As the cabdriver took the exit, I saw the air traffic control tower on the horizon getting closer, closer, closer. I was almost free to breathe! Just then, the driver turned his head in my direction and asked, “Which airline are you at?”
I started to show four fingers in a misguided attempt to pantomime the words “US Airways” so that I wouldn’t have to stop holding my breath. And it was precisely at that moment that I solved the mystery of the overwhelming stench.
It was his breath. That terrible, sickening smell was coming from his mouth. And the sickest part of it was that I knew I wasn’t overreacting when the urge rose up inside of me to scream as if I suddenly had found myself sitting in the middle of Grand Central station with no pants on and a wad of Charmin in my hand. I quickly grabbed my purse, got my wallet, and rummaged through it to find enough cash for the fare so I wouldn’t have to stay in that cab a second longer than necessary.
I grabbed a twenty just as the cab pulled up to the curb and stopped in front of the US Airways terminal. Just as I leaned forward to hand it to him, he opened the car door to get out.
I’m not exactly sure what happened next—I don’t know whether the bottom of his nylon sweatpants caught the handle of the seat adjuster below, whether one foot stepped on the hem of the other pant leg, or whether the elastic suddenly around his waist had surrendered and exhaled its final, exhausted breath. I can’t say. All I know is that as I leaned forward, I saw the shiny navy blue material bolt south, cresting over a wide expanse of flesh and gathering momentum for its last push to the bottom of the hill, and before I could shoot backward, the driver’s exposed, unveiled ass was less than two feet from my face.
Without missing a beat, he immediately reached back, grabbed his waistband, and yanked it back over his enormous, bare, brandished posterior and slammed the cab door like it happened a million times. Every. Single. Day.
There are moments in life that pass all too quickly, and there are those that drag all too leisurely, siphoning every grain of time they have left in the frame. Then there are moments that make the world halt, that hold you hostage long enough for the comfort of denial to settle in, until you believe that a cabdriver’s pants did not fall off at the distance from your face that you would normally hold an ice cream cone. This was one of those moments.
It was at this point that I wondered why it was that I stopped carrying a flask of bourbon in my purse. If you had asked me prior to this moment what circumstances would have allowed me to become nose to cheek with a stranger’s bare buttock, I only could have surmised that I had become a crack whore, and even then, I would not be the one about to hand over a twenty-dollar bill. Especially not to a stranger who couldn’t be bothered to brush his teeth for decades, let alone secure his danglies with some undergarments.
I will admit that I held back on my typical twenty percent, but do believe that some solid advice can take the place of monetary gains when administered properly.
“Here’s the fare,” I said, finally relinquishing the twenty as I fled from the cab. As I grabbed the handle of my suitcase from him, I took a large step back, looked him dead in the mouth, and said: “And here’s a tip: Whatever about the dental floss, you’ve got three teeth left, you’d just be going through the motions at this point. I get it. But before other parts of you start to rot, too, you need to buy some goddamn underwear.”
But what I didn’t see coming was his jaw dropping just as quickly as his pants. Within seconds, his concentrated fetid breath shot in a direct line out of his mouth and into my sinus cavity, where the scent firmly planted itself and remained until I reached my gate and headed into the two thousand miles of airspace beyond.
THE RED CHAIR
It was the grandest red chair I had ever seen.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
The contour of its winged back flared out at precise, perfect angles; the brass tacks flawlessly aligned along the edges of the armrests fixed the dark, deep red bouclé upholstery firmly in place; the arms rolled outward slightly in an invitingly wide curve, as if going too far in one direction would be unforgivable.
I loved this chair.
But it was too late. I had already pledged my allegiance to the antique dressing table that was displayed in the window of St. Vinnie’s, my favorite thrift store. I had unabashedly lusted for a three-mirror table for most of my adult life, and I couldn’t have found a more perfect one than if I had rubbed my own belly and made a wish. The cashier had my debit card and a SOLD sticker was slapped on one of the mirrored panels before I even looked over and saw the glorious chair. And the side tables that matched the vanity. And the antique footstool covered in floral, cabbage rose chintz. And the incredible floor lamp, and the carved rocker, and the overstuffed settee in white linen. But the standout, I felt by far, was the chair.
“How much is that?” I asked without a second’s hesitation, knowing full well that if he said anything below sixty bucks, I was going to take it even though I knew that I was already going to have trouble sneaking a dressing table into the house, never mind a huge 1930s wingback chair.
“It’s $74.99,” the cashier said without looking up, and handed me the receipt for the table.
“Oh,” I scoffed, more grateful than anything that I had just escaped the trap I had set for myself. “That’s far too much. Far too much.”
The cashier shrugged.
“It’s too much,” I said in a whisper and I nodded. “It is.”
“Okay . . .” the cashier replied.
Fine, I thought in my head. Charge too much for a red chair. See if anyone will buy it! I thought you were a charity! Shame on you for letting people go hungry or naked or whatever because you priced a chair too high!
But as I was leaving, I had to pass the red chair on my way out. I reached out and touched the wool upholstery, still in great condition, eyed the broad, wide expanse of the seat, the sweeping curves that flared out with elegance of a bygone era. “Oh,” I heard myself whisper, “I love you. How I do!”
It was the Great Gatsby of chairs. Understated yet bold, subtle though demanding. A classic. A standard set so high that other chairs wilted in its shadow, afraid, lesser. I pictured it in my living room, layered in newspapers and unopened mail. In my office, with my computer perched in its lap. In my bedroom, smothered under an enormous pile of wrinkled clothes.
I could not bring this chair home with me, I told myself; I could not. I find it very difficult to pass up once-in-a-lifetime deals and they happen all the time to me. As a result, I already have two Victorian couches, an antique architect’s desk, a steamer trunk, and an eighteenth-century French pine door in my subterranean wing, which is what I like to call our basement.
However, I have plans for everything, and I keep telling my husband this. I will get to the couches as soon as I master the art of reupholstery, which I will probably start sometime in my fifties, possibly sixties; the desk will go into the library as soon as I marry my second husband (hopefully a plumber), who will make enough money to build one; and I will use the door when I buy a house that is missing one that measures nine feet tall.
And I know danger lingers right around the corner. I am aware of that. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I do have true concerns about becoming not just a hoarder but a hoarder who goes down in hoarding history, like the Collyer brothers, who died in their New York City town house when one of the brothers—while attempting to feed the other brother, who was blind and immobile—was crushed by his own booby trap of newspaper bundles and a baby carriage to catch “intruders”; as a consequence the other brother starved to death ten feet away . . . although their bodies were found two weeks apart. Or Big and Little Edie Beale of Grey Gardens, who had a twenty-eight-room mansion but used only three rooms because of the abundance of trash, raccoons, and cats that ruled the rest of it. Or Howard Hughes, who held on to his urine and collection of fingernail clippings for far longer than was really necessary. My husband shares these concerns and is
convinced he’s going to die in a fire fueled by my abundance of ephemera, with his major lament being, “People will never know that I was funny.”
So when I came home with the announcement that my lifelong quest for the perfect dressing table had just been completed, he was far less thrilled than I was.
“Great,” he said without looking at me. “One more place you can put paper in.”
“It’s an awesome table,” I said. “It’s got a three-way mirror and rosette carvings on the front.”
“Where is it going to fit?” he asked. “In between the two Victorian sofas in the dungeon where it can get nice and warped and grow mushrooms on its legs? Does it even fit in the bedroom?”
“Yes!” I lied. “I just need to move the pile of clothes that need to be dry-cleaned over to where the pile of clothes that need to be lint rolled is, and put the piles of clothes that are moth-eaten or have stains I can’t get out into the plastic bins, so I can put those in the basement until I decide I can’t save them and then throw them away in roughly twelve years’ time.”
“You should have been an engineer,” he said, starting to walk out of the room.
“One more thing,” I said, standing on my toes in unbridled excitement. “There’s this red chai—”
“No,” he said as he walked into the kitchen.
“But you don’t understand,” I said, presenting my case. “It’s magnificent and—”
“No,” he said finally, without even turning around.
Okay, I thought. I get the hint. I have pushed the limits with the vanity, I need to back off and let it go and forget about the chair.
For dinner, I made his favorite meal and tried again after he took the first bite.
“This is great,” he said, giving me the nod of approval.
“It really isn’t great,” I replied. “There are very few things in the world that are great, like Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, Yo-Yo Ma, Gandhi, and the red chair. That’s how awesome the red chair is.”
He didn’t say a word. He didn’t even look at me.
“As I was trying to explain earlier, I was at St. Vinnie’s when I saw the vanity, and then the red chair—”
“Stop with the red chair,” he advised. “I’m never going to say yes. We have too much furniture in this house as it is.”
“But you don’t understand,” I pushed. “It was incredible in there. Somebody really good died, because it was like walking into my own estate sale. There was stuff that seemed like it already belonged to me. So it’s like I have to get it back.”
“This argument would have much more weight if you didn’t meet an eighty-year-old lady with crazy hair, wearing bright red glasses and a beret—at a jaunty angle—with a huge red velvet flower on it while walking the dog last week and become convinced you just met yourself from the future,” he added.
“I’m sorry,” I said adamantly. “That was future Laurie, and you are in for a wild ride, my friend!”
“If you say one more word, I’m going to tape you and play it for people,” he informed me.
The next day, I woke up from my dream about sitting in the red chair, in which I was wearing my favorite lint-free smallest dress from 2000, eating Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, and my bald spot (I reserve the right to call it a cowlick) had almost completely grown in.
An hour later I repeated what I could of the dream and realized that unless I had arrived already equipped with ice cream, I was foolish to even try. Every St. Vinnie’s employee who passed offered to help, to which I replied that being in the store “was like being at my own estate sale. Somebody really good died!” until the manager came over and told me he’d give me a discount if I’d sit in that chair all day—at my own house:
“Ten dollars off,” he said.
“Fifteen,” I volleyed.
“Sure,” he answered. “Sixty and the chair is yours.”
“Will you hold that price for twenty-four hours?” I bargained. “In the meantime, I want this rug. It looks very familiar to me. Like I’ve walked on it before.”
I was dragging the wool rug into my house when my husband came home early.
“What are you doing?” he asked as I struggled with the small fifty-pound, bedroom-size rug.
He looked at me and when I didn’t say anything, he shook his head.
“Did you buy that at your estate sale?” he asked.
“I was just visiting the red chair,” I tried to explain. “And I saw this.”
“I thought we were past the red chair,” he said. “I thought that was your obsession for yesterday.”
“I got him to come down on the price,” I said weakly with a trace of hope. “It’s only sixty dollars now.”
“I’m never going to say yes,” my husband reminded me. “Never.”
“I’m feeding hungry families,” I added. “Or naked ones. Probably both at the same time. And they only need the price of a cup of coffee a day to live well. I don’t know if that’s deli or Starbucks prices, but the point is I am making a difference.” My husband looked at me expressionlessly, waiting for me to finish. “It’s for the children. They’re naked,” I added.
“We don’t need another chair,” my husband said. “There are nothing but chairs in the living room as it is. You don’t even sit in the leather chair you bought at St. Vinnie’s two months ago. It looks like Rent-A-Center in here. All we need is a couple of washing machines and we’re set!”
I didn’t say anything else about the red chair. Not through dinner, not during commercials that my husband forgot to fast-forward through when we were watching TV, not when we were playing with our dog. I waited until he put his sleep apnea mask on, a complicated facial contraption/vacuum apparatus complete with buckles, snaps, and an accordion hose that rises from the middle of it and stretches out about the length of an intestine. I am positive that in the fire that will ultimately engulf us, my husband will squander his chance to live because he’ll be too afraid to run outside and let another man see that he had let his wife browbeat him about his snoring until he agreed to vacuum-seal an elephant’s trunk to his face for eight hours a day.
With the whir of the machine going, I climbed into bed and faced the red chair’s greatest adversary.
“Hey,” I whispered right into his face. “I know what I could do with the red chair.”
My husband’s sleepy hand batted me away like a pesky mosquito.
“I’ll use it in my office for my sewing chair,” I continued. “Can I get it?”
His mouth opened and made a huge sucking noise, which I understood as “Yes, you must go and fetch the red chair before another lucky husband gets to have it blocking doorways in his house.”
After I woke up in the morning, I immediately showered and squealed into the St. Vinnie’s parking lot. Within fifteen minutes, I was back in my driveway with a red chair sticking out of the hatchback. I dragged it into the backyard next to a dresser I forgot I bought at Goodwill. I wasn’t hiding the chair exactly, but I knew it was a sore subject and didn’t want to make it worse by flaunting it so soon.
The next day, my husband was taking out the garbage, bumped into the chair, said “Ow,” and continued on his way without a word. He said nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief—his initial confrontation with the chair had come and gone with not so much as a dirty look in my direction. I took that as a very good sign that although all was not exactly well, I’d overcome the first hurdle in getting the chair onto the premises undetected. Still, I was hesitant to press my luck and move the chair into the house. I figured by the end of the week, he’d be used to hurting himself on it and I could complete the relocation.
The next day we were sitting on the deck when he looked at me and said, “I’m so glad you let that red chair thing go. You haven’t said a word about it for days and I really appreciate your considering my opinion on it. I’m sure it found a good home.”
My eyes got wide. I smiled. And I panicked a little.
“I
think it did,” I said. “Once I get it inside.”
He shot me an incredulous look.
“You said I could get the chair! So I did! It’s under the deck. It is ten feet from you. And you ran into it yesterday!”
“I did not,” he replied, quite adamant.
“Look at your knee! I bet you have a red chair bruise on it,” I added. “You would be the worst witness ever to take the stand.”
“Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable,” he informed me. “What shirt was I wearing five minutes ago?”
My mind went blank. I didn’t know. I was stumped. What was he wearing five minutes ago? I had no idea.
His smile grew bigger as my silence did, and then I took a chance.
“I have an answer, but if I’m right, you have to help me move the chair into the house,” I said, to which he nodded.
I pointed at his chest. “You were wearing that shirt,” I said, knowing that in our house, once we get dressed, that’s pretty much it. We could have a carotid artery splash like a fire hose on our clothing and we would seriously weigh the effort of finding another clean outfit or just ignoring it until bedtime required otherwise.
He laughed. And then he helped me bring the chair inside.
I promised not to go to St. Vinnie’s anymore, in addition to promising that I wouldn’t buy any more furniture from Goodwill or Value Village, or bring anything home that I found in an alley. Later that night, when I passed by the living room to go to the kitchen, I saw my husband reading a book.
I’m sure that he abandoned the effort of getting to the couch after trying to scale the valley of the red chair and realizing he would need some rope, a spotter, and something to pee in, but that really didn’t matter. He was relaxing in the chair, with its wingback so widely and elegantly spread, the brass tacks in perfect, gleaming lines down the sides, completely blocking the doorway from the living room to the dining room.
The Potty Mouth at the Table Page 11