This Is Not Fame

by Doug Stanhope

  I later used the term “low-watt gurgler in a high-back chair” in the film The Aristocrats. The term is now listed in the Urban Dictionary. I am not cited as a source. But I know and whoever made the entry knows. I’m happy to languish in the infamy.

  When I die, there will be a small chorus of comedians who will say it was sad that I was underappreciated and could or should have been so much more recognized. And if they die before me, I will say it was sad that their own unquenchable desire to need more, get more, be more might have made them miss out on that one night that you had to cling to the driveway, out of your brain on psychedelics, to the point that you pissed your pants on purpose, leaving your wife to change you like a baby. You would have never taken the time to skip drunkenly into the ocean with Roseanne. You would have missed the time the girls from the band Birdcloud peed on you. And you would have slept through that vacuum cleaner salesman story in Alaska. It wouldn’t have seemed believable even if you were awake. Some of the best nights in your life will never make it onto your Wikipedia page. Stop worrying about your credits and consider enjoying your day.

  You die at the end.

  I left Los Angeles in 2005 to live in Bisbee, Arizona, the hidden, eclectic cul-de-sac of the desert Southwest just at the border of a Mexican town that Mexicans have never heard of either. People asked me why I’d suddenly picked up roots of an arguably rising career to seemingly go on the lam in a place that was too remote for even a vigilant stalker to make time to visit.

  I’d tell them that I moved here to make it big.

  It used to be a joke but, using my own personal barometer of what it means to be successful, that is exactly what happened. There is no comedy scene here and I’m glad for that. I miss the comedians but I don’t miss being around the business. Living in Bisbee made me love comedy again. Now when I have to go to LA or New York, I feel giddy like it’s a high school reunion every time. I laugh at acts that I would have crucified under my breath in the back of the room, back when this business was my life instead of my living.

  Nobody knows stand-up comedy here. When I come back from the road, at best my local friends will ask me “How was your trip?” No differently or in-depth than “How was your vacation?” Then we move on to football or who of our friends made it into the “Police Beat” back page of the weekly newspaper. I’m only famous here at Safeway. As a customer, not as a comedian.

  We’ve had some legendary Super Bowl parties here at the house over the last ten years, some of them lasting as long as nine days. We would generally have a show in the yard with live bands on the Saturday night before Super Bowl but that trailed off after Nowhere Man and Whiskey Girl died. They were a married local musician duo and close friends who could be the foundation of any makeshift jam band that could be put together at the last minute. No matter how sloppy drunk or amateur the rest of the participants were, Nowhere and Whiskey could make them great. But then Whiskey died of a lupus-related blood infection just after turning forty. Nowhere Man followed her out later that day with a bullet through his head. Jam bands kinda fell off after that, without them as a cornerstone. The neighbors are probably happier because of it.

  You need to know that the small neighborhood we live in is so quiet that you can hear someone’s television at night a block away and six houses down. And it’s usually something boring. So having a live band on your patio means that everyone in the entire neighborhood can’t help but listen. The noise ordinance says it has to be shut down by 10 p.m. and we stick by it, but sometimes they call the cops anyway.

  The first visit from the police was when, after the music, I thought it would be a good idea to put some comedians on the stage. We had quite a few top-notch comics who were drunk and ready to go. Kristine Levine went up first and I immediately saw the problems coming. I knew that our crowd would love her but I hadn’t considered that my neighbors, who had never called the police about the music, might take exception to most of what we consider funny. I remembered Brandt Tobler who was evicted for having me play his backyard. I paced like a nervous club owner anticipating the bad comment cards. Kristine Levine, unnecessarily amplified, graphically detailed the condition of her obese undercarriage after having three children.

  “My pussy looks like it swallowed a dog that chewed its way out!”

  Imagine this kind of material and worse resounding through the walls of every house within three blocks in any direction. It wasn’t after 10 p.m. but I still waited by the gate for the police to show up, which took all of about eight minutes. The way my house is situated on a downslope, you can’t see the patio and yard from the street over the corrugated tin fence. I walked out to the cop car to try to circumvent the problem. As the cop and his partner came out of the car onto the street, I politely asked them if there was a noise complaint. He said that it was in fact a language complaint as he swung open the gate into the driveway. There he was greeted by about eighty people and a comedian onstage, all silent and staring at him. Like he’d inadvertently opened a side door of a live theater production and the entire play shut down because he’d accidently walked onto the stage. The pause lasted an eternity.

  “Okay, first question. Why weren’t we invited?”

  That’s a cool cop. Granted that it’s easy to be the most popular guy at the party when you’re the only one with a gun, but that’s still pretty fucking cool. We told him that we’d move the comedy portion of the show indoors. I completely understood the complaints. I might be annoyed at hearing “Mustang Sally” at top levels on my Saturday night at home but comedy is different. If I had to listen to Jeff Dunham while I’m trying to watch TV, I’m calling the cops.

  The next year on the same Saturday night before the Super Bowl, the cops came again. This time it was just party noise in general and well after the 10 p.m. ordinance. It was one of those fortuitous times where the party happened to break up in the minutes between the complaint and the arrival of the police. They walked into a few drunken conversations still chattering on in the yard and assumed that the complainant was just overly sensitive. I told him that I tried to be observant of the rules and was myself concerned about disturbing the neighbors. He said he was aware of that because he’d been called here the year before.

  “Wait, are you the ‘Why weren’t we invited’ guy?”

  “Yeah! And why weren’t we invited again?”

  The next morning I called the police station and invited them all to the game. They didn’t show but laughed and appreciated the offer. That was years ago.

  As I write this, the Patriots just defeated the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl 51. It was the biggest comeback ever in Super Bowl history and the only one to ever go into overtime. And again, that same cop showed up. This time he came to watch the game with his wife and kids. I don’t allow kids in my house but I make an exception for famous people. Officer Bob Friendly is famous to me and I love to drop his name.

  FAME RETARDANT

  When I was growing up, my elders would always judge the level of someone’s success by how young they were when they could retire. They would tell you that Paul retired at thirty-eight with a sense of wonderment and envy, as though the man had been released early from prison. The implication is that working sucks and the implication wasn’t subtle. Even if that was a baseless, ingrained belief, I still don’t see how it’s wrong. What evades me is how those people who do retire early allow themselves to actually relax and enjoy it. Having to work at any job is a loaf of shit but when I actually take the time to spend weeks or months slobbing on the couch, I never feel comfortable doing it. I’m constantly agitated. Always that gnawing restlessness that I should be getting something accomplished. I’ve always said that I could quit comedy and never look back and I’m certain I could do that. But I’d always feel like I should still be doing something else.

  I’ve never been one of those comedians who says “The stage is my life” or the ubiquitous “I’m just so happy to have been given the gift of making people laugh.” No co
median cares if you laugh. They care if you laugh at them. If that comedian kills and the rest of the show sends you home outraged and crying, that comedian doesn’t give a fuck about you. He cares that he killed.

  I’d like to be happy doing nothing at all. I have shiftless comedian friends who are my seniors who do nothing but play video games all day, have no money and still live on ramen noodles without a care in the world. I envy them while I remain dumbfounded by the rich and famous who don’t just quit now when they never have to look back. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle.

  I’ve gone on Netflix binges so epic that Netflix couldn’t keep up with enough content to support them. I put as much effort into sloth as others do into achievement. But I never felt relaxed, even if there was nothing specific that I should be doing otherwise.

  Howard Stern has seven hundred billion dollars that he keeps in cat carriers full of cash in a storage shed. I know. He made me count it. The reason that he still continues to get up at four in the morning to do a four-hour radio show when he’s close to eighty years old mystifies me. Maybe he’s like me and just can’t handle the guilt of slack. Maybe society convinces you that it’s wrong to not always want more, even if you don’t really want it.

  I live within my means and could probably just quit and live small here in Bisbee based on my life expectancy. Yet here I am writing another book. I blame it on the inability to say no. Or maybe it’s a sadder version of ego where I’m just flattered to be asked. That’s one of the problems with being a drunk. Your own personal version of what is the truth fluctuates over the course of a day. If this book had been written in one day, it would be in three chapters titled “Sober Regret,” “Happy-Hour Enthusiasm” and “Drunken Who-Gives-a-Fuck.”

  It wasn’t until I was engaged in a deeply emotional, impassioned relationship with my close personal friend Johnny Depp—who I’ve lain in bed with in our underpants while he tenderly held a knife to my throat—that I had the true and ugly up-close experience of what it is like to be hugely famous.

  All the clichés of the loneliness, the lack of privacy, everybody wanting something from you and never being able to gauge people’s intentions are probably true. By all accounts, that is Depp’s reality. I have never seen that with him. Not only was I never destined to be famous, I have proven to be a fame repellent. Johnny, who can’t leave his house without batteries of paparazzi rushing his heels, has never even been blinked at once while I have been with him.

  He was going to bring his son Jack to my show at a comedy club in LA. He may as well have been the President of the United States. His phalanx of security came hours early to map every entry, exit and possible sniper’s sight line like they were Secret Service. They did everything short of sample the appetizers for poison. When showtime came, Johnny came through a side door and hung out in the greenroom like anyone else. When I went onstage, Johnny sat in the sidelines of the crowd, dressed exactly like Johnny Depp. No baseball hat and sunglasses, no Hollywood incognito. He was a fucking gay pirate with his kid.

  Nobody noticed.

  The next day, Johnny asked if Bingo and I wanted to join him and his daughter to go to Target. He said that he’d never been to a Target store in his life. His kids needed back-to-school shit. Absolutely, we would like to go. It would certainly be chaos!

  We wandered around Target with not a care in the world, like we were roaming a barren fiord looking for a quiet place to picnic. Johnny was still dressed as a gay pirate but now in the fluorescent lights of a crowded box store. Nobody save for a few foreign women even batted an eye. Johnny was just fascinated by the colors. Anywhere else, he would have had TMZ galore taking video.

  At first I wrote it off as people thinking he was a Johnny Depp impersonator. Why else would he go out dressed like that? Yet it continued to happen every single time I was with him in public. Nobody ever noticed.

  Ever.

  I am sure it is because of me.

  I am not simply unfamous, I cock-block fame. I am fame retardant.

  I once asked Johnny while he was shooting a movie that he outwardly hated why he still did all this bullshit when he was worth megamillions. Why he didn’t simply retire. He said that it was because he employed sixty-plus people who counted on him. There lay the trappings of fame. You can’t quit because that would mean some Nicaraguan housekeeper who has worked for you for thirty-plus years would be out on the street. I understood. I only have Hennigan and Chaille to worry about. And our wives. I know that they could all survive on their own without me but I know it’s so much easier for all of us the way we are doing it now. And so much more fun. It has been a jumble-fuck of fun.

  Every time I catch myself in that mental rat trap of “I could have done more with my life,” I realize I have done more with my life. I just don’t remember a lot of it. You’d blame the years of alcohol but the years alone will do it. I know plenty a peer my age who hasn’t soaked their head in booze for decades and they can’t remember shit either.

  People who tell you that you could have done more with your life typically mean that you could have done more with your career. They equate work with living.

  Years back Dave Attell called me to ask about decent venues in New Orleans. At the time I had never worked New Orleans and I told him as much. In classic Attell he said, “Suuure you have! Remember the night when we did that show and you made the woman cry and then we ate beignets and you hopped a freight train???”

  I laughed at his patented non sequitur silliness. But as he added more detail I realized that it wasn’t a joke at all, as it slowly came back to me. Andy Andrist and I had road-tripped after a gig in Atlanta to see Dave, Mitch Hedberg and Louis Black doing a theater in New Orleans. Afterwards Andy, Attell and I had crashed an open mic and I had indeed sent a woman out crying with my post-9/11 vitriol and the ensuing argument. Later still, as Dave ate beignets at Café Du Monde next to the railroad tracks, I saw a slow-moving freighter and ran to it, hopping onboard and traveling all of a hundred yards or so when I got scared and jumped off. Andy remembers me peeing off it as well. It takes a village to piece together a solid bender.

  Yes, I could have done more with my life. Like losing a leg to remind me of the night in New Orleans.

  And as for my shit memory, it may be solely responsible for my saying I have no regrets.

  When it all started, it was all a drunken goof. Most of my cohorts quit along the way and probably reflect fondly on the time that they at least gave it a shot. Some found an offshoot of the business where they were more adaptable. A few made it big and can’t stop thinking about ways to make it bigger. Fewer still, a sliver of us looked at this life as an endless party, compelled to drive it until it ran out of gas. We all put on a face as kids and kept doing it until eventually it stuck like that.

  At some point along the road, we all turned into the people we used to pretend to be.

  “You’re just hangin’ out / At a local bar / And you’re wonderin’ / Who the hell you are / Are you a farmer? / Are you a star?…

  Keep on smilin’ through the rain.”

  —Wet Willie, “Keep on Smilin’”

  Wiley Roberts bugging out after sleeping with a pig.

  My alleged Jerry Springer conspirators.

  On set of Tosh.0 with Bingo, Daniel Tosh, and Joe Rogan.

  The year we made D.T. Tosh a star!

  It’s funnier to lift your kilt and show your dick at a karaoke singer if he’s blind.

  Chicago Comedy Festival 1998. If you look close, you’ll spot Louis CK, Mitch Hedberg, Tom Rhodes, and others getting famous and me about to pull my dick out instead.

  Costa Rica, Working Girls/Spokespersons.

  Naked at Koot’s with Matt Becker, Midget Dave, and Kenny Midget.

  In the UK with Bingo.

  With protesters in Madison.

  Chaille and me ready for the road.

  At the AVN Awards with Chloe and Nina Hartley.

  Acme Comedy Club Green Room notice to comics—sp
ecifically me. The broken English of owner Louis Lee bleeds through.

  Florida jock strap.

  Allison Pearson article asking “What Planet Are They From?”

  Even Bingo has fans with bad tattoos of her.

  With Dr. Drew.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are so many people I have to thank for this book that I can’t even remember.

  So let’s just leave it at that.

  Fuck you, then. I’ll try. I’ll do it drunk and refuse any type of editing.

  If I could hire Tracey Wernet to just sit quietly for hours making me drinks, crocheting unstable drink coasters and then being my own living editor and thesaurus… well, she would probably be available without her dumb husband Greg Chaille making her do hump work. My favorite parts of writing this book were her company.

  Alex O’Meara, as always, was a trusted ear even when I didn’t take his notes, mostly because I forgot them. he also likes to give me grammar notes. That is why I am demanding to leave these acknowledgements as I write them, so you know that I write like I’m on Twitter and fighting a character limit yet ignoring unnecessary commas.

  Brian Hennigan and Ben Schafer don’t seem to have much concern about quality control over expedience. I am weak and tend to follow their lead. Hennigan is great at telling me that I should have included that one great story just after the deadline has passed. Fuck that guy too.