by Jenny Lawson
But here’s the deal: Between the herbs, and oil, and acupuncture, and the cancer drugs, and all of the rest of it, you find yourself occasionally having pain-free days. Days that you learn to appreciate simply because no one stuck eighty-six needles in you that morning. Days when you have an impromptu picnic on the lawn because you can bend your knees that day. Days when studies are released showing that booze helps stave off arthritis attacks. Those are the golden days.
And even on days when I’m bedridden and can’t move, I’m grateful to have my daughter curl up near me and watch old Little House on the Prairie episodes. I try to be appreciative of what I have instead of bitter about what I’ve lost. I try to accept this disease with grace, and patiently wait for the day when they find a cure. And for when I get my monkey butler.3
1. Or the Spanish Inquisition.
2. Actual warning: “Some side effects may cause death. You should only take this drug to treat life-threatening cancer, or certain other conditions that are very severe and that cannot be treated with other medications.”
3. Also, from now on, all the handicapped parking spots really do belong to people in wheelchairs and not just to people who feel like they’re disabled because they have really bad cramps that day. And also, if you’re in a wheelchair you get frontsies in line at the liquor store from now on. And you get free sexy shoes. We need to get this all passed in Congress before I’m disabled because then it’ll look like I’m just doing it for me because that’s what Jesus would do.
It Wasn’t Even My Crack
Not long after I quit my job to become a writer, Victor quit his to be an executive at a medical software company. This was awesome, except for the fact that now both of us worked at home and constantly wanted to murder each other. I took a lot of freelance writing jobs to pay the bills, including one where I was paid to review bad porn. Victor would walk around the house in his Britney Spearsesque hands-free headset, making business deals and screaming things like “BUY! SELL! WE NEED MORE ELEPHANTS ON THIS PROJECT!” Or something like that. Honestly, I wasn’t really listening. I just know that nothing is more distracting than a man wandering aimlessly through your home while yelling to himself about spreadsheets and investment returns while you’re trying to write a satirical article about the eternal cultural relevancy of Edward Penishands.
Inevitably Victor would wander blindly into my office as he walked around the house, looking as if he were screaming about project management to the confused cats hiding under my desk. I’d glare at him, but he would never get the hint, so instead I’d pull up a work-related porn clip from my computer, skip to the money shot, and turn the volume to eleven. Victor would look at me in horrified panic as he’d cover his mouthpiece and run from my office, desperately hitting mute and whisper-screaming to me about being on an important conference call. Then he’d ask—in his professional telephone voice—whether everyone was all right, as it sounded like someone was hurt, and I had to hand it to him, because that was a pretty good recovery. Then he’d come back and explain the importance of silence on his serious conference call, and I would stress the importance of staying in his own damn office. Then he’d stress the importance of my “doing some real work instead of just watching porn at three in the afternoon,” and I’d stress that I was not “enjoying” the porn and that I was merely “reviewing” it. FOR RESEARCH. Considering that we spent a majority of our workday in pajamas while porn played in the background, there was a surprising amount of stress in that workplace.
Eventually Victor would stalk off, muttering about ethics and courtesy, and I’d scream down the hall, “THIS IS MY JOB, ASSHOLE. STOP HASSLING ME OR I WILL STAB YOU IN THE EYE,” and then he’d put his call on mute again and threaten to poison my coffee. It was a lot like working in a regular office, except that there were cats there, and also you got to say out loud exactly what you would have just said in your head if you worked in an office that had cubicles and security guards.
Before, when we both worked out of the house, we used to come home and bond by complaining about the moronic people in our respective offices who were obviously trying to destroy us, but now we couldn’t even have that conversation, because, as we were the only ones there, it was perfectly obvious that the only moronic coworkers now trying to destroy us actually were us. After many months of near stabbings, we finally agreed that we needed a house where our offices were farther apart, and we realized that there was nothing tying us to Houston any longer. We were free to move anywhere we wanted. Victor suggested Puerto Rico, but when I looked in my heart I knew where I wanted to move, and no one was more shocked about it than myself, because it went against everything I’d promised myself years earlier when I had Hailey.
When Hailey was born my first thought was that I needed a drink and that hospitals should have bars in them. My second was to assure myself that Hailey would have an entirely different childhood than I had had. I looked at her little face, and I promised to never throw large, dead wild animals on the kitchen table, or set cougars loose in the house. Victor seemed confused but agreed, as he assumed that the drugs were still in my system. They were, but it didn’t change the fact that I was determined that Hailey’d have a life of ballet lessons and museums, and would never wander into the backyard to look at the caged bobcats, only to find a pet duck whose beak had been eaten off by a wild raccoon.
After Hailey was born, Victor and I had settled into life in the suburbs just out of Houston, and I struggled in vain to fit in. Hailey was almost four now, and she was sheltered, and protected, and slightly pale from lack of sun in her small private school, where she was learning music and dance and how to be exactly like everyone else. We enrolled her in gymnastics, but all the other preschoolers seemed to be practicing for the Olympics, and more than one mom mentioned putting their toddlers on diets, which was just fucking crazy. In the end, we decided to just quit and let her jump on the couch. Still, she was on the perfect path to fitting in beautifully in a normal, pretty life, and it scared the shit out of me. Both because I wasn’t sure I was actually doing her any favors by protecting her from a life that I found I actually missed, and also because I had to admit that I found myself feeling a little sorry for Hailey. For not being able to go explore the canals, or feed deer in the yard, or have memories of playing with baby raccoons in the house. We had our cats, and she loved our sweet pug, Barnaby Jones Pickles, who was awesome (who was as close to Laura Ingalls’s brindle bulldog as we would ever get), but he was no bathtub full of raccoons, and I suspect even he would have agreed with that.
And so that’s when I found myself convincing Victor that we should move to the country with a few acres of land, so Hailey could run, and explore, and experience a little of the fucked-up sort of rural life that had made Victor and me able to pretend to be comfortable in many different social circles without ever actually fitting into any of them. We’d both had fond memories of growing up in wide-open places, and I was shocked to suddenly realize that now that I’d seen what it was like to live on the pleasant-but-boring “other side of the tracks,” the childhood of country life that I’d wanted to save Hailey from was one that I now treasured. The heat and wild animals and isolation had molded who I was, and I found myself proud of those bumps along the way that had shaped me. It seemed unfair to deprive Hailey of those same experiences, and moving to the country seemed like the perfect answer.
Hailey—discovering the joy of dirt.
West Texas had changed too much to feel like home, but we eventually found a house in the Texas Hill Country, an hour outside Austin. It was in a tiny town, thirty miles from the nearest grocery store, but it was quiet, and nice, and the house sat on a few acres of trees that drifted down to a pretty, open meadow filled with bluebonnets. I felt like I was home. Plus, my office was on the opposite side of the house from Victor’s, and both had doors you could actually close.
And there was sun:
As always when we bought a new home, Victor asked the questions about
deed restrictions and taxes, while I asked the two questions I was always responsible for: “Has anyone ever died in the house?” and “How many bodies are buried on the property?” I always assume real estate agents are honest on the first question, because legally I think they have to disclose that, but technically I don’t think they’re required to answer the second. I used to ask whether anyone was buried on the property, but I was afraid that real estate agents weren’t being honest with me, so I switched it to “How many bodies are buried on the property?” because then it makes it sound like I expect there are bodies buried because that’s totally normal, and so they’ll be relieved and casually let slip that there are only two and a half bodies buried there. Victor says that my asking those questions is actually doing just the opposite, and that I’m making everyone uncomfortable, and then I point out that I’m actually fine with bodies buried on the property, but that I want to know where they are in case of the zombie apocalypse. This is the point when most real estate agents excuse themselves. Probably because it’s boring to see couples arguing about the zombie apocalypse all the damn time. I expect this sort of thing is the downside to being a real estate agent.
Eventually, though, we bought the house and began the five stages of moving:
DAY 1: Pack everything nicely with Bubble Wrap. Clean it all first so it’s fresh and ready to be unpacked. Label boxes on all sides.
DAY 2: Start intentionally breaking things so you have a reason not to wrap and pack them.
DAY 3: Find eighteen choppers in the kitchen drawers. Demand that Victor stop buying shit from infomercials late at night. Intentionally break seventeen choppers.
DAY 4: Question why you ever started collecting little glass animals, and who allowed you to have fourteen hundred of them. Also, why do we have three junk drawers? Is that a sign that we’ve finally “made it,” or a sign that we’re hoarders? Try to get on Twitter to ask your friends, but then realize that your husband has already packed your computer cords. Feel utterly and completely alone. Cry in the bathroom, but be unable to blow your nose because you can’t find the box you packed the toilet paper in.
DAY 5: Set a large bonfire in the living room. Laugh maniacally as you push cardboard boxes into it.
This was all true except for the very last part. In actuality, my father-in-law (Alan) came on day five to help us throw everything into boxes, and to keep me from throwing choppers at Victor, who’d spent all four days “packing” the garage, which I was pretty sure contained absolutely nothing of value, and which I would have sold for twenty dollars on Craigslist if Victor had died. I’m not entirely sure why a man would need two cabinets filled with tools, when I’ve been able to make it through thirty-five years of life with just duct tape and one screwdriver. Victor says it’s because “people don’t rebuild carburetors with duct tape,” but I’m pretty sure that Victor just doesn’t know how versatile duct tape is.
After we’d packed up the moving van, we began our long ride to our new home. A few minutes into the drive, Alan cleared his throat and self- consciously pulled a baggie out of his front pocket. “Oh. By the way. I found some . . . uh . . . crack, maybe?” he said as he hesitantly handed me the Ziploc bag of crack. My first thought was that it was strange that my very conservative father-in-law would offer me crack, and I wondered whether this was some sort of test. My second thought was that although I’d never seen crack before, I assumed it was expensive, and this seemed to be a lot of crack to have at one time. Unless possibly he was selling it, which seemed strange, since Alan was a very successful businessman. Still, I was aware that he’d given up a whole day to come help us, so I tried to be nonjudgmental as I struggled to find a polite way of turning him down, but then I recognized my handwriting on the baggie. I realized with relief that Alan must have found the bag when he was packing and was nice enough to bring it along for the ride. I laughed and explained, “Oh, this is not my crack. It’s Hailey’s,” and he looked a bit more nauseated, and then I explained that what I really meant was that it was Hailey’s and that it was not crack. It was a powder you can buy that explodes into fake snow when you add water. I explained that Hailey played with it every winter, since we didn’t get real snow in Texas, and it was reusable but that when it dehydrates it looks like crack. I threw a small crack rock into an almost empty water bottle, and it instantly filled with snow, and Alan sighed with relief. It was a little insulting that he’d found crack and automatically assumed it was mine, but I considered everyone else who lived in the house and instead gave him credit for knowing me so well.
Soon after we moved in, I started researching the history of the area and found that we now lived on the edge of “The Devil’s Backbone,” one of the most haunted stretches of land in Texas. I’ve always been fascinated with ghost stories, so it didn’t bother me until a neighbor came over and told me about the bodies buried down the road from us. “The who buried where?” I asked her. Turns out a family had been buried in what was then their backyard, but the wilderness had grown up around it, and now the graves were all but lost. It bothered me. Not that there was an impromptu cemetery down the road (dead neighbors make quiet neighbors . . . I think Robert Frost said that), but that there was a lost graveyard in our subdivision that no one could find. Had it been built over? Were the graves fresh? I’d been happy that we were so far out in the country and wouldn’t be attacked by the hordes of overpopulated city zombies, but it concerned me that if the zombie apocalypse came we might have homemade zombies planted nearby, and we had no idea which direction they might come from. I was concerned. So was Victor, who said he’d appreciate it if I’d stop talking about the zombie apocalypse in front of our neighbors. “She deserves to know,” I retorted, and I told Victor that we needed to find these graves, because I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew where they were.
“No,” he said firmly. “We’re not going traipsing around the woods, looking for bodies in the unlikely event that there is a zombie apocalypse.”
“CONSTANT VIGILANCE,” I (may have) screamed. “I’m doing this for all of us, asshole.” And I was. We had a zombie garden somewhere nearby, and I wanted to be sure that it was old enough that the zombies would be no threat. We fought about it for a few days, until finally he agreed to find out where the graves were, probably because he finally realized that there are some unpleasant things the protector of the house is responsible for. Or possibly because I continually woke him up every three hours to ask whether he heard something on the back porch that sounded “hungry and shuffling.”
Victor found a local guy who claimed to know where the graves were, and he said to just take the road at the end of the street. Except that there wasn’t a road at the end of the street. I pointed at two overgrown tracks in the grass. “I think that’s what he’s talking about.”
“That’s not a road,” Victor said dismissively, but there was nothing else there.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a road,” I explained. “You can tell because there’s a fire hydrant next to it.”
He stared at me in aggravation and clenched his jaw as he turned our car onto the road that wasn’t a road. Several minutes (and one dented oil pan later) we reached a dead end and Victor glared at me. Then something ran out from the brush and I screamed, “CHUPACABRA!” And then Victor slammed on the brakes and just stared at me like I’d gone insane. Probably because I’d been so flustered that I’d accidentally shouted, “CHALUPA!” which I’ll admit is disconcerting to have someone scream at you while you’re being attacked by a dangerous creature. In my defense, though, no one could be expected to communicate properly after seeing a vicious Mexican goat-sucker monster running through the woods. Victor said he’d agree with me completely if the chupacabra hadn’t actually just been a small deer. It was disheartening. Not only were we living in a neighborhood littered with chupacabras1 who were great at impersonating deer, but also we never found the graves. And now I wanted a chalupa, and there wasn’t a Taco Cabana within sixty miles of us. I
t was a failure by any standard, but I consoled Victor by reminding him that at least we didn’t own any goats that we’d have to worry about getting sucked. Then Victor asked me to stop talking, and he told me (for the first of what would eventually be eight thousand times) that we had made a huge mistake in moving to the country.
I defended our new town and assured him we just needed to readjust, but he was right. Clearly we were in over our heads, and I felt it was just a matter of time until one of us got dysentery or yellow fever. Until then, though, we settled back, safe in the knowledge that in moving we’d somehow cheated death . . . certain that when the end came, it would not be from Victor and me stabbing each other from work-related stress, but more likely from the unchartered wilderness (and possible chupacabra zombies) outside our door. Victor and I were comforted in the knowledge that our offices were now far enough apart that we would be safe from each other, but still we were worried.
And we were right to be.
1. Spell-check refuses to recognize the word “chupacabra.” Probably because it’s racist. Spell-check, I mean. Not chupacabras. Chupacabras are monsters from Mexico that suck blood out of goats. They don’t care what race you are. Bizarrely, spell-check is perfectly fine with the word “CHUPACABRA!” in all caps, which makes no sense at all. Unless it’s because it recognizes that you’d use that word only while screaming. Touché, spell-check. P.S. Actual words used in this book that spell-check insists are not real words: Velociraptors. Shiv. Chupacabra. Yay. It’s like spell-check doesn’t even want me to write my memoir.
Honestly, I Don’t Even Know Where I Got That Machete: A Comic Tragedy in Three Parts Days