I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

by Laurie Notaro

  On my right arm, a nurse was digging around trying to find a vein like I was a fetal pig in AP biology class. In all honesty, with my cookie exposed to the world, my shaggy, gray shredded underwear sitting beside me like a mechanic’s rag, rockets of pain going off in my abdomen, and a lady poking me in the arm with a needle so many times I could have qualified for methadone treatment on sight, I swore I had probably died at the check-in station and was now in my orientation session for my new lifetime/eternal membership in hell.

  Pretty soon, I was sure, classmates from high school and old boyfriends would be passing by, commenting on my weight and how very poorly I had aged. How could this scenario be any worse?

  The lady attempting to give me a homemade tattoo picked up my wrist and looked at my bracelet.

  “Oh, look at that,” she said. “You’re that girl from the newspaper. Oh, oh, yep, here we go. Got a vein. There we go. I was beginning to think you were dead!”

  “Could you please arrange that?” I replied.

  And then, in a matter of seconds, all was peaceful. All was lovely, all was soft, and pretty and painless. All was as it should be.

  I was on a Demerol drip. You could have brought cameras into that place, propped me up and shot away, and printed the gruesome image on top of every column that I wrote and at that moment, I would have let you. I would have encouraged it.

  I was HIGH. I was really HIGH. I used to think I had pretty good connections, but none of my guys ever came through with anything like that. I was higher than I was in all of 1994 combined, and that was the year I was totally into Janis Joplin.

  I smiled at my husband. “I want to take this stick home,” I said, grabbing my rolling IV drip. “I want to keep it by my bed and just be happy and soft forever.”

  I could have sworn I saw tears gather in a rush in his eyes. “Oh, Doctor,” he cried. “Thank you! Thank you! This is the girl I married! There she is! I haven’t seen her this happy since she stopped self-medicating!”

  “We think you have kidney stones,” the doctor informed me, which was good news as opposed to hearing, “You’re going to have a baby at any moment and you were just too fat and disorganized to know it!” or “You’re incubating numerous alien reptilian embryos and they’re about to burst through your rib cage in three seconds and then scurry into the hospital ventilation system. So hang on.”

  Kidney stones. How do you even get kidney stones? Could they be pieces of Bubble Yum that I’ve accidentally swallowed from my childhood, now fossilized and evil; Pop Rocks that never lived up to the “pop!” portion of their promise, and still retained their rock form; or little pieces of corn who thought to themselves, “Well, if I’m never going to be digested, why on earth would I want to go any further, where the lower you go, the worse it gets? There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s not a good one. Forget it. I just might as well stay here where it’s warm, velvety, and purple. It’s like being at the Artist Formerly Known as Prince’s house”?

  In addition, I didn’t know what you do for kidney stones, or how you get rid of them, and all the people at the hospital did was give me a prescription for Vicodin and send me home. But my husband was smarter than that. Way smarter than that, and when we approached our freeway exit, he sped right past it and kept on going.

  All the way to my mother’s house.

  When I woke up in her bed hours later, ice went through my veins. I was afraid that a version of my deepest, most horrifying fears had come true, which is that I have ultimately and tragically eaten enough sugar to force my body into a vegetative state and my mother takes me back in so we can finally have the close maternal relationship she has always craved, which consists solely of me not having the ability to speak and her picking out my clothes. Fresh from my Demerol daze, I knew it was only a matter of hours before my mom loaded me up in her van and took me to Wal-Mart so she could buy me several pairs of polyester short sets and back to the orthodontist to teach me a lesson for lying on my head-gear chart in eighth grade.

  And then a little rolling stone inside my body began gathering no moss but was bouncing around like it was a pinball.

  “MOM!” I yelled. “I need my drugs!”

  “Keep your pants on, Courtney Love,” my mother said as she doled out a Vicodin. “Which is more than what you did at the hospital from what I hear. You’ve had so many accidents with strangers seeing your coolie that I would wear shorts under everything if I were you.”

  I gulped it down.

  “You hungry?” she said. “I made some nice tapioca pudding.”

  “Give me back that bottle, please,” I said, reaching out my arm. “I don’t want to live like this. I just can’t do it.”

  “You just don’t know how lucky you are,” she replied. “There’s a Diamonique special on at two that lasts the whole afternoon! Maybe we can get matching earrings and a pendant set!”

  For six days I was confined to my kidney stone prison, eating tapioca pudding, taking drugs, and staring into the toilet after almost every visit.

  When six days had come and gone, my doctor finally decided I needed surgery immediately, but passed it off to his partner since he was going on vacation for a week.

  Nervous about slicing open the kidney of a patient that he had never seen before, my doctor’s partner called my mother and told her about his unease.

  “This is what I propose,” he said. “I’ll prescribe Dilaudid for the pain, have Laurie drink as much water as humanly possible and lie with a heating pad around her side. If the stones don’t pass over the weekend, we’ll operate on Monday.”

  Three hours later, after drinking more water than the state of Arizona is allotted in a whole season and lying on the heating pad, I gathered with my mother and my father in the smallest room in the house. The three of us hadn’t made a joint appearance in the bathroom since my whole family gathered around the bowl after my little sister swallowed a bicentennial quarter.

  “Is that them?” my mother said, pointing.

  “I guess,” I said, shrugging.

  “That’s it? That’s what they call a stone?” my mother asked. “That’s what we’ve been waiting for? I expected a cashew, maybe a macadamia-nut-sized thing. A malted milk ball would have been nice. But that? A lentil could dwarf it!”

  “I know,” I said, rather disappointed. “I was expecting a comet. The stones in our Diamonique pendants are bigger than that.”

  “Please,” my mother said to me with a disgusted look on her face. “If you bought these kidney stones on QVC, you’d get them twice as big for half the price. These are nothing!”

  “I’m a little let down,” my father said with a frown. “I expected more.”

  True, the pair of little stones nestled at the bottom of the bowl were nothing to boast about. But at least I got to go home and eat food of my own choice, and would be able to answer nature’s call without having to scrutinize it.

  And I still had a bottle of painkillers left to boot.

  That, at least, rocked.

  A Rolling Stone, Even When

  Sober, Is a Difficult Catch

  Did you know that kidney stones are worth their weight in gold?

  Well, of course you do. Apparently, every person in the world knows this but me, judging by the way my doctor was looking at me.

  “You did WHAT with the kidney stones?” he asked for the second time in twenty seconds.

  “I said I flushed them,” I repeated.

  My doctor just stared at me, then shook his head, as if he had just seen me pull my finger out of my nose.

  “Can you tell me why?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.” I nodded. “If something leaves my body, I pretty much figure that my relationship with it has reached the end. Besides, I just got the last in the Planet of the Apes action figures on eBay, and there’s no more room on the display shelf for any other collectibles.”

  Now, I wasn’t sure if I needed to set the stage for him, but I should probably explain t
hat the day my kidney stones made an appearance wasn’t exactly a day of joy. After writhing in six days of the most incredible pain known to man, when those stones finally came rolling out, I named one Mick and I named one Keith and then I flushed them good-bye. There was no way I was about to reach into the potty and start pulling things out of it, I mean, there’s no amount of pharmaceuticals that could ever make that seem like a good idea. Besides, I wasn’t about to play with fate! The stones were gone, and the last thing that I wanted to do was keep them around for good measure, there’s danger involved there any way you look at it. I mean, this is MY WORLD we’re talking about, where it is quite feasible that Mick and Keith could have been mistaken for peppercorns and added to my food, or I could have popped them right into my mouth thinking that they were baby Coco Puffs.

  My doctor, however, continued to stare at me.

  “I’ve just got this thing about playing with my own tinkle,” I tried to explain as a last resort, but he was having none of it.

  “I’m not asking you to fingerpaint with it,” he explained as he sighed. “But we need to examine a stone to find out what caused them and how we can prevent them. And according to these X rays, you still have one left!”

  Damn that Charlie Watts! I thought, lagging behind and too mellow for his own good!

  “This is a prescription for a diuretic,” he said as he handed me the piece of paper. “Take these pills and drink lots of water for a week. And this time, catch the stone.”

  I nodded as the doctor started to leave the office.

  “Wait!” I cried. “How am I supposed to . . . catch it? My reflexes aren’t that sharp. I have problems catching a softball, let alone something the size of a Fruity Pebble.”

  “Go to a pet store and buy a fish net for an aquarium,” he informed me as he left. “But you need to make sure to use it every time.”

  Well, I guess I can do that, I thought to myself as I drove to the pet store. I guess I could pee into a little net. It wouldn’t be so hard. Carrying it to the bathroom at work would be a problem, though, I suddenly realized, so I’ll have to get a special little purse to hide it in.

  At the pet store, however, I understood that a little purse wasn’t quite going to cut it. In fact, it looked as if I was actually going to need a duffel bag, since the only nets in stock were easily large enough to capture a wide-mouth bass. Including the handle, some of the nets were the size of a rifle. Oh, that will be great, I said to myself. I’ll just walk around the newsroom looking like Lee Harvey Oswald every time my bladder sends me a signal.

  “Do you have anything smaller?” I asked the salesclerk. “I could have caught myself a medium-size second husband with this thing.”

  “Well, that’s the standard net,” he said. “How big is your tank?”

  “Um.” I thought for a moment. “Five gallons.”

  “And the type?” he asked.

  “Freshwater,” I added. “Or at least it usually is to begin with.”

  “Then that’s your net,” he said with a shrug.

  “Okay.” I sighed. “I’m just going to be honest with you. I need to pee in it.”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence between us.

  “You know, ma’am,” the salesclerk said as he shook his head. “I know the dog collars and the leashes may send out the wrong message to some people, but we’re really not in the fetish business.”

  “Fetish? It’s not a fetish!” I gasped. “It’s medical!”

  “Uh-huh,” he scoffed. “Like I haven’t heard that one before. It’s not like you have gold up there or anything!”

  “Wanna make a bet?” I snipped.

  Back at home in my bathroom, the net was proving to be something of a challenge. Not only did I suffer scratches on the backs of my legs trying to find the appropriate catching position, but I didn’t know exactly what to do with the net when my session had concluded. I knew I had to clean it somehow, but the thought of doing that at work was so horrible that when I fell asleep, I had dreams that kidney stones were floating around the office like butterflies, and I had to chase them with my net as I tried to run with my pants down around my ankles.

  The next morning, I was attempting to shove the net into my purse when my husband saw it.

  “Whoa,” he commented. “By the size of that net, it looks like you won’t be losing a kidney stone, you’ll be gaining a bowling ball.”

  “Oh, that’s it!” I cried. “I can’t do this! I can’t bring this net to work! What if someone sees me using this in the bathroom? I mean, I can only use the excuse ‘Smile, you’re on Candid Camera’ so many times in there, you know?”

  So I left the net at home. I figured if Charlie Watts felt like showing up at work, that was fine, but I needed to be able to walk around without people pointing and whispering in the elevators, “There’s that nut job who plays with her own pee and thinks she’s always on Candid Camera.”

  Plus, as it turned out, Charlie never made an appearance at all that week, and my doctor wasn’t too happy to hear that when I had my next appointment.

  “Well, that’s quite unfortunate,” he said with a deep breath. “We still need to find out why you’re getting kidney stones. I’m going to need some samples from you.”

  “I’m game as long as it doesn’t require a hook and bait,” I replied, “or any other kind of sports equipment.”

  Down at the lab, the tech had just finished taking my blood when she asked me if my doctor had explained the “other” part of the sample.

  “Just point me to the rest room!” I joked. “Believe me, I’m such a pro at that kind of sample that I don’t even need a net underneath me anymore!! Ha ha ha!”

  The lab tech gave me a funny look. “I don’t think you understand,” she said slowly as she pulled out something that looked exactly like a plastic gas can with a spout and everything. “It’s a twenty-four-hour sample, which means everything for twenty-four hours goes into here.”

  I looked at the gas can, and I wanted to laugh, but I just couldn’t. I mean, it even had a handle on it. Forget about the duffel bag, I was going to have to bring a suitcase to work. Now, not only was I going to be a pee handler, but I was a pee saver to boot.

  I looked at the tech, who simply shrugged, and I could only think of one thing to say.

  “Please tell me,” I implored earnestly, “to look into that spout and smile.”

  Pain in the Assisi

  The moment I saw it, I knew it was perfect. The perfect Christmas gift for my impossible-to-buy-for mother.

  Let’s just say that it’s a given that courtesy of QVC, whatever my mother wants, my mother gets, and typically within eight seconds of seeing it. My mother gets so many packages that she’s on a first-name basis with the UPS guy and he knew the results of her last mammogram before my father did. However, there is an upside to my mother’s passion for collecting abstruse gadgets. As a result, my sisters and I have begun a new family tradition on holidays called This Is Your Brain on QVC, in which we try to guess the purpose of any new QVC purchase, how many times my mother will use it, and how long it will be before she will throw it out. Last Christmas, it looked like she got nipple clamps by mistake, but after a lengthy ponder, she insisted that it was an accessory to bind the legs of the turkey while roasting that had a dual purpose as an eyeglass chain.

  On the last scouting expedition of This Is Your Brain on QVC, my sister and I discovered these delicious-smelling muffins, which is what they looked like, but on closer inspection it was discovered that these were no muffins at all. They were candles. Muffin candles. I mean, they smelled like muffins, they looked like muffins, but eating them would have been like eating a Glade Solid or a stick of Mennen. So I was forced to ask her what they were, and she looked at me like I was stupid. “They’re muffin candles,” she said, much like she would say, “This is a candle. And this is a muffin.” Separately, they’re fine, I was dying to tell her, it’s together that they’re a problem.

&nb
sp; So I said, “Well, why don’t you burn them?”

  And she said, “Because they’re not for burning. Burning would melt them.”

  So I said, “Well, what are they for then?”

  And she said, “To look like muffins.”

  So I said, “Then why don’t you just get some muffins?”

  And she said, “What, are you an idiot? You just can’t leave muffins on the counter day in and day out without people thinking that you live like an animal! I don’t want people running around town, saying that I keep the same old muffins on the counter!”

  She was also very anxious to show us her newest arrival from QVC, which was some sort of food preserver/laminator thing. Everything she put in it came out looking like my employee badge at work, and you basically had to use a table saw or a blowtorch to get at the food once you “preserved” it.

  “You can save ham for up to two years with this thing!” she said excitedly.

  Now, I don’t know if she has some inside scoop that the Three Little Pigs and Wilbur are now considered members of an exotic or endangered species, but to be frank, even if the last pig on earth were snorting his last breath at this very moment, I’d eat my own toes before I ate two-year-old ham that’s really just a floppy pink fossil. I don’t even want to drink water that’s two years old, let alone something that died well before the last presidential election or when I had a whole different and much quicker metabolism. Plus the fact that she just completely ruined Easter for me; there’s no way now that I’m going to trust any ham that she puts on that table. I’d have to carbon-date it before I even remotely considered taking a bite.

  But this gift, the magnificent one I had found for my mother, was something she couldn’t get on QVC, and as the clerk swiped my Visa, I couldn’t help but smile.

  “This is the last thing my mother would ever expect I would get for her,” I said with a little laugh.

  Only several days before, she had anxiously called me after her two-week trip to Italy, and frankly, I was surprised. Previous to her departure, she had informed me that the trip was not really a vacation but a pilgrimage to Assisi for the sole purpose of following in the footsteps of Saint Francis, and frankly, I couldn’t resist making some fun out of it.