Thirteen Confessions

by David Corbett

  But returning to the knife.

  For the sake of argument, let’s grant your assumption that I put the dog outside. This would, as you suggest, make it easier for me to approach Rachel—Colette, rather—without being detected. The dog was not just company, he was protection. I mean, this is obvious.

  There are those, I’m sure, who see little contradiction in an animal devoted not just to affection but defense. And yet—indulge me for a moment—I can’t see a slobbery, lick-his-niblets-then-your-face mutt being much good against an intruder—can you?

  Yes, they bark, but so? The neighbors say, “Oh it’s that damn yip-yap poop machine again,” and they call Animal Control, not the police. As if Animal Control, they see an intruder, they’re gonna put a cap in his ass. Unless it’s a raccoon.

  But the point is, Colette doesn’t have a dog. Ixnay on the ogday. As I said, it might be better if she did, but she doesn’t. There. So we must be talking about Rachel.

  Except Rachel, she has this thing about sharp objects. So a knife? Out of the question. She refuses to have so much as a letter opener in the house. Go on, read her blog if you doubt me. She lives in abject terror that somewhere somebody is in pain. Only in California, huh?

  She’s depressed is what she is. When the days grow short and dark like this, something comes over her. She sits in that voluptuous red chair of hers with her head bowed and she pats her hands together as though keeping time to a train of thought that any moment might tumble off the rails.

  She goes days without bathing, wears the same clothes weeks on end—I mean, I find this disgusting, but it’s all right there on the Internet, for the world to see—refuses to eat anything but rice cakes and cruciferous greens. Strange word—like she wants to be nailed to a broccolini. Or get scourged at the pillar outside Mollie Stone’s. If this is what they mean by a California girl, I’ll take the Midwest farmer’s daughter. And her little dog, too.

  I love that movie. We’re not in Kant’s ass, anymore, Toto …

  Getting back to Rachel, or Colette for that matter—where do women like this come from—do they just sprout up from the soil out here? And we’re talking about a knockout, movie star cheekbones, Amazon thighs, breasts like the goddamn Hindenberg. Well, before it caught fire. But what difference does beauty make when your mind’s a mudslide?

  So no, given the fact we’re discussing a knife, we’re most definitely concerned with Colette. You’re mistaken about the dog. That’s the only way to explain it. I don’t care what the neighbors say.

  Mother of Christ. The neighbors. Don’t make me choke on my kügel. What is so horrible, so monstrous, so bone-chilling and fearsome about a man sitting in his car, listening to his iPod, eating pastry, waiting. Granted, there are only a few houses in her hamlet, no police, too far out, unincorporated area, the boonies. Paradise, if you’re a psycho. Or a raccoon.

  I had something to discuss with her, we were getting nowhere over the phone—no, no, listen to me—we were getting nowhere over the phone, nowhere by email, Colette cut off payment on her credit card, I responded by filing a lawsuit online, double damages plus legal fees, get her goddamn attention. I told her I knew where she lived, right there off the Pacific Highway, cute little bungalow shaded by eucalyptus trees facing the inlet, she couldn’t hide from me. I’d slit her miserable throat—figure of speech, okay? I’m not that kind of guy and besides, like I said, there was no knife.

  She responds by calling the local sheriff. Filed a complaint for harassment—have I mentioned the crazy wicked things she said to me? I’m the one who’s been harassed, middle of the night, these messages—understand?

  Anyway, it was time somebody took the initiative and grabbed his keys, got in his car, drove all the way from his comfy home in San Francisco across the goddamn Golden Gate into the land of sprouts and bulgur brownies and wheat grass colonics and made an effort. I did this. I made, may I say it, the fucking effort.

  What do I get for my trouble? Some arugula-chewing kale-belching bovine neurotic staring out her window like a pothead paranoid, bitching and moaning about the yippy-yap dog next door and then she sees me and Holy Mother of Meltdowns, call the police, I mean the sheriff, call Animal Control, call the wizard—

  Excuse me? How do I … I don’t know. Okay, I confess. Jesus Holy Hell—hang me by the nutsack, you want. I do not know for a fact that the neighbor lady eats arugula. Or kale. I assumed. So sue me. Figure of speech, sporadic license. I mean, who else but crazy people eat that stuff? Exhibit A: Colette. I mean Rachel.

  Back to the knife. By which I mean: There was no knife, okay? As for the dog …

  Did you know that male walruses in captivity become sexually aroused by the sound of power tools? I’m not making that up. Google it, you don’t believe me.

  I run a simple business. I sell pillows, throw pillows to be exact, hand-embroidered, designer fabrics, imported from Turkey, or Ireland, very elegant. It seems such a simple thing, but the demand for throw pillows is astonishing. Who knew?

  The problem, as you can imagine, is storage. The overhead will kill you, especially in San Francisco, rents are insane, smother your business like a baby in its crib. I can’t keep stock hanging around, and that means I’m not big on returns—is that, like, suddenly an indictable offense?

  So—just because somebody whines and moans about a refund, an exchange, credit on their account, doesn’t mean I take things back. Merchants have rights too, you know. This thing, what people say—the customer is always right—what lunatic honestly believes such a thing? Only in California, I swear.

  I am no different than one million other guys hustling to shake a buck. The Internet gives me a very tidy way of attracting customers, showing my product, taking orders, collecting payment, mailing delivery. The only difference is, I understand how the whole thing works.

  I was a gizmo guru in Silicon Valley before the dot.com crash, I understand ranking strategies, stacking algorithms, how you get noticed on the web—and how you can disappear without a trace, just like that. Creative destruction, that is capitalism. A drowning pig goes down slower than the average business. Make rain while the sun shines, that’s my motto.

  No. I didn’t say I was from Turkey, I said the pillows were from Turkey. Or Ireland. Half my family comes from Kosovo, the other half Ulster, I’ve never been either place, well maybe once, when I was, I dunno, six? Twelve? Twenty? It’s stamped on my passport but that’s another thing, my name is not Osman, I don’t care what your records show. My name is Archibald. Look it up, you don’t believe me.

  Getting back to this trick with the search engines, it came to me by accident. I began to get complaints—these loons, these crazy people, you can’t call them liars because they believe their own ridiculous bullshit but they order something, you send it to them—zoom, next day, clean as a thistle, I have happy customers too, you know—but some, I won’t call them scumbags, they just change their mind, but do they say that?

  No, of course not. No one takes responsibility anymore.

  They say: You didn’t send the right pillow. I ordered satin, you sent chenille. I wanted scarlet, you gave me crimson. I asked for teal, you mailed me turquoise—yadda yadda, lies, all lies, make me want to puke up a poodle.

  They call the number on the website—you can see, my office is my home, but they call all hours of the night, I haven’t slept in weeks—no, no, listen to me, they are the ones calling me, not the other way around—they call and you wouldn’t believe the filthy nasty California things they leave on my machine. It’s incredible, never mind the stinking noxious awful stuff they say to my face. On the phone I mean, when I pick up. They say I’m abusive? It’s self-defense, okay?

  I’d play one of the messages for you but I can’t stand to have them around, I just delete them as soon as they come in. But I’m telling you, there are psychos out there. And they all want pillows.

  The knif
e, yes, I’m getting to that. Keep your horses on.

  So I realized, once I began to get complaints, and people started writing things on the web about the company, going on these ombudsman websites, complaint boards, make-your-own review pages—Yelp, Get Satisfaction, California Consumer, Better Business Bureau, FBI, Homeland Security, Interpol—more and more, angry and more angry, a dozen, two dozen, a dozen of dozens—what do you know, my site begins to rise on the search engine rankings.

  Not just a little. Like Noah’s ark lifted by the rain. Like the good witch ascending to heaven. And I get more and more customers. Who needs ads? As long as people are unhappy, I have the win-win.

  Search engines, they’re like merry little imbeciles, what do you call them—idiot savants—they just count. They don’t care if what’s said is nice or not nice, they just count count count. And so complaints or compliments, it makes no difference, all publicity is good publicity, you can’t keep bad news down.

  And there is the secret: The worse I was to these loony-tune bats, the better it was for business. Talk about creative destruction. But hey, that makes me the bad guy. Fine. Sue me. Shoot me. Cut off my—

  Did you know that walruses have a bone in their penises? It’s, like, three feet long. A yardstick made out of bone. Eskimos use them for pool cues, I’m not making that up.

  Don’t let these women fool you, they are not Little Red Riding Crop. You have done your homework on Colette? Then you know she works for Regimar Financial, mortgage servicer, just got the bejeebers sued out of them by investors they were scamming—I swear, you want to look into a racket, that’s what you should be investigating, leave me alone. But no, of course, I have a penis, I have a funny accent, psychos never lie, I am the big bad wolfman. Fine. Cut off my head, my tongue, my three-foot salami. With a knife. Except there is no knife.

  So this Colette, the one with the dog—I told you, Rachel could use a dog, or a bird, something, but she won’t have one, allergic she says, too busy eating rainbow chard—or wait, I mean Colette, I was right the first time—anyway, she harasses me day and night, leaves these yodeling banshee messages on my machine, calling me things that would make a Portuguese sailor cut out his molars.

  Luckily she’s also bitching up a storm on the web, all the other misery-mongers chiming in, a choir of whiners, so I’m making out okay, business is buzzing, except I’m getting, like, not one wink of sleep, my wife is trying to ovulate, and finally I just say: Enough! Fine. Let’s meet face-to-face, earth lady, earth mother, psycho demon witch from Oz.

  If she’s telling you she never agreed to this … Jesus in a nutshell, how can I keep up with the lies?

  So I’ve been waiting for hours, parked along the road beneath the eucalyptus trees, smells like a throat lozenge out there, I see no car in the drive, finally I say: To hell with this. Walk up to the door, ring the bell.

  No answer.

  I think, maybe she’s in the back, she can’t hear the chime, I’ll go see.

  Next thing I know, there I am in the kitchen. Back door was open, no one answered. I’m concerned, I’m not a bad person, I let myself in and yes, the dog went out. Lock the door. Good. Safe. Fine.

  Okay, maybe I gave him a little nudge—you seen the thing? Like a Shetland pony, that dog. Anyway, I’m in, he’s out, sure I gave him a little boot but he lived, am I right?

  Now he’s yapping away outside and the fat miserable wretch next door is dialing 9-1-1 because she gets the hives when the dog starts barking—talk about wackos, there’s a record of her calls, long as your small intestines, calls about the dog, I mean, or raccoons—and no, she doesn’t dial Animal Control this time, she wants the constable, the sheriff, the wizard. Why? Ask her. Blame me. I don’t care anymore.

  Meanwhile I’m trying to figure out if Colette is okay—like I said, I’m a nice person—turns out she’s been home the whole time—who knew?—and I find her in the living room, like a mummy without the bandages, buried in that monstrous red chair—it’s as big as an altar, this chair—and she’s gnawing away on raw barley and organic mustard greens and throwing back burdock root tea—may God strike me down if I’m lying—and she looks up at me with those sunken movie star eyes and I have her pillow in my hands, the chenille not the satin, crimson not scarlet, and I hold it up and say—I mean, what else is there to say—Is this what you fucking want?

  You see what I’m saying? There was no knife. I’m a businessman. I have mortgages to pay. My wife wants to have a baby, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Why am I the monster?

  Now, let me guess, I can imagine what you’re about to say. What about Rachel? Talk about a nut job—did you know she works at the zoo, the aquarium, Sea World, some such place. Her job? She tries to get the animals to screw. To mate. But they don’t want to—again, you don’t believe me, check out her blog. The animals are dying out, you can’t get them in the mood anymore. Something about not living in the wild, living in the zoo instead, or the aquarium, Marine World, Sex Flags, the place she works, whatever it is. They’ve tried everything, panda porn, naughty puppets, even piping in Barry White—I’m not making that up. The females ovulate but the males don’t care. They’re more interested in power tools.

  Wait. Maybe it’s Colette’s blog where I read this. No. I don’t think so. You wouldn’t believe how much garbage I’ve read online lately, it’s hard to keep it straight. And sleep, Jesus marry Joseph, I can’t tell you the last time I had some decent sleep.

  Regardless, Rachel, she makes these huge PVC vaginas then pumps them full of warm petroleum jelly or VapoRub or Jiffy Lube, trying to trick the male into shooting his walrus wad, so they can blow-dart the spung into the bazoo of the female.

  I ask you—is that a job for a sane person? Should I take it personally if she calls me a thieving sociopath?

  Actually, what she called me was a mad dog.

  Which finally explains the knife.

  Somehow the dog got back in—I think the hefty nasty neighbor woman had a key—and Rachel is screaming at me and I am as serious as cancer all I was doing was holding up the pillow, Mister Nice Guy, coming all the way out to her godforsaken house, Little Hippy Hamlet, middle of I swear-to-God nowhere—Marin housewife my ass, crazy screwball vegan from hell—but there I am, delivering the thing she said she wanted all along, silk not chenille, turquoise not teal, fine, good, I’m happy, she’s happy, win-win, go home, you know?

  But suddenly this walrus-sized dog is coming at me and there was, maybe, now that I think about it, I can’t say for sure but, perhaps, a knife. Or a power tool. Maybe a pool cue. But I had to defend myself—okay? You’ve seen the pictures, yes, I’m not making it up, the dog was a moose, a mountain with legs. And teeth.

  Ever been bit by a dog? Ever had a rabies shot? I’d rather spend a summer in hell with my Uncle Orhan than do that again. And the parrot is going off in Arabic—I’m not making that up—and the neighbor is screaming, It’s a terrorist, Osama bin Haydn. And he’s killed the dog!

  But think for a second. None of that, even if it were true—and I admit nothing—but for the sake of argument, assume it’s all, every word, cross my heart, hang me by the yardstick, true. It still does not magically make me a wolfman or a madman or a bad man or a California Man or al Qaeda nor am I the walrus ooh-coo-ca-choo.

  And like I said, I don’t care if she complains, complaints are good for business, and maybe, sure, I show up, scare her—ooga booga boo!—she goes on the web, writes a lot more emails or blah-dee-blogs or whatever, all her idiot psycho women friends chime in, screaming heebie-jeebies—and behold: My site just keeps ascending in the Google rankings, like an angel, like the Hindenberg. Before it caught fire.

  Bile is good for business, what can I say, I’m supposed to feel bad? There’s no crime in making a profit, not yet anyway. Except, of course, in California.

  So, back to Rachel, or Colette, I might scare her, but harm her? She’s
like the goose that lays the golden emails. Even if I was there to hurt somebody, why would I kill the dog? The dog didn’t order the pillow—you see?

  All of which proves, of course, that I was never at Rachel’s, I was at Colette’s, since Rachel refuses to have a dog. Because she has allergies. But Colette, she’s a pacifist, animal lover, cannot bear to have knives in the house. So everything you’ve heard up until now, this minute—it’s crazy. Lies. What else can I say?

  Maybe now you understand how upset this has made me. I’m the victim here. My life is going to hell in a ham sandwich. My wife wants a child, it’s all she talks about, our cycles are off, I can’t get any sleep. Babies die in their cribs. Maybe the fat nosy neighbor—talk about a walrus, the blubber on that woman, her arms alone, bingo wings they call them, she’s the one belongs in a zoo—maybe she brought the knife. Maybe Rachel and Colette are in cahoots—I love that word—maybe they got together on the Internet, hoping to frame me or do away with me or cut off my—I get these headaches—I’m telling you, there are crazy people out there, this is California, land of fruits and nuts, people say the ugliest things, online, offline, no one takes responsibility, you can’t protect yourself, the Internet—

  What’s that you’re holding?

  No, not the microphone.

  The other hand.

  Dead by Christmas

  I’ll tell you what ruined my marriage, and it wasn’t gambling or drink or chasing skirt. Our son, Donny, was walking home from a friend’s house when a LeSabre blew the stop sign, ran the poor kid down in the street and dragged him twenty yards, then fled the scene.

  Seven years old, Donny was. And he fought, or his body fought, half the night, until the ER surgeon came out to talk with Barb and me with that look on his face.

  All I remember of the next two weeks is I went on a mission—horning my way into the loop as every department in the valley tracked down the driver, even tagging along when the arrest came down in Apache Junction.