Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  Surrendering to Paris

  Paris is a special city in my life, considering I’m not much of an international traveler. I first saw Paris on August 25, 1944, the day the city was liberated from the Germans by a combination of French and U.S. troops. I entered it across the bridge at St. Cloud. We had reached St. Cloud the night before, and the tank commanders decided to wait until morning to make their final drive into the city.

  Two German Army trucks, loaded with soldiers, tried to cross the bridge in our direction in the middle of the night, not knowing we were there in such force. They ran into the barrage of fire from the 75mm guns mounted on the tanks of our armored division sitting there on the other side of the river.

  The bodies of the Wehrmacht soldiers, riddled by machine-gun bullets, lay askew in the trucks and on the grated bridge roadway where some of them had fallen, their blood dripping into the Seine below.

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  That was my gruesome introduction to what has been, ever since, an almost idyllic relationship to one of the world’s great cities. (I suspect that if there were a poll taken among all the people who have been everywhere to determine their favorite city, Paris would win.)

  Paris is too expensive for an American to visit now, of course, but a lot of Americans go there anyway. We try to save some money and take the trip once every few years. I’d rather go to a foreign city I’m sure I like than take a gamble on a place I don’t know.

  Two of us went to one of the good restaurants in Paris for a birthday celebration in 1991 and dinner cost almost two hundred dollars apiece. That included one of the least-expensive bottles of wine. French wine is as expensive in France as it is in the United States. You could say that about California wine and California, too.

  When you enter a restaurant in France, an American is struck by how many people are puffing cigarettes. The French don’t have nosmoking sections. Morley Safer attributes the relatively good health of the French to the amount of red wine they drink. Some people are always looking for reasons why a vice of theirs is actually good for them. I accept Morley’s word on this myself.

  All French restaurants add 15 percent to the bill for the waiters. Service is as good or better than in the United States, where we assume waiters try harder to get a better tip. They don’t, and we should abandon tipping and add a service charge. There’s a restaurant I go to in New York that gets a lot of French tourists and one waitress told me they often don’t get tipped by their French customers because the French assume it’s included on their bill.

  The French always seem to be having a good time when they eat. When a man and a woman sit together in a cozy restaurant, it’s as if they were dancing. I don’t understand what French women see in French men, though. I do see what French men see in French women. Even the women who are nowhere near beautiful have an attractive, sexy way about them. French men, on the other hand, are as a whole and by my own standards not as good-looking as the average American man.

  Before I left home for Paris, I bought a new pair of white pajamas, because I didn’t want to be in my old, tattered ones when the maid came in every morning with the traditional French hotel breakfast of coffee, hot milk, a crusty loaf of their great bread and several croissants and jam.

  I think, by the way, that the French ought to sue some of the bakeries making what they call “croissants” in our country. A soft, soggy roll is not automatically a croissant just because it’s made in the shape of a crescent.

  The third night I was there, I was getting ready for bed but I couldn’t find my pajama bottoms. I know I’d hung them on the back of the bathroom door and it was apparent that the maid had picked them up with the white towels and bedsheets and put them in the laundry.

  I didn’t know whether to spend the money on a new pair, which probably would have cost as much as the expensive dinner, or sleep in just the tops for the rest of the trip. It occurred to me that it seemed almost impossible to surprise or shock the maids who brought breakfast, no matter what you were wearing, if anything at all. You can guess what I did.

  I drove eighty miles from Paris to Reims, the heart of champagne country, and stopped for gas just outside the city. The superhighway gas station had everything one in the United States would have, except unleaded gas. The French don’t have much unleaded gas yet. The gas station sold candy, junk food, Eiffel Tower ashtrays for tourists and trashy magazines, but, unlike any gas station I’d ever seen, it had a huge selection of expensive champagne for sale. I was tempted to buy a quart of oil, a bag of potato chips, and a magnum of Moët and Chandon.

  We went to Reims, or “Rheims,” as it’s spelled in English, because I wanted to see where the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945. They’ve made the building into a museum, but it’s not very good. The French are not much interested in making a big thing of a German surrender to

  Waiting 239

  U.S., British and Russian troops. They seem to be vaguely embarrassed about their role in World War II.

  On the way back to Paris, we came over the same bridge I had crossed forty-eight years ago when Allied forces entered the city. It’s one thing I know more about than the Parisians know about their city. It gives me a kind of smug satisfaction when they’re impatient, because I don’t speak French very well.

  I just smile quietly and think to myself, “I know something about this city you’ll never know.”

  No, Thank You

  Waiting

  Today I stood in line for seventeen minutes to cash a check for seventyfive dollars. I’d given this company, a bank, all my money to hold onto for me until I needed it, and today, when I needed some of it, it took me that long to get it back.

  This is a good example of the kind of things that makes so many of us smile when we read that banks are having a hard time. We’re glad. It fills us with pleasure to read about their troubles. They’ve made us wait so often over the years that nothing bad that happens to a bank makes us do anything but laugh. “You had it coming, bank.” That’s what we think.

  Waiting is one of the least amusing things there is to do. Short waits are worse than long waits. If you know you’re going to have to wait for four hours or six months, you can plan your time and use it and still have the pleasure of anticipating what you’re waiting for. If it’s a short wait of undetermined length, it’s a terrible waste of time.

  I’ve read all the proverbs about waiting and patience:

  “All things come to him who waits.”

  “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  “Patience is a virtue.”

  I don’t happen to believe any of those old saws. Impatience is a virtue,

  that’s what I think. Shifting from one foot to the other and tapping your fingers on something and getting damn mad while you stand there is the only way to behave while you’re waiting. There’s no sense being patient with people who make you wait, because they’ll only make you wait longer the next time. The thing to do is blow up . . . hit the roof when they finally show up.

  Some people seem to think they were born to get there when they’re ready, while you wait. Banks are not the only big offenders in the waiting game, so are doctors. Some doctors assume their time is so much more important than anyone else’s that all the rest of us ought to wait for them,

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  “patiently,” of course. What other profession or line of business routinely includes in its office setup something called “the waiting room”?

  In New York City many of the parking garages have signs over their cashier windows saying, “No charge for waiting time.” What a preposterous sign! What it means is that they can take their time getting your car, but you don’t have to pay them anything while you wait for it. I always tell them that I have a charge for waiting, and I think doctors ought to start knocking ten dollars off their bill for every half hour we spend in their waiting rooms. The doctor who tells all his patients to come at nine o’clock ought to be sent back to the hospit
al to spend another year as a resident.

  All of us admire in other people the characteristics we think we have ourselves. I don’t have any patience, so it’s natural, I guess, that I don’t admire it in other people. Sometimes I reluctantly concede it works for them, but I still don’t think of it as a virtue. I secretly think that people who wait well are too lazy to go do something. Just an opinion, mind you. I don’t want a lot of patient waiters mad at me.

  The funny thing about that word “waiter” is that those who make a living as waiters are about the most impatient people on earth. You can’t get a waiter to wait ten seconds. You go in a restaurant, he hands you a menu eighteen inches long with fifty dishes to choose from, and in three seconds he starts tapping his pencil on his order pad to let you know how impatient he is.

  I’d make a great waiter. I can’t wait at all.

  Hot Weather

  I detest hot weather. That’s easy enough for me to say in the middle of a heat wave, but I’ll say the same thing on the coldest day of the year.

  Somehow we don’t worry quite so much about the people subjected to relentless heat as we would if they had been through a flood or a hurricane. There are no pictures of it for television, and millions suffer silently.

  Even though there are no pictures of heat and no one dies instantly as they might in a storm, in some ways heat may be worse than other natural disasters. In terms of physical damage to material things like houses and cars, the hurricane and the flood are worse, but when you’re talking about the human spirit, a heat wave is worse. People join together and work shoulder to shoulder with a great sense of camaraderie to fight the effects of a flood or a snowstorm, but in oppressive heat all effort is impossible.

  Half a dozen memories of the worst heat I’ve ever experienced come to my mind when it gets hot.

  My first month in the Army was spent at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in August. I will never forget having to stand at attention for hours on the red clay drill field on that one-hundred-degree day. The commanding colonel of our artillery battalion made a maddeningly slow inspection tour of the full field packs we had laid out on the ground, and our company was the one he came to last. Nine men fainted or decided to drop to the ground so they’d be carried off.

  Later in World War II, I flew with the Eighth Air Force on bombing raids over Germany and I traveled across Europe with the First Army, but I never had that bad a day again.

  When I go to bed at night, I often toss and turn without being able to go to sleep for as long as fifteen or twenty seconds. Insomnia has never been one of my problems. I can go to sleep when I’m worried, I can go to sleep with a headache and I can even go to sleep when I have one too few blankets over me on a cold night. There’s just one thing that keeps me awake, and that’s heat.

  Late at night in those early Army days at Fort Bragg, I lay awake in the barracks thinking about ice water. One night I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, waited for the guard on duty in the company street to pass, then I slipped out the door and crawled under the barracks. The barracks were built on stilts, and there was plenty of room to walk in a

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  low crouch. Underneath, I made my way the length of the barracks to the next company street and waited silently again for the guard to pass. It was as though I was a German infiltrator about to blow up the base, but all I wanted was ice water.

  I made my way under three barracks until I came to the post exchange. It was 2 a.m. by then and the PX had closed at nine. But there was something I knew. Every night as they cleaned up, they dumped all their ice on the ground outside the back door. I finally arrived, undetected, and there it was, just as I had hoped. Cakes of ice that had originally been so big that even in the heat they were still huge chunks glistened. I took two cakes so big I had to hold them braced on either hip. It was cold and wet but wonderful, as the icy water soaked through my pajamas.

  It took me ten minutes to get back to the barracks and my friends were glad to see me. As a matter of fact, I do not recall a time in all my life when I was so great a hero to so many people.

  We broke the ice into pieces, filled our canteen cups with them and then added water. For more than an hour, ten of us sat silently on our bunks in the sweltering heat, drinking that beautiful ice water.

  I’m one of the privileged class who lives and works mostly in airconditioned buildings. For us, hot weather is like a heavy rainstorm. We get out of our air-conditioned car and rush a short distance to an air-conditioned house. During the workday we move quickly from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned building, as if to keep from getting wet in the rainstorm.

  I feel terrible for the people I read about being subjected to awful heat, and I always wish I could bring them ice water.

  Neat People

  N eat people are small, petty, nit-picking individuals who keep accurate checkbooks, get ahead in life and keep their cellars, their attics and their garages free of treasured possessions. They just don’t seem to treasure anything, those neat people. If they can’t use it or freeze it, they throw it away. I detest neat people. I was in a neat person’s home several weeks ago and he took me down into his cellar. He must be making a dishonest living, because there was nothing down there but a few neatly stored screens and the oil burner.

  I feel toward neat people the same way I used to feel toward the brightest kid in our class, who was also a good athlete and handsome.

  My dislike for the tidies of the world is particularly strong this week because I realized Sunday that my desk is such a mess I can’t find anything, my workshop looks like a triple-decker club sandwich with tools on top of wood on top of plans on top of sandpaper on top of tools on top of wood. If I need a Phillips screwdriver, it’s easier to go out and buy a new one than to find any of the three I already own.

  How do neat people do it? I hate them so much I don’t want any help from them, but I would like to follow one around someday and see how they live. I bet they don’t do anything, that’s how they keep everything so neat. They probably do all sorts of dumb stuff like putting things back where they belong. They probably know which shelf everything is on in the refrigerator; they could probably put their finger on the nozzle to the garden hose.

  What do you do with all that stuff I have cluttering my cellar, Neat People? Did you throw away the hammer with the broken handle? Mine is still down there.

  What about the twenty feet of leftover aerial wire and the small empty wooden nail keg? Don’t tell me you were so heartless that you tossed that out. You don’t even appreciate the fact that you never know when you’re going to have a good use for an empty wooden nail keg. That’s how dumb you Neat People are. I, on the other hand, have been ready with an empty nail keg for the past twenty years. That’s about how long it’s been in the cellar, right there in the way if I ever need it.

  You probably throw out broken plates and glass pitchers that can’t be repaired, don’t you? Tell the truth. I don’t. I keep broken plates because I can’t stand to throw them out. I’m waiting for them to make glue that will really mend china and glass, the way the ads say the glue will now.

  Many years ago a man who owned a hairbrush factory gave me a bushel basket of odds and ends of rosewood. They’re beautiful little pieces and I’ve never figured out what to do with them, but I wouldn’t neaten up my cellar by throwing them out for anything.

  My wife says the old bookcase I took out of the twins’ room in 1973 should be thrown out. She gets a little neat every once in a while herself. Thank goodness that never happens to me. That’s why I still have that bookcase.

  We have four children and I’m not saving much money, but should I ever die, I’d like to leave the kids something. I have nineteen cans of partly used paint, some dating from the late fifties, in the cellar. I don’t want them fighting over my estate when I go, so I think I’ll make a will and divide the paint among them, I want it to have a good home.

  Driving

  June i
s the beginning of the time of year when Americans do the most driving. I often spend 20 hours a week in my car during the summer months. It seems like an awful lot of time now that I’ve written it down. If I sleep for 42 hours a week and drive for 20, that means I’m not doing much of anything for 62 of the 168 hours in a week. Maybe we better get a weekend place nearer home.

  The trouble with driving is that you often do it in a state of agitation. I’m not usually very relaxed when I drive because I’m mad at the guy behind me or the woman in front of me or the truck that just cut me off. As soon as I do relax, I get sleepy. I’d rather be angry than sleepy when I’m driving. I’m not a very safe driver when I’m driving slowly to be safe. When I’m mad, I drive faster but at least I’m alert to everything that’s going on. I’m trying to get that dirty so-and-so who cut in front of me.

  It is my opinion that the slow drivers are a greater menace on the road than the ones driving at, or slightly above, the speed limit. The slow drivers sit there, slumped way down behind the wheel, smug in the knowledge that they are safe drivers but they’re wrong. They’re the ones who don’t know how to move. They’re the ones who can’t get out of their own way. They cause the rest of us to pile into something to avoid them.

  You can tell I’m just off the road because I’m writing in an agitated state. I just drove 150 miles from upstate New York to New York City and it was the kind of drive that makes you wonder whether the weekend was worth it.

  I confess to being a competitive driver. I’m vaguely irritated when someone passes me, even when the other driver has a perfect right to do it. The chances are, though, that he doesn’t have a legal right because I’m probably driving as fast as the law allows, or faster. What irritates me on a major highway is that there are some nuts who won’t let you maintain a reasonable distance between your car and the car in front of you. If you do leave a sensible opening, someone comes along and cuts into it and then you have to drop four or five car lengths behind him. You’re losing ground and it makes you mad. I think this is the cause of a lot of accidents. People tailgate because they don’t want anyone getting in between them and the car ahead. When there’s a sudden stop or slowdown, it can be too late to brake to a stop before hitting the car you’re following.