Magnificent Vibration

by Rick Springfield

  Everything goes swimmingly until a dissatisfied customer calls Ernie and complains about one of my deliveries. They want to know if the little pieces of freeway gravel are an extra topping or just part of the unique ingredients in Ernie’s extra-large cheese and pepperoni. Have you ever tried to balance an oversized and extremely hot pizza on a scooter’s handlebars while zooming along the freeway at forty-five MPH with trucks and cars whizzing dangerously close making wild wind vortexes that shake and wobble the crap out of you and your little bike, too? The pizzas fall off occasionally, and I do my best to pick the road-kill out of them if I’m unlucky enough that the box opens up on impact, but so far there hasn’t been a problem. The people who’ve called to complain about the added pebbly roughage in their order say they thought they heard the sound of a small motorbike pulling away from their house post-delivery. So Ernie wants to see my car. I show him my scooter instead. He takes a swing at me but my reactions have been honed from dodging my mother’s flailing fists through the years, and he misses by a mile. Correctly assuming I am fired, I jump on my scooter, flip Ernie off, and ride away with my dignity intact, as Ernie hurls unkind epithet after unkind epithet at yours unemployedly’s retreating ass-end. My dreams of a pizza delivery monopoly are shot to hell, however.

  I’m only on my second girlfriend (unfortunately this tally includes the Reverend’s wife), so obviously the gigolo career isn’t going to happen either, damnit. My second girlfriend gives me the boot once the weather starts to turn colder and she gets fed up arriving at our destinations with her eyes tearing, her nose red and dripping, and an ill-behaved case of helmet hair. I get it, though, and am now seriously motivated to purchase a car (with the all-important backseat, wink, wink). Honestly, what a clueless goober I was.

  But first I have to find another job so I can actually afford the car. And somewhere along the way I’ll need a driver’s license.

  A year or two into the serious job search, with more pizza delivering (still on the scooter, I’m afraid), busboying, and Starbucks trashemptying to help pay the rent and feed myself, I actually land a real adult job! I walk out of the interview at Apex Audio/Video Dubbing Sound Stages with the news that I start the following Monday still spinning around in my head. How did I fool them so completely? Why can’t I do that all the time? I am absolutely giddy with success. And also extremely concerned that they’ll find out I’m just a kid, even though my license, yes, license, says I am now twenty-three. When does the “man” thing kick in, I wonder? I thought it was at twenty-one, but nothing happened inside me at twenty-one. Perhaps I’m a late bloomer and I just have to handle the kid business longer than most. I do miss my monster “figurines,” though. They would have looked super-cool in my cupboard/apartment.

  The new gig has me starting in the “mail room,” of course, and though I’m not actually delivering mail, I am sweeping floors, fetching coffee, and generally bearing the brunt of the working stiffs’ frustrations in this video-dubbing house in North Hollywood. It’s the very same workplace I’ve mentioned earlier that has, for some ungodly reason, decided that its best chance of survival in the cutthroat world of audio/video dubbing is to corner the much-maligned (mainly by me) Cambodian gangster-movie market, because someone somewhere wants to see these dreadful films in English! The way the work is described to me when I first apply for the job makes it sound waaaaay cooler than it really is, and I imagine myself eventually working on major motion pictures and rubbing elbows with Leonardo and Harrison, Scarlett and Meryl. But as it turns out, I will at best be working on movies starring Pheakdel and Samnang, Kola and Darareaksmay. This video house is many, many light years from the Hollywood silver screen. But I am on board and locked in. Starting at the bottom. Actually, come to think of it, I was much happier running out for Starbucks and emptying trash bins than I ever have been sitting in front of a video monitor watching the same ass-sucking scene over and over to make sure the English-speaking voice-over actors (most of whom sound like William Shatner if he’d never taken an acting lesson or Paris Hilton if she had) dub their lines in relative synch with the Cambodian dudes and babes on the screen.

  And this is all before the Right Whale joins the festivities. It’s still a couple of years before he belly-flops into my working life and turns it from dreary ennui to a complete and utter living hell. But right now everything is comparatively copacetic.

  There’s a saying the Buddhists have that’s something along the lines of, “With every terrible event comes the seed of something wonderful: and vice versa.”

  One morning the “vice versa” of that noble saying walks her perky ass into my place of employ. My future ex-wife has just careened into my life. She’s pretty and mouthy and has a sense of humor that sets her apart from most of the dour folks working in this place. She tells me she’s going to be answering phones and getting coffee. These video-editing people drink more coffee than dance marathoners and long-haul truckers combined. Her name is Charlotte and she seems to like me right away (?) and I her. Since I have been working at Apex Audio/Video Dubbing Sound Stages for a while now, I offer to show her around. She says she’s excited to be working in the movie business and wants to see all these “sound stages.” Like me, she’s made the mistake of thinking that this place is somehow connected to the exciting and glamorous world of Hollywood. I guide her to the tiny dubbing rooms, the barren, sterile office cubicles, and break the bad news to her that Chet Chong Cham is about as close as she’ll ever get to Gone with the Wind.

  So we begin dating, and she becomes the fourth person I have ever had sex with. (And I am including my faithful right hand in that count of four.) Reflecting on this fact, I conclude that living with my mother for so long was a bad idea all round. Now that I have my very own “shaggin’ shack,” I anticipate a lot more action from the many, many, many, many, many hot women I see every day on the street.

  But Charlotte has other plans for Woody, and she keeps him pretty busy and fairly sapped of his life-giving cocktails, if I may use that phrase in the context of discussing my penis.

  Matt, a guy I have befriended at work, has an odd reaction when I tell him that Charlotte and I are an item.

  “Ooh, dude. Bad idea, dating someone from work. Could get ugly.”

  “Poppycock,” I say and wish I hadn’t. Sometimes my mother just leaps right out of my mouth at the most inopportune moments. “I don’t see a problem with it,” I continue, not really understanding what this simple phrase portends.

  Another workmate named Ned, who considers himself the resident Lothario but who I would only charitably describe as moderately good-looking and pleasantly plump, says he thinks Charlotte is “a damn fine chick.” I don’t really take offense because Ned is one of those guys who always has his sleeves rolled up and his shirt front undone to display the flab he sadly misreads as well-toned muscle. He also considers his beer belly muy macho. I tell Charlotte to steer clear of Ned because he thinks she’s a “damn fine chick,” and I laugh. She wants to know which one is Ned, I assume so she can avoid the poor guy. Sorry, Ned.

  I move in with Charlotte—into her apartment, because there just isn’t physically any room for two people to both lie down at the same time in mine. I am actually living with a woman who is not my mother! It’s kind of grown-up, kind of fun, kind of weird. She cooks real food, we watch movies together, we have regular sex in our own bed, and when I wake up in the morning I don’t have to get dressed and go home or feel shame from porking a theologian’s missus. We even have our own computers in the kitchen just like a real couple. She’s on hers a lot.

  One day she tells me she’s Catholic and we should have a Catholic wedding!! “Whoa, wait, what? Slow down, babe! Who said anything about marriage?” is what I want to say but I don’t and instead mutter, “Hmm,” thoughtfully, hoping it sounds fairly noncommittal. But she has made up her mind that it’s time. Isn’t that what they say in the movies to the guy on death row just before he’s led to Old Sparky and cooked to perfection
? “It’s time?”

  “Okay, Louie, it’s time.”

  Well, it’s time, Horatio. And without further ado I say, “I do.”

  My mother doesn’t show up for the ceremony because when I call and tell her, she says “She’s a Catholic, this girl you’re marrying,” like I’d somehow missed this point during the mass and all the frigging Latin that goes on forever and ever at the couple of Eucharists she’s dragged me to in preparation for our upcoming wedding.

  “Mom, she’s a Catholic, not a Satanist,” I try.

  “It’s close,” answers Mommy the Presbyterian.

  Accursed religious intolerance.

  “I guess she won’t be babysitting for us,” I joke to Charlotte the Catholic.

  Charlotte grabs my arm with her G.I. Joe kung-fu grip.

  “Ouch,” I squeal like a wussy.

  “I’m not into having children,” she says firmly.

  “Shouldn’t we have discussed that before saying our vows, renting the band, and prepping the toilet for the three a.m. hurling session because we both drank way too many vodka tonics and glasses of champagne on an empty stomach?” I want to say but again do not. It’s too late, anyway. Maybe there’s a dog in my future, and as if she’s reading my mind she adds, “And I’m not a dog person, either.”

  Damnit! Oh well, no kids, no dogs. Maybe she’ll be okay with a cat if I can just get a handle on my cat allergies that cause my eyes to redden and swell shut, my throat to close up enough to be life-threatening, and my skin to break out into angry red hives. On Google I look up “What is the third most popular pet in the United States?” figuring correctly that the first two are dogs and cats. Ferrets! Ferrets come in third. I wonder if I’m allergic to ferret fur? They sound like a tough sell: “Darling, how about a ferret or two?”

  Onward!

  I marry her.

  Yep. I do.

  That’s pretty much it.

  And I remind myself of a guy I met on a plane once, after I’d begun taking the odd flight here and there for my work. I start chatting lightly as one occasionally does with a fellow traveler who isn’t trying to steal both armrests, doesn’t smell like spoiled milk mixed with urine, and isn’t coughing, sneezing, and loogie-hawking all over you. He’s an older man, and he starts talking about his life. He goes on and on about the year and a half he spent in the army, serving in the Vietnam War when he was twenty-one. And he still seems really charged up about it. There are stories of dangerous missions and anecdotes about wild nights spent with war buddies and hookers during R & R in Nah Trang and Sydney. Amazingly vivid recollections and memories that seem to be burned right into his brain cells.

  He doesn’t stop talking for most of the three-hour flight about his time in “ ’Nam.” Finally the conversation slows, and I ask him what he’s done since leaving the army. He sums it up in three words: “I’m in insurance.”

  And that’s it. That’s all he has to say about the following forty years.

  I think I may be in a similar situation with the whole marriage bit. Three words: “I got married.”

  And I don’t even have anything as cool as going to war (though I’ve never been to war to see if it’s cool or not) to compare with the rest of my dull life. Okay, there is a little more to my married life than those three words, but it often doesn’t feel like it.

  I move up in the “firm” and actually start working on the “movies” if I may use that word in connection with the on-screen feculence we have to deal with. Sorry, I know I sound bitter.

  Charlotte and I do the honeymoon thing, going only as far as San Diego and our finances will allow. A week and a half at The Shores Hotel, which isn’t actually on the shores, but set a few blocks back from them, so that’s a bit of false advertising on their part. I get such a great deal on the room, however, that I decide not to moan about it. The time goes fairly slowly (never a good sign on a vacation and possibly even less so on a honeymoon), and we eventually arrive home eager to get back to our separate routines. We are kind of relieved to be done honeymooning because, with the whole day and night free, once the “dance with the swollen pickle” was done, there really wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to talk about, which leads me to believe that we may not actually have a lot in common as a post-coital couple.

  But we are married, and I assume we’re both committed to making it work, whatever that means. We’ll come up with something else to take the place of actual conversation. Possibly we can take a class together. Juggling, maybe. Or macramé.

  Head down, move forward.

  We eventually buy a small house that’s beyond both our means, as is the American way, and I, after many attempts, succeed in talking Charlotte into getting a dog. I think I threaten her with a ferret, which she believes is a type of large rat. In the end this wins the battle for me. It’s a big battle, the dog battle. And I do win it, but I definitely lose the war.

  The memory of barbecued Bob still lingers at the edges of my memory, along with the need to heal the wound of losing him. Or maybe I just like dogs. We see a man selling puppies in a shopping mall parking lot one Sunday and I look at Charlotte, who rolls her eyes, which I take as a fully enthusiastic acceptance of the plan. Full steam ahead on acquiring the dog. And away we go.

  The conversation with the owner of the puppies goes something like this.

  Me:

  “Oh my god, they’re so cute. What kind of dogs are they?”

  Him:

  “They’re Red Golden Retrievers. They’re purebred, but my dogs breed like rabbits so I’m selling ’em at a discount.”

  Me:

  “ ‘Red’ Golden Retrievers?”

  Him:

  “Red Golden Retrievers.”

  Me:

  “That’s two colors.”

  Him:

  “No, one. They’re Red Golden Retrievers.”

  Me:

  “But isn’t that like saying Black Yellow Labs?”

  Him:

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Me:

  “You said that they’re Red Golden Retrievers. Two colors. Red and gold. But they’re only red.”

  Him:

  “They’re Red Golden Retrievers.”

  Me:

  “But they’re really just Red Retrievers.”

  Him:

  “They’re Red Golden Retrievers.”

  Me:

  “Okay, I get it that’s the official name but they’re not golden. They’re red. So doesn’t that make them just Red Retrievers?”

  The world-famous lonely cricket chirps in the moonlight somewhere on a cold and windy mesa in Taos, New Mexico. There is an uncomfortable silence that lasts for a second or two or three. Then . . .

  Him:

  “They’re Red Golden Retrievers.”

  I buy the cutest one. Actually he’s the one that seems to like me the most, and I name him Murray and he is fully awesome. Charlotte thinks he’s a filthy, hair-shedding varmint, bred only to chew her good shoes and the crotches out of her underwear.

  I give him the thumbs-up on all three activities.

  I keep Josie’s little wooden box on the mantel over the fake fireplace of our new home.

  Charlotte thinks it’s “creepy.”

  My girl Josie is most certainly not creepy.

  We have a brief summer of love, my new wife and I, and then we both hunker down for the remaining long winter of her discontent.

  She gets fired (for reasons I’m not clear on) and I get promoted at the video-dubbing house of crap movies. It creates the beginnings of a tension that slowly grows with an argument here, a screaming match there, over the next few years as we both start to realize we have made a horrible mistake by heedlessly jumping into the whole wedlock business, so ill-suited are we as a couple. I begin to want the marriage to work for Murray’s sake. He doesn’t need the baggage of coming from a broken home. Okay, I may be anthropomorphically projecting onto our dog a little here, but really, he hates it when we ar
gue so I assume he would be devastated if we got an actual divorce. Unfortunately, he is already a damaged child. I love Murray. Murray loves me. Murray loves Charlotte. Charlotte doesn’t love Murray. It seems my dog is having the same luck with women I had when I was his age. Must be hereditary.

  Charlotte finally finds work as a vehicle inspector at Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Thousand Oaks. This means she checks the returning cars for “door dings.” The job doesn’t have a very healthy, corporate ladder-ascending future, but it does add a little something to the weekly pot. The arguments continue nonetheless.

  And just when the video-dubbing house from hell has become the only place where I can get any kind of peace and freedom from the anxiety and squabbles at home . . .

  Enter The Right Whale.

  He takes an instant dislike to me for some reason, and his first action is to ban Murray (who I have been bringing to work with me since things at home have gotten so tense) from the premises.

  Then he bans coffee from the dubbing rooms, although no one has ever dumped coffee anywhere but down their caffeine addicted pie-holes. This is almost as bad as banning Murray, such a coffee ho have I become. And with good reason.

  Hour after hour of these siesta-inducing films bestow on the unlucky viewer the need for serious stimulants. I briefly consider amphetamines but decide against it after seeing some frightening “before and after” photos of meth addicts on AOL.

  The Right Whale begins out-and-out abuse and name-calling. It’s very stressful for yours ass-wipedly (one of his favorite sayings). Not so much as a result of the mistreatment but because if he’s talking to you, you can’t miss seeing those little white milky curd balls in the corners of his mouth. And if you try to look away he gives you the “Look at me when I’m talking to you” line. Really? Do I have to? I sometimes wonder if he’s married and there’s some poor woman out there who has to see those cheese-clotted lips coming in for a goodnight kiss. Eeeeuuuuuuwwwwwww! He focuses his wrath on others, too, but I seem to be his favorite. Lucky teacher’s pet.