Based on a True Story Read online

  —NORM MACDONALD

  9. Well, the results are in, and once again Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is the richest man in America. Gates says he is grateful for his huge financial success, but it still makes him sad when he looks around and sees other people with any money whatsoever.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  10. This week in the O. J. Simpson trial, Johnnie Cochran delivered a spellbinding final summation. In a brilliant move, Cochran put on the knit cap prosecutors say Simpson wore the night of the double murders—although O.J. may have hurt his case when he suddenly blurted out, “Hey, hey, careful with that. That’s my lucky stabbing hat.”

  —NORM MACDONALD

  11. In music news, number one on the college charts this week was Better than Ezra. And at number two: Ezra.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  12. According to a controversial new biography, Elizabeth Taylor likes her lovemaking loud, rough, and frequent. Coincidentally, that’s also how she likes to eat.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  13. Well, it’s official. Michael Jordan is leaving baseball to return to basketball. It is unclear whether the media will now refer to him by his old basketball nickname, “Air Jordan,” or his more recent baseball nickname, “Señor Crappy.”

  —NORM MACDONALD

  14. In Walnut Creek, California, anyone who turns in his gun can now get free therapy. And anyone who does not turn in his gun can get free anything.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  15. Earlier this week, Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on Larry King Live, among them that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology and announced that Brando is now free to work again.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  16. At Virginia Commonwealth University, a professor is being sued after revelations that he spanked one of his students. It was the student’s parents who became suspicious when they asked, “What kind of marks are you getting?” and she replied, “Big red ones on my ass.”

  —NORM MACDONALD

  17. Yippee!!!!!!!! Jerry Rubin is dead. I’m sorry. That should read, “Yippie Jerry Rubin is dead.” My apologies.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  18. Former first lady Nancy Reagan reports that her husband has been relaxing at their ranch, riding horses and chopping wood. Sadly, eyewitnesses report that he was actually riding wood and chopping horses.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  19. It was revealed this week that mass murderer Richard Speck, while serving a lifetime sentence in prison, was videotaped with hormone-induced breasts, snorting cocaine and having sex with a man. The film was apparently made with prison video equipment and a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  20. Dr. James Watts, a neurosurgeon who performed the first frontal lobotomy, died this week in Washington. If you recall, a lobotomy involves drilling holes in the skull and then inserting and rotating a knife to destroy brain cells. What a genius. He’ll be missed.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  21. Officials in Disney World have ordered their ride the ExtraTERRORestrial to be shut down so they can make it even scarier. When the attraction reopens in two weeks, it will be exactly the same—but missing one bolt.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  22. Last week, on his latest trial for assisted suicide, Dr. Jack Kevorkian startled a Michigan courtroom when he stood up and shouted, “This is a lynching!” Everyone turned to look, and, sure enough, he’d just lynched some old guy.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  23. On Wednesday, World Chess champion Garry Kasparov tied Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that can examine 200 million positions per second, in the fourth game of their six-game series. Earlier in the week, Kasparov admitted he made a “catastrophic blunder” in game two when he failed to force a draw by moving rook to e8, opting instead for a Caro-Kann defense that soon transposed into a Pribyl defense, which, after Deep Blue moved bishop to e7, gave it the advantage with its ninth position. With all due respect to Mr. Kasparov…what the hell were you thinking?

  —NORM MACDONALD

  24. A French man, who calls himself “The Human Snake,” was arrested this week after climbing up the side of a Manhattan high-rise. Yep, he climbed right up the side of a high-rise. Just like a snake!

  —NORM MACDONALD

  25. In North Dakota this week, a hunter narrowly escaped death when a pocketknife in his breast pocket deflected a bullet shot by another hunter. Man, you know we have too many weapons in this country when people are getting shot in the knife.

  —NORM MACDONALD

  31

  THE FAT MAN WITH THE

  ARTIFICIAL HAIR

  Adam Eget slams on the brake and the car screeches to a stop in front of the Ski Inn. The parking lot is empty. At the top of a hill we can see the mansion that is home to the fat man with the artificial hair.

  “Behold the Salton Sea, boys,” the barkeep says, as he wipes a perfectly clean glass behind the bar. “Twenty years ago it seemed like a surefire bet, but look around and know that nothing is certain.”

  We look out the window, out at the uncertainty of it all. The town looks torn to hell, with the young meth heads stumbling around and giggling and scratching at itches that never go away, and the old men, rum-drunk, driving golf carts aimlessly through the rubble. No one goes near the beach. The sand beside the Salton Sea cannot be seen. This is because it is covered a foot deep in the broken skeletons of dead fish. And the stench is everywhere.

  “What happened here, old man?” I ask. “What killed everything?”

  “Salt.”

  “Listen, old man, you’re not making any sense, and you’re making Adam Eget nervous.”

  “I want to go home, Norm. I want to go to the Comedy Store and ask to get my job back.”

  “You see, boys, salt corrodes. It eats everything—steel, rock, the dreams of man. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, boys. Salt can even kill a sea and eat the fish that live there.”

  “But salt is what makes a sea.”

  “Too much salt,” mutters the old man, and walks away. “Too much salt.”

  And so Adam Eget and I walk, ankle-deep in fish skeletons and sludge, up to the giant unfinished house on the hill, the house that contains my last hope in this cold, cold world. As I get close to the entrance I see the biggest red Cadillac I’ve ever seen. It’s a beautiful thing how big it is, and I understand how a real fat guy would want a big car like this. And it’s the brightest red, but even this expensive, beautiful car is not immune to the salt. There is disintegration along the edges, where the salt has eaten away at the steel. I hear a noise and there stands a boy who must be about ten years old, holding a big gun. “Whaddya here for?” the boy asks, and I carefully recite the line Gabe gave me.

  “I am a desperate man, here to ask a favor.”

  The boy leads us through the house and into a large room.

  The room is magnificent: red marble floors, oversize chairs with gold inlay on the mahogany arms, immaculately clean. There are three well-dressed goons, the type who like to punch you in the stomach, and they stand behind us. In front of us is a large table, where the fat man with the artificial hair is eating a meal.

  “Sit down, boys.” He invites us to the table with his meaty paw.

  “We don’t want to disturb your meal.”

  “Would you care to join me? It’s tilapia. I caught it only an hour ago.”

  “But the bartender said that the fish were all dead. He said the salt ate them.”

  “He spoke the truth. The salt ate every type of fish but one.” The fat man with the artificial hair picks up a piece of his fish with a fork. “Only the tilapia survived. It takes much more than salt to kill a creature like the tilapia fish,” and the fat man with the artificial hair takes a salt shaker, twists off its top, and pours half of it in his mouth. I can hear the salt crunching like glass between his teeth. I look around and notice that there aren
’t any drinks on the table.

  “How much you boys need?”

  “He needs nothing, ever,” I say, motioning to Adam Eget. “I need one million dollars, and I only need it for a week. The reason is—”

  “No,” he interrupts, without looking up. “It’s none of my business. Carlos, get the man his million dollars. These are the terms: The first month is free. After that, I charge one percent per week.”

  “Hold on,” I say. “That’s ten thousand a week. That’s pretty thick juice.”

  “Yeah,” says Adam Eget as he stands up. “That’s horseshit. No deal, fat man.”

  One of the goons quickly punches Adam Eget in the stomach and he falls to the floor.

  “Did he just call me fat?” the fat man with the artificial hair asks, and the hurt in his voice surprises me. Adam Eget is doing his best to apologize, but he can’t get a sentence out proper because he’s still recovering from the massive blow. “Sorry if I was out of line…owwww…uggghhh…with that crack about…” That sort of thing. It’d be sad to watch if it wasn’t so funny.

  “So let me understand. You think that ten thousand a week is too much to pay me if you lose the million?”

  “Yes,” Adam Eget gasps from the floor. “I think that is too much.”

  “Let me ask you something, boys. Are you planning to lose this million dollars I am loaning you? Is this what I am hearing from you?”

  “No, sir,” I say. “No, not at all. I have a plan, sir, and it’s not to lose. It’s to win and to pay you back quickly, taking advantage of your generous first-month-free deal.”

  Carlos enters the room with a duffel bag, and I can tell by the way he walks that that duffel bag is heavy. A million dollars heavy.

  “Sign this paper,” says the fat man with the artificial hair. This catches me off guard, and I laugh. Here we are with two goons standing by Adam Eget, another with a red duffel bag full of money, and the fat man with the artificial hair is acting like we’re in a legitimate bank doing legitimate business.

  But I don’t care; I’ll sign anything. My name is as worthless as a bent penny, and if it helps me to scribble it on a piece of paper, no problem. But when I look down at the document on the table, I understand. It’s a life-insurance policy he wants me to sign.

  It will, upon my passing, pay two million dollars to my beneficiary. And across the table from me, smiling like a crocodile with salt-caked teeth and handing me a pen, sits my beneficiary.

  “It came to me in a dream,” he says.

  I smile right back at him and sign the paper.

  A piece of coal will never become a diamond, no matter how long you wait. That’s the truth. But forget the truth. Coal is famous for becoming diamond.

  Mr. Macdonald had a moment in the mid-’90s when he was a diamond, and I watched him on TV and thought he shone brilliantly and had facets. But it was a lie and we were all fooled. Mr. Macdonald was and is a sad, misshapen, crumbling chunk of the blackest coal.

  Before I can walk once again in the sunshine of New York as an important author, before I am seen as the diamond I always have been, I must finish this damnable memoir. I must find Mr. Macdonald’s essence. And to that end I must become him.

  I have begun donning his preposterous wardrobe. Now when I look in the mirror, instead of seeing a fashionable New York gentleman, I see a costumed clown, a slovenly mess, each piece of clothing an advertisement for Macdonald’s past success.

  Twice when I have ventured out in the street with the costume, I have nearly been mistaken for him. I can see how people see me and search their memories for my name but are unable to bring it to their lips. A few times people have thought they went to school with me.

  I have been poring through all the tapes he’s given me, dozens of TV shows and movies I never realized he’d done, and each one is worse than the last. I’m captivated by the boxes of videotapes of Mr. Macdonald doing stand-up, stretching from thirty years ago to the present. The tapes are fascinating only in that they each contain the exact same stand-up material, word for word.

  And finally I’ve been reviewing all the tape recordings of me interviewing him. On them, he often flares up with anger and shouts things like, “I’m giving you gold, Keane, gold, I tell you!” and I think, You have given me straw and a Rumpelstiltskinean task.

  A few weeks ago, Mr. Macdonald called me from Las Vegas and told me a story of meeting Andy Griffith at an airport, and he insisted that the encounter be transcribed “word for word.” I have never done such a thing. To let a celebrity’s words, unvarnished, touch the page goes against every instinct I have as a ghostwriter. So after I hung up I phoned Julie; she’s the boss.

  To my surprise, Julie agreed wholeheartedly with Mr. Macdonald, telling me that what she is looking for is “authenticity.” It must have been my imagination, but when she spoke I swore I could hear the oaf grunting like a swine in the background.

  I do not consider myself a cruel man, but since it is out of my hands, I can’t help but smile, knowing the reader will have to endure a small taste of what I have been force-fed a steady diet of for nearly a year now: a story by Norm Macdonald, word for word.

  32

  WORD FOR WORD

  It’s true what they say. Never meet your heroes. It turns out they’re all a bunch of fucking assholes. They’re probably the reason you turned into such a fucking asshole—because they were your heroes and you spent all your time trying to be like them. Lemme tell you a story from my life so you can understand what I mean.

  It was a day like any other. Except Ben Matlock was standing really close to me. But, besides that, it was a day like any other. Yeah, right. Like every day Ben Matlock is standing really close to me. That’s a laugh.

  I was at the airport because I had to take a plane because I had to go do stand-up in Portland, Oregon. I’m really good at stand-up. Then I look over into the bookstore and who do I see? You’re never gonna believe it. It was Ben Matlock. I shit you not. And he was standing there, reading one of those big books. You know the kind. Usually you can’t even understand their stupid titles, and when you try to read them you get one word in and get really sleepy. And it’s so stupid to try anyway, because if the stupid book is any good they’ll make a TV movie out of it and then you can watch that instead. They’ll probably get an actor like that guy from that one episode of Mannix to be in it. What the fuck is that guy’s stupid name anyway? The guy who was in that one episode of Mannix.

  Now, you must remember this happened a long time ago, back when Ben Matlock was still alive.

  Literally nobody but me had spotted Ben Matlock, and I didn’t want to blow his cover, but I sure did want to meet him. Who knows, maybe we would become friends and I would introduce him to my buddies by saying, “You know who this guy is? This is old Ben Matlock himself! He never lost a case. Hey, Snake, you should hire this guy next time you get in trouble. He’ll keep you out of the joint. Just stop making your stupid face and show some respect and get the man some cheese.”

  The problem was, I hadn’t even met Ben Matlock yet and I knew at any time old Ben might hear his plane was ready to go, and then I’d be fucked. I shit you not.

  I needed a plan, but fast. I looked at a table with some books on it. I searched for a title like How to Come Up with a Plan, but Fast or The Art of Fast-Planning. But no. Nothing. Just a bunch of fucking shit.

  I grabbed an Archie comic from the rack and began to read it as I snuck up beside Ben Matlock. It was that one where Jughead gets a job at Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe, and the gang can’t figure out why he took it, because Jughead is such a useless bum who’s always mooching off his friends, but it turns out that Jughead just took the job ’cause he knew they’d let him wear one of those oversize chef’s hats and he could use the hat to steal hamburgers. That Jughead is a dirty, thieving sonofabitch, but he sure does make me laugh.

  When I was right beside Ben Matlock, I threw the Archie comic away and grabbed the biggest, thickest book I could find and t
urned to a random page. Then I loudly said, “What the fuck? I certainly didn’t see that shit coming.” Ben Matlock turned his back to me.

  I kept talking but way louder this time.

  “I don’t know about you, fellow, but I love books. And the bigger and heavier, the better.”

  Matlock turned and looked right at me. I almost fucking shit my pants. I shit you not.

  He’s like, “I must say it’s refreshing to see a younger man who appreciates literature.”

  And so then I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I love all that shit. I’m a comedian by trade, but mostly I like reading big long books with titles you can’t understand, and of course I like TV shows, especially ones about lawyers and…heeeee­eeeee­eeeee­eeeee­eeeee­ey, I just realized who you are! Why, you’re my favorite TV lawyer of all…” And that’s when my mouth got real dry and I had no words and I realized I’d been tricked.

  It wasn’t Ben Matlock at all. It was just some old man. He didn’t even look like Ben Matlock.

  I’d just spent over two minutes talking to some old man. Who the fuck would ever do that?

  There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about that stupid old man and how much I hate his fucking guts.

  33

  WAY OUTTA LINE: THE MAKING

  OF DIRTY WORK

  Many times, young people will approach me to ask me how to make it in show business, and I always offer the same foolproof advice. Just remember three little words: “Meet Adam Sandler.”

  The rest pretty much takes care of itself. Sandler had vouched for me to be on SNL. In the summer break he put me in his first film, Billy Madison, and then he told Robert Simonds, who produced Billy Madison, “You should give Normie a movie.” And that was that. I went from being a low-paid road comic to starring in my own film due to one guy’s help. I’ve never thanked Adam for doing all that for me or told him how lost I’d be without his generosity. And I never will either. That’s because I’m a self-made man.