As I Lay Frying

by Fay Jacobs

  Frankly, neither do we. Not to mention spending the next two weeks living in an antiseptic bubble. For fear of crumbs, the only family member who ate in the kitchen was Moxie, while Bonnie and I sacrificed and went out every night. The stress of keeping the house pristine almost killed us.

  But then we got the call, “Start packing. You’ve got a contract!”

  Of course, as these things go, the contract fell apart, then the buyers found another lender, then we dickered about closing costs, then six calls later a deal was struck, then…somebody get the Dramamine.

  Finally, we sold the place. I sure hope the people who bought it enjoy the bird who nests in our dryer vent every spring. She should be moving in, just as we’re moving out.

  At Passover Seder, the traditional end-of-ritual saying is “Next year, in Jerusalem.” This year, we added “next year in Rehoboth.” Actually, next week in Rehoboth. My very next column will be written as a full-time Rehoboth resident. If this is a mid-life crisis, I’m lovin’ it.

  April 1999

  YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALL

  After a hectic week of packing and shlepping, I arrived in Rehoboth more convinced than ever that I got out of DC just in time.

  Between the government agonizing over ground troops— no, not for Kosovo, for the Tidal Basin to catch the bucky beaver chomping down the historic cherry trees, and The Washington Post carrying front page coverage of model Fabio getting whacked in the schnozz by a low flying goose, it’s been too weird to believe.

  Did you catch the Fabio thing? The infamous romantic coverboy was dressed like Adonis and riding the lead car to inaugurate a new rollercoaster. Everything was ducky until the Fab must have closed his eyes in terror, because he never saw this humongous kamikaze goose heading for his face. The cover photo of Fabio’s bloody beak was not Mr. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’s finest moment.

  But if that wasn’t disgusting enough, during my office farewell party, in the midst of wine and cheese, a pre-pubescent roller blader sidled up to the party room’s plate glass window and, while executing a triple salchow, mooned the entire crowd. Now there was a sign it was time to go.

  We howled. The FBI could have dusted the big tush on the window for asshole prints.

  As vivid a farewell as the moonie was, the sign outside the office was even better. My colleagues thoughtfully installed the letters “Farewell, Fay, thanks for the memories” on one side of the sign, but blushed when they were reminded that the back side said, “Get rid of bulk trash this Saturday.” Yup. I was outta there.

  I also bid a fond farewell to my spouse, who is charged with handling the home fires for another few weeks until our settlement when she, too, can move to Rehoboth full-time. We’ll have to make do with nightly phone calls. In the meantime, awaiting the move to our new home, I planned to camp at the condo.

  So I arrived in Rehoboth on Sunday, April 11, no longer just a weekender, and a mere night’s sleep away from my first new job in 17 years. As I tried to relax, channel surfing to keep myself company, it was no small irony that I stumbled upon the very first

  episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I fell asleep watching Mary greet her new boss (“But Mr. Grant….”), new neighbors Rhoda and Phyllis, and totally new surroundings. I empathized.

  Let me tell you, from the instant my alarm clock went off, things were gloriously different. In the hour I used to spend commuting, pouring coffee down my suit jacket, enduring public radio fundraising, and fighting road rage, I went to the gym, got a newspaper, and had coffee. Life was wonderful.

  In fact, my new job seems to be wonderful, too. One of the things that attracted me to the position was the prospect of a one-person office. No more football pools, office politics, or staggered lunch hours. If I want to gossip around the water cooler I just grab the Britta jug and talk to myself.

  Of course, being seriously hardware challenged (I know, it hardly seems fair, considering my lesbian credentials), the downside of office solohood is having nobody to call when machinery goes berserk.

  Lest my new employers pale, let me assure them that I’m quite competent in the skills they sought at the interview. I’m just an office equipment klutz. Like it took me three days to figure out that the printer wouldn’t print because somebody had helped themselves to the printer cable

  Once I leapt that hurdle, we had a paper jam. The machine is beeping and some cartoon geek on the computer screen is hollering commands. When I manage to liberate the shards of crinkled vellum, half a ream of paper shoots over the room. Suddenly I’m Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory, running around the desk and screaming for Ethel Mertz.

  Meanwhile the phone rings. “Hello, Hello????” Nobody there. I’m thinking I got dissed by a heavy breather when I realize it isn’t the phone, it’s the fax. Another machine I flunked. Which is probably good. Otherwise, I might be tempted, as Murphy Brown once did, to fax my chest to the West Coast.

  But the crowning glory of my first week came when I locked myself in the bathroom. While the office is in a cute little historic house, it’s a very old little house. I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and the door handle fell off. Oh good. Trapped. Now here’s a serious downside to the single-person office.

  First I panicked, eyed the window and wondered if I’d be able to shimmy out without either killing myself or landing onto page one of the local press. I gave the window thing a good old college try and realized that this round peg would have lots of trouble getting through that square hole. By this time I was standing on the toilet, head and shoulders out the window, laughing like a hyena. I dethroned and took another look at the bathroom door. I finally figured out I could jiggle the lock open by sticking my pinky finger into where the door handle used to be. Sprung!

  I’ve been flying solo almost three weeks now and I’ve started to leave little notes around the office. “Put letterhead in printer upside down, stupid.” “Fax originals face down, moron.” Luckily we don’t have a shredder or my clothes would look like the costumes from Les Miserables.

  Having negotiated this uneasy truce with my mechanical staff, I’m settling into my new job and new hometown. I miss the girlfriend, but her arrival is imminent. I’ve checked out the grocery, discovered mid-week dinner specials, walked the boardwalk after work, and generally enjoyed the heck out of myself. I think I’ll take my rainbow embroidered baseball cap up to the boardwalk, stand on Rehoboth Avenue, toss the hat up into theair, and listen for Mary Tyler Moore’s theme song.

  I’m smiling.

  May 1999

  CHANGE IS GOOD (TRANSITION SUCKS)

  Oh, the frustration of relocating my entire life.

  Hell, just arranging phone service for our new house is life’s work. What are there now, twenty thousand phone companies? And they all called me tonight during dinner. “Hi, this is a courtesy call from MCI….” If they were really courteous they wouldn’t call at 6 o’clock.

  Apart from connecting and disconnecting service, which now take a minimum of a month each on hold with a robot, my favorite phone company trick is slamming. Has it happened to you yet? While you sleep, no-name long distance companies steal your account. Then, when you make calls, your new company electronically selects the highest possible rate in the hemisphere. I’m paying a dollar seventy-five a minute. They should automatically dial 911 for you when the bill comes.

  And just try to straighten it out. Short of having Amnesty International intervene, your only hope is spending the foreseeable future pressing 1 for Residential Service, 2 for Billing Questions, and 3 for the Spanish Inquisition. I was on the phone so long trying to get my phone company back that the operator, showing a refreshing sense of irony, ended our conversation with “Thanks for spending the day with Bell Atlantic.”

  Following that, the first call I got was from some cheesy long-distance company, interrupting yet another meal, to beg for business. Can’t we pay them ten cents a minute to go away? Now I’m into the traditional kind of slamming—as i
n down the receiver.

  As long as I was aggravated anyway, I called the cable company. First I was put on hold for the afternoon, forced to hear non-stop promos for Nicholas Cage movies. Then, the genius operator couldn’t figure out how to order service at a new house where cable had never dared to go before. Duh. When she put me on hold, I came into a movie promo at the very words “It’s Dumb and Dumber….” No comment.

  Meanwhile, between calls to local utilities, Bonnie and I are holed up in our condo, belongings piled to the ceiling, waiting to get into the new house. The transition is even making the dog nuts. The poor little guy doesn’t understand what happened to his backyard.

  His frustration has manifested itself as a craving to chew wicker. Great. It’s a beach rental. Wicker Central. A Moxie munching ground. Yesterday, for wicker du jour, he ate half a chair.

  I’m easily amused these days. In my continuing transition to office maven, I called the people at Intellifax (Oxymoron Alert!!!) for help when the fax machine herniated itself. They told me, and I’m quoting here, “you’re sticking it in the wrong hole.”

  But as frustrations go, by last week I finally had the mother of all irritants, an example by which all future frustrations may be measured. It happened as we moved Bonnie’s office stuff to Rehoboth. Try sitting in traffic, at a dead stop, on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (always frustrating), only this time, as the minutes tick by, you are paying the moving van stuck behind you, $70 an hour. Tick, tick, tick….

  So the upshot is that change may be great, but transition’s a bitch. I give credit to my new friends Dan and Peter for that particular sentiment.

  When we met them twelve weeks ago, Bonnie and I were in a Sarasota restaurant with my father, trying to explain why it was sensible for me to quit my long-time job, take a position for less than half the salary, sell the house, uproot Bonnie’s business and move to the beach. Mission impossible.

  As President of the Bank of Dad, he worried we’d evermore be dialing for dollars. No, we’d be fine, I said. We’d thought it all out, we had a financial plan. Then I told him that more than money, it really just came down to a sense of community. Our friends, the welcoming atmosphere, my opportunity to write for Letters, the diversity, the wonderful people we’d met….

  He wasn’t buying it. I talked and talked, but Dad looked wild-eyed, dwelling on that teensy “quit my job” part. Just then, somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a nice-looking stranger, about my age. “Are you Fay Jacobs, from Letters from CAMP Rehoboth?” he asked.

  Now really, what’s the chance of that happening a thousand miles from Rehoboth Avenue? A zillion to one?

  I fessed up to it being me, as he introduced himself and his partner, glanced to my left and said “And you must be Bonnie. We have a place in North Shores and we enjoy reading Letters. We recognized you, Fay, from the picture. We just moved to Rehoboth full-time. Isn’t it a wonderful place????”

  My father was gape-jawed. Either he instantly understood our babbling about community, or, more plausibly, he wondered when the heck I’d had time to plant these guys in the restaurant.

  Either way, after we chatted a while and the guys went back to their table, Dad cautiously endorsed our beach relocation plan and stopped stuttering “quit your job????” To this day, I’m sure he still thinks it was a set-up.

  And now that we’ve completely uprooted ourselves, final push courtesy of our new Sarasota boyfriends, it’s only fair that they got to counsel us last week over dinner. Yes, they said, change is good; it’s just transition that’s hell.

  Well, if the end result is that a bad day negotiating for phone service at the beach is better than a good day anywhere else, we’ll take the traffic-snarled moving vans, dialing for dummies and wicker chomping. Heck, I have to have something to rant and rave about.

  Of course, while I’m typing, Bonnie’s fending off a call from Sprint, Moxie’s got his incisors around the coffee table leg, and we’re so anxious to move in and get settled we’re ready to gnaw the wicker ourselves. Change is good; change is good, change is good….

  June 1999

  BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE,

  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOMELESS

  I promise, these are absolutely, positively the last words I will EVER have to say about real estate. I know that reading about my move to the beach must be on your very last nerve by now, so I’ll make it short: We didn’t settle, we didn’t move, we’re nomads again. Rehoboth Hobos. (That’s Hobo, with a b.)

  Do I have the world’s worst real estate karma, or what? Twenty-four hours before moving day we discovered that the builder forgot one teeny tiny detail for the new house—an occupancy permit. That’s his job, for god’s sake. It’s like gay men forgetting hair gel. Or Rehoboth forgetting to install the parking meters. Or me forgetting to eat, god forbid. It doesn’t happen.

  But the moving van was on its way from Maryland, renters were heading to the condo and the settlement was off. I had two choices. I could walk into the ocean or laugh.

  Ergo, here’s the hyena from hell. Nero fiddled while Rome burned and I just howled while my heroic real estate agent and crackerjack settlement team tried to locate a building inspector. What a hoot!

  By 4 p.m. on moving day we got permission to unload the trucks, but we had to swear not to move into the house. Laughed, thought I’d die. Imagine the hilarity when I remembered I’d already arranged for the gas dryer delivery, cable installation, California Closet lady, and mail forwarding. Here’s a hot one: If the phone number is transferred to the new house, but there’s no one there to hear it, does it still ring?

  With a mighty guffaw, Bonnie and I did the sensible thing and went to the bar at Blue Moon. “Ha-ha-ha, if we’re too drunk to drive, we’ll take a cab home!”

  “Yeah, said my spouse, “What home?”

  “Beats me, ha-ha-ha”

  Fortunately, friends leaving for vacation offered us refuge for the night. By the next morning, we raced to our 3-bedroom storage unit to meet the closet lady and spend a half hour surveying the walk-in closet, which is the longest I’ve been in the closet since 1978, ha-ha-ha….

  And did you hear the one about the farmer’s daughter who married the Jewish Princess and now they’re both homeless because the builder forgot to get an occupancy permit, ha-haha?

  By Sunday night we cried with laughter as we packed bags at the house we’d just moved into to go back to the condo we’d just moved out of. Hot on the heels of the departing renters, we brought back much of the same crap we’d moved out forty eight hours before. What a gas!

  I thought living out of a suitcase since April was bad, but it was just a chuckle compared to the rip snorter of having our belongings in a whole other house, four miles away. Twice on Sunday night we had to drive up and down the highway to retrieve necessities. Now that was a side-splitter. And speaking of splitting, let me tell you about the kind of headache you can get from all this. Hey, which house has the Tylenol??? A plague on both our houses ha-ha-ha....

  Okay, a real estate agent, a mortgage man and a lawyer were all walking up Rehoboth Avenue trying to calm down a hysterical client, when…wait a minute, that’s no joke, that’s my life, ba-daboom.

  “It will all work out,” Bonnie said, letting out an enormous guffaw. Or possibly a wail.

  To paraphrase Henny Youngman, take my spouse, pleassseee!!!

  Or, as Groucho said, “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “Dethpicable…” quoth Daffy Duck.

  I know! We’ll just click our Reeboks, whisper there’s no place like home and find out we’d been in a tornado. We’ve now been laughing for more than a week. So here are Fay J’s top five reasons why we’re still not in our house:

  On Monday the builder said the plumbing inspection would be Tuesday;

  On Tuesday the builder said the plumbing inspection would be Wednesday;

  On Wednesday they discovered that they’d forgotten to fully insulate the ceiling;


  On Thursday they delayed the final inspection until next week;

  On Friday my realtor, shocked that I was still laughing, asked me what medication I was taking.

  They’re coming to take me away Ha-Ha Ho-Ho Hee-Hee to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time and at least I will have an address for mail forwarding. Ba-da-boom.

  May 1999

  I (ALMOST) CANNOT TELL A LIE

  Bonnie made a liar out of me. To the police, no less.

  Two weeks ago our intrepid editor invited me to join him for the Rehoboth Beach police sensitivity training session on hate crimes. I knew CAMP participated in the session every year and I was honored to be asked to join the team.

  Realizing I’d have to prepare some comments in addition to being available for questions, I thought back to the hurtful occasion where Bonnie and I were threatened with a hate crime. It happened in Key West of all places.

  It was a beautiful evening as four of us, dressed for a lovely dinner, walked towards the inviting lights of Duvall Street. As we dodged a huge puddle in the road (fearful of getting our prissy sandals wet), our quartet fanned out in opposite directions.

  Suddenly, from nowhere, a low-rider Chevy with dark tinted windows careened around the corner, almost mowing us down. “Whoa,” I said, motioning to the driver, mostly as a reflex, as he came within inches of my shoes.

  “Hey!” hollered Bonnie, similarly.

  The car screeched to a halt, a young man got out, screaming, “Dykes! Dykes! You f-ing Dykes were in my way, Goddammit. F-ing dykes,” And then he let fly with a string of obscenities that would make a redneck blush.