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Waiting for Dr. Godot

I
t’s nice that Dr. Godot has a whole room just for waitng. It’s so convenient. But it makes you wonder. If he called it the “Wasting Your Valuable Time Room” would his patients sit there so willingly? Calling it a waiting room makes it sound as if waiting is the most normal thing in the world that we could be doing with our time. We’re not fuming, we’re not steaming, we’re not twiddling our thumbs because it’s a waiting room—not a fuming room, not a steaming room, not a twiddling-our-thumbs room.

There must be some really thoughtless doctors out there who take patients as soon as they show up at their scheduled time and don’t give them any time to wait. But as soon as they are found, they are drummed out of the profession. Of course, it’s not just doctors that make us wait. Airports are composed almost entirely of waiting rooms. They have acres and acres of waiting rooms. The waiting rooms are so humongous they have book stores and restaurants and souvenir stands and coffee bars in them. If the airlines really thought every flight would leave on time do you think they’d build such gigantic waiting rooms? Maybe the ticket price for air travel should drop each hour you have to wait. Wait one hour, ten dollars off the ticket price, two hours, you save twenty dollars and so on. For every hour you sit in the plane on the tarmac, fifty dollars off the ticket price. Under this system, most of us could make money by flying.

My appointment with Dr. Godot was for two o’clock; I still haven’t seen him and it’s now three o’clock. But if I had shown up at three o’clock I would have missed my appointment.
I
would have been late. That seems so one-sided. If I have an appointment with Dr.Godot, why doesn’t Dr.Godot have an appointment with me? Oh sure, I understand that there are emergencies. I watch those hospital shows on TV. Well, I used to, but not anymore. It’s too unreal.

On TV, entire families walk right into the Emergency Room without waiting; Mom, Dad, five or six children all wailing and screaming, “Don’t let her die!” She has a bad case of psoriasis. The psoriasis family never fills out a form; they never wait a minute. The doctors on television all look like fashion models. Dr. Godot looks like Jack Klugman.

On television no one ever waits. A show called
WR
wouldn’t stand a chance. Who would want to watch a big room full of people moaning and sneezing and bleeding from the forehead and NOT being treated?

At least Dr. Godot tries to class up his waiting room and make it comfortable. He hangs pieces of fine art, and the chairs are big and soft. I even know what he does in his spare time thanks to the magazines scattered around. Godot subscribes to
High Class Ski Resorts
,
Exclusive Golfing in Europe
,
Expensive Antiques Monthly
,
Cigar and Wine Bore
and
Cayman Islands Tax Shelters
.

There is a very fine reproduction of a large, ancient Etruscan vase in his waiting room placed between two chairs. It’s waist-high. The classy effect is spoiled, however, by the hand-printed note taped above the vase that says, “This is not a garbage can!”

How can they be so sure? Maybe that’s exactly what the Etruscans used it for. Garbage pick-up on the ides and nones of every month. The Etruscans are probably having a good laugh that Godot paid six grand for it at auction.

Finally at three-thirty the nurse told me the doctor would see me now.

“I’m so sorry about the delay,” said Dr. Godot, “but there was an emergency. A man collapsed out at the golf course.”

“Is he all right?”

“I suppose so; EMS took care of him. But it held up our foursome for an hour.”

It’s a Fun Job, But Someone’s Got to Do It

D
riving past a fast food restaurant today I spotted a sign out in front that said, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.” Fun jobs. The sign seemed to contradict something my Dad used to say to me at least five or six times a week when I was a teenager: “If it was fun, they wouldn’t call it work.” His other favorite sayings were “That bed won’t make itself,” “That lawn won’t mow itself,” “This house won’t paint itself,” and the one we always hated to hear, “That finger won’t sew itself back on.”

Still I wonder, what could these fun fast-food jobs possibly be? Cleaning the restrooms? It’s not that much fun. If it was fun, kids would do it at home. If it was fun, the customers would pick up after themselves. Perhaps that’s why so many places have stopped cleaning their restrooms—it’s just not fun, it’s like, a job.

That would also explain why there are no paper towels in the paper towel dispenser, why the place smells of antiseptic spray instead of soap and elbow grease, and why there is some kind of nasty mold growing under the sink. Cleaning: it’s just not fun.

Microwaving the food sounds like fun. But after the first four or five hours, I’ll bet teenagers figure out it’s not as much fun as playing “Grand Theft Auto” while locked in their bedrooms. Cooking food all day long is not as much fun as playing video games all day long and then ordering in pizza when you get hungry. If only they would pay us to play video games. That would be a fun job!

There’s not really much of anything in a fast-food restaurant that would qualify as a fun job once you’ve done it a few hundred thousand times. Emptying huge bins of trash all day long, mopping floors, policing the parking lot—not fun, not fun, not fun.

A fun job would be, say, testing suntan lotion. Fifty thousand a year to start, no experience necessary. That’s the kind of place that should have a sign outside that says, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.”

Being a hotel-fortune heiress is probably a fun job. No wasting time getting a college degree; no bothering with inconvenient job interviews. Just buy a closet full of ten-thousand-dollar dresses and start going to nightclubs. The great part is you pick your own hours and you’re your own boss. Now that’s fun. The bad news? No paid vacations.

Movie stars look like they have lots of fun on the job. The sign out in front of most Hollywood studios should say, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.” No one asks actors to clean the studio parking lot, someone’s always fussing with their hair and makeup, they get driven to work in a limousine and they get an RV for a dressing room. Best of all, the minimum wage for movie stars is a few million dollars a year. And there’s a good opportunity for advancement.

Here’s the perfect first fun job for a young high school student: Cell Phone Tester. The kids would work on commission. The phone companies would give them a cut of their parent’s bill, say fifteen percent. So on a hundred-dollar phone bill, your high-schooler would only make fifteen dollars, but if they can drive your bill up to five or six hundred dollars, they could make as much or more than any part-time, not-so-fun job would pay them.

Some of them might even be able to test two phones at a time. They wouldn’t have to learn how to make change the way they would at that fun fast-food restaurant job, and they wouldn’t have to wear a uniform or a hairnet or a name tag. It’d be like hardly working at all. What a fun job!

A Learner’s Permit to Kill

R
emember when James Bond out-golfed Goldfinger by one stroke? Bond never practiced, but he played golf like a pro. I play golf three or four times a week and I get worse, not better.

Bond walks through Q’s laboratory, picks up the latest gadget and knows how it works instantly—without ever having read the manual. I can’t even do something new on my cell phone—
with
the instructions in front of me—for a week.

It takes me fifteen minutes in a rental car to figure out how to turn on the lights and the radio, and to learn how to adjust the seats. James Bond jumps into the world’s newest and most sophisticated fighter jet and, never having seen it before, he flies it like he’s a Blue Angel.

I go to a casino and I lose every single hand, every roll of the dice. Bond? It’s like the place is his personal cash machine. He knows all the dealers and all the bartenders. He’s just come to withdraw a few hundred thousand dollars.

The computer I’ve been using for years still figures out new and exciting ways to frustrate me. Bond walks into a strange office and downloads secret files onto a hard disk disguised as a mole on his cheek with the aid of a paper clip and a fountain pen. Could he please come to my house and get my printer and my computer to talk to one another?

Bond flies from London to Rio and before he gets to his hotel, he has three dirt bike chases, one parachute jump, and pilots a mini-submarine to a yacht in the harbor, where he finally meets the second-most-attractive woman on Earth and goes to bed with her.

That evening Bond, who carried no luggage, will turn up at a casino in a custom-made tuxedo that can be turned inside-out to become a Level 5 Haz-Mat self-contained breathing suit. The great mystery of all James Bond films is not how Bond is going to stop the villain from destroying the planet, but how James Bond’s clothes got to his hotel room. You never see him carry any luggage. You never see him standing at the baggage carousel. Who wouldn’t golf, who wouldn’t ski, who wouldn’t program their own computer, who wouldn’t travel if it were really this easy?

I flew from New York to London last year and I have never been so exhausted in my life. The people in First Class looked tired; the people in Business Class looked tired; the people in my class, Abusive Coach looked clubbed and beaten. The flight was so numbing it only took one flight attendant to tie down our drunken air-rage passenger. Nobody on the plane was up for
one
dirt bike chase, much less three of them.

My feet hurt, my clothes were rumpled. Don’t 007’s feet ever hurt? Doesn’t he ever get jet lag? Does Bond ever spend two hours going through customs? I wasn’t met at the airport by a sexy female driver with a double-entendre name like Vi Agra who would flirt with me as she drove me to my swank hotel in her brand new BMW convertible.

No, I took mass transit to what had once been a meager one-star hotel, but was now seedy and faded. My hotel room had no grand staircase, no gilt furniture, no fresh-cut flowers, no wet bar, no spectacular view. On the plus side, there was no one in the room waiting to kill me. How could there be? There wouldn’t have been enough room for the two of us in such a tiny, cramped room. But I did feel very James Bondish. Thanks to the airline, I, too, was now luggage-free.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

“Did you just wake up?” asked Ralph the counterman as he poured out my breakfast coffee.

“No.”

“Something looks different. Did you put on a ton of weight?”

“No, thank you, it’s just a new haircut.”

“You paid for that?”

“Yes, I did. And unlike you, I had to pay full price for having so much hair. You must get, oh what, a seventy-five percent discount?”

I shouldn’t have said that. For the next two weeks I will get runny eggs and day-old coffee. Ralph’s service will be slower than usual, there will be no refills, and it’ll take forever to get the check. But Ralph knows I’ve been trying to find a new barber ever since Charlie went to Florida two years ago after he developed carpal tunnel syndrome.

“From the repetitive motion of giving everyone the exact same haircut for thirty years,” Sue contributed.

“He didn’t give everyone the same haircut. He was an artist.”

“Yeah. So was the guy who painted the dogs sitting around the table playing poker.”

Since Charlie’s been gone I’ve been to every place in town and no one seems to get my hair right, or care.

Toné’s House of Hair (formerly Tony’s Barber Shop) in the mall won’t take reservations. Each time I go, someone new cuts my hair. Someone who wasn’t there last time.

“What happened to Jeannie?” I asked Madame Toné, the proprietor.

“She’s having a baby.”

“I was here two weeks ago. She didn’t mention it. She didn’t even look pregnant.”

“Did I say having a baby? I meant she’s in a safe house hiding from her boyfriend. But Tiffany’s free.”

Tiffany has rainbow-colored hair—blue, red, yellow, and purple, with black tips. Yeah, I know, black isn’t in the rainbow, but then, neither is hair. Her eyebrow, nose, lower lip and ears are pierced. She is wearing all black and zippers. I’m guessing she’s about forty years younger than I am.

“How do you like it?” she asked, running a hand through my grey hair.

“Oh, as Goth as you can make it.” She laughed and did a great job. She gave me a haircut that didn’t look like I’d just gotten a haircut. Finally, I thought, someone who understands me, someone who knows that I don’t want to look like a person who spends a lot of time fussing with his hair but I don’t want to look like Rasputin on a bad hair day, either. Tiffany and I bonded; from now on, she would be the only person to touch my hair. Two weeks later she was gone.

“Don’t tell me she’s hiding from a boyfriend,” I told Madame Toné.

“No, she was having money problems.”

“Really? She looked so busy. I’m sure she got good tips, too.”

“Yes, that was her money problem. Someone offered her more money to leave here.”

“Where’d she go?”

Toné looked at me as if I had just crawled out of a Paris sewer. “David’s free,” she said. She pronounced it “Da Veed.”

David had a buzz cut that looked like he had a five o’clock shadow where his hair should have been except for one long lock right in the middle of his forehead pasted into a spit curl. David was wearing huge hoop earrings. My haircut that day was not successful. It looked very much as if someone had just cut my hair—with an axe.

“You’ll be able to get into all the clubs now,” he said.

Next I went to Nick’s, the jock barbershop with all the sports magazines and pictures of sports heroes covering the walls and featuring Nick’s personal collection of autographed footballs, baseballs, basketballs, golf balls, and hockey pucks. Nick wanted to carve the logo of his favorite team into my hair. I said if I’m going to be their billboard, they should pay me. Talk to my agent. After that, Nick lost interest.

There’s a bald guy at the other end of the counter getting another refill of hot, fresh coffee while mine sits, cold and half-empty. I don’t need a new barber, I need a new hangout.