Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) Read online

  At the pep rallies, the football players stood on the front steps of the school wearing their varsity letter jackets and looking manly, while we civilian students urged them to fight, fight, fight for the Green and White. I would have killed to be standing on the steps wearing a varsity jacket and basking in the adoration of the student body, but I was not football player material. I was more the puny-kid-in-ugly-glasses-who-the-football-players-stuffed-into-the-trash-can-for-amusement material.

  I was never good at sports. For a while I played Little League baseball, but I had very little interaction with the actual ball. I heard a lot of yelling about the ball, and I occasionally sensed that something—which I assumed was the ball—had just whizzed past me. But I almost never had any direct personal contact with the ball, which turns out to be crucial to succeeding in many athletic endeavors.

  I was like that in every sport. I was not good at catching things or throwing things or even necessarily seeing things. I was not strong, and I could not run particularly fast. My main physical skill was wincing.

  Nevertheless, at Pleasantville High I was so desperate to get a varsity letter and be adored by the student body, especially the girl members, that I went out for the track team. My thinking was that since there were many different events in track, I might find one that I was good enough at to get a letter. The event I finally settled on was the long jump, which seemed like a good candidate for me because it involved relatively little actual physical activity. You ran down a short runway, and when you reached this board, you launched yourself into the air, then you landed in a sawdust-filled pit. I figured, how hard could that be?

  What I did not anticipate was gravity. Apparently some people contain more gravity than others, and it turned out that for a high school student, I had an extremely high level of gravitational attraction. I was probably affecting the tides. During track team practice I would run down the runway and launch myself from the board, then I would soar through the air for approximately the length of a standard matchbook cover before thudding back to Earth. Sometimes I couldn’t even jump far enough to land in the sawdust pit. I possessed essentially the same natural leaping ability as the Lincoln Memorial. As a result I took a lot of good-natured ribbing from my fellow track team members. (“You suck.” “Why are you even on the track team?” “Who cuts your hair, an enraged barn owl?”)

  So that was a discouraging time for me. But there’s an old saying among jockstraps: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” These words are very true. Sometimes, when we face adversity, instead of becoming discouraged, we decide to work harder, to show the doubters that they were wrong. This was not one of those times. The doubters were 100 percent correct: I sucked. So I quit the track team. The only way I will ever own a varsity letter is if I buy one on eBay.

  (On a more positive note: I was elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High Class of 1965. But that was not much consolation. Another thing you will never hear a high school girl say is, “When I lose my virginity, I want it to be with the Class Clown!”)

  At this point I hear you saying, “But Dave, so what if you were an unattractive, non-athletic, four-eyed, hand-farting loser with zits and a bad haircut in high school? That was many decades ago! Since then you have gone on to enjoy unparalleled success as a minor humor celebrity. You have also made many friends, and apparently even had sexual relations with the opposite sex at least twice. Get over the past!”

  Ha-ha! That’s easy for you to say, because, as we have already established, you are a stupid idiot. The truth is, I will never get over high school. My self-image was permanently etched into my brain back then, and nothing that happened since has changed it. No matter how old I get, when I look in the mirror, this is what I see:

  My point—and I admit this is pathetic—is that I am still insecure about how I look. Deeply insecure. And this insecurity gets much worse when there are good-looking, athletic guys around.

  Which brings us to David Beckham. He is of course the world-famous former soccer star and underwear model who is considered to be the hottest man on Earth by essentially every woman on Earth, a group that unfortunately includes my wife, Michelle. I am not saying Michelle does not love me. What I’m saying is, when she says the words “David Beckham,” she gets a certain look on her face that she does not get when she says other words, such as “delicatessen.”

  “But Dave,” I hear you saying, because you apparently are unable to help yourself, “it’s perfectly normal for a woman to harbor a harmless ‘crush’ on a handsome international superstar! It’s not as though anything could ever come of it! How would your wife ever even have the opportunity to meet David Beckham?”

  If you will be quiet for just a moment, I will tell you how. Michelle is a sportswriter. For her entire career, she has been going into locker rooms filled with large athletic naked men who are not wearing any clothes because—as I may have mentioned earlier—they are naked. I can live with that. My wife always tells me that she finds this situation to be very uncomfortable, and I believe her. I’m sure that if I were to walk into a room filled with athletic naked women, I would also be very uncomfortable, although in my case this would be because my eyeballs had fallen out of my head and rolled across the floor from staring so hard.

  But here’s the problem: One of the sports my wife covers is soccer. It happens that there is a business group seeking to bring a Major League Soccer team to Miami and build a stadium here. It further happens that the leader of that group—as you have probably guessed—is none other than: Danny DeVito.

  No, that’s who I wish were leading the group. But of course it has to be David Freaking Beckham. As I write these words, he has spent the last few months ardently wooing Miami. Every time you turn on the TV, there’s David Beckham in Woo Mode, attending government functions, meeting with civic groups, talking with students, rescuing babies from alligators, stopping hurricanes with his bare hands and just generally being handsome and charming and hugely popular in the greater Miami area.

  This wooing process included a big downtown reception, to which Michelle, as the Miami Herald’s soccer writer, was invited. The good news was, she couldn’t attend, because she was at the Sochi Olympics. The bad news was, she arranged invitations for me and our fourteen-year-old daughter, Sophie. Michelle thought it would be, quote, “fun” for Sophie to meet Beckham. That’s right: My wife deliberately arranged for her own daughter, who is female, to physically meet the world’s leading sex symbol.

  So Sophie and I went to the reception. Many Miami dignitaries were there, including the mayor, and everybody was very excited. I knew this because people actually got there early, which never happens in Miami. This is a Latin town, and we operate on Latin time. If you’re invited to, say, a July Fourth picnic scheduled to start at noon, you are considered on time if you arrive any time before Thanksgiving. Miami people are late to their own funerals.

  But everybody arrived early for the reception. We stood around for twenty minutes in a fairly dignified manner. Then David Beckham came through the door, wearing a suit, and suddenly the dignitaries turned into a mob, swarming toward him as if he were the last lifeboat on the Titanic. I’ve never seen anything like it—all these alleged adults acting like teenage girls, desperately wanting to get next to Beckham, be photographed with him, touch him, and ideally bear his children. And those were the men. The women were even more aggressive.

  Among those swarming toward Beckham was Sophie, who managed to get next to him for a photo. I am also in this photo, sort of:

  © Seth Browarnik/WorldRedEye.com

  That’s me, off to the left. I’m the one Sophie is clearly not even vaguely aware of. She wouldn’t have noticed if I had been actively on fire. She is totally focused on David Beckham, Hottest Man on the Planet, who has his arm around her, causing her to beam with a look of ecstatic radiant happiness that I will never cause to appear on a female fa
ce.

  Not that I am bitter!

  In the photo I’m smiling, too, because that’s what you do when your picture is being taken. Also I was happy for Sophie, because this was a big deal for her. But the truth is, when I look at that photo, this is what I see:

  “But Dave,” I hear you saying because you will NOT SHUT UP, “so what if your daughter was thrilled by the opportunity to meet this handsome, charming international superstar with a much nicer suit than yours? At least your wife was safely in Russia and thus wasn’t there to be swept off her feet!”

  No, that happened a couple of weeks later. After Michelle got back from Russia she received an email from one of David Beckham’s public relations people about setting up a meeting between him and Michelle. The email contained the following statement, which I am not making up:

  I think David Beckham was thinking of a one-on-one with you, either in a small Herald conference room or your cubicle.

  Yes! David Beckham was thinking of a one-on-one with my wife! Just the two of them, in her cubicle or a small conference room!

  Needless to say, this email generated much excited discussion among my wife’s female friends, all of whom voted for the small conference room. They also had many non-journalistic suggestions concerning pedicures, body waxing, etc.

  For her part, Michelle, who knows I am deeply insecure, handled the whole thing very sensitively. She assured me that the meeting was going to be just another routine interview for her, although she did not explain why she wore a low-cut strapless evening gown.

  No, really, she wore regular business attire to her meeting with Beckham, and when she got back she told me that it had been a strictly professional business encounter and, in all honesty, no big deal. She was obviously lying, but I appreciated the effort.

  Anyway, that’s why I hate David Beckham. I know it’s not his fault that he looks the way he does. I just wish he would go look that way in some other city. But as it stands now, he’s going to be around Miami for years, and if I’m not careful, it’s going to drive me crazy. I’ve given a lot of thought to what I should do about this, and I think the time has come for me, finally, to grow up—to get past my juvenile self-image hang-ups; to confront and overcome my insecurity; to stop obsessing pathetically over what I am not and instead learn to accept myself for who I am, which is plenty good enough.

  So I’ve made up my mind.

  I’m going out for the track team.

  A LETTER TO MY DAUGHTER AS SHE BECOMES ELIGIBLE FOR A FLORIDA LEARNER’S PERMIT

  * * *

  Unless I Can Get the Law Changed

  * * *

  Dear Sophie—

  So you’re about to start driving! How exciting! I’m going to kill myself.

  Sorry, I’m flashing back to when your big brother, Rob, started driving. You and I both love Rob very much, and he has matured into a thoughtful and responsible person. But when he turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, he had a marked tendency to—there is no diplomatic way to put this—drive into things.

  This was never his fault. I know this because whenever he drove the car into something, which was every few days, he would call me, and the conversation would go like this:

  ME: Hello?

  ROB: Dad, it wasn’t my fault.

  Usually what he had driven into through no fault of his own was the rear end of another car. Cars were always stopping unexpectedly in front of Rob for no reason whatsoever. Or possibly—we cannot rule it out—these cars were suddenly materializing from hyperspace directly in front of Rob, leaving him with no option but to run into them. Whatever the cause, it stopped happening when he got older and more experienced and started buying his own insurance.

  My point, Sophie, is that just because the State of Florida thinks you can drive a car, that doesn’t mean you actually can drive a car. As far as I can tell, after three decades on the roads of Florida, there isn’t anybody that the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles doesn’t think can drive a car. I cannot imagine what you would have to do to fail the driving test here.

  DMV OFFICER: OK, make a left turn here.

  TEST TAKER: Whoops.

  DMV OFFICER: (Writes something on clipboard.)

  TEST TAKER: Does that mean I fail the test?

  DMV OFFICER: Nah, she’s getting back up. You just clipped her.

  You may think I’m exaggerating the badness of the drivers down here, Sophie, but that’s because you haven’t been at the wheel of a car on the Palmetto Expressway going 60 miles per hour, traveling forward—which, as you will learn, is considered to be the traditional direction for vehicular traffic on expressways—only to encounter a vehicle, undoubtedly operated by a licensed Florida driver, going backward. And not on the shoulder, either. In your lane. This has happened to me more than once; it’s how some Miami drivers handle the baffling problem of what to do when you miss an exit. When ESPN shows a NASCAR highlight in which drivers collide at 150 miles per hour and a dozen cars spin out in a whirling mass of flaming wreckage, my reaction is: “Big deal. They were all going the same direction. Let’s see them attempt to drive on the Palmetto Expressway.”

  The State of Florida also does not seem to have a problem issuing licenses to drivers who are very elderly.

  Q. How elderly are they?

  A. Their first vehicle was a chariot.

  I once had an eye exam during which the ophthalmologist was telling me about some of his older patients, who according to him were basically blind. He said: “I ask them, ‘How did you get here?’ And they tell me they drove. And I tell them, ‘You can’t drive. You can’t see.’ And they say, ‘How else am I supposed to get here?’ And I say, ‘I don’t know, but you can’t drive, because you can’t see.’ And then they drive home.”

  I believe him. I once had a short but terrifying ride on the streets of South Florida in the backseat of a car driven by an elderly man. He was a perfectly nice person, but he had basically the same level of visual acuity as a corn dog. So he outsourced the actual seeing part of driving to his wife, who sat in the passenger seat and did her best to keep him posted on what was going on out there in the mysterious region beyond the windshield.

  “You have a green arrow,” she’d say. “Go. Go. I said GO! No! Wait! Stop! STOP!!”

  I believe this Seeing Eye wife arrangement is not uncommon among elderly couples on the roads of South Florida. And if you’re wondering why, if the wife can see, she doesn’t just drive, the answer is: The man drives.

  So to summarize, Sophie: Many people who lack the judgment and/or physical skills needed to safely microwave a burrito are deemed qualified by the State of Florida to operate a motor vehicle. When you get out on the road, you will be surrounded by terrible drivers. And guess what? You will be one of them. Yes, Sophie: You will be a bad driver, and not because you’re careless or irresponsible, but because you’re a teenager, and it is a physiological fact that at your stage of brain development, you are—to use the term preferred by researchers in the field of neurological science—“stupid.”

  There is no shame in this. All humans start out stupid, then gradually become more intelligent as they get older (with a few setbacks along the way) until they reach a certain age, after which they start becoming stupider again. Here’s a scientific chart illustrating this phenomenon:

  SOURCE: AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC ACADEMY OF SCIENCE

  What does this chart tell us, Sophie? It tells us that according to science, even dead people are smarter than teenagers. Teenagers are barely capable of forming sentences. Allowing them to drive—especially if they are males—is insane.

  “But Dad,” you’re thinking, “didn’t you drive when you were a teenage male?”

  Yes I did. I got my New York State driver’s license in 1963, at age sixteen, and I spent many hours cruising on the highways and byways and occasionally the lawns in and around Armonk, N.Y. But th
at was different, Sophie, because I drove safely. I don’t mean “safely” in the sense of “carefully.” I was definitely your standard male teenage idiot. But I was a safe idiot, because I was driving the safest vehicle ever built: my mom’s 1961 Plymouth Valiant station wagon. It did not have modern safety features such as seat belts, air bags, antilock brakes or a computerized collision-avoidance system. What the Valiant had, which was better than any modern technology, was: Inertia. I would stomp violently down on the accelerator and basically nothing would happen for several lunar cycles, because the Valiant was no more capable of acceleration than a fire hydrant. This was the only car ever manufactured that traveled faster on the assembly line than under its own power.

  You could not hit anything in a Valiant. Fully mature trees moved quickly enough to get out of its way. So it couldn’t do any damage even with me at the wheel. If I were in charge, today’s teenagers would be permitted to drive only if they drove Plymouth Valiant station wagons. Also I would require these teenagers to tune the Valiant’s AM radio to New York station WINS and listen to the late Murray the K play hit 1963 tunes such as “Da Doo Ron Ron” because THAT WAS MUSIC, DAMMIT.

  Unfortunately, Sophie, I am not in charge, which means you’re going to be driving on roads teeming with modern high-speed automobiles operated by incompetent idiots such as (no offense) yourself. To prove that you’re qualified to do this, the State of Florida will make you take a test based on the information found in the official Florida Driver’s Handbook. For example, the test may ask you to identify the Florida “standard” speed in business or residential areas. According to the Handbook, the “correct” answer, the one you should mark on your test, is 30 miles per hour.