Ben Stein's Diary: Driving Near Forest Lawn
Stein, Benjamin J.
by Benjamin J. Stein Driving Near Forest Lawn Thursday U gh. Other people's kids. Tommy and I are up in Idaho, having a five-day last vacation of summer. We've given up the waterfront house on...
...Life looks different when you are going slowly...
...The Little Maharajah and I awakened, had a lavish breakfast served by a cutie named Melissa, and planned our day...
...How long since you played...
...Everything is perspective...
...It is a scene unimaginable to most people in cities...
...You certainly see wooden crosses and bunches of flowers where people died on Route 95...
...Plenty of people here die from drunk driving, and I guess their families put up monuments...
...That's how fast we were going...
...Perfect peace...
...Puhleeze...
...I started to explain that not 58 November 1997 • The American Spectator wanting him screaming "We're gonna crash" on an airplane in flight was not really controlling him, but then I thought why should I argue with someone who is smacked out of his mind...
...Incessant teasing...
...It must be at least three miles across...
...Of course I remember some of it, but not what you remember...
...If only I could have Tommy all to myself all of the time...
...He told me he thought I was trying to control him...
...The problem is that I also got the room next door for Tommy and his pals to play in and keep our bikes in...
...Sandpoint is playing Bonner's Ferry, located about forty miles north...
...Legs at an angle to the ball...
...You're in Idaho now...
...They did their dance and then disappeared in a whirlpool of light...
...But that flight was really a memory...
...saying that the Constitution should be The place is near Warner Brothers, a abridged so that they, the biggest atten- studio I like a lot, where I recently did a tion-seekers and lowlife publicity hounds guest stint on "Murphy Brown," even closon earth, can get their privacy...
...Unbelievable that they Forest Lawn...
...Yelling and screaming...
...The form...
...He probably has not played in decades, just like me...
...Who has a bigger set of ears...
...What must it have been like for these brave young men to come from rural North Idaho and fight at Vella La Vella or Leyte Gulf or Anzio or St...
...Next week," I said...
...The form is all...
...Play by the rules...
...I read that and it's true...
...I complained to the stewardess but she did nothing...
...Calm down,' as the bumper stickers say...
...It doesn't matter how far it goes," I said...
...we found the pro shop...
...It was hot and humid outside, just as it's African-Americans and whites hitting balls been here for weeks...
...Get the form right...
...I love horses, but I really know almost nothing about them, and they sort of scare me...
...Two, I will take away your Cannondale...
...I pointed the craft at the The American Spectator • November 1997 57 shore, maybe two miles away, and opened the throttle as wide as it would go...
...This is what you do...
...There are also few tourists in town...
...However, Springs, Arkansas, where she's visiting her there were no gangstas here...
...After our meal, we cast off...
...Keep your left arm rigid on the back swing for as long as you can, crook it at the top, and then straighten it out on the downswing...
...Joel is still very much in touch, a successful guy in the watch business in New York...
...That is far more than were lost in the nation as a whole...
...There we had a small but delightful lunch while nearby, two women talked about horses...
...What a feeling on that 700 Wave Runner...
...Motorized carts you sat in did not exist...
...We pulled up even and began a water drag race...
...We bought the use of some golf balls, three buckets' worth, and headed for the driving platform...
...He looked like Dionysus on a very, very good day...
...We've given up the waterfront house on Third Street because the owners came back...
...He hit some more and then wanted to go to the upper level of the driving platform...
...After breakfast, 56 November 1997 • The American Spectator we took out our bikes and rode back and forth on the Long Bridge...
...door and bring my bike into the house...
...As we did, Melissa told us the story of her 20-year-old life...
...He has brought one of his countless Star Wars books and is sitting at a table reading it...
...We took many wrong turns trying to I miss Idaho already...
...And in Los Angeles...
...The other was for those who died in Vietnam and Korea...
...On the way home, I called my father to tell him about the golf and how I remembered the rules of the game he had taught me...
...At this spot about eleven months ago, Glen Warren, Dana Martin, and I tossed Peter Feierabend's ashes into the lake...
...He was quite good after that...
...My father, recently a widower, watches golf faithfully on TV, in fact more than faithfully...
...I used up my balls, and so did Tommy, and I felt great...
...The list for World War II was frighteningly long...
...It won't help," I said...
...have gotten our usual temperate, dry Tommy and I wandered around until weather this summer...
...I thought of Peter's spirit on the water and then we headed back to the marina...
...As drunk as they were, the flight attendants kept feeding them more liquor and beer, even when the plane was on the runway...
...Bend over the ball...
...The club and your form are what count...
...I hate them...
...You remember being young, but most of what remember about you is that you were on TV eight times last week.' 60 November 1997 The American Spectator I turned around to see him holding the club as if he were holding a tree branch, hands far apart, right hand on top...
...Were you studying a certain kind of Buddhism that worships only the worst parts of human nature...
...My shrink says it's a sign of being well-adjusted to like jokes of that kind and a sign of puerile excess repression to fail to like them...
...But so far no one here has thought to put up a monument to party girls who die in car crashes while driving with international playboys...
...You," he said, go to Griffith Park to drive some golf balls...
...Rest again, and then the summum bonum of human life...
...Well, you can have a wood—they're steel these days—but if you're out of practice, it might just cause you trouble," the man said...
...We headed southwest under the railroad bridge and then under the Long Bridge that separates Lake Pend Oreille from the Pend Oreille River until we got to a wide spot on the river near our rented house...
...Look at the ball...
...I had been on edge because my last flight from Spokane to LAX two weeks earlier had been the worst of my life...
...He thought about that for a while, and then asked when we could start lessons...
...Especially when it gets to be driving-age time...
...I'd like some myself," I said...
...Take the long way home," as my sister once said...
...We went over to another part of the marina and rented not one but two Wave Runners, a 70o and a 650...
...A pinto is a breed, but a paint is a color, or maybe I have that backwards...
...Daddy," he said, "Daddy don't floor it, so I can catch up with you...
...I cannot recall ever having so much fun on the water...
...When we got on the ground, one of the drunk young men, whom I recognized as a former child star, told me they had just come from a conference on Buddhism in Coeur d'Alene...
...It was getting to be late in the afternoon and there was still no one on the lake but us...
...But it was just the perfect day and having my boy with me on the lake...
...Tommy, Rex, and Wingo have Keep your left arm rigid on the back swing as long as you can, crook it at the top, and then straighten it out on the downswing...
...We went out past a point and by a turnof-the-century cabin built on rock...
...I did not zoom across the lake as I usually do...
...Then I showed him while standing behind him...
...He carries on bravely, and he has a girlfriend who cares for him, but the waitress says his life is precarious...
...Even lightweight Tommy on his 65o could barely keep up...
...The water was glass...
...Making him take the right stance...
...Marvin has vanished from my life...
...In the days when we played at Sligo Creek or Walter Reed, both of them public golf courses, we smoked as we played, and tossed our cigarettes on the grass before we hit, the way the pros did...
...I asked...
...Get the form right...
...Bear in mind that Sandpoint has never had many more than about 5,000 souls, and there were at least fifty lost in World War II...
...Incessant bragging...
...A knot of Japanese At lunch, we watched Greg Norman women were buying golf souvenirs...
...They were crime was that he refused to put down his on the ground with their hands cuffed comic books to help me open the front behind them...
...Stand with your feet parallel, toes on a line, perpendicular to a line through the ball and touching the line of your toes...
...He had one of the end- picnics of tens of thousands of Hispanics...
...Naturally, modern male maturity being what it is, the young man has thousands to spend on mountain bikes, boats, and Jeeps, but not a sou to spend on supporting his son...
...I had dreadful imaginings...
...The water flew by and suddenly we were at the other side of the river...
...I'm sure I never expected to be thinking about the rules of the game forty years later on the road between Disney and Forest Lawn...
...I think he's given it to me, and I ranger standing on the side of the road for feel dizzy and lethargic...
...Who is a better athlete...
...If you do this every day for thirty days and master the form, you'll hit it a hundred yards every time this year and two hundred when you're i6...
...By an amazing coincidence, I know who this young man is, since he is now dating one of Tommy's beautiful babysitters...
...Now I love them...
...Like flying...
...I don't care about the score...
...One, I will spank you...
...I felt as if I were floating, in ecstasy, on morphine...
...Four, we will leave here tomorrow morning...
...But then Amber spotted them having a small touch game on a field near the game field...
...I was beside myself...
...Alas, the trouble-making, fire-starting Wingo was still around, trying to tempt Tommy with the cigarette lighter in the rented Caddy, among other toys...
...We watched Sandpoint score its first touchdown, talked to various young people, and then headed to Ivano's for dinner...
...I could remember my father, who knew how the game was played, doing the same with me forty years before...
...Don't look at the course more than once...
...Speaking of something to think about, on this flight today I read several articles about celebrities in California seeking changes in the law to make it easier to restrain the press and to protect their privacy...
...Among the spokespersons for this movement to protect their dignity are Sharon Stone and Madonna...
...Will he remember any of it...
...Line the left shoulder up in a straight line down to the handle so you form a straight line to the blade of the club...
...A month later, Glen Warren was also dead...
...When Tommy came scampering over, I thought I would pass out...
...Basically it was that at age 17 she had become pregnant by a young man in the town...
...Maybe the next monument at Barlow Memorial Field can be for them...
...When I got out past the no wake zone and opened it up, it seemed to fly...
...Don't try for power...
...So the Mom works here serving breakfast while Tommy and I look at the lake...
...So much suffering...
...The form is everything...
...I raced out in front of Tommy and we headed back to the Long Bridge...
...But then every time he caught up, he would cackle fiendishly and try to splash us again...
...And these people are whin- an immense, sprawling mega-park here ing about protecting their privacy...
...I am not sure how muchthey have in common with a woman who had an unearned income of millions of dollars and played on yachts with men who were engaged to other women...
...Tommy giggled and tilted his boat back and forth so it would splash us...
...Learn the rules of the game...
...Tommy was right behind us, laughing and screaming for us to slow down...
...Rock me on the water, sister won't you ease my fevered brow...
...less colds that ten-year-olds are In desperation, we asked a very fat park prone to...
...If only he would never go to college, never hang around with dirty bad boys and girls, but just with me...
...Madonna published a book of out of the house, poured ourselves into photos of herself displaying her vagina in my car and headed off to Griffith Park, various ways...
...That's one percent of the whole town...
...Forget the power play...
...What a day...
...She was sad here with her no-good boyfriend and all of the nutty people and no available nice men...
...With tears brimming in his eyes, he got it...
...That's so odd," he said...
...By the time I went to bed, that little boy, whose surliness and ingratitude had driven me to insanity, once again lookedlike a little angel...
...I shifted to the wood and did the same drill that I had heard from my father and my golfing betters so long ago...
...Then it got on plane and flew...
...The driving range, as it turned out, We both moped around the house, was only a few hundred yards from this occasionally calling my wife in Heber encounter with modern L.A...
...Naturally, the boys were late and I could not find them for about half an hour...
...For a while he got up and played with the owner's dogs, but now he is reading again...
...Know the form," I said...
...Too many people are dead on a beautiful day like this...
...Amber laughed and threw back her head...
...Anyway, the worst that the kids do is actually defy me...
...I don't appreciate your talking that way about my home," she said...
...The east seems to from a double-decker driving platform...
...The rules of the game...
...I teed up with a little plastic tee, and showed Tommy how to do the same...
...Forty years ago my father taught me the rules of golf that I am trying to teach Tommy...
...A waitress then explained in great detail how horses get their colors...
...My boy," I said, "if you do not mend your ways pronto, the following things will happen...
...I guess I know which category I fall under...
...I don't know...
...The weather is even better than it was this morning...
...I The American Spectator • November 1997 61...
...Are you married...
...It won't help to get up one story higher...
...Instead, I motored at barely above idle along the north side of the bay, looking at the cabins and the trees...
...Like being a dolphin, like being half man, half sea-god...
...In front of one home, two yellow labs snoozed on a dock in the sun...
...Billy was killed while biking on Long Island two summers ago almost to the day...
...The water around us was choppy, and then became a blur...
...So much courage...
...Sharon Stone moved from being nobody to "somebody" in Hollywood by "Not a bad idea," I said...
...A hit an unbelievably fine drive to win a short man behind the counter helped golf tournament, and Tommy said, "Let's Tommy and me to clubs...
...Interestingly enough, there is not any plan yet in North Idaho to build a monument to Princess Di...
...I wonder why, snicker, snicker...
...Let the club do the work...
...See," she said...
...Peace on the water...
...Tommy watched the players practice their putts on a huge, very crowded green...
...Off to the opening high school football game at Barlow Memorial Field right on the water in Sandpoint...
...I asked...
...He might also be directions...
...Even Tommy is calm...
...Look to his companions," says a voice in my brain...
...That means very few kids roaming about loose...
...A slightly cool breeze is blowing over us, but not cool enough to be uncomfortable...
...The woman, our waitress, had the good sense and love to have the baby...
...Our waitress had a brother who was left a paraplegic by a drunk driver in Aspen a few years ago...
...As he and his pals scrimmaged, I noticed two obelisks honoring local heroes...
...Friday A perfect day...
...Without the trouble-making Rex, he was fine...
...Calm down," as the bumper stickers say.'Take the long way home,' as my sister once said...
...Just hit it and don't even look where it goes...
...on Alaska Airlines...
...When I get back from visiting my father...
...Just today, for example, Tommy and Rex, his pal, were asked by me, the man who buys them everything and amuses them, to go with me to Bottle Bay for dinner...
...An immense, clear lake, and it's all there for Tommy, Amber, and me on our Wave Runners...
...I hate this place," the Canadian waitress said...
...You're in Idaho now...
...will probably want a seven iron...
...It was considered effete to even have a cart on which you pulled your golf clubs...
...Meanwhile, Amber and I sat on the 700 and planned to follow him around the lake...
...I know women love them...
...A young Greek god, with his aging Dad...
...Look at the ball...
...As I addressed the ball, I remembered playing with my father at Sligo Creek golf course in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1962 and 1963, with my great golfing buddies, Joel, Marvin, and Billy, on summer afternoons with heat and humidity that made this day seem like air-conditioned perfection...
...A few loons swam lazily about...
...I don't just dislike them...
...Yes," I said...
...I swung, and the ball sailed off down the range better than I could have hoped for, the seven iron resting easily in my hands...
...It was like when Han Solo hits hyperspace in The Millennium Falcon and the stars around him become a blur...
...Don't try to kill the ball...
...The pro, a startlingly young man, came out and told me he loved my work...
...At his pleading, we let Tommy drive the 65o all by himself...
...To sacrifice er to the Walt Disney Studios, and even a one-millionth part of the Constitution closer to Mount Sinai, the Jewish part of for these people...
...Tommy," I said...
...Saturday A n uneventful flight down to L.A...
...We'd sat behind two totally stoned young actors —you might know their names—wrecked on heroin and booze...
...After dinner, I told Tommy a "Ren & Stimpy" story...
...However, this is a sort of off-the-beaten-track place and people here lack the sophistication that is to be found in Europe...
...Now, this I like a lot...
...I always get the same room, and its view is staggeringly good, through three cottonwood trees across a large vividly green lawn, and out to the lake and the mountains...
...Get it...
...Tommy went below deck to read...
...There are trees and little cottages everywhere...
...You might want to get your son some lessons," he added...
...The Chevrolet of boats," Peter Feierabend used to call it, but I like it a lot and come to think of it, I like Chevies a lot, too...
...Airplane flights...
...At first the Wave Runner lurched slightly...
...They were drinking like madmen...
...He zigged and zagged and laughed like a madman, but we consistently beat him...
...We have to really be grateful, though, to those who show the greatest bravery of all—going on international TV and admitting they have an eating disorder...
...Don't golfers usually drive with woods...
...See...
...And having a perfect day can change your mind about everything...
...That's how glorious he looked under the lights for the football game...
...Look at the ball...
...We're now at the wonderful Edgewater Motel, the very best bargain in the history of hotel accommodations...
...A maddening and never-ending series of crepitation jokes...
...I kept returning to Tommy...
...It was almost six p.m., and the sun was directly in the eyes of everyone on the platform...
...Definitely something to think about...
...Keep your knees slightly bent...
...Just a group father and her desperately ill stepmoth- of very determined-looking Asians and er...
...One was for those who died in World War I and World War II...
...On a massive scale...
...I am so happy I am here...
...As Tommy shot through an overpass—in defiance of Coast Guard rules—the blow-back pushed back his glorious blond hair...
...She is now in my very, very good book...
...The beautiful Amber, Tommy's babysitter, but not the one going with the bad boy, appeared...
...In fact, Tommy and I and the two horsewomen are the only people eating on the deck overlooking the tiny estuary of Bottle Bay...
...Ever since we arrived, Tommy and his pals have been running riot...
...I tried to retain it for "Win Ben Stein's Money," but the information just did not stick with me...
...We couldn't even see where Tommy's ball went because of the sun right in our eyes, but sometimes you could hear and feel a good whack, feel that the ball hit the blade just right, and know that it went down the range half decently...
...It turned out that he, along feeling some of the after-effects of my telling with several other very fat park rangers, him that he was so lazy and disrespectful was arresting Hispanic gangsta-looking last night that he cannot go to play a paint young fellows with baggy trousers, stock-ball game with his pal, Omid...
...People in Sandpoint tend to work for a living...
...I think I will...
...showing her vagina in a "mainstream" After a long nap, we dragged ourselves movie...
...I pray I will remember this perfect day when I think my life has been wasted...
...I told him...
...None of them is very good...
...about it...
...You remember it, and you remember being young, but most of what I remember about you is that you were on TV eight times last week...
...I would just give anything for you, Tommy, my boy, to learn to play something where you learned the rules of the game and followed them," I said after I hung up with my father, as we drove back in twilight...
...Peace in the valley...
...find the driving range part, as opposed to the old locomotive museum, the Autry Sunday Museum of Western Legacy, the mameither Tommy nor I felt well this moth Naghdarian family picnic, and the N morning...
...Ingratitude...
...Put your left hand on top, then your right hand over your left thumb, both thumbs in a line pointing straight to the ball...
...They sulked, refused, were totally difficult BENJAMIN J. STEIN iS a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...Look at the ball...
...I told them to pipe down at one point and they did, but they were still muttering and singing, "We're gonna crash, we're gonna crash," when we approached Seattle and when we approached LAX...
...Children remember their youth, but parents don't remember their kids' youth," he said...
...In front of us, the loons dove for cover—even though I would have avoided them since I'm a Hollywood animal-loving guy...
...I used to hate Wave Runners because they made noise...
...The actual ing caps, and many tattoos...
...At about 5:30, I signaled for His Majesty to come back to port, which he did very grudgingly...
...Because it's after Labor Day, school has started...
...Love your new show," said his colleague behind the counter...
...Mercifully, Rex and Wingo were in school and then at football practice until fairly late...
...A pretty waitress from Canada said she loved my show and wanted to go back to British Columbia...
...I sent Rex home to ponder his sins, and then I spoke very seriously to Tommy...
...Keep your eye on the ball at all times...
...If your form is all right, the ball will go where you want it to go...
...A much older waitress who was reading the Racing Form yelled at her for what she had said...
...Especially little red Corvettes, ah-ha...
...Three, I will throw away your video game gear...
...Rock me on the water...
...insisted on meeting Amber and me...
...Incessant arguing...
...Tommy and I cast off and headed across the lake to Bottle Bay...
...Daddy," he said, "buy us a Wave Runner...
...They want to come on their bikes...
...I hit a few more, also to my entire satisfaction, when I heard Tommy stamping his feet...
...Who got a better score on a vile video game...
...We went into the Nineteenth Hole, a miserably scruffy, downat-the-heels bar and cafe next to the pro shop...
...Clear, perfect fall temperatures, a hazy but beguiling view down the river and across the lake...
...Not how far the ball goes today...
...His mouth was in a huge smile...
...What a big wide world to die in...
...There was not one soul in sight...
...Not the detail...
...We never, not once, used a golf cart...
...Then we rested briefly and went over to the mighty Thompson Carrera z000...
...When we were finished, we knew we had done some work...
...A long time, but I see them on TV playing with woods...
...are not tarred and feathered...
...But once he was gone, Tommy was an angel...
Vol. 30 • November 1997 • No. 11
