I Hate Everyone...Starting With Me (2 page)

As the title clearly states, I hate everyone and, like any self-respecting hater, I hate myself the most. All
great haters do. I’ve been told that to this day, Charles Manson can’t pass a mirror without going, “Bleghh.” I know just how he feels.

And let me tell you why. It all goes back to my childhood. I was not a pretty girl. You know how some people comment on a person’s appearance by saying things like, “She looks like her father”? Well, I actually
looked
like my father: mustache, man boobs, big thighs, hunched shoulders, sideburns.… All I needed was an enlarged prostate and you wouldn’t have been able to tell us apart.

Right from the get-go, my parents didn’t like me. When I was born, my mother asked, “Will she live?” The doctor said, “Only if you take your foot off her throat.” I was the only baby in the maternity ward who had to take a bus home. My earliest childhood memory was watching my parents loosen the wheels on my stroller. For school lunch they’d make me peanut butter and strychnine sandwiches. Instead of a library card I had to carry a DNR warning. In seventh grade, I had a bad hair day and my mother went to court to fight for my right to die. My parents used to give me advice like “Take candy from strangers” and “Ask the guy in the raincoat if he owns a van.”

When I was a
tween
—which is just a teen who hasn’t given a blow job yet—I was fat. Fat, fat, fat. In spite of dieting, gagging, purging and drinking ipecac for lunch, I was a chubby girl. But rather than get angry or depressed I lived in a constant state of denial. I thought that being the only girl on the sumo team simply
meant I was ahead of my time. In the hallway in our house my parents had this huge mirror and every time I walked by I thought,
Where’d those fuckers get the money to buy a Rubens? And they won’t get me a new Barbie? Selfish pricks…

Fat wasn’t a condition, it was a way of life. In Girl Scouts, they had to let out my tent.
I
made Amos famous. I considered M&M’s one of the food groups. On my first day of summer camp I said, “Where should I put my trunk?” The counselor said, “Wrap it around your tusks.” A rapist grabbed me, took a look and said, “Maybe we could just be friends.” My boyfriend needed a Sherpa to climb on top of me. I was the only person who ran with the bulls carrying a bottle of A.1. Steak Sauce. My husband used to
dress
me with his eyes. I sat shiva when my neighborhood Arby’s closed.

And you wonder why I’m bitter?

Things are no better now that I’m in my decrepitude. Everything is falling apart…except for my face, which I’ve had lifted so many times I wear my earrings on my kneecaps. But my body has had it. I have chicken skin. I get “Wish You Were Here” cards from Perdue. Everything is sagging, and
I hate me!
My boobs are so low I had to put curb feelers on my nipples.

Getting old sucks! Everything is confusing. Sometimes late at night I wake up with this hot, moist feeling and I’m not sure if I’m having an orgasm or a stroke.

Look, I could go on and on and on telling you why I hate myself, but it’s so self-centered… and I’m not
like that. I’m a giver. So I’d rather branch out and start giving it to everyone else.

Forget the list at the top of the chapter. You want to know who and what I really hate!?! Then keep going…

I hate children.
Okay, it’s not actually the
children
so much as it is the people who surround them. For example…

I hate people who think I’m interested in their children.
I am
not
interested in their children. I’m barely interested in Melissa and What’s-his-name, even though they say she’s my child and he’s my grandson.

Last week I was sitting on a plane and the guy next to me pulls out his wallet and says, “Wanna see pictures of my children?” What I wanted to say was, “Of course I do. When I woke up this morning I said to myself, ‘Joan, what would make your day?… Hitting
the lottery?… Winning an Oscar?… The unexpected death of any slightly younger comedian? No! Sitting on a cross-country flight looking at photos of some fat tire salesman’s children? Why, yes,
that
would make my day. In fact, it would make my life worth living!’”

But I smiled and said to him, “Sure! I’d love to see pictures of your children! And you know what? I’d like to show
you
pictures of my colonoscopy. You have kids and I have polyps—let’s swap!” Sometimes I’m too fucking nice.

I can’t stand women who think that giving birth is some unique achievement that no one else has ever accomplished;
that if it were not for their dropping Billy and Jimmy and Susie out of their wombs, the entire world would be an empty, desolate place—like a library in Alabama or a dentist’s office in England.

Giving birth is not a new phenomenon; it’s been happening since the beginning of time. Female dinosaurs were giving birth to baby dinosaurs long before female humans began giving birth to children. Except maybe in Wasilla, Alaska, where apparently they roamed the earth at the same time.

I hate people who make videos of their children’s births.
I’m aware of the fact that reality TV has blurred the lines between public and private behaviors, but there are some things that people really
should keep private. For example, Woody Allen shouldn’t order Chinese at a PTA luncheon. And nobody should have the cameras rolling when delivering a baby. But if you absolutely have to show people your childbirth movie, then at least have the decency to run the film backward and make the kid and all the gunk it comes out with disappear.

I’ve seen this sort of footage and it’s not pretty. There are people crying and blood and guts all over the place. It’s not a happy occasion, it’s a crime scene; they ought to put yellow tape around the delivery room. This is not a home video; it’s a new series on CBS:
CSI: Vulva
.

Unless you’re giving birth to the Christ child or a Minotaur, I can wait until the kid’s cleaned up to say hello. If I hear, “Do you want to see the head and shoulders?” you’d better be talking about shampoo.

I hate ugly children.
When I see an ugly baby I feel enormous pressure to lie and be nice to the parents. I’ll look at little Quasimodo in the bassinet and say things like, “His face has such character” or “He’s going to be quite the lady-killer someday” or “She already has such personality.” But if the kid is really, really, really ugly, I’ll think
What the hell?
and just give up and say, “Where’d you buy the crib?”

And since we’re all adults here, let’s be brutally honest—most babies are not
actually
attractive. In fact, they’re weird and freakish looking. A large percentage
of them are squinty-eyed and bald and their faces are all mushed together, kind of like Renée Zellweger pushed up against a glass window.

I live next door to a single mother and she’s got the ugliest baby in the entire world. This kid could frighten Wes Craven. This baby is so hairy it looks like Sasquatch in a bib. Thank God for small things—at least the hair on his head matches his tail. No one knows who the father is, but I think she must’ve screwed everyone in the Village of the Damned. When the kid was born and she brought him home (probably from the zoo) I didn’t know what to say. All I came up with was, “At least he’s not a twin.”

Ugly adults should not be allowed to breed. Genetics is nothing new. If you’re homely and your partner is homely, on a scale of one to Golda Meir, chances are the baby will be homely, too. When was the last time you saw homely parents with drop-dead gorgeous children? If I want to stare at someone with mismatched features I’ll buy a Picasso.

I hate the women who run “the stroller patrol.”
Last week I was walking down Fifty-seventh Street, shopping for knockoffs and making snap judgments about the people walking by, when marching toward me was a tidal wave of women pushing strollers. They were marching eight across, like a German panzer division or Saddam Hussein’s Red Army, barreling down the sidewalk, forcing everyone else to walk in the street. I said to one of them, politely, “Hey, you’re taking
up the entire sidewalk, bitch!” She scowled and yelled, “I have children!” I yelled back at her, “Well, next time give your husband a blow job and you won’t! Why should I have to walk into oncoming traffic because you don’t want to give a little head?”

I hate people who exploit missing children.
Nothing ruins a lovely evening like a cheesy news anchor rattling on about some poor kid who’s wandered off or gone missing or been eaten by a dingo.

Every time I see one of those stories on HLN (which I think of as the Human Loss Network) about some new child that’s gone missing I get so upset I have to grab the remote and change the channel. (Okay,
I
don’t actually grab the remote. I have one of my assistants do it. I don’t lift.)

It’s bad enough a child is missing, but do I need to see some talking heads trying to leave
their
imprints on a terrible tragedy?

I saw one pretty little news anchor named Tiffany or Heather or Poppy open a story by saying, “It’s every parent’s nightmare to have their children go missing.” Really? How the fuck would you know; you’re twelve! What I really wanted to say to the little bitch was, “In hindsight, I’ll bet Lyle and Erik Menendez’s parents wouldn’t have felt that way.”

As you can tell, I’m the kind of person who’s always looking for a silver lining and because of that I wonder if children gone missing is part of a larger plan; without them we never would have heard of the fabulous
Nancy Grace. Would Big N be a TV star, a household name and the symbol of abducted toddlers everywhere, or would she be making six dollars an hour as a cashier in a Piggly Wiggly or as a hostess in a roadside Stuckey’s?

I love the end of the
Nancy Grace
show when Nancy puts up an on-screen profile of a real missing child. It’s such a genuinely good thing to try and help find those missing kids, or at least help their families find some closure. But I hate it when the “missing child” she’s profiling is thirty-five. It’s one thing to profile little Amber, who was three years old when last seen at a campground near a lake; it’s another to be profiling Mrs. Annette Roberts, who was forty-one and last seen driving away from her divorce lawyer’s office in a red Camaro with her boyfriend, Vinnie.

I hate people who have thousands of children.
They say a child is the greatest gift a woman can receive. I don’t know who “they” are, but “they” have clearly never been to Bergdorf’s.

There is no reason for any family to have more than one or two children (unless you’re the Osmonds or the Jacksons, and the little shits can support you from the get-go). If you have more than a couple of kids, you’re not parents—you’re hoarders. And hoarding is a disorder, not a gift.

Two kids? Fine. Built-in babysitter; one can keep an eye on the other so Mommy and Daddy can get liquored up in the den. Three? Okay, but only if the little
one is subservient and willing to do scut work around the house like a long-suffering Polynesian slave. But four kids? Only if the eldest one is in a position to post bail, in case the parents snap because the other three drove them crazy.

Everyone thinks Angelina Jolie was the first celebrity baby hoarder, but she wasn’t. Before Angelina there was Mia Farrow. Mia had an entire farm full of children. I think she got them at Costco. “I’ll take two white ones, three brown ones, and a couple of those cute little yellow things.”

When they ran out of regular kids she started adopting the wildly disfigured: “Give me the black torso, the Chinese girl with five legs, and how about that giant head sitting on the shelf?”