Thursday, December 31, 2009

Wanna Sleep With Me? (Cigar Smoke 12-31-09)

Would you like to sleep with me? (Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you spill your coffee.) Actually, I’ve asked that question to many women over the years and, of course, they assumed that I meant would they like to have sex with me, and their answers have ranged from “With you?” to offensively feminine finger-pointing pissy laughter to being nailed on the side of the head with a purse to having to excuse myself before the police came — and once, to having to dodge projectile vomiting.

OK, forget the sex thing. I get it. I’m talking about actual sleep. I seem to have a few quirks when I get in the sack. (And that’s not counting that spaced-out country music groupie in Bakersfield 30 years ago who mistook me for Buck Owens.)

Here’s what I do when I get in bed. First of all, I have to wear boxer shorts. I cannot sleep in briefs. I just can’t do it. And I can’t sleep naked because of the restraining order. And I can’t wear pajamas ever since I went to college and wore them once and my so-called buddies ripped them up and waited until I got back from my classes to burn them in front of me. And I can’t wear a T-shirt. Just boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts. Big, loose, oversize boxer shorts.

And once I am actually in bed I have a set of rituals I must go through before I can even think about going to sleep. I am not joking here. I have to do the following. And in this particular order. No variance at all. Variance is for sissies. First of all, I have to sigh and moan. I just lie down and it seems as if the weight of the world lies down with me. And I sigh and I kind of moan “Oh, God, that feels good.” And I throw in a couple of other moans just because that is always what I do.

Then I consciously start addressing various body parts that need attention. My back is always first. I have a chronically bad back, and I have to press it down into the bed until it hurts. And it hurts every damn night, and I keep pressing it harder and harder into the mattress and the hurt kind of feels good and I moan out a few Oh, Gods to somebody — I’m not sure who.

Then I take the heel of my right foot and push on the inside of my left knee maybe three or four times. I’ve had two operations on that knee and it, like me, is somehow just not right. So when I push it with my heel that stretches it out — and the pain is both expected and welcome. And then I moan just a little louder than my back moan.

Then I take my right heel and continue down below the knee to my left calf. And then I massage my left calf a few times to take the pressure off of it, and it seems to relax me. And then, because I want to be fair, I take my left heel and go over and massage my right calf so it won’t feel neglected. I am not making this up. I do this, dammit. Every night.

Then I take one heel and put it in the ball of one foot and massage the bottom of that foot and then take the other heel and massage the bottom of the other foot. This allows me to draw one final moan-sigh out of my excuse for a functioning body. “Oh, God, that feels good.”

Then I pull the covers up around my neck and tuck the left covers under my left cheek really securely, and then I tuck the right covers under my right cheek, and it’s all very snug and tight like a Boy Scout mummy bag. It makes me feel, well, toasty. And then I rub my bare chest vigorously for a few seconds, and just before my chest hair catches on fire, I stop and enjoy the warmth.

Now, I move into my final phase. (No, not senility.) I interlace my fingers and rest them on my toasty chest and start to crack my knuckles. But I don’t just crack my knuckles. No, I count the number of successful cracks for each hand. For some reason, I can crack more of the fingers on my right hand than on my left hand. Usually I crack, maybe, three fingers on my right hand and only two on my left. Only rarely does my left hand ever win. And even rarer still are the nights when I successfully crack all my fingers. I think this has only happened three or four times in the last 10 years. And when it did happen, I was so excited I had a hard time going to sleep. But, like I said, that hardly ever happens.

Usually, I finish my knuckle-cracking ritual and I give one final sighing moan to the gods of sleep, and I lie perfectly still and let myself metaphorically melt into the bed like a drunk Zen guy. And I fall asleep within 30 seconds. Like a damn clock, baby.

Next week, I’ll tell you how I brush my teeth.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Giving the Gift That Never Starts Giving (Cigar Smoke 12-17-09)

I try to give good gifts at Christmas time. In fact, most people think I am very trying. Last year I asked someone who had received a gift from me how they liked it. And they said, “You are very trying.”

Like I was saying, I usually give pretty good gifts. But I do have a tendency to push Santa’s chunky envelope just a little. A couple of years ago I gave someone in our extended family a gift that I didn’t know what it was until after she got it. Really. I bought this kind of psycho-looking funky metal art object with arms reaching to Pomona kind-of-statue thing. At the time, I felt a little uneasy buying it, but I thought it looked pretty cool so I pulled the Visa on it.

Then when the unbelievably happy recipient of the gift opened it, she was very excited. She said, “Wow! I’ve always wanted a jewelry butler.” I am not kidding you. I had purchased a jewelry butler not knowing jewelry butlers even existed. She asked me where I found this and I had to tell her the truth — that I had searched the Internet for months and talked to jewelry experts around the country until I had found just the perfect jewelry butler I knew she would love. (Please don’t tell me what a jewelry butler does. I don’t want to know. My ignorance and I are very happy together.)

I admit I do try to give gifts that are a little off the beaten track. I like to give gifts that nobody would ever give themselves. I look for gifts out in left field, just north of the power alleys. Once Robert Frost told me one of my gifts was on a road that shouldn’t even be considered.

Yes, I am the guy who gives you that purple elephant footrest. I can’t think of a better way to rest your tired feet than propping them up on the back of a foot stool that looks like an elephant, a purple elephant. You know you wouldn’t buy that for yourself.

I once gave a newlywed couple I knew a Christmas gift of a power drill. I thought to myself, just how many pretty, useful things can one couple use. So I sprang for a Black & Decker beauty that could drill through cement, and I’ll never forget what the wife said to me after she opened it: “When did you get out of prison?” You talk about a moment of Christmas joy.

But last year something very unusual happened. I was visiting the house of someone whom I had given what I thought was a really nice gift and, hot damn, they actually had it in their kitchen and were actually using a gift that I had actually given. Actually. It was incredible.

I said, “Do you remember the wonderfully thoughtful person who gave you this stunning gift?” The woman whom I had asked, at first, tried to not tell me who it was, but I held her down near the sink and had my knee on her apron-covered upper torso until she said, “You did. You did. Thank you. Stop.” I said, “Yes, it was me who gave you that cool gift. Thank you for remembering.”

I had given them one of those combo coffee pot and tea-water-heating units that lets you use individual packets of specialty coffee or tea packets to make your own favorite beverage. That way everyone in your family can have just the right drink for themselves. It’s just so modern and efficient and cool (almost snazzy) that I feel like breaking out into a break dance. That reminds me; a few years ago I gave my 80-year-old uncle some break-dancing lessons. He made it to the lesson where he spins on his head in the kitchen. His widow never forgave me for that one.

But that combo coffee-brewing baby was a hit. I just love going over there when they throw a little party and walking among the coffee- and tea-drinking guests. Everyone is getting the exact drink they want and love and need. A latte. A mint tea. A cappuccino imotatte. An English tea. A Chinese tea. A Chai tea. A Nestlé’s cocoa packet some little fart neighbor kid snuck in. It just makes my Christmas heart sing.

Speaking of Christmas singing, I bought our family a wonderful gift many years ago and it still is the most joyous gift we as a family have ever received, (although, technically, because I was the one who gave it, I don’t know if I can receive it, too. In the spirit of the season, let’s just say I can.)

Anyway, I gave the family a Christmas ornament that is painted a bright and shiny Tijuana gold, and if I say so myself, it is quite beautiful. It’s a gold metal ornament that looks like Elvis. Looks just like him. Right down to the drug injection marks on his arms. The detail is amazing. And not only does it look great, it plays two of his Christmas songs — “Blue Christmas” and something else we can’t make out. And get this. The batteries are still going. The same batteries it came with 10 years ago. It makes me want to cry.

My family feels the same way.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Driveways Driving Me Crazy (Cigar Smoke 12-3-09)

I know I am a blessed person. I have a great family. I have both my health and my nine medications. I have a hovel up in Oregon I can escape to. And I have enough money to still be able to subscribe to newspapers. And I’m lanky. I’m living on house money, baby.

But I have to complain about one thing. For the past 38 years, yes 38 damn years, I have had really bad driveways. I bought my first house up in Altadena in 1972. It was such a great house and such a great deal that I just decided to hell with having a bad driveway. But indeed, it was a bad driveway.

The house was on funky little street called Northhaven Lane on a cul-de-sac. (That’s French for “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”) And you came down this very steep hill to get to the front of our house. And then the driveway was on another even steeper hill to get to the garage. Yes, the god of driveways had doubled down on me and had given me an essentially useless, probably criminal, driveway. You could not go down the driveway and have much hope of coming back up the driveway.

Occasionally somebody could do it if they had a Hemi-kind of V8 engine and floored it in reverse and screech-assed up the thing and scared the hell out of me and my insurance agent. But generally, you could go into the driveway, but you could not get out of the driveway. It was like the Roach Motel for Buicks.

I can’t tell you how many plumbers and pizza delivery guys would not even slow their macho butts down when they got to the driveway and ended up on the bottom and had to be towed back out. I should have bought a tow truck but, like now, I wasn’t that bright.

Anyway, it was an ugly driveway and I endured that car-swallowing sucker for 17 years. And then Marge and I moved into another house in Altadena over on Crest Drive. It was another great house, built back into the semi-woods, maybe 100 yards off the street. Well, Virginia, that 100 yards of blacktop was my new driveway nightmare.

No, it wasn’t steep, but it had a few other fun navigational challenges. First of all, the driveway was very narrow and it went over a flood control channel on a stone bridge built by Chinese slave labor in 1896. Then about 50 yards in, there was a huge tree stuck right in the middle of the driveway. And this tree further divided the driveway into our driveway and the driveway of our neighbor who hated our Airedale. He would call us up and say, “Would you please keep that beast of yours quiet?!” And I would tell him, “Marge isn’t that noisy, dammit!”

Speaking of Marge, she would always have her car parked in the garage and she would want to get out at night, and she would say Jimsie Whimsie could you pleasie-wheezie get my car out of the bad old driveway that scares me because I’m a woman and you’re a man and you like backing out backwards and driving in the darkness of death when you can’t see over Chinese slave-labor bridges into seven-foot tree trunks? Please? I’ll make you chocolate-chip cookies and hide them in my bra. (OK, she never said that part about the cookies, but everything else is damn close to being true.)

So I put up with 12 years of the second horrible driveway. And then we moved to our current driveway-challenged house on Braeburn. When we were thinking about buying it, I mentioned to Marge that the driveway wasn’t really that good, and she said that she knew that, but it was better than the last driveway. And I said yes, it was better — in kind of the same way Mussolini might have been better than Hitler.

Well, she looked at me, closed her eyes, opened them up again, and I was still there, and then she turned to the Realtor and said, “We’ll take it.” So we’ve been in this driveway hellhole for the last nine years. And, OK, I admit that it isn’t quite as bad as the other two nightmare driveways of my past, but it still is not good. You see, it is another long driveway that goes right from the street straight back into the backyard. But now we have a gate to the backyard, which I have to open and close all the time and it’s a hard-to-muffle-my-screams kind of gate.

And then once you get inside the gate you have to kind of split off a little to get both cars in there. And, of course, Marge has her car in the garage and I have to keep mine out in the coldness and dampness where squirrels can take their little dumps on it.

So now when Marge needs to go out and my squirrel-turded-up car is there, Marge will coyly say, “My car needs to get out.” She flicks her eyelashes a couple of times, and adds, “You’re so manly when you’re backing my car up.” And I say, “I’m in my robe! It’s midnight!” And she says, “The neighbors probably won’t call the sheriff again.”

God, what I would give for a circular driveway. Or a couple of chocolate-chip cookies with bra marks.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Spice Up Your Sex Life (Cigar Smoke 11-19-09)

OK, admit it. Your marriage could use a little juice. A little tap on the accelerator of love. How do I know this? Because I have my ear to the ground and my nose to the wind and my mouth to the top of a Coors Light. Like the other night, a friend of mine told me that he had cuddled up to his wife, and said, “You wanna have some steamy sex tonight?” And she said, “Sure, who’s coming over?”

Now if you are a guy, that is not something you want to hear from your Spousy Wousy. So I would like to offer a little bit of marital advice to all the men out there. (You women can read along, too, if you promise not to use this information in your divorce hearing.)

OK, here we go. You’ve been married for a while. The last sexual conquest you had, other than your wife, was a female Sherpa on Mount Everest. Yes, it was exciting getting her out of that big, furry Eskimo outfit, and yes, you enjoyed her moaning your name in Urdu. But that was a long time ago. You are now married. You are not bored. You love your wife. You still find her romantically pursuable to engage in naughty stuff. But you need a little kick.

A while back I thought I’d jack things up a notch, so I suggested that my dearly beloved get flat-out jay-naked and wrap herself in Saran Wrap and meet me at the front door when I came home from work. I know this is kind of trite. It’s been done before. But it had never been done for me. So I was really jazzed. And I rushed home that evening and knocked on the front door, and my Wifey Poo answered the door, and she was stark naked! Of course, it might have been a little sexier if she hadn’t wrapped herself in aluminum foil. I remember it well. All she said was, “We were out of Saran Wrap.”

Another approach you might want to try is using sex toys and marital aids. You might want to try that. Not me. I’m too afraid. I know if I showed up some night in the bedroom with a whip and wearing German boots and running some battery-operated object that whirred, I would not get the desired affect. I just know my beloved would be laughing so damn hard she would spit up on her flannel nightgown and keep slapping her knee. Who needs that?

Here’s something that is not quite as extreme as whirring things. This is a killer. You should pay me for this one. Please don’t tell anybody you heard it here. (I could lose my poetic license.)

When you get in bed with your Loin Mate, just nuzzle her a little, and be playful, and put your finger on her cheek and let it run down her neck and then let your finger drift to the top of her shoulder and then on to that upper chest region where it is OK to touch without permission and then stop, and arch your eyebrows, twice, and say, “Darling, I would like to spice up our sex life a little.”

Hopefully, she is not laughing and says coyly or with slight alarm, “How?” And then you reach down and grab the little red and white tin container you have put on the nightstand and you sprinkle some cinnamon right there on her upper chest freedom zone. And as she is looking puzzled, you say, “Cinnamon. Spice. Cinnamon is a spice. Spice up our love life. Get it? Get it?” And if she tries to dial 9-1-1, say, “Columbus sailed over here for spice. Just do it for Columbus. Please.”

OK, OK, maybe you want something that is a tad more subtle than sprinkling cinnamon on your Matey Watey’s Chesty Westy. May I suggest a Mystery Evening of Love? Yes, I have done this many times. You just arrange the evening ahead of time but you don’t tell your wife where you are going. It’s that damn simple. Even you can do it.

No, you can’t go to a sports event. Geez. And don’t go to your gentleman’s club and say, “Uh, Destiny, this is my wife.” Don’t do that. That’s not mystery, that’s masochism. Other than that, most things are open. It doesn’t have to be expensive. A dinner at a restaurant in a different town and a movie. Maybe go see a play in some little playhouse where there are more actors than audience members.

There are a lot of mysterious things you can plan. Just announce it as a Mystery Evening of Love and you are set, baby. Just don’t tell her ahead of time what it is. You don’t want her to know she’ll be eating at Denny’s in Temple City and then seeing a movie with Adam Sandler in it.

My best Mystery Evening of Love was a few years ago. I told Marge ahead of time to expect a mystery night and she was maybe not all a-twitter, but pretty much semi-a-twitter. When the big night finally arrived, we got in the car and headed out the Ventura Freeway. For an hour and 15 minutes! Marge kept asking me where I was taking her. I kept pretending I remembered where it was.

We finally got to the venue and to reveal the mystery; we were there to see a Tom Jones concert in Thousand Oaks. And hey, Marge loved it. When old Tom was belting out “What’s New Pussycat?” Marge was answering him. And when he sang “She’s a Lady,” Marge whispered to me, “Since we aren’t staying in a motel, would you mind if I gave Tom our house key?”

I told her, “If you ever do that, I will never sprinkle cinnamon on your upper chest again.”

Friday, November 6, 2009

Eureka! I Have Lost It (Cigar Smoke 11-05-09)

I would like to write about something young and vital, but I forgot what youth is. I think it was a time when most of your body parts still worked, and you wished they wouldn’t. I’m not sure what that means, either.

As you all well know by now, and are sick of hearing about, I am now 68 years old. But I am a vibrant, virile 68. Many times people will come up to me and say, “You look so vibrant and virile you could pass for a man of 67.” And I just nod my head and tip my imaginary hat with a young vigor of, maybe, a man of 66.

Anyway, the other day I had just gotten out of the shower, looked at myself in the mirror, flexed my arm muscles and scrunched my rippling abs, and said, “You look like a man of 65.” So I put on my slippers and went into the bedroom to get dressed. And I finish getting dressed, except for my shoes. I can’t find one of my shoes.

Now, I am usually kind of a neat-nik. Some might even say I am an anally retentive piece of human garbage who continually spoils things by trying to always be better than others. Well, what can I say? I am better than all you sloppy losers. I like being neat. I like being orderly. I like being not liked.

But I have to admit that in one area of life I am not neat and orderly. My dresser is always full of T-shirts and pants and sweat suits and jackets, and next to my dresser on the floor are at least five pairs of shoes. Regular shoes, tennis shoes, loafers, slippers. All turned over in a jumbled mess. If I saw this disaster at your house, I would look down on you and know I was better than you.

Hold it a second. I think I am having a senior moment. I can’t remember why I am writing this column. Oh yeah, I remember now. I couldn’t find one of my shoes. I am all dressed and I am looking for my black loafers. I can only find one of them. I go through the pile on the floor again. Not there. I then go into the closet thinking I may have actually put them where they are supposed to be. Thank God, they weren’t there. I go back to the pile and actually get down on all fours. I think I may have accidentally pushed one of the shoes under the dresser. Nope. No missing shoe there. Just dead spiders, rat droppings, toxic dust bunnies and M&M wrappers.

And then, while I am down on all fours, I had an epiphany. (When I was younger I used to know what that meant.) All of a sudden it came to me that I had seen only one of my slippers, too. Yes, on my crawling searches I had seen only one black loafer and only one tan slipper. And I thought to myself, “Self, that is damn peculiar. What are the odds of losing one shoe for two pairs, at the same time?” And I answered, “Self, for a 68-year-old piece of senile shit, you rock.”

So I get up off of all fours and I am standing there in my bedroom, all alone, and I say to my one rapt listener (me), I know where my other shoe is. And I exclaim, “Eureka, I have found it!” And I look down at my feet and tears come to my eyes. I have found both of my missing shoes. On my left foot is my black loafer and on my right foot is my tan slipper. And at this moment I realize that I have experienced an official senior moment. I really cannot believe I was actually wearing two different-colored shoes at the same time for at least a half a day. The night before I had gotten into my robe at around 7 o’clock and had gone back out to the den to watch television and pass on words of wisdom to Marge. I sat there on the couch for four hours and I had my feet up on the table and I never once saw that I had on two different-colored shoes! I never saw it.

And I went outside and had a cigar and put my damn feet up again on a damn end table and I smoked a whole damn cigar and I looked right down at my one tan slipper and my one black loafer for a half hour and I blew smoke rings up their little shoe nostrils and I never saw them!

So I go back inside to relate this Eureka moment to Marge, who has been known to have a few senior moments of her own, her being a much older individual than I am. She’s 69. Yeah, she’s a cradle robber. I say, “Margie Pargie, I have something to tell you.” And she says, “I know your first name is Poopsie, but what is your last name again?” I say, “Whoopsie. It’s Poopsie Whoopsie.” And before I can say anything else, she falls asleep on the couch and her Kindle falls to the floor.

At first I was kind of pissed off that I couldn’t tell her about my “Eureka!” senior moment, but it actually worked out pretty well — because by then I had forgotten what it was.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Not A Happy Ending (Cigar Smoke 10-25-09)

This is a public service column. It is my semi-educated guess that most of you men out there have never had a pedicure. Am I right? Of course I’m right. (I voted for Bush. Twice.)

And until I was 68, I had never had a pedicure either. But, because of a couple of knee operations, bad back and a problem with uncontrolled lankiness, I have had a hard time cutting my toenails lately. So now I have had three pedicures — one at a private nail salon, one from my podiatrist and one by my wife. And I would like to share my experiences so you other men can reap the benefits of my sacrifice for my fellow man.

My first toenail experience occurred in a little nail salon on Colorado Boulevard. I tried to find one that I was pretty sure none of my friends would use or see me enter. So I walk in, without an appointment, and I’m standing in front — hoping to be ignored so I can leave — and then this cute little Filipino-Thai-Korean-Hong Kong woman says, “Can I help you?” And I whisper that I’d like a pedicure. And she says, “What?” And I whisper just a little louder, “I’d like a pedicure.” And she yells out in her little Filipino-Thai-Korean-Hong Kongian voice, “A pedicure!”

Four women and the four salon employees doing beauty stuff to them, and two other currently unattractive people waiting to be beautified look over at me. And then down at my feet. Let me tell you, it is embarrassing when ugly people look down at your toes.

So I get in the chair and I’m sitting there and the toenail woman comes over and looks at me, and says, “Well?” I say, “What?” She says, “It would be easier if you took your shoes off.” I always thought Asian women weren’t supposed to be funny.

Then I put my feet into this little pan of water she had. And then she took off my socks and got started. (Us American men can really be funny, too.) She starts washing my feet in water that looked like it had been recycled from Roman Polanski’s hot tub. Then she towels my toes off and picks one of seven toenail clipper/scissor things and then starts cutting my toenails. And with each toe she would take another cutter and cut like a professional, baby. I was impressed.

Then she filed them down and buffed them with an electric buffer. Then she put plain polish on them. Geez, my damn toenails looked better than my face. And then I looked at her and she looked at me. And I was getting the vibe that I was finished, and that I should leave. But I knew that couldn’t be true, because I hadn’t even asked her yet about the happy ending.

“That’ll be $12,” she said. And I said, “And how much for the pedicure?” She threw back her head and laughed that throaty Asian-woman laugh that only Asian women who are humorous can laugh.

Then, about eight weeks later, I went to my podiatrist to give him a shot at the toenails. He had told me that because I had diabetes, I should take good care of my feet, so to punish him, I made him do the dirty work.

I took off my shoes and he stepped back and said, “Whew. Those are some real sock-rippers there, boy.” And he put on his rubber gloves and said, “Eight years of medical school for this.” He then sprayed my feet with Raid and took one big-ass nail-cutter surgical instrument out of his bag and cut my toenails faster than UCLA can lose a football game. I couldn’t believe it was over so quick — I thought I was having sex.

Then I asked him, “What about the filing and buffing and polishing?” And I don’t think his response would have been approved by the American Medical Association, but he threw the surgical instrument at me while I was running down his hallway. Just as I got to the front door I looked back, and he reminded me of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” That sweating, glistening, fiendish face of my podiatrist will live with me forever.

OK, another eight weeks go by and more of my socks are getting ripped, so I have to find someone to cut my toenails before they run wild in the streets, like urchins in Rio. So I think to myself: Self, whom do I know that I can now turn to after burning my toenail bridges with non-happy-ending salon women and killer podiatrists? And I answer myself. Self, you can turn to your loving wife, who, although she wouldn’t agree to “obey” you at the altar, did agree to take you in good health and in a long-toenailed state of health.

So I walked up to my beloved, my little Margie Pargie Wargie, and I licked her left ear and breathed heavily on her neck with savagely hot breath, and asked her if she would like to cut my teeny-weeny toenails just this once because of her deep and semi-abiding love for me, her diabetical Muffin Mate with very few socks left. And she said, “If I won’t obey you, why the hell would I cut those suckers?” “Because you love me and you love hot savage breath, that’s why,”
I humbly replied.

So, incredibly, she really did cut my toenails, and all was going pretty well. Right up until I asked her if there would be a happy ending.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Bill Murray, Where Are You? (Cigar Smoke 10-8-09)

You know it wasn’t until I was 29 that I learned that not all women in bars are named Security. I would go into a place and sit down next to a beautiful (or any breathing) young woman, and I would look at her, and raise my eyebrows alternately, right, then left, then right again, and I’d let her catch a glimpse of my money clip with the two twenties in it hiding the ones, and I would order a Chivas rocks with a splash of 7-Up, and I would say, “Hi, would you like to have the wildest night of clothes-ripping, sweat-dripping sex you’ve ever had, or would you like to go out with me?”

And then, when she paused and gaped at me, I would introduce myself, “My name is Jim. What’s yours?” And she’d always say, “Security.” And I would say, “Hi, Security. This is really uncanny. You’re the fifth woman I’ve met this week with that name. What are the odds?”

But I digress. But before I digress, I would like to inquire if I can officially digress before I have actually started doing something? How can I digress when I’m not doing anything? If I had started my column, and then I mentioned meeting all the lovely Securities I once knew, that would be OK. That would be true digression.

Anyway, I am not digressing now. I am just continuing on with my column and entering into a completely new subject. The digression is now over, or to be more accurate, the digression never really started.

Do you guys have problems with rats, gophers and squirrels? Well, your favorite digressing columnist does. We have rats in our garage. And it is not pretty. These little rotten rodents are everywhere. We find rat droppings on the floor and on the shelves and on our car. They’ve gnawed holes in boxes and are making nests in old clothes. I think I can hear them laughing, too.

At first, I tried to get rid of them myself. I bought some of those deadly rat spring-traps and hired a guy from Gold’s Gym to pull back the iron bar things, and I baited the traps with peanut butter, and yes, the traps all went off, but I didn’t catch any rats. Nope, I just hear them spitting out PB now. You ever hear a rat go pa-tui. And then laugh. It’s not a good sound.

Then I took out my old .22 rifle and staked out the garage. And when I finally saw one of those little brown-faced PB-suckers, I pulled off a round. I missed, but the ricocheting bullet was kind of entertaining. It bounced off an old cook pot and then glanced off a lamp and then off a sand wedge into one of my seven coolers. I felt like I was in a Road Runner cartoon. So, for safety’s sake, I put on a hockey helmet and fired off a few more shots. Didn’t get any rats, but at least all those storage boxes know who’s boss now.

And get this: we have squirrels that are bad-asses, too. About a month ago, we were having trouble with our TV reception, so we call Charter and the guy comes out and checks some stuff, then goes outside and looks at the wire coming into the house from the garage roof, and says, “You guys got squirrel problems.”

“You mean those cute little bushy-tailed, buck-toothed critters who sing Christmas songs?” I said.

“No,” he said, “Those are chipmunks, dumbass. You got squirrels eating your wires. See up there?” And sure enough, the little varmint vandals had eaten clean through the wires, preventing us from getting our daily allowance of reality programming. (I think Marge showed them where the wires were.)

By the way, and this is a legitimate digression, have you ever seen a squirrel go poo-poo?

I have not. I have seen rats leave rat pellets. I have seen every other kind of animal leave their calling cards. I have seen my dog, Hadley, leave mounds that should have been illegal. But I have never ever seen a squirrel even so much as hunch over, let alone leave evidence of television wire coating in their scat or whatever those little squirrel suckers call it.

And now — as if the rats and the squirrels weren’t enough — we have been invaded by gophers. They are in our backyard. Holes everywhere. So we had the gardener try to (don’t tell PETA) drown them with the hose. Didn’t work. Then we got Orkin out here and they put poison down in their little gopher tunnels. Didn’t do diddly. I called Bill Murray and asked him to bring his “Caddyshack” dynamite, but I haven’t heard back from him. Bastard.

So what could I do? I got out my .22 again, and I was lying prone on the grass like Gordon Liddy humping Mrs. Liddy, and I had the rifle pointed right at the gopher hole just waiting for one of the dirtbags to raise his little pest head, and then I heard something. It was very faint at first. I could barely hear it. Then it got a little louder and I leaned closer to the hole. And I swear on my mother’s tattoo, I heard a gopher say in his little gopher voice, “Got any peanut butter?”

Thursday, September 24, 2009

The Fishing Trip (Cigar Smoke 9-17-09)

Well, I haven’t had my morning cigar yet (I’ll pause for you to retch) so I am feeling a little too healthy. And that always makes me grumpy. But I have had my coffee, so I am not shouting, “You lie!” at anyone we know.

Anyway, at this exact time just two weeks ago, I was not stomping around being grumpy or yelling at weasels or anything. Why? Because I was up in Oregon, just mellowing out, enjoying clear water and trees and seagulls, and fishing for salmon. And you know what I discovered? I discovered another human being just as grumpy as I am. Sometimes the lord works in mysterious ways. (I think the lord is grumpy, too. I think he may be ticked off that I used a lower case “l” on his title.)

So who is this fellow grump? I don’t want to use his real name. Let’s just call him Mike Harrington who used to go to Humboldt State College and now lives in Beaverton, Ore. OK, Mike knew I was scouting around to buy a boat, so he suggested I come up to God’s country (note the uppercase “G”) for a fishing trip in his kick-ass jet-powered sled boat, if I had the guts — which he doubted I did, because he had known me earlier in my life, and was pretty sure I was the inspiration for the term “gutless wonder.”

I laughed my insincere laugh of repressed spit, and said, “Give those salmon suckers a head’s-up, because the Altadena Assassin is on his way.” Mike said, “Laris, it’s only a fishing trip — relax.” I said, wiping some non-repressed spit that escaped to my chin, “Assassins never relax. The SAA (Salmon Assassins of Altadena) won’t let us.”

Anyway, I get up to Portland, and Mike picks me up at the airport and says, “Couldn’t get a cab, huh?” And we drive to his house in the trees, and we get there and his delightful wife, Shirleen, asks me if the Salmon Assassin would like a BLT. I did one quick karate-slashing move and said, “Kwaa!” (meaning “yes” in Tai Quando. I’m hoping Tai Quando is a martial art and not a Chinese province.)

After a nice evening of watching TV, eating a Costco ice cream bar and listening to Mike grump about his Oregon Ducks getting their little duck clocks cleaned by Boise State, I asked him what he thought about the Duck uniforms. His face got red and his head started to expand and two of his pimples popped, and he said, “They have frigging feathers!” I suggested that they might use them to fly away. He suggested that I might do the same.

Eventually, I asked, “What time do we have to get up tomorrow morning?” Without even a pause, he said “Five.” “Five a.m.?” “Yes, 5 A.M.!” I mentioned that the mouth of the Columbia River, where we were headed, was only about an hour-and-a-half away, and maybe we could sleep in a little. He mentioned that I was the most sissy Salmon Assassin he had ever met.

We get to the river, we launch the boat and we start heading for the place Mike says the salmon will be. He says the tide will be coming in around 12:30 or 1 p.m., and that’s a perfect time to catch ’em. I calmly and affectionately say, “Mike, you dumbshit, do you know it is now only 6:30 in the morning? Mr. Dumbshit, it is 6:30 right now. The fish are showing up at 12:30. What are we going to do for SIX hours!” He says, “Troll.”

So we did troll for six hours. And we did a few other things, too. Between trolls, Mike would maneuver the boat at high speed so it would bounce up in the air and come down on the waves dramatically wrong and wrench my back in serious spinal-disc premeditated pain. I asked him why he would do this to a fellow Humboldt Lumberjack, and he said, “Feathers.”

Then he started to put on some sunscreen and I asked what number he used. And he said, “Number 2.” I said, “Were they out of number 1?” He smirked and tried to hit another wave wrong, and I said, “You know, that sun shit goes up to, maybe number 54, or something. Number 2 is about as effective as, say, water. Air is number 1, water number 2.”

Well, after trolling our asses off, we did catch a salmon. One 22-inch salmon. And we had to throw back a big 15-pounder because it didn’t have a tag on its dorsal fin. The Salmon Assassin was not happy.

The only other fun thing that happened, if you don’t count all the nature stuff, was that Mike took a leak into a half- full apple juice container and then said, “Better not drink the top half, fish face.”

Well, we kind of made up after a while and went out to dinner. And because we’d been using his boat, I offered to pay for the meal. That’s just the kind of assassin I am. And I told my inadequately sun-screened buddy he could have whatever he wanted on the menu as long as it wasn’t one thing: expensive.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Remote Possibilities (Cigar Smoke 9-10-09)

You know, this may sound kind of unimportant. But then again, remember whom you are reading. (My grammar checker put that whom in, sorry.) Anyway, this is who speaking again. Yes, I’m on first, too.

Because I am a what? I am a man. Therefore, I am in charge of the remote control. It is my life and I would die for it. Do not try to take the remote out of my clutching fingers. Do not even think of trying to remove my remote. It will be a decision you and your next of kin will regret. It is my remote. Don’t touch it. Unless you just bought my TV from my craigslist ad. Then you can touch my remote, because it is actually your remote then. And I would never touch another man’s remote.

I know, most of you think of the remote problem as a guy thing. And I guess it is. Like not asking for directions or thinking about sex every four seconds. OK, every three seconds. But there is a hidden, huge responsibility of being in charge of the remote. If you are man enough to seize the remote, you must be man enough to use it for the benefit of your woman, your TV mate, your Vast Wasteland-watching partner. In other words, you have to choose some pretty good shows if you want to have the, excuse the expression, remotest chance of pleasing your Poopsie Pie.

And believe me, if your Poopsie Pie is anything like my Poopsie Pie, pleasing her is a challenge. It is tough. And I really work at it. And, of course, I have TiVo, too. And no, it’s not the old one-show recording TiVo. No, it is the new two-banger baby that let’s you record two shows at once or you can watch one show and record the other while you’re watching or you don’t have to watch the two shows you’re pretending to watch and it will still record stuff you don’t want to see. It is beautiful.

Every night after we eat dinner, we head for the family room to watch a little TV. Marge isn’t really a TV kind of person. Generally, she just likes to read her Kindle, and pretend she’s married to someone else who is also reading a Kindle. But sometimes she has very strong feelings on not being able to see anything good on TV. She’ll say something like, “Ah geez, I’m not watching that.

I just can’t watch that. Isn’t there anything else on? I just can’t watch it! That is awful. I cannot watch that! No, I can’t watch that!” And I’ll say, “Are you saying you can’t watch that?”

And then because I happen to have the remote in my hand and under my complete control, I hit the Now Playing button on the TiVo and I show Ms. Poopsie Pie a long list of previously recorded television favorites for her viewing enjoyment. And usually, because I am a wonderful TV mate, I suggest a preview of our television plans for the evening. I’ll say, “OK, first we’ll see a “Jeopardy!”, then we can either see a new “Monk” or an old “Law and Order.” She’ll jump in and say, “I don’t like ‘Monk’ anymore. It was OK at first, but I can’t watch it anymore. He makes me nervous. And how many times have I told you that I only like “Law and Order” with a colon after it, like “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” or “Law and Order: Criminal Intent.” Then I suggest that I could maybe put something like a remote control device in another colon if she doesn’t like the shows I pick, and she thinks that I am mean-spirited and gross and goes back to her Kindle and pouts.

Then I’ll start watching some show I like because she’s reading her Kindle and she’ll glance at it and say, “Is that all that’s on?!” Then I’ll gather my mean-spirited and gross self, and say, “Poopsie Pie, you wanna see a “Seinfeld?” She’ll say, “No.” “How about a replay of the Kings-Montreal Stanley Cup playoff from 1993?” “No!” “OK, how about a ‘Big Brother?’” And she closes her eyes, opens them, and says, “If you watch another one of those ‘Big Brother’ episodes, I will shoot your lame-ass stupid dead body and get the neighbors to help me stuff you into a suitcase and then I will mail you to myself and when you arrive I will stab you through the outside of the suitcase with a Japanese sword and then open the suitcase and pour kerosene on the pieces of your body and then light up a cigarette and drop the burning match into the kerosene and dance around the flames.”

“I guess you don’t care which houseguest is getting evicted huh?”

Hey, I really do try to find shows she will like. Poopsie Pie’s pleasure is my life. I want her to be happy. I want her to be fulfilled. I take my remote control obligations seriously. I just don’t TiVo for fun. No, I TiVo to be a serious remote control guy. I TiVo to save my marriage. I TiVo for my country. I TiVo to find shows with colons!

I think I may have found something. “Hey, Honey Poopsie, you wanna see this new reality show? It has a colon. ‘Octomom: The Formative Years’.”

Thursday, August 13, 2009

One More Time (Cigar Smoke 8-13-09)

OK, I know many of you are saying to yourselves, “This jerk-off is, as always, redundantly challenged and why the double hey hey does he have to tell us again of his redundancy.” Well, all I can say is, I would not be redundant if I didn’t try to explain.

Yes, I tend to over-explain things. Like just the other day I was coming home from a Scrabble tournament in Dayton, Ohio (not to be confused with Dayton, Sweden), a tournament in which I modestly must report to you that I kicked some serious old-lady butt. Of course, if any of the old ladies happen to read this and have their panties in a bunch at my using the term “old ladies” there is a good chance they will put bricks in their purses and Arte Johnson my old geezer ass. But, I digress. However, digression is a higher form of over-explaining, and if I had the time, I would over-explain why that is.

Anyway, a particularly noteworthy over-explaining incident occurred one morning when I went out to eat breakfast at the hotel restaurant. I had just taken a shower and, as is my wont (I always wanted to say that), I seemed to be perspiring quite a bit. Kind of like Lake Erie is quite a bit wet. Serial sweating is in my genetic code. This guy sweats after a shower. Yes, that noise you hear is God chuckling.

I don’t know what it is but I have always had this problem. Even when I was younger, before HDTV, I would take a shower and then dry off and get dressed and head off to work. And then, as regular as a damn soaked clock, I would start to sweat about 15 minutes later. Like clockwork, in 15 minutes I would be soaking wet. My shirt would be sticking to my body. My chest hair would be praying for a lifejacket.

I only bring this sweating problem up because you will need to know this information to follow my coming over-explaining.
OK, back to the restaurant. I go in and they seat me at a nice table. The waitress comes over and she hands me the menu and then she secretly glances down at my sopping shirt, and says hesitantly, “What can I get you?” I say, “A beach towel.” She does not laugh. I kind of thought it was funny. She’s just looking at me, not saying a word. So I tried again, “Maybe you could get me a blow dryer and a couple of sponges.” If she’s gonna laugh at that one, it will be in the future.

Now, here is where the over-explaining hits a higher gear. I know I should have just shut the hell up, ordered my eggs and hash browns and just let it go. But I have a problem. I’m me. So I tell her that I always sweat in the morning after taking a shower. I can’t help it. It’s just a Laris man trait. My dad always sweated like hell and my son, Mike, is carrying on the tradition of looking disgustingly drenched quite well, too.

She just looked at me and didn’t say a word. I don’t think I was actually scaring her, but she looked, shall we say, very alert. So I tried to reassure her, “Just because I am all wet with sopping sticky sweat doesn’t mean I’m an escaped murderer who chopped up nuns and ate them with Tabasco sauce, or just because my chest hair is matted down to my shirt like a pack of wet crippled spiders doesn’t mean I am a sex pervert who just drooled over a Britney Spears You Tube video eight times?” No, it just means I just had a shower and my pores are going postal. That’s all.

She didn’t answer me. She walked away silently and a rather big gentleman waiter guy came over and said, “Order something.”
Anyway, I finished my breakfast. The hash browns were a little damp and had one renegade chest hair in them, but I enjoyed the meal. Then I went out to the airport to fly home to Altadena. Did you know that you cannot tell someone you’re from Altadena without adding on, “Yeah, it’s just a little above Pasadena.”

I get on the plane. I sit down. I do not want to over-explain ever again. Then the lady sitting next to me happens to mention hair spray for some reason. And, incredibly, I had just been thinking about hair spray. (I had finished my quantum physics book.) So I said, “Could you please tell me which is stronger, Maximum Hold or Ultimate Hold?” She didn’t answer me. She just moved slightly farther away from me. I think she was the waitress’ sister.

But that didn’t stop me. “I kind of lean toward Ultimate Hold myself, but then again Maximum Hold has some things going for it, too. I mean, they do have maximum-security prisons, don’t they? I’ve never heard of an ultimate-security prison, have you? But then again, say you are looking for a mate and you find a guy and you go home to tell your friend about him, you wouldn’t say he’s the maximum. No, you wouldn’t say that — he would be the ultimate dreamboat, wouldn’t he?”

I noticed my seatmate had hit the attendant button, so I just ended the conversation quickly by saying, “The hairspray people could solve it really easily by just coming out with Infinity Hold, the bastards.”

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Ten Damn Good Years (Cigar Smoke 7/30/09)

Wow! I can’t believe the Pasadena Weekly is 25 years old. (That’s 475 years old in regular peoples’ ages, not counting the blood, sweat, cigarette ashes, grime, tears, ink stains, and pulled stress muscles and torn aortas.) I guess the paper had been around for four or five years before we bought it in 1988. Those guys did a nice job of getting it off the ground and then they sold it to my ex-wife, who owned another newspaper, and discovered that owning two papers at the same time was kind of like being one of Michael Vick’s dogs. So, after she stopped crying, she sold it to Marge and me and we had it for exactly 10 years. After a decade of forehead-vein popping, we sold it to the commie LA Times in 1998. Hey, I kid the commies. But, of course, I took the commie’s money. It’s just as green as environmental causes.

And then the Times sold it and it turned over a couple more times and the new publishers have put life and spirit back into it and the Pasadena Weekly lives. I am glad it has survived and I wish it many more years of good journalism and good times.

Anyway, the 10 years we owned it were 10 pretty damn good years. I think we took the paper in a new direction — a direction most people still haven’t quite figured out. I like to think the direction was up. But whatever, I think we definitely put our stamp on it. And I was proud to be associated with the professional people we had. We had such a great staff and we all worked our flabby buttocks so hard that eventually we had firm buttocks and we had so much fun doing it, it was like it was illegal. I’ll always remember it and always be grateful for the best 10 years of my life. OK, so it took off 10 years at the end of my life — who needs 80 to 90?

I’d like to go down memory lane a little ways. However, I’m not going to talk about what was actually in the paper for those 10 years because I’m semi-senile and I don’t quite remember a lot of it, and because, of course, I’m a shallow person who tended to get extra happy when we had big issues where we sold a lot of ads. And who wants to hear about ad sales? Except me.

I remember enjoying just going into the office every morning. I loved the routine. I would unlock the door, punch the code into the security alarm system (many times accurately), turn on all the lights, get a good feeling just looking out at all the empty desks, most of which I had literally assembled, and then going into the break room and starting a pot of coffee and checking the refrigerator for any uneaten leftover sandwiches or other goodies. I particularly liked to remove the little signs that said “Do Not Eat This!” on them. I would remove the signs, eat whatever was in the little white Styrofoam box, and then put the “Do Not Eat This!” sign on another Styrofoam box that contained something I didn’t want to eat. Oh, the memories.

One time some enraged Styrofoam box person stormed into my office and screamed, “Laris, did you eat the last half of my French dip sandwich? Please don’t tell me you ate it! Please don’t tell me you would stoop that low.” I had to fess up. I remember telling her that, no, it wasn’t me, but I did happen to see Fred Bankston (my ace ad rep) in the coffee room earlier and I couldn’t be sure but I thought I had heard the squeak of Styrofoam. Last I saw her she was heading for the ad department. I probably should have taken the stapler out of her hand.

Speaking of ad reps, one day I remember walking into the ad department and a new sales rep was, and I’m not making this up, standing on her desk, pounding a nail into the wall with the heel of her shoe. Another time I was eating lunch with an ad rep I had to let go, and as we were eating I noticed there was blood running down her lip into her food. She was so tense she was biting her lip and tongue and she wouldn’t open her mouth to talk to me. I didn’t know what to do. Check, please.

On the editorial side, I would pick up the phone and there would be a string of obscenities that even made me blush. No introduction, no hello, no nothing. Just obscenities. And finally after a while, he would stop for breath, and I would say, “Hi, Isaac. How you doing?” Yes, Councilman Isaac Richard was expressing his opinion. And then I’d hear someone standing at the front of our office singing the National Anthem at the top of his lungs. Some guy named Roy who had brought his bike up to our office was belting out a pretty good rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Oh, I miss it all. I especially miss all the great people who worked for me. Thank you everybody. Thanks for your hard work. Thanks for the fun. Thanks for the memories. It was truly a special time.

Here’s to another 25 years for the Pasadena Weekly!

Thursday, July 23, 2009

A Good Use of Tarp Money (Cigar Smoke 07/16/09)

OK, I am sitting on my deck in paradise. OK, it’s not paradise, it’s only Oregon. But I like to pretend it’s paradise because it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to paradise and I’m, as they say, getting on in years. In fact, in a lot of ways, I’ve pretty much gotten on and have almost arrived. And like wisdom and growing old gracefully, paradise has eluded me.

Anyway, I’m sitting on one of two pretty nifty recliners that I have given new life to. They are brand damn new recliners that were in the house, but I wanted a sleeper-sofa for my imposing houseguests, and these two beautiful recliners would
no longer fit in my hovel.

So, I thought about selling them on Craigslist, but I was afraid I would be killed by a sex murderer, so then I considered bartering them for a four-year supply of donuts, but then it hit me. I needed some comfortable places to sit on my deck. I needed to recline properly, like a man of leisure loafing in paradise, and feel the smooth, soft feel of expensive indoor fabric on my idle outdoor buttocks.

But, of course, my wife, Marge, the little woman, my better half, the yin to my yang, the chow to my mein and the toodle to my loo, tactfully mentioned that it rains in Oregon every 45 minutes and that maybe I could come up with another idea that wasn’t “totally whacked.” I said, “Does whack have an H or not?”

Well, I thought over the whole rain-ruining-nice-indoor-fabric issue for a while and concluded that I could somehow outsmart the rain, the fabric and the little woman. I just needed to think it through. Of course, that immediately presented another dilemma. I don’t think that well. And I’m impatient. Not the best of exactas, my friends.

So, I get on the Internet and Google outdoor furniture covers and re-upholstering and rainproof fabrics and Do Hooters Girls Like Owls (sorry, that was not a recliner-related search) and I come up with a number of solutions. And some of them would actually work well, except for a couple of things. They’re too damn costly. (And I’m too damn cheap.) And it would take too long to get them. (And I’m too damn impatient.) And redundant.

So then I say to myself, so what if it rains on the recliners. They’ll get wet, big deal. All I have to do is buy a raincoat and rain pants and I could sit on the wet recliner chair in my wet raincoat and rain pants and life would be good. Damp, but good.

But I do not do that. For some reason the word “whacked” seems more appropriate than it did earlier and I’m feeling like the little woman, the yin master, just might hose Mr. Yang down with a fire hose if I carried out this plan.

So, I rethink it. And as I’m rethinking, the little woman, the Jacko to my lantern, says, “You know, even if you sit on a wet recliner in your wet pants, the recliner will eventually rot from being wet and fall apart and be all shredded up and the springs will stick into your idle buttocks and the recliner will smell like an embalmer’s

T-shirt and our neighbors will laugh openly at you. And when they’re tired of laughing at you, they will mock you. You know that, don’t you?” I replied, “Of course I do, Little.” (It always pisses her off when I call her by her first name when we argue.)

So, I pop over to this big hardware/army surplus/espresso-latte place they have up here. And I buy a couple of nice-looking tarps (That’s a phrase you’ve never seen before, huh?). And I come back to my deck and I put a khaki-ass green, rainproof tarp over each little delicate flower of a recliner and violà, paradise has been rehabbed. It really turned out well. They’re featuring it next month in Better Homes and Hovels.

It’s perfect, baby. When it’s sunny, I just pull the flap back on the tarp and drape it over the back of the recliner. And me and my buttocks sit down on nice indoor-quality fabric that we enjoy and that we both deserve, and when it rains we just drop the flap back down and tell the rain to kiss our tarps.

So far it has worked great. I just sit there in paradise, smoking rum-flavored cigars, listening to my iPod and have Lyle Lovett tell me “if I had a pony and I had a boat, I would ride my pony on my boat,” and I’m snacking on a few cherries and, OK, maybe wiping my cherry-stained fingers on the nice inside fabric of my recliner every once in a while to keep myself neat and presentable. And, OK, there are a couple of cigar-ash holes on one of the arms on one of the recliners — but hey, you can’t worry about everything.

And it really doesn’t matter that much. When I’m through with a reclining session in paradise, I just stand up, brush off any recliner arm ashes, look for any renegade cherry pits hiding down between the cushions and then I do what? I tarp it, baby. I just flip the flap down. Tarp money well spent.

And then I leave paradise and I go inside the hovel and I say to the Goldie of my locks, the French of my dip, the three little words she loves to hear: “Where’s the remote?”

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

In the Fast Lane (Cigar Smoke 7-2-2009)

’m a pretty law-abiding kind of guy. I usually follow the rules. I bring my library books back on time. I don’t litter. And I only give the finger to old Asian-American drivers. If I was a fruit, I guess I would have to be a peach.

However, I do have one semi-glaring criminal tendency. I get a lot of speeding tickets. I don’t think I’m an unsafe driver. I’m not reckless. I don’t drive under the influence of anything except backseat drivers. I don’t weave in and out of traffic at 90 miles an hour with my right arm around a “big, nasty redhead” and use the lover’s knob to change lanes. No, I don’t drive like that. But I admit I have been known to drive a little faster than the speed limit. I guess I just have a lead foot. Some would say a lead head.

As I have mentioned a while back, I used to even budget for speeding tickets when I went on vacation. Yup, we’d head out for Colorado, or New Mexico or Nevada or Montana, and I’d allocate a damn 150 bucks to pay off the speeding fines, and that was usually pretty accurate. And I remember once being with my kids, Mike and Casey, just before we drove into Arizona, and I said, “You watch, I’m going to get a damn ticket.” Two minutes later I see the red lights flashing from behind a billboard, and I said, “Daddy never lies.”

Another time I was with Casey up in Canada, and we’re cruising through Manitoba after seeing a minor league hockey game in Brandon, and I didn’t even know we went through some tiny-ass town. I hear a siren and the Mountie guy with the cool hat stops me and is kind of incredulous and all I remember is I couldn’t figure out the kilometers-per-hour to the miles-per-hour ratio thing. He just kept shaking his head and I think he mentioned something about Americans are a-holes, eh.

I can also recall a couple of other out-of-state ticketing adventures. One time I was in Wyoming, Red Rock or Green Rock, some Rock city place, and a Rock cop guy pulls me over and gives me a ticket for going 27 in a 25 MPH zone. Two miles over the limit! I don’t call that speeding. I call that a reason to cry.

And once my 39-year-old son, Mike, was driving with me in Utah, and I just let him take the wheel because I thought finally he was old enough to drive, and he got a ticket faster than Obama can change his mind. It was fast, baby. And although I was dizzy, I was able to tell him, “I’m proud of you, son, you’re the Lead-Foot Loin-Springer I had always hoped for.”

And I’ve had three, count ’em, 1-2-3, speeding tickets right here on Altadena Drive heading south just before New York Drive. It’s a 35 mph zone, and it seems harmless enough. But you’ve got momentum from going downhill and you’re just cruising at about 40 or so. You’d have to be a sissy or a commie to go slower. I knew I had a problem when, after the third ticket, the cop comes up to me and says all cheery-like, “Hi, Jim.” Yes, he called me by my friggoni first name. Jim. He called me Jim.

My latest brush with the law happened just last week. I was coming down Lake Avenue from Altadena. I wasn’t speeding speeding, but I was regular speeding just a bit. The speed limit was 35 and I was, maybe, doing 40 to 45. Just fast enough to make me feel slightly better than the other drivers, but not unsafe in my own Mensa mind.

Then I looked to the right and my eyes met the eyes of a motorcycle cop. And in that split second of eye contact I instinctively tried not to look guilty and the copper instantly noticed my guilty-ass fake-not-guilty look and kind of pulled his helmeted head back just a little and eyeballed me even harder. And then I, of course, to confirm my guilt, hit the brake like the dumb-ass lead-footed speeding nitwit that I am and will always be.

As soon as I touched the brake and the cop saw me slow down, he knew he had my worthless butt in his Protect and Serve hands. (Now, there’s an image!) So he guns his bike and whips out behind me, and I see him in my rearview mirror, and his red lights go on, and I cuss myself out, and eventually pull up to the curb right in front of the McDonalds near Orange Grove. “You want fries with that citation, loser?”

The copper comes up to my window and says, “Do you know why I stopped you?” I said, “Because I have a bad Facebook photo?” He said, “You look worse in person,” and informed me that I was going 50 in a 35 zone. I offered that I was going 40, tops. He then inquired if I had ever heard the expression “Going like a bat out of hell.” I said I had heard of that expression, but this here particular bat-mobile I was driving was barely going fast enough to get out of purgatory.

He had no sense of humor. He gave me the speeding ticket. And since I couldn’t see any excruciatingly bad old Asian drivers around I gave him a kind of proxy finger. I kept it below the window so as not to hurt his feelings.

Even though I’m a speeder, I’m always considerate of others.

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Aging White Males Need Love Too (Cigar Smoke 6-18-09)

You know that new Supreme Court nominee, the one with the broken ankle, and the broken compass. Yeah, that one. Well she has raised my ire, my hackles and my blood pressure. Too bad she couldn’t do anything about my ED.

Anyway, her whole whining, tiresome, racist Latina diatribe about her being better than an old white male has frosted this old white male’s frijoles, baby. Of course, she’s not the first one to have this learned opinion. You hear it constantly. It’s the new mantra. All the sensitive, understanding types want to have “people of color” for elected officials and judges, etc., etc. Now, you gotta be black, brown, yellow, or red to be one of the correctly colored guys. Well, white is a color, dammit.

And you know, us old white guys haven’t done all that badly for, say, the last 300 years. We’ve created the greatest country in history for starters. We have the best system of justice since time began. We have had an incredibly strong economic system, a free capitalistic system, which has given the world a wealth it never dreamed of. Our medical system is second to none. Our farmers, mostly white males, have fed more people in history than any other particular color of farmer that I know of.

We have the most powerful military in the history of mankind, a military which has not only kept us free for over 200 damn years, but has also freed millions and millions of oppressed “people of color” around the world. Most of the dead guys buried in foreign fields are our white males who gave up their white male lives so their white male children could be bashed by non-white revisionist short-memoried ingrates.

Hell, I could go on and on about what us disgusting old white guys have accomplished — from the computer industry to the car industry to the life-saving drug industry to almost any other industry you can think of.

Of course, I realize we, as old white guys, didn’t do all this alone. We had the help of wonderful and talented women, and equally deserving people of every race and color. I am thankful and grateful for how we all pulled together to achieve what we’ve achieved. I applaud us all. I applaud all the people of color. Including the white color.

A lot of women and minorities died in our wars, and they were all absolutely essential to helping create this great country. I am not trying to pit one group against the other. On the other hand, I would have to say that the old white guys were the dominant force in what happened for centuries. And most of that was pretty damn good in this old white cowboy’s opinion. Maybe with all the talk about tolerance and understanding and acceptance, Judge Broken Ankle might cut us a little slack. Or is cutting a little slack just for people of the correct color?

And you know, some of these great people of color who are idolized haven’t done all that well in most of the countries they came from. The old brown males from South America and Mexico have, for the most part, established dictatorships and caused misery for millions and millions of their own people. Their economic systems have generally been a disaster — considering all the resources they have. Hey, you don’t see Americans risking their lives to sneak across the southern border too much, do you? I wonder why.

And Africa is almost a total catastrophe. It’s painful to see the level of corruption and despair on that continent. The millions of black people slaughtered — by their own people of color. It’s heart-wrenching. And when us old white males (along with others) send billions of dollars of food and aid over to help them, most of it is wasted or stolen by the people of color in charge.

Hell, using a person’s color to determine your role models just doesn’t seem to cut it. Old black males and old brown males can be just as bad as us old white males. So, I guess in this case, white is as good as the other colors.

And hey, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight David Eisenhower, Jonas Salk, Elvis Presley, FDR, George Washington, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Albert Schweitzer, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Red Grange, Jerry West, Bill Clinton, Alexander Graham Bell, Johnny Carson, Johnny Cash, Johnny Unitas, Willie Nelson, Audie Murphy, Alan Alda, Al Gore, Ross Perot, Tommy Lasorda, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mark Twain, Wayne Gretski, Clarence Darrow, Billy Graham, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert E. Lee, Ronald Reagan, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, John Irving, Carl Sagan, Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Edgar Allen Poe, Merle Haggard, Warren Buffett, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Rush Limbaugh all have one thing in common.

They’re all old white males.

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Plunging In (Cigar Smoke 6-4-09)

I know I have been accused of being anally retentive. Many of you astute readers, and even some of you stute readers, have mentioned over the years that I have a tendency to discuss certain things that, shall we say, are south of the Mason Dixon Line.

Well, I have tried to stop doing this, because I want to be accepted by all you non anally retentive people and live in a world where the opposite of being anally-retentive is really cool and maybe we could have some ice tea and play Canasta.

But something happened last week. Something so embarrassing and humiliating that I have decided to never go to the bathroom again. Oh, sure, I’ll go Number One, but I will hold in all Number Two urges until I either explode or shoot a few nuns.

I was at my sister’s house in Colorado last week, and I was enjoying talking to Carol and her housemate, Brent. Then I made the fateful decision to go to the bathroom. Excuse the expression, but I did my duty, and then when I tried to flush the results of doing my duty, let’s just say that the flushing was not exactly complete. I looked around for a plunger. No luck. God can be a kidder.

So I go back out to the living room and say to Carol and Brent, “Uh, excuse me, but would you happen to have a plunger?” Brent says, after moistening the twinkle in his eye, “What do you need a plunger for?” I ask my sister why she hangs out with these kinds of people. Finally, Brent brings me a plunger and says, “Be sure to put the round rubber side down, and hold the thin wooden handle in your hands.”

I go back into the emergency area wondering if they have the death penalty for homicide in Colorado. The disaster is still there. It’s a color now I have never seen before. And it has teeth. I plunge my little plunging heart out. Plunge. Plunge. Plunge. But nothing moves. So I go to my extensive plunging background and experience, and I do a really high suction suck with the plunger where I keep making the plunger progressively suction like mad in ever increasing suction sucks so eventually I will be able to suck the enamel off the damn toilet bowl.

I mean, I am really plunge sucking, baby. And that disgusting giant toxic glob of semi-solid and semi-liquid, grossly colored mess just looked back at me. And laughed. A little No. 2 semi-solid waste laugh that I will never forget.

Then I hear Brent’s soothing voice, “You been in there a long time. You need some help?” I think this over. Do I need help? Probably. Will I open the door so he can come in the bathroom in his own house and see what has come out of my body and is now coiled in swirls of wrongly-colored revenge and poised and ready to cause emotional damage to the next person who sees it? Probably not.

But, of course, after a while, I had to open the door. Brent came in. He looked right at where I thought he would look first. He staggered a little. And then said, “Jesus, this would make Richard Pryor faint.”

Then Brent plunged for a while. He’s younger than I am so maybe he plunged a bit better, but the results were the same. Nothing had moved, except our stomachs. If a director had asked for a disgusting bathroom, and walked in on this, he would have said, “Perfect!”

We worked on it for 10 more minutes and then he yelled, “Carol, come on in here.” Jeez. I had tried to protect my sister all my life, and now this. Carol came in. She looked you-know-where and she grabbed the towel rack and took a few breaths to get some oxygen. When she was able to speak, she said, “Did we have the same parents?”

So there we were. Me and Brent and Carol and The Thing in the toilet bowl. I asked if maybe Carol could call a few of her neighbors over to look at what had come out of her brother’s body. She said something quite un-ladylike into the handkerchief she was holding up to her nose. I further inquired if maybe she could get her church pastor over here. (We still had some space in the bathroom.) Or maybe some Girl Scouts could squeeze into the shower. Hell, we could call 911. Let’s just see if the Colorado Cops could Protect and Serve that.

Oh, I guess it’s kind of funny now that it’s over. Sure, Carol and Brent looked at me like I had an alien coming out of my chest. A coyote-ugly non-green alien. Yes, it was embarrassing. And yes, I was humiliated. But I think in some weird way it brought us all closer together.

We laughed about it for a couple of days. We all wondered if Hallmark made a card for this. And then when I was driving out of Carol’s driveway, I could faintly hear Brent saying, “I don’t care if he is your brother. He does that again, I kill the sucker.”

Jim Laris is a former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The Larry David Syndrome (Cigar Smoke 5-21-09)

You guys like Larry David? To me, he’s one of the funniest guys around (even if he does have two first names). Obviously, the “Seinfeld” stuff was great, but I liked him even more in his own show, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” That damn show used to make me weak. I’d be laughing so hard that I had to wear diapers — over my nose. I would be snot-snorting, baby.

In case some of you excuses-for-qualified-readers still can’t quite remember who Larry David is, he’s the lanky bald dude who is seemingly neurotic but who I think has his head on pretty straight. He notices things that most people miss, and not only does he notice them, he acts on them. Not only does he act on what he notices, but he can’t not act on what he notices. If Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” for Larry he would have had him say, “To be or to be, what is the question?”

Well, I’ve always had a little Larry in me. I do tend to notice weird stuff and find myself not quite able to let things go. The other day I go into a Starbucks to get a regular black coffee (which they had to send out for), and when I get my coffee and am about to sit down I notice that the little table I’m about to sit at has a checkerboard/chess game grid painted on the top of it. Yes, I was hesitant. My mind flashed to Larry and Hamlet arm wrestling.

Anyway, I’ve got my crusty cinnamon roll in one hand and my coffee in my other hand and I look around and notice that there are no free tables around. People are sitting at every table — except for the table with the checkerboard/chess layout painted on it. There is one table for four with one guy sitting there. I could have joined him, but I am not the social type. I can’t even come up with things to say to my friends. What the hell would I say to a latte stranger? Had any good mocha lately?

Well, I really wanted to have my coffee and cinnamon roll, so I asked myself, very quietly, “What would Larry do?” And, of course, I instantly knew what the answer was. I put my coffee and the roll on the checkerboard/chess grid on the table and said in a rather startlingly loud voice, “Excuse me, Starbucks coffee drinkers. May I have your attention? Please stop sipping your beverages for a few seconds.” The place went dead quiet.

I raised my hands up to try to reassure them that I wasn’t carrying an Uzi and that they shouldn’t be alarmed, and continued. “I am about to sit down at this table which has a checkerboard/chess layout on it and I just want to make sure that none of you are about to play a game of checkers or chess. I just don’t think it would be right if you were really wanting to play checkers, say, and some jerk-off such as myself just sat down at the official checkerboard table with no intention of playing checkers or chess. It just wouldn’t be fair. And I want you to know that I know it wouldn’t be fair, and if I sat there and didn’t say anything I would feel guilty and I would think you were looking at me with justifiable disdain.

“And because I am a person who does not handle public displays of disdain all that well, I thought I should just be upfront and see if any of you had plans to use the chess table before I just assumed you didn’t and sat there. Well, I am asking you now. Do any of you want to use the checkerboard/chess table?”

If possible, the room became even quieter than before. All you could hear were the thoughts of people wishing they hadn’t been born. I went on.

“Because of your silence I can only assume that none of you wish to play either checkers or chess at this time and that the table is free for me to use without even any glimmer of guilt. Is that correct? Have I made the correct assumption? I don’t see any little boxes of checkers. Anybody carrying a case of chessmen? I am going to sit down right now. Any problems with me sitting here?

I am pulling the chair back? I don’t hear anyone. I’m sitting down. Thank you for your time and attention. Please continue sipping your coffee or the other flavorful drink you have purchased. This checkerboard/chess announcement is now over. Thanks again. Appreciate your time. Take care.”

As I sat there at the checkerboard table enjoying my guiltless cup of coffee, I got to wondering. Why are checkerboards and chessboards the same? Same number of rows. Same number of columns. Even the squares are the same size. What kind of crap is that? Are Scrabble boards the same as Monopoly boards? Just what is going on here? I stood up again and said, “Excuse me, excuse me. One more thing, everybody …”

I think Larry would have been proud.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

So Far, So Dumb (Cigar Smoke 5-7-09)

First of all, before I try to be semi-funny, I want to thank all of you who sent me emails and cards about my having to put down my Airedale, Hadley. They meant a lot to me. Thank you very, very much.

Well, to kind of get my head out of what had been going on here, I decided to take another trip up to my new hovel in Oregon. I’m in the process of trying to make the place livable and I needed to take some special bunk beds up there.

So, after reading all the bed ads on craigslist for two weeks, I bought this kind of funky regular double bed with a twin bed on top. I got it at Couch Potatoes. I was going to haul it up to Oregon in my big old Dodge Durango. Finally, that polluting, gas-guzzling sumbitch was going to pay off.

The only little problem arose the day after I bought the beds. I sold the Durango. Pretty good planning, huh? (The White House has called me to help them screen their cabinet nominees. I kid Obama.) Just so you don’t think I’m completely nutso, I only sold the Durango because it wouldn’t start. I got stranded four times. It wouldn’t even start after I cursed at it and kicked it silly.

I got a neat used car that I really like, except it is not made to haul funky large bunk beds. It did, however, have a roof rack, and that’s where I made a really bad decision.

I was able to stuff all the wooden bed parts in the car. Yes, it was not completely safe. I had planks and springs and boxes going from the folded-down back-seat area up to the passenger side in the front. Just jammed in there. I could barely get in the driver’s seat, but I could see the right side rearview mirror, so I thought it would be relatively safe. My son, Casey, helped me get everything in there, but he made me sign a release form so he could show people at the funeral.

So far, so dumb. Then I decided to put the double-bed mattress on the roof and drive 830 miles. So far, so dumber. Being a conservative type, I wrapped the mattress in a special plastic tarp cover, and then I tied it down to the roof. And I knew the wind would be brutal, so I got six tie-down straps and cinched those suckers down tight. And I bought a bunch of bungee cords. And — I hate to say it — it looked pretty damn secure.

So I kissed Marge goodbye, and she said those 10 special words that I love, “Honey, you got the life insurance premiums paid, haven’t you?”

So off I went. I’m tooling along the 210 Freeway, everything is smoother than Nicole Kidman’s butt, and I merge onto Interstate 5, heading for hovelville. I am smoking a stogie I bought on the Internet so I didn’t have to pay California taxes; I am listening to Waylon say he is “too dumb for New York City and too ugly for L.A.,” and then I look out my left-hand window (the only window I can see out of) and I see a shadow. And the shadow is flapping around. Flapping shadows are not good. Then I hear the flapping shadow. Audible flapping shadows are even worse.

I pull off the freeway at Gorman. I stop at a gas station and I get out and look at the roof. It was like looking at Rosie O’Donell — it wasn’t pretty. The plastic was all ripped up; the straps were loose; the bungee cords were laughing.

So I go into this hokey AM-PM store and I look around for roof rack help and end up with some electrical tape, some duct tape and two coils of cheap rope. I spend 45 minutes in 60-mile an hour winds tying up that mattress, and I use up all the rope and the tape and the sanity I have left.

I go on down the road. It’s my life. I do not get far. I just make it over the Grapevine and the flapping is now so loud it’s making Big Bird horny. I get out and look up and I shudder. There is a loose, flapping, bleeding mattress, with ripped strands of tape and frayed rope everywhere.

Luckily, I have stopped at a Mobil station that has some pretty heavyweight tie-down materials. I buy four more cinch straps, wider ones. I get some better rope that doesn’t come apart as soon as you pay for it. And I get industrial-strength tape with fiberglass threads embedded in it. I spend another hour tying down that mess.

I head up the road again. I’m not having quite as much fun as earlier. I had to tell Waylon to put a lid on it. (You’re too ugly for Nashville!) Somehow I made it another couple hundred miles to a rest stop south of Stockton. I get out to go to the bathroom. Even bad roof-rack movers have to pee, dammit.

And, as I’m walking to the restroom, this guy next to me looks at the roof of my car, looks back at me, and then says, “Hey Tom, I loved you in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.”

I’m not going to tell you if I made it up to Oregon or not. However, if you’re driving northbound on Interstate 5 between Stockton and Sacramento, you might dial it down a few notches.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Rest in Peace, Big Guy (Cigar Smoke 4-23-09)

Last month Marge and I had to put our Airedale, Hadley, down. It was very sad. I can’t quite believe he’s really gone. I can still hear his dog tags jingling.

He had been on a steady decline for over a year. His back legs had been failing him and he had lost control of his bowels. He was going blind and looked dazed and confused a lot of the time. We knew he was in pain, but he had always been a stoic dog. He would not complain. He would not whimper. He never cried.

We tried to help him as much as we could. We’d lift his back legs to help him up. We’d hold his collar and guide him through doorways so he wouldn’t hit his head. Somehow, though, we knew we were probably doing all this for ourselves as much as we were for Hadley. We couldn’t bear to lose him. I guess we were selfish.

At the end, he was not able to get up at all. He had fallen on the driveway and was stranded there. He could not lift himself up, even to his back legs. Because he was so heavy, we couldn’t lift him. So we got his bed and managed to put him in there, and then we gently pulled the bed from the driveway into our bedroom. We wanted one last night with our furry friend. And we hoped he might be better in the morning.

And, amazingly, he was — for a while. Then he got worse. So I decided to go down to talk to the vet. She had taken care of him for almost 13 years, so she knew him well. She told us that he had had a good life and she couldn’t do much for him now. She thought it was time for us to let him go.

We brought him in later that afternoon. It was the longest 15-minute ride I’ve ever had. We arrived at the clinic and one of the attendants was able to carry him into the vet’s office and put him on the table. He looked so fragile, and scared. I put my hand on his head. He was shaking.

I had never put a dog down before. I asked the vet how it would all work. She said she would give him a shot to relax him. And then she would give him the final shot. She said it would be fast and painless.

We said OK. She gave him the first shot, and the process had started. Marge and I both broke down. We were crying and trying to comfort Hadley. But he didn’t seem to be relaxing much. So the vet gave him a second shot and then he did become more relaxed. He became very calm and quiet and stopped shaking.

Before she gave him the final shot, she told us it would take about 15 seconds to reach his heart, and then that would be it. We nodded. She gave him the shot. We looked at our Good Boy through our tears and then we saw his big, fuzzy head gently drop and cover his right paw. Hadley was gone. Marge and I both cried and said our good-byes.

It was the saddest thing I have ever seen. It broke my heart.

The last two weeks have been hard. We miss our guy, and we both expect to see him every day. Marge will automatically look outside to see if Hadley wants to come in. I will start to get up to fix his dinner at 5:30 every night and then remember. I’ll come home and expect him to meet me at the door. I’ll get a cigar out of my cigar box, and I’ll look for Hadley to ask him, “You wanna go have a cigar with me, you long-headed weasel?”

And the other day I snuck a box of Cheez-Its into the living room. You know, that big red-and-orange box. I actually had the box on my right hip, trying to hide it from Hadley. Hadley used to love Cheez-Its, and when he’d see me with that box, he’d jump up and come over and, well, hound me, for some handouts. He loved those damn things. I mean, really loved ’em. I’d take a couple for myself, and then give him one, and he’d gobble it down, sometimes with a side order of my fingers, and then he’d want another Cheez-It. When I’d put the box down, he would sit in front of me and paw my knee until I caved in and gave him a few more. Now he’s not there. It’s just not the same eating all the Cheez-Its myself. They’re too dry.

I miss so many things about that crazy dog. I miss how he used to scatter-ass the ducks at the Santa Fe Dam; I miss how he did a double take the first time he drank some seawater at the beach; I miss having him sit upright in the passenger seat of my old Explorer; I miss him nose-poking my butt to suggest we go for a walk; I miss bringing him two pieces of a cinnamon roll or a donut every morning. Whenever I’d go to Starbucks or some donut shop, I’d always have to save two pieces for him. Once I brought back only one piece of donut to the car, and gave it to him. He was pissed. I never did that again.

And I miss lying down with him on the rug. I used to lie down with him on the bed for a nap, but lately he couldn’t jump up there, so we had our naptime on the rug. Usually, he’d be lying there, and I would interrupt his sleep, and get down next to him, and put my human head right near his long horse head, and he would thump his tail a few times on the rug and then he would lick my face. I think he got a little doggie high on my cologne. And sometimes that wouldn’t be enough and he would slobber-lick the hairspray off my hair, too. And finally, he would calm down, and I would sleep next to him with my arm resting on his shoulder.

Rest in peace, my friend.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Off at the Races (Cigar Smoke 4-9-09)

I am not a big horse-racing fan. I’ve only been to maybe six or seven tracks in my lifetime. So I average about one race every decade. But I should go more often because, well, I am pretty damn good at betting the ponies.

And I’m going to share my system with you so you can take out what’s left of your 401(k) and finally make a little money. Here’s what I do. I get a copy of the Racing Form and look over the odds. Some horses will be 2 to 1, others will be 34 to 1. Whatever.

First of all, I never bet either the favorites or the long shots. If the favorite wins, I don’t make much money, and if the long shot wins, I just swear a lot. So I always pick a horse with medium odds, say, 8 to 1 up to 15 to 1. These horses usually will not be glue in the near future. And if they happen to win, you can make some nice money.

Armed with this fail-safe strategy, I went to Santa Anita Park last Sunday with the Altadena Soroptomist Club. My wife, Marge, is a member, and I like all the gals in the club. In fact, I’ve hung around with them for years now. One day I asked longtime member Shirley Manning why they let me, a man, run with their all-women club. And she said, “Because occasionally we need heavy objects lifted by someone not quite as smart as we are.” You can probably guess that I have warm feelings for them.

Anyway, they invited me to join them for A Day at the Races last Sunday, and I lifted a heavy object (myself) and accepted the invitation. We had great seats right near the center of the track. Had a super lunch of a corned beef on rye with crusty fries and a piece of cheesecake that took a couple years off your life. Oh, that’s another reason I like these people. They eat pretty well … for women.

For some reason (cheesecake withdrawal) I miss the first race. I bet 20 bucks to win on the No. 4 horse, High Note, in the second race. He goes off at 8 or 9 to 1. He starts off in last place. But I am screaming for him. I mean screaming. Soroptomist members are clutching their purses and their mint juleps to their bosoms like sick children.

But my screaming pays off. High Note wins the race. By a nose in a photo finish. I win $216. My system is a killer. My throat and nearby Soroptomist eardrums are broken.

So I kind of strut off to the window to collect my winnings and I come back waving two one-hundred dollar bills and I puff my chest out a little and ask if maybe any of the women are getting just a tad tired of their current husbands and might want a change. Marge supports me in this. She yells, “Take the bastard!”

In the third race, I find another horse that fits my system. I put another 20 bucks to win on the No. 3 horse, Patriotic Soldier. I think he went off at about 10 to 1. Well, this turns out to be an incredible race. It doesn’t get more exciting than this. My horse and the No. 5 horse were neck and neck. Coming down the stretch I was screaming, “Go 3! 3! 3! 3!” And the announcer says, “Down the stretch they come.” And me and my throat are raw. I’m yelling “3.” A guy next to me, a commie, is yelling “5.” I yell a louder “3!” He yells a pissy “5!”

It ends up in another photo finish. We have to wait over five minutes for them to figure out who won. I am weak. I would cry but there are too many Soroptomists around. Finally, the winning number flashes on the tote board. It’s No. 5. Not No. 3. I lost by a damn nose. No, by a damn nostril. No, by a damn booger. Yes, I lost another sure $220 by a booger.

I was devastated. My throat was wiped out. My chest was unpuffed. I felt weak and vulnerable. My wallet was lighter. Then another Soroptomist, JoAnn Formia, came up to me and said “You couldn’t carry my husband’s shoes, you loser.”

I lost another $20 on Bad Boy in the fourth. So then I gave up on that system and I went to my surefire backup system: picking horses by their funny names. I almost picked Cardinal Zin, but finally decided on Grylls because how could a horse without any vowels lose. I yelled Grylls as often as I could. I even yelled it with a German accent once and put an “a” on the end of it — Gryllsa.

Go Gryllsa! Go you vowel-less piece of dog food. Grylls did not win. Grylls did not finish. Grylls is still out on the track. Grylls is trying to buy a vowel from Vanna White.

So now that my system of medium odds wasn’t working, and my funny names system had mysteriously failed, I had to turn to my last great scientific strategy — always picking a gray horse. Somehow this had worked for me in the past. And I could always see my gray horse easily. It just stood out. And it made my screaming easier. “Go gray horse. Beat the brown and black horses.” Well, I yelled, “Go gray horse” in the final four races and lost all four. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe gray horses are hard of hearing.

But just send me your retirement money, anyway. I hear there’s a sure thing running at Hollywood Park next week — 12 to 1. A Hawaiian gray horse. No consonants in his name.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

A Stimulating Column (Cigar Smoke 3-26-09)

You know, I have been stimulating the economy for more than 50 years now. And how do I do this altruistic service to humanity? I buy cars, that’s how. No, I’m not Jay Leno. I don’t keep the cars and buy more cars. No, I just buy one car at a time, milk every last dying ounce of metallic life-juice out of it, then buy a new over-priced piece of potential junk, and repeat. I’m a serial car buyer. I live to stimulate the economy.

And while you have been crying and whining about the economy, I have been out there in the car-buying streets of hell for a half-century.

I bought my first car in 1957. I was 16 years old and the only thing leaner than my tough, stud body was my wallet. So, I bought a 1947 Mercury coupe for $50. The guy said he dropped a ’49 Ford engine in it and, sure enough, he did drop a V-8 into the engine compartment. However, he did not bolt it down to the actual car.

But you don’t care about my problems. All you care about is me stimulating the damn economy while you lie back and bitch about bailouts and moan about money. Go buy a car. Right now. They’re cheaper than houses.

When I was in my 20s and had a little more money, I remember, literally, using my last $900 to buy an MG roadster. It was a dumb decision. I did not have rent money. But, because my life was based on stimulating the economy, I did this for you and your ungrateful friends. I never even got a thank-you note.

A couple years later, I had my first kid and my wife thought we should sell the MG to help pay for the little interloper. She won that fight and I sold it for $500. I’ve made many bad decisions in my life, but that’s in the final four.

So, I took the $500 MG money and immediately bought an old lady Plymouth Valiant from my dad’s girlfriend. It was like a sedan with doilies. My biggest expense was buying paper towels to clean up my upchuck every time I got in that four-door loser. But I held my nose and my tongue and something else — I wanted to stimulate something. Yes, the economy. For you.

After owning the Valiant for a while, a friend of mine at work was selling this cool Pontiac convertible. I mean, it was really cool. It was really long and had more chrome and silver than Mexico and was shiny and had whitewall tires and air conditioning and the seats were this plush, dark blue leather. I bought it right on the spot, without telling the semi-little woman. I brought it home. I took the SLW (semi-little woman) out to see it. I told her to sit in the driver’s seat. I sat down in the passenger seat and I let the top down and I turned on the radio (which the Valiant didn’t even have) and turned the volume up to rumble and raised my eyebrows a couple of times and said, “What do you think, Interloper Mother?” And she said, “This will sure stimulate the economy.”

And I continued my personal stimulus plan over the years. When I left the job I had for about seven years, I had the option to take out my retirement money, so because I knew the economy needed to be stroked a little, I took the whole wad and went down to Felix Chevrolet in downtown LA and bought a brand new Monte Carlo. Drove that damn thing right off the showroom floor. I remember it to this day. My accountant was yelling at me as I drove off, “Don’t do this, you dumbass!”

And when that Monte Carlo turned into a worthless heap, I took that pile of junk over to a car dealer in Arcadia and I asked him what I could get for it, and he said, “Arrested.” OK, it didn’t have any brakes and the exhaust fumes were killing neighborhood pets. But the important thing was I had had the courage to drive it over there without any brakes to help stimulate the economy.

Yes, I ended up buying a pissy little Sentra because I was divorced and broke and lonely and the payments were only $127 a month. I hope you heard that. I was broke and lonely and I still had the humanity to stimulate the economy. I selflessly spent $127 a month for three years to help America defeat communism and be safe for me to get more credit cards with a 29 percent interest rate. And what were you doing? Don’t lie to me.

Oh, I could go on about other stimulating things I have done. But maybe there are kids reading this. Sure, I could tell you how I went out and bought an Eagle Talon sports car moving-ass machine so I could race home after my shrink sessions to regain my sanity. Yes, again I sacrificed and stimulated the economy. I was a good citizen in deep crushing debt, and you did nothing!

And, because the need is so great today, I went out and bought a new used car just yesterday. Yeah, I sold my big old gas-guzzling Durango SUV and I bought a pretty cool car. I can’t tell you what kind of car it is or you would know what size galoshes to buy Mr. Johnson.

The important thing is I stimulated the economy. I bought something I don’t need and I spent more money than I wanted to spend. You can do it too. S-T-I-M-U-L-A-T-E!

Jim Laris is for the former publisher and owner of the Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com.

Friday, March 13, 2009

This Column is Depressing (Cigar Smoke 3-12-09)

I’ve always had a problem with depression. It runs in my family. (Or walks, trudges actually, with its head down.) My dad was depressed. My grandmother was depressed. Her father was depressed. And I’m pretty sure my Greek forebears, Plato and Aristotle, were depressed.

I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years. It’s helped a little. Now I pretty much know why I’m depressed. But, when I think of how much money it cost me for that knowledge, I get depressed. I’ve got two friends who are depressed, too. But we’re too depressed to talk about it. We’d all shoot ourselves except we’re such poor shots.

So, how do I deal with depression? Basically, I try to ignore it, or blame it on other people. Especially dead people – it’s very difficult for dead people to defend themselves. But when that fails, I do something that has worked every damn time. I take a road trip.

I just get in the car, light up a semi-cheap cigar and take off. And something always happens that cheers me up. Like last week I was feeling really low, so I decided to drive up to Oregon to visit my empty hovel.

I was buzzing along Highway 5 in the rain, which is not the part that cheered me up, and I had to pee. I saw a sign that said there was a rest stop in 20 miles. I thought me and my bladder could make that, so I kept driving. When we get to the rest stop exit, it says: Closed. Next Rest Stop 52 miles. Mr. Bladder was, excuse the expression, pissed.

Anyway, I couldn’t wait that long, so I found a gas station in a few miles. Got some gas and went in to the Stop N’ Overpay store to get a bottle of water and a lighter. I gave the clerk five bucks and she said, “It’s $11.27, sir?” I said, “For a bottle of water and a $1.99 lighter?” She said, “The lighter is $9.99.”

I looked down and, sure enough, it was $9.99. I inquired as to why it was $9.99. She told me because it had a fingernail clipper hidden inside it.

Now that cheered me up. Finally someone had invented something I’ve needed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been lighting a cigar and I’ve said to myself, “God, I wish I could cut my fingernails right now, too.” It’s just a shame they didn’t come up with this lighter/fingernail clipper earlier. I could have saved a bundle in psychiatry bills. It’s depressing.

Oh, well. Got back on the road and drove along the California Aqueduct for a while, and remembered many years ago seeing a pilot fly his open-cockpit crop-duster right over my head and he had a Snoopy scarf blowing behind him in the wind and it made me smile. The road comes through. Again.

I got to the Kettleman City turnoff. I always stop at Mike’s Diner for lunch. It’s one of those cluttered Cracker Barrel kind of places with kids’ wagons and old Texaco signs and license plates on the walls. I ordered a chicken tostada. (Yes, I’m going to tell you what I ate for breakfast soon.) When I took my first bite of chicken, I thought something wasn’t right. It did not taste like chicken. It did not taste like anything I had ever eaten before. It tasted like an unlucky circus animal. But it did get me out of my own head. It’s hard to be depressed while eating a lion tostada.

That night I stayed at a Holiday Inn and my avalanche of cheerfulness continued. I turned on the TV and I saw a bunch of teenage guys chasing emus around in a field. Yes, emus. Big, clumsy, ostrich-like emus. Yee-haw! Take that, depression.

The next morning I had breakfast at IHOP. (I told you.) Every time I eat there, I get real serious and lower my voice and I ask the waitress, “Do you guys have pancakes?” And every time, her reaction cheers me up. But then I look at the seven kinds of syrup to choose from, and I go back down.

After breakfast I drove three hours out of my way to see a little mountain town called Hayfork. I’d always wanted to see it. I don’t want to see it again. Then I zigzagged and car-sicked my way through hours of switchbacks and slushy snow and I got to the Eureka Bay in Humboldt County. Now, I’m not saying the rainy, foggy, cold, sludge-filled bay is not attractive, but their slogan is “Our Harbor is Uglier than Your Butt.”

I ate lunch at a neat little place at the marina. And I swear to God, as I’m eating my tuna melt, the waitress comes up to me and says, “Would you run with the bulls?” Out of nowhere. “Would you run with the bulls?” So I said, “Would you share what you’re smoking?” She looked quizzical. I said, “Honey, I wouldn’t even walk with the cows.”

By the time you read this, I’ll be home again. Why don’t you come on over. I’ll light up a cigar for you. And clip your nails.