I'm On Geraldo!
by Mark Maynard
See images from the show now, or read the full story below first...
I told my friends that I went to New York to attend my friend Rob’s wedding. I really went to New York to be on television (sorry Rob). For the entire month before I left, I pestered my friends in New York to get me tickets for different talk show tapings while I sent away for tickets from Crimewave Central in Atlanta. Dan’s girlfriend, Jen, came through with Montel tickets while I scored Geraldo tickets (Ricki and Sally were both on sabbatical during the week that I would be there). As it worked out, I ended up seeing the taping of Rush Limbaugh’s first video release, “Sometimes You Just Gotta’ Laugh” (I laughed like a moronic jack ass at all of his stupid jokes just to get the camera on me, but that’s a different story, one which I’ll tell you about in the next issue, after the video’s been released, and when it’s too late for them to edit me out) and the Geraldo show. As for Geraldo, IO really enjoy him and respect his position as the reigning King of Infotainment. I know that’s sick, but it’s true. I want to hate him for his sensationalism and what it’s doing to America, and I want to abhor him for the things which he did to Kurt Vonnegut’s daughter Edith (the former Mrs. Rivera), but I can’t. I like him (especially when he does the intellectual thing and puts on those glasses for his CNBC show). He’s got style. Then again it’s not hard to have style when you’re standing in a group with includes the likes of Richard Bey.
The Geraldo show I went to see was called “Strange & Twisted Affairs, I can’t believe you slept with…” I had almost forgotten about it by the time that it aired on October 16th (two months later), but seeing it again brought everything back in frighteningly vivid detail. Luckily for me and you, my friend Matt called me the day before it was to air to tell me that it was coming on. Apparently, he had seen an ad late at night and recognized the title as that of the one I’d told him about. Not only did he jot it down, but he went out and bought a VCR for the occasion (I’m honored, Matt). Now, thanks to Matt and the memories which the show has jogged, I think that I can bring myself to tell you about my appearance as a questions-asking audience member on Geraldo.
I got to the studio early to ensure a good seat and stood in line for about an hour and a half, making friends with the people around me (one woman swore that she saw me as a guest on Ricki Lake) and stealing cookies and iced tea from the courtesy table that was set up for Charles Perez’s audience, who were lined up against the wall on the other side of the door. I was the only virgin there. Everyone else had been to see either Ricki, Sally Jesse or someone else of their journalistic caliber, and they all had incredible stories (most of the women had either seen or touched a male stripper at some point in their audience-filling career). This went on until the female guests from the earlier taping of Geraldo poured out into the street, still fighting (he tapes two shows a day). The woman who got the majority of our attention was this 200 pound, 4 foot 5 woman who was wearing a skirt that didn’t cover but one cheek’s worth of her enormous ass. We all went crazy as one of the women further down the line yelled, “You got a nasty ass, bitch. I bet you don’t wipe that thing”. The “nasty assed” bitch didn’t hear it though. She was too busy threatening to kill a lovely gold-toothed woman who was wearing a hair pyramid on her head. After they broke it up and went their separate ways in cabs, we saw the guests for our show come in by way of limousine. I may be mistaken about this but it seems as though they bring you to the studio by limo and escort you in, but then make you find your own way out to the street and home (and they don’t have security people outside to break up fights like they do in the studio). I didn’t know it right then, but a certified nymphomaniac (I guess that I should be PC and say, “sex addict”) brushed against me. It turns out that she even got caught by her husband, draped over the arm of a couch, having sex doggie-style with his father, her father-in-law. If I had known that then I would have asked for an autograph.
Not even knowing what topic awaited us, we went into the building on West 57th Street and made our way through the prop rooms and sets of some soap opera (it’s apparently a popular one judging by the way my newly found women friends pointed at actors’ names on lockers and oohed and aahed). We were then ushered into the surprisingly small and cold Geraldo studio. Being the second in line (there was a woman in front of me, she was a nut case from Kansas and she’d already been waiting for two hours when I got there. I think that Geraldo must have spoken to her through the TV and told her to come. She had those kind of eyes), I took my placed in the very front row. We sat there and discussed our favorite episodes and guests. After a while, the producer of the show came out and talked to us and told us how important we were and how it was really our show and stuff like that. He didn’t quite come out and say it, but you could tell that all he wanted was for us to hoot and holler like trailer park retards. Unfortunately, he built us up to the point of rioting only to have us wait in anger while the soap opera next door finished using the taping equipment (apparently they all share), It took so long in fact that Geraldo himself came out and chatted with us. He usually waits until the start of the show (they make it a big point to keep telling you, “When you first see Geraldo, we’ll be on the air”). Well, he came out and made a joke or two about the old shoes that he was wearing, some beaten up old patent leather Hushpuppies and he talked to the elderly woman behind me who had been to every one of his 1,200 tapings. She told some mixed up joke about a parrot and a moose and then Geraldo laughed. He was the only one to laugh and he laughed nervously. I got the impression that he’s afraid of his audience, and judging from what I’m about to see, I think that he’s smart to be scared.
Midway through the show I decide to ask a question and use up one of my fifteen minutes of fame. Maybe it was because I was nervous about the questionable taste of what I was about to say or maybe it was because I was scared at the prospect of being seen by millions, but when I stood up there next to Geraldo I completely blacked out. I still managed to mumble out the question that I had been rehearsing in my head, but I don’t really remember it. All I remember is kind of a kind of dark fuzziness. I remember pointing, I remember looking at the dirty blue carpeting at my feet and I remember Geraldo putting his hand on my shoulder and pushing me down into my seat when he had had enough. When I finally hit my seat, I woke up with a jolt of pain that started to tear through my body. I swear to God I couldn’t even move. It was like the Tingler (a spine grabbing lobster-type creature from the William Castle film of the same name) was fused to my spine. I’ve always been scared in front of groups. You can ask anyone who was treated to one of my gut wrenchingly painful performances in high school (in college I was OK because I could buy and drink whiskey). This, however, was much different. This was the only time that I had actually managed to paralyze myself.
When it was all over and the bright lights were going off, I made my way out of the building quickly, afraid of retaliation by the burly men on stage whom I’d so offended. I was expecting them to be outside waiting for me like the nasty assed girl from the last taping was waiting for pyramid head. I tried to quickly change my appearance by exchanging the shirt that I was wearing for another in my bag and mussing up my hair, and then I high-tailed it to a bar called Rudy’s in Hell’s Kitchen, where I met up with a bunch of friends who were just then getting out of work. I told my Geraldo stories as the seats around me filled up with the curious, the envious, and those who just needed a drink. I had heard that there was a courtyard in the back and I proposed the idea that maybe we’d be less cramped if we were to head back that way. Anne was on her way to the bathroom anyway so she agreed to take a look and see if the courtyard was as packed full as the bar proper.
About five minutes later, Anne returned with Dan and a story of voyeurism that would make Bob Guccione get a little boner. Apparently there were two people in the act of ‘doing it’ on a table right in the middle of the courtyard. I was afraid to get up only to have her seal my seat and laugh at me, but if there were naked people having sex I sure as hell wanted to see it. I jumped up and ran back there with the equally curious Gillian. We cracked the door and saw what appeared to be two guys lying on a table, one with his hands in the other one’s pants. Instantly, Gillian and I began to make jokes about Anne and the possibility that she believed that THIS was ‘sex’. Maybe Anne really was still a virgin who just thought that she was having sex all this time. We closed the door and went back to the table. Upon our return, two more people jumped up and headed back to have a peak. They soon came back with more stories of partial nudity and an enormously large, trunk-like penis with hung down to the owner’s knees. I’m not sure what to think. I saw two men while others saw a man and a woman. I saw harmless, casual petting while others saw penetration, thrusting and exposed organs, and all of this happened within a ten-minute period. Don’t feel bad for Gillian and I though, a friend who shall remain nameless made up for our missing out on the action in Rudy’s courtyard by treating us to peepshows at The Playpen 2 on 8th Avenue (where I got my camera confiscated). Oh, for those of you who want to know; we decided not to take our drinks into the courtyard. At least at our overcrowded indoor table we knew that the sticky stuff beneath our fingertips was just beer.
SEE WHAT HAPPENED ON THE SHOW