“Thanks a lot, guys. We did it!” are Ginny’s parting words to us, at about 10 P.M. And off into the night walk twenty-five strangers, all bearing sexual secrets.
2. “Looking for Someone:
A Career as a Private Detective”
The description in the book said, “Learn surveillance, interview, interrogation and undercover techniques.”
The class is being held at the Nick Harris Detective Academy, which turns out to be a small brick building in the San Fernando Valley. There, inside a regulation-style classroom, a small wiry-haired man named Milo Speriglio is standing at a podium. Despite the fact that there are only fourteen people attending tonight, he is addressing the class with a microphone. A plaque attached to the front of the podium says NICK HARRIS DETECTIVE AGENCY. SINCE 1911. Against the back wall of the classroom is a giant banner that reads NICK HARRIS DETECTIVE AGENCY. SINCE 1907. I am a couple of minutes late arriving so I sneak to an empty desk; on it is an “information kit,” the front page of which says NICK HARRIS DETECTIVES. FOUNDED IN 1906. But never mind. Milo correctly identifies me as the woman who is coming from a magazine. “What magazine are you with?” he asks me. “New York Woman,” I answer. “Oh,” he says, “I didn’t know it was a woman’s magazine. Is it M-r-s or M-s or M-i-s-s? I was once interviewed by Gloria Steinberg.” “No,” I tell him, “it’s called New York Woman magazine.” “Does it have anything to do with Playboy or Playgirl?” he asks me. I can see a pack of Kool cigarettes through the pocket of his translucent yellow shirt. On each of his wrists is a crushed-gold wristband: one watch, one bracelet. He is also wearing several rings. Now Milo holds up a pen. “Anyone know what this is?” he asks. No one is dumb enough to say “A pen.” Someone says, “A transmitter?” “It has been determined that Marilyn Monroe was murdered,” Milo answers, “and using my magic pen—I just touch the top of it—” He does so and activates an audiotape of some interviews he conducted during his apparently endless investigation of this case. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes we listen to a man he calls his “deep throat” and another guy who says one of his ambulances drove Monroe’s body. He gives more obscure information than I ever wanted about this particular incident. “Was she starting to turn blue?” Milo asks the ambulance guy. “Well, the patient would inevitably turn blue, yes” is part of what I hear before I begin to tune it all out. A blond woman in the next row is picking hairs off her giant shoulder pads. The class is predominantly female: eleven women in summerwear and three men who look considerably grungier. When the tape is over, Milo asks for questions and someone asks for more information about “pretext,” a concept that was apparently introduced last week, at the first part of this course. Milo says he might give additional examples were it not for the presence of a certain magazine reporter.
Milo now entertains us with anecdotes regarding his own wacky escapades … like the time he made an illegal U-turn on Sunset Boulevard: “I’m being chased and so I take out my credentials … which look very close to that of another investigative bureau—I forgot the name of it but the initials are FBI …”
“Any more questions?” A thirtyish man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt shoots up his hand. During an upcoming break I learn that his name is Jim and that he is a plumber from Pomona. Jim thinks that being a private detective might be a more interesting job, “for a while anyway.” (No newcomer to the world of extension programs, Jim last attended a course in “Makeup and Skin Care,” where he learned to “drink lots of water and use certain creams and stuff like that.”) Now he wants to know if some detectives use multiple identities. “Yes,” says Milo, “when they’re using subterfuge or pretext. They won’t come out and say, ‘I’m John Smith.’ They might say, ‘I’m Jack Smith’ or something like that.”
As the class goes on, Jim has a great many questions to ask. He wants to know if hypnosis can help you beat a lie detector. He wants to know if you can file your fingerprints off or whether the application of glue will cause them to disappear. He wants to know whether galoshes will eliminate footprints. I begin to wonder, Why exactly does he want to know?
Now Fawn wants to know if Milo has worked on “cases of international proportions.” She is wearing a ponytail pulled to one side of her head. Just this week she got dumped from her job in sales, and, she tells me, she has enrolled as a full-time student here. “Yes,” says Milo. “Can you give some examples?” she asks. “No,” he says, eliciting light laughter. I talk to the hennaed woman with braces and checkerboard socks who is seated behind me. She is Candy, a woman who has taught grade school for seventeen years, but thinks that someday she might like to have another career. Now she feels she wouldn’t really want to be a private detective because she doesn’t really like the idea of using pretense in dealing with people.
Before the class ends Milo shows us how to write on money with a crayon that can only be seen in ultraviolet light, and demonstrates equipment that makes a beep when it gets near hidden bugs or wiretaps. I realize I have been regularly checking my watch to see how late it is getting, pretty much the way I used to do when I was in high school. On my way out I chat with a stocky fiftyish woman named Judy Johnston, who tells me she just retired from her job as an accounts-payable clerk. Judy looks as unlikely a candidate for a career as a private detective as any living creature has a right to. But she tells me she has always been interested in the field. And so she was disappointed. “I felt we didn’t really learn a whole lot. I feel like I paid forty dollars for very little. But I’m interested in taking the investigator course,” she says as she unlocks her car.
What I Have Learned from My Studies
FBI agents bend their car antennae so they will recognize each other.
Woman-on-top and rear-entry-knees-to-chest are the best positions for getting hit in the G-spot.
It’s easiest to take criminal fingerprints off a dead body.
Four women that Ginny Dingman knows set off airport metal detectors by trying to go through wearing Ben Wa balls.
The most dangerous form of private-eye work is process serving.
There is an Oriental sexual practice in which you take a silk string with knots in it and insert it up your lover’s rectum. At the moment of orgasm you slowly pull it out. The key word here is “slowly,” for you can pull out a person’s intestinal tract, which, for people like me, is really a giant turnoff. In fact, I’m not sure that some of these darn sexual secrets weren’t better off when they were secrets.
Something Extremely Important
Today our friend Paul came to the house in a nearly dissociative state of panic. Suddenly and without warning, it appeared that his marriage was unraveling.
He sat down on the big red couch in the living room, I offered him a vodka, and he cautiously began to detail his anguish.
“Up until yesterday, if you had asked me if my marriage was a happy one, I would have said yes,” he said, choking back tears, his voice quivering with emotion, “and then last night, out of the blue, my wife comes in and tells me she wants a divorce.”
As Paul spoke, our dog Puppyboy, a skinny brown-and-black Tijuana Shepherd, approached with his mouth full of a large, black, completely deflated soccer ball. He placed the flat wet piece of rubber gently on Paul’s knee, where it balanced like a rock at Stonehenge. Then he sat down right in front of Paul to wait for the games to begin. To Puppyboy, a ball is still a ball whether or not it is currently filled with air, and any opportunity is as good as any other to begin a game of “Toss the Deflated Soccer Ball Across the Room.”
Paul was too upset to notice. “She told me she wants to start seeing other men,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes, “and that’s not even the worst of it. Today I found out from friends that they have already seen her around town with another guy. They didn’t want to say anything until now.”
He began to cry. It was heartrending. Except to Puppyboy, who saw it as a cue to apply a little additional pressure. So he picked up the deflated piece of rubber off the edge of
Paul’s knee and moved it to a new spot, a little farther up Paul’s leg, thereby putting it just a teensy bit closer to Paul’s hands, for his convenience. Just in case Paul hadn’t noticed it all the way down there on his knee. And, having rectified the problem, Puppyboy sat back down in front of Paul and resumed the ceaseless staring that he felt confident would now cause the game to start.
But Paul had the bad manners to be completely preoccupied by his own tragedy.
“I have no idea what I am going to do,” he said, as Puppyboy moved in a little closer and began staring a little harder, his eyes going intently from the flat black rubber thing that was balancing on Paul’s thigh, to Paul’s face, and then back to the flat black rubber thing, as if to help Paul out in case he was having trouble locating it.
“It’s been just emotionally devastating,” Paul continued. “Everything I’ve worked for has fallen apart. And what happens to me now? Am I going to lose everything? My house? My cars? My life savings?” He broke down and began to sob: the only time I have ever seen this incredibly stoic man cry.
Which was a signal to Puppyboy that the game was finally about to get going, so he picked up the deflated soccer ball off Paul’s thigh and moved it to the most conveniently located spot of all, the very center of Paul’s lap. Then he sat back down in front of Paul and resumed his intense staring, his face as bright with expectation as a preschooler’s on Christmas morning.
The more gruesome Paul’s story became, the more overwhelming his pain, the more convinced Puppyboy was that game time was near. He knew that by moving that flat wet piece of rubber that used to be a ball to slightly different places on Paul’s legs, and then staring with what amounted to X-ray vision, he had a winning combination that was ultimately irresistible.
So he kept doing this for the whole two hours that Paul was at our house discussing his recent catastrophe, despite the fact that Paul never acknowledged him at all.
Later that night, after Paul had gone home to pick up the pieces of his shattered existence, I began to wonder what Puppyboy was thinking during this piece of behavior, which was akin to trying to start a game of catch with a man whose entire body was trapped under a fifty-ton boulder. So I asked him.
Puppyboy Speaks
Hello, new seated person. I am Puppyboy and I can see that you are very upset for some reason. But I have something on my mind.
It is an idea so big that I can hardly hold my head up from the enormous weight of it. It is more than an idea. It is an urgent message. I am going out on a limb here to tell you that it is the most important thing I have ever had to say. And it is this: I have placed a thing on you that you must throw.
If you look down now, you will see it. It is the large flat thing that is balancing on your knee. It is stretchy and chewy and damp: everything a large flat thing should be. Please listen to me when I tell you that this is an opportunity you cannot pass up.
The reason I feel I must tell you that I have placed this large flat thing on the edge of your knee—by the way, you have noticed that your knee has a big flat wet thing balancing on it, haven’t you? Or are you so busy sobbing and weeping and talking about yourself that you are having trouble seeing it?
Here’s a hint: I am staring at it right now. So if you can imagine a laser beam coming from my eyes and then follow it down to the spot on your leg where it is focused, it will lead you right to it.…
There.
Now, either you see it or you need to get your eyes tested. The only other possible explanation for your puzzling lack of interest is that you are purposely ignoring me. And why would you do that? That doesn’t make any sense. Especially since you are really hurting yourself more than you are hurting me. Because, let’s face it, you’re the one who is passing up a great opportunity. And by “a great opportunity” I am referring to the chance to have the kind of fun that everyone dreams of having. I speak of the chance to throw a big flat stretchy wet thing. Think about it for a second.
It is a thing that can be chewed but does not really need to be swallowed.
It is at once like dinner and nothing like dinner at all.
It is tough and meatlike and moist like a dead thing, but, here’s the kicker: It’s all of the fun of a dead thing and none of the attendant trouble. It stinks like a dead thing, and you can roll on it, or take it with you to bed like a dead thing.
It can be stretched and laid upon and pulled apart like a dead thing. But it can also be flung repeatedly, without coming apart in a million pieces and losing all its guts like a dead thing. Can you believe your good luck? AND guess where it is right now? It is right in your lap. I can’t believe you would be foolish enough to pass up this chance.
I don’t want to be preachy, but in life there are certain moments that may never come again. This, I believe, is one of those moments for you. Throw it now or live a life of regret.
I mean, I can’t stop you if you’d rather just listen to yourself talk. Wife wife wife, she did this, she did that, great.
FOR CHRISSAKES LISTEN TO ME, YOU WHINY, HENPECKED MOTHERFUCKER. Just look into my eyes, and play along! Pick up the big flat wet thing.
Pick up the big flat wet thing.
Pick up the big flat wet thing. PICK IT UP. PICK IT UP. PICKUP THE BIG FLAT WET THING!
CAN YOU HEAR ME OKAY? PICKUP THE BIG FLAT WET THING.
Are you even listening? You know, maybe if you had LISTENED A LITTLE BETTER DURING YOUR MARRIAGE your wife wouldn’t want a divorce. DID you ever think of that? IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME IF YOU NEVER THREW THE THINGS THAT SHE BROUGHT YOU EITHER!
Okay. I admit that was hitting below the belt.
So that was not the only chance you will get. I am going to give you another chance right away, as you will see, if you will but gaze legward.
I have again placed the big flat wet thing on your thigh and now you will find it is even more conveniently located than before.
And listen, pal, if I were you, I wouldn’t pass up an incredible opportunity like this again.
An Insider’s Guide to the American Woman
The first item in my collection of the greatest irritants of the early nineties is the June 1990 issue of Esquire featuring “The Secret Life of the American Wife.” On the cover is a partially clothed woman, anatomically labeled with such questions as “HER LIPS: Can you trust what they say?” and “HER BRA: What really keeps it up?”
I’m not surprised to learn that men are still mystified by women. Certainly women are still utterly baffled by men. But what I found so infuriating this time around was the type of thing the (presumably college-educated) editors and writers were pretending to find so gosh-darned unfathomable. And their approach! So retro, so fifties, so “Honey, now dry those tears and how about we take you downtown and buy you something sparkly?”
The lead article (“Your Wife: An Owner’s Manual”) offered pseudoscientific dissections of such feminine mysteries as “HER HANDBAG: Its capacity and contents” and “HER PLUMBING: General diagnostics.” If this is how far men have come in their knowledge of women—to wide-eyed wonderment at the contents of her purse and dumbfounded speechlessness at the thought of “female plumbing”—well, I personally think now is as good a time as any to throw in the towel.
My suggestion to men is, Stop trying to comprehend that which is clearly too complicated for you. Let me kindly state that it no longer really matters whether or not you understand. I just don’t think you should worry your pretty little heads about it for another moment. Instead, simply memorize the following information and blindly incorporate it into your thinking, much as one might deal with an elusive scientific concept, such as E = mc2.
Merrill’s Fun Facts to Know and Tell About Women
1. Women and the English Language. To a woman, the words “I had a great time. I’ll call you” translate roughly to mean, “He said he had a great time. He’ll call me.” So, if you say those words, expect to make a call to the woman to whom you have said them. If this does not fit into you
r plans, do not say those words. (I know this is confusing. Just memorize it and do it. There’s nothing more to discuss.)
Women have other quirky language-oriented notions. For instance, to a woman the words “I love you” represent a heartfelt expression of the intensely fond feelings you have for her. At least, this kind of thing will be what the woman has in mind when she utters the words, and so she will not be pleased if your response is “Thank you” or “I know.”
There is an interesting truth behind some of this that may be hard to grasp: Women like to talk about personal things. In fact, they actually listen when a man does just that. Why? Well, because women believe that a conversation can go beyond a simple exchange of sports scores! Yes! They do! In fact, women who meet for the first time on a checkout line will often have more intimate conversations with each other than they have had with men to whom they have been married for two or three decades. They do this voluntarily! Why? Because they find it enjoyable!
Now that you understand this, realize that the answer to “Hi, honey. What did you do today?” is not “I don’t know. Nothing.”
2. Women and Food. Most women are on a diet, thinking about going on a diet, or wondering if they should think about going on a diet. In a free-market economy, a majority of women will order a salad on a majority of dining-out occasions. If a man wishes a woman to change her eating habits and make them more like his own, he need only repackage the food he would like to see eaten as a salad. For example, most women would feel okay about sitting down to a hot-fudge-sundae salad or a pizza salad.
What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned Page 4