Elderly Celebrities Relieved Hackett Was the One to Go

he death of legendary comedian Buddy Hackett early last week at the age of 78 was met with fond remembrances and tributes from his family and fans, and a collective relieved sigh from the nation’s remaining elderly celebrities.

“You know how the saying goes,” explained Bob Hope, 100. “Celebrities always die in threes. After Peck and Hepburn went, every celebrity over 60 had to wonder if they would be next. Actually, I think most of these assholes thought it would be me. Maybe I’m just oversensitive, but I was definitely getting some strange looks last week.”

“To be honest, I thought it would be Bob Hope,” confessed comedian Red Buttons, 85. “How old is that guy? He’s definitely cheating death at this point. That guy’s so old he looks like a big walking scrotum. If he gets any older, some far-off king’s gonna have to wrap him up in a silk box like a goddamned royal tortoise. When he does go they might have to count that as three celebrity deaths wrapped in one, like some kind of loophole for rolling over the oldometer.”

Some elderly celebrities handled the superstitious deathwatch more gracefully than others, with actress Fay Wray, 96, noted by loved ones for her calm demeanor and total lack of response to external stimuli all week. Comedian Sid Caesar, 81, took the threat more seriously, locking himself in a hyperbaric chamber with a pistol upon hearing the news of Hepburn’s death. “Let ‘em come and get me,” Caesar was quoted as snarling as the door to the chamber was sealed. It was unclear whether Caesar was referring to old age or gremlins.

“I liked Buddy and all, but if it was between him and me, and it was, I’d pick me. So I’m glad it was him. He was probably in bad shape, anyway,” rambled Phyllis Diller, 86. “Probably had a compacted bowel or the snorts or something, he’s probably better off. I definitely am.”

While talking to a pair of twentysomething autograph-seekers, actor Mickey Rooney, 83, commented on his fondness for Hackett, with whom he once shared an ice cream. Rooney then answered his fans’ queries by explaining that Hackett was neither the mascot for Lee jeans nor the inventor of the hackey sack.

As they walked away, one fan was heard commenting to the other.

“Jesus Christ, Mickey Rourke looks like shit!”

Actor Karl Malden, 90, eulogized earnestly about Bob Hope’s career for 20 minutes before this reporter could adequately explain that it had been Hackett, not Hope, who passed away last week.

“Nah, you’re funnin’ me,” colloquialized Malden. “If Bob Hope’s still alive, how come he’s been haunting my dreams all week? Unless that was Eli Wallach. Hmm. Is that bastard still alive? Tell you the truth; it starts to get hard to tell ‘em apart after a certain age, they all take on that Jacob Marley look after about 80. Shit, maybe it was the Ghost of Christmas Past! Gah! What’d I give you last Christmas, the bath towel or the VCR?”

This reporter left Mr. Malden to his soul-searching, opting to pursue a quote and a Dilly bar from a passing ice-cream truck driver.

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Modern mysteries come in all shapes and sizes, from the five-toed horny gorilla to the location of the island where they breed reality show contestants. But some of the most vexing mysteries of all come in the blandest of blandishments. Sometimes they slip under our radar in plastic-windowed envelopes, without any kind of Unsolved Mysteries theme music alerting us to their mysterious presence.

The only thing harder to read than an epileptic doing sign language or Spanish scribbled on a men's room wall is the modern cell phone bill. We live in a society where experts can catch a killer based on the velocity at which the blood hit the beanie baby display case, but there doesn't seem to be a person on the planet who can tell you what the fruity hell is going on with your phone bill. We have scholars who can read hieroglyphics, cave drawings and the handwriting in hip-hop album liner notes, but even they throw up their hands in disgust when you ask them what a Cross-Promotional Technolocality fee is or why you're being charged for Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal. And this isn't only because you called them up at home in the middle of the night from a bar and they couldn't hear your question over the Phil Collins blaring in the background. They just don't know.

However, all that is unknown may not be unknowable. It may just be that no one has ever had the balls to rip the phony rubber Richard Nixon mask off the truth. And believe you me, there is truth behind the cowardly jargon that clogs your phone bill like Cher's decapitated head stuck in a toilet. Icky truth.

Phone bill jargon is all about telecommunications companies needing to give you a "deal" to get your business, but being genetically incapable of actually giving you a deal. If they actually managed to give you a bargain, their fat-cat golfing buddies would never let them hear the end of it, and might actually call into question whether they're really white or actually a member of some deceptively near-white-looking minority group. That, and they're greedy as fuck. So you can rule out not being bent over the barrel by the phone companies, that's just a fact of life.

However, everybody likes to feel like they're getting a bargain, so the phone companies developed a clever ploy to lower their rates while actually raising their rates. They gradually shifted more and more of their expenses into itemized fees and taxes that aren't included in your standard rate. So now your cell phone plan is only $40 a month instead of $60, but they're charging you $22 in made-up fees and official-sounding taxes on the back end of the bill. Washington capitulated because they liked the sound of the word and wanted to put "capitulating" on their résumés.

So now you open your cell phone bill and it's like you let a bunch of greedy leprechauns loose who are running around and grabbing whatever they can get their dirty little mitts on. There's one called the Federal Programs Cost Recovery Fee. This is to reimburse the phone companies for all the money they spent lobbying to get all of these fees and taxes okayed by the bureaucrats. Another is called the Universal Connectivity Fee, which is universal because everyone has to pay it, and it covers the cost of the phone company making sure everything is plugged in.

Telephone Number Pooling fees cover the cost of phone company employees picking out phone numbers that spell embarrassing words on the keypad when they're supposed to be working. Wireless Number Portability is a fee to offset the money phone companies are losing to cell phones, while the Audible Proximity fee is to offset the money cell phones are losing to people being in the same room and talking.

Enhanced 911 is a feature that plays a little animation of a guy getting carjacked next to a funny cartoon policeman sleeping in his cruiser with little Z's coming out of his head while you're waiting for 911 to connect you with a dispatcher. The Relay Service and Communication Devices Fund covers the cost of connecting calls to land-based phones, while the Telecommunications Relay Service Surcharge connects you to phones shaped like footballs and other novelty items.

The Universal Service Fund Surcharge is a fee paid to Universal Studios to recoup their losses from people who are talking on their cell phones so much they're not scared by the big jumping shark on the tram ride. The Federal Exercise Tax is meant to recoup the strain on the health care system caused by you talking on your cell phone instead of exercising.

The so-called State Regulatory Fee is also known at the Don Knotts Surcharge, which guarantees that you will never, ever, be telephoned by Don Knotts at any time. The FCC Access Charge covers lawsuits against the phone company brought by people who've had movies, meals, sporting events, urinations, wedding vows and evening commutes ruined by some idiot yakking on his cell phone.

Last but certainly not least, the Trans-Continental Deactivation fee is the charge for them to pull their dick out of your ass after they're done fucking you.

Likewise, you're taxed by the states, counties, cities, and special taxing districts you're calling to and from, and by Burt Shyman from Oak Grove, CT, who invented the dropped call. And you're also paying to not have your phone number listed in Serial Killer Magazine, and for the expenses incurred by the phone company while they're selling your phone number to every disabled reindeer charity, opinion survey group and credit card company in the nation.

The deeper you probe into this mystery, the murkier it becomes, kind of like Ronald Reagan's brain. Stare too long and you may come away cross-eyed, or sterile. One thing is clear, however: If it's not cell phone radiation giving us these brain tumors, it's the bills.

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I can't count the number of times in this life that I've been unfairly accused of being a pessimist. Actually, I probably could, since I'm a capable adult who made it through grade school with little trouble, unlike some people I could mention by name. So perhaps it is more accurate to say I don't care to count the times. If somebody out there is hot to get on my good side, they could run up some figures and leave the result on my desk after working hours today, but otherwise we're just going to have to work from my general estimate of "a whole lot."

Usually the name-calling follows a familiar scenario: Some dewy-eyed dreamer with his or her head up in the clouds will make some unrealistically optimistic statement about his worth as a human being or her newborn baby's chances of surviving its current bout with pneumonia. My reply then invariably inspires a response along the lines of "You know, Doug, you're a real 'glass-is-half-empty' kind of guy." Sometimes this is followed by a physical assault. That's a figure I can actually peg at exactly 107, as the county sheriff's office has done the tallying legwork for me on that one.

What few have the patience or acumen to realize is that I'm not a pessimist at all. Far from it. I'm an asshole. I don't fear the worst in any given situation, I embrace it and wish it upon all those in my immediate vicinity, hoping to be myself passed over in the cosmic game of "duck, duck, goose" called misfortune.

I see the glass as neither half-full nor half-empty. I just want to know who the hell drank my water. I'm not performing a glass-filling service here, people.

Irregardless of the truth, I am continually accused of finding the cloud inside the silver lining and the bucktooth on the beauty queen. In my high school yearbook I was voted "Most Likely to Sue the High School Yearbook," which actually ended up being true. They must have had a couple of Criswells working on the staff there, pretty impressive. However, a couple of Johnnie Cochrans might have come in more handy since they lost the suit and now South El Paso High has been without a yearbook department for going on forty years. Sucks for them.

As for me, I parlayed my windfall from the settlement into the beginnings of a successful 1-900 telephone business, Psychic Kick. You may remember our television commercials from the early 80's. They featured three actors, in heavy makeup, dressed as a clown, a simpleton and a mean pro-wrestling sumbitch, with the three of them together representing "The Fates." During the 30-second spot they would taunt and heckle the viewer into calling to hear what the future had in store for them, for a modest per-minute rate and generous telephone surcharge.

Our "telephone psychics" were actually a bunch of gum-popping beauty school girls moonlighting for two dollars an hour and free tax advice. When a customer would call in, the girls would keep them on line as long as possible, pulling "fortunes" that I had written on slips of paper from a large novelty hat. Most of them contained terrible news, like "You will die alone in Oklahoma" or "Your dog will contract a rare blood-shitting disorder known as diarrheabetes," but somehow the service still became wildly popular.

Some have suggested that the service's great success was due not to my sharply penned fortunes, but more to the fact that the girls, under heavy pressure to keep the Johns (as we referred to callers) on the phone as long as possible, would resort to describing their blowjob technique when they ran out of fortunes to read. This may or may not have been true, but since I didn't pay the girls a red cent in the end I like to think they at least gained some experience toward their inevitable future careers.

Pessimist? I think not. Asshole? That's more like it. I implore you to contemplate the difference as you lie there on your deathbed in the poor house one day, examining the broken shards of your wasted, miserable life. You might learn something for once.

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