IT'S NOT EASY BEING STUTTERING JOHN. HE NO SOONER SITS down to sign copies of his latest LP, Everybody's Normal but Me, at an HMV music store in midtown Manhattan than the third guy on line starts busting his balls. The guy has a tape recorder and claims to be from a college radio station. He wants to do a quick interview.
"Do you think this album is going to go aluminum?" he barks. "Do you stutter when you snore? Does stuttering help when you're performing oral sex?"
John just smiles, sighs, and signs the next CD. How else can he react? For the past ten years, in the service of Howard Stern's radio and television shows, John has crashed parties, openings, and press conferences armed with a microphone, a camera, and a list of rude, crude questions with which he ambushes unsuspecting celebrities. Their responses are a litmus test of sorts. Some ignore him. Some good naturedly hang in there and answer. Then again, some assault John.
John reels off his war stories. "Morton Downey-hit me and I fell off a chair. Eric Bogosian-I asked him if there was going to be a Talk Radio 2 and he grabbed me by the neck. Lou Reed-I was backstage at the Bob Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden and all I asked him was 'Do you still masturbate?' and he didn't say anything, he just started choking me."
Then there was Raquel Welch. John nabbed her coming out of an, auction at Christie's. She was striding briskly to her limo and John was right at her side.
"Are they dr-dr-drooping yet?" he stammered. She ignored him and continued walking. John repeated the question. Without missing a step, Raquel gave him a backhander right to the nose. "The next day my nose was killing me, and I went to the hospital. I was gonna sue, but I was talking to Andrew Dice Clay and he goes, 'You're gonna sue? And tell dill whole world you got your ass kicked by a chick? So I didn't."
But its not just celebrities who vent on John. One night shortly after he'd gained notoriety from his interviews, he was on the Long Island Rail Road, riding home from the Stern show. Suddenly, a well-dressed executive came up to him. "Are you that guy from the Stern show?" he asked.
John smiled, happy to be recognized.
The executive threw his cupful of orange soda all over John. "That's for making fun of Tommy Lasorda," he said and stormed off the train.
Stuttering John has experienced this sort of abuse for as long as he can remember. Born John Melendez on October 4, 1965, the fourth (and final) product of the union of a Spanish/Puerto Rican Port Authority engineer and a Danish homemaker, he remembers that his father was basically a decent guy who would fly into uncontrollable rages.
"My childhood was shaky," John says. "I remember when I was five, I saw my mother run down the stairs, half naked, and jump on my father's back to prevent him from going nuts on my sister." Soon after that, he says, the stuttering and his ongoing obsessive-compulsive disorder began. Of course, back then he didn't know that terminology-then it was just The Fear. He couldn't play baseball because of the fear that he'd drop a fly ball. He couldn't read a book because of the fear that he'd get a bad thought about his mother dying. He couldn't be tickled by his brother or sisters because of the fear of suffocating. And he couldn't go out of the house because of the fear that he'd open his mouth, stutter, and get beat up by the neighborhood bullies in Massapequa, Long Island. Ultimately, John befriended those bullies and began to amass J.D. (juvenile-delinquent) cards for throwing snowballs at school buses and pulling the tops off unsuspecting females at the beach. That's when he began to fear the wrath of God.
But if the child is father to the man, it was John's fourth-grade teacher who recognized his unique abilities. "Johnny asks some unusual and sometimes penetrating questions," she wrote on his report card, "and tends to stutter when excited. He still needs to control his silly behavior."
It was precisely those qualities that immediately endeared him to Howard Stern years later. In 1988, John was a student at N.Y.U. film school, fronting a band named Rock Slide. When he wasn't jerking off to the latest issue of Penthouse, that is. "All my friends would deny that they masturbated, so I felt like a wacko. Then I heard Howard talking on the air about jerking off, and it was like, wow, there's somebody else who does it too!"
So when John's roommate Mitch had to leave his job interning at the Stern show, John begged him for a reference. Mitch recommended Melendez to Gary Dell'Abate, Howard's producer, with one caveat-John was a stutterer. That was all Howard had to hear. "Hire him on the spot," he told Gary, sight unseen, stutter unheard.
For both parties, it was a marriage made in heaven. For John, he'd get valuable radio exposure to promote his band and make contacts to further his acting and directing ambitions. For Howard, John would be the quintessential celebrity interviewer. At that time, Stern's show was too declasse and outrageous to attract Grade A celebrities, so they would have to stalk stars in their natural habitats. At first Howard himself tried his hand at the kamikaze interview, but he was too embarrassed by the outrageous questions that show writers Fred Norris and Jackie "The Joke Man" Martling would craft. Gary was the next interviewer, but he pawned the job off on an intern after Van Halen's manager called Gary a "piece of shit" for asking new lead singer Sammy Hagar if on a hot day he came across a dog and former Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth locked up in separate cars, which one would he save?
A stuttering interviewer was a godsend. For one, in the interests of political correctness, stars would have to be nice to a stutterer. On top of that, because he would invariably garble the question the first time, John would get to ask and the celebrity would be forced to listen to the outrageous question a second time. Another of John's virtues was that he was basically culturally clueless. He could approach Ally Sheedy and innocently ask her, "Have you puked today?" totally unaware that she was reportedly in the midst of battling bulimia. Basically, John was a programmed assassin.
And he was an instant hit. Not only did he begin garnering recognition for his radio interviews, but when Stern's Saturday-night show began to air nationally on WOR-TV, John emerged as its first star. And why not? Now not only could you hear the sounds of revulsion and anger emanating from the celebrities, but you could actually see them shudder and flinch from the questions posed by the cherubic, long-haired, stuttering grungehead. It's a priceless moment in the annals of TV when baseball legend Ted Williams, sitting at a desk signing autographs, does a double take and then contemptuously swats John away when John asks him if he ever accidentally farted in a catcher's face.
But it was John's amazing performance at Gennifer Flowers's first press conference that established him as a national figure, worthy of discussion on "The McLaughlin Group," of all places (where they referred to him as "Mr. Melendez"). If ever there was a sanctimonious event worthy of puncturing, it was Flowers's public revelation of the sex-filled taped conversations between herself and then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton.
"Gennifer, did Governor Clinton use a condom?" John's booming stutter cut through the packed hall.
Flowers tried to suppress a grin, but her handlers became irate. They tried to field more dignified questions, but John was persistent: "Will you be sleeping with any other presidential candidates? Was there ever a threesome?"
A st-st-star was born. "I remember Robin [Quivers] and I were on the street one day and all the people were stopping us and going, 'Stuttering John, we love you. Stuttering John. Stuttering John.' No one mentioned Robin. So she turned to me and said, 'See, John, these are all your fans. The stupid people. You're the hero of the stupid.'" On the WOR show the following week, "Hero of the Stupid" became John's official moniker.
John deserved his accolades. He was one of the hardest-working men in show biz. "I remember waiting eight hours for Chevy Chase to come out of a building one night-that's how motivated I was," John recalls. "I would never sleep. If I was at a party I would drink the free beer, get drunk, and go straight to work."
And he was incredibly resourceful, sneaking past publicists and security and nabbing his prey. "All that truant behavior from my childhood suddenly became useful. I'd sneak into places. I'd lie about who I was. When they began recognizing me, I'd get disguises. I'd buy a fake mustache and spirit gum. I got fake teeth. I cut my hair."
Once at an event, John turned it into his personal forum. Most of the press are fairly reserved and reticent, if not respectful. John was another breed altogether. "The press is way too calm and laid back. I was right in the celebrity's face," John remembers. "If you watch the old tapes, it's always me next to the celebrity and everyone else all behind me yelling at me to move away. I would crawl under people's legs. I was aggressive because it meant airtime to me, which meant I was going to be a star."
In the ten years he's been stuttering for Stern, John has built a career of sorts. He's been the lead in the Off-Off Broadway hit Tony and Tina's Wedding (where he met his actress wife, Suzannah). He was the cohost of a short-lived latenight network show, "Last Call." He's had bit parts in the movies Airheads, Meet Wally Sparks, and of course Private Parts, as well as on TVs "Wings" and "Baywatch Nights." And currently he hosts a lunchtime request hour on K-Rock, Stern's New York radio station.
Then there are his albums. Stuttering John, his eponymous 1994 debut, sold a respectable 40,000 units. Still, John suspects that his association with Stern was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it doubtless helped to get him signed. On the other, it was hard to get airplay on stations whose morning jocks were being destroyed in the ratings by Howard. And because of his wacky reputation, many people in the industry, without even hearing him, might have dismissed him as a Weird Al Yankovic wannabe.
"I think the reason why John's first record didn't do that well was that people thought he was a novelty act, but it really was a good solid pop record,"
Last October John released his second LP, Everybody's Normal but Me, which has been selling well if not spectacularly. This time around, the critical consensus was almost overwhelmingly positive. No less than Entertainment Weekly praised its "earnest, catchy surprises," and The San Diego Union-Tribune lauded the effort as "straight-ahead, honest, and refreshingly heartfelt hard rock with a self-effacing, comedic edge." But problems persist. MTV would not air the video for the first single, a takeoff on the Jerry Springer show, deeming it "too campy."
While he awaits music superstardom, John continues to show up for work every morning at six a.m..-after his morning obsessive-compulsive shower ritual. ("I wash under my arms ten times, each arm. I wash my balls three times, my ass three times. I wash my hands ten times, ten with one hand, ten, ten, ten, ten, and ten. My back three times. Three's a good number.") At work, he dutifully screens the calls that come in to the Stern show. He's been responsible for getting a murderer to confess his crime on the air (after various Stern interns hung up on the guy three times because he was calling the show collect from jail). He's nurtured wacky callers like Ian the Drunk and Dr. Remulac, a California dermatologist who suffers from O.C.D. and calls the snow and repeats robotically, "I am Doctor Remulac." Via the phones, John also discovered the newest member of the Wack Pack, Gary the Retard (but after hearing Gary's empty-headed gleeful rants, that-no pun intended-was a no-brainer).
And despite being the b-b-b-butt of everyone's jokes, John is beloved by his colleagues. Though she jokingly denies it on the air, Robin often treats John to a movie and dinner. Fred regularly gives him musical-equipment tips. And now that John has moved his family six blocks from Jackie's home in Bayville, Long Island, The Joke Man and John have become inseparable.
"I love Stuttering John," Jackie gushes. "He's very talented, he's very energetic, and he has a heart as big as the hole in his wallet. My wife, Nancy, and I and John and Suzannah go to dinner together, drink together, get stoned together, ski together, swim together.... We do everything together. So I guess I have to say that he's one of my best friends. Fuck, does that pain me. A speech challenged half-Spic who's 20 years younger than me. Help!"
But lately John's doing less of what made him famous. Partly it's a function of Howard's newfound semi-respectability in show-biz circles. Many of his former targets are now happy to come into the studio and plug their latest projects. Plus, John's wild and woolly days of latenight Manhattan celebrity parties are now over. These days John gets into his Jeep after the show and drives straight home, where he plays for hours with his three-year-old daughter, Greta. In his stead, Howard has been sending out the new crop of interns, with mixed results. Recently, a young female intern had to make an emergency weekend call to her therapist when she was consumed with guilt for having asked Richard Simmons, hero of the fatties, if he'd gotten laid lately.
It's times like that when John gets the itch again. Sure, he can dream about a gold record or a major role in a blockbuster movie or a hit sitcom, but as long as Richard Simmons is holding a press conference to introduce his new line of diet cards, or Kathie Lee is signing her new Christmas cookbook or Madonna is studying the cabala, playing with Greta can wait. After all, one day she'll be old enough to brag that her dad was Stuttering John, Hero of the Stupid.
Updated: 2-August-1999
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