Diary of a Mad Diva (6 page)

Dear Diary:

Had lunch with my friend Brian, who’s in AA, and his sponsor and his sponsor’s sponsor. Ordering food took longer than the Hundred Years’ War. “Is there alcohol in tiramisu?” “Does the wine burn out of the mussels?” “I could be wrong, but is there rum in the rum cake?” I’m hoping they get anorexia, so they’ll starve to death and I won’t have to put up with that bullshit again. And every five minutes, in the middle of a conversation, one of them would pipe in with, “Let go and let God.” However, this was never said when I was reaching for the check. I wanted to get in a car and drive right into them yelling, “Sorry! I let go and let God take the wheel.”

I just want to say here that I’m thrilled with my friends’ sobriety, but I’m sick and tired of hearing the competition of their rock-bottom moments. “I was drunk and raped by a gang of twelve. It was a horrible moment. Four of them were Japanese and poorly endowed.” “That’s nothing; I once ran nude through the White House; even Clinton booed.” “That’s nothing; I was so drunk I believed Richard Simmons was straight.”

Sometimes I hear about celebrities who’ve gotten sober and I wonder what they say at their meetings. “Hi, my name is Phil Spector and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve kidnapped my wife, shot a woman to death and, even worse, let my hair go to hell, but I didn’t drink today, so I’m a winner and I feel pretty good about myself.” “Thank you for sharing, Phillip.” Clap. Clap. Clap.

MARCH 17

Dear Diary:

My friend Margie has convinced me to go to a silent retreat in the Catskill Mountains for three days. It costs almost $2,200. I said, “Margie, why not just save the money and stay home and shut the fuck up?”

MARCH 21

Dear Diary:

Thank God the retreat is over. I haven’t heard that kind of silence since my wedding night when I asked Edgar, “Was it good for you?”

MARCH 23

Dear Diary:

I love Award Season. I watch all of them: the Oscars, the Grammys, the Golden Globes, etc. But I love two awards shows more than all the others: the Gay Awards Show, which is fabulous, and the statue is an exact copy of the Oscar except it’s on its knees; and the Porn Awards, which is also exactly like the Oscars except the red carpet is shaved.

MARCH 25

Dear Diary:

It’s Passover and I’m at Melissa’s house in L.A. for the holiday. (I’m also here for
Fashion Police
,
Joan & Melissa:
Joan Knows Best?
and
In Bed with Joan
.) As much as I love Judaism, I
really
love tax write-offs. So I invited twenty-six people over,
all of whom can help me career-wise.
To me, Passover is just Thanksgiving with Jews: lots of food, lots of laughs and lots of people sending food back to the kitchen because it’s too tough and you know your aunt Miriam has sensitive gums.

Very mixed guest list—Jews, Christians, atheists and homos. Should be fun. They start arriving in fifteen minutes, which gives me just enough time to do a final inspection and make sure the cater waiters have covered up their cold sores and open lesions so they don’t upset my guests and ruin the Four Questions by adding a fifth question: “Why is there pus in my soup?”

MARCH 26

Dear Diary:

Passover dinner couldn’t have gone better. It was the gayest Seder I’ve ever had. Two of the four questions involved Lady Gaga. When the giant lamb bone came out, half of the men at the table squealed with delight, and the other half said, “I think I know him.” There’s always one person at every Seder who’s an uber-Jew and knows absolutely everything about Jewish history and culture and tradition. And we had ours. For the sake of kindness (and because her father’s a lawyer), I’ll call her Nafka. Nafka knew it all: she knew the prayers in English, Hebrew, Yiddish and Farsi; she knew the answers to all four of the questions; she even knew why Moses schlepped the Ten Commandments down the mountain instead of taking the elevator (Big M was mildly claustrophobic and had once gotten stuck for six hours in an elevator with Lot and his wife, who was not only hateful, but lived on a salt-free diet of cabbage and beans).

MARCH 27

Dear Diary:

I haven’t gone to the bathroom in almost twenty-four hours. Matzoh is so binding. Now I know why it took us forty years to cross the desert.

Constipation is a terrible thing. Why do you think so many of our top serial killers (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, to name a few) come from Wisconsin and its neighboring states? Cheese, that’s why! Everyone knows this about cheese. I’ve always been surprised that those maniacs’ defense lawyers didn’t use this as an argument. I can just see Johnnie Cochran now: “If you eat the cheese, that revolver you’ll squeeze.”

I was once clogged up for a week after reaching the bottom of the Olive Garden’s bottomless pasta bowl, and I was in such a foul mood that I contemplated taking out an entire Boy Scout troop right as they were practicing their knot-tying skills on their giggling, gay scout master.

MARCH 28

Dear Diary:

Had to run to the store to pick up milk and tampons. I buy tampons so that the teenaged box-boy who works in the store will continue to look at me with both admiration and lust.

And when the fuck did milk become $8,000 a gallon? Is there a shortage? Are the cows on strike or on a work slowdown? Did Elsie and Flossie unionize, protesting work conditions? They spend all day standing in a pasture, staring at nothing and eating—just like Kevin James—so what’s the problem? If I didn’t care about Cooper’s teeth and bones I’d cut out milk altogether and let him eat his cereal with gin or Jack, just like Grandma does.

MARCH 29

Dear Diary:

Did press all day promoting
Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?
and
In Bed with Joan
. I did as many TV and radio shows in the New York tristate area as my schedule and medications would allow. All went great, although I must say I hate going on shows where the interviewer just reads the questions, regardless of what’s being said. Me: “I just killed my mother.” Interviewer: “I understand you like shoes?” I hate that. At least link it up with, “Did you get your mother’s?”

MARCH 30

Dear Diary:

I spent all day in bed watching the Discovery ID channel. All murders, all the time; it was like the good old days on A&E when it was Hitler 24/7. (No matter how lonely or how depressed I was, I knew I could always turn to that station and get a little touch of Adolf. I was in heaven.) Nothing makes me happier than watching the police find a family of five tied up together in their rec room, bound, gagged and stiffer than Martha Stewart. My favorite episode was a cliffhanger: all the victims were so fucking ugly that
everybody
in town had a motive to kill them. (Which begs the question: Who really was the victim here? The dead person or the townspeople who had to look at him every day?)

I got hooked on true crime when I first read Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, the story about two drifters in Kansas who slaughtered the Clutter family for no apparent reason. I take that back; the Clutters were simple, Christian, farm-folk—the drifters had a reason. I always hoped that Capote would have combined his two greatest works,
In Cold Blood
and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, into one sequel, and the drifters wouldn’t have just killed the Clutter family in that farmhouse cellar,
*
but they also knocked off Holly Golightly and her fucking cat, too. Now
that
book would’ve spent a lot of time on the bestseller list.

MARCH 31

Dear Diary:

Today is Easter. Jesus came back from the dead. I don’t understand this. We’re both Jews but he comes back from the dead and I can’t get up before noon.

According to my accountant, I spend too much. According to me, I need a new accountant.

APRIL 1

Dear Diary:

I love everybody. I think Melanie Griffith is smart smart smart smart. And John Travolta is straight as an arrow. And Jackie Chan is hung hung hung. April Fool’s!

Today is April Fool’s Day and I hate it because the people who play practical jokes on other people are usually assholes who think they’re funny and they’re not. (And to me, not being funny is a bigger sin than patricide, matricide and sometimes infanticide—but only if the baby was nice-looking.)

April Fool’s Day is not a real national holiday. If it was a real holiday, Saks would be selling bedding half off, and I’d be booked at some casino or country club at a wildly inflated price.

There are a lot of different theories as to how April Fool’s Day came to pass. According to Wikipedia, author/hand model Geoffrey Chaucer—who wrote
The Canterbury Tales
,
the feel-good book of the fourteenth century—coined the phrase April Fools to refer to the engagement of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia, either because they got the date of their wedding wrong or
because Anne was a taciturn, butch lesbian and Richard had no idea; he thought she was just a little frigid and a lot handy.

And as for “jokes” such as undoing the tip of a pen so it leaks or hiding cicada bugs on someone’s food tray, they really aren’t funny practical jokes; they’re stupid. If you want to do something funny, think big. One of my favorite pranks is to run into a kindergarten class and yell out, “Little Billy? Your mommy loves your sister more than you.” Wait five seconds, then run back in and say, “Just kidding! April Fool’s! She actually loves your sister
and
your brother more than you!” Poor little Billy.

APRIL 3

Dear Diary:

I hate Wikipedia. There’s no guarantee that what they say is true because
anyone
can go in and change the profile information. Today, I could change the part of Mother Teresa’s profile that refers to her as “a humanitarian who gives assistance and aid to women and children” to “an old lezzie who dressed poorly and liked touching strangers’ feet.”

APRIL 5

Dear Diary:

Went out to dinner last night with one of my closest friends, whose name escapes me for the moment. Anyway, she’s a diabetic and is constantly monitoring her sugar level. It was very exhausting. How many times a day can I say, “No, you’re not pale and you don’t look any worse than normal, but would you like to stop and get a Kit Kat?” She also has no boundaries, so right in the middle of dinner at Joe Allen, just as the waiter was bringing us our lump crabs, she hikes up her blouse, moves her boobs and gives herself a shot of insulin. The place went silent; it was quieter than Auschwitz the morning after shower day. She looked around at the appalled customers and said, “What? I have diabetes!” The guy at the next table said, “So what? I have colitis. You want me take a shit in the coatroom?”

APRIL 7

Dear Diary:

I hate—not dislike; not am mildly annoyed by—really hate that irritating, pasty-faced girl who plays Flo in the Progressive insurance commercials. Those commercials run during every show on every network at all hours of the day. They run so often I’m starting to miss that sexually frustrated couple that sits in separate bathtubs on the side of a cliff waiting for his hard-on medicine to kick in. Or that old couple that rides up and down the stairs endlessly on that easy-lift chair and never once seems to enjoy it and go “Wheee!”

I hate Flo. I hope she gets run over by a car . . . driven by an uninsured driver. And while she lies there waiting for an ambulance (that, god willing, is stuck in traffic), I hope the Aflac duck walks by and poops on her, just as the Geico gecko comes over and starts nibbling on her exposed, pulsating flesh.

APRIL 10

Dear Diary:

Reading the
New York Times
obituaries and I am so sad. For the fifth day in a row, not one celebrity who I’m jealous of has died. I get so annoyed reading about the untimely passing of a crossing guard, or the death of a pieceworker after a lengthy illness. These “losses” do nothing to start my day. Unless the crossing guard was run over by a school bus, or the lengthy illness was leprosy and the pieceworker died, so fittingly, piece by piece, all those obits do is waste my time and bore me half to death.