Dustin Diamond

by Timothy Niedermann

  ZACK AND KELLY COZY UP TO THE BOSS

  I’ve heard lots of Hollywood hearsay in my day, but I can only vouch for what I saw with my own two eyes and heard with my own two ears. Here is one of the most fucked up things I saw behind the scenes of SBTB. Draw your own conclusions because I still don’t know what to make of it.

  The Golden Child started getting called to St. Peter’s office for long meetings. Extremely long. He wasn’t in any trouble, there was no Zack Morris spin-off in the works; he just slipped into the office and closed the door behind him. Which was weird in and of itself, because typically Peter kept his office door open for most meetings. But then again, most meetings with the cast only lasted several minutes. So what were these talks? What was going on?

  I had heard stories about St. Peter, rumors beyond the dope and party days. Nothing I could verify of course. All I know is what I saw. I used to hang upstairs around the NBC offices at Stage 9 (where Good Morning, Miss Bliss started and where the original SBTB ended) because I liked to check out all the hot chicks who were cast as extras, the hot extras who were getting bumped up a notch to speaking parts, and, of course, the hot interns. This was during the time when The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was taping next door on Stage 11. We shared wardrobe rooms side-by-side with their show, and I used to play chess backstage with Will Smith, who was a strong player.

  I was upstairs one day when the Golden Child had been in St. Peter’s office, door closed, for like an hour and a half.

  Tiffani also began to be summoned upstairs for long, closed-door meetings with St. Peter. I mean, a couple of hours each time. Then, both Mark-Paul and Tiffani (!) were called, together, into St. Peter’s inner sanctuary for another mystery marathon behind closed doors.

  Just for perspective, I remember when St. Peter called me up to his office for a meeting. At first I was like, “Uh oh, what’d I do to fuck up this time?” It really was like being called to the principal’s office, but way worse than Mr. Belding ever gave it to Screech. I entered with great trepidation as St. Peter told me to take a seat. I was scolded for some minor transgression on the Peter Engel morality meter, but St. Peter did leave his office door open the whole time.

  Those long, closed-door meetings were all happening in 1992, prior to gearing up for our first movie, SBTB: Hawaiian Style. But before the movie was scheduled to begin filming on location in Hawaii for three months, the network was setting up an overseas trip for two cast members to do a press junket in Paris. Our promotional events had evolved over the years from mall tours and amusement parks to overseas trips as the popularity of the show spread in syndication around the world. The producers and network suits would decide which characters they were sending based on the exposure of the trip. Like I said, I got up to seven thousand pieces of fan mail per week, edging out all the other cast members by a small margin, but still consistently the most.

  So, based on fan popularity, Mark-Paul and I were selected to go on the Paris trip together. They were sending the comedy team of Zack and his trusty sidekick, Screech. I was stoked. I already had my bags packed when, lo and behold, Princess Tiffani pitched a bitch. She went up to St. Peter’s office for another hours-long, closed-door meeting, and when she re-emerged it was suddenly her and Mark-Paul now making the trip to gay Paree.

  You bitch!

  I mean, I really wanted to go to Paris, but not bad enough to find out what happened on the other side of St. Peter’s closed office door. So Mark-Paul and Tiffani jetted off to the City of Light for what was supposed to be a week abroad promoting SBTB. As it turned out, the lovebirds were enjoying themselves so much they wound up convincing St. Peter and NBC to keep putting them up in Paris for a couple of months. That money didn’t just materialize from thin air; it needed to be pulled from the budgets of other projects.

  So when Tiffani and the Golden Child deplaned in California from their European holiday and it was time to go to Hawaii to shoot the movie, suddenly our three months on location had become three days. There was no money left in the budget for us to film there. All we did while we were in Hawaii was wander around through the scenery shooting B-roll footage with no dialogue. “Okay, you guys, act like you’re playing on the beach …” “Okay, now walk along that footpath and gaze out over the water …” “Okay, stand there for a minute while we get this instantly recognizable Hawaiian landmark squarely in the frame …” “And no talking! We have to dub all this shit later.” “Okay, that’s a wrap. Let’s get back to L.A.” We ended up filming the movie on the beach in Santa Monica, just down the freeway from Hollywood. SBTB: Santa Monica Style?

  Tiffani liked to have her fun. Back in the day, guys would stop me on the street and say, “Tell me man, what’s Tiffani really like. Can I have her number?” I’d say, “Dude, trust me, you don’t want to go near that.” Frankly, I just didn’t see what the big fuss was about, but maybe that’s because I worked so closely with her. I saw what she was like on a daily basis, and my final verdict was, “Meh.” Besides, you show me the hottest girl in the world, and I’ll show you a guy tired of banging her. Hell, Tommy Lee got sick of nailing Pamela Anderson. It gets old. It’s just nature. Out in the forest, I suppose there must be owls sick of banging smokin’ hot owls, and so forth.

  THE SNIPER

  I’m allergic to cats, thus making me not much of a cat guy. But one summer afternoon when I was around nineteen, I was chilling in my backyard by the pool when a cat came around the corner. Not being a cat person has never precluded me from being friendly to all animals, so I said, “Here, kitty kitty …” The cat yowled and fell over. I thought, “Holy shit, this strange cat just wandered onto my property and died right in front of me.” It wasn’t a healthy looking cat, either—scraggly and emaciated with a very labored gait. Turns out it wasn’t quite dead yet, so I decided to feed it. I returned from the kitchen with some tuna and milk and encouraged it to eat. The cat seemed pleased by the attention and the meal, and I left it to its own devices while I puttered around inside the house. When I checked on the cat again it was gone. I searched around and finally located it sitting atop the fence separating my yard from the neighbor’s. It yowled for some more food and I obliged. And just like that, I owned a fucking cat.

  After a few weeks of this animal eating everything I put in front of it right down to—and perhaps beneath—the enamel of the crockery, it started getting rather fat and lethargic. I thought, regardless of its underfed condition when I discovered it, this cat is getting very fat, very, very quickly.

  I found out why one day when I came outside to discover it in one of our backyard flowerbeds, in mid labor. The cat had made a little nest for itself and given birth to eight kittens. And I was their dad. The cat fed her kittens, while I provided warmth and shelter and supplemented food and drink for those first weeks. Sadly, the smallest kitten didn’t make it.

  So now I had eight cats—a mom and her seven kittens. I gave them all names and collars, had them spayed and neutered, that is, all but one. Even though I was allergic, I could still handle them so long as I kept my hands away from my face and washed incessantly after each time I held them. Not a big deal, since I was always right next to our swimming pool. There was one kitten from the litter that refused to come near me. I named him Puss (like Puss in Boots). He wouldn’t let me approach him, either. Every time I’d extend my hand to pet him and say, “Hey Puss,” I’d get a bop-bop-bop with his razor claws, and he’d bail. Puss was a typical cat, though: he’d give me the ol’ figure eight around the legs when I brought his food out, but once he’d been satisfied I couldn’t even find him. So, because he was such an elusive dickhead, Puss was the only cat I didn’t get fixed. There was a big problem with that decision.

  The first problem was that Puss was female. That shows what I know about feline anatomy. The second problem was that when I couldn’t find Puss one day, I discovered she had crawled through a space leading into the garage and delivered her own litter of three kittens. Now I had eleven goddamn cats. Me, who
’s allergic to cats and could take or leave the entire species as a whole. I was now the grand patriarch of three fucking generations of the same cat dynasty, living (and breeding) in every crevice of my backyard life in Orange County.

  I also noted that the alpha male of the first litter—Puss’s brother—was looking rather scrawny, and his face was scratched up like he had been scrapping with another animal. Turns out what was happening was that some tomcat from somewhere else in the neighborhood was terrorizing my cats and stealing their food. I decided to catch this tomcat in action and scare it off with my pump BB gun. I figured a few pumps should be just enough to give it a good pop in the ass and discourage it from ever coming around my yard again. I didn’t want to kill the cat, or even break its skin, I just wanted to scare the shit out of it. So, for a test, I had my buddy Mark stand at the proper range, gave the rifle a few pumps, and shot him. The projectile appeared to hurt Mark more than he had anticipated but, upon review, had not penetrated his skin. My ballistic test a success, it was time to lay in wait for the tomcat. Like any good sniper, I climbed up to the roof of my garage and waited.

  One thing I forgot to mention was that my neighbors were a pair of miserable old cranks. They were the neighbors who shared that fence separating our backyards—the one I had originally returned to find that first cat perched upon, she who was now the matriarch of a multi-generational brood under my care and protection. This fence was important also because it was over this fence that my friend, Mark, had recently whipped a pizza crust into the old farts’ yard while they were gardening and pruning their lemon tree. I was helpless to stop him, being fully lounging in the pool at the time. Well, this pizza-crust incident exploded into quite the suburban shit storm. Moments after the pizza-crust sullied their immaculate landscape, the old man climbed his ladder and stared daggers over the fence. This moment of shared recognition marked my very first interaction with my neighbors. The old man then zinged a lemon into my head as I bobbed on my inflatable pool chair. Such injustice! I had nothing to do with the pizza crust projectile. I had been wrongly assaulted for an act I didn’t even perpetrate!

  “What the fuck?!”

  I clambered out of the pool and hoisted myself up so I could peer over the fence.

  “You can’t throw lemons at people.”

  “Fuck you. You can’t throw pizza crust.”

  “First of all, that’s not my pizza crust. It’s his. For what he did, I apologize. But there’s a big difference between a discourteous guest tossing food in a neighbor’s yard and that same neighbor assaulting a person with fruit.”

  “You’re just a troublemaker, that’s all.”

  Which was baseless. I was always very respectful of my neighbors. In fact, I was the perfect goddamn neighbor. Suddenly, the old lady hurdled a rose bush, ran to the fence, and started brandishing her garden shears in my face hollering, “I’m warning you, buster!” The two of them started swearing at me like sailors with Tourette’s syndrome. It was like an unexpurgated DVD of Geriatric Def Comedy Jam.

  The pizza-crust incident had seriously escalated. I was confused by this because I felt the advantage in the situation clearly rested with me. Though up to that point I had been respectful of my neighbor’s property and privacy, I was still a devious youngster with enormous resources and a fertile mind to plan and execute countless acts of mischief in retaliation. If I felt like it, I could rain all sorts of shit down upon their house. Were they serious?

  Now where was I? Oh, yes. So there I was, straddling the peak of my garage roof, my eye leveled on the bead of my BB sniper rifle. I was determined to teach a life lesson to the alley cat that was harassing my extended feline family. The operation was a classic bait-and-shoot. I had laid food out for the perpetrator to waltz right into my trap. I observed patiently as my own cats circled the food then scurried away, terrified that the tom might show his menacing whiskers at any moment. Sure enough, a giant tomcat crested the fence. This fucker was mean. He was the Mickey Rourke of tomcats. The big cat pounced into my yard and proceeded to clean house of all my frightened, furry little wards. I understand the laws of nature, but I have a deep sense of quid pro quo. In the animal kingdom of my cul-de-sac the moment had arrived for me to establish dominance. POP! My golden BB flew fast and true. I gave that Tom the shock of his life. He scurried back over the fence like greased lightening, and I descended the roof feeling pretty victorious about the whole affair. Mission accomplished.

  Later that day, I found myself inside the house playing video games when Dad entered. He said, “Dustin, are you playing a joke on me?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The police department just phoned to say they have the house surrounded, and we’re instructed to exit through the front door with our hands up.”

  We looked out the windows and didn’t see anything suspicious. We figured it had to be bullshit. Somebody was playing a prank.

  How wrong we were.

  The phone rang again, Dad answered. He was informed in no uncertain terms that if we both did not exit the house immediately and surrender ourselves they would take the dwelling by force. Holy shit.

  We exited through the front door. Somewhere, over a loud speaker, we heard, “Approach my voice. Turn around with your hands up.” I was freaking out. I’d never had any trouble with the law. The only thing flashing though my head was what a clusterfuck this was going to be when I had to explain it to NBC, or worse, if someone had tipped off the local news. As we walked down the sidewalk, bodies started pouring out from behind buildings, trees, vehicles—everywhere. There were city and county cops, a SWAT team, black and white cars converging on the area. All our neighbors came out on their front lawns wondering what the fuck was going on while the cops established a perimeter. It was like we were on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list. The cops handcuffed both of us while they explained they were responding to a report of a man on a roof with a gun. They asked us what weapons we owned before they entered and searched our house. Local law enforcement had diverted a lot of manpower to this call. This was high drama for Orange County.

  Admittedly, it was one of the stupidest things I’d ever done. My plan to thwart the marauding tomcat was far from foolproof. I explained (sort of) to the cops what I was doing on the roof earlier in the day and that the weapon in question was only a BB rifle. I was informed that, regardless, it was illegal to fire any weapon within the city limits. Good thing they didn’t know how often I’d fired off the howitzer in my pants at young extras.

  Of course, it was that old bat next door and her lemon-hurling husband that called me in. They had seen me play in the yard with my BB guns for months—setting up targets, shooting Mark at point blank range. They knew when they called the police that I wasn’t “a man with a gun on a roof.” They did it to fuck me. And it all traced back to that pizza crust.

  Gratefully, the cops ended up letting me off with a warning. I was incredibly relieved because, at the time, I was old enough to get in some seriously deep shit. There was no press coverage, but I’m sure the media reaction would have been in measured proportion to the circumstances. The reporters’ sense of journalistic integrity would surely have acted as a firewall against any hyperbolic sensationalism. Besides, I doubt anyone would have made a big deal out of learning Screech had been arrested by the SWAT team for perching on a roof with a high-powered sniper rifle.

  INNOCENT BYSTANDER NUMBER ONE: There he is, up in the bell tower! He’s snapped!

  INNOCENT BYSTANDER NUMBER TWO: Wait, listen …

  Screech is screaming something! He says he’s sick and tired of having to deliver corny dialogue.

  DUSTIN DIAMOND: (from bell tower/obscured) I am NOT gay with Mr. Belding!

  MAKING CHICKS “SCREECH!”

  Is it bragging to say I’ve banged over two thousand chicks in my life? Maybe it is, but it’s a fact. There were days when I had sex three times with three different, lucky ladies. In the SBTB studio alone, I would bang girls in my dressing room or in
the prop warehouse and spend the night in my dressing room at NBC. I had a great pickup line. I’d meet a girl out at some club on Sunset and tell her I had an early call the next morning on the set of my hit television show. I’d drive her to the studio, pull right onto the lot, through the security gate—“Good evening, Mr. Diamond”—park right beside Will Smith’s space and give her a tour of the set (which was the least glamorous part of the evening because we had to squeeze between the chained stage doors.) I banged girls right on the set. Oh yeah, that’s right—on the SBTB set. In fact, there wasn’t a bed in any of the bedroom sets from 1992 to the end of the series upon which I failed to complete the deed, except perhaps the top mattress in Screech’s bunk-bed set. Can’t recall.

  In the prop warehouse and set graveyard you could lead a girl through the fuselage of a 747, the drawing room of a murder mystery mansion, past a hot tub, and over the moon. Not a bad first date. It was the land of make-believe. We’d just choose our dark corner, duck in, and have at each other.

  Obviously, there was a lot you didn’t see on camera that was nevertheless an integral part of the sets and a familiar part of our daily lives while working on SBTB. For instance, backstage of The Max’s set, to the left of the door, stuck to the wall, was the world’s largest, gooiest, most grotesque mound of chewing gum. From the very first episode, someone squished his or her gum on that wall beside the door. Before long it had expanded into an amorphous, sticky rainbow of discarded mastication that just kept growing and growing over the life of the show. At the end, it looked like a seventy-five-pound tumor. It had toothpicks, paperclips, and all sorts of sharp implements and office supplies jammed into it, jutting out willy-nilly like some retarded hedgehog. Surrounding the gum hump was an array of hand-drawn pictures, scribbled notes, jokes, and insults.