Ben Stein's Diary/Fingered
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY FINGERED Thursday Up at 5:00 a.m. to be in Culver City for a commercial by 7:00 a.m. This meant quite a lot to me because, you see, the director is a truly huge name in...
...He said fine, and then took off for Vienna, Munich, and now the Cayman Islands...
...one in the Ziploc bags, that gets yelled at by the star of a whole campaign for the rival bags, which as I recall are made by Glad...
...I'm also competing with Catherine Oxenberg for a part in Prince Stash's film...
...As I stood at the counter ordering my plain tomato-and-cheese, I saw two Sikhs eating across the room...
...My parents threw me out, and I was held captive for several years by a couple who molested me and held a gun to my head to scare me...
...That's right...
...A few days ago, a woman whose son attends my devil boy son's preschool told me about a Healer just in from the Armenian SSR...
...Show me a woman who has named her child "Ly-Cee-Ah," and I will show you someone on welfare...
...And they would not be caught dead wearing silver jewelry...
...T walked farther down Beverly Drive I and continued my examination of the women of Beverly Hills...
...The woman said that the Healer had miraculous powers and had cured maladies far worse than severe fatigue and despair...
...This meant quite a lot to me because, you see, the director is a truly huge name in commercials...
...The amazing thing is that I felt better after I left Manu...
...By now, playing a finger was looking pretty good...
...I haven't had any pain in my kidney," I said...
...I paid no mind toathem until one of them began to shout to me...
...He had married a fellow Sikh on the orders of the head Sikh, and was now doing (I'm not kidding) real-estate syndications...
...Ttvo years off and on in mental hospitals...
...And they all wear silver jewelry...
...Maybe it's being a team player...
...Into Beverly Hills to get my hair cut and to pick up a gift for my researcher...
...Sixteen and seventeen," she said as she slurped up some shrimp tempura...
...Anyway, you know all about the Bible, and that's really a great connection...
...Every storefront in the place is in Cyrillic, and the women are all fat and the men look as if they would rather loaf around People's Tractor Factory No...
...So all you see is my finger, painted to have a little face on it...
...Or a hot potato, or something...
...I was out of there by 9:00 a.m., telling myself over and over again something I recently heard: that even humiliation is good for you because it teaches you humility...
...They wore collar-to-floor cotton robes, turbans, and medallions, and had flowing beards...
...Manu looked at me reproachfully and said, "Never mind, I fix anyway...
...He had become a Sikh about five years ago, he said, because his life was just not working out...
...If you know of anything, let me know...
...But the rich, from wherever they once came, seem to have vanished...
...I just write about them...
...Being at breakfast with people and getting paid is a change from having breakfast with Trixie while standing in the kitchen...
...On the other hand, I offer my erstwhile wife and her friend, the celebrity sex crimes prosecutor Linda Alice Fair-stein...
...Somehow, whatever spirit of display and getting and spending pumped the place up has moved on, or is sleeping, or maybe it's playing a finger on a set in Culver City...
...It's not good to lie...
...Geth...
...He took my hand and told me how happy he was to see me...
...He had employed me about twenty-five times in the past four years, and then dropped me like a rock...
...They literally foam with anger and the need to control everyone around them...
...It's never even going to be on TV...
...Anyway, it's bothering me...
...I have been mentally cataloguing all of this for many years now, and I have established a few Iron Laws...
...Yes, yes, indeed," I agreed...
...He stood about three feet from me and passed his right hand up and down my body from a foot away, as if it were a metal detector...
...No," he said...
...The producer is obsessed with the idea that Lincoln used marijuana...
...A few stores that cater to the middle class, especially Polo and Carroll, are still doing business, but the rest of the town looks as if a Depression had struck...
...Another Iron Law...
...All I knew was that it had something to do with plastic trash bags, and if it all worked out right, I would be really happy...
...Then he told me to breathe in and out and imagine that poisons were being expelled and healthy things taken in as I breathed...
...It's me, Melvin," he said...
...Hmmm," he said...
...It would be hard to tell you how desolate Beverly Hills is these days...
...It's not as much fun now that I do not eat meat, but it was still nice...
...I call it the law of the Inverse Relationship Between the Complexity of Names and Success in Life...
...Melvin Bleckman, from Paramount...
...A new husband recently in a drug detox center...
...Not Beth...
...12 all day than work...
...by Benjamin J. Stein That's one of the great things about not ever having been rich...
...I said "okay" as long as I can get the interest transferred automatically into my checking account at the end of each month in exchange for holding it for him...
...One is the Iron Law of Inverse Girlishness...
...The big prize was a letter from a woman I have known for about ten years here in Los Angeles...
...I got there and ate my catered breakfast...
...My "part," so to speak, was to play a finger...
...I looked over and saw one of them walking towards me...
...I passed by a Russian radiologist and a Russian plastic surgeon (there's one who will never be bored), and then found my man, the Healer, Manu, which is short for something too long to be pronounced...
...He told me that he thought business was down because of the real-estate depression...
...Monday Ithink maybe I told you that I am writing about what would happen if Abraham Lincoln came back and saw America today...
...Honesty may not be the best policy," as my old boss, a famous ex-President, used to say, "but it's worth trying some of the time...
...Friday T have been feeling tired for a long I time now...
...Me, I take it anyway I can get it...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991...
...I nodded agreeably while the director went on about how important it is to respect people and be honest with them...
...That's how it is on the set...
...Right now, she's an entrant in the Miss Middle-Aged California pageant, which she seems also to be sponsoring and to have created...
...The letter also transmitted a very thin square of latex and a neatly written note from the sender that this was a prototype of a condom for women which she hoped to market...
...How old were you...
...He motioned me into a spare "examining room" and asked a few questions, such as how long I had been tired, what my age was, and what my occupation was...
...Not really," I said...
...That's right...
...What was that...
...I think you and I are going to get along really well," Mom said...
...Now he's sure it's true...
...And you couldn't leave...
...They just didn't see when it would ever end...
...On Beverly Drive, store after store is shuttered...
...He gave me a pep talk about a wonderful motivational psychologist he had recently been seeing...
...Another Iron Law, but then you knew that...
...My hand was used in The Marrying Man and my legs on a couple of episodes of "Quantum Leap...
...Well, what the heck, it's just little things like Time and Money, so off Iwent to a small shopping center in the middle of Russian Jewish Emigre Hollywood...
...The skeptic may chalk this up to autosuggestion...
...Show me a woman who named her child Bill or Jane or Nancy, and I will show you a kid who has a chance...
...Would you ever consider being the ghost writer of my autobiography one day...
...Is there another examining room...
...I passed more worried-looking new Americans on the way out...
...Of course...
...If we can get over the addiction, we can change our lives...
...Then there is the Iron Law of Noble Metals and Aggression...
...Then there are the laws for men, for instance the Iron Law of Hair Morality, which holds that the amount of time a grown man spends on making his hair look modish is a precise correlative of how likely he is to be involved in white-collar crime...
...After a few minutes, the director came in...
...I stood up...
...Yes, I thought, but have you been a finger in a sales video...
...Even a little pinkie-toe would be all right...
...She's an actress/model/paid trainer to the rich...
...Manu passed his hands over me again, again from a distance, and then made a sweeping gesture towards my intestines, my heart, and my lungs...
...You eat too much salt...
...As the director told it, the psychologist insisted that his patients be completely honest...
...Have you lived...
...Well, they made me feel so much shame," she said, "and it was ten years ago, when there really weren't any laws protecting women...
...Sure enough, it was Melvin Bleckman, who once worked in the story department at Paramount (and who, incredibly, had changed his name from Melvin Pinsky to Melvin Bleckman...
...I had donated either thirty or fifty dollars to the pageant and to her entry, even though I have not seen her for a good five years...
...This law holds that the more childish, innocent, and carefree a woman's dress, the tougher, meaner, stupider, and more vicious she is...
...He was slight and short, with long, dirty hair, a decidedly hungry look, and the cheapest suit I have ever seen in America...
...In return, I got the following, excerpted so as to avoid shocking the conscience of America: I recently worked on a commercial with Robin Leach, and have doubled for Peggy Lipton, Suzanne Somers, and stood in for Priscilla Presley on the set of Naked Gun 2 1/2...
...It was a deep, dark mystery just exactly what I was going to do on the set...
...Maybe it's not even humiliation...
...That was almost nine months ago, and so you can imagine how happy I was when I was called suddenly and asked to do the part...
...I'm looking to go back to a studio...
...You don't argue with the director, no matter what he's saying...
...On Rodeo, there are no shuttered stores, but the stores are empty...
...Stand up...
...I strolled into Monte Factor, a barber shop above a bizarre clothing store that seems to cater mostly to women buying birthday presents for sons away in college...
...I have always had a hard time distinguishing the two...
...I say one very brief sentence and then get sneered at by the star...
...There was only one chair in the room, where I sat...
...Ben Stein...
...It's a script for a big, almost-defunct studio...
...This, he told me, was to remove whatever impurities there were in my system...
...I asked...
...I recently sent him the first fifty pages of my script, and he has just sent me back notes, from which I quote almost verbatim: "When Lincoln and Stanton are sitting around talking about how General Grant is doing, why not have Lincoln be really stoned, and have him start giggling like crazy about the idea of freeing the slaves, and how much it'll upset the Southerners...
...I offer, for example, the women of the "Peace" Movement and the Pro-Murder Movement...
...You don't miss it that much...
...Their faces are masks of rage and blighted homicidal mania...
...I play a finger, like the Benjamin .L Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Malibu, California...
...I have been to many doctors, none of whom can find anything wrong with me...
...A husband in federal prison in New York for life for smuggling guns to Mexico and bringing back heroin and marijuana...
...He had decided to follow the Sikh way, which had to do with the Buddha and a lot of other things like love and peace...
...A fmger...
...My last boyfriend, the one who just kicked me out, worked for Drexel and I know you have something to do with Drexel...
...This law, which I believe might revolutionize psychology, holds that women wearing silver jewelry are much angrier and more politically aggressive than women wearing gold jewelry...
...Mom herself in Hazelden, no less...
...Then he said he would examine me...
...The letdown came when we got to the set...
...I haven't lost weight, so I guess I can figure it's not The Bad Thing...
...The natives, by and large hordes of unbelievably tough-looking middle-aged women, are still around, but everyone else is gone...
...Oh, there are a few tourists, who are obvious because they carry cameras and don't look incredibly tough...
...Ben," he said...
...By the time I said goodbye to Mel Bleckman, I was mentally on my knees praying to get back to that set in Culver City and be a finger as soon as possible...
...Back at my little condo, I opened my pitiful mail...
...He says hell be back towards the end of next week...
...Show me a woman wearing little-girl tights and tennis shoes, and I will show you a woman who would just as soon slit your throat as tell you the time of day...
...It was where our Lord told his followers to take up poisonous snakes and the snakes wouldn't hurt them or anything...
...On the other hand, show me a woman wearing a neatly tailored business suit and high heels and stockings, and I will show you a well-adjusted woman without pathological hostility...
...I can't really improve upon this, so I had better go to sleep...
...He had me there...
...Saturday inner with a woman from my self-1,1 help group and her charming little daughter Geth...
...They never seem particularly angry, and almost never try to control anyone...
...It's short for Gethsemane," Mom said, "where something big happened in the Bible...
...A lot of people just gave up and moved to Palm Springs, he said...
...I believe that, if I am not murdered, my greatest reputation will someday come as a result of my research into dress, hair, and jewelry...
...Or the Iron Law of Lapels Fraud, which demonstrates that any man wearing a double-breasted suit bought after 1939 is currently involved in something punishable under the federal securities laws...
...He had had too much freedom in his old life, he said...
...Besides, he was right...
...Anyway, Mom and Geth ate their Japanese food and Mom told me about her life...
...I asked...
...I went into the California Pizza Kitchen, which offers delicious pizza dirt cheep (sic...
...I usually don't tell people that...
...For example, if you show me a woman wearing a little frilly bow in her hair and little frilly skirts and a childish pullover T-shirt, I will show you a woman who is so tough she would make John Sununu fly Super THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 25 Saver...
...He stood and stared at me...
...I think you should know that I was horribly sexually exploited as a child," Mom added...
...The fraudulent "art" dealers, the endless used jewelry stores, the clothing shops for wealthy drug addicts—all empty...
...I had several walk-ons as a waitress in the last season of "Dallas" and you might recall seeing me beside William Atherton on the plane in Die Hard 2. Currently you might or might not recognize me as a lesbian dancer in Switch, so you can see I've been busy working...
...He read about it in some drug comic book...
...In fact, I have been feeling extremely tired since 1980 or 1981...
...But really tired, like my brains are being sucked out my toes by Marla Maples on a good day...
...About taking up snakes and all that...
...It does seem to respond extremely well to large fees for commercials, so maybe it's psychosomatic...
...Most of us in this business are addicted to lying," he said...
...Then he told me to breathe deeply and drink at least two quarts of water per day, and that next time he would work on my liver...
...The place was empty except for me and my barber, a great craftsman named Eli...
...That business is in the toilet, though," he said...
...I went into the 7-Eleven in the shopping center and bought several bottles of Evian...
...The commercial is just an in-house sales job for the rival maker of plastic bags that's up against Ziploc...
...The letter continued: Last week a Swiss producer/Polish "count" opened up a joint bank account for me and said he would transfer $400,000 to $1.4 million into it in the next few days...
...He examined me some more and said my problem had to do with the pain I had no doubt been feeling in my left kidney...
Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
