OKAY, I FINALLY ACHIEVED TOUR BLINDNESS: I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING, AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM. I DON’T KNOW WHAT CITY I AM IN, WHAT HOTEL I AM IN, WHAT FLOOR I AM ON, OR WHAT THE ROOM NUMBER IS. THIS IS IT. PURE Zen. Or Alzheimer’s. They woke me up and dragged me out of the bus at about four in the morning and tumbled me into this mystery hotel in this nameless city. I’m not sure why. Usually they let us sleep if we want to, and last night I really wanted to. I think the bus has to go in for a fix, something about the pee tank being full.
So I wake up in a strange hotel room in a strange city. I do notice that the hour has changed and we are now on Central Time. I know we played Kalamazoo last night and it was a very good show, so we are somewhere within five or six hours of Michigan. And I know we are west of Chicago. I know this is Saturday and a day off, because I was hoping to watch soccer; but there aren’t any Premier League games on, dammit. So today I am in, well, where exactly? I can see a big river. There’s a watercolor gray wash sky and triangulated box girder bridges spanning a very wide, fast-flowing river, but I haven’t a clue as to what it is, and I’m starving. I look at the room service menu. A clue. They are serving the Idaho breakfast, so I’m guessing we’re in…Idaho? Also from the menu I deduce it’s a Radisson Hotel (very good, Sherlock!), and when my poached eggs arrive, the newspaper they send up is the Quad City Times, but I’ve never heard of Quad City. Aha, the telephone gives an address in Davenport. I search the Web; there is nothing listed for Davenport but endless cut-price hotels and escort services.
Always take a cab if you want to find out what’s going on. As I climb in the cabdriver says to me, “You look just like you!” He fills me in on the gaps in my knowledge. Turns out Davenport is the largest of the four cities that make up the Quad Cities. We’re on the border with Illinois. That’s it just across the river, which turns out to be none other than the Mississippi! He shows me downtown, the police station, the courthouse, the crack house, and the whorehouse. Actually there are two whorehouses. I’m guessing that’s why they call it I’d a Ho.18
This is where the streetwalkers line up,” says the cabbie, but jeez they’d freeze the tools of their trade on a day like this. It’s a cold gray day with very little light.
“The local crack house,” he says, “conveniently located directly across from the courthouse.” No one seems to be about. He completes his tour by telling me there are three local sights he always suggests first-timers to Davenport visit: the pizza parlor, the ice-cream parlor, and the John Deere factory.
“So much to do,” I say. He doesn’t notice my irony. He is keen for me to visit the tractor factory. Dear God, I feel I am in an episode of A Prairie Home Companion. He proudly points out the armaments factory “where they made the bunker blaster that killed Saddam’s kids.” I promise to visit.
There is an extraordinary statement from von Rumsfeld in the papers today.
“We are going to outlast them!” he claims proudly. It probably sounds better in the original German.19 Of course you’re not going to outlast them, they live there.
Killing for God
Is thrilling for you
Each drop of blood you spill
Is by the good Lord’s will
If they don’t believe
Then why should you grieve?
Just take their breath away
And give them death today
God wants those bastards dead
So shoot them through the head
It’s atheist blood you shed
When you’re killing for God.
After the show last week a young couple told me that their favorite thing to do is watch my episode of Laverne and Shirley. They watch it at least once a week. Now that is weird. In case you didn’t know, I married Laverne. I was a guest star on the series back when because Penny Marshall was a friend and invited me. In the story line I was part of a British rock group called London with Peter Noone (Herman’s Hermits) and Stephen Bishop. Laverne and Shirley, big fans of this group, meet us at a party. We all get inadvertently stoned on hash brownies, so stoned in fact that we go off to Las Vegas to get married. I married Laverne. NBC were so unhappy with the suggestion that hash might be enjoyable that they banned this episode on reruns for many years!
I’m not a big fan of sitcom, and I’m not very good at it. I played a ghost in the eighties in a very short-lived series, Nearly Departed, for NBC. They wouldn’t go with my suggestion to have me haunt an African-American family. I loved the idea of a black family having to live with a poncy white English professor.
“No way, too dangerous,” they said.
The executives wished to avoid conflict. But comedy is conflict.
Avery wealthy executive at a movie studio once told me to make all my characters nicer.
“But that’s not funny,” I protested. “Comedy is about dysfunction. If you have a perfectly nice family behaving perfectly well toward their perfectly pleasant relatives, where’s the comedy?”
For a year I was on Brooke Shields’s NBC show Suddenly Susan. They enticed me with the notion that as her boss, my character would do nothing but abuse her. He would tell her she was a hopeless writer and quite useless. I thought it was hilarious. Brooke and I read together for the executives and it seemed flat-out funny. Two episodes in, as a result of a random “focus group” (five housewives and a questionnaire) I was informed that the “audience” didn’t like Susan’s being insulted (even though she gave back as good as she got) and so, sadly, my character spent the rest of the year being nice to her and telling her what a great writer she was. I gnashed my teeth and took the quite enormous amounts of money they paid me not to be funny. It was out of this experience that I decided to return to my roots and perform live again, in 2000, singing healthily refreshing filthy songs onstage to big laughs. I think it was a form of penance. Now I’m in Quad City. Just how much penance can you do?