Celebrity: Life’s a Beach

Sometimes, it seems Gervase gets tired of being Gervase. At Diego and Chio’s Sunday Softball Game for — “I don’t know, some charity” — he is grumpy, his hat pulled low, barely verbal. There are about 30 people, a generous estimate, in the audience for Q102’s softball game against the Men of the Cave, and most of them look like friends and relatives. Gervase’s kids are arguing with Chio’s kid; it looks like a little inter-tribal conflict.

It’s a far cry from the heady post-Pulau Tiga days, before Gervase came home to take care of his mother (who is now in a nursing home), when he lived in L.A. and was invited to all the best parties, when people mobbed him in the street, on the elevator, at bars. “People still act crazy, like the show’s still on,” he told the Survivors gathered in the Marriott. But the truth is, it only happens occasionally these days.

After the game ends — Q102 loses — he perks up. There’s the Q102 party at the Lagoon later that night, and he’s meeting with a guy who wants to cast him in a movie.

He talks about how he wants to have a paper route, how he’s always wanted to be a human guinea pig, how he went to GlaxoSmithKline and filled out the paperwork and everything, because “That’s a cool job. You do nothing.” How he never had a paper route when he was a kid, but now he can. Because when you are making six figures for doing nothing, you can pick up and do whatever you want. “How cool is that, that I get to do that?” he says, in a way that indicates this is not a sales pitch. “I have a cool life.”

But doesn’t he ever worry that someday his 15 minutes, or whatever you want to call it, the Gervase Hour, might end? He has four kids, after all. Gervase Never Nervous climbs into his Pontiac Torrent, emblazoned with the Survivor logo, and smiles. “It won’t end,” he says “until I say it’s gonna end.” Then he drives off into the sunset.

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