Read Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child Online

Authors: Bert Kreischer

Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Essays, #Biography & Autobiography, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child (5 page)

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
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“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he announced like a 1950s father coming home from work.

He started the grill and rolled back into the living room, beer in hand.

“Too bad you guys don’t have any beers here to celebrate finals with, and don’t even try askin’, ’cause I ain’t giving.” Thinking nothing of it, Hartley and I paid little mind until we heard him open his first beer and take his first sip.

“Hmmm, this is a little flat.”

He put the top on and shook it a bit, then reopened it. Still nothing.

“I’ll drink this one last. Don’t you hate it when you get a flat beer?” He walked back out of the kitchen with a brand-new Mickey’s in hand. As he popped the top, Hartley looked at me and smiled. I remembered exactly what he was smiling about. Cheese took a sip of the new beer and looked up at us with the same confused expression. “This one tastes like shit, too.”

“Do you think they’re stale maybe?” Hartley said.

“They taste like water.”

“Tap water?”

“I can kinda taste the beer but not really.”

“Open another one.”

Cheese did and heard nothing. He opened another and another until they were all opened.

“They must have been tampered with.”

“Probably that. You should take them back and tell them you got screwed.”

Cheese’s eyes widened as he weighed the idea in his head.

“Or someone might have drunk them all last weekend and refilled them with water to teach you a lesson about putting beers in the fridge with a bullshit note.”

Cheese’s face began to build with impotent rage, knowing full well that all he could offer was an earful, and an earful wasn’t going to change anything.

The last words he said to Hartley that semester were when we were packing to move out of our pigsty of a town house. Being messes of young men, all our shit was in huge piles all over the house, which we would simply grab and throw into boxes. Cheese walked into my room, where Hartley and I were talking about our game plan for packing, and he coyly smiled.

“Listen, I didn’t want to say anything earlier, but my snake is missing. I looked in the cage, and I guess he got out today. While you’re packing, keep an eye out for him.”

Cheese shut the door and I saw that same pregnant silence in Hartley’s face. He was now faced with the prospect of a resting python in every armful of laundry or each time he reached his hand into a dark space. I’ve never moved an apartment with more caution in my life, and poor Hartley left the majority of his stuff there for the next tenants. Suffice it to say, Cheese had the last word.

*   *   *

It’s been twenty years now, and not too long ago I hung out with just about all of these guys. I was in Denver, and Cheese, Pete, and Siminson came to my greenroom before a show, cracking up about old stories and how much we used to fuck with each other.

Someone referred to Cheese as “Cheese” one too many times. “It’s Chris, guys,” he said. “I’m forty years old and I don’t want to be called Cheese anymore.” It was a moment of honesty, a moment of assertion for a guy we had tormented for half our lives. We left that night and promised to hang out the next time I was in Denver. I went back to my hotel to pack for an early flight to L.A.

The next morning, while waiting to go through airport security, I heard a familiar voice.

“Yo Bert!”

I turned and saw Siminson, dressed like a businessman and a father on his way to work, a grown-up in a collared shirt and khakis, rolling a carry-on bag.

“I was wondering if I was going to see you at the airport today,” he said.

We talked for a bit about how great it was to hang out and catch up, all these years later, then said good-bye again and made our way to our respective terminals. I passed through security and waited for the train to my gate. The train arrived, and in typical early-Monday-morning-traveler fashion, we all filed silently on like it was 1980 in Communist Russia. The doors closed, and as the train pulled away from the terminal, I heard a voice break the silence.

“Holy shit! It’s Bert the Conqueror!” a voice said, referring to my TV show.

I looked over to find the voice and found it was Siminson at the far end of the train, smiling ear to ear.

“Bert the Freakin’ Conqueror on my train! You
are
Bert the Conqueror, right?”

Everyone was looking now, trying to figure out who he was talking to.

“Yup,” I reluctantly answered.

“You’re on the History Channel, right?”

“No, Travel Channel.”

“Yeah, that’s it. You ride all those roller coasters and scream like a little girl.”

“And other stuff.”

“But mostly roller coasters,” he said for all to hear. “You mostly ride roller coasters.”

“Yeah.”

Siminson started grabbing people around him.

“Does anyone watch that show?”

He found only blank stares.

“No one watches that show? There is no way I’m the
only
person who has
ever
seen that show? This must be its first season, right?”

“Second,” I again reluctantly offered, knowing full well he knew it was my second season.

“Second season? Wow, and
no one
on this train recognizes this guy at all?”

I waited, hoping someone would save me from the friendly game of humiliation, but as I looked around I could see there was no one to come to my rescue.

The other passengers were kind of enjoying trying to figure out who I was. One guy joined in. “I watch that network all the time, and I never seen this guy in my life.”

“You ride roller coasters on TV?” another passenger asked. “Are you, like, a roller-coaster designer or something?”

“No, he’s scared of them,” Siminson said. “And he screams like a girl the whole time.”

Now everyone was looking at me.

Siminson kept it up for the remainder of the ride. The train stopped at the first stop, thankfully mine. As I exited, Siminson rallied the train for a final good-bye.

“Have a safe flight, Bert the Conqueror!”

“You, too, big guy,” I said. “Keep watching my show.”

The doors closed behind me and I exhaled as I heard one last, “Bert the freakin’ Conqueror.”

As I often do in airports, I went straight to the nearest bar. I began texting all of our mutual friends to tell them how I had just been expertly punked by Siminson—when a stranger approached me from behind.

“Man, that guy must love your show,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I actually know him.”

“Seriously? Oh, that’s too funny. I gotta say something to him next time I see him. I think my kids go to the same school as his kids. They just moved here.”

“Really,” I said.

“Yeah, small world. How do you know him?”

“We used to date.”

“Oh.”

The stranger chose not to sit down and walked away. I’ll never know if my message ever made it back to Siminson. I hope it hasn’t and is just being passed around parent to parent behind his back. Maybe it’s not, but it was worth a try.

 

3.

OOPS: A Love Story

 

The first time I ever felt up a girl was in seventh-grade study hall, in front of three other classmates, two of whom were girls. It was Truth or Dare, and I was dared to feel up Gwen Cohen. She giggled, I giggled, and the others looked at me as if I were a god holding a golden tit. I walked out of that classroom a man. A few minutes later I realized that my sexual conquest wasn’t so much a conquest as it was a forfeiture of land. Gwen had been dared to let me feel her up and I had been dared to do it. I was no god, more a false prophet. Still, it was amazing fodder for middle-school gossip. By the end of the school day, everyone, including my teachers, knew what had happened. I watched my newfound manhood turn into boyhood humiliation as they told my mom in the parking lot while I waited in the car. Needless to say that was the longest car ride home ever.

A year later I was on a trip to Disney World, on the haunted-house ride, with a new girl. I’d heard boys brag about fingering girls plenty of times but had never really heard the details, how they went about it, the logistics. And so when I got down to business on that ride, I felt like a World War II soldier dropped on Omaha Beach without ever having seen either combat training … or a beach. I spent the majority of the time surveying the perimeter, taking in just how beautiful the beachfront property was, looking for a path to the beach rather than storming said beach. I found the path a lot lower than I expected it to be. When it was time to act, I invaded that beach—and stayed. I remained there, not moving at all, for the rest of the ride, staring at her awkwardly as if I were taking her temperature. That night I told no one what had happened, having learned my lesson. I was also overly concerned that I had somehow acquired testicular cancer throughout the night, because my testicles throbbed in pain. That was my first case of blue balls.

After sinking my hands in the sand, I realized it was time to go surfing. I graduated eighth grade and moved on to an all-boys Catholic high school, where losing your virginity was as mandatory as avoiding sexual contact with the priests. Sean Hooker and Ty Rodriguez had already had sex, and they held court at our lunchroom tables, explaining the fundamentals. First and foremost, you needed protection—because apparently AIDS was running rampant throughout the ninth grade. Second, you needed to find a girl from a public school. Catholic-school girls were prudes, and their parents cared about them way too much for them to ever give up their virginity to us.

So, like a nineteen-year-old with a pound of cheap weed to sell, the public schools were where I set my sights. I very quickly started dating a girl named Alison Williams, who my friends had known from their middle-school years. She was pretty in a duchess kind of way, not that I knew that at the time. What I knew at the time was she had tits and that is all that mattered. We dated for what seemed like a lifetime (roughly two months), and though I tried to find a crack in her morals, they remained more or less intact. I tried my hardest to break her like a settler tries to break a wild stallion. But the call of the wild was too strong with this one, so I left her on her mountaintop. My attempts to get her to succumb to sex were mostly made over the phone. Let’s not forget I was in ninth grade. My best work involved surreptiously asking her about virginity, her virginity, how she felt about her virginity, did she know anyone who had lost theirs, and how they felt about it. She told me her best friend Jenny Powers had lost hers already and it had been a good experience, so like a gentleman, I dumped Alison and started dating her best friend, Jenny Powers—not the coolest move, I realize now. But at fifteen, a man has to do what a man has to do.

Jenny Powers, it was rumored, had had sex with upwards of two people. The most recent guy was dead set on keeping her. But I had broken up with Alison for Jenny, and Jenny broke up with the guy that loved her, and she and I started dating. I’m not quite sure what the shelf life of a ninth grader’s virginity is supposed to be, once he’s dating a girl, but at the time I ballparked it at about a week.

Our first night together was at a party at the aptly named Jason Stoner’s house. It was a public school party and though I was a Catholic-school boy, my friends had gone to school with these kids, so I figured it would be cool for me to crash. Then she directed my attention to her ex-boyfriend, Chris, who charged me like I had just tied his nuts. Like a rodeo clown and a bull, I spent the next hour dodging errant swings and the drunken stumbling of a heartbroken ninth grader—a boy who had been given the body of a fighter but not the coordination or heart. Not wanting to start a fight, especially in the company of a bunch of dudes who knew him and not me, Jenny and I made a hasty retreat and ended up at an abandoned house two doors down. It should be noted that by now it was mid-December, and although mid-December in Florida is not that cold, to Floridians it’s icy. I held her hand and romantically walked her into the vacant garage. I laid her down on the cement, moving some boards and nails, dusting away all the wood shavings so as to let her have a clean place to lie. There I began my magic. Foreplay at that time consisted of fifteen seconds of kissing, feeling up, and feeling down, all in the name of trying to get my dick out as quickly as possible. All of which I did. Only I had no protection. All our condoms were in the possession of a friend and fellow Catholic-school boy, Cayman, the guy who got me into the party. He was, at that moment, busy trying to figure out how Jason had earned his surname.

I quickly weighed my options. Unprotected sex wasn’t an option (because of the AIDS outbreak in the ninth grade), so we could play with each other’s bodies and not have sex. Or I could risk my own safety, sneak back into the party, and find Cayman and get a condom from him.

Needless to say, I chose the latter. Jenny accompanied me as I walked back to the party, assuring me that Chris had calmed down by now. When I arrived, I saw Chris again, who decided to prove her wrong and come after me one last time. By now he had sobered up somewhat, despite my friend Cayman’s best attempts at keeping him fucked up. This time his punches were coming too close for my comfort. It being late and being fourteen, the surrounding crowd was in the mood for a fight, so my fellow Catholic-school boys and I retreated together, my boyhood, sadly, still intact.

*   *   *

The remainder of my freshman and sophomore years were spent trying to find girls, in particular, girls who had been rumored to have had sex with boys. There was Michelle, Jenny, Jennifer, Jen, another Jennifer, and yet another Jen. Come junior year I had been driving for over twelve months and I felt like my time was well overdue. I had to either lose my virginity or accept the fact that I might be gay. That’s when I met and fell in love with a girl I will simply call The Saint.

The Saint was Italian, and had had sex with two guys, which in my mind meant I was a shoo-in. I tactfully consulted my best friend, Jeff, and he confirmed the information. He played on the varsity football team, and being the gentlemen they were, they said she was a sure thing. We went on a couple of dates, and by date four, I was ready to go. So Jeff and I concocted a plan. We would take our girlfriends to Jeff’s girlfriend’s dad’s apartment. Her dad, she had told Jeff, was in the midst of a midlife crisis. I imagined Jeff’s girlfriend’s father in Boca Grande: fishing with a much younger woman with teased blond hair who smoked Marlboro Menthol 100s, having margaritas, pretending to like The B-52’s, talking about how his next car would be a Mazda RX-7.

BOOK: Life of the Party: Stories of a Perpetual Man-Child
9.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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