President Me (5 page)

STORES THAT STAY OPEN AGAINST ALL ODDS:
There is a store on Ventura Boulevard in L.A. that's called something like “Candles 'N Such.” I always see places like that and think, “How do they stay open?” Your business plan is that once a month someone comes in and buys an eight-dollar sand candle? There's never anybody in the place. I'm getting rid of these stores. They are doing nothing for our economy. I'm sure it's just a bunch of rich husbands underwriting them anyway. This is the wife of the executive getting out of the house and having a three-hour lunch with her girlfriends and calling it a business expense. Maybe I'm just envious. I wish my day were showing up at noon, eating lunch, and then closing up at three. That might be my plan for after I finish this president gig. I'll find a rich husband to underwrite my business, then make sure it's a store no one would ever go into. I'd call it “Adolf's Herpes and Bear Traps Emporium.”

MEDICINE FOR CHILDREN:
We've gone nuts with the childproofing. I spent twenty minutes trying to open some multivitamins recently because of the childproof cap. Don't we want kids to eat vitamins? Why are we making them impossible to open? You can't get kids to take vitamins unless you flavor them like grape soda and shape them like Fred Flintstone anyway, so why do we think they're going to start popping my multivitamins like Skittles? I'm an adult and I can barely stomach these things; they get stuck in my throat, one out of every ten makes my stomach cramp, and they all make my piss stink. It's not like any kid has ever OD'd on zinc. “How'd Timmy die? Childhood leukemia?” “No. Too much niacin.”

Even worse is children's aspirin. It's made for children. But if one of my kids gets a headache or a fever, I have to take the bottle down to the garage, put it in the bench vise, and go at it with some channel locks to get the cap off. Ironically, the children's aspirin and the multivitamin are actually good for kids, but are harder to get into than MIT.

Why are we crazily overcautious in some areas but don't seem to give a shit with stuff that's more dangerous? Think about the electric knife you use on Thanksgiving to carve the turkey. It just has an on-off switch. There's no code you have to enter, no combination lock, no safety. You can take this electric stabbing machine with a thirteen-inch serrated blade and just switch it on. You could turn the switch on before you put it away and then next year when you plugged it in, it would immediately kick on. A kid gets ahold of that, he's going to turn the kitchen into a
Saw
movie. Yet if he took that same electric knife and held it to the childproof top on his vitamins, the motor would burn out before he got it open.

DISH SOAP:
You always see the ads about how the store brand will only clean this many dishes, but with superconcentrated Dawn one drop will clean all the dishes from the Caesars Palace buffet for a year. Which sounds great except for the fact that the next six cups of coffee taste like you opened your mouth going through a car wash. We need some rules about dish soap. It's
too
concentrated. You rinse the coffee mug once, twice, three times, and it's still foaming. I had to switch soap because what we were using was too soapy. You guys are doing too good a job. Take a week off.

And no more scented soap either. I switched to the natural, unscented soap and now I don't have to inhale the smell of Spring Rain Linen or lavender every time I take a sip. Actually, I have just decided that in my country, there will only be coffee-scented dish detergent. Just another gift from me to you, America.

WD-40:
Speaking of scents, this is intoxicating for men. Ladies, we don't give a shit about, or more accurately are nauseated by, your perfume, but we love this stuff. WD-40 smells like progress. I'm hereby making a presidential decree that the makers of WD-40 create and market a scent for women.

SERVICES THAT NEED MY SERVICE

As you can tell by now, I'm going to be the anti-big-government president. That said, there are many businesses and industries which form the backbone of our great nation that have fallen on hard times, or are tripping over themselves so hard they are in danger of going away entirely. I'm not talking about doing an auto-industry-style bailout, just providing a little guidance from my administration. I'll be sure to give my personal attention to the first one . . . the strip club.

STRIP CLUBS

This is an American institution that is slipping away. I recently went to Jimmy Kimmel's bachelor party. I hadn't been to a strip joint in a while and was quite depressed over what I found.

First and foremost—the music. Strip clubs used to play Grand Funk Railroad, the Cult, and Mötley Crüe. There was a time when bands would write songs specifically for strip clubs, like “Girls, Girls, Girls.” This was not what graced my ears at this particular bachelor party. Nowadays it's just nonstop pumping syntho crap that's played so loud it hurts your teeth. I'm in a strip club, not the Matrix. This isn't dude music, its pulsating, grinding techno that some gay guy created on his Mac. The strip club is supposed to be sacred ground. You're supposed to play songs by Foghat. What happened? Do you really want asexual pussies like Moby making strip-club music? They hate strip clubs. He wasn't at the Seventh Veil or Spearmint Rhino last night. He was throwing red paint on old ladies in fur coats. Strip-club music should come from guys like Warrant, who actually spent time there. An hour into the bachelor party my eardrums were bleeding and I would have performed oral on the DJ for even a tiny sliver of some “Cherry Pie.”

I blame the cocktails. That's another thing I noticed. In the glory days of strip clubs you used to be able to get a gin fizz or a couple of fingers of Cutty Sark, Sinatra-style. You drank like Frank. Now it's all vodka with Red Bull, Rock Star, or Monster energy drink. Strip clubs are already full of douchebags. They've now taken that asshole and turbo-charged him. It's a disaster. These guys were eights on the douche-hole meter before, but now they're elevens.

And that's why they like the shitty music: they're simultaneously drunk and beaked out of their minds. What's up? You're at a strip club, there are naked women. Boobies are the only drug you need.

A little side rant: We're completely overcaffeinated as a culture. Remember as a kid when coffee was just for the dad on
Leave It to Beaver
? Now every teenager is carrying a super-grande-venti machiatto frappé. We talk about how we need “energy” but not one single teenager I talk to can string a sentence together. Sixty-five-year-olds need energy, not seventeen-year-olds. They have no lust for life. There's no amount of caffeine that can make up for that. If you like what you do, and have a passion, you'll wake up every day with energy. There's no chemical substitute for enthusiasm. And Red Bull tastes like ass.

And speaking of lust and strip clubs, what happened to the performances? It used to be erotic and slow but now it's turned into
Gymkata
out there. (Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about.) I don't want to see Mitch Gaylord on a pole, I want to see a half-naked chick with a C- or D-cup jiggling
around
a pole. That's what that pole is there for. It was initially installed for when the stripper was so drunk she couldn't support herself. I like to see them a little boozy and having trouble walking in their stripper wedges. Now the chicks are out there doing stuff Bart Conner couldn't pull off. Crazy yoga moves, climbing gym-class ropes, running and diving on the pole and then holding themselves up like a flag at half-staff. It's going to be an Olympic event next time around, I'm positive of this. I'm seeing striated veins in their arms, six-pack abs, and there's not a boob to be found in the place because they're all built like the guy from Iron Maiden album covers. They have hard edges. And then they take that aggression out on your junk. It's like your lap is a nail and their pussy is a hammer.

At Jimmy's bachelor party I was watching chicks do acrobatics that, literally, included fire. I was thinking, “You are going to hurt yourself.” That's not what you want to be thinking at a strip club. It was impressive, but I don't go to the strip club to be impressed. Just because I can't do what you are doing doesn't mean it's going to give me a boner. I've seen twelve-year-olds do one of those cup-stacking competitions. It's impressive, but I don't want to beat off to it. It's like the goddamned Cirque du Soleil in strip clubs now. That's fine if you want to be entertained with your parents. But I'm looking to be entertained with my penis.

Let me explain the entertainment component of strip clubs—NUDE CHICKS. Let's never forget that. In the good old days did anyone ever go to a strip club and think, “Sure she's got a D-cup and is naked two feet in front of me, but why isn't she bending rebar over the back of her neck?”

And how about a little less information, ladies? I want to maintain the fantasy that you're just stripping your way through med school. I don't want to hear about how your ex-boyfriend stabbed you fourteen times or how much you love your kids. (A quick funny/sad story related to this. I went to a peep show once in New York and because I'm hypervigilant, I noticed, behind the gal, a stroller and diaper bag. I could barely beat off.)

Here's my promise to you, America. In my first hundred days in office we will bring back Ye Olde Strip Joints. No techno, no Red Bull, no personal information. Just plenty of curves, sloe gin, and “Slow Ride.”

While I'm on the subject I also have a new green initiative. Half of the strippers you see in Vegas are from L.A. So there will be no more going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to hit the strip club. It's a waste of the Southwest jet fuel. We're setting up a new government website so you and the stripper you'd be ridden by in Vegas can just meet in Van Nuys for the lap dance. You'll just get the info for the apartment she shares with four roommates, all named Tami, and meet her there. It's about energy savings, kind of like a car pool for your cock.

THE HOTEL INDUSTRY

I travel a ton and stay in a different hotel almost every weekend. During this time I've noticed that the hospitality industry could stand to make a few improvements. The hotel business is heavily regulated, so why not create a few more rules that will make travelers happier and thus increase the profitability that my government can wet its beak on? That's what we call a win-win.

This one happens at about one-tenth of the hotels where I stay—just enough to piss me off but not enough that I'm prepared for it. It's probably happened to you too. You check in, get your room number, get your key card, plop your bags down on the bed, grab the remote, and . . . nothing. The remote doesn't work. So you do that move that feels effective, but just might work. You pop the hatch on the back and give the batteries that magic thumb roll. Again, nothing. So then you go up closer to the TV and try the remote again, thinking, “Maybe I'm out of range.” Nope. Then you think, “Maybe it's the angle.” So you try it with the left hand, then the right hand, and eventually you stand up on the bed and hold it up over your shoulder like you're doing a skyhook. Not that that has ever worked, but my question is, what if it does? So you call down to the front desk and tell them the TV isn't working, and come to think of it neither is the A/C. They then say, “Sir, you need to take the key card and put in the slot behind the door to activate the electronics in the room.” Hey fuckwad, maybe you could have said something while you were giving me the card down at the desk. You know, a little heads-up that nothing in the room is going to work unless I slide the card into the vagina that is conveniently blocked when I open the door to the room. It's like they assume you work at the same hotel as they do. They need to have a huge red arrow that says “Put it in here or nothing is going to work.” Or even better, here's the way to eliminate this. All those cards should be shaped like a penis. It would be fun to slide it into that slot, you'd never lose it, and you'd know exactly where to put it.