Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  And no sooner had I asked, they delivered! You know how on The Price Is Right they play that sad pathetic horn when a contestant loses? Well, you might as well cue it up right now. The date was set to be around Thanksgiving and everything was in order, then two weeks before the day, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. And that was that. The Tonight Show shut down and the moment was gone I never made it to The Tonight Show and I never got to play Tickle-Tickle in front of millions of people with my hero. It was just one of those things that wasn’t meant to be.

  Robin meant so much to me, as he did to so many people. Without even really knowing it, he touched us all. But for me, he was the Holy Grail. He was brilliance personified, yet he maintained a certain humility that made him magnanimous in his art. I am eternally grateful for that because, as a result, I was able to share time with him. And more importantly, I was afforded a more candid glimpse of the man because we never played media games. We just shot the shit and laughed. Or I should say, more accurately, he shot the shit and I laughed! But during that process he welcomed me in. He encouraged, nurtured, and supported me with his willingness to let this neophyte sit at his table and drink from his fountain. A rare honor that I shall remember forever.

  I was devastated when he took his own life in 2014. It was an immeasurable loss for anyone who had even remotely grazed his existence and a heartbreaking tragedy for his close friends and loved ones. My heart goes out to them, for they are the ones who truly knew the full measure of his wonder. I was just a lucky girl who got to meet him and spend a little time talking. He was a genius and, unbeknownst to him, had become a mentor to me. I always walked away from our “conversations of the absurd” with great stories, great memories, and even greater confidence. I am better for knowing him. We all are.

  NUMBER OF NOTHING TO ENCODE

  I didn’t know Robin personally, but I was heartsick to learn of the tremendous amount of pain and isolation his depression and addictions caused him, and how his family and friends were powerless to help him.

  Unfortunately, it’s something that I can relate to all too well. My best friend and business partner, Ken Stroscher, wasn’t just the heart and soul of No Good TV, he was my greatest inspiration. Despite all his flaws and creatively self-destructive behavior, he helped me find the truth of who I am, be brave enough to own it, and find the inner strength to fight for it. Not a single day goes by where I don’t miss his eccentric idiocy, which I firmly believe is an essential ingredient for a life well-lived. There is nothing that we have ever created or continue to create at NGTV that doesn’t have his fingerprints all over it in some way, and his DNA within it. This whole thing was always an exercise in sheer will and faith, in one way or another, by three friends who saw the world in the same uniquely fucked-up way and decided to turn that into a business. Plus, that funny fucker turned out to be my human spirit animal.

  “Cocksuckers!”

  —Peter Falk

  He may have influenced me more than anyone because he was there when it was the hardest. When we had very little and dreamed so very big. Kourosh will forget to have fun if you don’t remind him, but Ken was all about the fun—any chance he got. Ken was my savior when things got tough and I couldn’t see my way through. I don’t know where I’d be without “naked editing” and the countless other stupid things he’d come up with to make me smile and keep moving forward. I just assumed I’d be there to save him if the time came, as well. But it turns out that, in life, things don’t always turn out the way you’d like them to.

  Sadly, the more successful NGTV became, the more Ken seemed to turn to drink. He wasn’t handling the pressure well. On top of whatever else was eating at him that he wouldn’t tell me about. Then, somewhere along the way, a casual drink turned into drowning in two liters of booze a day. Of course, he hid it so well that I had no idea how bad things had gotten. Until one day when I quite accidentally came across the most curious thing as I went to grab something for him from his car. Conveniently nestled in the driver’s center cup holder was a crystal tumbler, filled with liquor like he was Dean Martin or James Bond. Assuming James Bond had traded in his Aston Martin for a used 1979 beige Volvo. I mean, who the fuck uses glassware as a to-go cup?! It was so dumb and very much a “classic” Ken move to conceal a terrible addiction under the veil of living the fabulous life. His mom was going to kill him when she found out where her missing Waterford crystal set had gone.

  I really didn’t know what to think. But I found the casual and brazen nature of it very alarming. So I made a point to quietly check his car as often as I could, and sure enough, I found the same thing every time. I confronted him about it only to have him play it off as a little bit of harmless fun that wasn’t affecting his work. I wasn’t convinced. Not surprisingly, soon enough, Ken’s drinking started to affect his work. He started being chronically late, showing up intoxicated, and blowing off his responsibilities. This became a huge problem because he was heading up production and training newly hired editors and producers. He was essential to making them understand our vision and editing style. Plus, he was central to the biggest location shoot we would ever do just on the horizon.

  So there we were, heading to our first-ever Toronto Film Festival. Ten days of on-location shooting in Canada, where we had over a hundred celebrity interviews lined up. Just writing that makes me want to punch Kourosh in the gut. A hundred interviews!! Who the fuck books that many? Had we made a deal to start feeding E!’s entire programming that I didn’t know about? Fucking Entertainment Tonight wasn’t doing that much! Even carnival organ grinders gave their dancing monkeys a rest! He was trying to give me a heart attack! But what I hadn’t anticipated was that Ken was going to give him one first.

  Ken was terrified of flying the way Kanye West is terrified of humility. But when it’s just the three of you and you’ve got to fly somewhere, you do what you have to do. And in Ken’s case, it was like getting B. A. Baracus from The A-Team on a plane. So we brought some Xanax and figured we’d give him two of those on the plane and he’d be out for the duration. That would have been too easy! Once we checked in for the flight, we headed to the Friday’s to kill the forty-five minutes before we boarded. Where we ended up was at the equivalent of a one-man frat party where we witnessed Ken chug down ten Long Island iced teas in thirty minutes. We watched him casually cruise by the state of rat-assed on his way to obliteration station. Stunned into a state of abject horror only comparable to the first time we heard Kanye’s remix of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” it was in that very moment that Kourosh and I had the realization that this was not Ken’s first rodeo.

  We were worried they wouldn’t board him if they knew he was wasted. Which really didn’t matter because how the fuck was he going to stand up, let alone walk to get on the plane?! Then came the next surprise: Ken stood up and walked as if he’d been sipping on a lemonade. Who was this guy? So we rolled with him into the crowded boarding line. As we boarded the plane, we kept an eye on him and thought he was right there with us, but when we got to our seats, Ken was nowhere to be found. “He must’ve stepped into the bathroom,” I said to Kourosh. “I mean, where else could he possibly be?” He agreed, but we gave each other that “This is Ken we’re talking about, so let’s pray he’s not passed out on the toilet” look, and patiently waited for twenty minutes … no Ken.

  Calm changed to panic when we noticed the flight attendants were about to close the door. We grabbed their attention and explained what had happened and begged them to look for him before leaving. They held that plane at the gate for almost thirty minutes before Ken finally strolled on, flanked by two security guards, and sat down next to us, a bit frazzled. It turns out he had somehow wandered onto the plane right next to ours, an international flight to New Zealand. Which would have departed with him on board had we not raised a red flag, having already closed their doors and been about to taxi. Only Ken could find himself at the center of a real-life shit-show worthy of a network sitcom! Word
to the wise: Everything tragic begins as something stupid and funny.

  And that, as they say, was the beginning of the end. The year ahead would test the boundaries of logic and reason as Kourosh and I tried to cope with the challenges ahead and Kenny struggled with his pain. Within a couple of months of our return, the shit hit the fan and things began to escalate and spiral out of control. What had started out as a bit of insanity and craziness turned a dark and tragic corner. I started to get calls late at night, from the weirdest places, like Disneyland and Universal Studios, asking me to come pick him up to avoid their calling the police, after he’d passed out on one of their benches. He would graduate to getting arrested on a couple of occasions. Each time we’d get him a lawyer, bail him out, and check him into rehab. Only to find out that after a couple of days or a week, he checked himself out of rehab, checked into some random motel, and got blitzed before the motel would kick him out and he’d end up on his mom’s doorstep. His alcoholism was approaching Leaving Las Vegas levels. I don’t think I had ever been more scared.

  The bigger our business got, the more lost Ken got. He was doing everything to just fade into the background. He was producing very little and barely even showing up. Before we left for our second Toronto Film Festival, Ken was M.I.A. We couldn’t get him on the phone, e-mail, nothing. He had gone completely off the grid. We had already made commitments with the studios, and not knowing what to do, Kourosh and I took our scheduled flights and hoped to solve the situation on the fly. On the way to the airport, I sent two coworkers to his apartment complex to get to the bottom of the situation. It took them an hour to figure out how to get into his building and another hour to convince the building manager to let them into his apartment without calling the police first. What they discovered once they gained access looked like a crime scene in a horror movie. The apartment was a disaster zone, with broken furniture everywhere and Ken passed out in a huge pool of blood. For a moment, it looked like he was dead, but then he started to come to. Apparently after a night of hitting the bottle really hard, he had accidentally slipped and smacked his head on his air-conditioning unit and knocked himself unconscious. He could have bled to death.

  Kourosh and I were incredibly relieved that he wasn’t dead, but we were so fucking mad that we wanted to kill him. When we got back from the festival, we had a long, intense conversation with him. “Ken, you’re not musketeering!” Kourosh pleaded, dumbfounded. “All those years we struggled to get anyone to give a damn about what we were doing, and now they do and you don’t care. It used to be the three of us in the dark, trying to get the power going, rubbing nickels together to get through the day. Where the fuck are you now? You got a date with two liters of jet fuel a day? Why are you ruining this? Why can’t you enjoy it?” The situation had clearly escalated far, far beyond our ability to overcome it.

  Ken’s problems were bigger than we could ever understand or handle. Ultimately, we all agreed that it might be best for him to take a leave of absence and take all the time he needed to heal himself and try to get his life back on track. His job would be waiting for him whenever he decided to return. No matter how long it took. It was a very sad day. It was as if we were losing a limb, and no matter how big we had gotten and how many employees we had, Ken was irreplaceable. But we held on to hope because we knew Ken was a survivor of the bizarre, so anything was possible. After all, I remember him and his mother telling us the story of how, when Ken was a teenager, he survived a middle-of-the-night encounter with the legendary Lawrence Welk, who was driving through their neighborhood armed with a rifle and had decided to shoot up their house. They even showed us the bullet holes. I figured if he could survive something as random and farcical as that, he could survive anything.

  Sadly, I saw Ken infrequently over the next couple of years as he went in and out of several rehab facilities, but I stayed in close contact with his mom and kept close on tabs on him. The highs and lows of his addiction were beating the living hell out of him. Eventually, his body started to aggressively show the wear and tear two decades of alcohol abuse had inflicted. He would go on to suffer a few mini-strokes that left him slightly impaired and requiring a cane to walk but still filthy and whip smart. But inevitably his liver couldn’t take it anymore. Two years after he quit NGTV, his mother, Gertrude, called us and said he was in the hospital and wasn’t going to make it much longer. Kourosh and I rushed to his bedside. I almost passed out when I saw him. He was unrecognizable: bloated beyond recognition and yellow from jaundice.

  It was a terrifying sight, and I can only imagine that it must have been a horrifying ordeal for poor Ken. Kourosh and I stayed and visited him daily, and miraculously, somehow over the course of the following weeks, he started to get better and eventually got well enough to go home. He had been given one last chance for a do-over. The doctors warned him that his liver function was dangerously low and that any drinking would kill him. I remember thinking maybe this was the rock bottom he needed to hit to finally make a change. He had come so close to a painful and terrible death and I could tell that he was shaken by it, so there was hope, I thought.

  A couple of months later, we got the same call from his mom, and again, we rushed to the hospital to be met with the same scene as before. Only this time, Ken had slipped into a coma. His eyes were sealed shut, his mouth crusted with blood, and he had a million tubes going in and out all over his body. One by one all of his organs were shutting down. It was utterly devastating. I’ll never forget his mom’s shattered, expressionless face and vacant stare. She was broken. For days, we waited in silent vigil. I would sit by his bedside, rub his hand, and talk to him in the hope that he might hear my voice and wake up or at least know that I was with him. It was a futile gasp for courage to avoid choking on my fears, but it did little to stop my heart from bleeding out.

  Sadly, his condition continued to worsen, but for some reason, he refused to let go. Deep down inside, I just knew that even though his body was giving up, he was holding on … for us. He knew how much we needed him, how much I could not let him go. Whatever flaws he had, honor and integrity weren’t amongst them. My brave boy. My Kenny bear. One last stand for the three musketeers. In many ways, he was the best of us. He deserved better. And I simply couldn’t bear to watch him suffer any longer.

  I remember sitting next to his hospital bed, slowly reaching for his hand, and holding on to it for dear life. Desperately, I tried to find the strength to let go, as if the choice were mine to make. All the while, I could feel my heart purging its twisted wreckage through my rib cage and spilling all over my shattered soul. I squeezed his hand, took a deep breath, leaned over, and whispered in his ear, “If you’re holding on for us, just go. It’s okay.” As soon those words left my mouth, my eyes erupted in an uncontrollable flood of tears. Until you hurt, you just don’t know how deep it can go. I tried but couldn’t prevent them from falling on him and sliding down his cheeks as he lay there, peacefully. And then, for a brief moment, I saw his face catch the light and glisten with my grief like an angel. I told myself that maybe this was meant to be some sort of parting baptism to declare to whoever was listening that this boy was loved, that he mattered, that he made a difference, and that he would never be forgotten.

  Ken passed away shortly thereafter.

  He was thirty-nine years old. “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks” was all that remained for those of us that were left behind. Hamlet’s lament proved all too real. He was survived by his family, his loyal friends, his NGTV family, his best friends (Kourosh and me), and as a cofounder of No Good TV, a legacy that will last forever.

  Ken was my best friend. I loved him like a brother. I tried to help him. I tried to fix him. But there was nothing I could do. My heart has been held hostage since the day he left with the sweet poetry that was his gentle soul. I couldn’t save him, and I carry that with me every day.

  At his funeral service, Kourosh gave an incredibly emotional eulogy to a packed church filled with fri
ends Ken had known since high school, family, and a large collection of past and present employees of NGTV who had all come out to say farewell to a friend they admired. He ended his speech with a grand gesture that few will forget. Having asked everyone to stand, he recited the words from Admiral Kirk’s farewell speech to Captain Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. “In accordance with the traditions of Starfleet and of Article 184 Starfleet Regulations, we are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honored dead.” The church fell completely silent as Kourosh said good-bye to a fallen Musketeer. Ending with, “Of my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most … human.” Kourosh and Ken’s friendship of twenty years had started from their mutual love of Trek, and everyone there knew that. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  Later at his burial service, I searched for the strength to ease my trembling silhouette long enough for me to bare my soul and honor my friend with a walk through the beautiful wreckage of “Green Grass” by Tom Waits. But the finality of seeing Ken’s casket descend into the ground shattered what little hope of that I had. And though I felt the words “Don’t say good-bye to me” flow through my veins, they could not find form in the vacuum of my despair. No longer able to breathe, I handed my notes to Kourosh to share for me as I tried my best to keep my pounding heart from tearing a permanent hole in my chest.