We started talking on the phone and messaging each other every day after that while I was deployed to Iraq. It was like we were high school sweethearts, excited about making plans for the future together. We knew each other’s work and sleep schedules. He even FaceTimed me in the shower one day. I could hear his wife yelling at him.
“Are you really FaceTiming a dude in the shower that you’ve never met?!”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Taylor!” I shouted through the FaceTime screen. “There are no dick and balls in the frame!”
Two days after I got home from Iraq, I flew down to El Paso and stayed with Jarred for five days. When I landed, he picked me up from the airport and even came inside to baggage claim to greet me like a lady. On the drive back to his house, he pointed out the restaurants he thought I’d like and the gyms he thought would suit my needs.
“A bunch of these places are for sale,” he said, pointing to different houses in a residential neighborhood. “You can rent them too. I know the dude who rents them out.”
He was talking like a real estate agent welcoming a new family to the neighborhood, as if I was moving there or something. I just nodded as we turned in to his driveway. Wait, this was his neighborhood? Who was this crazy bastard?
Jarred and his house had a lot in common. They were good-sized, they looked nice and well maintained on the outside, but on the inside they were a total fucking nuthouse. The living room had no furniture and no TV, just band equipment and amplifiers. The first room he showed me was a spare bedroom that was decked out with more editing gear than a local TV station.
“Pretty cool, huh? I told you, I got everything down here,” he said.
“Yeah, man, this is awesome. Where are your wife and daughter?”
“They’re around somewhere, I don’t know. Probably out getting us food or something.”
“And she’s cool with you having a small concert venue in your living room? You don’t even have a couch.”
“No, we do. It’s out in the garage,” he said in a matter-of-fact way, as if this was a completely normal thing.
“Why is it out in the garage?”
“I spend most of my time out there.” That was the least surprising thing I had learned since touching down in El Paso. “Come on, I’ll show you. Let’s shoot some shit.”
“Wait, where am I sleeping?”
“I got a room for you.”
Jarred walked me down the hall to a spare bedroom that resembled something out of a porn shoot for Black Ops Back Door Bonanza. It was completely bare except for a queen-sized bed and about a dozen AR-15s on the floor. I looked at the mini-arsenal lying there thinking, Those muzzle brakes have definitely been inside more than just a tactical carrying case. I dropped my bag and Jarred took me out to the garage. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?
As soon as he hit the lights, I knew exactly what I had gotten into: production gold. He basically had a professional photography studio out there. I’m talking five-point light kits, 5D cameras, props, and every kind of backdrop you could imagine, from simple pastels to green screens. This motherfucker wasn’t kidding when he said he had all the necessary production gear. He had everything. It was incredible. He turned on one of the light kits and focused a camera on a backdrop.
“All right,” he said, “let’s get started.”
* * *
—
Within a matter of days after leaving El Paso, my Facebook page and YouTube channel began growing exponentially within the military community. Initially, my newfound popularity wasn’t a problem, because I was still able to float under the radar when I was deployed. Except for my first two trips as a contractor, I wasn’t really around any military. I worked with the same small team of contractors at the same small ████, which housed contractors and ██████████████████, with no active-duty military present except for the occasional ███ team that would swing through. Everyone there already knew me and had seen my earlier videos, so none of this stuff was new to them. In this little bubble of ours, I was still just the guy who was the head of security and who would sit around the fire with them after work like one of the guys, drinking a beer, bullshitting about life. The only difference, now, was that I would float possible sketch ideas by them and write down the funny shit they said. In a way, they were invested in my videos, so they weren’t surprised each time one posted.
The reason my team members and I consistently worked together for nearly four years straight was that we were always on the same deployment cycle. But by early 2014, when things really started to kick off with the videos, I had to start changing up my deployment schedule to take advantage of opportunities to film and promote and do other business-related things. The first time I decided to delay one of my deployments and take extra time off, it was to go to the SHOT Show hosted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation in Las Vegas to promote my channel MBest11x. This pushed my next deployment to the following slot in the rotation, which meant that my normal assignment to Iraq would no longer be open and I would have to deploy to another theater. In this instance, Afghanistan. Specifically, I’d be detailed to “The Flagpole,” which is where NATO and all the military brass and a shit-ton of enlisted dudes were garrisoned. Fine by me, no big deal. To my mind, that just meant it would be easier to blend in. Oh Mat, you beautiful idiot.
First day: “Hey, aren’t you that dude from YouTube?”
“Uh, yeah.”
The guy slugged me hard on the shoulder. “Holy shit! I knew it was you! Your videos are fucking hilarious, man! Keep up the good work!”
“Thanks, man.”
He smiled and walked off. I stood there stunned for a minute. SHOT Show aside, I had never been recognized for something other than what I did while I was in uniform or who I was caught with when I was stripped naked out of it. It was one thing to sit there and watch the YouTube subscriber numbers and Facebook friends grow into the thousands, but it was something else altogether to put a face to one of those numbers. It was surreal.
With each successive deployment, I met more and more people who seemed to already know who I was and thought what we were doing was cool. At one base, even the new interpreter assigned to me by the Afghan government knew who I was. I mean, this dude spent the first two hours of our training eye-fucking me so hard that I didn’t know if he was an insurgent or in love.
“Is there an issue, Sparky?” I finally asked.
“No sir, but are you the American that does the guns and bikinis?”
“What?”
“You know. The American who knows how to pick up women on YouTube?”
Oh fuck, he was talking about my video, “How to Pick Up Chicks.”