My Point ... And I Do Have One (12 page)

Let’s see, what else frightens me. Oh, I know. The scariest thing in the world almost happened to me the other day. Just thinking about it makes me break into a sweat (or maybe it’s the hour and a half that I just spent on my treadmill that has caused me to break into a sweat; the important thing is that I’m sweating). Let me tell you about it. But first, a warning: If you are faint of heart, it would be a good idea to have a registered nurse nearby while you read this tale of near-terror. On the other hand, if you are a registered nurse, there’s no need to have a faint-of-heart person with you. All they’d do is fidget around a lot and make you nervous.

I was at home, I was barefoot, I was about to put my shoes on … (Have I set the mood, is your heart beating fast?) Like a fool, I was just going to slip my foot into my shoe without looking. Luckily, at the last second I glanced down. In my shoe was … a huge spider—a big black-and-orange, hairy, crunchy spider. I almost put my foot right on it. Isn’t that scary? Isn’t that like something Stephen King would write? Stepping on a spider has to be the scariest thing in the world.

Actually, do you know what would be scarier? If, after putting on the one shoe I then recklessly put my foot in the other only to discover that it was teeming with … 
hundreds
of spiders! All the babies were in there, a whole—let’s see, it’s a gaggle of geese, a school of fish, what is a group of spiders called? Oh, now I remember: a whole
snorkel
of spiders. That would be the scariest thing ever.

Unless, let’s say you’re out camping in the woods, or not even camping, or even in the woods; you’re sleeping in your backyard. I don’t know why. Maybe you like the great outdoors, but you want to be close to home in case somebody calls. Or maybe you had a fight with the person you live with, and you ended up yelling, “Okay, that does it. I’m sleeping in the backyard tonight!” It’s only when you get back there that you realize it wasn’t much of a threat. But you have too much pride to go and sleep inside (even though your dogs look at you from inside through the picture window with an expression that’s a mixture of pity and confusion).

So (and this is the scary part), you’re in the backyard and you’re just about to doze off when you start feeling something kind of funny—not ha ha funny, but creepy, weird funny. So you look inside your sleeping bag and there’s … a snake crawling up your leg. Aghhhhhhh!

That just blows the spider thing away. It is not possible for there to be anything scarier than that.

Wait, I just thought of something more frightening. What if you’re playing Frisbee on the beach and the person you’re playing with (either a friend or someone kind of attractive who just happens to have a Frisbee, and you’re flattered when they ask you to play with them—this part isn’t important so you shouldn’t be dwelling on it) throws the Frisbee way past you and you’re furious because it’s their fault, but you smile and yell, “I’ll get it,” and they say, “Okay.” (Notice how I’ve managed to build up the suspense with some terse dialogue?)

Anyway, it turns out that the Frisbee has flown into one of those caves that you see at most beaches. Well, you go to get it and you realize that the Frisbee has gone farther down into that cave than you had thought. So you have to spelunk down into the abysmal depths of the pitch-black cave.

Finally, you reach what you assume is your Frisbee and you grab it, but it feels weird so you say, “Why is my Frisbee squishy?” So you squeeze it harder and you realize, “Hey, this isn’t a Frisbee … it’s a bat!”

Well, the bat starts making that
wee-bee-bee-bee
bat noise that bats make when you’re squeezing them a little too hard (for more information on this read
Bats and the Sounds They Make When You Squeeze Them
, by Carney Pheek). So you start running as fast as you can out of the cave, but your screaming sets off thousands of bats—not a snorkel, that’s only for spiders—a whole
Nipsy Russell
of bats, which start flying out after you. Now you’re running through the sand, which is even harder than it sounds because you’re wearing high heels (they look good with the swimsuit and slenderize your hips). So you’re heading for the water thinking you’ll be safe from the bats. But just before you submerge, a bat bites you on the ear. Oh man, those sharks can smell blood from miles away. So now you can see the shark fins swimming toward you. But you can’t get out of the water because of the Nipsy Russell of bats. What a dilemma. It’s like
The Pit and the Pendulum
, only different. I defy you to come up with something scarier than that. It’s impossible.

Unless
, say you’re on a farm visiting your aunt … or whomever … and she calls out to you through the kitchen window, “Ellen, Ellen honey—would you mind going to look for that thing I misplaced?” And you don’t even care what the thing is—because that guy’s inside and he wants you to call him Uncle Larry and he’s not your uncle and he’s drunk all the time and he always wears those weird pajamas—but it’s her life. So you go to look for that thing, and you think you see it in some bushes. You reach in to grab it, and you think you have it, but what you realize you’re grabbing instead is (Oh my God!!!) a … lamb.

Okay, I admit that’s not too scary by itself. But what if it’s not just one lamb? What if it’s a lot of lambs? What if it’s a rack of lambs? That’s pretty scary, huh? Because a lot of anything is scarier than one something.

Am I right? Think about it. One hundred poodles are scarier than one leopard. That’s assuming, of course, that the leopard has no legs. You could come home, open the door, and see a leopard with no legs sitting in your living room. So what could it do? It’s got no legs. It would be growling away, and you could sit right in front of it and make faces and touch its nose and “Woo” at it.

The only way a no-legged leopard could hurt you is if it fell out of a tree onto your head. I don’t know how it got up the tree; maybe some of the other animals lifted it up there. But you have to admit when that leopard fell on you and clamped down on your head with its teeth, it would be pretty bad. You’d start running down the street yelling, “Help, help me, please.”

And more often than not, you’d run into a big group of animal-rights activists, a
Naugahyde
of animal-rights activists. And, instead of helping, they’d probably throw red paint at you. You would scream out, “It’s not a hat, it’s a live animal! It’s got no legs. I would never wear fur. I am wearing it against my will.”

So now you’ve got a live leopard on your head and paint all over you as well. That is pretty darn terrifying. But you know, I don’t want to diminish the spider in my shoe. Believe me, looking back, that was scary enough. I guess all I’m trying to say is you don’t have to make stuff up; there are enough scary things in real life.

the time ellen
degeneres had
an emergency!

O
nce I had to be taken to the emergency room of a hospital. It was an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Actually, I don’t have a worst enemy or even a best enemy. I’ve never taken the time to rank my enemies. I’m afraid of hurting somebody’s feelings. “Hey, I thought I was your worst enemy,” one of my lesser enemies might complain. I sort of wish I did have a worst enemy, though. Because, come to think of it, having them go to the emergency room is exactly the sort of thing that I would wish on them. I mean, what’s the point of having a worst enemy if you can’t take enjoyment from seeing them suffering and in pain? It would be kind of fun. As it was, it was me suffering and in pain.

I got hurt in a real stupid way. Before they tape my sitcom, I go out and warm up the audience a little bit. Usually I tell jokes, but sometimes I perform feats of strength. You know, like pulling a jeep across the stage using my teeth. Well, this time I had people come up from the audience; I would tense my stomach muscles and they’d punch me as hard as they could. Everything was going fine until I relaxed for just one second. Out of nowhere this huge teamster ran over from the donut table and socked me in the gut. It was either a teamster or Dom DeLuise dressed up like a teamster.

That’s not really what happened. I just don’t care to tell you why I really went to the emergency room. Okay, I had a cyst. See, it’s not quite as interesting as getting socked in the gut by Dom DeLuise. But still, it did hurt like hell.

I was in bed doubled over in pain. It really confused my dogs. That’s not saying much, though. It doesn’t take a lot to confuse my dogs. Ringing the doorbell does the trick.

My manager, a man who told me that it was in my best interest that I don’t know his name, so I refer to him always as “my manager,” drove me to the hospital. I would have taken an ambulance, but when I called on the phone they told me that you had to book one two weeks in advance. It’s just as well. I never know how much to tip the drivers of those things anyway.

We picked up my mother on the way. She wanted to come because that way we could ride in the car pool lane. Also, she works as a speech pathologist at the hospital I was going to. She figured since she was an employee she could make things easier for me. You know, like getting me a good table and giving me the skinny on how things work there. “You see that man in the white coat with a stethoscope? He’s a doctor.” (Thanks, Mom.) “If you were to speak to him you would call him Dr. Jones and not Mr. Jones. That is, assuming that his last name is Jones.”

When you’re in terrible pain, you don’t care about the way you look; you’re not embarrassed by your facial contortions and grimaces; you don’t care if you’re wearing plaids with stripes, which, thank God, I wasn’t.

I was doubled over in the car, my face pressed against the window (the passenger window, not the front window), crying out in pain. When we were stopped at red lights, people would look over from the next car. They’d see my manager driving and me sitting next to him crying. You could see on their faces what they were thinking. First they’d think that I was in an abusive relationship and had just been hit. Then they’d slowly recognize me, honk their horns, and give me a big thumbs up. My manager would never hit me, but while I was groggy from the pain he did have me sign something that gives him 50 percent of whatever I make.

They rushed me into the emergency room: doors slamming, voices overlapping, people running—a flurry of activity. But as soon as I got in, I had to sit and wait and wait and wait. It’s not fair. It’s not like the bakery where you take a number and it’s first come first served. Here they have this crazy idea of bringing you in based on how serious they feel your illness or injury is. I knew I was in for a long wait when I saw a guy sitting next to me with his arm falling off and his head in his lap. As it was, he was only there for the happy hour. If you’re admitted between five and six there’s a buffet table with cocktail franks and nachos.

The first thing I had to do, besides proving that I had insurance, was tell them what my symptoms were. Unfortunately, they recognized me as a comic, so they thought I was trying to be funny, that I was trying out a new part of my act.

I said, “I have this sharp intense pain in my lower abdomen. I started feeling it about two hours ago.…”

And the admitting nurse would interrupt me, barely able to control her giggling, “Yeah, yeah.… Then what happened? Wait! Mary, Stan, come over here, she’s really funny. Start from the beginning.”

“I was hurting so much I couldn’t move,” I continued.

The admitting nurse started laughing hysterically. “Oh yes. That’s great, it’s hilarious. Oooooo, I’ve got an idea. Tell the rest of it like you’re on the phone with God. That would make it really funny.”

So after I made it past the admitting nurse, they had me sit on these extremely uncomfortable plastic chairs (they were rejected by Greyhound bus stations for being too painful) in the waiting area again until they could find someone to help me. Everybody else there was watching TV. They finally wheeled me in to see a doctor because my crying and screaming in pain was ruining people’s TV-viewing experience. “Keep it down, we’re trying to watch Jerry Springer!”