Celebrity: “Do You Know Who I Am?”

The Wack Pack is Howard Stern’s answer to the Rat Pack, a group of listeners-turned-guests who have become more popular than Stern’s traditional celebrity interviewees, the forefathers to a generation of “reality stars” for whom talent is beside the point. Its members have included “Beetlejuice” (a disabled man whose brain and head are abnormally small), Celestine (an Atlantic City woman with no arms and legs who was killed in 1998 when a car struck her motorized bed just off the Boardwalk), “Crackhead Bob” (a recovering crack addict whose drug use led him to suffer strokes), “Dan the Farter” (obvious), and “Rappin’ Granny” (an 85-year-old who has orgasmed on the show). Stern’s genius — or original sin — was in creating an old-style circus on air, taking an assemblage of “freaks,” giving them a platform, and then laughing not only at them but with them. For in some perverse but real way, Stern’s motivations have proved beneficent, helping to humanize, even destigmatize, a population otherwise shunned.

Many Wack Packers have forged careers in show biz, and it was this possibility, Janks told me, that drew Kallenbach into Howard’s orb. Janks and Kallenbach met in 1990 in a Secaucus parking lot on their way to appear on Stern’s then-super-low-budget TV show. Kallenbach had written to Stern hoping to demonstrate his talent of blowing cigarette smoke from his eye socket. As Kallenbach sat across from a hysterically laughing Stern, after seven tries — each time he inhaled the smoke though his mouth, then pushed out as hard as possible — gas burst from his anus, snot streamed from his mouth, and not smoke but tears poured from his eyes. No matter. He was in.

While the Stern connection would prove the ultimate coup for Janks, Kallenbach held larger aspirations. “I think he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild. He was constantly sending out packets to casting agents and TV shows, really professional-looking stuff,” Janks says. “He was certain he was just about to make it big.”

But there was, evidently, much Kallenbach kept to himself. Janks did not know the details of Ken’s arrest until after his death, and when the two spoke for the last time in the final days of March, Ken did not see fit to mention that he was at that moment out of jail on bond (and was soon to be re-arrested). And for the nearly 20 years that the two were friends, Ken also kept from Janks the fact that he was suffering from cystic fibrosis, the lifelong disease that would ostensibly kill him. “Ken was a very private person,” Janks says.

NONE OF THEM knew how serious his illness was. Not Janks, not Stern nor sidekick Robin Quivers, not Ken’s agent, not even his surprising number of girlfriends, including his latest, Danielle Schutz, the soft-spoken, diffident 26-year-old West Chester University student who’d responded to his personal ad on Craigs-list a couple months ago, and who is now in his mother’s kitchen, showing me the tattoo she’s just gotten above her left breast, of a heart with tulips and a massive letter K in the center.