“I’ll be right there. Ten minutes, tops,” she said, almost breathless with excitement, like an E.M.T. Then in a calmer, more lyrical voice she added, “What would you do without me?”
Have a beer blast.
When I returned from L.A. my apartment was unpacked, and everything had been arranged according to Debby. She’d even hung my pictures on the wall at waist height. Then on the kitchen counter was a note: “Welcome home Augusten. As you can see, your new home is beautiful. Unfortunately, I greatly underestimated the amount of time it would take to assemble the apartment. In fact, I underestimated by exactly half. Therefore, I will require another nine hundred dollars (in cash) at your earliest convenience. See you Sunday!!!!! Debby.”
I was horrified. She’d arranged my furniture only to allow for the wide sweep of her mop and not with any aesthetic eye. The table, the sofa, and the coffee table were all lined up against one wall, creating a large expanse of bare floor in the center of the room. Against the opposite wall were the two other living-room chairs and an end table. It looked something like a reception area. And on top of this, she wanted twice the amount we agreed on.
I was about to sit on the sofa to think when I saw a hair. It was a long, brown Debby hair. And the sofa cushions themselves were dented in such a way that I could almost see the outline of her body. As though she’d been napping.
And suddenly, it seemed clearer to me than any window Debby ever polished: she was taking advantage of me. And I’d been allowing it. She was drinking a bottle of cheap white wine at my apartment every Sunday. She was taking naps on my sofa. She was cleaning only the lower portion of the apartment. And now she wanted more money?
“Brad, what should I do?”
Brad sighed into the phone. “Well, I think you’ve let her take over your life. And you need to create a boundary.”
“How?
“Fire her sorry ass.”
“Yeah, but—” I stopped. Could I fire her? Was it just that simple? Was I actually the one in control? “Can I just do that? Fire her?”
Brad chuckled into the phone. “Sure you can. Tell you what. I’ll fire her, too. We’ll both fire her, and that’ll make the blow even harder.”
In many ways, Brad was such an excellent friend. If I ever needed somebody to drive the getaway car, I knew I could count on him.
“Okay, I’ll call her now. And then are you gonna call her?”
“No,” Brad said. “No, I think I’ll make more of a game of it. Maybe I’ll bake some laxative brownies and then fire her when she’s home on the toilet, calling in sick.”
I didn’t have the passion to play any more games with Debby. I just wanted her gone. After I hung up with Brad, I called her. “Listen Debby, we have a problem.” I was furious, so my voice was firm and authoritative.
“Yes we do,” she countered. “You owe me money and I’d like it.”
I was shocked by her own tone of voice, which was angry, demanding. “I just walked in the door five minutes ago, Debby.”
“I checked your flight information. You got home last night, plenty of time to call me up so I could get my money.”
“I had to take a later flight,” I said. And then thought, she checked my flight arrangements?
I said, “You’re fired, Debby. I won’t be needing you anymore. I’d like my keys back.”
“You cocksucking faggot,” she shouted. “You can’t fire me.”
“I sure as shit can, you ugly fucking midget. Send me back my keys, you granny-cunt.”
“Go to hell,” she screamed and hung up.
Debby had to die.
First, her grandchildren had to be killed in a fiery car crash, and then she must slip under the Eighth Avenue bus.
I called a twenty-four-hour locksmith and had them change my locks. It cost me three hundred dollars but this was three hundred dollars I was happy to spend. Debby was now locked out of my life.
But it didn’t take her long to discover what I had done, and she began calling me nonstop and leaving venomous messages on my machine. “You spoiled, lazy, gay cocksucker. You give me my fucking money.”
I changed my phone number and had it unlisted.
A week later, a summons appeared. Debby was suing me in small-claims court. I was to appear before a judge in two weeks.
Although I was editing my contact-lens commercial and would be working very late for the next month, there was no way I wouldn’t show up for that meeting. Luckily, I’d always paid Debby with checks. Debby always wanted cash, but I never gave it to her. “Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to go to the ATM,” I always said, which was true. “Next time,” I always promised. As a result, I had a record of all the money that I’d paid her, with the exception of the last nine hundred dollars I’d left in cash on top of the box. Hard evidence.
When the date arrived, I saw Debby waiting on a bench outside the judge’s chambers. She was dressed in a suit, her hair in a bun. She looked, for the first time, like a possible grandmother.
We didn’t speak, but I smiled at her. I smiled because I was carrying a briefcase filled with receipts and check stubs.
When we got in front of the judge, I was relieved to see that he was tall. Even though he was sitting behind his desk, I could tell. He was a handsome, tall grandfather, wise and calm. Surely, he would side with me against the evil troll.
Debby outlined her case against me. She claimed that we agreed on a fee of eighteen hundred dollars to unpack my apartment and that I only paid her half and she was due the other half.
I presented my evidence against her. Checks, signed receipts from Debby herself. The judge examined the receipts and he said, “You’ve paid this woman twelve thousand dollars? Over the past eight months? Just to clean your apartment?”
Then he looked at Debby. “I don’t see what your case is, Ma’am. This man has paid you to clean his apartment, and he’s paid you quite a lot of money. Do you have any proof that he owes you money?”
She was furious and defeated. “No,” she said.
The judge then said, “Well, you need to prepare yourself a little better. I’ll give you a month to pull your case together.”
Then to me he said, “And you should get yourself some Windex and a roll of paper towels.”
He set a date to appear before him again in one month.
But wait! Hadn’t I just won? Why was he giving her a month to prepare her case? It didn’t make any sense.
No matter. I’d just come back in a month with my same briefcase filled with documents.
Debby and I were forced to share the elevator going down, and she made a point to stare straight ahead, at the “3” button on the elevator, while I stared at the top of her head and imagined hitting it with a hammer. I’d won, or would win, and wanted her to feel it. No longer would she steal from me or control my mind and life.
Except that on the day I was to once again appear in front of the judge, I was called out to an “emergency” client meeting in New Jersey. Of course, there are no real emergencies in advertising. There is no appendix that must suddenly be removed. There is only a logo to be made larger at the last moment. “But I have to be in court,” I said, trying to get out of it.
“We’ll get you out of jury duty, don’t worry,” my boss told me.
“But this isn’t jury duty; it’s something else.” How could I possibly explain Debby to him? “My housekeeper was stealing from me, and I have to go to court.”
But because this was advertising, there was no excuse that was more important than the emergency meeting. Thus, I missed my court date.
And a month later, a notice arrived, certified mail. It stated that because I failed to appear before the judge, I was now ordered to pay Debby the sum of nine hundred dollars.
I held the notice in my hand and read it again. Of course, I’d known this would be the result of missing the hearing. And my boss had told me to “just put in an expense report for it.” But still. It was the principle of the thing.
But Brad was very clever, and he had a great idea. “Meet me at the Citibank on the corner of Fifth and Fifteenth in an hour,” he said. “And bring a friend. I’ll bring my car.”
It was a big step for agoraphobic Brad to leave his apartment, but when I saw him standing on the corner in front of the bank, he actually looked happy. Excited, even. I introduced him to my friend, Kevin, and we went inside the bank to do our business.
Afterward, when we were in his car, I said, “Brad, this was such a genius idea. You’re amazing. You should really leave your apartment more often and spread some of your evil around the world.”
“Aw, shucks,” he said with pretend modesty. Then, “That’s it over there.”
He’d stopped the car in front of an apartment building on Ninth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street, an area known as Hell’s Kitchen. And where else would the little demon live?
“She’s on the second floor, apartment 2B.”
“I can’t believe you even know where she lives,” I said, stepping out of the car and hoisting one of the bags up onto my shoulder.
“I check everybody out. She lives in a one-bedroom. Her grandkids live in California along with her kids. They all hate her. You know, she’s fifty-three?”
“No way,” I said, breathing heavy, trying to keep the awkward bag balanced on my shoulder. “She doesn’t look it at all.”
“Well, she will when she gets done counting these,” he said.
And we dropped the last of the bags in front of Debby’s apartment door. Six bags, all together.
Nine hundred dollars, exactly.
In pennies.
ROOF WORK
F
or the past week I have had this curious bubble on the roof of my mouth. It’s about the size of small lima bean and firm like one, too. I’ve been flicking at it with the tip of my tongue constantly. This bubble occupies so much of my mental energy, it might as well be a uterus, sprouting outside my body.
On Friday night it began to hurt. Not a stabbing pain but a dull ache. Not an emergency but rather a warning. I wasn’t sure if the pain was because I was endlessly tongue-slapping it or if it was getting bigger and more life-threatening. So I decided to go downstairs to the pharmacy and buy a compact so I could have a small mirror to shove in my mouth. But buying the compact turned out to be unexpectedly shameful because of the smirk I received from the young Hispanic girl behind the counter. I think she actually winked at me like You go, girl. This brought up all sorts of transsexual issues from childhood, and I wanted to explain myself, tell her about the tumor. But it was just too involved.
I took the compact upstairs to my apartment and went into the bathroom. Here, I opened it and rested the mirror side facing up on my bottom teeth, angling it so that I could see the roof of my mouth in the medicine cabinet mirror in front of me. I was surprised by how small the bubble was. And yet it was causing so much pain. Did cancer cause pain? I thought I remembered that it didn’t, until it was too late. I decided to do some research.
After three hours on the Internet and most of a bottle of scotch, I came to the conclusion that the bubble was just some sort of benign cyst that needed to be lanced. Probably, I concluded, I had jabbed the roof of my mouth with my toothbrush and this somehow created the cyst.
So I removed my friend Suzanne’s wedding picture off my wall and held the thumbtack over the flame of my Bic to sterilize it. Then I went into the bathroom again and did my compactmirror trick. Very quickly, I stuck the thumbtack into the center of the bubble, bursting it.
The relief was instantaneous. A clear liquid was able to escape from the bubble. As I wrote once in an American Express newspaper ad: The pressure is off; the weekend is on.
I decided I would call Bob and see if he wanted to have a spontaneous Friday-night date. Bob is this very friendly and short forty-year-old who answered my personal ad on AOL. We’ve had four dates, sex on the third. And the night before last he invited me over to his apartment on the Upper West Side, where he cooked a rack of lamb. He’s an excellent cook. But as I was walking around his apartment looking at pictures, I came across a picture of an extremely handsome man in a bathing suit. I said, “Who is this?” and he said it was him, taken when he was thirty-two.
Immediately, I felt gypped and wanted to date the younger Bob, no matter how good his rack of lamb was.
But he was so funny and charming that I decided eleven years wasn’t really that significant an age difference. And the nine-inch height difference between us didn’t matter so much when we were lying down.
I phoned Bob and got his machine. This sort of made me feel a little suspicious, because I didn’t recall him telling me he had plans for tonight. Maybe he had gone out for milk? A movie with a female friend? Or maybe he was asleep.
Then I figured, Fuck it. I might as well go to sleep, too. So I undressed, climbed into bed, and turned out the light. In the dark, I poked my tongue around the roof of my mouth. The bubble was gone.
The next morning I woke up, and automatically my tongue went to find the bubble. By now it was such an automatic function, I knew it would take weeks to unwire my brain. Except my tongue did come across something. Not a bubble. The opposite: a hole.
Alarmed, I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to inspect my mouth. What I saw was a tiny hole, right in the center of the roof of my mouth. The hole was much larger than a hole created by a thumbtack. It was more like something you’d expect if I’d used a ball point pen.
Hmmmmmmm.
All weekend I obsessed on the hole. I looked at it hourly and gargled with warm saltwater and Listerine constantly, hoping to prevent infection.
On Monday I returned to work and was extremely busy. Thus, I was distracted from my hole until returning home at night to see it still there and gaping.
By the end of the week, the hole was still there.
It was still there by the end of the month. And, I thought, perhaps slightly larger. The edges of the hole did not appear pink and infected. Rather, they were the color of the rest of my mouth. So this meant that the hole was now a part of my body. Except that I was certain the hole was larger than it was originally. And who was to say it wouldn’t grow larger, still? Eventually, would I be able to tuck the entire tip of my tongue in there? Perhaps be able to store things in the hole? The possibility of dating a drug addict in Rikers occurred to me. I could stow his heroin bag inside my mouth and nobody would think to even look in the hole because a person isn’t supposed to have such a hole in the roof of his mouth.
The hole didn’t hurt. Couldn’t that be considered a good sign?
But no. I decided that there was no good sign to be had. A hole is a hole, and a person is only supposed to have so many. And this hole was dangerously close to becoming an orifice.
I decided it was time to see my dentist. This is not an action I undertake lightly, as I do not care for my dentist. She believes not in local anesthetic and laughing gas, but in acupuncture and positive imagery. For this reason, I dislike her but have always been too busy to find a good, real, drug-oriented dentist. She was all I had, so I phoned her office. When the receptionist told me there wasn’t an opening for four weeks, I told her about the thumbtack.
Moments later, I was in a cab to her Park Avenue office.
Dr. Bridges sat me in her dental chair and forced me to explain my self-surgery to her. She did not approve at all, and she let me know this as she inspected my curiosity. Finally she said, “I think you need to see Mac. He’s the oral surgeon next door. I think he should take a look at this. Let me give him a call.”
Five minutes later she returned. “Guess what. It’s your lucky day. Mac can see you right now. So you wanna just leave here, then walk two doors toward Park. He’s number twenty-seven. Tenth floor, suite twelve.”
Mac wa
s a large, hairy beast of a man. He was disheveled and sweating profusely. His shirttails hung out of his pants, and I knew that he used them to wipe the considerably thick lenses of his glasses. He didn’t shake my hand but instead said, “What did you do?”
There was something about his facial expression that made me feel he was either brilliant or insane. My brother is a true genius, so I am familiar with the look.
Mac inspected my mouth. I again repeated my tale of selfsurgery, only Mac didn’t seem to find this so odd. It was almost as if he felt that there was nothing wrong with self-surgery as long as a person knew what he was doing, which I pretty much felt I did.
I glanced around his office and saw that there were piles of books everywhere. They were so high in places they nearly reached the ceiling.
I decided that Mac was not insane, just brilliant. He probably read science fiction novels and then wrote the author, pointing out flaws, just to demonstrate his superior intelligence.
“Know what this is?” he asked, sliding his chair back on its wheels.
“What?”
“I see this a lot. You’ve got a cyst there that was caused by the bones in your palate shifting. How old are you?”
The bones in my palate shifting? “Thirty.”
He grinned in a self-satisfied fashion. “I knew it. That’s when it happens. Thirty, thirty-three. See, what it is, is a congenital abnormality. It’s the same thing that would have caused a cleft palate, but for some reason in the womb, that didn’t occur. But the bones have shifted, and that’s what created the cyst.”
All I heard was cleft palate.
I could have been born with a harelip? That would have changed my entire life. People with harelips are not often seen in public. Like conjoined twins, they tend to stay indoors and order in. Exactly as I would have done. I came this close to living my life like a shy Japanese girl, covering my mouth constantly and blushing, though from harelip shame.
But by some fluke of nature, perhaps because just as it was happening my mother rolled over on her side, thus knocking the genes apart, I was spared a life of deformity. I said, “What do I do?”
Magical Thinking: True Stories Page 9