Free A View From a Broad by Bette Midler Page A

you’re out on tour, wherever you may be, the native with whom you come in contact most is the man whose job it is to drive you to and from the airport, hotel, hall an restaurants, the man who also tends to be your guide on sight-seeing junkets and shopping sprees. In other words, your chauffeur.
    For a chauffeur, enthusiasm, patience and a keen sense of the ridiculous are very important, especially when driving folks who are longing to see the sights but haven’t the vaguest notion what the sights are, or why, indeed, they are sights at all. Couple this ignorance with the fact that such grimly uninformed travelers are invariably in a hurry, and you can readily understand why the life expectancy of chauffeur, especially in the non—English–speaking countries, is much shorter than that of almost any other worker involved in a service industry. In fact, one of my chauffeurs explained to me that many of the stone markers one sees along the highway are not kilometer signposts, as one might think, but rather dainty gravestones marking the spot where various chauffeurs have dropped by the wayside. I myself saw such a stone engraved: “HERE LIES LARS SCHAV. HE DROVE JOEY HEATHERTON. R.I.P.”
    My driver in England was named Bert, and he was quite extraordinary. Overweight, but underwhelmed by anyone of any station. The only thing Bert ever really tipped his hat to was a good dirty joke. Or a bad one. In fact, Bert preferred the bad ones, which made me like him even more. To show you what I mean,here’s Bert’s all-time favorite:
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    BERT’S FAVORITE JOKE
    Have you heard the one about the fat little boy who was so dumb he thought “sex” was the past tense of “six”? He finally earned his dunce cap when a teacher who thought he was getting too plump asked him how many slices of bread he ate each day.
    “Oh,” the lad replied, “I have sex in the morning, and I have sex at night. Sometimes I even have sex for luncheon.”
    Well, word got around that the little chap did not want to be dumb anymore, so a very enterprising schoolmate picked up some rabbit droppings and put them in a jar. He went to see the dunce and said, “You want to be smart, heh?”
    The dumbo nodded.
    “Tell you what,” the rascal said, “I have some smart pills here. You can have ’em for a quid.”
    Well, the little boy was ecstatic. He paid the chap a quid and started to chomp on the pills. “Holy mackerel,” he cried, “these taste like shit!”
    “You see?” the other replied. “You’re getting smarter already.”
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    How could I help but be charmed by a man who told with the greatest enthusiasm jokes even older and more gruesome than mine?
    Another chauffeur I will never forget was Josef, my driver in Copenhagen. In his late forties and about five feet tall, he was a pint-sized version of a classic Viking god.
    One day on a sight-seeing drive around Copenhagen’s famous harbor, Josef stopped in front of an old and graceful yacht that was tied up in the notorious Sailors’ Quarter.
    “She’s beautiful, no?” Josef smiled at the boat like an old lover.
    “Definitely, beautiful,” I said, “and what a wonderful name it has— Englen med Sorte Vinger. What does it mean?”
    “The Angel with Black Wings,” Josef answered.
    “Oh,” I said, “that’s a sort of scary name for a boat, don’t you think?”
    “Not really,” he said, turning around in the front seat andgazing at me with his calm blue eyes. “It’s from an old Danish fairy tale about a baby mouse who steals up into the attic to nibble on some cheese he’s swiped from the family larder. Tired and full, he’s just about to fall asleep when a bat flies in the window, directly over his head. In a flash, the little mouse is up and racing downstairs to his mother. ‘Oh, Mama, Mama’ he cries, his heart beating with excitement, ‘guess what I just saw!’ ’What, dear?’ Mama Mouse asks her little baby. ‘Something wonderful,’ the little mouse exclaims.