Still Foolin’ ’Em

by Billy Crystal

  So the house is now 99 percent done and our idea is working out. The grandkids come here and sleep over, and I can wake up to the sound of them playing. As I listen to them giggling, I get a little misty and think that one day after I’m gone, these beautiful kids, all grown up, will come over here and they’ll have one of their friends or maybe even their intended along and they’ll proudly take them into my office and say, “This was Grandpa Billy’s office. It’s where he had everything that meant so much to him … and once I got rid of all his crap, I turned it into a dance studio.”

  Buying the Plot

  This is the hard one. The chapter I was dreading. The one that took the longest to write because it’s about … death. My death. Our biggest fear. Wait—your biggest fear is not my death. Our own death is our biggest fear. It weighs on us so much that we, as humans, have developed all kinds of psychological ways to deal with it. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about the five stages as she saw them: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She was a genius. And now she’s dead.

  She was the expert on death, and now she’s just … dead.

  I look at the stages of death differently. To me they are retirement village, assisted living, nursing home, hospice, and burial plot.

  I know what you’re thinking: Billy, you’re such an optimist, and now you’re going dark on us. No, I’m just being realistic. I do see a silver lining; it’s the satin in my coffin.

  The actuarial tables tell us that once we hit sixty-five, we can expect to live into our nineties. And then … bye-bye. And you know how in the back of your mind you’re thinking that you’re going to be the one that gets away with it, that you’re going to be the one that God, like a bouncer at a nightclub, lets slip by? It doesn’t work that way. For anyone. In fact, you know who else thought they might slip by? Every single person now in a cemetery.

  So we have to plan ahead for what happens when we go.

  Personally, I do not like planning a huge party I won’t be attending. And as with our federal debt, I may just decide to stick my grandchildren with the bill.

  You also don’t know how you are going to go. Everyone has the same fantasy: that you are lying in bed, it’s serene and quiet, everyone you love is gathered around you to say good-bye, there is no pain, and you leave this earth with a smile on your face. Except that’s not how people go.

  We’re eaten by a giant shark.

  Crash into a building while parasailing with a fly-by-night company run by a Mexican drug cartel.

  Crushed beyond recognition by a falling boulder.

  Burned to a crisp when your car rear-ends a fuel truck.

  You eat something bad and get poisoned by E. coli.

  Flesh-eating bacteria eat you.

  Shopping at a farmers’ market, you’re run over by a fellow senior citizen who shouldn’t have a license because he’s legally blind.

  Reading this book in the bathtub, you doze off and drown.

  And those are some of the more pleasant things that can happen.

  So although you have no control over how or when you are going to go (though some sadly do), you do have a say about where you spend eternity. I don’t mean in the deeper sense of where the soul will go to rest and whether you should call ahead and get a good table.

  This is about what my uncle Danny used to say after every Thanksgiving meal: WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE CARCASS?

  My favorite philosopher, Yogi Berra, when asked by his wife, Carmen, where he’d like to be buried, simply said, “Surprise me.”

  Janice and I have had lengthy discussions about this because we don’t want to burden the kids with the decision. And judging by the presents they get me for Father’s Day and my birthday, I can’t trust them. So Janice and I keep talking.

  “What do you want?”

  “What should we do?”

  “Where do you want to be?”

  We sound like we’re in a scene from that great movie Marty.

  “Where you wanna be when you’re dead, Janice?”

  “I dunno, Billy, where you wanna be?”

  We’ve talked about getting cremated. I can’t do that because I know my luck. The day after they cremate me, they’ll find a cure for what I had. Once you’re burned up, you have no hope of being put back together again. I’ve lived too long a life to be turned into Tang.

  The big question then becomes what to do with the ashes. People are usually scattered in a special place they love. This won’t work for me because that would be in front of the TV in my favorite chair. Then I know what would happen. Janice would come home one day and find our housekeeper, vacuuming.

  “¿Dónde está Señor Crystal?”

  “OH NO!”

  The other problem with cremation is that if you are scattered around, there is no place for the kids to go to feel guilty. Of course you can be cremated and kept in an urn in the living room so you’re still in the middle of the action. The only problem there is that you are in a FUCKING URN.

  But I have heard some lovely things about cremation. A good friend of mine, seventy-two years old, lost his wife a few years ago. What she loved more than anything in the world was tending to her roses. After she was cremated, he sprinkled her ashes on her flower bed. The next spring, when the roses bloomed, they were the most beautiful roses he had ever seen—although he swears that late at night he can hear her whisper, “Do you have a sweater? It’s cold out here—would it have killed you to put a blanket over me?”

  I explored other options. I researched getting laminated. Seriously. Put me in Plexiglas, lean me against the bar in the rec room with the Yankee game on, and I’ll be very happy. And since the company also does trophy fish and game, why not put a smile on my face and hang me on the wall?

  There is also a process where they use heated water and potassium hydroxide to liquefy the body, leaving only bones behind. Coincidentally, this is the way my grandmother made chicken soup. That’s actually kind of comforting. Drop my bones in a big pot of boiling water, add a matzoh ball and an onion, and have me for the Seder. If there are any leftovers, freeze me, because if anyone gets a cold, what’s better than a bowl of me?

  That’s a little creepy but no creepier than giving the bones to the family, which is what they recommend. This scares me because Jenny and Mike have a two-hundred-pound English mastiff. If I’m going to be buried, I want to be in a cemetery, not in the backyard.

  In Georgia, they have something called Eternal Reefs. They mix your cremated body with concrete and throw you in the ocean, where you become a reef for fish. Didn’t they do this to Jimmy Hoffa? Leave the dead guy, take the cannoli. (And by “they,” I didn’t mean the Mafia.)

  Then there’s freezing. The children of Ted Williams arranged to turn him into a “Pop”sicle. They hired a cryonics company that cut off Ted’s head and froze it. What’s the point of that? The amazing thing is, Ted’s frozen head still hit .315!

  Related to this is an alternative called Promession, which involves freeze-drying. You are immersed in liquid nitrogen, which makes you really brittle, and then vibrations shake your body. It sounds like a waiter with a severe haircut in a New Age restaurant telling you how you will be prepared: “Chef takes you and immerses you in a liquid nitrogen reduction, then he shakes you apart. The meat falls right off the bone.” But that’s better than what they really do. After they shake you apart, they suck all the fluids out of you, and not in a fun way (could there be a fun way for this to be accomplished?), then turn you into compost. I don’t want to spend the next millennium smelling like doody.

  Space burial is the new thing. They shot Scotty from Star Trek into outer space. But because of the high cost of space flight, they can’t send all 165 pounds of you. So they cremate you and send three grams of your “cremains” into space. Wait a second—the soul is supposed to weigh twenty-one grams and they’re only sending one-seventh of it into space? That means I’ll have eighteen grams of soul still here on earth. Just about as much as John Boehner.


  The Neptune Society will bury you at sea. You know that organization by another name: SEAL Team 6.

  None of these options appealed to me or Janice, so we decided to go old dead school: a plot. In a way, it’s a family tradition. Years ago, during World War II, my grandparents bought a family plot for themselves and all of their children and their husbands and wives, so everyone could spend eternity together in New Jersey. Which sounds redundant. I actually like going to the cemetery, as painful as it is. The plot is on a gentle hillside, under beautiful trees. My parents are there and all my aunts and uncles, and it’s very comforting to see everyone in the same position they sat in at the dining room table. The plot is full now. One big happy dead family. So, with that thought in my mind, I went shopping for a plot.

  Have you ever spent time with a burial plot salesman? I guess we’re all selling something, but how bad did you fuck up on your SATs so that this is the job your guidance counselor recommends? “You know something, son? Your aptitude tests show you’d be great at selling graves.” Explain that one to your folks. “Mom, Dad, I’m going into real estate. Kinda.”

  This burial salesman was far too cheerful.

  “Well, somebody looks mahvelous!… And will forever!” He shook my hand a little too hard and laughed way too loud. Then he abruptly changed tones: “How many plots do you need?”

  “Just two for now—I still haven’t discussed this with the kids. They may want to be on their own. We’re really just looking.”

  “You know, we have a special this year: six plots for the price of five,” he told me, producing a lovely brochure. “They make a lovely Hanukkah gift,” he added.

  That will go over well. “Hey, everyone, instead of taking you to Hawaii this year, I bought burial plots.”

  The salesman tried to convince me that now was the time to get in.

  “You know, Billy, you can buy the plots for yourself and Janice and then give your family what we call ‘eternity gift certificates.’”

  He was starting to press me, so I tried to back him off. I’m not good when I’m pressured by a salesman. I have a John Deere tractor, two hip replacements, and a llama farm I didn’t need.

  “You know, I’m not dying tomorrow,” I joked, starting to sweat.

  “You don’t know that, now, do you, Mr. C?” Mr. C? Suddenly he was a maître d’ in a club I didn’t want to belong to.

  At this point I had to get out of the office, so I asked him to take me to see some plots. The first place he brought me to was what he called “Headliners’ Haven.”

  “Jack Benny has a plot right there, and you’re only a tombstone’s throw away from Jolson,” he said.

  I told him I wasn’t interested. Being around famous people would bring tourists, and who needs that? Isn’t there a quieter place? Maybe where the opening acts are?

  He said, “If you can wait a little, we have a brand-new section opening up in 2015. I could be”—he looked me in the eye—“convinced”—wink wink—“to hold some plots for you. It’s right by our lake, wonderful view.”

  “WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT THE VIEW? I’M DEAD!”

  “The view isn’t for you, it’s for the mourners—they like the lake.”

  “Yeah, well, lakes mean ducks, and ducks mean duck shit, and I don’t want mourners to have duck shit on their shoes when they come to visit. I’ll smell it and start to gag.”

  The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be in the ground. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…” I asked about a mausoleum.

  At this, his face brightened up.

  “I’ve got the perfect one. White marble, very distinguished, above ground, no mold.”

  Now, that sounded like me. But it had to be private. When people come to visit, I don’t want the paparazzi taking pictures of them at my grave. I also told him I didn’t want a vault in a wall, like Marilyn Monroe. I won’t like it; I can’t even sleep on a plane.

  He explained that the mausoleum (which looked like a marble doghouse) was “very private and very tasteful, with its own garden area.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars … each.… More complicated, we build a vault for you both. George and Gracie are in a vault together. It’s lovely.”

  I couldn’t breathe. Before I knew it, I was running away from him through the cemetery. I ran to the lake and ripped off my clothes and dove in. As I swam, I could see a small group of mourners at a lakeside service. I emerged from the water stark naked, and a woman in black lifted her veil. “Billeee, Billeee … kiss me twice.” Sophia Loren and I were about to make love on Jolson’s tombstone when I heard, “Mr. C? Are you okay?”

  “Huh? Yeah,” I said meekly, distracted by my daydream. “I want to think about all this. Where do you do the service?”

  “You’ll love it,” he said. “We have a beautiful theater—it seats two hundred.”

  “We’ll need more room,” I said.

  “You can do two shows. Plus, we valet for those we recognize.”

  My demise started to feel too real as I imagined everyone at the service. A tidal wave of sweat moved across me.

  I excused myself to wash my face. While I was in the men’s room, I realized that all I really wanted was a simple service. That and not to die. All I want is for it to be funny, for Janice to be stunning and charming, as she always is, for my friends to tell great stories. I want my kids to be strong and make people laugh, I want my grandkids not to kick the chair in front of them, for Derek Jeter to say, “He could really play,” and for the service to end with an Asian girl on a unicycle who uses her feet to flip soup bowls onto her head. She does halftimes at Clipper games, and she performed at my fiftieth birthday party. It’s a real crowd-pleaser. Google her—she’s amazing.

  While the salesman was in the office, I scooted out the back door, like a criminal on the lam in a detective movie. I got in my car and drove home. I started to think maybe I should have bought the plot. And I will someday, but not now; I’m not ready.

  How can I handle my own death when I still have trouble with everyone else’s? I have lost so many people I cared about. Life is like a big game of musical chairs. One by one we get eliminated, except there’s no winner at the end; it’s just an empty chair, a covered mirror, and a lot of leftover sponge cake.

  So what does death mean to me? Death just means … no more. No more laughs with my brothers and friends, no more watching my kids grow older. It means no more seeing what amazing things are ahead for my grandchildren, and it means … no more Janice and me.

  That’s the hardest part. As I sit here writing and look across the room at Janice, I keep thinking of the most heartbreaking question: Which one of us will go first? It could happen that we go together; we could be like all those white-haired couples in Iowa: he’s ninety-seven, she’s ninety-six, they met at the state fair in 1926, he dies in bed, and an hour later she just slips away so she can be with him for eternity. But chances are, one of us will go and the other will live on.

  So that’s what it comes to. I can’t bear to think of life without Janice. I want to go first, because I don’t want to miss her. That would be a pain far worse than any death. I don’t want to miss the way she makes me laugh. I don’t want to miss waking up and realizing she’s holding my hand while she quietly sleeps. I don’t want to miss hugging her when nothing else in the world makes sense. I don’t want to miss her finishing my sentences because we’re thinking the same thing. I would rather be gone than have to miss her. I won’t buy the plot right now, because I can’t. I’m going to just go on and keep living and laughing and loving. I’d like to think there is a heaven and it starts from the happiest day in your life. I’ll be eighteen and Janice Goldfinger will walk by me in a bikini, and I will follow her and it will start all over again. I’d really like to think that.

  Epilogue

  March 14, 2013, the evening of my sixty-fifth birthday. We were having a small dinner party in the dining room at my da
ughter Lindsay’s house while she was in her bedroom having big labor pains.

  A few hours later my fourth grandchild and second grandson, Griffin, was born.

  I had told Lindsay no gifts, but you know kids, they never listen. “Do something special” my mom always said about my birthday. It doesn’t get any more special than this.

  The day that started with angst ended with me holding the greatest treasure one can ever receive: a healthy, beautiful baby. This little guy and I will be forever united by our birthday.

  Once we got home from the hospital, I got into bed just after two A.M., and I did something I don’t usually do in the dark—I smiled.

  It is a great life with plenty more to go, I hope. Time to see how my little ones fare in the world we turn over to them. That is our task after all. Get them ready for the rain. Teach them all we know and help them try to be better than us. That is my job as I begin my sixty-sixth trip around the sun. And yours … fly safe … wait a second …

  HOLY SHIT! I found my keys!

  “Happy Birthday to Us, Happy Birthday to Us…” 3-14-1948 meets 3-14-2013, the greatest gift of all.

  Acknowledgments

  After I retired from the Yankees, I didn’t know what to do with myself. As I approached my sixty-fifth birthday, I thought it would be great fun to go out on tour and do stand-up again. I’d talk about all the things that were going on in my head and to my body as I neared the milestone. Inspired, I started writing, and after I had sixty funny pages or so, I read them aloud as if it were a performance. Instead it felt like a book. Here are the people who agreed with me:

  Simon Green at CAA was a pleasure to deal with, and his knowledge of the book world was essential. Thanks to Steve Rubin at Henry Holt, who believed in the material and his wardrobe, and to Gillian Blake—so smart, so easy to work with, who pushed me to be better. To the production team at Holt for their talents and for being so open to ideas. To my managers, David Steinberg and Larry Brezner, for their expertise, friendship, and unwavering support all these thirty-nine years. To those named in the book throughout the chapters of my life: each one of you is an important part of my ongoing tour de chance. For those not named—or named but Gillian cut you out or wouldn’t let me wax on—I’ll name you now. John Goodman, John Lassiter, and all the genius folks at Pixar; the backstage crew at the Oscars and my writing team all stars, Jon Macks, Dave Boone, Ed Driscoll, and Billy Martin. Thanks to Troy Miller, Dan Butz, and the talented group at Dakota Films for magically putting me in all those nominated films, and to Mike Seligman for always finding the dough. To Barry, Wanda, and maestro Giorgio Armani’s beautiful designs and his ability to make me look taller. To Manny Kladitis and my Broadhurst Theatre family; it was an honor to walk that stage.