Being Mike Messier Striving for a normal life — times 10 BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

You’ve got to hand it to Mike Messier: he doesn’t give up. The Energizer Bunny of Self-Promotion may play at being the Sultan of Self-Delusion, but play is the operative word, as far as we’re concerned.

There’s something interesting going on here, I thought, to my surprise, after I finally got around to viewing the video Rejected by Reality, months after it was thrust into my hands at the Rhode Island International Film Festival gala closing reception. The earnest thruster was Mike Messier who, earlier in the evening after a Brown campus screening, managed another successful touché. At no less than the highest ranking celebrity at the festival, actor Steve Buscemi, who was already skittery and more bug-eyed than usual in the wake of a Your-#1-Fan assault on a prior occasion.

The Rejected video was a self-produced calling card-cum-documentary, snazzily edited by Chad Williamson with lots of character-enhancing little special effects and don’t-blink animations by Chris Miller. It’s about Messier trying to get famous. Part of it covers HBO flying him out to Los Angeles as a semi-final candidate for a reality TV show.

On Sunday, November 9 at 3 p.m., Rejected will be screened at AS220, along with his video Victorious: The Battle for Sanity, which consists of a tape of a self-exploration play of his and a short documentary charting its rejection when he tried to get it made into a film. Admission is $5, popcorn, beer, and meds extra.

Gotta hand it to Messier for, intentionally or not, making yearning so entertaining. How often does the sheer nervy energy of self-aggrandizement, that Everyman low-impact sport, warrant a respectful chuckle because it’s worked so hard to catch our attention?

The videos follow Messier as he swings his ego around like a dead cat, settling for the attention of whomever he happens to whack. The questions arise: "Is this done completely without irony?" and "Is this done completely without talent?" A smirk and nod in ether case would render all this pathetic. The answer is: "Not completely — just enough of a lack of both to make this as interesting as if there were a lot." In other words, with loads of irony Messier would be Michael Moore and we would be watching his stuff on the IFC Channel. And loads of talent in his interest areas could have made him anyone from Al Pacino to Harvey Fierstein to a one-man wrestling tag team.

In either case, however, Mike Messier would be far less instructive as a social phenomenon.

Talent? In his I Deserve to Be a Celebrity documentary video, he is dryly funny playing pushy by being obnoxious. He interrupts a wrestler backstage, asking him for career advice while the guy is on the phone with his wife. His video production values were good enough to get him recent paid gigs as a videographer for two drag queens. And not just for Newport’s Lady Bunny but also for Lady Chablis, that living treasure of Savannah who stole the show in Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil.

Irony? He’s hip to himself, just enough. Promoting himself to HBO in Rejected by Reality, he cites two mayors he grew up with, inspired by their negative examples, and declares: "Imagine the flaws people can see in my armor . . . He’s arrogant, he’s vulgar, he’s out of shape . . . Even if you take medications, even if you have problems, you can still be a winner in the game of life — and that’s what I am."

Mike Messier — he pronounces it the French way, rhyming with bustier, when he doesn’t slip — was sitting in a back corner at AS220, next to the stage. He left his improv acting class at CCRI early to make the interview and would afterward be going to a rehearsal in Chepachet. (He’s playing the evil corporate video industry mogul in Memories of a Video Store Madman, written and directed by Lenny Schwartz at Assembly Theatre in Chepachet November 20 through 23; call 647-5156 for reservations.) His two-hour Cox cable access show airs on Saturday on Channel 18 at midnight, and on Tuesday on Channel 13 at 1:30 a.m. Busy, busy, busy.

"I’ve got a lot of respect for seeing someone perform something really well," he declares in the subsequent conversation, citing Andrew Dice Clay as well as Pacino.

Messier wears a worn leather golf cap backwards, a sheriff T-shirt, and a couple of visible tattoos, the forearm one sporting a heart labeled Cupid above a scrolled "Michelle," the name of his anima, and "Nicole," the name of a young woman who died in a high school car crash, the girlfriend of his lifelong pal Chris. In the videos, his face seems pneumatic, sometimes puffed to pudgy, especially in footage from his Rhode Island College wrestling days. Now he’s 275 pounds, but at 6’2" just looks chunky, with short hair, long sideburns, and a chin tuft. Messier, 29, lives in the Silver Lake district of Providence, down by Cranston.

"I was very average," he says of his days growing up in Fairfax, a northern Virginia No-Drawl Zone. He attended Robinson High School, which in 1990 was featured as a typical American high school on the CBS news mag show 48 Hours.

"I don’t think a lot of people want to be average, but I think most people are, more so than we want to admit," Messier says. "We see celebrity TV shows, and it seems that they want to be one of the two extremes, the homecoming king or the nerd who blossoms."

At age 10, he discovered pro wrestling while surfing past Saturday morning cartoon shows, engrossed and convinced that a couple of guys called the Samoan Brothers and two others who were supposed to be Native American warriors were actually having a blood-lust feud week after week.

At age 28, Messier submitted an 80-page novella/scenario, applying for a spot as a World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly "Federation") ring announcer. The world of pro wrestling is Grand Guignol gonzo theater. Grappling as "Mad Mike" Messier while at RIC, he created Smudge Baby (featured in Rejected), a "gimmick character" — a masked, cross-dressing bruiser who always carries a broken doll called Lucy Leprosy. In the video, Smudge does her/his Southern-drawling best to get on The Jerry Springer Show, but that best — an angry, sweaty, distilled, 100-proof eau de Messier — was not enough for Springer.

"It’s almost as though I feel that’s the only thing I can do — be Mike Messier for a living," he says, laughing through a reference to himself that’s triple removed: a qualification of a quasi-subjunctive of a third-person designation. "As sad as it sounds, I didn’t get my teaching degree at RIC — I got an English degree with a creative writing major. As I say, I’m qualified to be unemployed. I really have no job skills. I can do a computer, but not as good as a lot of people, you know what I mean? I feel like I have to make Mike Messier a product, you know? I have to make myself something that people want to see."

But after all, he’s asked, is life while famous likely to be all it’s cracked up to be?

"Well, there probably would be a whole lot more problems," he says. "I read an interview with some celebrity, I forgot who, but he said that it’s like your normal life times 10."

Mike Messier: actor, ring announcer, playwright, wrestler, filmmaker, rock singer, video-cover artist. That’s marching toward 10.

America, the go-go land of the free-to-do-anything. Which, of course, means you’re free to settle down to nothing.

"A lot of people on television — I feel that I’m more entertaining than them," Messier declares. "A Pauly Shore, or the people on reality TV shows, especially. I feel that I have more to offer as far as humor, intelligence, sensibility, whatever, than a lot of these people."

America, the We’re Number One! land of the dinky trophy for coming in second, where talented success is confused with lottery luck. Where being a winner is the big dream, is everything, and everything it took to get there might as well have been a dream.

And by definition, you’re not a loser if you keep on moving toward the dream, keep on playing the game. After all, then you haven’t actually lost yet.