by Brad Garrett
THE DIVORCÉE
This is by far the most complicated dating category. Because there are so many divorced women out there, go in knowing you’re bound to be dealing with a mixed bag. You will need to prepare yourself for the worst and hope for the best. Depending on how her last marriage ended, she could be struggling with any number of neuroses, including insecurity, paranoia, outbursts of sobbing, rage, disbelief, abandonment issues, cat addiction, etc. Nine times out of ten, if you ask about her ex, she will spin it as “what a piece of shit he was.” Adamantly agree. If by chance she takes the blame for the divorce, go shopping for a ring, but only after you’re positive she’s a woman. And whatever you do, don’t be the prick to bad-rap your ex. It will set you back four dates and make you look like the jerk you really are.
The divorcée is in desperate need of feeling attractive. Compliment her wrists unless she has to move flesh to accurately tell the time. Be sure to mention how you like her outfit, but steer clear of jewelry, since it probably came from the ex. If out to dinner, order for her. If she’s around your age, she will most likely have trouble reading the menu, so this makes you look in control as well as chivalrous. It’s also a handy way to avoid paying for the surf and turf. If she dresses younger than she should, it’s most likely a mess under there. If her hair is more than two colors, don’t stare, but mention that her “eyes seem to change hues with the night sky” if you can’t stop looking at her fucked-up coif. And ramp up the bullshit by 15 percent for every five years over fifty she happens to be.
THE NEVER WAS
This is a gal who has never walked down the aisle. There can be many reasons for this, but only two are truly commendable. Either she has invented a foolproof way of pleasuring herself, combined with an imagination that Walt Disney would envy, or she’s loaded with dough, loves to work and travel, and has realized that most men aren’t worth the small dick they rode in on. These women never bought the bullshit fairytale about the handsome prince on the white horse. They may well be in search of a black prince who’s hung like a white horse, and who could blame ’em? But most likely, neither is the case.
Most “Never Was” women are batshit crazy. They’ll tell you they’ve been engaged twice; most likely, they’re the ones who proposed on both occasions. One of their parents may live next door, if not closer. They are likely to own a pair of Birkenstocks and refuse to “eat anything with a face.” And something tells me, not a great blow job. If you can get your bar that low, you may find some hidden treasure: there’s a very good chance she can rewire a floor lamp simply because she had to learn to do many things on her own. If you’re a Jew like me who can’t work a ratchet wrench, she could end up being quite cost-effective. But warn your mother beforehand that she’s not one of the tribe. Because she won’t be.
If you want to get this type of gal in the mood, take her to a Renaissance Faire and then go apple picking. Brag that you never had your back shaved, and drop the phrase “carbon footprint” in mixed company. But beware, these lasses usually have many secrets. Or they collect shit that most would throw away. If there’s a dream catcher on her rearview mirror, she may believe the moon landing never happened. If she has a compost pile in her backyard, there will be an odor. And not from the pile. I’m sorry, but prove me wrong and I will refund your money for this book (paperback only).
One of my most heated conversations with the opposite sex was on a first/last date with a woman I was set up with at a party. She had this silent confidence that I found attractive and, for some reason, made me think she might be bisexual. Let’s be honest, every guy hopes for that. Unfortunately, it ended up she was just a latent ball-buster. The argument was about whether or not it was okay for a man to receive a hand job from a paid masseuse if the man was in a relationship. I knew I wasn’t going to see her again, so I felt I could be honest. I said, “Absolutely.” She thought I was the seed of Satan for feeling this way and tried to turn the tables, like most females: “What if your lady was pleasured during her massage while in a relationship with you?”
“Then she got her money’s worth, and it has no reflection on our relationship,” I said. What I left out was: “As long as it’s by another woman.”
Yes, men invented hypocrisy. It’s our never-ending desire to spin shit our way because our gender is notoriously greedier. (Unless the marriage crumbles.) Obviously, women are wired very differently, especially when it comes to sex.
The broad then started to spew how a real masseuse would never give a happy ending. Because that would make her a hooker. I asked, “If a hooker rubs my feet, does that make her a masseuse? Feeling good is feeling good, right?” Wrong, according to her. And, I’m sure, most gals. “But it’s a full-body massage I’m paying for. Should it not include the penile region? What if I don’t ask for the happy ending but she does it anyway? Am I still to blame? Who am I to tell her how to do her job?”
This reminds me of a time several years ago when I was getting a massage at a questionable establishment called Tai Tug. After a thirty-minute rub, Madame Cougar Butterfly proceeded to ask me if I would like “a wacky-wacky.” Not versed too well in “Tai,” I made her repeat the offer. “You know, wacky-wacky,” her hand gesture driving it home. Being a man who felt lonely and vulnerable in a strange land known as North Hollywood, I said, “Sure, why not?” in the same fashion I would answer if asked to supersize my Big Mac meal.“I be rye back!” she said with a scary wink.
So there I waited. Hanging off a table not much larger than a cutting board. Five minutes turned into fifteen and no Yoko. Was she getting dressed in something diaphanous? Or would it be the typical dragon-head-with-crotchless-panty ensemble known as “item #18”? Hopefully the latter. All of a sudden she stuck her head in the door and asked, “You finish?” The moral of my story: always tip up front.
* * *
I have always found it incredibly difficult to be faithful to one woman, and when I asked my shrink what was wrong with me, he said, “Nothing.”
I asked, “Why do I do it? Fear of commitment? Lack of self-worth? Control? Insecurity?”
He replied, “Because it feels good and you enjoy variety.” That was also when he told me to stop worrying, because when I hit my late forties, a lot of that urge would dissipate. Boy, he wasn’t kidding. I went from watching the wiggle on the waitress’s ass to watching what was on the tray. I went from pussy to pastry almost overnight. The impending devolution of thine wiener starts to take shape (or lack shape), and all of a sudden the chocolate cake is more arousing than the thirtysomething dame delivering it. More satisfying because it comes without agenda and is much cheaper in the long run. And next week, if you feel like a berry tart, the chocolate cake won’t care.
The body knows when the dick is going south, but the brain is usually the last to accept it. Only when you succumb to the inevitable and stick something else in your yapper can you enjoy the bliss that is your new, quiet freedom. I guess the real key to dating later in life is not to give a shit about the outcome. Your experiences with the opposite sex (along with this book, I’m hoping), will teach you that you have very little control over your good fortune. And finding the right mate is nothing more than stone-cold luck. So learn from your mistakes and stop thinking you deserve better. You can aim high or be optimistic, but as my father used to say: “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.”
The stroke victim and the airhead.
There’s someone for everyone.
(Courtesy of author’s collection)
16
My Body Is a Temple in Iraq
I found my first gray pubic hair on May 22, 2013—the day that part of me died.
I was eating graham crackers in bed, watching a rerun of All in the Family, when I dropped some crumbs on the Netherlands. Upon extracting the fragments, I noticed the fucker. Like a limp lightning bolt emerging from the valley of broken dreams, there it stood, as if to say, “Pluck me, I dare you.” My girlfriend was ly
ing next to me, and the time didn’t feel opportune to yank the bastard, so I made a dash for the bathroom, because I knew I couldn’t just lie there with that white barb making itself comfy in my loins.
As I stood naked, looking down at the deadened curlicue in my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I felt surprised that it affected me so much. It was only one hair, but even more reason why it had to die. In previous years, I would pluck the grays from my temples as they would sprout, until there were just too many. Then it was the grays from my chest that I took aim at. Those, too, became unmanageable and I relented once again. But the day I saw the lone gray wolf in the lower forty-eight was the beginning of an undeniable acceptance that would not go down easy.
Then there was the reality of tweezing a dead follicle from Testicle B that got my attention a little more than, say, my nose or ear. It all made me wonder how long I could go on until I gave up, like I had with the temples and the chest. How old would I be when I looked south and admitted, “I don’t know you”? Would the pain outweigh the motivation or vice versa?
And why the hell does my left ear have ten times the hair as my right ear? It makes no sense. If I moved to London, would the hair in my right ear start to balance out?
I never felt like I was in shape even in my young, thin days. At twenty-five years old, I found myself wheezing on an escalator for no reason. Maybe a fear of heights? I never worked out a day in my life, and I stand by that avoidance with pride. By middle age, I’ve learned something important when it comes to working out: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In my case, that means I feel good enough without the inconvenience, boredom, and strain that come with working out. My blood pressure and heart rate are stellar, and I get enough exercise walking around parking lots looking for my car. That alone probably gets me a good two miles a week. Sure, I’d like a better shape: no love handles; more muscle definition; better stamina in the ole sack; a not-so-flabby ass. But at what price? I’m a Jew and accustomed to negotiating, and at the end of the day, I need to feel I’m getting a bargain. I just don’t feel I’m getting one at Equinox for a hundred and fifty dollars a month when I could be feeding the pigeons or sexting a stranger for free.
I always had an aversion to working out, ever since my days in junior high when I was continually humiliated and ridiculed for being the slowest and weakest male in the seventh grade. Remember the Presidential Fitness Test? Kids who did so many sit-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, etc., received a lame iron-on patch and a fake certificate from the White House incumbent. The number of reps required for each calisthenic was determined by your height and weight. According to the chart, at six feet tall and 160 pounds, I should have been a redhead, married with four kids, and living in Iowa. The Presidential Fitness graph didn’t go that high or even in that direction. They had to call the primate clinic to get stats on my compatibility with others. The school cafeteria worker used to feed me at arm’s length. During fire drills, kids were told to “meet at Brad.”
My asshole PE teacher’s solution to this problem was to add ten more reps of each requirement to Antonio Palagenzo’s score. Antonio Palagenzo was thirteen and had a goatee that he had to trim in between his trips to juvie. He was also the strongest kid in the San Fernando Valley and started his own gang that stole trash cans. No one really understood why, but we knew better than to question. In twelve years of public school, I was never awarded the Presidential Fitness patch. But I did buy one off of Barry Langman, just to say I had it if the topic ever came up during truth or dare. None of it really mattered. Palagenzo is at Rikers Island, and I’ve sold twenty-eight books. I wish I’d known that back then. It would have saved me a lot of grief and therapy.
Here’s a secret: quitters finish first because they’re smart enough to stop. Period. It’s Madison Avenue that guilts you into “Just do it,” “No pain, no gain,” or “Climb it because it’s there” idiocy. No pain? Guess what? No doctor, no ointment, no piss-tasting Gatorade. And no money for the corporations that make this crap to fix our bodies because we’re attempting shit we shouldn’t be doing. How many people do you know who ski? Out of those people, how many should not? Eighty percent? More like 90. And why do they ski? Because their ego convinces them they can. There’s a reason why urgent care is at the bottom of the hill and not at the top.
Jim Fixx, the health and fitness guru and successful author most famous for his running accomplishments and unprecedented endurance, died from running. It wasn’t enough that he was already in great shape and the spokesman for Grape-Nuts. He had to keep proving it by running some more until his friggin’ heart imploded on lap 207. Why? For what?
Richard Simmons made $50 million—you heard me, $50 million—with his frightening “Sweating to the Oldies” crap and his Dial-A-Meal propaganda. You think he’s in shape? This guy sweats more when he has to strap on his heels because he’s late for a parade. You don’t get a gut like that from “taking it to the limit,” Home Fry.
I once had Jack LaLanne, the Godfather of Fit, in the front row at one of my shows. He looked half-dead in that scary baby-blue jumpsuit, like an extra from “Thriller,” with the family cat masquerading as his hair. I told him that his blood tested positive for dust and that I read his diary from the Civil War. Feeling attacked, he jumped up from his chair and proceeded to tell me, “I may be eighty-three, but I can still touch my toes!” I told him,“Yeah, but it doesn’t count if you do it with your balls.” And that’s my point, ladies and gentlemen. You age anyway. Gravity and the hands of time have a deathgrip on your prostate, so why the rippled biceps? Who are they for, Gunther? The pink, that’s who. Have you learned nothing?
Good genetics play a big part in all of this. Even though cancer has killed more people in my family than one can imagine, my ticker might as well be Swiss-made. As far as my grille, I stay on it like a second job because the family genes were not so kind to the Chiclets. My zadie, who by the way called me a schmuck on his deathbed before drifting off to wherever we go, had dentures by age thirty-five. He never brushed a day in his life and kept the chompers in a cup at night, fizzing away. As kids, my cousin Darren and I used to sneak into Zadie’s bathroom in Oxnard when we visited and marvel that he could actually take his teeth out of his head. When Zadie arrived at Ellis Island from Poland in 1926, he was twenty-three. An immigration officer stamped his papers and four teeth fell out. He never looked back.
My father had horrible teeth as well, rest his soul. He was a child of poverty, and dental care was a luxury. His teeth were as loose as a girl in a prom dress. He once took me to a petting zoo, and the owner gave him a carrot and a cube of sugar.
I had a ton of dental care as a kid, including braces. Now my teeth are starting to succumb to my lineage. I recently was told by my dentist that my gums are receding because I brushed too hard and too often in my younger years. He also told me that I take my floss too deep. Huh? I felt like bitch-slapping the old doc. Who does he think is at fault for giving me that advice? My gums are retreating like the Dutch army, and I have a ton of root showing from brushing too often and flossing too well. My pearls could end up like Steve Buscemi’s, a hundred grand later. But Zadie’s smile? Like a pearl necklace on Pamela Anderson. The kind she never paid for but definitely deserved.
17
No Scales in Heaven
Art and wine age well, so why the hell can’t we? And I don’t mean “preserve” well. Who gives a shit how you look? I’m talking about pulling out the stops and trying to find your balls of yesteryear, when they were a tad higher and things were attempted with less fear. I’ve spent middle age in search of who the hell I really am, settling on the philosophy that “what you see is what you get, Jack.” That freedom becomes possible only with a great deal of maturity, experience, and denial. Or when we just plain burn out from pretending to be that guy we never were. You will get to that last hole on that belt you bought in 2002, so prepare accordingly.
As we know by now, the theme of this book can be summed up in one wor
d: don’t buy the hype. Okay, that’s four words. If your doctor tells you to lose weight, look at all the variables involved in that advice. For starters, how fat is he or she? My doctor happens to be fifty pounds overweight. If he’s armed with the best medical information, what’s his story? And exactly how am I supposed to lose the weight? What do I have to give up? What’s in it for me if I conform? Is the dread of losing late-night ice cream really going to outweigh the six pounds I lose by Christmas, only to put it on again because if I don’t shove my mouth full of holiday goose, I might tell the family how I feel about them?
How many minutes of jogging must I endure to lose this weight, Doctor? What if three men in my family died of heart attacks before the age of fifty? Can I factor that in and say I’m not changing squat because the odds are stacked against me anyway? Yes. Yes, I believe I can. Or, in the words of the great Jewish philosopher: “Damn straight.”
If it’s true that we are what we eat, then it’s safe to say, “We shit what we were.” So it’s a push. It’s all good. The oldest person I ever knew was my ex-wife’s grandmother. She lived to be a ripe 102 years old. Being gentile and upbeat, I’m sure, had a lot to do with it. The woman ate like she was going to the electric chair. I thought the warden was going to come in any minute and blindfold her. She ate pork every day and loved her Arby’s roast beef sandwiches (which has to be the furthest thing from roast beef known to man). She downed those suckers like they were mints. She loved her sherry, had a liking for fudge and the word “negro,” and scarfed three bratwursts and a quart of Guinness at an Octoberfest on her ninety-fifth birthday. Then she proceeded to drive home. Even the Asians pulled over.