Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (27 page)

My camera guy wasn’t sure if he should bother going to her place. Was the shoot off? Finally after a half hour, she got back to me and said it was all cool. I was shaking when I saw her. Now I was back to being the guy on eggshells. We shot the scene in three minutes, and then for the next half hour we had fun telling stories about degenerate comics we knew.

My next little problem was shooting Howie Mandel in just three minutes downtime during a break while he was doing his new series
Mobbed
. He’d be rushed over to sit in my car, and then would have to run back to his show. But I knew Mandel was an admitted germaphobe, so before the shoot I rushed to a car wash, and then had to send it through an additional time just to make sure there’d be no problem.

Mandel did a fun bit where he told a juicy story about seeing one of the
Deal or No Deal
women’s naked breasts, but my character is frustrated because the story was drowned out by a gardener using his leaf-blower a few feet away.

And Fred Willard was hysterical playing a clueless celebrity who is brought to our greenroom, which was a tent a few feet away with a nerdy lapdancer.

I managed to sell the show to a website, then had the additional headache of getting the celebrities later on to sign their releases for consent to air on the Internet. Bob Saget signed at first, but then his high-priced lawyer got him very nervous. And though Sarah Silverman couldn’t be nicer and more accessible, I was nervous about bothering her again, so I first donated money to her favorite charity for goodwill, e-mailed her the confirmation for the contribution, and then asked her.

I was so thrilled about the possibilities of the show, especially when a friend saw a rough cut of the segments and said they had the fun feel of
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
. I thought this was going to take off on the web, and then I’d have my own real TV show!

They aired, and many people seemed to like them and thought it was a great idea, but my illusion of these segments “blowing up” on the Internet didn’t exactly occur. But since the feedback was so positive, I wanted to hang onto that guard booth for when at some point I did more episodes. I looked into storage spaces, but because of the size and width of the booth, the cheapest I could find was about $170 a month on the outskirts of town. So I did what everyone does: I asked on my Facebook wall if anyone had a garage or backyard where I could store the booth as a favor.

“I love and believe in your
Gate Show
! I have a big garage I don’t use!” a peripheral friend generously offered. So Aaron, my director and builder of the booth, rented a truck and drove the booth to her garage. We slid it on its side, and then she said, “So, how much you gonna pay me?”

“Huh? I thought this was a favor, a belief in my artistic
endeavor.”

“You said it was gonna cost you at least $170, and I’m a single mom out of work, so what will you give me?”

We were stuck. I offered a price that was too low, so we agreed to $100 a month. Each month when the rent is due, I pay in cash and I meet her at a restaurant that’s attached to a video arcade so her kids come along. I end up paying for everyone’s meal, and some games for her boys to play. It usually ends up costing more than if I went to the $170 storage space in the first place.

I’ve made a list of other show ideas, additional celebrities I could pester for more
Gate Show
segments, and if that doesn’t work out, I’ve thought of celebrities I could do an actual sex tape with if all else fails.

36

LIFE IMITATING ART

I
had graduated from the annoying pharmacist on
The Nanny
to the annoying waiter on Fran’s Drescher’s new show,
Happily Divorced
. Fran’s character sits down for her first meal at a restaurant all by herself and I make the experience a dreadful one. I humiliate her by screaming out, “She’s all alone!” as the busboy empties her table of the extra silverware, and I continually remind her she’s all alone when she requests certain specials only available for two or more.

It was sort of ironic that I played this character because the truth is, almost all my meals out, I’m the guy who feels the anxiety of eating alone. You may ask:
How can that be? You’re a guy who’s been on TV a bunch. You really eat out alone a lot?
Or, by now, you’re probably not saying that.

I don’t work in an office where there are ladies in low-cut dresses begging to set me up with their friends, or guys who point at their computer screens, showing me the latest video of a cat with Tourette’s. I don’t work anywhere most of the time, so when I get hungry, I like to get out of my apartment. But I also have found it could be a harrowing experience eating by myself at the wrong establishment.

I wish I could be one of those people who can sit at a restaurant, alone, reading the paper while chatting up the waitress. “So, what’s new in your world, Doris?” But I have the social skills of a skittish cat. I know Doris works hard, but . . .

I usually like a place that doesn’t have waitress service. I like the freedom to be able to bolt at any moment, so that’s why I like paying for my food before I eat. Just last week, I needed to flee desperately. An attractive, annoying couple was sitting in the booth next to me. They did that thing where they didn’t sit across from each other, but sat side by side. I suppose they sat like that because they couldn’t stand the idea of not having the sides of their hips touching for thirty minutes. Then they started kissing. The only thing more sickening would’ve been if they took out a wad of cash and started counting and kissing that too.

At another table some idiot started talking very loudly on his cell phone while his baby cried; and he ignored the kid. I gave the kid the stink eye, knowing it would do no good. Only thing worse here would’ve been if the kid was crying while on a cell phone. Well, maybe not. All I wanted was my check, but of course the waiter was nowhere in sight.

Eating alone is not the worst way to dine. I’d much rather eat alone than eat out with my mother. When I visit her in Florida, I try to avoid TooJays, a Jewish deli in Boca, after we had an incident there. At first I was okay with her continually using her catchphrase (which I’ve heard my whole life), “It’s almost over.” She also kept putting her head down, covering her eyes because she couldn’t bear looking at the black busboy working there. “I can’t look. Black lives are so sad. This is all they have, or prison.” I was even patient when she pointed to others from her retirement community and informed me which ones had parts of their bowels cut out. She’d intersperse this with stories of those who’d had strokes and laid on their hot kitchen floor for days until someone found them. I simply nodded, but then, when I got up to use the bathroom, she yelled so everyone could hear, “Freddie, you need to see a doctor. You urinate so much! Why do you urinate so much?”

“Will you stop it?” I said, gritting my teeth.

I stormed to the bathroom, but still she called out,“It’s your fourth time urinating today, Freddie! Or are you defecating?”

I went to the bathroom and returned to find an obese, bearded man with food all over his shirt sitting with my mother.

“Freddie, this man is a doctor. Maybe you could talk to him.”

That’s when I lost it. I cursed and stormed out. A bit later, she met me outside.

“I don’t wanna talk to a doctor, I’m fine, goddamn it!” I screamed.

“You’re so fresh! You resent me so much. The man was being nice and you didn’t want to see him. You’ll be happy when I’m gone, Freddie!”

The lesson learned here was at least when you’re alone, no one pays attention to how much you go to the bathroom—well, if they do, at least usually they don’t say anything to you about it.

Many dates, at least most of mine, were also worse than eating alone. It’s hard to pick my most horrific date. I thought it was just last week, when I met this woman for what I thought was a casual brunch. It was one of those Facebook things. Our names came up; we knew each other peripherally from the past. We made Internet small talk and decided to meet up for a brunch at The Daily Milk on Beverly Boulevard. When I got there she started to cry—real tears—when she saw I hadn’t shaved. “You don’t take me seriously enough to shave for?” People started looking at us so I made an escape to the bathroom. Luckily, she left when she got a phone call for, what she flat-out told me, was a better offer.

But since that date ended rather quickly, I’ll refer back to a blind date I had a few months earlier as my worst blind date. I bumped into a friend at a supermarket checkout who asked if I was single, saying he had a great woman for me. I Googled her and was pleasantly surprised by the images I found. She showed up looking like her photos, very attractive, and with a nice, sweet smile. Not even four minutes into our lunch she told me she had a boyfriend.

“Then why’d you come on this blind date?” I asked.

“I looked you up on the IMDb, saw you had some okay credits, and figured it’d be good to have some showbiz contacts,” she said. “I could certainly use the help.”

Before I tried explaining that I didn’t think I could help her career, she whipped out a spec script for
Modern Family
and insisted she act it out for me. I tried to tell her to stop, but she ended up acting out the whole episode as I sat there with my head down. At the end, she asked what I thought.

“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with
Modern Family
.”

She rolled her eyes. “Then why’d you have me read it?”

37

MY AWESOME SHOWBIZ PERKS

O
ne of the perks of being a writer on
Seinfeld
was that I was forced to join the Writers Guild for $1,200. Around this time, I got a phone call from Gary, a guy I’d taken a Learning Annex class with a few years earlier

“You know, Writers Guild members are entitled to three months of free movies. And you can take a guest. Can we go see some movies?”

I was thrilled to have this movie buddy. Seeing a movie alone poses many of the same headaches as eating alone. Weekends and holiday nights are too depressing. Afternoon matinees are good and they’re less crowded and less expensive. But I find Monday and Tuesday nights are preferable when the movie warrants a full-price ticket.

I admit, sometimes I have hovered around the lobby at The Grove movie theater in my neighborhood, looking at my watch and pretending to be a normal person waiting for a friend to go see a movie with. It’s similar to how I feel when I sit and people-watch next door at The Farmers Market; if I sit on a bench staring into space, I’m a lunatic, but if I have a latte in my hand, I’m a regular person.

So when I feel really cooped up and isolated, sometimes I will just go to the movie theater lobby and hang out for a bit, posing as if I’m waiting for that friend, but really I’m waiting to see if I bump into anyone I know. Don’t judge me (probably way too late for that), but the hope is that someone I know will be on their way to see a movie and say, “Hey, come see it with us!” This has never happened. I’ve only run into annoying people coming out of films who want to tell me everything that just happened in the film; or once, an annoying guy cornered me, telling me racist jokes with garlic breath and saying, “What’s with you comedians, you never laugh!”

I’m actually okay sitting alone in the theater—I don’t particularly need someone I know sitting next to me and annoying me because they talk too much, or asking questions about something that can only be known by the writer or a psychic, or trying to show how smart they are by pointing to something obvious on the screen. “That’s New York City!” But I don’t like the part when it’s all over and I have no one to talk to about what I just saw. That’s kinda the beauty of any movie—it could be the worst piece of garbage ever, but it’s worth every cent when you and a buddy can bash apart every unrealistic or corny moment in it. Maybe that’s why after a seeing a film, or even a TV show by myself, I like to check out the comments on the IMDB board. It sort of makes me feel like I’m part of a conversation.

I once saw
Dead Man Walking
on a Monday night. There might have been just a dozen people in the whole theater. As I walked out by myself, I lagged behind a group of two couples who were intently discussing the film. I overheard that they were getting a late-night snack at IHOP, and I seriously considered going and trying to get a table by them so I could continue eavesdropping and keep the experience of the film going just a little bit longer. (Elevators are good for this after the movie—you can hear viewers talking about it. But you’d have to do several trips up and down to keep the experience going, and that’s even too pathetic for me.)

I wouldn’t have known about these free movies with my union card if Gary hadn’t alerted me to it, so I figured I’d take him with me. Not only did I have someone to see almost every movie with, but as I wished, our movie viewing usually continued at some restaurant afterward, where we’d discuss the film we had just seen. Gary had a lot of time off like I did. He had sold some family car-detailing business handed down to him while trying to find his way in show business. Except for a few classes, his ability to describe himself as “in showbiz” was akin to me thinking I was a ladies’ man. I soon discovered it was very important to Gary to try to seem important, so anywhere we’d go, if he bumped into someone he knew he’d always tell them he was taking lots of meetings. What that meant was that he had business cards made up that said “Producer” on them.

He’d come by to pick me up in his big Jeep. At first I was embarrassed getting into this big, ridiculous, unnecessarily flashy car, but a few moments into our trip to the theater, I’d get over it and feel good that I had a place to go and someone to go there with. And it was free!

I probably went to more movies in that three-month span than in my whole life. And if we got a bite before or after at one of those trendy places with all the couples, it didn’t bother me. On a few occasions, Gary even initiated small talk with some women at another table. Nothing came from our little chitchats, but I felt great that I was in the game. I was out and not hiding.