I’d experienced or had grown to conclude on my own. Still, they were my first and to this day only protesters of my career. I wanted to hug them all and buy them all a beer but they weren’t even old enough to drink, much less have a coherent argument.
The capper to the whole event came towards the end of my interlude with the picketers. While we engaged in a harmonious discourse, one of my “fans” coming into the show walked into the group, staggering and stumble-footed, and asked the protester next to me what his problem was. I stepped in and asked the drunky-fuck if he was going to the show. He told me that yes indeed he was going to the show. He told me that it was just comedy and if I didn’t like it, I should just go fucking home.
Both my protesters and my audience had no idea who I was. Even the feminists had to laugh, including the few ladies amongst them.
Some ladies don’t like the media portraying unattainable body images as much as I don’t like the fact that I will never have “Abs of Steel” or whatever the most recent infomercial might be. The people who fall for that bullshit—the guys taking human–growth hormones and the girls upchucking cheesecake—are people who think they have nothing more to offer society than being fuckable. Nobody jerks off picturing somebody’s sense of decency or superior intellect. Fuckability gives people without better qualities an achievable goal. Don’t protest their last resort.
BROWNER PASTURES
The herpes on my dick are not nearly as disconcerting as the herpes on my resume. Before the stink of The Man Show could even blemish my nameless profile, I went one step deeper.
I hosted an episode of Girls Gone Wild just on a goof in the same way I pretended to be a traveling salesman on Jerry Springer years before. It seemed funny at the time—another discounted but worthy title for this book.
I was sitting home alone in Venice, California, on one of those empty nights where you think you might just drink a little bit and take care of yourself. Then Paulie from the bar pounded at my door with a friend in tow. They had to inform me of the genius idea they’d concocted down at O’Brien’s. This is one of those moments that reminds you why sober people bitch about how irritating it is to be around drunkards, while still understanding that the opposite is also true.
Paulie’s friend ran the Girls Gone Wild website. Their previous host was Snoop Dogg. If I spelled Snoop Dogg incorrectly, don’t fix it. It’s fucking stupid. They were looking for a new host for the next DVD and, with me being the new host of The Man Show, it was a slam dunk in their eyes. I told them to set it up and call me just to get them out of my house. I’m a drunk too so I assumed they would forget.
They called the next day and had arranged a meeting with the smarmy, barnacle-to-the-stars owner of GGW—Joe Francis—who wanted me to be the new host. I went to his office and we spent a few obligatory minutes of trying to be cordial. The connection was weak and the bullshit was strained. In short time, a reeking silence draped the office.
It turned out that while they’d told me that Joe Francis wanted to pitch me on being the new host, they’d told him that I wanted to pitch him on me being the new host. We drummed our fingers on the desk, each of us waiting for the pitch to start.
Finally he asked me what my idea was. I told him I was under the impression I was there to hear his idea. The fake laugh we shared when the puzzle was finally put together was the most genuine laugh we’d fake for the rest of our short relationship. I told him I’d put some thought into it an
d get back to him.
Paulie and I went to my apartment and instead of putting thought into it, we put beer into it. We got drunk and wrote up a proposal that held little or no substance other than over-the-top braggadocio as to why I was the perfect host for the show and that with my new position as host of The Man Show and the inherent cross-promotion, they would be insane not to hire me at once. The email was jammed with every industry jargon cliché I could come up with and weeping with all the groundless self-confidence that is the foundation of Hollywood. It was a spoof of a proposal. We were crying by the time it was done and for good measure at the end I added: “PS. Don’t Fuck This Up.”
Hit “Send”!
This must have been the exact kind of moxie they were looking for in a new, unknown host and I was hired. We went out to seven or eight college towns in Georgia, Texas and Arizona—those are the ones I vaguely remember anyway. They all blended together like an MTV Spring Break montage of drunken idiots. All I had to do was be funny. But my brand of humor wasn’t copacetic with what dumb chicks who’d show their tits on camera for a free trucker’s hat would find funny. And I don’t find dumb chicks attractive.
Maybe the word “dumb” is inaccurate. I don’t mean that they’d be any more attractive if they could find Canada on a map, or didn’t dot their i’s with hearts. I’m talking about a complete lack of soul, desire for knowledge, curiosity or original thought. Girls who parrot television sexuality as a replacement for anything interesting to say and don’t really mean it. Girls who confuse name brands for style and money with joy. Girls who just don’t get it. Dumb chicks. And the rolling cameras were like a bug light drawing them in.
My cracking wise did anything but make these girls go wild. In fact, it could make a girl who was in the midst of going wild stop immediately on her heels and leave. There were times I wasn’t allowed on the bus during tapings so I didn’t ruin the wildness in progress. The only girls who ever seemed like they wanted anything to do with me were the ones nobody wanted going even the least bit giddy, much less wild. They were mutants like myself and were always the first to show up.
“Okay, I’m gonna take my top off! Are you ready???”
“Ah sure. Go right ahead.”
“Are you filming?”
“Of course. Go ahead and show us.”
Tits or something like them appear.
“Did you get it?”
“Yep, we got it.”
“But the red light wasn’t on.”
“Don’t worry, we got it. Here’s your free T-shirt. A large, I’m guessing?”
“Do you know when it’s going to air???” in desperation as the crew quickly disappears.
The whole thing was sad and abusive on every level, starting and ballooning at the top. Joe Francis is such a boorish, vile and megalomaniacal person that at times I even skipped his private jet in favor of taking the bus with the crew. Imagine Donald Trump if he were young and could get an erection. A frat boy worth fifty million who’d still bang a girl in the hotel suite toilet and come out saying, “Smell my fingers.” Not in the funny way like a comedian would. Like some guy who would fuck girls at after-parties and then immediately throw them out just to make them cry. Like some dude who would brag about it and collect his high-fives.
Nobody said shit to Joe until he left the room. Everybody hated him. But his pig teats were lactating cash and everybody continued to nurse. I wish I had said something. He is fucking disgusting. I tried my best to avoid him but that doesn’t excuse what I’d become part of and still doesn’t.
All the while Eric—the “vice president of production” whose real title should have been “flunky”—followed behind me with his tail wagging. He was the one who pulled the trigger on hiring me and now I was his liability.
“I’ll never forget what you said in that first email! ‘Don’t Fuck This Up’!”
Remember that I was only hired to do one single video in an endless series of soft-core titty flicks for semi-hard men. But that one video would be the one they advertised. The ploy was to get you to buy the one video advertised on TV and that started you on a perpetual subscription you could cancel anytime. On one of my first tours of the GGW offices we passed an empty bank of desks with ringing phones. Eric said, “That’s the cancellation lines. Our running joke is that anyone who answers them gets fired.”
My video came out and every late-night cable viewer was bludgeoned with it every fifteen minutes for seemingly years. I’d done it as a joke and for the money but the commercials still aired long after that money was gone and the joke had turned embarrassing.
But I wasn’t out of the woods yet, contractually or morally. Whatever I thought about Joe Francis as a subhuman being, I bit one more time. Not long after we’d finished filming, I was asked if I’d host their upcoming Super Bowl pay-per-view halftime special on the fictional Girls Gone Wild Island, which is just a large estate on a beach in Mexico. To be fair, it was fucking huge and beautiful but that wasn’t enough for Joe Francis. He had to lie and call it an island.
The halftime special would pay twenty-five thousand dollars for a day’s work. My concern for how many girls could get harmed in the making of the show got lost in my periphery and I signed on the dotted line.
But as the original commercial continued to run and become a growing source of embarrassment, I asked my then-manager to get me out of the halftime contract. She said she would and by the time it was supposed to be taping, I was comfortably on vacation in Costa Rica with at least a dozen friends including Becker and the Alaska contingent. There, my manager tracked me down with word that Joe Francis was still expecting me and was threatening to sue if I broke the contract and didn’t show up. Becker and I had been going to Costa Rica for a few years by then—before I had any problems in that country—and had always talked about buying a place there over too many Pilsen beers. Lesser men drink Imperial in Costa Rica. Becker and I are Pilsen men through and through.
We decided that it was best I leave the party and go do the GGW bullshit and that I would put the money towards whatever property Becker could find. Becker did find property and has since built a house on it so that I have a place to hide if I’m ever on the lam. I know you won’t find it. I’ve been there and I know I couldn’t find it again.
Leaving Costa Rica to GGW island meant flying back through US customs in Houston and then back through Mexico City, where I can still smell the rotting sewage outside the airport while I smoked, and then to Puerto Vallarta before a ten-mile drive to the GGW campsite. I made the production well aware that I didn’t want to be there and that I would be drunk for as much of it as was possible. I did not disappoint.
I have three memories. I had a lady co-host who took too long getting ready and we were late for rehearsals that night before the filming. Joe told our driver he’d be fired if he didn’t get us there ten minutes ago. Thank fuck I was already potato-faced because the ensuing race at a hundred miles per hour on winding twenty-five-mile-per-hour roads would have surely had me in a high-pitch squeal. Instead, I was happy to die. I’d noticed during the day that cops drove pickup trucks with tall roll-bars holding spotlights. On that insane, roller-coaster suicide drive, I spotted headlights coming towards us and cringed. When I saw the spotlights flash from above a police vehicle, I was happy that we were about to be pulled over. When I saw our driver respond in kind by flashing his own high beams, I thought we’d die in a shoot-out. When the police didn’t even turn around, I was perplexed.
We finally arrived at the rehearsal and I asked the driver how he pulled that off. He explained that when you drive an expensive car that looks official—in that case a black Suburban with tinted windows—the show of aggression he’d displayed makes the local cops think you’re someone of higher authority. That’s some fucking balls. And money. Years later I did a private show for American time-share salespeople in Cancun. The guy who booked me said he could never go back to living in the States because the corruption in Mexico made liv
ing too easy. He told me about a time he’d been pulled over on a Christmas Eve in an otherwise total blackout and simply gave the cop fifty bucks to continue on his way home.
I did that show on a slowly revolving dance floor to a nightclub in the round. It was horrible and I couldn’t bribe my way out of it.
After the Death Race 2000 to the GGW rehearsal, I went into a banquet room of a hotel where thirty-some women sat in four different team uniforms. Joe Francis stood at the front and shouted directions for what was to happen the next day. The special was a series of sports-meets-titty-dancing-related obstacles, a low-budget American Gladiators with tits on a beach. I don’t remember a single one of them, nor would anybody else who watched it. At the end of the rehearsal, one girl said she wanted to change back into her street clothes to go out on the town. Francis went into a fit of madness and told her she could not. It was suggested that she be put on a bus back home. She burst into tears. This was some Hitler-level power tripping and we all looked at our feet. We knew it was all bluster but she didn’t. I would have flown her home myself. I didn’t need the money this bad. Nobody did.
I spent the next day filming so drunk I’m amazed I could make words. The only snapshot memory I have is of them filming me crawling on all fours to my room. I was that drunk that crawling was probably all I could accomplish but somehow I sold them that it would be funny for the show.
The next morning I took the same insidious flight back to Costa Rica. I knew what the expression “blood money” meant but now I “got” what it meant. I never went back to ask about the supposed residual checks. I was happy not to have them.
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