The Last Testament: A Memoir (20 page)

2 (Yea, the Jews are also my Chosen People; but there’s a lot of overlap.)

³
Celebrities are like unto me: adored; worshipped; tantrum-prone.

⁴
We live in our own universe, our every whims catered to by loyal assistants, who chideth us not lest they wish not to work in that town again;

⁵
And our public appearances are limited, and for promotional purposes only.

⁶
I tell thee truly, that those who deem the pursuit of earthly renown futile and empty are nothing but straight-up haters.

⁷
For three hundredscore generations of man have come and gone; three hundredscore generations of the famous and three hundredscore generations of the obscure are both now equally returned to dust;

⁸
But the dust of the famous still glitters with that certain special something.

⁹
Besides, how can I hate famous people, when my own son is the biggest celebrity of all time?

¹⁰
(Do not quibble, he
is
the biggest; I know the Beatles said they were bigger, but they were not;

¹¹
They came close, but they skipped Woodstock; which, I admit, might have put them over the top.)

¹²
Yet I never intervene in the lives of the famous; in fact I take extra care to remain undetected by them.

¹³
The reason is obvious: the last thing a famous person needs is to think God is talking to them.

¹⁴
That is why, as has been widely reported, I almost never make my presence known in Hollywood.

¹⁵
And yet I have shared many special moments with celebrities; in Hollywood, and New York, and Milan, and all over the world.

¹⁶
I have been there with them through the good times and the bad; the laughter and the tears; the joy and the pain.

¹⁷
Yea: I have been present for every single moment of every single celebrity’s life;

¹⁸
Which means that I have witnessed the single most horrible thing each of them has ever done when they thought no one was watching.

¹⁹
[Pause.]

²⁰
Ah, the stories I could tell.

²¹
[Pause.]

²²
Wouldst thou like to hear some?

CHAPTER 2

¹
T
hen let us godsip.

²
For I know all, and I tell all; I am the Ultimate Insider and the Original Gawker; as superior to
People
as I am to people; greater than
Us
, for I am Me; I am E!, only my E standeth for Eternal!

³
Of dirt wert thou made; and now dirt will I dish.

⁴
And first I shall speak of those celebrities, who have interpreted Jesus’s maxim to treat their bodies as temples, as if those temples were synagogues in Berlin on Kristallnacht.

⁵
I have seen Andy Dick fall off the wagon, then grope it.

⁶
And I have seen David Hasselhoff run out of whiskey, drive to a bog, put peat moss in his mouth, and wait for it to ferment.

⁷
I have seen Larry Hagman place a delivery for 25 orders of penne à la vodka, “but hold the penne à la.”

⁸
I have seen Melanie Griffith guzzle Cosmopolitans like they were going out of style; which in fact they were.

⁹
I have seen Tara Reid attain a blood-alcohol percentage whose mathematical significance she could never have grasped, even stone-cold sober.

¹⁰
I have seen Matthew McConaughey so stoned he thought he saw Me;

¹¹
I have seen Snoop Dogg so stoned he
did
see Me;

¹²
And I have seen Harrison Ford so stoned he did
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

¹³
I have seen Whitney Houston accumulate so many empty vials of crack she filled each one with different amounts of water and used a coke spoon to play “Greatest Love of All” in each of the twelve major keys before shitting on the minibar.

¹⁴
I have seen Chevy Chase steal the painkillers of colleagues who desperately needed them to kill the pain of working with Chevy Chase.

¹⁵
I have seen Courtney Love refer to Xanax as “one of my top ten favorite palindromic drugs that I’m addicted to.”

¹⁶
I have seen Nicole Richie abuse substances for years until the substances finally found the courage to leave and take refuge in a shelter for abused substances.

¹⁷
I have seen Britney Spears so drug-addled she tried to buy meth from her baby and burp her dealer.

¹⁸
I have seen Lindsay Lohan and her mother Dina get so drunk, they wound up switching jail cells with each other one Friday;

¹⁹
It was freaky.

²⁰
I have seen Oprah Winfrey’s weight fluctuate so rapidly her midriff fluttered.

²¹
I have seen Jennifer Hudson respond to the imminent closing of an Arby’s by breaking into a stirring rendition of “And I Am Telling You (I’m Not Going).”

²²
(That was a long time ago, of course; these days Jennifer looketh terrific!)

²³
I have seen Kate Moss order a neutrino for lunch, and eat half.

²⁴
I have seen Ginger Spice throw up meal after meal; ironic, since ginger is a digestive aid.

²⁵
I have seen Kirstie Alley replace her hot and cold water pipes with mayonnaise and ketchup and then stick her mouth on the faucet and guzzle gallon after gallon of lukewarm Russian dressing.

²⁶
I have seen Zac Efron cut himself to see if it would make his face register emotion;

²⁷
I have seen David Duchovny masturbate to a staggering .000007 percent of all available Internet porn;

²⁸
And I have seen Carrot Top compulsively exercise so much it would have been funny, had it not been Carrot Top.

²⁹
And through it all I have seen Dr. Drew Pinsky pray for more celebrities to develop horrible addictions, that he might cure them televisually.

³⁰
Consider it done, Doctor; love the show.

CHAPTER 3

1
T
hen there are those who have regarded the body and face I gave them as mere jumping-off points.

2 For I have seen Nicole Kidman Botox her hair.

3 I have seen Meg Ryan suck collagen directly into her lips with a straw.

⁴
I have seen Burt Reynolds lie down on the side of the road and call a tow truck to come lift his face.

⁵
I have seen Kim Kardashian’s ass get a rest-of-body reduction.

⁶
I have seen the remnants of Kenny Rogers’s and Dolly Parton’s original faces dissipate like islands in the stream.

⁷
I have seen Heidi Montag order “one of each.”

⁸
I have seen Carmen Electra transform a simple boob job into an entire boob career.

⁹
And I have seen Michael Jackson... hoo boy.

¹⁰
Michael, Michael, Michael.

¹¹
I think of Psalms 27:8: “When thou saidst, Seek ye my face, my heart said unto thee, Thy face, L
ORD
, will I seek.”

¹²
Did Michael read that and take it literally?

¹³
His songs celebrated my Creation; his dancing was praise in movement; he ruled the Kingdom of Pop with a bejeweled glove and a diapered monkey.

¹⁴
But uneasy lies the head that wears a crown; and for MJ, even uneasier lay the skin and cartilage at the front of that head.

¹⁵
Yet I pitied him; so at the end, as he faded away, entombed in that chalky, polymerous face-soup, I filled him with one last vision of the angelic youth who once fronted a sublime fraternal quintet;

¹⁶
And I heard his final, heartbreaking thought as he beheld that nine-year-old:

¹⁷
“I want you back!”

¹⁸
(By the way, in case thou wert wondering: Michael is in heaven.

¹⁹
No, we do not permit pedophiles here; but what is a just God to do, when the cherubs’ parents keep settling out of court?)

CHAPTER 4

1
Y
ea, the breadth of the dubious behavior practiced in secret by the famous would fill a book;

2 And that book is this one, so let us proceed.

3 I have seen Christian Bale call Nelson Mandela’s three-year-old great-grandson a useless sack of shit.

⁴
I have seen Mel Gibson . . . actually, nothing worse than what thou hast already seen, which is bad enough.

⁵
I have seen Angelina Jolie place four Botswanan orphans in a steel cage and order them to “fight for my love”;

⁶
And I have seen Brad Pitt tell those Botswanan orphans that the first rule of fighting for Angelina Jolie’s love, is not to talk about fighting for Angelina Jolie’s love.

⁷
I have seen Jennifer Aniston bounce back from breakup after breakup tougher and stronger than ever.