This is what I wear to Target when I just need a little pick-me-up.
By the second week, the kids were getting used to sharing the backseat with the monkey, and even Brandon seemed resigned. See, I thought, Brandon will be able to accept not being the baby anymore. I think a new baby is really the way to go. That night I had to take Mackenzie to Target to get something for school. When we got out of the car in the parking lot and locked it with my remote, she said to me, “But Mom, you’re leaving your baby in the car.” I just laughed and said, “He’s OK. He’s sleeping and we’ll only be a minute.” When I got up to the front of the store where the solicitors with their petitions are, I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “Excuse me, miss. I’m sorry, I don’t normally do this.” At that point I thought, Yes, it’s me, I’m the girl from Chelsea Lately and After Lately. Thanks for watching E! This happens a lot to me at my local Target. People approach me all the time, and not just when I’m wearing a red shirt and tan pants, which can be annoying when all they really want from you is to know what aisle the Swiffers are in. As I turned to her with a smile, anticipating a compliment and a request for a photo of us taken on her camera phone, she said, “You cannot leave your child sleeping in your car. It’s over ninety degrees out. You’re lucky I didn’t call 911.” Oh my God, she’d heard Mackenzie and me joking. “No, that’s a stuffed monkey. It’s not a real boy,” I said. She continued, “Look, I won’t call the police if you get him out right now!” Everyone was staring at us, including the people collecting signatures for a petition to get the local pound to serve only organic dog food. She went on: “I don’t believe you. I’m going to follow you to your car.”
Since when do people get so nosy? My mom left us alone in the car all the time. I was just thankful that she remembered to pick us up from Rollerrama in the first place. Maybe this woman saw too many episodes of ABC’s Primetime: What Would You Do? with John Quiñones, where hidden cameras capture real people responding to outrageous behavior by actors who are hired by ABC. Oftentimes the actors are overly pushy or neglectful parents and the show captures a concerned citizen stepping in and then later revealing to them that it was all a setup and congratulating them on getting involved. Seriously, I knew this woman wasn’t going to let up, so I said, “Here, please come and see for yourself.” When I opened the car and pointed to the monkey, Mackenzie chimed in, “My mom uses him so she can ride in the carpool lane on the 405 to work. She’s on Chelsea Lately.” I didn’t know what was more horrifying, that the woman who was questioning me was an African American, or that Mackenzie was selling me down the river.
“Mackenzie, that’s not true,” I said with a smile. “Then why did you tell us that?” Mackenzie asked. My heart was beating so fast. I imagined myself in an interrogation room at the police department and what it would look like when they put it on 48 Hours Mystery. How I would look being shot from above with the surveillance camera? How many hours could I go on lying until I’d finally break and admit to the crime? More important, if I were to be arrested, would I be famous enough for my mugshot to appear on TMZ? Maybe not the TV show but possibly TMZ.com. I believe at least it would be posted up there for a good part of an afternoon. I’ve been practicing my mugshot face since Lindsay Lohan was arrested for her second DUI back in 2007. It’s a soft, closed-mouth smile, and I tilt my head slightly to the left with big innocent eyes so I still look pretty but somewhat regretful for what put me behind bars—even if it was a simple misunderstanding.
The woman who walked me to the car said, “I’m sorry. I feel like such an idiot,” and walked off. I turned to Mackenzie. “I told you never to tell anyone about the carpool lane,” I said firmly. “I’m sorry; I didn’t want her to think you were a bad mom,” she said as she started to cry. I felt terrible. Here my beautiful stepdaughter was just trying to protect me. That night I removed the monkey from my backseat for good. About a month later, we read in the Los Angeles Times that an old friend of ours, whom we hadn’t seen in years other than his Christmas card, pled guilty to tax fraud and was facing hard time. Peter turned to me and said seriously, “That’s why I don’t want you ever driving with that monkey in the carpool lane.”
“I told you he’s out of my car, back living in Brandon’s room. But do you know how you can never have to worry about me illegally going into the carpool lane again?” I said coyly.
“How?” he asked.
“Give me a new baby,” I said.
He thought for a second and then said very dryly, “I’d rather you go to prison.”
3
THE NINE STEPS OF BEING KICKED IN THE ASS BY SUZE ORMAN
At Chelsea Lately, we were able to get financial guru Suze Orman to come in and film her giving a few of the writers financial advice. I was lucky enough to be one of them, or so I thought. She seemed nice enough and she had extremely white teeth, which highlighted her Suze hair. We started talking, and I immediately liked her. I stared at the infamous one pair of earrings Suze owns; she only bought one pair of earrings in her whole life, and that’s why she is so wealthy. (Can you imagine opening up a lemonade stand with her as a kid? She would be so serious, keeping books, not giving samples, and talking all the time about how she wanted to expand.) Appropriately, her earrings were gold balls.
Suze said, “What can I help you with?”
My question for Suze was “Can my husband and I afford a fourth child?”
She said, “Do you own your own home?” speaking in Suze voice.
I proudly said, “Yes!”
“How much do you owe on it?”
I said, “Well, our loan is for more than the house is worth, but isn’t that everyone’s situation today, except for you and Oprah?”
Suze said, “What are the terms of your rate?”
I said, “I know it’s thirty-year fixed. I don’t know the rate, but my husband told me it was a really good one.”
Suze went apeshit.
She asked, “What does your husband do?”
I replied, “He’s a mortgage broker and a Realtor.”
She became incensed. “So your husband the mortgage broker and the Realtor put you in a home that is now worth less than you paid. Do you have any stocks?”
“Yes,” I said proudly.
Suze asked me, “Who are they with?”
I said, “I don’t know. The statements come with an envelope that reads ‘LPL’ on it.”
She grew red. “What the hell is LPL?”
I grew red, and said, “Well, I don’t know, but I could call my husband at home and ask.”
Suze asked, “He works from home?”
I said, “Well, he has been trying to sell his one listing for the past eighteen months, which says a lot about the owners still really liking his service.”
Suze shook her head and then asked, “Do you have life insurance?”
I said, “Yes. He has a million dollars on me, but I only have $500,000 on him. Do you think I should be suspicious?”
Suze barked back, “No. He doesn’t make any money. You don’t need it.”
Suze then wanted to know about some of my other expenses.
I said, “Our children go to private school, and Peter has a golf membership for $550 a month.” I was a little scared about admitting the second one.
Suze immediately tore into the golf membership. “Don’t you think you should take that $550 a month and pay off your home loan?”
I said, “He really enjoys it. Even when he goes to a charity auction, he always bids and wins to play rounds of golf at other country clubs in our area. So not only is he familiar with all the other golf courses, he’s also quite a philanthropist!”
Suze was dumbfounded and couldn’t speak for a minute.
Suze then said, “Well, you’re generous with him. Is he generous with you?”
I said, “He never makes any comments on what I spend on clothes. But I’ve asked him when he grocery shops to please buy fresh-squeezed orange juice, which he refuses to do.”
She said, “I agree. Looking at your finances, you can’t afford it, nor do you deserve it.” Then she asked me, “How is he with the children?”
I said, “Well, I ask him to buy organic milk for the kids because there are so many hormones in the regular kind, and if you buy that your daughter will get her period at four. Our daughter is twelve and she still hasn’t gotten her period. I think it’s because of the organic milk.”
Suze said (again in Suze voice but this time much louder and firmer), “Your daughter is twelve and she still hasn’t gotten her period? Well, I’ll tell you why she hasn’t. She hasn’t gotten her period because she is so stressed out that her mother knows nothing about her family’s finances.”
She continued, “Let me tell you about a woman I met. She and her husband were at a flower store. It was their one-year wedding anniversary. She turned to look at a tulip, and when she turned back around he had dropped dead just like that. She had no clue where their money was, the terms of their insurance policy, or their debts, let alone what their mortgage rate was. I cannot tell you how many countless crying widows I have counseled who all have the same story: My husband took care of it. Well, guess what? He can’t take care of it when he’s six feet under. What if tomorrow Peter goes out to the golf course and on the ninth hole he drops dead just like that? I’ll tell you, you’ll have more problems than having fresh-squeezed orange juice to worry about. I can’t tell you how many women have rolled over in the middle of the night to feel their husband’s icy-cold deceased body lying next to them and they don’t even know where the key to the safety-deposit box is. Heather, what if Peter choked on a chicken bone in the middle of dinner, clutching his throat as he takes his final breaths and drops dead? Do you have any idea how much your water bill is each month?”
I said, “No. Don’t they bundle it with the electric?”
Suze shook her head and said, “How are you going to live on Peter’s $500,000 life insurance with not just three, but four kids?”
I said, “Suze, actually you’ve helped me decide to not go ahead with that fourth child, since Peter is going to drop dead at any moment.”
That night I went home with a clipboard with all of Suze’s questions. I gave it to Peter to fill out. He said he would look into it the next day. And I said, “Over your dead body. You’ll do it tonight!”
4
B.C.
When you’re raising a boy, you inevitably begin to notice that every girl around your son’s age seems smarter, more verbal, and just generally is more on top of shit. That’s because they are. Unfortunately, I didn’t come to this particular realization until my son Brandon’s behavior began confounding the preschool teachers. According to them, he often climbed on the outside of the jungle gym, jumped off into the woodchip pile, and got hurt. But then he would just cry alone for a bit and go back and do it again. The teachers grew concerned that he wasn’t feeling pain properly, and so couldn’t correctly gauge the danger of his actions. On first hearing this, I couldn’t help but wonder how their line of thinking would work in a football game; the minute anyone got sacked, they’d just have to quit. But the week before, Brandon had climbed over our booth at P.F. Chang’s, fell into another couple’s laps, laughed, and stolen their chocolate-covered fortune cookie. Maybe a little lesson in consequences wouldn’t hurt. So I took their report very seriously and decided to have him evaluated.
Unfortunately, I left the report out one night when my parents came over to babysit. When Peter and I returned from dinner, my dad instantly wanted to talk about it. And by talk about it, I mean recruit my four-year-old son to the Marine Corps. “That boy is great! He just doesn’t give up. He’d make a perfect Marine.” My dad was a combat Marine in World War II, played college football, and likes to say he comes from the greatest generation that ever lived. I patiently explained that we actually weren’t very happy about the report because the teachers were concerned that he didn’t feel pain properly and had difficulty evaluating danger. My father just smiled and said, “That’s the kind of fearlessness that the Marine Corps looks out for when choosing those few good men.” My mother, however, went crazy in an entirely different way. “Does this mean they won’t let him into St. Ignatius’s kindergarten?” I said, “I don’t know, Mom. If it’s not the right school for him, I’m not going to force him to go there.” My mother, being the open-minded woman she is, said, “Well, there is no better school than St. Ignatius. It’s the number-one school in the Catholic Los Angeles Archdiocese. There’s no way he’s going to the public school. What’s he going to do? Go to school in a flak jacket? Because that’s what they do now. I read it in the L.A. Times. Besides, he’s not bilingual; he wouldn’t understand the teachers. I think I saw that on Fox News!”
We were getting ahead of ourselves. When I first began looking into schools for Brandon, I visited CHARM, a public school where normal kids learn side by side with physically and mentally handicapped children. I figured it was a safe bet since I wasn’t yet sure which side my child was on. Desperate that Brandon would have no school to go to, I offered the admissions officers tickets to Chelsea Lately, claimed I could get Chelsea to sign books for them, and promised to shower them in Chuy Bravo bobbleheads. Driving out of the parking lot, I looked around at the other students, and thought, Brandon might actually have a chance here. To boost his self-confidence, he could play kickball with the wheelchair-bound children.
This actually wasn’t the first time I doubted Brandon’s ability to play on a regular baseball team like his older brother, Drake. A few summers back, I had been cutting a Dodgers cake for Drake and his teammates when another mother alerted me to an inert Brandon lying facedown on the concrete. Flinging down the knife, I sprinted to his side and picked him up, but he just stared at me and didn’t say anything. As another parent quickly called 911, I grabbed Drake by his uniform, pulled him in front of Brandon, and asked, “What is his name, what is his name?” Brandon looked blankly at Drake and didn’t answer. My heart pounding, I cried out, “He doesn’t even remember his brother’s name!” Another boy stepped up behind me, and I heard Drake say, “Mom, I’m right here.” Slowly looking up at the boy I had trapped in my viselike grip, I realized I had not managed to grab my own son. Even I didn’t know this kid’s name. I let go and nervously patted out the newly formed wrinkles in No-Name’s shirt while Brandon calmly explained to Drake that he had simply been trying to lick some spare bubblegum off the pavement. On second thought, those wheelchair kids might have given Brandon a run for his money on the kickball field.
The second school I visited was a half hour from our home, compared to the three-minute drive to St. Ignatius. This school only had normals, and since they had a bunch of graduate students teaching there, the ratio of students to teachers was extremely low, meaning Brandon would get the attention he was quickly beginning to prove he needed. I liked it a lot, so I decided to bring Peter and Brandon there to see if they liked it too. The whole way there, Peter wouldn’t stop complaining about how far away it was. According to him, if there was an earthquake, and we broke off into our own island, it would take precisely ten days for us to reach Brandon. My mother had of course read in the L.A. Times that this disaster was imminent, and constantly reminded us to be prepared. I figured I could just hunker down in her wine cellar/garage, which was already stocked with Chardonnay and canned goods. Plus, her pool was purified, so we could make a killing bottling the water and selling it to the neighbors.
At the school we visited a kindergarten class was already in session. In a year Brandon would be learning these same things that were being taught in the classroom. As I was talking to the teacher, Brandon finally put on his A-game and began reading off every single sight word on the blackboard. We got the application and told the administrator that we were going to discuss it, and that we’d get back to her. However, seconds after we pulled out of the parking lot, Peter said, “We’re not going there, or to the first school, because there’s nothing wr
ong with him. I’m not driving him all this way, so if St. Ignatius’s doesn’t take him, he’s going to our public school just down the street. I don’t care what your mother reads in the L.A. Times!”
The next day at work, I was upset about Brandon’s situation, so I wisely decided to confide in Chris Franjola, who has no kids and is the biggest playboy on staff. “Apparently Brandon’s teachers say he doesn’t like to hold a pencil and prefers the iPad,” I said. “I just spent $150 on supplies from a website called Handwriting without Tears. Why did I name him Brandon? That’s seven letters. If I had named him Max or Bo, surely he would have been able to write his name by now.” Chris paused, looked at me, and said, “I don’t fucking get it. Why use a pencil when you have a fucking iPad? The kid must be real smart.” This cheered me up, so I decided to call the principal, Mrs. Walls, at St. Ignatius to talk about Brandon and find out if there was a patron saint of holding a pencil whom I could start praying to.
My Inappropriate Life Page 3