I dunno, I read this thing in a paper awhile back about Syd Barrett, you know, the fucking founder of Pink Floyd, who’s now this direction-less waste case, complete and utter burn out, won’t take visitors, won’t acknowledge his fans, or whatever you call ‘em, all that. I mean, he’s a celebrity tragedy if there ever was one, but it sure isn’t a popular one. Why? Because he’s alive, and also because he’s a jerk. I can associate with that.

I mean, part of it’s a class thing. You don’t think so? Let me tell you, muppets are accepted one place, on T.V. Hell, it’s the same for any minority. Black people, everyone loves ‘em on T.V. I knew this out and out racist, once, I mean a real ‘go whitey’ kinda guy, freaking hated black people. You know what his favorite show was? The Cosby show. Seriously. He loved Bill Cosby. Because on T.V. Cosby was abstract, he was black like Alf’s an alien, you know? Not ‘real’. Trust me, you get Bill driving his taxi or god forbid handling his banking and it’s a whole different story. Same with muppets. Believe me, getting work as a muppet is no picnic. Outside of the entertainment industry, it’s almost impossible. I mean, look at me. What do I do? I clean the stadium, and I’m not even allowed in until the crowds have left. That’s my job, sweep the bleachers, clean out those freaking disgusting toilets, but for god’s sake make sure no one sees you.

Which is why, when they first met him, everyone liked Kermit so much. I mean, you’ve just spent three months in Stauton Island and suddenly you realize that no one, I mean no one, is going to hire you. They don’t want you there, they don’t want you taking their jobs, nothing, and suddenly there’s Kermit, and he’s offering you a job and a place to stay and better yet, what you’re doing, the job, you’re gonna be loved. I mean, suddenly you have a home, a family, money and the love of the American people, and yeah, it seems like some divine savior, some angel just swept down from the heavens and lifted you up. And no, it wasn’t great money, but with what you had at the moment, which was nothing, and everything else he offered to boot, it seemed like a fortune.

Of course, when the frog realized how easy it was, he started recruiting. I’m sure you’ve seen on the news about the thing with all those Russian prostitutes, those girls out of Russia who some guy they know in Israel or Europe or something says, "hey, I can get you out of Russia and into a better life," and so they do it only to find it’s a con and basically the guy says, "either you work for me as a whore or I’ll rat you out and get you sent back," and sometimes they don’t even get the ‘I’ll send you back’ option, sometimes it’s more like ‘whore for me or I’ll beat you half to death’ option. Well, same thing. Kermit would head back to the homeland, give the same pitch to the locals and come back with a boat load of fresh young faces, and by the time they realized how things really worked around here it was too late.

I’d already been in the States for a couple of years when I met Kermit. The truth is that he came across me passed out outside of Brian’s. I’d been jobless for about three months, homeless for one and drunk for about five days. Of course, Brian’s Bar was right next to the theater, and Kermit was already trying to clean the place up, which included getting the riff-raff like me off the streets. He called the cops and I got tossed into lockup to dry out. I shoulda been in there for a day, tops, when suddenly it comes down that my immigration papers were in question, and it looked like I might end up getting deported.

So as you can guess, I was pretty upset, and at that point I really needed liquor, so I was blubbering and whining and then suddenly, there’s Kermit, and at first I’m really pissed off because this is all his fault but then he tells me, "you know, I think you have a lot of untapped potential. I’ve talked to the judge and he’s agreed to let you go under my care. That means you’d have to stay and work at this theater under my supervision. You think you can handle that?"

So here I am, scared to death of being deported, in a jail with no booze and suddenly this frog is offering me a chance to get out, stay in the States and a place to stay with a job to boot? You’re damned straight I took it. I mean, like I said, Kermit always seemed like your best friend at first.

But once you got in, the whole thing changed. He held that damned deportation above my head for two years before one day it let slip that the whole thing was a lie from the start. There was no judge. He’d bribed one of the guards something like $50 to fake the whole thing. He got me for $50. And then the real shit went down.

First of all, don’t kid yourself. Those cute little muppets you see gleefully running around singing and nodding happily on stage, that’s bullshit. That was the cover. I mean, we all know that behind the scenes is a lot different than what’s on stage, but the whole Muppet Show was a complete charade. Did you know that some of them, some of the littler ones, lived in boxes? Little wooden crates Kermit had built to house them, with barely enough room to lie down straight and the minute their musical number was done, if they didn’t have any other work to be doing, he’d cram them into their crates and lock them in, sometimes three, four to a crate.

The real depressing part was how long it took some of them to get it. I mean, muppets are pretty naive by nature, and I remember they’d look up at him with these confused, trusting eyes, asking when they were gonna be let out, and he’d just tell them to shut the fuck up or no food that night, or something similar, you know, his usual mix of wit and sympathy. But a lot of them, it took them years to realize he was the bad guy, that it wasn’t going to get any better, ever. Some of them never figured it out. Robin went to his grave thinking ‘Unka Kermy’ was the fucking second coming of Jesus Christ.

Anyway, for the first couple of years I mostly drank myself stupid and cleaned the theater. That’s another thing. I mean, for every muppet you saw on stage, I can guarantee there were at least three behind the scenes who never saw more than the handle of a broom or a scrub bucket. Kermit never wanted to pay for what he could get for free, and he had muppets cooking, muppets cleaning, muppets hustling weed on the streets, anything to save him a cent or make him a buck. Anyway, so I’m pretty much a broom pusher, and stuck there to boot, since I think if I quit or leave Kermit’ll just have my ass deported, and then one day Ms. Piggy, in a rage, comes and tells me about the whole ‘deportation set up’ to get back at Kermit for some infringement or another and the next thing I know, I’m at the bottom of a bottle and then I’ve got that bottle out and am threatening Kermit with it.

Anyway, Kermit realizes that he’s taken it too far with me, so what he does is he finally offers me my own act. I don’t remember if I ever told him how much I wanted to be a stand up comic or not, but it doesn’t really matter. He was good about that, he could get into peoples’ heads, find out what it was they really wanted, that kind of thing. So he offers me an act. And I take it, because all my life, all I’d ever wanted to do is stand up on stage and make people laugh. There was probably a lot of, "I was just looking out for you, didn’t want to see you ruin your life away on the booze," kind of talk as well. Kermit could be really charming when he wanted to, or when he needed to, and no matter what he’d done before, it sorta slipped by you.

I’m ecstatic. I mean, finally, I’m gonna be onstage, I’m gonna be funny. I’m gonna be a star. Well, what can I say? You’ve seen the act, right? Yeah, so you’re probably saying, "How the hell did that no-talent bear ever manage to stay up there?" right? I’ll tell you how. Statler and Waldorf. You ever wonder who Scooter’s ‘Uncle’ was? You know, the one who owned the theater? It was Waldorf. Look at him. You can tell, once you think about it. They’re definitely family. Anyway, Waldorf and Statler were muppets, sure, but they had bought into the whole ‘racism’ thing. They hated themselves because they were sell outs, had made their money by caving into ‘the man’, but they also hated themselves partly because they really believed what they heard, that muppets were stupid, that muppets were incompetent, so they saw their own success as kind of fraudulent, you know? They felt like they were living lies. Then, of course, they hated us all because we were so useless and pathetic that it seemed to prove the point, that muppets really were lower life forms, and that just made them feel even worse, so they took out their anger and hostility on us even worse than most klanners and those people do.

Anyway, Statler and Waldorf hated my act, and they hated me, but they loved mocking me, they loved abusing me, so they insisted that Kermit keep the act. And every night they’d come down to the theater and tear me apart until it was all I could do to not just collapse on stage. And in the end, acting was worse than cleaning. I remember one time I begged Kermit to drop the act and just let me go back to cleaning, and he even would have but for Waldorf. And Kermit hated them for making him ruin his show that way, and they all hated me because I represented everything they hated in each other, so it all just sort of focused around me, eating away at me.

Most of the time I just drank. Later in the show you’ll notice that I just cringe and babble most of the time. By then heckling and tomato flinging had become part of the act, so I didn’t have to do much before the crowd just started in on me, which was fine because by then I was so strung out I couldn’t have spoken coherently, anyway. I’d end the session and struggle back to my bunk where I’d just burst into tears.

I tried to leave a couple of times, but that was even worse. I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t drop the bottle, people on the streets either hated me, or they loved me for the act, and I couldn’t get away from it. People would hound me, they’d even come up to me, I mean, seriously, this happened more than once, I’m lying face down in my own vomit and they’d come up and ask, they’d fucking ask if they could hit me with a tomato, like it’s some great honor to attack this poor, defenseless bear or something. Anyway, I’d always end up crawling back to the theater and after the second time Kermit made it clear that if I left again, the doors wouldn’t be open to me anymore, and after that I was too scared to leave.

About that time, heroine was becoming the big thing and Gonzo started me out on that. The weird thing is that I think I mostly did it as a form of protest. I mean, when it came down to it, the drink is what I wanted and when I actually kicked heroine, I hardly even noticed. Liquor, that’s the hard thing to give up. The way I see it, you’ve got one addiction coming to you, and once you’ve got it, nothing else can take its place. So, like, half the crew is completely strung out, the guest stars are starting to complain about the smell of the place and the working conditions and all that and the big names aren’t really coming in any more, and Kermit, I think in his heart he knew it was all over, but he couldn’t let it go, so instead he would go after the rest of us. I mean, he’d always been pretty abusive before, but it was during that last couple of seasons that it turned physical.

But by then nobody could be made to care. He’d pushed us too hard, and we were all broken in one way or another. Even Piggy had lost her drive, her passion, and sometimes I remember she’d just sit there and take it while Kermit laid into her, and sometimes, if she were really feeling active, she might sob a little after he left, but mostly she’d just shoot up and crawl into bed and just, you know, escape from it all. Our spirits were gone. The Muppet Show had stopped mattering to anyone but Kermit.

So my big finale, if you like, came a few months towards the end of our second to last season. By this time, I’d given up the heroine for the booze, but it hardly even made a difference anymore. I spent all my time drunk, and usually it was off of cheap crap that left me barely able to stand. My kidneys were in such bad shape that I limped everywhere and I didn’t even bother flinching from the tomatoes. I’d just stand on the stage, let the old men call me a spineless cocksocker for a few minutes, get beaned a few times, then wander back to the bottle. Sometimes I’d still tell a joke, coz I figured, what the hell. By now no one even listened, so it wasn’t like the joke was gonna make them any more hostile.

Only there was this one night when it all just finally came crashing down on me. I’d finally realized, I mean, I’d finally emotionally come to grips with the fact that I wasn’t funny. I was never gonna be George Burns, no matter what, you know? And the thing was, and this was weird, it wasn’t like I blamed anyone. I mean, no matter what had happened to me, it’s not like I was going to miss out on my big break or anything. There couldn’t ever be a big break, because I was no good, right? So, I dunno, my mind just started trying to figure it out, "Why can’t I be funny? What’s funny? What makes people laugh?" I mean, I’d seen people laugh before, so what was making them laugh?

So then I started thinking about all the bar jokes I’d heard. All sorts of horrible, sick things drunk old wash outs tell each other to keep entertained, and the next thing you know, I just sort of blurt out, "What’s the best thing about fucking a two year old? The sound of their pelvis cracking!" And the whole room goes dead silent. I mean, like a freaking tomb. I guess someone must have been listening after all or something, because everyone heard that one. But you know how it is. The room always catches what you’re saying and just the wrong moment. And Waldorf, I swear, he’s having a heart attack up in the stands, and suddenly I feel like I’m in charge, for the first time in, like, ten years. I mean, they weren’t laughing, but they weren’t throwing things at me or calling me names, either.

So then I just start going. I tell all the dead baby jokes, all the Pollock and Puerto Rican jokes, all the fart, dick and pussy jokes, all the Irish jokes, all the sheep fucking jokes, all the whore jokes, anything, and the weirdest thing was that everyone just sat there. No one left, no one tried to haul me off stage, nobody laughed, nobody did anything. It went on until I’d run dry, and it was like I’d committed suicide, but I was still alive to tell about it. I felt at peace. It just didn’t matter anymore, so I ended with a, "You’ve been a gracious audience. Fuck you. WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA !!!" and left the stage. And that was the last show I worked.

It didn’t really matter, since the show only lasted another season, and after that Piggy and a few of the others took a class action case against Kermit and managed to get a few bucks for those of us who’d made the whole show happen. But I still have to resort to joe jobs to get by.

Sure, there are still movies being made, these weird little things that we all do for the money, but it’s not the same. We hardly talk, we get the work done and get out. I usually have only bit parts. Kermit tries to keep that one night on stage out of people’s memories, but he’s not willing to risk giving me a major part and I wouldn’t want one, anyway. Anyway, if you’ve seen ‘em, you’d understand. There’s that one, Muppet Treasure Island, I mean, look at me in that one. That was the last time I was really trying to kick the booze and they had me on these anti-depressants and everything, and, well, I think I’m hilarious. All it takes is a healthy cocktail of drugs. No, seriously, does anything I do make any sense at all in that film?

They tried getting the show back together awhile back, but it didn’t work out. All the muppets were trying to run the thing. Kermit couldn’t control them with the iron fist that he used to, although don’t get me wrong, he tried. But the sad truth is that Kermit was that show. He knew how to keep people in line, and he knew talent and how to use it. Without that strong lead, it just flopped. The whole thing was a disaster.

So that’s the so called ‘Rise and Fall’ of Fozzie Bear. See what I mean? Nobody died, so it’s just annoying, not really depressing. No one really cares. Hey, here’s an idea, hold onto this until I get hit by a transit bus or something, then it’ll really get people’s attention. Until then, if you happen to run across Syd, tell him I’m up for a drink if he’s interested."