I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow

by Jonathan Goldstein

  The characters on Deadwood are constantly drinking whisky or taking dope. If I lived in Deadwood, I’d be in a continual state of anxiety, always trembling, terrified I was about to be shot in the ass or worse. I wouldn’t even look at people, for fear of inciting their wrath. I’d slither around on the ground between people’s legs, apologizing and avoiding eye contact. Thank God I don’t live in Deadwood, I think while pouring Skittles into my mouth.

  THURSDAY.

  I’m over for dinner at Marie-Claude’s and while she’s cooking, I make conversation with Katie.

  “Ever notice how the word ‘bed’ looks like a bed?” I ask.

  “Not ‘pillow,’ though,” she says.

  “And what’s up with pimentos?” I ask, picking up an olive from the plate on the coffee table. “What are they anyway?”

  “They’re red,” she says, keeping up her end of the conversation. “Where do you think pimento trees grow?”

  “Inside olive trees.”

  “Stop filling my daughter’s head with garbage,” Marie-Claude says, walking into the living room and putting down a tray of cheese and crackers. “And do me a favour and shave your beard already. It’s unsanitary.”

  I’d lately begun growing it back. Running my hand across my cheek in a way I hope looks thoughtful, I say, “People tell me it makes me look intellectual. And more youthful.”

  “It makes you look like a hostage,” Marie-Claude says, leaving the room.

  “Mama’s only joking,” I say to Katie. Katie takes off her shoes and asks if she can rub her bare feet in my beard.

  Marie-Claude re-enters the room to find her daughter doing the moonwalk on my cheek.

  “Katie,” Marie-Claude says, “go wash your feet.”

  FRIDAY.

  At work, I confide to David, a fellow radio producer, that I’ve lately been feeling an overwhelming urge to lie down on the sidewalk on my walk to work.

  “I’m overcome by this feeling that I can’t go on,” I say. David tells me to be careful not to get arrested for vagrancy.

  “On days when I feel especially frustrated,” he says, “I always make sure to give myself a nice close shave before leaving the house. That way, if I start yelling in the street, people will be less inclined to see me as a garden-variety street lunatic, and more like a man wheeling and dealing into his Bluetooth.”

  I decide that shave again I must. Sometimes it’s worth making the effort of personal hygiene, if only to afford yourself the freedom of antisocial pleasures.

  The Great Gazoo

  (42 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  I stare at myself in the mirror, shaving cream covering my face.

  Mid-shave is a good look for me. A face full of lather really brings out my eyes. I wish this could be some kind of style—something to leave the house in.

  I imagine myself at Tony and Natalie’s wedding, toasting the bride and groom in a three-piece suit—a face brushed white, erasing all blemishes. I could always become a clown, but when I’d take a cream pie across the face, instead of making the audience laugh, I’d make them gasp at my sudden, horrifying beauty.

  THURSDAY.

  I’m meeting Tony for coffee. When I sit down, I find him drinking from a coffee cup the size of a fire hydrant.

  “The other day I watched a Steve McQueen movie from the seventies,” I say. “Do you have any idea how small coffees were back then? The way things are evolving, in a couple more generations, we’ll be ordering coffees using mattress sizes. ‘One queen-sized soy latte to go.’”

  “I’ve always hoped that one day in the future I could walk into a coffee shop and have the counterman ask, ‘With or without Sea-Monkeys?’ It would be like bubble tea, but with bubbles that do tricks.”

  After a silent stretch spent staring out the window at the falling rain,Tony asks, “If you could eat only one or the other for the rest of your life, which would you choose: Baby Aspirins or Flintstone Vitamins?”

  “Based solely on taste or curative properties?”

  “Just taste,” he says.

  “Flintstones,” I say. “The Great Gazoo in particular. Did you know he was exiled to Earth for inventing a machine that could destroy the universe with the push of a button? When I was a kid, I used to think about that a lot.”

  “When I was a kid,” says Tony, “I thought about brontosaurus ribs a lot.”

  FRIDAY.

  Still thinking about the food of my youth, I’m struck by the realization that I no longer have friends who make Jell-O shooters. I don’t even have friends of friends who make Jell-O shooters. Let me be clear: I never actually liked Jell-O shooters, but I guess I just assumed they’d always be around. And now their memory has become more potent than what they were.Which was disgusting.

  Even so tiny a loss has the power to still feel like a loss.

  Forty slowly descends like a mid-November frost.

  LOSS OF MEMORY

  There was once a man who felt his losses more acutely than others. Lost watches. Umbrellas. A money clip. He just couldn’t let go. The passage of time didn’t help, either. He still dreamt of childhood toys he hadn’t seen in years.

  And of course there was the loss of women, some of whom he still woke up aching for. He’d study their remnants alone at night—slips of paper bearing old phone numbers. Photographs. A mitten. In bed he would stare at the ceiling, trying to seize on the exact feeling of a particular woman’s head on his chest. Its weight, the smell of her hair.

  And yet oddly, the majority of these recollections were almost perfectly wrong. His memory turned redheads into brunettes, French women into Spaniards. Awful women into saints.

  One day while waiting for his bath to fill—he

  lived in a building with ancient plumbing and it often took hours—the man went out to buy a magazine to read while bathing, and on the street he ran into one of those ex-girlfriends of his. She was staring into the window of a candy store, and when he approached her there was not a shred of recognition in her eyes. He told her his name, repeated it, pointed at his face, and still, it was like staring into an abyss. He worried this might be some game she was playing. A hurtful game.

  As he turned to leave, the woman touched his shoulder and explained that, about two months earlier, she’d been in an accident and had lost many of her memories. Some she kept. Small ones. The colour of old blankets. A mole on a kindergarten teacher’s face. But most of the big ones had been wiped out.

  “You might have been a big one,” she said and smiled.

  It was in seeing the woman smile that the man immediately realized this was not his ex-girlfriend at all. His ex-girlfriend did not have a gap between her front teeth. His ex-girlfriend in fact looked nothing like this woman.

  “If you’re not too busy,” the woman continued, “I’d love to hear about us. The things we did. What I was like back then. What we were like together.”

  She suggested a nearby café, and the man, not sure what to do, began to stammer and hesitate.

  “Please,” she said. “I’ve been so lonely without my memories.”

  And so with nothing else to do besides wait for his bath to fill, the man acquiesced. To lose a fountain pen is one thing, he thought. But to lose one’s entire self! It was clear this woman needed him.

  Seated at a table in the rear of the café, he searched for where to start.

  “Well,” he said, “we went out for hamburgers quite a bit. Milkshakes, too, and you always insisted on paying. It was your thing. Our thing.”

  “I don’t eat many hamburgers these days,” the woman said with amusement. “I’m mostly vegetarian.”

  “And we always sat on the same side of the booth,” he said.

  The woman listened to him recount her past, taking it all in, sometimes with closed eyes as though soaking up sunshine and other times shaking her head with disbelief. Occasionally, she would throw her head back and laugh.

  “When you drank soda,” he said, “you held the can backw
ards, like a cute little monkey.”

  She tried it out with her mug and felt the coffee dribble down her chin.

  “I still do that sometimes,” she said uncertainly.

  “You had this way of rubbing my head furiously when I’d bang it,” he said. “I banged it often.”

  Some of the things he tried to remind her of sounded familiar, and made her feel like she was entering a warm, carpeted room; but other times, the things he spoke of seemed so alien that they made her feel like she was hopping out of a cake onto a cold, dark stage.

  “One time,” he said, “we were trying to get out of the rain and we mistakenly ran into an S and M bar. There was a TV in the back and we watched an old episode of Frasier.”

  He was painting a portrait made from the bits of memory he’d stored from all the women he’d ever loved. Brandy’s fondness for American sitcoms. Nancy’s joie de vivre. Kathy’s impenetrable melancholy. Meaghan’s enthusiasm for the smell of toast. Or was it socks from the dryer?

  “You liked raisins and you liked chocolate,” he said. “But you did not like chocolate-covered raisins. You enjoyed it when I sat on the lid of the toilet and talked to you while you showered.”

  The more he painted, the more he experienced the sensation of falling in love. With something. Or someone. Possibly her. It seemed the woman was feeling something, too.

  She was in fact feeling something indeed. For as the man spoke, as he leaned towards her, closer and closer, the smell of his coffee breath was slowly turning her stomach. And with the smell crept spiders of memory. His morning breath. The way he would speak so close to her that she’d have to wipe spittle from her glasses.

  “So much is coming back to me,” she began.

  Yes, the woman thought. I’m certain this must be why we broke up. Those noises he makes while drinking. The way he doesn’t let me get in a word edgewise.

  “You’d made me promise,” he said, “that if you were ever kidnapped or locked away somewhere, that I would never give up, never rest until you were free.”

  The man leaned forward and looked at her with great intensity, and as his bathroom flooded with bathwater and his downstairs neighbour pounded on his apartment door with increasing fury, he knew he was succeeding in making her remember.

  The Tears You Cry in Dreams

  (41 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  After helping my parents clean their garage, I decide to sleep over. It was a long night spent convincing my father how certain things were better off being thrown out, like a box of microfiches, considering he doesn’t even own a microfiche projector.

  “Once the internet fizzles, they could come back,” he said. “Look at vinyl.”

  In the middle of the night, I’m awakened by a dream in which my lap is on fire. Some back story:

  When I was a child our family used to eat at a restaurant called Pumpernick’s, a kosher-style tiki bar-restaurant where the husbands made sport of driving their wives as close to the front door as possible. This often involved getting right up on the curb, almost killing anyone foolish enough to lolly-gag after a meal.

  When dining there, my sister and I usually shared a hamburger, but my dream was to one day have the flaming Pu-Pu platter, a dish of chicken, onion rings, wontons, and God-knows-what, all brought to the table ablaze.The diner had to blow it out like a plate full of birthday candles, or a stray Molotov cocktail. To a ten-year-old, a Pu-Pu platter turned dining into an act of heroism.

  In the dream, even though it closed down years ago, I am back at Pumpernick’s. It is late at night and when I walk in, the cashier tells me they’re closed.

  “I’ve come a long way,” I say. “Just one quick Pu-Pu?”

  She gives in and tells me I can have one.To go.

  The flaming tray is brought out, I pay the bill, and walk out into the night to catch a bus back home. As I ride through the night, the fiery plate jostles to and fro on my lap. I am nervous and want to tell the driver to slow down, but then it is too late: my lap is on fire.

  I awake to find Boosh, curled up, asleep on my groin.

  I am becoming more and more like my father. Yearnful for things that no longer exist. But in spite of this, my father and I are happy men—happy that, at the very least, we are not on fire.

  It’s already morning, but I don’t want to disturb Boosh, so I lie still, staring at the ceiling and trying to decide what to do with the day.

  MONDAY.

  It appears that someone has taken a candy out of the office candy dish, removed its wrapper, sucked it, and put it back in the bowl where it now sits stuck to the bottom, red, wet, and gleaming. Someone who is capable of something like that is capable of anything. There is a sociopath among us. I make a mental note to stop using the communal office dishrag and start keeping my uneaten Melba toast in a locked desk drawer.

  FRIDAY.

  No one has removed the candy from the candy bowl.

  In my teens, when I kept notebooks filled with poetry, the lone candy, tasted but not chosen, might have been the kind of thing that could’ve made me cry. Back then, pretty much anything did—an old man eating by himself in a restaurant. Songs by Carole King. Commercials for long distance calls. And then one day the crying stopped. Sitting at my desk, it strikes me: I haven’t cried in close to twenty years.

  When the executive producer of my show, Carolyn, stops by, I share this with her.

  “The closest I come is sometimes I dream I’m crying,” I say.

  She tells me that her friend had the same problem and her therapist told her that the only tears that are real are the tears you cry in dreams.

  Too bad the same can’t be said of the Pu-Pu platters you eat.

  Two Yarmulkes

  (40 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  I’m dog-sitting Boosh at my apartment, and when I arrive home I find the kitchen garbage scattered all across the living room. The dog is out of control. In the middle of the night, she awakens me with lavish licks to my shaved head like she’s working away at a Tootsie Pop. What’s even more unsettling is that the sensation is disturbingly tender and maternal.

  TUESDAY.

  Before heading out to the store, I make sure to put on some thermal underwear. As I’ve gotten older, long johns have become more and more important. When I was a child, my father warned against them.

  “You get used to long underwear,” he said, “and then you can’t take them off. July rolls around and you’ve still got them on under a pair of jean shorts. And then by the winter, you need two pairs—and the winter after that, three!”

  For my father, long johns are much the same as heroin.

  FRIDAY.

  The laces on my shoes keep snapping. It feels like I’ve been going through about half a dozen a month. Every time I tie them, I think: “They can break right now. Or even now.” It fills me with Weltschmerz, and really, who wants to start the day with Weltschmerz?

  I’m probably pulling too hard, though maybe I’ve somehow been endowed with supernatural strength. Maybe the moth I shooed out of my sports jacket last month was radioactive. Perhaps the ripping of my shoelaces is the first manifestation of my superpower—a superpower for wearing away at fabric.

  When I stop by Tucker’s for a beer, I share this thought with him.

  “Your only superpower is for wearing away at people’s patience,” he says.

  As I’m leaving his apartment and putting on my shoes, again, my shoelace rips.

  “You see?” I say, vindicated.

  Tucker disappears into his apartment and returns with a bag. A shoelace bag.

  Tucker is a man who doesn’t have an ice tray, a doorbell, or even a functioning smoke detector—but a shoelace bag he has.

  He pulls out a pair of thick laces the length of skipping ropes.

  “These won’t break,” he says. “They’re for hockey skates.”

  I lace them through my shoes and still have enough left over to crisscross up my calf like a Roman sandal. As I wal
k home, I try to convince myself that I am a gladiator. For the first time in a while, I actually feel less anxious about my footwear.

  I.B. Singer writes of a Hassid who is so religious, he wears two yarmulkes—one on the front of his head and one on the back, just in case. Whereas the Hassid is anxiously devoted to his religion, I am religiously devoted to my anxiety. And to long johns. I’m sure the overzealous Hassid and I both appear ludicrous in the eyes of God, but at least I am not cold.

  Knights of the Roundtable

  (39 weeks)

  SATURDAY, 1:15 P.M.

  As a change in the regular format of the show, Mira and I set up a line for people to call in with their personal problems, and today we’ve convened a roundtable of advice-givers: my father, goddaughter Helen, and Howard.

  “It’s always been a dream of mine to be part of a roundtable,” Howard says, sitting down at the studio microphone, “but I somehow always imagined there’d be a cheese platter involved.”

  2:35 P.M.

  We listen to Stephanie from Montreal’s phone message. She’s a self-described nerd looking to meet a boy nerd.

  “How can I help her?” my father asks, sounding genuinely stumped. “I know nothing of nerds.”

  “Me neither,” Howard says.

  “How can you say that?” I ask Howard. “You are a nerd. You collect Star Wars dolls, for crying out loud.”

  “They’re from Star Trek,” he says. “And they’re collector’s figurines.”

  “I think that except for in the movies, there’s really no such thing as a nerd,” says Helen.

  “Just a lot of lonely people looking for someone to hold on to,” says Howard.