2. “Maybe he wanted to meet you.”
Meet me? What is he, the Welcome Wagon? I’m up there shvitzing like a collie. What will he do next? Ask me to analyze the Redskins’ offensive line while I’m soaping up in the shower?
Finally, George said, “Look, the guy pays the same amount of money as you do to belong to that gym, and he can run on any treadmill he wants. Get over it.”
By this time, the ethical debate had spread throughout the department. Obviously, the smart people agreed with me that this was a clear violation of my space.
My friend Nancy told me that her hubby, David, was once running in a gym where the treadmill area was surrounded by mirrors. David glanced into the mirror to find a man on the treadmill in back of him looking into the mirror blowing David a kiss! Now there’s a case of a guy wanting to meet someone.
My friend Tom was appalled by what the Hobart guy did. Tom equated it to violating “The Urinal Rule,” which holds that you never, ever step up to a urinal next to someone if there is an open urinal somewhere else. That is just not done. Nor is there any talking at the urinal. Or any eye contact. Never. No way. You look straight ahead no matter what. Even if someone is being murdered two urinals down. Like in the movie Witness.
“Men don’t stand there and chat?” my friend Nancy asked.
God, no!
“Women have conversations between the stalls,” Nancy said. “Sometimes they say, ‘Hold it, I’ve got to flush.’ ”
Chicks.
(This reminds me of the time in 1978, when I was a sportswriter in New York and I came to the old Capital Centre to cover the NBA finals between Washington and Seattle. During halftime I went to the rest room, and as luck would have it the only open urinal was next to Senator George McGovern, whom I recognized immediately. I was so excited I VIOLATED THE URINAL RULE! I actually began talking to him. I said, “Senator McGovern, I know this seems sort of awkward, but I just want you to know that I voted for you for president, and it’s a great honor to, um, meet you, and I’d like to shake your hand, but I guess that would be rather inappropriate in this setting.” But I digress.)
You’ll recall that my boss George said I totally overreacted to the guy getting on the treadmill next to me.
So a few days later, George is on a treadmill in his gym in Virginia, and a woman ascends the treadmill next to him, even though there are open treadmills down the row. George notices this—but he can’t say jack; he’s trapped by his own self-righteousness. And in fact, he says to himself, “I can live with this. She has as much right to this health club as I do. She can run anywhere she wants.”
Well, they’re running together, side by side, for a few minutes when, in George’s words, “the woman passes gas that would kill a moose.” She cuts the cheese! It all but brings him to his knees.
Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Suck It Up, Not Out
You’ll forgive me if I seem a little down today. But my hopes, my dreams are dashed.
I don’t ask much for out of life. I just want to fit into size 36 Dockers.
I was willing to do almost anything—except, you know, stop eating cheese fries.
Then along came liposuction, and I learned I could get the fat sucked out of my waist, no muss, no fuss. I’ve been dreaming about liposuction for ten years. I assumed I was a prime candidate in that I was: (1) fat, and (2) rich. What did that porpoise Kenny Rogers have that I didn’t have?
But I read in USA Today that the death rate for liposuction is twenty to sixty times as high as the death rate for all operations—including those in which the patient pretty much starts out dead. Apparently, having liposuction is more dangerous than, say, being operated on for a gaping chest wound. You’d think that most people electing to have liposuction were relatively healthy. Come on, they’re just fat. They’re not in a coma. At least not going in.
Liposuction kills. Go figure.
Who’d ever have thought that if you wanted a couple of inches off your waist it might be safer to literally sit down in a frying pan and sizzle it off?
Really sick people, total goners, die at an average of 1 in every 100,000 to 1 in every 300,000 operations. In liposuction it’s 1 in every 5,000. (And just our luck, Linda Tripp was holding number 4,999. Did you see all the stuff Tripp had done? A face-lift, an eyelift, a nose job, a chin job, and a big load of fat sucked out of her neck. I’ve seen “fixer-uppers” that didn’t need that much work.) How is it possible so many people die from liposuction? What are the surgeons doing during the operation, playing Nintendo?
This is the worst medical news ever. I put my faith in medical science and this is what I get, a toe tag? Liposuction was my bailout. But I’ll have to rethink whether it’s worth dying to squeeze into corduroys.
I called Man About Town Chip Muldoon for advice.
“You didn’t think you’d be playing Russian roulette with liposuction, did you?” he asked. “But, what the hell, roll the dice. Phyllis Diller always seems to dodge the bullet. Why not you?”
My friend Nancy wasn’t so reassuring. “I always said I’d rather die than have a big, fat can,” she said. “Now I see that’s probably the case.”
It still puzzled me why people should die after liposuction. So using my excellent medical training, obtained from close study of resuscitation techniques as practiced on Baywatch, I came up with a theory:
Okay, the liposuction patient has just been operated on. It’s been, what, three, four hours since his last Grand Slam breakfast? Naturally, as soon as he comes to, he’s lunging for the fried chicken or maybe a slice of cream pie. But he’s so light, he just flies off the gurney and cracks his skull on the floor. Another statistic.
“Not bad,” Chip said.
Chip’s theory was based on a different school of medical thought: the hour-long drama as opposed to the half-hour eye candy. Chip said: “During operations on Chicago Hope they often drop a surgical tool inside the patient, and they can’t find it. With liposuction, you’re usually operating on someone the size of Louie Anderson. So you can lose an entire ’57 Chevy in there, with no hope of fishing it back out. And that can be fatal, especially one of those models with tail fins.”
This is terribly disturbing news because everybody my size wants liposuction. It gives you another chance at the buffet, doesn’t it? You can take all those clothes you’ve been wearing lately—the oversize sweaters and the pants with the elastic waistband—and put them in mothballs. All the fat they can suck out of you in one hour, it’ll take years to regain it. I was going to get liposuction and have my surgeon tattoo Did Somebody Say McDonald’s? on my new shapely buttocks.
I imagined my first words upon awakening from surgery would be “More gravy.”
(Liposuction is becoming nearly as popular as laser eye surgery, which is such a rage that Starbucks is now offering free laser eye surgery with ten purchases of “grande”-size coffees.)
The scariest news of all was the disclosure that any doctor can perform liposuction. One plastic surgeon was quoted as saying, “Even dentists have been doing it.”
Dentists!
My doper friends in college became dentists because they couldn’t get into medical school. I wouldn’t let any of them sell me dental floss, much less open a hole in my body and suck out some flab. Who could possibly be below dentists on the surgical chain, optometrists?
According to the coeditor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, any doctor can attend a seminar and “learn how to perform liposuction within a few hours.”
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to believe that learning how to perform a tricky surgical procedure would take somewhat longer than getting your prints back from MotoPhoto. So forget about liposuction. I need to find another strategy for dealing with my big behind. Oh, you’re probably thinking: diet, exercise, willpower. Yeah, sure.
I’m thinking: size 42 Dockers.
Laughing Stock
After much deliberation I have finally de
cided to jump into the stock market. Even as the market climbed higher and higher, I resisted. Quite frankly, a man of my age has difficulty relating to anything that rises so high and so fast. But now I have decided to buy stocks.
I made my decision when my mailman drove past my house the other day in a Mercedes. He’s been dabbling in the market. His initial portfolio apparently consisted of a single 29-cent stamp and he’s been reinvesting his profits for a year.
It used to be that the mysterious intricate nuances of the stock market were unfathomable to idiots like me. Traditionally the men who scored big in the market had names like Chauncey Pickering Poockington IV, and the women who scored big had names like Mrs. Chauncey Pickering Poockington IV. But my friend Paul, who’s a business writer, assures me that “now every idiot can make a killing.”
So I think the time is ripe for me to get into the market—considering that the Dow has doubled since the time you began reading this. It is up so high that this time the folks throwing themselves off roofs are the ones who don’t own stocks.
Be forewarned, though, if I go into the market, you may want to get out. I’ve tried this twice before. The first time was almost twenty-five years ago. A girl I had gone to high school with had become a stockbroker, and I went to her with my entire savings and told her I wanted to buy a stock that would make me rich. She told me to purchase a computer stock called Intel. This was before everybody had computers, so the stock was unknown. I bought five hundred shares at 16.
Day after day I followed Intel. It went up as high as 18, and down as low as 14. So it was pretty much becalmed. But every day I called my broker seeking reassurance. If I saw it going down one quarter of a point I’d say, “Do you think it’s bottoming out? I have a bad feeling. I think we ought to sell before it crashes.”
This went on for months. Finally she told me I was driving her crazy. “You’re too needy,” she said. “I’m a stockbroker, not a psychiatrist.” She said that if owning Intel was too aggravating, I should sell it.
It was trading at 14 at the time. I sold it all.
That’s me, Tony Kornheiser, Mr. Phlegm-for-Brains. To my knowledge nobody else in the history of the stock market ever took a loss on Intel.
It is now around 90. And that doesn’t count all the times it has split. Intel has made so much money over the last twenty-five years that had I kept it, right now I could own Switzerland. The official Swiss currency would be the Kornheiser. It would be very strong against international markets. It would take only 12 Kornheisers to purchase a Lexus. But with 20, you could buy a Kornheiser Z-16F, a snazzy gull-wing racing car manufactured by Kornheiser Motor Works of Zurich.
But I didn’t keep Intel. I sold it and bought a five-year CD at my bank, where it made 3 percent interest, which made me the laughingstock of everybody in my neighborhood, including many preschool children. I ran into my stockbroker friend a few months ago, and she reminded me about selling Intel at 14.
“You were a fool,” she said.
“Yes, but at least my money was safe in the bank,” I said.
“It would have been safe in the toilet too,” she replied.
(By the way, she looked great; she’d had her nose done.)
Anyway, the next time I bought stock was in 1987. I remember it distinctly. I had saved up enough money to feel adventurous. And in the fall of 1987 I bought $10,000 worth of a variety of stocks. I remember the exact date, October 16, a Friday. The reason I remember was because on Monday, October 19, I got on a flight to Minneapolis to cover the World Series, and by the time the plane landed the stock market had crashed and my portfolio was suddenly worth $5,000. I lost half of my savings in two and a half hours. It’s a good thing the World Series wasn’t in L.A. That’s a five-hour flight. I’d have been tapped out. I sold the rest of my stocks the next day, and I haven’t been back since.
That relieved me of the responsibility of paying attention to Alan Greenspan, the saturnine chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Isn’t it great how Greenspan belches and the stock market panics? What power.
It’s too bad he appears to have no zany sense of humor. Because if he did, he could call a press conference, stand at the lectern, clear his throat importantly, and say, “Ahem. Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again.” And then just walk off.
Pillsbury stock would plummet! Thousands of Americans would lose their jobs! The president would urge calm! Julia Child would be appointed secretary of the interior! The dollar would sink against the yen! Wheat futures would skyrocket!
And then this bull market would turn into a bear market—right when I was set to jump in! Story of my life.
All the Stock Answers
You may recall that a few months ago I wrote a column about my bad luck with the stock market. I explained how I was the only person on Earth to have lost money on Intel, buying it at 16 and selling it at 14—about an hour before it started climbing like an F-15.
I’d like to thank the reader from Bethesda who, after figuring out all the splits of Intel after I sold it, informed me that had I held my original five hundred shares they’d now be worth $5 million. Thank you very much for pointing that out to me. Now die.
Though I had a savings-and-retirement strategy that some might have called “conservative”—I stashed half my money in gold bullion and the other half in my Uncle Boots’s cremation urn—I decided it was time to be more adventurous. So I went into the market as the Dow was taking off like Gypsy Rose Lee.
Well, you saw what happened last Monday. The market plunged 554 points. I blame myself, of course. But experts said it all started because of uncertainty over the Thai economy. Are you kidding me? There’s a Thai restaurant on every corner in my neighborhood. And why did the crash occur in the Hong Kong exchange? I thought its economy was booming since China took over. There’s obviously full employment in China. Every eight-year-old is working eighteen hours a day in a fire-trap factory to make sure our kids get Christmas toys.
So, Tony, how much did you lose?
I probably lost tens of dollars. I thought about flinging myself out the window like folks did in the Great Depression—but since I hadn’t put too much money into stocks yet, I just jumped off my porch.
When I came to work on Tuesday, everybody was calling his broker. I heard my editor Rich, a fretful Dow watcher, get on the phone and demand, “Get me [such-and-such]. It’s the Big Kahuna!” I assumed Rich was buying a particular stock, although it’s possible he was ordering lunch, and what he actually said was, “Give me a big tuna.”
Anyway, Rich wanted reassurance from his broker. A broker, by the way, who once phoned Rich to say he had good news: One of his stocks had split two-for-one. “Let’s see,” the broker said, “you had twenty-five shares so … hold on, lemme check … give me a second, my computer’s running slow. Okay, yes, you’ve now got fifty shares.”
The day after the crash, Rich nervously asked his broker, “So, what do you advise?”
“Sit tight,” the broker said.
Other brokers were giving equally sagacious advice.
“Think long term,” said one.
“Think big picture,” said another.
“Think about wearing a barrel and selling apples,” said a third.
So I called my broker.
“I’m sorry, but he recently fled the country,” his secretary told me.
No, I’m kidding. He put me on hold for a while, then said, “Tommy! Great to talk to you, pal. The crash? No big deal.”
And as it turned out, it wasn’t. By the end of the next day the market had come almost all the way back. And later in the week the Great and Powerful Greenspan, who simply by belching can cause blue chips to sway back and forth like the Wallenda family, said Monday’s plunge of 554 points could prove to be a “salutary event.” (I ought to introduce Greenspan to my cousin David. David used to consider a Category 5 hurricane to be
a salutary event, because he had a glass and mirror business in Miami.)
The events of the week taught me I needed to pay more attention to the market. I had a serious questions: How could this have happened? Could it happen again? And, most important, should I also order the tuna for lunch?
To be honest, I have no idea how the stock market works. I also have no idea how the Internet works, or how Doppler radar works, although I envision a stock market crash sweeping in from the Far East, El Niño–style—and we’ll be able to see it coming through some kind of financial Doppler radar. It will glow with that deep red that indicates incredibly forceful winds, torrential rains, and cows flying through the air. And everybody’s 401(k) will be sucked out the window. And the next morning I’ll be working at Hecht’s, selling bathrobes.
So I began to read the business section carefully. And the first thing I noticed was that every day you’d see the same photo of a group of Asians looking upward in terror. I’m assuming that the Asians pictured are watching the plunging Hong Kong stock ticker. But for all I know they’re reading a message board that says, DISNEY PLANS REMAKE OF FLOWER DRUM SONG.
I also took careful note of the names of stock exchanges and indexes throughout the world. In England, for example, there is the “Footsie.” In Hong Kong, there’s the “Hang Seng.” The currency in Thailand is the “baht.” In Malaysia it’s the “ringgit.” Hahaha. That’s so comical compared with the sophisticated names we have, like the “sawbuck” and the “finsky.”
Finally, in desperation I went to my friend Paul, a business writer. I confessed that much of my anxiety was over the fact that the graphs in the newspaper charting the peaks and valleys of the market looked just like my EKG.
“Does anybody understand what happened in the stock market?” I asked him.
“Only after the fact,” Paul said. “Those who claim to understand it really don’t, because if they did, they’d be rich.”
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