Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (5 page)

So, I nodded, yeah, I’m condescending. Greed and clawing for fame got me to the point where I was pretending to care what Clay Aiken thought of me. What have I done?
What have I done?

Clay spent over an hour and a half of his time, and wasted much more than that of mine, having a heart-to-heart with me over how he, Clay Aiken, thought I should treat Lou Ferrigno. He wasn’t talking about how Clay Aiken thought I should treat Clay Aiken, about which I would have had to work hard to give a flying fuck. Clay was talking to me about how he, Clay Aiken, thought I should treat the guy who played a cartoon character painted green, decades ago. He also told me to stop using the word “groovy.” This from a man who uses the word “bitch.” I like the word “groovy.” I don’t like the word “bitch.” After our talk, I went back to the hotel, called my wife and talked to her about being upset about my talk with Clay Aiken. One’s wife could bring home a couple of her sexy MILF friends for a very special sex birthday party and one could be unable to get a hard-on and then pee all over oneself and start crying like a little girl while chewing egg salad on soft bread with one’s mouth open, and it would disgust one’s wife less than talking about one’s heart-to-heart talk with Clay Aiken. She’s a very understanding woman.

If you’ve gotten yourself into a situation when Clay Aiken is going to talk about his feelings with you . . . and if your cock is bigger than a cashew, it’s time to kill yourself. If it weren’t being documented, you could kill him quickly and bury him in a shallow grave—who’s going to notice? You could go on living your happy normal life, but if there are TV cameras pointed at you while Clay is pretending to soul search, and your wife is going to find out and some of your friends from the carny might watch the show in a bar somewhere, well . . . you should kill yourself.

It is a tribute to having the greatest parents in the world, my wonderful wife and children, and to having character rammed into me by my third-grade teacher that I’m still alive to write this now. Clay was explaining to me how I could live my life in a way that would please him, while we sat on an upper floor of Trump Towers and the door to the balcony was unlocked. I could have jumped. As the cameras shot us, Clay looked directly in my eyes like he was showing compassion for an autistic child while he knew he was on a reality TV show. He was playing compassionate, smart and practical in the face of this big loud aggressive guy. Then he used the word “bully” against me (that word was used a lot during that episode), referring to how I dealt with Lou Ferrigno. Lou had called me a “fat motherfucker” and hit me, and hurt me, several times as he pretended to greet me and show me affection but really as he showed me how strong he was. Lou said that his roughness with me was proof that he liked me. I said, “Then don’t like me.” I sure believed it was affection. He would swear that he never hit me and he wouldn’t be lying. What he considering greeting, I consider battery. I’m a pussy. I hate that jock hugging hitting thing. It’s why I became a theater guy. Lou explained to me that “no kidding” he was trained in combat and could kill me in three seconds. Clay explained how I should deal with Ferrigno. Clay said that he knew how to deal with Lou because Clay himself had worked for years with intellectually disabled students before he discovered himself on
American Idol.
He thought I should deal with this grown man—who was our peer, who had punched me in friendship—as if I was dealing with an intellectually disabled child, so . . . get this . . . so I wouldn’t come off as condescending in front of the non-groovy, but very bitchy Clay.

You don’t have to be a mind reader to know what I was thinking as Clay’s perpetually half-closed, unfocused eyes met mine and he placed his “comforting” hand on my shoulder. I was thinking,
I have made a lot of money. So has Teller. Teller loves me. If I run out to the balcony and jump off, I’m sure my wife and children wouldn’t get my huge life insurance policy (I’ve seen
Double Indemnity
), but Teller would get a big press bump from me being dead, and he’d use that money to make sure that my family are taken care of. And there’s a chance, with this conversation on video, they’ll get Clay for murder, and my family will get the insurance money after all and can maybe file a civil suit against Clay for more money. I’m bigger than Clay by a lot. I could probably kill him with my bare hands even without Lou’s military training, but at this point, I’m thinking my funeral, his trial, instead of the other way around. It’s a coin toss.
Condescending. Hand on shoulder. Looking into my eyes and . . . for OVER AN HOUR!

How long is an hour? When my wife and I decided to get married and have children, the conversation took forty-five minutes. On my mother’s deathbed, the honest “I love you”s took a half hour. The decision for Teller to quit his tenured classics teaching job and spend the rest of his life working with me took ten minutes. This “good TV” heart-to-heart with the second place winner of a talent show took over an hour. An hour during which the people I really loved, my mom, my wife and Teller, were being spit and pissed on by my hearing out Clay on camera about something completely unimportant. I should have jumped. At least some of you might have respected that. No one respects me talking to Clay Aiken about feelings. Not even Clay. He was just doing it to win a TV game so he wouldn’t have to go back to condescending to mentally disabled children for a career.

What happened? Did I forget how to say “Shut the fuck up?” Or, “I’m sorry, I think I left the bathwater running in Las Vegas, and you know it’s the desert, there’s a water shortage.” Or, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English. I learned our Vegas shows phonetically.” Or, “Hey, Clay, there are more TV cameras on the other side of the room. Why don’t you have a heart-to-heart with Arsenio Hall? That might get you more close-ups.”

I owe my family and Teller my full attention no matter what tripe they want to babble, but those people never babble tripe. I owe Aiken jack shit, and yet I was letting him tell me how I should act. He’s not fit to eat shit off Teller’s shoes, and I gave him more time than I’ve ever given Teller? The time didn’t mean anything to Clay. He would have a heart-to-heart talk with a salmon if there were a chance it would be broadcast. If you’ll listen, he will talk. He’s used to having cameras around him all the time, and he knows how to create an improvised soap opera for TV. When he said he wanted me to treat people differently, I said “Okay” and I changed how I was. Everyone who was on the show or watched the show noticed that I took all his advice and changed how I acted. I did that instantly. I told him I’d do that in the first five minutes of our talk. He got that promise from me and I kept that promise—it’s on video. But he wasn’t telling me things to have me change. What I was doing didn’t matter; it was the talk itself he wanted to have on camera. He was gathering evidence and not actually talking. Crazy world this showbiz thang.

I try to have an honest relationship with my wife, so that night I called her and told her that I’d had a heart-to-heart with Clay Aiken. I could have told her that aliens had come down and given me intergalactic herpes on my asshole and she would have been more credulous and less disgusted.

So the morning after my heart-to-heart with Clay, I’m sneaking out of Trump International, as part of my quest to have my fake business abilities judged by Trump. I’ve run a very successful business for almost forty years and have always been in the black. Always. Teller and I never went bankrupt. We’ve paid all our bills and supported our families and the people who work with us. Before Clay Aiken touched me, I was a fucking artist.

I’m walking beside Dee Snider. We’ve got our hair and makeup done, and we still look like men in their fifties with long stupid hair. We get out of the loading dock, and there’s freezing rain and wind hitting us in the face. Dee had broken his finger falling off a horse, while dressed in drag, for a medieval dinner theater show in Jersey that I made him do when I was
The Celebrity Apprentice
“team leader.” We were both a little damaged, bleary, worse for the wear and tear, and Dee turned to me and said, “I’m getting so paranoid, I’m starting to think that the show’s producers made this weather happen just to fuck with us.”

Dee had nailed it. His broken finger had not beaten his real-world perspective, the way Clay’s heart-to-heart had broken mine. He still had some non-
reality
reality left. When Dee said that, I realized that was what I was feeling, without the “I’m getting so paranoid” part. Right before Dee spoke, I was feeling that the freezing rain was some sort of TV producer plot. That they had planned it to see what we would do, that they had done it to make “good TV.”

Why people act worse
on
reality than they would
in
reality, is a mystery. Other than avarice and desire for empty fame, the main reason I did
TCA
was to feel what it would feel like to be in that situation. I did it to see what made people act like that. Not everyone falls off a motorcycle without a helmet to become Gary Busey. Some people do it just because there are cameras around. When you’re in it, it seems like the producers must be making this shit happen, but I don’t think they were. I don’t think they have to do much to drive people like us crazy. We start with a leg up.

Daniel Kahneman’s book
Thinking, Fast and Slow
introduced me to the idea of “ego depletion.” I read it after my tour of duty on
The Celebrity Apprentice
, and it explained some of the mysteries I experienced doing that show. Studies have shown that if you make someone very self-conscious about everything they do and say, their self-control just gets tired out. The ego can be exhausted. It’s the very trying to be one’s best on camera that puts one at one’s worst on camera. You just can’t keep it up that long. You want to be at your best, but pretty soon the internal censors are exhausted, take a break, and pretty soon sweet Arsenio is yelling things like, “I’ll tell you what a fucking bitch whore she is!”

The non-sexual question I’ve been asked the most since
TCA
is “Were those others just faking?” It’s a question I can’t answer. I know Lisa Lampanelli pretty well. She did our movie
The Aristocrats
and we’ve been out together socially. We’ve talked. I sat with her in a room while she was yelling at Dayana Mendoza (who had been Miss Universe). Lisa and others had problems with Dy (she let me call her that), but I had no problems with Lisa or Dy. I just didn’t like Clay having a heart-to-heart talk with me. Lisa was really yelling. She was really crying. It was really real. I felt it was sincere. I felt that Lisa was really frustrated and really upset. I sat there. When people are really upset, I sit there. You can find a few ex-girlfriends who will vouch for that and not as a good thing. While she was yelling, she yelled something like, “I’ve been putting up with this shit for eight weeks.” I don’t remember the exact number of weeks she said. But I do remember it was way, way more weeks than we had been there. And I remember it was the right number of weeks it was going to be when it aired. It was both of those things. The show is shot with about two days for every week. We shoot six days a week and during most weeks we do three tasks and each one of those tasks is a week of broadcast. The first task was three days and some of the broadcasts used more or less than one task, but . . . overall, the amount of time we were there was about a third of the amount of time that it took when broadcast. Lisa was really upset, but the amount of time she said she’d been disgusted with Dy was the amount of time the show would be on the air, not the real amount of time we’d been there. So, they could use that video and not violate the chronology of the show. Lisa wasn’t lying, she wasn’t faking, but she was aware she was on TV. We were all professionals, we were all aware of the camera, but we were also living our lives. It makes it very crazy. I spent a lot of time saying to Paul Sr., whom I love, “It’s not real.” But that’s not true. It’s also not TV. It’s really not TV. When I was having my heart-to-heart with Clay, the full endless horror of it was never broadcast. It was edited down to a minute. When I’m on Piers Morgan and he’s ripping me a new asshole, that’s TV, I know that every word he says is going out. But
The Celebrity Apprentice
is so long that you know the vast majority of stuff will never be seen, but cameras are still on; it could be seen. It’s Schrödinger’s showbiz: it’s all fake and it’s all real at the same time. The situation itself makes everyone crazy.

The production isn’t entirely blameless. There was a lot of alcohol available at any time it could be even slightly justified, but most of us never drank a drop, and even the drinkers were moderate. But the producers didn’t need anyone drunk; they got their telegenic outbursts from ego depletion. And after someone had an ego-depleted outburst, they’d reward the impropriety. In real reality, there would have been hell to pay for screaming epithets at people, but in
TCA
world, there are no repercussions. No one loves anyone on the set enough to say, “Hey listen, man, take a little break and think about this.” No one cares. We’re all trying to save our own sorry asses. Then the next day, Trump says something insane like, “I’m glad you showed some backbone. I like passion.” He means, of course, he likes passion for his little TV show, but it feels like he’s saying the outburst was a good thing. We’ve chosen to make this whackjob, with the cotton candy piss hair and the birther shit, into someone we want to please.

I made a deal with the producers and myself that I would pretend to care what Donald Trump thought of me. I believe, in the real world, that I care less about what Trump thinks of me than he cares what I think of him. When he was into his free-form rants in front of a captive audience, he would talk about articles written about him and defend himself against charges made, as far as I could tell, by random bloggers with a few hundred hits. Attacks that could have no impact on his life at all. It sounded like this cat was Googling himself, being bugged by what was written, and then defending himself to people who were trying to improve their careers by playing a TV game with him. He sat on this throne, and told us he’d made a good business decision by selling a house of his for much less than the asking price and these bloggers should know that. They should know he was a good businessman. The nightmare of Trump is not that he doesn’t care what people think; it’s that he desperately cares what people think and . . . he’s doing the best he can. I don’t know Donald Trump. We’ve crossed paths a few times, but I’ve never talked to him. He talked to me, but I was on a show where I wasn’t supposed to talk back. I still did, but only a little. I disagree with him about a lot, but you know, I disagree with you about a lot, and we still get along. He was wicked wrong about the birther shit, but I’m wicked wrong about a lot, and we both have stupid hair.