As I Lay Frying

by Fay Jacobs

  “Well, then he can’t be mad,” said another clerk.

  “She won’t say a word,” I said. “I know what leaf blowers cost.”

  The salesdyke fought back a grin as I took my receipt, smiled sweetly at the open-mouthed clerk, and left.

  Reality intruded again, as the waves picked up, sending tomatoes rolling, cups catapulting and an open mustard jar into the air. The mustard itself flew faster than the jar (that Isaac Newton thing, I guess) and a huge glob became a heat-seeking missile, Grey Pouponing what would have been my lap if I’d been sitting down. I shouted a bad word.

  The real captain (as opposed to the intern), thinking I’d been hurt, instantly throttled back. The boat stopped but I kept going, landing butt first in Max’s water bowl. Now I had a lap, with ripe tomatoes and a huge vidalia onion coming at it, in a simultaneous application of Newton’s and Murphy’s laws. I became a hoagie.

  Miraculously, lunch got made, everyone ate, nobody turned green, and we reached Lewes on schedule. Loyal but wind-whipped friends waved at us from the Rehoboth Avenue Bridge as we made our second annual arrival in the canal, and cheered the success of the former barf queen’s aversion therapy cruise.

  Heading to our marina, I remembered wondering last year if the Bay Pride and its rainbow flag would be welcome. Upon arrival, we had been a curiosity. This time, several marina neighbors, strangers when we pulled in last year, waved, hollered “what took you so long!” and offered helping hands for docking and dispensing beverages.

  I’m so glad to be back. If anyone asks “Have you any Grey Poupon?” I can say proudly say “Yep, I’m wearing it.”

  June 1996

  IS IT HOT IN HERE, OR IS IT ME?

  We’re turning into our parents. Well, not entirely.

  I don’t think our parents had the fun in middle age that baby boomer gays and lesbians have. But in other ways we’re becoming them whether we like it or not.

  Last week I heard myself making the same noise my father used to make getting out of a chair.

  And lately, no matter who we’re with, sooner or later somebody says “hormones” or “health care” and we start discussing fat grams, forgetfulness and other topics I can’t recall at the moment.

  I do remember the 1950s (short term goes first) and my parents and their friends discussing the new tranquilizer Miltown. Now we speculate about Prozac. Same-same.

  We have a dermatologist friend about to give up his practice. These days, the phrase I hear most is, “He’s retiring, so I went to get something taken off.” Then we compare the moles we’ve got left and look for ticking time bombs.

  Remember Fire Island or P-Town, when you’d baste yourself like a turkey and lay frying on the beach like an omelette? Now we slather with so much Coppertone #25 epoxy that sand sticks to us like Shake-n-Bake. If every 40-something lesbian I know shook off before leaving the beach we could cancel our beach reclamation project.

  And it’s a good thing my spouse and I were home and not in the grocery last Wednesday when she leapt up and started ripping off her clothes. In seconds she was down to birthday suit and deck shoes.

  Gape-jawed, I asked, “Hot flash?”

  “Power surge,” she said.

  They’re happening all over. Ever watch a waiter try to adjust the air conditioning at a 50th birthday bash? The guests sit in their seats, fanning themselves with menus. And I’m petrified that my significant other might do Gypsy Rose Lee during the salad course.

  When the waiter comes back from adjusting the thermostat for the third time, and finally starts taking our order, the game begins.

  The first guy or gal to fumble for reading glasses gets to order first, then passes the drug-store specs to each succeeding party-goer. At least one person, too vain to admit to needing glasses, stretches his arms so far to be able to read that the menu hits the candle and bursts into flames.

  The crowd starts to sing Happy Birthday but quickly realizes it’s just another menu going up.

  And speaking of smoke, it’s been ten weeks since one of our buddies traded smoking for nicotine gum. “But just try and get that stuff,” she says. “When I went to the store they were out. I said ‘what do you mean you don’t HAVE any? We’re all hooked on this shit and NOW you don’t HAVE any???’ Then they tried to sell me cigarettes!” She was one angry woman.

  So I whined to her about my doctor-prescribed diet pills. I’m losing tons of weight, but the HMO refuses to pay for the medication despite all their “wellness” crap. Losing the equivalent of half of model Kate Moss doesn’t count?

  So I swallow 90 bucks worth of pills a month. It’s better than downing an equal amount of beach fries. Pills don’t need salt and vinegar, and the seagulls won’t use you for target practice while trying to steal them.

  And so it goes. On our last boat trip we forgot the blender but everybody aboard remembered dental floss. And after chic Southwestern food one night we all shared somebody’s package of Beano like we used to share a nickel bag of grass.

  I have this theory. One day on the news you’ll hear about Thelma and Louise robbing a Nicorette Gum truck. Then a local woman, a writer in fact, goes berserk after six months of eating nothing but vegetables, fat-free cream cheese (what is that stuff?), decaf cappuccino with skim milk, and the occasional hard pretzel. Armed with a stale baguette in her pocket, she holds up the local candy stand, making off with a pillowcase of taffy—then continues to the Gourmet shop where she demolishes the fat free honey mustard bottles, and takes the entire stock of Boursin cheese and caviar hostage. The crime spree ends at the custard stand in a hail of chocolate jimmies.

  No longer will disgruntled postal workers get all the press. A militia of nicotine chomping, sunscreen wearing, fat-gram counting, people of a certain age will hole up on a Montana ranch and dare the FBI to turn off the electric. What the heck, they can’t stay awake much past 9 p.m. these days anyway.

  These radicals will demand that the government fly in the best plastic surgeons, the most delicious low-fat cuisine, a tub of Retin-A and personal trainers who look like Jody Foster or Brad Pitt. Soon, their energy will return, extra chins will disappear and they’ll set fire to their stockpile of Zantac, Ibuprofen and Metamucil.

  After a three-month siege they’ll emerge looking and feeling like they did when The Village People were popular the first time. And then....

  Excuse me. My mate is talking to me. “Honey, I’m trying to finish up my column. What? They want to meet us at Blue Moon for a drink? Now? Sounds great.”

  I gotta go. The sky is full of stars and we’re heading to Baltimore Avenue for Absolut Vodka and some laughs. Maybe we’ll see sunrise on the beach. After all, the night is young. When my parents were this age they would never have gone out after Gunsmoke and the 11 o’clock news. Armed with antacids, I’m on a roll.

  June 1996

  AND YOU MUST BE BONNIE

  Syndicated columnist Deb Price’s book is called Say Hi to Joyce. No columnist is an island if they have a spouse.

  I loved Deb’s book about starting a syndicated column about gay issues. But I had no idea that just as Deb’s column publicly outed her lover Joyce, so would my writing catch my significant other like a deer in the headlights.

  When Steve first asked me to write a column I figured I was in it alone. Just me and my laptop.

  Wrong. It seems I never do anything alone. I’m not complaining, mind you, but my credibility would be history if I misled people into thinking I actually know how to start the engine on my boat. Mix drinks, yes, back it into the slip, no. Although I did help back it into the dock once. (That was expensive.)

  So the not-so-Lone Ranger had to find a way to acknowledge Tonto. Phyllis Diller chose to call her husband Fang. If I went that route I’d soon be doing a lot of important things alone.

  And what about friends who naively socialize with us only to read about their embarrassing moments (“You’re not going to write about this are you???”) two weeks later?

&nbs
p; One wonderful man who shall remain nameless makes me swear he’s “off the record” before I step in the door.

  So I’ve taken to using friends’ addresses instead of names (“...the Hickman Street boys visited Mr. Maryland Avenue, who told Ms. Newcastle Street that...) The subjects stay anonymous but it’s obvious I’ll not only be passed over for a Pulitzer, but Steve will weep trying to edit the mess.

  But Tonto had me stumped. Advocate writer Janis Ian conquers the problem by using the term of endearment Mr. Lesbian. My thesaurus produced only the well-worn “significant other- lover-spouse-mate-and/or better half.”

  One day, after typing “significant hardware fanatic” for my lover and the poetic “household dog” for my Schnauzer, I became literarily unglued and started naming names. My lover Bonnie’s name was all over the page like a rash. “I now know how Mr. Bombeck felt,” she muttered.

  Dog mentions came in second, although Max might have been flattered being called Fang.

  I fared the best. My name tops the article and that’s it. If people read a byline at all, they completely forget the writer’s name by paragraph two. I’d have to refer to myself in the third person to keep up with Bonnie’s press. “Fay Jacobs thought that referring to oneself in third person sounded pompous and silly.”

  So everybody now knows all about Bonnie.

  Last week as I filled out a raffle ticket the seller said “Oh, you’re Fay Jacobs who writes for Letters.” Before I could say “thanks for reading my column,” he turned his back on me and said to my companion “You must be Bonnie. Do you really do all those nutty things?” She shot me a venomous look and muttered “I’m afraid so.”

  On a recent stroll past a store with backyard fountains, the proprietor overheard Bonnie describing her plan to decorate the dock behind our boat. “Say, aren’t you those girls who wrote about driving the boat down Delaware Bay to Rehoboth?” he asked.

  That’s funny, I don’t remember Bonnie writing about it.

  Recently, a local waitress teased Bonnie about hitting a sandbar in the Lewes Canal. City Hall sent Bonnie a completed parking sticker application since they know where she lives, what she drives, and where she generally parks. Unfortunately, the Route One police know exactly when she’ll fly by on Monday mornings. I’ve revealed so much minutiae about my mate that Trivial Pursuit is coming out with a Bonnie edition.

  It’s all been in good fun, of course—such good fun that Bonnie was starting to enjoy seeing her name in print. Then tragedy struck.

  A regretfully misguided burst of creativity made me write a column about aging baby boomers, hot flashes, and squinting at restaurant menus. No longer relying on euphemisms like “significant hot flasher,” there was nothing to do but relate how Bonnie was handling estrogen warp.

  “Are you nuts, Jacobs?” I thought to myself (That’s me, Fay Jacobs, the name on the byline, as you have probably forgotten by now). “You can’t print that story about Bonnie having a hot flash and ripping all her clothes off. She’ll kill you.”

  So I asked her permission to use the story. Flushed from recent quasi-celebrity, (or a hot flash, now that I think of it), she suffered temporary insanity and said “sure, why not.”

  WHY NOT????? Because since my last article came out, our friends, along with perfect strangers, have been telling Bonnie “power surge” jokes, winking at her when she squints at a menu and offering her Pepcid AC with pizza. Nobody says a word to me. They can’t remember the name of the idiot who wrote the article.

  My spouse is NOT amused.

  At least the dog is still talking to me. Although there’s a great story about Max getting spooked and backing right off the dock into the water. “Clad in his tiny life jacket, he dog paddled until Bonnie.... “

  July 1996

  DUMBSTRUCK

  According to a local wise-ass, Rehoboth recently suffered its second major event of the year. The first, according to said wise-butt, was the Delmarva blackout. So the second was Hurricane Bertha, right? Wrong...although that minor incident happened the same weekend. Mr. Smarty Pants deemed this columnist being struck totally silent by laryngitis as the season’s second defining event.

  It started Friday, July 12 with the good news that Hurricane Bertha had been downgraded to a tropical storm packing mere 40 mph wind gusts. Heck, I could do that telling a good story. That is, before Thursday night when sinusitis turned me into a Canadian Honker.

  By Friday I had no voice at all. That seemed to tickle a certain bookstore manager, who turned gleeful town crier to spread the news.

  Then, a noted artist asked if I was contagious and if so, would I please spend time with the editor of this publication (now we’ll see just how committed said editor is to freedom of the press). And these folks were not alone. Our young actor friend, with us for the weekend, kept imitating that scene in The Miracle Worker where Anne Bancroft teaches Patty Duke to sign the word for “water.” Only he was teaching me the sign for vodka.

  One sarcastic fellow said “Gee, if I’d known, I would have come prepared.” With what, a long-winded story like I usually tell so turnabout could be fair play?

  My spouse, thrust into the unaccustomed role of communicator general, interpreted my gestures (to suit her opinions, I might add), and kept up our social obligations. Once she learned how to turn the boat phone on, folks getting her calls were sure something tragic had happened. Actually, it had. To my horror, Bonnie started plagiarizing my versions of family stories, while I stood by, smiling weakly, like the village idiot.

  Soon Her Royal Chattiness cheerily broadcast what fun she was having as our domestic partnership’s public information officer. In the face of her unbearable gloating I resorted to rudimentary sign language, featuring only one digit.

  The vicious but good-natured (I think) kidding lasted all day, as folks asked me questions, then saw me shake my head and clutch my throat.

  Then the bad news: by late afternoon, Old Bertha was a hurricane again, packing 100 mph winds and heading directly for us. Now up to this point, our marina, nestled between ocean and bay on a narrow strip called Dewey, seemed to cry “location, location, location.” Unless, of course, there was a hurricane coming our way. We needed to seek safe harbor.

  Casting off, we drove to a protected canal where friends, off in sunny Florida, had left us their house key. Since radio forecasts put the storm’s arrival at noon the next day, we tied up to the pier and joined friends for dinner and a movie—where, to my relief, it’s fashionable not to talk.

  Repeated lulls in dinner table conversation prompted me to mouth “this is when I would be talking” over and over until somebody finally noticed me.

  Back at the boat, our marine radio re-confirmed Bertha’s Saturday mid-day arrival, so we decided to sleep aboard. At dawn we’d retreat to the house to await the storm. No sense having to wash guest room and sofa bed sheets if we didn’t have to.

  So the three of us—the boat captain, our buddy the actor, and I —went to sleep on the boat.

  Now I’d like to know where our local weatherpersons learned meteorology. At 4 a.m. we awoke to a vicious howling and the guttural moaning of ropes on pilings (“or is that you trying to talk, hon?” asked the captain.) The rain, falling in sheets, blew sideways, and the boat rocked like that Boardwalk arcade ride where people pay money to be shaken like a Vodka Gimlet.

  And I couldn’t even yell “Mayday!”

  “We’ve got to abandon ship,” said the captain quite calmly. Now this scared me. Unlike me, the captain is not a hysteric.

  The actor was still sleeping (now that’s focus) so the captain shook him and said, “Abandon Ship!” He said, “Five more minutes.” Finally he opened one eye, saw an ashen-faced street mime gesturing wildly over his head and realized we were having a monsoon.

  The three of us grabbed shorts, shoes and shirts, and headed topside. The six-inch trip from the boat to the dock was tricky since both places were moving. “Careful, careful, remember Natalie Wood,” I raspe
d, quite unheard, adding, “This is where I would be screaming!” as we ran (or were blown) into the house.

  Sleepy, drenched, and pissed at the forecasters, we turned on the TV to find a big, disgusting “4:39 a.m.” at the bottom of the screen and a map of our favorite shore points. Remember the blob that landed on Sigourney Weaver’s face in Alien? It was on radar, sucking up the Delaware shore.

  From the kitchen window we saw wind and rain bend trees, blow shrubs sideways, and threaten to launch lawn furniture to Kansas. But by 9 a.m. it was all over except my not shouting. No damage, no problem.

  By noon, “I survived Hurricane Bertha” T-shirts were already in stores and I began a new day as the target of merciless razzing. Bonnie was in rare form, blabbing about the joys of talking for two.

  And then it happened. At a Saturday night gathering, during an especially virulent—but clever—round of harassment, several of my friends suddenly realized the pen might just be mightier than the cord. “She may not be able to talk, but she’s going to write about this,” said one frightened harasser.

  They backed off so fast the resulting suction practically pulled the pen from my hand. Heck, the ribbing was fun. Sort of. But now that my voice is almost back—I sound like Talullah Bankhead—I want everyone to rest assured that although Bertha’s gusts are just a memory, I’m back up to hurricane strength. Start looking for safe harbor.

  August 1996

  WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION

  Even now, as an adult (chronologically, anyway), I get weak in the knees around Labor Day. Though I know in my heart it won’t be me going to junior high on that awful Tuesday morning, I still panic at back-to-school ads.