Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [12]
“You probably don’t remember me,” he said nervously. “I never thought I would ever see you again or get the chance to talk to you. I can’t believe I get to do this.”
Do what? I thought. I braced myself for the man’s soon-to-be-broken hand.
“I never thought I’d get to apologize to you,” he said, as a few tears started to come into his eyes. “And now, here you are, and I get to say this: I’m the guy who ruined your Oscar night. I’m the guy who yelled ‘ASSHOLE’ into your ear right after you came off the stage. I… I… [he tried to compose himself]. I thought you were attacking the president—but you were right. He did lie to us. And I’ve had to carry this with me now all these years, that I did that to you on your big night, and I’m so sorry…”
By now he was starting to fall apart, and all I could think to do was to reach out and give him a huge hug.
“It’s OK, man,” I said, a big smile on my face. “I accept your apology. But you do not need to apologize to me. You did nothing wrong. What did you do? You believed your president! You’re supposed to believe your president! If we can’t expect that as just the minimum from whoever’s in office, then, shit, we’re doomed.”
“Thank you,” he said, relieved. “Thank you for understanding.”
“Understanding?” I said. “This isn’t about understanding. I’ve told this funny story for years now, about the first two words you hear when you’re an Oscar winner—and how I got to hear a bonus word! Man, don’t take that story away from me! People love it!” He laughed, and I laughed.
“Yeah,” he said, “there aren’t many good stories like that.”
Crawling Backwards
THE FIRSTBORN OF MY FAMILY was never born.
And then I came along.
There was another baby on the way, a year before me, but one day my mother felt a sharp pain and, within minutes, Mike the First expressed second thoughts about his much-anticipated debut on Earth, shouted “Check, please!” and was out of the uterus before the audience with their applause decided who was Queen for a Day.
This sudden and unfortunate development greatly saddened my mother. So to console her, my grandmother took her on a pilgrimage to Canada to beg for mercy from the Patron Saint of Women in Labor, the mother of the Virgin Mary herself, Saint Anne. Saint Anne is also the patron saint of Quebec, and a shrine had been built in her honor at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in the province of Quebec. This holy site contained some of the saint’s actual bones plus other holy items encased in the Holy Stairs on the grounds of the shrine. It was said that if you climbed these stairs on your knees, the mother of the Blessed Virgin would help you do what virgins don’t do, which is to conceive.
And so my mother ascended each of the twenty-eight stairs on her knees—and within weeks, as sure as God is both my witness and fertility specialist, I was conceived on a hot July night, first as an idea and then… well, the rest I’ll leave to your imagination. Suffice it to say that within nine months the fertilized egg grew into a fetus and that eventually became an eight-pound-twelve-ounce baby boy that was born with the body of a linebacker and the head of Thor.
They knocked my mother out cold so she wouldn’t have to experience firsthand the miracle of life. Me, I wasn’t so lucky. They poked and prodded and pushed and, instead of letting me get around to the business at hand in my own goddamned time, they grabbed me and yanked me out into a world of bright lights and strangers wearing masks, obviously to conceal their identity from me.
And before I could feel the love in the room, they gave me a serious 1950s old-school wallop on the behind. Yeow! “WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!” That fucking hurt. And then, get this—they severed my most important organ—the feeding tube to my mother! They just cut me right the fuck off from her! I could see this was not a world that believed in prior consent