Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  These four easy steps will help you navigate this penis pavilion. First, accept the fact that you are attending a glory hole convention and not your grandma’s garden party. Second, realize that behind every schwantz is an insecure person trying to stand out in a congregation of willies. Third, understand that coexistence with these knobs is not a defeat and it doesn’t mean you have to engage with them. Just exercise a bit of tolerance. Think of them as shitty art on the wall of a fleabag motel that rents by the hour. And lastly, don’t be afraid to grow a dick yourself because at some point you’re going to find out that quite a few of those todgers coming out of the walls belong to women. If you take my advice, pretty soon you’ll just stop being distracted by the ocean of wang and move about your business, enjoying everything else the convention has to offer. What you will eventually figure out is that this glory hole convention known as “the showbiz” is nothing but a meaningless display of a postmodern existential crisis, otherwise known as Disneyland for dicks. Once you get past the fact that you’re getting manipulated for money, it’s an awesome time!

  “I have this thing where like, when I like, stub my toe or something, the first thing that comes to mind is … COCK! I don’t know what it means.”

  —Olivia Wilde

  But I digress. Now, back to my story.

  On the record label job front, I’d give myself an A+ for effort, but an F for execution. It just wasn’t happening. I was starting to feel as useless as a shirt on Matthew McConaughey. But it just so happened that I had made a friend who lived at a Melrose Place–looking apartment complex in West LA who kept inviting me to come hang out and meet some of her friends in the biz. I was a bit reticent because, for the uninitiated, usually those types of apartment complexes are the perfect front for “incall” escorts. Not that I have a problem with that, but I wasn’t looking for a career giving HJs on the DL. So I was a bit concerned about what “biz” she was trying to hook me up in. However, I set my concerns aside and swung by and discovered that it was legit. It was teeming with young and hungry actors, writers, producers, musicians, and hustlers, so I started hanging out there a lot and meeting all kinds of cool people. It was networking without actually networking. One afternoon, while I was lying out at the pool, I met a girl who said she worked for Hans Zimmer. “You want to work around music, right?” she asked. “We need a receptionist.”

  Yeah, I did, but I had no clue who Hans Zimmer was. I pretended I did and made a mental note to look him up later on this fabulous new Web site called Google. Turns out, he was and is one of the most prolific Academy Award–winning film composers in Hollywood history. Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Thelma & Louise, The Lion King, Gladiator, The Simpsons Movie, The Dark Knight Trilogy, 12 Years a Slave, Man of Steel, Interstellar … the list is endless and epic. I had very little knowledge about what music in film was but got schooled the second I walked through his front door. The heavens opened up and every hair on my body got a stiffy. Imagine this huge office-building compound, where every room has the most heavenly, ethereal music wafting out of the doors. Walking down the hallways, it was like a creative mega-hive filled with composers, scoring all of the biggest movies you’ve ever heard of. After the interview, which I didn’t screw up thanks to my Google search, they asked me if I wanted the job. I believe my answer was, “Fuck yes! I want the job.”

  It was a pivotal moment in my life working for Hans. My understanding of the music world was blown wide open. Turns out, composers are rock stars as well. I was so happy and energized being around all of these creative people 24/7. I got a promotion pretty quickly, running a department that had three music editors. My job was to keep everybody in line, making sure they showed up to their temp scores and dubbing sessions and filling out their cue sheets, a log of all the music used in the movies. This was a whole new world for me, and I was absorbing all of it. I made a lot of lifelong friends there who I’m still in touch with today and who have played crucial roles in this crazy voyage I’ve been on. Hans was an amazing and inspirational person to work for, and I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor in my life. His kindness and generosity toward me all these years has only been eclipsed by his grace. From buying me my first television set to being the first call I receive every time I get a new gig or leave one, he set the bar super high on what being a man of great character is, and I’m incredibly proud to call him my friend.

  I was making a decent salary and able to rent my first little studio apartment in Studio City. It had a Murphy bed coming out of the wall, and it was next to a reservoir where police had recently found a human head. It was both functional and fucked up. I was home. After bumming rides for far too long, I decided it was time to buy a car. Back in Buffalo, I’d always gotten two-hundred-buck hand-me-downs from my siblings, like a green Chevy Impala and a little black Fiero I christened “the Batmobile.” A clunker wasn’t going to cut it here. In Hollywood, it’s all about the car you drive. You could be living in a cardboard box under the 101 freeway, but you better have some sweet wheels to pull up to the valet you can’t afford.

  I noticed that all the cool kids drove vintage muscle cars. So one day, when I spotted a candy-apple-red 1964 ½ Mustang for sale in a parking lot off the 405, I just knew it had to be mine. So what if it was in a go-kart racing lot and had a bumper sticker on it that read: IS YOUR DADDY IN JAIL? ’CAUSE IF I WAS YOUR DADDY, I’D BE IN JAIL? She and I were meant to be together. Like a nine-year-old anxiously coveting her first My Little Pony, I took it for a test drive but never bothered looking under the hood. Which is too bad because if I had, I would have discovered that the car was more of a Cleveland steamer than a Ford Mustang. And despite the fact that it was missing spark plugs, I happily plunked down fifteen hundred dollars and drove off the lot believing I had legit street cred.

  On the ride home on the 405, in that spot between Santa Monica and the Valley, my beautiful lemon barely made it up the hill. I had to putter along in the right lane like a grandma, while fully functioning automobiles whizzed by, honking and waving the finger out the window at me. Flash forward a year: I’d hemorrhaged about seven thousand dollars trying to keep it running, then sold it for a thousand. I lost my ass on that car. Which reminds me of a great joke I saw on Instagram: “How did the hipster burn his tongue? He sipped his coffee before it was cool.” I was in no position, in my current financial situation, to be driving a cool kids cars. After that fiasco, I decided to drive a very sensible black Nissan Sentra that I bought on the cheap as it came with a unique theft-deterrent system I affectionately called “the Skunkmaster 2000.” The Sentra was on the top ten list of most stolen cars, but anyone who would try to steal my baby would be engulfed in the soul-hugging stench of cat piss and Febreze: a noxious cocktail that did not buy me any friends in the valet-parking community.

  So I had a few setbacks, but I was loving my new life and hoped my brother, Sean, might follow me out to the West Coast. My brother has always been a dreamer, with all these amazing ideas that I thought he would have a better chance of bringing to life out here in LA. So I lured him out for a visit, and even though we rocked out together at a Pantera/Black Sabbath show, I could tell that LA just wasn’t for him. He was a country mouse at heart and I was becoming a full-on city mouse. I realize now that Sean was exactly where he needed to be because less than a year later he met the love of his life, Jill, and married her in a fairy-tale wedding. She wrapped her arms around the fireball that is my brother with love and devotion; gave him a sense of purpose and turned his world right-side up. I don’t see my brother as much I’d like to and I really miss getting into trouble with him, but each time I see their beautiful daughter (my niece), Piper, I stop wondering about what could’ve been and feel great about what is. Me, on the other hand, I was 2,534.6 miles away from Buffalo in every way: body, mind, and soul, and it was, exactly, where I needed to be.

  After working for Hans for a while, I started to get the itch. I wasn’t a composer, so there was only so far I could advance
at his company. I got wind that another legendary composer, W. G. Snuffy Walden, was looking for someone to manage his shop, and something inside told me I needed to be there. So off I went. Little did I know how that decision would play a huge role in crafting the rest of my life. Snuffy was another incredible soul and mentor. He was and is arguably one the best composers on TV as well as one of the kindest and most caring people I’ve ever met. He is a recovering alcoholic and has spent more time than you could imagine sponsoring and helping those in recovery. We bonded pretty quickly, and I learned so much from him about compassion and humanity. Those lessons would prove themselves to be priceless in the future as I dealt with friends who had been crippled by drugs and alcohol. And, as a bonus, he introduced me to his friend “Uncle Steve,” aka the legendary Steve Perry from Journey. Woohoo!

  It was while I was at Snuffy’s that I became friends with an extremely talented musician and all-around cool cat named Troy Hardy. He was the son of a luthier, who had moved to LA from the Midwest with his wife, Melissa, with a dream of working in the music industry. He was from western Michigan, I was from western New York, and our relationship was basically two people giving each other shit all day. I sarcastically called him “Boy” to make him feel like less of a man and to put a pickle in his ass, and he called me “Girl” to shove that same pickle right back. We were the same kind of idiot. Brothers from another mother. Needless to say, we truly enjoyed working together, and it was he who introduced me to the man who would completely change my life.

  Troy knew I was growing tired of doing office work when I really wanted to be out there doing what I loved, which was promoting bands. So one day, out of the blue, he came to me with an interesting opportunity. He told me his bandmate and lead singer in their group, The Gingerpigs, was looking to hire someone at his Web start-up called Netgroupie, which was going to be a new music marketing platform. Once I got past the notion that it sounded like a dating site for band sluts, I thought, what the hell, it could be cool. It was the dawn of the digital Wild West, and a lot of interesting things were happening. I was intrigued. The only problem was ideas are like toilets; everyone has them but most of them are full of shit. I told Troy I’d check out one of their live gigs and meet him. I figured the worst that could happen was I’d spend an evening being verbally molested by another showbiz schmuck wafting in the smell of his own dook.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  5

  IT’S ALL ABOUT THE COCK!

  When in doubt, go for the dick joke.

  —Robin Williams

  Kourosh.

  What can I say about the man who was destined to become my best friend and business partner? He’s always been a bit mysterious and somewhat enigmatic. When I first met him, he had a ponytail and didn’t talk a lot. He‘s always believed that there is great strength in silence (very Yoda of him). He has these really intense eyes that are both intimidating and yet very kind. There is a strange duality about him. He is creative at heart and business in mind. He is the juxtaposition of mutually independent disciplines in an industry that is typically all crazy or all business. On top of that, he wasn’t preoccupied with how big his dick was and how badly he wanted to show it to me. Quite the surprise he was (there’s that Yoda thing, again).

  Without a doubt, meeting Kourosh Taj was my butterfly effect moment. The one single occurrence that changed the course of my life forever. When I showed up that night, at some shitty bar in Santa Monica, I didn’t really have any major expectations. Little did I know that this enigmatic Persian guy already had big plans for me, simply based on Troy telling him, “Carrie’s a good hang. You should talk to her.” Good ol’ Troy, always great with the heavy-handed and layered introductions. It was his gift!

  Kourosh and I instantly hit it off. Even though he had a debonair British accent and this way about him, he was actually quite humble and a little shy, which was quite endearing. But when he started talking about his Web project, he came alive with a massive jolt of charisma. He had such vision and boldness that it almost bordered on arrogance. But it was incredibly captivating. I’ve always had a thing for confidence. Besides, once we bonded over our mutual love of Rocky, Rambo, and all things Stallone, it was, in my mind, a fait accompli. I mean we spoke for twenty minutes about the impact Sly’s trucker-arm-wrestling movie Over the Top had on our lives when we were kids and why his movie Oscar is an underappreciated gem. It quickly became obvious that we shared the same fucked-up sense of humor. So after chatting a bit, I told him I’d love to talk further about a job at his company.

  A week later, we sat down at this awesomely crappy little diner in the Valley, and Kourosh passionately painted me an even bigger picture of what he had planned. At the time, they had raised an initial round of funding from an angel investor, had a staff of about five people, and were an aggregator of music content from a hundred producer/affiliates and another fifty live music venues nationwide. They were building an independent music marketing network, which was music to my ears. But Kourosh had bigger plans. He wanted to create his own channel. He had big ideas and even bigger balls. I have to admit I respect a big ego, but only if you can back it up. There are so many douchebags in Hollywood who talk a big game but don’t do jack. Sometimes, this town feels like a never-ending World Series of Talk where a verbal jerkoff is the equivalent of a grand slam home run! For some reason, I instinctively knew Kourosh was not full of shit. At that point, I wasn’t exactly sure why he wanted me so badly to be a part of this grand scheme, but I could tell he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Like my dad, Kourosh was an entrepreneur, dreamer, thinker, and doer. No risk, no reward was in my blood. I told him I was in.

  A lot of people think they know exactly what they want. They become so adamant that it can only be one way that they end up missing out on all of the other amazing things that can happen. In my case, I went where the Santa Ana winds took me as long as it was in the neighborhood of what I loved. It wasn’t like one day I wanted to work at a record label and the next day I decided to be a professional snake milker. Although that would be fun, too. What Kourosh was doing with Netgroupie was music related and it was building something from the ground up. He was a pioneer in a new frontier. Laying down creative roots and building a professional family, which were things that mattered to me. Whether it failed or succeeded, at least it would be mine, ours.

  Eventually, Kourosh revealed his hand at our next meeting. It turns out he knew from the beginning that he wanted me to be on camera. He started telling me about his exhaustive search for a lead anchor and a face for the network. And how everyone he had met with had had a lot of media training and/or received a degree in broadcast journalism but that none of them felt right. He wanted someone spontaneous and unlike the robotic mannequins who speak with the same cadence that we’re used to seeing on entertainment newsmagazine shows. He was determined to find someone not classically trained in journalism. Someone who wouldn’t know what the rules were so they would be free to break them and just have fun having raw, real conversations with the talent. Someone who could jump right in and engage people during interviews. He was looking for charisma and told me he was convinced that since I had disarmed him in our meetings, I could disarm anyone.

  Here I was, thinking we were joining forces so we could build this amazing company together. I had no clue that he had an ulterior motive. He may have been right, but it was completely overwhelming and not at all what I was even remotely interested in. It wasn’t what I’d signed up for, and I didn’t want to do it. I said “No” on the spot. Then the chase to get me to change my mind began.

  I saw Kourosh as a visionary, but I thought he was delusional about me being the face of the network. I was no Mary Hart, and I had zilch for experience. He envisioned me on camera. I saw myself marketing, promoting, and working behind the scenes. He was insistent. “Come and do the interviews for me,” he’d plead. I must have said no a hundred times! I simply had no interest in being in the s
potlight. So then, in his infinite wisdom or a brilliant display of cajolery, he backed down and offered me a position behind the scenes in affiliate relations.

  My first day working at Netgroupie was kind of a disaster. My very first assignment was to continue building relationships with our affiliates so they’d feel comfortable sending us their content. As we developed this national marketing network, we were basically working with some of the best local producers and live venues across the country in an effort to aggregate their original video content in all different genres—hip-hop, country, pop, punk, everything. It all felt oddly familiar. I was networking with and soliciting people, which was the exact thing I’d sucked at when I’d interned at the record labels. “Um, hi, do you want to send us stuff? No? Okay, thanks. Bye!” These kinds of calls are uncomfortable at best, and I was so nervous about doing it. But I had my own office and I was getting paid, so I had no choice but to dive right in. Ultimately, I discovered that our affiliates were really sweet people who were excited to be working with us. There really was no hard sell, just fun conversations.

  Already in place at Netgroupie was a small but interesting cast of characters. A couple of standouts were their chairman of the board of directors, Al Cafaro, a music industry icon and former CEO of A&M Records. Kourosh thinks the world of Al and was incredibly honored when he agreed to join the company. He would always tell me that Al was the first person to stand up and be counted and provide legitimacy to his idea. Without him, we would never have gotten off the ground. I found Al to be smart and incredibly charming. He has always been supportive and kind to me, even to this day.