As the deadline for today's harangue arrived, Phil Bronstein was still not dead, nor did his horrible death appear especially imminent or even a distant possibility.
You take your miracles where you can get 'em, I guess.
Perhaps you heard about what happened to Bronstein. He's the executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the husband of extra-hot film seductress Sharon Stone. He was recently bitten by a Komodo dragon, which is almost impossible unless you're having a backstage tour of a major zoo like the one in Los Angeles, which he was.
Except for the part about being executive editor and marrying Sharon Stone, this same thing almost happened to me once. And I'm here to tell you that Phil Bronstein is a MAN! They may be crowing all over Los Angeles in the hangover of the NBA championship that Shaq is a MAN! Or even THE MAN! Well, Shaq nothin'. Phil Bronstein is THE MAN!
What proves it is that Bronstein went toe-to-toe with the ridiculously dangerous Komodo -- toe-to-teeth as we'll see from the impending play-by-play -- and spent only five days in the hospital. Phil, you da man. He faces only a few months of physical therapy. You've got to know your Komodo to appreciate the fact that we're still talking about Phil's future.
For my money, and from some personal experience in the form of a backstage pass from the National Zoo in Washington four years ago, the Komodo dragon is not only the most frightening creature on God's Earth, a contemporary wide-awake nightmare right out of "Jurassic Park," but easily the most dangerous living thing on The Discovery Channel, MTV or even Larry King.
The Komodo is so fantastically destructive it's gone right to National Geographic specials. In an episode that aired Saturday night, a stare-down between a Komodo and some type of deadly Asian cobra ended when the cobra, frozen except for a small quiver of the lower mouth that seemed to say, "Why did they book me on this show? Where's the Hindu with the basket? Look at the SIZE of that boy!" took a crackling faceful of dragon tail and slithered off. In the same episode, two Komodos actually stood on their hind legs and wrestled for sexual domination. Had there only been a turnbuckle and some handy slutflesh, Vince McMahon would have had the rights.
The Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard, can kill you so many ways it just isn't fair. It can bring down livestock with its tail, fell a 1,000-pound water buffalo with the septic bacteria dispensed in its bite, swallow the calf of a delivering goat whole and eat the mother if it's particularly hungry, hold a boar in place with its grappling hook claws and rip its flesh away with its serrated teeth, or, on rare occasions, just have a salad and a small club soda with lime.
Sharon and Phil and I share a fascination for the animal, so Sharon arranged a private zoo tour for Phil as a Father's Day present. Neither mentioned it to me actually, but it's all right; I had plans. At the Los Angeles zoo, the keeper asked Phil if he'd like to come inside the dragon's quarters so that Sharon could snap a picture. Fearless as he is (he's said to be the first journalist to have seen Imelda Marcos' shoes), Phil said yes. Error! The keeper then asked Phil to remove his white shoes so that the dragon would not mistake them for white rats, a common dragon foodstuff in captivity.
This is a common precaution. When I had my backstage tour, the keeper, the affable Trooper Walsh, told me it was important for him to wash up before opening the rear of the dragon's cage. "If he smells rats on me, I'll be shredded," Trooper said. I noted that Trooper did not ask me to wash up, an apparent assumption that I'd not been handling rats that day.
You take your compliments where you can get 'em, I guess.
Anyway, barefoot in the dragon's lair, positioning himself for Sharon's lens, Phil made some kind of foot pivot that the dragon interpreted as decidedly snack-like, and the dragon chomped on Phil's big toe. But instead of screaming and passing out, which I'd considered just as Trooper opened the door in Washington, Phil pried the animal's jaws loose and headed for the emergency room. What a man.
With everyone on the celebrity-crazed left coast trying to broker the dragon's appearance on E! to see if they can get it to say Phil tasted just like chicken, no particular scrutiny has been directed at Sharon beyond some idiotic speculation that the whole episode was her payback for Phil being photographed by a British tabloid having cocktails with another woman. A more reasoned question might go to the nature of her other Father's Day gifts. Does she have a receipt, for example, for that chic male cologne, Calvin Klein's Rodentia?
Of course, none of this happened to me, because when Trooper asked if I cared to extend my wrist, as he was, to let the dragon sniff me with its pink, forked, vacuum-cleaner cord tongue, I managed one of the truly intelligent answers of my life.
"How 'bout, 'No.' "
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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