President Me (7 page)

Speaking of the fecal marathon: Some of you may know a tale from my previous tome about pissing into an ice maker because the urine countdown had started and I couldn't get into my room. Well, this past year I had a similar incident. I was at a hotel on the road and staying on the ninth floor. I had a very nice suite, but that meant it was at the other end of the hall, as far away from the elevators as possible. I had just rolled in after a long road trip, gone through the usual rigmarole at the front desk, and hustled upstairs to drop a deuce. Well, like the other nine out of every ten times I check into a hotel room, my key card didn't work. Knowing that I was T-minus two minutes until the fecal had landed, I did the butt-cheeks-clenched run to the elevator to go down to the desk and get the card fixed. I hopped in, pressed lobby, and went down one floor. The doors opened on the eighth floor and two blond twin boys with white-trash faux-hawks were standing there. One of them grabbed the left door, the other one grabbed the right. Then they just stood there staring at me like an Alabama version of the two girls from
The Shining
. I asked, “What are you doing?” They said, “Our dad's coming.” I asked, “Well where is he?” They said, “He's in his room.” I was going crazy. I was thinking, “Were you sent here from hell to force me to shit myself?” I said, “You've got to let the door go.” They said, “No, we're waiting until Daddy comes.” Even though judging by their haircuts Papa was probably the kind of guy who carries a .38, I pried the door out of their Mountain Dew–sticky fingers and headed down to the desk. I managed to have them replace the key card and get back to the suite just in time to obliterate the bathroom.

Here's what we don't need in hotel bathrooms. I was staying in Utah, and there was a gold-seal sticker on the toilet paper that held the loose end to the rest of the roll. Because we've all dealt with the horror of the next piece of TP flapping in the breeze, mocking us. Well, when I went to wipe in Utah I tore off the first few inches and realized I had left the sticker on there. I haven't shit for two years.

The hotel bathroom is not only the place where I shit, it is now the place I'm forced to go when I need to smoke. Nowadays the majority of hotels are smoke-free. When you check in you have to sign something that says you won't smoke or there will be an extra $250 on your bill for cleaning. First off, really? One fat Guatemalan chick with a spritzer of Febreze is $250?

I felt the sting of this new policy especially hard in Winnipeg. It was the end of a long night after the travel—a situation at customs which you'll soon read about—the gig, and the postshow autograph signing. It was after midnight when I got to the hotel and it was zero degrees outside, so I was sure as shit not heading to the curb to blow a butt. I went into the bathroom, removed all the towels—they'd be the evidence of my crime because they absorb the scent—and stood over the toilet blowing the smoke into the fart fan. At a certain point I caught a bleary-eyed, exhausted glimpse of this pathetic scene in the mirror and thought that perhaps I should have gone down to the curb to smoke and found the sweet relief of hypothermic death.

I didn't get caught that time, or the hundred times since. But if I ever did get the $250 fine, I would surely fight it, and here would be my argument to the hotel. You're charging me a fee for smoking up the room, but meanwhile you pump porn in so that people can beat off with impunity. I imagine that if you were to ask the patrons of your hotel which they would rather have, the room in which someone recently smoked half a Marlboro Light or the room where a guy made a jizz pentagram on the bedspread, they'd go for the secondhand smoke instead of the left-hand beat-off every time.

In my America, hotels are now 50 percent smoke-free and 100 percent spooge-free, though it will be sad then to see all the guys outside on the sidewalk twenty feet away from the entrance beating off into the gutter, bumming lube off of strangers. Though as I'll soon be staying only in presidential suites, I'll enact an exception for them. I'd be honored to sleep on Eisenhower's crusty sheets.

And finally there's this.

I took this picture in a hotel in Milwaukee. I looked at the back of my door and noticed the peephole. But then I looked just below it and thought, “What is this? That glory hole will work for me, but what about the average-sized gentleman?” I then realized it was a peephole for little people. At first I was angry about lawyers and how everything has to be constructed to accommodate everyone nowadays, but then I thought, “C'mon, Adam. Quit being an asshole. Midgets can be businessmen, they can travel and use the same hotels you do, and they'll need to answer their door too.” But then I thought, “What are the chances another midget has come to rape them? When the midget looks out that peephole, isn't he just going to see the regular-sized person's balls? ‘Wait a second, I don't recognize those balls. I didn't order a Denver omelet. Turn around, let me see your asshole.' ”

So to recap—hotels will soon be decaf-, room-service-tip-, double-peephole-, novelty “Do-Not-Disturb”-sign-, wake-up-call-, key-card-electronic-control-, and jizz-pentagram-free, all with one stroke of my presidential pen.

THE FOOD-SERVICE INDUSTRY

This is the fastest-growing sector of our economy, because our fat asses are the fastest-growing sector of our bodies.

As a former McDonald's employee, I did plenty of complaining about that company in my previous book. And it's obviously a thriving American business. But I'd like to offer one suggestion. I know the plan is to shut down breakfast at ten thirty and switch to the lunch menu, but you are missing out on millions in Egg McMuffin sales. Especially on Saturday when ten thirty is still hangover time. If you don't make this change, I'm going to do it for you. I'll just roll into Mickey D's at 10:25, order sixty-five Egg McMuffins, stand at the front of the drive-through, and tell all the people rolling up hoping for one after ten thirty, “Here's your Egg McMuffin. That'll be eighty-seven dollars and a blowjob, please.”

And I would like to order McDonald's to knock it off with the toys in the Happy Meal. This has created an aspect of our culture that I see, and despise, with my kids. Every day they need a new toy. Every meal, every event, every trip to the park needs to be commemorated by bringing home a cheap piece of Chinese plastic shaped like a character from whatever forgettable animated movie is out that summer.

Here's a new law for all restaurants, especially delis and diners. Once you serve over seven different kinds of sandwiches or more than two varieties of french fries, you must also offer coleslaw. There's nothing more annoying than going to a restaurant, ordering a nice pastrami or smoked-turkey sandwich, and not having a side of coleslaw to go with it.

Strike that. The only thing worse is when they do have coleslaw but have gone all fancy pants with it. I got some coleslaw the other day with apples and cranberries in it. I've seen coleslaw with golden raisins. Stop trying to make it good for me; it's not salad, it's just a way to feel good about eating mayonnaise and corn syrup. Coleslaw wasn't broken, stop trying to fix it.

And enough with the cold butter and chilled silverware. This is not a luxury. Think about everything that is luxurious—heated car seats, mink coats, massages—all warm. Warm is a luxury, not cold. So why are you giving me frozen butter that is harder to spread than the gospel at an al-Qaeda training camp and an ice-cold knife to do it with? Are we not aware that attempting to spread butter at anything below room temperature tears up the bread? You end up with a crust corral enclosing a golf ball of bread with a frozen butter center.

Just like the theme hotels, I don't need the theme restaurant. Your only theme should be good steak.

The prime example of this is Medieval Times. This is a nerd version of Benihana. You have to sit with strangers and eat mediocre food while watching wannabe actors pretend to be Knights of the Round Table. I don't know anyone who thinks, “The prime rib at Arnie Morton's is great, but there's just not enough tournament. I'm heading to Medieval Times.”

And if you do have a theme restaurant, I don't need the cutesy bathroom door signs. Is anyone frequenting your establishment even though you have shitty food and terrible service because of your hilarious bathroom door signs? You're not seeing too many Yelp reviews reading, “The food sucked and the waitress was a cunt but the bathroom doors said ‘T-Birds' and ‘Pink Ladies.' Terrific.” The food-service industry is full of government codes, so in my administration, we'll be adding one more. Just put
MEN
and
WOMEN
on the bathroom signs. I don't need the signs that say
CABALLEROS
and
SEÑORAS
at the Mexican joint or a picture of a mustache or a lipstick kiss mark at a trendy place. Don't get clever or abstract. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. One day I'm gonna have a couple glasses of wine and bust into the ladies' room and have to shout, “Sorry, I had to piss and I didn't know if I was a Doe or a Buck.”

TATTOO SHOPS

One American business that is doing just fine is the tattoo industry. This is boom times for them. In the fifties it was just merchant marines and a few actual marines getting anchors or hearts with “Mom” in them on their upper arm. Now chicks and black guys are getting them in droves. There's no way this could have been predicted when Eisenhower was president. Imagine a black guy going into a tattoo shop right after WWII. Depending on which part of the country he did this in, he might not have come out alive. Now you can't be in the NFL without an illegible tattoo on your arm, or, in some cases, face. And chicks getting tattoos? Forget it. They would have been declared hysterical and put into an asylum back in the good old days. I think this started in the seventies, but really broke in the eighties with punk and the nineties with grunge, and now it's game on. There's no way that Marilyn Monroe would have gotten a tattoo. She was the Pam Anderson of her day. Can you imagine Pam Anderson
without
a tattoo?

But the reason I want to get the government involved in this issue is that I don't think it's a great sign for our future. There are more people under thirty who have tattoos than ones who don't. This makes me shudder. It shows that the next generation has no plans for the future. If you put the barbed-wire tramp stamp on your lower back, you're living for now, as the Pepsi ad commands. You're not thinking about how the tattoo is going to look at forty-five when you're bending over pulling your brood out of the minivan. This “fuck the future” attitude is the cause of many of our nation's biggest problems. Everyone lives their life like a meteor is going to hit the planet next Wednesday. There used to be elders who told us how to prepare for the future. Now, if anyone over forty tells anyone under thirty anything about life, the response is “Fuck you, old man. Go change your diaper.”