Cake or Death

by Heather Mallick

  You attend the Sweetwater, Texas Jaycees rattlesnake roundup where six thousand pounds of rattlesnakes are caught, killed and eaten. You are crowned queen. Festival queen Miss Snakecharmer Scarlett Steakley skins a rattlesnake as part of her regal duties and gets covered in snake blood. (How often is one honoured and asked to peel a serpent? I mean, you already got the prize.) You scream, quiver with fear, vomit, can’t eat for a week and are never quite the same again. You are worse, I mean.

  Falling asleep in front of the television: It could mean you have sleep apnea, which means you experience lengthening periods in the middle of the night where you stop breathing, which deprives your brain of oxygen and slowly makes you stupid while killing you, and you’re the last to know because by then you’re already hopelessly stupid.

  Avoid the Seventies Revival: If you are wearing polyester clothing when your plane explodes, your clothes will melt onto you, making it impossible for you to survive your burns. In a repellent episode of grotesque intrusion into the life story of a celebrity who has given me nothing but pleasure, I tracked down the FAA report of the 1974 Eastern Airlines air crash that killed the father and two older brothers of the great satirist Stephen Colbert. The idle chatter of the experienced, alert flight crew caused them to ignore repeated signals that they were flying far too low as they approached the airport. Many passengers burned to death because their trendy clothes melted. I feel ashamed that I sought out this information on the accident that ruined the life of ten-year-old Stephen and I do not like myself at all. So watch out for the Internet turning you into a nasty piece of work. It happened to me. See? It just happened to you too ’cause you read this.

  Don’t smoke. There are cancers and there are cancers. Throat cancer is one. You can end up having your tongue removed and being fed through a tube, and you’ll allow this knowing that you will still die. This happened to John Diamond who loved his wife Nigella Lawson and their two children so much that he didn’t care about being a humble, pretty corpse. It’s a death I wouldn’t have wished on Slobodan Milošević. So don’t smoke. Even dying of drink won’t be as bad.

  Unplug your office paper shredder before you clean the blades. I didn’t once, and I already had a husband who cut off his finger with his own self-wielded secateurs because he was simultaneously pruning and thinking about his impossible teenager, and yet I still didn’t unplug the shredder first. I’ve seen the end of a finger slowly rot, for God’s sake. I know whereof I speak.

  The following things have been suggested, perhaps by charlatans, to be associated with breast cancer: asymmetrical breasts, the compression of breast tissue by bras, hormone therapy or the lack of hormone therapy, relatives with the disease. So either expand or shrink a breast, go braless, and drop your cancerated mother. She’s dead tuh me, as Tony Soprano would say.

  The presence of even the slightest glimmer of light or electrical devices in our bedrooms as we sleep is said to shorten our lives. For it is not natural for man to have light during his sleeping hours. I do wonder about cavemen and their fires. Perhaps they were already on the long light slide to an early death. Who needs to know when it’s three in the morning? Stomp that glowing clock.

  We will not even discuss the damage cell-phone use may inflict on the brain, but the concomitant traffic dangers are likely just as significant. Don’t drive while talking to a disembodied voice. As well, don’t wear an iPod while jogging on the street, although heaven knows why you are not using the sidewalk. You are running disabled by music. An ironic way to die.

  Don’t sit under your chimney. It may collapse, wiping out your family. This happened in London, Ontario. Let elevators have their way. Fighting them may lead to decapitation. It does so relatively infrequently considering the time we spend half-on, half-off the elevator, but stay alert. Up or down, it doesn’t matter, as long as all of you goes up or down.

  Wear heavy gloves when gardening. An errant thorn could cause, and has caused, the loss of many a hand.

  Photograph your handymen. Forty years later, your children may discover the Boston Strangler standing behind you in the kitchen with his workmate. If you are the writer Sebastian Junger, you will get a very unusual book out of this brush with death. But that is by the by. My advice is take a snapshot. Once you have photographed him, you have evidence that makes him unlikely to kill you, unless he is driven into a sudden uncontrollable rage. Be polite. Offer herbal tea, not coffee, to your workmen. Or lemonade.

  Beware stalkers, especially if you are British politician Mo Mowlam who helped bring peace to Northern Ireland. As a beautiful young student at the University of Tallahassee, she was stalked by Ted Bundy, who went on to strangle, bite, sodomize and smash in the heads of several students there. You have a duty not just to yourself but to your fellow man. And even if your future contains only a disastrous marriage, hateful children, a job at a call centre and a sad hobby like scrapbooking your series of failures, lock your door anyway.

  Never volunteer for a drug trial unless the drug has been tested rigorously on animals, and in similar quantities, and all procedures have been followed. Make those procedures your bible. Or else your immune system will explode as did those of several young volunteers in a British hospital and your head will literally expand while you scream for help. At the very least, you will lose your fingers and toes. Furthermore, use your wiles to get into the control group that is given placebos, there’s a clever boy.

  Eat ginger to prevent ovarian cancer. Or don’t. Scientists disagree over whether it provides the faintest help. Same with ginseng, echinacea, green and other special teas. If you have a vasectomy, have a follow-up test to see if it worked. They often do not, Daddy. Then check for prostate cancer, to which vasectomies may be linked. Or not.

  If you have a heart transplant, keep your old heart in there, just in case. You’ve got room. It can work out real well. And you can get the old heart restarted. This is true.

  Don’t sit on a toilet in the washroom of a dodgy-looking building without checking for rats. Dan Aykroyd didn’t check. It was a huuuuge rat, he said. Also, if you are kidnapped, beware of Stockholm Syndrome. Think about it. Does this man who has you in manacles truly have your best interests at heart? I would just stay away from Sicily altogether, or Brazil. If you are in Brazil, do not be a destitute street child. Your fate is written in tears already cried. I am crying now. Marry the offspring of Melinda and Bill Gates. Life will be spectacular in a good-quality-sneakers kind of way.

  Don’t be bitten by sandflies. There’s one kind of visceral leishmaniasis which is always fatal unless you get to a hospital fast for a month of injections. It eats your spleen and liver. The second kind destroys the mucous membranes in your nose, mouth and throat; the third just gives you big obvious sores. Sandflies hardly sound dangerous. They are. Get a mosquito net with a really fine mesh.

  Be very upset during your pregnancy. Add stress to your life by watching speeches by George W. Bush. Argue with your husband or leave him—poverty is the greatest stressor of all. Stress during pregnancy is said to result in children developing at a faster rate, perhaps the result of all that fight-or-flight cortisol leaking from mother to fetus. Although I’m trying to imagine the kind of woman who would be utterly calm through a pregnancy.

  Have many boy-children, thus making it more likely that younger sons will be gay. Scientists say that the “maternal memory” means the womb becomes increasingly hostile to those things with a Y chromosome. As it delivers male after male, it attempts to become immune to boys. Proof can be found in stuff found in the folds of the placenta. Gays in the family means that at least some of your children will behave in a civilized fashion and will assure you of companionship in your older years. Alter that will now.

  Here’s the latest on prostates: The BBC advises men to drink an eight-ounce glass of pomegranate juice each day. (But only if they have prostate cancer, I hasten to add.) “Pomegranates: the fruity panacea,” read the site’s dreadful headline. And even then, men won’t
be terribly motivated after they’ve hammered their seven-thousandth pip and the kitchen looks like someone’s lungs exploded outside their body. To accompany the story, the BBC had a photograph of huge off-white balls. Jesus, that’s what a sick prostate looks like? I always thought they were like a little broad-bean. But it turns out the picture was of sickly unripe pomegranates. Good luck with your juicing, men.

  I’d continue, but you get the picture.

  The People I Detest

  I know what you’re thinking, she can’t get that in one essay but see, there’s the magic of categories

  SUBSET: THE I-FAIL-TO-SEE PEOPLE

  If there’s one phrase that sums it up, and there is, it is “I fail to see …” Since I live in Canada, this is usually followed by “the humour of …” and if it’s a newspaper I’ve written something for, “Heather Mallick’s recent remarks regarding….”

  My recent remarks embrace a multiplicity of things but what they all have in common is that a certain type of reader took them deadly seriously and wrote to complain that I apparently did not.

  Now it is a law that only mad people write to newspapers or TV stations to complain. I’m not quite comfortable with this law given that over the past few months I have occasionally felt a passion about something and considered writing a heated letter to a newspaper about it, something beyond “We moved the mailbox to the side of the house last week. Can your delivery people grasp that now?”

  Having once edited the Letters page of that under-cooked tabloid The Toronto Sun, I know about mad people, and I don’t wish to be one. But the fact that I occasionally think of joining their ranks means a) they’re not all that mad and b) I am quicker to anger now. Furthermore, I am getting older like a pet, i.e., seven years have passed for every birthday cake I’ve had presented to me (here’s a housekeeping tip: icing sugar’s fine, but mousse cakes sieved with cocoa should never get a hearty blow, just a little something my carpeting and I have learned over the years) and I’m a coffin-dodger whose clothes are getting baggier and beiger by the minute. I both irritate the world and am irritated by it. I irritate the hell out of myself. (Here’s another housekeeping tip: there’s a place and an outfit suitable for spraying black Suede Renew on Christian Louboutin pumps, and indoors while wearing the pumps isn’t it, when will I learn that?)

  Look how hard I try to make myself useful to you. I’m old in mind but I’m sweet and handy as a chunk of apple in a bricklike bag of brown sugar. (That tip actually works; don’t say I never taught you anything.) There, I’ve softened you up.

  In truth, aside from politics and the coming destruction of the planet, I have no problem with the way the world is headed. It’s better and offers infinitely more opportunities for pleasure and adventure than when I was a child twitching the rabbit ears on the TV.

  But I still want to write these letters. Then I read the letters that are written to me and the humourless editors of whatever I’m writing for, and I realize that there’s a phalanx of crazed, spittle-spraying, damaged and dangerously un-straitjacketed people out there with nothing better to do than complain about their own wildly incorrect interpretations of what I wrote, having convinced themselves that I will be deeply moved by their complaints.

  And sometimes I am deeply moved. To write back. And there the trouble begins.

  I once wrote a brief shopping column. One week I did four hundred words on children’s toys. They should be wood, I said, and not just because wood is chic in toyland. I could give a toss about fashion, allegedly. (I am under the impression that I am not shallow. I could be wrong about this.) Wood is not intrinsically more educational than any other material unless you’re teaching your toddler about different kinds of wood, i.e., This is oak, my child, good English oak bought in Hamleys. It was Dutch elm disease that destroyed the superficial good looks of the American small town, well, that and big-box stores and the curse of the automobile but that is by the by. What matters is that when you throw that wooden toy at Auntie Heather’s head, it dents (her head and the toy) but you can’t say that of plastic.

  No, cheap plastic toys made by desperate underage factory slaves (very much like you, my little Alexandra) in China will not dent. But these toys will dry out and split. Worse, they will stain with the plethora of substances you insist on introducing into the living room. A living room is not a place for paint or jam, my child; it is a place for reading and contemplating, or perhaps watching an improving David Attenborough documentary on bird life.

  Then the child hits me, hard this time.

  I bought a toy kitchen for my niece. It was like a little phone box, but with counters, ovens, microwaves, pots and cutlery, all made of plastic. She loved it and I was, by design and by far, the most popular relative that Christmas. But when I visited next Christmas, I wrote, the play kitchen was broken in six places and irretrievably stained. It looked, I wrote, like the kitchen of an alcoholic.

  I then received a letter from an aggrieved man who told me that he was an alcoholic and that his Jenn-Air kitchen was immaculate, positively gleaming. I owed alcoholics, who have struggled to overcome their disability, an apology for impugning their household maintenance.

  I wrote back instantly, of course, saying, Dear Sir, Are you certain you weren’t drunk when you wrote this?

  The guy then sent his letter and my reply to the editor, who insisted that I apologize. I think I did too, for the sheer fun of repeating the line about him being drunk, and said alcoholics are the cleanest, tidiest people I know. It’s so funny watching them at Christmas as their faces go numb and they pour an entire drink on their shoes under the impression it is flowing down their little red lane. These people are nature’s hygienists. Okay, I didn’t put that last bit in the letter.

  I am invariably harangued by readers when I write about mental illness, pets and “supporting our troops” in WhereverTheFuck. What I resent and can’t say is that I have seen more mental illness than they’ve had hot dinners, and that is because I venture out of my home where the madmen roam and they clearly do not. It is my job to get outside. It isn’t pleasant, but it is always sick-making in an interesting way, especially if you can get a halfway entertaining/useful column out of it.

  I remember spending a week trying to track down a cell-phone company that was selling ring tones that were the sound of a woman crying out as she was kicked in the face with a leather boot. After a week of being avoided by a huge company that operated by phone (its public relations people invariably answered the phone with a nervous “How did you get this number?”), I finally screamed at a voice-mail that they’d be sorry, dickless wonders.

  Then, and this was both funny and horribly mortifying, I had to write to two men at this awful company and assure them that they had generative organs. Big ones. The editor took that bit out. Which is good, because everyone at this cell-phone company was a misogynist and utterly devoid of dick, so why pretend?

  At the time, I did feel guilty because I think it’s wrong to disparage men by referring to their genitals. But this was my problem. Nothing was ever funny to a Canadian, ever. I started to think that Canadians had no sense of humour, and then I realized that it was only Canadian letter-writers who had no sense of humour. Everyone else in Canada was fine, which is why they hadn’t written to me. They either saw the humour or hadn’t read the column or they were busy with their lives and didn’t have the time to witter away to a complete stranger about personal assemblages of resentments built up over the decades.

  The thing they didn’t know was that I was by nature a polite person. I always apologized after losing my temper. Losing your temper is a failure by definition, I think. It’s my dream to be a calm person. I have long known I will never achieve this dream, but now I can see that I won’t even be able to build a facade.

  Even humourless Canadians started to look good to me after I appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, that spewing-on Murdoch-owned Fox News, by that awful loofah-penis yelly-man Bill O’Reilly. He’s such a disgrace t
hat Stephen Colbert based an entire show, The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central parodying the idiocy, arrogance and dopey cruelty of O’Reilly.

  But I was being interviewed by O’Reilly on my welcoming American draft dodgers to Canada. Non-violent, thoughtful young people come here in great numbers, I said. O’Reilly hated this, wanting them all in prison being sodomized by white supremacists, but what he hated more was that I had clean hair, pearl earrings and perfect teeth and I was calling myself a socialist.

  I was aiming to show O’Reilly viewers that a socialist could be civilized and reasonable. I imagined his audience as cave-dwellers who dealt with excretion by getting down on all fours and letting loose like an animal. I was right about that last bit, of course. You would not believe the e-mail I got. These men mentioned their yearning to bend women over logs and make them squeal like pigs. Worse, they wanted to do this to these draft dodgers and their wives, some of whom were not white, which was beyond the pale in their eyes, one might say.

  E-mail itself is odd by its very nature. What happens when your job consists of sitting at home writing is that at some point you become pathetic enough to make e-mail friends. I have met almost none of these people, although they’ll show up on book tours and after a speech and they seem normal and nice. But the problem is that they have become my social circle. It is not normal to have a social circle you haven’t met.