The Nation's Pulse/Viper's Nests
Stein, Benjamin J.
THE NATION'S PULSE VIPER'S NESTS by Benjamin J. Stein Wednesday A trip up to the Port Hueneme Na- val Air Station to Do My Bit. I had read that there was a support group there for the children of...
...The frightened want to be safe...
...I'm glad I chose this field...
...I'm not sure I do...
...Los Angeles is a colonial city...
...She's the one with the 38 double-Ds and the whole-body tattoo...
...I can get you a ticket...
...The black kids wanted to go into show business, to sing, to dance, to make lots of money, to ride in limousines...
...Just the ones at the big national firms...
...I am sorry," I said, "but I don't eat meat...
...My interlocutor this day was a woman so intense that I repeatedly started to laugh...
...Roast beef...
...Some wore see-through blouses...
...This is the main industry of Los Angeles—not remaking real estate, not making movies, not even selling junk bonds...
...Of course, I do not mean all of the accountants...
...The host firm brought in sandwiches for lunch...
...I had read that there was a support group there for the children of sailors in the Persian...
...Most of them said they wanted to go into the Navy, just like Mom and Dad...
...The strong want to be monster-strong...
...Ted, Ted," he said, "this is Ben Stein, the guy you like so much on 'The Wonder Years.' " "Yeah, great, man," the large fellow said...
...Thursday A grueling day, as I gave a deposition about a movie mogul and his apparent breaches of duty to his stockholders and other investors...
...A clever-looking woman lawyer asks you cagey questions meant to impugn your expertise...
...It's sort of fun to be at depositions...
...I passed by a tattoo shop with a fat man holding a terrifying instrument and staring atthe pimply back of a pale young woman...
...Why don't you come inside, too," he asked...
...I love your work...
...Women's jobs are difficult...
...I have known John for sixteen or seventeen years now...
...Well, I have plans for tonight," I said...
...Three sailors stood at attention...
...That's real fraud...
...I was summoned to read a part in which I grill a divorce plaintiff about why she posed nude, with her legs indelicately positioned, for a portrait painted by a man who soon became her co-respondent (if there even are co-respondents any longer...
...There the old self is pulverized, carpet-bombed, nuked into shame and oblivion, and a new self is built on the ruins...
...Oh, happy day, when I left the practice of law . . . " Friday A busy afternoon writing about eth- ical lapses among management...
...and a contract, but that did not make much of an impression...
...This is the one-day-at-a-time crawl into peace of mind, into the tortuous—sometimes torturous—process of making peace with oneself...
...You think the kid from Bensonhurst who got to be an agent and have blond girlfriends is a lucky fella...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...
...That's what actors say...
...Do not think for even a moment that accounting is dull...
...Yes, but I'm not planning to eat my shoes," I said...
...But they are from dead animals, are they not...
...The lost want to be found...
...Gulf...
...Maybe while we're gone they are having their boyfriends over, listening to our Nakamichi tape decks, doing funky things in our pools and jacuzzis...
...She loves 'Wonder Years.' " "Well, maybe some other time I'll meet Viper...
...Several other kids nodded and agreed that they would like to visit Los Angeles, but that it was probably too dangerous to do so...
...Getting rich, getting famous, getting thin is just technique...
...The man, as it turned out, was a freelance writer himself...
...It would be far too time-consuming to describe the case, except to say that it's about fun and games that the mogul apparently played with about $100 million of OPM...
...A stenographer yells at you not to talk over the question...
...We describe our acting as "work...
...You get to sit in a hot, stuffy conference room for a whole day...
...Men's jobs are difficult...
...They have a whole giant life here, and it's not just the gangs and the booths on Olivera Street...
...It touched me to think of this different race of patriots and protectors, living by a code of self-sacrifice so that the rest of us can be as mean-spirited and selfish as we wish...
...It's hard to believe just how lonely I felt as I walked down the Strip, which, in a way, has been my home for about fifteen years...
...I reassured them that their main worry was thieves who steal with a fountain pen Benjamin J Stein is a writer and actor living in Malibu, California...
...Hey," the large man went on, "I am so sorry that my lady friend Viper isn't here...
...I'm sure she's very memorable...
...For women to have been sold that bill of goods that men's work is somehow not work and just fun and games—wow...
...That's the Los Angeles of twelve-step movements, which, contrary to some assertions, are unequivocally forms of group prayer...
...What's her last name...
...I passed a palm-reading salon...
...It's a sort of anti-life of what the hueros are doing...
...It's all a thrill...
...That's why it's called work...
...He accepted, so off I go in my Acura to do good...
...In a nutshell, taking is what's going on...
...Just Viper," the man said...
...The addicted want to be sober...
...First of all, Los Angeles is a city of permanent war, not of gangs or of hate crimes but of humans against their old selves, the nonstop guerrilla war of self-help...
...We hueros open the door for our maids, and then leave...
...There were about forty kids in the support group, ranging in age from eight to fifteen...
...Then there is the Los Angeles of real peacemaking, of prayer by people who really mean it...
...But they are not invisible to themselves...
...she persisted...
...Outside, a homeless man carrying two brimming paper bags stared at a red Testarossa...
...Then, when we come back, there they are, staring at the ironing and saying nada...
...If they had only had a clue of what law was like, they would have lynched Betty Friedan and Gloria Stein-em and 141-Grace Atkinson...
...He nodded and then grabbed a large man about my age (46) and pulled him over...
...Above all, the old want to be young...
...There is temporary peace between what is and what wants to be, a peace made of drugs and compulsive everything...
...Tonight, however, it had a surprisingly well-dressed knot of men, young, middle-aged, maybe a little beyond middle-aged...
...I've been in X-rated since before it was X-rated...
...Who's had the good time that night...
...But the war is devastating, and the old guerrilla self fights back...
...Martin's Press...
...It's really a fascinating city for reasons other than that it's in a desert and has a lot of rich Jews who run show business...
...He's an irascible fellow with a scarily sharp instinct for saying things that are really on target and embarrassing...
...One wore jeans with the fly open to very low on her abdomen...
...Amazingly, they seemed only somewhat familiar with my fabulous TV show, "The Wonder Years," but they knew each and every detail of a commercial I had done for Chips Ahoy Sprinkles, and I mean every word and every gesture...
...But," he said, "I hear there are gangsters there and if I go there I'll get shot in the head...
...You did it voluntarily...
...Others wore see-through skirts...
...Aren't they leather...
...One lively black boy of about ten said he wanted to go into Los Angeles to see the "ruthless rappers of Compton," which is a scary neighborhood downtown...
...Even my interlocutor seemed to be amused and almost laughed, and then caught herself and looked dour...
...Taps" was being played, and sailors, wives, children, and I stood still as its notes wafted over the dusk...
...We saw the Mexican-Americans and the rich Jews (a favorite theme of John's) and people in Lexus sedans, and all along John talked to us in his mellifluous voice...
...My little sociological mind was churning as I talked to the kiddies...
...the man asked...
...Creating bogus entries that allow bad people to own homes in Bel-Air and Lakeville...
...I called the base chaplain and offered my humble services as a micro-celebrity...
...In the meantime, maybe you'd like to meet some of these ladies," the man said...
...It was about 7:00 p.m., and the Strip was dead...
...His new novel, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, has just been published by St...
...And you feel afraid that you might be saying something that will completely wreck the stockholders' case...
...Work is difficult...
...Then another that sold leather dresses...
...The real goal of life in L.A...
...Well, I'll keep my eye out for her...
...I was mostly laughing with joy and thanks to God that I was not doing her job, that at the end of the deposition I could leave and go about my business and not have to spend the next day inside that room with her and her colleagues...
...God help us...
...The poor want to be rich...
...The fat want to be thin...
...Then a Thai restaurant and a Mexican restaurant and a Chinese restaurant...
...The thin want to be super-thin...
...The hueros with money employ legions of black- and mostly brown-skinned people to clean their toilets, wash their cars, feed their kids, clean up for them, and fade into invisibility...
...showing us this evangelist from Houston or Santa Ana...
...I will not live on the eating of the flesh of my fellow animals...
...Yes, but these cows, the ones who supplied the leather for my shoes, committed suicide after lengthy soul-searching and shame caused by their breaches of fiduciary duty towards their fellow cattle...
...Sausage...
...What other city is so engaged in the process of remaking the self day by day...
...I was pretty startled at just how good a voice John has, to tell you the truth...
...Society snickers at the accountants, who just look sheepish and then go home and squirrel away another few billion...
...I will never run out of material and I will never run out of anger and I will never run out of typing paper, so I'm all set...
...As I studied the relentless countenance before me, I thought of the fraud that had been sold to women about how glamorous and great it would be for them to be lawyers...
...If they had only known...
...Then a dealer who sold Ferraris and Lamborghinis...
...With one meaty arm he swept three women towards me in various states of undress...
...These people have a life, my friend...
...The brown kids seemed to be thinking it over...
...But he was on his best behavior on the documentary...
...While I heard the sounds of made-inChina microchip aerial combat toys coming from the devil boy's bedroom, my little, Nutrasweet-besotted mind ran wild...
...Sunday W hile the devil boy, the world's cutest human being, Tommy Stein, played with his war toys and watched the Ninja I watched a show on KCET, our local PBS station, about John Gregory Dunne's Los Angeles...
...How long will it be until there is a class action against the National Organization for Women...
...The rich want to be Milken-rich...
...But I'm sure you were really great...
...Do you know her work...
...This is only a metaphor, but it's pretty buff for the Hispanics here...
...He took us viewers from downtown Los Angeles to the cliffs of Trancas, Malibu, literally right across from my little house, and showed us Los Angeles all along the way...
...What am I to make of that...
...LAWYER: Madame, all of us have our legs spread in one way or another...
...Turkey...
...For this war, the battlegrounds are the AA meetings, the Cocaine Anonymous meetings, the Schick Center, the Care Unit, LifeStarts, the psychiatrists' sanctums, the Crystal Cathedral, the TV set at 3:00 a.m...
...The dull facade is carefully cultivated to keep outsiders unaware of what is really going on under the green eyeshades...
...I drove through the gates—manned by private-contract guards who snap off crisp salutes—just as the flag was being lowered...
...He was waiting in front of Gazzari's for the "X-Rated Film Fan Club Awards...
...I passed by Tower Records, its windows filled with posters advertising frighteningly vacant, violent-looking people of every race...
...The throngs who would come later were still in Pacoima THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 25 shining up their Camaros or in Encino talking on the phone...
...0 tempora o mores," I thought, and averted my eyes until a man in a tuxedo said, "Ben, Ben Stein, I love reading about your life in the Spectator...
...They aren't just washing dishes in kitchens: they're living like kings compared to how they lived in Zihuatenejo...
...It's sort of her trademark...
...She looked thoughtful and then said, "What about your shoes...
...This is Mallory and this is Valhalla and this is Scorpion," he said...
...The battles are fought openly in the sports clubs, gymnasiums, plastic surgeons' offices, boiler rooms, women's kick-boxing classes, martial arts seminars, and assertiveness-training centers of Los Angeles...
...is to emerge a new you...
...The white ones seemed basically satisfied with their lives...
...Then a store that sold spangly mini-skirts and blouses...
...I have a fantasy of a valet taking the Bentley he parks for the film director, hurtling off to Oxnard to pick up his girlfriend, going to the film director's house on Broad Beach, having a party for two hundred of his pals, then cleaning it all up, returning to Geoffrey's just as the director finishes his cappucino, and delivering the car with a few servile words...
...That's the Los Angeles of psychiatristsand psychologists and other people who seek to mend the broken shards of the self and put them back together...
...I passed Gazzari's, a rock club that is usually deserted at this hour...
...But even if you don't know her face, you'd recognize her body...
...They all looked very nice and like they wouldn't kill me unless therewas nothing worth watching on MTV...
...Viper What...
...The Irish all seem to have great voices...
...About two-thirds of the kids were black or brown...
...It's not...
...Hey, do you ever see me...
...Later, before dinner, I moseyed down Sunset Strip with Trixie on her leash to pick up my script so that I could prepare for my role...
...A call from my agent about a tryout for a part as a cruel divorce lawyer in a new show about—surprise!—divorce lawyers...
...He did it, as they always do, with the help of accountants at a major national firm...
...The base sprawls (as bases will) by the ocean in Ventura County and would make a fabulous planned community, except that it already is a planned community...
...The weak want to be strong...
...I've been in fifty f--- films, usually as the main guy doing the main scenes...
...With them were a gaggle of skimpily dressed women...
...I get to say, or at least hear, the deathless exchange: WIFE: Yeah, but I'm the one out there with her legs spread for the whole world to see...
...T hen there's the Los Angeles of the serving class...
...I'd love someday to host a show on PBS or somewhere else about some of the other Los Angeleses besides the tourist's Los Angeles...
...Check out the pachuco who didn't have running water and now parks Ferraris and has a color TV, and a girlfriend who does aerobics, and air conditioning, and MTV, and a club where they know to give him a Dos Equis as soon as he walks in the door...
...Well, I haven't really seen as many of those movies as I should," I said...
...The radio is set to a Spanish station...
...When I left the office building, I actually was singing...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
