Ben Stein's Diary /It's in the Cards
Stein, Benjamin J.
It's in the Cards by Benjamin J. Stein Tuesday I have a new plan. I am sitting outside a store in Hollywood called Meltdown, between two different Thai restaurants. Meltdown sells collectible and...
...The Al Gore character is my favorite...
...Monday 1 'm in Washington again, visiting my parents...
...Partner at [and here he mentioned one of the largest accounting firms in the world...
...Then there are some cards that can throw your opponent's card back into his hand...
...So I slap myself to feel angry...
...Don't be in town when it happens," is the general theme...
...He has about one chance in a hundred to survive," Joel said...
...A few minutes later, I was at the helm of the Sea Trixie, heading out over choppy water, getting tossed here and there, but making my way far down the lake to Whiskey Rock...
...You can just tear it up and throw it away...
...Really...
...Saturday A 6G 11 right, Daddy, now let's go get me some lunch," Tommy said...
...As I rode out to the swimming beach on my hydrobike, I passed three young girls on a log...
...I asked him what he'd been doing in D.C...
...Something about "tapping...
...Because I'm not going to do it any more...
...Not at all," I said...
...We didn't even feel it...
...He's got a very angry woman station manager on the line, and I am there sort of stoking up trouble...
...Tommy to do his insanely long choosing process with the patient proprietor of the store, Gaston...
...It was not supposed to be funny," she said...
...I hope you won't mind if I tell you that you look incredibly thin," I said...
...We stayed pals while he went to graduate school in psychology as he also worked as an accountant after college...
...A ton," he said eagerly...
...she asked...
...It's mid-August and it is painfully hot...
...I'm never going to forget those summer nights when we listened to Bob Dylan and thought we would live forever...
...I laughed at what I thought was her effort to wake herself up after a long day on the set...
...We'd make up names all the time, call with a different name, make her think that everyone in California was calling her...
...How do you like it...
...We can use any pills he finds though," she said, "so we'll be all right...
...Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Malibu and Hollywood...
...Meltdown sells collectible and super violent comics...
...No, my boy...
...At least we're not pretending anything...
...A man has to plan for his retirement and save for it, and he also has to live in the moment...
...Something about "mana...
...I am on TV a lot," I said modestly...
...Just a working stiff...
...Yes, I think it's a good card...
...That was never what it was about...
...It happens to be a very good card...
...Bob," I said, as I looked lingeringly at the boat and its gorgeous turquoise trim, like a 1957 Plymouth Fury or maybe a 1955 Chevy Bel-Air, "am I an idiot to buy this boat...
...Tell me about your life," he said...
...It looks, well, icky...
...No, on second thoughts, I'll call it the Trixie, or maybe the Sea Trixie...
...We were in the magazine section...
...Do you see The American Spectator here...
...I think I can do better...
...And you know what I say...
...I really feel worried that Billy Farhood has died...
...I told him about Hollywood, about how much of a thrill it is to be in front of a camera, about my adventures on the lake in Idaho...
...Like the Hillary card can commit income-tax fraud and securities fraud, and she can have the media say she's the victim, not the criminal...
...I let Peter's 11-year-old son, Alex, drive...
...Is this because you had to pay out so much money for the S & L frauds you guys said were all right...
...Wouldn't I be smarter to buy stock for my retirement...
...Really, really sorry...
...Make sure we don't have to get sued every few days...
...No, he brought something with him that was so great that we didn't bother to eat...
...The American Spectator October 1995 59 That's why Chris Dodd of Connecticut was so involved...
...Sunday I 'm waiting for Tommy's gang of pals, plus Peter, to come over to ride with me on the Sea Trixie...
...Right on, sister...
...Billy was thrown seventy feet into the air and landed on his head...
...To zoom around Lake Pend'Oreille and up the Pend'Oreille River...
...They can fold backwards and forwards so they can do every kind of perverse act that the Clinton card and the Hillary card might want them to do...
...I'm getting myself into the part...
...Very funny gag...
...It's spectacularly hot...
...Iam a recurring character twice in thirteen episodes, playing a mean, nasty station manager...
...The ground doesn't seem to touch my feet...
...Something is wrong...
...Spray slammed into my face...
...You must love Chris Dodd," I said...
...On "The Wonder Years...
...No, it's not a good card...
...and could not get back to sleep until 2 a.m...
...But, never mind...
...So our liability as partners turned out to be about twenty-five thousand, and we had five years to pay it off...
...What school is he in...
...Right on for a woman who will challenge Warren Buffett...
...Thursday T hirty-four years ago, I became friends with a boy named Billy Farhood...
...Uh, huh...
...Right," he said...
...I wonder if the people who run the world have any idea of how angry we are that our streets and communities have been taken away from us by hoodlums...
...Do you think this is a good card...
...As we get ready to film, the woman who is playing the station manager is pacing back and forth...
...But after that, we'll all get together and laugh a lot...
...Top of the world...
...We talked for a while, and I told her I recommended that she ski Idaho next winter...
...So you see, a wild man like me can't be trusted anywhere...
...My fellow guest was a deeply amusing leftist named Christopher Hitchens...
...Well, I haven't been eating much lately," she said...
...The part that makes my spine tingle is that this is exactly the way I felt in 1983 when my beloved friend Martha Dauman died—like I was just going to fly apart and turn into atoms...
...No," she said with a becomingly shy giggle...
...I thought about that often, and then I called Billy and told him I hoped to be in New York after Labor Day...
...Get it...
...Big deal...
...Tapes of 'Ben and Stimpy...
...That was the summer I discovered Bob Dylan, my ultimate hero...
...I ran down and looked at it...
...You guys mounted a helluva campaign...
...I zoomed through the wake of other boats...
...Sure...
...Trust me, an idiot, to ask a boat store owner if I should buy a boat or buy stock...
...another girl asked...
...Like, we had to pay four hundred million to the RTC for what we did with the S & L's...
...Now Billy was in the hospital, in intensive care, deeply wounded, with severe edema in his skull...
...But a big, fancy boat of my own...
...Make her think everyone in California's really worked up about it...
...A woman swerved from the highway seventeen feet onto the shoulder and hit Billy's bicycle at high speed...
...I found one I like at one of the two boat shops in Sandpoint, The Alpine Shop...
...Then, each player will have certain abilities and powers...
...I have been bargaining over it for a few months now...
...Tommy is interested in "Magic...
...All right...
...I did the interview, and then I went back to my hotel room to sleep...
...I know you," she said...
...It's a tough world...
...I used to be the hostess at —," and here she named a restaurant in Maryland that used to be one of my favorites...
...In fact, it's so hot that I feel like I'm floating...
...In the scene we're shooting this late, we're talking to a Rupert Murdoch–like owner who is worrying that a sexual harassment lawsuit will hurt the station...
...Not just the Sea Puppy...
...A few hours later, as I stood on the deck of my room at the Edgewater, I saw the mighty 20-foot Thompson heave into view...
...No, he's in medical school at —," and here she mentioned one of the best medical schools in America...
...Billy Farhood and all the rest of us listened to WAVA, all folk music, drank and smoked and played golf, pool, and talked about the future...
...Deep sleep until 12:30 and then I called for my messages...
...You used to come in all the time...
...That's not my problem...
...I see...
...The fear is that there'll be riots if he's found guilty, riots if he's in a mistrial, and riots of celebration if he's acquitted...
...Wlady and I will invent a card game called Clinton...
...Something about how many blows you can absorb and how many you can dish out...
...I let Tommy drive...
...Is that why you lobbied so hard...
...Anyway, here's my idea that's coming to me while I am waiting in my car for...
...Anyway, as I was strolling down the street in Foggy Bottom, I saw a woman in a short skirt with a skinny frame...
...We were here to give an award to Senator Chris Dodd and to thank him for his help on tort reform...
...That's what I love about you, Ben," he said with a big smile...
...It's set in a TV newsroom...
...Insane...
...Well, just next time have some respect for the way other actors prepare...
...What about the stockholders...
...A Fool and His Money...
...You get to be recognized...
...No, I'm looking for Investor's Business Daily...
...As if to prove my point, when I got back to the mighty Shoreham Towers, there was a note in all mailboxes saying that the prior night there had been yet another robbery, this time at gunpoint, of a woman walking her dog...
...she said in a deeply aggrieved tone...
...I'm out on a hydrobike to get some exercise...
...The man in the seat next to me was a portly, florid-faced, good-natured fellow...
...How come you know this incredibly complicated game that even your mother and father don't know and can't tell us when your dog makes a mess in the kitchen...
...Tommy got seasick and went below to the tiny cabin to hide...
...Plus, we'd given her so much money it probably didn't matter how many calls we made...
...I think that's what I'll call my boat...
...But for me, a big boat is a 20-foot Thompson...
...All right...
...the first girl asked...
...No, really...
...But don't worry," she went on...
...Maybe a few hundred people were making all those calls...
...Yes, he brought them on the boat...
...I'm not getting into this tonneau thing...
...I've arranged to put it on my MasterCard...
...Suddenly, she stops, and slaps herself twice on each cheek, quite hard...
...But that was just to make sure...
...Oh...
...Look at that...
...I drove again...
...I am afraid not...
...No way," he said...
...CI The American Spectator October 1995 61...
...she asked...
...Daddy, do you think this is a good card...
...We played golf almost every evening after my unbelievably dreary job at the Civil Service Commission, adding up columns of figures about injuries and sicknesses of civil servants with an ancient Marchant calculator for $67 per week, with half an hour for lunch...
...Then they pretend they're all doing it for the public good...
...You slapping yourself," I said...
...We went to the Hot Shoppes and ate Mighty Mo triple deckers...
...I'll be on Long Island most of August," he said...
...Saturday T he moment of truth...
...And I am supposed to know what those little symbols mean...
...We've all got to look out for number one...
...Daddy, do you think this is a good card...
...Great," I said...
...I've seen you somewhere...
...nyway, I would have made a A great salesman, because later that night, as I was buying apples at the Georgetown Safeway, a store that's roughly 50 percent more expensive than the Sandpoint Safeway, I met a beautiful woman who was looking at magazines...
...We smoked cigarettes like we were invulnerable...
...Obsessed...
...How I wish my parents lived in Idaho...
...Hey, are you someone famous...
...All through dinner, I felt crazed...
...Hi, Ben," she said as I approached her, "Don't you remember me...
...Pharmacology...
...Five thousand a year for a partner at our firm...
...I don't work there anymore, though, anyway...
...He was on the shoulder...
...Billy was amazed by little me...
...Thanks for helping you guys never get sued anymore, no matter how badly you screw up a company's books, right...
...Just forget about it, Tom," I said...
...You'll be swell...
...The card is something like "The She-Vampire of the Bog of Metamucil...
...Friday 1 t's nearly 11 p.m...
...He gets to write a book while he's a civil servant, make a million dollars from it, and haveno qualms at all about helping to accuse the Newt character of ethical gaffes for writing a book and not taking an advance...
...No, my boyfriend and I had a friend visiting us...
...How can you ski with all those corn fields...
...Billy had a blue Pontiac Bonneville convertible, and we sped around the Beltway at a hundred miles per hour, no seatbelts, no airbags, just luck...
...Then I couldn't find my car keys...
...Heroin...
...He stares at them...
...Oh, what the hell...
...Is that cross country...
...Nevertheless, we did the scene, and it was fine, and then I got to do another scene, and I went home through the dark streets...
...It has no mana and it can only take three and give out two...
...Then we had excess coverage...
...Today, Joel Block called to tell me that Billy had been riding his bicycle on a country road in Patchogue, Long Island, on one leg of a twenty mile health bike ride...
...I kept hitting myself on the head with its support bar...
...This is the problem...
...Right," she said skeptically...
...Heroin...
...Very good," I said...
...Lots of shows...
...This is a good show that will be on the new United Paramount Network starting in September...
...Clinton—A Game of Magic and Illusion...
...Thursday u p at 5:30 a.m...
...He shows me some tiny symbols and they mean less than nothing to me...
...The Janet card will be able to commit stunning mistakes in trying to "save" children from a maniac cultist and let the kids die of fire—and she gets the press to say she, Janet, is the victim...
...Why not just let Warren Buffett do it for you...
...If I can't feel it, I can't act it...
...It was beautiful," he said...
...He said he had never met anyone who was a good student and also liked to smoke and drink and laugh, and this made him think he should be a better student...
...I just offered you lunch at home and you didn't eat it, and I told you no lunch at all if you didn't eat at meal times...
...His father was a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board whose name had originally been Farhad, as in a Lebanese name, but he'd changed it to Farhood to sound more English...
...It has to come from a very real place inside me...
...On TV," I said modestly...
...Very, very clever...
...No, this is about lowering our insurance premiums...
...I went home to the River Inn and was asleep by 9 p.m...
...Right," he said cheerily...
...Like our Dianne Feinstein...
...He had a pretty girlfriend named Shirley Koenig, who was best friends with a lonely, touchingly eager-to-please young woman named Goldie Hawn...
...He was reading a "men's" magazine...
...You just totally snowed under the stockholders and the plaintiffs' lawyers...
...I want Bob, the owner of the Alpine Shop, to be really happy with me...
...Were you worried that would put you out of business...
...That's Iowa, not Idaho," I said...
...But he earned it...
...Well, I'm a little bit famous," I said...
...Simpson trial ends...
...I felt as if the molecules in my brain were being pulled apart and the glue between the molecules was screaming...
...Ha, ha," I said...
...She can also obstruct justice a half-dozen times and still have Time magazine say that no one has found anything wrong in Whitewater...
...So I have a month to think about how to pay for it...
...We buy them...
...That you'll do anything, just like a little kid even though you look so serious...
...And to go through his Magic cards...
...What you don't know can't hurt you...
...Then I saw a girl I knew on Wisconsin Avenue and couldn't remember her name...
...Was he so awful that you couldn't eat...
...You get to feel as if everyone on earth is in your family...
...How come you can memorize the rules of this incredibly complicated game and can't consistently do simple addition and can't remember to close the refrigerator...
...This afternoon, I wandered out to Dulles Airport, after a long visit with my parents, Wlady, Danny Wattenberg, and Aram Bakshian, turned in my rental car, took the bus to the mid-field terminal, vamped in the Admirals' Club for a half-hour, and then boarded flight 75 to LAX...
...I'm an accountant," he said...
...I guess I'm just not as good an actor as you, because I can't just put it on...
...Well, that's how Congress works," he said...
...Daddy," he said, holding up his right hand like a traffic cop stopping cars, "just listen for a minute...
...Then I woke up at 10 p.m...
...How about 7-11, and I'll have Slurpees for lunch...
...Well, I have to go now...
...No matter what you do, right...
...It has various symbols on it...
...Ben," he said, "you have to have some enjoyment before you retire...
...Have you been sick...
...60 The American Spectator October 1995 People are whispering about what will happen when the O.J...
...That's a joke...
...Then are you really super rich...
...Billy and I became close pals, along with a whole gang of boys named Joel Block (ace golfer), Calvin Kline (not the designer), who had the coolest car known to man, a pristine white 1962 Corvette, and Marvin Goldberg, ace card player, mathematician, and golfer...
...He has a huge box filled with them...
...He and I stayed pals while I was at Columbia and he was at the University of Virginia...
...I shook my head and pitied people who believed what they read in schoolbooks...
...Still, he gave a good answer...
...Right on, that she has not been burdened by traditional white male Eurocentric thinkinglike knowing the difference between a Rocky Mountain state and a Midwest state...
...He holds them up and puts them in front of me and asks, "Daddy, do you think this is a good card...
...No, not interested...
...Good, good," I said...
...Aren't you on TV or something...
...He has many photo albums filled with Magic cards...
...Why you had this whole giant campaign...
...I have decided that I need a boat of my own...
...Were you always this thin...
...Well, then what's the point of being famous if you're not rich...
...And you laughed and interfered with that...
...We all make out by selling what we have to sell...
...I'll call when I know more about the funeral arrangements...
...I bought two suits at super sale prices and then lost my dark glasses...
...This card has five mana and can take five and give out five...
...Your sense of adolescent daring...
...I sat at the normally homey Sequoia and felt as if I were surrounded by lizards...
...I'm telling you, the kid could teach Johnnie Cochran how it all works right now...
...It's getting worse here in L.A., too...
...Peopletalk to you as if they were your friend...
...I am so sorry," I said...
...The food tasted awful...
...In this episode, my predecessor, a tough woman who has been sexually hounding a TV commentator, gets fired and I replace her...
...Not really," she said...
...Folk music was all the rage...
...It will have cards for Bill and Hillary and Vince and Webb and Bernie and Janet and Gennifer and several assorted movie stars...
...What's more important: me eating when I'm hungry or you ordering me around...
...He's been fighting for you guys for a long time...
...This was during the long, languid summer between my last year of Montgomery Blair High School and my first year at dreary but effective Columbia...
...You must have given him a ton of money...
...The senators never knew what hit them...
...Insurance paid for three hundred and fifty million...
...Just last December, he and his lovely wife Christine, whose wedding I went to twenty or more years ago, came to my fiftieth birthday party at my sister's apartment in Brooklyn Heights...
...What's the difference...
...He wants to 58 The American Spectator October 1995 plan for his child's welfare, but he also wants to have fun with his child now...
...What are you laughing at...
...And in fact, my boyfriend started school today, and we've vowed we won't use any more heroin while he's in school...
...Billy was a dark, good-looking boy, a sort of a model handsome young man...
...and I'm still on the set of "Live Shot...
...But somehow, the occasion will call for riots...
...Tom, the boat shop's ace mechanic, started to explain to me how to put up the boat's tonneau cover, snapping its buttons, putting up its shafts...
...The only one we couldn't touch was Barbara Boxer...
...I get it," I said...
...one of the girls asked...
...I want him to be happy enough so that he will go anywhere on the lake, at any time, to rescue me...
...No, I don't think that's a good card...
...I decided not to try to get the best possible deal...
...Oh," I said...
...It's a great feeling working on that safe, protected set, that little well-fed city within the city...
...All right...
...He beamed and smiled and patted me on my back...
...Great," I said...
...Now, let me tell you how I got about sixty thousand more from the insurance company for earthquake damage than I actually had to spend . . ." my neighbor said, but I told him I was suddenly very tired and had to sleep...
...Tommy let out a long sigh...
...To look up stocks to buy for my investment portfolio...
...The day before the vote, we made forty thousand calls to her office...
...Sure...
...The best characters are the media cards...
...Crazed...
...Sunday A little tidbit about how Congress works, what tort "reform" is, what money is, and what the people who it buys are...
...Good-bye, Billy...
...A fool and his money are some party," as my pal Peter Feirabend says...
...It's a 1993 that was never sold...
...But worrying that some killer will shoot me as I sit in my car on La Cienega Boulevard—that's not quite as great...
...The interviewer was Susan Swain, a capable woman...
...Tom shrugged...
...Billy died yesterday afternoon," he said...
...That's worth a lot, isn't it...
...That's what they have to sell...
...At that, he looks at me and holds up another card...
...You think you can do better than 28 percent per year compounded for almost thirty years...
...Wednesday visit to Britches, a clothing store A in Georgetown...
...We had everyone at the firm, everyone at every big accounting firm in the state, call her office, her committee offices, six different numbers for every person to call, make it look like six different people were calling...
...However, it also sells (choke, gasp) decks of cards, "booster" decks, individual super valuable cards, and other things connected with a vile, horrible game called "Magic...
...It has to be there so I can feel it...
...Why did you have to be so in love with wheels...
...From now on, "It is imperative that dog walkers go out only in pairs...
...to get off to the C-Span studios on Capitol Hill to talk about politics and the conspiracy against the small savers of America by the lobbyists for the big investment banks and accounting firms...
...I'll buy a cover for it with elastic...
...He shows me something like "Ghouls of Balboa Island...
...He carries them everywhere...
...That's their problem," he said...
...The third message was from my pal Joel...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
