THE CEO OF THE SOFA
ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE
Modern Manners
The Bachelor Home Companion
Republican Party Reptile
Holidays in Hell
Parliament of Whores
Give War a Chance
All the Trouble in the World
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
The American Spectator’s Enemies List
Eat the Rich
P. J. O’ROURKE
THE CEO OF THE SOFA
GROVE PRESS
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2001 by P. J. O’Rourke
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Rourke, P. J.
The CEO of the sofa / by P. J. O’Rourke.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-55584-709-8
1. American wit and humor. I. Title.
PN6165 .076 2001
818'.5402—dc2l 2001035534
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
For Tina, Elizabeth, and Olivia
THE CEO OF THE SOFA
One year in the life of a man who said, “Mind if I put my feet up? I think I will take this lying down.”
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SEPTEMBER 2000
CHAPTER I
Oliver Wendell Holmes has been agreeing with the CEO’s opinions for nearly one hundred and fifty years. The CEO’s wife does so less frequently. The CEO speaks on the subject of mobile phones in the manner of a 1959 curmudgeon inveighing against transistor radios. Imagine if cheap devices to broadcast noise for idiots had allowed idiots to broadcast noise in return. The UN is visited—a nice enough place until it was discovered by foreigners.
OCTOBER 2000
CHAPTER II
The CEO considers stock market investments and decides that risk may be involved. His wife suggests getting a job but wonders if anything is available in the field of monkey business. The CEO considers employment and decides that work may be involved. He conceives a brilliant idea for making his fortune by thinking like a toddler but cannot find a play group with a wet bar.
NOVEMBER 2000
CHAPTER III
The candidates for the 2000 presidential election are given a thorough examination although the mainstream media are allowed to do the part involving a check for prostate enlargement. The mainstream media encounter themselves up there. Hillary Clinton is praised for her abilities as a GOP fund-raiser. The Political Nut, who often shows up in the CEO’s household during the cocktail hour, thinks eBay could make political corruption more market-oriented.
DECEMBER 2000
CHAPTER IV
The CEO argues that Las Vegas is superior to Venice as a vacation destination—having found himself in better shape after being pulled over in traffic by the Nevada Highway Patrol than he was after being pulled out of a canal by the Italian carabinieri. Christmas gifts are chosen. The CEO carefully inspects the catalog from Blunderwear—lingerie that would be a mistake for anyone other than the catalog models. Hillary Clinton is embraced again—not, thank goodness, in her lingerie. The CEO attempts to bring modern ideas of caring and compassion to great works of literature but discovers that banning the death penalty ruins many masterpieces. At the end of A Tale of Two Cities, Sidney Carton has to explain to his parole officer that he’s become a better person.
JANUARY 2001
CHAPTER V
Decadence is pondered and found to be a rotten old idea. The CEO begins an essay on how to get properly inebriated but realizes he has important research to do. He embarks, with his friend Chris Buckley, on a blind (drunk) wine tasting, the results of which have to be carried home flat on their backs in an SUV. The Political Nut beats a dead horse but Bill Clinton keeps whinnying. The impeachment is fondly remembered, and plans are made for a Bill Clinton/Ken Starr reunion tour. The CEO meditates upon hypocrisy and decides that you can’t fake it.
FEBRUARY 2001
CHAPTER VI
The CEO is perplexed by the quantitative nature of modern celebrity and wonders how many times Thomas De Quincey would have to be arrested for opium eating to become as famous as Robert Downey, Jr. The CEO is—thanks to the miracle of modern car alarms—able to teach his teenage godson how to parallel park by sonar. The CEO lectures his young assistant on the virtues of the automobile: Consider having a hot date and needing to borrow your father’s feet.
MARCH 2001
CHAPTER VII
The CEO intends to write his memoirs but forgets. He helps with his godson’s homework instead, asking, “What’s all this argle-bargle about the loss of certainty in modern mathematics? I was never able to get anything to add up the same way twice.” The CEO explains the concept of “spring break” to his godson who hears the lyrics of “Where the Boys Are” with disbelief and disputes the idea that Connie Francis and George Hamilton were ever teenagers.
APRIL 2001
CHAPTER VIII
The Democrats next door are vanquished by the CEO’s logic and are forced to resort to low political tactics such as not letting the CEO borrow their string trimmer. As an Oprah guest, Hitler is suggested: a larger-than-life personality who wrote a popular book about his struggle with personal issues. The CEO argues against legalizing drugs, now that the statute of limitation has expired on his behavior in the 1960s. Then the CEO argues in favor of legalizing drugs, if the federal government promises not to tell his wife.
MAY 2001
CHAPTER IX
A new baby-sitter arrives on the scene causing romantic disturbance—for those in love with Keynesian economic assumptions. The CEO reveals his secret for avoiding stardom as a television commentator. The CEO holds forth on the proponents of Earth Day and declares them “Dirt of the Earth.” Counsel is consulted and a brief is filed on missile defense. The CEO prefers a plea of guilty rather than nolo contendere. The CEO’s baby-sitter and young assistant are chastised for swiping tunes with MP3 technology—especially since none of the tunes swiped is “Volare” or “Moon River.” San Francisco passes a law forbidding discrimination against the fat, and the CEO is outraged that the lazy aren’t included.
JUNE 2001
CHAPTER X
A blessed event occurs consisting of the arrival, in plain brown wrapper, of cigars from Cuba. The CEO’s wife has a baby, too. The CEO’s godson finds there are difficulties in dating a young lady who can do risk-analysis computations. Breast feeding is an excellent method of getting a big baby to sleep, but the CEO is up in the middle of the night anyway. The second anniversary of the air war in Kosovo is celebrated with suitable pomp. The CEO declares the e-mail fad has run its course and buys stock in the Mimeograph corporation. Wives are praised for not killing their husbands, particularly the husband the CEO’s wife is married to.
JULY 2001
CHAPTER XI
India is traversed and the wild Indians are…well, let’s just say Dancing with Wolves got it all wrong. The CEO proposes that an inexpensive second honeymoon could be had right in the living room if a second bottle of scotch can be procured. The CEO’s wife goes in search
of the keys to the gun cabinet.
AUGUST 2001
CHAPTER XII
The CEO’s godson’s sister experiences rather more enlightenment than can stand the light of day. The Political Nut counters with a more sensitive and less judgmental upgrade of the Ten Commandments. Good feelings prevail. The Political Nut decides to apologize for all the horrible things he’s said about Democrats—especially the true things. The baby-sitter tutors the CEO’s godson in the higher mathematics of:
2 Sweet
2 Be
4 Got
10
The CEO’s young assistant gets a real job. Hunter S. Thompson is shown, through rigorous textual analysis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to be a heck of a nice guy. The CEO’s wife gets the CEO to shut up. A happy ending is had by all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Poking around in a used-book store a couple of years ago, I came across a beautiful 1875 edition of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes. I bought it for $1.50. Holmes was once a literary Pathera leo of far-heard roar. The Autocrat, first published in 1858, was, for half a century, one of the best-loved and most-reprinted American books. As late as the nutty, modernist 1930s Virginia Woolf was comparing The Autocrat to “champagne after breakfast cups of weak tea.” (A phrase that may explain a lot about Virginia Woolf’s mood disorders and literary style, but never mind.)
I hadn’t read The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table since college. And back then I had read around in it. I’d never read it through. This time I did. The book is a collection of columns from The Atlantic Monthly magazine. The conceit is that Holmes lives in a boardinghouse and holds forth to his fellow boarders over the morning meal, which must have lasted rather longer than today’s Starbucks-and-a-power-bar-grabbed-on-the-go. The volume’s essays, poems, and speculations on widely various topics are presented as the autocrat’s monologues with occasional interruptions by such characters as a comely widow, a wisecracking clerk, a dense landlady, and two O.W.H. alter egos, the Professor and the Poet.
Holmes pulled this off with so much wit and charm that there was only one way I could pay his idea the compliment it deserved. I swiped it. And herewith is a collection of my own columns, just not as good and mostly from magazines less august than The Atlantic Monthly. Holmes himself said, “A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.” And he probably uttered that thought again when he handed his book publisher a wad of old Atlantic clippings.
I stole the form. I should have stolen the content. As little-known as Oliver Wendell Holmes is today, I could have gotten away with it. The man does not deserve such neglect. Alone among the New England Transcendentalist posse, he merits reading by an adult. Holmes had a broader, better, and more commonsensical intellect than Emerson or Thoreau. He had the humor that Emerson usually, and Thoreau profoundly, lacked. He was far less boring than Melville and wasn’t a head case like Whitman. And, most amazingly for a nineteenth-century American intellectual, Holmes was (to speak a thought Holmes wouldn’t have uttered once, let alone a hundred times) not full of shit.
The characters appearing in this book are fictional except, of course, for those who aren’t, one of whom is not me. I’m completely made up. Muffin and Poppet, however, exist in an even more relentlessly adorable incarnation than what is seen here. Likewise, my wife, Tina. I do have a godson Nick. He’s older and possessed of more gravitas than the Nick in these pages. And he doesn’t have a crazy older sister Ophelia. He has a normal—although not so normal as to be weird—younger brother, Tom. The baby-sitter, her mother, and the Democrats next door are all imaginary. Although, since we live part of the year in Washington, D.C., there are Democrats next door, but we’re on good terms—even though both of them are lawyers working for the National Association to Ban Almost Anything (NABAA). Hi, neighbors! And be assured that we have trigger locks on the assault weapons so you can let your nanny bring the kids over for a play date without worrying.
Max Pappas, my young assistant, is also real, which is a good thing since this book really would not be finished or really even started without Max’s skills at research, organization, word processing, and diplomatically coaxing the author to put the cork back in breakfast and get to work. As for the Political Nut who shows up at cocktail hour, he is much too real. (And so, God help us, is the book Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing.)
Bits and chunks and indeed whole globs of the CEO’s monologues have previously appeared in: Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Forbes FYI, Forbes ASAP, The Weekly Standard, The New York Times Book Review, The Spectator, The American Spectator, The American Enterprise, The Paris Review, Automobile, Car and Driver, TV Guide, and even the ancient National Lampoon. As the careful reader of the acknowledgments page—if there is such a person—can tell, I am nothing if not a devotee of recycling.
My thanks to these publications for their permission (I assume some more responsible-type person than myself has requested it. Max, where are you?) to reprint this material. Other soliloquies are drawn from a (surely mis-assigned) introduction to a Men’s Journal book on sport, fitness, and pleasure travel; a letter to Elaine Kaufman on the occasion of her restaurant’s twentieth year in business; a monograph about theft of intellectual property (I’m an expert) written for the American Association of Publishers, and a preface to a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which Hunter rejected saying that, while it was certainly a delightful commentary and he thoroughly enjoyed reading it, everything I said about his book was flat damn wrong. (This is why literary criticism tends to concentrate on writers who are either dead or don’t have the critic’s phone number.)
I owe a debt of gratitude to Oliver Wendell Holmes, but he’s not the only one. There’s Jann Wenner, proprietor of Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, who has kept me in daily bread for half a generation even though, for all I knew, Tupak Shakur was an Iranian artificial beverage sweetener; Bob Love, managing editor of Rolling Stone, who did the editorial lifting and carrying on most of the longer items in this book; Terry McDonell, who as editor of Men’s Journal gave me my best essay assignments and who, even better, is the father of my godson Nick; and David E. Davis, Jr., former editor of Car and Driver and founder of Automobile, who got me started in automotive journalism back when a Hyundai was something you did after too many Budweisers.
Thanks also to Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Andy Ferguson at The Weekly Standard, Jean Jennings at Automobile, Sid Evans and David Willey at Men’s Journal, Kim Goldstein at Rolling Stone, Patrick Cooke and Thomas Jackson at Forbes FYI, Wlady Pleszcynski at The American Spectator Scott Walter at The American Enterprise; to illustrious copy editor Janet Baker, fantastic proofreader Don Kennison, outstanding Grove/ Atlantic managing editor Michael Hornburg, and to all the other editors, associate editors, editorial associates, proofreaders, fact checkers, and factotums who have been so patient with my Hollywood spelling and Haight-Ashbury work habits. And a special double ration of thanks—with extra grog—goes to Christopher Buckley, editor of Forbes FYI (or Business Fun as it’s called herein). In chapter 5, Chris’s part of the dialogue (the funny part) is his own. So are most of the best lines in the rest of the blind (drunk) wine tasting and in the chapter 6 “Who the F—Are They?” section, which was—after a long lunch—Chris’s idea. My wife also writes her own dialogue. This is why, my dear, I sometimes leave the room right in the middle of what you’re saying. I’m not avoiding a discussion, I’m taking notes.
As long as I’m making a general confession to pilferage, let me confess that I took the Polo-Playing Deaths Memorial Quilt from expert equestrian Molly Vogel and US Airways Church of Christ from brilliant photographer James Kegley. Then there are those jokes that come from who-knows-where and turn up in little bassinets on a humorist’s doorstep, so to speak. The humorist is pretty sure he didn’t physically produce these jests, but they’re awfully cute and he’d hate to leave them out in the cold. E.g., “unautho
rized autobiography” is not, I’m almost certain, my progeny. And the quip about Clinton’s popularity ratings getting so high that he started dating again definitely belongs to someone else. Maybe it belongs to Al Franken, who is a tremendous wit even if he is a Democrat. I wrote a snarky review of Al’s very funny memoir of the Franken presidency, Why Not Me? I unfairly twitted Franken with the fact that there was more funny business going on in the Clinton White House than any humorist could invent. Just recompense almost demands that I get caught stealing a joke from Al.
To continue a theme, the cover concept was boosted from a poster by early twentieth-century German architect and graphic artist Ludwig Hohlwein, although in this case it was my wife who had the taste and education to do the shoplifting. The cover was then photographed by James Kegley, a man of genius with portraiture and Job-like patience with other people’s children not to mention their grumpy old dad. The cover was designed by the master of cover design Charles Rue Woods, who came to Washington for the photo shoot and ended up doing a stint as Muffin and Poppet wrangler. Enormous thanks to all of these people and their confreres and co-soeurs whom I’ve failed to mention. And, naturally, a big much obliged to publicity wizard Scott Manning, my lecture agent Don Epstein at GTN in New York, my literary agent Bob Dattila, who unaccountably lives in Montana (No, Bob, I’m the writer. I live in Montana. You’re back on the East Coast with the mortgage and the kids.), and my publisher and editor Morgan Entrekin. P.S., I’d also like to apologize to the four of you, respectively, for pissing off Oprah, saying “shit” to an audience of nuns, betting the book commission on Kibbles ’N Bits at the Preakness, and making my next project a history of Toledo, Ohio.