Superfan

I didn't even vote for Shuli; I voted for the guy who recently tried to give Howard a framed sample of his semen for Christmas. In 2004's monumental contest to earn the job formerly held by Stuttering John Melendez—who'd abandoned The Howard Stern Show and its legendarily loyal supporters to chase fame and fortune in Hollywood by working as Jay Leno's dummy (and is now dead as far as most of us are concerned)—Shuli, a Las Vegan, produced good but not great bits during his trial week, chose not to campaign for himself on the Internet or with fliers, lost the online vote and personally disappointed Howard with his performance.

"I didn't even vote for myself," Shuli says. "And I couldn't ask people to vote for me when I knew other guys had a much better week. I voted for Sal; he was amazing."

During the call-for-entries stage, Howard regularly played submission tapes on the air, often eliminating them from contention on the spot. Shuli was convinced Howard would think his entry was either the absolute worst or the very best of the bunch. Shuli's submission was an homage to the embarrassingly sincere 1980s video that producer Gary Dell'Abate made to help win back the girl who broke his heart. It didn't work for Gary, but it did work for Shuli: Howard hyped it as his favorite entry.

"When they're talking about you on the show or playing something that you sent in, it's something you can't explain to people. It's awesome," Shuli recalls. But his advantage ended there. Realistically, he never had a chance at winning this job.

As an out-of-town candidate, he didn't have the intimate knowledge of the studio and staff that the others had, or any of their New York connections. But as a Howard Stern superfan and a voter, I can tell you that his most severe disadvantage was his normalcy. Consider some of Shuli's competitors: Racist, nihilistic clown Yucko (who later landed a starring role in the quickly canceled MTV2 sketch comedy show Stankervision); badly tattooed Steppin' Out magazine publisher—with hair plugs installed by a garbage man and a deformed penis from a lifetime of abnormal masturbation—Chauncé Hayden; professional comedian known for closing his sets by eating bleu cheese out of a woman's ass crack, and winner of Howard Stern's "World's Meanest Listener" contest, Reverend Bob Levy; and the notorious bully to Baba Booey responsible for more than a decade's worth of classic prank calls and song parodies, weirdly weepy Sal the Stockbroker.

This wasn't a contest to see who would be the most reliable and competent candidate for a job; Shuli could've easily won if that were the case. This was more a contest about replacing Stuttering John as a character, and the other candidates were wilder, darker and generally more willing to degrade themselves for good radio than Shuli was. That's just not Shuli's style, and that's what really cost him the vote.

"Throughout all the years of doing the show, I've said to myself, I'm going to be myself. And you know what? Maybe I'm not a dick enough to go anywhere on this show. Maybe I'm not crazy enough. Maybe I'm not retarded. But I'm going to be myself; what people hear is what they get. And I don't buy that 'nice guys finish last' shit."

But he did—he finished 10th out of Howard's 10 handpicked candidates. My guy, Richard Christie, won John's job, and Howard was so impressed by second place-winner Sal that he soon created a position for him as well. Incidentally, Sal's gift to Howard this Christmas was a nude photograph of himself in Howard's traditional, terrestrial radio studio.

A normal guy like Shuli can't hope to compete in this terrifying arena. So why was he selected to in the first place, and why did Howard see dark horse potential in him? How did a listener from Vegas work his way up the ranks from frequent phone caller to Howard Stern's go-to guy? And how did his ultimately stunning failure in the "Get John's Job" competition lead him from Vegas to New York City, reporting for Howard 100 News on Sirius satellite radio?

Well, I'll tell you.

Even nonfans of Howard Stern have at least heard about his Las Vegas connection. For years, he and his crew made weeklong visits to the Hard Rock Hotel, where thousands of fans from all over the country crowded together to witness historic broadcasts. Howard had the No. 1 morning show in Vegas until, on November 7, KXTE 107.5-FM took him off their airwaves—26 original programs short of Howard's final terrestrial radio broadcast, and two months before The Howard Stern Show debuts on Sirius.

"As a fan, I don't even know what I would've done," 31-year-old Shuli says of Howard's absence from Vegas these last two months. So I tell him what I've done: visited howardstern.com for daily rundowns of each show, listened to Howard 100 for Stern-related news and content on one of the three Sirius receivers I purchased the week KXTE dropped him, and quit listening to KXTE all together.

"My first phone call to the show was a week before they came to Vegas, around 1999," Shuli says. "What's funny about this is, my girlfriend and I have been together for 11 years now. She is not a huge fan of the show, and not a huge fan of the time I take to call into the show. That's what really bugs her.

"We got into an argument one night, and she went, 'You know, you stay up and listen all night. [Howard's show aired live in Vegas from 3 a.m. until 6 a.m., before switching to a prerecorded broadcast from 6 a.m. until 10:30 a.m.] The least you could do is call in.'

"And I'm going, 'Wow, she's a bitch, but she's onto something.'"

Shuli called in that morning and posed this scenario to Howard: You're in a horrible accident and die. In the trunk of you car, they could find either 500 gay pornos or 500 fecal fetish pornos. Which would you prefer?

"He goes, 'Easy, the doodie tapes.' And I agreed with him, because, you know, you don't want to be known as a fag when you get buried."

Encouraged, Shuli then asked if he could tell Howard a joke, but with a stipulation: "If you laugh, I get to make a bet with you at the blackjack table in Vegas." Howard agreed, and Shuli told a joke involving God, Saint Peter, the pearly gates and three black men.

"Howard laughed and said, 'Ahh, that's so stupid!' And I said, 'Hey, you laughed ...'"

So after just one phone call, the then-unknown Shuli managed to book himself as a guest the following week on The Howard Stern Show.

"It was only a matter of time before I realized I wasn't made to be an engine for fat f--kers," Shuli says of his pre-Howard job providing wheelchair assistance to visitors at McCarran International Airport. "Oddly enough, no handicapped people need assistance; the only people that need 'pushers' are fat loads.

"There are so many fat loads that need pushers, they have special nicknames for the chairs that they need. Like, if someone gets on the radio and asks for a 'Galaxy?' Galaxy means their ass is the size of the universe. The Galaxy chair was like the nuclear bomb; we knew we had it, we just prayed we wouldn't have to use it.

"My first Galaxy chair I ever had to take was this woman who was over 500 pounds. And, you've flown in and out at McCarran a bunch: the A-B Gates, when you come out, is just that ramp-up of carpeting. I went over to the security guard, and I go, 'Is there an elevator?' I'd been there a week, I didn't know. And I'm like, 'Is there an elevator I can take?' And the guy just gave me the saddest look, and he's like, 'No, dude, I'm sorry.' And I was like, 'All right, check this out. If you hear screaming and you see me standing on the back of her chair, that means we're coming back and we're coming back fast.' And I f--kin' ran and hit that chair full-speed, got her up that little mountain in about five seconds, and couldn't talk for about the next 30 minutes. I was completely out of air."

That job followed one even less appealing: "I used to work at the famous souvenir film shops that got raided once a week for selling film for $87 a roll. They'd do this thing with the tourists where they'd rip them off. I was the only Israeli that worked there that had legitimate papers and could quit and get a job somewhere else, so I would just talk shit to all my bosses. And one day I was just like, 'You know what? F--k this. I'm done ripping people off.'"

Shuli moved briefly to LA, where he made his first attempt at stand-up comedy. "I did two open-mic shows at the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, and they were just dreadfully awful. I was 20, and I was just really, really bad. I thought to myself, Well, I'm never doing this again.

"I didn't understand how to write material, how to do material. And I went back to Vegas and kind of put comedy on the back burner. Then a buddy of mine who works as a valet parker at Olympic Garden said that every other week on Sunday nights they were doing a comedy show upstairs where the guys dance—they were off on Sunday nights. Sandy Hackett was doing this comedy show, and I knew Sandy's the son of Buddy Hackett. I knew he's owned comedy clubs in Laughlin, and that [Sam] Kinison used to play his room a lot, and [Bill] Hicks and all these guys. I thought, Here's a guy who'll at least let me know if I've got a shot doing this shit for a living.

"I went in there and I said, 'I'm a new comic, I've got about three minutes if you want, and I'd like to do it.' And instead of saying, 'You f--king idiot, get outta here,' he was like, 'You know what? That's fine. Why don't you let me get up the guys that I've booked, and then I'll have you on.'"

But Shuli didn't do any better this time. "Believe me, three minutes—when you suck—is an eternity. But for some reason he told me to keep coming back and try again. He was very receptive to me learning and gave me a lot of tips."

Hackett later opened a comedy club at the Greek Isles, while Shuli grew as an entertainer. "He started having me there once a week, twice a week, then three times a week. And then I was there whenever I wanted.

"But I had to basically strip all my material and start from scratch, because playing to a casino crowd isn't like playing to a comedy club or a bar. People are waiting to see a tiger and props and magic and dancers. For me it was a whole new world. I started at three minutes of material, and every week I would add about two minutes to my set. Eventually it got to the point where I just ran the room. I hosted it, I did as much time as I needed to do based on how many comics we had. Some nights I did the whole show myself—45 minutes."

I took notice of Shuli's calls early on, and was proud that someone from Vegas was becoming a Stern Show regular without humiliating himself. "I didn't want to be labeled a Wack Packer. And there was a fine line there between calling in three times a week as a regular caller and calling in three times a week as 'Shuli the Retard' or something, you know what I'm saying? And I didn't want to be in that category at all. So I had to keep watching myself and make sure that I kind of just reinvented things over and over again."

Shuli wanted to contribute something to the show that he knew both Howard and the fans would enjoy, so he devised games for Howard to play on the air. Through the process of elimination, Howard would determine, for example, who his best guest or favorite Wack Packer was. "I would do a bracket thing, almost like an NCAA college tournament. I'd come up with a game like 'Who's Crazier,' and I'd list some of the facts. 'Robin hung a giant picture of herself in the living room of her own house, she bought a pool and doesn't know how to swim ...' All this stupid shit."

However simple on the surface, Shuli's games always sparked great discussion and the occasional staff fight—a treasure to Stern fans. And at one point, Howard's crew began to call Shuli to see if he had any games Howard could play on the air, rather than waiting for Shuli to call in.

On November 1, Howard began his show by commenting on a commercial that KXTE had been airing that thanked him for all his years of entertainment. Howard said he was upset that Vegas listeners had only a few shows left before he'd be taken off our airwaves, and that we wouldn't be able to hear some great farewells. But he said he'd be seeing us once again when he moved his show to Sirius.

Meanwhile, in a dingy, noxious apartment in Queens, Shuli began his live coverage of a contest to see how much fecal matter the rotund and repulsive Wack Packer High Pitch Eric would eliminate in a 24-hour period. The "Craptacular" was deemed by Howard's New York City station's management to be too graphic to broadcast on terrestrial radio, so Howard ran it as one of the first programs broadcast on his Sirius channels. (Though The Howard Stern Show doesn't debut until January 9, Stern has been providing programming since November.) Consider how frightening Shuli's assignment was: In a 2004 contest where a woman was guaranteed $20,000 if she could spend three days handcuffed to Eric (supervised, of course), she bailed six hours into the contest, claiming his apartment smelled like urine, horse poop and body odor. But Shuli persevered, and the following day Howard and the gang noted how impressed they were with Shuli's performance as a reporter. And suddenly the listeners, who had always seen Shuli as a respected superfan, now saw him as a legitimate member of Howard's gang.

"I remember my dad dropping me off at junior high, in the car listening to the Stern Show together. And I remember telling him, 'Dad, I'm going to be on this show one day.' Meanwhile, on the air a guy's eating dog shit. He's going, 'Great, my son's going to be on this show one day.'"

Since signing up with Sirius in mid-November, I've heard Shuli cover a backwoods Thanksgiving from a remote in Kansas, conduct Stern fan roundtables, take the Howard 100 News van to the streets and interview Wack Pack favorites like Beetlejuice, Jeff the Drunk, Eric the Midget (a.k.a Eric the Actor) and Elegant Elliott Offen. As the only superfan in the Howard 100 News team, he has enthusiasm and a credibility among listeners that none of the professional, seasoned reporters can match. And because of his unwavering character, "They can trust I'm not going to pants somebody's dad while doing my job."

At 12:01 on January 1, I listened as Shuli helped make history in the Howard Stern universe. Howard's contract with terrestrial radio had officially expired one minute earlier, and the legal stipulation preventing the voice of any member of his crew from appearing on Sirius was no longer valid. Broadcasting live from a house party in Long Island, Shuli brought the voices of Howard Stern Show members onto Sirius for the first time ever. The voices belonged to his former job competitors Richard Christie and Sal the Stockbroker. Now all three were all part of the new Howard Stern family, and they were ecstatic. Sitting in my home office that night, working on this feature, I got chills for Shuli. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Since leaving Las Vegas, Shuli's life has been virtually consumed by The Howard Stern Show and everything it brings. Wack Packers call him on his cell phone day and night, because he's the guy who made it from our side of the radio to Howard's side. They're often depressed that they haven't been more involved with programming. "Every night someone tells me they're about to jump off a bridge," Shuli sighs.

But he loves every minute of it. Now living in Queens, Shuli trudges through snow to take the subway to work at 8 every morning, but he stands out in the crowd. "I've got the biggest f--king smile on my face you've ever seen.

"I just saw Howard today, and it's so surreal. He's asking me how I'm doing. It's a dream come true. I told my brother last night that if somebody was to come up to me on the street and say, 'Give me your wallet or I'll blow your head off,' I'd give him my wallet and say, 'Shoot me right here, f--ker, 'cause it ain't gonna get any better than this.'"