What a good life
I’ve made here
But what I really miss tonight
Is a smoke and a beer
—“The Good Life” (Thornton/Andrew)
I THINK THE WHOLE SMOKING THING IS A WITCH HUNT. YOU CAN’T smoke in West Hollywood anymore. You cannot smoke in West Hollywood, California, in the United States of America. You can’t even smoke in certain places in Dublin and Paris—cities where all they do is smoke. I’ve been to some of those places, and goddamn, smoking is like their life, and all of a sudden it’s banned. Well, I never smoked a cigarette and had a head-on collision. But I’ve seen motherfuckers drink half a bottle of bourbon and do just that, and there’s a liquor store on every corner.
What happened in L.A. was they decided that smoking is the number-one killer of everybody. “Well, look at the sign over there in Westwood,” they point out. “It says, SMOKING DEATHS THIS MINUTE: 852 BILLION.” How the fuck do they know that? What I know is, I know a guy who smokes from the time he gets up in the morning to the time he goes to sleep. He also drinks tequila all day long. I saw him not too long ago, and God bless him, he’s eighty-some-odd years old and still going. I’m not saying, “Hey, kids, run out and smoke,” that’s not my point. I’m saying, if I want to smoke outside in a town that I live in, in a town I pay taxes in, I should be able to. If you want to talk about instant death, just mix people and cars with liquor stores and payday. When those guys came up with this smoking ban, did they really think it through all the way? Let’s say that during their committee meeting they voted to ban smoking in West Hollywood. To celebrate their new law, they decide to go out and have a cocktail party that night. Now, let’s say two hundred of them are at the party. One hundred ninety-eight of those motherfuckers are so drunk they can hardly get out the door after the cocktail party. And then, still hypothetically speaking, let’s say eight are in an accident that night and four people die in those eight accidents. Not one person at the cocktail party smoked a cigarette, but four people died. They’re not banning liquor, though, are they? I don’t think so.
Our band has played a few charity gigs for the American Whatever Association, and we were onstage playing for a room of like five or six hundred shit-faced doctors. They’re drunk off their asses, but for some reason, smoking is bad. Those doctors tell us, “You’ve got to quit smoking,” and they quote that sign in Westwood—852 billion or something died from cigarette smoke. They say, “It’s true. We’ve proven it.”
Have they proven it? I bet if somebody dug into the AMA hard enough, they would also prove that there’s been a cure for cancer and AIDS for a long fucking time, and they won’t tell anybody because if they did, their business is over. Can you imagine if there was a car made that never fucking needed a repair and it never broke down? You got one car the rest of your fucking life and it can fly and do your dishes and shit like that? Never has a problem? Can you imagine the automotive industry? Do you think they’d want you to know about that car? You think the oil companies want everybody to drive a fucking electric car? Of course not. And doctors, you go to an orthopedic surgeon and tell him your shoulder hurts, and he’ll cut your fucking arm off. But you go to the holistic guy, and he’ll say, “Why don’t you chew on this sassafras root twice a day.” Then, on the other hand, you go to one of those cats and they’ll muscle-test you by giving you a bottle with nothing in it and a label on it that says BLACK PEPPER. They get you to hold it in your hand, and they test to see if they can put your arm down when you’re trying to hold your arm stiff. If your arm goes down, it means you’re allergic to black pepper or something. Who the fuck knows if that means anything? I know one thing: if you do get your arm cut off at a fucking sawmill, don’t go to a holistic doctor, go right to the horrible pricks who want to cut you to pieces, because they’re the only ones who know how to sew it back on.
It’s real confusing about these doctors, but I’d suggest to everyone, if you get the chance, go see both of them. Go to those fucking underhanded guys, the so-called real doctors, if you’ve got an amputated limb or a stomach with a hole in it. If it’s just some weird shit and you’re not quite sure what it is—you’re tired, no energy—go see the alternative doctors because they’re not going to just dope you up right away. The drug companies, they really want you to take their medication, and then this is what happens: you take a pill for your arthritis, well, that drives your fucking blood pressure up or down. Now you got to take a fucking blood pressure pill. The blood pressure pill hurts your stomach worse than the arthritis one does, and now you got to take a stomach pill, and so on. They get you hooked on this shit. They’ve got you on twenty pills all of a sudden, and now, in order to stay alive, you have to keep taking these motherfuckers forever, and every one of them makes you sick so you got to take something to prevent that sickness that that fucking pill did to you. These pharmaceutical companies want to keep you on dope so bad—you go to a doctor, and they tell you to take seven of these today and twelve of those tomorrow and fifteen of these on Saturday. Then later you see the commercial for this shit, and it says, as I heard on The Simpsons one time, “Causes loss of scalp and penis.” The commercial will say shit like “increases risk of stroke, heart attack, depression, suicide.” You ask them why their drug does all this bad shit, and they’ll tell you, “Well, we have to put that on there.” Why do you have to put that on there? Because it’s happened to people, right? “Well, yeah, but their percentages are very low.” Okay, you know what? I don’t give a fuck if it’s a half a percent. If you happen to be the motherfucker who’s in the half percent, that sucks for you. In World War II, the fliers would go out on a bombing run over France or Germany, and they used to say, “You’re only on a milk run”—well, it’s only a milk run if you make it back. It’s not a milk run if your airplane gets shot out of the fucking sky. That’s why percentages don’t mean shit to me. I’ve said it before, it’s like the weather. There’s a 25 percent chance of rain. A 30 percent chance of rain. The fuck does that mean? There’s a fifty-fifty chance of everything, all the fucking time. That’s the way it is. It’s either going to happen or it’s not. That’s fifty-fifty, so I don’t get it—motherfuckers and their percentages. Doctors. Lawyers. What assholes.
So what is it about cigarettes?
“Well, if I have a drink, it doesn’t get in the air and bother you.”
I’m sitting next to a four-hundred-pound motherfucker who is eating a baked potato the size of a football, with fucking sour cream and butter on it, and a side of steak with more fat on it than you can shake a stick at, and he’s got his diet soda there—like that’s going to do him any good—and my cigarette smoke is going to kill him? When your cholesterol is 319 or some shit like that? Ban butter, you know? It’s ridiculous. There’s shit out there that will kill you the fuck dead. And maybe smoking will kill me, but it’s my business if I smoke a cigarette in my fucking alley. I’m sorry. That’s my air too. If you’re going to say that’s not my air, then I’m going to say it ain’t that city bus’s air either. Let everybody get themselves a wagon and go live in Pennsylvania Dutch Country with the Amish, and then maybe they’ll all be real happy because I guarantee you there’s shit killing you besides me and my little American Spirit cigarette.
I went to this asshole the other day (pardon the pun, and you’ll see why in a minute). I decided to get all my medical tests out of the way in January. Sometimes I have to get physicals several times a year because each time you do a movie you have to get a physical for the insurance companies that provide coverage for the production. Every year I try to go do my thing, get my own yearly physical, so this year I went and had the treadmill test with the cardiologist (checked out okay there), went to the dermatologist (everything’s fine), went and had my regular physical (no problems). I’ve had my problems in the past, as I’ve talked about with the starving-to-death thing, but other than that I’ve not had much. I’ve got a little bit of arthritis in my neck, my spine, and my knees because of sports and because of a horse accident years ago that nearly killed me. I had a kidney stone once, which really sucked. Otherwise, I seem to be okay.
I’ve never had a colonoscopy, and once you get to be fifty you’re supposed to go get one, so I asked my doctor if there was a gastroenterologist he could recommend me to see. He said he knew a doctor he thought was good, so I went to him. That doctor—with him it was like everything is about “You have to get a colonoscopy.” That’s the only fucking test you got? He proceeds to scare the shit out of me talking about “We put a tube down your throat and up your ass—we put you out, you don’t even know what happened.” I was trying to tell him about this problem I’ve been having with my stomach ever since we were in Atlanta shooting Jayne Mansfield’s Car. I was just dehydrated all the time, and I think I fucked myself up a little bit.
So there I am, sitting in the exam room, and I’m trying to tell this doctor what’s going on with me.
“The problem I’ve been having is—”
“I’ll ask the questions.” And he’s over there typing while I’m talking. Sometimes doctors want to act like they’re fucking God or something. Well, fuck you and your diploma on the wall. What do you mean you’ll ask the questions? If you’ll let me tell you for thirty fucking seconds about what’s going on, it may give you a clue instead of you asking me all the shit that you know about and seeing what little fucking category it fits in and what test that costs a billion dollars I can take that won’t be covered by insurance. He was a prick. A real asshole. (See? Does the uncalculated pun make sense now?) I was in there for about five minutes before I couldn’t stand it. I said, “I had a full body scan recently and an MRI on my head, and they said I’m good.”
“You can’t tell everything from the scan, or the this or the that …”
Well, they can tell if you have a fucking tumor the size of a goddamn grapefruit, which I don’t have. I went to a fucking blood specialist and got my blood drawn by a guy I know who makes his living as an expert—this is a high-dollar cat who looks for cancer in your blood, and he said I was fine. All you want to do, because this is your area of expertise, is shove a fucking camera up my ass and that solves every problem in the world. That’s the ultimate fucking test you can take. Okay, fine. I get it. I’m going to get a colonoscopy, goddammit. I’ve already said, yeah, I was going to do that, but I’m certainly not letting this cold fucking asshole do it. The upshot here is, at the end of the thing he said, “Why would you subject yourself to radiation having a full body scan and yet you eat vegan?”
I said, “Because I fucking want to. That’s why. I’d like to find out all at once if I’ve got any bad shit. When somebody’s sick in the hospital, you motherfuckers give them that test. You give it to them all the time. As long as you’re being paid by the motherfucker, then you’ll give them all the tests you want. But all of a sudden this test is no good. So in other words, you say that your profession is so underhanded that you have a test that’s dangerous to you and it doesn’t work. And yet you work in this fucking profession.”
I don’t trust these cocksuckers. My brother is an RN, and he teaches nursing up in San Jose and San Francisco. He’s a really good dude, and he knows that profession inside and out. There are plenty of good people in the medical field, and there are a lot of pricks too. It makes you wonder, Well, who do I listen to? You go to the holistic or homeopathic doctor, and they tell you, “Just eat this pill, it’s made out of licorice and it will cure you.” I’ve personally found that both of them, the so-called real doctors and the holistic/homeopathic doctors, have a lot of value. If you get your fucking arm cut off, go to the emergency room and let one of those hacks sew your fucking arm back on. But if you’re just feeling kind of nervous and you don’t understand why you got the shits three times a week and the other four days a week you don’t, try a homeopathic or holistic doctor. Get some acupuncture. Because sometimes that shit will fix you up without having these motherfuckers wanting to saw you in half to look at your liver.
My problem is that I’m too nervous and I have physical symptoms from being too goddamned worried and nervous all the time. If you can find something, like drink a couple of beers a day—some people like to smoke a joint, and maybe they’re better off—maybe that’s better than medicine. I’m not condoning drinking or dope, I’m just saying. Maybe you just need to do things that will calm you the fuck down, then maybe we wouldn’t need doctors so much. That’s what I’m working on. It was one of my New Year’s resolutions this year. Try to calm the fuck down and not worry so much. Doctors don’t want you to calm down.
I know a lot of this is very rambling and angry, but I think it’s important. I’m just saying. You’re reading words, but there’s blood in my eyes.