Why We Suck

by DR. DENIS LEARY

  1. Buy a set of drums.

  2. Join a band.

  3. Skip Steps 1 and 2 and take Ropinirole.

  The only problem is, Ropinirole apparently has a number of side effects—one of which is an uncontrollable urge to gamble.

  Any possibility the Indians are putting some of their newfound casino wealth into prescription drug research? Let’s check the labs for free passes to Huey Lewis’s next show at Mohegan Sun.

  A few years back, doctors announced the “discovery” of a new disease called SAD—seasonal affective disorder. Victims claim the symptoms begin sometime in September and often last until March or April and include depression, despair, misery and guilt combined with a desire to oversleep or extreme napping as well as overeating.

  I’m sad to say that—in THIS doctor’s estimation—SAD is not a disease. It’s called WINTER, asshole. It happens every year right after the leaves fall off the goddam trees.

  And you are not a victim—you are a fat, human sloth who wants to suck down boxes of Twinkies and wash them through your cellulite-enflatulated system with a two-liter bottle of Orange Crush and you feel guilty because you slept for nine hours last night but just had a forty-five-minute nap while you were watching Ellen cry about a dog she gave to her makeup specialist who somehow ended up in Paris Hilton’s backyard with twenty-seven other Chihuahuas and only half a Snickers bar for all of them to share.

  Here’s my prescription: get off the fucking couch and buy a set of skis. Or skates. Better yet—buy both. And don’t eat the yellow snow.

  Case closed.

  The car companies are developing corn-fueled cars AND larger seats for fatter-assed Americans at exactly the same time. I say we ignore the irony and indecision implicit in that arrangement and instead plod on with cars that have larger seats that are in fact just comfier versions of toilet seats so you can drive, eat and shit almost simultaneously—the engine built to run on methane which will be produced by the farts you emit as you drive and gorge your way across the country. Fart-fueled automobiles. Short trip over to see Ma? Down a cup of peanuts and some soda. Headed down south to watch spring training? Swallow three hot dogs, put a case of canned pork and beans in the backseat and away we go. Now if we could just come up with a kidney that turns urine back into beer as it passes through your penis, we’d be all set.

  I’m tired of the denial. I’m tired of the fat the loud the lazy and the stupid.

  We’ve drugged the fat we’ve stapled their stomachs we’ve reinvented the vacuum cleaner so we could attach it to their huge asses and suck out all the fat but still—still—they insist on eating.

  Well, eat up.

  That’s right.

  Eat.

  Eat as much as you want. I’ll explain why in a little bit.

  They just announced a study that proves Botox may enter the face, but it settles into the brain stem—not only freezing elements of your visage but some of your thought patterns as well—which explains those pregnant smiling pauses you see every time Sharon Stone gets interviewed on the red carpet.

  Botox it up, baby. Shoot your whole goddam body full of that freeze-dried frozen goat sperm.

  Steroids—I want the steroid testing to stop. Immediately. The Mitchell Report, the FBI’s Roger Clemens Investigation, the Federal Court Trial Of One Barry Bleeping Bonds—end it all and end it now.

  I want the biggest baddest baseball players and football maniacs and biking teams this planet has ever seen.

  We’ve had the wrong attitude going on since day one with this stuff. You wanna prosecute athletes for using performance-enhancing drugs? Hey—how about you?

  Viagra, Ropinirole, Botox, Advil, NyQuil DayQuil Budweiser Pot Cocaine Emergen-C Xanax Prozac—you name it, someone in this country is taking it right now to improve their sex life, semen count, leg strength, nasal condition, anger management, bowel movements, piss volume or tit size. And you wanna bust a guy for taking some human growth hormone laced with extra ball juice before he rides in the third leg of the Tour de France? Hey—you want me to ride a bike through the French countryside for half a month I’m gonna need a shitload of drugs—HGH and an extra couple bags of testosterone being the least of it. I couldn’t ride from one end of Manhattan to the other on a bike without a backpack full of coffee, two bottles of morphine and a crystal meth dealer riding in a rescue car alongside.

  I don’t wanna hear any arguments about how many more home runs Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth would have hit if they had used steroids—they were both drunks. Ruth on steroids? He would’ve gone through 2 three livers and most of the hot dogs in the Western Hemisphere before his heart exploded while he was fucking an elephant in the Bronx Zoo on the night of his twenty-seventh birthday. Mantle had 536 home runs when he retired at age thirty-seven. If he had been able to shoot the juice? He would have hit 538. Before he was old enough to vote. Then his head would have blown apart. Ever seen pictures of the guy with his shirt off at that age? Steroids would have turned him into a walking time bomb.

  I want all Americans on steroids—starting now. The athletes the assholes the fat fucks—everyone.

  I wanna see baseballs hit 800 feet.

  I wanna see footballs tossed 100 yards.

  I want heavyweight boxers who weigh 400 pounds and can punch their way through brick fucking buildings.

  You don’t think the Chinese are already creating a race of giants to eventually dominate the Olympics and from there the world? What—you think Yao Ming is just some crazy freak of nature? No way—Yao Ming is the warning shot fired across the hull. We live in the greatest country in the world with access to the biggest and the best and the brightest—but we ain’t gonna be number one for long if we don’t start putting the pedal to the medal.

  Once we get the biggest athletes possible—we monitor the carnage and violence and bone-crunching power they are capable of—and how long before their heart valves turn to cheese—and then we start creating a crew of supersized police and soldiers—meat-eating, man-beating machines we unleash on the rest of the universe.

  Meanwhile, the fat people we’ve been feeding steroids to on the side have now become the fattest animals alive—hippopotami with human hands who wear an old Aerosmith T-shirt on each foot as a sock—we top them off with a couple tons of Twinkies before stuffing them into a specially rigged air force bomber and then—we fly over enemy territory and just drop them out of the sky—it’s what I like to call my Fat Fucks Crush Skinny Evil Pricks Program.

  I want Ritalin-rattled geeks galore stuck in video game centers all over the country so addled for action that they can’t stop inventing new ways to blow shit up at the lightning-fast press of multiplastic buttons.

  I want stun guns jam-chocked with Botox we all get for free so that whenever a politician tries to sell us a long line of bullshit we can semi-assassinate him or her—freezing them in place for a solid five minutes. When they melt—they get a do-over until they start to bullshit again and the whole process begins once more.

  If models and actresses insist on continuing not to eat—I’m taking the Twinkies away from the Fat Fucks during the prebombing raid flight overseas and replacing them with a steady parade of posers.

  Who’s hungry for Kate Moss?

  I want a new state added to America—The State Of Denial. We clear a bunch of land somewhere out in the middle—Oklahoma or Nebraska or Idaho—and we fill it with cigarettes and alcohol and heroin and cocaine and every other drug imaginable. You move there you get to smoke, snort, swallow, suck and otherwise involve any substance you like into your system. You can drive drunk you can drive high you can do whatever the fuck you want within state borders. You die? Good riddance. You don’t die—that’s okay too. ’Cause the profit from every dime bag and dollop you buy there goes right into the coffers to pay for medical assistance for the rest of us.

  And the governor from The Great State Of Denial will be none other than deposed senator Larry Craig, infamous for the press conference he organized t
o announce “I am not gay and I never have been gay.”

  Here’s a future clue, Larry: if you have to hold a press conference to announce you don’t like having sex with other men? It’s too little too late. You might as well take the time to announce just what type of place, guy and cock it is that makes you horny. Although we have a pretty good idea the place is a Minneapolis airport men’s room and the guy is whoever might be sitting in the next stall over. And trotting out your postmenopausal, middle-aged wife was not a particularly good idea either. She looked like she was two knitting needles and one honest confession away from donning a handmade midlife lesbian sweater.

  Bobby Brown is moving into downtown Denial City, by the way. He says Whitney Houston turned him on to hard drugs.

  Uh-huh.

  And David Guest made Liza Minnelli into a heavy drinker. 2

  No more hypocrites and high-toned hype.

  And here’s another thing—you decide to climb up a snowy mountain on a personal “quest” to achieve some asinine physical goal and you get stuck in a blizzard? We ain’t comin’ to get you no more. No helicopters no search parties no news coverage no cell phone contact. You climb up, you climb down. Otherwise—see ya. It’s called thinning the herd. We invented houses and cars and cable TV so you could stay warm and move around and WATCH bad weather on TV. You decide to go out in that weather? Yer on yer own.

  Two guys in California decide to tandem skydive out of a plane using a single chute that doesn’t support their weight? I don’t call that a tragedy. I call it a test—two less morons to avoid on my way to work.

  And I’m sick of hearing about my carbon footprint from Al Goddam Gore. He’s gonna lecture me about how many pounds of tree pulp it takes to make the paper box they pack my Filet ’O Fish in?

  I don’t think so, Al.

  How many South African gold miners had to fork their foraged nuggets over to illegal ganglords to make the Oscar, the Emmy and the Nobel Peace Prize Al has hanging on the mantel in his dining room where he must be eating at least four or five organic, free-range chickens a day, based on the size of his current carbon ASSprint. The seats in his house must be made of lead.

  I don’t wanna hear another word from Rush Limbaugh unless he’s gonna explain how to successfully combine illegal Viagra prescriptions, heavy antidepressants and a successful round of golf into the very same afternoon. If he has any news about playing eighteen holes with a hard-on, a big smile and the same Titleist you started with—gimme a ring.

  The only Hasselhoff I ever wanna see again is The Drunk Hasselhoff. I’m all for safe driving and a long, healthy life and he does have children to set an example for, but if he’s not gonna break out on a bourbon and blow bender once or twice a year and end up on digital video eating a cheeseburger off the floor—what good is he? I don’t wanna Hassle The Hoff—but, c’mon, Dave—give the people what they want every once in a while.

  Fuck waterboarding—who needs it? You wanna torture terrorists and tyrants we catch in whatever corner we uncover?

  Play some American music.

  Some REAL American music.

  You plant an angry Arab member of Al-Qaeda into a steel chair, tie him down with chains and braces, surround him with twenty-five-foot-high mega Marshall amps and crank up the tunes?

  Grand fucking slam, pal.

  But you can’t play what they always play—heavy metal, hip-hop, Van Halen.

  That shit doesn’t work—it’s exactly what they’ve been trained to expect.

  You gotta hit them with the really hard stuff.

  And when I say hard I mean REALLY hardcore:

  Clay Aiken.

  Hannah Montana.

  Celine Dion—in English AND French.

  You play that shit for a couple of days—he’ll be begging to be waterboarded.

  All the info we’re looking for will fumble right out of his mouth.

  Seventy-two virgins may be what he has in mind—but if Celine hits those high notes long enough? He’ll give that dream up as soon as his ears stop bleeding.

  The things that make this country great are staring us right in the red, white and blue face, folks—the biggest, the baddest, the best.

  The biggest bombs, morons, racists, drunks, hypocrites, fools and assholes.

  The baddest movies, music, sitcoms, reality shows, taste, food, fads and educational system.

  The best—what?

  Laid plans?

  Intentions?

  Potential?

  We got those. No one gives more in charitable dollars, time or prayer than we do. No one has more promise or hope or faith in a better future. All the parts for a bigger, better equation are there. We just gotta figure out the math.

  Maybe we can get the South Koreans to lend us a hand.

  Scientists have ready research that says if everyone used up resources at the rate Americans do on a daily basis, we would need four more earths in order to survive.

  Which means one thing and one thing only:

  We gotta kill everyone else on this planet and we gotta do it right fucking now.

  Or—we take a good, long look in the mirror and realize most of us can’t even physically leave the house because we’re too fat or high or freaked out or foolish or a dangerous combination thereof.

  Somewhere in between those two possible responses lies the real answer.

  Me?

  I say we just get the religious right to pray our way onto the extra earths.

  Or just ask George Bush Jr. to mention it to Satan the next time they talk. Because unlike most ex-presidents, who travel the one planet we already have getting paid to preach peace and prosperity and friendly co-existence—this guy’s gonna have a whole lotta time on his hands.

  CHAPTER 20

  SOMEONE TELL MY MOM THAT CELL PHONES CAUSE CANCER

  So I decided to wrap up my book by having one more conversation with my mother.

  She seems to be a beacon of common sense and working-class creativity, her main interests in life born of the pure family values the Republican Right is always nattering on about—kids, God and country—even though she has voted as a Democrat in every single election since she came to America.

  Her sister—my Aunt Margaret—had died a few weeks back, a mere four days after her husband of fifty-something years, my Uncle Connie. It was one of those rare forms of love you don’t see anymore—like a baseball player who plays for the same team his entire career—Uncle Connie and Aunt Margaret raise their kids and oversee their grandkids and grow old and get ill together and then when one dies the other can’t wait to get to heaven and join the spouse up there in the ever-after. Connie was buried with his beloved Red Sox cap and Margaret with her favorite emerald-green tea mug.

  I stood in my mom’s driveway the morning of Aunt Margaret’s funeral as we waved at the funeral home limo which was picking up Margaret’s kids—she had lived a block or so from my mom—to make sure they knew Ma was ready to roll. Then—something strange happened.

  My mom’s purse rang. 2

  Thinking it must be MY cell, I reached into my pocket just as Ma reached into her bag and produced a cell phone—flipping it open to say:

  Okay, Sheila. Can you see us? Okay, sweetheart.

  Then she calmly flipped it shut and stuck it back inside the bag.

  I stared at her.

  What’s wrong? she asked.

  Ma—when did you get a cell phone? I replied, my jaw dropping.

  I dunno, Denis. But it sure comes in handy.

  And with that she jumped in the limo and I jumped in my truck and we traveled the eight blocks to the church where everyone in my family—from my father twenty-something years ago to my cousin Jerry The Firefighter—had been celebrated and mourned in their passing.

  As I followed the limo I considered a world where my mom has been given a portable form of communication—she could now chastise, cajole, remind and update us from anywhere on the planet.

  Holy shit.

  In
the church, several of the grandkids got up on the altar and spoke about Aunt Margaret—one of the funniest and sweetest and most devoted moms of all time. Many little details were brought up—her love of tea and her ability to feed a house full of screaming children without a whisper of a complaint or even breaking a sweat. My favorite little fact emerged from the altar: one of the grandkids remembered a roomful of grandchildren creating such a loud ruckus during a giant kid brawl that Aunt Margaret rushed in and said “If you kids don’t settle down right now goddammit I’ll sell each and every one of ya’s to the Indians!”

  We all laughed.

  We had heard it before from my ma.

  The fear of being sold off to live on a reservation with a tribe of Mohawks or Mohegans would make us sit right down and quietly watch the TV.

  Of course, nowadays, being sold to the Indians only means you get a nice cut of casino profits while you live in a McMansion in the Connecticut suburbs.