Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(2)

I kept hearing the word “elitists”—that everyone in California and New York lived in a bubble. That the election of this lunatic was a result of all of us not knowing anything about the rest of the country.

That didn’t ring true for me. I had traveled all over the country doing stand-up for so many years. I had been to every major and some minor cities multiple times. I wasn’t an elitist. My father was a used-car dealer. I didn’t have a trust fund or wealthy parents. We weren’t allowed to answer the phone growing up because, more often than not, it would be a bill collector. I had four hundred dollars when I drove across the country alone to move to Los Angeles, and then was broke for seven years living paycheck to paycheck, while simultaneously getting fired from every waitressing job I ever had. I worked for everything I have and never even went to college. How could I be an elitist without ever having gone to college?

    And then—Oh, wait a minute, now I remember.

I grew up wanting to get as far away from the life my parents had given me as possible. I had created a life in which there was a zero-tolerance policy for any discomfort. I could handle physical discomfort, like dental work or elective surgery to make my thighs smaller, but not any discomfort related to not having money.

Sure, I was just scraping by on those cross-country trips in the beginning of my stand-up career, barely making enough money from small comedy clubs to cover my hotel room for the week. But after a few years, I was earning more money—and the clubs turned into theaters, then arenas, with private planes and chauffeured cars, sometimes for less than twenty-four hours and then on to the next city, so here I was again, not taking into account the optics—or for that matter, the reality—of my own entitlement.

I had become exactly what I’d always wanted to be—an elitist.

I did live in a bubble, inside a bigger bubble, which was inside an even bigger bubble. Three bubbles. Two assistants, two cleaning ladies (who are more like my nannies), a driver, a pool guy, a landscaper, a florist, a houseman. What is a houseman, you ask? Someone who walks the dogs and polishes the outdoor furniture, and, oh, cleans up the dog shit outside. Basically, an outdoor butler. When was the last time I cleaned up dog shit? Probably the last time I flew coach.

    I hated having these thoughts. I hated it because something clicked in the process of making these associative leaps. I realized that I’d made a career of over-hydrating people with my honesty, yet I was being dishonest with myself, which left me operating in a deficit of truth. Now that I was aware of this situation, I would have to do something about it. I couldn’t carry on the way I had been carrying on, just coasting and cashing checks for essentially being a loudmouth.

I took another hit of my vape.



* * *



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What I really wanted to do was watch the news, even though the news was giving me diarrhea. The whole administration was giving me diarrhea. My outrage was high. I had spent the year after the election being sucked into the vortex of news cycles that accompanied Donald Trump’s ascendancy and my subsequent mental hernia. The news was like a high-speed merry-go-round that never slowed down long enough to figure out when it was safe to hop on or off, so like everything in my life thus far, I hopped on and stayed on.

I had spent the better part of my day in a wormhole, googling pictures of “young Robert Mueller” because I was developing strong sexual feelings toward him as well as his investigation. In an interesting plot twist, it turns out Bob Mueller is even hotter in his early seventies than he was when he was in the Marines. I was more attracted to present-day Bob Mueller than I would have been had I been alive during ’Nam. The guy fucking kills me. Who is hotter than Bob Mueller? Daniel Day-Lewis playing Bob Mueller, maybe, but the jury is out until that movie is released and Daniel Day-Lewis gives up “shoe cobbling” for a year. I mean, my God. Just stop it with the cobbling. Just act. You’re great at it. People adore you. No one’s talking about your shoes. Maybe your wife, but I doubt it.

    Bob Mueller was the only hope I had that Donald Trump and that terrible vampire family he spawned would end up in prison. The investigation into Donald Trump and his conspiring with Russia and all the other crimes I’m sure he’ll be indicted for made me realize what real men look like. They look like Bob Mueller. A seventy-four-year-old with a six-pack (possibly an eight-pack) underneath that suit. You can see it through his shirt when he walks—he’s ripped. “Keeping your shit together” is what that’s called. A prosecutor, a Marine, and the director of the FBI? How on earth is any woman worth her salt meant to control herself around him and not sit directly on his face? And then, that hair-part? Very few seventy-year-old men have a head of hair like that, and if anyone knows their way around seventy-year-old men, it’s me—they’re my core demographic. The thickness…the salt and pepper…it’s one thing after another with this patriot.

    My best friend, Mary, and I have spent many a night deliberating about what he drinks when he gets home after a long day. Was it a scotch on the rocks…or a scotch neat?

“One ice cube,” Mary would say. “And it would be Macallan.” People who use one ice cube usually annoy me, but this was different. I knew that Bob Mueller knew better than I did, and if he wanted to use one ice cube, then he was trying to accomplish something different with his libation—something that only a scotch or whiskey drinker knew about. I would be willing to switch over to scotch or whiskey—and even use one ice cube for the rest of my life—if the reward meant seeing Donald Trump dragged out of the White House topless, handcuffed, in his tighty-whiteys, while his hairpiece detached from the tape on his head and flew around like a cyclone, landing in the Rose Garden.