I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

by Laurie Notaro

  What kind of guy does yard work for a living . . . without tools? I wondered. Where were his teeth? Who breaks apart a tree with his hands? Through the window, I peeked outside, and that’s when I saw two of them, Jerry and his “assistant,” violently swinging on the tree like monkeys as they rocked it back and forth. Then they landed and kicked it until it was dead.

  I sat down and wrote a note in case the FBI might need it once my husband spotted the freshly opened and still somewhat flexible bounty of chocolate Twizzlers in the cabinet, proof positive that if my favorite snack was present without one or both of my hands in it, there had to be some sort of foul play involved.

  “I have two homeless guys trying to kick down the dead orange tree in our front yard,” I typed. “I’m going to describe them to you so if they end up robbing and killing me, you can give the police a lead once you realize months from now that I am gone and not just on a diet: Guy #1, ‘Jerry’: No teeth. Short. Possibly going through withdrawal of some kind. Guy #2: ‘Assistant’: Some teeth. Shorter. Apparent aggression issues. Oh. Now there’s one less tooth. And it just may be lodged in one of suspect #1’s knuckles.”

  I ran outside to access the damage. “That’s very nice,” I nodded at Jerry, who was emphatically grinning and nodding back. “Now you have to leave before my husband comes home. Here’s some eggs.”

  Within seconds, my husband’s truck pulled up in front of the house. He got out slowly, glared at me, and then walked inside without saying a word.

  “The tree is gone!” I said excitedly with a big smile.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that,” he answered. “The tree is not gone. It’s lying in five hundred pieces around the yard. Who are those guys? Why are you talking to strangers when you’re in the house alone? Who told you to mutilate the tree? You’ve ruined everything!”

  “There were only four green leaves left on that tree,” I said quietly. “I was pretty sure that a comeback was out of the question.”

  “That’s not it!” my husband yelled. “Now I have to take back your Christmas present!”

  I gasped with glee. “But the therapist wouldn’t write the note when I asked her,” I said, jumping up and down.

  “It’s okay,” my husband said, shuffling toward his study. “I bought an electric-powered chain saw with a plug-in cord so if I run away fast enough, you can only chase me so far.”

  “There’s a tree in the backyard with only six green leaves on it,” I suggested.

  “It’s ALIVE!” my husband shot back.

  The Haunting of Jerry

  Someone’ s knocking at my door. I have a feeling it’s Jerry. I almost liked Jerry when he first came to my house and pulled out the semidead orange tree from my front yard, using nothing but his bare hands and a whole lot of angst. I was amazed as he rocked the tree out of its earthen bed with his homeless little man-child body, exposing the tree roots and leaving a crater big enough to barbecue a hog in.

  I liked him as he unabashedly gave me a tour of his battle scars, showing me a six-inch former wound on his head that he sustained while wrestling with the private parts of a particularly mean queen palm, the way he could flip his arm around like a rag doll after he dislocated his shoulder after a forty-foot tumble, and the way he had to close one eye in order to make the right cut on a tree, and not the imaginary one.

  He was proud of his work, and pointed to various palm trees in the neighborhood, claiming that the bulbous, circular necks under the fronds were his “signature,” though in my opinion, they looked a little more like goiters than a trademark.

  “No matter how many times I’ve fallen out of a tree,” he boasted, “I’ve never sued anybody. I’ll sign anything you got.”

  He must have told the same thing to my next-door neighbor. After he finished killing my orange tree, he scurried up a fifty-year-old palm in her backyard like a squirrel in the dead of night, and left his signature with a saw and only the stars to guide him.

  My husband, however, was not as impressed with Jerry as I was.

  “You are not allowed to answer the door anymore,” he said simply and firmly.

  “Come on,” I said. “The man weighs eighty pounds and can only see straight if he covers one eye! I could knock him over with a fart. Besides, I assessed the situation and decided that he was harmless. He won’t sue us, he said he’d sign anything.”

  “A serial killer will always try to gain your trust!” he replied. “What good is a lawsuit after he’s eaten your brain like it was chili?”

  I was getting my morning coffee the next day when I looked up and gasped. From my kitchen window I saw Jerry, again forty feet up in the air, hugging my other neighbor’s palm tree with one hand while he waved to me with the other. It was a very friendly gesture, although you are never really ready for a homeless tree trimmer to extend a greeting to you from the sky when you’re not wearing a bra or pants.

  For about a week after that, Jerry came by every day to see if I needed any more work done. I kept saying no, mostly because I felt I was lucky that Jerry hadn’t already dismembered himself or accidentally fallen on some electrical wires on my property. His physical disfigurements didn’t bother me as much as my suspicion that he had a hankering for hooch, and was tanked a fair amount of the time. The last thing I really needed was a television news crew parked in my backyard, filming a fireman relentlessly poking at Jerry’s hot, pickled body with a stick until he fell headfirst into the waiting recycling bin.

  Finally, however, Jerry wore me down, especially when he began showing up at night, wanting to cut something up. To get rid of him, I agreed that he could cut the shortest tree—one that really wouldn’t have presented much of a challenge to a three-year-old armed with a dull butter knife—on one condition. He had to start work early in the morning, so he would be somewhat sober, thus significantly reducing the risk of death, injury, or loss of electrical power to my house, because I really hate resetting clocks.

  Jerry went to work, and scampered up the tree in someone’s old golf shoes and a harness made out of a retired motorcycle chain and a bunch of frayed rope. I spent the next hour searching my homeowner’s policy for a homeless, drunk tree-trimmer clause until Jerry knocked on the door and said that his signature was done and he was thirsty.

  With a sigh of relief, I paid him more than the tree was worth, gave him the last can of Mountain Dew, and said good-bye.

  “Now you have done it,” my husband said to me as I closed the front door. “You’ve fed him. That’s like leaving a whole ham on a picnic table in bear country. You’ll never get rid of him, and he’ll probably start breeding in the crawl space under our house!”

  He was right. In fact, Jerry came back every time he got a little hungry, every time he got a little thirsty, and every time he ran out of cigarettes. Then he said that I had been so nice to him that he’d trim my palm trees next year for $30, which was a deal.

  “Thank you, Jerry,” I said, agreeing to the deal. “That’s very nice.”

  “Can I have half of it now?” he asked.

  Apparently, I was Jerry’s gold mine, and though he eventually stopped asking for work, he just started asking me for outright cash. When he popped up on my porch at ten o’clock on a Sunday night, I had had it. I solely bore the responsibility of creating my own human feral cat.

  “I need twenty dollars,” Jerry said as I opened the door. “Consider it a loan.”

  “Jerry,” I said harshly, “I’m a writer. We eat ramen four nights a week and ramen bake the other three!”

  “Fifteen!”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Ten! I’ll take ten!”

  “Jerry!” I yelled as loud as I could. “The bank is bust!”

  As I closed the door, I felt really bad for him. I kept on feeling really bad about it until my husband did the math, figured out that in the two days that Jerry had done work for us and our neighbors, he had made more than we both did in a week. In fact, it turned out, Jerry was making himself a
pretty healthy salary.

  “TAX-FREE,” my husband said, adding insult to injury.

  “Now that I think about it,” I said, turning things over in my mind, “he always wore clean clothes. And I’ve never seen him wear the same thing twice.”

  “Do you think it’s a scam?” my husband asked.

  I didn’t know; I still don’t. I do know that Jerry keeps himself pretty busy. I’ve seen him almost every day, fifty feet up in the air, hacking away at someone’s tree, dangerously close to the power lines. I see him, but I don’t wave anymore.

  And right now, I can hear him knocking, but he can’t come in.

  FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

  It wouldn’t be at all unusual for someone to be banging on my front door at 3 A.M. on a Tuesday morning.

  And that’s exactly what I was thinking as I shuffled to the door amid the panicked, frenzied, “stranger danger” barks of my dog. It wouldn’t be at all unusual. I’ve opened the door at more inappropriate times to find a variety of characters on the other side. After all, I’m not living in Scottsdale or Paradise Valley, where Stevie Nicks lives, high on a mountain—I just had to be an urban girl, be in the middle of things and buy a house with character—which just happens to be down the street from a newly opened casket store. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not a mortuary—it’s a casket store, for those DIY burial sort of people. Buryin’ on a budget. The store just sells caskets. Nothing else. Caskets. In fact, the store isn’t even called something pretty like the Casket Basket or Eternal Slumber. The sign just says CASKETS. What kind of neighborhood has a casket store, you ask? Well, not a very nice one, I’ll tell you.

  Now, because of the kind of area I live in, my door-knocker could very well be Jerry. I thought it was odd that Jerry’s brand of horticulture was ripping the former orange tree apart limb by limb with his hands and kicking it down with kung fu moves until I understood that Jerry was no horticulturist but just your average, run-of-the-mill Apache Junction tweaker with battery acid and lye shooting through his bloodstream and not a dime to his name. Jerry, alarmingly, had taken a particular fancy to me, and to this day, when he’s not incarcerated, he pops up on my front porch during all hours of the day and night, demanding money, cigarettes, or Mountain Dew.

  Or my door-knocker could be the guy who pointed to a house across the street, introduced himself as my neighbor, and asked my husband for money because he needed to “buy medication for his pregnant wife.” Finding it unlikely that Rebecca, the woman who lives in the house across the street, was pregnant by this guy since I’d seen her the day before riding a motorcycle manned by her girlfriend, Jane, I advised the fictitious father-to-be, “Next time, don’t point out a house with a rainbow flag waving from the porch.”

  Or my door-knocker could be the guy who looked like a high school senior and went door-to-door armed with a photograph of a little girl, claiming that the child was his recently departed daughter and he needed money to bury her, despite the fact that the aged, yellowed, circa 1970s Polaroid was older than he was. Smelling suspicion because the words “car wash” were not even used once (the typical method for people in my neighborhood to raise the necessary funds to bury the remains of their loved ones) and he didn’t know how his “baby girl” had died and also didn’t know her name, I declined to make a donation to help bury a fake kid and told him that if he relayed his story to the casket store down the street, maybe he could cut himself a deal.

  So, honestly, when I answered the door that night, I wasn’t particularly worried about who was on the other side; I just wanted him or her to go away and let my Tylenol PM do the work God intended it to do. And sure enough, as soon as I opened that door, there stood some woman I had never seen before, hardly clothed, hair all tousled, and barefoot, who claimed she was my neighbor and then screamed, “Fire! Fire! Fire! Your backyard is on fire!”

  “Let’s make a deal—I’ll give you my last can of Mountain Dew and some cigarette butts if you promise to go smoke that crack pipe of yours in someone else’s front yard,” I almost said, but instead, my eyes followed her pointed finger, which was directed to my dining room windows that faced the backyard.

  And that was when I saw fire.

  Fire in the backyard that we had just begun to landscape, after seven years during which it was a barren plot of dirt and could have easily been mistaken for Oklahoma, 1935. This time, I had veered away from crystal meth addicts and had hired real landscapers to tear down the three dead orange trees, install a sprinkler system, and put down sod, which had just been delivered that afternoon and was still resting on pallets that I thought were surely now a big ball of flame.

  I am here to tell you that nothing will frighten you more than an inferno quickly eating its way toward your house, and I’ve come home after the DEA ransacked my house and went through my underwear drawer, so I know fear when I see it.

  “Fire! Fire! Fire!” I screamed to my husband, who was still resting soundly while our home was about to be reduced to kindling. “My sod is on fire!

  “Get up! Call 911!” I shrieked as I threw the phone at him and then ran into the backyard.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what to do; I mean, I was rather freaked out. I wasn’t at all prepared for a fire. In fact, I had pretty much figured that my chances of encountering one essentially became nonexistent when I quit smoking and drinking at the same time. The only thing I knew to do in case of a fire was drop and roll, and in this case, I thought the drop-and-roll maneuver was a wee bit premature since I wasn’t on fire yet (although I was not ruling out the possibility), plus, if anyone saw me, I’d look kinda stupid. So I did the only thing I knew to do, which was to grab the garden hose and pray to God that it was still intact, since we use it so infrequently it was a miracle that it hadn’t shriveled up to the size of a shoelace. I turned it on and ran to the back fence, where the fire was roaring, thankfully, not in my backyard, but in the alley behind the fence, where the remnants of the three dead orange trees were placed.

  Directed by my shoeless, anonymous neighbor who was now standing on the alley side of the fence, I lifted the hose over the wall and ran the trickle over the hottest spots. Apparently, something of a crowd had begun to gather on the other side of the wall to watch my decrepit hose spit on the blaze, although none of my neighbors ran back and forth with additional hoses, pails, or bowls of water as I would have imagined they would after seeing fires run rampant on Little House on the Prairie. No, nobody made a move to start a bucket brigade or anything like that to save my house from catching fire, they just stood and watched, chatted cordially among themselves like they were at a block party, when suddenly I heard someone say, “Did anyone call the fire department?” and my blood ran cold.

  The fire department.

  Goddamn it! I said to myself. See, that is exactly what you get. Goddamn it! Exactly what you get for violating your own set of rules you invented and vowed to live by when you were in eighth grade, which includes #1: Never date a guy who drives a Camaro, Trans Am, or has any type of “car art” performed on his vehicle, particularly if it involves a horny Viking maiden wielding a sword, wearing a metal bra, and who has a snake wrapped around her leg, hissing; #2: When you get married, arise an extra hour early to curl hair and apply makeup and then go back to bed so your husband never sees you ugly and thinks that you wake up beautiful; and #3: Always go to bed with curled hair and a full face of makeup because you never know when you might encounter a hot, foxy, and perhaps shirtless fireman.

  And look at you now! Not a stitch of concealer, no mascara, not even lip liner. This is your one chance to encounter a fireman and here you are, just a hag with a hose. That’s what they’re going to call you, you know. Hose Hag. Why could you just not adhere to the rules? Why? Just once follow the rules!

  Right then, I heard the wail of sirens and another thought hit me, like a bolt of lightning. “To hell with the makeup,” a big, deep voice in my head declared. “Because you’re not wearing pants.”r />
  I gasped. I looked down. It was true. I wasn’t wearing pants. I had been fighting this fire, in its entirety, in my underwear and a tank top that provided no support for my sandbag boobs and no hidden sanctuary for the flesh curtains that are my upper arms.

  “Honey!” I heard my husband scream as he ran toward me. “The police are here! The police are here and you’re only wearing panties!”

  I turned around and handed the hose off to my husband, who then looked at me quizzically and said, “Why do you look much better when I wake up in the morning?”

  No New People

  Frankly, I had never been happier to see a half-naked lesbian in all my life. In fact, there were four hundred of them, topless, bouncing, shouting, and heading my way.

  I was absolutely thrilled.

  I was on vacation with my friends Michelle and Maxie, and we had come up to San Francisco for several days to get out of the heat of the Phoenix summer. Maxie had looked up a friend of hers, Paula, who lived in the area, and suggested that we all meet for dinner so she could give us tips for what we should do for the rest of our trip.

  I’m not big on meeting new people, especially new people I’m never going to see again. There’s all kinds of uninteresting, insincere banter, I have to pretend to be a nice person, and because 96 percent of the world’s population are dim bulbs, odds are excellent that I’ll be stuck in the middle of a Spontaneous Freak Encounter. For Maxie, though, I was willing to make an exception to my “No New People” rule. I was going to open my soggy, rotten tomato heart and try to like the new person.

  Enter Paula: Identified by enough yardage of purple gauze to build a mess tent above the waist and sporting what looked like Princess Jasmine harem pants below, Paula resembled someone who bought out a Pier 1 clearance clothing sale in 1988 and never looked back. The ensemble, as a whole, cried “tragedy” as well as “I can make my own soap.” I’m not exactly sure I can describe her tresses, except to say that they had a Bon Jovi air about them and said, “That’s what happens when you think you’re pretty good at cutting your own hair.” I was far too terrified to look at her feet, because I do believe I’d caught a glimpse of something sparkly in addition to an elfinlike point. And then, I saw it. The ultimate bad omen, worse than spotting a “666” birthmark on the back of someone’s neck. A THUMB ring. Oh yes. Paula was a proud and active New Ager, and the first thing that popped into my head as I absorbed her Paulaness was, “This one excessively uses the word ‘goddess’ and her bathroom is covered in framed angel posters.”