By this time we’d already told the bartender our whole scheme and he was as anxious for a payoff as we were. So as I hung up the phone shoving the film boy towards the door yelling to the bartender that we’d settle up later, he didn’t have a qualm. A story was brewing. We sprinted to the room, filled Andy in that it is was a go, miced ourselves up and made for the lobby.
Through the front door of the hotel was the lobby and if you kept going directly through, there was another door going to a patio and a pool. We set Andy up at a center table and had our video gofer back in a corner table with his camera hidden in some clutter we’d created. We jabbered plans about what we’d do when he showed like we were coked up on nerves alone.
We waited a long time. Turned out that in Bo Y. Fondler’s paranoia, he’d called the police for an escort to this suspicious meeting with a private investigator. I saw who I assumed was Bo Y. Fondler walking in followed by his assumedly mail-order wife and the cop. The cop blew my already panicked nerves into overdrive but the alcohol didn’t let it show on my face.
I met him in the lobby and said with the smile of a cruise ship director: “Mr. Bo Y. Fondler? Come with me!” It was all very Chris Hansen To Catch a Predator style. The cop asked which of us was the private investigator. Not knowing if it was illegal to falsely represent yourself as such, I told him that I never said I was a private investigator, only that I was investigating the matter privately. He seemed to buy it.
I led the triumvirate out the back door to Andy, sitting calmly on the patio.
“Have a seat, Mr. Bo Y. Fondler. You remember Andy Andrist?
“Uh, yes. Yes I do.”
Andy unleashed a jumbled load of pent-up memories in a caterwaul of accusations. Do you remember the Adidas track suit? Do you still have the videotapes? Then some references to Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky who’d just been busted for fucking kids. It came out in such a torrent that I was as confused as the wife and the cop who’d been in a prick intimidating-cop mode since he’d arrived. They had no idea what to make of any of this. Like an interpreter for the insane, I told them plainly that Bo Y. Fondler had molested Andy as a kid. I was dressed in a pale-blue 1970s leisure suit and Andy was still blathering incoherently so none of this looked legitimate. Andy pressed him harder and Bo Y. Fondler said he wouldn’t comment as he had no lawyer present.
I caught a moment to create a pause and then Andy asked him, “Are you at least sorry for what you did to me?”
And then this feeble wreck of a man, rocked backwards in this moment that he knew would eventually catch up with him, said without thinking, “Yes. Yes, of course I’m sorry.”
The moment brought a silence over all of us. To anyone there, it was like he just fucking admitted it. It was the ultimate “You can’t handle the truth!” moment. The wife lost her breath and the cop jumped sides onto ours.
Andy reminded Bo of the time he promised to buy him a car if he graduated high school in an attempt to keep Andy’s mouth shut. As Bo backtracked and denied it, Andy slid his high school diploma across the table.
“I want my car.”
At this point, Bo Y. Fondler asked the cop if he was required to be there and if he could leave. The cop reluctantly told him that he was free to go. He quick-limped off with his cane, the hidden-camera blockhead hot on his heels. The perp hid his face as our cameraman barraged him with ambush-journalism questions. Bo answered none. He jumped into his car and left. Without his wife. There is footage showing the cop consoling her in the parking lot, her knees buckling.
We all went back to the hotel bar and celebrated. We ordered champagne, which the bartender put on the house tab after hearing the outcome. I even made a drunken phone call to console the wife who had by that time already been brainwashed into believing that it was all a ruse to scam money from them. Sometimes you believe what you want to believe. Other times you believe what you have to believe.
And this was what would follow us.
Bo Y. Fondler filed some kind of injunction or cease-and-desist to prevent us from talking about the event or showing the footage. He’d used Andy’s demand for a car as proof he was being blackmailed. Not that Andy wouldn’t have taken the car but he honestly just wanted to know why this guy did what he did and how he lived with himself afterwards. Andy wanted to know if this guy cared that it had ruined Andy’s psyche ever since. I wanted to know how it made Andy so goddamned funny.
The best comedy comes when it’s in the most horrible circumstances and the right people need to laugh. Jay Kirschner loves doing law in the same way, when it’s for the right reasons. He’s generally defending shit-brows who are guilty and don’t deserve reasonable representation. He doesn’t get these kinds of cases often where he can feel as though he is finally providing an actual benefit to society and that’s the reason he defended us, not just as a courtesy but as a pleasure.
I’ve asked Jay to explain exactly what happened in court in the aftermath. He tells me in detail and then my eyes grow numb and glassy in the barrage of his legalese, the same as they had in the courtroom. I know three things. One, Andy and I had to fly back to go to court wearing some thrift-store suits that made us look poor but reverent. No polyester disco suits. Two, after a lot of court-speak, a judge told us he needed to sleep on it. I think he was sleeping in the moment. But in a short time, the injunction was shitcanned. Something about “prior restraint” and the First Amendment. Lastly, and it took more fighting from Kirschner, Bo Y. Fondler was forced to pay for Jay Kirschner’s legal expenses.
I’d hoped that somehow this would bring some closure for Andy, that in this so-called victory, he would be able to let it all go and in the wake he would become less funny than I am. But the trauma can’t be taken away with a simple court ruling and Andy remains one of the funniest people alive.
FLORIDA SEX OFFENDERS, PART TWO
Now to a joke that I’ve gotten a lot of emails about over the years. My opening softball joke on my album From Across the Street is titled “Funny Thing About Child Porn.”
It starts with a question.
“You know the funny thing about child porn? Aside from the lack of credits at the end? No big egos in that part of Hollywood. ‘Who was the editor on this? I wanna use ’em on my next big-budget studio movie!’ But no names at the end. Not even a nom de plume. Some people are in it just for the art.”
But then I meandered and forgot the answer to the question that wraps it all up, the tag to the joke. Hence the inquiring emails. Yes, Doug, tell us! What is the funny thing about child porn other than the Hollywood asides that you made so jocular?
The payoff to the bit I forgot was that it was funny that child porn is the only crime you can get arrested for being a witness. You can’t call 911 and say, “Send someone quick! I’ve just seen child porn and I can describe the guy!”
Not gold by any means, I know. That’s probably why I forgot to say it on the album. Now I’ve answered your question so you can stop asking. I only put it in because it becomes important to the story.
I got a handwritten letter from a fan via the old-fashioned snail mail. This happens from time to time, as I give out my address on my podcast and in interviews so that people can send stuff to me and Bingo. I love getting real mail. You’d think with some of the deranged people who are attracted to the delightful verbal tapestries I paint, I’d play more on the safe side. But I also know that my insane fans are also broke, lazy and drunk and that I live far, far away. And I really do like mail.
Here’s a handwritten letter that I received. I got it somewhere in the midst of an eight-day Fourth of July party and had my friend Hack read it out loud—without us knowing the content—to a bunch of us getting drunk in the kitchen. I had to let everybody know that I get fan mail. Ego. We all laughed at the gushing, fanboy content as he read it. At least at first.
Dear Doug… or should I say feloow drunk Doug,
I was at your show last October or November down in Ft Lauderdale, I was the creepy kid in
black among the crowd of creepy kids in black and I really enjoyed the show and I’m glad I got to see you live because I was beginning to think you weren’t real; I was starting to think you were some form of CGI digital Santa Claus that was sent down by God to save us from this retarded society we live in. At least I got to see the philosopher Doug Stanhope do his magic and I’m talking real magic, the kind that makes you want to drink even when you really don’t want to.
Anyway, since you’re reading this you should knw that I’m already dead by the time you get this. I’m no fan of the world and even less the way I live in it, and there are some good things but I’ve had 23 almost 24 years to do those things, and although I want to stay a little longer and get to see some more I can’t, for the moral justice thinks I have to do 7 years in a prison for looking at the wrong kind of porn even though that happened to me as a kid and I never complained about it.
Anyway, now that I’m completely out of hope, I’m leaving you my favorite book, which I think you will like and maybe give a few ideas for new material. It’s not perfect but most of the concepts in the book are similar to your views, just a little less vulgar.
So Doug, thanks for giving me something to laugh at, that was almost impossible with my gloomy outlook and sick sense of humour.
Thanks for being the one person with the balls to speak out the truth. I hope you are much more successful in what’s left of your career and save some worthy people before it’s too late.
Thanks and good luck
Your fan and follower.
Liam S.V. Hughes
Oh and by the way, it’s painless helium suicide in case you were wondering. At least I DIED LAUGHING!
Well, that took a turn for the worse. Someone broke out a smartphone and found the obituary. It actually affected me. It may have been that we were in the middle of mocking some kid who could have been any kid that I meet after a show who’s all fucked up and somehow found some kind of solace in my angst. A kid sending out a sincere, final salvo while I was shitting upon him for starting his fan letter by likening me to a deity.
Or it could have been that my serotonin was so low after days of partying that I would have cried to a Carpenters’ song.
Or it may have been that I never got to reach him in time to tell him that it’s nitrous oxide, not helium, that makes you laugh. Stupid.
It still made me well up a bit.
The kid was in Florida so, of course, I called Jay Kirschner to check it out and see if was legit. Jay got back to me. Liam was indeed facing at least that much time and probably more for twenty counts of being in possession of photographs of children performing sexual acts. He killed himself on the day he was due in court. Kirschner went on to tell me of this kid’s prospects in prison and of trying to make a life after prison should he survive. I concurred that he’d made the right decision.
The difference between Liam and Bo Y. Fondler, I guess, is a lot in perception but mostly in action. Fondler was a shuddersome ghoul who’d molested Andy as a child. He also took lewd pictures of Andy. Liam was nearly a child himself and his letter made him sound as much of a victim as a perpetrator. He’d only looked at pictures, so far as anyone knows. Fuck, he could have been looking at pictures of a young Andy for all we know. Kind of a funny thought right there. The problem with defending someone like Liam is that you’re afraid of coming off as someone who must secretly like child porn yourself. But it raises serious arguments on thought police. I’ve jacked off thinking about some stuff that I’d never do in real life. Nothing illegal. I just know that in reality it would probably hurt a lot or smell bad. But it’s still a matter of fantasy versus action. What person of any substance hasn’t fantasized about murder? I’ve watched graphic murders on the Internet. If anything, it queered me off actually wanting to murder people. Like S&M porn, it’d make you feel real bad afterward.
I don’t know the answer but I know that a kid who’s been fucked up by being molested shouldn’t have to choose between killing himself or being beaten or killed in prison. He needed help. Or maybe he couldn’t be helped. I don’t know. All I know is that his letter humanized him.
It also made me wonder if that’s how old Liam found my act to begin with, googling “child porn” and finding that first track of that one album of mine. It’s a funny thought but it’s plausible. That is the same album that I close on a story about another fan, Clark Adams, who had delayed his planned suicide when he heard I was coming to town. I phoned in a slipshod, hung-over abortion of a show that night, not knowing that it was Clark’s big Last Year’s Eve countdown. I found out about it in an email from one of his friends after the fact. Clark killed himself with helium as well, which was the crux of my story. On the album, I close the Clark Adams story with a high-pitched Alvin and the Chipmunks rendition of Clark’s final words.
“Goodbye, cruel world!”
There’s no way of knowing if Liam was beyond help or if I could have told him with any honesty that suicide wasn’t the answer. But I could have told him not to use helium. It doesn’t make you laugh and I already used that story in an old bit.
FLORIDA SEX OFFENDERS, PART THREE
Treasure Island
Bingo, Chaille and I had just finished a tour in Florida and took a needed break from all the boozing by getting drunk at another of my favorite day-drinking spots, the Thunderbird Hotel in Treasure Island outside of St. Pete. The 1950s neon sign alone makes you want to put on your ugliest Hawaiian shirt, slather zinc oxide on your nose and order a Singapore sling at Ikki Woo Woo’s Tiki Hut by the pool. You’d expect Don Draper to be sitting beside you. Throw on your short-sleeve leisure suit for sunset and you’ll be sauced enough to enjoy the guy playing Don Ho songs for tips.
We’d started drinking before the kickoff of the early NFL games and by sunset, we were getting a bit too rowdy for the tastes of the aged lizards poolside by the tiki bar. This was not a youngish person’s domain. The dirty looks rained down as I was yanking my jock strap up from my shorts and over my distended belly—which I can easily bloat out to late third-trimester proportions—with the leg straps wedged into my ass crack. My friends and nobody else were highly amused. One woman was particularly irritated by the sounds of frivolity and made sure through a series of “ughs” and eye-rolls that her displeasure was known.
As we watched the sunset from the strand on the beach just in front of the bar, some dude was racing a remote-control monster truck at high speeds across the beach. We were waiting for him to kill someone.
Just then a pair of Florida cops showed up. We assumed they were coming to stop the inevitable carnage that the virtual drunk driver was sure to cause with his toy. Then they came straight to me.
They stood on either side of me and asked if I had been exposing myself. I told them that I had not. I told them a truncated version of how I’d been pulling my jock strap up to my tits but they weren’t convinced. They told me that they’d received a report of me exposing myself in front of children. One cop stayed with me while the other canvassed the people at the bar, including that weathered handbag of a woman—the one we knew unquestionably made the call—who stood by her story that I’d exposed my genitals.
When it looked like I was surely about to be arrested, Chaille stepped in. He remembered that he’d taken a plethora of pictures of my antics and told the cops as much. They asked to see his camera. There was a pause. Chaille realized the amount of incriminating pictures that were on that camera from earlier in the tour. He offered a bargain.
“How about this. I’ll show you the pictures. But I get to hold the camera.”
The cop agreed and Chaille scrolled slowly through each and every picture of my silly jock-strap gags until they were satisfied that I was nothing but a goofball who’d worn the lampshade on his drunken head and that the woman who reported me was a lying, rug-burned cunt. By the time they let me go, she was conveniently gone. I wanted to drown her in the Jacuzzi. Brendon Walsh immortalized the woman in a bit where he talked ab
out leathery Florida women who you know used to be attractive but now they just look like Robert Plant.
With the cops gone and the buzz killed, Chaille went back to the pictures. He realized that if he’d gone back just one more, the cops would have seen Walsh from the night before standing proudly on his hotel bed in his late-night delirium pissing on his own mattress.
I recently watched a documentary called Pervert Park about a trailer-park community in Florida that houses registered sex offenders where nowhere else would allow them. Had it not been for Chaille taking pictures like a Japanese tourist at the Mirage, I could have been listed as a registered sex offender for showing my junk to children. I could have been stuck there in Pervert Park living between Bo Y. Fondler and Liam Hughes. A perpetrator, a witness and me, the wrongly accused. And I probably would have killed myself too. Just having to live in a Florida trailer park would be reason enough.
WRONG AGAIN
Diana Hone thought that suicide would at minimum help her financially struggling family when they got her life insurance.
She was a beautiful and hopelessly shy girl that would come with her husband to my shows at Winstons in Ocean Beach, California. She was the type who would always apologize for being polite and think that she had overstepped her boundaries for simply offering a compliment. She’d even painted a portrait of Bingo and me that she brought to a show, saying she was sorry that it wasn’t finished yet. She hated herself for being everything you wanted in a fan or a friend.
This Is Not Fame Page 20