I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  You press, your fairy godmother answers.

  “It’s like somebody up in Heaven watching out for Mr. Tony,” my friend Nancy said the other day when I pressed the magic button.

  What can I do for you, Mr. Kornheiser?

  The voice identified herself as Tamara.

  “And where are you today, Tamara?” I asked.

  “In the Carolinas.”

  “Do I have to guess which of the Carolinas?” I asked.

  “The North,” she said.

  The North?

  Before I could pursue this, Tamara was gone. Her signal faded. Most likely she was whacked by the geography police.

  I pressed the button again.

  “You’ve reached OnStar. All available advisers are assisting other callers. Please remain on the line.”

  At least nobody said, “Your call is very important to us. In the meantime, please continue to enjoy selections from The Very Best of Yanni.” But I must say it was disturbing to be on hold with an emergency road service. What if I’d been in an accident and my car was on fire? By the time they actually got to me I’d be …

  “Toast,” Nancy offered.

  Fortunately, Debbie came to my rescue.

  “Can you pinpoint where I am?” I asked. (And don’t be a wiseguy and say, “In your car.”)

  “I’m showing you in Washington, D.C.,” Debbie said.

  “That’s easy, Debbie. You could have gleaned that from my OnStar ID card.”

  “Let me zoom in,” she said. “I see you on … Fifteenth Street Northwest?”

  Wow. She was right on the money. I should have asked, “Where do you see me in five years?” But I was a little off balance. I felt like I was onstage and the Amazing Kreskin had just told the crowd what kind of underwear I had on. (And thank God it wasn’t the Victoria’s Secret stuff.)

  “Can you see that there’s a woman in the car with me?” I asked Debbie.

  “No, but I’ll bet she’s quite good-looking.”

  Yeah, right. Like they can pinpoint your car from five hundred miles away, but they can’t see who’s in there with you. Like they can’t see every move you make. Like they don’t sit around in The Carolinas watching you and whoever you’re in the car with, doing whatever you’re doing in there. Like this isn’t the Voyeur Channel.

  I asked Debbie what level of service I had, since I feared a Doomsday Concierge Scenario: Like, let’s say I’d packed up the whole family to go visit more colleges for Elizabeth, and by the time we hit Franklin & Marshall College I realized—God, I forgot my son, Michael! If I called OnStar and asked them to pick him up in a limo, would they say to me, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Kornheiser, but you have ‘Economy’ OnStar. That option comes with DeVille, not Catera.”

  Here’s what I’ve got: OnStar will make hotel and restaurant reservations for me while I’m driving. It’ll get me tickets to plays, concerts, and sporting events. Debbie said she could get me World Series tickets.

  Tony, do you think she could get you …

  No. Forget about Heidi Fleiss. It’s over!

  I have an emergency button (the one with the red cross, stupid) to press in case something catastrophic happens—like my hair plugs get caught in the moon roof.

  I have “air bag notification”: If my air bag deploys, Debbie will know in The Carolinas. (I asked if I had “old bag notification” as well. Would a buzzer sound if I started making out with some fifty-year-old floozy in the backseat?) I have “remote diagnostic”: If the “check engine” light comes on, they can tell me from The Carolinas if it’s a real emergency or if it’s okay to drive nine thousand more miles the way cabdrivers in New York do. “Look, ‘brake’ light is on. Hahaha. Is big joke. Not to worry, boss! We go to Bronx now, yes?”

  They can even unlock my door by remote control. What’s more unbelievable than that—I mean, besides icky Paula Jones getting naked and saying, “I’m just doing this to feed my kids”?

  Most of all, though, I can’t tell you how great it is to hear somebody say, “What can I do for you, Mr. Kornheiser?” At home I never hear that. At home I hear, “Dad, tell the little freak to give me the clicker, or I’ll beat his fat butt.”

  Dumb to a Turn

  I feel so ashamed.

  Last night, I was innocently watching a quality movie on TV, Bikini Biker Babes from the Beyond (I thought I was on PBS, but in hindsight, I guess I wasn’t), when an infomercial came on. I should have looked away, but it was too late. The next thing I knew, the phone was in my hand, and I was ordering kitchen cookware.

  God help me. I bought the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ.

  What a piece of hardware! You could roast a Doberman in there!

  I felt gleeful. I felt liberated.

  Pray for me. Maybe next I’ll have the urge to see Cats.

  “You bought something from Ron Popeil?” my friend Nancy said. The way she said “Ron Popeil” made me uneasy. It was the same way a theater critic might say “Pauly Shore” if he were reviewing Pauly Shore’s Hamlet.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Nancy said.

  “I’m not kidding,” I said. “I’m fifty years old. I’ve missed out on Mister Microphone and the Pocket Fisherman, and, dammit, I’m not going to miss out on this. It can cook four chickens at once!”

  (I told this to Man About Town Chip Muldoon, and he said, “Do you have a need to cook four chickens at once? Are you opening up a carryout? I think you’ve crossed a line here. Soon you’re going to wake up in a motel next to Tonya Harding. Did you get the Ginzu knives, too?”)

  “You bought this item on impulse, right?” Nancy said knowingly. “How big is it? How hot does it get? Can you regulate the temperature? Does it have a timer? You don’t know the answer to any of these questions, do you?”

  Details!

  I didn’t expect her to understand. Ronco is a guy thing.

  Take another Ronco classic, the Inside the Shell Egg Scrambler. A woman would ask: How hard is it to scramble an egg by yourself?

  Of course it’s not hard to scramble an egg. The point is this baby scrambles an egg inside the shell! How cool is that? (Plus, while the egg scrambles itself, a man has his hands free for more important things, like scratching himself.)

  Here’s the deal with cooking: There’s something about watching food cook that turns a guy on. It’s the same impulse that drives guys to gather around the dryers in a Laundromat and watch their clothes tumble around. Men like looking through glass and seeing some action. That’s why there are Peeping Toms, not Peeping Tinas. (Also, that explains the Super Bowl.)

  I looked at that rotisserie on TV. I saw prime rib turning around, cooking before my eyes, sizzling, glistening, dripping—and I said, “I’VE GOT TO HAVE IT!”

  “Of course you did,” Nancy said. “It’s boar on a spit. It’s the caveman in you. You’re encoded. This gizmo is the perfect confluence of a man’s interest: large slabs of meat cooking in something that looks like a TV.”

  I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’d watch anything cook on a spit, including George F. Will.

  “You’ll use it once and never again,” Nancy warned.

  “Once is fine. I’ve always wanted to make restaurant-quality prime rib at home,” I said.

  “Restaurants don’t cook prime rib in a rotisserie, Tony. They use an oven. There are no Ronco products in restaurants.”

  What?! Not even the Electric Food Dehydrator and Yogurt Maker that “makes great beef jerky” and is “ideal for camping and hikers?” (Hiker-jerky?) Or the Popeil Automatic 5-Minute Pasta and Sausage Maker, where “one load feeds four?” (Gosh, I wish they wouldn’t use the word “load.”)

  I told my friend Tom about my purchase. He was ecstatic.

  “You know what’s beautiful about a rotisserie?” he said. “You just rig it, turn it on, and stand back. It satisfies a man’s most pressing culinary need—you can drink beer while you cook.”

  Tom learned his kitchen licks from his dad, who every now and
then began bragging about the fabulous omelet he made. Everybody had to stand back in awe while he went to work. “When he was done, there were eighteen pots in the sink, which he left for my mom while we went to watch football.”

  I showed Tom the picture of my Ronco.

  He looked at it reverently. “Of course you know there’s no way in a million years this is actually going to work,” he said. “Have you seen it in a store?”

  “It’s not available in stores,” I said.

  “Of course not. It’s probably made out of tinfoil.”

  Oh, ye of little faith. You can scoff all you want. But when you have a Super Bowl party, and your life will be ruined if you can’t rotisserie four chickens at once, you’ll be calling and begging to use my quality Ronco product.

  I could have bought more, you know. When I ordered the rotisserie, the operator didn’t want me to stop at just one. She read from a prepared text of Ronco offers, and began each new item with the words “Ron wants you to have …” like we were buds, and he was in a generous mood.

  I was offered marinades, rubs, meat racks, vegetable trays, thermometers, discounts for CDs, movie rentals, nasal hair remover, live iguanas, answers for the law boards; I’m pretty sure I heard the words “time share.” In the end she told me I could get $30,000 worth of stuff for $29.95.

  “Wouldn’t you like Ron to send this to you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “But give Ron my best, and tell him we should do lunch some time. Rotisserie chicken, maybe?”

  Scratched by the Cat

  I recently bought a new car. I arrived at work the next day puffed with pride, because I finally owned a vehicle of class and dignity, a car that complements my personality.

  One of the first people I ran into was my boss’s boss’s boss, a man of immense power and prestige, renowned for his judgment. I told him what I had purchased. He regarded me with a curious look, a look I had not seen before. I took it to be respect.

  Then he started to laugh.

  “What a dope,” he said.

  See, I bought a Cadillac.

  When you are hurting in your soul, you seek solace from friends. I went to my friend Gino and explained what had happened with The B-B-Boss.

  “You bought a Cadillac?” he said.

  Uh, right.

  “You’re a jerk. I can understand someone of your age, pushing fifty, buying a Jaguar or a Lamborghini or even a lovingly restored 1972 powder blue Karmann Ghia. But a Cadillac? What can you possibly say in defense of a Cadillac—that it’s the top of the line of General Motors? That’s like ordering the best bottle of Yoo-hoo money can buy.”

  My car is the Catera, the new pint-size Caddy. I love it. Unfortunately, owning a Catera means you are stigmatized by driving a Cadillac without the attendant advantage of having a car so large and swinish it says to the world: “Hey, world, bite me, okay?”

  That’s what Cadillacs used to be like. My friend Mit has an old Cadillac, a Fudgsicle-brown 1976 Eldorado drop top. My Catera can fit comfortably in his trunk, which, by the way, has a power device that closes it automatically, on the assumption that the average 1976 Eldorado owner no longer possesses the upper-body strength to slam it shut, what with his walker and all.

  Mit’s car is eighteen and a half feet long, seven feet wide, and weighs just under three tons. I asked him, “Are you gonna drive it or christen it?”

  Mit says: “It came with an eight-track tape player. So if you’ve got any Mantovani tapes …”

  It’s got a five-hundred-cubic-inch V-8 engine and a thirty-gallon tank, which gives Mit the opportunity to have the following conversation with a gas station attendant:

  “Fill ‘er up, sir?”

  “Nah, just stop at forty dollars.”

  Unfortunately, the car gets six miles a gallon. There is no vehicle anywhere that gets worse gas mileage than Mit’s Cadillac. Mir is more economical.

  (“I bought it on Earth Day,” Mit said. “Everybody celebrates his own way.”)

  Mit’s Caddy cuts a wide swath. “It uses a lot of lane, if you know what I mean,” he said. “You pull behind a Miata—all they see in their rearview mirror is grille. They get reeeeall peppy when the light turns green.”

  That was the heyday of the Cadillac, of course. 1976. What depresses me about my new car is a recent article I read about how Cateras aren’t selling. Worse, the people they are selling to are ancient.

  Half of Catera’s owners are at least sixty-five!

  It must be the official pace car of Leisure World.

  I had the same feeling a couple of years ago when I bought a Buick …

  Of course! I remember now. You bought a Buick. You have a Buick and a Cadillac now. You and Bob Dole, right? Ladies and gentlemen, there is no reason to continue with this column. The man has a Buick and a Cadillac. That is ludicrous. Let us just buy him a pair of white shoes and a white belt, send him on a cruise and be done with him.

  … and every time I’d see another Buick on the road, it was being driven by someone whose head didn’t reach above the steering wheel. The people who bought Buicks were so old that one of the options on my LeSabre was a dashboard denture holder.

  When people hear that I have a Cadillac, they naturally assume it is filled with ridiculous power options. This is a slander of me and my car. Sure, it has power steering and power brakes and power door locks and power windows and a power sun roof and power seat controls and power backrest positioning devices and power mirrors. But it’s not like it has electrically heated seats for the wintertime warming of one’s big soft American behind.

  But Tony, it DOES have tush warmers.

  Shhhhh.

  They marketed the car as “the Caddy that zigs.” But when you look at who’s buying it, it’s more like the Caddy that shuffles and kvetches. I may be the youngest person in America to buy a Catera.

  Here’s a true story: The other day I went through the carwash, and the guy in front of me looked at my car admiringly and said, “That’s a Catera, right?”

  He was my age, and he was driving a Mercedes C220, which goes for about the same price as the Catera.

  “I’m thinking of buying a Catera,” he said.

  “You’ll like it,” I told him.

  “Oh, not for me,” he said. “For my father.”

  Bee All You Can Bee

  My vacation is over. I devoted it to playing golf. I played golf every day. I played golf in Washington, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. I teed it up in every state there was a drought—hoping to get more roll on the fairway.

  My goal was to get better at golf, and I am pleased to report two results:

  1. I got better.

  2. I still stink.

  I still struggle to break 100. The ultimate goal among senior golfers is to shoot their age. I’m lucky to shoot my body temperature.

  It’s pathetic to shoot 100 when you’ve been playing golf as long as I have, fifteen years. My thirteen-year-old son, who started playing golf a couple of months ago, is already in the 80s. I expect my dog to break 90 by Wednesday.

  “Maybe you ought to play tennis,” my daughter said sweetly.

  “If I can’t hit a golf ball that’s sitting still, what chance would I have with a moving tennis ball?” I asked her.

  I don’t get it. I bought the best equipment. I bought the best shoes. You oughta see my golf shirts.

  So it’s gotta be me, right?

  I am my own handicap, hahaha.

  (That’s a golf joke. So is this: Two guys are on the fourteenth tee one afternoon when they notice a funeral procession going by the golf course. One of the men takes off his hat and bows his head. Moved by this unusual display of respect, his playing partner inquires politely, “You knew the deceased?” The man nods, then hits his tee shot and says, “We would have been married thirty years today.” Bada-bing.)

  Anyway, my golf story concerns the time a few weeks ago that I played golf in Getty
sburg, Pennsylvania. There were four of us: Me, my friends Johnny and Fred, and Johnny’s friend Jack. Jack was the biggest hitter of the bunch, and he’d just hit a huge drive on the sixth hole when disaster struck: Taking a big gulp from a can of soda, Jack swallowed a bee, which stung him in the throat on the way down!

  Jack immediately began coughing violently, trying to expel the bee. But it was too late. The bee was already on its way to his stomach.

  “What should I do?” Jack asked all of us.

  “Are you allergic to bee stings?” Johnny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said.

  “Well, are you swelling up?” Johnny asked.

  “No. Not yet anyway,” Jack said.

  Jack looked at us. We looked at Jack.

  I didn’t know Jack well at all. But he looked okay to me. And we’d driven over an hour to play at this course, which was really nice. And it was such a lovely day. And we were only on the sixth hole. And we had paid nearly one hundred dollars for the round. And me, personally, I was hitting my five-wood great. So I said, “Let’s keep playing.”

  I mean, what’s the worst that could have happened? Jack dies, right? Then we’d have had to drag him hole to hole until we finished the round. But as my friend Denis says, “That’s why there are two seats in a golf cart.”

  So we played on, and finished all eighteen holes.

  Jack was still hitting big drives, but by the end of the round, he was having trouble breathing. Jack’s left side began to swell up on No. 16. He said he could feel himself expanding, like a balloon. A couple of times he wondered if he should stop playing, in case he risked having a heart seizure. But Jack was a real trouper. He even made a few pars on the back nine, after he stopped coughing. Which I really appreciated, because Jack and I were partners, and I couldn’t putt for squat.

  After the round, we stopped at the grill and ordered lunch, but in consideration of Jack’s medical condition, we told them to wrap it “to go” then took Jack to the emergency room in Gettysburg.

  I told this story to my friends Nancy and Susan, and they were aghast that we finished the round—and ordered lunch.