It's So Hard To Type With A Gun In My Mouth by Steve Bluestein Page A

It's a house that was featured on HGTV, so modestly I say...it's nice. When I travel it's really important to me that I have similar accommodations. So I check in and ask the girl what floor I was on... "15" was the answer. I'm thinking view of the strip, I'm thinking neon lights at midnight, I'm thinking Billboard with my name on it. I'm really excited. She called it the "Luxury Tower". However, like everything else in Vegas, reality has it's own space and time. The hotel adds ten floors, to make it seem grander... so I was not on the 15th floor but the 5th. And as for Luxury, I was in the Warsaw Hilton. There was still blood on the carpets from the last guest's murder. It smelled like a carton of camels and I'm not talking about the cigarettes. Who picks out the colors, Stevie Wonder? Pink and green? I needed a motion sickness pill to go to the bathroom.  Still, I wanted to see what I could see from the 5th floor. I open the drapes and as God is my judge... on my father's grave... I swear to you there are six, 14 inch, air conditioning conduits running right across the window blocking 50% of the view. I am looking at pipes...huge, silver pipes. I can see the strip if I drag the table onto the bed and stand on it. The room sucks.
     
    I unpack and head for the showroom where I discover the announcer has been fired the night before and a new one has been hired to make a tape loop for my introduction. Before I even hear the tape, I know what to expect. My name is pronounced Blue-stine like beer stein. The announcer on the tape is going to say... "Blue-steen" like Bruce Springsteen. And that was exactly what he did. "Can't we make another tape?" They look at me like I just shot the Pope. So every night when they introduce me, I'm backstage with my fingers in my ears going LALALALALALALALA, so I don’t hear my name sounding like some summer camp director.
     
    The shows are great. I was working with Cathy Ladman and Steve Altman. These are two of my favorite people on the face of the earth. We drove up together (so my plane did not crash in the desert.) We had a great drive until Baker...where they are repaving the road... bumper to bumper, five miles an hour... for six miles. I could have gotten out and run to Vegas faster. Cathy has a small child and decides we should play car games. I check the glove box for a gun.
     
    Cathy, Steve and I are like the 3 Musketeers. We do everything together. The most of which is laugh. Three comedians who like each other, this is like finding an Arab who wants to move to Shaker Heights. The hotel gives us free food at the Riviera Club. Sounds nice, no? It's the employee cafeteria...or as we called it...Death's Diner. The hotel sends down day old food from the "good" restaurants. The employees can feast on shoe leather chicken and cream of the day before yesterday vegetable soup. Since I can't cook, I don’t mind the swill. But the other two were very picky. "I want taste" " This is rubbery"... babies.
     
    During the day we do what all comedians do on the road... we go to the mall. We usually spend about 6% more than we earn. I found a sports jacket to replace the one from J. Crew. "Take the security tag off, please!". Cathy buys enough children's clothing to keep China sewing for six months and Steve Altman went wild in Structure.
     
    The week was like that... bad food, shopping, fat audiences, sleep. Sound exciting, no? Then yesterday it happened. What you were all waiting for. THE BAD THING. Sometime back I mentioned my L4 & L5 bone spurs. They are the result of Polio, which required a spinal tap as a child. (Oh how could I make this shit up...) And every so often, without warning, the spurs cause muscle spasms in my back that absolutely cripple me. One time I was out with my dog and had an attack that left me paralyzed on the sidewalk. I was on the ground for ten minutes unable to move, with the dog still attached to my arm via the leash. A woman walks up to me and straddles my chest.