God, No! (20 page)

Our children are four and five, and surprisingly Santa doesn’t come up too much. It’s kind of like god—selling the shit is hard; not selling the shit is easy. It just doesn’t come up much. But we’re trying to create our own traditions. I’ve already mentioned one of them: when someone sneezes, we don’t say “God bless you.” We weren’t even comfortable with “Bless you.”
“Gesundheit”
is really fun to say, but it’s about “healthiness,” and that’s a little too Colbert for our family’s taste. So we go with “That’s funny.” We say “That’s funny” when someone sneezes, because it is funny, and we say “That’s really funny” when someone sneezes a second time. It can get pretty hilarious when the pollen comes out and gets blown around in the desert. “That’s funny” started with my friends in high school loving to say
“gesundheit”
after anyone said “nephew” or “a shoe” (puns are important to nerds), but that left us with nothing to say after a sneeze. “That’s funny” covered it. While other students were tagging cars, shooting dope, and reading literature, we were figuring out how to react properly to sneezes and words that sound like sneezes. In our children’s preschool, our children have said “Bless you” a few times, but all the children there say “That’s funny.” Further support for Jefferson’s conviction that good ideas would drive out bad ones in the marketplace of ideas.

We’ve tried to create a Jillette winter ritual around Xmas. We’ve chosen New Year’s Day. Teller and I finally made enough money that we don’t have to work New Year’s Eve anymore. In showbiz it’s about the most lucrative night of the year, but also the most depressing. Venues pay three times what they normally would for a show. Everyone in the audience gets a hat and a noisemaker, and no one gives a fuck about the show. Every year would end with a nice big check and a show that we
hated doing, so we said fuck it, and now we take New Year’s Eve off. As you know, I’ve never had a drink of alcohol or tried any recreational drug in my life. Neither did my parents. I was brought up to watch TV and eat ice cream on New Year’s Eve and that’s what I do with my children. I don’t do a show on New Year’s Day. On Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Labor Day, and Xmas, I do shows, but New Year’s Eve I’m with my family.

My mom died on New Year’s Day. When she died, I was on a plane flying to a gig in Lake Tahoe. I landed to a message on my cell phone from my sister. “One voice mail message” was a death notice. I’d been at Mom’s bedside with the morphine pump in my hand when she’d gone into a coma a few days before. Her dying wish was that I not miss any shows. She said that they had raised me to work hard and keep my commitments, and her dying was no excuse to negate the work ethic they’d tried to instill in me. So, I’ve done the trifecta. I did shows the night my dad died, the night my mom died, and the night my sister died.

When Gilbert Gottfried’s mom died, he called me. My mom had died about a year earlier and I had called him and we had gone out to dinner. During our grief we got together and made jokes in worse taste than you’ve ever heard. Our movie
The Aristocrats
is nothing; I’m talking about jokes that if I even hinted at obliquely, you’d put this book down and start organizing boycotts. I know that you wouldn’t be reading this book unless you were a freedom-of-speech extremist, so you wouldn’t want us arrested, but you would want us to never work again. Gilbert and I did those jokes just to each other. Horrible, unfunny, gross, hateful jokes for hours and hours, just laughing and laughing at the pain and suffering of life. Sickening jokes. Just spewing out a “fuck you” to the whole world. Yes, I remembered all the wonderful times with my mom, and yes, I cried alone for hours, but I also told jokes with Gilbert I would never let anyone else in any situation hear me tell. Jokes that I had never told. It was a time for sadness and memory, and it was also a time for pure, raw, empty hate at the pain of life.

We had dinner and made the same jokes after Gilbert’s mom died. A couple of days later Gilbert was booked to do
The Hollywood Squares.
He said he couldn’t think of a reason to do
The Hollywood Squares
after his mom had died. I said, “Yup, there’s no reason. But there’s never going to be a reason. Your mom will never be alive again. There will never be a reason to do
The Hollywood Squares
again. You knew your mom was going to die, so there was never a reason to do
The Hollywood Squares
before. There never was a reason and there never will be a reason to do
The Hollywood Squares,
except that that’s what we do. We’re fucking guys who do
The Hollywood Squares,
except now we’re fucking guys with dead mothers who do
The Hollywood Squares.
” I think he went and did it, I don’t know. I cared about his mom dying, but I don’t care about the fucking
Hollywood Squares.
If he did it, he was funny, I will bet my life on that.

Gilbert had to think about it. He had to decide when to go back to work. My mom made it easy for me. She told me I’d miss her forever, and taking a night off wasn’t going to help. She didn’t give me a choice. When my dad died, my mom lied to me. She said he was still alive when I called her from backstage at a show in Concord, New Hampshire. She kept the news from me so I could do a show that night and not be ripped apart. My sister and nephews disagreed. They thought I had a right to know, but my mom didn’t care. With no support from the family, she lied to me. She told me to hurry home to her right after the show, and I did. Friends drove me in a car for hours, and she was waiting up in her chair, crying. She told me when I got home and was with her that my father had died that afternoon. Fuck your Santa Claus in the neck; Valda Jillette loved me enough to lie to me about the death of the man she had loved her whole life. Match that with “Oh, the guy in the supermarket is one of his elves who dresses up like Santa,” motherfucker.

I lied to my mom too. When my dad got really sick, he was in the hospital on Xmas Eve. The doctors said that Samuel H. Jillette was to start in a nursing home on Xmas day. The bullshit social worker told me she would tell him and it would be okay. She was a professional, paid by the county. She was a liberal. She told him, and dad began sobbing softly. Crying was not a big deal for my dad. He was enough of a man to cry at Hallmark commercials. If you did a cheesy TV show with a
horse or a family in it, my dad would cry. He would cry and wipe his eyes, and my mom would throw something at him and call him a fool. My dad taught me to cry at everything, and my mom threw shit at both of us. He cried at TV, not at real life. He did, however, sob that day. He certainly wouldn’t ever complain, but he wouldn’t be happy with the nursing home. He wouldn’t be happy away from his wife and the house they built themselves, just the two of them. But he felt he had no choice, so he sobbed.

My dad never took a penny from me. Country and western stars always buy their moms and dads houses when their first record hits, and when our Broadway show took off, I would have bought my mom and dad Dollywood, but they lived in that house they’d built together and I wasn’t going to change that. When I had more money than god in the eighties (god wasn’t doing well in the eighties), if I came home and we went out to dinner at the HoJo, my dad paid. If I’d reached for my wallet he would have been insulted. When I was forty years old and came home in a limo to go to the county fair, my dad gave me two bucks to buy a candied apple for myself. Nothing made him happier than his son taking money from him for a treat. My dad did not take money from me. I asked the social worker how my dad could stay home instead of going to a nursing home. She said he couldn’t. She said he needed nursing care around the clock. I said, “I can afford for him to have that in his home.” She said, “No home-care agency will ever start a new account tomorrow, on Xmas day.” I said, “I can make them an offer that’ll make it worth their while to start tomorrow.” Then I told her I needed a humanitarian service from her: “I need you to go in there and tell my dad that there’s a government program that will pay for him to have nursing care around the clock and he can stay home.” Little Ms. Sensitive New England County Social Worker, with the short hair and sneakers, said she didn’t lie and wouldn’t lie for me. I told her she was going to lie for me. She said no. I said, “I’ll make this simple. You go in that room and you lie to my dad and make him believe it, or I’m going to hit you as hard as I can. I’ve never hit anyone in my life, but I’m two hundred and eighty pounds and I’m pretty sure I can do some damage to an intense New England
salt-and-pepper-haired social worker. You’ll call the police and I’ll go to jail, but I won’t let you ruin our family without a fight.” I don’t know if I would have really hit her, but I knew I had to make sure she would be able to give me all the blame for the lie she was being forced to tell. Her conscience was clear and she could hate me forever. I’m okay with that.

Little Ms. Down Vest lied to my dad and he came home happy. On Xmas day the health care professionals, those astronaut heroes at a low wage, those wonder men and women (ours were all women) who care for people near the end of their lives, started working around the clock for the government—which, at that Jillette house, was me. Our Xmas dinner that year was cooked by me and a home-care person, and my dad was thankful, and my mom and dad lived at home until they died. On that first Xmas night, which was supposed to find my dad in the nursing home, my mom and I had a conversation. We had it right in the room with my dad. He didn’t hear well and napped a lot, so we could talk behind his back in front of him.

My mom said, “I know very well the government isn’t paying for all this. You’re paying for this. You’re paying for all this care. That woman lied to your father and me and she did it because you made her do it. You made her lie.” I said, “Mom, if you say that louder, if you say that to Dad, he’ll throw a fit and he’ll be in a nursing home for the rest of his life, and soon you’ll be there too. If you tell my father that I’m paying for this, your daughter—my dear sister—will be so sad to have to visit him in there, and things will be much harder for her. Mom, I love you and Dad. I love you enough to lie to you to allow you to stay in your home. So, Mom . . . I promise you . . . I give you my word that I’m not paying for a penny of this home care.”

My mom looked at me with a tear in her eye, smiled a little, and said, “Well, if you give your word, I have to believe you; I know you would never lie to me.”

“I never would, Mom. I love you.”

And we grinned at each other.

I’m not above lying to people I love, but really . . . about a fat guy with toys? Let’s save the fucking lies for when we really need them. I’m
writing this in a coffee shop at an Indian casino a couple of hours out of Portland, Oregon. A very nice woman just asked me to pose for a picture with her daughter, who is in a wheelchair.

I told them, “Please forgive my eyes for being so red and runny . . . it’s the allergies, I live in the desert and all this green really gets to my eyes.” I didn’t want to say “I’m crying my eyes out while I type into my iPad about my mom and dad dying to the sound of slot machines.” I don’t only lie only about important things, I lie about allergies and frozen yogurt when the truth would be better, but, fuck, the North Pole?

My mom went into a coma a few days before New Year’s Day. While she was in her bedroom, which had been turned by the heroes of health care into a hospital room, with oxygen and morphine and magic beds to protect her paralyzed body from bedsores, she had helium balloons to watch. I don’t remember who got them for her, it might have been me, but I think it was Teller—he’s one balloon-sending motherfucker. He has those cocksucking balloon people on his speed dial. When my daughter, Mox, was in the hospital, there were plenty of balloons from Uncle Teller.

My mom couldn’t move and she needed someone to feed her, but her mind was sharper than mine ever was or ever will be. I sat by her bedside when I wasn’t doing shows and read
Moby Dick
to her. Not because it’s her favorite book, but because it’s my favorite book and she just wanted to hear my voice. She would watch those balloons. She watched them move in the air currents around her oxygen. Finally I put a couple of the Mylar balloons outside her window, so the cold winter Massachusetts air would whip them around. She watched those balloons for hours. In the night, they were ghostly bumping against the windows, and she watched them. What else can you do when you can’t move and you’re waiting to die?

My mom asked my sister and I if we’d do her a favor. “Now what?” I asked impatiently, to try to get a little laugh. She asked that after she died, we would let the balloons go and watch them go up into the air. “Set them free.” My mom did not believe in an afterlife; she knew we couldn’t pray for her, but her wishes were for me to do my show and for
us to let the balloons go. She made me get on with my life, and she gave us a tradition. After the show in Tahoe, I flew back across the country and my sister and I met at our mom’s house. We gathered the balloons from Mom’s room and from outside. They were a bit old and funky and there wasn’t a lot of helium left. We took them out into my mom and dad’s yard, and in the middle of a cold winter’s night, we let them go. They didn’t have much lift, but the night was dark and the wind was swirling and it was moonless, so they went out of sight pretty quickly. My sister, named Valda like our mom, and I held each other and cried together.

I’m trying to make that a family tradition. Every New Year’s since my mom died, I go alone to a supermarket and buy a bunch of balloons, about ten or so, usually all one color, usually blue. Since my wife has been with me, she’s been part of letting the balloons go. Since my children have been around, I buy some extra balloons for them so they have them to play with for the rest of the day. I go outside with the balloons and I hold the balloons and I think of all the people that I love who have died. I cry. I let go of the balloons and I watch, through watery eyes, the big bunch of color fly into the sky; I watch them until they’re a single dot, and then keep watching until the dot is no more. I’ve been doing this for eleven years, and now I’m also thinking about my sister and my brother-in-law and a bunch more friends; there’s more to think about every year.