Get Off My Lawn Podcast #15 | I've met a lot of celebrities over the years
I’ve met tons of celebrities, not because I’m fabulous, but because that’s working in media for a quarter century. Like being a hairdresser or doing makeup. You get to know some. This episode grazes stories about Kimberly Guilfoyle, Jennifer Aniston, Jimmy Kimmel, Steve Coogan, Tommy Lee, and Curtis Mayfield. The takeaway is celebrities aren’t special and being famous sucks.
As I said in my book, Death of Cool, I know them the way a hairdresser knows celebrities.
We're in the industry.
I was in media.
My job was to sort of write about them.
Like TMZ.
So I would come across them.
And also, when you run a magazine, I think people in the arts, they want to be around you because they want to be documented.
One of the reasons Warhol is such a legend is we have so much footage of him.
We have so many pictures and quotes and documentation.
So that makes this canon more relevant.
I mean, if it didn't get documented, it doesn't happen.
And I noticed, too, a lot of people will document scenes who weren't there.
Some chick who wrote a book about the early aughts, and she clearly... Lizzie Grubman?
Was that her name?
No.
She wrote a book about strokes in the early 2000s, and I was in New York at that time.
I don't really remember her around.
When you read this documentation of this scene and these celebrities and this event, the odds are you're not hearing it from someone who was there.
In fact, the odds are the people who were there are dead.
If you want to know about the early aughts in New York City, talk to Dash Snow.
But you can't unless you have a séance.
So, this is just a Bubblegum episode where I'll just go over some stories of hanging out with famous people.
It's stupid.
It's not political.
It's not relevant.
But it's funny, and it's a fun thing to listen to.
So I'll start with one of my favorites, and those of you who have been listening to my show for a long time will have already heard all these stories.
So feel free to peace out at any given moment.
But I'll start with Kimberly Guilfoyle.
This is one of my favorite stories, and it's actually why I decided to do this episode on celebrity encounters, because I was walking down the street yesterday and I just started laughing remembering this story.
And there's few things that can do that.
There's very few things where you just look at it and you chuckle.
There's a reparations movement in Florida called the Uhuru Solidarity Movement.
That always makes the corners of my mouth turn up.
And when I see pictures of them on Instagram, it makes me smile.
That's always funny.
This is similar to that.
So, Kimberly Guilfoyle is a Fox News host.
I think she might be one of the most attractive women in the world.
Obviously there's prettier young girls, like there's a model I follow on Instagram called Gabriette, which might technically be the most beautiful woman in the world.
She's a French model, black hair.
But she doesn't have the culture.
She doesn't have the context.
And there's something about women who have kids.
It shows their parts work.
I find them more attractive.
So, amongst my scene, the new right and the old right, the right wing I guess I should call us, we all see Kimberly Guilfoyle as our Britney Spears.
I mean, she's a goddess.
I think one guy was saying, she's the kind of hot where you would murder your family on Christmas Eve just to go out to dinner with her.
I call her Scott Peterson Hot, because you would kill your wife for her.
But I might have to abandon that trope, that colloquialism, because someone pointed out to me, the woman that Scott Peterson was having an affair with is like a six.
So it implies the woman is a six.
I wasn't thinking of her when I came up with Scott Peterson Hot.
She makes you want to decapitate your wife and put her in Tupperware.
That's how hot she is.
By the way, Scott, what were you thinking?
First of all, there's a thing called divorce.
Secondly, you're married to one of the cutest, bubbliest, happiest.
She's got that perfect little cute Disney face.
I don't like handsome.
I don't like Michelle Pfeiffer.
I'm not looking for a cow catcher chin.
Although Kimberly Guilfoyle does have that, but she also has the cute thing.
We like, us 70s kids, we grew up with Barbie Benton, which was Hugh Hefner's girlfriend at Playboy.
We like little button noses.
We like them to look like Bambi.
We go for cute over beautiful every time and that's what Lacey Peterson had in spades That'll be a good thing if you're a slave slave dealer your motto for your slave company is we have spades in spades Sorry racist joke Yeah, he killed her on Christmas Eve while she was pregnant with his child I have a theory about Scott Peterson.
I think he's down syndrome level dumb.
He's a handsome guy, so he did good in sales, but there's certain levels of sales where all you have to do is show up and say, hi, we sell manure, okay, let's go out for lunch.
I think he may have been retarded, and he just went, me like girl, girl not like me.
Me have wife, make wife go away.
He gets love letters in prison, by the way.
Anyway, so Kimberly Guilfoyle has got Peterson hot, and I think she's dating Scaramucci now.
My Nights at Columbus meetings, there's some guys there who have seen them, you know, blue-collar dudes who are writing security and stuff, see them apartment shopping.
They're looking for an apartment overlooking Times Square.
That's already out of the bag, right?
Yeah.
What is he, five feet tall?
Lucky bastard, those tits are right in his face!
Holy talil.
If I was having sex with Kimberly Guilfoyle, I would last nanoseconds.
I would probably, I'd probably blow it walking up the stairs and then she'd get there in the bedroom and say, alright, should we get started?
Yeah.
How about in about 10-15 minutes?
I've got some cleaning up to do.
Every time I see Gavin, what's his name, the former mayor of San Francisco, I just think, way to go, dummy.
She was married to the mayor of San Francisco.
It must be the father of her kid.
And he blew it.
How did you blow it?
Anyway, this is a lot of tangents to get to this story.
So Kimberly Guilfoyle, in my community, which is everyone right at center, is a goddess.
I mean, she's just not the butt of a million jokes, but we are the butt of a million jokes about her, all the things we would do to be able to just smell one of her shoes.
I mean, she's just a goddess.
And at Fox News, she also has that status, probably because, you know, everyone likes looking at her.
So she's valuable to the company.
She's valuable to the broadcaster.
And she's cool and funny and nice, so everyone adores Kimberly Guilfoyle to the point of a goddess.
And it's the kind of thing where, like, say you walk into the makeup room and they're doing Dana Perino.
Dana Perino's beautiful and wonderful, don't get me wrong.
But when you walk in and you see Dana and she's getting makeup on, you go, hey, what's going on?
Oh yeah?
How's your dog?
How's Jasper?
Everything's cool.
But if you walk into the makeup room and Kimberly Guilfoyle's getting her makeup, you sort of go, oh, Jesus Christ.
And you walk out again.
She's the Mariah Carey of Fox News.
And so I saw her in the makeup room, and she's got her dress there.
And I go, oh, Jesus.
And I leave.
And I'm an alcoholic.
So for me, the mornings till around noon, I'm always nauseous, hungover.
And that involves explosive diarrhea, unfortunately.
So, I'm wandering around Fox News in a daze, hoping I can get it together to appear on a show I'm about to be on.
I think it was Kennedy.
And I go, I gotta hit the loo again.
So, the only bathroom available near the Green Room is the Handicap Bathroom.
Now, there's something about Handicap Bathrooms where you feel like you can trust the lock more.
I mean, no one wants to see someone with those weird Kermit the Frog legs on the bowl.
So I feel like the tradesmen in the handicapped bathroom industry make the deadbolt extra strong.
Just to get these poor bastards can't walk, or they have cerebral palsy, or spina bifida, or whatever.
Let's make them have some private time.
So you sort of feel pretty good when you go ka-chunk with the deadbolt in a handicapped bathroom.
So I get down there, drop my pants, and just explode.
And it's one of those ones where it's just salad.
I mean, it's just salad that smells bad.
There's no real matter there because it's the 32nd of the morning, right?
So it just looks like a rabbit barfed in the toilet.
But there's also some post-business where you feel like you've prolapsed.
And simply wiping it isn't going to do it.
So I go, oh God, I'm almost going to faint.
And I get up from the bowl.
And this is after maybe five minutes of explosions.
It sounds like Dunkirk.
I go, all right, I got to go.
I got to go with, like, with paper towels over to the sink.
The sink is a good 10 feet away.
It's a very, it's a very luxurious handicap bathroom.
It's for Liberace after he got AIDS.
And so I go, all right, I guess I'll shuffle over there with my pants at my ankles, my suit pants, and what I'll do is I'll get a paper towel with freezing cold water and then tamp it.
That'll help.
And of course I leave the rabbit barf there.
And I think I said as a joke in my head, if God really hates me right now, if God's not a fan of the G, or if he's just a dick, he'll make Kimberly come storming in.
And she does.
The deadbolt didn't work.
You'd think you'd get that fixed right away, or at least put a notice up.
You will be surprised.
And there's no changing room, I guess, in this particular green room.
So she was coming into the handicap bathroom to change into her beautiful gown that framed her perfect breasts and revealed just enough of her Unbelievable legs!
She has the legs of the reporter in Cracked Magazine when it was, remember that comic book in the 80s?
She was like an intrepid reporter who dressed like she was at the Academy Awards.
I forget her name.
She's just stunning from top to bottom.
I bet her baby toe is sculpted.
So, she comes storming in with her dress And now we have a mental vocabulary.
We have a visual vocabulary for walking in on people in the bathroom.
You see someone on the ball and you're facing them and they're sort of just a little bit below your eyes and you go, whoopsie, and you close it and you see like a nanosecond because your brain goes, get out of there.
Get out.
But when you walk in and no one's there, you keep walking.
So she gets hit with the barf smell right away.
And it's not a normal bathroom smell.
This is hungover problems.
So you're getting bile and all kinds of different scents.
So that's one shock.
Then she sees this lettuce sitting there and all variety of vegetables.
That's another... Oh my God!
So her eyes are assaulted.
Then she swivels, and she's deep in the bathroom now, because she was in a rush, so she came in about four paces.
And she swivels, and there I am, just going, oh, with my penis hanging out.
And I've got the paper towel in my hand.
My pants are at my ankles.
Finally, her brain probably went, oh, I know what this is.
Sorry, Kim.
This is a decrepit drunk trying to repair his broken bowels.
So she sees, probably it's, what do I mean probably?
It's definitely, The grossest thing she's ever seen.
I mean, I'm not talking... She doesn't go on LiveLeak and watch beheadings.
So as far as her life experience, this is probably the least beautiful thing her eyes have ever beheld.
And she's a classy broad.
So she just goes...
Makes a sound like that, like some sort of a fog, siren warning that maybe happens at a dock.
Maybe, I would imagine it sounded like Pearl Harbor.
After the first bomb, they set off this thing that just goes, ahhhh!
And she goes running out of the green room, running out of the entire building.
Fox is in two buildings.
I think she ran out of that entire building, into the other room.
And the sound guys are there looking at me, just laughing their heads off.
I mean, I'm married, so we were never gonna be together, Kim and I. Not that if I was single I'd have a snowball's chance in hell.
So, I don't feel bad in that sense, because, what, I lost her as a potential lay?
So, I just had to shrug and go, that was hilarious.
And I never really, she never really looked me in the eyes again.
I had sullied my glamorous reputation by exploding in the green room.
Oh, gosh.
And I think, you know, I remember a friend, Chris Lombardi, said to me, he's the guy who started Matador Records, he said, I know you sometimes, he wasn't talking about me, he was saying in general, you feel bad about things that happen to you, but if no one got hurt, then it's just funny.
I'm going to have a swig of coffee here.
Out of my, get off my lawn, laser engraved mug with my face on it and the logo of the show.
You can get this at CRTV if you sign up for a year.
Here's my other famous one.
I'm going to go in order of famousness, I think.
And it's funny, because after doing this, excuse me, after doing this since the early 90s, I have, every time I read the paper, I go, oh, I remember bumping into that person.
Oh, I met that person.
And again, celebrity's not cool.
In fact, in the past six months, I've become unmanageably famous with millennial men.
And when I walk down the street, they stop and they gasp, or they'll yell, holy shit!
And now I just sort of point to them like a gunpoint, like boop, and keep walking, because inevitably it's a selfie where they can't work their phone, but it really is annoying.
And I guess I learned this at a young age.
I was in a band when I was 18.
So I was a celebrity in our tiny, tiny little suburban Ottawa punk scene.
And, uh, it's not like people come up to you and say, hey man, uh, in that Anal Chinook song, Pubic Lice, I noticed you say, uh, don't know where I got him, don't know how, uh, look down at my dick, look down and pow.
Uh, why'd you say look down twice?
It's never like they're into your craft.
Not that Eno Chinook, Chinook being an Inuit word for warm wind, not that Eno Chinook was a very in-depth band.
But it's always like, hi, hey, how long have you been in the scene?
Oh, what's war and peace like?
That's the singer of Grave Concern.
Not even questions that good.
So I learned quickly that being well known is just really a lot of tedious conversations with shy strangers.
That's all it is.
At best.
Now that we have selfies, there's a whole other layer of boring added to the thing.
So I've never been impressed with celebrity.
And to this day, now that I have kids, I'm much more impressed by kids.
If you have four kids, I'm jealous of you.
If you have, sometimes you meet someone with six or something and you just go, you're a billionaire.
Then you meet a billionaire and you go, you're lonely.
You got divorced and you have a giant home theater with no one in it.
I'm not talking about Anthony Cumia, by the way.
He's always got parties at his house.
That guy's definitely not lonely.
I know a few people with home theaters and there's never anyone in them.
Sort of like a truck.
There's never anything in a truck.
It seems to be used to help people move, or occasionally someone buys lumber, but 99.9% of the time you see a truck, there's nothing in it.
Just kind of a waste of space.
You're just carting around a big rectangle of air.
I know that sounds anti-blue collar, but... Anyway!
Another famous person I knew, I guess, is Jennifer Aniston, and that's through Justin Theroux, her husband.
I know him through funniness.
He was really into do's and don'ts when I wrote them for Vice, and we met while he was working on Zoolander 2, I believe.
He wrote Tropic Thunder.
One of the funniest movies ever.
I mean, he invented the whole term never go full retard, which, by the way, got him in trouble with the Special Olympics.
And this story, by the way, sums up everything that is wrong with the politically correct left.
So in the movie, what's his name?
Robert Downey Jr.
is in blackface and he says, you never go full retard.
And clearly that is Justin mocking Actors and how they go for cheap Oscars by pretending to be retarded and he's talking about Sean Penn Who was a retard in that movie or Rosie O'Donnell was a retard in a movie and it's just a really cheap trick that they play that works and I think what's-his-name Ben Stiller's character overdoes it in the movie and So that's kind of a pro-retard thing.
It's saying, don't exploit these people.
But the retards over at the Special Olympics decided, no, that's insulting me.
I think it was obviously the people who run the Special Olympics are not retarded, but their kids usually are.
And so they go, they start these protests.
And so you're putting a sign in the hand of someone with Down Syndrome going, yeah, that movie's making fun of you.
Now they have fabricated a really crass insult.
And by the way, no one calls retards, retards.
When you say something's retarded, you would never call someone with Down Syndrome that.
The idea that you'd go up to someone with Down Syndrome and say, hey, retard.
I mean, you'd have to be, I'm going to say six.
Definitely not seven.
A seven year old wouldn't do that.
So it's a strange accusation to make.
Oh, yeah, you probably go up to people who have spaghetti legs in wheelchairs and say, nice legs.
There's no muscle tissue there.
Ha ha.
We don't do that.
Humans don't do that.
It's a strange accusation.
I kind of feel the same way about racism.
Oh, you refuse black people who are totally qualified to be accountants that'll make your company tons of money because you're racist.
What?
Why would anyone do that?
That doesn't happen.
Anyway.
So you put this sign in this handy, mentally special needs kid, I believe is the term, and you say, this movie's calling you a retard.
Now, these poor kids are marching going, someone's calling me a retard.
That's so mean.
Thanks a lot, Justin Theroux.
I mean, you invented an insult.
A brutal insult, by the way.
And now you've told this kid that people call him retard all the time.
Hollywood movies that people thoroughly enjoy and clap and get popcorn to and sit there and watch and eat popcorn and laugh at you.
That's horrible.
Now you're the fucking bad guy.
So they had to do that, and they had to do a special screening for the Special Olympics, and the guy who ran the Special Olympics, who started this whole thing, he got a raise, and he was promoted to top of the Special Olympics.
Just disgusting behavior, really.
And the irony is that he was exploiting these retards for his own personal gain.
He was going full retard.
So, and isn't it funny too, like Justin Theroux, I think he's a vegan or something and he's really into dog rights and very politically correct guy.
He has even raked over the coals.
So, I'm hard pressed to think of anyone I know, famous or not, who hasn't had some sort of controversy.
Like my buddy Trace was running the Twitter account for his buddy's bar, The Long Branch Inn, and Mexico was playing, I don't know, Spain or something in the World Cup, so obviously the Americans are going to vote for, are going to be backing the Mexicans.
Especially if it's somewhere weird like Norway or Africa, you're going to go for Mexicans, they're right there.
So he tweets out, we're all wetbacks now!
He gets in a huge pile of shit.
The restaurant, they're talking about boycotting their restaurant.
Meanwhile, he was saying, I'm on the Mexican side.
You can almost throw a dartboard at your address book.
Call that person and say, have you ever been in big trouble for some sort of politically incorrect faux pas?
And they go, yeah, yeah.
I got a sexual harassment thing at work, and I wasn't even there that day.
Like my dad, who got a sexual harassment joke for saying, women like bald men because it looks like a penis.
The woman he said that to laughed.
Someone else who overheard it filed a complaint on her behalf.
And she wasn't remotely annoyed by it.
Because they're friends.
Anyway.
So I would go out to LA and I would stay at their giant palatial mansion.
One thing I really appreciate about their home, which you can find online, is it doesn't have the Spanish theme.
I don't like that look.
You know those terracotta pot roofs and those big archways everywhere with columns?
What are we, 1950s Spanish movie stars?
I don't like Spain.
Why are you so into Spain in LA?
I guess because it doesn't rain there?
It looks stupid.
You look like Pablo Escobar wannabe.
But their house has almost more of a Mandarin theme.
Lots of right angles and stuff.
That I like, big giant doors, cool.
And it's not an ostentatious home.
It's actually about the size of my home now.
They got a bunch of people working there and stuff.
And so I'd go down there Now, the problem with L.A.
friends, when you're from New York and you have kids, is you're used to getting up at 7 a.m.
7 a.m.
is 4 a.m.
in L.A.
So it's an untenable friendship.
Because you go down there and you're too far to whack.
Especially people without kids, like the Annistons, they probably sleep into normal kidless times, like 11.
11 is 2 p.m.
To me.
My day's already half down the toilet.
So how do we hang out?
So I'd get there at night and it'd be time to party and stuff.
And there's always, they've got a little bar there with plenty of bourbon.
I'm exhausted.
I was just on a plane.
I got to stay up till, say, midnight.
That's three in the morning.
Three in the morning to a guy with kids is way too late.
So I'd get super hammered.
Because when you're an alcoholic, booze is like coffee.
And we'd hang out and have fun and she's a very cool person and very nice.
And Justin and I just wanted to argue about punk rock and hardcore.
He grew up punk rock so we have all that to talk about and joke about and I think she may have felt a little left out sometimes when we say, when we argue about whether the Misfits were hardcore or punk.
And so I'm staying there one night and I'm hammered, believe it or not.
Everyone goes to bed.
And so I had a pitch meeting with Cartoon Network the next day and I was half an hour late for it.
That's how hammered I was.
Which, you know, that means you woke up like six hours late because of the time problem.
Three hours late, sorry.
Anyway.
So they have a guest room downstairs and I get into it and obviously a gazillionaire's bed is going to be the most insane bed on earth.
So it's a little standalone apartment, this guest room.
It's got a washer dryer, it's got a bathroom in it, a little office and looks out onto the backyard.
So I go down there and I step into bed.
It was like stepping into Kimberly Guilfoyle's vagina.
It was the softest bed I've ever touched with my toes.
There was like the normal mattress and then there was this weird sort of a mattress lining that I've never experienced that was full of angel tears and the feathers of babies.
So you step in that and you go, oh my word.
And I like to sleep nude.
I'm like a slithery little snake in the bedroom.
So I just slither into this soft beauty.
And it added an extra layer to the pass out.
So obviously, I wake up the next morning and I've wet the bed.
That's not good.
Like, I valued my friendship, which is over by the way, I valued my friendship with Justin a lot, but it was great for my marriage.
Because my wife would go, well he's a pariah, everyone hates him, but he's friends with Jennifer Aniston, so there must be some value to him.
He can't be all bad.
So it was good currency for my marriage.
Sort of saved me.
My wife would just go, I guess I just don't get him.
And if Jennifer likes him, I guess I do too.
My wife's very devoted, as you can see.
So I go, I got to fix this.
Now the good news is it's like 5am LA time.
So I've got a good six hours to rectify this problem.
And I figure I can wash and dry a sheet.
In that time.
Now, this thing was that vagina thing I was talking about.
So it's more like a maxi pad than a sheet.
So that's going to be a problem.
And now I know they have a pool and I think, why don't I just put on all the piss sheets and then jump in the pool and then get out of the pool and hang them on a fence.
And even if it takes like three hours of sun, that's gotta be enough to dry it now.
So first I take the first pea sheet.
And again, this is drunk pea.
So it's not like it's dark orange.
It's just really very little pea is in it.
It's mostly just water.
So I take that out and there's a fountain right outside my guest bedroom sliding door thing.
And it's a sphere.
It's like an apple.
That's just constantly overflowing with water.
And then the water goes back to the bottom, and beautiful.
It's like a glowing, flowing, spherical fountain.
With a little, you know, chopped off the top so that water can be in there.
So I think, oh, I don't have to go all the way to the pool.
I'll just do this.
So I put the sheet in, and I get it nice and wet, and then I run over to the fence, foomp, put it over the fence.
I can feel the sun beating down on it.
I'm feeling pretty good.
Pretty, pretty, pretty good about this one.
Now, the next problem is the maxi pad.
So I get this big, giant mattress liner.
I get that off.
It's pretty heavy, even with just a little bit of pee on it.
It's not the pee.
The actual thing itself is heavy.
I guess it's down.
And I go over to the fountain, and I put it in, and all hell breaks loose.
The fountain just goes... Oh, sorry.
The liner goes... and sucks up about 300 liters of water.
Infinite water.
I've never seen anything like it.
It was honestly like I dipped a tampon in my beer.
It just inflated.
And the fountain had infinite water supply.
So don't worry about the fountain.
Worry about this liner that I just made weigh.
I'm not going to exaggerate.
Okay.
120 pounds.
It weighed 120 pounds.
So I can technically lift that much.
If it was a person that was nice and compact, held together with skin and bones and you could put them over your shoulder, this is an amorphous blanket thingamajiggy.
So I get it in the water and I go, what the hell am I gonna do now?
And I go to lift it up and putting it over my shoulder was like Oprah's leg was just one tiny part of the blanket.
So now my shoulder is sort of weighed down by this large chocolate leg.
And then I gotta yank the rest out of the fountain and it's, it's, it was like pulling an arrow out of someone.
Like I really had to go and then I finally get the whole thing over my shoulder, but I'm not big enough.
It's long.
It's like seven feet long.
I go, and as the last part comes out of the fountain, it just goes slap on the ground on the grass.
And then I can't, I don't have enough length on my arms to get the whole thing off the ground.
So I'm dragging it on the ground and it's getting, it's ripping the grass out of the ground, revealing the mud.
So I'm scraping green and brown mud on this, I don't know, $10,000 mattress liner.
And I can't get it up over the fence is the other problem.
So I have to walk down more dragging, getting it dirty.
I mean, this is stupid now at this point.
I mean, you can't put a brown and green mattress liner back, no matter how dry it gets.
And even if I snuck it back, they're gonna go, hey Gavin, that bed you slept in is green now.
What the fuck did you do?
Is that bile?
No, it's grass.
It's grass?
So I find sort of a four foot high chain link fence that's sort of within the grounds.
And I plop it over that, and some of it's still on the ground.
It's pathetic!
And I let that dry and I think, well, I won't be invited back here and with good reason.
But luckily, I don't even think they've been to the guest bedroom.
It's in another wing.
Well, not another wing.
It's in the basement.
And when the help arrives, like around 11, they just handle it.
And they don't care.
It's not like some Mexican is going to come up to me and say, excuse me, Senor Gavin, did you pee-pee your bed last night?
What's happening here?
You know, that is very, very bad.
This is going to have to be sent away to be dry cleaned.
They don't care.
There could be a cadaver in the bed and they would just wrap it up in a carpet and take care of it.
So, all that panic was for naught.
But that was a typical, that, that, that ghost time from when I wake up to when they wake up sometimes would be like four or five hours.
And so I just be walking around the house like a ghost.
Look at some coffee table books.
I go through their kitchen, which is obviously beautifully organized by the staff.
And there'd be like vegan pizza there.
Try some of that.
Try to figure out the weird, you know, fancy coffee machine.
That will take like an hour.
Watch a movie?
Watch a whole movie?
Go for a swim?
I would go for a swim alone at like 8 a.m.
just swimming.
Nude?
I was nude?
So the security, which is 24 hours a day, must have been watching me on the camera going, who is this?
I think there is really, who is this nude man?
There is a naked intruder on the property.
Luckily, the pool was heated, so when they saw my genitalia, it looked reasonable.
But yeah, I think Justin dumped me because we had a lot of falls.
I'm not a fun guy to be friends with.
And one time I published a picture on Instagram of a bachelor party he and I were at, and that really pissed him off.
That was strike one.
There was a couple of strikes, but I think what did it for him was pretty innocuous.
On my old blog, Street Carnage, I put a picture of him and Angelina Jolie and they're both wearing Crass shirts.
And it said, uh, did, did Angelina pick the wrong one or something like that?
I just thought it was funny.
I would sort of tease him like that all the time.
Like he's into Crass, the punk band.
So I cut out a picture of him in a celebrity magazine and I magneted it.
I put a magnet on it and put it on the fridge at Crass's house in Britain, in Dial House.
And just to bother him.
So I thought it was fun, ribald teasing.
But I never heard from him after that.
Stopped returning my calls.
That hurt.
But again, when you're a ghost at someone's house for five hours, it's not the hugest loss in the world.
Although, I gotta say, Justin Theroux, one of the funniest guys in the world, and he did a pilot, I think it's called Documental, he wrote it.
It was based on, if you check Tropic Thunder, check the extras, and they have that Steve Coogan character, the director.
Justin Theroux plays a German who worships Steve Coogan, who's one of the worst directors in the world, I mean the character.
But this film student in Germany doesn't agree, and he thinks Steve Coogan's a genius.
So he follows around, does a documentary about him, and Steve Coogan obviously is gobbling up all the attention.
It is brilliant.
And the written pilot that was for HBO was fantastic.
I heard that that pilot got screwed up because Coogan was just wasted.
I heard through HBO people that... I've never met Steve Coogan, so this isn't a celebrity encounter.
He didn't show up for the first rehearsal.
They go to his room, and there's just coke and heroin everywhere.
The room reeks of sex, and there's just piles of cigarettes.
He's obviously been smoking, doing coke and heroin, and having sex with prostitutes.
During the shooting!
Like, we need you right now, dude!
And he screwed up his lines and everything.
I think he was a junkie, with Courtney Love, actually.
There's a story where Again, this wasn't my personal encounter, but there's a story where he was just hanging out with Courtney Love because she always had tons of heroin, and that was great.
He started noticing in the media that she'd say, yeah, me and my boyfriend, Steve Coogan, and he'd go, uh-oh.
We've all been there, right, gentlemen?
When you are fornicating with a five for a long time just because it's convenient, and you realize, oops, I'm her boyfriend now.
So he goes, I got to get out of this because she's starting to stalk me.
And so he goes back to Britain for a few months.
And that usually works.
I highly recommend if you're in a relationship you want to get out of.
Well, actually, what I always say is, look, people work in the sewers.
People have tough jobs.
People are outside right now in zero degree temperatures trying to fix electrical things.
Their hands are freezing off.
You can sit down with a woman for five hours and explain that it's over.
You pussy.
But if that's not working, leave.
Go somewhere.
Stay at your friend's house for two weeks.
Let her decompress.
Get some new habits.
Boil some bunnies.
So he does that and it kind of works.
Then he comes back.
And he's driving and the cops pull him over.
And so he...
He goes, what's the issue here, gentlemen?
And they go, we think you're drunk.
And he goes, he doesn't say this, but he's thinking, you know, of all the times to be pulled over, I have been drunk and high so many times.
And you just pulled me over and I'm not remotely drunk.
First time ever, I think.
That I've been driving sober, and this happens to me the time I get pulled over.
So he says, look, look, this is very simple.
I'm happy to do a breathalyzer.
I feel absolutely fantastic.
If you think you've got the man, you don't.
And I mean no ill will to this, but I can guarantee, I swear on my children's life, I am completely sober.
And they go, no, we don't believe you.
And he doesn't understand why they're so insistent.
He says, I'll breathalyze.
I'll do anything.
And then he goes, they go, look, just go to that diner for a little bit.
And, uh, we're going to search your car for drug paraphernalia or booze.
He goes, what?
Uh, or we can impound it.
So you can go have a coffee and try to sober up and wait.
Oh yeah.
That was it.
They said they weren't, they weren't going to search his car for drugs.
They said, go to that diner there and have a coffee and wait and just sober up a bit.
And we'll let you go.
He goes, what?
Uh, okay, I'll go have a coffee and try to not be wasted anymore.
So he does.
And he comes back and they go, thanks, we're good, bye!
So, Coogan starts dating again, and Courtney Love shows up everywhere he goes.
He goes to some weird, innocuous, uh, battalion restaurant no one's ever heard of in Silver Lake, Who's sitting at the next table?
Courtney Love.
Hi!
How's it going?
He goes to a club.
A nightclub.
He's dancing with another date!
There's Courtney in the dance floor.
What's up, sweetie?
And he can't figure out what the hell's going on.
And then he thinks, is my phone tapped?
So he hires a private investigator to come in and check his phone.
And the investigator goes all over his house.
And he goes, no, you definitely have no bugs.
He's got one of these bug detectors where you don't have to take everything apart.
You can just sort of beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
And then he's about to give up.
And the detective says, hang on a second.
He goes under his car.
And he finds what looks like a bomb, but is actually a tracking device.
It's sealed to the axle of the car.
And Coogan's in a parking garage, I believe, at the time.
There's no way anyone could have gotten to his car any time.
And the detector goes, well, someone got to your car when you weren't looking, and they attached this, and this is how she knows where you are.
And then it hits him.
Those cops, those cops that were determined to nail me because I'm drunk, knew I wasn't drunk.
They just had to get under the car.
Now I ask at this point, were those actual cops?
Or were they undercover?
I mean, were they guys dressed up in cop uniforms that Courtney Love had paid?
If it was the latter, guys, that's a pretty big felony you just did for Courtney Love.
How much did she pay you?
Let's say $10,000 each.
So she paid actors $10,000 each to pull someone over and risk going to jail, I assume for a while.
That's one option.
The other is she...
She is so close with the cops because they're Nirvana fans?
But that's not enough.
I think she would have to be blowing them.
She would have to be doing sexual favors for corrupt cops in order for them to have that kind of loyalty.
Because you're not going to risk your pension all 20 years.
That's even a bigger risk than the civilians dressing up as the cop.
So that's the mysterious part of the story is who were these cops?
The rest of it is just typical crazy junkie behavior.
So we got the thing off and they've gone their separate ways.
But you know what's interesting about the row thing?
If he X'd me because of that picture, that's a very, that's quite a one-way street we have here with mockery.
Because the thing I've noticed with celebrities is they can dish it out, but they can't take it.
Like Tommy Lee, I wrote about this in my book.
He loved the Do's and Don'ts book too and he said it helped him be unshackled when he wrote Dirt.
And Dirt is like, please kill me.
It's just a book where they sat and they interviewed everyone in Motley Crue for hours and hours and hours and they transcribed it and then ordered it into a book where you get the same story from different angles in a nice, you know, non-repetitive way.
Dirt is an amazing book.
I highly recommend it.
So, uh, he said that his managers would, they were reading do's and don'ts on tour, and they, every time he said, I don't know if I want to mention that story, he'd say, look, look, look at what Gavin did.
He said, he said this, this horrible thing.
Like, uh, there was one that he mentioned where I had this hideous redneck in short shorts who's about 60, and she looks like a racist, but she's staring at this black guy, and she looks like a whore too, like her breasts are hanging out, and I have her saying something like, uh, What's the matter, nigger?
You blind?
Look at this fine piece of tail!
That's a bad word, the N-word.
But I think in that context, it's perfectly reasonable and funny and not racist.
So, when he was in New York, his manager said, Tommy wants to meet you.
And I said, OK.
And my thing with meeting anyone is I like to start with my worst and then we're settled now.
And if you don't want to hang out with that, if you can't take me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best.
No, but seriously, I'd rather just joke around and see, do you have a sense of humor?
Can you be cool?
Rather than, you know, ass kiss.
But I think celebrities are used to just being totally surrounded by yes men.
It's like their life is a giant Facebook.
So they're used to everyone saying, so true, Tommy, so true.
And he's super corny.
I mean, I loved him on the crew and stuff, but check out some of Tommy Lee's solo work.
There's this one song, it's like an acoustic song.
To the place where the wildness never grows.
He's got a fedora on, a chain wallet.
He's on a surfboard in the video, and then a shark comes up to him, but it's him.
And then he looks at the camera and goes, what the fuck?
It's so queer.
So I don't really have a problem with that, though.
That's just very, very corny.
And you have to get used to that.
In L.A., you've got to get used to people that are going to be wearing stressed denim and are not going to know that chili peppers suck.
I mean, it's like here I am in the suburbs.
It's basically L.A.
It's like rich people dressed like British Protestants, British wasps, with their little pleated coats.
They all wear this sort of bee, you know those British hunters would wear with the beeswing, bee wax, waterproof coats and the rubber boots.
They all look like they have a farm in Essexshire.
And they like the red hot chili peppers.
It's such a strange affectation to pull.
Because I go, why?
I mean, I understand they seem kind of classy, but what a strange demographic to want to mimic.
British aristocrats that you'll never meet, that live in another part of the world, that ride horses and go fox hunting.
That's what you want to be?
You've never even met them!
Why do you want to be that group?
It's like me dressing Hasidic all the time and having my little payas and my fur hat.
So, uh, I meet Tommy at some corny bar in Midtown, of course, like rock and rollies.
Hard Rock Cafe.
And he's got a table of dudes who don't know that they're in their 40s.
You know, they shave their head with a razor so you don't know they're bald, even though you can see the stubble.
And they got their chain wallets and their $400 shirts unbuttoned too low.
And their vans and shit.
God, that's my generation, is grown men wearing vans.
Oh my God, I'm actually wearing some right now.
I'm making fun of Gen X wearing vans in their 40s, and I'm wearing a pair of blue Eras as I say that.
So I come up to him and he's like, yo, what's up?
And I hug him because someone from L.A.
needs to be hugged.
And by the way, I'm making Tommy Lee sound like a total douche in this.
He probably is a fun guy to hang out with outside of this, you know, need to have your ass kissed.
So I hug him and I go, hey, what the fuck?
This guy's got a boner over here.
And I look over to his friends.
That's like a Canadian hoser joke.
And if this was done in In Cappus Casing, Ontario, everyone at the table would laugh.
And they'd add to it, like, no, that's not a boner, that's normal size.
If it was a boner, you'd have a bruise or something like that.
It would be, hilarity would ensue.
It's like a good bonding thing, I think.
But instead, it looked like, I don't know, I worked for TMZ and I was trying to frame him as having homosexual desires.
So no one at his table smiles at all.
And they all stare at me, and then I sit down, I order a Bud, and then he leans with his back to me now, and is talking to someone else.
Which I guess means, in retrospect, I guess it means leave?
Or apologize or something?
But I don't know, maybe I didn't have enough social skills at the time.
I just moved to New York.
This is probably 2000.
And so I just sit there and start nursing my beer, smiling and going, OK.
I think actually I was enjoying how horrible it was, because everyone was sort of staring.
It was like I just had a wet fart that was super loud and you could smell it.
That's sort of like what my joke did, because everyone was just sort of looking around like, OK.
And then Tommy started talking to one of the waitresses, and then he sat at a separate booth with her.
So now I'm stuck with his dorky chili peppers friends.
Who are all dressed like the drummer from the Chili Peppers.
Like fingerless gloves and stuff on 40 year olds.
And he ends up going up to, I guess it was at a hotel, like it was the basement bar of a fancy hotel in Midtown.
Soho Grand or something.
And he goes up to her room with her.
And then I go, I'm gonna go.
And I just throw ten bucks down or whatever.
And leave.
And I brought that up to go back to Justin because they can dish it out but they can't take it.
Like, I went out for dinner with Jimmy Kimmel and Justin Theroux and some other famous dude whose name I forget.
And they were all fucking with me.
The entire table.
So they had probably said in advance, let's make Gavin really mad.
Let's goad him, try to get him to lose his temper.
So I get there and they start talking about Hannity and looking over at me and talking about what a douche he is.
I don't know.
I don't care.
Go ahead, have bad opinions about Hannity.
I don't think Hannity likes me.
He's not my brother.
And they keep goading me and stuff.
And of course, with these celebrities, like, you're divorced.
You weren't there for your son.
You probably see your son three days a week.
So careful, careful what fights you pick.
And I forget, sorry, I should find the name of this guy.
He's like a B-list celebrity.
You'll see him in like Law and Order type shows.
But he's fucking with me and I'm making fun of him for riding a scooter.
And then I make fun of him for not seeing his kids seven days a week.
And he has a temper tantrum.
So it backfired.
Plus I'm drunk.
And you're trying to make a drunk guy lose his temper.
You're just picking a fight with someone who has liquid courage and no fear.
So I might be misremembering this, but I think I won.
But that's not why I bring up that story.
I bring up the story because I rode my motorcycle there to this dinner.
It was at the Smile Cafe in Soho.
And I put my helmet on.
I drive home wasted, which I don't recommend, in a thunderstorm.
And to Justin's credit, he did his very best to stop me and steal my keys, but I was not to be reckoned with.
And I rode my motorcycle in a thunderstorm over the Williamsburg Bridge.
But when I got home, I noticed that it said Hillary on the back of my helmet in Sharpie.
And I had ridden home in the rain with Hillary on my helmet.
Now, you can't get Sharpie off a white helmet, so I had to put reflective tape over it.
I thought that was funny.
That didn't make me mad.
But you get mad because of a picture?
Be my friend!
Be my friend!
I got a million more.
I could make this a regular series.
I've always been determined to do a graphic novel of it.
Because there's such a variety.
Like I'll do one more and then we'll have to go.
Curtis Mayfield.
Do you know who that is?
Black singer.
He's an incredible human being who revolutionized music and he doesn't really get the credit for that.
He's the one who did Superfly.
He kind of invented this whole way of singing.
Freddy's dead!
I'm obviously not doing a great job.
He used to be a doo-wop dude back in the 50s and he was in a band called The Impressions.
Keep on pushing!
And I don't like that music.
It sounds like Sambo music to me.
It's like, alright negro, you can perform but make it all love songs.
And it's alright, hey, it's alright, yeah.
My baby's got a sweet tooth.
Fuck off.
They still do that.
That was a big thing in Brooklyn too.
Weirdest phenomenon.
Every night, the men from that block, and in Brooklyn in the 60s and even the 70s, you would never leave your block.
To leave it, to go 10 feet was an act of war.
The most parochial culture since cave people.
So they would sit on a garbage can and they would sing.
Sometimes they'd have an oil drum, they'd light some garbage on fire to warm up, some wood, and they would sit there going, hey my baby don't care for me.
How gay is that?
Doo-wop singers, blue collar dudes, plumbers, construction workers, just every night with their big pompadours, hey my baby don't Like, in the 60s and 70s, too, because there was that 50s revival in the 70s.
Anyway, don't like that music.
Don't like doo-wop.
And Curtis didn't like it either.
So he went solo and he started his own record label, Mayfield Records.
Now, I don't know when this was.
1960?
Find out when Mayfield Records started, Dave.
This would be like 65 or something, maybe even earlier.
And this was an artist starting his own record label when the other record labels were CBS Records, Polydor, RCA, like major corporations with huge buildings devoted to them.
And he said, no, I just do it myself.
Thank you.
And now I would argue that he invented the whole idea of independent music.
All these indie labels, that's all Curtis Mayfield.
And, uh, Yeah, he did.
I think the Superfly soundtrack was the biggest hit for him.
But go through any of his canon when he's solo as Curtis Mayfield, and it's just hit after hit after hit.
And political, too.
That was the other exciting thing about it.
No blacks were singing about anything political back then.
And he was like, God bless us, Miss Black America!
And singing about the rent, and how it's hard to pay the rent.
I'm black and beautiful, and all things that were sort of not done back then.
You were only supposed to sing about how your baby has a sweet tooth.
You sure it wasn't Curtam Records?
Does that sound right?
Yeah, that sounds right.
When was that?
68.
68.
Pretty darn early for an indie label.
So he was doing a show, and the guy performed for decades and decades.
I mean, his music career goes back to when he was probably a teenager.
Like Jimi Hendrix kind of vibes.
You look up old pictures of him and you see him in a suit with his hair all straightened, posing with five other guys wearing the same suit.
And he was doing a sound check and a light fixture fell on the back of his head and didn't kill him, but made him paralyzed for life.
I bet that sound guy felt pretty good, huh?
Ah, we don't need all four screws.
One screw should do it.
What's gonna happen?
There'll be some shaking.
Worst case scenario, it dangles a little bit.
No, worst case scenario, it paralyzes one of the most important figures in the history of rock and roll.
Yeah, that too.
So, at my old magazine, I wanted to get him on the phone, because I was a fan.
And I couldn't get him on the phone, because we were just a 16-page free Montreal newsprint back then.
And his son was running the label.
His whole family ran the label at that point.
It was a family affair.
And so I called him up in a rage, going, I'm trying to give you a free ad!
Do you understand?
An interview is a free ad!
Do you know how much money you're saving?
We're trying to help you get your records up in Canada and Montreal and Quebec!
I've always been a grump.
And it worked.
And the son goes, OK, OK, hold on, hold on.
And then, boom, Curtis Mayfield's on the phone.
Hello?
That's, by the way, if you get a call and you don't want to talk to the person, or you don't know who it is, but you have to answer it, because someone goes, OK, I'll call you in the next five minutes.
And then you get a call from a strange number, and you think, is that him?
So I like to answer it as Curtis Mayfield, and just go, hello?
And they go, hi, it's Gavin there.
Hang on, who is this?
Sometimes they just go, oh, wrong number, and hang up.
That sucks.
So we talk for a little bit, and he talks, asking about rap music.
Does he like it?
Yeah, I like it.
Sometimes the lyrical content can seem a little bit too much.
I don't need swearing and nigger this and nigger that.
But for the most part, I'm very impressed.
These people out there doing, essentially, beat poetry.
It's just an incredible... And that's the beauty of music.
It's always evolving and changing.
It wasn't quite that high-pitched.
I've never done my Curtis Mayfield before today.
And I go, shit, I gotta ask him about the light fixture.
Because, you know, it's like, you can't interview Hulk Hogan and not talk about the gawker thing.
You can't interview what's-his-name and not talk about the scream.
What's that politician's name who went, yeah!
That was Howard Dean.
Howard Dean.
You can't do a Howard Dean interview and not mention the scream.
Can't talk to OJ and just talk about sports memorabilia, so it has to come up, right?
And I go, so, what happened, uh, that light fixture?
What was that story again?
Ugh.
I'm just a little kid at this point.
I was probably 25.
And I didn't have a lot of finesse.
I mean, I should have said, look, Curtis, I'm sorry if you don't want to talk about this, I understand, but I feel like I have to ask you about the accident.
That would have been a smarter way to do it.
But I said, so what happened with this?
Pretend I didn't know.
What happened with the light fixture again?
Which is also really insulting.
Like, you got an interview with Curtis Mayfield, and you're not familiar with how he became paralyzed?
And he goes, oh, I'm sure you're familiar with the story by now.
I was doing a sound check, and I was just out there testing the microphone.
And then just blackness.
He would probably not say black this, no, because he likes everything black.
I just, the lights went out.
And then there's a long pause and he goes, and when I awoke, I found myself to be paralyzed.
And the way he said paralyzed, I just felt this like wet blanket of shit.
And I just felt so dirty, so cheap.
I felt like such a douche.
Why did I make him have to relive that moment?
What a lame thing to do.
And that's, whenever I think of the Celebrity Encounters graphic novel I want to do, when I learn how to draw again, I always think that should be the first story.
Because that feeling was such a bad, cheap, gross, tacky feeling.
I'll never forget it to this day.
Going for the low-hanging fruit like that.
Being such a TMZ fake journalist.
It just felt wrong.
I thought, I'm never doing that again.
I never want to feel that way ever again.
And that's the moral of this story.
That celebrity culture is based on myths.
Celebrities are based on the notion that some people are magic and different than us.
And they really just lucked out with a movie deal.
Or I mean, in the case of Curtis Mayfield's ability, yeah, he's an incredible musician who is a talented entrepreneur, but he's not a god.
He's just like a really talented chemist.
If you met someone in biotech who had come up with a way to, you know, Make genetically modified corn.
It saved a billion lives, like Norman Borlaug.
You wouldn't be scared around him.
You just go, holy shit, Norman Borlaug!
You're the guy with the corn!
That's amazing!
Wow!
Jesus, that must... So that took a lot of trial and error, I guess, with other shitty corn.
Yes, yes, it did.
We had a lot of terrible corn on the way there.
You know what I mean?
Like this whole idea that they're special or magical, that you would yell, holy shit!
When you see me at the train station, it's just... it's not American.
Again, Britain is the class system.
Britain is sort of like, well in a way it's like Catholicism.
I'm sorry to desecrate my own religion, but there's sort of the ones closer to God and then the ones farther away from God.
There may be some merit to innate talent and there are people I think who were born with more skills than others and born with more potential than others, but this idea of worshipping people I'm pretending that people are magic.
It's just, well, it's really gay.
And, uh, I don't think we need to do it anymore.
As a famous person, I'm telling you that being famous sucks, and we need to get over it as a culture, because it is a total and utter waste of time.
The only thing it's good for is telling stupid stories on a podcast about explosive diarrhea.
Thank you very much for tuning in.
I think I'm going to start doing these twice a week, by the way.