Queen of the Oddballs (22 page)

1997

• As breaking news follows alleged murderer O. J. Simpson driving to the courthouse for the verdict in the civil case against him, I spot my girlfriend Maxine on TV, on her way to a meeting, coincidentally
  driving behind O.J.
  
 

• We get season ticket courtside seats to the premiere year of the WNBA. At every game we sit next to L.A. Sparks player Lisa Leslie’s mom and failed O.J. prosecutor Christopher Darden.
  
 

• Princess Di is killed in a tragic accident as her car tries to elude paparazzi.
  
 

• Maya Angelou’s memoir,
  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
  is banned from the ninth-grade English curriculum in Maryland because some horrible, nasty, stupid white parents say it “portrays white people as being horrible, nasty, stupid people.”
  
 

• While promoting my book,
  Girl Power
  , I speak at Wellesley College. Meanwhile, Wellesley graduate Hillary Rodham Clinton doesn’t have a clue that her husband Bill is spilling his semen on White House intern Monica Lewinsky’s navy blue dress.
  
 

• Two years after my book is released, the hugely successful Spice Girls sell over 45 million albums and make a mockery of, I mean
  popularize
  , the term Girl Power.
  
 

1998

• Smoking is banned in all California bars and restaurants. Good thing my father died because of his smoking habit and didn’t have to live to see this day.
  
 

• Fifty-five-year-old Michael Douglas’s divorce is final, leaving him free to be with his girlfriend Catherine Zeta-Jones, twenty-five years his junior. FDA approves Viagra for use as a treatment for male impotence.
  
 

• I play basketball every Sunday with a group of female friends and several “celebrity guests” who stop by and play with us, including Rosie O’Donnell, Martina Navratilova, Sara Gilbert, and Melissa Etheridge.
  
 

• Just months after President Clinton denies he had sexual relations with “that woman,” he admits in taped testimony that he indeed did. At the MTV Movie Awards, Jim Carrey wins for his convincing performance in the film
  Liar Liar.
  
 

1999

• Rev. Jerry Falwell warns parents that since a popular Teletubby carries a purse, is purple, and has an antenna shaped like a triangle, Tinky Winky is gay.
  
 

• Charlton Heston serves his second year as president of the National Rifle Association as two Littleton, Colorado, teenagers open fire on their teachers and fellow students, killing thirteen and injuring twenty-four at Columbine High School.
  
 

• Katie and I collaborate with Debbie Gibson, now Deborah Gibson, to adapt
  Skirts
  into a Broadway musical. At a reading in our producer’s living room, future Tony winner for
  Hairspray
  , Marissa Jaret Winokur, plays one of the lead roles, and fan-favorite soap opera star Ricky Paull Goldin another.
  
 

• Lance Armstrong wins his first Tour de France and, after eighteen failed nominations, Susan Lucci finally wins a Daytime Emmy Award for her role on
  All My Children
  .
  
 

• Maxine and I, along with another partner, start an enormous Internet Company—Voxxy, an online network for teen girls. We get Jennifer Aniston to be our spokesperson and do a broadband show with us, and I go from a life of freelance to being a boss of about forty employees.
  
 

• As we head into Y2K, everyone stockpiles supplies and prepares for all the disasters that might occur on New Year’s Eve, when the clock strikes midnight.
  
 

A
word of warning: If you ever say to your mother, “Think about what you’d enjoy doing, just name it, and I’ll do it with you,”
be prepared
.

Feeling badly about not spending enough time with Mom after my dad died, and seeing how hard she worked to continue running his business, overwhelmed with responsibilities, I mistakenly made that offer. I figured it was the least I could do—go with her to see some theater, join a book club together, go shopping.

But no, my mother wanted me to take her to Hell.

I remember an episode of
Night Gallery
that I saw in the early seventies where John Astin, best known for his classic portrayal of Gomez Addams, the French-spouting, arm-kissing patriarch of the creepy and kooky
Addams Family
, played a hippie who died and was sent to Hell. Only there he found no fiery inferno, no whips or chains, no snake pits or vats of boiling oil. His Hell was a drab room covered in ugly wallpaper, where an elderly suburban couple showed endless slides of their summer vacation—forcing the hippie to face an eternal after-lifetime of boredom.

Had I been featured in that episode, condemned to my own distinct version of Hell, viewers would have been subjected to the sight of me in the most plastic, soulless, hyperoxygenated, boob-inflated, money-sucking place on earth—Las Vegas.

In the
Night Gallery
episode, the devil was quick to point out to the tormented hippie that “Up there, this identical room is someone else’s idea of Heaven.”

So give the devil his due. For while Vegas is my Hell, it is Mim Carlip’s Heaven on Earth.

1997.
The first year I took my mom to Vegas (yeah, this became a yearly sojourn of torture), we were sitting in a restaurant at the MGM Grand after a long, tedious day of losing money at the quarter slots. As we were both digging into oversized ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktails, one of the televisions at the bar showed some headline news.

Mother Teresa had just died.

I closed my eyes to quietly honor the life of the saintly woman who had devoted her years to helping the sick and needy, to spreading compassion and goodness throughout the world. But my contemplation was interrupted by the arrival of an unruly group of drunken “islanders” who gave Gilligan—and the Skipper, too—a run for their money. Dressed in tie-dyed sarongs, fake flowered leis, and Hawaiian shirts that were louder than the inebriated revelers themselves, each of them wore on their head a large, brightly colored felt or velour
stuffed parrot
, beak rising high, tail feathers flowing down necks and backs. As the waitresses served them frothy drinks, the female revelers, wearing bras concocted of coconut halves, began to sloppily sing, “Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville….” The men, wearing flip-flops embossed with parrots and sunglasses festooned with the same feathered friend of choice, joined in at full volume. A hugely pregnant woman in a T-shirt with the words “Parakeet Inside” sequined over her belly sang loudest and most out of tune.

Hellooo! Mother Teresa just died, motherfuckers
!

I asked our waitress, whose Fu Manchu acrylic nails were dotted with rhinestone flowers, “What’s going on?”

“Oh,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Those are Parrot Heads.”

“Parrot Heads?”

“Jimmy Buffett fans,” the waitress explained slowly, as if I had some sort of learning impediment.

There was a huge outburst from the tropical posse as they returned to the chorus of their object of devotion’s greatest hit. Not a tinge of solemnity. You could bet that if Jimmy Buffett had gone to that big island in the sky, they’d all be removing their stuffed parrot hats out of respect and crying into their margaritas.

As we left the restaurant, I saw an elderly woman sitting at the Wheel of Fortune slots, weeping. Finally.
Someone’s
showing some reverence for Mother Teresa’s passing. I smiled at her and asked, “Are you okay?”

She shook her head. “It’s terrible. Tragic. I’ve just been denied a cash advance on my ATM card.”

1998.
As if something or someone were forcing Mom and me to look Heaven and Hell right in the face, the following year’s trek to Vegas featured another icon’s demise.

This time the breaking news unfolded while we were staying at the Mirage. I had convinced my girlfriend, Maxine, to join us despite the fact that she hates Vegas as much as I do—especially after doing gigs at most of the hotels during her stand-up comedy days.

At 6:00 a.m. Maxine was still asleep, and Mom had already hit the slots. I was at the hotel gym, running on a treadmill that featured its own built-in television, relieved there was no cardio equipment with built-in slot machines. I turned on CNN and suddenly saw a “death montage.” When a series of still pictures of a celebrity’s early days flashes on the news, even with the sound off you can tell that the person has met their maker.

This time the celeb happened to be Mr. Las Vegas himself.

Frank Sinatra had just died
.

I ran back to the room to tell Maxine. For the next two hours we huddled on the bed watching the coverage, and imagined how the city would pay homage to the Chairman of the Board. Frank’s likeness would be carved into butter sculptures at all the $12.99 buffets. In his honor, the Liberace museum would temporarily shroud the world’s largest rhinestone. Men would eat ham and eggs off of hooker’s boobs like Frank did, according to Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography. (Were they sunny-side up? That seems redundant with boobs. I would have gone with scrambled or a nice cheese omelet.)

It was time to meet Mom in the lobby so we headed down in the elevator. We gasped when we heard the piped-in music playing “The Lady Is a Tramp” and wondered if it was just a coincidence or if the Muzak programmers had already begun their tributes.

When the elevator doors opened, I was immediately assaulted with all that I hate most about Vegas. A cloud of toxic smoke in the shape of an iron lung hovered above the Pai Gow poker tables. The casino smelled like a nauseating combo-platter of stale beer and White Diamonds, Liz Taylor’s perfume, which, years later, would provoke a bus driver to go berserk on an over-scented passenger. I heard buzzers and whistles and bells and sirens, like France during the occupation, and I even saw an old man at a roulette table, smoking a cigarette through the tracheotomy hole in his neck.

Mom was waiting by longtime bachelors Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers, on display behind glass. “Did you hear?” I asked.

“Hear what?”

Max broke the news. “Ol’ Blue Eyes shut his peepers for good. Frank Sinatra passed away.”

My mother gasped. “That’s so sad.” She welled up with tears and opened her purse to find a Kleenex. “Oh, sorry,” she said, embarrassed when she noticed her nicely manicured hands had turned black from the coins she’d been handling all morning. “You girls go ahead to the buffet. I’ll wash and meet you there.”

My mother caught up with us between the omelet bar and the make-your-own-waffle station. We piled our plates high with empty carbs and moved to a booth.

“Mom,” I said, chewing on a cold, rubbery waffle, which was more of a
wawful
, “don’t you think it’s kind of weird that whenever we come to Vegas someone famous kicks off?”

She looked up from her oversized, most likely genetically enhanced, corn muffin. “Yeah, it is kind of strange.”

“Maybe we’d better stop coming,” I declared.

Mom’s lower lip jutted out. “Hill, I don’t understand what you don’t like about Vegas.”

Then, in perfect timing, as if they magically appeared just to illustrate my point, Cher, Michael Jackson, President Clinton, and Marilyn Monroe sat down in the booth next to us with plates of eggs benedict.

“Need I say more?” I answered. “Everything’s fake here. Even the hotels are busy trying to be something they’re not—Egypt, Rome, New York.”

Maxine chimed in. “Mim, I understand why you might have loved Vegas years ago—when Frank and Sammy and the rest of the Rat Pack played here—when Ann-Margret rode onto the stage on her motorcycle. But today it’s just so….” Her voice trailed off, depleted by the depleted scene around us.

Like a lawyer steadfastly defending her client, Mom inhaled deeply for dramatic effect. Then the words poured out. “I think it’s exciting and alive, like nothing in our everyday lives. I love the noise, the energy. Maybe it’s the oxygen they pump in, but I always feel high when I’m here. Did you notice there aren’t any clocks around? It’s timeless…mindless. It’s like anything goes.”

I saw it then and there. For as mundane as her life in L.A. was, in Vegas, Mom’s world sparkled. I fell silent.

We spent the rest of the day dropping coins into the slots, my mother chanting in Sinatra’s honor, “Luck be a lady!” Per usual, she wasn’t.

Then that night, the lights inside each and every one of the towering casinos, as well as on the perpetually neon-studded strip, were dimmed for an entire minute in honor of The Voice. In the sudden deep blackout, just one marquee remained lit, featuring Frank’s face. Maxine and I hadn’t figured on that. Nice touch.

When the lights came back on, my mom looked out of our hotel room window at the marquee in front of the Mirage, and read aloud: “Francis—there are not enough towels in the world to dry our tears.”

“It’s true,” she muttered, drying her own tears with a Mirage-logo’d cocktail napkin from the minibar.

I excused myself and went into the bathroom, where I couldn’t help but weep. And not for Sinatra, but for my mom. For her struggles, the life she lived with my dad, and the life she lived now without him. My tears were primal, as reflexive a gesture as taking my mom’s arm when we crossed the street or carrying her luggage even if together with mine it was too heavy to bear. I wanted to protect her, to shield her from pain, stave off disappointment.

That night, in a faux-marbled, fluorescent-lit hotel bathroom, I realized I had become the parent.

1999.
The next year, several months before our scheduled trip, I started trying to talk Mom out of going to Vegas. “If we go, there’s no telling who else will croak just to keep up our family tradition.”

She didn’t budge. I tried again.

“I made a list of beloved celebrities in failing health. Do you want the blood of Joe DiMaggio on your hands?”

But as much as I had been dreading the trip, Mom had been looking forward to it. So faster than you can say “Nudes on Ice,” it was back to Hell.

This time Maxine couldn’t come with us because of work (lucky her) so I was forced to deal with the torture alone. A couple of days before departure, as I was sharing my dread, my filmmaker friend Jane came up with a brilliant suggestion. “Why don’t you take pictures and make a documentary of the trip?”

I lit up. A creative project was all I needed to shift my outlook.

And so, on our first day there, while Mom gambled to her heart’s content, I busily set about taking pictures.

I posed my mother in insane tableaus…

…and documented her winnings: