The Joy of Hate (12 page)

Some people might say, “Dude, it’s Twitter. Lighten up.” But those people are fools. Once it got on Raw Story, it would be on the HuffPo, then the New York media sites, then MSNBC, etc. I had to kill it before the caterpillar became a butterfly (which is generally my approach to caterpillars and butterflies).

So, back to the apartment. Yeah, the East Coast liberals looking at real estate must really hate people like me. And I have to sell my apartment, so I have to get myself out of the “I hate conservatives” equation. I have to erase my existence in my 900-square-foot apartment. Because I don’t really believe a lefty—no matter how
much they love the apartment, in a New York real estate market that remains highly competitive—would buy a place inhabited by someone who, in their mind, probably eats the homeless (I do).

In real estate sections of city magazines, you’ll occasionally come across a feature on an agent whose job it is to sell houses where grisly crimes took place. Suicide, drug overdoses, mass murder, dance parties hosted by Bob Schieffer—all of these lower the price of property, not just for that residence but for the places surrounding it. Debates occur as to whether that information should be disclosed during the selling, or somehow interested buyers should be allowed find out by themselves. Maybe they’ll just assume it’s a wine stain.

Sadly, I’ve never seen an article on how to sell your place if you are a well-known righty. Maybe it isn’t as big a deal as I think, but I don’t know anyone else who has to hide the things they read or write before an open house. Not that I was forced to do it, but it made sense to do it anyway. It’s like if I had a bondage fetish, and I had to hide the equipment. It’s why I have a false floor under the bed for the fetish clothing and restraints. (I told the contractor it was for Christmas decorations.) I wonder if there is a “conservative lived here” exorcist service? Maybe they can import the Reverend Wright to wave around a copy of
The Nation
and dispel all the evil, righty demons.

I don’t think this is an issue for someone working at MSNBC, because, of course, liberal perspectives are embraced by New Yorkers. If you were to take in an open house, and spy a book on a coffee table by Bill Maher, you might throw up, but most Manhattanites would ponder pleasantly how they share the same assumptions as the homeowner. It might even make them more likely to buy—even if they can’t afford the place (something that doesn’t
bother most New Yorkers).
We just deserve to live there! These are my people!

While we were selling the apartment, we were also looking. And in nearly every place we hit we found the same old crap on coffee tables. Books by Bill Moyers and Al Gore seemed common. I didn’t see any copies of
Decision Points
lying around. But it didn’t bother me. It’s part of the wallpaper. If I buy the place, I ain’t buying the stuff that goes with it. One pretty cool apartment I saw had the owner’s stuff everywhere. Apparently he created soundtracks to movies, and he had his many awards all over the place. It didn’t make me want to buy the place—it just made me feel like the guy who lived there was a show-off. And he could’ve at least closed his robe during the open house.

And it wasn’t like I tried to get a job as a talking head whose role is to challenge the left. Remember, I was a fitness editor—for
Prevention
magazine! The magazine that made
Reader’s Digest
look hip. I taught old people how to do sit-ups on cruise ships. I was also editor of
Men’s Health
. Then
Stuff
, and finally
Maxim
. These are not stepping stones to conservative punditry. Nope. I was sequestered in magazine publishing, a bastion of stifling liberalism so mundane in belief that for everyone in the profession, politics doesn’t even come up. The assumptions are such a given, it’s almost impossible for them to see the point of debate.

Being an open conservative in publishing is akin to being a gay communist in 1950s Nebraska.

They would find out my dirty secret by accident. Sitting in the cafeteria, everyone laughing about another stupid Republican, they’d see I wasn’t joining in. Instead I’d be lost in thought, stabbing an overcooked baked potato. And they’d ask why I didn’t find Newt’s latest gaffe hilarious. And then it would unfold: First,
they would assume I was joking when I disagreed with them. Then, when they realized I was serious, they were confused. The kind of confusion you see on the face of a puppy watching a clothes dryer. The stages were as predictable as the ones for grief. Then, for the rest of my career there, I became “that guy.” The coldhearted right-winger with a dungeon full of delicious orphans.

The good news is that when my political views spread around that company, like-minded strangers would pop out of the woodwork. They would stop by my office to chat. The president of Rodale Press suddenly became a close friend—a telling fact that the most powerful person in the building was a righty. In that company, possessing over a thousand employees, there were maybe ten of us. Which is nine more than I expected. We would meet in the basement, at night. Using a secret password: “Morey Amsterdam.” (Don’t ask me why—and if you ask anyone else about this they’ll just deny everything. That was part of our pact.)

Where I work now, there are plenty of outspoken righties. But there are also tons of lefties. There are also lots of gays and greenies. There, everything is tolerated, so much more than at all the other “open-minded” places I toiled in.

My employer is so tolerant, in fact, that it saves lives. I end this chapter on a surreal note: Sitting at lunch with the staff of one of my shows in a tony Midtown steakhouse. At the table sat an immensely lovable, colorful, hard-charging, cantankerous lefty known for running the Dukakis campaign and working in the Carter administration, among other things. He’s a bright man, whose views can veer from sharp to delightfully incoherent within the same sentence. During the appetizers, he went blue. Then purple. He was choking to death on an oversized shrimp
(not me). The first one up at the table? The boss. This most evil of evil right-wingers pulled the lefty out of his chair and administered the Heimlich like a seasoned paramedic. Progress was made, but something was still stuck in the poor guy’s throat, and a fellow cohost—bigger and with longer arms—jumped over the table and finished the Heimlich successfully, and the lefty was saved by a righty.

Yep, a righty saved a lefty. But don’t read too much into it, or you might think conservatives aren’t so bad after all. It’s like finding out Darth Vader was your father.

SO I’M SMOKING A CIGARETTE
on the corner near my apartment when I hear two girls behind me, heckling me. Like I’m playing third base for the Phillies, which I imagine is a sports team made of adorable horses. At any rate, they’re loud. The girls, that is.

“Get lung cancer, man.”

“Secondhand smoke, asshole.”

“Hope you get cancer.”

I did my best to ignore it. But they kept going, getting louder and louder and saying all sorts of crap. (I think they might have had Tourette’s.) Finally, in a monumental moment of stupidity, I turned around and asked them, logically, “Why are you doing this?”

They said, “Cuz it’s secondhand smoke. You’re going to die.” I stupidly tried to explain how that really doesn’t work outside.

Secondhand smoke may be the most exaggerated panic since global warming, attention deficit disorder, bird flu, and Yahtzee combined. But because smokers are the easiest target to project your instant outrage onto, no one really questions it anymore.

I joked to the girls that they were getting more toxic stuff from the bus billowing exhaust nearby. But sensing they had a hapless
participant in their afternoon volley of acceptable bullying, they started once again, saying they wanted me to die.

Now, I left out the part that these girls were black. By the way, there were plenty of black people on Ninth Avenue also smoking. That’s the thing about smoking—everyone does it. It’s a unifier. The great equalizer. A good lung dart has brought more people together than Kofi Annan singing Kumbaya. Addiction is color blind. It’s like stupidity. The reason this is important is that as a middle-aged white-guy smoker, I will lose, on paper, and elsewhere, when engaging in a debate with two young black women. In the name of modern political correctness, I must tolerate the abuse of strangers, even if I’m innocent. These delightful young lasses, however, could come after me with a vengeance. And, again, I didn’t want to end up on NY1 News (I was in pajamas under my coat) because my appropriate response would be construed as a racial attack.

I kept walking and they followed me, harassing me even more, even louder. Finally, I snapped, turned around, told them to fuck themselves, and tossed my cig.

The damn thing bounced. And nearly landed on their feet.

They came for me. For a brief, ugly moment, I thought my life was heading for total and complete ruin. Surely, I would be attacked, a crowd would form around me, chanting “Racist, racist, pajama-wearing racist,” and ultimately I would be arrested. My face would be all over the news, with clever headlines like “Butt-Loving Bigot.” I’d have to publicly apologize, shed tears in a press conference, and enter private one-on-one counseling with a man named after an herb. I’d get an earring and make PSAs against bullying. I’d denounce patriarchy and gender oppression, then call for reparations and a new currency based on the likenesses of dead hip-hop artists. I would confess I was a victim of
adolescent beatings, and also a bisexual hustler during college. I would claim I was molested by an overfamiliar emu at the zoo as a child (which is b.s.; he was just being polite, although he still sends me flowers on my birthday). I would reveal my addiction to snorting pixie sticks in public toilets with Pauly Shore. In prime time, Dr. Drew would hold me while I shook with tears.

This horror fantasy was way too much to bear. I scurried off into a drugstore and hid behind an
Us Weekly
(where I was gratified to learn that Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, had adopted either a child or a member of the Kardashian family—I was understandably distracted at the time, and possibly drunk).

My point is, I had three strikes against me: I am white, I am male, and I was smoking. The girls had three strikes for them: they were young, female, and black. I realized that no matter how this “debate” would unfold, I would probably be the bad guy. I was already deemed bad. In the world of tolerance, I had no protective force field against ready-made rage—but they did. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but so be it. I guess this was payback for four hundred years of oppression that I keep hearing about but had nothing to do with it.

If only this were an isolated incident, regarding my smoking habit.

I smoke—not a lot, but I smoke. And I smoke outside, which puts me in the vicinity of other people—primarily nonsmokers, who are usually pleasant people as long as they don’t talk to me. Sometimes, when they get drunk, they start hitting me up for cigarettes, looking at me as if I am some weird cigarette tree, which they can freely grab a smoke from whenever they’re tipsy. (As a rule, I never give out cigs to strangers—especially in New York, where it’s fast approaching a buck a cigarette. I look at cigs like I
look at birth control—you can buy your own—unless you’re Sandra Fluke.)

But here’s an experiment I undertook to illustrate how some behaviors are tolerated over others. I’m sitting outside at the hotel bar of this new joint in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s got a beautiful wraparound terrace, and I’m lounging at a table, with no intention of smoking. The signs plainly say “no smoking,” and I’m anything but a lawbreaker. I’ll happily go downstairs to the street to puff. The exercise is fantastic for sculpting quads.

The bar is sparsely attended. In fact, it’s pretty much empty, but clean and laid-back, the sun creeping down as night approaches. I sit for twenty minutes waiting for a server to get my first drink. Then thirty minutes. It’s now forty-five minutes and no one is waiting on me. Perhaps they’re too busy handicapping the Tonys. So I look to my friend and say, “Watch this.” I light up a cig. I take a drag, and instantaneously, I have a bartender, a waitress, a manager, and a bouncer at my left side. In unison, they tell me, “There is no smoking here.” It was then I said, “I know. I just wanted service, and smoking was the only way to get your attention.” They seemed peeved at my cleverness—and took my drink order. I’m sure they wrote, “Asshole at table 7” on my check. But after getting my drink, and drinking it, the same thing happened: After an hour, no service in sight. If I had suffered a coronary, I would have died on the spot. What I couldn’t understand: Why were we getting no service but there were waiters everywhere? Did I forget to change my underwear? The answer is yes, but that wasn’t the issue. They seemed to be in some sort of complex dance, a floating ritual of purposeless behavior involving serving trays, gossip, and ice. Otherwise known as “New York service industry hipsters and the ennui they’ve embraced.” Also known as: lazy.

So I looked to my friend and said, “One more time.” And sure enough, holding the cigarette was enough. It wasn’t even lit, and I had the cavalry of angry servers. This time they weren’t polite, and the manager scolded me. I replied, “If you were a decent manager, this wouldn’t happen. You care more about smokers than service, you bozo.” Because the manager was not from New York—or the country, for that matter—he took
bozo
to mean something pejorative, far worse than it was, and I was escorted out by some beefy men. My friend stayed back (traitor that he is) and noticed everyone there was shaken by the incident.

All over smoking.

I haven’t been back there since, which sucks, because it’s a beautiful spot. But there are lots of beautiful spots, and some of them “tolerate” smoking, even if the city doesn’t. The one bright spot about the shitty economy: the city has given up being a nuisance, and looks the other way if someone is smoking at a café table if it helps business. We just don’t have the luxury of fining people over a behavior whose illegality is based on faulty science and people’s phony outrage over something they don’t do.