I'm Not Gonna Lie Read online

  This may sound strange, but I feel that getting rid of your excessive crap may be a deeply religious act. Seriously. I would not call myself a religious person. Not at all. If I practice any religion, I would say I’m a member of the House of Golf. But I feel a strong obligation to share, to give my extra stuff away to people who need it more than I do.

  The other day I was hanging out at my local coffee shop sipping some tea and reading the paper when I noticed a woman sitting by herself at a table outside. She was a large woman, dressed in shabby clothes, unkempt, obviously homeless. She was staring off, just watching the cars drive by. I could tell she had nowhere to go. She kept staring at the cars with this vacant look in her eyes. But more than that, she looked . . . sad. And lost. And without hope. I don’t know what it’s like to be homeless, but I recognized that helpless look on her face. I’ve felt that way myself. Maybe you have, too. You can’t seem to take the next step. Or worse, you don’t even have the strength to figure out what the next step should be. You just can’t get it together. Yes, I’ve been there.

  I got up from my table in the coffee shop, went outside, and walked over to the woman.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I don’t mean to intrude.”

  She squinted up at me and shaded her eyes with her hand. I got the feeling that not too many people talked to her politely or with respect.

  “How you doing?” I said.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “Could you use some financial assistance?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I could.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I didn’t want to insult you.”

  I handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

  She took it from me without looking at it. She folded up the bill and stuffed it into her pocket. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and smiled.

  Her face brightened, folded into a huge, grateful smile.

  That made my day.

  I went back into the coffee shop, got my tea and my paper, and sat down. I couldn’t get my mind off that woman. I wondered how she’d ended up so destitute, and if she’d use the money to buy food or drugs.

  Back in the day, growing up poor and without hope drove a lot of kids to drugs. Now, a lot of rich parents begin medicating their kids at such an early age that by the time they enter middle school, they’re already addicts. I call it “parenting by pill.”

  Some parents don’t parent at all.

  The worst I’ve seen are parents who fly to Hawaii or Europe for a vacation and bring their nannies with them. I’ve been on planes where the only other Latino people have been nannies. I’m sure the parents sold the nanny hard, telling them, “This is gonna be great. We’re going to Hawaii. You’ll be part of the family.” The nanny buys this line for about two minutes, because at the airport she finds out that the rest of the family’s flying first-class while she’s stuck in coach trying to calm the screaming baby and change his smelly diapers.

  It gets even worse once the family hits Waikiki.

  While Mom’s in the spa and Dad’s on the golf course, the nanny’s with the kid, entertaining him, changing him, and feeding him out by the pool. First thing in the morning, while the kid and Mom and Dad sleep, the nanny has to rush out and get their cabana all set up. If the nanny has any time to think about it, she’ll realize that she might be in Hawaii with the family she works for, but she’s the only one who’s not on vacation.

  This kid will end up so pampered and feeling so privileged that the first time he doesn’t get his way, he will completely crumble. If he gets turned down for a job or, more likely, for a highly desirable, nearly impossible-to-get unpaid internship, he will medicate himself to ease the pain of this loss. Let’s face it: We’ve become a medicated society. It’s gotten so we can’t handle rejection or pain or discomfort—or reality.

  • • •

  I don’t know how long I’m gonna live. Nobody does. All I know is that I’m alive today, right now, in this moment, and I feel good. I want to enjoy every second I’m here. I don’t ever want to get so old and out of it that if I piss ten cc’s, it’s a great day. I couldn’t bear that.

  I used to live next door to a lady who looked around a hundred. She had around-the-clock nursing care. Sometimes a nurse would wheel her outside into the sun and sit with her. Neither one of them said a word. One day, I overheard the nurse talking on her cell phone to the woman’s son.

  “Oh, yes, it’s a great day,” the nurse said. “She had a wonderful bowel movement, nice and soft. I’m very proud of her.”

  Really?

  I do not want to end up like that. I don’t want to be that incapacitated, and I certainly do not want my bowel movements making anybody proud.

  Of course, I don’t know if my neighbor took care of herself when she was younger, or if it even matters. Because if taking care of yourself when you’re young is that important, then it’s pretty much over for me.

  Let’s start with what doctors now say is one of the single most important activities you can do to assure good health: regular flossing.

  Never did it. Nobody in my family flossed. Nobody in my neighborhood flossed. Nobody that I knew flossed. Floss? I thought it was a girl’s name.

  I was so not into flossing that I used to go to sleep with a candy in my mouth. I couldn’t wait for the morning, because I knew the moment I woke up I was already eating a candy. I’d keep it tucked in the back of my mouth. I’d wake up, yawn, and think, “Hey, there it is. Oh, yeah. Already starting the day off right.”

  I COULDN’T WAIT FOR THE MORNING, BECAUSE I KNEW THE MOMENT I WOKE UP I WAS ALREADY EATING A CANDY.

  I had two candy preferences. I would sleep with either a chocolate drop tucked back into my mouth or a lemon Jolly Rancher that would attach itself to my teeth. I’d wake up with this delightful fruity taste. I never had to use mouthwash. I had mouthwash built in.

  I loved to eat crackers, too. A good cracker went a long way. You’d eat a cracker and some cracker remnant would always get stuck against your back teeth, and then you’d put your finger in your mouth and pull the mushy, mostly eaten cracker remnant forward. So good. It was like you found a second cracker. A dessert cracker. A wonderful surprise.

  “George, would you like another cracker?”

  “No, thanks, I still got a whole cracker leftover somewhere in my mouth from this morning.”

  Man, I think about what we did as kids and sometimes I wonder how I made it through my childhood alive. I’m serious. Half the stuff we did back then we’ve since found out can kill you. Spending more than five minutes outside in the sun, for example. Nobody ever heard about skin cancer–causing UVA rays or UVB rays or SPF to protect you against the UVA and UVB rays. I never put on sunscreen. Now parents slather sunscreen with high SPF all over their kids before the kids step out of the house. I’m not talking about when they’re going to the beach. I’m talking about when they’re walking to the car.

  We also played with deadly poison on a regular basis. We called it bug spray.

  We always kept a bug sprayer within reach, especially in summer. The sprayer had a wooden shaft with a bowl filled with pesticide attached underneath. It looked like an old-fashioned tommy gun. I treated it like a weapon, too. I would go outside, pretend I was a commando, and go on a search-and-destroy mission for bugs. If I saw a caterpillar or some other bug crawling around, I’d get right into its grille, say, “It’s on,” run inside, grab the bug sprayer, pump it like a shotgun, run back outside, and go all Rambo on its ass.

  Everybody in our neighborhood grew vegetables, especially tomatoes. If we saw one bug crawling up the side of a tomato, it was on. I’d race into the garage, grab the tommy-gun bug sprayer, and douse the hell out of that tomato, which, of course, we would eat in a sandwich an hour later. We were convinced that the gnat or mosquito wandering around on the tom
ato carried the West Nile virus or dengue fever or some weird disease that turned you into a zombie. I took care of that. I pumped my tommy gun and drenched that tomato in a gallon of DEET or Off! By the time I was through, bug spray dripped down the sides of that tomato, forming a puddle on the ground. I wanted to make sure we were perfectly safe.

  Then one summer about ten years ago I went up to Canada for a couple of club dates and stopped to play a round of golf in Winnipeg, which should be renamed Mosquitoville. Worst mosquitoes ever. Miniature dive-bombing insect terrorists. I wore jeans and it didn’t matter. They bit right through my pants. Chewed holes through the denim. One of the pros at the club said, “Hey, man, use this,” and he handed me a can of DDT. “Spray this on yourself. It’s the only thing that works.”

  So I did. Rolled up my pants and doused my legs with the DDT.

  Cracked the skin off. Left me with welts the color of Mars. I could barely walk. Killed the bugs, though.

  I somehow made it to fifty by not flossing and by swallowing gallons of deadly bug spray. Now, I admit, I have started to obsess a little bit about my quality of life. If I end up with some nurse pushing me around in a wheelchair after she’s just wiped my ass, I will seriously wheel myself off a cliff. So, I’ve been considering alternatives.

  Cryogenics, for one thing.

  Yes, freezing my body so I can come back to life in a hundred years.

  Here’s how it works: First, you do all the paperwork and make the arrangements with a special cryogenics company. You even have a choice of companies, because more and more people are going the cryogenics route. I heard that six hundred people have already been frozen, and now some celebrities have signed up, like Simon Cowell of American Idol, whom many people think couldn’t get any colder, and Larry King—a surprise, because most people thought he died years ago, even when they watched him on TV.

  After you fill out all the paperwork, you basically sit around and wait until you die. Or almost die. You can’t actually die or you couldn’t be frozen with any hope of coming back to life. You’d just be a human Popsicle. But you do have to legally die. Otherwise you’d be frozen alive. Bottom line: Once a doctor declares that there is nothing more he can do for you medically, the cryogenics people take over. They transfer you out of the hospital bed and drop you into a tank of liquid nitrogen at a nippy minus-238 degrees. They keep you in frozen storage for the next hundred years, or until you’ve instructed them to thaw you out.

  I’m not sure about this.

  For one thing, I heard there have been a few glitches with some of the cryogenics facilities. One place I read about had seventeen people frozen in tanks. Cost these people $200,000 for the procedure and for storage. A few years in, the company went bankrupt. They lost their lease, closed their business, and had to thaw everybody. That’s not what they paid for. They didn’t want to come back with this economy and no Oprah.

  I’m confused, too, about the differences in price. Some companies charge $30,000 to be frozen, some way more, some way less. I’d be worried that somebody who’s pissed at me would have me frozen according to my wishes, but they’d go with some shady cryonics company that would charge, like, $800 and shove my body into the freezer in the front of a 7-Eleven.

  “Dude, get me a Coke, will ya?”

  “Sure, man, let’s see, a Coke— Whoa! That’s George Lopez! You got G-Lo on ice!”

  “Hey, grab your soda and close that thing, man. I gotta keep him in there for a hundred years. I had to do it so I could get lotto.”

  I don’t know. This whole thing seems like a scam, like some fancy, frozen version of a storage unit.

  Which is a sore subject with me.

  I’m kicking myself now. Because if I listened to RJ back in the early eighties, I would’ve made a fortune. He wanted me to invest some money with this guy who came up with a brilliant, innovative idea.

  Storage units.

  Nobody had ever heard of this before.

  “What the hell is that?” I said.

  “Very simple,” RJ said. “There’s this building just off the freeway, which he got cheap. He divided the building into small units, like closets, all different sizes. The idea is, you take everything out of your garage or your basement, all your crap, and you put it into one of these storage units.”

  “Into these closets by the freeway?”

  “That’s right.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, yeah, and then what?”

  “Then you get a key, so anytime you want to go over there and see your crap, you just go, open it up, and take a look.”

  “You drive over and open up your ‘storage unit’ so you can look at your crap?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m not following this. What happens to all the crap in your garage?”

  “It’s not there anymore. You took it out. You put it in your storage unit.”

  “Which, I’m guessing, you paid for.”

  “Right.”

  “So, you’ve taken all your crap out of your garage and put it into a different place, and you’ve written a check—”

  “Every month.”

  “Oh. You write a check every month.”

  “It’s not that much. You pay, like, sixty bucks.”

  “Okay. And for sixty bucks a month, every month for as long as you live, you drive far from your house so you can visit your crap anytime you want.”

  “Now you got it.”

  I nodded. “I have one question: Who is gonna do that? Who would want to drive somewhere else, near the goddamn freeway—for money—to see the stuff that you could’ve walked five feet to see in your garage for free?”

  RJ paused. “It does sound messed-up.”

  “It is messed-up.”

  “The guy is gonna lose his shirt.”

  “He’s an imbecile.”

  “He’s an idiot,” RJ said. “I wouldn’t give him any money. I wouldn’t give him a dime.”

  “Please.”

  We laughed like hell. Of course, I didn’t invest any money in what turned out to be one of the biggest moneymaking ideas of the decade.

  Then one day, in the early nineties, RJ rolled into my driveway behind the wheel of a brand-new Mercedes convertible. I ran my palm over the hood and sat down in the passenger seat. The ultrasoft leather squished expensively.

  “Man, this is nice. Smells rich.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s beautiful. How much you put down for this?”

  “Nothing,” RJ said. “I paid cash.”

  “You what? How can you afford that?”

  “An investment I made a few years ago paid off. Did I ever tell you about it? Storage units. It’s a dumb idea when you think about it—you know, putting your crap in a different place than your own garage and paying a monthly fee—but, hey, people are stupid. It’s like printing money.”

  I don’t blame RJ. It was my own fault. I couldn’t pull the trigger. I get that way sometimes when it comes to taking risks. That’s probably why I won’t have my body frozen. Too risky. I want to know what to expect when I thaw out. I need someone else to go first. I want a guy I know to come back and tell me how great it is before I commit. I wouldn’t trust Simon Cowell. He’d be too critical. And I’m pretty sure Larry King died a few years ago.

  I’m also afraid they’ll mix me up with somebody else. I’ve checked the Internet. There are a lot of people with my name. Plus, it’s happened to me before.

  More than thirty years ago, when I was around twenty, I went on a bender one night and stupidly ended up getting a DUI. I landed in jail overnight. I’ll never forget it: It was a Sunday night, and when I slept it off, I woke up Monday morning in a smelly, scary jail cell feeling horrible and embarrassed and disgusted with myself. I woke up lying on a metal bench. Every bone in my body ached. I forced myself to a sitting po
sition and came eye-to-eye with a big dude, a heavyset Latino guy with huge blond hair flying all over, as if Gorgeous George had stuck his finger into a wall socket. He wore black eye makeup that had turned into blotches and spread all over his face, and he had bright orange lipstick smeared kind of near his mouth. I looked down and saw he had bare feet, and he had painted his toes orange to match his lipstick. He crossed his legs and wagged his knee, and I thought, “As if this could get any worse.”

  He smiled at me. I smiled back, and I thought, “I really hope this tranny doesn’t kill me.”

  A few minutes later, a cop came over to our cell. He looked down at a clipboard in his hand, squinted, and said, “Lopez?”

  The heavyset dude with the big blond hair and the orange toes and I stood up at the same time. What were the odds? We were both named Lopez. We approached the cop.

  “No,” the cop said to me. “Mrs. Lopez.”

  The tranny winked at me.

  My luck. If I agreed to do cryogenics, they would freeze the wrong Lopez. They’d take Tranny Lopez.

  So, I’ve made my decision.

  When I die, I do not want to be frozen.

  Mainly because I’m not afraid of dying.

  I came to peace with death by surviving kidney disease, turning fifty, and from my friend, golfing great Lee Trevino.

  Lee didn’t just look death in the face; he literally died and came back to life.

  June 1975.

  Lee and two other golfers walked onto a long par three at the Western Open at Butler National Golf Course in Oak Brook, Illinois, outside Chicago. Ominous silvery clouds had shadowed them all match. The clouds suddenly darkened, faded to pitch-black, and the winds kicked up. A crash of thunder jolted them and then the rains came. Some golfers, including Jack Nicklaus, scrambled off the fairway, sought shelter in the clubhouse and huts just off the course. Not Lee. He shrugged off the rain that pelted his shirt. He stood on the tee and squinted through the rain at the green a couple hundred yards away. The rain started coming down in sheets, slamming into the pond at the edge of the tee, not far from where Super Mex stood.