I’d head over to the amusement park where we had staged the day’s event, meet a girl, hook up on the rides, and, later, head back to the hotel. “Hey,” I was thinking, “I’m fifteen years old, and I’m staying in a suite paid for by NBC.” It didn’t take a ton of game for me and my amusement park sweetheart to find ourselves back at my hotel, pre ordering room service for breakfast.
One disastrous morning I had to appear solo at an event in some small town in South Carolina. Along was my friend Mark, who came to most of these gigs. We were just kids traveling around the country having fun. On the plane, Mark and I were able to score some drinks, so we were feeling mighty fine upon arrival. Then, our handlers for the event—some good ol’ Southern boys—took us straight out to a bar for a few more drinks to loosen up even further. The event was a no-brainer autograph session scheduled first thing the following morning at a downtown convention center. There would just be a table with a line, and I’d wave and sign photos and other SBTB promo materials for a few hours. We had a good time the night we arrived, drinking hard and picking up a pair of hot Carolina chicks. We brought them back to the huge, multi-room suite that was provided so they could ride our gamecocks.
The next morning I awoke to discover that my California non-driver’s ID card and wallet chain were missing (don’t give me grief about the damn wallet chain, okay? It was the style of the day). The chicks we banged had stolen them. They didn’t steal my money; they just appeared to have made off with a couple of mementos from their night with Screech. Still, it was a pretty big deal to have my ID stolen. But that wasn’t the worst of my troubles. My main concern that morning was that I had the bells of fucking Notre Dame going off in my head and wanted to vomit out my pancreas. I was so hung over I was pleading for death. And Mark looked worse than me. Our handlers from the night before showed up at our hotel door, still hammered themselves, and said it was time to go down to the limo. We were running late for the event.
Inside the limo, I pled illness to the other, more adult organizers of the event. But they could smell the alcohol seeping from my pores and were not happy at all. I said I felt like I was coming down with a virus, like I thought I might get sick; maybe it was something I ate. Their eyes shot back, “Tough shit, kid. You’re hung over. The show must go on.”
We rolled up to a red-carpet entry leading into a giant convention arena packed with people. Before I exited, they informed me there was an RV trailer in the parking lot for my use during breaks. I stepped out into what had to be the brightest daylight on record. I felt the sun burning three inches from my eyeballs. There was press there from every corner of the state. That small town was treating my Screech appearance like the friggin’ Cannes Film Festival. Mark felt zero compulsion to suffer with me, and made a straight beeline to the RV, where he immediately fell asleep. Meanwhile, I made my way along the red carpet through the microphones and flash bulbs of what constitutes the paparazzi south of the Mason-Dixon.
Inside the convention center was even more mayhem. Thousands of people were gathered with hundreds more formed into lines snaking towards a giant, raised dais like the throne of King Xerxes. The organizers led me up the steps, my ass dragging the entire way, and deposited my sunken carcass at the signing table with a little stack of pens. Clearly, my body language conveyed that I was not having a good time. To channel Raymond Chandler, I had a face like a collapsed lung, and I looked like a bucket of mud. The event staff definitely picked up on my reluctant vibe, which made for a very uncomfortable morning and afternoon. The feedback was not good: This is a complete disaster, the kid is drunk off his ass, he’s miserable and not smiling at anyone, he’s hurrying people through the line … On top of that, I was still stressing that some chick had stolen my ID and personal items. The promotional event had shaped up to be a catastrophe of epic proportions.
On the bright side, before Mark and I left for home, it was such a small town that those handlers who took us out and got us wasted the night before had tracked down the chicks that stole my stuff. My possessions were passed along to me in a nondescript manila envelope.
Safely, mercifully, back in L.A., Linda Mancuso was selected to scold me for my poor performance in the public sphere. “Dustin,” she said, shaking her head wearily, “what happened?”
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently, finally sober again.
“The local NBC affiliate in South Carolina has dropped SBTB as a direct result of your visit to their community. They claim you were drunk and practically catatonic. So again, what happened?”
What could I do? I knew that I could trust Linda to tell her anything. So, I lied.
“I wasn’t drunk. I had food poisoning or something. I was deathly ill but went ahead and completed the event as best I could. The show must go on, right? Mark was with me. He can vouch.”
“That’s right,” said Mark, conveniently nearby. “Dustin would never arrive drunk to an event, Linda. He’s a professional.”
Technically, we were telling the truth. I wasn’t drunk at the event, I was hung over. I was drunk the night before and into the wee hours of the next morning, carousing with some hot chick who boosted my ID after we made sweet love back at my hotel. I always felt badly that I didn’t come clean with Linda, especially years later when she wouldn’t even have cared. But I really was embarrassed. I had cost the show through my unprofessional behavior. I started to wonder if I was becoming part of the troubled Hollywood youth culture. But then I looked at my co-stars, with all their problems, and I decided, “No, I’m fine.” That realization was a fitting epilogue to my southern fried clusterfuck.
I did another solo show in Miami, where I signed a bunch of promo material for a very excited young girl and was immediately approached by some Tony Montana-looking, scar-faced Cuban dude. He was surrounded by an entourage of grouchy Cubans sporting shoulder holsters filled with an array of large-caliber weaponry. Tony Montana sat down next to me and in a thick Cuban accent said, “You do that show and make my daughter happy. I have a gift for you.” He led me out back to the trunk of his black Mercedes and offered me, from a pile of white bricks, a kilo of cocaine. I gracefully declined … though I can think of some other cast mates who might possibly been tempted.
The entire cast appeared once at a mall in Arizona. Again, Sidney Sharron was along as our guardian. We were riding to the event in our limo when Mark-Paul announced he needed to go to the bathroom—immediately. We pulled into a 7-Eleven and Mark-Paul ran inside. The clerk decided to be a dick, telling Mark-Paul that the restroom was for customers only. Mark-Paul offered to buy something, but the clerk said, “Too late.” This minimum-wage Arizonan obviously didn’t know, or care (or maybe he did) that he was dealing with the Golden Child, star of NBC’s top-rated sitcom for kids. He told Mark-Paul, “Too bad, so sad. Beat it.”
His bladder reaching critical mass, Mark-Paul decided to piss behind the dumpster. It wasn’t the world’s best-secreted dumpster either, with a clear line of sight from the interstate, but desperate times call for desperate measures. As his stream pounded the pavement, an acrid steam rising to his nostrils, Mark-Paul exhaled a grateful sigh of relief. What a picture: In the background, the grand desert vista of the American Southwest. In the foreground, Saved by the Bell’s Zack Morris grinning with satisfaction as he micturated on a 7-Eleven dumpster.
Returning to the limo, Mark-Paul caught a flash of strobing lights and heard the blurp of a siren. A police officer had been seated in his car just a few yards away, watching him the whole time. Spooked, Mark-Paul dashed inside the limo, scurried to the far end and tried to make himself as small as possible. The cop tapped on the window, Sidney lowered it a crack.
“Can the gentleman who just urinated in public please step outside the vehicle?”
Huh?
“Sorry officer,” said Sidney, “you must have the wrong vehicle.”
“No,” said the cop. “I don’t.”
“Mark-Paul,” whispered Sidney, incredulous, “did
you do what the officer is suggesting?”
Mark-Paul, from his fetal ball, whispered back, “Please make this go away.”
It’s a good thing Mark-Paul had at that point already relieved himself or he would have been pissing in his pants. Poor, sweet, old Sidney shook his head and stepped out to see what the hell was going on.
A few minutes later, Sidney returned, and we were back on the road to our event. He had taken care of it. Not only was Sidney a kindhearted, gentle math wizard, now he had graduated to the role of fixer!
That wasn’t the only time that Mark-Paul fucked up. One summer we were all participating in a SBTB cast-and-crew softball game played in some local public park. It was introduced to us as a regular bonding event meant to strengthen our sense of teamwork through the rigors of physical exercise and the spirit of competition and fair play. It was so lame I never went back.
The only moment worth recounting was a particularly stellar at-bat by the Golden Child. The ol’ Dutch-in-the-clutch. Thai Goes to the Runner. Mr. Amster-slam. He spit into his batter’s gloves, clapped his paws together, tapped the plate a few times with the stickeroo, knocked dirt from his wooden cleats (just kidding), took a couple of practice swings, kicked up some red dust, then stood, bat on his shoulder, shifting from his back foot to his front, waiting for the pitch. Then came the wind-up, the pitch, and … TWANK!
Oh, wait. One thing I forgot to mention is that way beyond the end of the left-field line, a family was having a lovely afternoon picnic. It looked like a birthday celebration for one of the little tikes—balloons, presents, crêpe paper, and all the fixin’s. From the family truckster, the dad was approaching all those beaming faces, in his arms a giant sheet cake. I know some stories sound made up, that they could never have occurred so perfectly, but trust me.
Back to Zack at the bat. The softball exploded off the barrel, filling the expanse of the park with the teeth-rattling resonance of a hollow thunderclap. The fat ball sailed high into the almost cartoonishly blue sky. Higher and higher, over the left field fence and …
Dad was traversing the fresh-cut grass, skipping along as he smiled, holding aloft the beautifully decorated birthday cake for all to see, when the softball smashed him squarely in the face. Yellow cake and frosting detonated in his hands like a box of pineapple grenades. Children started screaming, howling in terror; women were wailing. Dad crumbled to the turf where he convulsed acrobatically for several heart-stopping moments. It was horrific or hilarious, depending on where you were standing. Then nothing. Motionless.
“He’s dead!” a woman shrieked. “They killed him!”
But he wasn’t dead. Only knocked cold; his clock thoroughly cleaned. Mark-Paul, the half-Asian for every occasion, was completely freaking out. If there were a limousine nearby, he would have made a mad dash for it to hole up while Sidney Sharron administered CPR on his beaning victim. But this was not a seedy 7-Eleven in Arizona, this was Southern California. The classy thing to do was to go to the man, determine if he was alive or dead, and apologize. Perhaps even to his wife, apoplectic children, and other stunned family members and party guests.
Which, I’ve got to hand it to the guy, is exactly what Mark-Paul did. Turned out the dad was okay. He sat up, knew most of his name, what day it was (roughly), and he appeared to vaguely recognize his wife. Mark-Paul apologized profusely for his galactic home-run-hitting display, brought about by his steroidinduced mondo manliness. He told the guy that if he ever found himself in Burbank—or Holland or Thailand—he owed him an autographed headshot. No, fuck that, two autographed headshots. The man smiled woozily; it wasn’t clear if he understood what the words meant.
Around 1992, Lark and I were asked to appear at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. They wanted us to come out and do a little Screech and Lisa Turtle bit where Screech pines for her attention and is rejected yet again. Technically we were there as Dustin and Lark, but our scripted dialogue was peppered with a few lame tongue-and-cheek Screech and Lisa jokes.
“So, Lark, how about after this you and I go …”
“Unh-uh. That is never gonna happen.”
At the time, the show Double-Dare was popular, as was its signature gag of “sliming” people. The producers asked backstage if it would be okay if they slimed me. I didn’t have a problem with it—it was all in good fun for an audience of children—but I had borrowed the shirt I was wearing from wardrobe at SBTB. It was an expensive shirt, and it was a nice thing for wardrobe to offer, something they were definitely not required to do. Whenever I went to them and explained that I had an event I needed to look nice for, the wardrobe department would usually offer to very generously let me borrow cool clothes (not Screech clothes) for the event. They would go out of their way to deck me out in something classy. The condition was that we take care of the garments and return them in the same condition as when we borrowed them. Which is just a good life rule to live by in general. So I said to the Nickelodeon producers, “Sorry guys. These clothes aren’t even mine, and, not for nothing, my curly hair doesn’t really agree with a bucket load of slime.”
There were lots of performers and recording artists milling around backstage, including the Atlanta teenage rap duo Kris Kross—Chris “Mac Daddy” Kelly and Chris “Daddy Mac” Smith. You know, the little dudes who wore their clothes backwards. Their big hit, “Jump” was popular at the time. They were strutting around like big-time gangsta rappers.
That’s the thing: anybody who experiences the slightest taste of fame in Hollywood feels like they’ve finally made it. They just don’t realize how fleeting it all is. The moment you recognize that you’ve achieved some measure of fame, it’s already running away from you. Some people are involved in the entertainment industry solely for the craft. That’s admirable and can be fulfilling, but you can’t drive around in craft. Craft doesn’t keep you dry during a thunderstorm or feed your family. So you try to use your craft to earn money. After securing a decent income, the next step is recognition and, perhaps, fame. The danger is when you take a straight moon shot to fame. You lose touch with reality. Holding on to that fame, whatever the price, becomes more important than the money, the craft, or even the people you love.
I introduced myself to Kris Kross. Based on their clothing, I was confused as to where I should present my hand for shaking. Predictably, they blew me off. I said, “So, what are you guys gonna do when your song “Jump” plays itself out?”
“We gotta whole album, yo,” said Kris or Kross.
“Mmm,” I thought. “A whole album, indeed.”
I wonder what they did when that song did play itself out… a few weeks later.
Either way, I’m still waiting on that second hit from that whole album.
In addition to our road appearances and events, another commitment we were required to perform back in the Burbank studio was known as “affiliate days.” These were marathon sessions where we sat in a tiny room at NBC and did literally hundreds of fifteen- to twenty-second meet-and-greet promotional conversations, rapid fire, with all the network affiliates across the United States. It was just the cast members (rotating in and out throughout the day), a few chairs, a camera, microphone, and earpieces stuffed into our ears to hear the questions. Those days were a bear, but we had to keep our spirits high and be fresh for each brief interview. Almost as annoying as the task itself was sitting all day next to Mario, who was a total microphone hog. He was incapable of shutting the fuck up. Typical interviews would run like this:
(From earpiece: Okay, you’re on with WAFF-48 in Huntsville, Alabama)
AFFILIATE NUMBER ONE: Hi gang! So Dustin, what do you think is the secret of your show’s success?
DUSTIN: That’s a good question. I think it’s …
MARIO: Hey guys, Mario Lopez here, I think that’s a really good question, too. In my opinion, the best thing about
Saved by the Bell is … Blah, blah, blah.
Boom. Fifteen seconds is over. On to the next interview.
&nbs
p; (From earpiece again: Okay guys, this is Channel 11 in Atlanta, Georgia)
AFFILIATE NUMBER TWO: We have Dustin Diamond, a.k.a. Screech Powers, here. Dustin, what’s it like playing the comic relief on such a hugely popular children’s television show?
DUSTIN: Well, I tell you, it’s a blast …
MARIO: Y’know, Dustin, it is a blast. Isn’t it? And I like watching you, man. Let me tell you something about this guy. By the way, is it hot today in Atlanta? Yada, yada, yada.
All day long, that’s how affiliate days would go, sitting next to Mario. The dude would constantly speak over whichever cast mates were seated with him. It was all televised, so we had to keep our smiles painted across our faces, and we could never let off a whiff of conflict between the principal cast members. But after a few hours of this, I did want to scream, “Mario, buddy, shut the fuck up before I stab you with a railroad spike.” Mario was older and larger than me, but nobody is spike proof.
Another way we interacted with the public was through our mail. We all got our share of wacky correspondence from cool fans, shut-ins, creeps, the mentally unstable, and a wide variety of stalkers-in-training, like the weirdoes who would send Tiffani gold necklaces, diamonds, naked photos, and such. I got this one letter that had a dead spider smooshed inside. The fan wrote, “This is my favorite spider. He means a lot to me. Please take care of him and send him back.” I don’t know if the guy was going on vacation and needed me to spider-sit or what, but I was like, “Whatever, fruitcake,” and tossed it in the trash.
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