I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  It’s bad enough to look at Dole now, after his face-lift—the new cheekbones they inserted are so preposterously high, and make him look so artificially chipper, it’s like they injected a live squirrel into his face.

  But what really gets to me is this TV spot Dole does about the problem of “erectile dysfunction”—which after the first reference he mercifully refers to as “ED.”

  Erectile dysfunction. Gaaaack. Bob, you ran for president. Why do you feel the need now to tell us that your executive resolve is wilting?

  Have you no sense of shame?

  He was big as a horse, of course, of course,

  But a problem in bed led him to endorse

  A pill that could save him from divorce.

  And now once again he’s a big stud horse.

  Bob Dole, Mister ED.

  How do you put erectile dysfunction back in the can? The next time Dole appears on Meet the Press, Tim Russert might say something like this:

  “So, Bob, how are those erections coming?… I’m sorry, I meant those elections!”

  This certainly doesn’t make it any easier for Bob’s wife, Liddy, to run for president. Now she’ll be out there on the stump, as it were, and she’ll have to answer questions about Bob’s Big Boy.

  The public discourse is being fouled by things that my friend Nancy refers to as Images We Wish Had Never Been Conjured Up. Certainly, Bob Dole waiting for the Viagra to kick in would qualify.

  This coming week we have a two-hour dose of nightmare images: the Monica Lewinsky interview. Two hours of this cement-head blubbering with Barbara Walters. And if there’s anyone we need to hear even less from than Monica, it’s BaBa. Why she hasn’t been put on a bus to the dog track by now is beyond me.

  My point is that there are certain people who simply need to go away … now.

  Take Dennis Rodman. And stuff him.

  Is the word unsightly not in Rodman’s vocabulary? (Hahaha. Did you read his “books”? The word vocabulary is not in his vocabulary.)

  God help him if he ever has ED. You wouldn’t be able to read the full inscriptions on all his tattoos. He has so many metal doodads stuck through his face, if there’s ever another world war and we need scrap iron, we can just toss Rodman on top of the pile and go home.

  Charlie Sheen. Christian Slater. Robert Downey Jr.

  Please, don’t speak.

  Cher. You don’t have a squirrel in your face, you have the National Zoo. What do you give as a home address now, Dow Chemical?

  I don’t want to accidentally come across The Sonny and Cher Story and find out that when you and Sonny were still married you told him to get out of your hotel room because you intended to sleep with “Bill” that night.

  Bill who?

  No, no, forget I said that. Let’s not go there.

  And Kathie Lee. I know so much more than I want to know about Kathie Lee and her husband and her children and her clothing and her heartache when she found out that two thousand Indonesian children had gone blind sewing the beads on her bolero jackets. Isn’t there something I can get that will take back all the stuff I already know about Kathie Lee? A Kathie Lee–ectomy?

  I never want to hear the term “semen-stained” again.

  (Unless it’s a new shade of Duron paint.)

  And Roseanne.

  How did she get a talk show? Did she eat the previous host?

  How much time has to be devoted to this load? We already know about her child abuse, her horrible marriages, her unmentionable tattoos, the pouches that were sewn into her stomach so she wouldn’t eat anyone else.

  My friend Nancy and I were talking about Roseanne the other day, and Nancy said, “She’s so pathetic. They should put her out of her misery.”

  But she’s not in misery.

  We’re in misery.

  And Fergie, who has traded in getting her toes sucked for a 350-calorie stroganoff.

  Is there no extradition treaty we can sign to keep her out of our lives?

  I just saw her on the Today show—introduced as “Sarah, Duchess of York,” and by now she’s got as much pull in British royalty as “Colonel Sanders”—and she was talking about her fat behind and her new book, which is about her fat behind.

  Katie Couric asked her why a duchess should be pushing low-fat jack cheese. And Fergie said, “So many say, ‘What on earth is a duchess doing working?’ ‘Why is she talking about weight?’ ‘She should keep her private life private.’ ”

  To which I would say: Amen.

  Tragically, the batteries in my clicker were dead. But Fergie wasn’t. She continued: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a duchess, or who you are—whether you’ve got a title, or not a title—the fact is, if you’ve got a weight issue, you’ve got a weight issue.”

  Then she said to Couric that she wanted to have a career in television. So we’ll be seeing more of Fergie and hearing more from Fergie and learning more about Fergie.

  If I have a choice, give me erectile dysfunction.

  Me, the Jury

  I am being held hostage by the government.

  All week long I have been on call for jury duty in the District of Columbia. But so far I have not been selected. I really want to serve on a jury, because (1) it is my patriotic duty as an American citizen and a participant in the democratic process, and (2) you don’t go to work and they have to pay you anyway, hahaha.

  I think it’s really cool to be on a jury. Take the O.J. jury—the people on that jury got book deals, and they got on Nightline, and some of them even got to meet Greta Van Susteren! They were always being written about in the newspapers: “Juror No. 1, a thirty-six-year-old Caucasian male with a master’s degree, who works for a high-tech corporation.” Throw in a line about how “he likes to hunt and fish,” and you’ve got The Dating Game.

  I wonder what they’d write about me. “Juror No. 4, a fat, bald, old, whiny Caucasian man who dresses like a vagrant and has complained incessantly about the texture of the toilet paper in the jury lavatory.”

  Emergency update: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my friend Gino, whose roof fell in, dumping a ton of carpenter ants into his home. Well, I am happy to report that Gino got everything back together and repaired just in time for the big storm Thursday evening. A bolt of lightning struck in his backyard, toppling a tree, darting through the ground, up into his house’s electrical system, making a beeline for the room with the new roof, and roaring out and over his surge protector, frying his two computers, a fax machine, and a printer. I will continue updating this story as it develops. (Next week: locusts.)

  Anyway, I have a vision of what I’d be like in the jury room, how I wouldn’t have to say anything at all—it would be obvious how smart I was, so the others would naturally elect me foreman. The case would be murder one, a blockbuster. I would solve it secretly from the jury box, because of my Sherlockian savvy and a lifetime of judging human behavior as a journalist. During deliberations, I would bide my time, watching my poor clueless colleagues steamroll toward conviction, until I finally swayed them all to an acquittal by showing them the truth: how the defendant had obviously been railroaded by the Real Killer, his adoring but secretly faithless wife. Instead of merely delivering the verdict, I would point dramatically to her in the courtroom with an accusation, and she would fall to her knees, sobbing, and confess.

  Of course, with my luck, I’ll get a civil dispute over who owns a refrigerator.

  But to use a court term, it is moot. I’ll never get on a jury.

  I’d be easy to bounce off a jury. Any lawyer could do it with a few questions. Humor columnists are in the business of writing outrageous, opinionated, totally indefensible things.

  Lawyer: “So Mr. Kornheiser, you think you are without prejudice?”

  Me: “Sure.”

  Lawyer: “Are you aware the defendant is an insurance agent?”

  Me: “Sure.”

  Lawyer (shuffling papers): “May I direct you to a column you wrote in July of last
year, where you said, and I quote: ‘Insurance agents are just like big hairy water rats but not as cute, and if one of them is ever accused of a crime and I get on a jury he will fry like an egg?’ ”

  Me: “Er.”

  Plus, what if they asked me typical jury-screening questions?

  Lawyer: “So, Mr. Kornheiser, have you ever committed a crime?”

  Me (indignantly): “No!”

  Lawyer: “You mean you never stole anything? Ever?”

  Me: “Um, do Dave Barry’s jokes count?”

  A few years ago I had jury duty, and I never got selected. I spent three full days sitting in a big room that smelled like disenfectant, along with about eighty other people waiting for my number to be called so I could be impaneled. But my number was never called. (I think I was the only one whose number wasn’t called. A Fed Ex guy delivering a package got called, and I didn’t.)

  I spent the entire day, from 8:00 to 4:00, watching the one TV in the room, which was locked in on PBS. So you can ask me anything at all about the migratory habits of birds and flying insects in Oceania and I’ll have an answer. Those were the most boring three days of my life. It felt like I had been chained to Dr. Art Ulene.

  I suppose I should be grateful for not being on a jury. What if we were sequestered?

  Being sequestered means that all of us on the jury have to do everything together. We eat together. We travel together. We watch specially selected movies that could not possibly prejudice us, so they cannot be about crime or courts or lawyers or injustice. Basically, it would be Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, over and over again.

  But what I’d really fear was if the other jurors found out I was a sportswriter. Because as soon as people find out I’m a sportswriter, they start peppering me with questions:

  Who was better, Magic Johnson or Larry Bird? Joe Montana or Joe Namath? Yogi Berra or Secretariat?

  Could Babe Ruth have won a gold medal in the giant slalom?

  Can you get Michael Jordan to write me a recommendation for college?

  Who would win if Joe DiMaggio played Ping-Pong against Martina Navratilova’s cat?

  It happens. It drives you crazy.

  I’d sooner be on trial.

  When the Sweat Hits the Fan

  What’s the greatest invention of all time?

  Many would say it was the Wright brothers’ airplane, Edison’s electric lightbulb, or Gutenberg’s printing press.

  (Steve Guttenberg invented the printing press? The guy in Police Academy?)

  But my feeling is, those are obvious. Everybody was working on those things. Even if the Wright brothers had taken the gas, somebody would have invented the airplane. What, you think ’N Sync would be going from city to city on their summer stadium tour by camel?

  So we’re all on the same page: We need to distinguish between an invention and a discovery. An invention is something that doesn’t exist in nature—like Michael Jackson. But a discovery is already there; it’s just waiting for someone to, um, discover it. Clearly, the top discovery of all time is boiled lobster. I mean, look at that bad boy. Who was the first guy who thought of eating that thing?

  “Hey guys, listen to this. Tell ’em, Tommy boy.”

  “Okay, I know a lobster looks like a giant black spider from Mars. But I have this theory that if we drop it in a pot of boiling water, it will turn bright red, and we can crack it open with mallets and eat it.”

  “Sure, Tommy, sure. Whaddya think it would taste good with, drawn butter? Hahaha.”

  Eating lobster is a fascinating discovery. But I’m talking about inventions of epic proportion, inventions that have totally shaped our lives, inventions we could not live without. So we can eliminate Call Waiting and matching mother-daughter sailor suits.

  I’ve narrowed the list to three.

  Anesthesia, the TV clicker, and air conditioning.

  My friend Nancy argued for flush toilets, but I asked, “Okay, which of the other three would you throw out?” That’s a tough one, isn’t it?

  My dilemma was what order to rank them—which was solved for me on Monday night when my air conditioning went out.

  I’m not so young that I don’t remember the world without air conditioning. I remember well how my family got its first window unit when I was sixteen. Fifteen years I spent sleeping in a pool of sweat. (In retrospect, that may explain my lack of dates.)

  Some people are nostalgic for the good old days. My feeling is: Let them ride horses to work, and when they get the flu, let them go to a doctor who will insist on bleeding them with leeches until they feel perky.

  I want my room so cold in the summer that I can hang veal in the closet.

  So when my air conditioning went out, I did not have a good night. I was shvitzing like an aardvark—even with the windows open and the fan set on Stockholm. I awakened several times feeling like I had been dipped in a marinade. I felt so clammy I thought maybe I’d been sleeping with Darva Conger.

  Consequently, in the morning I wasn’t full of high spirits. I believe my first words were: “If the air conditioning guy isn’t here by nine-thirty, I will find him and hang him upside down from the shower rod like a roast duck.”

  Now I don’t want to sound like a spoiled brat. I know there are plenty of people who don’t have air conditioning, and I am no better than they. But normally I am colder. And that’s how I want to keep it.

  “What’s the matter here?” I asked the repairman.

  “Your compressor is broken,” he told me.

  “We have a service contract,” I said gleefully.

  I’m a big believer in service contracts. Over the years I must have paid $5,000 in service contracts on my air conditioner. I do that precisely so that if the thing breaks in July, SWAT teams of refrigeration specialists will rush over with tanker trucks of Freon and foam my entire house. In November, they can take their time. In July, I want them crashing through the door before I hang up the phone.

  “Service contract won’t do you any good,” the repairman said. “This box is twenty years old. We don’t fix them that old. You need a new one.”

  “Fine,” I said. “When can we get a new one?”

  “We can get a salesman over here tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “After I buy a new one, when will it be installed?” I asked.

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “We’re pretty well booked up,” he said.

  Of course you’re booked up. This is July! You know who’s not booked up? Nanook’s House of Snowmobiles.

  “Okay, how long?” I asked.

  “Well, it won’t be like a three-month wait,” he said.

  How reassuring. Two months would be, let’s see, early September. By then, they’d need to come over here with a two-hundred-pound Hoover just to suck me out of the carpet.

  “I was hoping we could get it done sooner than that,” I said. “Because I just watched the Weather Channel, and you know how the nineties are in orange? Well, there’s a big fat band headed this way the color of Strom Thurmond’s hair. So I’m thinking tomorrow might be good.”

  He gave me his boss’s number to call.

  I called.

  I got the answering machine. It said, “At [name of company] we can assure you of a speedy response. We’ll be there when you need us …”

  I need you.

  “… We pride ourselves in responding quickly …”

  Good. I’m waiting.

  “… We apologize for the delay.”

  It took a few minutes, but I got a live body, and I explained the situation. He assured me that I could get a new air conditioner within one day.

  “How much might this cost?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  He was right.

  So now I am looking forward to being poor but refrigerated.

  Lobster salad, anyone?

  Where Have You Gone, Casey Jones?

  It’s bad enough I’m afraid to fly, and I
have to take the train everywhere. Now the trains aren’t safe. Now we have runaway trains! (How am I ever going to go anywhere from now on? I get my taxes done in New York. Will I have to get in bubble wrap and ship myself to my accountant?)

  It turns out there was a two-man crew running this forty-seven-car train in Ohio, the conductor and the engineer. The conductor was already off the train. Then the engineer wanted to step off for a second, and instead of applying the brake, HE OPENED UP THE THROTTLE.

  Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do!

  Excuse me, you don’t turn the engine off when you leave the train?

  Okay, I’ll guess: “Because you want to keep the AC going?” Bzzzt! I’m sorry. It’s a train, dummy, not a Honda Civic parked in front of the Wawa with two kids and a dog in the backseat while you run in to get cigarettes.

  I’m assuming the engineer got off to go to the loo. There’s a sign in every train lavatory: DO NOT FLUSH TOILET WHILE TRAIN IS IN THE STATION.

  So when he got back from the bathroom, then what?

  a. “Dude, where’s my train?”

  b. “Hmmm, I could have sworn I left it right here. Oh, wow, this is the ‘C’ lot. Maybe I left it in ‘E.’ ”

  c. “Well, it’ll turn up. I mean, it’s not like I was so stupid that I left it in gear with the motor … Uh-oh!”

  (At this point I believe it’s Sandra Bullock’s turn to say, “Ohmigod, I thought this was going to be a quiet vacation.”)

  Come on, this isn’t a set of car keys we’re talking about. It’s a train, forty-seven freakin’ cars long. Nobody’s going to believe you’ve misplaced it. The only people who could misplace something that big and important are FBI agents.

  Now add the fact it was carrying hazardous liquid, which turned out to be a concentrated form of stuff they put in mouthwash. If it’s not diluted, it will “burn the skin on contact.” Doesn’t it make you feel good to know the active ingredient in Scope is some kind of flesh-eating chemical? By all means, swirl it around your mouth. (“Funny,” my friend Nancy said, “but I thought it was hazardous if you didn’t use mouthwash.”)

  So I guess I’ve taken my last train ride. I’ll remember it fondly. It was on Sunday, from New York to Washington, and I came upon a piece in The New York Times about jargon specific to medical residents, a sort of “resident-speak.”