I Hate Everyone...Starting With Me (15 page)

I hate Savannah.
It’s beautiful but there’s a paper mill on the river that makes the whole city smell like vomit. Spending a week in Savannah, Georgia, is like spending a weekend in Mary Kate Olsen’s mouth.

I hate Florida.
It’s all old people, trailer parks, drug dealers and Disney World. I can handle the old people, drug dealers and trailer parks. But screaming children and a giant mouse with three fingers? Am I in Orlando or Saigon?

There are too many old people in Florida. It’s like Arizona with mosquitoes. Just once I’d like to go to a dinner party where every conversation doesn’t start with, “Do you remember…?” followed by the name of somebody who just died. It’s like the Oscars’ death reel played on a continuous loop.

Floridians brag about living with crocodiles—as though building a house on stilts so you don’t wind up without feet is a normal thing. Let me tell you, if I want to live with a scaly creature that has an unhinged jaw and jagged teeth I’ll move in with Lea Michele.

I hate the Plains states.
They’re plain. There’s no color, everything is wheat and grain and barley and grass. The whole region is nothing more than a Pottery
Barn with cows. The leading cause of death in Nebraska is people falling asleep. It’s so dull the kids go to Kansas for their senior proms.

I hate cities that fight the elements, like Chicago,
whose mottos are “It’s great to be inside” and “Shut that fucking door, you idiot.” Their number one export is “things that fell off the truck.” Let’s just hope that one good gust of wind blows Chicago into a better climate and suddenly it’s Chicago, Bahamas.

I hate Austin, but it’s not Austin’s fault.
Austin is a great city that’s stuck in Texas. You can always tell when you get inside the Austin city limits because the hair is smaller and you can understand what the people are saying.

I hate New Orleans,
but I respect it. You’ve got to respect a city that doesn’t want to hear about building above sea level. Grandpa dies and he’s buried over you. Even hell is up. New Orleans is filthy and dirty; it’s the only city that looked better after it was hit by a category five hurricane.

Mardi Gras is fascinating—you can puke in front of all the really good hotels. In New Orleans you can wear anything and do anything and no one seems to notice; it’s like hanging out at the Braille Institute.

Some people do love New Orleans—Anne Rice loves it, vampires love it; even Lee Harvey Oswald loved it and he was quite the sourpuss.

I hate San Francisco
because I not only left my heart there, but my hairdresser. San Francisco is the only city in the world that has a lisp. The whole town smells like lube. It’s built on hills that are so steep that when you get to the top of one of them in a taxi, you can’t see what’s on the other side. Going up a hill in San Francisco is like going down on Kathy Bates.

Enough with the good ol’ U. S. of A. There are whole countries I hate…

I hate Sweden.
Well, I don’t actually hate Sweden, I hate
Mamma Mia
and all the acclaim Meryl Streep received for singing “Dancing Queen” slightly off-key. It’s enough with Meryl, it’s enough with ABBA and it’s enough with all the pretty, smooth-skinned, natural blondes. Give me a couple of skanky brunettes with pockmarks and gunshot wounds and maybe, just maybe, I’ll feel better about the place. Sweden is like the Plains states in that it is totally devoid of color. And I’m talking about the population, not the geography. Sweden is so white even the black people are white. It’s like being at a Klan meeting with supermodels.

I hate the northern lights.
Sweden is in absolute daylight six months out of the year. Who needs that? I’m not in daylight for six hours a year. My best feature is total darkness. My plastic surgeon’s office is in the Howe Caverns. The northern lights are actually called
the aurora borealis, and I hate that because Aurora Borealis is my porn name. I feel so violated.

The constant daylight has made the Swedes so crazy that there’s a mental illness named for them: Stockholm syndrome. This is when victims of kidnap and torture begin to identify with and protect their captors instead of turning them in to the authorities. Remember when newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and forced to join their radical cult? They changed her name to Tania and made her wear a beret and forced her to help rob a bank at gunpoint and people were killed, and she protected her captors and went to jail.

And as this was playing out on the news every night, one thought kept going through my head over and over: What kind of idiot wears a beret in April?

I hate cities and countries that change their names.
Beijing used to be called Peking. Mumbai used to be known as Bombay. Why did they do that? Are there Google Earth lobbyists trying to make money off of new maps? This name changing thing is a huge pain in the ass; the other night I called up for Chinese food delivery and it took me almost forty-five minutes to order a large Peking duck. In the amount of time it took me to order, I could have flown to Beijing and brought the thing home myself. We don’t do that name-changing crap here in America. Since day one, Los Angeles is still Los Angeles, Chicago is still Chicago. And Detroit is still a shithole.

I hate places that are incorrectly named,
like Greenland, which is cold and icy. Or Iceland, which is lush and green. I think they took those names just to fuck with us.

I don’t know if the Ivory Coast has any actual ivory in it, but I respect it because it’s the only country named after two deodorant soaps.

I hate Paris.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s the most beautiful city in the world, but it’s inhabited by the most disgusting people. Parisians are horrible. If you ask a Parisian for help you’ll die in the
rue
before they’ll lend you a hand. Their yellow smiley-face buttons are smirking. Parisians always walk around with this expression on their faces like they’ve just smelled something rotten. Well guess what? “Hey, Jean-Claude, the smell is from you! You stink!” The French are not known for their hygiene; in fact, the level of b.o. in Paris is
tres horrible
mostly because the French always have their arms up in the air—since they’re always surrendering. It is a country of smelly cowards. Do not, I repeat,
do not
stand downwind on a hot summer day on the Champs-Elysees.

I hate the pretentiousness of Parisians.
They name their streets after the literati, like Rue de Victor Hugo and Rue Guy de Maupassant. The only street I like is Rue Honore de Balzac, because “Balzac” sounds so gay, and I love my gays. I might like Parisians more if they named their streets
only
for gay icons, like Rue
Liza Minnelli or Rue Bette Midler or, my favorite, Rue McClanahan.

I’ve always hated Maurice Chevalier.
He sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” and the French adored him.
Creeeeepy!
In America we have a word for men like that:
Polanski
.

I’ve hated the French ever since Dreyfus.
The affair, not the actor—although it’s a crime against humanity that Richard Dreyfuss never got to do “En Paris.” Be that as it may, I hate the French because they were big Nazi sympathizers. Sure, there was the so-called French “Resistance,” but I put up more of fight on my wedding night. During World War II they had a rebate program, “Bring in a Jew, get a toaster.” The great designer Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathizer and a great anti-Semite. Her original fragrances were Chanel No. Fünf and Auschwitz No. Nine.

I hate Winnipeg.
It’s cold all the time. No matter when you go there the people are shivering and shaking. It’s like being at a detox center on intake day. Winnipeg is so cold the town witch has no tits. They froze and fell off.

I hate Venice—
the city in Italy, not the beach town in California. Venice, California, is just steroid-riddled bodybuilders with bulging veins and shrunken testicles. People think Venice, Italy, is canals, art and romance
but actually it has more bums, drifters, vagrants and losers per square mile than anyplace else. It’s like Occupy Wall Street, but everybody has better complexions because it’s near the water.

If I could live my entire life no more than six blocks from Fifth Avenue I’d be perfectly happy. Okay, I wouldn’t be “perfectly happy”; I’d still be sour and unpleasant, but I wouldn’t mind it as much because I’d be close to shopping.

First of all I hate him, hate him, hate him! Probably the worst villain of the last five hundred years and on top of that he had
zero
fashion sense. Brown shirts? Brown was over in 1839, let alone 1939. And the boots in the summer and the armbands and the guns and the epaulets—the whole look didn’t work.

Hitler also had a horrible attitude. Millions of Germans would practically throw their arms out of their sockets saluting him, and he’d make this half-ass wave back at them, as if to say, “Whatever.” These people are getting up early, early, early to march and sing and parade around, the women got up at the crack of dawn to iron lederhosen and put their braids on top of their heads, and all Hitler could manage in return was a faggy little wave? Nice.

I hate him because he was stupid. In 1776, George Washington crossed the Delaware River.
February
1776. In the winter! Across snow and ice. Who was his travel agent? Mohamed Atta? Wait till April when it thaws, big boy.

Even more shocking, he went from Pennsylvania to New Jersey? Who goes to New Jersey? Even the bridges and tunnels only charge a toll to get out.

Then there’s that cherry tree nonsense. According to legend, when George was six, he took his hatchet and chopped down his father’s favorite cherry tree, but he didn’t get punished because he confessed to doing the dirty deed. Historians look at this episode as a study in character. I look at as a study in psychosis. What kind of six-year-old has a hatchet? And what kind of grown man has a favorite tree? And then I wonder why, even as president, he walked around in a white shoulder-length wig and tight blue capri pants.

I hate him because he was a total pervert. (And I know perverts: I dated two-thirds of the Osmond brothers; they’re in my little black book of Mormon. And I for one can tell you why Mormons’ underpants are magic.)

Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by accident. We all know he took that stupid kite with the key on it out in the rain, but when the key got struck by lightning, he loved it. He was turned on like Michael Jackson at a Boy Scout jamboree. In fact, for the rest of his life, anytime it poured he ran out on his roof, naked, and stood there with a fork in his mouth.

Mo, as he liked to be called in bed, was a man on a mission, and the mission was “peace through starvation.” Why he couldn’t pick “peace through retail,” or “peace through clever white wines,” God only knows. To me, giving someone the chance to buy high-quality shoes at low discount prices is a much better marketing tool than starving to death.

He got lost. He left Spain looking for the trade route to South America, zigged when he should have zagged, missed his turn and wound up in Rehoboth instead of Rio. In spite of his wife’s pleadings, he refused to pull over and ask for directions.

Stephen Hawking is brilliant, an absolute genius. He can drool in twelve different languages. But so what? His wife beats the shit out of him twice a week. And this is the second wife, not the first. (How he meets women at all is beyond me; the man’s a coffee table with a tongue.) Stephen left the first wife for this one. I could understand it if the first one whacked him around—I mean, he did cheat on her and roll off with another woman, but why this one is turning his life into a hell on wheels is anybody’s guess. But you’d think, with all of his brainpower, he’d at least have figured out how to blink 9-1-1.

She only wrote the one book
and
didn’t finish it. What kind of a work ethic is that? She has nothing to do all day long, yet, when it comes to completing the one task at hand, she can’t be bothered. I mean c’mon, maybe this is why Peter Van Daan wasn’t all that interested in hooking up. No one likes lazy.

And don’t say, “Oprah who?” You know who. Stedman’s beard, that’s who. Oh, please. Sure, she denies it but even Abraham Lincoln didn’t have this big a beard. I know Oprah’s opened
schools and raised money and given away Buicks, blahblahblahblahblah. But so what? She can’t keep her weight at a reasonable level. One day she weighs 140, two days later she’s being fitted for a boat cover. What kind of a role model is that? Her weight goes up and down more than Monica Lewinsky’s head. And honestly, I don’t know how she keeps gaining the weight; how fattening could Gayle King be?

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and everyone’s been carrying on about it ever since. I’m not saying it wasn’t a huge accomplishment—being the first person to do anything is notable for sure. But how about a little perspective?

When Neil left Florida that morning for the moon there was no traffic. Plus, he made all the lights, so the trip itself was relatively simple. A couple of hours later he gets to the moon and lands right away. No trouble finding a parking spot. No meters, no loading zones, nothing. So he puts the parking brake on, gets out, walks around, takes a golf swing, picks up some rocks and comes home.