Meet me in Rehab, OK?
LIKE MANY MEN AT some point, I dream about opening a bar. I plan to call it Rehab. I like the idea that on a Friday night, you could call home and tell your spouse or girlfriend, “Hey, I’m going to Rehab for a while,” then come home two weeks later and she’d be glad to see you, hug you and tell you how proud she is that you admitted you had a problem.
“You showed uncommon maturity,” she’d purr into your shoulder.
“I did?”
“You were there two weeks,” she’d say.
“Rehab takes time,” you’d explain.
When Rehab gets rolling, I’ll open a bar called Work Out. It will cater to married women in need of a little fun (the world is thick with them). On Friday nights, they’ll be able to call home and say, “Sweetie, some of the girls and I are going to Work Out,” and you’ll compliment her for taking care of herself, while she’s really out wolfing down appetizers and ogling shirtless, baby-oiled bartenders at Work Out.
See, I have this gift for business. I am, as my wife Zsa Zsa likes to note, “A man with a million ideas, none of them very good.”
Speaking of Zsa Zsa, she’s up in the local mountains right now with a couple of the kids, wandering from ski slope to ski slope, looking for some place to put down their skis.
“It’s super crowded up here,” reports Zsa Zsa by phone.
“Really?”
“Must be the holiday weekend,” she explains.
I like crowds as much as the next guy, but I’d rather stick hot pokers in my eyes than be stuck in a lift line for an hour on Presidents Day weekend. Since when did honoring presidents turn into Mardi Gras on a mountain? For me, mountains are all about solitude and moonshine. In fact, I may be a midweek skier for the rest of my life, now estimated to be about 10 more months.
Because here’s some of the stuff I’m dealing with:
First, I’ve got Zsa Zsa, my first wife, who is fed up with this plain little life I’ve made for us -- too many kids, too many chores, mind-numbing debt. The other day, she said she thought we needed a new family car.
“Sure,” I said, “a police impound is probably in our budget.”
“Wow, an impound?” one of the kids said excitedly.
“How about an ’87 Lincoln?” I said, and saw my dear Zsa Zsa age about 20 years, becoming her mother right before my eyes.
We are, as I’ve noted, the last middle-class family in Los Angeles, which creates certain tensions, most of them related to money, not values or sex, the two topics that booby-trap so many L.A. households.
Yes, money is our madness. Last year, we thought we’d found a little cushion when I published a new book, an anthem to life here in suburban America.
It sold 12 copies -- six of them to my mother. Four other copies went to various aunts and uncles, who used them for martini coasters, then sold them at yard sales. The two remaining copies went to perfect strangers. (I think I owe you dinner, whoever you are. Call me, OK? We’ll arrange something.)
When the book didn’t take off, I pitched a TV show, then wrote a screenplay, a story involving oversexed penguins -- tapping into two perennial favorites, penguins and porn.
Then I penned a short novel based on the earlier TV idea that didn’t sell. Currently, I am at work on a set of encyclopedias. In a month, I plan to sell them door-to-door. Next up: a contemporary reworking of the Bible -- “The Newest Testament.”
Such is the life of a writer, sending off the most personal thoughts possible to his hard drive, like a drunk bellowing at the moon. I’m at the keyboard at 6 almost every morning, hoping to tap out one idea -- just one -- that will take us up the hill, to the mountain, to the top.
The other day, a friend told me about her twentysomething niece, who jogged six miles in a thong, then spent three hours in the emergency room for severe blistering. I could get a TV pilot out of that. An ingenue, a witty doctor, a thong, a romantic dinner ...
Then on Friday, I was standing in a bar (of all places) when the guy next to me started chewing the top off of a can of Foster’s, just peeled it off with his vampire-like eyeteeth. I don’t know what I can get out of that exactly, other than a short story about a vampire chomping aluminum cans in a Burbank saloon. A writer, probably, doing bar gags for beer money.
Hey, dude, nice trick. Wanna work at Rehab?
Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, and an update on his presidential bid, see myspace.com/chriserskine.
