Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen

GROSS! Wait—it’s like, it’s like a banana.”
    “A BANANA!?” she screamed. Now I had her. Full bedlam. It was time for the turn.
    “OH! I know what this is from … Oh, gross!” My voice loosened as I began laughing. “Oh, I know.”
    “What?! What could that possibly be from?” I’d hooked her. She wanted in.
    I sighed. “Oh … I was just at a party the other night and Grac convinced me to put a banana in my pants. So of course I did and I guess when I took the pants off, the banana got into the laundry.”
    “GOT into the laundry? Andy? Graciela made you do that?”
    “She didn’t MAKE me, Mom … She just—it was funny. Don’t worry about it. Wait ‘til I tell her what happened. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to do all this laundry again…”
    There was a long pause. And then: “Andy?”
    “What?”
    “Be your own man,” my mother said.
    “What? What are you saying?”
    “I’m saying ‘BE YOUR OWN MAN!’ I’m serious!” And she was.
    “Okay, but it was funny, Mom! I mean, you should’ve seen it.”
    “Yeah. I bet.”
    The laughter in my apartment started the second I hung up the phone. “Be your own man, Andy!” Grac squealed. “Be your own man!”
    My mom thought Grac was pulling my strings like a marionette and that on my own I would act with some level of common sense, or even (gasp) judgment. But wait: My whole life, when I was being my own man, or my own boy before that, I was one hundred percent clown. I’ve always loved playing meaningless pranks on my parents, specifically my mom. I don’t even know if “prank” is even the right word. Maybe fibbing? Long-drawn-out elaborate lies?
    Once, as a kid, I went to the dinner table and told my parents that Richard Nixon was dead. According to my TV Guide memory, Hart to Hart was on in those days, so Nixon was long out of office, but it still came as a big shock to my parents. “When? How?” they sputtered.

     
Grac, looking like the cat that ate the canary, with my parents
     
    “This afternoon. I just saw on the news.” I let it go on a few minutes and then told them I was kidding.
    “Kidding? I don’t get it,” my mother said. “Is that funny? Do you find that funny?”
    “Sort of.” I chuckled.
    “How? How is it funny if Richard Nixon died?” She turned to my father. “LOU—do you UNDERSTAND this? Lou?”
    I knew it then but I didn’t say. It wasn’t Richard Nixon dying that was funny, it was the notion that I could march in, make up a bold-faced lie, and get a genuine, sometimes horrified, but always true, reaction out of my parents.
    When I met Graciela, though, she helped me take it to another level. After all, what kind of fun is being “your own man” when you can conspire with a like-minded accomplice to achieve a higher plane of stupidity?
    “Tell them we had sex,” Grac said once. We were smoking pot and trying to think of new ways to disquiet my parents.
    “That’s just mean.” Even the gays know which lines aren’t crossed. “It’ll get my dad’s hopes up too much. And you’re already on thin ice with my mom. Too risky.”
    “You want another hit?” Grac knew the herb would get us thinking.
    “Okay. I know. I’ll tell them I sprained—or broke?—my arm because I was dancing in a tub full of corn oil. And that you told me to do it.”
    “Too much of me telling you to do stuff,” reasoned Grac. “I need to be involved but not totally responsible. Especially since you’ve been warned—”
    “To be my own man. Okay.”
    *   *   *
     
    When your life and job are a little twisted, it’s easy for plots to just appear. “Okay, so I told you that Queerdonna was a no-show at Bank last night,” Grac said on the sixteenth minute of our fourth conversation of the morning. Even though we both had busy jobs, it was amazing how much time we were still able to spend on the phone with each other.
    “Yeah, so who’d you get to replace her?” Queerdonna was the three-hundred-pound hairy