Rubber Balls and Liquor Page 4

  It doesn’t matter where we happen to be, or how famous we are, or how famous we think we are, we fit ourselves into each situation like we were born to it. And—invariably, unavoidably—we’re drawn to each other. Like the time I ran into Howie Mandel at a radio station in Chicago. He was making the rounds, promoting his book about being a germaphobe. I was out promoting the dirty jokes DVD I couldn’t interest Harrison Ford in turning into a big-budget movie. We talked for a bit at the station, between our interview segments, and as Howie left he told me where he was staying and suggested I stop by afterward.

  This alone wasn’t unusual. I’d known Howie for years. We weren’t exactly friends—he’d never invite me to his kid’s Bar Mitzvah, except possibly to wait tables—but we ran in some of the same circles. When you work in stand-up, you tend to follow the careers of other people who work in stand-up. You know all the same people, the same places. It’s kind of like the way everyone assumes that all black people know each other, only in this case we do. Kind of, sort of. Especially if we’re Jewish. Then there’s a secret handshake, too.

  Anyway, I did my interview and told the cleaned-up versions of some of my dirty jokes. Then I went to see Howie at his hotel. Here again, not so unusual, right? We can ignore each other in New York or Los Angeles, but since we’d run into each other on the road, in the middle of nowhere, we had to make this little extra effort to get together, only it just so happened that I was suffering with a really bad cold. I was coughing and sneezing like crazy, and it never once occurred to me how deliciously ironic it was that I would now be doing my coughing and sneezing next to one of the biggest germaphobes of our time.

  (Is there any other kind of irony, really?)

  Let me put this in terms you can easily understand: Howie Mandel is the kind of guy who would ask a girl to gargle with Purell before giving him a blow job. He’s over-the-top about this stuff, but I didn’t think anything of it just yet. I was too focused on the particulars of our celebrity dance. We found a nice little seating area in the hotel lobby and sat down, and I started coughing almost as soon as we started talking. I was having these uncontrollable fits of coughing, just hacking and gurgling and sounding like I was about to spit up blood.

  Howie recoiled, like he’d just heard a gunshot. He said, “Wait a minute, Gilbert. Are you sick?” He looked at me like I’d just taken a big, hot, steaming shit, right in the middle of the hotel lobby. Or, like I’d just taken a swig from a bottle of Purell and was about to go down on him.

  I said, “I have this cough. I can’t seem to shake it.” Then I coughed some more, and attempted a full body shudder meant to indicate that I was trying to shake it.

  He said, “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Then he moved over to the far edge of the sofa where we were sitting and turned away from me. I think he even covered his face with a scarf. He was like a kid in kindergarten, deathly afraid of catching my cooties.

  I said, “Oh, that’s brilliant, Howie. That’s very mature, and scientifically sound. Of course, my germs can’t make a left turn and find you facing away from me, all curled up like that in the corner of the couch. They can only go forward, in a straight line.” Then I put on my most annoying, most sarcastic voice (as opposed to my merely somewhat annoying, somewhat sarcastic voice) and said, “You’re perfectly safe now.”

  He said, “Fuck you, Gilbert.”

  The great part about this visit with Howie Mandel was that we continued to sit and talk in this way for a while longer. He asked about my family. I asked about his. He asked about my career. I asked about his. And yet the whole time he was curled up in his corner of the couch, facing away from me, talking into his scarf, while I was doing what I could to steer my germs directly onto his person.

  And then at some midpoint in this weird, sick exchange, it occurred to me … the answer to one of life’s great questions: no, Rue McClanahan might have been nothing to sneeze at, but Howie Mandel?

  3

  Not Living up to My Potential

  I don’t like to talk about my personal life. It’s too personal. Also, a part of me thinks my personal life is nobody’s business. Another part can’t imagine why anyone would even want to know about this stuff. However, I guess I could share a little bit of it with you, dear reader, but only if you promise not to tell anybody. You see, I’ve spent all this time building all these walls and closing myself off from all these memories and feelings that I’d hate to undo all that good work just to sell a couple books. That sort of thing would be beneath a stand-up guy like me, don’t you think? Besides, I’m not really in touch with my memories and feelings—at least, not enough to write about them. We used to be in touch, but we had a falling-out. We’re working through a few things.

  But this is a book, so it’s not all about me. Yeah, I know, it’s my book, so you’d think it might be all about me, but you’d be wrong. As it happens, it’s also about this character I once saw in a movie, who seemed to have his shit together. He was a dashing young man, fairly oozing with charm and warmth and good cheer. Me, I’m just fairly oozing. This other character, he had women and money and cars. Me, I just have dick jokes and some loose change and I can sometimes tell the difference between a car and a bus. Together we make an interesting pair.

  Okay, so let’s just say this is the part of the book that’s based on my life. It’s not about my life, but it’s based on it. It’s like that line you sometimes see on movie posters, “Inspired by a true story.” It means a whole bunch of stuff is made up. The way it works is I think back to something that actually happened, in such a way that I’m inspired to stretch the truth, to embellish, to exaggerate. Basically, to lie. Only here my stories are not exactly inspiring, although there may have been some perspiration involved. It’s not quite the same thing, I know, but I thought I’d mention it.

  Here are a couple half-truths and distorted memories from my childhood. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to figure out which is which. Let’s start with my father, who served in the military in World War II. He was a Nazi officer, it turned out. (Who knew?) He masterminded the Third Reich. (Again, a big surprise to us Gottfrieds, who were led to believe all along he had been working on the First Reich, which of course at the time would have been known as merely the Reich, since there was no reason to line them up and start counting just yet.)

  Actually, let me amend that last misstatement: my father masterminded the Final Solution. That sounds so much better than being the guy behind all those Reichs, but you can’t really blame him; it wasn’t really his fault; he was angry at his accountant at the time.

  Now, I’m afraid I must put these proceedings on pause for a bit to let you in on a curious exchange between me and my editor. When he read the first draft of the manuscript, he scribbled in the margins that these last few paragraphs about Nazis and the Final Solution didn’t really work for him. I couldn’t make sense of his handwriting, so I called and asked him to read it to me, and after he did I couldn’t make sense of his point. I thought, Oh, the Third Reich didn’t really work for you, huh? So sorry to hear that. Perhaps we can go back and try again. Maybe we can get it right this time.

  We went back and forth on this, in phone calls and e-mails, until it was finally agreed that we would let those earlier paragraphs stand as originally written. The kicker came when my editor threw up his hands in exasperation and sent me an e-mail of surrender. I knew he’d thrown up his hands because he told me later he had to type with his elbows.

  (Confession: I know how difficult this can be, typing with your elbows. I’ve tried to do it myself on several occasions—mostly when I was looking for porn on the Internet and my hands weren’t exactly free.)

  He wrote, “Do whatever the fuck you want, Gilbert. You’re the legendary comedian.”

  I sent him back an e-mail, apologizing sincerely for having ruined the Holocaust for him. “Trust me,” I wrote. “It won’t happen again. NEVER AGAIN!”

  When my father wasn’t campaigning for a new wor
ld order, he liked to work with tools. He was very handy—which in turn came in handy with respect to his thriving Final Solution business. He had a hardware store, and he knew how to use everything he sold. This must have been a good quality in a hardware store owner, although you’d never have known it to look at his business ledger. (Also, you’d never have guessed he even had a business ledger.) He had drawers and drawers of nails and screws and nuts and bolts, of every conceivable size. He was a regular Mr. Fix-It. He could break open walls, rewire an electrical system and repair the plumbing. Sometimes he did these things in our neighbors’ apartments, and he’d have to work very quickly, before the police showed up.

  At this point, most readers are probably asking themselves, “Gee, Gilbert, with a hands-on, take-charge father like that, how did you turn out to be such a pussy?”

  Well, I have my mother to thank, if you must know. Or, to blame—not that she was in any way responsible, but I learned early on that someone has to take the blame for every shortcoming or failing in your life, and if you can’t blame a Jewish mother then who can you blame? And, as long as we’re pointing fingers, there was quite a lot I could hold against my mother. At a time when most women got married and kept house, my mother actually went to college and earned her degree. Then she got married and kept house. She raised me and my two older sisters in a cramped apartment, directly over my father’s hardware store, and every once in a while she would remind us she had a college degree.

  Now readers are probably saying, “Oh gee, Gilbert. Let me rephrase the question. With a hands-on, take-charge father like that, and a strong, independent woman for a mother, how did you turn out to be such a fucking pussy?”

  Another good question, I must admit. And here again, I have no good answer, but that won’t keep me from distracting you with an irrelevant aside. Here goes: back then, when my parents were young and just starting out, you didn’t have an option to be a pussy.

  (Note to filmmakers: perhaps it’s time to permanently retire the phrase “Failure is not an option,” unless you happen to be making a movie about a census taker who takes his job way too seriously, in which case the phrase could be reasonably made to apply.)

  (A follow-up note to filmmakers: “Not on my watch!” is another tired line that should be banned from all future productions, and as long as I’m on it let’s make it against the law in Hollywood for a character to recognize that he or she is an unusual situation and to remark that they’re not in Kansas anymore.)

  Back to me and my plain, nonpussy existence: there were no Mommy & Me groups, no playdates, no DVDs like Baby Einstein, which as far as I know give you valuable tips on how to be … well, a baby Einstein. For that, in my day, we just went to our snake oil salesman.

  We kids were left on our own a lot. We learned to amuse ourselves, which in my case turned out to pay dividends in the jerking off department, where I soon demonstrated a certain degree of proficiency. My parents were too busy to chase after us. That, or they couldn’t be bothered. Or maybe their interests lay elsewhere. My father was always downstairs, working, but I never saw any customers in his store. For all his expertise, for all his nuts and bolts, for all his abilities with a hammer and screwdriver … every time I went in there, the place was empty. I don’t know why he even had locks on the doors, other than to advertise the fact that he sold them inside. You could have had a girl lying next to an open cash register with her legs hanging open and no one would have walked into that store, which was called “Gilbert’s Father’s Hardware Store,” because even then my family was cashing in on my name—although, looking back, having a girl with her legs open lying next to the cash register would have been a useful accessory for my developing skills as a world-class masturbator.

  My father wasn’t much of a businessman, but he could sniff an opportunity. Literally. For a while when I was growing up, young people in New York City were into sniffing glue. Nowadays, kids experiment with all kinds of illegal drugs, but in my day all it took was a tube of model airplane glue to get high. It was a much more wholesome brand of drug abuse, and it was all the rage.

  (Ah, life was so much simpler back then … just ask Norman Rockwell.)

  You’d see kids walking down the street in the middle of the day with their noses pressed into brown paper lunch bags and think for a moment they were inhaling some exotic new blend of tuna fish sandwich. Or, they’d be sitting on a stoop, passing a bag back and forth, and you’d wonder how many bites there could be in one little tuna fish sandwich, that so many people could share it.

  As a result of all this glue sniffing and apparent tuna fish sandwich sharing, there was an ordinance passed in New York City restricting the sale of model airplane glue. Under the new law, you couldn’t sell model airplane glue unless you were also selling a model as part of the same transaction. It was a stupid law, really, because it didn’t account for those actual model airplane hobbyists who might have already purchased their model and simply run out of glue, but my father wasn’t the sort of businessman to question a new local ordinance. He only cared that he could make money from it, so he dusted off the cheapest model airplane kit he could find on the back of one of his shelves. In fact, it was the only model airplane kit in the store, and it had been there forever. It was a Wright Brothers model, and if I’m not mistaken it was actually made by the Wright Brothers.

  Like every other item in the store, my father had pretty much given up on the thought of selling this one model airplane kit, but then this ordinance happened and it was a regular Christmas miracle—except for the fact that it was nowhere near Christmas at the time. This one model airplane kit was so cheap my father could price it for about a quarter. Also, it was so cheap that if you bothered to actually build the model and then stood back to admire your handiwork, it would fall apart if you looked at it too closely. Whatever wood there is in nature that’s flimsier than balsa wood, that’s what they used for these kits. He put this one model airplane kit next to the rack where he kept the modeling glue, hoping the nutty neighborhood kids would reach for it so they could go off and get high without breaking the law. The model was like a necessary ingredient, the key to the whole transaction, but he knew the kids didn’t give a shit about the model. He knew all they’d care about was that it only cost a quarter.

  But get this: the first group of kids who bought the cheap model tossed it in the trash as soon they left. My father found it in the garbage can by the side of the store later that afternoon. This was the Christmas miracle part of the story. The kids hadn’t even opened it, so my father picked it up and brought it back inside so he could sell it again. And again. It got to where the kids would leave the store and he’d count to three. Then he’d go outside and reclaim the unopened kit. Over and over, he did this. For years, this was our major source of income, all these quarters, until the neighborhood kids found some other way to get high and my father was stuck once again with this one cheap kit, which I believe he finally took as a tax deduction.

  He was ahead of his time, my father, one of the original recyclers. And a regular entrepreneur. Some kids, they get to walk around the neighborhood boasting that their fathers were in the airline industry, or that they worked at the airport, but my father the model airplane magnate was in a different end of the business. The lower-than-balsa-wood end.

  I don’t want to give the impression that my father played fast and loose with the law in his hardware store, because that certainly wasn’t the case. There was nothing fast about him, just loose. In fact, there was one time when he was so completely not fast that the law caught up to him. Specifically, it caught up to his brother, my Uncle Seymour, who ran the store with my father. Why you needed two people to run a store that was barely a one-man operation was beyond me, but they were partners. And it was a good thing, too, because the police came by one day looking for illegal merchandise. It happened to be a day when my father was out of the store, probably scouring the city for unopened model airplane kits. The police had received
a hot tip that my father and uncle were selling party poppers. Remember party poppers? They were little plastic champagne bottles, with a string hanging from the top where the cork was meant to be. You’d pull the string and the thing would “pop” open and spit confetti all over the place. Fun for the entire family and all that.

  Well, the cops told Uncle Seymour that it was against the law to sell this novelty item. (The hot tip, it turned out, was the fact that my father and uncle had thought to display these items in the window—a misguided attempt at marketing, it turned out.) The cops said the poppers were some sort of illegal firearm, and they dragged poor Uncle Seymour from the store in handcuffs. Really. Okay, maybe not really, but this was how Uncle Seymour always told the story. He liked to embellish, probably because he wanted my father to feel bad for being out of the store that day. In any case, Uncle Seymour wound up spending the day in jail. Really. Okay, okay … maybe not really, but he was there for a couple hours, which was more than enough time for him to bend for the soap in just the wrong way.

  Despite his run-ins with the law, my father the drug dealer and illegal firearms merchant was a hard worker. He was almost always at the store when I was growing up. In this way, he was like everyone else. Fathers weren’t around much in those days. They were always working. Not like today, when they’re supposed to be around all the time, starting in the delivery room. This is a disgusting new development, if you ask me. It’s even pretty disgusting if you don’t ask me. Speaking personally, and from the heart, which means you should probably put your ear to my chest if you care to make out what I’m saying, I miss the old days when expectant fathers rolled up their sleeves and paced back and forth in the hospital waiting room, loosening their ties and smoking cigarettes and waiting for their babies to be born so they could get back to work. At least, that’s how I think it used to happen, although it’s possible I might have gotten this from an I Love Lucy episode. (Or was it Dick Van Dyke? I can’t be sure.)