Almost Interesting

by David Spade

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MY HOUSEKEEPER

  Another situation you find yourself in when you get a little cash is you have to hire a housekeeper. This makes a lot of sense, because most people hate doing chores (me) and don’t have time with all this fancy famous-people work shit to do laundry and dust off the Emmys (that I may get one day). Laundry is something I truly hate. I hated it in college and I hated it when I did stand-up on the road. The act of going to a grimy local Laundromat somewhere in Tulsa with forty-five bucks in quarters in a pillowcase and sitting there staring at a dryer sounds fun, but it isn’t. I hated laundry when I was on Saturday Night Live, because I had to spend my one day off, Sunday, going down to the 100-degree cavernlike basement in my apartment building and check on it every ten minutes because people would either steal your shit or put your wet clothes on the folding table if you waited too long. Whatever it is, it is all bad. Plus, because of the SNL hours, I never had any time during the week to go to the bank for my quarter addiction, on some weeks I was super hosed. So long story longer, I now have a maid. You know, a housekeeper . . . She’s a maid, though, come on. I don’t know what to call her. I’m a grown-up now and I live by myself but I can’t pull my shit together so this lady helps me.

  My housekeeper always had two people with her whenever she came to work. This is usually the drill in the wilds of Beverly Hills. This particular maid had a daughter and another woman with a gold tooth who tagged along. A gold FRONT tooth, mind you. That’s pretty hard to hide, but I guess what’s the point of a gold front tooth if it’s hidden, right? Maybe I’m overthinking. She was like the Lil Wayne of maids, I guess. This girl with the gold tooth was pretty cocky in my opinion. She was always shining her tooth with her T-shirt on company time. Which was gross (and sexy). Actually not sexy. It’s 100 percent gross. I get it—you were rich one day of your life and bought a tooth instead of a car. Fine. Quit subtly bragging. An odd reality of housekeepers out here in Los Angeles is that they always seem to bring a floater/helper. And you can never keep track of who’s who in your house. I think it’s meant to confuse you. It’s a lot of razzle-dazzle to keep you off balance, and it works. I don’t like strangers in my pad to begin with, and the maids bring in a plus one for “extra help” once in a while or when they are out “sick” and send over a replacement or a fill-in they met at IHOP. I don’t know. It is all unsettling. I don’t know who is in my house and who is on the clock and on my dime. I’m always like, “Where’s the main maid who I sort of know??”

  But the main maid was smart because she was orchestrating this shell game. She got more time off and I stopped asking who’s who. Genius move. One time, she actually had a good reason to skip two weeks of work. She said, “David, I’m going to be gone next Friday for three weeks, but the strangers will be here working so you are covered.” I was a little taken aback, because two to three weeks seemed like a long time. “Why gone so long?” I asked. “I’m having my baby,” she said. LIKE I HAD ANY IDEA SHE WAS PREGNANT! (I’m so self-centered I didn’t notice.)

  I felt so dumb. I said, “Um, oh . . . right . . . cool . . . ya, no problem. Take your time. I’m sure . . . uh . . .”

  “My daughter and Gina can handle it.” She knew I didn’t know anyone’s names.

  “Sure, ya, they are good.” (I figured Gold Tooth must be Gina.)

  Obviously I have a ton of embarrassing things around for a maid to see. This is the hard part. My maid knows me back and forth. She sees girls stop by, she sees famous people coming and going, and she knows when I’m acting like I’m working in my office but probably whacking off. She sees empty booze bottles, a renegade Vicodin in a pants pocket here and there . . . etc. . . . etc. This chick is a Google search on my life. There are no secrets. And since she’s been with me for years, she’s really got the 411 on old Spadeyboy. This makes me nervous, and especially now because what she knows she may have shared. One of those details is that I always have a fair amount of cash in my house. I get money delivered (baller alert) and I keep it in an envelope because I don’t go to ATM machines. (I gave up on them years ago. I don’t want to get shot. I think everyone’s getting shot who uses them. And I know they have cameras at ATMs that are supposed to keep you safe, but that just means there is a video for TMZ after the fact of me getting shot with a handful of twenties. Not super comforting.) So I get a bunch of tens and twenties and some c-notes (rapper talk) brought home and I keep them in an envelope in a drawer in my dining room. Over the next few months, I was plucking them out as needed and it seemed like a bit was missing. It isn’t enough to make me freak out, but I felt confused because I thought I had more dough stashed away. Then, one day, boom. A lot of it was gone. I didn’t know what to do. I got scared. Maybe the maids were pinching? Maybe I was being careless, tipping too much like Scrooge McDuck or making it rain a lot, who the F knows? But I didn’t go to the cops yet, because I’m a moron.

  Then it was Christmastime, the time of year when I yank out a lot of cash to share with my family and friends because Christmas is the time of milking (me). I decided to get smart, so I put the cash in a duffel bag, which I partially zipped. Only partially, because I think, No one can get in this. It’s foolproof. Who’s smart enough to think of unzipping it?!? Three days later, it’s almost Miller time. I hit up my bag and IT’S GONE. ALL OF IT!! WHAT THE HAY IS HAPPENING?! I stare at the bag. Nothing. My first thought was that I had thrown the money away. Honestly. I did not immediately think that I’d be robbed. Especially by my housekeepers. There was a lot of money in that bag and I was always around. It would have taken Ocean’s Eleven to plan this caper. It would have been too ballsy and in my face. So I went to the main maid, who was then back from her maternity leave, and asked her if she’d seen the dough in the garbage. (I realize it is a dumb question. Me: “Hey, did you see a bunch of money in the garbage?” Main maid: “Yes, why? Did you not mean to throw it away?”) She has no idea what I am talking about. I don’t know what to do. Something’s wrong and I think it’s me. This is like when my parents got divorced when I was four and I thought it was my fault. (Later I was informed it was.) I’m just a mix of confused/pissed/weirded out.

  So I went to the Golden Globes to clear my head as one does, and who do I see but the lovely Kate Beckinsale. She’s a doll. She was there and she’s all like, “Blah blah blah . . . How ya been . . . blah blah blah . . . You’re so funny . . . blah blah blah . . . You’re a genius . . . blah blah blah . . . I wish I was single.” You know, small talk. We were there talking, and I don’t remember the exact convo but then it popped into my head that we have the same maid! Can you believe it? So I immediately asked, “How’s the laziest maid in America?” (Just to be hilarious.) And she said, “Lame! In fact I’m missing ten-thousand-dollar earrings. And some other shit!” HOLY FUCK! All the puzzle pieces are suddenly fitting! I’ve cracked the case! I don’t know if I was more excited about this or about the fact that I had been seen talking to Ms. Kathrin Beckinsale. I shook off my joy of discovery and said, “Oh my gosh! I’m missing over ten grand in cash!” (Sorry I sound like an asshole but that’s not a lot when you see bigger assholes on Instagram flaunting way more. You heard me, Floyd Mayweather.) And she said, “I think it’s Gold Tooth.” And I agreed: “Yes, yes! Fucking Gold Tooth! She’s shady as shit. Always shining up her grille. It has to be her . . . So what do we do?” Kate has no ideas. “I’ll think of something.” Then Kate drifted off into the night and I stood there, soaking in my new info (and some Belvedere).

  The next day I called my business manager. He’s like an accountant but does more and costs wayyy more. I caught him up with the sitch and told him to fire all the maids. (I don’t want to do it because I’m a pussy and she might rat me out to the Cartel for being a snitch.) “You can’t just fire someone,” he said. “Even if they are clearly ripping me off?” “Nope. They can sue you.” Wait, sue me?? What’s happening in this world? No one can get fired anymore. I seemed to have no problem getting fired from ever
y job I had back before I started doing comedy. Then he piped in with this brilliant idea: “We will get a private investigator to figure this out.” “Oh no, no, no, I don’t want a sting operation going down in my house. I’m too freaked out.” But I finally agreed because it seemed like the only way I might see my Benjamins (rapper term) again. So now “Operation: Where’s my fucking cash” was in full effect. Two days later these two scary dudes come over and break down the whole plan for me. It was like a plot from a Fast and Furious movie. I just sat there and nodded my head, like Vin Diesel does. I actually didn’t understand what they were planning at all, but I played along. Next the guys took out a camera pen and filmed my duffel bag for about thirty seconds. “This will be used later,” he told me. Thirty seconds didn’t feel long enough to me. I didn’t even know if they were real private eyes but they looked like Ray Liotta so I went with it.

  The next day the maids were supposed to arrive at nine thirty. The private eyes came at nine and walk me through the Big Sting. My first clue that something was amiss should have been when I saw the ladies roll up in a new Land Cruiser with twenty-two-inch spinners, but all I could think at the time was, “How was the Kendrick Lamar after-party?” But once they got out of their fat ride the idea was that the detectives would split up the maids and grill them separately in different rooms. Divide and conquer. Each was going to be asked the same series of questions, with the hope that one would be caught in a lie, get scared, or narc the other one out. The lead undercover detective was fluent in Spanish, so he let them have a quick chat before separating them to catch any last-minute cover-up plans.

  I wanted to bail on the scene because I was cringing at the thought of seeing the maids all confused and upset. And if they weren’t guilty, I would feel like the biggest asshole in the world. All those people on Twitter will be right! So I got out of the house pronto, and ran over to a breakfast spot and sat monitoring the phone, texting Kate B. updates (along with some dick pics; until her husband sent back bigger dick pics). After I had my usual breakfast of Diet Coke (I know, gross) I got the first text from my assistant: “They took them into different rooms, it was scary!” Of course I had made her stay and watch them stare at her with the same look dogs give you when the vet takes them back to have their nuts chopped off. That betrayal look. It’s brutal. Ten minutes later I texted, “What’s happening?” She said, “I don’t know I’m hiding in your office!” “No, no, get out there, get on the front lines, I want to hear all the deets!” Eventually she texted me back. “Ok big news, Gold Tooth cracked! She admitted to taking $500.” And I said, “Holy fuckarolli, have them roll up those sleeves and keep going with the waterboarding.” An hour later she admitted to ten thousand dollars! This chick was singing like a canary! Now you couldn’t shut her up. Meanwhile the main maid wasn’t saying shit. She was the Whitey Bulger of the gang. Hard-core. No squealing. I wish I had been there. I would have told them, “I don’t care if you steal a few Planet Hollywood jackets from me, I mean, just keep it to a minimum. I get it. I have some money, my life looks easy. I know you’re going to steal from me, that’s not a problem. Just don’t go nuts and make me look like an idiot. I mean ten grand?!” So we let them drive home and the guys met me for postgrilling orders. I didn’t have them arrested. But they are down to working only two days a week (lololol). The best part was that Gold Tooth told the detective it was all my fault for leaving the money lying around. She pulled the old dipsy doodle.

  So, remember when they filmed my bag for thirty seconds? That turned out to be the clincher. In the interrogation room, they set up three phony monitors. Then they put the thirty seconds of footage of my bag playing on one of them, and had my assistant guide the maid into the room so that she could see it when she walked in. The detective yelled out, “No, no, no we’re not ready yet, get her out of here!” and they turned it off real fast. Of course, the maid knew the gig was up then, and thought that she’d been filmed picking Benjamins. She started singing right away. She admitted that for years, every time she came over she would take at least two hundred-dollar bills. EVERY TIME. Do the math. That’s a lot of money. Shocker of the centch.

  The next whammy was that I still couldn’t fire the main maid. She hadn’t yet confessed. I needed to force her to confess, and somehow we did. She wrote it all down and said it on camera. I sent a copy to Kate B. as a birthday present.

  So the lessons I learned were . . . don’t be rich. And try to be a better hider of money. And buy a pen camera. And don’t have a gold tooth.

  Maybe I got the wrong lesson from all of this.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A VICTORIA’S SECRET PARTY

  Twitter and Instagram are pretty new to the world (compared to the wheel), but I’m finally getting used to them. I skipped MySpace for the most part and even skipped Facebook initially because I never believed they would catch on. That shows you how smart I am. But in my defense, MySpace, if you recall, was mostly about music in the beginning, a place to hear someone’s lame band or bad raps. MySpace sort of replaced demos. I always hated people handing me demos, especially my friends, because once they hand you their music demo it’s a ticking clock until they ask you to give them feedback. And rarely can you make this feedback honest. No one really wants to hear negative stuff about their “tracks” and they’ll usually just grumble, “What the fuck do you know about music anyway.” They have their response covered whether you like it or not, so any feedback is pretty pointless. Another problem is when my two rocker buddies used to catch me off guard in my car with their dogshit CD. That was always horrible, because before I could say no, it would be, “Hey, I just so happen to have a copy of my band’s latest crummy tunes right here. Let’s pop it in. By the way, the mix isn’t final and vocal mikes were fucked that day but you’ll get a feel for it.” Really? This is your sell?

  And besides that, what if, in some miraculous chain of events, I decide to give your shitty disk to Guy Oseary or Kid Rock or any other important legit music guy who could sign you? This is the pitch I get? This is your best swing? I’m supposed to picture a song I don’t really like 20 percent better? Not possible, you dumb fuck. No contestant on The Voice says, “Hey gang, before I start just FYI, I’m super-hungover and my voice sounds like Lindsay Lohan’s after a guy from Dubai just jizzed a sand load down her throat but let’s try this.” So I’m always stuck in demo jail in my car. I can’t leave and I can’t roll down my window. I just have to stare and fake-listen to noisy squelches that will never see the inside of an iTunes store. And I don’t even know where to look; do I stare at the actual CD player? (yes) or do I act like I’m into it by slightly bobbing my head (sometimes) or God forbid do I look over at my musician friend air drumming or singing along with such intensity that I know it’s an act because he’s heard this song five hundred times already and can’t be this into it? (I try not to. So embarrassing.) Usually I just quietly count to three minutes in my head and hope it’s over then so I can say “cool” and sprint out of my car into traffic.

  But my point was, I didn’t get tangled up in MySpace for that reason, but when Facebook popped up I thought, Oh fuck, this isn’t going away. Now there’s another version of this dumbness. So I waited a year hoping this small fire would burn itself out but nooooooooo, it got bigger! So I finally joined. I gave in. So after getting caught flirting by not realizing how it works I pared down the people I follow. I can’t believe a guy invented this because it’s such a great tool for women to bust guys cheating! Girls know every nuance of how Facebook works, that’s what I have learned. It’s a never-ending bust. I don’t even know half the time why I’m getting caught because girls will never explain how they figure it out. And by the way, these are just girls I’m casually dating. God forbid I was married or had a live-in girlfriend. I don’t know how my friends do it.

  I finally jumped in with Twitter about a year after it started, and I got on Instagram even faster because I realize the fans get mad if you don’t engage a bit. Pl
us, I ended up liking engaging with my fans. The movie and television studios now actually look at how many followers you have to help decide if they want you for a part (true story). They want actors to use their “socials” to help them get the word out for free on their projects. All of this is actually a great deal for the money people. You blast out shit to two million people and it’s like a little commercial on a low-rated show. But it’s still a lot of reach. Twitter started out big, but Instagram passed it fast—at least with my friends. I think Twitter is now mostly writing jokes or saying clever things about your life and some people just have trouble with that. And I get it because doing that is fucking hard. Unless you’re writing, “I had Funyuns today,” then it’s tough going. I try to be clever and within 140 characters it’s hard to do and I’m supposed to be good at this. I know some ladies who get a brain cramp because they all aren’t Jerry Seinfelds and don’t have a keen eye for observational comedy, which plays so well on Twitter.

  Instagram, on the other hand, is perfect for the gals. When the chicks of the world heard there was a new invention where all you do is take pictures of yourself, your food, and your dog, fist bumps all around. Holy shit this is too good to be true! A lot of them left Twitter in the dust and focused solely on the business of Instagram. (Snapchat is even easier! Instead of a picture of your cat, it’s a twenty-second video of it!) This is all causing problems for me. Instagram gets me really nailed. My problem is that it’s so easy to track your whereabouts with all of this shit. It’s like LoJack (old reference). YOU CAN’T LIE ANYMORE, FOLKS!! DO YOU GET IT?! THIS IS A PROBLEM! Honestly (hee-hee), lying is a thing of the past. If I tell someone I’m busy for a night and can’t hang out, they can just type my name into Twitter and suddenly it’s forty Spade sightings all over the place. You can literally track a person’s night like connect the dots. “@DavidSpade is on my flight to Arizona!” (Photo of back of my head.) Then “just got a pic with Joe Dirt @DavidSpade at Hertz counter in Scottsdale.” Then “@DavidSpade is next to me on freeway with some chick. I think he went to school here #ASU.” So you can see how this is a problem. The girl I blew off will call me and say, “How was your night?” and I’ll be like, “Oh, pretty chill, just laid low.” “Really? Laid low in fucking Arizona? My friend saw you there with some brunette!” (By the way, it took me four years to realize that her “friend” was the Twitter time line.) “You’re an asshole!”