It ain’t over.
The worst part was that I still had to promote it. I think of this every time I hear an actor promoting a film they know is a plate of slop. Porn chicks and prostitutes who have to promote—like those from the Bunny Ranch HBO reality show Cathouse are in the most unenviable spots. They could never come clean and say, “I fucking hate it. It’s humiliating but once I got into it, I couldn’t find a way out.” Nobody wants to jerk off to a girl you know is crying on the inside, save for maybe Joe Francis. I’m sure there are a few who love what they do or at least prefer it to answering phones in a cubicle with the same fake smile for pennies on the dollar.
As I had with The Man Show, I now had to put on the face and sell this porn-sploitation to any media outlet that would have me. Girls Gone Wild was worse in that I had to go on Howard Stern with Joe Francis and a handful of girls and dishonestly encourage people to buy this dreck, which I purposely did poorly.
Stern has a reputation for making you say shit you might never tell a close friend, much less divulge on the air. I have a reputation for saying it anyway. More than once Howard has actually told me not to say things that were true but might get me in trouble. Stern was my hero and my “I’ve made it!” moment the first time he had me on. To have to sell some Girls Gone Wild bullshit out of contractual obligation on Stern was dishonorable at best. Fortunately for me, Howard likes to focus on the fucking and there were girls there. That took the focus off of me.
At some point during the show, Stern asked me how much pussy I got filming GGW. I told him honestly that I got none. I added that it wasn’t only because I was married at the time. I told him that I didn’t want my DNA anywhere within a hundred yards or miles of Joe Francis.
Even after the money was spent and the commercials stopped airing, the herpes scar of GGW still haunted me. A few years later Joe Francis—GGW megalo-patriarch and predator, not new to being locked up—got arrested again for some financial or moral malfeasance.
Fox News ran the story on the hour and every time they ran the same footage; the graphic “Girls Gone Wild Owner Under Arrest” ran with commentary over an endless, silent loop of footage of my drunken face from the infomercial, making it look like I was the one who’d been busted.
They say no press is bad press. I would have preferred no press.
ACTUAL PORN
When I was asked to host the annual Adult Video News (AVN) Awards in Vegas, I thought I’d finally been recognized by my own people. The AVNs are what are commonly referred to as the Oscars of porn. I felt like I was their perfect Billy Crystal. Like porn people, I put out DVDs that guys would have to hide under their mattresses too.
I had no idea that porn people took their careers seriously. Porn is a go-to, always funny topic for comedians, maybe the number one topic. I assumed that porn people had the same point of view. I know that porn is far more popular than comedy in the amount of views but I couldn’t imagine there was any ego there. I assumed the awards would all be pillow fights, Ecstasy and inside jokes.
I’d played the Acme Comedy Club in Minneapolis where usually the crowd looked like they were there for something out of Lake Wobegon Days rather than my fist-fuck comedy. One weekend night there was a couple in sweaters in the front row center that looked like in-laws who only faked the smiles because it was Thanksgiving. I kept ribbing them for being offended, for not putting any effort into what kind of production they were coming to see, making them out to be prudes.
Joke was on me. After the show, the gentleman approached me at the bar and told me that he was also from Los Angeles and in fact a producer of porn. He invited me to watch a shoot when we were both back home. I gladly accepted. I showed up at a castle-styled home in Chatsworth—the Hollywood of porn—at some hour that seemed very inappropriate for this type of enterprise. Daylight, to be specific.
None of what happened was anything I’d expected. There were only five people there aside from me. The producer, a cameraman, a makeup girl and the two actors. The chick I don’t remember her name. The dude was an actor named Erik Everhard. It’s a difficult name to forget. In my heart of hearts, I knew that the porn industry exploits and feeds on women who are damaged. You ignore that heart when you are jacking off. But that day I knew I wouldn’t be jerking off and expected to eye-witness what I knew to be true.
It was all the opposite. Erik showed up with the flu and made it clear that the last thing he wanted to be doing was fucking a really hot chick. The lady on the other hand was there to get fucked and fucked well. She was very vocal about it.
“What the Fuck??? Why did you yell ‘CUT’ when I was just about to come???”
Erik would come over near me during breaks in the shoot and I’d try to make funny. He looked at me like I was a fucking asshole for even being there before walking away to cough up snot. You’ll tell me that this was an anomaly where the girl loves doing porn and the guy seems the victim, or at least like he deserves more sick days. I would tend to agree even in an uneducated assumption, even though my only firsthand experience was the complete opposite.
What I took away from it all was that no matter how glorious or enviable your career might seem to the general public, once it becomes something you have to do, it will one day suck.
Kinda sad.
Yes, even having to do porn might suck but the AVNs was an awards show. I assumed that it would be different and that drunken frivolity was certain to ensue. I was glad to be invited to the party.
You’ve seen less tension and backstage jitters at an Italian wedding. Everyone at the AVNs was on edge and snapping at each other. Nobody was having fun. They actually cared about winning. And for the most part, they were assholes. If I watched any one of them getting corn-piped in a film afterwards, it was out of spite and with a reticent boner.
Nina Hartley, a true porn star with porn name recognition from the days when such a thing existed, was introduced to me on the afternoon of the awards. She told me like a general would tell a front-line troop who was sure to die: “Good luck, have fun.” Then she told me to stay away from sex jokes—that although you’d think they’d work in this audience, they wouldn’t.
Talk about a pre-show head fuck. That’d be like me telling her before her first-ever porn shoot: “Have fun, be yourself. Just don’t take off your clothes.” I had already front-loaded all the sex jokes I could find for my set list and it was too late to rethink and rewrite.
The Venetian banquet hall where it was being held was overfull at about thirty-five hundred people. I’d been told upon hiring that I could not drink before or during the show. I had a reputation for getting plastered and fucking up shows, evidently. So I had to keep my drinking undercover by drinking openly and a lot, once I could see that everybody was too caught up in the moment to care.
I opened the show to almost nobody out of the thirty-five hundred in attendance paying attention and the few who were, hating me. What I didn’t know until afterwards was that, all the while I was onstage telling jokes, they had giant screens hanging from the ceiling away from me and towards the crowd with a roaming cameraman shooting live shots of porn chicks in the audience showing their tits and pussies at their banquet tables, all hoping to be crowned the queen of jizz flicks. Why would anyone look at the dude onstage talking? I could have read baking tips off a Ritz cracker box or blown my head off and no one would have noticed. Porn stars would have stood on my corpse, blood leaking from my skull as our spoiled dreams coagulated, tearfully accepting their award for “Most Believable MILF in Teen Porn” or “Least Likely to Be Otherwise Employable.”
The worst part was knowing that my part wasn’t even close to over. I would have to keep going up after each award and be disliked again and again. It lasted for well over three hours.
People call it the Oscars of porn but it isn’t. I wish the Oscars could be so honest in their vanity. At the AVNs, once a category or film had been awarded and the actors in question had nothing left to win or lose, their entire b
anquet table entourage would leave en masse in the middle of the show, either celebrating or indignant at the slight, and loudly blow out of the showroom. I’d love to see that at the Oscars. I’d love to see Meryl Streep lose on her Best Supporting nomination and get up during the winner’s speech, waving her entourage to grab their coats and head up the aisle towards the exits, stealing the bottles off the table as they leave. Fuck who wins Best Picture, our business here is done.
Again, like the porn I saw filmed, kinda sad.
I thought we were kindred spirits, you and me, porn.
Once it becomes a business, I guess it can take all the fun out of it.
We can all take it all too seriously.
And if there was ever an award for “Worst Ever Host of the AVNs,” I have no doubt I’d be a winner.
The only time I’ve had the opportunity to smoosh my penis up against a porn star’s private parts came years later. I’ll get to it in a roundabout way, as seems to be my “style” in this book.
The Office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is one of my all-time favorite day-drinking bars in the world. For me the criteria is stumbling distance to the hotel and proximity to food. The Office is attached to a clumsy Days Inn that also houses a twenty-four-hour diner. The bar is tiny, has about six stools, three tables with a jukebox and as of this writing, it still allows smoking. Valhalla. I’ve never had a bartender there that I didn’t fall in love with and I’ve never had a show in that city afterwards that I wasn’t too shitfaced because of it.
The reason I bring this bar up is that I tend to have a Jekyll and Hyde memory. Sometimes I will remember things from when I was drunk only when I’m drunk again. I spent an afternoon before a gig at the Office bullshitting with one of the regulars, slowly imagining my show going in the toilet and not caring. As the small talk ran into the usual grandiose—that sweet spot in the indulgence where everyone is interesting and everything begins to look beautiful in life—I asked him more about his backstory. It almost felt like I gave a shit. He said he’d recently moved to the area after having been a doorman at a strip club in South Florida. Then it came up that I was a comedian, probably when I wanted to seem more interesting myself.
One drink leads to another and wouldn’t you know. Turns out we’d been old friends for a minute back in a day. The titty bar he’d worked in was owned by my old friend Scott, who’d once roped Bingo and me into playing in a charity poker event at that same strip joint with celebrities (of my caliber) and porn stars, one being an actual star of 1980s porn—again, back when porn actually had stars.
My drinking buddy here in Chattanooga had been working the door that night of the poker party.
Scott the owner was friends with this porn star and I’d actually performed at her porn retirement party at his other club in Colorado Springs not long before. I’d even been removed from the stage at that show. I was doing a bit about how girls like her would never fuck me. It went on graphically into how one day she’d be old and ugly, carrying her tits in her pants pockets, rolling over her labia with the wheels of her walker, etc. And it went on and on, each detail of her hideous future spelled out so distinctly that you could almost smell it.
The payoff was that at the end of the bit where I’d say, “Oh yeah, that day will come! And THEN you’ll fuck me!” Sure, you have to hear it in its entirety to get the full effect. The point is that one of her friends backstage knew I was drunk and thought it was just a run-on trashing of what she would look like, just me being a rambling asshole. He didn’t know that there was a payoff. He came out and grabbed the mic out of my hand before I could get to the punch line, without which everybody thinks I’m just a rambling asshole. I wanted to go person to person in the audience and explain where the bit was going. Instead I hid in plain sight, people avoiding me like a wet cough.
Fortunately at the poker event, the porn star didn’t remember any of that. She was one of the only really cool people there who, like us, was more interested in the bar than the cameras. She was probably the only one who hung out with me and Bingo at all. The rest of the new-porn gals were giggling hollow shells who’d proudly wear a dunce cap as a crown, wearing makeup like it was done by a mortician trying to mask a violent death. Our girl was a human being, a fun, intelligent human being and, in this crowd, that made her an outcast like us.
Scott knew her well and told us to keep her away from cocaine as though that was possible in South Florida. But he didn’t tell Bingo and me to keep away from cocaine. And nobody told him that we were neighbors in the same hotel.
I’m not bragging when I tell you that I have been involved in too many threesomes and they are always awkward. Invariably everyone involved had to be incredibly fucked up just to make it happen. Usually the girls knew each other and repeatedly fell into giggle fits of “OMG I can’t believe we’re really doing this!” Not sexy. I had one fivesome where I was so drunk that I could only focus on squeezing enough blood into my pud to achieve penetration with all four of the ladies so that the story was technically accurate. There is no doubt that they would have preferred it had just been an all-girl drunken foursome had I not been there. They let me in out of pity. I have the Tony Romo of dicks. It can squeak out a win on the road in Buffalo but when you put it in the big game under pressure, it fumbles.
This was no different in Florida with Bingo and the porn star.
Several lines and cocktails later back at the hotel, I was twisting my coke-dick like I was wringing out a wet towel trying to get it workable so I might add my third into the Porn Star–Bingo twosome that had kicked off. I tried and failed. But on the positive side, I was scheduled to go on The Howard Stern Show in a matter of days. Knowing he’d always lead off with talk about fucking, I needed a good story. And the short version of my story was this.
If you’re gonna have sex with your favorite porn star from the gilded age of XXX video—do it in 1985, when boners were easier to come by and the porn star wasn’t post-retirement.
The upswing and the karma of the story is that, in real life but tacitly, I finally managed to get that punch line out.
“Oh yeah, THEN you’ll fuck me!”
STILL, NOBODY KNOWS YOU
I am happy to say that I have paid to see myself live several times. From the early days when some thick-neck doorman would half slap me with a backhand at the entrance to tell me that it was a five-dollar cover charge, I would gladly pay just to watch him apologize after he saw me onstage. It was also a great out for when jokes didn’t work. I could tell the audience that I was no different than them. I paid the same as them and I was also hoping I would be funnier. We were all on the same page. It still happens occasionally only now it costs more.
Artie Lange asked me to open for him at the Palms in Las Vegas after he was already ensconced as the new co-host on Stern and I was always forgotten as a guest. I knew the gig was going to be an inevitable death. The bill was full of Wack Packers and mainstays of the show. I think I was scheduled to follow Yucko the Clown. And I was the last guy before Artie.
Morning radio audiences are always the worst. Assholes who live their lives stuck in morning-drive traffic listening to radio on the way to a job they loathe, who sit on hold for hours hoping to get on the air to say something pointless. Now they are here live and still have all those pointless things to yell but there is no longer a call screener to hold them back. All of those unanswered calls are blurted out like an endless rain of dull-pointed arrows throughout the show.
I was almost happy when they wouldn’t let me onto the show to begin with. Although I was on the bill and brought by a phalanx of security all the way from Artie’s suite through the back hallways to the artists’ entrance, the drunk-with-power backstage doorman said I needed my necklace-laminate to gain entry. I had assumed that the Secret Service delivery through Frank Sinatra tunnels would have given this guy a clue that maybe I wasn’t a door crasher. I was wrong.
“I don’t give a fuck. You need your pass.” As he turned his back.
You don’t need a pass, you ape. You needed better knees. That way maybe you coulda gone pro out of college ball instead of being here all bitter and an asshole, stuck in a back hallway flicking me shit. I didn’t say it but I wrote it down in my head. The Palms is one of those hotels where the beautiful people tend to go and rave and have unwanted pregnancies or whatever the fuck they do. It is something in nature that the more attractive the clientele a place draws, the more angry and shitty the doormen become.
Then I noticed that right beside the door next to us was a huge poster for the show with my name and picture right underneath Artie’s. I pointed this out to the simian and my smug look only made him pissier.
“Don’t give a fuck. They told me everyone needs their pass.”
I’d taken the gig out of respect for Artie Lange, in that he’d asked me to do it at all. The money was good but it was a fact that Artie was offering it to me only because he liked me. He certainly didn’t need me. And with this manatee door-plumber being an overt fuckhead, I decided I didn’t need to be there for any reason at all. I’d had enough times in my life where I had to kowtow to some overzealous bar-muscle who was more concerned with his own waning power than the job with which he was entrusted. So I just quit. I was in Vegas and would be just as happy to gamble.
At some point somebody from the show found me at a blackjack table, apologized for the lack of courtesy and brought me back to the greenroom. As expected, by the time I got to the stage the crowd was too exhausted by the amount of opening acts and I was too exhausted by all the bullshit and hating the dance-club-nation vibe of the whole place. The show was an exchange of me shitting on the club and specifically all those notes about the doorman I’d jotted down in my gray matter, followed by the audience shitting on me and shouting me down for not being Artie, and then me shitting on the audience for being rubes who sit in traffic listening to radio on their way to jobs they hate and taking it out on these performers.
This Is Not Fame Page 15