This Is Not Fame

by Doug Stanhope

  We both decided that our abstinence might be the problem.

  My stamina for hallucinogens is pretty frail, the recovery period too long, especially during a tour. Chaille pulled out his pocket notebook, found where we had two days back to back in Victoria with the club inside the hotel. I can swing that, Mr. Chaille. Pencil in “Do Drugs!” We are professional people. We can schedule drug use to cause the least burden on commerce and detriment to the paying customer.

  By the time we hit Victoria I’d built at least a reasonable skeleton of a new set. We had acid for me and mushrooms for Chaille prepared for a well-earned post-show vacation. My phone rang that afternoon with an LA area code. I looked at Chaille and he looked at me. I was again transformed into a chubby teenage girl hoping against hope. I answered my cell phone delicately like it was attached to an improvised explosive device. On the other end, a stammering Hunter S. Thompson started to awkwardly tell me what a big fan he was. Johnny had made that Hunter face for too long and it stuck. Chaille leaned in to listen like an even chubbier teenage sister. I ran to the parking lot to smoke. I have a hard time talking to strangers without a cigarette.

  Johnny went on and ear-raped me about what a genius he thought I was. I’ve learned to just say thank you. For me and for most of the comedians I know, you greet any compliment with self-deprecation. This can convince the person who is complimenting you that they are wrong, that you really aren’t that good. Johnny repeated his favorite bits of mine that I humbly had to correct. Nothing will force a comedian’s hand into repeating his own bit at the table than someone else doing it in front of him poorly.

  Later I’d find out that Depp knew about me through Marilyn Manson making him watch my No Refunds special during a bender. When I eventually told Manson about the initial Depp phone call, I didn’t know they were friends. I just thought it was weird that two famous people had called me in a short amount of time. Manson was rightfully wanting credit for Johnny knowing me at all. Fame and all that comes with it is like owning a boat. It isn’t any fun if you don’t bring people who don’t have a boat along with you. But you secretly want them to know that it’s your fucking boat and you’re the reason they are there. I do that with Junior Stopka when I bring him on the road. And he bucks back the same way I do by not trying or wanting to be famous or even noticed. I get it.

  After quite a while on that first phone call from Johnny, he mentioned a vaguely thought-through television project he’d thought of for me and humbly asked if I’d have any interest.

  “Johnny? I’m standing in a Days Inn parking lot trying to smoke out of the rain, about to play in a sports bar to sixty-five people. I’m not going to say no.”

  It took him too long to laugh. Too long to realize that I wasn’t kidding.

  And as I hung up, I realized that this phone call had ruined my new five minutes of “Johnny Depp Never Called Me” material.

  I really needed the material.

  NAME DROPPINGS

  I wouldn’t consider myself a star fucker but I’m without question a name dropper. I try to be blatant about it. Sometimes I’ll catch myself accidently dropping a name in an underhanded way and have to stop and apologize for not grandstanding it a bit more.

  “Oh? Did I just say ‘A. J. Hawk’? Did I not mention that he is my close personal friend A. J. Hawk whom I know?”

  Okay, some of the names I drop may only hold weight with my football friends in Bisbee who are 80 percent Green Bay Packers fans and I may have only met A. J. Hawk briefly once after a show. And after becoming friends with Johnny Depp, the quality of my name dropping showed a decisive chasm. It goes from Depp and plummets down to A. J. Hawk level, no offense intended to the fine former linebacker. There aren’t a lot of names in between. But dropping names always has to be blown up big so that you don’t look like you really mean it. Even when you do. Famous people liking you is cool in the same way it is when black people like you. Somehow it’s worth so much more.

  Star fuckers are different than name droppers. I don’t know if there is a Webster’s definition for star fuckers but to me they are people who need to be around famous people so that in some way they become de facto celebrities themselves. Like Joe Francis from Girls Gone Wild. Being around famous people always makes me more self-conscious than I can stand and I tend to drink too much to compensate. In this case, drinking too much means being way more drunk than other people who tend to drink too little. If everyone is drunk on the same page, things tend to work out. Drinking too much around famous people gives me an unwarranted sense of regret in the morning. I never regret being too drunk around people I don’t know. But if they’re famous, the regret makes me hesitant to name drop as it just brings up bad anxiety, that rush of fear that you probably said something stupid. Like when I made a Bryan Adams joke to singer Ryan Adams that he’d only heard from every single tool who ever sat next to him at a party.

  In 2008 I got an email from Justine Bateman. It said that she loved my Showtime special No Refunds, that she agreed with everything I said and that she wished me great success. I vetted that it was in fact the same Justine Bateman who played Mallory from the eighties show Family Ties and immediately dropped the name on Bingo. I referred to her from then on as “my new girlfriend Justine Bateman,” just to send Bingo into her adorable fake temper tantrums. It still works.

  Garrett Morris had just opened a comedy club in downtown LA and I was booked there. I invited Justine, who said she would put together an “army” to be at the show. She came with a group of people, from what I remember a lot of industry folks. Industry—meaning agents and producers—are far more uncomfortable to be around than famous people. They are trained to work the conversations around bullshit like what your goals are and how they maybe could facilitate your dreams. Barnacles with a pitch and a club soda while you’re on your fifth Manhattan. And I didn’t have any dreams.

  The comedy club was in a fairly decent hotel with the showroom somehow situated around a sushi bar with a separate bar downstairs. In this hazy hindsight, the comedy room probably sucked and certainly doesn’t exist anymore. All I know is that the plan was to meet Justine and her army at the downstairs bar after the show. I was accompanied by Bingo and Lynn Shawcroft, who’d held back to man the merch booth while I raced down to entertain my name-drop opportunity. I tried to maintain some decorum and hide my level of drunkenness. I’m well versed, or so I think.

  Justine and her folk were casually casual, the polar opposite of my usual post-show audience of shitfaced roustabouts, high-fivers and their stumbling ilk. I tried my best at small talk. I’d evidently worked with one of the producers at the table on a television pilot. I pretended to remember. I desperately waited for Bingo and Shawcroft to catch up with me and even out the odds.

  Shawcroft had announced earlier in the evening that she was on a new low-carb diet that required she no longer drink beer, instead moving to vodka. The problem that night was that she had been drinking vodka at the same rate and volume as she would normally drink beer. It couldn’t have been later than 10:30 p.m. when Shawcroft shuffled sideways into the bar with purpose, like a 4 a.m. spiteful drunk with something to prove. Bingo was in tow, just as drunk if only a bit more timid and as always, adorable.

  The finely tuned industry-speak was interrupted and turned into bar-brawl volume chaos. Shawcroft spread out in the middle of the long table and proceeded to tell everyone in an angry slur what was what in an unprovoked tirade that culminated with her go-to tell of “You don’t even know what love is!”

  She kept yelling into the black hole of the silence she’d created.

  “What is love then? Tell me! You don’t know what true caring about people is!”

  She followed these outbursts by long swigs of vodka and soda.

  The table maintained their stares and side talk, ignoring the time bomb that was slowly exploding in the midst of the benign chitchat. Justine started busting balls out of the corner of her mouth that showed me she’d been here be
fore. You talk shit just quietly enough to go over the heads of your company that is unamused, amuse the ones in the middle ground who will get the joke, all without inflaming the drunk who is the problem. It’s a skill. A skill that Justine had mastered.

  Leftover pizza—the thin-crust fancy kind they serve on a stand with a can of Sterno keeping it warm below—was the needed distraction for Shawcroft to quit her inane blather. She asked the table if people were done eating it and everyone was happy to offer it up, hoping it would make her stop yelling at everyone. Yet in her attempt to grab it, she knocked it onto the floor, nearly setting the table on fire with the canned heat. Some people might take this as a cue to leave, both the drunk and the people tolerating the drunk.

  Nobody left.

  As the table made curious eye contact as to what might happen next, Shawcroft made the only move that remained logical in her own cloudy head. She got on her hands and knees and crept underneath the table to eat the pizza she’d spilled. She ate it hunched up off the floor like a squirrel. Justine raised the level of shit talk like perfectly hurled curve balls of a hall of fame closing pitcher, just out of reach of Shawcroft’s ears.

  I was mortified on two levels. One, I hated the fact that I gave a fuck just because Justine was famous and I was distancing myself from Bingo and Shawcroft hideously plowed. Two, was that they hadn’t stayed drinking with me at my own pace. I was certain to be that drunk myself later on and by then they’d be passed out and I’d be drinking alone.

  The Bateman group finally decided it was time to go as Shawcroft rolled under their feet, hitting her head on the bottom of the table as she tried to get up. We all made polite goodbyes as though nothing ever happened.

  In the morning, Lynn Shawcroft called me from her hotel room.

  “Oh my God! Did I make an asshole of myself in front of that Mallory girl?”

  “Um… yeah?!? You ran into the bar doing that ‘You don’t know what love is’ shit and then knocked their pizza off the table and then crawled around eating it off the carpet under their feet. I mean, if that’s what you call being an asshole.”

  Shawcroft paused and, without the slightest bit of kidding said…

  “Oh no! I ate pizza? I’m not supposed to have carbs!!!”

  Fame also makes it much harder to obscure someone’s identity when you have a compromising story that includes them and you are writing a book. I can write about Andy’s molester, Bo Y. Fondler, and the publisher makes me change it to Frank Wheeler. Again, somehow that’s no problem.

  Changing the name alone doesn’t necessarily work with famous people. It’s tough to pull off a story that begins with “One afternoon I was huffing spray paint on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean with the star of the movie… ‘Danny.’’’

  For the record, “Danny” and I did not huff Krylon together. I’m just making a point. But still, I hate to have to bury a good story just because someone is well known. And usually they hate it as well. Most famous people have to keep their sordid antics on the down-low because they have an image to uphold or they can be fired. I don’t have to hide anything. I have no network to answer to, no sponsorships to lose. Only you can fire me by not coming to my shows or buying this book, which is obviously too late.

  Here’s a couple interactions with mildly famous people that I will try to get out in front of the lawyers by making them as vague as possible namewise, although by now their names are as obscure as my own.

  I walked out having finished a show in the Southeast ahead of the crowd still settling their tabs. I’d quit smoking at that time, meaning that I now only bummed a couple cigarettes from folks before and after shows. The first couple out of the showroom were already outside smoking and I bummed one with confidence. I felt I had that kind of star power in this situation and besides, smokers tend to take care of one another. The guy told me he was a big fan and started repeating old bits he remembered from before I remembered remembering anything. I was impressed.

  As the rest of the crowd started pouring out, I ducked back in the fire exit to the greenroom. He and his gal tried to follow but Bingo stopped him and told him that this room was “comics only.” I ran interference and told her these people were cool. They had cigarettes.

  At some point he awkwardly dropped that he was an infamous professional athlete from the days of yore who had a reputation worse than my own. Only more well known.

  “Holy shit! You’re that guy!”

  A drink leads to plenty more and at some point we’re downstairs in an after-hours club in a public bathroom stall where he’s handing me a key bump. He was sort of meandering with a passive-aggressive apology about the quality.

  He half shrugs and tells me: “It’s not really good shit. It’s not meth. But it’s not not meth.”

  I snorted it and then ran quickly out to Chaille to make him write down the quote before I blacked it out or died from ingesting it.

  “It’s not meth. But it’s not NOT meth.”

  Inadvertently brilliant.

  The next night in the next town I wanted to tell the story but I didn’t want to rat out his identity. There was a cable comedy series that had recently run, loosely based on his career without giving him credit. So I told the story that night saying, “I won’t say who it was… I’ll just call him…” and I used the character’s name from the TV series rather than his real name. A few people got it. At least one didn’t.

  The next day I got a tweet from someone from the previous night’s audience saying: “Don’t worry I won’t say anything about you and [the actor that played the fictional version of the real guy who got no credit for a television version of himself] doing meth in a toilet!”

  I then realized that I’d inadvertently implicated a famous actor while trying to hide the identity of the guy that the character was based on.

  The analogy would be if Bert Kreischer gave me meth-not-meth and then I used “Van Wilder” as a not so subtle pseudonym when repeating the story and then had to apologize to Ryan Reynolds, the actor who played Bert Kreischer’s character as Van Wilder in a movie. It must suck more to have someone be more famous for playing you than for you being you.

  I played some other club many years earlier where the manager told us that the quarterback and kicker from that area’s hometown NFL team would be coming to the early show on Friday. In my youth and exuberance, I thought it would be funny to get a Nerf football to try to nail a field goal through the kicker’s upturned goalpost hands to close the show. By the time Friday arrived, I knew this was a bad idea, but I’d already found a Nerf football and I hated to waste it.

  I announced that the kicker and quarterback were in the room in the back and set up my silly field-goal idea. The kicker reticently played his part, arms up while I teed up the football from the stage. There was no momentum going into this. The crowd felt like they were being put on the spot as much as the poor kicker. They iced me. I kicked the Nerf ball directly into the front row inches before me, blasting their drinks all over themselves and their neighbors.

  “Thank you. Good night.”

  After the show, the kicker and the quarterback came back to the greenroom. They wanted to hang out for the late show. I was a nobody and they probably felt like nobodies too, being the worst team in the NFL at the time. They were probably familiar with poor fourth-quarter choices like mine that night.

  The late show was different, as my only obligation was to do five minutes in front of the special event that night, Dr. Dirty: John Valby. This was a guy who’d been legend when I was a teenager in Worcester, Massachusetts, who did dirty songs with dirty words that rhymed. Spoiler alert: “suck” rhymes with “fuck,” as does “cocksucker” with “motherfucker.” But his crowd were more crazed than even mine have now become. This was a musical Andrew Dice Clay with a mob of fans that aggressively yelled “Fuck You! Fuck You! Fuck You!” at the guys who were only there to pull his piano onto the stage.

  I was terrified. I watched this angry horde get more an
d more combative as they got seated and even more overserved. The quarterback loomed over me in the wings, his mouth just as agape as mine in fear for my immediate future.

  “Man. I wouldn’t wanna be you right now.”

  This from a man who was used to routinely getting booed for being the quarterback of the worst team in the NFL in one of the most brutal markets in America. I didn’t wanna be me either.

  He pulled me aside and asked me: “Hey, do you party?”

  I was too young to understand the nomenclature of cocaine. Years later I remember a stranger giving me a simple half nod from across the bar after a show and knew it meant bumps in the men’s room. But back then I just assumed that “party” was a term for drinking and said yes. Obviously I partied. I’d been drinking with him for hours.

  He slipped me an envelope that I retreated with into the greenroom to find the surprise of powdered confidence.

  The backstage announcement for me starting the show was barely audible over the vicious chants of the crowd.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  I told my opening joke and some woman yelled something back with bile spitting out of her neck.

  I called her a cunt.

  The crowd blew up in hives with laughter at my gifted ability to be so clever and I killed for the next four and a half minutes.

  Thank you for that white-flaked burst of confidence, my one-night friend. I’ll only refer to you as my Jewish grandmother. And when your kicker friend bemoaned being shit on by your head coach when he was “the best kicker in the NFL,” it was your confidence that made me jokingly say, “Oh, wait. I didn’t know you were Morten Andersen!” Zing!

  BOURBON LEGENDS

  Some things you just don’t talk about. Especially when they aren’t true.