Most of you know me, Berhardt Goats, known to friends as Behr, the famous columnist here at this website everything2. Some of you might not know middling actor Harrison Ford, the star of such films as Regarding Henry and Air Force One. For those unfamiliar with this borderline Hollywood star I will say that he is considered an upstanding and attractive man with some degree of talent on the stage and in film. While he is yet to have a breakthrough role he is pretty good.
Back in 1991 we were still in the process of getting our business, Civil War Action Figures, Ltd. off the ground. We were looking for investors and my boss, Mr. Benedict, had called in some wealthy investors to a cocktail party in the famous city of Las Vegas (which used to be run by gangsters but is now home to famous crime scene investigators). To make a long story short (leaving out the whole part about the Japanese ladies), a number of Hollywood types along with people who knew how to run a proper investment program, including soon to be president Donald Trump (don't forget to vote for him to Make America Great Again), showed up and we wined and dined them while introducing them to our program.
In short, Civil War Action Figures, Ltd. ran on the idea that we would get individuals to invest $70,000 ($140,000 for families) in action figures based on people from the American Civil War. The big profit margin came from the fact that we never intended to actually produce the action figures, just bank the cash, and then reward people with a few dollars of pretend dividends every now and again to keep them from getting anxious. It was a valid and proper business scheme and we operated our business profitably for more than a decade.
The story I am here to tell you (today) is about something that happened at that cocktail party that I have never told anyone before (out of shame) and I feel it is only right to talk about it now, in the months building up to the much anticipated Donald Trump presidency (don't forget to vote FOR HIM).
I admit I became a bit starstruck by the number of celebrity types who were in attendance at the cocktail party and looked forward to talking to them about investing in Civil War Action Figures, Ltd. I was attempting to work up the nerve to approach some of the ladies (I have never done too well with the ladies and was actually married at the time but knew she was stepping out on me with a real estate investor type guy). Then Harrison Ford walked over to me with a drink in his hand and said "How are you doing?"
Now I had kind of been hoping that one of the actresses or other pretty ladies would have walked up to me and said something like "How are you doing?" but instead it was this actor who wasn't all that well known at the time (Air Force One hadn't come out yet). I thought about discouraging him from talking to me but then I realized two things (each different from the other in different ways). The first thing I realized was that I was there to get investors for Civil War Action Figures, Ltd. and Harrison Ford probably had some money to invest. The second thing I realized (which was different from the first) was that hanging around with this handsome actor (Harrison Ford) could cause ladies to approach us and maybe I could get some of the cast-offs that Harrison didn't want to take to bed.
I started making my pitch for Civil War Action Figures, Ltd. to Harrison Ford and he cut me off before I could get to the meaty part of the pitch by saying "Yeah, no problem, I'll write you a check. How much do you want?" So I told him the minimum buy-in was $70,000 and he wrote me a check for $700,000 and said "Just don't put my face on the Robert E. Lee figure or I'll sue the pants off you." I had never considered the possibility, but since we had no intention of ever actually producing the action figures I told him "I can promise you that won't happen." And he said, "Thanks, you're a pal."
Now at this time I hadn't had too many friends, or "pals" as they say in the modern vernacular. I hadn't yet met my friends Chopper, The Slow Kid, or The Guy with the Red Hat I see sometimes at Applebee's. So I was feeling pretty good about this male bonding that was happening, especially since he was a handsome actor type (Harrison Ford) and I was a somewhat pudgy, balding man of Middle Eastern descent raised in Germany near the wall to a German father and a mother of Palestinian stock. I didn't want our conversation and friendship to end with the writing of the nice check, so I started telling Harrison Ford (new friend) about the time I was asked to stand guard on the wall while one of the soldiers who was assigned to guard the wall went off to have sex with a prostitute.
"You must have a lot of stories," Harrison Ford told me at that point, which made me smile and make sounds indicating that I did have more stories and was willing to share them with him. These sounds were like animal grunts, somewhat low in tone but very audible. Harrison Ford thought I was choking on something so he did the Heimlich Maneuver and then got me a glass of whiskey.
"Let's get wasted while you tell me some of these stories about living near the Berlin Wall," Harrison suggested. He then got a whole bottle of whiskey from the bar and told me to follow him to a coat room where he handed the coat check girl a handful of money and told her to "get lost."
We sat in the back of the coat room with coats all around us (due to it being a coat room) and passed the bottle of whiskey back and forth between us, taking long swigs (drinks) from it as I recounted my stories of being a young lad growing up next to the Berlin Wall (I won't tell you which side but it probably isn't the one you are thinking about right now). I told him how my father was a triple agent in those days of The Cold War and how he served American interests as well as Soviet ones while also secretly helping to build a commercial fishing venture with some investors out of Prague. Then he asked me if I liked his chin scar, a question I declined to answer for obvious reasons.
"I like hearing about all that spy shit," Harrison told me after the uncomfortable moment involving questions about "liking" his chin scar. "It kind of helps me develop some of my characters, you know, hearing some of the real stories about people who lived in the middle of all that."
"I didn't know my father very well," I told him (Harrison Ford) as I started to feel drunkeness overcome me and render me stupid. "My mother was a cruel and controlling woman and she was all I really knew, except for the soldiers who came by and took her upstairs sometimes. Every once and a while they would give me caramels."
"Were those rare in those days?" Harrison Ford asked me. "Candy, I mean, was it hard to get candy where you grew up right next to the Berlin Wall?"
"I don't remember, but the food I ate was pretty harsh. That could have just been my mother's cooking. She was a severe woman."
"Is she still with us?" Harrison Ford asked.
"She's not at this party."
"No, I mean is she still alive?"
At that point she was still alive (this was before she was killed due to a soak in a chemical bath) so I told Harrison Ford that she was still alive.
"What about your father?"
"I don't know. My mother took me to Baltimore in the seventies so I could have a Farrah Fawcett poster in my room, and I haven't heard from him since."
"You know that the Berlin Wall came down, right?"
"Yes, that was very tragic. I wept for days, and I don't mean like a woman, I wept like a man for the loss of better days that were when the wall was there. People are so impulsive sometimes that they ruin perfectly good things for others."
Harrison took a long drink from the whiskey bottle and his eyes seemed to glass over. We were both very drunk and had trouble getting up from the floor of the coat room. He started muttering incoherently about things like spy novels, Corey Haim, and some actress whose name I can't remember. Then he passed out with his head on my lap and I didn't know what to do so I just went to sleep.
This is the point where this perfectly normal story gets weird so if you have every had any traumatic experiences while being drunk and in a coat room (or other enclosed space featuring coats) you should probably stop reading at this point and I apologize for the inconvenience. Don't forget to vote for Donald Trump and Make America Great Again. Thank you.
I woke up I guess a few hours later (no clock in the coat room and someone had stolen my watch earlier in the evening due to the nature of the party). I was feeling a strange sensation and didn't know what to make of it while still asleep (you can feel things happening to you in your sleep and also sounds). I woke up to determine the nature of this sensation and didn't remember where I was (due to having been in a dream state where I was dreaming about working out on a beach with Denise Austin). I felt a head on my lap and heard the sounds of a man sleeping and making gurgling drunken sounds and drooling.
Harrison Ford (new friend) was having some kind of a dream and he was moving his mouth and drooling in his sleep. My shirt had come untucked during the drunken coat room encounter and my pudgy stomach was hanging out over my belt (this is what Harrison Ford was using as a pillow). He was making little biting motions in his sleep, causing him to nibble at and gently bite at my exposed gut (called muffin top by the young people) and I didn't know what to do.
I swear it didn't go any further than that, but the odd thing is that when I went to another event about ten years later to pretend to be interested in helping the poor in order to corral investors for a junk bonds scheme I was running I saw Harrison Ford again. He denied ever having met me before and when I insisted we had and told him the story he told me I'd likely met someone named Gary York who worked as a stunt double for him in some movies in the early nineties and had been fired for pretending to be him in order to sleep with women.
A likely story. I know it was Harrison Ford who nibbled my muffin top in 1991. With all this business about Bill Cosby out now I have that as proof.