Ben Stein's Diary / I'm a Soul Gland
Stein, Benjamin J.
I'm a Soul Gland by Benjamin J. Stein Friday A aarghh! This cannot be happening. But it is. A modem nightmare. A modem efficiency-productivitydon't-give-a-damn nightmare. Tommy and I are at the...
...The plane is about to leave...
...Anyway, a group of us ate a delicious lunch of fresh tomato soup and swordfish and talked about life...
...It's an industrial site far more than an artistic site...
...Because you can't go out shopping anymore without being afraid of being mugged...
...Now, here's a fascinating fact...
...These are for three times the price in the record...
...I drove up Outpost, turned right on Mulholland, and sure enough, there were police everywhere...
...There's a whole world out there that's a lot of joy to be in and it has nothing to do with punching a clock...
...I woke up in Malibu with Ginger the dog looking me in the face...
...T ommy and I went to a shabby McDonald's, had a stale cheeseburger, and then some stale fries, and then went home to mother...
...The guards then kill me and take me to the evil Doctor Orloff, and he dissects me, looking for my "soul gland...
...This is very near where my wife and I used to go shoot assault rifles...
...Sometime in the 1960s, kids stopped learning the Virginia reel and the fox-trot and the jitterbug and just stood on the floor and waved their arms as they grinned...
...You'll do a lot more than that," I said...
...I hustled over there in my Acura...
...That's why...
...I'm out here because I am having my back measured for a body cast that will fit over my back and look as if I have been dissected...
...Friday On the set again...
...By this time, Little Mr...
...I'm helping the policemen," Tommy said...
...In a hand-written letter...
...I don't even want to go anymore," he said...
...Obviously, things have improved since then...
...I hope he knows how much we all love him...
...I left Ginger at Alex's house with Elena and went off to Disney...
...Long gone...
...Told us we were going to prevail in history, and we did...
...50 The American Spectator January 1995 Then, a tide on the freeways back to town...
...There are macho human beings all over the place...
...Yeah...
...Anyway, after a few minutes, the police went door to door in the neighborhood telling us all that the villain had been caught...
...She said, "You just wait right here, Benjamin...
...There are stories of people who used to be stuntmen who were Army Rangers before that...
...Yeah, Daddy," he said...
...Supervisor, could you please just take us to the gate, explain the deal, get us on the plane, and fix the tickets later...
...My boy would be in the next bed, begging me to tell him Ren and Stimpy stories as he ate hot chocolate and strawberries from room service at the Edgewater Inn...
...Saturday I isalmost Election Day...
...We got dressed, went for a walk, had breakfast on the deck looking at the hawks and the quail and the waves and the Fuji blimp...
...Thin and healthy...
...There are dark green shoots and new branches...
...We have to pick him up to carry him away...
...It's the kinetic equivalent of what conversation and debate used to be: ordered, dignified, with some rules...
...In the front of the restaurant, on a little raised platform, four young men and four young women in cowboy outfits did intricate country dances...
...The women are applying the makeup...
...Let's sue 'em...
...Perfect was getting restless...
...It's a blue-collar world on the set, there with the union men and women...
...I felt happy...
...I want to do that show...
...All the time, he's shouting, "Oh, sir...
...And also I'm sure they'll let you back because you're a movie star," my witty wife added, with a smile in her voice...
...Before I went to sleep, Alex called to tell me that Tommy was so excited by what had happened at the SWAT team site (his home) that he had written a tiny essay about it for his school...
...It's not work," I said...
...Now, there is one small part of my little yard, one patch of a few feet on that lot, where I can still smell it...
...Just in the living room, Tommy stood with his dog, Susie, on her leash...
...a slightly different way each time...
...I love Hollywood...
...It's a new day and I feel great...
...Still, the computer won't let us change them...
...Whatever deficits he racked up, they were a bargain as well...
...Here are a few reasons: • Because everyone knows O.J...
...There's a bright light above my back...
...There is no caviar...
...Thursday D er Tag...
...She said, "Oh, Mr...
...No," I said...
...Men talk about hunting and sports and fighting...
...Young people today usually do not know how to dance...
...Because Alaska is hiring new people and paying them low wages, they get people who can't operate the machines of modem commerce...
...Then—modern life again...
...Loved you in The Mask...
...Someone on the street below us has taken a hostage and has a gun and there are police and helicopters and the SWAT team all around here and they're diverting traffic...
...This is all for "Tales From The Crypt," the scary HBO show I am to be on this week...
...A staggeringly beautiful Swedish girl who was the lover of the criminal, drug dealer, kidnapper, hostage taker, tearfully told the camera that her man was a great guy and could not possibly have done any of this...
...B ack to my little word processor, a nap listening to Mozart clarinet concertos on the headphones, and then over to pick up Alex and Tommyfor dinner at Universal...
...When I brought the tickets back to him another agent, a Hispanic woman, helped...
...Here I am far out in the San Fernando Valley...
...The security guard at the Team Disney building tugged at his cap and made certain I knew exactly where I was going...
...Look," I said...
...Just show up...
...Then I get to yell at them quite a bit more, and then I get to have Hank Azaria clobber me on the head with a flashlight, and keep hitting me as I twitch in agony...
...New growth...
...In the middle of a fall day, when there's no traffic, the freeways are a great invention...
...I went through those swinging doors about twenty-five times...
...I like for strangers who are parking my car to just call me "Sir" or "Mister," or even nothing at all...
...Because your heart is in your mouth when your kid is out of sight for ten minutes...
...There was a call from my agent asking me if I wanted to work for a few days on "Tales From the Crypt...
...He makes these mistakes all the time...
...Up on the floor where I was to meet my fellow brains, I told the receptionist who I was and who I was there to see...
...Tommy and I missed the plane, all because the first agent was incompetent, the later agents were incompetent, the people who had programmed the computer were incompetent, and the manager did not give a damn...
...I never can get over the obvious truth that a little turn I did—all improvised, not scripted—in one movie for which I got paid $380 has turned out to mean far more in my life than having gone to law school or college or anything else having to do with occupation...
...The tellers can't figure out how to get me an account balance...
...A few days ago, I made reservations to fly on Alaska to Spokane, thence to Sandpoint in a rented car...
...Gave us back our confidence...
...There was a chorus of "Buellers" all up and down under the garish, gaudy lights...
...You can turn the telescreen on, but you can't turn it off...
...A surgical table...
...I play a mean-spirited mortician who yells at his sullen, surly guards, played by the fabulous singer Travis Tritt, and the fine actor Hank Azaria...
...Behind him in the living room was an immense web of rope tied to chairs, love seats, sofas, French doors, lamps, even looped over a ceiling light...
...Well, figure it out," I said...
...Just as I was leaving, I got a call from Alex...
...That's why people are angry...
...Because family men and women pay to support people who are too irresponsible to keep their families together...
...Because the world has women in it who drown their own kids in a lake...
...I didn't even mind lying on my stomach, really on my face, on a very dusty floor, for about an hour...
...There was a man who had been in the Marines for eight years and thought he would have wound up in jail without the corps...
...Show me any law office in the world where Travis Tritt sings in person...
...The people at the yogurt shop don't know how to make chocolate mixed with peanut butter...
...Three times...
...Because white collar criminals loot S&Ls and get away with it and we pay...
...Tommy perked up mightily at that...
...Since when are people who are working for you supposed to call you by your first name the first time they meet you...
...I drove on a few feet to Alex's house...
...Helicopters withsuper-bright spotlights, police with German shepherds on leashes...
...By that time, I had expected to be staring out at the lake, listening to the lanyards jingling against the masts of the sailboats, feeling the breezes off the Selkirks and the Cabinets, feeling the roar of the passing Burlington Northern...
...He had never met her before either...
...Life is not political...
...The joke of this is that I am in a warehouse surrounded by casts of ghouls and scary monsters...
...But that's not really what's bothering me...
...Below-theline Hollywood, the Hollywood of the working man, is very largely conservative...
...Now, I have never met this woman before in my life...
...He'd been waiting, sitting on his tackle box, for over an hour...
...I'll have to say good-bye to the groaning crafts services table, loaded with chips and fruit and juices and sodas...
...He didn't have to do that, and it was incredibly nice of him...
...Because there's a civil war going on between the criminals and the honest people, and the criminals are winning and the government is not doing a damned thing about it, except taking guns away from people who will never use them in a crime...
...And now Ronald Reagan has announced that he has Alzheimer's...
...I'm going to be a very lonely guy when this is over...
...Very little, because I have the poorest soil on earth, but still, there is growth...
...That custom is right up there with waiters who shake hands with you and call you by your first name...
...Whatever he spent on defense, it was a bargain...
...I said, "Goddammit, get up...
...It'll take a few minutes...
...When we got to the counter, a young man named Mr...
...No audition needed...
...Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Malibu, California...
...Oh, great," I said...
...We went to the Universal City Walk and strolled around...
...Women talk about babies and makeup...
...I'm the principal of the high school in the small Missouri town where Markie Post, John Ritter, and Billy Bob Thornton put out a newspaper in close proximity to a really talented actor named Conchata Farrell...
...I sometimes wonder at people who say that voters are angry and they can't understand why...
...And what's more: • Because the public schools have been demolished...
...It's like this everywhere...
...That's not civilized...
...Dancing is supposed to be a way for cultured people to relate to one another in an orderly fashion...
...Suddenly, as I am having these self-indulgent, self-obsessed thoughts—eureka...
...I used to smell that smell in Santa Cruz...
...But I'm sure they'll let you by because you live in the neighborhood...
...This is like asking a heroin addict if he would like a key to the pharmacy at Cedars-Sinai hospital...
...The show must go on...
...There's a long goose-necked lens being inserted in my mouth to simulate a scalpel being put into my head...
...did it, and everyone knows he'll get off...
...0 The American Spectator January 1995...
...Fate...
...I can't leave here...
...I am doing a little errand there for some big brass...
...What do you mean...
...It was kool...
...It was really fun...
...I was seething by the time we left, with the agents apologizing and promising that at least we would not have to pay for the tickets...
...Joan Didion once wrote a fabulous essay about being on location with John Wayne, and that really captures it...
...That's not dancing...
...There are women talking about babies...
...It's pure pleasure...
...But he's kind to me, and that's what counts...
...Where do you live...
...Then again, maybe not...
...Because it seems as if it doesn't pay to obey the laws any more...
...Harryand I probably differ on a lot of issues...
...Airline reservations clerks are the worst of all...
...No haggling about price...
...This is Fun Day...
...Forty-five minutes later, she emerged to tell me they still could not override the computer and issue the right tickets...
...I'll do it by hand...
...Tuesday F orget all that...
...Maybe the views of these people can be brought to bear on what gets made...
...I was still seething...
...I called back with extreme suddenness and told my agent I was ready for "Tales From the Crypt...
...Bad me...
...The parking attendant raced across the lot to make sure I was happy with my space...
...She was breathtaking...
...He also had a little hood over his head...
...A lucky thing, too, because otherwise we would probably be criminals now for having them...
...It's personal...
...I couldn't blame him...
...He seemed to have a fair amount of edge for a man who had just been through what he had been through...
...Oops," the SWATman said...
...You get three different fares for the same trip on the same carrier if you call three different times...
...Wong is brand new...
...Someone is playing Jackson Browne on a tape recorder...
...But I can't change them once they're issued...
...She called the man I was to meet and called him by his first name, John...
...It was great...
...That's not communication...
...As I hit traffic near Fairfax, I called my machine...
...Let's go fishing here at Lake Arrowhead...
...I'm not quite sure what's to be done with that fact, but something, I guess...
...Where is the service in the service economy...
...There was a police line and a policeman in normal blue uniform, and then a SWAT team member carrying an H&K machine pistol...
...I spied Michael Eisner across the room and went over to talk to him...
...I hate to litigate, but I think I'd like to sue you just so you'd get a taste of what it's like to jam someone's gears and ruin his outing with his son...
...And Susie is helping the police dogs...
...He smiled at me and gave me a thumbs-up sign with his free hand while he held the weapon in the other...
...I'm too busy...
...As I opened the door, two policemen with German shepherds strolled by...
...53...
...Even the men who apply makeup want to talk about fishing and hunting...
...Wow...
...Men's men sitting around a fire, in Sonora or in Van Nuys or Northridge...
...Out of my mind...
...After a simply horrible meal, we walked down the garish street and let Tommy play with the video games at Sam Goody's...
...We ate at a new countrymusic-themed restaurant with TV monitors in the floor, like some ghastly, Orwellian nightmare...
...He's the one who will live in history, when the pessimists are long forgotten...
...I am a million miles from Wall Street and from law offices, and I am a very happy boy...
...There was furious barking from inside the house...
...I'll have to say good-bye to Rock and John and Ashlee and Travis and Hank and Larry and Austin (who plays the mad Doctor Orloff...
...Now I was on top of the world...
...I am to play the bad guy in a story about whether condoms should be passed out in high school...
...I'll have to say hello to the dreary world of the freeway and waking up with only the gray smoggy skies to stare at...
...You may have a little trouble getting over here," she said in her usual laconic fashion...
...I'm sure the tickets are just about ready...
...The body cast is so good it really looks as if he has cut open near my spine and is looking for a brightly shining thing that will be my soul gland...
...He had stood in line to say good-bye to him for ten hours in Yorba Linda...
...But they weren't ready, and they did not get ready...
...I said the 'W' word...
...There's Travis Tritt singing one of his great songs: You say you were wrong to ever leave me alone, Now you're sorry, you're lonesome and scared, And you say you'd be happy if you could just come back home, Well, here's a quarter, call someone who cares, Call someone who'll listen and might give a damn, Maybe one of your sordid affairs, Here's a quarter, call someone who cares...
...Harry Thomason, the producer here, called me over to introduce me to her...
...I told him and he said, "Hey, I love your work...
...Teach your children well that there is life far away from offices, factories, schools and medical facilities...
...Wednesday L ife...
...We used to comeout here and fire at targets...
...Tommy and I are at the Alaska Airlines counter at LAX, gnashing our teeth...
...There are burly guys lifting sets and lights everywhere...
...Get up, you idiots...
...I live here," I said...
...It's taping night at "Hearts Afire," where I am, once more, playing a big nerd, mean-spirited as well, named Mr...
...Tommy and Christopher ran out by them and did their little jerky imitations of dancing...
...The director, Larry Wilson, who also wrote the script,and I were just having a helluva time each and every second...
...Wong laboriously made out our tickets, but made them for three times the price I had been quoted on my reservation...
...As we were taping, a big star named Delta Burke came over from her show on the next stage...
...There are men talking about hunting...
...W e undid the trap, took Susie out of her leash, and headed up to Universal City Walk to have dinner with our friends Linda and Michael and their seven-year-old son, Christopher, also adopted, also a gorThe American Spectator January 1995 51 geous child...
...But it did no good...
...It's a bit scary...
...It's intoxicating...
...I'm not positive I agree with where this show is pointing on the issue, but I know this: I love being here with these fine people...
...The clerks at clothing stores don't know how to charge something on my credit card...
...There was a man who was a former Marine who had been a huge fan of Richard Nixon...
...Sailing...
...All right," she said...
...Told us for the first time that we would win the Cold War—and we did...
...He got us to stand up to the lie that history was on the side of tyranny...
...Then some cruel soul stole them from us about ten years ago...
...The Hollywood of broad shoulders and repairing your own car and wondering if you'll have enough money to pay for the fire insurance...
...Friday N ow I'm lying on a stainless steel table...
...I want to say what I've said over and over again...
...asked the man with the machine gun...
...Considering that he just had bypass surgery and has had a major struggle within the company, lost his best friend, had problems with Euro Disney, and had to give up on his plans to have a theme park in Haymarket, Virginia, he looked great...
...I love these guys...
...I like that...
...He was laughing about how he was eating something that looked like an omelet but was really made of vegetables...
...It tastes of the Pacific and of the sun and of the pine needles...
...That's all gone...
...I get to walk through some swinging doors, find my guards drunk and asleep, and shout at them, "Goddammit...
...This is a trap I made in case the kidnapper tries to get in and gets by me and Susie and tries to get at Mommy and Nana," he said with his big bucktoothed smile, his blue eyes wide and excited...
...Because every night's news is about murders and you know the people who did it will get away with it nine times out of ten for one cop-out reason or another...
...Dozens of kids recognized me and wanted their pictures taken with me...
...We have an hour before the plane leaves, and I want the right tickets...
...A few minutes after that, there was a story about it on the local TV news...
...Otherwise he won't leave...
...This is Republican Hollywood...
...There are no prima donnas...
...Anyway, that was long ago, when Jimmy Carter was president and we were in a lot of fear about our personal safety...
...Her supervisor came out and stood behind her as she ever so slowly tried to write out new tickets by hand, like a scribe copying the Bible...
...I'm almost fifty years old...
...What a guy...
...Well, that's a perfect, straightforward, honest Reagan touch...
...There's a smell that comes up Encinal Canyon, through the dense gully of brush and scrubby pine and occasional madrone oak...
...But no...
...That's why we won't let him own a video game...
...Starnes...
...Oh, sir...
...All up and down the City Walk, young people came up to me and grabbed my hand and said, "Bueller, Bueller" and had their pictures taken with me...
...Then we fertilized the plants with something miraculous called Miracle-Gm, and then walked around and around the house figuring how much the jacaranda had grown...
...May I go in...
...Not just Tommy's age, but up to their thirties...
...No," he said, yawning...
...No audition...
...The life of a set is completely different from what you think of Hollywood life...
...It read, "Susie and I helped the SWAT team save a woman who was kidnapped by a drug dealer...
...You can move at seventy across a vast city and arrive at your destination feeling as if you had just had a pleasing wind sprint...
...What's bothering me is that this is the last day of my shooting 52 The American Spectator January 1995 on "Tales From the Crypt...
...Then I get to be dragged off to a lab and have various probes put in my body...
...She, disappeared behind the wall behind the counter...
...There was no escaping the sound and the pictures of mass culture...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
