President Me (29 page)

Another outdoor activity I have no interest in is ice fishing. This is the frozen, more drunken version of golf. Golf was invented so guys could get away from their wives for a couple hours and down a few beers. (Which is why I've never understood the guy who wants to get his wife into golf. The whole point is to leave her at home while you hit the links and have a couple drinks.) Any kind of fishing, but especially ice fishing, is the same. You want to get away from the wife for the day and get hammered, but if you did it in the backyard she wouldn't buy it. So you create an activity that involves pulling a Sears gardening shed with no bottom over Lake Minnetonka, drinking, and marinating in your own farts under the guise of trying to pull a trout from a hole in the ice the size of a toilet seat. That is, unless you have one of those supercabins with the carpeting, heat, full kitchen, and fifty-four-inch plasma. At that point you're not even ice fishing. You might as well just have a guy show up at your house while you're in a La-Z-Boy watching football and hand you a prespeared sturgeon.

Since I don't give a shit about the outdoors, I'll be naming as my Secretary of the Interior someone who has great respect for the land and waterways of our nation—Jimmy Kimmel's fly-fishing partner Huey Lewis. I've always joked that “fly-fishing with Huey Lewis” sounds like a threat my agent would make. “If you don't take this deal, your next gig will be fly-fishing with Huey Lewis.” But the truth is Huey is an avid outdoorsman and he could probably come up with a nice jingle and some PSAs to get people to visit our national parks. “Hi, I'm Huey Lewis. Burned out from workin' for a livin? It's hip to breathe clean air at our national parks.”

THE FAKE OUTDOORS

I'm not even a big fan of theme parks, never mind national parks. Just like with the family camping trip, you're going to get a lot of shit talked about you to a therapist someday if you don't take your kids to Disneyland. There are three types of people at Disneyland—superhappy kids, their miserable parents, and lost souls trying to recapture a stolen childhood. This is the guy you see at Disney with the denim vest covered in buttons depicting every ride and attraction. He collects and trades them with other lost souls/molestation victims on the Internet. The number of buttons and pins on that vest is directly proportional to the number of cigarettes stepdad put out on him. The adult relationship with Disneyland should be “once every couple of years for the kids,” not “This is my home. The Magic Kingdom is where I belong. It's my safe place.” If you've gone there more than ten times in your life, and more than one time in any year of that life, something went horribly wrong and there is no amount of pixie dust that can fill that hole in your soul.

I've taken the kids down to Disneyland a couple of times. That park is exquisitely crowded. There's no cap on the number of people they let in. Last time I was there I saw a three-hour line for the
Cars
ride. You seriously couldn't see the end of it. When was the last time you stood in line for three hours? There could be a line to titty-fuck Sofia Vergara and it would only be two hours. At that pace one afternoon at Disney will get you on three rides. So I finally wised up on my last trip and coughed up for the valet. Many people don't know about this, but you can pay extra for a park employee to take you to the front of the line. Sounds great, right? Well, when I say “extra,” I mean $350 an hour. With a six-hour minimum. But if you have the money and the option is having your kids cry the whole trip home because the lines stretched into the next state and all they did was the Matterhorn and Splash Mountain, it makes sense.

But here's the problem. As we were being escorted around by the valet, lunchtime hit. Lynette said, “Let's take a break, the kids want to eat.” I was instantly doing the math in my head on how much of the $350 an hour I was paying was going to be consumed by the time consuming overpriced hot dogs. So I said, “Okay, ten minutes.” Lynette said, “No, we need to relax.” I was thinking, “How about we relax when we don't have a nineteen-year-old former host at Chili's with a GED who I'm paying more than Phil Spector's attorney.” The valet, wife, and kids all headed to the snack shack while I grabbed a table. When they came back I saw the valet with a bottle of water, which, of course, I later found out I had paid for.

Then at the end of the day the tipping part came up. I asked Lynette, “Do we tip her?” Lynette replied, “I don't know. Maybe give her twenty-five bucks? Or fifteen percent like a meal?” I was okay with the twenty-five dollars but 15 percent would be $300 on the two grand for the day. So I just came out and asked her if they accepted tips. She told me that they weren't allowed to before but recently that changed, so yes, she'd be happy to take more of my money.

As much as it hurt my wallet and made me resent my kids (after all, there is no way my parents could have/would have done this), it was a satisfying lesson in capitalism and how the government doesn't work. Disney is a business. They recognize that me paying more is good for business, so they make it worth my while. When it comes to the government, the guy paying a ton more in taxes doesn't get to the front of the line on shit. We get no return on that investment. This would be like Disney letting in a bunch of people for six bucks, some for two grand, and many for free, and not only letting everyone fight it out in line, but letting the people who paid nothing vote to see who covers the cost of maintenance on Space Mountain.

GRIFFITH PARK AND THE L.A. ZOO

When I don't have the time or inclination to take the kids camping or to Disney, our local park is Griffith Park. It's got the L.A. Zoo, pony rides, a miniature train, etc.

I recently took Sonny to the L.A. Zoo. Let me say this—the people at the L.A. Zoo are much scarier than any of the animals. Lots of tattoos. Plus some of those people outweigh one of those lowland gorillas. That might have to do with the fact that one of the first things you see when you get into the zoo is the Churro Hut. Yes, a stand solely dedicated to the sale and distribution of churros. For those of you in the Midwest and Northeast, a churro is a Mexican donut. It's a deep-fried stick of dough that they were too lazy to shape into a circle. But at the L.A. Zoo they're not just any churros—they're stuffed churros. As if the dough javelin wasn't bad enough, these are filled with jelly, chocolate, and cream. Do you know how homoerotic it is to see a male devouring a nine-inch, flesh-colored baton stuffed with cream?

Another thing that pissed me off about the L.A. Zoo is that they have benches named after dead people. As a fund-raiser people get to put a little plaque on the bench in memory of their long-lost zoo-loving relative. This is a total bummer. After a hard day hiking around the giraffe-a-torium, I need to take a breather on that bench and I don't want my balls resting on dearly departed Nana.

But the thing that drove me insane about the zoo was at Sonny's favorite, the reptile house. Here's why. All the snakes and lizards and turtles and shit are in a simulation of their “natural habitat.” First off, how natural can it possibly be? Three times a day some fat lesbian in cargo shorts comes in and feeds them crickets while a fat gangbanger staring at them feeds himself a churro. Yep, just like in nature. (By the way, it must suck to be a cricket. You're the go-to food for every asshole who has a pet lizard. They must be thinking, “Why not cockroaches? There's plenty of them and they're disgusting. We're just trying to rub our legs together and make some night music. We're cool.”) So anyway, I've got my face pressed against the glass trying to see some African tree snake in its “natural habitat.” But because it's green and everything around it is green, I can't spot it. All I see is the green leaving my wallet for the fucking zoo ticket. Secretary Huey Lewis will now enforce that all zoos cut this “natural habitat” shit. I want the whole thing angled forward so they slide toward me. I want the animals suspended from a fishing line in front of a stark white sheet. I know that's not how nature intended it but I want my money's worth.

Another thing I see at the park that drives me nuts is Recumbent Bike Guy. If you go there on the weekend you'll see groups of cyclists, in packs of twenty, but this cat always rolls alone. Think Lorenzo Lamas in
Renegade
, minus the part where he gets laid. It's always the same guy, late forties, early fifties, no friends, who is never part of the group of Sunday cyclists three hundred yards in front of him. He's a lone wolf. And he's just as anti–sitting upright as he is antisocial. This guy is motivated enough to pedal around Griffith Park four times, but not motivated enough to sit up. He doesn't talk much, but when he does he'll tell you the recumbent bike design is 42 percent more efficient. But if that's true, how come you never see a guy in a yellow jersey coming down the Champs-Élysées on a Barcalounger?

The only bigger loner you see at the park is Metal Detector Guy. There's never a gaggle of them. Just one guy in jean shorts with a T-shirt tucked in, wearing giant headphones and waving a metal wand around looking for loose change. What are you expecting to find? It's one thing if you are walking around a Civil War battlefield looking for artifacts. At Griffith Park the only metal you're going to find is a used cock ring from the previous evening's after-dark activities. Have you ever lost anything more valuable than ChapStick at the beach or the park? It's not like you're in the car on the way home going, “Where's that sterling-silver dinner tray I brought?” This isn't about treasure; it's about tuning out the world. I'm convinced those metal detectors don't even have batteries. It's just a spray-painted mop handle with some headphones attached. He just doesn't want to talk to his wife.

You can find some scary dudes at the park. I took Sonny and Natalia to the pony rides there and looked down the line of felons in front of me waiting with their kids. As president, I'll raise the price for things like this to ten bucks to thin the herd a bit. I can do without the twenty-one-year-old father of three that has
FUCK
tattooed on one eyelid and
LAPD
on the other. It's even worse when the scary dude is the one working there and supervising your children. Whether it's at the park or just a carnival that's rolled into town, the people responsible for our children's safety are some of the sketchiest characters out there. You know the type—wears a jumpsuit with no T-shirt, unzipped to his navel, smoking a Winston, has a weird mustache, and is a little short on the dental work. I'm sure that whenever they pull into town, most carnies have to head to City Hall and register as a sex offender. That paperwork is probably the worst part of their gig.

And the rides they're manning are dangerous. The Zipper is scarier than any ride at Six Flags because there is a real element of danger. It was put together that morning by a guy who was smoking and sipping off a flask while he was doing it. And the House of Mirrors is a disaster. It's a fun house where the fun is head trauma from running into a sheet of glass. Kids just dash into this maze and plow right into the glass like a dog running into a closed sliding door trying to chase a squirrel in the yard. I saw my kids running around the house of mirrors at the Feast of San Gennaro a few years back and they both hit their heads. I said to the guy taking the tickets, “What is that? Is it Plexiglas?” He said, “No. Just glass.” Does anybody think this is a good idea to have disoriented four-year-olds banging their foreheads into panes of glass? In a world full of lawyers, how does this exist? It's okay; I'm sure the carnies running these deathtraps have complete and up-to-date first-aid and paramedic training.

A last quick thought on carnivals. In terms of hotness, is there a bigger gap between the chick in a booth at a carnival and the chick on a float at Carnival?

Back to the pony rides. My son is a puss. I put him on one of those ponies at the park and he had a look on his face like a black actor from a 1950s mummy movie. My daughter, on the other hand, is the daredevil. She wanted to ride the one named Hurricane. Sonny was waiting for the one named Quaalude.

One of the other things I don't like about taking my kids to the pony rides—other than spending time with them in general—is that horses piss wherever and whenever they want. At least dogs will give you a little heads-up. As I'm taking in a nice moment watching my kid ride a horse, the thing just lets go like one of those planes dumping water on a forest fire.

And they poop everywhere too. I was walking on a trail the other day with my dog, and as I bent over to pick up her poo I stepped in a big pile of horseshit. I realized the only crap we're not required to pick up is the horse dook. How come it's no problemo if you let a metric ton of horse dung go on a trail but if I let my yellow Lab take a dump you'll give me the stink eye if I don't pick it up? Horse owners should be required to scoop that up. It's the biggest of all shits, outside of a zoo or safari scenario. But there aren't a lot of bull elephants and hippos in my neighborhood.

Plus horse owners get to ride their pets. If I'm walking my dog, I'm already working hard enough. If I could ride her—I haven't been able to since I cut back on the drinking and her hip went bad—it'd be a different story.

All horses should have to strap on the shitbag. What's wrong with the sack they put on horses like they do with the carriage rides in Central Park? The horses don't care. No animal is more used to having stuff strapped to them than a horse. I don't think this is too much to ask.

ENOUGH WITH THIS HORSESHIT,
ON TO A BIGGER POINT

Speaking of shitbags, this ultimately leads me to a bigger point. As president, I'm going to use our parks as an example to other shitbag countries about how to be great. How to get their acts together. I'm going to convene a delegation from all the third-world nations—from the Middle East to Mexico and Africa to Afghanistan—and bring them to Griffith Park. I'll say, “Now over here we have some horses. These horses don't go anywhere. We put our kids on them, we pay a former convict to walk them in a circle. Unlike your horses, these don't pull a cart or take us to the bottom of a mine shaft. This is just entertainment for us. And by the way, that horse ate better today than you have this month.”