The Perfect Comeback

Saying the right thing, or the perfect comeback.  It is almost always an afterthought isn’t it?  How many times have you been in a conversation with somebody, things are said, it’s over…and then 15 minutes later you think of what you should have said.  Like when you meet a famous person and you stammer your way through an awkward conversation…or you meet a hot chick in a bar and she asks you a silly question giving you the perfect opportunity for a witty reply but you totally blow it…or you are at a meeting at work and the boss asks you about a late report and you give some lame excuse.  Then you go over it later in your mind and of course the perfect line pops into your head of what you could have said instead of the stupid stuff that you did say.

It’s frustrating, but what can you do?  You can’t pre-prepare for every situation.  Sometimes I’ll be laying in bed and I will think of something funny to say, the perfect line, the perfect clever thing to interject into a conversation.  But then you have to think of how to get yourself into that situation or conversation and then remember to actually use the line.

Like for example if I am ever engaged in a conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger and suddenly we are interrupted because somebody needs me in the other room for a second, I will of course look Arnold squarely in the eyes and sternly say:  “I’ll be back.”  Or if I am ever out taking a walk with my 2 year old son Jack and we happen to run into Al Pacino, I will flash him a smile, pat Jack on the head and coolly say:  “Say hello to my little friend.”  Or if I am ever over at the Clinton’s house for dinner but Bill is away on business so it’s just me and Hillary and I accidentally spill my glass of red wine down the front of my white shirt and Hillary tells me to take it off so she can have it cleaned right away and then Bill comes home early to find me shirtless while Hillary is dabbing the rest of the wine off my chest…if that ever happens I will quickly back way from Hillary, point at her and loudly exclaim:  “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”

It all reminds me of a 1997 episode from Seinfeld entitled ‘The Comeback’.  George Costanza is at a meeting when a co-worker named Reilly sees him stuffing his face with shrimp, so Reilly says:  “Hey George, the ocean called; they’re running out of shrimp.”  George is flustered, and then only later while driving in his car thinks of the comeback:  “Well, the Jerk Store called, and they’re running out of you.”  George thinks it is the perfect comeback and he spends the rest of the episode going to great lengths to try and recreate the situation so he can use it.  When Reilly transfers to Akron, Ohio, George even goes so far as to fly to Akron and brings a plate of shrimp to a meeting with Reilly to try out the ‘Jerk Store’ line.  He gets to use the line but of course it all goes horribly wrong.  Chandler Bing from ‘Friends’ was the perfect comeback artist, George Costanza not so much.

It feels so good though when you do come up with a good line or comeback on the spot without having to pre-plan.  My buddy Mitch Marshall is the best real 'non-TV' person I know at that, but I have had my moments.  One warm sunny spring day back in high school my friend Mark Smith and I were sitting out in the smoking area smoking a bowl and talking about all the stupid stuff that high school kids talk about.  Suddenly Mark nudged me and pointed to a big beautiful monarch butterfly sitting on a huge pile of dog crap.  I said:  “Wow, I never knew butterflies could poop so much.”  Maybe it was the weed, but we both died laughing and cracked up over it for years afterwards.  Or the time my buddy Ted Booker and I were dancing out on the floor at a Radiators concert at Tipitinas Bar in New Orleans and Ted gave me a big joyous hug because we were both so happy to be there.  He’s shorter than I am so when he started to pull back from the hug, instead I held on tight and yelled over the music into his ear:  “Hold me closer tiny dancer!”.  We still laugh over that one, and whenever I hear that Elton John song on the radio I just have to call him.

As I relayed to you in my 2/15/13 blog entry ‘Meeting Heroes’, I did meet Dan Akyroyd once and it was awesome.  I brought up stuff that people normally would not think to talk to him about and we had a great conversation.  That is not how it went though on 10/23/86 when I went to see the ‘Go Ahead’ band at the Cabooze Bar in Minneapolis.  Go Ahead was a band that consisted of Brent Mydland and Bill Kreutzmann from the Grateful Dead, Alex Ligertwood and David Margen from Santana, as well as funky guitarist Jerry Cortez.  They toured extensively in the Fall of 1986 because Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead was out of commission indefinitely after slipping into a diabetic coma.  A lot of Grateful Dead shows were cancelled and all of us hungry Dead fans were excited about anything Dead-related.  I couldn’t believe I was going to be seeing 1/3^rd of my favorite band in a bar instead of a huge arena or stadium!  The band played covers and were basically just a bar band, but they were a great bar band.

Seeing as how it was in a bar, I of course had a few drinks and was getting buzzed, and now that I think about it I am pretty sure that I was high on acid as well.  I was standing up in the balcony off to the right of the stage dancing and enjoying the show.  Suddenly during the drum solo I happened to look down and there sitting on the edge of a pool table was Brent!  Freaking Brent Mydland from the Grateful Dead was sitting all by himself right below me!  Nobody was talking to him!  I had to go say hi.  I would never forgive myself if I didn’t.

So I stumbled down the stairs and cautiously approached him, having no idea what I was going to say.  He looked kind of sad and somber sitting by himself and when I got to him I reached out to shake his hand and say hi.  We shook hands and I just stared at him sort of freaking out that I was ‘talking’ to one of my heroes.  Maybe I should get his autograph I thought?  I had no paper so I pulled out a dollar bill and like a dork I handed it to Brent and asked him to sign it.  He sighed and said that he did not have a pen.  Of course not, and neither did I so I retrieved the dollar and put it back in my pocket.  Long uncomfortable silence as we just stared at each other, me with a huge grin on my face, him still looking sad.  I had to say something, anything.  Still to this day I have no idea why I said this but all of a sudden I blurted out:  “I love the songs you sing…the vocals…you sound just like Jerry Garcia!”

What?  What??  Why?!  Why did I say that?!  I don’t even think that!  I love his songs and his vocals, but he doesn’t sound like Jerry, he sounds like Brent.  He just stared at me for a second, quietly said:  “Thanks.” and then turned his attention away from me and back to the stage.  Soooo many cool things I could have done and said that night and I have thought of a million of them since then, but telling the somewhat insecure ‘new guy’ in the Grateful Dead that I liked his vocals because they sound like someone else was not one of them.  So not cool.  And sadly, four years later he would be dead.  If there is a next life I will try for a ‘do-over’ with him then.

The reason all of this comes to mind is that recently we had our annual health screening at work.  If you want you can get screened every year for various bio-markers like your blood pressure, BMI index, blood-work, etc.  You go around to different stations, get screened, and for every health screen that you pass classified as ‘healthy’ the company will dump some money into our insurance plan’s HSA account.

Let me also set this up by explaining that as a guy, we like to brag whenever we have had sex.  I work with my buddy Frank ‘The Tank’ Huffman (star of 9/30/11 blog entry ‘Golfing With Frank’) and whenever one of us gets some from our wives we have to tell the other guy.  So the night before our health screening this year I happened to have had sex, and when I passed Frank in the hall that morning I gave him the ol’ sideways Tony Soprano fist-pump hand-signal.  He smiled, called me a bastard and we moved on.  Sorry, but we’re guys…that’s what we do.

Anyways, shortly afterwards it was time for my screening.  I work with my wife Nadia and we booked our screening at the same time.  So we went and filled out all of our forms and Nadia finished hers first.  She started going through the various screening stations with me a couple minutes behind.

Eventually I got to the blood-draw area where they test your blood for various things like cholesterol and tobacco-use.  The nurse stationed there asked me my name and date-of-birth to verify who I was.  I gave her my name and as she signed off on the sheet she recognized my last name and said:  “Oh, I just did your wife a few minutes ago.”

I immediately replied back:  “Oh really?  I just did her last night.”

It was so…f*cking…PERFECT!  The lady’s jaw dropped, she took a step back, looked at me with eyes wide open and her face frozen for a few seconds.  I wasn’t sure which way this was going to go until finally she burst out laughing and said:  “I cannot believe you just said that!”  We both laughed and then I beamed.  I was so happy.  It made my day/week/month/year.  The perfect comeback.  It is out there ladies and gentlemen…you just have to want it, and live long enough to get to it.

Austria

So picking up where my 1/24/13 blog entry ‘Switzerland’ left off, my girlfriend Lona and I escaped from Zurich, Switzerland early on the morning of August 24^thin 1990. We had only been in Zurich for two days, but that was plenty as we were a little creeped out after walking with the zombies in Needle Park. Using our Eurail passes we boarded a train for Innsbruck, Austria, the next stop in our 5-month journey that had started 4 months earlier in Greece with stops in Italy and then Switzerland. It was about a 4-hour train ride so we settled in to our seats and read through our ‘Let’s Go Europe’ book for ideas on what to do in Austria.

We got to Innsbruck at noon, found a bank and cashed in one of our $100 travelers checks for Austrian Schillings, and then checked into a youth hostel. As with most of the hostels in Europe we had to sleep in separate male/female rooms. We were exhausted from almost no sleep the night before so we decided to nap for a couple hours. We got up still sleepy and disorientated so the only touristy thing we did that day was go to the top of the 167 foot Innsbruck City Tower (Stadtturm). This cool old tower was built between 1442 and 1450 and is in the very center of the city’s historic Old Town. It was a hot day but the medieval tower was nice and cool inside. We were so tired that it was a struggle to climb the 148 steps up to the viewing platform, but the awesome 360 degree view of this beautiful city and the surrounding mountains made it worthwhile. In addition to the great pictures we took from up there, it also gave us a good idea of the city’s layout so it was a great first-stop thing to do.

When we got back down to ground we found a pretty cool café and sat outside trying various sausages, bread, wine and other local cuisine. Then for more wine we were directed to a wine-bar that looked extremely old. We descended down the stone-brick steps into a dark, musky underground room, found a table and tried various wines. Then we went to bed fairly early for a change.

We were well rested the next day and ready for some sights. We toyed with the idea of spending the day skiing. The brother/sister couple who gave us their ‘Let’s Go Europe’ book in Zurich had told us how awesome the skiing was there and not too expensive. Innsbruck…home of the 1976 Winter Olympics…Franz Klammer’s crazy gold-medal run…this was the chance of a lifetime to go skiing in the Austrian Alps! We decided against it though because it was an activity that would take up pretty much the whole day and neither of us were big skiers, plus we did not have winter coats. Just jeans, tee-shirts and light jean-jackets. Instead we took a cable car to the top of a mountain and hiked around in the woods for several hours. Then we came back down to town for sightseeing and another great meal with lots of German beer. We got pretty drunk, but not too drunk to check out of our youth hostel and head to the train station.

We decided to get back to our normal routine of taking overnight trains. We travelled at night in order to save money on hotels and to maximize our limited daylight hours to sightseeing instead of sitting on trains. With that in mind, we left that night on an overnight train for Vienna, Austria. We slept better than usual on that train because as soon as we got on we found an empty private room in a 2^ndclass car, quickly closed the door, turned off the light and nobody disturbed us all night. We got to Vienna early on the morning of August 26^th, and armed with recommendations from our travel book we headed out to see the sights.

We spent a few hours in the huge Kunsthistorisches Museum and only saw maybe 1/1000^th of all the things they had to see there. After awhile it was too much so we left and walked around looking at the cool old buildings and architecture. Then we found Beethoven’s statue that was erected in 1880 in a public square called Beethovenplatz. After a full day of sightseeing we decided to take a nap in Stadtpark, a large city park not far from the Beethoven statue.

After awhile we got up and went to a market to buy some beer. It would be cheaper than a bar. I made beer in college and as a beer-lover was extremely excited to try some of the local brews they had to offer. We bought a bag-full of various bottles and went back to the park. We settled on a park bench with our bag o’ beers and soaked up the sun and marveled at how awesome life is. Sitting in a beautiful park on a warm sunny day in freaking Austria drinking local beers. We thought about our friends back home in Minneapolis and wondered what they were doing at the moment. Then we heard a commotion near a large water fountain a couple hundred feet away across the grass. There were 3 homeless people hanging out laughing about something. We decided to head over and say hi.

They were visibly drunk and eyed us with suspicion as we approached. But after being on the road for over 4 months wearing the same 5 sets of clothes the entire time we looked almost as raggedy as they did and we did not appear to be much of a threat. Then when we pulled beers out of our bag and offered them each one, their faces lit up and we were one of them. We sat in the grass next to the fountain drinking beer and smoking cigarettes for the rest of the afternoon with our new Austrian friends.

They spoke very little broken English and we of course spoke no German so communication was a bit difficult. They were extremely friendly however and tried as hard as they could to talk to us in the little bit of English that they knew. We had a great time trading stories, with them asking us about America and us in turn listening to their stories about how they had become homeless. After awhile we did feel like one of them, as we were in effect homeless too. Back in April we had moved out of our apartment in Minneapolis, packed up all of our belongings and stored them in Lona’s parent’s basement, and bought a one-way ticket to Greece. The only difference between our new friends and us was that we had some money to fall back on.

It was fun hanging out with them, but it was also a little sad. One of them told us how he had a good job, but got laid off, lost his home, one thing led to another and here he was – a homeless man living in the park. They each had similar sad stories. We bonded though and felt close to them. As we all got drunker however, things started getting sloppy. One guy got angry about something and gestured wildly, but we did not know what about. And then the girl accidentally fell back into the fountain and came out dripping wet and crying. We all hugged her and told her it was going to be okay but she just accepted her wet fate as a fitting punishment to her already desperate situation of being a homeless drunk. It was very sad, but it was time for us to go. It was getting dark and we had not eaten any lunch or dinner, so we all hugged, said our goodbyes and gave them the rest of our beer.

We found another café near the train station and had a nice meal, but the mood was a little somber as we thought about our friends in the park with no food or money. Why do some people sleep in mansions and other people have to sleep in parks? It seemed so unfair to a couple of young hippies on the road. After finishing up our food and spending the rest of our Austrian money, we decided our next stop would be Munich, Germany. We headed to the train station for the overnight train to Munich, and ‘Munich, Germany’ will be the subject of a future blog.