“Shut your pie hole!” I screeched. “Choo! You made me sick! Your voice goes through me like daggers! Get me some soup! But I want it from scratch!”
“I’ve got something a little better,” he said, getting up from the couch, and in no less than five seconds, I heard the familiar sounds of Plop! Plop! Fizz! Fizz! coming from the kitchen.
Big Black Bastard
Something smelled. Something smelled bad.
It was there when I was watching TV, when I was working, when I was cooking, and when I woke up.
It seemed nearly to have a life of its own; it came and went at will, becoming overpowering at one moment and a second later, it would just disappear. After watching an episode of Sightings, I became terrified that I had opened a portal to another dimension in my house as a result of a sad and clumsy attempt to dabble in voodoo the last time I was fired. After downing the nearly crystallized remains of a Mudslide-mix bottle I found in a cabinet, I became convinced that I should retaliate in an attack of unprecedented horror. This seemed like an especially good idea since I had recently received a souvenir voodoo doll from my friend Jamie, who had just vacationed in New Orleans.
As I pondered the most obvious inflictions—the breaking of an arm, the loss of sexual competence, the procurement of massive, floppy man-breasts with nipples the size of coasters—I decided on a horror far superior to those afflictions, well, except for the man-boobs curse because I couldn’t figure out how to express that action through the doll. Instead, I decided to stick a pin through the doll’s head while chanting the most malignant song ever known to man, so it would run through my ex-boss’s head in a never-ending loop for all eternity and slowly drive him mad.
“Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey! hey Mickey!” I sang as I got ready to push the pin into the doll’s head, but as I commenced the first clapping solo, the pin tragically shot from my hand and vanished somewhere on the floor below. After searching for another, all I found was a bobby pin and a chopstick, and after several attempts with both objects, I gave up and just crank-called the asshole instead.
Still, I was afraid that my drunken foray into the shadowy world of sorcery had acted as some kind of welcome mat for a wandering incubus or homeless devil-imp when the foul stench began making appearances. After exploring all other options (lack of personal hygiene, misplaced rotting food, leprosy), I had no other explanation for the smell.
I was showing my husband where I had found demonic proof—a definite cold spot in the living room—when he looked at me with wide eyes.
“YES! With my psychic antennae, I’m sensing that you’re dangerously close to the gates of hell!” my husband said, and then suddenly gasped and pointed to the ceiling. “Oh. Sorry, it’s just a vent!”
“How was I supposed to know that you turned the cooler on!” I protested as I pushed away our cat, Barnaby, who had mistaken my leg for the arm of the couch and was trying to claw the meat from my bones. The cat, none too pleased with the apparent rejection, retaliated with a scratchy and full-mouthed “meow.”
It took approximately two seconds for my husband and me to be hit by the wave of smelly horror that festered in our lungs with the pain of a thousand bee stings.
“It’s Barnaby!” we both gasped as we looked at the cat, who had stink lines and waves of stench emanating from his smelly kitty mouth.
I had first tried to brush his teeth years ago, an event that didn’t go very well and subsequently caused one of my ex-boyfriends to comment while holding my hand, “I can tell you’ve seen some hard times, sister, but I think it’s really sexy that you found the will to stay alive. Did you use a piece of glass? Because those scars are totally gnarly.”
In the course of his life, a very long and tumultuous twelve years, Barnaby has managed to destroy every new piece of furniture I’ve ever purchased by either urinating on it or slicing it open like a cadaver with his devil claws. As we all know, cat pee is the most dangerous liquid substance on earth.
I’ve tried to combat the damage and called several upholstery cleaners to remove the smell. The first place I called quoted me $100 to start, but also mentioned that it would depend on the size of the couch and the size of the animal.
“Excuse me?” I questioned. “What do you mean the size of the animal? It’s a cat. A HOUSE CAT, not a panther.”
Once, in a curious moment, I totaled the damage at nearly five thousand dollars in assorted demolished love seats, chairs, couches, pillows, and, naturally, my clothes. As a result, I’ve had to resort to the old Notaro family tradition of covering nearly every stick of furniture with plastic in the form of tarps, old shower curtains, and Hefty garbage bags. If I could find a Glade air freshener in the scent of “Meatball,” it would be just like walking into Grandma Notaro’s house.
Barnaby, however, has a great life, and I know he’s very happy. He is currently dating my husband’s shoe, a Birkenstock named “Left One,” and we often catch him during conjugal visits with her. He’s never gone hungry, has toys to play with, and as the Great Fearless Hunter has the death of nearly a dozen paper towels and one cricket attributed to his name.
I was sure that because of Barnaby’s advanced age, our friendship would be quickly coming to a close, so imagine my shock when a friend informed me that her cat had just turned twenty. Eight more years of bearing tinkle and bloodshed was more than I could stand, but I was powerless.
That is, until the stench of Barnaby’s jowls polluted the airspace around me, and I suddenly had a thought. When I was in high school, my friend Doug took his cat named Fluffy to the vet to get her teeth cleaned. Fluffy, as it happened, simply never came back.
“We should get Barnaby’s teeth cleaned,” I suddenly said through my pinched nose and covered mouth to my husband, who nodded in agreement.
“Sometimes,” I added in a loud whisper, “when they’re under anesthesia, they just . . . slip away.”
Now, for all of you who are getting ready to write me a hate letter on Hello Kitty stationery about how mean I am and you really hope God strikes me barren, let’s imagine this: You show me your favorite piece of furniture, and we’ll have Barnaby relieve himself on it, repeatedly. Then we’ll let you play with Barnaby, and I’ll even give you a lift to the emergency room to get your skin graft.
As I got Barnaby ready for his vet appointment several days later, I lowered him into his carryall, patted his head, and smiled sweetly.
“Be a good boy,” I reminded him as he tried to slash the flesh on my hand into skin ribbons. “Now don’t bite anyone, because I don’t have insurance to cover that. Don’t pee, and if you see a bright, white light, run toward it. There’s Whiskas and Pounce in the light, Barnaby! Run into the light as fast as you can!”
In one last giant effort before my husband placed the carryall in the car, Barnaby bared his teeth and hissed at me, shooting hot air from the sewer that was his mouth.
When I went to pick him up at the end of the day, I was ready to hear the tragic news. I had practiced looking up at the sky as I thought of something really sad, like if chocolate Twizzlers were suddenly discontinued, so my eyes would get watery. I practiced quickly covering my mouth and saying, “Oh my God! Not Barnaby! Why, Lord, why?!!!!!”
The receptionist greeted me kindly, and took a deep breath. “It was more complicated than we thought,” she said. “He really didn’t like us, and it was very difficult to administer the anesthesia.”
That was my cue. I looked up at the ceiling, thought of a world without the chewy satisfaction of a chocolate Twizzler, and felt my tear ducts begin to swell.
“It didn’t go exactly as planned,” she continued. “And the doctor tried very, very hard to save his—”
My hand flew to my mouth. “Oh my God!” I squeaked. “Not Barnaby! Why, Lord, why?!!!”
The receptionist gave me a puzzled look. “Tried very, very hard to save his TEETH,” she interrupted, “but he had to pull a bunch of them. That will
be two hundred eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents, please, cash, check, or credit card.”
I just stared at her as a tear quickly slid down my cheek.
Boys and Girlas
Aunt Laurie,” my nephew said to me as he tugged on the fanny of his Pull-Ups. “My diaper feels funny.”
I looked up from my magazine as he played with a puzzle on the coffee table. “Did you do fluffies?” I asked, using my mother’s designated term for “doody.”
He shook his head. “It feels funny,” he said again, this time tugging at his diaper from the front.
I didn’t really know what to do. I was only the baby-sitter, and was watching my nephew for the afternoon while my sister was at a doctor’s appointment getting an ultrasound of my nephew’s not-yet-born sibling. It was that doctor’s visit that would tell us whether I was going to have a new niece or another nephew, and personally, I was pulling for a double X, or “girla,” according to my nephew.
It’s not that I don’t like boys; I’m just not equipped to deal with them. I was raised with my two sisters in a household that was 80 percent female; the only guy, my father, dealt with his den of she-wolves by retreating to his upstairs cave and staying there for thirty years. Family issues consisted of each of us growling, “Mom, she’s wearing my shirt without my permission!” “Mom, she used my Love’s Baby Soft without my permission!” and “Mom, I only gave her permission to wear my clogs on Tuesday, and today is Wednesday!”
So when my sister, pregnant with my first nephew, informed all of us that she was going to have a BOY, we looked at each other, completely perplexed, though my father finally came downstairs and grinned from ear to ear. It would have made more sense if she would have said, “They think it’s a badger!” or “Looks like we’re having a cuttlefish!” because then at least we could have identified it, or pictured it in our heads. But a BOY?
A BOY? She had to be kidding.
“But there are no cute BOY clothes,” I argued. “Not even in Baby Gap.”
“I can think of only one way to do a boy’s hair,” my other sister said. “And that’s down.”
“We’ll love this baby no matter what it is,” my mother said, trying to comfort my pregnant sister. “Even if it is a BOY.”
“Maybe we can make it gay,” I offered.
At the time I was thirty, but my mother hit me anyway.
Then, the BOY was born, and I recognized how special he was the first time his pee hit my mother’s cheek as she changed his diaper prematurely.
“Every time you pee on Grandma,” I whispered in his baby ear, “Aunt Laurie will pay you ten dollars.”
Watching my mother deal with my nephew’s equipment was worth passing up a linen blue and white sailor dress at Baby Gap, and buying the overalls instead. She was shocked speechless and I believe consulted a priest the first time my nephew touched what my mother called “the wingding.”
“He was in the bathtub, and he just grabbed it,” my mother later whispered to me. “He kind of gazed off into the distance, and got this look on his face like he was in a fantasy land.”
Admittedly, I have to say I wasn’t much better at dealing with it, although I was able to identify his tools by the correct biological term, “wee-wee,” or the more advanced “hinky-dink.” Still, however, if I could avoid speaking about it or referring to it in passing conversation with my nephew, I would. But that would prove impossible the afternoon I baby-sat.
“Aunt Laurie,” my nephew insisted again, yanking at his diaper, “my wee-wee is big.”
“Do you have to go pee-pee?” I asked.
“No,” he said adamantly, “it’s BIG.”
I sighed. Dear God, I said to myself, they certainly do start obsessing about this kind of thing at a young age. No wonder it’s such a tremendous deal. Big, big, big. I decided simply to feed into his ego.
“Okay,” I agreed. “Yep, it’s big.”
“Aunt LAURIE,” he said, getting frustrated, “LOOK AT IT!”
And then, suddenly, my Idiot Veil lifted, and I understood what my nephew was telling me.
“It’s BOTHERING ME!!!!” he added.
How did this ever, EVER fall into MY lap? Why was I chosen to explain the nature of men to my nephew? ME. ME!!!! The one who didn’t know the difference between boys and girls until I was consumed by horror when my best friend (who had a little brother) educated me about the male biology as we played tether ball on the playground when I was ten. I was so stunned that when the ball came swinging around the pole it smacked me square in the head. That means I spent nearly a third of my life thinking that everybody has the same stuff down there. That fact alone disqualifies me from dispensing any information of this sort. To ANYBODY, especially an impressionable toddler.
But I had to come up with something, and something fast.
“That sometimes happens with hinky-dinks,” I said. “It’s okay. If you think about kittens, it will go away.”
“But why?” he asked, which was not what I wanted to hear.
“Let’s sing a song!” I suggested, and began clapping my hands. “This land is your land, this land is my land! From California to the New York Island!”
He was having none of it.
“WHY, Aunt Laurie?” he insisted.
I took a deep breath. “Well,” I started. “I’m not a boy, so I don’t really know, but it’s nothing scary. Every little boy has a wee-wee that sometimes . . . bothers them.”
“Like Scotty across the street and Baby Mitchell?” he asked. “Just boys, no girlas?”
“Exactly.” I nodded.
Luckily, at that moment, his mother and father walked through the front door.
“Guess what?” my sister said to her son. “You’re going to have a new little brother!”
My God, I thought to myself, I can’t do this again. Not again. At least now, however, I’d be a little more prepared for the next “big wee-wee” talk, where there would be no song singing, no clapping of the hands, no conversations about stuff, only a mad dash to the nearest pet store to find the kitten corral.
Pissing Off the Pee Taker
As soon as the door closed behind me, I knew that there was no going back.
Standing alone in a strange bathroom with a cup in my hand, I was slightly horrified and a little excited at the same time. Finally, I thought, a test I can pass, and I didn’t even have to ruin a pair of shoes by writing the answers on them!
Apparently, I was the last of any of my friends to comply with a mandatory drug test for potential employment, mainly because I’ve been unemployed the longest. As a precaution, many of them filled me in with warnings:
“You’d better be nice and not treat them like pee handlers, because if you don’t, they’ll drop a rock of crack cocaine in your cup and foil the test, which goes on your PERMANENT FBI RECORD.”
“Do the wise thing and shave, because they come in with you and watch the whole time. No, I don’t think you can use your religious beliefs as an excuse, because no one likes a hairy girl, devout or not.”
“You’re going to have to get naked, I mean really naked.”
“Don’t try to sneak stuff in by shoving it up your butt. They’ll look up there, oh they certainly will.”
“Are you serious? Really, you’re not kidding me? Someone actually wants to hire you?”
So with those words of wisdom and three gallons of Diet Coke under my belt, so to speak, I went to the drug-testing lab/medical center confident that I was prepared.
When I walked in, I realized I was sadly mistaken. A teen mom-to-be sat by the door in a chair, breathing heavily in patterns; a man with what looked like a knife wound moaned from the adjoining room; and a band of hooligans grouped in the corner looked like they were there for the same reason I was, except they were holding papers that listed them as defendants.
I timidly walked up to the front desk and gave the receptionist my paperwork.
“I’m here to pee,” I told her quietly.
“Please have a seat,” she said with a smile. “We’ll call you when we’re ready.”
I suspected “getting ready” entailed the plugging in of stadium-quality lights and warming up the anal probe. And I sincerely hoped they would hurry, because I had been holding it in all day for this, and my bladder felt as big and full as the uterus of the teen mom who was sitting next to me.
I tried to read a magazine, but I was already getting itchy from the marathon shaving session I had conducted earlier. In fact, I’d had so much work to do that I had to conduct the session in segments because I kept running out of hot water in the shower. As a result, my entire body was so follicle-free I looked like a newborn rat, though I could feel the rush of fresh growth commencing in the areas that I had cleared the forest from first. And frankly, it wasn’t in places I felt I could scratch without having to explain myself in front of a judge.
I really had to go, and had already been sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes. I looked at the teen mom, hoping that her water hadn’t broken yet, so that if my bodily functions surpassed my own control, I could blame it on her.
“Laurie,” the receptionist finally called, opening the door.
She led me down a hallway to an alcove where a rather large, stocky bald man was waiting for me.
“This is Arthur,” she said. “He’ll be conducting the test.”
Arthur smiled at me. He looked like an anal-probe kinda guy.
I shivered, and felt my bladder crack.
“Wash your hands, but don’t use any soap,” Arthur instructed, motioning toward the sink.
“If I turn that thing on,” I warned, knowing that the levee was about to break and drown all of us, “I’m very afraid that we’re going to have to collect my sample from a wet/dry vac via the carpet. I drank more this morning than an insecure freshman at a little-sister rush.”
He motioned again.
I had to comply, and did it as quickly as I could.
Autobiography of a Fat Bride Page 19