by David Cross
I’ll tell you what kind. The sweetest of them all—the perfect kind. Is this for people who don’t believe in angels (because “believing in angels is ridiculous”) but do believe in the power of transcendental meditation to create an energy shield that would turn back nuclear missiles? Because that makes complete sense. First of all, who’s going to dig around to find out who to check with about whether there’s really a star named for you, and then actually check? No one, that’s who. And if anybody does check, all you have to do is show them some bullshit certificate-looking thing that you can print off of your computer at home with a heretofore unknown font declaring that your star name is sanctioned by the “ISC”? They actually have a thirty-day guarantee. In case you get a sudden case of the “What the Fucks”? or “your” “star” red dwarfs and explodes in the next few weeks.
I’m imagining something like that. Am I close?
Scrapbooking in Michigan
RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND I AM SITTING IN THE BAR AT THE Sheraton in Novi, Michigan, just outside of what used to be Detroit. The name of the bar is 21.1.11, which is the zip code for Novi, except broken up by periods. The bar is very much your typical corporate hotel bar. It is just off the lobby and visible to everyone from every angle. There are two flat-screen TVs showing various football or baseball games. In between the games they show FOX News. I’ve been a regular here for the last two months while I shoot a movie here in Michigan. Like pretty much every hotel, the drinks are outrageously overpriced. But I get them back by never paying any money for the coffee that’s set out in the morning at their “honor bar.”
There have been many groups that have come in and out of the hotel for a day or two or three while I’ve been living here. Nothing too exciting. A wedding occasionally will liven the place up, but mostly it’s groups of people belonging to the Michigan Psychoanalytical Foundation, or a company of regional tire salesmen, or Peggy Hartford’s 85th birthday party or some such thing. But today is different. Today promises a wealth of emotions and involuntary judgments. Today there is a scrapbooking convention taking place. The name of the company holding the convention is Close to My Heart, and they use the word convention in a literal sense. It’s less of a celebration of great scrapbookers or a sneak peak at some of the new items in the scrapbooking world that will soon be entering the market, but more of a get-together of women who would normally be doing this at home by themselves or with a couple of friends. But here, for an all-inclusive fee, they scrapbook with hundreds of like-minded strangers. All women. Not even older gay gentleman who dress like Mr. Rogers and whistle Lerner and Lowe tunes while wearing half-glasses. Not even one! There’s nothing really on sale here. No new scrapbooking technology being shown off, just the scrapbooking itself. There are a couple of seminars throughout the day, but outside of that it’s pretty much just the act of scrapbooking. That is to say, pasting photos on pages and then decorating the edges around the photos with various seasonal or occasionally appropriate stickers and cutouts. Is it a photo of last Halloween? Then add a pumpkin! Are you memorializing Brittany’s baby shower? Then add a cartoon of a stork and a pacifier!
Scrapbooking seems to me one of those things that you don’t really need any help with. It seems like something I could figure out on my own without having to spend ten hours in a seminar. I’m a heterosexual male, but still.
I met two of the several hundred women in town for it here at the bar just last night. They were very excited to take a picture with me even though they weren’t exactly sure of who I was. They were, however, confident that I was on TV or in the movies or both, so the picture was requested. I commented on what I saw as maybe being unnecessary—the need for “instruction” in scrapbooking—but they assured me that it was all part of the process. Now I am going to have to stop for a bit because they are coming out of the ballroom where they were “cropping” (which is when everyone scrapbooks amongst each other in a fun way to bond after a long day of seminars). I mean they are pouring out in droves and are now starting to swarm the bar in the way that only large groups of middle-aged scrapbookers from Ottowa on one of the few “vacations” they’ll go on this year can. I better go upstairs lest anyone see what I’m writing and get upset. Okay, I just read this over and I want to say that it was rude of me to put quotes around the word “vacation” back there. Just because they’re not scaling Machu Picchu or exploring the Cenotes of Mexico or having their senses ramped up to 1,000 at a Russian disco in Ankara, Turkey, as the very large man who literally pulled you in from off of the street now grips your thigh under the table so hard it’s bruising while promising you that the women who are trudging about unsuccessfully pretending that they aren’t high and/or sex slaves are clean and love Americans * doesn’t mean that they haven’t in the past or won’t in the future. These scrapbooking women are on a vacation, even if only in the sense that they are away from their families or solitary, unexciting lives back in Grainy Lakes, Ohio.
There is more than a little irony to the fact that this very event is something that one would imagine would merit being “scrapbooked.” That the time being spent here by these women (and one gay man—I was wrong), hunkered down over an officially sanctioned “scrapbooking scrapbook,” remembering better times that, obviously, weren’t spent at the Sheraton Novi, remembering other memories. I walked down to the Grand Ballroom where they are all meeting and I am going to take a rough guess that there were about 350 women seated at the long tables that had been put into rows stretching from one end of the hall to the other. Were it not for the faux gold leaf on the walls and fake crystal chandeliers, you might think you had stumbled onto some room in China or Mexico or the Mariana Islands where the local ladies were assembling vibrators for a penny a day. And in what could be viewed as either irony or unremarkable happenstance, depending on your view of all this, “Almost Paradise” from Footloose was playing at full volume as the ladies unwound from the day-long seminars (including one called “Crop Talk”—no kidding) by applying their newfound pasting skills to photos of them drinking margaritas at newly single Tonya’s apartment, where they all watched the Project Runway finale.
I was looking in through the open double doors from what I thought was a safe distance, in the hallway with my back against the far wall, but the two ladies from last night saw me within seconds. We talked briefly and they filled me in on what was going on. That’s how I now know the term cropping. It’s fun to have terms and abbreviations and just generally make up your own language for your hobby. It lends a sense of exclusivity and insider standing. Earlier that day I had walked through the parking lot of the hotel so I could go across the street to Best Buy and get a video game (my own stupid but fun time waster) and walked passed at least a dozen cars with some form of “Close to My Heart” adornment on them as well as the Christian fish symbol thing that some Christians put on their cars to let other drivers know that they don’t believe in most science. This does not in any way surprise me. In fact it goes a long way toward validating my cocky, assured judgments. The kind that piss people off when you see a bunch of overweight women in sweats and U of M (or W or O or I) T-shirts, reeking of drugstore perfume, lugging crate after crate of scrapbooking paraphernalia and a case of Mountain Dew through the hotel lobby, greeting everyone by name in an accent that would make the characters in Fargo seem like students of Henry Higgins, while a bag of Doritos and a six pack of Seagram’s Peach Fuzzy Navel stick out of their homemade Kid Rock purse, and you say out loud, “I bet half of them have those little Christian fish things on their cars. Wanna bet? Anyone?”
Hold the phone! It is now October 3, I’m still at the Sheraton, and the entire second floor and a couple of banquet rooms on the first floor are being taken over by another scrapbooking outfit! This one is called “Creative Memories.” These ladies make the “Close to My Heart” women look like lazy pieces of shit that just crawled out of an iron lung so they could go take a nap on the couch. These women are scrapbooking on steroids and acid times t
en meets the Wolfman!! As I said, they’ve booked the entire second floor and are having scrapbooking sessions that start at eight in the morning and go to eleven at night! Jesus. What? I don’t understand.
I’ve met a number of these women in the past few days, and they all seem genuinely nice, but this is starting to feel sad. I went walking up and down the second floor with its walls the color of blisters and it’s cheaper-by-the-ton, not-so-stain-resistant carpeting, peering into rooms with titles like “The Charlevoix” and “Isle Royal” that seem more like prison rec centers and less like “banquet” rooms. Barely anyone talking, all hunched over their scrapbooks, lifting their heads occasionally to nibble on snacks. It’s easy to project “concentration” into robotic movements, but this is utter boredom at its utterest. And this is, I suppose, a slice of the “real America” that so many Republican candidates have been prattling on about. Here in Novi is where the values of small towns triumph over their big-city brethren through sheer moral force, reducing everyone in their path to a quaking shell of a supposed human, boo-hooing apologies, bent in contrition, while the weight of all their elitist wrongs renders them in mute awe of the righteous. Well, I’ve seen enough. I wish these women well, not only on their current projects but also in the sufficient attainment of future memories. At least as much as necessary to bring them back to the Sheraton Novi/Detroit next month.
Go Lions!!!
I Would Be the Shittiest Survivor in History
I WOULD BE THE SHITTIEST SURVIVOR IN HISTORY, I DO BELIEVE. Not that this is something I’m proud of—more like an ambivalent realization I came to while in line at Whole Foods. I was buying twenty dollars’ worth of olives—that is to say four ounces of olives, but it’s worth the exorbitant cost to lessen my carbon footprint. (I’m concerned what people six thousand years from now may think of me.) Anyway, lately, for no specific reason, really, just pure coincidence, I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries and Discovery Channel and History Channel shows that have a “survivor” theme or are simply “tales of harrowing survival.” Whether it’s one person stranded by themselves seriously injured in a forest buried under a mountain of fire ants or a small group of people who run out of gas in an arid, unforgiving desert or a large group who get stuck in a surprise killer storm on an icy mountaintop, I’ve witnessed dozens of reenactments and even actual footage that the survivors had the wherewithal to document. Brutal, torturous, forever life-altering struggles to live. And I’m not talking about that silly TV Survivor reality nonsense where the winner gets a million dollars for basically going without chocolate for a month and shitting in a hole in the ground. I’m talking about people who, less then “cheating death,” survived on a courage most of us will never know—a staggering primal fortitude that is often said to be inherent within us all but, for me at least, is highly doubtful. I’m talking about when a plane crashes and there’s one survivor, lost at sea, freezing cold, holding on to a floating chunk of foam core trying not to think about sharks too much but rather concentrating on figuring out the best way to drink their own urine (much harder to do if you’re a girl).
Man, that is not for me. I would be working on a way to drink so much seawater that I would get all filled up and drift off to a nice post-meal nap that I would pray I would never wake up from. Did you read about that teenage girl who was kidnapped by a well-armed stranger and taken cross-country against her will and managed to leave clues to her whereabouts and outwit her kidnappers leading to her rescue? Those are the tales of survival I’m awed by. Now, I like to think I’m somewhat clever. Certainly if you were to see the terrarium I made in sixth grade for Ms. Kowalski’s science class (currently on display at the Carter Center in Atlanta) you’d give me the benefit of the doubt. But I think if I found myself in any of those situations I would likely end up a pile of cowardly bones somewhere, providing an unexpected yet delicious carrion treat for the locals. Have you seen Touching the Void? Have you seen or read about Shackleton’s Endurance? Or better, how about the guy who had to s-l-o-w-l-y chop his arm off at the elbow with a pocket knife because when he was rock climbing his arm got stuck and he couldn’t get it free and he knew that no one was gonna be coming for weeks and he knew that it was the only way he was going to have a chance at getting down and remain alive? Are you kidding? I’m such a pussy, I’d still be dangling there today, a funny-looking skeleton with glasses.
There’s no way I could go through all that shit. I’m not sure it’s even about the pain. I think that the nagging feeling I have even in the best of times (pizza party!!), the feeling that I don’t think life’s all that great, would take over eventually. I don’t have kids, so I won’t go through the “I’ve got to do it for the little ones” phase that might imbue me with superhuman strength. Perhaps in Day 2 of my dilemma, hungrier and weaker in mind and body, I might think about my baseball cards I want to get back to, or the new Radiohead CD due out next week that I was really looking forward to, but will that really keep me going? Nope.
I don’t even know the first thing about survival. There are at least a dozen of those bathroom books with subtitles like “Everything you ever wanted to know about how to get out of every situation ever—and ten you don’t!” that tell you to punch a shark in the nose or to tell a bear it’s stupid and things like that, but come on—punch a shark in the nose? I guess I’d do it, but I would have already started the flashback of my life well before I balled up my fist and put on my best shark-punching face—i.e., I would already have given up and started saying my goodbyes. If I were lost in the desert by myself, I would just lie there and cry for two days and then spend the rest of my time alive trying to use my shoes to light a fire or something equally as inane. I would probably go through a brief phase of hitting rock bottom and then having the epiphany and accompanying surge in strength where I would stop feeling sorry for myself, rising up and yelling out to the stars, “Get yourself together, dammit! You’ve got to do something or you’re dead! Now think, motherfucker!” before I got tired and looked around for a relatively comfortable place to lie down and die. As for kidnapping, well, I’m pretty sure that if I was kidnapped by brutal forces, dragged around, and beaten regularly but then found myself with a risky but maybe my only chance to try and escape, I’d probably still be hanging out with the kidnappers asking them if they wanted tea and did they need me to drive.
Now on the other hand, if I was on one of those Survivor or Survivor-lite reality shows, I think I would do quite well. If I knew that the sound crew who were just out of frame could ultimately save me or set a broken bone or give me that fucking chocolate bar that every privileged egotistical crybaby with no true sense of sacrifice seems to miss in a way so histrionic it would make Al Pacino multiplied by Nicolas Cage divided by Tyra Banks blush, I would be able to get through most any “survival” condition in which I found myself (in the month we were shooting). Now that I think of it, though, I suppose that if I were in a real, honest-to-goodness true survival situation, I would at some point become aware of the financial and sexual rewards awaiting me if I were to survive my ordeal. A book, film rights (and since I am an actor, potential work playing the older version of myself in a fictionalized future scene. The younger me would of course be played by Orlando Bloom or Jude Law, whichever one is, as of the publishing deadline of this book, “hotter” in accordance with the scientists at People magazine). A separate book about the making of the film and how harsh the conditions were would be in the offering, too. It would be called My Story’s Story, and it would explain in detail how the cast and crew had to make due with very few modern amenities. (No Kiehl’s Green Tea Infused Eyelid Lotion available, or those towels that I like from that nice hotel in Milan, and also that time when we ran out of Mandy Patinkin’s * favorite pita chips etc.) Then a documentary film of the book about how difficult it was to make the movie. My Story’s Story—The Real Story Behind the Story. Kind of like Hearts of Darkness or Burden of Dreams but not a straight documentary. More like Touching the
Void but without the real danger of death and the awe-inspiring triumph over it through superhuman strength and courage. I could then write and produce a one-man show off and then on, and then off again, Broadway about my experiences of turning the graphic novella written about the financing of My Story’s Story’s Behind-the-Scenes of the Making of The Story Casino, which was thematically designed and inspired from the story the way I told it on a special sixteen-part Oprah. My point is this: I would be filthy rich. But ultimately, what we learned here is that Mandy Patinkin not only loves pita chips but that he has a favorite kind. Can you guess what they are? Answer at the end of this piece.
Oh! Hello! It’s the end of the piece!
Answer: Roasted garlic!
A Little Bit about Me, ’Cause It’s My Book
“I’VE BEEN TO PHOENIX, ARIZONA, ALL THE WAY TO TACOMA, Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A. Northern California where the girls are warm so I could be with my sweet baby, yeah.” Steve Miller sang those words and, thanks to the borderline tragic need of aging boomers to remind themselves of a fantastic youth that is more than likely 75 percent imagined, probably still does at the Verizon/Delta/Capri Sun amphitheater near you. By the time I was in my early twenties I had been to all of those places (yes, even Tacoma), living in two of them for at least nine years and another for six months. I’m using this to illustrate the point that, because of an unstable childhood in which my family moved at least once a year if not more, and because of an early entry into the world of stand-up, traveling “the road,” I too, like Mr. Miller, have been all over America. The only states I have not been to are Alaska and North Dakota, and North Dakota doesn’t even count. And Alaska is so far away that it might as well be Tasmania. And to say you haven’t really been to all of Australia just because you didn’t go to Tasmania is silly. So, I’ve been all over America.
