You Might Be a Zombie . . . (5 page)

“Looks Like We Made It,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “Ready to Take a Chance Again” were all written by other people. He did turn a cover of the UK hit “Brandy” into a U.S. hit called “Mandy,” a change that probably required
some
writing, or at least the use of a pen.

It was legendary Arista Records exec Clive Davis who pushed Manilow to cover “I Write the Songs.” So a more accurate chorus would be, “I sing the song that Clive Davis tells me to.”

Why didn’t you know that?

Quite simply, he’s ugly. Most people assume Manilow was a hit-writing machine because in the looks department, he’s a passable girlfriend for your bookish aunt who wears Sal y Jessy Raphael glasses. At best.

1. ORSON WELLES DID NOT WRITE
CITIZEN KANE

Citizen Kane
, the fictionalized account of publisher William Randolph Hearst’s life, is often referred to as the greatest film ever made. To say it’s Orson Welles’s signature work is an understatement. It’s like the
Citizen Kane
of understatements. Film geeks speak of the film with biblical reverence, and non-film geeks know better than to question them. It’s one of the great achievements in American popular art, and most assume Wel es conceived and birthed it whole after a night of hermaphroditic self-love.

Which is odd, since even according to the movie credits Welles is the secondary author to screenwriting veteran Herman Mankiewicz. In fact, the few people alive who still give a shit think that Welles’s contributions to the script were minimal. Rita Alexander, who took Mankiewicz’s dictation for the script, was quoted as saying that Wel es did not write or dictate one line of the script. Furthermore, film critic David Thomson, author of a book about the film, has said that “no one can now deny Herman Mankiewicz credit for the germ, shape, and pointed language of the screenplay.”

Why didn’t you know that?

Because it turns out that Wel es was kind of a dick. He wanted the world to think he was a one-stop, all -purpose, filmmaking wunderkind. The RKO-produced program handed out at the movie’s premiere read: “the one-man band, directing, acting, and writing.” Also, in an interview that occurred while writing credit disputes were ongoing, Welles was quoted as saying, “I wrote
Citizen Kane
.”

And although Welles claimed that he intended to credit Mankiewicz all along, Mankiewicz had to complain to the Screen Writers Guild, which then insisted that Mankiewicz be given top bil ing. Mankiewicz also claimed that Welles offered him ten thousand dollars to let him say he wrote it all himself.

So if you didn’t know, it’s probably because Welles wanted it that way. And for those of you keeping score, we also have it on good authority that Welles did not write his own dialogue for his appearance in
The Muppet Movie
.

YOU
know what’s scarier than death? Birth. Anyone considering procreation should know that there are some things about childbirth they’re not tell ing you. Disgusting, horrifying things.

6. THE CARNAGE

Many births involve a procedure called an episiotomy, which comes from the Greek word
epison
, meaning “pubic region,” and the suffix
-tomy
, which apparently means “to cut the living shit out of.”

In an episiotomy, a scalpel is used to artificial y enlarge the vagina.

Why would the doctor want to do such a thing? Why, to keep it from tearing, of course. To the layman, this might seem like starting a knife fight to prevent a shoving match. But that’s only because the layman hasn’t seen the other option: Try to imagine Barney the dinosaur getting into his car by climbing in through the exhaust pipe. well, without some control ed cutting, childbirth can be just like that but in reverse. And with blood. And instead of an exhaust pipe, it’s a vagina.

Yeah, just like that.

5. THE FECES

Not even the most terrifying clips of poo porn on the Internet could prepare you for childbirth. We’l spare most of the smel y details, but rest assured that after the birth experience your view of poop will never be the same.

First off, the mom-to-be is probably going to take a rather sizable dump right in the hospital bed. Yeah, Hollywood tends to leave that part out.

Apparently, passing an eight-pound canned ham through your hooha has a tendency to compress the intestine and push any fecal material it’s holding

out of the body. Thanks to a local anesthetic, Mom may not even know it happened, which means the lucky father-to-be gets to explain why the ten people in the room all just threw up in their mouths.

Secondly, the baby is gonna crap too. That isn’t news. Baby shit yel ow is one of the most popular colors of the new Chevy Camaro. Oddly, that same color is not an option available for the baby’s first duke. For the first few days the baby’s bowel movements will be black and have the consistency of fresh roofing tar—and will be approximately as easy to clean up.

To put it in perspective: Have you ever spent a night drinking cheap beer, only to wake up with a headache and a serious case of black diarrhea? It’s a lot like that. Which begs the question, How did the baby get Budweiser in the womb? The answer of course is: Through the umbilical cord. Duh!

4. THE PLACENTA

Picture a vagina blowing a meat bubble. Now imagine someone surgical y attaching that meat bubble to a newborn via a pulsating sausage casing.

Webster’s
defines the placenta as “the organ in most mammals, formed in the lining of the uterus . . . that provides for the nourishment of the fetus and the elimination of its waste products.”

Urban Dictionary would probably describe it as “the lumpy, blood-soaked terror that comes out after the baby and will visit you in your nightmares for years to come.”

The upside of witnessing the birth of a placenta is that the image it burns into your soul will make you thankful for the six sex-free weeks you have ahead of you. The downside is that you will forever wonder if your baby had a previously unnoticed twin who could have made you a fortune as the star of untold numbers of B horror films.

3. THE ALIEN-SHAPED HEADS

By
alien
, we don’t mean the guys you picked up at the Home Depot to help deliver the baby. We mean the Sigourney Weaver-fighting kind (whose infamous chest bursting birth scene, incidental y, is the only thing most expectant fathers have to prepare them for the act of childbirth).

As it turns out, babies’ heads are soft and don’t become hard until months or years after they’re born. This explains why you don’t usually see them at col ege parties, crushing beer cans with their foreheads.

Either way, having a soft skul comes in handy when you’re trying to be born without kil ing your mother in the process. Unfortunately, their heads don’t instantly regain their shape once they pop out, so your offspring will spend a day or two looking like a misshapen blob of ugly before you can safely take it out in public to go hat shopping.

2. THE FETAL MONITORING

If the doctor feels that your baby is at risk of anything (juvenile diabetes, low birth weight, high birth weight, medium birth weight), or if he just feels that he can charge you more, he may elect to hook up a fetal monitor. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? well, that’s because
fetal monitor
is a nice way of saying “a twisted metal thingy with wires coming out of it that we’re going to screw directly into your unborn baby’s head.”

Now, the fetal monitor itself isn’t all that scary looking. But the fact that they jam it into the baby’s soft spot while he or she is still in the womb, and leave it inside the skul until after the baby comes out, should bring back vivid memories of when that baby gets hooked up to the Matrix in the first movie.

Couple that with the fact that a baby’s heart slows way down during every contraction, which sets off a little alarm on the monitor similar to the one that goes off when a patient flatlines on
Scrubs
, and you may find that you have shit your pants before the kid is even out. Don’t feel bad though. Like we said, there is a lot of pooping going on at this point, so if you do let one slide, just motion toward the mother when she isn’t looking and plug your nose as if to say, “Yeah, I smel it too. It was her.”

1. THE BILL

Births are really expensive. Even a complication-free birth is likely to cost upward of ten thousand dol ars, and if your baby comes out and so much as sneezes in the delivery room, this number is likely to start rol ing up like a pinbal score. Sure, maybe you’re one of those fancy-pants families with “health insurance.” But tack on the cost of the car seats, baby clothes, toys, diapers, bottles, playpens, and some placenta-memory-erasing Belgian ale, and you can plan on having spent the equivalent of a new car before you set foot outside the hospital.

So basically you let a strange man touch your (wife’s) private parts, write him a check, watch him speed away in a Lexus, and then spend the next three months telling everyone what a miracle the whole thing was. Congratulations!