Finally, however, It’s All Good got his first big break into slang when he played a brief and nearly unnoticeable part on an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Star Will Smith decided to use him at the last minute, replacing No Way, José, who had just checked into drug rehab for the third time. Within weeks, It’s All Good was appearing on every episode and soon became a regular, which led to guest spots on Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, and Dharma & Greg.
“All of a sudden, It’s All Good was everywhere,” remembered his wife, You Go Girl!, who met her future husband on the set of Ricki Lake. “It was overnight, it seemed. People couldn’t get enough. He was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.”
His star was riding high. Jay Leno, Letterman, and Conan were calling. There was talk of an HBO special, a record deal, and an opening slot on the Britney Spears tour, and rumors were flying like gunfire about a possible Budweiser campaign. Things were looking great. And then disaster struck.
Negotiations with the beer giant crumbled when It’s All Good insisted that his younger brother, It’s All Aight (commonly known simply as Aight), be included in the campaign as well. Worried that “Aight’s” troubled past and affiliation with Sean Combs (then known as P. Diddy) would negatively affect the campaign, Budweiser pulled its offer when It’s All Good refused to budge. Word got around that he was difficult to deal with, and the phone stopped ringing.
“He got a fat head,” Dy-NO-mite! recalled. “But then another brother team, Wasssup? and What Are YOU Doing?, was hired for the campaign. That was the nail in the coffin, man. Punks!”
It’s All Good dropped out of sight, and it seemed that his once brilliant career was over. Younger, more splashier slang expressions such as No You Di’in’t and All Ate Up started to fill his spots, and most people, with the exception of teenage, truck-driving males in Yuma, Arizona, and Mudlick, Idaho, began to forget their former favorite expression.
Despite the production of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and Post-it notes with his image, It’s All Good was on his way to has-been status. But one day last fall, it looked as if his luck was about to change. Dy-NO-Mite! received a call from Buick, which was looking to create a “trendy and dope” ad campaign. And they wanted It’s All Good for their slogan.
“I found him in a seedy slang bar, sitting in between Keep On Truckin’ and Where’s the Beef?,” the agent recalled. “It was pitiful. He had begun selling some of his letters, even vowels, to pay for the booze. I almost didn’t recognize him. ‘’s All Goo, ’s All Goo,’ is what he said to me. He was a broken phrase, just broken.”
His agent cleaned and sobered him up and took him to the shoot. According to people on the set, the talent of It’s All Good had not faded, and he produced what some say was his best work to date. It was a glorious comeback. Tragically, however, it wasn’t to last.
When the first Buick commercial aired on Saturday, It’s All Good uttered his last breath and quietly faded away to the other side.
“He’ll live in our hearts forever,” You Go Girl! said as she wiped away a tear, “or at least on that Buick commercial until next year’s models come out. I heard No Way, José got that part.”
Sickening
When I found my seat on the airplane, the woman sitting beside me looked completely normal. She wasn’t missing teeth, she didn’t have any pronounced facial scabs, her hair appeared freshly washed, and I sincerely doubted that the octogenarian sitting next to her was a deputy extraditing a passenger. So, when she open-mouthed coughed as she was flipping through the airline magazine, I politely cleared my throat. When the second open-mouthed cough shot out of her like a bullet approximately a minute later, I cleared my throat again and gave her a warning look, which involves furrowing my brow, turning the corners of my mouth downward, and deeply expressing with my eyes “If you want to keep coughing like that, we’ll give you a sedative, put you in a crate, and stick you in the cargo hold with the rest of the livestock.” After approximately sixty seconds had passed and she erupted her foul lung discharge with no preventative barrier yet again, all bets were off and I reached into my purse and pulled out my bird-flu mask.
Curiously enough, the next cough that came from her body was, as expected, blocked by her manicured hand, which had finally roused enough initiative to reach up and cover her rictus of a mouth. Apparently, nothing says “Pardon me, but I’ve seen better manners on African dictators who use skulls for candlesticks. Kindly resist the compelling urge to spread your foul disease via your cannon of a mouth by simply covering it” like an N95-rated bird-flu mask that barely leaves anything but my eyes visible and lets everyone on the plane know that I drew the short straw and got the seat assignment next to Typhoid Mary.
To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t always the kind of person who keeps a bird-flu mask in her purse just in case she finds herself in an episode of “When Open-Mouthed Coughers Attack.” Nope. I used to be the kind of person who would ignore the vestiges of illness and was even known on occasion to extend an acknowledgment of blessing should someone sneeze in my company. But no more. Once you have seen the white light of disease, there is no going back, there is no ignoring the things you have been enlightened about. And for me, it happened on a sunny Saturday morning when I was flipping channels while enjoying a hot cup of tea, unaware that what I was about to see would bring to my life change in such epic proportions that I would begin to carry nothing short of a hazmat suit with me at all times. On that Saturday morning, I began watching a Discovery Health Channel show about how people get sick.
And there, on the television, was Holly, a girl who was standing in an elevator with a man who was getting ready to destroy her life.
He coughed on her.
Poor Holly. There she was, completely unaware while millions of minute mucus particles, each carrying the flu virus, exploded into the air like rain. It was their germ mission to land on her and try to find their way into an opening of her body, much like a date I once had attempted with me. Then one successful particle invaded her through her nose.
It was all over.
I knew how Holly felt, because I had been sick three times that fall, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. In fact, I suspected that my most recent illness was due to a lady who had gotten into an elevator I was in and coughed all over me like she was plucked out of the Middle Ages before she got off on the next floor. Now that I had seen Holly’s show and knew how germs worked, I was going to protect myself.
My husband, however, saw danger.
“What is all this?” he asked when he came home as I was unloading the groceries I had just bought. “Antibacterial hand wash, antibacterial tissues…do I sense an obsession?”
“No,” I said simply. “It’s not an obsession. It’s not an interest. It is my new way of life. I am now a germophobe.”
“Why can’t you have another hobby?” my husband pleaded. “Like exercise or dusting? Laundry would be a very good hobby for you. Think of how healthy we could be if we actually had clean clothes! Oh God. You watched a Discovery Health Channel show about cold and flu germs, didn’t you?”
“I will just admit to being more aware of the bacterial challenges around me in the everyday world than I was last night when I went to sleep,” I confessed.
“I thought we agreed that you weren’t going to watch ‘Things That Invade Your Body’ shows on Discovery Health Channel anymore after what happened last time,” my husband said with a very stern face.
He, of course, was referring to the parasites and tapeworm documentary we watched together about people who had gone to crazy, unsanitary places in the world and had come back with some new friends in tow, such as jungle butt worms. My husband was particularly horrified by the story of one gentleman who had recently returned from Vietnam with a new pal he named George, which was a worm that lived—kindly steady yourself—under his skin and would travel all over his host’s body, until one night while he was on a business trip and staying in a hotel, the host spotted George wiggl
ing across his upper thigh, had enough, grabbed the closest sharp object, which I believe was a ballpoint pen, and dug that little asshole out. While my husband writhed in disgust, I promptly added Vietnam to my list of Places Too Gross, Too Lacking in Private Potties, or with Entirely Too Vague of a Cuisine to Visit (any country that considers the heads of animals as dinner gets on the list).
That, however, was nothing, I felt, compared with the story of a massage therapist who had just returned from some other parasite-ridden landscape and was giving a massage to a client when she suddenly felt something “cold” in her panties. Curious, she excused herself and went to the bathroom, and when she pulled down her pants—pardon me, my gag reflex is threatening to resurface the gyros I just ate for dinner—deep breath. Deep breath. Deeeeeep breath. Kittens are so cute, aren’t they? God, kittens are cute. So cute! And puppies. I love puppies. They should have a cute-off, kittens and puppies. I really don’t know who would win, to be honest, puppy breath or a kitten chasing a fly? Um, okay, back down the hatch. I’m just going to have to write this very fast—when she pulled down her pants, a worm flipped out and landed on the floor. A worm. A WORM. I, myself, taking a cue from the Unabomber, would have tried to hang myself with those panties AT ONCE and WITHOUT DELAY, because I’m sorry, having knowledge like that is no way to live. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, for a reason, and that reason is that New York has a very good water-filtration system, which enables its population to rest easy knowing that worms won’t launch out of their panties when they go to the bathroom.
Now, it is true that I had a dream in which I was in Africa, sitting outside a tent, and it was very hot when I looked down and I saw something pink and folded just sort of heaped there, and I thought to myself, Is that…? Nah. Couldn’t be. Could it? Oh my God, it is. It is. Goddamn it, my vagina just fell out! And I didn’t know what to do, because how do you stick something like that back in? A vagina isn’t a Lego, it doesn’t just snap back into place with a playful push and a click! But it was just lying there in the dirt like a little pink wind sock. I knew it would be bad to have a dirty vagina, so I picked it up off the ground with a stick, then approached a man in a white coat, presumably a doctor, to see if he could put it back in. But when I tapped him on the shoulder, he, unfortunately, turned out to be Noah Wyle, and then I was just too embarrassed to ask him to help me return my genitals to their rightful place, so I put my pink wind sock in my purse with the intent of finding someone significantly less attractive to give me a hand with it later. It’s true, I had that dream, and honestly, it is a struggle for me to look in the mirror every day knowing that in some imaginary realm, my cookie fell into the dirt like a pork chop breaded in filth and hay particles. I have to deal with that. But apparently, this massage therapist was not raised a Catholic like myself but most likely in a much looser, “Sunday-only” religion like Protestantism, because she pulled her pants up, picked that worm off the ground, stuck it in her pocket to show it to her doctor later, and went right back to work without being bound by even the thinnest thread of shame.
Now, I only watched that show, and every time I felt the smallest little tingle, tickle, or hair moving on any part of my body, I would have to stop from tossing myself into a bleach vat or in front of a flamethrower, convinced that I had a colony of Georges tearing across my scalp in a worm race or that I had a tapeworm the size of a reticulated python trying to sneak out my back door. For weeks after, my diet streamlined down to foodstuffs that could not be found in nature, such as Oreos, Diet Coke, Funyuns, and anything else that supported a parasite-hostile environment and consisted solely of chemicals and cancer-causing agents. In the bathroom, I could barely touch the waistband of my underwear without having a full-blown “flippy worm” panic attack. And then, when I was finally beginning to forget about the butt worms and Georges of this world, my husband and I were at dinner at one of our favorite restaurants—a wonderful ramen place around the corner—when I took too big a mouthful, attempted to bite off the noodles I couldn’t accommodate, and while almost all of them splashed back into the bowl, one curly, white stray ramen noodle fell onto the table, at which my husband pointed his fork and then said simply, “Did you wanna put that in your pocket?”
So it is easy to understand how all of the sympathies I once had for that man have evaporated, and how utterly simple it was for me to completely ignore him when he vocalized his concern for my newfound fear of germs and viruses. If he couldn’t take the lurking danger seriously, then I had to focus on myself. I was concentrating on germs. From now on, I decided, shaking hands with people was out of the question. Instead, I would just say “Nice to meet you” and then wave at them energetically or blow them a kiss. There was no way I would touch a public door. The surface of a doorknob holds a lottery of sickness, not to mention bits from people’s bodies. I used a paper-towel shield or pushed the door open with my rear end, since that area is usually protected by a very firm and impenetrable butt shaper, and germs seeking refuge down there would simply bounce off of the industrial-quality Lycra.
Touch a handrail on an escalator? You’ve got to be kidding! Those things are nothing more than conveyor belts of pestilence and filth, serving up a buffet of maladies and horror that would rival any petri dish in the labs at the Centers for Disease Control. Grab on to one of those things and you’re toying with unleashing the Apocalypse. Then we have shopping carts equipped with handles acting as flu and cold lightning rods, and don’t forget about airplanes, which recirculate air, creating a fan that spews out a wind tunnel of various afflictions. And if I ever heard someone cough, I’d sprint the other way like an Olympic athlete on some very good drug that her coach told her was flaxseed oil.
But it was on a plane ride to Eugene, Oregon, after spending Christmas in Phoenix, that I really became a true and devoted convert to germophobia. Now that I live in a small town, the planes I take reflect that small-town John Cougar Mellencamp size and are basically Fisher-Price toys with car engines controlled from the ground by a baggage handler with a joystick.
We all crammed on, all of us Fat Christmas People on a tiny plane, and that was when the symphony began. The coughing. The sneezing. The sniffling. It didn’t help matters that we were leaving Arizona, the state that was currently having the worst flu outbreak in the country—so bad it was a top story on CNN’s headline news. Now, I know people have to travel home whether they’re sick or well, and I can’t argue with that. But what I do take issue with is when the breathing cadaver in the seat behind me coughs and coughs and coughs hard enough that I feel his lung g-force hit my head and it makes MY HAIR MOVE. That cough had the wind-tunnel action of a Dyson and was easily strong enough to push-start us down the runway. And it was grotesquely apparent from the unmuffled sounds that the coughs had been released with reckless abandon—there had clearly been no obstacle to their discharge into the world. The man behind me was an open-mouthed cougher. No hand action to shield the rest of us from the germ cloud rushing from deep within his lungs—not even a Kleenex to provide a thin, flimsy barrier.
To make matters worse, he wasn’t the only one; the plane was full of them. And I don’t get this; I mean, really, where are these people when Dr. Gupta says it again and again on every news show, “To help prevent the spread of disease, wash your hands, cover your mouth, and stop blowing your nose on your Tommy Bahama shirt”? Do they not get the Discovery Health Channel? Did they not know of Holly’s plight? Who are these open-mouthed coughers? In which dark corner of society do they live? These people, I assume, must be these the same ones who leave pee on toilet seats and let gum simply fall out of their mouths onto the sidewalk. Being sick is not like e-mail—you don’t need to spread it around to a hundred people to have the gods shine on you or get better. Keep your death rattle at home, I say, because I don’t want it. In fact, I think making people stay at home when they’re contagious should become a national policy. Sickness has the same properties as people who look at porn on the Internet. Keep it whe
re it belongs, in private. No one wants to know your secret, and no one wants a visual.
For some people, however, that might not even be enough. For repeat offenders, for all of those selfish people who continually cough and sneeze on others when they’re sick, I believe we need a quarantine unit set up. If you simply can’t manage to raise your hand six inches to cover your gaping cavern of illness, go ahead and skip that step. But the next time you commit that offense it will be in a whole roomful of renegade nose-blowers and other open-mouthed coughers just like you who can infect each other repeatedly instead of contaminating the healthy population. If you sneeze once or twice, well, that happens, but more than that, it’s the sickroom for you. And when you’re quarantined, you’re quarantined. There will be a special sick restroom, complete with receptacles in which to dispose of your snot rags properly, like a bonfire, and yes, there will be excessive pee on the seats. And, so the sick can eat, there will be a sick vending machine, outfitted with already contaminated buttons.
And it was during that flight from Phoenix back to Eugene that I made myself a promise: I would never, ever, let myself be that exposed in a such a turbulent atmosphere again without recourse, showered continuously with microscopic particles of infection just searching for a new orifice to invade and set up shop.
I spent the rest of that flight with my napkin acting as my sad interpretation of a SARS mask, covering my nostrils as best it could from the germ shower being shot at the back of my head, and when I got home, I did the only thing I could do: I went online and bought two cartons of bird-flu masks. And then, several days later, I came down with a cold that quickly turned into pneumonia and made my lungs crackle like a bag of Tostitos being danced on every time I took a breath.