Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (10 page)

These guys know their dogs; they watch them carefully and talk to them individually. Every dog runs a little differently, has a different personality. For example, on my sled’s team, Sprocket was a good hard worker, a steady puller with a real nice gait; Brian hardly had to tell him anything. But he had to keep talking to Suzy, who was definitely not pulling her share of the load: She was more waddling than trotting. Brian would shout “SUZY!” and she’d start trotting for a while, but as soon as she thought he wasn’t looking she’d go back to waddling. You could just tell that if Suzy worked for a large corporation, she’d spend most of her day making personal phone calls.

But most of the dogs were off to the races. In fact, the hard part is getting them to stop. Brian told us that one of the cardinal
rules of this sport is that you never, ever get off and walk behind the sled.

“They’ll leave you behind,” he said.

We trotted briskly up to the top of the mountain, then Jeremy and Brian turned the sleds around in a maneuver that had all the smooth precision of a prison riot as the two teams of dogs suddenly decided this would be a good time for all eighteen of them to sniff each other’s private regions. But they got straightened out, and we roared back down the hill; even Suzy was in overdrive. The sun was shining, the valley was spread out below us, the wind (not to mention the occasional whiff of dog poop) was whipping past our faces. It was a wonderful moment, and I felt as though I never wanted to get off the sled, even if there had been some way to stop it. I’ll write when we reach Brazil.

W
hen you’re forty-seven years old, you sometimes hear a small voice inside you that says: “Just because you’ve reached middle age, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take on new challenges and seek new adventures. You get only one ride on this crazy carousel we call life, and by golly you should make the most of it!”

This is the voice of Satan.

I know this because recently, on a mountain in Idaho, I listened to this voice, and as a result my body feels as though it has been used as a trampoline by the Budweiser Clydesdales. I am currently on an all-painkiller diet. “I’ll have a black coffee and 250 Advil tablets” is a typical breakfast order for me these days.

This is because I went snowboarding.

For those of you who, for whatever reason, such as a will to live, do not participate in downhill winter sports, I should explain that snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough. These are of course young people, fearless people, people with 100 percent synthetic bodies who can
hurtle down a mountainside at fifty miles per hour and knock down mature trees with their faces and then spring to their feet and go,
“Cool.”

People like my son. He wanted to try snowboarding, and I thought it would be good to learn with him, because we can no longer ski together. We have a fundamental difference in technique: He skis via the Downhill Method, in which you ski down the hill; whereas I ski via the Breath-Catching Method, in which you stand sideways on the hill, looking as athletic as possible without actually moving muscles (this could cause you to start sliding down the hill). If anybody asks if you’re okay, you say, “I’m just catching my breath!” in a tone of voice that suggests that at any moment you’re going to swoop rapidly down the slope; whereas in fact you’re planning to stay right where you are, rigid as a statue, until the spring thaw. At night, when the Downhillers have all gone home, we Breath-Catchers will still be up there, clinging to the mountainside, chewing on our parkas for sustenance.

So I thought I’d take a stab at snowboarding, which is quite different from skiing. In skiing, you wear a total of two skis, or approximately one per foot, so you can sort of maintain your balance by moving your feet, plus you have poles that you can stab people with if they make fun of you at close range. Whereas with snowboarding, all you get is one board, which is shaped like a giant tongue depressor and manufactured by the Institute of Extremely Slippery Things. Both of your feet are strapped firmly to this board, so that if you start to fall, you can’t stick a foot out and catch yourself. You crash to the ground like a tree and lie there while skiers swoop past and deliberately spray snow on you.

Skiers hate snowboarders. It’s a generational thing. Skiers are (and here I am generalizing) middle-aged Republicans wearing designer space suits; snowboarders are defiant young rebels wearing deliberately drab clothing that is baggy enough to contain the snowboarder plus a major appliance. Skiers like to glide down the slopes in a series of graceful arcs; snowboarders like to attack the mountain, slashing, spinning, tumbling, going backward, blasting through snowdrifts, leaping off cliffs, getting their noses pierced in midair, etc. Skiers view snowboarders as a menace; snowboarders view skiers as Elmer Fudd.

I took my snowboarding lesson in a small group led by a friend of mine named Brad Pearson, who also once talked me into jumping from a tall tree while attached only to a thin rope. Brad took us up on a slope that offered ideal snow conditions for the novice who’s going to fall a lot: approximately seven flakes of powder on top of an eighteen-foot-thick base of reinforced concrete. You could not dent this snow with a jackhammer. (I later learned, however, that you
could
dent it with the back of your head.)

We learned snowboarding via a two-step method:

Step One:
Watching Brad do something.

Step Two:
Trying to do it ourselves.

I was pretty good at Step One. The problem with Step Two was that you had to stand up on your snowboard, which turns out to be a violation of at least five important laws of physics. I’d struggle to my feet, and I’d be wavering there and then the Physics Police would drop a huge chunk of gravity on me, and WHAM my body would hit the concrete snow, sometimes bouncing as much as a foot.

“Keep your knees bent!” Brad would yell helpfully Have you noticed that whatever sport you’re trying to learn,
some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? As if THAT would solve anything. I wanted to shout back, “FORGET MY KNEES! DO SOMETHING ABOUT THESE GRAVITY CHUNKS!”

Needless to say my son had no trouble at all. None. In minutes he was cruising happily down the mountain; you could actually
see
his clothing getting baggier. I, on the other hand, spent most of my time lying on my back, groaning, while space-suited Republicans swooped past and sprayed snow on me. If I hadn’t gotten out of there, they’d have completely covered me; I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

So I think, when my body heals, I’ll go back to skiing. Maybe sometime you’ll see me out on the slopes, catching my breath. Please throw me some food.

I
f I had to summarize, in one sentence, the major lesson I have learned in life, that sentence would be: “Sometimes you have to buy a vowel.”

I learned this lesson when I became a contestant on
Wheel of Fortune
, the hugely popular game show in which contestants try to figure out the hidden phrase, aided by the lovely and talented Vanna White, who smiles radiantly while turning over the letters one at a time. (Vanna, a total professional, could smile radiantly while having her spleen removed by weasels.)

The way I got on the show was, a
Wheel
staff person named Gary O’Brien, whose title is Talent Executive, sent me a letter asking me to participate in a special Award Winners’ Week, to be taped in March and broadcast in May.

“Famous actors, actresses, directors, writers, singers, and sports stars will be spinning the famous Wheel for their favorite charities,” Gary wrote.

I said I’d do it, and not just because I like to benefit charity by hanging around with famous actors and actresses. I also happen to be very good at word games, particularly
the part where you cheat. You should see me play Scrabble.

So I figured, how hard could
Wheel of Fortune
be? Whenever I’ve watched the show, the hidden phrase has always seemed pathetically easy to figure out. Some contestant will be staring at the big board, sweating bullets, trying to make sense of some letters and blanks arranged like this:

I’ll look at this for two seconds, then shout at the screen, “It’s OBVIOUS, you moron! HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME!”

I bet you do the same thing. We all do. Each day 24 million people watch
Wheel of Fortune
, and every single one of them always figures out the hidden phrase before the actual contestants do.

But after I agreed to be on the show, I began to have second thoughts. I realized that it’s probably WAY harder to solve the puzzle when you’re under the hot studio lights, in front of cameras and a live studio audience, with Pat Sajak standing right there and Vanna beaming high-intensity smile rays right at you from close range.

So as the date of my taping approached, I worked on my
Wheel
strategy. I started asking everybody I talked to, including Directory Assistance, whether I should buy a vowel. Unfortunately, there was no consensus on this issue. Some people said yes, definitely; some said no, absolutely not, never buy a vowel. The only real expert I consulted was a United Airlines ticket agent named Rico, whom I met at Dulles airport when I was catching a flight to Los Angeles to be on the show. Rico told me that he had actually been a winning contestant on
Wheel of Fortune
.

“Should I buy a vowel?” I asked him.

“Not unless you really need it,” replied Rico helpfully.

In Los Angeles I was taken to the
Wheel
TV studio by an Iranian limousine driver named Max, who was deeply impressed by my enormous fame and celebrity.

“So, Mr. David,” he said. “You are a singer?”

“No,” I said. “Should I buy a vowel?”

“Yes,” said Max. “You have to.”

At the studio I met some of the other famous celebrities participating in Award Winners’ Week, including rap artist and actor “L.L. Cool J.” (That is not his real name, of course. His real name is “L.L. Cool M.”) I also met the two celebrities I would be competing against, actresses Rita Moreno and Justine Miceli.

Gary, the Talent Executive, gave us a briefing on how to play the game; this briefing consisted almost entirely of detailed instructions on how to spin the wheel.

“Make sure your hand is dry,” Gary said. “Reach as far to the right as you can, get a good grip on the upper part of the spoke, and then pull.”

We all practiced spinning the wheel and calling out consonants,
although some celebrities, unfamiliar with the rules, tried to call out vowels.

“You have to
buy
a vowel,” Gary said, several times. “Once you spin, you’re committed to calling a consonant.”

When all of us celebrities were fairly confident that we didn’t have a clue what was going on, the live studio audience was brought in, and we began taping. In the interest of drama I am not going to reveal the outcome of my game, which has not aired yet, except to say, in all modesty, that I did get to the Bonus Round, where I had ten seconds to try to solve the following phrase:

You have no idea how truly stupid you can feel until you try to guess a hidden phrase in front of a live studio audience—every single member of which, you are convinced, knows the answer. For ten seemingly endless seconds, sounding like a person with some kind of language-related brain malfunction, you blurt out random incorrect answers (“HOME TO LOVE!” “ROME TO LIVE!” “NOME NO LIKE!” “DOME SO …”)