I Hate Everyone...Starting With Me (11 page)

9/11 with striped pajamas. “I lost my entire family at Auschwitz.” You don’t have to add, “We got separated in the gift shop.”

I was raped when I was in college.

Other than me, what kind of person is going to snoop to verify your claim? Medical and academic records are private. This excuse really only works if you graduated during the last ten years. After fifty, no one wants to think of you in any sexual situation whatsoever, and will not be sympathetic to you. “Raped? By whom, the Comanches?”

My father beat my mother.

Is there anything more traumatic than watching your father beat your mother? Yes… watching your mother beat your father. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you David Gest and Liza Minnelli. When Gest filed for divorce he claimed Liza used to beat him up. How is that possible? Liza Minnelli doesn’t have the strength to beat an egg or a drug habit, yet she was able to kick his ass up and down Christopher Street??? Please.

I just found out my brother is my father.

This excuse is best used in the Deep South, Utah or Mackenzie Phillips’s house.

I was forced into being a sex slave.

You’re only a slave if you didn’t get a back-end distribution deal.

PTSD.

Not unlike the 9/11 excuse-mongers, you don’t have to have been in an actual war to claim post-traumatic stress disorder. Simply having seen Marlon Brando in a loincloth in the jungle in
Apocalypse Now
is more than enough of a shock to keep this tidy little excuse in your back pocket.

I sometimes hear voices.

This implies the voices just might come back, and they might come back
now
, while you are shaming me and making me feel bad about myself because I didn’t send a thank-you note for your stupid e-card. No social miscue is worth that kind of risk. (What I don’t add is that although usually when people hear “voices,” those voices tell them to kill passersby or to go on shooting sprees in Southern malls and fast-food restaurants, my voices say,
Hurry over to Bergdorf’s for their amazing mid-winter fur sale.
)

I live in New York City where there are probably five million apartments and I believe only eleven of them actually have kitchens. New Yorkers don’t cook. We order in, or we go out. The only things New Yorkers put in the oven are their heads.

I consider cooking to be one of the true wonders of the world, like the great pyramids of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the unexplained success of Carrot Top. I’ve never been much of a cook; in fact when Melissa was born I had one of my neighbors breast-feed her. I told her to think of it as “ordering in.”

But I
have
eaten in restaurants and homes all over the world, from Buckingham Palace to White Castle, and whether it’s a five-star or a drive-thru, I can always find something to complain about.

Most major cities have ethnic neighborhoods and ethnic restaurants. In Los Angeles, you can go to Koreatown; in Detroit, get in your car and go to Greektown; in Miami, it’s Little Havana; in San Francisco, it’s Chinatown; in New York, it’s Little Italy. You know what I hate? There is not one city or town where you can just hop in your car and say to the kids, “Let’s go to Jewville; we’ll get some derma and some heartburn.”

I hate maître d’s.
They’re just ushers with control issues. And the first thing you see when you walk into a restaurant, at least in a restaurant that’s good enough that the Heimlich maneuver instructions aren’t taped to the front door, is the maître d’. You show up at some fancy restaurant at four o’clock in the afternoon on a hot Tuesday in August; the place is so empty (there’s more activity in Jessica Simpson’s head), the maître d’s reservation book is so white he’s getting snow-blind. And yet he says, “Do you have reservations?” No, do you think you could squeeze us in before that horrible 4:05 rush? And then, after he spends twenty minutes looking through his empty list, you slip him a sawbuck and he gets all friendly and sweet. I hate that.

He says in this very condescending tone, “How are we, tonight?” I always want to say, “
We’re
a little gassy. Come close and take a sniff. How are
you
?”

Fortunately, through the years I’ve learned there are ways to get back at snotty maître d’s. First, after they seat you, complain about the draft and make them move you to a warmer spot. Then, a half hour later, tell them it’s a little stuffy and ask to be moved back to the original table. Second, if the kitchen closes at eleven o’clock put in a huge order at ten fifty-eight. And third, linger. When you see the maître d’ wants to close down the restaurant and go home, dawdle over your dessert. Drag it out as long as you can. Pretend you’re having a romantic moment with your dining partner, even if your dining partner is your brother. And if you really do have to leave, send a note and a fifty dollar bill to another table and ask that couple to chew slower than Chris Christie jogs; make that motherfucker work late.

I hate politically correct jerks who whine that the words
waiter
and
waitress
are pejoratives.
The PC storm troopers insist that waiters and waitresses now be called “servers.” According to them it’s because they’re “serving.” I say, “Fuck them.”
I’m
waiting—for my food.