Aren't You Forgetting Someone?

by Kari Lizer

  Back in John Edward’s room, Jhoni listened as John Edward gave her images supplied by her dead brother, brought to West Hollywood by my dead sister, channeled by a medium whom we’d conned into seeing us by offering him a part on our TV show because I thought my sister was talking to me on his TV show. It was strange. It was soothing. And while it wasn’t like having our siblings in the room, it was something.

  My sister finally pushed Jhoni’s brother back through the spirit door, and Jhoni went back up to the pool. I stayed in that room for more than two hours. My sister never gave up on the young male with her, and her frustration with me was growing.

  I should clarify. Growing up, my sister and I weren’t the best of friends. We were mean to each other. I lived to torture her. She had a bad temper, and it was too easy and too funny to get her to go ballistic. When she brought her boyfriend home from college, the man she would later marry, the only thing I knew about him was that he was Native American and she really liked him and I was not to embarrass her. She introduced Jim. “Jim, this is my sister, Kari.”

  I raised my hand and said, “How.” You know, old-fashioned Indian style. My sister instantly punched me right in the stomach. I fell to the ground, gasping for air. I know it was obnoxious and ultimately painful, but it was completely worth it.

  Now, I could feel my sister’s ghost’s impatience growing. If she were here, she would no doubt be calling me an idiot. “I don’t know any young dead male with an A name!” I whined, as if I were actually fighting with Lisa instead of my medium.

  Then John Edward had a flash. “Oh. What’s buried in the backyard?”

  I thought for a minute and then remembered. “Alfie!” The hamster that died last week when he was only four months old. John Edward laughed, saying that was a first, but my sister wasn’t about to let it go. That sounded right. She was a pain in the ass.

  We did end up using John Edward on Will & Grace. Mostly because he was so kind and generous and funny but also because I don’t think it would have been smart to fuck over a person who is potentially connected to all the dead people who ever walked the earth. Another thing that confirmed his legit status: he was not a good actor.

  A few years later, I heard from him again. He called my cell phone one day. “Hi, Kari, it’s John Edward. I’m just checking in. Sorry if this is weird, but these past few days, I keep thinking about you. Someone’s putting you in my head. Are you okay?”

  I told him I wasn’t. My brother had died a few days before. His drug addiction had finally stopped his heart. John told me when he was taking a shower that morning, I came into his mind and he just kept getting the message for me, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He thought he should tell me.

  John Edward came to visit me a few weeks later in LA. I was doing The New Adventures of Old Christine at Warner Bros., and he was as warm and regular as he’d been a few years before. He told me that he’d been going through some stuff. Trying to figure out how to take what he does and make it have an impact on people’s lives moving forward. He didn’t want just to be a link to the past or a carnival act—I don’t remember if those were his words, but that was the idea. Then he sat with me and told me the picture he was getting from my dead people on the other side was the image of a french drain. You know, when you dig a trench around your house to channel water away from the building to protect the foundation from damage? He said in every family there are cycles of pain and dysfunction that get passed down, creating more pain and dysfunction—like water running down a hillside.

  He told me that what he was being shown was that I was protecting my children from the runoff by redirecting the energy, changing the direction, breaking the cycle. My sister could see it. My brother could see it. Probably my grandparents and aunts and uncles and dead hamster could see it. It was my reason at a time when I couldn’t pick out a reason for anything. John Edward gave me a huge gift. Say what you want about psychics and magic and ghosts—John Edward finally gave me something to believe in.

  #NotMe

  I’m sorry. I’m not a joiner. I know for most people, aligning themselves with like-minded individuals brings comfort, makes them feel like they belong. But for me, it makes me feel less special. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a sorority or church group. I’ve never been part of a squad, team, or troop. I don’t read books in clubs or take vacations on buses. If I could sing, I’d be a solo act. I could have no doubt benefitted from an Al-Anon meeting or two along the way, but the idea of standing around bonding over like traumas, then holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” or whatever is my idea of a nightmare. I like to believe that my problems are uniquely my own. I don’t want people to relate to me. It doesn’t help me for someone to say, “I’ve been there,” or “I feel you.” I like to believe that you don’t “feel” me. I have made a perfectly satisfactory lifetime of failed relationships from being misunderstood.

  There are those women who seem to like coming together over collective experiences in a different way than men. I was never one of those girls. The ones who openly cried together or marked their cycles on calendars. Girls who shrieked when they discovered things they had in common. “Me toooooo!” they squealed when they realized a mutual love of baked brie or Scott Baio. “Oh my God. Me. Too.”

  Maybe because growing up, the women in my family didn’t share personal feelings or intimate information. I learned how to use a tampon by reading the back of the box. A box that I stole from my mother’s sweater drawer, where she hid them from the view of my father and brothers. I stole from her, she replenished, and it was never discussed. I don’t know where my sister got her tampons. It was just some shameful secret underground tampon railroad that worked for the womenfolk of the family. It’s the same drawer where the paperback copy of Jaws was stashed, which was the only explicit sexual information I received—specifically the scene on the beach before the girl skinny-dips in the ocean and becomes the shark’s first meal. That was all the material I had to work with until Maria Stewart told me about blowjobs, and both pieces of data were traumatic and, I hoped to God, fictional.My father’s Playboy magazines, on the other hand, were kept in plain sight next to the toilet in the hall bathroom. The men in my family also openly farted and made no apologies for forgetting to flush the toilet or gaping boxer shorts—all sending a loud and clear message to elementary school me: it’s different for men.

  In the early 1980s, I worked as a waitress at the Comedy Cellar in the Village in New York. This is the same place where Louis CK recently made his unapologetic comeback to stand-up comedy. The restaurant upstairs from where the comics performed served Middle Eastern food on chalkboard tables that customers scribbled on while they waited for their falafels. It stayed open until 4:00 a.m., at which time the waitresses—all women—began scrubbing down the tables with steel wool and Ajax until all the chalk dust had been removed. Management was a little fussy about this.

  You were required to have them come inspect your tables before you could clock out, and if they had even the slightest chalky film, you were sent back to do it again before you were released into predawn New York City with your less than twenty dollars in tips, deciding whether to brave the creepy subway home or spend all of your tip cash on a safer taxi ride, picking the shards of steel wool from under your fingernails, hair smelling like shawarma grease. Management was also convinced the waitresses were stealing food, so they installed a camera in the dessert fridge. Which was deeply insulting, even though, yes, every time someone ordered a piece of cheesecake, I would shave off just a little sliver for myself and quickly shove it into my mouth before delivering the slightly undersized remainder to my customers. It was just a little sliver. It was really good cheesecake. It felt like a harmless offense, but they were serious. If they caught a waitress taking even a bite of something she hadn’t paid for, she was to be terminated, no questions asked. The Comedy Cellar didn’t fool around. Unless, apparently, you were a comic who liked to drop his drawers and masturbate in front
of young women who would lose their source of income if they made a fuss. In that case, all you had to do was lay low for ten months, then come back to the stage to pick up where you left off. Nobody really cared about the women he held hostage with his penis power play. Because he’s famous. And he’s funny. And he’s a man.

  When he returned to the stage, the audience sipped their drinks and ate their hummus and undertipped their waitresses and, I heard, gave him a standing ovation. Comics also get their cheesecake comped. It’s different for men.

  As a comedy writer, most of my success came at a network where there were rumors that the president liked to assert his dominance by exiting his private bathroom in his office midmeeting minus his pants to show his penis to unsuspecting women who hadn’t asked to see it. I don’t know why this is a thing. Most people don’t like looking at a penis. They do it because they’re in love… or they think the guy’s funny or they like the way he plays the guitar. But being surprised by a penis is like being surprised by a slug in your slippers. This is a strictly male move. Some men like to let you know they have power—in large and small ways. The insecure ones like big trucks and tiny women. They stop sleeping with you when you’re fat or when you’re old or when you’re more successful than they are. Money makes them feel powerful. And guns. And killing things like bunnies and ducks. I can’t fathom showing my vagina unbidden to anyone. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to display it to people who have asked to look at it. I mean, I know a vagina is not a penis. You can’t whip it out, for one thing. It doesn’t whip, completely eliminating the “ta-da” factor. And masturbating in front of anyone is inconceivable, since I can’t even masturbate with my dog watching. And even if I could physically manage any of those things, I can’t imagine it would result in a long and successful career at the top of my field. A lady who touches herself at business meetings doesn’t go far. Even in Hollywood. It’s different for men.

  I work in rooms that have traditionally been dominated by males, and the message was always clear: “Be a good sport, and we’ll let you stay.” If a woman in a comedy room objects to a joke made at the expense of her dignity, she is invariably met with “Oh, come on; I thought you were a comedy writer,” implying that her being offended means she has no sense of humor. So a woman has two choices: laugh along or be held up as an example—“See? Women aren’t funny.” I don’t blame the men. We’re ruining their fun. And that wasn’t the deal. We promised to keep our shit in the sweater drawer.

  As all of these things have unfolded, my brush with the players and places has evolved into a sordid game of six degrees of separation from yuck. It’s forcing me to ask myself if not being a joiner has somehow made me complicit. I had always really hoped success was its own revenge. Then came Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. As I watched her telling her story, brave and alone, something changed for me. Because I believed her. Because I’ve been where she’s been. I know what she knows. I’ve been held to the bed. I’ve been laughed at, ridiculed, shut down. And as I watched, all I kept thinking was that I’d bet after her long day of reliving her adolescent nightmare and apologizing for being traumatized, she’d get back to her hotel or home or wherever she goes, and someone would still ask her, “What’s for dinner?” Because men still want us to take care of them even when they so blatantly and cruelly show they have no intention of taking care of us. Even the good ones just aren’t getting it. Because it’s different for women. I’m not a joiner, but joining has been thrust upon me. So in support and sisterhood, I’ll step into the circle, become one among many, order the T-shirt, learn the secret handshake, and declare kumbaya, motherfuckers. Me too.

  Tick

  I walked into Everlast Home, where my father is cared for, with Fred, my wirehaired wiener dog tucked under my arm. When I was admitted through the locked and alarmed door to the Alzheimer’s wing, called Wisteria, Shirley intercepted me two steps into the room, hunched over in her wheelchair, tied in with a bed sheet. “Do you have your gun?” she asked me, in her gravelly voice that sounded like a gangster dame from an old black-and-white movie.

  “Am I going to need it?”

  “Well, the police sure aren’t doing anything about it, and the bodies are lining up like ducks in a row,” she informed me. Shirley’s trapped in a reality that is as dramatic as it is consistent. And we are all players in her play: guests at a weekend wedding, stuck in the hotel where her family members are being murdered at an alarming rate. I accidently smile, and Shirley tells me I wouldn’t think it was so funny if it was my relatives being murdered, that’s for sure. She spins away from me and moves quickly across the room, moving her wheelchair by shuffling her fuzzy-slippered feet along the linoleum floor, begging every resident and caregiver to help her save her family before another one dies. The caregivers have been listening to it all day and are weary.

  They wave her off. “Shirley, nobody’s dead.”

  Or they just ignore her altogether and continue their conversations with each other about their kids or their weekend plans, how their husbands are pissing them off, or which diet is working for them at the moment.

  Almost all are fairly overweight. They cart in their Weight Watchers meals from home but never skip the industrial sheet cake served to the residents after lunch.

  I’m amazed by their hearty appetites. The smells of the place alone put me off food for the rest of the day—the way the soaked-diaper urine odor settles into my nostrils for hours after I leave. It has me sniffing my shirt sleeves all the way home, sure that I rested my arm in something because I’m getting such a strong whiff of piss it makes me feel like I’m drowning in it. But the kind of women who care for other people’s aging parents are stronger than me. They are not sensitive to smells. Or sounds. Or sights. Misery. Tragedy. Despair. Even death. They braid each other’s hair with the same hands that wipe an old man’s ass, cut the crust off someone’s grandma’s fungus-y toenail, then dive into their lunch box for a protein bar even though breakfast was just half an hour ago and it’s supposed to be their midafternoon snack. Their warmth, laughter, and nonchalance in the face of my father’s deterioration can sometimes feel like a relief on the hard days and sometimes feel like an insult on the harder days. A couple of the women have been there too long. Like Sondra, who snaps at the more difficult residents and handles them too roughly when she guides them back to their chairs after lunch. Verna’s hooting sounds get right under her skin, and I can see her thumbs pressing into Verna’s bony arms with their crepey, mottled skin as she hisses between her teeth to shut up and sit down or she’s going to go back to her room for the afternoon.

  Dorian is my dad’s favorite. She’s the only one who can get him to eat. She never gets frustrated. Just smiles and flirts and asks him questions while sneaking in bites of mushy chicken casserole between laughing at his jokes.

  I think she genuinely likes my father, which makes me genuinely like her. I don’t think any of them like me all that much. I think they would prefer I didn’t hang out for so long. My empty house and downtime from work has left me with the hours to settle in for long afternoons. I’m sure they prefer to do their work unwatched. They used to offer me bottles of water and ask me how my drive out was, but they don’t anymore. I think they think I’ve gotten too comfortable there.

  The other residents get mixed up in Shirley’s drama sometimes in whatever way their own reality can make sense of it. Reba is always certain she should be somewhere doing something, if only she could remember what that something was. She’s skinny as a stick because of her constant motion, doing laps around the large room crowded with pleather recliners all facing the large television set that always seems to be playing either Grumpy Old Men or that Charlie Sheen movie where he’s a baseball player. Reba only wants to help and spends most of her days moving from one resident to the next, adjusting their clothing, fussing with their hair, rolling up their pant legs—getting shooed away, scolded, and, a lot of times, kicked. Reba tells Shirley she would be happy to get some laund
ry together or even bathe the dogs for the parade tomorrow if that were something she was interested in. Shirley snaps back at Reba, “What the hell are you talking about? Parade? There’s no parade! These people are dead! What good is a parade when your family has been killed?” Reba gets her feelings hurt and goes to pout over in the corner, where Jim, the resident perv, sees an opportunity to go comfort her by sitting too close and resting his hand in her crotch.

  I find my dad on the other side of the room, in his recliner, half asleep, his San Diego Chargers blanket folded across his lap. He’s not paying any attention to the weekend wedding hotel murder mystery or anything else.

  “Hey, Pop, look who came to see you!” I say, loud enough to startle him awake.

  He opens his eyes, and when he sees Fred, he smiles. “Well, hey! I wondered where you were! Where’s he been?”

  I set Fred on his lap and tell him I had to take Fred home for a bath. My dad asks where Fred lives. I say he lives with me in Sherman Oaks. My dad looks confused. I tell him it’s okay. “We’re here now. Don’t worry about it.” My dad asks what I’m going to do. “Nothing, Pop. I came to sit with you. Is that okay?” I pull up a chair but inspect it for anything gross before I sit down. I’ll stay here for the next three hours or so, while he naps and eats lunch and pets Fred. I set Fred on his lap, and he immediately burrows under my dad’s arm, all the way up to his armpit. Such a good dog.

  My dad worries that dogs aren’t allowed at this place and we’re going to get in trouble if we’re caught. I’m not sure what he thinks “this place” is, and I ask him. “The barracks,” he tells me.

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, I got a special pass for the day.” I tell him Fred is a therapy dog and I got permission from the… general. That seems to satisfy his worry. He’s become a real stickler for the rules and order, always worrying about doing the right thing and not stepping on anyone’s toes. It’s quite a shift from the hell-raiser I grew up with. The dad who tied my bicycle to the back of his motorcycle on our camping trip to the desert and dragged me full speed over the trails until we hit an unfortunate bump and my bike went flying one way, my body the other. The bruise that resulted from the top of my shoulder to the back of my knees was a secret to be kept from my mother. And it earned me a ten-speed bike.