Tell me about one of the best days of your life. If pissing your pants at the end of it would have made any difference, you need to try harder. If your favorite bartender wouldn’t serve you when you come in telling her that you are steeping in your own wet, you need to find a better bar.
I’m not famous but if you ever hit Arnold’s Beach Bar in Waikiki and Dawn is working, mention my name and then mention the guy who was there with Roseanne that pissed his pants and she’ll know exactly who I am.
Here’s how to fly as a drunkard. The TSA rule is that you can carry liquids in a one quart–size bag with the liquids being travel size, no more than 3.4 ounces per item. That means you can ditch the shampoo and conditioner and pack mini-bottles of your liquor of choice. A one-quart Ziploc will hold ten mini-bottles of booze. The nomenclature for a ten-pack of minis is referred to as a “sleeve” if you wanna look cool at your liquor store. Next you carry on an empty travel mug. You can get it filled on the other side of security with ice and soda water at any bar or food concession for free unless they’re dicks. I’ve found that the bullshit vitamin supplements Emergen-C or Airborne—basically vitamin-fortified, fruit-flavored Alka-Seltzer—make for a good mixer with water. Mix your drinks on the sly and soon your middle seat on the plane will feel like you’re in first class. For pennies on the airport-priced dollar.
Remember to be somewhat sneaky. Drinking your own booze is as illegal in an airport or on a plane as anywhere else. It’s just wicked easy.
Here’s another airline tip that will probably never come in handy for you but it did one night for us. My old gal Renee and I were leaving Anchorage after what was always a bender and the local crew had been coaxing us to extend our stay for one more party. There’s always one more party in Alaska. We’d been tempted but we were already so strung out from the last so many days of epic abuse and I didn’t want to pay the hundred-fifty-dollar change fee per person to change the tickets. We showed up at the airport early and stinking for a late-night flight and killed the time in the bar directly across from our gate. Still somehow we didn’t hear the final boarding announcement and only happened to wander out to find out they were about to leave without us. They were cranky about it and I was cranky back. Why wouldn’t you have the announcement play in the bar? What civilized human being wouldn’t be in the bar up until takeoff?
The counter lady told us that we were the last people on the plane so there might not be any room in the overhead for our carry-on luggage. She said it more like she was wishing it as opposed to a helpful heads-up. We were in coach but I immediately saw open space in overhead up in first class. As I wobbled my bag towards the opening, I was informed by some nelly flight attendant that this baggage space was reserved for first-class patrons. I made an attempt to explain how the gate agent had said that there might not be room for our bags and that since we were last onboard, it shouldn’t be a problem. I collapsed under the look of derision, realizing that everybody already hated us for making the plane wait. We found other spaces for our bags in coach and sank into our seats on the sold-out flight. Shortly after, the same flight attendant who wouldn’t let my lowly coach bag ride in first class approached me and asked if I would mind trading seats so some kid could sit across the aisle from his family.
“Oh. You wouldn’t let my bag fly up front and now you want a favor from me?”
I was full cunty and not wrong. But I was drunk. Like I’ve said, you will never look right in an argument when you are the drunk one.
I watched him storm to the front of the plane and hold a team meeting with the other flight attendants. I leaned into Renee and said with resignation that we were not going to be on this flight. Like when you blow past a cop twenty miles over the speed limit with out-of-state plates. You know you’re getting pulled over. I already had my carry-on ready like license and registration for getting tossed.
After a small ruckus back at the counter trying to argue my case, we were told that we appeared too intoxicated to fly and would be put on a flight the following day.
And it turned out—at least back then—this service of being removed from a flight for being intoxicated and moved to another flight the next day was absolutely free. No change fee. Their bad. Go enjoy the party.
We called our friends and had them pick us up for one more party in Anchorage and saved three hundred dollars in fees.
Let me know if this tactic ever works for you.
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I’d always had an “outie” belly button but it wasn’t until I started getting old and fat that it became an eyesore. It stuck out like the butt end of a Vienna sausage. It was always the first part of my body to get smacked-ass red when I was out in the sun, glowing like a giant clown nose on my beer gut. People would recoil in disgust anytime I’d remove my shirt. Fuck ’em.
The medical terminology is “umbilical hernia.” The fact is that it is your intestines pushing out through your navel. And that’s pretty gross. You should only be able to feel your own intestines by going through your asshole. Feeling them straight through your navel completely bypasses your prostate altogether, making it not just uneventful but awful and yet another reason to kill yourself.
I showed it to my friends in Bisbee at one of their weekly poker games. I don’t always know what to say in mixed company so the obvious default is to show your most disgusting body part. Someone suggested that my gut-lump was an umbilical hernia.
There’s a clinic down the street where I’d get my prescriptions filled by Dr. Jack. He was great about not asking a lot of questions. So when I went to refill my Xanax for my “flight anxiety,” I lifted my shirt as an aside and asked if it was indeed a hernia or simply an outie. He said it was definitely herniated and that I could get surgery but that if it didn’t bother me, I shouldn’t worry about it.
No, it doesn’t bother me. It bothers other people when they are trying to play poker or make eye contact at the pool when my shirt is off. But it doesn’t bother me.
Bear in mind that this was the same Dr. Jack who prescribed RID to our friend Father Luke to get rid of scabies.
Allow me to go off on a side note.
When we first moved to Bisbee in 2005, we had our old friend Father Luke living with us for a while. At one point he caught scabies, or so he thought. Anytime scabies or any bug bite is explained to you, you get phantom scabies. You start to itch as though you are rife with them just hearing about them. It’s much worse for Bingo.
Bingo had been off her lithium for two days and was dealing with it as best she could. Bingo in those days was out of her tit. Same diagnosis as today but nowhere near under control. Bipolar, schizoaffective, OCD, manic. Off her banana. Fucked for lunch. A bit wacky to say the least. It would have been hard to convince her that bugs were not crawling under her skin at any given moment anyway. Now that we told her that there possibly were actual bugs under her skin it sorta made things worse but she kept it together in her own way. She’d scratch some holes in her skin like a tweaker but within a short time she’d be back to dancing to “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” and writing “Scabies” across the breakfast table in Cheez Whiz. I didn’t even know why we had Cheez Whiz but it was good to know it wasn’t wasted.
Father Luke shuffled down to Dr. Jack to get a prescription—or “subscription” as he called it—for scabies cream. They make you get a prescription so they know you’re not abusing it. Or perhaps it’s all just a scam.
Father Luke told the doc that he thought the bumps were scabies. The rummy doctor barely blinked and told Luke that he’d phone in a prescription. No test or swab, barely a cursory glance. After you’ve filled out all the paperwork to prove that you have no money to be felched dry of, the doc would just assume your own diagnosis was as good as any he could come up with and off you went.
We set off bug bombs to fumigate the house and took off to the pharmacy to pick up the Sca-Bee-Gone or whatever and planned to get a motel for the night. It was only after the Zyk
lon B had been released into our house that the pharmacist told us the prescription that had been phoned in was for RID.
RID is a medication for head lice that won’t do a thing for scabies. And RID is an over-the-counter medicine. Like aspirin. Toothpaste. The old doctor had phoned in a prescription for a nonprescription product. That’s like phoning in a prescription for a frozen pizza or corn syrup. We had a prescription for shampoo that would do nothing and we couldn’t fix it because the clinic was now closed—as mites were working their way towards our genitals or wherever they wanted to party that night.
We couldn’t go home because of the fumigation. And we would certainly pass on this affliction to some other poor slob if we went to the motel.
(pause for hack timing)
So we’re at the motel…
There we made frantic attempts to reach the doctor through his service before the pharmacy closed. Finally we got the irritated and obviously drunk Dr. Jack calling on a bad connection. Father Luke had lost his sense of humor at this point, if only to make the whole escapade funnier. He had welts like he’d been shot at with thousand-pellet guns.
“I’m dying of smallpox and this doctor is drinking Ripple down at the creek!”
This made Bingo laugh but it was that kinda laugh that you get just before or after you have beaten a homeless lady to death because you were drunk and wanted her scarf. It wasn’t healthy.
We got the proper cream called in just before the pharmacy shut the addict-proof glass. Father Luke it turned out had been the only one infected. Bingo and I only had sympathy itches. The motel went out of business and we will never know if it’s because Luke passed on his contamination.
But back to the hernia.
I showed it to my friend Nurse Betty and she freaked out. I told her that Dr. Jack said I shouldn’t worry about it. Betty informed me of all the possible doomsday scenarios involved with belly-button problems—it could prolapse or pinch off; the list went on and on but the one word she said that clung in my brain like a tumor was the word “necrotizing.” That can lead to death, she said. Death doesn’t bother me. “Necrotizing” bothered me long enough that I would at least consider surgery, something I said I’d never do. I’ve spent my life ignoring problems and they almost always go away. Being a comedian, I had no health insurance and didn’t have the slightest idea how to just walk in off the street for surgery out of pocket. No fucking way I’m going back to Dr. Jack to ask.
So I explained my condition on my website and offered a free autographed DVD and CD along with a T-shirt to any surgeon who wanted to pony up a complimentary stabbing in the guts.
Turns out my fans aren’t all bankrupt degenerates and lone gunmen. Doctors actually do come to my shows. Just so happened that a couple we’d recently met on the road—Drs. Mark and Suzie Bazzell—happened to be anesthesiologists and lived up the road in Tucson. They emailed me posthaste after the update and offered their services. Anesthesia is 99 percent of the game as far as I’m concerned. So long as I’m unconscious, I could have my dry cleaner do the alterations. But they had a surgeon friend that was game and who waived her fee as well.
Yes. Her. Thanks I assume to Obamacare and the comedy of Amy Schumer, gals too can be doctors now. This was a hot Japanese lady surgeon with ropey arms who probably mountain bikes and didn’t laugh at my examination room jokes and could have been twenty-eight or seventy the way Asian women tend to go.
My immediate concern was that this selfless act of charity on her part might change my ingrained hatred of women and Asians. Like those movies where a Klansman gets the kidney transplant that saves his life from a carefree Negro and learns a lesson. Would this complimentary surgery make me finally see the weaker sex and the yellow plague of the Rising Sun as equals?
Okay, I don’t actually harbor animosity towards ladies or Japaniards but I do think racism and sexism are hilarious when done tastefully and with good humor as I have just displayed.
My initial visit was the one where you get asked a lot of questions and you tell a lot of fibs. It’s funny how you lie and say you only drink about twenty drinks a week and their jaw drops like that’s a lot. I asked her what this procedure would normally cost for a cash-paying customer. She said that she didn’t know exactly but estimated between seven and fifteen thousand dollars. I didn’t and don’t understand how she could possibly not know and why there was more than a 100 percent difference in her ballpark guess. All I knew was that on either end, it was a fuck-ton of money.
This made it very awkward in how the fuck I was supposed to say thank you. It wouldn’t be sufficient to mail a Red Lobster gift certificate.
So I told the doctors that in return I’d do a benefit show in Tucson for whatever charitable cause they were behind. They discussed it and fortunately they don’t like people as much as I don’t and decided it was best to do the benefit for animals, something even my diseased fan base could get on board with.
Every time I’ve been asked to perform a charity function that I can remember, I’ve declined mostly because people who go to charity functions don’t want to hear the kind of misery and outrage I have to deliver. Plus I think most of them are scams. I’d rather just give a dude with cancer the money than give it to some alleged nonprofit. But this benefit was for the Humane Society and you can’t give cash to a homeless kitten.
I was lucky enough to get a bunch of my favorite comedians to fly out for no money. Brendon Walsh, Henry Phillips, Brody Stevens, Lynn Shawcroft and Neil Hamburger all flew in from LA for the show for one of the best lineups I’ve been part of. My friend Jimi edited together a pre-show montage video of animal porn with the ubiquitous Sarah McLachlan song “In the Arms of the Angel” from those sad puppy commercials playing in the background. It was only soft-core animal-on-animal porn. I fought to get the infamous video of the guy getting killed being fucked by a horse added but things like “disgusting” and “liquor license” kept coming up. I wanted a Humane Society benefit that PETA would protest.
We raised almost eighteen thousand dollars for the Humane Society and a permanent spot on their elite and repetitive mailing list. My navel no longer sticks out like a turkey timer and we remain good friends with the Bazzells who I give full credit for Bingo and me still being alive today. Needless to say there is no way I’ll ever be able to thank them enough. Especially when you consider I never even gave them the free DVD and the T-shirt I’d promised for the initial surgery on my website.
REALITY OR OTHERWISE
To the best of my recollection—which is always suspect—there was a war that started in March of 2003. Joe Rogan and I drove out to the house of some of his friends far east of Los Angeles. San Bernardino? Riverside? I have no idea. I wasn’t driving. It wasn’t my problem. I was just Rogan’s plus-one for the war party.
This war was evidently planned out for the US audience with a prime-time kick-off that worked for the home viewing audience. Nine p.m. EST/6 p.m. Pacific. We were going to pre-game the event by doing ayahuasca before settling in on the sofa for the big show.
Ayahuasca is almost as big a procedure as preparing for battle from what it seemed. Like making brauts in the parking lot of Lambeau Field before a Packers game. There was a lot of preparation, a ritual, boiling these psychedelic vines into some brew, some tea that would make the whole invasion seem even funnier. I felt out of place in that I’d only brought a small bag of mushrooms, the kind you just chew up and swallow while trying not to barf. I was even too embarrassed to tell anyone that I had them once I saw the production value of their culinary display. I’d brought Boone’s Farm and Velveeta to a wine and cheese tasting. Or so I thought.
After all the legwork and pageantry of making this sewer brew, we took turns choking down the vulgar concoction and waited for the grand payoff. I can’t tell you how long we waited but I could eventually tell in the disappointed eyes of these professional trippers that there would be no parade. A sadness crept over the group that no war could ever make right. The drug
s were bunk or the recipe was off and there was no denying it.
This is where I stepped in and meekly unrolled my ludicrously negligible baggie of caps and stems. I had no brand name to tout. I didn’t know if they were Anamaria muscaria or any other label. I knew that they were called mushrooms and that I’d had them before. And that they had worked. I doled them out like you would if you were trying to survive one more day on a deserted island. Prison rations.
In short time, we were tripping lightning on just my little satchel alone. I felt like Rudolph the Reindeer on some foggy wartime eve. We dissolved into our loveseats and recliners and watched what would be a Super Bowl countdown to carnage. The president had given Iraq a deadline to do something that they wouldn’t and didn’t do. I don’t remember all of the details. I didn’t even have money on the game. All I remember is that the show seemed to go off on time. Maybe there was a coin flip, perhaps a band scheduled for halftime. But we shat laughing at the fact that we were tailgating a war and that the war was punctual. Soon enough, we were watching grainy footage of missiles landing in Baghdad, which had home-field advantage but was losing early on in the match.
When the game is that much of a blowout, you tend to lose interest. Especially when you are bent off of your block on tiny little mushrooms. We left before the end of the war. Thank goodness there was no last-minute comeback. I always feel bad for the people who bailed early to beat the traffic only to miss out on the greatest comeback of all time.
This Is Not Fame Page 23