I'm Not Gonna Lie (12 page)

“Great! Now go get it!”

Tommy popped his thumb into his mouth, hesitated, sucked up his courage, and walked slowly over to the Suprema Pro. He squatted, picked up the ball, rolled it over in his hands, and examined it.

“That's it! You got it! Now come on back and—”

RRRRRRAAARRGH!

A distant rumble that rolled into a horrific growl sent a chill through Clem and Tommy simultaneously. They both froze.

A rottweiler—fangs bared, saliva dripping from wide-open jaws, eyes narrowed and yellow—streaked around the corner of the house, running low and ferociously toward Tommy.

“Uh-oh,” Clem said.

“Daddy!”

“Tommy! Run!”

RRRRRRRAAARGGGGH!

The rottweiler bared his teeth and charged toward Tommy.

Tommy looked at the Suprema Pro that he held in his hands.

“Tommy, run! Forget the ball! It's okay! I got two more!
Run!
”

A blur of black fur and white fangs.

All Clem could see.

Filling his line of vision.

The rottweiler rushing at Tommy.

Tommy screamed. The ball rolled out of his hands. He lowered his head and raced toward the fence.

He took two steps and fell.

The dog bore down on him.

“I'm putting my son's life in jeopardy for a nine-dollar golf ball,” Clem moaned. “Your mother's gonna kill me.”

The five-year-old scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward the fence. Flying around the side of the swing set, the rottweiler skidded to avoid the metal support. He opened his mouth, planted his front legs, and leaped at Tommy.

But his right front paw landed on the Suprema Pro.

His legs flew out from under him.

The rottweiler flipped into the air and sprawled onto the ground with a thud—at the same moment Tommy grabbed onto the fence.

The rottweiler righted himself, shook his head, and charged.

Clem threw himself onto the fence on the other side, reached his arms over, and hauled Tommy up, just as the rottweiler chomped at Tommy, missing his ass by an inch, biting the air.

Clem and Tommy landed in the front of the golf cart and Clem gunned it, the frustrated, hellish howl of the rottweiler at their backs.

“Golf's a hard game,” Tommy said with a shiver.

“Sure is,” Clem said, and then he muttered under his breath, “Nine bucks for that ball. Damn Cujo.”

Lesson Number Four:

Get your priorities straight.

I
think about my mortality every day.

Because you never know. This could be it. The end of the line. You can't predict if you're gonna go peacefully in your sleep or if some dude working construction thirty stories up is gonna accidentally knock off a piece of rebar and bash in your skull while you're standing at a corner, sending a text. I knew a guy who was putting up his Christmas lights and fell off his house. Boom. Gone. That's all she wrote.

That's why you have to enjoy life and make the most of every moment. Of course, take care of yourself, but don't go over-the-top. Don't shut yourself down. If you want to have a shot of tequila at two in the afternoon, so what? If you have an urge for a piece of cake, go for it. What are you waiting for? Do it. If that rebar boomerangs out of the sky and clunks you in the head and you're lying on the sidewalk with your life passing before your eyes, you don't want your dying words to be, “I wish I had that piece of cake.”

I always keep a box of doughnuts in my house, because when I was a kid, my grandmother didn't allow them in the house. She gave me a million reasons. They were treats, only for special occasions. Or they were bad for you. Or they cost too much. Or I'd abuse my doughnut privilege and eat too many at the same time. Whatever the real reason, I never had any doughnuts when I was growing up. Now, at night, when I'm foraging around the kitchen deciding on a late-night snack, I want to know that I have the option of a doughnut. I never eat them, but I like seeing them there. Makes me feel safe. Gives me comfort.

I also don't believe in the saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” No. He who dies with the most toys has too many toys. And I think we're potentially looking at a selfish hoarder. Get rid of your stuff. Liquidate. I'm on a mission to give a lot of my stuff away. I have accumulated too much—too many cars, watches, golf clubs. I've begun to purge, and it feels great.

This may sound strange, but I feel that getting rid of your excessive crap may be a deeply religious act. Seriously. I would not call myself a religious person. Not at all. If I practice any religion, I would say I'm a member of the House of Golf. But I feel a strong obligation to share, to give my extra stuff away to people who need it more than I do.

The other day I was hanging out at my local coffee shop sipping some tea and reading the paper when I noticed a woman sitting by herself at a table outside. She was a large woman, dressed in shabby clothes, unkempt, obviously homeless. She was staring off, just watching the cars drive by. I could tell she had nowhere to go. She kept staring at the cars with this vacant look in her eyes. But more than that, she looked . . . sad. And lost. And without hope. I don't know what it's like to be homeless, but I recognized that helpless look on her face. I've felt that way myself. Maybe you have, too. You can't seem to take the next step. Or worse, you don't even have the strength to figure out what the next step should be. You just can't get it together. Yes, I've been there.

I got up from my table in the coffee shop, went outside, and walked over to the woman.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I don't mean to intrude.”

She squinted up at me and shaded her eyes with her hand. I got the feeling that not too many people talked to her politely or with respect.

“How you doing?” I said.

“I'm okay,” she said.

“Could you use some financial assistance?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could.”

“Okay,” I said. “I didn't want to insult you.”

I handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

She took it from me without looking at it. She folded up the bill and stuffed it into her pocket. “Thank you,” she said.

“You're welcome,” I said, and smiled.

Her face brightened, folded into a huge, grateful smile.

That made my day.

I went back into the coffee shop, got my tea and my paper, and sat down. I couldn't get my mind off that woman. I wondered how she'd ended up so destitute, and if she'd use the money to buy food or drugs.

Back in the day, growing up poor and without hope drove a lot of kids to drugs. Now, a lot of rich parents begin medicating their kids at such an early age that by the time they enter middle school, they're already addicts. I call it “parenting by pill.”

Some parents don't parent at all.

The worst I've seen are parents who fly to Hawaii or Europe for a vacation and bring their nannies with them. I've been on planes where the only other Latino people have been nannies. I'm sure the parents sold the nanny hard, telling them, “This is gonna be great. We're going to Hawaii. You'll be part of the family.” The nanny buys this line for about two minutes, because at the airport she finds out that the rest of the family's flying first-class while she's stuck in coach trying to calm the screaming baby and change his smelly diapers.

It gets even worse once the family hits Waikiki.

While Mom's in the spa and Dad's on the golf course, the nanny's with the kid, entertaining him, changing him, and feeding him out by the pool. First thing in the morning, while the kid and Mom and Dad sleep, the nanny has to rush out and get their cabana all set up. If the nanny has any time to think about it, she'll realize that she might be in Hawaii with the family she works for, but she's the only one who's not on vacation.

This kid will end up so pampered and feeling so privileged that the first time he doesn't get his way, he will completely crumble. If he gets turned down for a job or, more likely, for a highly desirable, nearly impossible-to-get unpaid internship, he will medicate himself to ease the pain of this loss. Let's face it: We've become a medicated society. It's gotten so we can't handle rejection or pain or discomfort—or reality.

•   •   •

I
don't know how long I'm gonna live. Nobody does. All I know is that I'm alive today, right now, in this moment, and I feel good. I want to enjoy every second I'm here. I don't ever want to get so old and out of it that if I piss ten cc's, it's a great day. I couldn't bear that.

I used to live next door to a lady who looked around a hundred. She had around-the-clock nursing care. Sometimes a nurse would wheel her outside into the sun and sit with her. Neither one of them said a word. One day, I overheard the nurse talking on her cell phone to the woman's son.

“Oh, yes, it's a great day,” the nurse said. “She had a wonderful bowel movement, nice and soft. I'm very proud of her.”

Really?

I do not want to end up like that. I don't want to be that incapacitated, and I certainly do not want my bowel movements making anybody proud.

Of course, I don't know if my neighbor took care of herself when she was younger, or if it even matters. Because if taking care of yourself when you're young is that important, then it's pretty much over for me.

Let's start with what doctors now say is one of the single most important activities you can do to assure good health: regular flossing.

Never did it. Nobody in my family flossed. Nobody in my neighborhood flossed. Nobody that I
knew
flossed. Floss? I thought it was a girl's name.

I was so not into flossing that I used to go to sleep with a candy in my mouth. I couldn't wait for the morning, because I knew the moment I woke up I was already eating a candy. I'd keep it tucked in the back of my mouth. I'd wake up, yawn, and think, “Hey, there it is. Oh, yeah. Already starting the day off right.”

I had two candy preferences. I would sleep with either a chocolate drop tucked back into my mouth or a lemon Jolly Rancher that would attach itself to my teeth. I'd wake up with this delightful fruity taste. I never had to use mouthwash. I had mouthwash built in.

I loved to eat crackers, too. A good cracker went a long way. You'd eat a cracker and some cracker remnant would always get stuck against your back teeth, and then you'd put your finger in your mouth and pull the mushy, mostly eaten cracker remnant forward. So good. It was like you found a second cracker. A dessert cracker. A wonderful surprise.

“George, would you like another cracker?”

“No, thanks, I still got a whole cracker leftover somewhere in my mouth from this morning.”

Man, I think about what we did as kids and sometimes I wonder how I made it through my childhood alive. I'm serious. Half the stuff we did back then we've since found out can kill you. Spending more than five minutes outside in the sun, for example. Nobody ever heard about skin cancer–causing UVA rays or UVB rays or SPF to protect you against the UVA and UVB rays. I never put on sunscreen. Now parents slather sunscreen with high SPF all over their kids before the kids step out of the house. I'm not talking about when they're going to the beach. I'm talking about when they're walking to the car.

We also played with deadly poison on a regular basis. We called it bug spray.

We always kept a bug sprayer within reach, especially in summer. The sprayer had a wooden shaft with a bowl filled with pesticide attached underneath. It looked like an old-fashioned tommy gun. I treated it like a weapon, too. I would go outside, pretend I was a commando, and go on a search-and-destroy mission for bugs. If I saw a caterpillar or some other bug crawling around, I'd get right into its grille, say, “It's on,” run inside, grab the bug sprayer, pump it like a shotgun, run back outside, and go all Rambo on its ass.

Everybody in our neighborhood grew vegetables, especially tomatoes. If we saw one bug crawling up the side of a tomato, it was
on.
I'd race into the garage, grab the tommy-gun bug sprayer, and douse the hell out of that tomato, which, of course, we would eat in a sandwich an hour later. We were convinced that the gnat or mosquito wandering around on the tomato carried the West Nile virus or dengue fever or some weird disease that turned you into a zombie. I took care of that. I pumped my tommy gun and drenched that tomato in a gallon of DEET or Off! By the time I was through, bug spray dripped down the sides of that tomato, forming a puddle on the ground. I wanted to make sure we were perfectly safe.

Then one summer about ten years ago I went up to Canada for a couple of club dates and stopped to play a round of golf in Winnipeg, which should be renamed Mosquitoville. Worst mosquitoes ever. Miniature dive-bombing insect terrorists. I wore jeans and it didn't matter. They bit right through my pants. Chewed holes through the denim. One of the pros at the club said, “Hey, man, use this,” and he handed me a can of DDT. “Spray this on yourself. It's the only thing that works.”

So I did. Rolled up my pants and doused my legs with the DDT.

Cracked the skin off. Left me with welts the color of Mars. I could barely walk. Killed the bugs, though.

I somehow made it to fifty by not flossing and by swallowing gallons of deadly bug spray. Now, I admit, I have started to obsess a little bit about my quality of life. If I end up with some nurse pushing me around in a wheelchair after she's just wiped my ass, I will seriously wheel myself off a cliff. So, I've been considering alternatives.

Cryogenics, for one thing.

Yes, freezing my body so I can come back to life in a hundred years.

Here's how it works: First, you do all the paperwork and make the arrangements with a special cryogenics company. You even have a choice of companies, because more and more people are going the cryogenics route. I heard that six hundred people have already been frozen, and now some celebrities have signed up, like Simon Cowell of
American Idol
,
whom many people think couldn't get any colder, and Larry King—a surprise, because most people thought he died years ago, even when they watched him on TV.

After you fill out all the paperwork, you basically sit around and wait until you die. Or almost die. You can't
actually
die or you couldn't be frozen with any hope of coming back to life. You'd just be a human Popsicle. But you do have to
legally
die. Otherwise you'd be frozen alive. Bottom line: Once a doctor declares that there is nothing more he can do for you medically, the cryogenics people take over. They transfer you out of the hospital bed and drop you into a tank of liquid nitrogen at a nippy minus-238 degrees. They keep you in frozen storage for the next hundred years, or until you've instructed them to thaw you out.

I'm not sure about this.

For one thing, I heard there have been a few glitches with some of the cryogenics facilities. One place I read about had seventeen people frozen in tanks. Cost these people $200,000 for the procedure and for storage. A few years in, the company went bankrupt. They lost their lease, closed their business, and had to thaw everybody. That's not what they paid for. They didn't want to come back with this economy and no Oprah.

I'm confused, too, about the differences in price. Some companies charge $30,000 to be frozen, some way more, some way less. I'd be worried that somebody who's pissed at me would have me frozen according to my wishes, but they'd go with some shady cryonics company that would charge, like, $800 and shove my body into the freezer in the front of a 7-Eleven.

“Dude, get me a Coke, will ya?”

“Sure, man, let's see, a Coke— Whoa! That's George Lopez! You got G-Lo on ice!”

“Hey, grab your soda and close that thing, man. I gotta keep him in there for a hundred years. I had to do it so I could get lotto.”

I don't know. This whole thing seems like a scam, like some fancy, frozen version of a storage unit.

Which is a sore subject with me.

I'm kicking myself now. Because if I listened to RJ back in the early eighties, I would've made a fortune. He wanted me to invest some money with this guy who came up with a brilliant, innovative idea.