I'll Mature When I'm Dead (7 page)

What happened was, they put me and my co-marshal, author Ridley Pearson, into an antique fire truck along with Daisy Duck and Clarabelle the Cow. I have nothing against either of these veteran Disney characters, but let’s be honest, their careers are not currently sizzling, especially in the case of Clarabelle, who hasn’t had a hit cartoon since roughly the Civil War. (Also, not to be catty, but she has had a
lot
of work done on her udder.)

So anyway, Ridley and I and our families got into this fire truck with Daisy and Clarabelle, and then they sent us out into the Magic Kingdom, where literally fifty thousand people had been waiting restlessly in the heat to see the legendary Main Street Parade with all its spectacular floats. The problem was that
the parade did not follow us
. I don’t know if it was a prank or what, but for some reason the parade floats remained back in the staging area for at least ten more minutes. This meant that we were out there basically naked, with no float cover, two idiots in rodent ears sitting next to a B-list duck and cow in a fire truck creeping through this vast sea of restless expectant tourists at the speed of a tectonic plate. It was horrible. We had been instructed to wave, so we grimly waved for the whole parade route (roughly eighty-two miles) but hardly anybody waved back. You could see the puzzlement on their faces as they put down their video cameras and asked each other: “Who are these dorks?” And: “Where’s the actual parade?” And: “Is that Carl Hiaasen next to Clarabelle? ”

Another “perk” that comes with being a minor celebrity is that I occasionally have the opportunity to interact with celebrities who are actually famous. For example, I once shared a microphone with Bruce Springsteen. This happened because I belong to a rock band called The Rock Bottom Remainders, which consists mostly of authors. Our biggest celebrity author is Stephen King, although he keeps a fairly low profile. For example, once I went to a baseball game with him, and he wore a ball cap, so most people didn’t recognize him. Just before the game started, the actor David Birney arrived and sat two rows in front of us. The woman sitting behind him wanted to get his autograph, but she didn’t have a pen. So she turned around, all excited, and asked if anybody had a pen. She borrowed one, used it to get David Birney’s autograph, then handed the pen back to: Stephen King.

Anyway, The Rock Bottom Remainders get together once a year to play benefit concerts on behalf of literacy. You may have noticed that for some time now, literacy has been in a steep decline. I’m not saying the Remainders are totally responsible for this, but we’re probably a factor, because as a band, we suck. We routinely play entire songs without ever reaching full agreement on the question of what specific key we are in. So when people hear us perform, their reaction often is: “Maybe literacy isn’t such a great idea.”

Anyway, one time the Remainders were performing at an event in Los Angeles, and Bruce Springsteen was there, and he joined us onstage for one song. As it happened, he and I shared a microphone, just a couple of celebrities chilling together. Here is a verbatim transcript of everything that was said between us:

So to be totally honest, Bruce didn’t say anything to me except “Gloria!” But in the time we spent together, I could tell that, despite his celebrity, he’s a regular guy, a guy who puts his pants on just like everybody else, with the zipper in the front.

Another perk that comes with being a celebrity is that you get to go into VIP areas. These are areas at clubs or events where only celebrities are allowed to go, so they’ll have some privacy while they engage in exclusive celebrity activities such as standing around. In my experience, this is mainly what VIPs do in their areas: They stand around. It’s not a significantly different experience from standing around in a civilian area. But for some reason, whenever there’s any kind of exclusive area, people develop a
fierce
desire to stand around inside it.

It reminds me of lobsters. If you’ve ever looked at a tank of lobsters in a restaurant, you’ve noticed that most of them tend to clump together in one corner of the tank, even though they’d have more room if they spread out. They have decided, for whatever lobster reason, that this corner is more desirable than the other corners, where you might find one or two lobsters who weren’t allowed into the VIP corner because they are
losers
.

I witnessed a dramatic demonstration of the pulling power of the VIP area during a party at the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia. Political conventions are excellent places to observe VIP-area-lust, because they’re teeming with high-level Washington-dwelling people who have chosen careers in public service specifically to avoid having any contact with the actual public. These people
live
for VIP treatment. Do you think that the Secretary of Commerce is motivated by an interest in the activities of the Department of Commerce? Don’t be a moron. Nobody even knows what the Department of Commerce
does
, including the employees, who spend their days planning elaborate pranks on the Department of Agriculture. No, the reason you want to be Secretary of Commerce is you get to ride around Washington in a limousine containing zero members of the public.

At a national political convention, you have hundreds of people who consider themselves at least as important as the Secretary of Commerce. If it’s a Democratic convention, you also have dozens of A-list Hollywood and music celebrities. (If it’s a Republican convention, you have Bo Derek.) Also you have swarms of lower-ranking Washington minions with titles like Deputy Assistant to the Associate Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff who are trying to move up the ladder to Deputy Associate to the Assistant Acting Deputy Assistant Undersecretary.

So at the conventions you have thousands of these highly status-conscious people swarming around, and every night all of them try to get into the same two or three exclusive parties. These parties are a HUGE deal, and it is truly pathetic the way people will whine and beg and grovel to get in. I know, because I’m one of these people. I have attended every political convention from 1984 on, and I estimate that I spend 93 percent of my time, as a professional journalist, trying to get into exclusive parties. Usually I fail, but every now and then I succeed, and it’s amazing, the elation you feel when you talk your way past the gatekeepers, leaving behind the pathetic losers standing around outside, because you know that once you get inside the exclusive party you’re going to have wild monkey sex with dozens of A-list Hollywood celebrities. (Or, if it’s a Republican convention, Bo Derek.)

No, seriously, all you do at these parties is stand around. Often you don’t even see any A-list celebrities, because they’re standing around in an even
more
exclusive area inside the party, set aside for VIPs more important than you. Which means that, on some level,
you’re still a loser
.

This was the situation I encountered at the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia. I was with a posse of five newspaper cartoonists, and we had managed, with great effort, to grovel our way into an exclusive party in a nightclub, only to discover that we were in the
outer
VIP area. There was an
inner
VIP area (possibly containing Bo Derek) that we couldn’t get into.

We were wandering around when we came across a room with a platform in the middle, about the size of a Ping-Pong table, raised two feet off the floor. For some reason, possibly related to beer consumption, we decided to turn this into our own VIP area. We climbed onto the platform and stood there, six guys on a platform. Whenever anybody walked past, we’d shout, “Sorry! VIP area! You can’t come up here!”

As you can imagine, this caused people to leave the room immediately. So for a while it was just the six of us in our VIP area. But then an amazing thing happened: Dick “Dick” Armey, who at that time was the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, entered the room. We invited him to join us. Incredibly, he agreed.

So now we had an actual VIP on our VIP platform. This had an immediate and powerful effect on the people entering the room: They’d see the House majority leader, and
they wanted to be on the platform
. Of course we didn’t let just anyone join us. We were total assholes about it. We admitted only those who belonged to one of three elite groups: (1) people whom Dick Armey knew personally; (2) people whom we knew personally; and (3) women.

Even so, within minutes we had easily thirty people jammed together on this smallish platform in the middle of an otherwise basically empty room, with more people pleading to be allowed on. Granted, some of these people just wanted to be on the platform as a goof. But I think the majority wanted to be up there because they genuinely believed it was more desirable to be squashed into a VIP area than to stand comfortably in a non-VIP area three feet away.

Why do people act this way? For the same reason lobsters do: They have brains the size of sesame seeds.

Which brings us to reality television. As a minor celebrity, I am concerned about the effect it is having on the overall celebrity population. Consider the following celebrity news item, which I found on the
People
magazine Internet site:

So essentially in this item
People
is reporting that Kim Kardashian has posted an item on her blog denying an untrue rumor that most people would never have heard of if Kim Kardashian hadn’t posted it on her blog in the first place. In other words, nothing happened. This is considered news because Kim Kardashian is what is known as a “reality show personality.” She has appeared on
Dancing with the Stars
as well as in a widely distributed homemade sex video. It goes without saying that she also has a fragrance line. Kim and her sisters Khloe and Kourtney are the stars of the reality show
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
, which is about all the fascinating celebrity things that you do when you are a Kardashian, such as eat. Also appearing on the show are other members of the Kardashian Klan, including their mom and their stepfather, Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner, whose son, Brody Jenner, is also a reality-show personality, having appeared on a number of reality shows and dated several other reality-show personalities, including Nicole Richie, who was on a reality show with Paris Hilton.
¹²

My point is that thanks to reality TV, all of these people are now celebrities, despite the fact that
the only one who has ever actually done anything
is Bruce Jenner.
¹³
And the Kardashians are just a tiny part of the vast, ever-expanding reality-show industry, which is constantly vomiting out new celebrities, adding to the strain on our nation’s already overburdened VIP-area resources.

Also contributing to the celebrity glut is the disturbing phenomenon of “celebrity DJs.” These are the people who put on headphones and play records while adjusting knobs with expressions of great intensity, as if they are performing a particularly challenging violin solo, when in fact they are PLAYING A FREAKING RECORD, which requires NO MORE ARTISTIC TALENT THAN REHEATING A BURRITO IN A MICROWAVE OVEN.

I apologize for using capital letters, but this is a serious problem. America has become a nation where more citizens can name the contestants on
American Idol
than can name their own important government leaders, such as the Secretary of Commerce.

We need to do something about the celebrity surplus, and I have an idea, which I got from agriculture. Think about it: What do we do when our farms produce surplus wheat, and it starts to pile up in grain silos? We export it to other countries! Do you see where I’m going with this? That’s right: We need to
start putting minor celebrities into grain silos
.

If that turns out to be legally questionable, we should export them. This would not be difficult. All we’d have to do is park a cruise ship in Los Angeles and announce a new reality show called
Celebrity Cruise with the Stars
. Within minutes there would be Kardashians storming up the gangway. As soon as the ship was full, we’d untie it and send it steaming off to someplace that doesn’t produce enough celebrities of its own, such as Asia. Granted, at some point these people might try to get back to the United States. But that is exactly why we have a navy.

By following this program, America could get back to a saner and simpler time; a time when being a celebrity
meant
something; a time when it was easier for veteran traditional minor celebrities such as Clarabelle and myself to get into popular restaurants. I know I speak for both of us when I assure you that we will not take this privilege lightly. As celebrities, we will conduct ourselves with dignity and never knowingly pose naked for
Playboy
without adequate compensation. We recognize that we are role models for the public. This is why I always make sure that I wash my hands after I pee in a public restroom. I don’t want somebody recognizing me and going around telling people, “Hey, you know who doesn’t wash his hands after he pees? Carl Hiaasen!” Because as I say, Carl is a friend.