Rubber Balls and Liquor (17 page)

It really was quite a moment, stuck somewhere between a thrill and a humiliation. As a matter of fact, it was the humiliation part that got me into some trouble, because I kept putting my head down, hoping no one would recognize me. When we started out, our car was sandwiched between the Planters Peanut float in front, and the Poppin' Fresh float just behind us, but I looked up from my embarrassment at one point and couldn't spot any trace of a parade. Suddenly, there was a city bus in front of us, and a cab stuck in traffic right behind us, and my idiot driver had somehow taken a bunch of wrong turns and was now inching down Ninth Avenue in bumper-to-bumper traffic. People were looking at me, sitting on the backseat of this cheap convertible, next to a giant stuffed duck, wondering what the fuck I was doing. And the worst part was I was all out of stuffed ducks to throw at people, so it's not like I was armed or able to defend myself.

For the life of me, I couldn't imagine how we had drifted all the way to Ninth Avenue, headed downtown, when we should have been headed uptown on Madison. It's like we were in two different boroughs. By this point, the rest of the Hall of Fame characters had made it to the end of the route, where they were supposed to be honored in a special ceremony. They had bleachers set up, in case anyone wanted to sit down and watch, and a podium so some hot-shit executive could make a speech, but no one could figure out what had happened to me and the duck, and the people in charge didn't want to begin their presentation until I arrived on the scene.

Snap and Pop were particularly put out by the delay, I was later told. Crackle, it turned out, was struggling through the first steps of a 12-step program for saccharine addiction, so he had to drop from the route at some point with an artificially induced case of sugar shock. But every other character had made it to the ceremony. Every other character made an appropriate, timely entrance. Even the M&M boys were on hand, refusing to melt in the heat of what was turning out to be a tense professional moment.

(I heard that and thought, Good for them. They're regular troupers, those M&M boys…)

In the end, it took almost two hours for my idiot driver to finally get me and the duck to the closing ceremony, after giving me a tour of Manhattan I didn't particularly need, and the whole way over I kept thinking of ways to explain our disappearance. In my defense, I was in character, and ducks are not known for their sense of direction, so I decided to go with that.

 

8

Gag Reflex

Originally, the title of this chapter was going to be the title of the whole book, but then I went away to one of those writer's retreats and came up with the title
Rubber Balls and Liquor,
which I liked a lot better.

However, that left me with the problem of what to do with my original title. I hated to see it go to waste, so I decided to use it as a chapter title instead. But that only created another problem, because it had nothing to do with any of the chapters I planned to write, even though it's the only title I could think of that has something to do with eating disorders, blow jobs and offensive comedy—three things I especially enjoy. Other than
Gone with the Wind,
of course, but that one's already taken.

I suppose I could have come up with an entirely new chapter, one I hadn't planned to write, but that would have meant more work for me so I figured I would just use the title. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't go with anything. But I went to all that trouble coming up with it.

Now, before you go telling your friends and relations that Gilbert Gottfried is a lazy, no-account Jew who can't be bothered to write fresh, new material on every page of his side-splittingly hilarious and thought-provoking new book, hear me out. And, don't be so quick to judge. I sincerely meant to write an entire chapter, to go along with my achingly clever chapter title, but I had a previous commitment. I'm a busy man. At least I give the appearance of being busy, which is close enough to the same thing. No, I'm not busy like James Brown, who for the longest time was known as the hardest-working man in show business. Certainly, he's slowed down a bit since his death, but he's got a long way to go before he slows all the way down to my level. Me, I like to think I'm the hardliest-working man in show business. It's what I aspire to. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking of trademarking the phrase, and putting it on T-shirts, and possibly developing it into a theme song or maybe even a line of adult diapers, but I'm afraid this would require too much effort and possibly contradict the nickname.

And yet despite my lackluster work ethic I sometimes have a conflict on my schedule, which appears to be the case here with this nonchapter. I won't trouble you with the details of this conflict, because it's probably better if you don't know. Suffice it to say that it involves lunch meat. And caulk.

So what do you say we just sit back and enjoy this clever title, shall we?

 

 

9

Circle Gets the Square

I watched a lot of television as a kid. We've covered that, but I want to emphasize the point. In all fairness to me—and it's my book, so from this point on
all fairness to me
should just be assumed—it's not like I could have put my time to more productive use on the Internet. I couldn't play Pong or do a Rubik's Cube, because those things hadn't been invented yet. I couldn't run for office or start a movement, because I preferred my pursuits to be a lot more trivial. I suppose I could have hung out with my friends, but I didn't have any, so that pretty much left television.

You have to realize, I wasn't exactly like the other kids in the neighborhood, or even the other kids in my family. (Well, you don't
have
to come to this realization, but I believe it helps.) I couldn't study to be a doctor or a lawyer. It's not like I had any interests, beyond movie monsters and jerking off. What was my poor mother supposed to say each afternoon when I came home from school?

Gilbert, try jerking off to Betty once in a while! That Veronica gets all the attention!

Gilbert, go to your room and study to be a filthy, degenerate, moderately successful comedian!

She couldn't even send me to my room, because I didn't have one. It was a small apartment, so I slept in the living room, which worked out well because that's where we kept the television. Lucky for me, it was the golden age of afternoon television. There were
Superman
reruns, and game shows like
Password
and
What's My Line?
where you'd see celebrities who were famous for being on game shows. Hey, it was New York City, the throbbing, pulsing center of the media, and anytime you get to use words like
throbbing
and
pulsing
to describe whatever it is you're in the center of, it's probably a good place to be. Even if you're just off to the side, where I usually liked to stand, chances are it's not so bad. Throbbing and pulsing media center or not, we only had a few channels, but there was plenty to watch, believe me.

One of my favorite shows was
Hollywood Squares,
which in those days was hosted by a guy named Peter Marshall, and featured moderately successful comedians like Paul Lynde, Rose Marie, and Charley Weaver. Also, Charo. It's hard not to love a program that offered an exciting young talent like Charo an opportunity to demonstrate her many and varied gifts as an entertainer.

She was particularly adept at rolling her
r
's, as I recall.

It's good to have something to shoot for, so here I collected these marginal celebrity-types and moderately successful comedians like role models of the entertainment industry. I'd watch and think,
That could be me someday
.

Or,
Who needs medical school?

Or,
Wally Cox! Wow! To do voices for cartoon animals! Jeepers, it doesn't get any better than this!

But then, underneath those hopeful considerations, there would be a darker, more sinister line of thought. I'd think,
Boy, how pathetic do you have to be to be on
Hollywood Squares
?

Even at twelve or thirteen years old, I was pretty jaded, I guess.

Okay, so that's the setup to a
Hollywood Squares
story I'm determined to share. For my money, there's nothing like a good
Hollywood Squares
story to put a real shine to a Hollywood memoir. In George Gobel's book, readers might remember, there was a rollicking good story about
Hollywood Squares
and a surplus case of Lemon Pledge that people are still talking about. (What they're saying, exactly, I couldn't exactly say.) In
her
book, the loud-mouthed comedienne Kaye Ballard wrote wistfully about a tragic incident, involving an unintended use of one of the show's oversized
X
's from the prop department. (Also, in a sidelong way, she referenced an unnamed “lover” who came to her “square” when a sudden power “surge” darkened the
Hollywood Squares
set during a taping, who was believed to be famed song-and-dance-and-windswept-hair man John Davidson.) And who can forget the stirring account from Orson Welles about the time the show's producers asked him ever-so-carefully if he'd mind occupying one of the ground-floor squares, in consideration of the few extra pounds of winter weight he appeared to be carrying?

Without further ado, then, my
Hollywood Squares
story …

Oh, wait. I forgot. There's just one more
ado
. Sorry. There's a Henry Winkler anecdote I need to fold into this thing, as a kind of setup, because I plan to come back to it later, as a kind of punch line. I'll begin the anecdote by stating the obvious: Henry Winkler is one of the nicest guys in the entertainment industry. I know this because Henry Winkler told me so himself, in no uncertain terms. He said, “Gilbert, you won't find a nicer guy than me in this town.”

Then he said, “I don't know how I could put this in terms that are any more certain.”

Regrettably, Henry Winkler said this in the small town of Hoot Owl, Oklahoma, where we were performing in a dinner theater production of
Man of La Mancha,
so I don't know that he was saying all that much. Indeed, the town of Hoot Owl was so small, it couldn't even support a dinner theater. It was more like an appetizer theater, and the portions were not very filling.

To Henry Winkler's credit, though, he said these nice things in the sincere, soft-spoken voice he uses on talk shows, and not in the loud, over-the-top, Fonzie voice that made him famous. Have you ever heard this man talk, in real life? He sounds like he's on antidepressants. When you compare it to how he talks in fake life, as Arthur Fonzarelli, the contrast is startling. And, unsettling.

In all seriousness, or at least in some, Henry Winkler did actually come up to me to introduce himself and say nice things at a comedy awards show. He did speak slowly and softly, like a bad therapist. I don't think we were in Hoot Owl, but I could be wrong. He sought me out backstage, and he took my right hand in both of his in an overly enthusiastic two-fisted greeting that was meant to connote warmth and genuine good feeling.

He said, “Gilbert, what a pleasure it is to watch you onstage.” He said this as if he really, really meant it. More than that, he said it as though he had just watched Christ Himself perform a hilarious five-minute set—from the cross, no less. (Talk about a tough room!) Henry Winkler's famous, prime-time eyes opened up, and his famous, prime-time smile widened, and he went on and on about how I was one of the most amazing comedians he had ever seen. I believe he used the phrase “legendary brilliance,” although here again I could be wrong. He could have used the phrase “not half-bad for a filthy, godforsaken Jew,” but you can certainly understand how I might confuse the one for the other.