Rubber Balls and Liquor (5 page)

But I kept thinking of Julia Roberts—again, like every other not-so-incredibly-good-looking guy in the world. I followed her career. I closed my eyes and imagined her going down on me. In a room filled with pillows and swimsuit models and, strangely, small kitchen appliances. I looked for opportunities to make jokes about her, and maybe make myself feel a little bit better about being so much less attractive than the misshapen-headed Lyle Lovett that she would never even consider going out with me. Or down on me. Or even just being in close proximity to me.

And then, just when I was feeling so low it appeared I might never write a good, mean-spirited, beguilingly brilliant celebrity joke again, fate smiled down upon me with a close encounter punch line to my Julia Roberts woes. It was almost enough to jump-start the entire genre. You see, people forget that before she threw in with Lyle Lovett, Julia Roberts nearly married Kiefer Sutherland, who I believe was the love child of Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland. Like Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland was a hot young actor at the time, a guy who was actually good-looking, in a rugged, über-masculine, non–Gilbert Gottfried sort of way. But if you believed the tabloids Julia Roberts broke Kiefer Sutherland's heart just as they were headed to the altar—and why wouldn't you believe the tabloids? It's not like they've ever gotten anything
wrong
.

Anyway, it worked out that one of Julia's movies was playing on my flight to Los Angeles, and it further worked out that Kiefer Sutherland himself was seated in the row directly in front of me.

Again, pure, sweet manna from comedy heaven—and at an altitude of 30,000 feet, we were that much closer to heaven, so the manna was also oven-fresh.

Now, here's where things took an interesting turn. The stewardess got on the plane's loudspeaker system and announced that the movie was about to begin and that she would be coming down the aisle soon with headphones for passengers interested in watching. And, she added, she would appreciate it if everyone would please close their window shades so that we could all fool ourselves into thinking we were sitting in a darkened movie theater instead of careening through the skies at some ungodly rate of speed.

Well, as far as good old Kiefer was concerned, the stewardess might as well have asked us to shit gravy—and then crack the window a bit in consideration of the other passengers.

A couple minutes later, the stewardess stopped at Kiefer Sutherland's row, and asked in her most professional, hostess-y voice if he would like a set of headphones.

“What's the movie?” Kiefer Sutherland asked.

“Julia Roberts in
Runaway Bride
,” the stewardess answered—quite reasonably, she probably thought—and at this Kiefer Sutherland merely turned his head and looked out the window. How perfect was that? The comedy gods were smiling on me that day, dear reader, and not because I'd been gifted the chance to see a hackneyed and formulaic Julia Roberts movie. Not at all. The real, everlasting gift of comedy gold was that I was seated directly behind Kiefer Sutherland, as he himself sat in the uneasy crosshairs of his private and public lives. I believed this was what poets have referred to as delicious irony, and I chose to imagine that Kiefer Sutherland made a silent vow to himself that there was no fucking way he would close his shade and darken the cabin to enhance everyone's viewing enjoyment of his ex-fiancée's charade of a farce of a film that put his private heartbreak on public display, but it's possible he just took a nap.

For the time being at least, I was a happy little comedian, and the rest of the flight passed without incident. Really, the time just flew by. It's like we were up in the air or something.

It's a strange business, this celebrity business—but like it or not, accept it or not, I've managed to fit myself into it, even if I'm only sitting one row behind it and can only see the back of its head, like I was on that flight to Los Angeles. Like Kirstie Alley squeezing into last season's bikini, I've fit myself into it. Like Valerie Bertinelli buttering her thighs to slip into something more comfortable, I've fit myself into it. And it never ceases to amaze me, the strange dance that happens when I run into someone I'm supposed to know in show business—because we once sat on the same dais at a roast, or waited in the same green room for our turn on some soundstage. Or maybe somebody I worked with on some movie at one point worked with this other somebody on some other movie.

It doesn't matter where we happen to be, or how famous we are, or how famous we
think
we are, we fit ourselves into each situation like we were born to it. And—invariably, unavoidably—we're drawn to each other. Like the time I ran into Howie Mandel at a radio station in Chicago. He was making the rounds, promoting his book about being a germaphobe. I was out promoting the dirty jokes DVD I couldn't interest Harrison Ford in turning into a big-budget movie. We talked for a bit at the station, between our interview segments, and as Howie left he told me where he was staying and suggested I stop by afterward.

This alone wasn't unusual. I'd known Howie for years. We weren't exactly friends—he'd never invite me to his kid's Bar Mitzvah, except possibly to wait tables—but we ran in some of the same circles. When you work in stand-up, you tend to follow the careers of other people who work in stand-up. You know all the same people, the same places. It's kind of like the way everyone assumes that all black people know each other, only in this case we do. Kind of, sort of. Especially if we're Jewish. Then there's a secret handshake, too.

Anyway, I did my interview and told the cleaned-up versions of some of my dirty jokes. Then I went to see Howie at his hotel. Here again, not so unusual, right? We can ignore each other in New York or Los Angeles, but since we'd run into each other on the road, in the middle of nowhere, we had to make this little extra effort to get together, only it just so happened that I was suffering with a really bad cold. I was coughing and sneezing like crazy, and it never once occurred to me how deliciously ironic it was that I would now be doing my coughing and sneezing next to one of the biggest germaphobes of our time.

(Is there any other kind of irony,
really
?)

Let me put this in terms you can easily understand: Howie Mandel is the kind of guy who would ask a girl to gargle with Purell before giving him a blow job. He's over-the-top about this stuff, but I didn't think anything of it just yet. I was too focused on the particulars of our celebrity dance. We found a nice little seating area in the hotel lobby and sat down, and I started coughing almost as soon as we started talking. I was having these uncontrollable fits of coughing, just hacking and gurgling and sounding like I was about to spit up blood.

Howie recoiled, like he'd just heard a gunshot. He said, “Wait a minute, Gilbert. Are you
sick
?” He looked at me like I'd just taken a big, hot, steaming shit, right in the middle of the hotel lobby. Or, like I'd just taken a swig from a bottle of Purell and was about to go down on him.

I said, “I have this cough. I can't seem to shake it.” Then I coughed some more, and attempted a full body shudder meant to indicate that I was trying to shake it.

He said, “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Then he moved over to the far edge of the sofa where we were sitting and turned away from me. I think he even covered his face with a scarf. He was like a kid in kindergarten, deathly afraid of catching my cooties.

I said, “Oh, that's brilliant, Howie. That's very mature, and scientifically sound. Of course, my germs can't make a left turn and find you facing away from me, all curled up like that in the corner of the couch. They can only go forward, in a straight line.” Then I put on my most annoying, most sarcastic voice (as opposed to my merely somewhat annoying, somewhat sarcastic voice) and said, “You're perfectly safe now.”

He said, “Fuck you, Gilbert.”

The great part about this visit with Howie Mandel was that we continued to sit and talk in this way for a while longer. He asked about my family. I asked about his. He asked about my career. I asked about his. And yet the whole time he was curled up in his corner of the couch, facing away from me, talking into his scarf, while I was doing what I could to steer my germs directly onto his person.

And then at some midpoint in this weird, sick exchange, it occurred to me … the answer to one of life's great questions: no, Rue McClanahan might have been nothing to sneeze at, but Howie Mandel?

 

 

3

Not Living up to My Potential

I don't like to talk about my personal life. It's too personal. Also, a part of me thinks my personal life is nobody's business. Another part can't imagine why anyone would even want to know about this stuff. However, I guess I could share a little bit of it with you, dear reader, but only if you promise not to tell anybody. You see, I've spent all this time building all these walls and closing myself off from all these memories and feelings that I'd hate to undo all that good work just to sell a couple books. That sort of thing would be beneath a stand-up guy like me, don't you think? Besides, I'm not really in touch with my memories and feelings—at least, not enough to write about them. We used to be in touch, but we had a falling-out. We're working through a few things.

But this is a book, so it's not all about me. Yeah, I know, it's
my
book, so you'd think it might be all about me, but you'd be wrong. As it happens, it's also about this character I once saw in a movie, who seemed to have his shit together. He was a dashing young man, fairly oozing with charm and warmth and good cheer. Me, I'm just fairly oozing. This other character, he had women and money and cars. Me, I just have dick jokes and some loose change and I can sometimes tell the difference between a car and a bus. Together we make an interesting pair.

Okay, so let's just say this is the part of the book that's based on my life. It's not
about
my life, but it's based on it. It's like that line you sometimes see on movie posters, “Inspired by a true story.” It means a whole bunch of stuff is made up. The way it works is I think back to something that actually happened, in such a way that I'm inspired to stretch the truth, to embellish, to exaggerate. Basically, to lie. Only here my stories are not exactly inspiring, although there may have been some perspiration involved. It's not quite the same thing, I know, but I thought I'd mention it.

Here are a couple half-truths and distorted memories from my childhood. I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to figure out which is which. Let's start with my father, who served in the military in World War II. He was a Nazi officer, it turned out. (Who knew?) He masterminded the Third Reich. (Again, a big surprise to us Gottfrieds, who were led to believe all along he had been working on the First Reich, which of course at the time would have been known as merely the Reich, since there was no reason to line them up and start counting just yet.)

Actually, let me amend that last misstatement: my father masterminded the Final Solution. That sounds so much better than being the guy behind all those Reichs, but you can't really blame him; it wasn't really his fault; he was angry at his accountant at the time.

Now, I'm afraid I must put these proceedings on pause for a bit to let you in on a curious exchange between me and my editor. When he read the first draft of the manuscript, he scribbled in the margins that these last few paragraphs about Nazis and the Final Solution didn't really work for him. I couldn't make sense of his handwriting, so I called and asked him to read it to me, and after he did I couldn't make sense of his point. I thought,
Oh, the Third Reich didn't really work for you, huh? So sorry to hear that. Perhaps we can go back and try again. Maybe we can get it right this time.

We went back and forth on this, in phone calls and e-mails, until it was finally agreed that we would let those earlier paragraphs stand as originally written. The kicker came when my editor threw up his hands in exasperation and sent me an e-mail of surrender. I knew he'd thrown up his hands because he told me later he had to type with his elbows.

(Confession: I know how difficult this can be, typing with your elbows. I've tried to do it myself on several occasions—mostly when I was looking for porn on the Internet and my hands weren't exactly free.)

He wrote, “Do whatever the fuck you want, Gilbert. You're the legendary comedian.”

I sent him back an e-mail, apologizing sincerely for having ruined the Holocaust for him. “Trust me,” I wrote. “It won't happen again. NEVER AGAIN!”

When my father wasn't campaigning for a new world order, he liked to work with tools. He was very handy—which in turn came in handy with respect to his thriving Final Solution business. He had a hardware store, and he knew how to use everything he sold. This must have been a good quality in a hardware store owner, although you'd never have known it to look at his business ledger. (Also, you'd never have guessed he even
had
a business ledger.) He had drawers and drawers of nails and screws and nuts and bolts, of every conceivable size. He was a regular Mr. Fix-It. He could break open walls, rewire an electrical system and repair the plumbing. Sometimes he did these things in our neighbors' apartments, and he'd have to work very quickly, before the police showed up.