“He’s a come-in-your-face kind of guy!” his friend yells, high-fiving him.
“Ow,” Andy says. “My broken finger. I’m a come-in-your-face kind of guy. Yeah.”
“So, when you were licking everyone’s face . . .” I say.
“I was doing it because I was desperately trying to tie the show together like a fisherman with tuna,” he says. “And you’re a little piece of fresh tuna . . . But thanks for asking. Do you want me to lick your face now? Do you want me to lick your cunt?”
I take this all in, looking for the Big Idea.
“Whose face did you like licking the most?” I ask.
“Yours,” Andy says, lunging toward me and licking my face. “Yours.”
At this point, I am heading toward the door to get out of there.
“I love her, I don’t want her to leave, don’t leave,” he says to his friends. And then to me, “Don’t be a fucking pussy, don’t puss out.”
I turn the voice recorder off, and as I am walking out, Andy leans in to try to kiss me one last time. I ward him off, but not before he bites me on the right hand.
The door shuts. I look at the teeth marks on my hand. No skin broken. That’s good, I guess. I stand there, stunned.
What the fuck just happened?
I walk, dazed, past the security guard and into the after-party, where I first run into Jeffrey Ross.
“Andy Dick just bit me,” I say.
“Better get tested,” he says. He isn’t smiling. He knows I’m not joking.
I bum a Marlboro Light, type up my notes, and email Paula Froelich at Page Six the details. Short, straight, to the point.
The next day, it’s the lead item in the gossip section—“Comic’s Worst Gross-Out Ever”—and is picked up by outlets around the world. Childhood friends I haven’t talked to in twenty years are calling.
“Turned out great,” Richard Johnson emails me. “Thanks.”
* * *
I WATCH AS savvy industry people piggyback on the gossip item (not quite a feeding frenzy, but a feeding snack, to be sure). The entire experience gives me a chance to see firsthand how the tentacled gossip industry operates. Ryan McCormick, a publicist who is running New York’s Funniest Reporter contest, places an item in Page Six that Andy Dick is banned from the festival unless he wears protective headgear. Howard Stern asks for the audio, and when I turn it over, they talk about it for days on air, with Artie Lange observing it sounds like a “pre-rape tape.” When I walk into the Post after returning from the trip, executive editor Steve Cuozzo looks at me with wry amusement. “You’re famous,” he says.
I’m also asked to do shows I’ve never done before, including one with Nick Kroll and Julie Klausner at Mo Pitkin’s. I decide I’ll do a reenactment, and I get Nick and Julie to act out the parts. Nick looks at me after it’s over, and, I think comparing it to my very mediocre stand-up, says, “That was funny.”
Sure. When you have Andy Dick writing your material, no problem.
Which is where Dick is right to criticize me as he’s done in numerous interviews about the incident. I do have a conflict of interest as a performer myself. In fact, I thought he was hilarious even after assaulting me. I suppose it’s lucky for him I did. Any other reporter would have filed charges after being groped and bitten. I just lambasted him onstage.
The way Andy dealt with the incident? Rehab and carrying around a notebook with an unsent letter to me in which he referred to me as a “dried-up cunt.” I learn all this from reading the Washington Post article profiling Dick and listening to his livid appearance berating me on Howard Stern.
After performing at the sold-out Mo Pitkin’s show with Kroll and Klausner, which was hosted by Michelle Collins (now of The View fame), I’m approached by a small bald man who is in the audience. It is Moby. Turns out, he has stories of his own about touring with Andy. There are many, but the most notable portions:
1. Andy once took a dare to defecate on a cake, then actually followed through.
2. At one point, Andy made himself comfortable on Moby’s bed, where he proceeded to have sex with a man, who Moby said was straight but just liked being with celebrities.
3. During the sex, Moby caught a glimpse of Andy’s penis, which he described as being the size of his forearm.
4. Andy once replaced the champagne in a bottle with his own urine and served it to several unsuspecting guests.
Moby and I spend the rest of the night chatting at the bar, and I notice how celebrities are instant status boosters. A younger comic who has treated me like shit every other time I talked to him suddenly acts like I am his new best friend. Sipping my Smirnoff and soda, I tell Moby one of my dumb stand-up jokes: “I’m not really a starfucker. I’m more of a star-spooner.”
He politely laughs. We exchange numbers, and I proceed to send the following ingenious text messages to him as the night progresses, and I get increasingly hammered.
12:28 a.m.
All right, well very nice to meet you sir.
12:34 a.m.
Um that’s me call me if u want
12:36 a.m.
Ok tried ur # but no cigar am headed home almost
1:18 a.m.
Am about 2 pass out near the slope?
1:20 a.m.
Gotta confess it would be fun to meet up but almost nearing my end of the night
1:24 a.m.
Well its 124 and I’m abiut to sign off . . . fun 2 meet u!
1:30 a.m.
Tempted 2 call u 1 more time
1:46 a.m.
&Allright just woke up roommates r u in brooklyn even?
1:50 a.m.
Wacky good night, Moby. Good luck w ur evening’s conquests
The next morning I wake up to the horrors of my cell phone. But—to my surprise, there is a single late-night email from him. “Hi from moby is this you? Moby”
“ha yep . . . reading through my novella of text messages I RULE,” I write.
“yes. you do rule,” he writes. “i concur. g’night, moby”
He sends me funny non sequitur emails from time to time, like, “do you know about the 2 different types of nyc fire-escape? and why nyc has water towers? i can be pedantic, if you like, and tell you about them. i’m going to go sit on my roof and read and drink tea.”
Since I spent all of 2004 in a shitty marriage and a shitty job, blasting Moby’s “South Side” in my office alone late at night, it’s a strange feeling. I tell Mackenzie this in the Post bathroom one day and another reporter overhears and interjects super dismissively, “Congratulations, you’ve been hit on by Moby. You’re officially a New Yorker now.”
“Does that mean you have?” I ask.
Her face turns crimson. I guess she is not a New Yorker yet.
“I mean,” the reporter says, “if you want to fuck him, fuck him.”
I don’t, really, but I do want to go on an actual date with him, which we do soon enough.
We meet at the vegan hot spot Candle 79 on the Upper East Side one night, and the conversation is nonstop. Some people are like scorpions, he says. You know they are going to sting you, but you befriend them anyway. He says fame is like a drug, and that he was really addicted to it at first. He says one of the main headaches of being rich and famous is getting hit with petty lawsuits—like for around $9,000—where the litigants know it’s easier just to pay out than fight it.
I tell him I’m considering writing a book about douchebags.
We walk across a misty, dreamy Central Park to the $4.5 million prewar penthouse he is renovating in the twin-towered El Dorado building near West Ninetieth Street. To get to the “sky castle,” as he calls it, we have to take an elevator up to the twenty-ninth floor, then walk up two flights of iron stairs guided only by the light of his phone. Caring for a dream home is like caring for a child, he tells me.
When we reach the roof, staring down at the swirl of traffic lights and cars below, Moby leans into me and says, “You have a very patrician neck.”
Then he sniffs it. For a while. Gets a real good whiff. This is new. Moby pulls back and looks pleased with himself. He must know no one has ever done this before.
“In your book about douchebags,” he says, “are you going to say some guy sniffed your neck?”
I laugh.
“No,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“You have beautiful hair,” he says. Then he smiles and says, “God took my hair.”
Pointing to the softness of his sky-blue cashmere sweater, Moby says he can warm me up and rubs my arms. I’m super nervous and try to think of something to say to fill the silence.
“You could never feel sad up here,” I say.
“No, not sad,” Moby agrees. “Maybe forlorn.”
On the cab ride to take me home, he directs the driver which streets to take (“At the right time of night, this one is like butter”), and tells me to buckle my seat belt. He says how strange it is no one does that in New York. The closest we get to being physical—outside of the sniffing—is a light kiss at the end of our night.
When I reach the lesbians’ brownstone in Park Slope, I race upstairs to Lola and Juanita, who are awaiting details. I tell them everything.
“Congratulations,” Juanita says. “You just had your first lesbian experience with Moby.”
Other hangouts with Moby are decidedly non-dates. He invites me to a fund-raiser he is doing with the Roots at Crobar, and I run into Michelle Collins, who invites me up into the VIP section with Julia Stiles and Drea de Matteo. When Moby finally comes upstairs, I say, by way of seduction, “I hear you hit on all young writers.”
“I like smart people,” he says.
When he emails me with pictures of screaming fans at his concerts, I tell him this is like the celebrity version of a dick pic. “What’s a dick pic?” he asks.
Another night, he joins me as a plus-one to an event at Dangerfield’s comedy club on the Upper East Side, where Jerry Seinfeld and friends are feting a new documentary about Rodney. We drink Manhattans at the bar, talking about the awesomeness of the old-school vibe of the club, but when I say I am going to get some quotes for Page Six, he takes off. Now on a singular dateless mission, I walk up to Joy Behar and explain who I am.
“I know who you are,” she says with a half smile, and I figure she must be referring to the Star Jones piece. Behar continues to eye me suspiciously, but Susie Essman jumps right in with an anecdote, telling me that Rodney Dangerfield was the only comic who told her to make her act even dirtier.
“Rodney called me up one day out of nowhere,” Susie says. “ ‘You got to be the female Andrew Dice Clay, that’s the way to make you a big star.’ ”
Susie turns to Joy and says, “He was supportive of women comics.”
“Yes, he was,” Joy says. “He also wanted to fuck all of us.”
When Moby says he wants to see me at the “reporter battle,” as he calls the New York’s Funniest Reporter contest I get asked to compete in, I give him the details, but the night of he doesn’t show.
But I don’t care, because I’m more focused on the stand-up itself. Thanks to Ryan the publicist’s girlfriend, Sharon Simon, who mentored me before the show, I now have a secret weapon: information about how to not completely suck at stand-up.
Simon, a very funny stand-up comic with years of experience, listened to me patiently as I complained. “It’s like, I do the same jokes, and sometimes I’m terrible and other times I do really well, but it’s the same material.”
“Okay,” she advised. “That’s actually pretty easy to fix. Tell me, when do you do well?”
“When I’m in the moment, when I’m just talking and being me.”
“There you go,” Sharon said. “All you have to do to put yourself in the moment is immediately comment on something that’s happening at the start of your set, and everything will come out more naturally after that.”
It was like the lesson on writing that Steve gave me. One moment, one thing determines how the rest flows. Find something that anchors you, that is naturally your voice, and the rest of what you say will follow.
The night of the show I follow the delightful Robert George, a wonderful op-ed writer whom I work with at the Post. He has just done his set, in which he talks a lot about being both an African American and a conservative.
When I am called up onstage, I remember Sharon’s words, and I say, without hesitation or overthinking, the first funny thing that comes to mind.
“I don’t mean to sound bitter,” I say, as I pull the mic off the stand, “but all these other reporters are stealing my ‘what it’s like to be black’ material.”
Huge laugh. And I am off, with the rest of my jokes flowing with the same ease of rhythm as the first. At the end of the night, the judges deliberate and then come back with their announcement: I won!
Mackenzie and Steve are both there to cheer me on, and it is such a high. But then . . . I get some whiskey in me. Afterward, walking through a drizzling rain, I go to a sleek new comedy club in the Meatpacking District called Comix and drink so much Jameson, I have trouble standing up. To my left is Eugene Mirman. To my right is Todd Barry. I have no idea what I say to them, but I’m sure it’s a disaster. Tig Notaro is extra nice and maybe even a little concerned. Around 2 a.m., some cheesy grandstanding guy comes up to me, swoops in, and kisses me—and I go along, then stagger out. Not too long after, I end up making out with a second guy, with a shitty knockoff Morrissey hairdo. When we stop kissing, I start to cry and tell him about my promise not to have sex because of God and the last terrible one-night-stand tampon-fucking incident.
He writes me the next day.
Subject line: Nothing better . . .
. . . than making out with NY’s Funniest Reporter nestled on a centuries-old couch in a deserted bar in the West Village at 3:10 a.m. in the morning. Did I forget to mention that afterward, she happened to cry a river and confess her sexual frustrations? You look so lovely rain-soaked and uttering such passionate murmurs in my ears . . . Don’t be a stranger and surprise . . . surprise . . . A guy in this town actually followed up on his intentions. Call me.
Reading it, I feel like such an asshole. I hate hooking up with guys when I am blind drunk. It’s so completely depressing and the opposite of what I want out of life. And as much as I want to make a random emo dude my savior, his email completely turns me off. Or maybe it’s just me that turns me off. Whatever it is, I don’t want anything to do with it.
* * *
THE MORE I drink, the more I think about my earliest experiences with alcohol.
The first time I tried to get some, I was thirteen years old, and I walked with purpose into the dingy liquor store up the street next to the 7-Eleven on El Cajon Boulevard.
I plucked out a pack of Seagram’s strawberry wine coolers from the fridge, carried it to the counter, and hoped that it would work like how cigarettes do. If you’re tall and confident, you’re good to go.
“How old are you?” the clerk asked me.
“Um,” I said, figuring this was a test where you had to give the right coded lie. “I’m fifteen?”
“Come back in six years,” he said.
“I’m twenty-one?” I tried again.
“Come back in six years,” he said.
But the answer to finding alcohol came soon enough. One day when I was babysitting the kids who lived up the street whose parents had all the dirty channels and kept expecting me to get their weird Twin Peaks references, I executed what seemed like a flawless plan. I brought tiny empty shampoo bottles with me; then I pulled down from their liquor cabinet the bottles of Kahlúa and brandy. I poured their contents into the barely rinsed out containers of Pert Plus and watched as they bubbled over.
I kept my contraband inside a pink-and-silver starry music box that my mom had ordered me from one of those special mom catalogues. Of course, like every other kid on the planet, instead of putting nice things in there, like barrettes and shit, I put in cigarettes
and alcohol.
Later, in my parents’ guesthouse, I pulled out my spoils to show my two best friends, Karen and Maureen. We gulped down the bubbly concoction: part liquor, part anti-dandruff hair care solution.
“It . . . tastes . . . really bad, Mandy,” Karen said.
“Like soap,” Maureen said.
“But do you feel it?” I asked.
Because I did. A rush of confidence. A warmness in my chest. Pink cheeks and excitement. For the first time in my life, I felt like I wasn’t the bad person I thought I was. I had finally found the answer to all my problems. All I had to do was get more.
* * *
AS AN ADULT, I can have all the alcohol I want, anytime I want it. Which, when you have no boundaries, is a dangerous combination.
Of course, sometimes it comes in handy. Like on satellite radio.
One of the more memorable moments in all the Andy Dick fallout comes when fellow Post reporter Reed Tucker asks me to do a guest spot on his radio show with Lazlow Jones, the tech genius who’s the voice of Chatterbox FM in Grand Theft Auto.
It’s an aggressive shock-radio environment (I’ve listened to enough Sirius and XM ahead of time so I won’t flinch if I’m called a “hole”). And when Lazlow asks me about Andy Dick right down to the specifics of what female scent I might have emitted, I enjoy the opportunity to be unfazed and play ball.
“My website is actually myvaginasmellslikerosepetals.com,” I riff, and it gets a nice laugh from the room.
I find out afterward that Jim Norton listened and dug my appearance. We begin an email and text friendship, including me asking him for direction in some of the sex-and-dating articles I’m writing. (Jim: “I give pervy advice.” Me: “What? No, I can’t imagine.” Jim: “I know it’s shocking.” Me: “Shocking, disappointing . . . so many emotions.”)
Norton is headlining a show for the upcoming New York Comedy Festival, which I’m previewing in the Post. During the festival, I see as many shows as I can, and when I go backstage at Town Hall to ask Howie Mandel a question, a gorgeous raven-haired woman follows me out.