It's Not Easy Bein' Me Page 15
That night a big group of us were having dinner in my hospital room, when Dr. Laks walked in with a few other doctors and asked to speak to Joan and me alone. When everybody had cleared out, Dr. Laks looked me in the eye, man-to-man like, and said, “Rodney, you like to be creative, don’t you? Your work requires a lot of thinking, so we want to do everything we can to preserve your brain.”
Uh-oh. I started hearing that damn Twilight Zone music in my head. Do-dododo, Do-dododo, Do-dodo…
Dr. Laks continued, “Our team has reevaluated your case. Your angiogram this morning gave us some new information. We feel your heart is stronger than the initial tests revealed.”
Then I realized what he was saying: they wanted to do the brain surgery first, then do the heart surgery. They had concluded that my heart would be strong enough to endure the brain surgery after all, and that would optimize my chances with the heart surgery.
We figured the brain surgery would take place the following day, but Dr. Martin was on vacation and wasn’t reachable by phone. (I think he went mountain climbing or something.) I didn’t want to spend Dr. Martin’s vacation in the hospital, so Joan took me home and I continued to practice parallel parking the scooter in our dining room. I was still writing jokes and working on this book.
* * *
I told my doctor, “Every day I wake up, I look in the mirror, I want to throw up. What’s wrong with me?” He said, “I don’t know, but your eyesight is perfect.”
* * *
The big day finally came. On April 7, 2003, I checked into the hospital, this time for brain surgery. My son and daughter flew in again. That night we had a small party in my room. Bob Saget and Louie Anderson kept us all laughing until we were exhausted.
Joan spent the night with me and went to pre-op with me in the morning. Just before they gave me the injection to knock me out, Joan says I said, “I want to live…”
Those were my last words for about two weeks.
* * *
My doctor’s a very strange man. I said to him, “Doc, what’s the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer?” He told me, “The taste.”
* * *
The surgery went well, but there were still some spooky days ahead. For various reasons, they had to place me in a “medically induced coma,” which, they said, gave me a better chance at a full recovery. Since I was in a coma for part of this time, and pretty whacked out for the rest of it, I don’t have many memories of what went on, so I’ll turn things over to Joan for a while:
When Rodney was taken out of his coma, he was still pretty far gone. He couldn’t talk, or hardly move, so I was always looking for clues to figure out if his unusual and newly blood-soaked brain was processing information. Some days he would seem responsive. Others not very. One day his eyes were open and he was able to weakly squeeze my hand, but not really on command.
Dying to know if he could understand what I was saying to him, I finally asked him a question I figured would get a reaction. A while back a fan had e-mailed Rodney an X-rated cartoon that Rodney thought was hilarious. I can’t bring myself to describe the cartoon, but the caption was: Surprise Balloon. So, that day, I asked Rodney if he wanted to see a surprise balloon. What a reaction! He grinned from ear to ear and tried to talk. I’ll never get that picture out of my mind—both sides of his mouth turned up in a smile despite the big ventilator tube stuck down his throat, with another one up his left nostril, and his skull shaved and covered with staples and electrodes. I was thrilled.
A few days later, another thing happened that assured me Rodney was on the road to recovery. Before his surgery we always looked forward to one daily ritual, watching The Jerry Springer Show. This went on for years and years. We never missed that show, no matter what was going on.
The morning they finally took all the tubes out of Rodney, he was sitting up in bed in the intensive care unit, and I noticed that he was staring at the clock and then looking out the window. It took me a minute to realize that it was 10 A.M., which meant that Jerry Springer was on. I asked him if he’d like to watch, and he said yes in this deep, almost satanic voice, so I turned it on very quietly, because I didn’t want to disturb anybody else in the unit, or let the doctors know what we were doing. When Rodney saw Jerry Springer, he lit up. He was so into it—like a kid making his first trip to Disneyland. Pure glee.
The word quickly spread that not only was Rodney okay, but that the first thing he had wanted to do when he had regained consciousness was watch Jerry Springer. Our publicist mentioned that in the press release that day and the story was picked up all over. Jerry Springer even sent us tapes of all the shows Rodney had missed while in his coma.
Oddly enough, though, once we were home, the fully recovered Rodney no longer had any desire to watch television. But for a while, especially with restricted blood flow to the brain or while coming out of a coma, Jerry Springer was a wonder drug, a tonic for Rodney’s tortured soul.
It turns out the UCLA doctors are geniuses. The brain surgery was the right way to go. My recent echocardiogram shows normal heart function. In other words, I got to skip having heart surgery for a while. I still have aortic valve stenosis, but I don’t have shortness of breath. A full year after the surgery, I’m breathing fine, walking fine, thinking sharp. One of these days I will have to get that aortic valve replaced, but for now, I don’t think about it.
By the way, originally I was going to include the Surprise Balloon cartoon in this book but the publishers felt it was too risqué. If you want to see this X-rated cartoon, come to my website, www.rodney.com, or send me an email to rodney@rodney.com.
* * *
I tell ya, I think doctors get too much respect. A hooker should get more respect. She’s more important than a doctor. I guarantee you, at four o’clock in the morning, drunk, I’d never walk up five flights of stairs to see a doctor.
* * *
Chapter Seventeen
End of the Line
With me nothing comes easy. This morning I did my push-ups in the nude…I didn’t see the mousetrap.
People ask me, “How do you write jokes?” There is no set procedure, but writing is basically thinking. Before you write anything, you have to sit there and think about it. Sit down and try to think funny in whatever area you want: wife trouble, car trouble, kid trouble.
With my image, everything is trouble.
Many of my jokes are written on the spot when I hear something I can make funny. One day I was sitting in Mulberry Street Pizza in Beverly Hills. It’s a nice place to hang out with the guys—and one of the guys I was hanging out with at the time said that he had a “tale of woe.” So I turned that into: “Every man has his tale of woe. Unfortunately, in life there’s more woe than tail.”
One time I was kidding around with a waitress at Mulberry Street. I said, “Make it with me, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars for an hour.”
Here I am with Jim Carrey, Bob Saget, and some of my other favorite young comics. Who the fuck knows where we were?
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “that’s not enough.”
I said, “Okay, I’ll stay two hours.”
I was in Fort Lauderdale, driving along by myself. I came to a red light, and at the intersection was a convertible with two young couples. To my left, about three feet away from me, was a very attractive girl. She looked at me in a sexy way and said, “I wanna suck your cock.”
I could see what her game was—she wanted to see if she could shock the “old man.”
So I said, “You’re gonna have to pay me.” As I drove away, I could hear them laughing and yelling, “Rodney!”
Putting a good joke together is a delicate thing. The emphasis on the right word is very important. So is the rhythm, the timing.
And of course, the joke has to be funny.
People don’t know the preparation you do in show business. I still do The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, an
d I try to do all new jokes each time.
Counting my stand-up routine and my “conversation” on the couch with Jay, I need about 30 new jokes. That means I have to write a hundred new jokes. Then, to know which jokes get the best laughs, I go to a local comedy club the Laugh Factory and try them out.
After I have about 30 new jokes I like, I have to put them in some kind of order—create some flow, some continuity. I call that stringing them together into my joke necklace—they have to be in the right order to work. I have to string together about 10 jokes for my stand-up bit and another 20 for my “chat” with Jay afterward. It takes hours and hours of work at home and many nights onstage to get a Tonight Show routine the way I want it.
* * *
This girl was ugly. They used her in prisons to cure sex offenders.
* * *
Living as long as I have, you can’t help but look back on life and wonder what does it all mean. Sometimes, I don’t ever think I’ve made it. Even today, if I check into a hotel and a bellman picks up my suitcase, I feel awkward. I feel like I should be taking the bags. I guess I feel like I’m one of the masses. Maybe people know that.
I’ve been broke most of my life. For years I was picking up the phone and acting surprised. “The check came back? Oh!”
Celebrating my eightieth birthday, on The Tonight Show. Jay and Jim totally surprised me.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
Here’s me and Joan between operations.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
Every day now when I get up in the morning, I read the obituaries.
The obituaries have been very entertaining. Often you will read about the lives of some fascinating people.
I read about Suzanne Bloch, a musician and teacher. She was a class act, respected by all. Suzanne often played chamber music with noted scientists, including Albert Einstein.
Einstein turned out to be very difficult to work with. Suzanne would give the downbeat, but Einstein always came in late. Each time they had to go back to the beginning. Finally in exasperation, she turned on him and said, “Mr. Einstein, can’t you count?”
But I can count and I know my days are numbered. I can picture my own funeral, the things that would be said:
We are here today to bid farewell to Rodney Dangerfield.
A good husband, a good father, and a very good tipper.
A man who cared about the homeless. He was always looking for a girl who needs a room.
A man who always loved his neighbor—if she was easy.
Farewell, Rodney. We know you’ll be in good hands—your own.
I tell ya one thing, though, I’m not about to die anytime soon. There are too many people out there who owe me money.
I can accept getting older. I can even accept getting old, but dying? Man, that’s a tough one to accept. As my friend Joe Ancis used to say, “Who made this contract?”
Life’s a short trip. You’ll find out.
You were seventeen yesterday. You’ll be fifty tomorrow. Life is tough, are you kiddin’? What do you think life is? Moonlight and canoes? That’s not life. That’s in the movies.
Life is fear and tension and worry and disappointments.
Life. I’ll tell ya what life is. Life is having a mother-in-law who sucks and a wife who don’t. That’s what life is.
My grandson, Joshua, has a great sense of humor. I just told him a joke. Look how he broke up.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
Acknowledgments
Who should I thank first? I think it should be the guy who wrote the foreword to this book, Jim Carrey. Thank you, Jim, and thanks for being a real friend.
I also want to thank Chris Calhoun and the folks at Sterling Lord for their support and Bob Roe and Mic Kleber for their assistance.
This book also benefited from the talents and professionalism of the people at HarperCollins, especially my editor, David Hirshey.
Here’s thanks to my bookie for being so patient.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank the following people for their friendship and kindnesses over the years:
David Permut, Harry Basil, Bob Saget, Billy Tragesser, Adam Sandler, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, Louie Anderson, Oliver Stone, Harland Williams, Dr. Neil Martin, Johnny Carson, Chris Albrecht, Paul Rodriguez, Jerry Stiller, Lenny Clarke, Anne Meara, Tim Allen, Anthony Bevacqua, Chris Albrecht, Joseph Merhi, Dr. Bruce Edwards, Marty Belafsky, Dom Irerra, Charlie Burke, Smokey Child, Tony Bennett, Merv Griffin, Warren Cowan, Richard Sturm, Dr. Grace Sun, Kevin Sasaki, Larry Shire, Dennis Arfa, Harold Ramis, Dr. Jamie Moriguchi, Robert Davi, Michael Bolton, and Jay Leno.
I want to thank the Chinese restaurant that delivers late.
And a big thanks to my wife, Joan; my son, Brian; my daughter, Melanie; her husband, David; and my grandson, Joshua.
Copyright
Some images not available for electronic edition.
IT’S NOT EASY BEIN’ ME: Copyright © 2004 by Rodney Dangerfield. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195764-2
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