Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  Over the next few years other celebs started going public with their traumatizing interactions, and I felt part of a not-so-special club who’d been bullied by Bruce and survived. By far my favorite confessional was Kevin Smith’s, who directed him in Cop Out. He described the experience as “soul crushing” and Bruce as “the unhappiest, most bitter, and meanest emo-bitch I’ve ever met at any job I’ve held down. And mind you, I’ve worked at Domino’s Pizza.” If you haven’t seen Kevin’s twenty-to-thirty-minute play-by-play decimation of Bruce Willis during one of his TV specials, you’re missing out. A poetic, passionate, and detailed colonic delivered with the force of a fire hose. A master class on the art of celebrity master-cleanse. Even Sylvester Stallone, one of the genuinely nicest A-listers I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know, called out Bruce for being “lazy” and “greedy” on Twitter, kicked him off The Expendables 3, and replaced him with Harrison Ford. Bruce was even made fun of on Dancing with the Stars, the most saccharine show there is, for being a cranky sourpuss while watching his daughter Rumer perform. The dancers imitated the scowl on his face on camera.

  People who are assholes are one thing. It’s inexcusable, and to me, there’s nothing funny about it. But the people who take themselves so seriously and in a manner that is so over the top that it borders on insanity, are tragically hilarious. I’m talking to you, Eddie Murphy. There’s not a single laugh today that doesn’t somehow originate from one of your jokes or bits from back in the day, and yet, I haven’t seen you break a smile in over twenty years. If you can have the life and career that you’ve had and end up looking as miserable as you do, then what fucking hope is there for the rest of us? What the hell happened? Please say alien abduction. It has to be alien abduction. Just fucking say it! I need to hear it, Eddie!

  I know! I digress.

  So, somehow, after winning the social lottery of life and being given the gift of worldwide fame and untold riches, my man Bruce, in his infinite wisdom, decided to dedicate his life to becoming that guy at the gym who has his spray tan set to Snooki, wears half-shirts, and is in a constant state of flex? The kind of guy who probably looks at his sphincter with a hand mirror every day just to make sure it’s not getting flabby. Good on ya, mate!

  Alas, I will never see that scowl again in this lifetime (unless Kourosh and I finish our documentary Searching for Bruce Willis’s Sense of Humor and enter it at Sundance). I refuse to interview Bruce anymore. I don’t want to, I don’t have to, and I don’t need to. When Live Free or Die Hard came out, I interviewed his costar Justin Long and simply added in snippets from a stock interview with Bruce provided by the studio. Anyway, it all worked out perfectly for us on that movie thanks to the ever reliable and always fucking hilarious Justin Long:

  Justin: He does say “Yippee-ki-yay motherfucker” in the movie. He does say it, and it’s the weirdest situation. It’s actually while he’s inside me.

  Bruce: All the stunts are done manually.

  Justin: I can’t believe Fox went there with that. I think after the success of Brokeback Mountain it’s going to be a little bit easier for people to be able to handle this kind of subject matter.

  Then we showed a montage of slow-mo clips of Justin and Bruce staring into each other’s eyes and touching each other, to the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack.

  Me: Was he slapping your ass while it was going down?

  Justin: That’s really something that … I’m not sure what cut they left in. If it was the one where I had the ball gag in and he was slapping me …

  Bruce: Hard core …

  Justin: Or if it was the one that he just had the riding crop and he was wearing the ball gag. We did a couple different … for the censors, you know, we did a couple different variations. So I’m not sure what they’re going to leave in.

  Bruce: We did it. I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.

  Me: Now when a cop comes knocking at your door, and he doesn’t have a badge on …

  Justin: A vag on?

  Me: A BADGE. Are there things you shouldn’t say to him? That you might get arrested for?

  Justin: Like, “Fuck you, bald prick”?

  Exactly!

  I owe you one, Justin!

  We all have our Bruce Willises to overcome. I know I learned a lot from mine. It cost me a great deal of heartache, and I wish I knew then what I know now, but I guess I needed to slay this dragon and learn to trust myself. So my advice to all you future Don Quixotes is to go forth and let your heroes fall because those windmills ain’t gonna slay themselves. Endure the pain and persevere, but don’t spend too much energy worrying about the lobotomized fuckwits of your world. When it’s all said and done, they’re not worth it. It’s like giving a snowman a blowjob. All that’s waiting for you on the other end is a brain freeze!

  16

  GEEKGASMS AND THE INFINITE PRECLAPULATION

  Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  Anyone under the impression that their religious friends aren’t enjoying their lives as much as you are, I urge you to acquaint yourself with “saddlebacking.” It’s the dernier cri amongst Christian teenagers. It empowers them to maintain their “virginity” while competing for the title of “Anal Queen” of their junior high or high school. Because, let’s face it, Homecoming Queen is so passé! Gospel-sanctioned and no pesky condoms. Damn! Talk about a religious experience. No doubt you’re asking yourself the same question I am: How the fuck is it possible that they’re having more fun than me, and who is this “Theocratic Zoolander” that’s guiding the devout these days? I need him in mah life! Clearly, the Church’s centuries-long (aka shlong) obsession with what’s going on in our pants has led to what can only be described as “sexually ridiculous behavior.” Remember the good ol’ days when the only thing kids had to worry about were knock-around nuns and pervy priests? Now we have “butt-stuff for Christ!” Hey, it’s somebody’s happy place!

  Being happy. Two words that can cause a lifetime of anxiety and disappointment or, for those who find it, total and utter … bliss. The truth is, finding a happy place just might be the greatest journey of our lives. A place to color outside the lines without admonishment. A place where interpretive dance need not meet the definition of interpretive nor dance. A place where the drugs you take have only one side effect … hope. I’ve always believed that until you find the happiness within you, you’ll never be able to unlock the potential within you. Knowing how to be happy can be the difference between a life that feels like a consistent daily never-ending full-body orgasm or a life that feels like a nonstop cinnamon challenge where every day you’re forced to eat a spoonful of ground cinnamon in sixty seconds with no water. Hence, the difference between a life of relentless shakes, delightful quivers, and moans of ecstasy, or gagging, coughing, and vomiting. No doubt about it, the stakes are high and the results range from the dangerous to the bizarre to the incredible to the unexpected. As you can see, finding a happy place is a tricky son of a bitch.

  “Tits, balls, ass, and I fuckin’ love it! It’s fucking great!”

  —Jason Momoa

  I’ve been really lucky in my life. I’ve found more than my share of joy. I would have to say that my happiest place is when I’m playing with my nieces, Kira (my monkey butt), Piper (my mini-me), Alexis (my chicken), and Scarlett (my little supermodel), and my nephews, Rhys (my Reese’s Pieces) and Kian (my Special K). One little smile, one great big giggle, and the inevitable Dutch oven and I’m ten years old again. When people use that expression “to your heart’s delight,” I’m pretty sure what they mean is the feeling you get when you’re playing with kids.

  But for you to understand my other happy place, you need to appreciate the two different sides to me that I enjoy cultivating. One is working hard to be a badass chick, ’cause that’s the only way for a girl to find her true self in a business that doesn’t always want her to. And the second is to keep my inner dork a
live and fulfilled because I wouldn’t have it any other way. You see, I’m a card-carrying geek, and my life is just one crazy fucked-up awesome twisted hell of a geeksploitation movie. It’s filled with lots of action, heaps of comedy, a fair amount of thoughtful dialogue involving gaseous anomalies, a smattering of male and female full frontal nudity, and of course, stars yours truly as Power Girl! You have to experience it with the wild abandon that I do and rest assured that my happy place is just as powerful as our churchgoing friends, but admittedly, it has a lot less anal sex!

  It’s never really been a choice for me. Because when I was a child, I was rescued by members of the Rebel Alliance who revealed to me that my true identity was that of a galactic princess named Leia. This, of course, was quite a shock, but somehow it all made sense once Luke Skywalker, disguised as my cousin, and Han Solo, disguised as my brother Lucas Sean, explained to me how they had infiltrated the Death Star, cunningly made to look like my bedroom, in order to rescue me from my prison. And so they did … breaking a window, a table, two chairs, and a support beam in the process. They were so brave. Once Sean and Lucas had discovered Star Wars, it was Star Wars for the rest of our lives. Well … at least, until I got older and discovered Star Trek.

  So you want to know what I could talk about for hours, bursting with joy, like our church-going friends? Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 6, episode 4, entitled “Relics.” For those of you who don’t remember, it’s the Scotty episode, as played by James Doohan. Anyway, in the final scene, the Enterprise with Picard and crew is trapped inside a Dyson sphere (an artificial biosphere surrounding a star). Scotty and Geordi are on board Scotty’s ship the Jenolan. They’ve wedged themselves into the gateway of the Dyson sphere and are blocking it from closing using their ship with the shields activated, waiting on the Enterprise to make a run for it and escape. As the Enterprise makes its getaway flying through the opening, they beam up Scotty and Geordi right before their ship buckles and blows up. You see the problem, of course? How the fuck did they beam these guys out with the shields up? I mean, what were they thinking? That we, the same people that own the blueprints to every ship in Star Fleet and carry a pocket Klingon-to-English translator so we can enjoy Shakespeare in the original Klingon would not catch this HUGE contradiction? Do they consider us “nuch qoH je”? When we are “SuvwI’ yoH”!! No! I don’t think so! That would be patently absurd.

  Nevertheless, it has been the subject of great discourse over the years between me, my friends, and complete strangers who work on other starships in the same quadrant. Naturally, as any loyal fan would, I have an incurable desire to resolve these inconsistencies because one of the simple pleasures of this world is to use your innate knowledge to problem-solve for the greater good of mankind and because my intergalactic A.D.D. demands it—it’s the Advanced Directive for Dimensionalization. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. So, to that end, we postulate theories that could provide the explanation. Some of the more flawed hypotheses from my colleagues are: “Oh, the ship was blowing up and the beam-out coincided with that final moment as the shields fell,” or “The Enterprise matched the frequency of the shield and beamed them through it,” or “The registry of the ship was NCC2010, so it was a super-old ship, making the ship faulty.” Well, to that I cry, “Bullshit!”

  Let’s be real! The only plausible explanation is that Scotty must have diverted shield strength to the port and starboard, where the force of the pressure from the closing gate was greatest, leaving the minimum shield requirement at the bow, thereby facilitating their escape. Yet, even though I have clearly put this subject to rest, my friends and I have been arguing about it for years. I’ve been meaning to bring it up with my friend Brannon Braga, one of the executive producers and writers from the show, each time I see him, but he and I still need to work through the whole Captain Kirk death scene in Star Trek Generations, which he co-wrote. But I’m still not emotionally ready for that. It’s only been twenty-two years and you can’t rush these things. Despite the intensity of these frequent debates, to quote Loverboy, I assure you, my friends and I were “lovin’ every minute of it!”

  That’s where it all begins. A conversation about the impossible in the company of the improbable. A powerful connection between people from all walks of life, with disparate beliefs, religions, and sexual persuasions, all finding each other on a road heading in the same direction. All around you the loners, the disenfranchised, the weirdos, the oddballs, the socially awkward, the sexually ambivalent, the technical poets, the toy scientists, the unexpected artists, and everyone else who didn’t fit a mold and couldn’t find a place to belong … finding each other. Our destination? A brand-new world of our own intelligent design. No judgement, no violence, and no hate, where we all stand separate but equal. It’s kept me company most of my life and provided a safe haven to reignite my faith when I needed it the most.

  It’s a place that previously only existed in a land far, far away, beyond the endless reaches of your imagination. A world where differences are celebrated and creativity encouraged, with a civilization so advanced that their mental and physical powers have been developed to the peak of perfection. A world where communication and censorship are mutually exclusive. A world where a warped mind is a terrible thing to waste. A magical place that always restores your faith in humanity and in all that is good in the world of entertainment. A place where your state of mind is constantly aroused and on the verge of climax. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Loki, Tom Hiddleston, himself:

  It’s not just a hammer, but the hammer of Thor. It’s, like, embarrassing. You probably have to leave the room, but you can’t leave the room because your boner is so big. That gravity is going to weigh you down, and you’ll fall over trying to cross the room. Like THAT kind of boner. You’ll fall over. It’ll unbalance, like we’ll go back to being apes. Ya know what I mean? Like it’s no longer possible to stand, the boner is so big.

  What more could you ask for? This world, my friends, is called FANDOM. It’s a community populated with fanboys and fangirls from all over the globe who share a common bond over our mutual obsessions with film, TV, comics, anime, books, etc. It is where I find my joy.

  It is where I find my people.

  It is where I get to dress up in costumes.

  It is where I get to be a kid again.

  It is my ultimate happy place.

  And, as if that wasn’t enough, on top of everything else, it also happens to be a place where cursing for joy is the national pastime. More exaltations of “Holy shit!” “F-U-C-K ME!” “My fucking lord!” “M-O-T-H-E-R-F-U-C-K-E-R!!!” “Well, fuck me sideways!” “Did you fucking see that?!” “Can you even fucking believe this?!” are catapulted into the atmosphere from the world of Fandom than anywhere else. It is such a quintessential necessity that it’s not limited to the languages of this earth. Here we are all connected through our profane and, often, verbose reaction to the incredible world all around us. And I assure you, you’ll encounter no cool indifference here because everybody’s carrying two shits and a rat’s ass and cannot wait to give them to you!!

  And when we gather to celebrate its awesomeness around the world, it’s a wonder to behold. Two of the largest gatherings take place annually in New York City and San Diego, California. They are attended by over 280,000 people, collectively, and are known as Comic-Con.

  Comic-Con: San Diego is a four-day convention/tailgate party where 130,000 of the most diehard fans in the universe converge on the “Whale’s Vagina,” so they can geek out with the stars of their favorite franchises. It’s not just for Trekkers and Warsies. It’s the ultimate buffet of anime, books, cartoons, comics, video games, TV shows, movies, collectible toys, and everything in between. It’s for the genre-obsessed fans of everything from Pokémon to Assassin’s Creed to Marvel Comics to Family Guy to Game of Thrones. Every fan base shows up in full force!

  The celebs that appear at Comic-Con appreciate their rabid fans and vice versa. Even though
it’s a mutual love-fest, more than anything it’s a tribute to the regular folks. It’s a chance for them to get close to the stars they feel so connected to through their work. It’s a divine interchange between strangers who don’t know each other at all yet rely heavily on each other every day. It’s such an incredible moment that’s best described by the words of Irvine Welsh from the film Trainspotting, “Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you’re still fuckin’ miles off the pace.”

  There are still a lot of people who seem to have trouble understanding what this whole Comic-Con thing is and why its fans are so “committed” to it. To those people, I say: It’s a lot simpler than you realize. It’s a vacation from the harsh realities of the world we live in. The wonder of the experience is that you get to be you, you get to not be judged, you get to feel connected, you get to feel safe, and you get to be happy. It’s the one place where if you were going down on your girlfriend and she accidentally yelled out Kirk as she was cumming, instead of having some jealous fight, you’d be high-fiving! It’s a world with its own rules that gives you a happy ending without the shame or fear of being arrested in some shitty massage parlor in North Hollywood.

  Comic-Con is a period of infinite excitement. Cosplayers from around the universe are shining their plastic armor, mixing their green body paint, and packing their limited-edition mint-in-box treasured collectibles for the epic yearly pilgrimage to the epicenter of awesome. It’s the biggest tailgate party for all geek kind, and I always set my face to stun and party my Oola tentacles off! I’ve attended Comic-Con seven times; at least that’s all I’ll admit to—anything more would just be showing off! I have moderated panels in and out of character, but between you and me, I prefer to do it in costume.