Bad Habits Read online

  Bad Habits

  Dave Barry

  Dave Barry.

  Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-Free Book

  Dedication

  To Mom and Dad, who never forced me to go see Santa Claus.

  Introduction

  When people come to my home for the first time, they often ask me, “Dave, where’s the bathroom?” To which I always answer, “Down the hall there, on the left.” And from that point on we are usually close friends.

  I bring this up because people often wonder what I’m really like. “Dave,” they often ask, when they get out of the bathroom, “are you really as witty, insightful, articulate, and handsome as your writing suggests?” I would have to say that yes, I am, although I am not as tall as you might think. I’m maybe five nine. But then a lot of truly great writers were of average height or less. William Shakespeare was only fifteen inches tall!

  Which leads us to accuracy. When Doubleday & Company decided, after days of heavy drinking, to publish this book, they hired a panel of extremely brilliant nuclear physicists, who combed through these essays and marked, with a red pencil, every sentence that might conceivably be accurate, and these sentences were all removed with pruning shears. So I freely admit, right up front, that there are no facts left in this book, and I don’t want you Little League coaches out there to send me a lot of cretin letters informing me that a ten-year-old can’t really throw a baseball six hundred miles an hour. Okay?

  So there you have it, except for my philosophy of life. My mother used to say to me: “Son, it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.” I think that still makes a heck of a lot of sense, even in these troubled times.

  Household Perils

  It’s In The Genes

  My wife and I were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to decorate their homes. If we had lived in the Neanderthal era, ours would be the only cave without little drawings of elk on the walls.

  When we moved into our house eight years ago, there was this lighting fixture in the dining room that obviously had been installed by vandals. Simply removing this fixture would be too good for it; this is the kind of fixture that needs to be taken out in the backyard and shot. When people came over to visit, back when we first moved in, we’d gesture toward the fixture derisively and say “Of course that’s got to go.”

  Of course we still have it. We have no way of deciding what to replace it with. What we have done is get an electrician to come in and move the fixture to another part of the dining room, because, after years of thinking about it with our defective brains, we thought this might be a good decorative idea. To move the fixture, the electrician had to punch holes, some of them big enough to put your fist through, in the wall and ceiling. I have taped plastic sandwich bags over these holes, to keep the air from rushing in and out.

  So now, after eight years, we have the original vandal fixture, plus we have holes with plastic bags over them. We eat in the kitchen. We will always eat in the kitchen, and our dining room will always look like the South Bronx. We have learned that anything we try to do to improve it will just make it worse, because of these missing brain parts.

  We do a lot of work with plastic bags. We made curtains for several rooms by taping up dark plastic garbage bags. My wife feels guilty about this, because she believes women are supposed to have this Betty Crocker gland somewhere that secretes a hormone that enables them to sew curtains. God knows she has tried. She reads articles, she takes measurements, she even goes to the fabric store, but because of what she perceives to be a deficiency of her Betty Crocker gland, she never actually produces any curtains. Which is fine, because I have a deficiency of my Mr. Goodwrench gland and would never put them up.

  So we use plastic garbage bags. They work fine, but I have noticed that most of our friends, now that we’re all grown-ups, have switched over to actual cloth curtains. Also they have tasteful Danish furniture. They just went out and got it somehow, as if it were no big deal, and now everything matches, like those photographs in snotty interior design magazines featuring homes owned by wealthy people who eat out and keep their children in Switzerland. We have this green armchair we got at an auction for twenty-five cents. This is not one of those chairs that are sold for a song but turn out to be tasteful antiques worth thousands of dollars. This chair, at twenty-five cents, was clearly overpriced. It looks, from a distance, like a wad of mucus, and it could not possibly match any other furniture because any furniture that looked like it would have been burned years ago.

  Accompanying this chair is a sofa that some people we know tried to throw away six years ago, which we have covered with a blanket to prevent guests from looking directly at it and being blinded or driven insane. Such is the tastelessness of this sofa. And these are two of our better pieces. The only really nice furniture we own is manufactured by the Fisher-Price toy company for my son’s little Fisher-Price people, although I certainly don’t begrudge them that, inasmuch as they have no arms or legs.

  I imagine you’re going to suggest that we go out and buy a nice piece of furniture, and then, when we can afford it, another one, and so on until we have a regular grown-up neat and tasteful home. This would never work. If we were to put a nice piece of furniture in our living room, all the other furniture would wait until we’d gone to bed, then ridicule and deride the new furniture, and emit all kinds of shabbiness germs into the living room atmosphere, and by morning the new furniture would be old and stained and hideous. I also firmly believe that if we were to leave our chair in one of our friends’ tasteful living rooms for several days, it would become sleek and Danish.

  This interior decorating problem extends to cars. None of my friends, for example, have plaster models of their teeth in their cars. I have two in my car. My dentist gives them to me from time to time, sort of like a treat, and I’m afraid to throw them away for fear he’ll get angry and make me come in for an appointment. I keep them in my car because God knows the house is already bad enough, but I know they are not tasteful. I can’t put them under the seat, because my car, like all the cars we’ve ever owned, has developed Car Leprosy, which causes all the nonessential parts such as window cranks to gradually fall off and collect under the seat and merge with French fries from the drive-thru window at the Burger King. I’m not about to put my teeth down there. So they sit in plain view, grinning at me as I drive and snickering at my lack of taste.

  My wife and I are learning to accept all this. We realize that if the present trends continue, we will not be able to admit people into our house without blindfolds. I can live with that. What I worry about is that we will get in trouble with the bank or the government or something. One day there will be a violent pounding on the door, and we will be subjected to a surprise inspection by the Committee of Normal Grown-ups, headed by my wife’s home economics teacher and my shop teacher. They’ll take one look at our curtains, and they’ll take away our house and cars and put us in a special institution where the inmates are roused at 4:30 A.M., chained together, and forced to install wallpaper all day. Nancy Reagan would be the warden.

  Barbecuing Is The Pits

  What could be more fun than an outdoor barbecue? I can think of several things offhand, such as watching the secretary of state fall into a vat of untreated sewage. But that would probably cause us to go to war in Nicaragua or somewhere, so I guess we’ll have to settle for a barbecue.

  The barbecue was invented more than eighty million years ago by Cro-Magnon Man, who was the son of Stephanie Cro and Eric Magnon, a primitive but liberated couple. Cro-Magnon Man used to eat dinosaur meat raw, and it tasted awful, worse than yogurt. One day, while Cro-Magnon Man was eating, lightning set a nearby log on fire. Cro-Magnon Man was so surprised that he dropped his dinosaur meat onto t
he fire, where it ignited and gave off a disgusting odor that drove off all the insects, which in those days were the size of mature eggplants and extremely vicious. “This is terrific,” said Cro-Magnon Man, only nobody understood him because English hadn’t been invented yet.

  Burning dinosaurs quickly became a major form of insect control. At large Cro-Magnon lawn parties, the hosts would put whole brontosauruses on the fire, and they would sizzle into the night, keeping the insects away and giving off a stench that lingers to this very day at the northern end of the New Jersey Turnpike.

  Eventually, of course, they used up all the dinosaurs, which led to the discovery that if you put cows and pigs on your fire, you could not only drive away insects but in a pinch you could also eat the cows and pigs. This led to the invention of hamburgers and hot dogs, which are cows and pigs that have been ground up in Chicago and formed into little portable units that can be easily thrown on a fire. Today people rarely put entire cows on fires except in Texas, where lifting animals is a major cultural activity, second only to wearing big hats.

  To hold your outdoor barbecue, you’ll need several dozen units of cow or pig and a portable grill, or hibachi. (“Hibachi” is a Japanese word meaning extremely flimsy grills that break at the slightest touch but Americans buy them anyway.”) You’ll also need fuel. At one time, people used wood, but then the Consumer Product Safety Commission discovered that wood is flammable and banned it. So today you are required to use charcoal, a mineral that forms in torn paper bags in supermarkets. The problem, of course, is that charcoal, being a mineral, does not burn. Neither does charcoal lighter fluid. Firemen routinely use charcoal lighter fluid to extinguish major refinery fires. So what actually heats your barbecue food is matches, hundreds and hundreds of matches that you heap onto your charcoal until they form a blaze.

  While you’re waiting for your matches to get going, you should prepare a tangy barbecue sauce.

  TANGY BARBECUE SAUCE RECIPE

  1 cup broached onions 2 liters vanilla abstract 1/2 pound neat’s-foot oil 2 table-spoons butter or oregano 1 fresh poltroon, diced

  To Prepare

  With floured hands, on a floured surface, standing on a floured floor, and just generally surrounded by mounds and mounds of flour, combine the ingredients in a greased 5518’ by 16318’ pan, then pour the mixture carefully into an ungreased 4318’ by 18718’ pan and heat it until a 1318’ blister forms when you stick your hand into it.

  Now place your meat units on the grill. They should burst into flames immediately. Let them burn until they’re cooked the way you like them:

  RARE (5-10 minutes): The outside is burnt and welded to the grill; the inside is pink and swirling with cow and pig disease germs.

  MEDIUM (5-10 minutes): The outside and part of the inside are burnt; many of the disease germs, particularly the elderly and pregnant ones, are dying slow, painful deaths.

  WELL DONE (5-10 minutes): Both the outside and the inside are completely burnt; almost all the disease germs are dead, and the few remaining ones are making elaborate plans for revenge.

  When your meat is done, extinguish it with the barbecue sauce or charcoal lighter, detach it from the grill with a spatula or sharp chisel, and serve it with something that people can eat, such as Fritos or turkey sandwiches. You should eat quickly, because the insects will monitor you from a safe distance and attack the instant the smoke clears.

  A Solution To Housework

  Almost all housework is hard and dangerous, involving the insides of ovens and toilets and the cracks between bathroom tiles, where plague germs fester. The only housework that is easy and satisfying is the kind where you spray chemicals on wooden furniture and smear them around until the wood looks shiny. This is the kind of housework they show on television commercials: A professional actress, posing as the Cheerful Housewife (IQ 43), dances around her house, smearing and shining, smearing and shining, until before she knows it her housework is done and she is free to spend the rest of the afternoon reading the bust-development ads in Cosmopolitan magazine. She never cleans her toilets. When they get dirty, she just gets another house. Lord knows they pay her enough.

  Most of us would rather smear and shine than actually clean anything. For example, our house has a semifinished basement, which means it looks too much like a finished room to store old tires in, but too much like a basement to actually live in. Our semifinished basement has a semibathroom, and one time, several years ago, a small woodland creature crept into the house in the middle of the night and died in the shower stall. This is common behavior in the animal world: many animals, when in danger, are driven by instinct to seek refuge in shower stalls.

  Since we hardly ever go down to our semifinished basement, we didn’t discover the dead woodland creature until several weeks after it crept in, at which time it was getting fairly ripe. Now obviously, the correct thing to do was clean it up, but this is the hard kind of housework. So instead we stayed upstairs and went into an absolute frenzy of smearing and shining, until you could not walk into our living room without wearing sunglasses, for fear of being blinded by the glare off the woodwork. Eventually, we managed to block the woodland creature out of our minds.

  Several months later, our friend Rob, who is a doctor, came to visit. He stayed in our semifinished basement, but we noticed that he came upstairs to take showers. One of the first things they teach you in medical school is never to take a shower with a dead woodland creature. We were so embarrassed that we went down and cleaned up the shower stall, with a shovel and acid. But I doubt we’d have done it if Rob hadn’t been there.

  Our behavior is not unique. People have been avoiding housework for millions of years. Primitive man would stay in one cave until the floor was littered with stegosaurus bones and the walls were covered with primitive drawings, which were drawn by primitive children when their parents went out to dinner, and then the family would move to a new cave, to avoid cleaning the old one. That’s how primitive man eventually got to North America.

  In North America, primitive man started running out of clean caves, and he realized that somebody was going to have to start doing housework. He thought about it long and hard, and finally settled on primitive woman. But he needed an excuse to get himself out of doing the housework, so he invented civilization. Primitive woman would say: “How about staying in the cave and helping with the housework today?” And primitive man would say: “I can’t, dear: I have to invent fire.” Or: “I’d love to, dear, but I think it’s more important that I devise some form of written language.” And off he’d go, leaving the woman with the real work.

  Over the years, men came up with thousands of excuses for not doing housework—wars, religion, pyramids, the United States Senate—until finally they hit on the ultimate excuse: business. They built thousands of offices and factories, and every day, all over the country, they’d get up, eat breakfast, and announce: “Well, I’m off to my office or factory now.” Then they’d just leave, and they wouldn’t return until the house was all cleaned up and dinner was ready.

  But then men made a stupid mistake. They started to believe that “business” really was hard work, and they started talking about it when they came home. They’d come in the door looking exhausted, and they’d say things like “Boy, I sure had a tough meeting today.”

  You can imagine how a woman who had spent the day doing housework would react to this kind of statement. She’d say to herself. “Meeting? He had a tough meeting? I’ve been on my hands and knees all day cleaning toilets and scraping congealed spider eggs off the underside of the refrigerator, and he tells me he had a tough meeting?”

  That was the beginning of the end. Women began to look into “business,” and they discovered that all you do is go to an office and answer the phone and do various things with pieces of paper and have meetings. So women began going to work, and now nobody does housework, other than smearing and shining, and before long there’s going to be so much crud and bacteria under the natio
n’s refrigerators that we’re all going to get diseases and die.

  The obvious and fair solution to this problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything. So men are out.

  But there is a solution; there is a way to get people to willingly do housework. I discovered this by watching household-cleanser commercials on television. What I discovered is that many people who seem otherwise normal will do virtually any idiot thing if they think they will be featured in a commercial. They figure if they get on a commercial, they’ll make a lot of money, like the Cheerful Housewife, and they’ll be able to buy cleaner houses. So they’ll do anything.

  For example, if I walked up to you in the middle of a supermarket and asked you to get down and scrub the floor with two different cleansers, just so I could see which one worked better, you would punch me in the mouth. But if I had guys with cameras and microphones with me, and I asked you to do the same thing, you’d probably do it. Not only that, but you’d make lots of serious, earnest comments about the cleansers. You’d say: “I frankly believe that New Miracle Swipe, with its combination of grease fighters and wax shiners, is a more effective cleanser, I honestly do. Really. I mean it.” You’d say this in the same solemn tone of voice you might use to discuss the question of whether the United States should deploy Cruise missiles in Western Europe. You’d have no shame at all.