Ben Stein's Diary //f This Is Tuesday
Stein, Benjamin J.
If This Is Tuesday by Benjamin J. Stein Monday 'm at the old Howard Hughes aircraft I plant in the middle of a vast wasteland between LAX and Marina Del Rey. Tucked into a ravine, it has old...
...That she and Bill each had a secret name for their "private" parts...
...Neely," I said...
...I dragged myself out of bed at two in the afternoon and got dressed very slowly, and then headed to breakfast and thence to the Museum of the Army...
...The air reeked of dope...
...They looked at me as if I were talking about an event on Mars...
...Off we went, through the Forest—actually a small woods—of the Soignes, and then past a few reminiscent spots like a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut, and many, many car dealerships, to the most famous battlefield on earth...
...As near as I could tell, the suite was 25,000 BF per night, or about $800...
...Super food...
...How can that be...
...You won't believe this," I told her, "but a few times, I've dreamt that I was back in Silver Spring, and everyone from Blair was gone...
...Finlandia, I think...
...In fact, as I write about this later, I'm sobbing, and I can't really figure out why...
...CI The American Spectator July 1995 55...
...It's very creepy...
...His was "Willard" and hers was "The Precious," although "the common carrier" might have been a better name...
...It was a mess, Small, dark, ugly...
...Hardly any graduate of Yale Law School except Bill knows them as well as I, a long-time Hollywood observer, know them...
...I am nervous: Will my hotel room be ready in Brussels...
...It's only a tiny role, but I'm happy to have it...
...Back to my hotel, where we sat in the bar and she drank and told me her father was the spawn of the devil and that therefore she would never have children, because they would also be the spawn of the devil (but then wouldn't that mean that, urn, you, Marge Simpson, you also might be, umm...
...I was rocked by noise from both sides...
...she said, frowning...
...Should I give up on Amsterdam...
...She told me about her life and we arranged to meet for dinner in Brussels, and then I was there...
...No sign of a party...
...Twenty minutes," my pal Sid Dauman says...
...It's a big part of the Passover service—although in fact the questions have never seemed that complicated...
...On the street in front of my lavish room, there was also a jazz concert...
...I awoke and packed and went out to a little dive for breakfast...
...I can only remember you and Dana Beers...
...Afterwards I got into my car and headed home, where I found Tommy practicing reading the Four Questions...
...Why are the Europeans so stupid...
...Combien d'ans avez-vous, mademoiselle...
...The accursed New York–Brussels Jazz Rally...
...I checked out of the American, and told them about the bedbugs...
...I don't like it...
...I liked that one a lot...
...This place, so like any other lower middle-class person's home, was the last redoubt of one of the most evil people in history—along with Mao and Stalin...
...Back to bed and glorious jet-lagged sleep...
...I'm here to play a tiny role as a sleazy (!) lawyer for Superman, who's being sued by someone who claims Superman gave him whiplash when he pulled him out of the way of a falling rock...
...I am always followed by KGB...
...Ce n'est pas ce que nous avons agree...
...Then there is a hall, with hideous murals of elongated, poorly drawn Germans happily drinking beer at a lakeside tavern, with real big suds on the beer...
...I finally simply strolled away, and the water was still falling on the lobby...
...I asked for a porter and got one...
...I cry when people are really good people, and I guess that explains it...
...Yummy French fries...
...They all laughed as well...
...There were police everywhere...
...It's secluded, and there could be any kind of evil thing happening here...
...Most scary of all, there is a V-1 rocket, a real one, full size...
...I bravely talked to a beautiful young woman who was pas friendly...
...I started to walk to my hotel, naturally with no idea where it was...
...The first disappointment is that absolutely none, not one, of the signs is The American Spectator July 1995 51 in English...
...I finished dinner and then strolled down a magically leafy 25th Street to see my magically healthy parents at the Watergate...
...Then suddenly, it's over...
...Chicken feed in Abu Dhabi...
...Biting...
...I asked the desk clerk, a young woman...
...How can I get to the Hotel American...
...None...
...Why am I here...
...We were so lucky," Neely said when I returned to the table...
...Thursday/Friday 0 ff to Brussels, Belgium, to see an exhibit about the Second World War and then to see the battlefield of Waterloo...
...As if it were setting up a new company...
...I laughed out loud reading the book and showed parts of it to my neighbors in lavish first class (a gift from American to make up in part for the bag that fell on my head on January 8...
...Are many KGB in Los Angeles," he said...
...I sat on a bench for a cold, damp hour, and then I got on the train to Amsterdam...
...It actually seemed pretty dreary compared with the many Civil War battlefields I have seen...
...Do you think maybe I should get some reduction of my bill...
...About twenty-five bucks for about two minutes...
...Mainly I just want him to know I was thinking about him...
...You are perhaps a Jew," he asked...
...Then, a few feet on, there is a full-sized replica of a few rooms of Hitler's bunker...
...Now middle age seems to go on forever, and then it will be over...
...Then, on to try to find a better hotel...
...I checked in with my Moroccan porter...
...Can I take a tram...
...It's in an immense old building crammed with visiting school children and old, patently dusty museums, mostly of the Napoleonic era...
...A young man sat down across from me...
...It's beautiful, but it's ruined because some idiots have erected huge bleachers and a stage for the New York-Brussels Jazz Rally...
...That's the way I try to live," she said...
...I am having supper with my friend from junior high school, Neely Holmead, and her husband, Bob Oplinger...
...The Moroccan at the bureau argued with me, said I could not have my money back...
...The desk clerk paid absolutely no mind to the problem...
...There is a concrete reception room with a sign-in sheet with a lot of names I could not read...
...I asked for my money back...
...Then, off to find a cab...
...Well...
...We will spray the room...
...And then I think I'll go home early...
...Los Angeles man...
...of A. I bought Tommy some souvenir T-shirts...
...Then, through the densest, drunkest, most frequently urinating-in-public crowds I have ever seen, back to my crappy Hotel American...
...That Bill made her pregnant, made her have an abortion, and would not even take her to the doctor...
...On the way back, the cab driver told me about how much he loved Belgium compared with Morocco...
...Only from there do you see the sweep of the place...
...I'll pay you double the meter," I said...
...That's all it is, and then it's over...
...Then to The Conrad, my hotel...
...The dumb American comes to town and is a target for rip-offs...
...I was too tired to argue...
...Incredible...
...She was head of the girls' prestige club, the Blair O'Debs in high school, captain of the cheerleaders, one of the top students in the class, and totally, and I mean totally, without any pretension at all...
...It's been said before, and will be said again...
...I also remember—from 1956—her uncanny ability to almost immediately diagram sentences while I was desperately trying to figure out where the adverbs went...
...It looked a little small and wrinkled...
...I always reply that if she does, I'll become a Presbyterian...
...Small wonder...
...There is also a little German family with giant SS men with shields guarding them, again, as poorly drawn as if it were in a TV movie...
...I looked up and—blammo—mad chaos...
...I cannot remember your ever having anything bad to say about anyone at any time...
...A totally talentless singer sang off key in the empty Brussels night...
...Drums...
...It reminded me of us kids passing around Peyton Place in the cafeteria at Montgomery Hills Junior High School in 1958...
...By the way, her next boyfriend was a fellow whose private member—I guess not so private anymore—was nicknamed "Big Tex...
...The desk clerk had two other rooms...
...Then I went to the front desk to check out, and as I stood there, a torrent of water fell onto my head...
...The banality of evil...
...But he was just stealing so I said, "Si vous ne pouvez pas restorer mon argent, je dois telephoner les gendarmes...
...Is true," he continued...
...Then at the hotel, he told me my bill was "deux mille cinque cent francs," or about $85, much more than bargained for...
...He had a big vodka bottle in his pocket...
...Look, I'm from Los Angeles," I said...
...A beautiful Thunderbird...
...I found one opposite a big park...
...That Bill was a heavy-duty user of marijuana and cocaine...
...That was a great small museum...
...We're using it today for an episode of "Lois and Clark...
...There is the actual piece of paper that Neville Chamberlain waved when he hailed "peace in our time...
...I walked into a hotel...
...Should I just go back to Brussels and fly home...
...Then there was the piece de resistance: a room with the tunic Hitler wore the day before he committed suicide...
...We argued for a long time in French, with yours truly at a great disadvantage...
...Maybe that explains all of those wars...
...Right on the Leidesplein, a big square filled with drug-taking revelers...
...I found a great one, the de L'Europe, near the Amstel River...
...Bed bugs...
...She was a pretty nearly perfect human being...
...He was drunk...
...It should really be called "A Slut and a Creep," or something similar...
...And had good things to say about all of them...
...The road to the Gare Centrale was blocked...
...I wish I still had it...
...With my bag, it was torture...
...Itching...
...Maybe the worst day ever...
...He dumped me and my bags on the sidewalk...
...What about it...
...But silently I thought, ". . . and paid for with the 50 The American Spectator July 1995 blood of so many men at Pearl Harbor and Wake Island and Vella la Vella and the Ardennes and Sicily and Monte Cassino and Remagen and Okinawa and Iwo Jima...
...But I could not find a cab or a bathroom, so I went across a vast courtyard to another museum: the museum of the automobile...
...Ike's Cadillac...
...I'll bet...
...I am so glad I have never been in a battle...
...I want to go to the Hotel American...
...The rate looked decent, so I handed over a hundred dollars and got far less in Belgian francs than I was supposed to...
...F--k KGB anyway," he said, looking at me to see if this bothered me...
...The best view I could get of it is through a GoKart track that's actually on the battlefield...
...We saw the sarcophagus of John Paul Jones, and a Marine guard whispered to me, "Bueller, Bueller...
...You are perhaps KGB following me...
...Neely lives in the house she grew up in, on a beautiful lot off Georgia Avenue...
...This, I hoped, sounded like, "I'm calling the cops...
...I decided to stay at my little room for only $250 per night...
...This is particularly gruesome because of itsscary abstraction: "You will find the trains, and you will find the poison gas, and you will find the lumber to build the camps, and you will find the pits to bury the people we machine-gun in place," and so forth...
...I will see," said the Moroccan...
...The first two taxi drivers I got refused to take me to my hotel...
...What a great way to wake up on a long plane flight...
...But it has a queen-sized bed," he said...
...But the exhibit has its charms...
...And there is a replica of a bombed out Berlin street...
...It looks painfully ordinary...
...Apparently he had a second-class billet, and he wanted to sit in first class, and he had a fight with the conductor, and now he was ready to argue...
...A first-class seat...
...Well," he said, "have fun in Amsterdam, Mr...
...That Bill told her that Hillary was an aggressive lesbian...
...Now, I'm happy, and I think I'll sleep the rest of the day...
...Then, the hotel...
...I'm not kidding...
...This is true...
...It was a good meal, mine fish, hers pasta...
...FDR's Cadillac...
...t will probably be ten years before he has even a clue about Waterloo, but still, then he might remember them...
...On a wall is a touching, tear-evoking letter from a Belgian resistance fighter about to be executed by the Nazis, telling his wife to remarry and have children he would be proud of...
...Friday A big day...
...D inner with the stewardess at Brasserie Georges in Brussels...
...A magical time to be young...
...I asked...
...In fact, it is a movie set...
...I shook my head...
...So lucky," I said aloud...
...Mais, ce n'est pas juste," I said...
...There were terrifying photos of deportees on their way to death camps...
...The flight was fine...
...Good-bye rip-offs and bad singers...
...Some weird kind of monopoly situation...
...There were hundreds of thousands of young people running and walking everywhere, drinking beer, smoking dope, all high, yelling, beating on drums, screaming, selling trinkets...
...There was the bed—startlingly small—where Wellington slept the night after the battle and the table where he wrote his dispatch to the king saying Napoleon was in full retreat...
...But then, to me, most of Europe is dreary compared with the U.S...
...They were having a big jazz concert in the lobby of the hotel...
...As Superman's defense lawyer I recommend we counterclaim and sue the people who make the Superman comics and T-shirts...
...It was in French, but I could read most of it...
...The most painful part was about how the wounded lay on the field for thirty days until they died...
...That she firmly believes Bill and his cronies murder people who get in their way...
...There is a rental of a guide on a tape that you listen to on a Walkman, but it's pretty poor and covers maybe one in ten exhibit cases...
...There was a painting of Marshal Blucher, the Prussian who saved the day at Waterloo, studying the captured hat of Napoleon...
...By daybreak, I was ready to commit murder...
...Why did I leave my happy Malibu, my happy Idaho, to come here...
...I thought and thought...
...Yelling from down the hall...
...I met a very kind young man wearing a baseball cap that said Los Angeles Redskins (I told you Europeans were lame), and he helped me tote my bag to the surprisingly cheap first-class compartment...
...Everywhere...
...Will it be a good, quiet room...
...This is mostly what I came to Europe for: an exhibit about World War II that is said to be the biggest and best exhibit about the war ever mounted...
...I see...
...In typical Brussels fashion, there was an immense line to get my ticket...
...I have so much respect for people 52 The American Spectator July 1995 who have been...
...Bob, Neely's hubby, is a former pro football player...
...Was I happy to get to the de L'Europe...
...Much too tired...
...Are you sure ?" "I am sure...
...he asked...
...I went down to the desk...
...Much cursing...
...Est-ce que vous etes itudiante...
...Maybe," I said...
...The cab driver, another Moroccan, told me he would be happy to take me out to Waterloo for a mere "mille cinq cent francs" or about $50, including waiting and return...
...I asked...
...Naturally, Neely could remember all of them...
...Horror of horrors...
...Neely was and is a beautiful girl with strawberry blond hair, a ready smile, almost maddening intelligence in every subject, a popular personality, and genuine good will...
...It was Queen's Day in Amsterdam...
...There was water pouring out of a recessed light over my head, spilling onto the marble floor, making a sort of lake in front of the reception desk of the most exclusive hotel in Brussels...
...And I would, too," Neely said earnestly, "and you could stay as long as you wanted...
...Gennifer's bookrings completely true...
...There is Stalin's personal handgun...
...But I do know slutty girls...
...I guess they're just demented...
...I dozed off and started to dream of a recent visit to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, with my pal, the authentic genius Aram Bakshian...
...It had the actual shipping route lines through the Atlantic...
...Who else was there...
...Each one was about $500 per night...
...My wife keeps saying she's going to convert to Judaism...
...Now, she's sitting at the table, and we're talking about people from high school...
...I must be crazy...
...There is a World War I trench...
...Suddenly, though, my whole room began to shake from loud, horrible jazz, my least favorite form of music except for rap...
...H e left, and from nowhere, up loomed Amsterdam...
...I told you I was not from Russia...
...He gave me more francs, but still not the right amount...
...Quiet...
...Should I check my bag and walk...
...Why...
...The noblemen, of course, were all carried off by their aides and were well cared for—at least by the standards of the day...
...The ordinary guys just lay there and bled to death and died of thirst while pickpockets stole their boots and wallets...
...Tucked into a ravine, it has old 1940s-style buildings with little frills and raised wings and curvy lines like an art deco movie theater...
...I'm sitting at the River Cafe, a little restaurant in Foggy Bottom in the Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Malibu and Hollywood...
...All of this happened, and I just replayed it in my sleep until a stewardess came over, shook my arm, and said, "Are you the teacher from `The Wonder Years...
...Nothing," he said...
...No," she said...
...There was almost no one at the museum...
...At the best hotel in Brussels, the peaceful rest of the guests was ruined, monstrously crushed, by a group of white boys pretending to be blacks and blasting horrible jazz through the hotel to boot...
...You could be KGB...
...It should be a movie set...
...And what they're all doing...
...Fine," I said...
...I sat peacefully for a while listening to Mozart on my Discman, the traveler's best friend, and then, wham, in walked Trouble...
...There were amazing Nazi comic books telling the Belgian population, in French and Flemish, that they should join the SS and become big and strong and happy...
...What to do...
...No value on peace and quiet...
...It got worse...
...I love you...
...It was booked solid, but I had dinner there...
...Aram had answered, "Ben, it's a big country...
...It's a medieval-type square of old guild halls and replicas along a maincobblestone center...
...There's always a price...
...Jews know this...
...So I'm ready to believe everything she says about Bill...
...Great view of the Amstel River...
...No problem," he said...
...Or a TV set...
...Near it was Hitler's day-planner diary for the week he committed suicide...
...It is bashed in from the bombing of his Chancery, but it's amazingly detailed, and I could even find Spokane, Washington (although not Sandpoint, Idaho) on it...
...Good-bye stew...
...I was truly exhausted, and decided to go to bed early...
...I had to wait for an hour for my room, and then—bliss—it was huge, with a big, firm bed, and wham...
...We grew up in the fifties and the early sixties...
...It looks like just another big field, except that it has a lot of souvenir stands and cafes near it...
...It doesn't look like a madman's home...
...Thus you cannot see much of the old guild hall and replicas...
...I guess we'll probably leave it as is...
...Mad pounding...
...He was cursing like mad...
...But I was glad I came...
...We settled on "deux mille francs," which seemed to make him amazingly happy...
...But there was not one car in that immense hall to compare with the perfect little red 1962 Corvette I bought in 1972 for $1,700...
...Non, je ne suis pas itudiante, et pourquoi avez-vous demande mon age...
...It had a thoroughly understandable description of the battle, many fine paintings, scary eyewitness accounts about people cutting other people's heads off with swords and watching the head and helmet roll across the field...
...Then I started to cry and left the table...
...There is also the actual globe that Hitler used to study the world and plan his conquests...
...Saturday/Sunday One of the worst long, days of my life, travel-wise...
...There was also the actual map that Ribbentrop and Molotov used to carve up Poland, and notes from Ribbentrop and Molotov...
...Why not also a homeless person's rally, or a rude cabdriver rally...
...She's too self-obsessed, too madly in love with her own "career," too self-congratulatory, too blasé about her sluttiness, not to be real...
...Let's start at the beginning, shall we, ladies and gentlemen of the jury...
...The only other man in it was an Argentine soccer player who was hanging out his underwear and socks on a seat to dry...
...To see this little towheaded, blue-eyed angel, the Aryan Nations poster boy (as I always call him) reading the Four Questions is really touching...
...We talked for a long time about that...
...I don't want to ever have anyone try to cut my head off...
...And all of their husbands' names...
...Instead I called my pal, Claude Dauman in New York, a regular at the de L'Europe...
...Why should he...
...Could I please have another room...
...That was long ago...
...A friendly looking cop said, "Today, it might be impossible to get there at all...
...Jews is followed by KGB also...
...I couldn't sleep, so I read the new book by Gennifer Flowers about her affair with Bill Clinton...
...Yummy entrecôte...
...Wednesday A perfect, sunny early evening in Washington, D.C...
...It is dark, but there is the sound of ventilators thumping and bumping through the night and day, and also the shadow of a giant fan...
...He was taking a reservation for a suite from Abu Dhabi...
...The airport was fine, except that I had to wait in line for almost an hour for a taxi...
...Then I read for many hours about a case where some Drexel players looted an insurance company...
...The stew and I then went to the stew's favorite place in Brussels, a bar where the tables are on top of coffins and there's—oh, far out—black light to make your white clothes glow...
...When I was in high school and junior high, youth seemed to go on forever...
...I was out for eight hours...
...Especially when I only slept maybe ten minutes out of eight hours of travel...
...For the day before he died, there is the neat notation, apparently in der Fiihrer's hand, that he had a meeting with Speer, another with Bormann, and one with someone named Rudel, who does not ring a bell...
...It was hellish...
...I've been there many times, and this time the grass was all mangy and unkempt...
...In the warm spring evening, I thought about how short life is...
...Noise all night...
...I don't really like Europe, except for Ireland...
...There were old cars, new cars, middle-aged cars...
...I well remember how every Christmas I would send her a card and she would send me back a more beautiful, more tasteful card...
...I looked up...
...Great service...
...We got to someplace called Rosendaal, and I learned, for the first time, that I had to change trains...
...Well, it's been 180 years...
...I went back to the taxi stand and found a Dutch driver...
...Then, off to the Wellington headquarters and museum...
...I asked...
...Among the highlights: that she can remember every car of every man she ever went out with...
...That meant I had to lug my bags a long way...
...Still, seeing him, and listening to him learning to worship at all at his young age, makes me very happy...
...I wonder what Janet Reno's bedroom looks like...
...It is the definition of a good hotel...
...Then we talked about Silver Spring...
...The stew had hair like Marge Simpson from "The Simpsons...
...There are also the actual pages of the Wannsee Declaration, where it is planned to kill the Jews of Europe...
...Do you remember all of the cheerleaders...
...Now, I do not know about nuclear physics or about organic chemistry...
...I rushed into the hall...
...He offered me his vodka bottle...
...Clean, neat room—although the bed was too soft...
...lobby of my wonderful hotel, the River Inn...
...Still, I thought, it's the same old story...
...My room was a broom closet with a double bed, right over a nest of people from Africa playing drums...
...Do they set no value on rest...
...There is also Hitler's study, wood-paneled even though underground, with heavy, kitschy furniture and paintings of the Alps...
...No, thanks...
...Then a tour of La Grand' Place...
...Who could be so sick...
...Will I be so tired that I feel sick...
...Also, there was a Bureau de Change...
...Still," he said...
...No...
...I asked Aram why anyone in this country would blow up a day-care center...
...It was a dump, where a tiny glass of wine was about four dollars...
...There was no Hot Shoppes anymore, no Silver Theater, no Pizza Oven, no one I knew at the high school, and then I remembered you, and you were still there, and I came over to your house and visited you and you took me in...
...Yes," I said...
...Idiot savant, I thought to myself...
...Don't have to pay double the meter...
...felt very happy to be out of that I exhibit...
...He got me in, thank God...
...Oh, wow...
...She was as friendly to the nerdiest loner as she was to the most adored athlete...
...The fertile soil of a safe, prosperous America fertilized with so much blood...
...The desk clerk said he had my reservation all right, but—and this he said with a smile—my room would cost about $50 more per night than had been arranged...
...Sure enough, he maneuvered me through the crowds, got me to the hotel 54 The American Spectator June 1995 in about two minutes, and was happy when I did in fact double the meter, making for the most expensive taxi ride in history...
...Also, there are no guides and it's extremely hot inside...
...On the day of his death, there is just a line through the day...
...Maybe your grandfather was from Russia...
...You are from Russia...
...I will be old, and Tommy will be grown up—if it's God's will—and a perfect spring evening in April of 1995 will become just as much a memory as the Hot Shoppes and lowered cars and Neely Holmead's perfectly diagrammed sentences in 1956...
...But I thought, once again, the dumb American gets fleeced...
...At that point, though, it was no longer worth calling the cops...
...He stared at me for a long time...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
