Rubber Balls and Liquor (21 page)

After a while, one of us came up with a genius idea. I'd like to take full credit for it, because it really was a genius idea, but I suppose it's possible that Marlee Matlin's interpreter might have had a hand in it—and when you suggest that someone who's fluent in sign language had a hand in giving voice to an idea, that's really saying something.

Anyway, it was decided that I would switch seats with this guy, so I tiptoed back to Marlee Matlin's row and sat myself down right next to her. Remember, she was sleeping, so I made it an extra-special point to be especially quiet, so as not to disturb her.

Then I elbowed her in the ribs.

Now, what happened next was a little surprising, because I've always heard that deaf people have a heightened sense of vision and smell, just like blind people are supposed to have a heightened sense of hearing and smell, and so on. One sense is supposed to compensate for the other, right? But that couldn't have been true, I realized, because Marlee Matlin's sense of vision wasn't so hot. She took one look at me and just assumed I was her interpreter. Of all people, you'd think she would have been able to tell the difference, but my cover wasn't blown just yet. She gave me a look that said she was terribly annoyed with me, her interpreter, for having elbowed her in the ribs.

At any rate, that's how I interpreted her response.

Then Marlee Matlin made a low, moaning kind of noise that might have been a line from
The Elephant Man
or
The Miracle Worker
or
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I couldn't think what to do or say at this point, so I started making some furious hand gestures. This is what you do when you're stuck in a tense moment with a deaf person. If I couldn't make myself understood in my own language, I would make the extra-effort and communicate in hers, so I made an OK signal with my right hand, and poked my left forefinger through the hole, over and over. I hoped she would take some comfort in this, because I seemed to remember that this was the universal sign for asking a deaf person out on a date. Then I cupped my right fist, as if it was gripping a cock, and pretended to pound it against my pursed lips, also over and over. I seemed to remember that this was the universal sign for asking a deaf person if she'd like to get to know you better. Then, after a while of this, I didn't trust that I was effectively communicating my offer of friendship, so I started sticking my tongue in and out of my mouth and in the direction of my cupped fist that was meant to be gripping an imaginary cock. I wanted to emphasize the point that I really, really wanted to be her pal.

Apparently, something was lost in the translation, because poor Marlee Matlin took great offense at these gestures of friendship, and she grunted another few lines from
The Elephant Man
or
The Miracle Worker
or
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Then she reached for the Call button above her seat, thinking perhaps the stewardess could save her from this unpleasantness.

Now, before you go off and tell all of your Facebook friends that Gilbert Gottfried is a filthy, despicable misogynist who's so pleased with himself that he can cast aspersions in the direction of all womankind, even a handicapped woman who can't defend herself without an interpreter, please note that I was once named by the editors of a magazine as one of the Top 50 Unsexiest People in the World. Take note … and
then
you can go telling your friends and relations that Gilbert Gottfried is a filthy, despicable misogynist. Not only was I named to this Top 50 list, I was number one, which I guess could also mean that I was at the very bottom of the list. I was even lower than Osama bin Laden. It's one of my biggest accomplishments, and the good news here is that the list wasn't published just once in the pages of this one magazine. It was picked up by news organizations all over the place.

At first, I was a little insulted by this particular kind of attention, but then as I became more and more known for my appearance at the very top of the list—er … the very
bottom
—I decided to take another, more positive view. I was the best, after all. The best at being unsavory. The most unpleasant. The biggest turnoff. I ended up getting more press out of my appearance on that list than anything else I ever did. It even turned up in newspapers in Russia and India and China, just to make sure I wouldn't get laid anywhere in the world. Not that I needed any help
not
getting laid, because by this point I'd pretty much become an expert in the field.

One final point, before moving on: now that I've spent these past few pages demeaning all of these women, I can't help but wonder if there is an alternate universe, anywhere in the cosmos, where a group of tiny, whiny starlets are sitting around sipping lattes and waxing nostalgic about the leading men they never had. I can close my eyes and picture it (especially the waxing part). Cindy Crawford is sitting at a table with Elle Macpherson and Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer, going on and on about … me! Don't laugh. It's not so far-fetched. It's merely fetched. It could happen. It could be that, right now, Cindy Crawford is sitting down with her girlfriends, saying, “Oh my gosh, do you think I have a chance to suck Gilbert Gottfried's dick? Nothing would make me happier, or feel more complete as a woman. Ever since I got my first
Vogue
cover, this has been my dream. Fingers crossed, girls!”

It's a nice picture, don't you think? Just give me a moment while it comes into focus.

I think we can all agree that there's certainly a strange little dance that comes along with being famous. And, it's certainly fun to watch as we hopeful celebrities scramble up and down that damn ladder—especially during the Academy Awards, when they start showing the annual dead person montage. As celebrity barometers go, this one's pretty telling. I look forward to it all year long. I read the obituaries or listen to the news and think,
Oh, this guy won't make it onto the dead person montage
. Or,
This guy will probably get a full-screen tribute
. For the bottom-rung celebrities, they usually put a bunch of smaller stills into the same frame, but the top-rung stars get our undivided attention. The really, really big stars sometimes get a whole clip, to open or close the segment, and it's usually followed by a loud and sustained applause.

Just this past year, for example, Kathryn Grayson died a week or so before the Oscar broadcast and I caught myself wondering if she'd make the cut. Now, chances are you're reading this and thinking,
Who the hell is Kathryn Grayson?
Well, she was an actress and opera singer who appeared in a bunch of movie musicals, including
Anchors Aweigh,
with Frank Sinatra. If you didn't grow up sleeping on the couch in your parents' living room, staying up until all hours watching movies on the black-and-white television, there's a good chance you might never have heard of Kathryn Grayson, but that wasn't me. I couldn't say with any great degree of certainty, but there's a good chance I jerked off to her, at one time or another. At some point during her career, she might have topped out at #314 on our celebrity depth chart, although to be fair there were probably only six or seven hundred celebrities at the time. However, at the time of her death Kathryn Grayson was probably charting at #3,000, give or take a couple rungs.

Farrah Fawcett? She'd spent a couple years in the double digits, at the upper reaches of fame, so you'd think she'd be remembered on Oscar night for her work in
Sunburn
and
The Cannonball Run.
As it turned out, though, the folks in charge of the dead person montage that year didn't even think poor Farrah deserving.

Go figure.

It's a fickle business, show business. For Hollywood stars like myself, our place on the celebrity ladder is only as secure as our last hit movie, our last sold-out show, our last scathingly funny performance at a Friars Club roast.

I can only hope that when my time is up and I've told my last offensive joke, the folks in charge of the dead person montage will honor me and my life's work with an appropriate tribute. Right now, I'm thinking a still from
Hot to Trot,
the Bobcat Goldthwait starrer, would be a fine and fitting send-off. It didn't exactly launch my career, that picture, but it didn't kill it—and, if you've paid any attention to my career over the years, you'll know that's saying something.

 

11

Cheating Death

You haven't lived until you've had a near-death experience. I know this because I've had two of them, although most people would only count the first, and even then they'd argue that I didn't come close enough to dying to start writing books about it. They'd also argue that I didn't come close enough to dying because I'm still here, not dead.

There's no pleasing some people, is there?

Before I go any further with this line of thought, I offer a word of caution. Or maybe it's a word of apology. To be accurate, it's not just
one
word, it's quite a few, and here they are (in no particular order): it troubles me, a little bit, whenever a semi-celebrity like myself comes out in public and thumps his chest and boasts that he has survived some terrible ordeal or illness or accident, as I am apparently doing here. (I can't help myself!) It's a slippery slope—and if you've never been on a slippery slope, trust me, it can get pretty slippery. If you're not careful, you might hurt yourself.

You see it in the semi-celebrity press all the time. Someone who can't even get booked on
The Wendy Williams Show
(which, if you're not familiar with it, is kind of like
The Arsenio Hall Show
with bad hair), winds up on the cover of
People
magazine, announcing he or she has survived a near-death experience, like it was some sort of career move. That's not me. (Oh,
please
, don't let that be me.) I'm not some poor schmuck talking trash about beating cancer or tonsillitis or anal warts. Whenever I see that, I start to think the disease is listening in and getting angry. It's just a matter of time. It's like when someone is in a street fight, getting his ass kicked, and then the guy who's doing the ass kicking decides he's handed out enough of a beating or maybe he's just bored so he starts to walk away. And then the person who was getting his ass kicked grows a pair and stands up and shouts, “Yeah, you better walk away, you fucking pussy!” And then whoever it is doing the beating gets pissed and comes back and finishes the job. I feel that way about any disease. It's never a good idea to piss it off.

Okay, so maybe I am that schmuck, but I'm hoping no one will notice. (Let's just keep this between us, if you don't mind.) If I was doing this on the cover of
People
magazine, it would be hard not to call attention to myself and my struggles, but here in the pages of this book I should be all right. This being a book by Gilbert Gottfried, I'm pretty sure no one is going to read it anyway.

Once again, I'll follow the lead of my nodding celebrity acquaintance Julie Andrews and start at the beginning. (And by
nodding
I mean she shakes her head from side-to-side whenever I get too close to her at an industry event.) Julie Andrews doesn't just sing, you know. She also writes books, so she knows about things like pacing and structure. Plus, there's a reason why the expression
first things first
is so much more popular than the hardly used
first things second
, so I'm going with the crowd on this one.

Oh, wait: I just remembered a Julie Andrews story, and I'm thinking that as long as she now shows up twice in these pages there should at least be a story attached to one of her appearances. This one took place soon after September 11, and airport security had become really tight, so I was going through a fairly thorough search before being allowed through the gate. Don't misunderstand, it wasn't a full, anal-cavity-type search—those only happened on Mondays, I was told—but let's just say my luggage was being violated. The interesting thing about this particular search was that the security people knew who I was. One of the guys said, “Oh, you're Gilbert Gottfried!” As if I needed to hear this from
him
. Then he proceeded to rattle off a list of my credits, coming up with movies I'd been in that I didn't remember at all. He knew my career better than me, and the whole time he was rattling off my credits he and his co-workers were going through my suitcase and patting me down.

Finally, I said, “You know who I am. You've seen all my movies. And you still have to search me?”

So the guy said, “Oh, don't be offended by that. We did the same thing to Julie Andrews yesterday.”

It's not much of a story, I know, but at least it's a story.

Okay, now if you don't mind I'll get back to the
real
story I was telling before I so rudely interrupted myself—the one about me sidestepping death. First, around the time I was recording my voice-over part for
Aladdin,
I began to feel terribly sick. Along with the terrible sickness came a terrible worry. It had nothing to do with my role in
Aladdin,
this sickness, or with my uncertain career prospects. Mostly, it's that it wasn't like me to feel so terribly sick. More likely, I was the one inducing terrible sickness in others, but I was having severe stomachaches. I believe the technical term for it is
intense abdominal pain
, which sounds much more serious. Also, I was getting the chills and shaking like crazy. I believe the technical term for this is
getting the chills and shaking like crazy
, which sounds pretty much the same.