by Brian Posehn
I fucked up a couple of times but was able to figure it out, and I know we will be together forever. I know I’ll never fuck up again. She told me she’d cut my wiener off if I cheated. I believe her. It is possible, nerds, to get your dream girl. Just don’t be a dick. If you like being yourself, you can probably do it sooner than I did. I got my dream girl—the cheerleader, the popular girl, the achingly cute little blonde, the Tami Baker. I did better than Tami; I got my Melanie Truhett. And I eventually made her a Posehn.
We married in 2004, and she’s been my life partner and my best friend ever since. Melanie is the funniest, smartest, most loving woman I’ve ever met. In May of 2009 she became the mother of our son, Rhoads. She’s an amazing, loving, nurturing mom and an irreplaceable partner and co-parent. She has her own business and has excelled at that effortlessly while juggling two nerdy guys and three dogs in the house. She has aged with such grace and style that I am constantly in awe and I couldn’t feel luckier. And she still has the tits of a Disney Princess.
TWENTY
NERDING OUT
I’ve been going to Comic-Con for over twenty years. I have not missed one since 1996. And oh boy, I have met some fucking nerds. Most of my friends are nerds. Nothing like a Con to make you feel better about your nerdiness. I may be a giant fucking nerd, but what about that dude? Oh wow, look at her—holy shit! Who is nerdier? Nerdiest? A Furry. A Trekkie? An Anime nut? A Belieber? A cosplayer? A hard-core Christian? You heard me: if we follow my “nerdiness is an obsession” rule, then a Christian is just a nerd for Christ. Their cosplaying is amazing.
Besides my obvious love for metal, Star Wars, Rush, horror, comedy, and Stephen King, I have played video games my whole life; D&D became a big part of my life in the second part of it. And since the late eighties, when my friends Dana and Aaron from Tower Records had turned me on to The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and The Watchmen by Alan Moore, I’ve been completely immersed in comic books.
My uncle Mike had shown me Pong in the mid-seventies. The same guy who introduced me to nerdiness through Star Trek showed me Pong on his computer when I was visiting him at his office at Lawrence Livermore Labs. I loved it. I got a pong machine when Atari released them one Christmas. With each new development in video games, I was in. There was a diner in my neighborhood with a Space Invaders; I had the Atari 2600 and 5200, and they both had Space Invaders, and I was still terrible at it.
I sucked at games, but I loved them. I had to have every new system—TurboGrafx, Nintendo 64. Donkey Kong Country and Mario Kart 64 were fucking amazing and fun to play with other people. And Golden Eye. Season four of Mr. Show we had a system in our office and later our dressing room, and our work didn’t suffer. Games were an addiction. I picked up the GameCube, the Sega Genesis, and the total failure, Dreamcast. I got a little money in the late nineties and bought a Defender/Joust upright arcade game and Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga machine along with a Jurassic Park pinball machine. Since I’ve done voice-over jobs, I’ve wound up in a couple of games. Doug Benson and I did a game for 3DO called Off-World Interceptor—it was terrible. I did voices for the Star Wars parody I cowrote, Star Warped, as well as Halo 2. My fellow Sonoma High metalhead, Tim Schaefer hired me to play a main character in Brutal Legend, and I wrote on Destiny with David Cross.
In 2011 my friend Gerry Duggan and I began cowriting the popular Marvel comic Deadpool. My history with the character went back to the beginning. I knew of him from X-Force by Rob Liefeld. I loved what writers Joe Kelly and Gail Simone did with the character. They nailed the manic voice and actions of the unkillable Merc with a Mouth. Deadpool has the best fans in the comic business: voracious and loyal, DP cosplayers are super-popular sights at Comic-Cons around the world. Women even cosplay as a character we created, Shiklah, in the forty-five issues we cowrote. We got the Deadpool gig because Gerry and I had a minor success in comic book writing.
In the early 2000s Gerry and I had created The Last Christmas together as a script. Santa Claus after the apocalypse fighting zombies. People loved our script, but no one wanted to pull the trigger. So we did what our friend Steve Niles had done with 30 Days of Night: he had failed to sell it as a script, so he wrote it as a comic book and sold it as a movie for a lot of money. We recently sold The Last Christmas too. Not for a lot of money, though.
Because it’s clear that I’ve earned my nerd cred, I feel like it’s my time to comment on gamer and nerd culture. CUE OLD MAN RANT. First off, these angry young nerds I read about on the internet harassing women involved in the comic book and video game industry because they’re jealous of their talent has to fucking stop. To treat fellow fans that way is one thing, but to harass industry professionals is embarrassing to an old nerd like me. Not to mention the shit cosplayers have to put up with. There should not have to be signs at conventions that say COSPLAY IS NOT CONSENT. No shit. And then every time a nerdy movie or show comes out with a diverse cast, nerdy white assholes get mad about it.
From the Ghostbusters reboot to franchises like Star Wars and Wonder Woman, these guys are complaining that the cast is too female heavy or that they don’t like the feminist leaning of the actual movie. Black Panther is too black? Good. It’s about fucking time. And shut up, nerd. And take your racism with you. White male “nerds” need to quit griping. As the oldest nerd in the room, I hereby tell you to SHUT THE FUCK UP! The misogyny and racism have no place in our culture. Nerds, of all people, should know about inclusivity and how vital and important it is that we accept and welcome all nerds. END RANT.
If it wasn’t cool enough that I have been able to turn most of my hobbies into extra income and fans, I also get paid to play Dungeons & Dragons. That’s right: people pay me to play Dungeons & Dragons, and that is so crazy. My history with the game goes back to junior high when I heard about it in seventh grade and was disappointed to see Ross Jox ruining it with his dumb friends.
I didn’t get into it again ’til 1991, when I was working at Rainbow Records in Sonoma. This dude Rick, a total hesher friend of mine, taught me how fun it actually was. We went over to his house after work one night and got super high with his parents. Yep, that’s right. Another Sonoma parent who got high with their kids and it wasn’t weird. It was actually super cool and relaxed. I feel like not everyone grew up with that kind of openness.
We cruised back to Rick’s room with our friend Tony A. and listened to Slayer while we played. It was pretty dark, and we played some kick-ass D&D. You know how people defend D&D, saying it’s not satanic? Because when seventies and eighties Christian people would attack Dungeons & Dragons for being this Satanic thing, people who played D&D would say, “No, it’s not satanic”? Well, when we played it, it was. Weed and Slayer made it fucking creepy, and I always came out of there feeling bad for my soul, but those were fun times. We made D&D satanic.
In 2004 we were playing Halo a ton. A pretty big group of mostly guys—there must have been sixteen of us. Four people on four TVs, so you do the math, as a terrible comedian would say a long time ago. I just said it into the dictation app on my phone, so I’m a high-tech terrible comedian.
Anyway, we were playing Halo 2 one night, and after the game we went to a late-night diner, the 101 Coffee Shop. It’s the Hollywood diner featured in the film Swingers—you know the one: it’s called the 101 Coffee Shop, like I just told you. It’s sort of near Silverlake, where the hipsters live. So we went for food after playing Halo 2 at my friend Paget Brewster’s house on one of those nights. Paget is a helluva actress and was an amazing host to a rowdy group of nerds.
Those game nights were crazy fun. People you’ve seen on TV would be drinking and killing each other in three different rooms. Then we’d head to the backyard for smoke and food breaks. People you like, like Paul F. Tompkins, would be there. He’s a pretty good gamer. I don’t know if he games anymore, but we were pretty serious about it back then. I was probably the worst player at Halo and Halo 2, a game I did a voice in.
After a while, I figured out,
I was of best use as a human shield. I would just run in and get killed. I would often be the first murdered, and I didn’t mind. I always played with goofy gamertags like “a dirty hobo” and then, later, “AIDSY Hobo” so it would say on the kill screen, “You just killed A Dirty Hobo.” We would all laugh then. I also played with the gamertags “Rapenstein” and “Rapeula.” Yes, I know, rape and AIDS aren’t funny. I am well aware that there is nothing funny about rape or AIDS. And yet those names were.
Anyway, I later landed on “Ruth Gordon” as my gamer tag. If you don’t know who Ruth Gordon is, then please stop reading and immediately watch every single movie she ever did. Amazing. Harold and Maude was the film that blew my wife away in our early dating years. I got a lot of points for sharing that movie’s greatness with her.
My pals Gerry Duggan and Sark were at the diner that night. Sark’s real name is Scott Robison, but he always played as Sark, which was a Tron reference and it just stuck. No one calls him Scott. He’s a thin, tall, white kid from Utah with a shaved head. Sark looked like a Mormon Marine. And he’s one of the coolest nerds I’ve ever met. Sark has been a big gamer his whole life and makes a living as a gamer now, doing YouTube videos. A total fucking nerd and one of the coolest dudes I know. Almost fifteen years later, and he still looks like that Mormon kid straight out of Utah.
So we’re sitting there eating grub late at night and we got on the subject of D&D. Dungeons and also Dragons. And we thought it would be great to get a game going. And that was it. We played a couple of weeks later. Sark immediately tracked down a bunch of second-edition advanced Dungeons & Dragons player manuals for us, and we got a group of people together pretty quickly.
Sark’s games were weird and super fun. It was Patton, Gerry, Sark, my old friends Ken Daly and Blaine Capatch, and my buddy Chris Martin. Not the dude from Coldplay—I would never play with him. My character was super fun to play, a monk named Jackie with high dexterity and strength. Jackie Chan if he were a murderous rogue who loved pickles.
We killed a bus. Sark called it a land whale, but it was an LA city bus. We had experienced a time rift that put us in modern Los Angeles. During that same game we showed up at the famous Beverly Center mall and were confused. It also happened to be some sort of holiday, so we killed a fat gnome in a red suit that was sitting on a throne and blessing children. Actually, we didn’t kill him; we levitated him with a child on his lap.
He missed a saving throw and dropped the kid to his death. When he landed, everyone in the mall killed him. Sark fucking killed Santa. Sark was such a great DM. Those nights were amazing and sold me on the fun and magic of D&D. In the beginning we played wherever we could. When we lost Chris, we were joined by my friend Sarah, who is the coolest—such a smart girl with great energy and a sense of humor enabling her to put up with us all.
Later it became a popular podcast called Nerd Poker. I named the show Nerd Poker with Brian Posehn and Friends because I feel like the main attraction to D&D for me is the social aspect—like poker, just way fucking nerdier. We did it for three-plus years on the Earwolf podcast network. I started to lose interest. The other shit made it not fun; booking the show and driving to it through traffic at six at night just wasn’t worth it.
So last year, after missing the game and my goofy friends, we rebooted the show. Brian Posehn’s Nerd Poker is an independent, more intimate version of the show with my pals Dan Telfer, Sarah Guzzardo, and Blaine Capatch, with guests like Tom Lennon and Joe Manganiello. We record the show at my dining room table. It’s a blast playing again, and we’re not going anywhere this time. And when I cash a check from money I made playing D&D, I cackle.
TWENTY-ONE
MEETING MY HEROES
I’ve heard the expression “Don’t meet your heroes” for a long time, but my luck with it has been mixed. Sure, some performers I’ve met have been assholes, but other times they have been incredibly cool. And a couple have even become my friends. The first famous people I met when I moved to LA were the Zappa kids. I had read The Real Frank Zappa Book a couple of years before. I was a casual fan of Frank’s music, but his writing made me a fan for life.
One of my takeaways from the book was what a cool family they were. I remember thinking how fun it would be to be friends with the Zappa kids. I thought Moon was super cute from her “Valley Girl” song with her dad and her MTV appearances. And Dweezil seemed like the coolest kid ever and was a shredder on guitar. So my head exploded when I wrote a sketch for Trashed that needed a famous shredder cameo and my producer, Leslie, said, “Would Dweezil Zappa work?” I said, “Fuck yeah!”
A week later he did the sketch with me. I played a poser Guitar Institute of Technology instructor who gets shown up by his student—Dweezil, of course. Through Leslie I met the whole family—Dweezil’s brother Ahmet; his younger sister Diva; their mom, Gayle; and of course Moon. Moon was even cuter in person; I had a crush before we met that intensified once I got to hang out with her and her cool siblings. That summer of ’94 I spent a ton of time at the Zappa house on Laurel Canyon. One afternoon I was over swimming and followed Dweezil into his dad’s studio to get something. I briefly met Frank. Quick and cordial. Meet a legend. A minute later I’m in the pool and laughing with his daughter. Surreal. I love LA. I loved it the minute I got here.
Meeting Scott Ian from Anthrax was also super random and yet made total sense. I was hanging on the roof of Messina Baker Management, where my manager, Dave Rath, worked. I was hanging out with a guy who worked for Dave, my buddy Sheck. We were smoking pot, and I mentioned that I was going to see Anthrax that evening at the House of Blues. Sheck said something like, “Do you know those guys?” And I said, “No, man, but it seems like we should be friends.” I then told Sheck the reasons I should be friends with Anthrax: next to Metallica, they had always been my favorite. Anthrax was crunchier and catchier.
Scott Ian had that insane guitar tone that created a sound. Charlie Benante was monster behind the drum kit and easily my favorite metal drummer. And I felt a bond to them, like we had something in common. Of all the thrash bands, they were the only ones who seemed to have a sense of humor, they wrote songs based on Stephen King stories, they wrote songs about comic book characters, they liked hip-hop, and they wore board shorts.
I was running out of things we had in common. I think Sheck just agreed, “Yeah, they seem cool.” Or “Word.” Sheck was from Jersey and also enjoyed hip-hop. That night I became friends with Anthrax. I went by myself, because none of my friends back then wanted to go to heavy-metal shows with me. That was before I hung out with Brendon Small and Steve Agee. Patton may reference Anthrax or Lamb of God in his act, but he was not gonna mosh it up in the pit.
I was standing at the bar before Anthrax went up, and a roadie-looking dude says, “Hey man, you’re Brian Posehn,” and I said, “Yep. Usually.” Because I want to be liked, but I’m still kind of an asshole. He said, “Do you know the guys in Anthrax?” This was the second time that day someone asked me that, so I just said, “Nope.” He said, “Do you want to meet them?” I said, “Uh, yeah.” He said, “C’mon. I’m a roadie. I’ll take you back there.”
Back there was Anthrax’s dressing room. They were all getting ready. To be my friends. No, they were looking at the set list, warming up, stretching and hanging out, with another band that happened to be there, fucking Slayer. I was overwhelmed. It was a blur as I met my heroes; I thought I was gonna destroy my pants and pass out. Scott and Charlie knew Mr. Show and some other shit I had done. I was completely fucking blown away, which helped ease my nervousness and made it so I might not embarrass myself in front of one half of the big four total metal legends. They were about to go on, so I headed out to the floor. The roadie, Bill, gave me a pass so I could come back after the show. I did. We hung out for a while; it was a total blast.
I was living the dream, literally. I had never read The Secret, but here, just like meeting Frank and the Zappa kids, I had put something into the universe, and it happened.
Because at the end of the night I exchanged phone numbers with Scott. And we have been friends ever since. Scott and I have had an amazing fifteen-plus years of friendship—recording songs, traveling, friendship. Before Scott I did not have a great track record with meeting hard-rock musicians.
Besides the James Hetfield embarrassment, I had bad experiences with the bands Night Ranger and W.A.S.P. Mike Baden and I were backstage in Sacramento at a Night Ranger, Y&T show, and we walked by Night Ranger. When we said hi, they blew us off. Mike yelled to the guitar player, Jeff Watson, “Fuck you, Jeff! We’re here to see Y&T anyway.” Later that same year I’m at W.A.S.P. and meet the guitar player, Chris Holmes. I said, “Hey, man, can I get your autograph?” He said, “Grow some tits.” Like, that was the only thing stopping me from being a hot lady—a set of tits. It never made sense to me and wound up in my act.
Knowing Scott has been incredible for the sheer amount of metal gods I’ve met through him. I’ve been introduced to Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, the Slayer guys, most of Pantera, and even Ronnie James Dio. I wrote a sketch for the Revolver magazine Golden Gods Metal Awards, and Ronnie was the star. We shot the sketch in my library using my actual vinyl. Ronnie James Dio looked at my record collection, and we talked in my kitchen.
I didn’t want to wash my kitchen after that. I have a picture of Ronnie in my backyard, enjoying the sun, and it’s one of the definite highlights of my metal nerdy life. We were standing in the driveway with Scott, Ronnie, and Vinnie Paul from Pantera, and Vinnie said, “Hey Ronnie, doesn’t Rudy Sarzo live around here?” Ronnie thought and said, “Yes, I think he does.” Mundane exchange, and yet I will never ever forget it. My wife, Melanie, once pulled on Kerry King’s beard. Twice. He’s the guy who looks like a Satanic wrestler and plays guitar for Slayer. Melanie can get away with anything. I wish I were born cute.
