Here Comes Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

and eventually I got a smile out of him. Finally, I said I had to go or we were going to miss our movie.
    “Hey man,” he said, holding out his hand to shake mine. “I’m sorry I called you that name. You’re right, I don’t really know anything about you. But the fact that you just stopped and talked to me after I called you that—well, that’s got me thinking—I really didn’t know you. Please accept my apology.”
    I did, and we shook hands. There would be no more disrespecting me or threatening me—and it was that attitude that made me safe, or as safe as one can be in this world. From now on, if you messed with me, there would be consequences: I may make you watch one of my movies.

     
    A few weeks later I was back on The Tonight Show for the first time in a while. When it was over and I was leaving the stage, the guy who was operating the boom microphone approached me.
    “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

    T HE 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