It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (19 page)

I
put on TV the other night and I came to a fashion show. It puzzled me. All those beautiful models walking around and they all look mean. Why don’t they smile as they walk? Who are they mad at? They do all right. They make good money. All the guys love them. All the girls want to look like them. But they still walk around mean. It’s a mean turn. A mean stop. It’s always a mean face. They make me feel like I did something wrong.

Another thing that puzzles me. When models pose for pictures, they show their belly button. Why? A belly button
is not sexy. A belly button is good for only one thing: when you’re lying in bed eating celery, it’s a place to put the salt.

When I say she’s a doll, I mean it.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

Here’s something I don’t understand. When I got married, the guy said to me, “You may kiss the bride.” Big deal. After all the things I’ve already done to the bride, he tells me I can kiss her.

When I watch a football game, I see guys trying to bang the other guys as hard as they can. They tackle hard. Their heads collide. Their bodies slam against one another. And all of a sudden the game stops. There’s a penalty for “holding.”

And another thing.

Why do they make such a big deal out of the “two-minute warning”? Everyone knows you got two minutes to play and that’s it. To me, a two-minute warning is like when I’m in bed with a chick. The phone rings. It is her husband calling from his car phone. He says, “Honey, I’ll be home in two minutes.” Now,
that’s
a two-minute warning.

I also don’t like when they have girl announcers for a football game. They should have only male announcers. Football is a man’s game. I don’t want to hear a girl tell me it’s two inches short.

With my wife nothing comes easy. When I want sex she leaves the room to give me privacy
.

I
was working in Atlantic City. One night after the show, my friend and I went to a little nightclub to get a bite to eat. We were feeling good, had a few drinks. There were two girls who worked onstage there. One played the piano, one played the harp.

Not too many people were there. It was toward the end of the evening, and the girls were close by. So we started talking to them. It got to a point where they were coming off in about fifteen minutes, and maybe we’ll go somewhere and have a drink.

They said, “Fine.” So we had a date.

My friend says to me, “Which one do you want?”

I didn’t know which one to pick. They were both attractive—maybe the harp girl had a slight edge.

Then I thought, She plays the harp. It seems like such a religious thing, a saintly thing, a “do what’s right in life” thing. The chances are she’s not gonna be a wild girl.

I
picked the piano player.

As usual, I picked wrong.

I know how to always make a woman say yes. I ask her, “Am I bothering you?”

Chapter Fourteen

Three Lucky Breaks

I’m at the age now, when I meet a woman sixty years old, she’s too young for me.

L
et’s face it, I’m getting old. That’s bad enough, but in the last few years, I’ve had four major operations. I’ve been cut up so many times, I feel like I’m back in my old neighborhood.

Before each operation I’ve had, the same thing always happens. As I’m lying on the gurney, the doctor comes over and he smiles at me. The smile says, “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. Have confidence in me.”

I always tell the doctor, “If I don’t make it, I’ll never know it.”

My first major operation was in 1992, to fix an abdominal aortic aneurysm. That was serious—if your aorta goes, you go. Most people die in minutes. Lucille Ball, George C. Scott, and Albert Einstein all died of ruptured aneurysms.

When a doctor catches it in time, it’s often discovered by accident. That’s what happened with me. One day I
woke up and had some pain on my right side. I went to the doctor and got an X-ray. As the doctor had suspected, the tests showed that I had pancreatitis. But they also showed something the doctors really didn’t like—an aneurysm. So I had the surgery—what they call “the open procedure.”

Here’s how that goes: First they cut you open from your diaphragm down to your “ecstasy rod.” Then they take all of your intestines and put them on a table next to you. Then they perform the operation.

When I came to, I was in intensive care. My torso was wrapped in bandages, and there was an IV stuck in my arm to feed me intravenously.

A doctor looked in on me and said, “Hiya, Rodney, how ya doin’? Don’t worry, we’ll have you walking in no time.”

He was right. I got the bill. I had to sell my car.

I mean, I’m not a kid anymore. I could go tomorrow. And I hope I go tomorrow. I haven’t gone today yet.

P
eople often say, “It’s a miracle I’m alive.” And for me, they may be right. I was a heavy smoker for over fifty years. Never could stop. I used to walk around with three different packs of cigarettes in my pockets—filters, non-
filters, and menthols. Sometimes I’d quit for a whole day. Then I’d give myself a reward—a cigarette.

That’s how I ended up going to the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica in 1982. It’s no longer there, but it was a highly recommended place where you could lose weight and stop smoking. So I thought,
I’ll check in there for a month. I’ll take care of myself
—which I did.

One morning, I ran into the head man, Nathan Pritikin, a great guy who was really down-to-earth.

I said, “Dr. Pritikin, nice to see you.”

He said, “Rodney, how’s your cholesterol?”

I thought,
Wow, he gets right to it.

“Getting better, Doc,” I said. “But tell me something. You say don’t eat lobster because it’s all cholesterol. But if lobsters are all cholesterol, how come they live a hundred years?”

Nathan had a sense of humor. He said, “They don’t smoke, they don’t drink, and they watch what they eat.”

I said, “How about sex?”

He said, “No thanks. I don’t know you well enough.”

After a month in that place, I felt like a tiger.

After I left Pritikin, I didn’t smoke for three years. It gave me a chance to clean out my chest. It made my lungs fresh. Then one night I got drunk, and I had a cigarette.

After that, I was back smoking again. I smoked even after I had my aneurysm operation, right up until my double bypass. By then I knew it meant my life. So I finally stopped.

I haven’t smoked now in over three years. After my last
bypass operation, I was all cleaned up, and I’d be a fool to start stuffing my lungs up all over again with cigarette smoke.

I never thought I could quit, but I did. Now when the urges come, when I think I can’t make it, I just remind myself that nobody ever died from not smoking.

What a doctor I’ve got—he’s really mixed up. Last week, he grabbed my knee and told me to cough. Then he hit me in the balls with a hammer
.

I
got three lucky breaks that summer I spent at Pritikin. I lost weight, I stopped smoking, and I met my wife, Joan Child. She owned a flower shop in Santa Monica. One day I stopped by to smell the roses. And I stopped by again the next day. And the next day. And the next…

We started dating, which was tough because I wasn’t in L.A. much once I got out of Pritikin. At that time I was doing dates all over the country and in Canada. Luckily, we stayed at it, though; we dated for ten years.

One night, when Joan was closing up her store, she said, “I know a great place to get a bite.”

I went back to visit all my old schoolteachers. I only had to make one stop, the cemetery.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

Me and my beautiful wife, Joan, on our wedding day. Joan is a Mormon, so next week, I’m marrying her sister, too.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

I said, “Let’s go. But I need to take my car, too. I have to get up early tomorrow, so from the restaurant, I’ll go right back to Pritikin.”

“You’ll never find this restaurant,” she said. “Follow me.”

We took off in two cars. I was right behind her, but I had to drive fast to keep up. Next thing I knew, there was a police car behind me, lights flashing, bullhorn screeching, “Pull over!”

But I couldn’t. I knew that if I pulled over I’d lose her, and I didn’t know where we were going, so I hit the gas—and so did the cops. So now I was following Joan, and the cops were following me, lights still flashing.

When Joan finally stopped, the cops pulled up with their sirens wailing, bullhorns, the whole thing. I thought they were going to drag me out of my car and club me to death, but they were cool. When I explained the situation, they started to kid around with us, they were all right. Then they said they wanted my autograph—on a ticket.

People think I get plenty of girls. I go to drive-in movies and do push-ups in the backseat of my car.

My neighbors complained when I tied up traffic to have my new hot tub flown in. I didn’t see what the big deal was—it’s not like I was naked in it.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

I
moved to L.A. in 1990, and Joan and I finally got married on December 26, 1993. It wasn’t a big, dramatic thing—we just decided to do it. We flew up to Vegas, got married, then I played some craps and we flew home that night.

Besides going into show business and opening Dangerfield’s, this was another time people told me I was nuts. I married Joan with no prenuptial agreement. They thought I was making a big mistake. We are now married over ten years. It looks like “the mistake” worked out.

I learned in life, you can never say never. After my first marriage, I said I’d never get married again. Here I am married again, and this time it is the way it should be. Joan and I get along great. Thanks to Joan, I am in love, and I’m loving it.