Mr. Know-It-All, page 16
The waiter brings back the coffee—the special Deadly Grounds brand they serve here that calls itself “highly caffeinated” and boasts right on the label, “Never sleep again!” You take a sip and can barely get out the words “Thank you.” Your heart starts racing and you feel like a human tuning fork on diet pills. Jitters were never this ferocious. The waiter sees your dilated pupils and runs for a bottle of that Tylenol from the recalled lot supposedly poisoned by food terrorists. “Here,” he says after explaining the pill’s provenance, “they work better than Tums.” “But they’re lethal,” you sputter in food paranoia. “Oh, pooh,” he answers with a chuckle, “we give them out all the time at Gristle and nobody’s died … yet. Here’s the check now, though. Just in case.”
You refuse the painkiller and grab for your wallet to pay the bill. Good God, it’s $1,315 and you only had one beverage! Without asking, they have added another huge “alternative tip.” It’s enough to make you faint. You hand over your credit card and attempt to stand up but you feel numb all over. A severe headache throbs through your brain. Suddenly the restaurant starts revolving. How could this be? In the middle of New York City. Yet it is! Just like the cheesy Holiday Inn that opened in Baltimore in the mid-sixties and then closed soon after because it gave diners such a bumpy, seasicky, unsafe-feeling ride. You try to be like a ballet dancer and focus on one point in the 360-degree turn, but since there are no windows in Gristle, that’s impossible.
The waiter pressures you to sign. We want you out of here before you collapse. Your eyeballs have started to cloud over so you can’t see what you’re signing, but who cares? You gotta blow this spinning joint while you can. You attempt to leave but it’s like walking in a rolling barrel at an amusement park fun house. You grab on to the waiter, but we’ll have none of that here at Gristle. “Am I having a heart attack?” you ask in real fear. “Probably,” our staff has been trained to answer honestly. Suddenly another piercing bolt of pain shoots through your head right behind your eyes. You scream. “Quiet,” the waiter hisses, used to these medical emergencies as he opens the front door and you, the onetime gourmet enthusiast, see the outside world spinning. You take aim and leap out, miraculously landing on your own two wobbly feet. Gristle’s door slams behind you.
Fully fed, you stand alone on the sidewalk out front for a few seconds. People stare at you, the lucky one, recognizing your new appreciation of extreme food. Suddenly a massive stroke and a brain aneurysm hit at the exact same moment. You keel over, finally having eaten a meal to die for. Foodie heaven lies before you.
DELAYED
You must travel. “The day you stop touring, your career is over,” Elton John once told me, and he’s right. All showbiz pros know you have to stay on the road your entire life. When Jay Leno was at the top of his career on the Tonight show, he still went out to Middle America on his night off and did stand-up. Bill Maher does, too. You can never blink. Someone is always waiting in the wings to seize your place. Debbie Harry took a little time off right after Blondie had their first hits and Madonna came along and stole her act. Never blink. Nobody said it was easy to be famous.
You should always have backup plans, too. No one career lasts forever. If you can’t get a movie made, write a book; if the book doesn’t sell, go on a speaking tour. Better yet, do all three and make ’em all sing. You gotta stay out there. Meet your public. Press flesh. Hold babies. Do selfies. Sign autographs. When you’re out, you’re at work, get used to it. “Sorry to interrupt,” fans sometimes say, but they’re not. They paid for that outfit you’re wearing, didn’t they? They have the right to have a photograph of you with them. You are never “off” in show business.
You shouldn’t have a fear of flying; you should have a fear of not flying. If I’m not scheduled to go somewhere professionally at least once every couple of weeks, I get nervous. Like Joan Rivers in that revealing documentary about her, Piece of Work, I don’t like to see a lot of white space on my upcoming calendar. You can’t hate planes. All other travel is worse. Buses? For long-term travel? Out of the question. Even fancy ones like country-western stars use. They’re fart wagons. Plain and simple. A traveling “Dutch oven.” Know what that means? That’s when you’re in bed with your loved one and you fart and pull the covers up over both of you so that neither of you can escape the odor. That is giving someone a Dutch oven. All long-distance buses are Dutch ovens. Or horror rides. Haven’t you read those terrifying news stories of low-cost bus trips where the driver is drunk or speeding and has to crash into parked cars to stop? Or seen those awful photos of injured bus passengers with their spilled-out and damaged luggage, sitting dazed and bruised on the breakdown lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike after bus accidents? My own niece was on one such ride when the whole bus caught on fire and many passengers had to watch their bags go up in flames.
Even the better, cheaper bus services have issues. I often ride the BoltBus with a friend from Baltimore to New York round-trip. It’s cheap, direct, and relatively painless. The big drawback is the driver’s regularity. Once, in the middle of our trip, the bus driver pulled over off the turnpike and without explanation moseyed to the bathroom in the back of the bus. We waited. Passengers started squirming, looking at one another in horror. Was the driver actually taking a shit? He was! We hear the rustling of toilet paper, even grunting. Grody! Gag me with a spoon! After what seemed like an eternity, he exited and slowly, nonchalantly walked back up the aisle to his driver’s seat. Without shit shame! As if it were his God-given right to take a dump on our fully paid-up travel time. I wanted to bolt, all right. Right off the BoltBus!
I used to prefer Amtrak trains for interstate travel and still do with minor reservations (engineers who speed, fall asleep, and crash; tracks that are old or untested causing major derailments), but there are a few other problems, too. On the East Coast, the Acela is great (and expensive), but the regional ones in the rest of the country are not as luxurious. Lots of stops. Slow. Major delays. Bumpy as hell, too. Once I spilled a glass of water on this traveler I didn’t know seated next to me. He was so outraged that he forced me to give him $11 in exact change to pay the dry-cleaning bill for his whole suit. And it was just water, not red wine! Taking a piss? Forget about it. The unisex bathrooms are politically correct, but all men know standing up and aiming a stream on a train is a Jackson Pollock painting in the making. Ladies, bring along cleaning supplies if you’re even thinking of sitting down for urination relief.
Riding on a train is also not easy because they keep blaring out that recorded warning “If you see something, say something” every goddamn second on the public address system, and I do see something: another person, a tree outside the window, a suitcase. “Something!” I holler. “Something! Something! Something!” until the alarmed conductor feels like shooting me with a tranquilizer gun to shut me up.
Cars? Well, at least you can just throw your luggage in the trunk without hassle, but there are those goddamn tollbooths where somebody in your car has to come in contact with the hands of the person who collects the money inside who may be a lightning rod for the Ebola virus—just think of all the germs on the person’s fingers from touching the giant unwashed public’s mitts every other second. I don’t care if they are wearing gloves, these attendants could still be infectious. I know about E-ZPasses, I wasn’t born yesterday, but even though you don’t have to drive in the regular germ-filled “cash” lanes, how about the mosquitoes that fly through the air of the E-ZPass magic lanes? Couldn’t they have the Zika virus? One bite and your baby is E-Z-deformed.
That leaves airplanes, and the main goal of your entire life should be to be able to somehow fly first class one day. I don’t feel guilty saying that—I flew coach promoting my films all over the world until I was in my forties. But now I can never go back even though, believe me, first class ain’t what it used to be. In flights under two hours, you don’t even get a meal, just a basket to pick through of “free” potato chips and half-rotten bananas for an extra $1,000 or so. It’s still a lot better than coach.
I’m amazed that air travel works as well as it does. All those flights; “weather,” as they irritatingly put it—meaning bad weather! Human error. Still shocking to me that this huge hunk of metal, sometimes as big as a football field, actually flies in the air over an ocean. It’s a “pretty good invention” as a more down-to-earth friend said to me innocently after getting off a flight, and maybe we should all stop, think, and marvel at his obvious but truthful words. A damn good invention, indeed.
But the rituals before and after the plane takes off are enough to make you commit suicide. Oh, I forgot, that’s the pilots’ priority. Nobody talks anymore about that German flight that was crashed into the French Alps with a full load of passengers by a suicidal pilot who first locked the copilot out of the cockpit. “There were only five or six other flights that were thought to crash from suicidal pilots,” some aviation official pooh-poohed. Five or six other ones?! Don’t we have enough to worry about (flocks of birds being sucked into jet engines, lightning, drunken air traffic controllers, shoe bombers) besides pilots on a bummer? You can always see the crew boarding before you get on any flight, and I always try to check out the pilot’s expression. Uh-oh, he looks depressed. “Hi, Captain!” I chirp happily, hoping to cheer him up. “Just remember,” I say in a singsong voice, “a smile is just a frown turned upside down,” before muttering under my breath, “Please don’t kill us.”
I like to get to the airport early. Very, very early. At least two hours before my domestic flight, three internationally. Just in case anything goes wrong, I’m first in line to get rebooked, but that doesn’t happen much because I usually book the first flight out in the morning even though I often have to get up at 4:00 A.M. to get to the airport in time. The early-morning planes are always there, the crews can’t be delayed, and thunderstorms usually seem to happen in late afternoon or early evening.
I’m the opposite of O.J. running through the airport in those old Hertz ads. Me, I like to mosey. I already have printed my boarding pass, not on my phone. It doesn’t always work. I’ve seen people being sent back, so I’m one step ahead of the game. Even though the luggage-cart machine can rip you off and double-bill your credit card, I get one anyway because I don’t know how much to tip the curbside redcaps and am paranoid they go through your checked luggage stealing your La Mer products.
I love that the Baltimore airport is one of the few that allows you to take your cart all the way through security to your gate despite the hassle of getting it through the X-ray machines. But the regular security checks are just as tedious as everywhere else, especially now that pre-check lines are often as long as coach’s. I amuse myself, as all gay men do, by watching other males remove their coats and sweaters, which always offers a glimpse of stomach or ass as they struggle to disrobe. I am appalled every time I fly by the hideous way many travelers dress. No, you can’t wear shorts. Do you think others want to sit next to your hairy, scaly legs? Workout clothes? P.U.! Who wants to smell your sweaty armpits? Bare feet! How disgusting! And pajamas? You have to be kidding me! Are you a baby? Does Daddy need to hold you? Get the fuck dressed! The only thing worse is traveling with a companion animal. If you are so mentally fragile that you can’t leave home without some poor creature you’ve condemned to a lifetime of cuddling, then you shouldn’t be allowed to mix freely in society. Don’t go to the airport; check yourself into a mental institution.
I need to be first on the plane, first off. At the gate, I pick the seat nearest the counter and watch the airline staff’s every expression to notice even the most remote possibility of a delay or cancellation so I can be first in line to rebook. A full half hour before the boarding time, I leap up and get in the priority line even if I am blocking the departing passengers who have just arrived on the plane I’ll eventually get on. I want that overhead baggage space and I want it before you!
“Thank you for your patience,” the agents at the gate always say when a flight is delayed, but even though I feel sorry for these employees, I let them know in no uncertain terms that “I don’t have any, so please do not thank me for something I cannot offer.” They look at me blankly but not with so much hostility as they do when I roll my eyes in derision at the other fliers who “need extra time to board,” who get to go on in front of me even though I’m in first class. I know that sounds heartless but so many of these passengers are faking! Especially on Southwest, which has open seating once you get on board. “What’s the matter with her?!” I always want to ask the flight attendant. “Can I see a doctor’s note?” I’m not being coldhearted here; most of those “disabled” passengers are liars! I see them once they get on the Jetway—it’s like Lourdes! They throw down their crutches and sprint toward the airline door, laughing and singing, “Yippee, aisle seats in the front of the plane!” Bastards.
I don’t mind “any active member of the military” getting to go on board before me because they’re sometimes brave, always cute, and I feel sorry for them; they might die and maybe they were in those military porn movies I used to collect. Some airlines have recently and correctly changed the rules, but others still allow “families with children in strollers” to also butt in line. And, of course, a baby is always screaming. I don’t blame the kid. He or she must sense they’re going to be sitting in coach. But why does the mother always say to me, “He’s just tired…” “From what?” I always ask. “I mean, does he have a job?” “Well, no,” the mother answers, recoiling. “Did he just unload a truck before you got to the airport?” I challenge, and by now this parent knows I mean business and curtails her stupid excuses. Do I say ignorant stuff to her like “Just whip that little fucker with a car aerial—that’ll shut him up”? No, I do not.
I always feel like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The V.I.P.s whenever I fly first-class internationally. But why is everybody ugly in first class? It’s true. Watch aircraft passengers deplane anywhere in the world. The first ones off the plane are first-class, and Godfrey, rich people are dogs. You’ll think they’re wearing Halloween monster masks, but it’s their real faces! As the seating goes farther back in coach, the “cute factor” rises. Why are poor planners hotter? Why is the middle-seat passenger better looking? Younger? Hipper? Just remember, the next time you’re in the last row of coach, next to the germ-filled bathroom, you’re way sexier than anyone in first class.
And believe me, up front on the plane, once the flight has taken off and you’ve eaten your free (Ha! One-way to Australia, $13,605) caviar and drunk all your complimentary liquor, you have to sleep with your fellow passengers. In most airlines the sky bed lies flat and somebody is right next to you. Sure, you get real cotton sheets, feather pillows, adjustable reading lights, but no matter how glamorous you might feel, you quickly realize you’re actually sharing the space of a standard double bed with a complete stranger. It’s usually a man and he is always snoring. And drunk. I’m constantly paranoid that he will roll over in his sleep and accidentally goose me. Roman hands and Russian fingers. Watch it, buster!
Other airlines do first class differently but seating always seems ill-designed. Delta’s flat bed pods at first look appealing, but when you lie down and slip your feet inside, you can’t help but be reminded of what an MRI feels like. While Virgin calls first class “upper class” (is coach “lower class”?), they at least have single beds stacked at an angle that does afford privacy, even if you sometimes feel like an anchovy in a can or your own corpse in a fitting for your coffin. More embarrassing is British Airways’ first-class seats that actually put passengers in a sitting-up “69” position forcing you to stare into your adjoining passenger’s face, which seems inches away unless you put up a privacy “fan” that blocks the view between seats. But that’s a complicated question of manners—who puts up the “fan” first? If you do, are you uppity? Unfriendly? Subtly saying no to the person sexually? Yes, I know it’s absolutely ridiculous to ever bitch about first-class seating, so feel lucky if you’re in coach. You don’t have to reject anyone or, worse yet, be rejected.
Just the sight of a family of four sitting in first class is enough to make me see red. It took decades of my hustling before I could demand to be flown noncoach, and now I’ll see a mom and dad on an international flight with two kids routinely nibbling filet mignon in flat bed seats in the front of the plane. How much could that cost the family? Forty thousand dollars? Obscene! Do these Richie Rich brats realize how privileged and pampered they are? All children should be in coach until they can afford to pay for the first-class tickets themselves or scam someone other than their parents to spring for it. You’re twelve years old and want to fly first-class? Go on a quiz show and win the money. Enter some contest, become a model—just don’t expect Mom and Dad to ever pay for first class. Or me to look at you in it.
I always get an aisle seat so if there’s trouble, I can grab my Comme des Garçons hanging bag (don’t think I’m leaving that behind!) and knock down old ladies to get off the plane before it explodes. I’ve seen the passengers in coach in the exit rows that offer more legroom who nod their heads affirmatively when asked if they will be able to assist opening the exit door in case of an emergency landing. Oh, sure! You’ll be able to open this big heavy door when there’s been no oxygen, the plane has plunged toward earth while people are screaming and praying, and that fireball has come down the aisle toward you, setting your face on fire.
