The Potty Mouth at the Table

by Laurie Notaro

  It fit perfectly.

  I’M GONNA GET YOU

  Last week, I was on a flight from Salt Lake City to Austin to visit some friends, and the man seated next to me, who had not uttered one solitary word for the whole hour we had been in each other’s breathing space, suddenly flipped off his seat belt and ran down the aisle toward the cockpit. It happened immediately after beverage service, so I told myself he must have had to urinate superbad. So bad that he didn’t care that he looked like Mohamed Atta as he catapulted out of his seat. His enormous body was so large that he had to sit sideways in his seat merely to fit, but he was surprisingly fast.

  The need to pee is a powerful motivator; it can rouse you from a wonderful dream in which you are carelessly digging into a ten-pound slice of cake from Cheesecake Factory by yourself; it can drag you away from the last fifteen minutes of Inception; and it can force you to put the responsibility of ordering dessert in the hands of your husband, who once misheard the words “Can you get me the bananas Foster?” as “I’ll just meet you out in the car.”

  Despite his suspiciously terrorist behavior, he would not have been the person of interest I would have picked out of the security line. First of all, his physique did not lend itself to jumping over hurdles, eating nothing but roasted goat, and living in caves in Pakistan, which is where Sara Rue and Jennifer Hudson secretly have been. He also had a neck tattoo of the sun, a clear lapse in judgment that would make any al-Qaeda leader wary of putting him in charge of the dirty bomb.

  Then again, it’s always the ones you least expect; I’ve watched enough Scooby-Doo in my life to know that much. Still, I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt and took advantage of the elbow room, only to have the flight attendant take his seat twenty minutes later, lean over, and ask me in a whisper what I could tell her about the man who had been sitting there.

  After I told her that I didn’t know him, she replied that he had told her that when he was in SLC, he got involved in some drugs, and now “the dealers were sitting all around him and were out to get him.” I glanced at the two cute boys with spiky hair in front of me, who were taking turns sleeping on each other’s shoulder—drug traffickers rarely kiss each other, so we could rule them out. And if the woman across the aisle was selling meth bags, she was really good at acting like she was enjoying every smug word of Eat, Pray, Love while unabashedly picking at the dead skin on the soles of her bare feet. And the middle-aged man behind us was clearly too busy trying to hit on the hottie half his age seated beside him to sell a gram of anything.

  And I, by the way, was eating the complimentary biscotti and trying to conjure enough turbulence with my mind power (yes, even people who still have nightmares about fractions can have mind power) to coerce my seatmate’s untouched biscotti to slide off his tray and into my purse. So, obviously I couldn’t have been pushing pills on him—it would take way too much mind power for someone who still has nightmares about fractions to sell drugs and coax those cookies into my purse.

  As a result of his paranoid complaints to the flight attendant, the purser thought it was in the best interest of the remaining passengers that he be seated up front, away from the girl in 17D with the fat ass and arthritic knees who was too busy eating her in-flight biscotti to realize that her enormous seatmate was losing his shit at a cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet. Either that or it was all a ruse to move closer to the cockpit so he wouldn’t have to run as far in his flaming underwear.

  The flight attendant then went on to tell me that the authorities would be meeting our plane at the gate, but if the Big Ray of Neck Sunshine returned, I was to alert her immediately. Which, honestly, took a little bit of the enjoyment out of the last bite of my cookie. But I did feel a bit relieved that if my seatmate returned with a knife in one hand and a nice bottle of Chianti in the other, this 110-pound blonde in a size 00 pantsuit would come to my rescue in her Christian Louboutin knockoffs from JCPenney.

  I was going to ask her if she could drop off a few more biscotti, you know, because I am always far less nervous when I am chewing. But I thought better of it in the end lest she think I wasn’t taking the situation seriously enough. Which couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, I take any kind of erratic behavior on airplanes very seriously—doesn’t matter if it’s coming from terrorists, schizophrenics, or children. When I see the wheels popping off the bus, I am not afraid to press that stewardess button.

  Which is why I need to find investors for my multimillion-dollar idea: Batshit Airlines—the go-to airline for anyone who doesn’t take his lithium or haloperidol on a regular basis. Passengers are strapped into straitjackets, outfitted with noise-canceling headphones, and tuned into the guided relaxation channel until the captain turns off the restraints sign. At that time, flight attendants will come through the cabin, dispensing sedatives and electroshock treatments as needed, and—for an extra charge of seven dollars, payable by credit card only—a variety of pills are available for recreational use, all of which can be found at the back of your in-flight magazine.

  Batshit Airlines may sound elitist to you; it may sound like I am trying to round up all the nutjobs so as to keep “their kind” off commercial flights (even though I would obviously say it was “for security reasons”). And if that makes me elitist, then call me Sir Richard Branson, because if I have to stand in line to have my ass crack x-rayed to see whether I’ve got a stick of dynamite tucked in there, I should at least have a say in who will be sharing my recycled air.

  Passengers would just have to answer a few questions, like: “Have you ever slaughtered a family pet?” or “What’s the last thing you’ve seen shape-shift?” A couple of brain scans of the frontal lobe at the security checkpoint for good measure and you’ll be cleared for takeoff. Batshit Airlines also features a separate security line for entitled mothers too cheap to buy their devil spawn their own seats and too lazy to discipline them when they get loud and spastic. If these toddlers have enough endurance to kick the back of my seat for two hours and nine minutes, they can handle any asshole who’s just snorted bath salts and tried to eat a homeless person naked.

  Maybe it’s an unpopular position, but I really don’t want to fly the friendly skies with anyone who looks like a character on True Blood. I have enough of an issue with that nutjob standing behind me in line at Safeway, the one buying duct tape and a case of Capri Suns who smells like a gigantic wheel of ripened cheese. I certainly don’t want to be within Bad Touch reach of a lunatic, let alone a guy whose psychotic ass fat is grazing mine. I don’t need the extra stimulus. Seriously. Pave another road with it. I have enough anxiety worrying about the air-blowy machine coating me in germs. I don’t need the additional stress of flying over the cuckoo’s nest with Chief boxing me in.

  Batshit Airlines: Where Most of the Turbulence Is Your Brain Chemistry.

  SINS OF THE PIN

  Look away! Look away! Why can’t I look away?

  Every day, I cringe. Every day, I gag. And yet I continue to visit Pinterest every day, and every day I witness atrocious food pins signaling the demise of a society that is crumbling around its very foundation. True, I’ve scored some great ideas and recipes on the site, but more times than not, I’m trying to control my gag reflex when it comes to seeing what people find acceptable to share in public. But isn’t.

  Take this as a gentle guideline, a subtle suggestion, or an innocent approach to navigating the malignant waters of the pinning ocean. If I thought this trend would sputter and fade within a reasonable amount of time, I wouldn’t bother even mentioning it, but I’m afraid that this has all the hallmarks of a virus that has the potential to mutate and jump species. Twenty years from now, legally, you might not be able to make a sandwich without a tutorial and photos from six angles. If you want to live in a world where a Milky Way Midnight bar has no choice but to come complete with the crunch of chia seeds, keep pinning, people. Otherwise, take heed.

  Here are six signs that Pinterest food pins are destroying t
he world.

  6. Unconventional food vessels. I don’t know how many mason jars you have hanging around your house, but if you don’t have a farm and the answer is more than five, it’s time for a garage sale, my friend. Because hoarding doesn’t happen overnight—it worsens over time like Madonna’s music. A guy up the street from us was actually on an episode of Hoarders because he kept living in his hovel even after most of it burned down. He threw a couple of tarps over what was left of the roof and used a chain saw to cut out some new windows in the plywood with a sign that read CONDEMNED stapled to it.

  If you were to ask his relatives, I’m sure they would say that mason jars were the first sign of trouble, and that it all started when he had a dinner party and thought it would be cute to serve individual salads in them. Get it? Get it? You shake it!! Containers of any kind are a gateway purchase on the road to hoarder.

  So when I see a girl in a sequined headband buying twenty-four clay flowerpots at Home Depot with the intention of baking cupcakes in them, a range of emotions washes over me. The thing is, chances are the people who would put anything in a _______ (insert Pinny phrase here: “So cute!” “Yes please!” and “I’m going to do this!”) jar, muffin pan, or test tube are the same people who put up signs asking you to take your shoes off before you walk through their house. Life is short. Skip the clay pots and use a friggin’ plate.

  (Full disclosure: In the interest of dissuading overachieving bakers wearing polka-dot aprons from sending strongly worded letters on adorable stationery to the publisher, or hoarders from stink-bombing my Facebook page with offended comments, let it be known that I have enough mason jars for a cameo on Hoarders. And I am throwing stones at every glass house on the block.)

  5. Quinoa. Possibly the most annoying foodstuff to trend this year—even more annoying than the word “trend”: quinoa. Please. I’m begging Pinterest. Can we stop with the quinoa, made even more annoying by the pronunciation of “kee-no-ah!!!” (Yes, the three exclamation points are correct, as is opening your mouth as widely as possible on each syllable.)

  I’ll be honest with you, I can’t figure out what the hell it is. Is it rice, is it pasta? And really, who cares because it looks like larvae no matter how you cook it. Really. No matter how you try to convince me how delicious it is, I know it’s not and that you are lying because you don’t want to feel gullible alone.

  If I’m ever in the jungle with flesh-eating bacteria rotting my limbs off and cannibals chasing me, I might eat it because I’m sure I’d find some under a fallen log while dodging my pursuers. But until then, back off, People of Quinoa. And for the sake of all that’s holy, I am begging all hippies to stop putting it in brownies and making “mac and cheese” with it. I don’t want to see another picture of bug-egg burgers or unhatched kale cakes. Enough is enough. Just because you saw it in the Fearless Flyer at Trader Joe’s doesn’t make it right.

  4. Crock-Pots. I keep waiting for the wave to crest just like it did in 1984, when my mom finally unplugged hers and put it in storage, but all of the pictures of breakfast casseroles and creamy chicken thingies are making me believe in parallel universes and I’m stuck in the bad-food one. Almost every time I gag while on Pinterest, it’s due to a slow cooker–induced wave of nausea. No more pizza casseroles, I beg of you. Stop making cheesecakes in them, or any recipe with the word “ranch” in the name for that matter. (“Ranch” is the word that often triggers my Crock-Pot gagging. Honestly, it works every time, especially when combined with the word “bacon.”)

  And guess what? Sure, you can make a sub sandwich in the slow cooker (I’ve seen pictures!), but it should take you eight hours to put ham on bread only if you have two hook hands. And hardly anyone has that. Guess what? I’m making chicken and dumplings right now. Without a slow cooker. I put the chicken in a pot—yes, a regular, metal pot!—and . . . turned on the burner. That was all. Yes, you can do it, too. You can. I promise.

  Walk away. Crock-Pot recruiters have cast a wide net and are gaining influence across the country. I know the Mormon Church is giving one slow cooker away with every conversion, and yes, that’s better than baptizing Anne Frank, but not much. Not really.

  3. Cute eggs. I know it’s simply a seasonal annoyance, but it really can’t be over soon enough. Sure, I admit that the first time I saw a deviled egg with sliced green olives for eyes and carrot slivers for feet, I smiled. But much like anything you’ve seen 1,953 times in a single day, it becomes irritating and loses its festivity around the 500 mark—that’s when they become sinister-looking, with those red irises and orange claw feet and that chalky yellow mush teeming with heart-stopping cholesterol. Should people continue to pin cute eggs, I believe that they should be required to show the mother hen what they’ve done. Not only did they eat her baby, but they humiliated it by making it into an olive-eyed, carrot-clawed facsimile of itself, if it had lived.

  2. Artificial colors in anything edible. How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it. I don’t care if it’s cake, a Jell-O shot, or a handful of Skittles, you’re going to get cancer. I’m betting the pastel strain wouldn’t be all that serious, hopefully an organ you have in multiples, but fire down any foodstuff dyed devil red or sunshine yellow and you might as well schedule a biopsy as soon as you swallow.

  1. Artistic kids’ meals. Um, apparently, there are parents out there who spend their free time cutting sandwiches into the shape of sheep or molding brown rice balls into the shapes of bears, instead of saying to their kids, “This is a ham sandwich. It’s in the shape of a sandwich. I’m not going to sit here and mold the film set of Fantastic Mr. Fox so I can get you to eat a carrot.”

  Aside from the lack of forethought involved in training their kids to eat that way, they are also more than happy to share their creations with other parents to keep the cycle of abuse going. I saw one photo of a child’s meal on Pinterest that was an elaborate re-creation of Hobbit Hill, complete with extensive carving, molding, and styling. I bet it took twice the amount of time to make it than it did to clean it up once the kid threw it on the floor.

  I saw another one that was a nest, compiled with green fettuccine for grass, cherry tomatoes as eggs, and crackers cut out in the shape of birds. This is the work of an enabler, and I am already crying for the kid’s future wife.

  I’m not completely without my quirks when it comes to food. I can be picky and weird and if something looks like chocolate, even if it’s on the floor, I’ll pop it in my mouth before I even consider what brown things on the ground could feasibly be. I don’t like my foods to touch each other, and I can’t stand the smell of fish, let alone eat it, and that’s a result of a mother who would look at my untouched plate, wait until I threw up, and then say simply, “Oh, no, you didn’t like your flounder? I guess you’ll find out every Friday that being hungry hurts.”

  But who hasn’t been messed up by her parents in one way or another? Eventually, you get old enough and make peace with your past. I, however, cannot make peace with the future if the crisis is not averted. So keep serving dinners in your mason jars, complete with landscaping with quinoa mountains crowned by a sun of yellow cancer eggs slow-cooked in your Crock-Pot, go right ahead. In fifteen years, I’m sure it will be no surprise when restaurants that serve you a menu offering a filet mignon in the shape of a pony, bunny, or elephant start popping up. Served with a side of cloud potatoes.

  HORNY

  I didn’t know what to think when he reached across the table and took my hand.

  Yes, my gut instinct was alarm, not only because I was having lunch with my ex-boyfriend, but because he should have known me better than to try to hold my hand while I was trying to eat. We had dated many years ago and between us we’d had marriages, divorces, children, a bankruptcy, jobs, disagreements with the law, and a period spent on the lam since the time
we spilt. (For the record, the job and a marriage were mine.)

  People can change. Some people can anyway. I might have eventually become someone who would really enjoy the moment when a former flame, his forearms covered in paint droplets, reached for my hand. But I was trying to eat chips and guacamole with my hand at the time. I was hungry. And one of the primary jobs of either of my hands is to feed me, not be obstructed by a larger, rougher hand dappled with Navajo White that was blocking my access to the avocado trough.

  Whatever. I’ve known this guy most of my life, I thought. Give him your hand, Laurie—he’s just trying to be sweet. He even told you that you were “holding up good for your age” when you came back from the ladies’ room . . . despite the fact that he saw you from behind when you left the table, so we both knew that was a lie.

  But he’s been through a lot, I remember, his marriage didn’t turn out to be the hippie love fest he had hoped and he’s raising his kids on his own. He got their mother pregnant while we were still dating, by the way, but I hold no grudges. I really don’t. She was a better choice for him than I was, and I’m thankful that she was so easily fertile, which often happens with runaway teenagers. So really, it was a small concession to give him my hand. The guacamole can wait a minute. It’s a room-temperature dish, I reasoned with myself. Although I am seriously putting a time cap on this thing, and when my fajitas get here, it’s every hand for itself.

  I smiled, thinking it was sort of sweet—you know, after all this time. It was really kind of cute. Ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, moving a little further out of their youth, each with small creases at the corners of their eyes. They both wear glasses. She remembers when he used to spend sixty cents on a Taco Bell burrito for her, and in exchange, she would sit on the floor of the Baja buggy he constantly worked on because he never put in a passenger seat. She remembers going to some of his rehab classes with him because his probation officer said it would be a good idea. He remembers the way her earrings chimed when she turned her head. Yay! We’re alive! We weren’t Sid and Nancy after all!