Ben Stein's Diary/Guys and Dollars
Stein, Benjamin J.
shouldn't I fly the farthest and miss a few days of work to do it? The air was warm and damp when I got to New York. I checked into my tiny room at the hotel near Lincoln Center (part of my false...
...He really should have been selected to succeed Johnny Carson...
...To be in a Russian army prison being tortured...
...Then my mother and sister went for lunch, and immediately the nurses came to take my father in for his angiogram...
...He said that it wasn't so bad...
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...Regis and you could come back from a war, and it would still be there...
...How horrible," I said to him...
...Contrary to what you might think, New York is cheery and friendly around Lincoln Center at night...
...I'm getting to like him...
...Regis to eyeball the new King Cole Bar...
...Sure enough,there was Clinton, playing the trombone, looking like a drug addict jazzbo, and playing pretty well...
...She had always planned to be an actress, but lately she had decided that she would also be an opera singer...
...The best store on earth, Balducci's...
...Of having a bad hair day...
...By chance, I sat next to my old pal, Roy L. Ash, stone solid genius of the first degree, co-founder of Litton Industries...
...After about an hour, a doctor came out from the examining room...
...He dashed into the store and ran until he found the Fast Trax section...
...There was only one torturer, and he was a civil servant, and he had a whole prison full of people to torture, and he wanted to get home every day at five, so he'd only spend a few minutes on each guy before moving on to the next...
...Kimball was friendly and filled with jokes and asides...
...Others are entering bars and restaurants...
...For some reason, it seemed sadder that Johnny would no longer be on TV at 11:30 every night than that people get older and have angina...
...Crowds are leaving theaters...
...He arrived and looked around for a newspaper...
...But, Daddy . ." "It doesn't matter if I use it, it's still a bad word...
...You have to be related to someone in the picture business," I said...
...He laughed and then passed on his merry way to write more novels or edit more books or something...
...I reminded him of probably the best story about bureaucracy anyone Guys and Dollars by Benjamin J. Stein 38 The American Spectator August 1992 has ever told, which he told to me in 1976: Korda was a cub reporter for the BBC covering the Hungarian uprising against the Bolshevists in 1956...
...Watch your mouth, pal," I said...
...It's a lot better to hope than not to...
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...Name: Address: City: State, Zip: OR CALL: 1-800-787-0430 3726 The American Spectator August 1992 39 ladies to have tea and sandwiches and another slightly bigger room for men and women to have organic fruit salad and jicama...
...I went into a bar at 64th and Broadway, ordered my usual double Pellegrino straight up, and stared at the various men and women at the bar...
...Of being dissed...
...They were all actors compelledby a cruel fate to work in accounting firms...
...First stop, however, was at Toys-R-Us, to buy Tommy a reward for being a good boy...
...12.95 plus $2.05 shipping and handling Published by the Prayer Book Society Publishing Co...
...Joe Battle Wagon, made in China, with a genuine missile launcher...
...The bill for the two of us was almost $150...
...It even fired its rockets in proper sequence, and went backwards and forwards...
...0 The Book That Cried to be Written and Begs to be Read...
...All for a test...
...Lunch in New York with Billy Kimball from the Comedy Central Channel and Al Franken, a famous comedian who appears regularly on "Saturday Night Live...
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...I had to send back my Senegalese soup...
...On the street, hailing a taxi, was John Gutfreund, former head of Salomon Brothers...
...He pedaled a little bit, and then a little more, and then he was gone—and then he fell down...
...Oh, brave new world of fear and health that has murdered the King Cole Bar, how strict you are...
...What a tragedy...
...It's about forty miles north of Malibu, up the coast past the rocky cliffs of Leo Carrillo Beach, past the giant boulders of doom across from Deer Creek, past the missile park at the Naval Air Station, and thence to the far reaches of Oxnard, a beach town with an almost entirely Mexican downtown and an old movie theater advertising, just for today, Tres Mexicanos Calientes...
...My mother and sister came over, and we all talked...
...When I got home and took it from its box, I saw the dreaded words: "Some assembly required...
...These are remote-controlled trucks and cars that can crawl over anything—"even over your big feet, Daddy," because they are on "treads, just like tanks...
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...New York has a somber air...
...We sat next to three elderly women who were haggling with the waiter about whether they could have separate checks...
...He picked himself up and got on and fell off...
...They wanted to know what, it's like to be a real actor, who got paid and everything...
...He looked florid, excited, on edge...
...Roy is so smart, so filled with energy, he sometimes seems to be beyond human...
...Tuesday up at 5:00 a.m...
...Of sexual harassment on the job...
...Without writers, without preparation, he's consistently laugh-out-loud funny...
...It wasn't really that bad," he said...
...Then I might have time to go through the newspapers and throw them out," my mother said...
...I never remember his jokes, although they usually have something to do with Ireland...
...When the Russian hordes swept back into Budapest, he was arrested and put in jail and tortured...
...We sat and talked for a long time, had the most Spartan dinner imaginable, and then went to watch the final episode of Johnny Carson on TV...
...I checked into my tiny room at the hotel near Lincoln Center (part of my false economy campaign) and immediately went out for a walk...
...In the fourteenth-floor reception room, I ran into my erstwhile editor on many projects, Michael V. Korda...
...On the sidewalk was a TV where there was a picture of the bandstand inside...
...I can do it," he said...
...Air shuttle...
...We took out the parts, studied the instructions, and went to it...
...Off to Simon & Schuster for a meeting with my editor on my book about the life and times of Michael R. Milken, an accountant from Van Nuys who really made the grade...
...The young guys in their expensive suits with their cigars and their cagey, smug ZBT looks, the young women with their Anti-Sex League running shoes and their pearls, the endless lines of limousines for every purpose, a forty-foot limousine to pick up a pastrami sandwich for the law firm associate working at the printer on the Columbia S&L Preferred "D" prospectus, just a feeling that they had outwitted gravity and were going to suck money out of the society for the rest of time...
...It's that simple...
...As a ratio of quality to cost, it ranked lower than any meal I, have ever had...
...40 The American Spectator August 1992 I followed his cart to the exam room, as he sang a few more bars of "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have...
...Suzette looked thoughtful...
...I can do it myself...
...My father could probably get by with rest, medicine, and a very modest diet...
...The young men no longer look so smug...
...Two Secret Service men wanted their photos taken with me, and then I walked back to the Empire Hotel through the balmy night...
...Booth 1120...
...Is that a bad word...
...Meagher has just had heart surgery...
...No bypasses today, thank you...
...It was only when I got back to the little nest near the Empire Hotel that I saw people who had stars in their eyes...
...he sighed and said, "I wish I could just freeze time like this, forever...
...As I waited, I called all my different agents to see if I had any deals...
...Expert's agree—Dr...
...Amazingly, I did, a Western Union commercial in Canada...
...I only say it when I'm upset...
...Sunday B ack in California, I took Mr...
...That's enough...
...I'm doing it myself," he said, and I felt as if I were a hundred years old and alone...
...I'm not kidding...
...Their fire burns bright enough to overcome the fear that is modern city life...
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...Alas, they were too expensive...
...Only in the swank restaurants do you see little islands of widows and wealthy elderly wives drinking their tea and imagining they were safe back in another decade...
...The comment says a whole helluva lot more about Perot than about Clinton, but it says enough about both...
...One of them, whose real name, and I'm not kidding, is Suzette, was from Abilene, Texas...
...I put him in a grassy field and shoved his bike forward...
...He really knew the manuscript well, and had a lot of good ideas...
...In no time, they had taken his blood (my own particular terror), then brought him to a room, where a veritable army of women came in to tell him about his exam and then about his diet, "lifestyle," and medication...
...He has lost weight...
...inner in Brooklyn with...
...As we watched one last time and waved one last wave, my father looked at my mother and me in the living room, which has long been flooded with newspapers and magazines, some of ten years vintage ("If I could save time in a bottle...
...She had just started voice lessons, at the tender age of 28, and now she was about ready to conquer the world...
...Still, under the Stein Household Sexual Identity Preservation Act of 1992, we have a rule: boys do not whine except in print...
...There was a message waiting for me from Maw that my father was having angina and that they weren't coming up to see Guys and Dolls...
...Don't spit on these kids and their foolish hopes, I thought...
...he asked...
...I especially like what Perot says about him and his sax: There's a lot more money in being a good musician than in being President...
...He looked slim and athletic, as always...
...Of not having their creativity recognized...
...Of losing their jobs...
...Still, Meagher, the world's wittiest human being, was in his usual form...
...It sort of breaks my heart when I see someone that smart smoking, but I guess that's what a free country is all about...
...Next to me, three women cooed and giggled...
...D my sister, Rachel, world's best aphorist, who coined the most notable phrase I have heard: "Your basic human is not such a hot item...
...Tommy played with his G.I...
...It's a lot better to be poor with hope than rich without, and far better to be unknown with a gleam in your eye than known without...
...I flew down to Washington on the U.S...
...Don't use that word," I said...
...We met at "21," which was filled with tough-looking types who looked as if they would sell you anything to make a rupee...
...Were you in Ferris Bueller's Day Off...
...That was New York in the 1980s, while underground, the subways went to hell, the middle class vanished to Boise, and the entire ballast of a great city went into shock or disappeared...
...Franken had a hilarious line of jokes about self-help programs...
...He's not even five yet, mind you...
...A timely reminder...of the changes in liturgical texts that have masked the introduction of heretical concepts into our worshiP...
...B ack to the Empire Hotel, with a detour over to Park Avenue to look at briefcases...
...The piper is being paid in the 1990s,although not as badly as in Los Angeles...
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...Perfect for a drive to Ventura...
...Gone was that great large room which suggested lawyers and account executives and brokers stopping for two martinis in a world that still allowed the leisure of inebriation and did not consider it a crime...
...Very readable...a must for bishops, priests and deacons who have the responsibility of ordering worship...
...I hope it works out, although the political situation is getting to be so sad that humor commentary on it would be a little likehumor commentary on a terrible bus plunge in India...
...I stood back and he got on again, pushed himself to the jogging path, and started up again...
...Still, they were happy to see me...
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...On Central Park South, there are still beautiful women, but they look scared, not just of rapists and killers, but of everything...
...It's impressive...
...As I squinted and grunted assembling the missile turrret, Tommy helped by pressing his cheek against mine and saying, "Wow, is this g--damned complicated, or what...
...He was off like a little blond rocket, going around and around the circuit as I watched...
...My chicken hash was likewise inedible...
...It's not hard to do, I love doing it...
...My father was obviously concerned about his angina...
...In fact, he's in the small club of people I never envied...
...Friday Arushed day...
...Gone was that luxurious feeling that some safe part of New York would last, and that it would be at the St...
...Now there's a tiny little bar, with that ridiculously outsized mural of old King Cole calling for his pipe and his bowl and his fiddlers three, looking like a whale in a child's aquarium...
...It was inedibly spicy...
...This time, however, I noticed that they were all staring back at me...
...There are street vendors, homeless people saying fairly funny things about how nice it must be for me to have a cashmere sweater, and the warm glow of taverns...
...Maybe I just hit it on a bad day...
...Oh, yes...
...I'm really not...
...The homeless are everywhere, and I mean everywhere...
...Many times that story has gotten me through an IRS audit, as I told Korda...
...she asked...
...My mother was even more concerned...
...All it takes is a computer, a modem and a local phone call...
...We'll rush your copy with invoice...
...On the way back, I stopped at a bar where Bill Clinton, I had heard, was going to appear to do an Elvis impersonation...
...Daddy," Tommy said, "is this g--damned impressive or what...
...Isn't it worth coming to Brooklyn for...
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...No, far from it...
...Eat, eat, eat, isn't it great...
...Thirty bucks...
...I don't envy him...
...Hey, are you an actor...
...More or less $100, or, as Tommy said, "a hundred bucks...
...She whirled around her apartment's commodious kitchen like Diaghilev, making a pasta here, a salad there, balsamic dressing in another bowl, broiling salmon in one oven, warming bread somewhere else, all the while talking the New York chef's mantra, in fragments: "The best balsamic vinaigrette...
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...On the streets, the shoppers look worried...
...Yes, it's a bad word...
...to take my father to the Washington Hospital Center's Heart Institute...
...Instead, I bought him a G.I...
...The bartender came over to me...
...Box 268 Largo, FL 34649-0268 Knowing Cod through the Liturgy by Peter Toon The American Spectator August 1992 41...
...We talked about my possibly commenting on the Democratic Convention for the Comedy Central Channel...
...Tommy snickered, but we carried on assembling, and soon the beast was done...
...It's simple and low-cost...
...Kids hurrying to and fro with towels on their heads and An Actor Prepares under their arms...
...Wednesday Aluncheon with my editor from wonderful Barron's, Jim Meagher...
...We talked about the problems with the Balanced Budget Amendment, which scares me a lot...
...It recaptures the sense of God's majesty and glory absent in progressive liturgies...
...He looked straight ahead for the first few circles, and then, on the fourth time by, he turned and smiled at me...
...I have found it to be a sort of rule in the world of comedy that the people behind the camera are almost always funnier than the people in front of the camera...
...Yes and yes and yes...
...I got that clue when I went back to the West Side and stopped in the new St...
...Oh, brother, big, big brother," I thought...
...I went to pick him up...
...Every few minutes, my father began to sing "See what the boys in the back room will have, and tell them I'm having the same...
...In the mid 1980s, I was repelled by a certain noisome, boastful opulence...
...At my parents' apartment at the Watergate, there was a worried feeling in the air...
...The Rt Revd and Rt Hon...
...At my meeting, I talked to my copy editor, a chain-smoking genius...
...It might break his heart to see me drive the way I do...
...The bar was packed, and there were Secret Service and enthusiastic looking Clinton volunteers outside...
...Young actors, young danseuses...
...Joe Battle Wagon for a few hours and then we went off to the park to have him practice riding his two-wheeler...
...Am I in some kind of PLO bar...
...The only problem," she said, "is that, like, how do you get an agent...
...He looks fabulous, like a high school kid...
...Toon's book is easy to read, clear, and fair...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
