I Hate Everyone...Starting With Me (14 page)

I have a love-hate relationship with a lot of cities and countries. As a rule, I love places that pay me to be there and I hate places that don’t.

By the way, when I speak of cities I mean real cities. I don’t go to “cities” where being mayor is a part-time job. Or where people brag that it’s safe to leave their doors open at night. These people obviously don’t have good jewelry. I don’t do towns, villages, burgs, hamlets or grottos. I’m a comedian, not an elf. If Hillary Clinton wants to do a village that’s her business—I just hope for her sake she finds a village where mannish women in pastel pantsuits are all the rage. The only village I love is Greenwich Village in New York City, and that’s only because (a) it’s not actually a village, it’s
a neighborhood, and (b) it’s where I started my comedy career playing little clubs like Upstairs at the Downstairs and The Duplex. If it weren’t for those little clubs in Greenwich Village I’d have had to pursue one of my other passions in life and instead of being the beloved star of stage and screen you are reading now, I would have become either a dental hygienist (I’ve always loved the thrill of a putting my hands in a strange man’s mouth) or a fetish model, posing nude for magazines like
Pavement Princess
,
Gutter Gals
, and
What Do You Expect for a Quarter?

I’ve gone around the world a number of times (often in the backseat of a Buick) and, having been everywhere from Bayonne to Berlin, I can say with certainty that Dorothy said it best when she said, “There’s no place like home.” (Meanwhile Auntie Em is thinking “Listen, bitch, we agreed to let you move back in with us after you graduated from college and couldn’t find a job, but that was only supposed to be temporary. Fact is, your uncle Henry and I were going to turn your old bedroom into a sex dungeon and then maybe do a little traveling. After all, it’s not like you’re our real daughter, right?”)

I live in New York City (except for when I live in Los Angeles with Melissa, which I’m willing to do anytime I can get a network to pay me to do it). But before I tell you all of the places that I hate, let me tell you that I love New York. (And by “New York” I mean Manhattan; anything west of Amsterdam Avenue I consider to be part of “the heartland.”) Here are a few reasons why New York is the greatest city in the world:

In New York, if someone stabs you in the head, chances are they have a very good reason to do so, i.e., you jumped in front of them on a lease application for a rent-stabilized apartment.

New York is the fashion center of America. Even the homeless have style—and its not just knowing how to make a shopping cart into an accessory. Little do people realize the homeless have a great eye for layering. Usually I am not a fan of layering but the homeless can pull it off—a wool scarf over a bathrobe on top of a flak jacket over a pair of cargo pants with three pairs of socks but no shoes? It’s a look. Again, not for me, but I’m not an autumn.

You don’t have to visit a nursing home to smell urine. Just walk down any street and the bouquet is in the air, like night-blooming jasmine with a very high acid content.

I hate cities where people are nice. In New York you walk down the street and you hear, “Fuck you, die!!” And I love to scream right back, “Fuck you, Sister Mary Louise!”

David Letterman is in New York. Even better—Jay Leno isn’t.

We embrace diversity: Our past five mayors were Jewish, black, tiny, gay, or had speech defects. Fabulous!

Finally, if someone drops dead of a heart attack in Saks Fifth Avenue, the salespeople are trained to move the body out of the way so that
it doesn’t impact the customer flow or purchase points.

I hate Houston.
It’s crawling with bugs. Oh wait, that’s Whitney Houston; I’m sorry, my bad. (Can I just mention that Whitney looked fabulous at the Grammys? She was in mahogany from head to toe.)

I hate Arizona.
It always eight hundred degrees outside and everybody’s always saying, “But it’s a dry heat!” So’s the inside of my microwave. You wanna grab your bronzer and spend a couple of hours tanning? Arizona is filled with old people, asthmatics and prisoners, as well as old asthmatic prisoners. By the way, do you know what they call people in Arizona who eat dinner after 4:00
P.M.
? Night owls. Arizona is the prison capital of America. Eighty percent of the population is incarcerated and the other twenty percent are on parole. In Scottsdale a prison cell is considered an efficiency apartment. The upside to Arizona is that your tax dollars go further because you don’t have to buy the convicts blankets and coats or warm food.

I hate the great northwest
because it’s gray and rainy and depressing. The only good thing is everybody’s so depressed there are thousands of suicides and that really opens up the housing market and makes it easy to buy a cheap condominium. The high suicide rates also make it easy to find parking, especially
during the holidays. In Seattle there is a six-month waiting list if you want to jump off a tall building. It rains so much in Seattle the leading cause of death is mildew, followed by reading
The Bell Jar
.