The House and I

The Tramp's Story, Part IX: A Fool and Her Money

2009-11-09T07:06:00.057-05:00

Con’t from previous post…

My Lady, see, she's very…

Well, I might as well just lay it out: she’s very rich. She inherited her money, she has never really worked, and – unless she goes on some kind of P. Diddy spending bender – there’ll be loads of it leftover when she’s gone. But if you met her you would never know. She lives in a two-room condo, for crying out loud, with thirty-year old Shaker furniture, and her biggest personal indulgence is local art. Granted, the condo is on Beacon Hill, but she paid cash for it ’81 so it probably cost her like a hundred bucks, and she hasn’t ever once in her life owned a car. She does happen to own a parking spot that’s worth more than my house, but that’s a story for another time.

The point is: My Lady is very aware of her good fortune at having been born into a cushy safety net. Because, see, the money’s not the reason she has never really worked, it’s just what allowed her to survive without the pressure. Lots of schizophrenic folks wind up wandering the streets, or hospitalized, or worse, and thanks to her inheritance she’s been stable now for quite a while. So she does her best to pay it forward to the universe.

She gives thousands to charity and spare change to homeless people. She funds children’s theater and food projects. She gives scholarships and land trusts and butterfly gardens, and is just generally – discerningly – philanthropic to a fault. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that she's also been very generous to me over the years, but what I find most endearing is how exceedingly wise she is about her finances. Very wise, and very wary. My Lady is no chump, is what I mean.

She can smell for miles when a charity, a foundation, a friend or family member is circling to try to hit her up. When she senses it, she makes her yes or no decision in advance -- if yes, then she decides how much -- and heads them off before they reach the pass. She's had the same accountant, bank, and broker for at least thirty years. When her trust fund account-exec retired, she had his replacement vetted and requested someone else.

Her phone number’s unlisted, naturally. And she never, never, never gives it out.

I meant to ask if I could have Maria call, I really did! But I meant to ask in person, when I saw her face to face! I didn’t know it would be happening so fast!

She was very nice about it. I apologized and said I didn't expect her to say anything that might make her uncomfortable. Once I reminded her, though, she did remember having been through this before, when I got the mortgage in the first place. All they wanted to know -- then, and now -- was simply that yes, I was employed by her, and for how long.

Okay, My Lady said. Maria could call back. She’d tell her.

Well. Before I even got off the house phone with My Lady, Maria was on my cell phone in a tizz. “It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I know it probably sounds shady, but My Lady understands now. She says that if you call her back, she’ll be happy to cooperate this time.”

“Hang on,” Maria said. “Are you a W-2 employee?”

“No,” I said. “She gives me a 1099. Why?”

“Well, on this form you sent you checked the box that says W-2.”

Balls.

You see? You see how much fun it is being me? Don’t you wish we’d never embarked on this together in the first place? Who wants to guess how many more installments there will be?

The Tramp's Story, Part VIII: Evil is Easy

2009-11-07T07:01:00.147-05:00

Con’t from previous post…

So I sent the forms in.

I called Maria first and told her I was going to send them in like she asked because Henry said it was okay, but that I couldn’t help but notice the name on the letter in the package wasn’t hers. She wheezed her answer, just like she always did.

“yeah things get shuffled around a lot but--"

“I understand,” I interrupted. Her simpering voice was really grating on my nerves. “I’m just wondering if the fax number it gives for her will also work for you.”

For those of you out there growing increasingly concerned: I thank you. But these forms I was faxing out into the nominal void were not deeds to my soul or anything. They were just – well, one of them I’ve forgotten what it was. Borrower’s Certification and Blood Oath or some such fucking thing. I don’t know, I didn’t read it. But I do still have it in an envelope around here, somewhere. I’m pretty sure I do, at least. I'm in bed, though, and it's cold. So you're nuts if you think I'm getting out and looking for it now.

Anyway, the other one I definitely remember. I don't know what it was called, of course, but it wanted me to check a box per my employment: was I a W-2 employee, it wanted to know (i.e., for you foreigners out there: was I employed by an actual company getting actual paychecks with actual taxes taken out of them. As if.) or was I self-employed.

Honestly, I don’t remember which box I checked. This is always a tricky question for me. I work for My Lady, of course, so I don’t consider me self-employed -- but the IRS does. My Lady gives me a 1099 form instead of a W-2, and that's all they care about. Because self-employed people, you see, have to pay taxes at twice the rate of W-2 people, to make up for what they’re not getting from your employer.

Oh, it’s totally fair. Not so much for me, I mean, because I make $17,000 a year so I can totally afford an extra grand. But let’s say for, oh, I don't know -- a painter. A regular-employed person puts in their eight hours (or more; I do recognize that oftentimes it’s more) and collects a check with roughly 1/3 missing – some of which, if he’s planned it wisely, will come back to him as a refund in April. A painter, on the other hand, spends half his time unpaid, driving around and pricing jobs he will not get, or picking up material for those he does. Plus he has to spend evening hours doing his own billing and accounting. Or his wife does. He can’t possibly charge enough per hour for the time he’s actually at work to make up for the time he’s not – people already think $25/hour is too much to pay for labor that they don’t believe takes any skill. (It would work out to $52K a year, before taxes, if he worked 40 hours every week -- with no sick time, health benefits, or paid vacation. Which is about what a secretary makes around these parts with all of those. But never mind.) And for all of this he gets the privilege of paying half again as much in taxes, not a cent of which does he have any hope of getting back.

I know, I know, I said “twice the rate” above and then “half again as much” right there. That’s because I don’t remember what it is, exactly. Johnny hasn’t had work in so long, we haven’t even had to file for the past few years, and if I look it up right now I will get agida.

Anyway. This form was surely asking how I file, and since I didn't in the years they specified, I didn't see how it mattered what I said. I considered checking yes, I am a W-2 employee, because it seemed it would be easier, and because -- since this was a non-income thingy-dingy -- I assumed they weren't checking, anyway. But, honestly, I don't remember if that's what I did or not. I could find out. It's in an envelope around here somewhere, swear to god.

Whatever box I checked, I sent it. Maria gave me a new number, I faxed the forms from Gary Drug, and when I called to confirm that they’d arrived, I found Maria working up some actual inflection! Was she warming up to me? Or was this a Pavlovian response in direct proportion to the tangibility of my account? Either way, it didn’t matter. A stalk of celery makes a more stimulating conversationalist than a limp carrot, any day. And what she said to me in her crunchy new voice was:

“What fax number did you send them to?”

Oh, jeez.

“Um? The number you gave me? This morning? When we spoke? The XXX one?”

Apparently? In an attempt to turn my own inflection up a notch to match Maria’s? I’d turned into an up-speaking Valley Girl?

“I’ll look around,” she said, “and call you. But next time use this other number, just in case.”

Um? Okay?

She called back in an hour to say she found the forms. “That person isn’t in today,” she said, “so your fax got kind of buried.”

You mean that person? Who’s fax number you gave me? Isn’t you?

Whatever.

The next step, Maria said, was to verify my employment, which she would do in the next day or so and call me. But what happened instead was that, an hour later, I got a panicked phone call from My Lady.

“Some woman from Bank of America just called! Asking all these questions! About whether or not you work for me!" She was quite worked up about it. I felt bad.

"But don’t worry," she went on.

"I didn't confirm anything.”

To be continued. Because I really don’t see any reason why you people should get to know how this turns out any faster than I did. This is MY soul I’m selling, after all...

The Tramp's Story, Part VII: Whena Yousa Thinking We Are in Trouble?

2009-11-05T07:02:00.116-05:00

con't from previous post

Although I felt I ought to sort through this roll call somehow, my gut told me not to rely on the two people with five names between them to dish up the straight dope (I know: I astound even myself sometimes with these rare moments of clarity). But Bank of America is so large and ubiquitous that I didn’t even know which state to call for Directory Assistance.

In a flash of inspiration (moment of clarity #2), I logged on to the BoA website. I was looking for a general customer-service phone number, but all the listings were so specific that I got all turned around. Somehow, I found myself on a page that wanted me to "live-chat with a representative to confidentially discuss the possibility of a schmeschminance!" I’d already done that, of course, but it sounded close enough. I might even be connected to the same bank of employees as I was the last time, and this way I could get candid answers about Aroutyun/Henry V--/B-- and Maria/Sarah without the chance that either -- or any -- of them would overhear. And if they weren't quite rubbing elbows, well, whoever came on the chatline would at least have access to a directory of employees in the schmeschminance department. No?

Well, to put it frankly: I don't know. Because simply by having an application on file already, I started off on the wrong foot with Mr. Chat.

He called himself something nonspecifically exotic – Nevi or Udal or Jar Jar – and, perhaps because of this, seemed to infer a level of ethnocentricity in my questioning of Henry’s list of names. His response was: “Mr. V-- may find that certain people have difficulty pronouncing Aroutyun and so uses Henry to make it easier on them” (n other words: “shut up, you racist retard”). Refusing to be cowed, I countered with “What about his second last name? The Germanic-sounding one that starts with B, that may or may not have been clipped from a certain terrorist-hunting agent, played by someone who I still think of as a vampire, on a clock-watching television show I’ve never seen?”

Silly me. I thought he might look up Henry B— for me, confirm whether or not he actually exists. But no. Jar Jar told me to ask Henry. He gave me Henry V—’s phone number (which I already had, but which means he did look in a directory, just not for the right guy), and the number of his boss (because if we’re all changing names around here on a daily basis, our bosses are going to both be aware of it and confirm it to our customers). I ended the chat right then and there without saying goodbye, never bothering to ask about Maria’s alias at all.

Why is Jar Jar’s the only name in all of this I can’t remember? Prick.

So anyway, I did. I called Henry and asked if he could catch the cloud and pin it down. He said well, yes. Since it can sometimes take six months between the package and the phone call, see, accounts do tend to get shifted around. It’s not unusual for the name on the letter not to match up with the person who eventually makes contact. That's why he originally told me not to mail the forms. You see?

I bought it. Doesn’t seem like a sound business strategy to me, but then again, neither does giving a $189,000 loan to someone making $17,000 a year, and I’m still hoping for that to happen, aren’t I? So what the hell. Until I actually put pen to paper, after all, I'm still no worse off than I was before I made that fateful first contact. So I don't see any harm, for now, in letting this particular charade keep playing out.

As far as his new last name went, Henry was baffled. I had to pull the papers out and tell him exactly where to find it on the page. “Very, very tiny type,” I said, “up in the extreme left-hand corner. ‘Prepared,’ it clearly says, ‘by Henry B—.’”

Henry laughed. Laughed!

“You are very meticulous about reading your paperwork,” he said. “That is just the name of the person who printed and collated the physical pages. He is not an account representative, he's just a clerk. He apparently has the same name as I do, yes, but it is purely a coincidence.”

“Really?" I said, a bit relieved despite my surviving skepticism. "How odd. Because, I mean, it’s not as though 'Henry' is the most common name in the English language.”

“Yes,” Henry agreed. “That’s why I chose it.”

I am so totally not meticulous about reading my paperwork. At all. I think that much, at least, should be obvious to everyone (if not Henry) by now.

But I don’t see any harm in letting that particular charade keep playing out.

to be (say it with me) continued!

The Tramp's Story, Part VI: the people the people the people the people...

2009-11-03T07:09:00.097-05:00

...con't from previous post...

It must have been a bad connection or something. The voice on the answering machine was so wee and small, it was like Horton Hears a Who (the book, I mean; I didn't even know there'd been a movie till I googled it. I am so sick of Jim Carrey screwing up classic literature, man). The only reason I didn't just delete it was that I managed to catch the words “Bank of America,” and I had to listen two more times before I caught her name:

Maria.
I've just met a—

No, I can’t say I heard the swelling of the orchestra quite yet. Even when I called her back, I could barely hear Maria's freaking voice.

Maria...
I can’t hear a girl named Maria...

Yeah, that's more like it.

Seriously, she had a voice like a weak handshake. No force or inflection, no enthusiasm or punctuation. She just exhaled, almost simpered, only barely repositioning her lips. (I wouldn’t swear to that last bit, either, except I’m pretty sure you can’t say “Bank of America” without moving your lips at least a little bit. I can’t, anyway. You try it.)

“hello ms ellia," Maria said, "my name is maria k— I will be handling your [schm]e[scmh]inance and I was just wondering if you had any questions”

No. My best friend Henry was pretty clear about everything – oh, wait.

“Henry told me to verify my new loan number with anyone who called. Do you have it?”

She did.

Well, all right then.

Um…

Nope. Still no questions.

“okay well my last name is spelled xxxx and my email address is yyyy and my phone number is zzzz and you can call me anytime if you think of any”

Okay, but I really won’t. Henry told me to just sit tight and wait for somebody to call, so that’s exactly what I plan to do.

“have you received the package”

I have, but I haven’t opened it, because Henry told me not to send the forms.

“oh I do need you to send the forms”

What? No. No, no. I need to speak to Henry V—.

“do you want me to give you his phone number”

No. No, no. I have it.

“okay well call him and then call me back if you have any questions”

I’m not saying she wasn’t nice. She was very nice, and trying to be helpful. In a disturbing and uninflected sort of way.

“Henry?" I said. "I’ve got this Maria K— lady on the phone telling me I have to send the forms, but you told me I didn’t have to send the forms!”

“I told you not to send the forms until somebody called…”

“Right!”

“Right...”

“So...?”

“So now somebody did…”

“Yes, but – oh. Oh!” Der! This is the call I'm waiting for! “But you said it wouldn’t come for sixty days!”

“That’s the average. I actually have some people who’ve been waiting for six months. Yours is happening very fast. That’s good. So yes, you should definitely send in the forms she needs.”

I hung up and tore open the package, only to discover three mildly disturbing things:

1. The account rep who signed the cover letter was most decidedly not Maria X.

2. The person who prepared the package went by the name of Henry B—. Which is just weird. I mean, I forgave Henry his pair of first names, why'd he have to go and get a spare last one as well?

3. It said if I didn't get the forms back to them in twelve days the whole thing would fall apart, but I had no idea what day the FedEx box arrived. I suppose I’d better fax them to be sure – but which of these three (or four) people am I supposed to fax them over to?

Well, hell, you didn’t think I was going to put the brakes on this process just because everyone I speak with seems to be under witness protection? Come on, people! Let me remind you:

4.375%!

Although, now that I see it written out like that in bold italics...

Doesn’t it look like a bunch of cartoon swears?

Somebody told me once, a loooong time ago, that she got the sense just about anything could be turned into a good story in my hands. It was a very nice thing to say, and because of it -- because of her -- I’ve stuck with this little hobby through incomeless-years of shouting my barbaric yawp into the void. And, although god only knows why, she has stuck around with me as well. If she even remembers saying it anymore, however, I bet she’s regretting having thrown that particular gantlet down before me now. 8000 words (and counting) on schmeschminancing a schmortgage. Yeesh.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying...

To be continued. Yet again.

The Tramp's Story, Part V: Everything is Fine. Period.

2009-11-01T08:15:00.017-05:00

Con’t

I panicked that night and sent Henry an email telling him about the bonuses I usually get from My Lady. I could have called, but it was a Friday, and I didn’t want to let my neuroses snowball for two days. Also, it was like 3:00 a.m. I did this when I got the first mortgage, too, for a completely different reason. Money talk just makes me tense, okay? I plain old didn’t see how they could possibly give me the loan he described based on what I said I made. Not that the couple-thousand-dollar adjustment up to what I really make would matter, but like I said: this time I wanted to tell the truth.

I mean, sure, I lied a little – about how it works and why it happens – but that’s just because the truth is too personal and complicated to explain. So I told Henry it was a “Christmas bonus” and left it at that. That’s not a lie so much as a sparing him of the gory details. He should thank me. And, really, he should not give me the loan.

He wrote back first thing Saturday morning, which surprised me, and here’s the sum total of what he said:

everything is fine

Well, the italics are mine, but the rest of it is his, verbatim. No Dear Erin, no capital letter, no period, no any more sentences at all, and no Love, Henry. I realize that Love might have been a bit too much to expect from him so soon, but he could have at least slipped a capital-E on it and said my name. Plus, I mean, call me superstitious if you want to, but a missed period so early in the relationship is not what this girl would call an auspicious sign. You know?

Johnny kept up a steady stream of soothing chatter in an attempt to talk me off the ledge. The worst that he could happen, he kept repeating, was that we’d be back where we thought we were stuck anyway. We didn’t ask for this twist of fate, we just kind of stumbled on it, and so we shouldn’t fret that it might fall apart. It’s not like last time, where we stood to lose our $12,000 deposit if the loan fell through. This time we’ve got nothing to lose. We already own the house (for what it’s worth), we already live here (damnit), and if we wake up Monday to find ourselves exactly where we were on Thursday after all, so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who would kill for that to be the case.

I tell you, man. That Johnny. What a pain in the ass.

He’s right, though, so I tried to hold my head. And the FedEx package did arrive a few days later. I don’t remember when, exactly, because – since Henry had instructed me not to mail the forms until I got that call in sixty days – I did not so much as tear it open. I just tossed it in my office, where it commenced to being in the way no matter where I put it, as if determined to fall behind a trunk and or something, thereby ensuring I’d be unable to find it come December.

But then just a few days later I came home to a message on the answering machine—

Actually, hold up. What happened first was that I got a call on my cell phone from an 866 number, which pretty well always means automatic-dialed junk. I answered it, but I didn’t say anything (which is what I always do), and when the delayed-human voice came on the line hello-hello-ing, I hung up. Later, when I was writing down the number from the answering machine, I realized: that person I hung up on was That Person from the bank.

Whoops!

It’s possible I’ve decided to drag this story on for as long as it took to go down in real time. Because finances and phone calls are such supreme suspenseful fun. Or maybe I’m just trying not to jinx it because it’s still not over. There might still be every chance that I’ll get sick of it and gallop right up to The End, or every other chance the whole thing will fall through. Also, there might be sex and drugs and leprechauns and intrigue! You never know, is what I’m saying. So stay tuned…

Con’t…

The Tramp's Story, Part IV: Share the Wine

2009-10-30T07:51:00.010-04:00

con't from previous post...

“Okay,” Henry went on (yes, yes, we’re three days in and still on that preliminary phone call). “Here’s what you can expect to happen. You’re going to get a FedEx package sometime in the next ten days with the workup of the loan – if it doesn’t arrive by the 12^th, you call me. There will be a few forms in there it’ll tell you to sign and send back – don’t send them. Wait until you hear from somebody. It has generally been taking 60 days.

“Your new loan number will be ######. If anybody contacts you to discuss this process, ask them to verify that number. If they don’t have it, hang up on them right away and call me. And remember, you do not need an appraisal. Sometimes people get confused. If someone calls to schedule an appraisal, tell them you refuse to do it, and—

“I know! Call you?”

“Yes,” Henry chuckled his deep, island chuckle, “you call me. Call me for anything, at any time, always. Now, sometime around the first of December you’ll get a phone call from the person handling your loan. At that point – would you like to put your husband’s name on the deed?”

“Oh! Yes!” He’s not on it yet for lots of reasons, not least because we weren’t yet married at the time. Now that we are, though, we’ve been meaning to do this for a while. It will be a whole lot easier on him when I finally freak out and throw myself under a bus

“All right,” sweet, soothing Henry said. “When that person calls you in December [he might not have said ‘that person.’ He might have said a job title or even a name. But I was having a hard enough time writing down things like ‘do NOT mail forms’ and ‘Johnny’s name on title’ to think about who ‘that person’ might be], you tell them you want to do that, and they can set it up. In the meantime, if you have any questions or need anything at all, you have my number and email address. I’m in Orange County – California – so we’re three hours behind you.”

“Orange County, huh? Actually, that reminds me: I do have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Why was your very first question what county Weymouth’s in?”

What can I say? I’m all about the details.

“Oh, that was just to make sure you were really you, and not somebody trying to get a [sch]mortgage in your name.”

Ah. I see. It’s a good thing I happened to guess it, then. Because it’s not like that information’s publicly available or anything.

As soon as I hung up I told Johnny what happened, then proceeded to call everyone I know. Well, not everyone – I don’t want all of you people I know out there start to feeling bad you didn’t get a phone call. What I meant to say is that I called my dad and Dr. One Friend. But the responses I got from the two of them pretty well covered it.

Dad said “That’s great! But is it too good to be true?” And Dr. One Friend said “That’s great! But – what exactly does ‘[schm]e[schm]inance’ mean?”

Ha! Right?

Took me three days to come up with an explanation.

Really, really to be really, really continued…

The Tramp's Story, Part III: A Rose is a Rose is a What Now?

2009-10-28T07:06:00.211-04:00

con't from previous post

Just when I was deciding whether this Henry person might be my new best friend, he said “Are you sure you don’t want to discuss this with your husband or anything?"

There was a time I would have bristled at that question. When I would have heard it as “Sweetheart, you are obviously not qualified to make this decision because you are a girl.” But I'm much older now. I've learned from more than my share of life's mistakes. I've realized that if I squeal and let the Big Strong Man kill the Little Hairy Spider (or vice versa), that doesn't mean he won't still hear me roar. I also know the sorry truth is that I am not qualified to make this decision – which isn't due to my X chromosomes, as far as I know, but to some other wonky aspect of my DNA.

I am an idiot. Financially, at least. I go through life like a tourist: holding out fistfuls of pretty-colored currency and trusting random strangers to take their pick. That's how I wound up with my first schmortgage, more or less, and just look at the bollix that turned out to be. This time, though, I was determined to do it right. So I slapped a muzzle on my inner Steinem and assured her Henry just meant that was this was not something to be taken lightly. He just meant that, since there did happen to be another member of my household, the two of us might want to take some time and hash it out.

“Nah.”

Well, Johnny would likely have opinions. That could only serve to complicate things, after all.

“All right, then, we’ll get you started. 4.375%, fixed for 30, no appraisal, no income verification, no penalty for early payment – in case you win the lottery, which I sincerely hope you do. Plus you’ll get to skip a payment when it’s finalized, so you and your husband can take a nice vacation." We could. Or we could heat our house! "And it looks right now as if you'll be getting $1600 back from the balance on your escrow account.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second...

“Why doesn’t this email I just got from you say ‘Henry’ on it?”

“Oh, does it still say ‘Aroutyun’?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

You bet your ‘Hm,’ there, Henry! Or, should I say, Aroutyun? Now I’m confused. The fast-talking Countrywide I dealt with last time at least let me call him “Kevin McGoff” the whole time he was shoving my first schmortgage up my ass. Your accent is lovely, Henroutyun, and while I certainly understand an immigrant taking a name that’s easier on the natives, don't you think you should pick one and stick with it? This is two-names stuff comes across a little shady.

Then again, my own grandfather abandoned the name on his Albanian birth certificate at age 14, when Dmitri became Mitchell at Ellis Island, and Dimi became Jimmy to his friends. So what the hell right do I have to judge?

I still didn’t quite grok why the $1600 escrow balance would be mine to keep, though. Don't I still have to pay insurance and property tax and stuff? Ah, well. For now I could afford to take Henroutyun’s word for that part, because apparently I’d have plenty of time to suss it out...

“It will probably take about 90 days to be final, so—”

“Which payment do I skip? November?”

“No! No, you’ll skip one when it’s all finished and closed. In the meantime, you must not even be late with a single payment, or the whole thing will fall apart. The only reason I can give this to you in the first place is because you don’t have any payments late so far. You’re very lucky.”

“Well..." I said. I don’t know how much ‘luck’ had to do with that, Henroutyun.

“Not lucky! I know! Very responsible! What I mean is, you’re very lucky with the timing, with this rate. Even if you do live there for thirty years, I promise you will never refinance this house again. You will never get a better deal than this.”

“I can imagine. But then, the only reason I let myself be fast-talked into an adjustable in the first place was that I thought we’d never see 5% again.” That, and I really did think we’d be out of here by now.

“If we did adjustable today,” said Henroutyun, “I could give you 3%.”

“Really!?”

“But you don’t want to do that!”

“No, no. I don’t. I was just saying: Really!?”

“Even if you did want to, I wouldn’t do it. I was just making small talk while I have a quick look through your file.”

God bless you, sir. Just for that, I’ll call you Henry again from now on.

So we went through some small details – my SS#, marital status, clearing up the fact that I do, in fact, live in the house now, and they can disregard the address and telephone number of our old apartment -- stuff like that. He asked me how much I earned and I told him, honestly. Actually, I told him a lower number than the truth, because I left out the healthy bonus my Lady usually gives me at the end of every year (I figured that, even though I’ve never not gotten it, it’s still really more of a gift than salary and therefore not a guarantee, so I’d be both more polite and better off to not assume).

It didn’t phase him. A $189,000 schmortgage on a $20,000 salary didn’t phase him. And here you thought they weren’t doing that anymore.

Hey, though, you know what? Whatever. At least I am better off now than I was before, and isn't that the American dream? That is to say, I will be. If this schmeschminance actually comes through. And if it doesn't, or if I wind up plastered to the rolling-snowball anyway, I can still blame it on Kevin McGoff.

That bleedin' Countrywide.

Tune in next time for the exciting continuation. There’s a FedEx package! And forms!

The Tramp's Story, Part II: Oh, Henry!

2009-10-26T08:20:00.003-04:00

The voice on the line was deep and accented – Caribbean, maybe, or Pacific Island – and the first thing it asked me was what county I was in.

“Country?” I asked, already getting annoyed. Couldn't they have headsed him up on at least that fairly major detail?

"No, Ma'am," the voice went on, calm as a tropical breeze. "County."

I put the beer down. What is this, a civics quiz?

I can never keep this answer straight. When I was growing up I lived in Worcester County, which was easy to remember because Worcester was the giant nearby city where I went to school. But now... Weymouth is twelve miles south of Boston, see, and therefore (obviously) Boston is twelve miles north -- but Boston's Suffolk County; and Weymouth's Norfolk. This makes no sense -- which really makes it quintessential Beantown logic, considering that East Boston is actually north and South Boston is actually east and the South End (which is not the same as South Boston by any stretch) is smack dab in the middle of the Hub -- but I still tend to get the county names confused.

“Um... Norfolk?” I guessed.

“Okay. My name is Henry. What can I help you with today?”

So does that mean I guessed right? Is this how the process is going to work? Like Who Wants to be a Millionaire? You keep asking questions and as long as I keep getting them right I keep playing, until – ta da! – I'm all schmeschminanced? If so, could we maybe play it like Cash Cab instead, where you get easier questions, three wrong answers, and a chance to double your money at the end?

“Well, Henry,” I said. “I honestly don’t think you can help me with anything [despite my brush with civic success I was still feeling a little cocky with the hopelessness of it all], but the Nice Lady told me that it never hurts to ask.”

I explained everything to him -- in more grotesque detail than I'd given the Lady, but maybe a little less than I've given to you here. I'm really not a skillful liar, see -- the "undocumented" process nearly killed me last time -- so for this go 'round I determined to 'fess up to everything and let the schmortgage chips fall where they may. The worst that could happen (in fact, the most likely thing to happen) was that I’d hang up fifteen minutes later exactly where I’d been before I made the call. Unless -- they couldn’t take away my active schmortgage, could they? Shit!

Well, it was too late. I’d spilled it. And here is what ol' Henry had to say.

“It looks like you’ve been a good customer so far. Never had a late payment or anything. So, sure. I can take care of this for you. We’ll do a non-income based loan, with no appraisal of the property, fixed for 30 years at 4.75%.”

Four? Point seven five? You mean my interest rate – my payments – would go down? And I say "would" because you and I both know that there’s no way any of this is really going to happen, but anyway: Four point seven five?

“Oh, yes. Or I could give you 4.375%, also fixed for 30 – which would bring your monthly payments down another $40. But only if you think you’re going to be there for a while.”

Huh? I mean, what kind of idiot choice is that? Who cares how long we're going to be here? Even if it's just one more month, I would like (der) the one with lower payments, please!

“Hang on,” Henry said, “let me explain. The closing costs on the lower rate are $3,500 higher. But if you’re going to be there for – wait a minute, let me do the math... Thirty-five hundred divided by forty dollars a month is 87.5 ... divided by 12 months is... Okay, it’s worth it if you think you’re going to be there for at least seven years. Otherwise, $3,500 is a lot of money and you might want to think about it and call me back.”

Well, chop me off and call me stumpy, don’t that shit just beat all. A schmortgage guy, explaining things, and giving a girl time to think. Kee-rist, I’m getting all verklempt just thinking about it. But, um, oh:

“Closing costs? I forgot about them. We don’t have—”

“They’re added on top and rolled into the loan. It won’t cost you anything out of pocket no matter what you choose. But it’s still real money, so you ought to think about it anyway.”

Yeah, I probably ought to. But I shan't.

“Give me the lower one.”

I still had no delusions of financial grandeur -- I knew I wouldn't actually get it or anything -- but this was starting to be a pleasant conversation, so I thought I might as well try on the princess dress and prance around.

“The lower rate?” asked Henry. “Or the lower closing costs?”

Oh, Henry, listen to you. You're like an Antioch college freshman, doggedly asking a girl's permission every tiny step along the way. I’m telling you, your mama would be proud.

“The lower rate. Please.”

I don’t know if we’ll still be here in seven years or not. That's not the plan, but the plan was for us to be out of here in less than ten and look how well that worked out. What I do know is that at this point forty bucks is forty bucks, and it will come in handy every month no matter what bad-in-the-long-term plan it might have come from. If we are here for seven years it will be worth it; and if not, well, $3,500 was never going to save our asses, anyway. Besides: who knows? Maybe we’ll be such billionaires by then that a measly couple thou will feel like pocket change.

Hey, man, it could happen. I'd give it even odds with this schmeschminance, anyway.

To be continued… again… I swear to god…

The Tramp's Story

2009-10-25T07:57:00.052-04:00

I’ve been hesitant to mention this because I’m scared to jinx it. I was told I’d have an answer in two days, and as I type these words there are eight or nine hours left before that's up. But it will probably take me at least that long to pinch this post out, so I might as well go ahead and plunge in. I'll just keep dragging it out if I have to, until the fateful final phone call comes. I'm good at dragging things out, don't you think? So here goes -- but, for extra-special jinx-protection, I hope you won’t mind if I speak in code:

I’m schmeschminancing my schmortgage. At least, I schmink I schmam.

See, I’m one of those idiots you've read about who overpaid for a house she could only tenuously afford, lied about her income on the loan papers to get it, and was fast-talked by a shady broker into an adjustable rate. Yep. I’m a regular housing-bubble hat trick, that's for sure. But you can’t blame the big KAPOW on me, oh no you can't. I'm still making monthly payments like a good girl, yes I am. Because my loan hasn’t adjusted yet, and since we had the foresight to buy this crumbling shitpile instead of an actual house (what I meant when I said "I overpaid" was "I shouldn't have paid anything at all") our monthlies don't bleed us quite as hard as some.

So, last year or so, when the news cycle was all aflutter with bailouts and homeowner assistance programs that were supposed to turn bad loans into good ones, I perked up for a second before tuning it all out. Honestly, I tune out the news a lot. It's so depressing. But this time I had a reason. I'd blipped in long enough to realize we wouldn’t qualify for any help. We had been stupid, yes, but apparently not quite stupid enough.

We only paid $245K for the AssVac, for example, a not-astronomical number we could just about afford. Put 20% down, too, just like in the olden days. And she's still worth $238K on paper, thanks to the buckets of sweat-soaked money we've flung at her since moving in. Our interest rate is fixed at 5% for ten years -- instead of a piddly, stupid, one or two -- and when it does adjust (in 2014) it will only go to market rate plus one percent. Plus, like I said, we've always paid our schmortgage bills on time. Not just on time, for that matter: I have a habit of sending checks almost a whole month in advance.

In an alternate universe, those would all be good things. Not as good as having gotten a fixed-rate mortgage in the first place, but darn close. But when everything's gone all topsy-turvy they help the hardest cases first, which means you had to be in arrears or underwater just to get a place in line. Plus there was that whole underwritten-by-Fannie-Mae-in-the-first-place requirement, which we didn't have. And presumably a little thing called income, too, which ditto.

Ever since our schmortgage-chicken's retarded cousins all came home to roost and started laying rotten eggs, Johnny hasn’t had a lick of work. We’ve been raiding our retirement funds for a year now just to keep on sending in those monthly checks. We made the decision to do it because (A) we couldn’t rent for cheaper, so there isn’t any sense trying to sell, and (B) as much as we hate Townville (a.k.a. Southie With Trees) here, the AssVac herself has (kind of sort of maybe) started to (yack, yack) grow on us a little bit (who said that? What?). If we were going to have to sell our stock to pay a landlord anyway, we might as well avoid the move and do our best to see the old girl through.

Schmeschimnancing sure would have been nice, though. The rate we have for five more years is low enough that in the short term our payments would probably go up, but it would have at least gotten that adjustable-rate-monkey off our backs. Ah, well.

So anyway, that brings us to about three weeks ago. And then...

Remember how I said I pay my schmortgage in advance? I mailed my November 1st payment, for example, on October 2. I started doing it the day we closed -- that first month's payment was included with the closing, but I went ahead and sent it anyway. Because I haven’t always been the best at paying bills on time, and one of the few things I knew about owning a house before I did it was that schmortgage bills are not like paying rent. If you’re late, you don’t just get a reminder phone call from some pain in the ass you can yell back at because your toilet's overflowing or your front door doesn’t close. No. If you forget to pay your schmortage you get a black mark next to your name in the Big Book for all time. And if you accumulate too many marks, they take your house and send you back to the Old Country. So I got in the habit of mailing checks in early, just to give myself a 28-day leeway to forget.

It never happened, though. Not really. Once it got lost in the mail (honest to god, I'm not just saying that; I mailed that fucking thing, I did, I know) and I called and yelled at a customer service rep until I cried. That Countrywide was no help whatsoever, but I managed to stop payment on the check and send another one in time. (Two years later, when we re-did the kitchen, that lost-in-the-mail envelope turned up behind a bookcase -- so maybe I didn't mail the fucking thing. What d'you know?)

But last month I almost missed it. We were trying to put off raiding our retirement again as long as possible, and we thought we could afford to wait because Johnny had actually lined up a job. The carpenter on the job was dicking around, though, wasting time, and the carpenter has to finish before the painter can get in. Weeks went by while the schmortgage check sat – forlornly written, sealed, and stamped – waiting in my office to be mailed. Finally, on the 16th, I broke down. But it takes ten days to get a check mailed from Fidelity. And then I had to wait till Monday before I could get it in the bank. So I didn’t mail October’s payment until September 28th.

On October 2^nd, I got a notice reminding me I had a payment due. I was pretty sure they’d crossed in the mail, but my check hadn't been cashed yet, so I called because I wanted to be sure. Yes indeedy, the Very Nice Customer Service Rep assured me, they certainly had received my payment and everything was set -- but, since she had me on the telephone anyway, would I like to talk to someone about possibly scheschminancing and bringing my monthly payments down?

Now, say what you will about Bank of America. I don’t know what they’ve got going on with Merill Lynch, and I don’t care. What I do know is that ever since Countrywide went under and BoA bought our stank-ass loan, I have felt much more like I’m in an actual business relationship and much less like I’m standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, tossing fluttery fistfuls of cash into the void. And I appreciate that feeling. The new one, I mean. I didn’t realize how much I'd missed it when it wasn’t there.

Still, though, this latest offer was a little much.

“Oh, no!” I said. “I mean, I’d love to, but -- I don’t think your schmeschminance folks would want to talk to me. My husband’s been out of work a while, see, and we just don’t make enough these days to get approved for any sort of loan.”

“It never hurts to try,” the Nice BoA Lady replied. “Would you like me to go ahead and patch you through?”

"Oh, sure, what the hell," I said, reaching into the refrigerator for a beer. "There's no way it's going to happen, I assure you. But the conversation ought to be good for a laugh."

To be continued tomorrow – really, I mean it this time. I’ve actually already posted it on a time-delay. I just think the whole story is too long to expect you to read it all at once and besides, it’s a rainy weekend. What the hell else am I going to do?

Snowden's Secret

2009-10-16T18:39:00.009-04:00

Oh, you want to know how my mother’s doing. Sorry. I forgot you can’t just share bad news and drop it like a speeding ticket, or else you run the risk of caring cyber-strangers starting to fret. And you can only take advantage of caring cyber-strangers for so long. So, before I lose my cyber-privileges, here goes:

Mom’s home from the hospital and she’s not dying. Not unless she gets hit by a bus, at any rate. Which isn’t likely, considering the dearth of bus routes running through her bedroom these days. Although of course there’s always the porcelain one down the hall…

The short version is this: being bedridden and appetite-suppressed for long enough can make a person averse to getting out of bed or eating food. And if you think that’s not funny, well, there are lots of things not even funnier. Like the fact that Mom hasn’t been out of bed since early June.

Here’s the long version: The Lyme disease is finally cleared up – you might not know she had that, but she did – and when she finally finished the course of kill-‘em-all-and-let-god-sort-‘em-out antibiotics that finally cured it, her liver pulled the rip cord on its fall. Which is to say: it’s not actively failing anymore, but it’s not exactly pulling down straight A’s. In fact, it’s going to need all the tutoring and legacy-help it can get just to be a gentleman’s-C-student from now on.

The doctors say a transplant’s not an option, for two reasons: A. in the overall weak state she’s in there’s just no chance she’d make it off the table, and B. if she eats and moves around and gets her strength back enough to survive a transplant, she won’t be sick enough to need the transplant after all.

What I take away from that is: C. my own liver is standing down till further notice, so it’s okay if I go ahead and have a beer. And: D. just to avoid confusion for anyone out there who’d like to join me: I’ll be calling Mom “Yossarian” from this point on.

Yossarian needs to eat – the equivalent of six nutrition-drinks a day, the doctor said, plus as much healthy food as she can hammer down. But Yossarian can’t stomach any of it. The doctor says if she’d just eat she’d feel like eating (which gives me flashbacks to all the times Johnny’s tried to get into the union through the years), and if it makes her sick she’s under orders to wipe her mouth and turn around and try again.

So that’s where you find us. She's still not eating near what she’s supposed to – and she's still not out of bed at all – but she says she’s trying. Which is hard for the rest of us to understand. I mean, if somebody told me I’d never get out of bed again unless I could suck down a lump of dog shit, you can bet your ass I’d be holding my nose and making like Divine. All she has to do is drink a milkshake...

I don't know.

Oh: Chuck (TFT) is not dead, either, as it turns out.

But that’s a story for another time…

P.S. Yossarian doesn’t get on the computer anymore at this point, either, so I haven’t considered the possibility that she might read what I have to say. If she does, though, and if it makes her angry, then I hereby swear that if she comes here and kicks my ass, I’ll take it down.

A Large, Friendly Dog in a Very Small Room

2009-10-10T10:16:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned Chuck (TFT)'s brown bread, have I not? How the slow transmission leak he had for a few months has turned into a roaring case of Motor City's Revenge? Well, it did. And this is it, folks. The Big One we've been waiting for. You hear that, Francine? He's coming to join you, honey...

(That's not the best link to give you to explain Francine, but a search turned up the shocking discovery that I've never really written about her here. Hm. We'll have to rectify that someday. But for now...)

Since Monday, then (which is really not too long in the grand scheme of things), I've been busing and hoofing and otherwise prioritizing all the to-do in my life. Drinking Budweiser, for example, because you can carry 18 of them home from the packy in one hand.

I've also been taking the dog for actual walks. I'd more or less stopped doing this, because we both loved going to the you-know-place so much -- but the you-know-place is almost two miles down the road (I may have said it was one mile before; I may have lied. The point is) you can't walk there, and play there, and walk back, and have any time left in your day to write. And let me tell you, that dog is a bear if he doesn't bang out his daily thousand words. He really is a diligent dog, after all.

So we've been walking in the neighborhood, and it's... you know. Lots of crossing and re-crossing of streets to avoid unfriendly dogs. This is part of why we stopped it in the first place. The Old English Sheepdogs who try to come over the fence. The German Shepherds who bark largely from the back of theirs. The trio of Dachshunds who get all I'll-bite-your-kneecaps if you laugh at their yippy 'tudes. Charlie is a friendly dog at most times, but you'd be well advised to avoid pissing him off. And the best way to piss him off (other than trying to hump him in his you-know-place and not stop when he asks you nicely) is to be a dog and refuse to sniff hello. If you're not sniffing, he figures, you must be a Bad Guy -- and before you know it I'm flying a 90-pound-dog-shaped kite up in the air.

The other day, after taking an unscientific Facebook poll about its couthness and deciding it was cool, I decided to take him to the cemetery near my house. The Old North. It's an old one (hence the name, der) -- Abigail Adams's folks are buried there; other stones date back almost 400 years -- so I was pretty sure we wouldn't run into any living relatives who might bristle at the idea of a Shetland pony pooping on Deargrandmother's remains (he really is a very big dog, after all).

The Old North really is almost a mile from my house, and if you'd seen us on our way you would've thought I never walked a dog before. It was my first time with a new leash, see, and it was the extend-a-kind -- which I'd asked my Dad to send along precisely for occasions such as this. I can't very well let him off-leash in the graveyard, I figured, but I could let him extend-a-ways and give the place a thoroughgoing sniff.

As I said, though, I had a hard time getting used to the device. Charlie was in the middle of the road before I realized you're supposed to keep your thumb down on the big black button all the time, and we had one foot in the graveyard before I found the small button that makes it so you don't. But I did figure it out. Eventually.

The Old North is built on a series of small hills -- wooded, now, though I doubt they were when it was consecrated -- with the newer graves spread out on the flat land around the edge. I kept Charlie on a short leash through the new part, and when the road curved sharply up and to the left it seemed safe to give him a little head.

Not -- jeez, people! Gross! Not like that! I meant "give him a little" as in "let him have his." Jeez! It's a horse thing -- and not a Catherine the Great horse thing, either. Jeez.

Anyway, I let him have his head, and at first he just went out before me on the road. But when he realized he was more or less free he set off to explore -- sniffing under bushes, drooling over headstones, peeing on trees -- wondering if this might be a whole new you-know place after all. Not thirty seconds in, though, I saw something out of the corner of my eye that gave me pause: a man, middle-aged and maybe a little rough-looking, running for the wooded corner in a crouch.

Junkie, I thought. And maybe you'll think I'm overreacting, but this town is gross. It might seem all idyllic and Olde Newe Englande, but really it's just South Boston with trees. Just yesterday, in fact, Johnny asked a friend to run him to the package store so he could haul home an economy-sized case of Bud for the weekend, and when they ran back in for cigarettes somebody stole the 36-pack from the car. Nice. So, although it hadn't occurred to me before I set out for it, it's not hard to imagine junkies in the wooded corners of Old North. The real-life guy that Johnny Depp played in the movie Blow was born here, after all.

Thinking all this, I found myself very glad to have a Giant Black Bear by my side. He really is a fierce-looking dog, after all. Although, of course, if it weren't for the Bear I wouldn't be here...

Ah, la vie. Elle est tres magnifique, il n'est pas vrai?

But wait! Rough-looking dude's not a junkie! He's gone rushing to the corner in a crouch to catch his dog! I don't know if he let the beast off-leash on purpose and is only catching him because I came along, or if the bugger somehow managed to get away, but I suspect the answer's A. This is still Townville, after all. And if you're paying attention, how can a dog possibly just "get away"?

Still, though, like I said: life is always easier if Charlie gets a chance to sniff hello. He is a very sociable dog, after all. So as we approached one another I chose not to rein him in. I was still on the roadway, Junkie Dog and Man were practically in the woods, and as Charlie rapidly crossed over the three or four graves between us, I called out to Junkie Man "Is he okay?"

"He's not that friendly, actually."

Oh.

How do you work this button thing again?

I hit something that jerked Charlie to a stop, which sent Junkie Dog into paroxysms of rage, and Charlie went all monkey-see on his ass -- leaping and barking and bristling the I'm-gonna-git-you-squirrel hairs on his withers ("withers" would be "between the shoulder blades," for all you non-Russian Empresses-y types). Thankfully the Junkie pair kept right on moving -- which really was the smartest thing to do -- except for the small fact that Charlie just kept right on moving, too. And soon he'd wrapped his Brand New Extend-a-Leash around Somebody's Grave. From which position he kept right on monkey-doing, in an attempt to launch himself into the air.

You know what a thin nylon rope does when you jump it up and down a few times along the weather-beaten edge of a 400-year-old piece of slate?

It snaps.

And now I see how how a dog can possibly just "get away"...

I wasn't worried about what Charlie'd do -- I knew that, for all his swagger, he'd just doofus up to the new guy and say hello. He really is a friendly dog, after all. But Junkie Dude had said his Junkie Dog was not nice, and what that meant I had no way to know. So, despite the fact that he was officially off-leash on consecrated ground, I put on my where's-the-stick voice to say "I'm gonna get you, Charlie!," and I lunged.

What fun!

We're off the leash! And playing tag! This is a brand-new you-know-place! And what's over here? A pinecone!? Oh my god!

He's really not a very smart dog, after all.

But thankfully Junkie Dog was just as easily distracted, and in a minute both he and Junkie Man had moved along. When they had, I donned my on-your-bed voice, gave the order, and Charlie hung his head and quit the game and sat right down. I grabbed the two-foot length of nylon that was still hanging from his collar, explained that we had to go now even though the fun had barely started -- and, since this was all the leash we had, he wasn't going to be able to sniff things on the way.

"O-kay," he sighed. And then he brightened.

"But when we get there, I still get to poop?"

He really is a very good dog, after all.

But Wait!

2009-10-09T07:30:00.006-04:00

Reports of my demise may have been marginally overspoken...

Tune in tomorrow...

And Now the Cat's Puking in the Corner

2009-10-08T08:11:00.000-04:00

So last week my cat threw up on my down comforter. My white, king-sized, Ralph Lauren down comforter that was a hand-me-down from My Lady.

Kitty's not the first one to throw up on the comforter. The first one to throw up on the comforter was Football Buddy. She was two. We'd just finished construction on the Bedroom From Hell when Johnny's mother died and he went home to bury her (well, he didn't bury her, but "went home to burn her body and toss her ashes in the woods" sounds downright criminal). While he was there, my sister and brother-in-law came to help me set up the bedroom so it would be ready upon his return, and as soon as the bed was made Football Buddy ran straight over to it and yuked up blueberry bagel. It was hysterical. You know I'm telling that story at her wedding.

This isn't the first time the cat yacked on it, either. This isn't even the first time kitty hurled on it this week. But it was particularly lavish, it was brown, I was running out of still-white corners, and it wasn't getting any warmer in the nighttime around here.

Just for the record, I have never spewed on the down comforter. Not the Ralph Lauren one, anyway.

There's a dry cleaner I walk by every morning (or I used to), about halfway between where I park my car (back when I used to) and the T. They have a sign in the window saying they clean down comforters, so last ... Wednesday, I think it was? ... I brought it in. They said it wouldn't be ready until Tuesday, so I hauled off and punched 'em in the nose.

No. No, I didn't. That was just a little private joke there for my friend Marie. She lived in Allston in the eighties, see, and---

Never mind.

I'm generally uncomfortable requesting favors (though I know some of you are reading this and thinking whaaaa???) and besides, haven't I had enough to deal with lately? On a cosmic level, I hardly think it would be wise to ask someone to take me to the cleaners. So when Chuck (TFT) bought the farm on Monday, I already knew I'd be fetching the down comforter myself.

I took the bus to the train and walked the mile from the station. If I'd thought ahead I'd've realized that the mile back with a king-sized down comforter under my arm would be uncomfortable, considering it was 80 degrees outside and I was dressed for 60. But oh well. The whole reason I was dressed for 60 was that I'm not thinking ahead. With my new zen attitude, remember, I'm only thinking about Now. And by the time Ahead was Now it didn't matter anyway.

Because what's happening Now is that the girl behind the counter's asking if I can come back for the down comforter tomorrow. And Now I'm explaining about the car and the bus and the train and the mile-long walk. And Now the girl's getting the manager, and Now he's explaining to me that my comforter was Very Messy (yes, you are a Cleaner), lots of stains (yes, I pointed them out to you and apologized, but once again: that is Your Job), he has to bleach it (bleach? Is that the Ancient Chinese Secret? Shit, I could have bleached it -- and it wouldn't have cost a week or $35, either), and he had to wait until someone brought in another one to balance the machine.

And Now I'm thinking about how on M*A*S*H, when there was just one wounded body, they'd put a dummy on the other stretcher to balance the helicopter. And Now I'm wondering if the manager would fit in the machine.

And Now he's asking me if I can please come back tomorrow, and Now I'm allowing as how I really have no choice. And Now, because I'm having a very hard time not thinking ahead to how I have to do this all again, I'm pointing out that he could have saved us both an awful lot of trouble if he'd called. And Now he's staring blankly at my chin, wishing I'd stop bugging him and go away.

And Now I do.

And Now, for the record and for the FTC, I would like to publicly state that I have received no goods or services in exchange for writing about the dry cleaners between the car park and the T. This is not a compensated endorsement -- in fact, it should not be considered an endorsement at all. But it's not an admonition, either. I can hardly risk a public insult, after all, considering that they're still in possession of my down.

Because oh, yeah, if that Manager thought I was bus/train/walking back the next day at his convenience, then I've got a little Ancient Chinese Secret of my own:

Goosefeathers!

And Right Now I Am Writing a Blog

2009-10-06T20:09:00.113-04:00

Oh, hell. I put this up last night and took it down because it isn't narky-snarky like I try to be. But it's what I'm living now, and I've come to realize that if I'm to post at all it's this or nothing. I'm going to try to write through it, to find my narky-snarky voice inside it, somehow -- and I will. I know I will. In the meantime, though, it just might be a train wreck. But train wrecks are fun, aren't they? And anyone who says they're not a rubbernecker is a lie. So let's make a deal: you promise to slap me upside the head if I get mawkish, and I promise to cheat toward the camera if I bleed.

It was the pile of sawdust under Chuck (TFT) that convinced me to eat the fucking strawberry.

I was out in Worcester for yet another meeting with Mom’s liver doctor. These things are starting to get old, but I wasn’t really worried about this one. At her last appointment (which I wasn’t at, and which was with her GP and not the liver doc, but still) the news was that she’s not sick enough to qualify for a transplant – either from me or from some random dead guy. So never mind that she doesn’t eat or drink or really even move: if she’s not that sick, then (I’m extrapolating now, but I think my logic’s sound) she isn’t dying. And not to be all me-me-me or anything, but it also means I won't be trying to finish my Really Big Project while I'm on a morphine drip. Although -- hoo, boy, talk about rubbernecking! That one would probably be worth the ride.

Anyway, so I pulled into the garage 45 minutes early and sat there listening to the end of an interview with Rosanne Cash on NPR. At first I worried poor old Rosie'd bought the farm, what with Terry Gross’s side job as the Crypt Keeper and all. But she’s alive. She just has a new album coming out. Golly, but I love that woman’s voice. And good old Terry did make sure to send me off into the bowels of the GI clinic at UMASS Memorial with Rosanne’s version of “Motherless Children” ringing in my ears, just so I wouldn’t think she’d gotten soft.

Well, I’ll give you motherless children, Terry. I thought I damn near was one when Dad finally pushed Mom’s wheelchair through the door. She looked like a fetus. All curled up against herself, protecting her soft core. She was trying not to hurl, is what she was doing, and for the entire hour they made us wait past the appointed time, she won. But as soon as they put us in the room and shut the door, she let it fly.

youuuuuu… hhhh…youuuuuuu…hhhh…youuuuu…hhhh…

“This is not good,” the Liver Doctor said.

No, Doc, it isn’t.

“How long has this been going on?”

Well, Doc, since a little before we first told you about it? Back in June?

“Do you think she ought to be admitted?”

Yes, Doc, please.

“Susan?”

youuuuuu… hhhh…youuuuuuu…hhhh…youuuuu…what

“We can’t admit you against your will. Will you allow it?”

youuu… hh…fine

Oh, thank god. Because, Mom, if you're in the hospital maybe they can get you to eat and drink things, and if you eat and drink things maybe you’ll get stronger, and if you get stronger maybe you can move again. Plus once you’ve been re-admitted your insurance plan reboots, which means you can go back to rehab, which means you can get physical therapy, which means maybe you can even walk and talk like in the old days. Wouldn’t that be great? To be strong enough to pat your dog again? Strong enough to possibly receive the better half of my hopefully-not-yet-too-booze-or-bile-damaged gut? And then go back to Maine? And tend your garden?

“Let’s take one thing at a time,” said Liver Doctor.

Okay, Mister Liver Doctor. Fine.

It took a few more minutes to hit me on a conscious level, but right there, for the first time, I understood the existential genius of that neuvo-Zen, live-for-the-now idea. It isn't about yoga teachers smoothing chakras and getting the ultimate enjoyment from their morning chai. It's about keeping your head down and inching yourself through the worst circles of hell as painlessly as possible and, if you're lucky, coming out the other side.

So.

The Now to Live For: getting Mom admitted.

After that, the next will be whatever it is. But that is next. And this is now.

Right now we have to wait right here till there’s a bed. Which can take hours. Even days. The last time we did this, Mom was in the emergency room from Friday night till Sunday evening. So Mom's Now for right now is to wait. And mine, as selfish as I hope it doesn’t sound, is to go home. Dad says he’ll wait here with her, and what good would I be doing, anyway?

I hugged both of them, twice, and then I left.

I stopped on my way out and bought a large, black coffee for the road. They really do make the best cup of coffee in that little lobby shop.

I used the one bar I had left on my cell phone to call Johnny and tell him I had not left Worcester yet. I was still on with him when I stepped up to Chuck (TFT) and saw the sawdust. Which I was positive had not been down there when I left.

It was quite pretty, actually. Cedar, I think. In a sort of paisley pattern. Or paisley shape, I should say. Just one blob. And reddish-yellow. Not yet soaked in whatever viscous liquid had at long last become emancipated from my car.

Although that "whatever"'s disingenuous. I knew it was transmission juice. I knew.

But right Now I had a job to do, and that job was to go home. The car was finally dying – well, let's be real here and admit the car was dead. This was at long last the morbid moment I’ve been waiting for, and there was nothing left that could be done for poor old Chuck. But if I had any hope of being any use to anybody in the short term, then I still had a mess of duties left to do. And the #1 one, at this moment, was: Get Home. So I turned the key in the ignition, and I put poor old Chuck (TFT) in gear.

He moved.

So I kept driving.

The big blue ox kept right on breathing till I got off the expressway at Neponset Circle, which is just about five miles from my home. In fact, it's possible that if I hadn’t taken that detour at Route 140 in Marlboro for that Angus 1/3-pounder, we might have even made it all the way.

But you know what?

That Angus burger tasted pretty sweet.

There Are Worse Things Than Staring at the Water

2009-10-03T11:56:00.001-04:00

Sorry I never finished the traffic-ticket story. On top of regular-old work and stuff I'm writing two other Very Big Things and going to nine thousand doctors appointments and also -- oh, this'll be fun! -- getting all four of my wisdom teeth yanked out.

So, to keep myself (and everyone else around here) marginally sane, I've also been doing an awful lot of this:

Epileptics, beware. I'm not exactly steady with the camera.

That's the off-leash you-know place a mile from my house. Shhh. We have to call it the you-know place or things get very barky around here. Sometimes we just call it Dog Shit Mountain. Here's what it looks like from the front gate, standing still.

Oh, speaking of which, Dr. One Friend had to say good bye to One Dog yesterday.

Bye, Zuni.

In your short life you saw more of this beautiful country

than most people ever will.

I'll be back in the swing of things soon enough, and when I am I'll tell you all about Johnny's taint and my teeth, our stupid furnace company and our fabulous new refinance, the cop Johnny called about the tree guy in our backyard and the junkie he's seen hovering around, plus the gallons of grape pie filling and all the other kitchen nightmares. But in the meantime, all of those things happened just this week, and I'm exhausted. It's raining, and it's cold, and I'm going back to bed with this dude for a while.

Duh.

Oh yeah, P.S.: I didn't get the traffic ticket. The cop called me "Sir," and I think he was so embarrassed afterwards that he just didn't have the nerve. So now I'm not just old but manly. Plus he identified himself as undercover, gang squad, so I'm a little nervous I might also be a Crip.

Ten Years Burning Down the Road

2009-09-25T08:29:00.001-04:00

I got pulled over by a cop the other day.

I used to be so good at that! Seriously, in the decade between my driver’s test and my first speeding ticket, I can remember at least eight times that I got stopped and managed to get away scott-free. It may have been partly because I was a 21-year-old blond with big tits and a still-clean driving record, but some of it, I know, was also skill. Or chutzpah. Or luck. Or whatever.

I never cried or anything, but I sure played dumb a lot. There were a few years there I didn’t even have a license – mine had expired, see, and I wasn’t always so good at grown-up follow-through back then – so playing dumb was a matter of survival. I perfected the art of handing over the expired card with an air of innocence and giving ‘em a wide-eyed “Really?” when they complained. Worked every time.

Well, not every time. There was this once I was going 60 in the Callahan and happened to have a smashed window taped up with garbage bags, because someone stole the backseat boom box I was using for a stereo (I still like to imagine the looks on their faces when they pressed play and heard Jesus Christ Superstar). Since I couldn’t pull over until I cleared the tunnel, I had plenty of time to think, and came up with the brilliant plan of sitting on my purse and telling the officer I didn’t have my license on me because it had been stolen. Really. Look at my window! He was very nice. He said he didn’t want to totally ruin my evening, and he strongly recommended that I come down and fill out a police report first thing in the morning. Yes, officer.

I finally did get a valid license, though. Sort of. So when I got nabbed in the Combat Zone at 1:00 a.m. with a flat tire that was shooting orange sparks, I batted my eyelashes and handed it over, saying “I know, Officer. I’m sorry. But I didn’t think this was a very good place for a single girl to wait for the AAA guy at this hour. I’m only trying to get myself safely home.” The cop took one look at my license – which still listed my folks’ address sixty miles away, because I was still illegally insuring my Chevy Impala there – gave me an arched eyebrow, and said “Where are you trying to get to?” I said “Oh! I mean, I’m staying with a friend! In a neighborhood over that way? I think it’s called, um, the South End?” “Well, all right then,” he said. Thanks, officer!

Another time, I was speeding home from I don’t know where with my Big Gay Bear riding shotgun. When we saw the blue lights coming for us in the distance I pulled off the highway and onto a soft shoulder. The Bear and I crawled into the back seat, breathed hard on all the windows, and started frantically making out. The cop came down the exit ramp and shone his light on us, but just kept right on driving by.

(I don’t recommend any of these methods, by the way. I’m just telling you what worked for me when I was young and dumb.)

At a speed trap on a different highway – the kind where there’s one guy behind a tree with a radar gun and one on foot beside the road waving you down – I just pretended not to see the waver-dude and kept on driving. Nobody chased me, and I never got anything in the mail. This success, being my first, probably made all the others possible, but I know for certain if I’d failed I’d be in a wheelchair now. Because I was still in college then, see, and I was driving my Mom’s car.

Twice, I simply told the truth: at Logan I said I was trying to catch a flight (“So is everybody else,” the cop said. “Now slow down”); and in Rhode Island being low on gas got me an escort to the nearest station. Even the cop in Brookline who – when I watched him approaching in my rearview mirror – made me think “Oh my god, he’s a Nazi” just like Thelma and Louise, turned out to be a sucker for a little abject subjugation.

So when it finally happened, I was stunned.

It was my first traffic stop since meeting Johnny, and we'd been together for at least a couple years. We had our own place by then, in fact, and we might have even been on our way home from Thanksgiving with my family. At any rate, I know he was in the car with me, because we were in the middle of an oh-my-god screaming fight. The cruiser tailed me for at least a mile before I even cottoned on, and when at last I noticed and complied, neither I nor the cop said an extemporary word. We just stuck to the required script, he wrote me a ticket for $180, and then I cried. But not till he was gone.

Johnny didn’t understand why I was getting all emotional, and since I hated him I didn’t bother to explain. I was upset because getting a ticket meant I was really a grown-up now. It meant I had to start playing by the rules, following through, acting responsibly and worrying about mundane things like insurance premiums. But most of all – and I hate to admit this, but since I’ve told you all my other shameful things I might as well (oh please, you don’t think I was sober when I tore through the red-light district with a shredded tire, do you? Shit. But I learned my lesson then, I swear to god). So here goes: most of all, I cried because getting that first ticket meant I wasn’t young and pretty anymore.

The second one made me cry because I felt it crush my idealistic spirit. What can I say? I don’t think the government should tell me what to do with my own body, even if that means letting it become an airborne projectile through shattered shards of glass. But I paid my ticket, and I hung my head, and I put my paternalistic seatbelt on.

Thankfully, the third ticket came while we were moving to the AssVac – literally on the way here from the old apartment with a carload – and I had more important things to weep about by then. I was so unfazed by it, in fact, that I got a little of my old chutzpah back: I fought that citation in traffic court, and won. Well, I didn’t “win,” exactly – I had no leg to stand on – but the judge threw the whole thing out because, he said, I “really wasn’t going all that fast.” When I got home, I looked it up. In this state, at the speed I was going, I could faced a $200 fine or fifteen days in jail.

That was my first clue there might be an upside to this middle-aged thing, after all.

Harvest at the AssVac Comes With Evil Strings Attached

2009-09-21T09:15:00.001-04:00

Warning: I had to write this post with one eye closed. Dad, you might want to do the same...

The weather has really taken a turn of late around here, and with it we have finally gotten ripe tomatoes...

...a bowlful of butternut...

... and one of these:

Johnny put his glasses there by accident. He laughed and laughed when he saw it and insisted I go get the camera. He's right. It's funny. And later, that eggheaded little fella made a tasty parmesan.

Unfortunately, the only apple to survive the windstorms and the rot, wound up half-eaten in the gutter across the street:

Johnny's blaming neighbors, but if it hadn't been washed off in the rain I'm fairly certain we'd find squirrel-prints all over it. Ah, well. At least we still got five gallons of these:

And another five or so of these:

Unfortunately (and yes, this is where I take my own autumnal turn, so be warned: now would be a good time for the squeamish among you to squint your eyes), when you wash the grapes off in the sink, you might find you've brought in a bunch of these:

Well, not a bunch, technically. Technically, I only brought in two. But since they were in the water, on the grapes, I couldn't squish 'em -- I had to scoop 'em in a cup and toss 'em back outside. Johnny thought that was funny also, but I didn't. Because, see, spiders are the other things that start showing up in the AssVac at harvest time, and every year they jumpstart my arson fantasies anew.

These first few were not actually inside. Not yet. But I could see the scheming in their thousand beady eyes. I found this dude, for example, among the plants on the back porch:

Those plants have got to come in soon. Remind me to hit 'em first with a bulk-sized can of Raid.

This next bugger (who may or may not be the same bugger as above) ...

... strung his web all the way from the back porch to the woodpile. You can't actually see it in this picture, so I took the liberty of illustrating to give an idea of the size:

Of course, it's possible it didn't look like that at all. But it was really there, I swear to god.

This next one, I'm warning you, makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little:

Big-ass, juicy, nasty, meaty, toad-looking motherfucker. Gross.

This bastard here, I shit you not, we first spotted from about eight yards away, in the freaking dark. Johnny insisted I take this picture the next morning. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry.

Because I love you people, and because I am the bravest arachnophobe that ever peed herself, I just went outside -- in my pjs! -- to measure that awning (a different corner of it, but still), so as to provide your imaginations with a sense of scale. But when I got there, I discovered the awning's gone arachno-condo, so instead what I did was yelp and drop my tape measure and run inside.

This last one, though? This last one is the worst. Because not only does she look like she wants to kill me (and oh yes, while those others were all definitely dudes, this one is unmistakably a she-beast), and not only does she look like she quite easily could, but also I found her on the wall above my bed.

That bitch was just waiting for me to fall asleep so she could saunter down and eat my face. Kee-rist. Every time I look at her I get the chills. And yet I can't stop looking. Help. I think she's hypnotizing me...

There is a silver lining, though. At least we didn't get any earwigs mixed in with the grapes this year. I don't know why. Because I swear to god they've been everywhere else in this house lately. Like my shower.

And I'm sure if you took a picture that tightly-focused of your own shower floor, you might find a couple brown spots that surprise you, too.

Guess What?

2009-09-18T14:03:00.002-04:00

I got sick.

I don't have swine flu, really. Or at least I don't think I do. It's just a cold. And not a very nasty one at that. I had to go to work anyway, both yesterday and today, so I didn't even get to wallow like I dreamed. Johnny did make me chicken soup and homemade whole wheat French bread for dinner last night, though, of which I ate so much I thought I'd burst. I didn't, though. Instead, I fell into a fitful sleep at 7:30 and dreamed I found a little lost girl in Gillette Stadium who'd gotten separated her mother, and when I tried to call someone for help, neither of our mobile phones would work. Mine had a loose wire, and hers turned out to be just a little notepad after all.

Gee, I wonder what that dream was all about? Anyhoo...

I also didn't create the above cartoon. It was forwarded to me by a friend, with no attribution. But it made me laugh a lot, and now that it's (sort of) topical (as regards to me, that is, which is the important kind of topicality; school closings and international death counts be damned), I thought I'd share. With apologies to whomever, and of course to A.A. Milne.

If I (or A.A., for that matter) had created it, you can bet your Bippy that the Penultimate Word would have been Spelled Correctly.

Phluyqun A.

I’m a Fine Girl, But…

2009-09-15T09:22:00.000-04:00

I’m not brandy.

Not generally, at least. I mean, sure, there are certain names I stick to because they’re what I know – ketchup is made only by Heinz, for example, salt by Morton’s, toilet paper by the good folks at Scott. Others I’m loyal to because they’re cheap – Aim toothpaste, Ivory soap, Scott tissue (in case you haven’t noticed, those rolls are pretty darn important around here, important enough to’ve earned themselves the right to double-listing). And a few other things I do try to keep consistent for one imaginary reason or another, but most of those I can’t remember what the brand name actually is, so if they change their packaging, I’m lost.

I keep my deodorant, for example, because I’m used to the smell. I don’t actually know or care who makes it, but as long as it keeps being a red container with a clear blue stick inside, I’ll keep picking it up off the shelf. On the rare occasion that I do use something different – if I stay with Dr. One Friend, say, and forget to bring my own – I spend the day catching random whiffs and inching subtly away from the imaginary person I’m convinced is invading my personal space so boldly as to actually be inside my clothes.

Speaking of Dr. One Friend: if she were here, she’d want me to mention (because she thinks it’s weird), that this deodorant I’m so loyal to is made for men. It would be easy to chalk this up to laziness (why buy two?) or poverty (why buy two?), but the fact is that I do buy two (one armpit hair on the clear blue stick was enough to cement that lesson), and I’ve been using this stuff since back when the full extent of my experience with two deodorants – or Irishmen, for that matter – was on kitschy tv ads for scented soap. Johnny uses Red Container because I do, not the other way around, and I also – on the rare occasions that I dab it on at all – wear men’s cologne. I like smelling like a man, okay? Or, I should say, I prefer musky/spicy/leathery to flowery/powdery/frou-frou, because it’s not like traditional “man smells” are anything but arbitrary chemical inventions, anyway. Really, what a man smells like is sweat and dirt and natural fibers and tobacco, and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, poo. Am I right?

Righty-ho, EGE!

Anyway, speaking of secondary sexual characteristics… When I say I’m not brandy, I mean I don’t much care what the hot new thing is (and I have no idea what that has to do with secondary sexuals, but I need a segueway). I’m man enough to admit that – while I definitely see the advantage in a nice Harry & David pear – I simply don’t taste the difference between a ten-dollar bottle of wine and a thirty-dollar one. My chest isn’t hairy enough for Starbucks coffee. I won’t be shamed into buying sea salt because it doesn’t dissolve and it hurts my fillings when I crunch down on a piece, and I have even (some of you, I know, will find this shocking), come to appreciate the appeal of a piss-poor, lemon-yellow, American-style beer.

I still prefer a muscly IPA or ESB, mind you, but Budweiser’s $22 for a case of 36 and Johnny hasn’t had work in a year. I am, apparently, a man, and a man knows when it’s time to hang up the cleats, I’ll tell you what. Am I right?

Righty--wait. What?

I'm sorry. Could you repeat the question?

Oh, sure. I could keep repeating the same question over and over and over until everybody wants to punch me in the neck. But I wasn't talking to you. You, sir, can go back to what you were doing. Again. If, you know, you think you can.

Ahem.

I say: A real man knows when it’s time to hang up the cleats. Am I right?

Righty ho, EGE!

So, anyway, yeah. This dude-smelling lady with the roll of toilet paper on her desk doesn’t give a hoo for names on labels... but don't you fuck with her Café Du Monde. All right?

Righty-ho, EGE!

I first tried it at the place itself in 1995. Actually, that's a lie. It was at a satellite cafe in a mall, and I am forgiven for spending three of my 48 precious New Orleans hours at the mall because we were there to see Rockin' Dopsie on the Riverwalk, so nyeah. I liked the chicory flavor fine, but it was one cup of coffee in a three-week cross-country trip that included stops in Seattle, Salt Lake, Alburquerque, Austin and, yes, Orlando, Florida – so let’s not overstate its relative memorability. It paled, for example, beside the Zydeco Twisters. Am I right?

Yea, you right, EGE!

The next time I was down there – this was probably in 2000 or so – I found the Café store, picked up five or six cans, had them shipped, and gave them to loved ones as souvenirs. Kept one or two for myself, enjoyed it, and moved on.

Then I discovered that the Asian convenience store up the road from where we lived then stocked it, but not reliably. I’d buy it if they had it, sometimes I’d pick up a bunch at a time, but then the roof fell in on the little Asian convenience store up the road from where we lived then, and they closed, and I moved on.

(I did try the French Market brand you can buy at Stop & Shop, and I still have the little red plastic scoop that came in it because Johnny insists it will someday be good for something. But if he’s right about that, then that plastic scoop is the only useful thing that came in that can. Nasty? I’d rather drink earwax.)

Then I discovered that a chain of Asian markets in the Boston area had Du Monde, too. This was more reliable. They always had it; they were a chain so it’s not like they were going anywhere; and they were right on my way home from work if I got off at a different T stop and went home the other way. And that is when Cafe Du Monde became my go-to brand.

I think I realized I had a problem when Katrina hit and my immediate response was to go to the Super 88 and buy every can they had in stock.

I'd like to say I was trying to do my part for the economy of New Orleans, but the truth is I was just afraid there's be a break in the supply. There wasn't, and by the time that shopping-cart supply ran out, the Super 88 was out of business. Boo.

Conveniently, Mom & Dad decided to do their part for the economy of New Orleans’ by actually going there. Unfortunately, what they accidentally brought back with them was something called Café Da Mont. It cost the same, and the can looked identical right down to the font, but the stuff inside tasted like it had been swept up from the Bourbon Street gutter on Ash Wednesday. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but I’d rather suck on Aaron Neville’s big black hairy mole. Am I right?

No, EGE. That’s disgusting.

Well, sor-ry.

I didn’t tell my mom, though. I thanked her and pretended that I drank and loved that crap, and apparently I played the part so well that when she found the real stuff at her Asian market up in Maine, she agreed to become my dealer. The first batch was free, and after that I’d place an order and we'd work out a meeting place for the exchange.

I’ve never figured out what it is about the Asian markets, by the way, but maybe that analogy is apt. Maybe my drug of choice comes in on shipping routes like lonely sailors, heroin, and longhorned beetles?

Righty-ho, EGE!

Anyway, you know what happened next: my mom got sick. So my source dried up in May. And by the end of August, I was out. I spent a week or so blending espresso beans with Maxwell House and Dunkin' Donuts in a sad attempt to duplicate the taste, to no avail, and then I spent another generic week drinking tea before I remembered about Cafe Du Monde's website! Unfortunately, at that point I was so caffeine-deprived it took another week for me to remember to actually place the order, which then took another week or so to come.

Yes, yes, I know I've added up too many weeks there. It's a teeny bit possible I may be using a device we literary men refer to as comic hyperbole. Deal with it. The point is that the box finally arrived, and now everything's righty-ho in my world. Or in one crucial corner of my kitchen, anyway.

One of these days I really ought to hie myself to the actual, you know, Café Du Monde. But in the meantime...

Can you spot the roll of ScottTM brand toilet tissue in this picture...?

I Have a Hangnail, and My Heart Is--

2009-09-08T18:06:00.002-04:00

I’m lying in my bed, watching a Law & Order rerun on the USA network, wishing desperately that I was ill. Yesterday Johnny thought he might be, and even though he looked completely miserable, I got all inwardly-excited at the thought that his outward-misery might be contagious. It turned out to be a migraine, though, so rats.

See, I’m looking for an excuse to stay in bed for a couple days. No big deal. I’m not depressed or anything, just tired. I need a vacation. But I don’t get one and can’t afford to take one, so instead, every time I hear anyone so much as sniffle in my immediate vicinity, I wait until they walk away and then very subtly lick everything I think they might have touched.

Not really.

I do this every year, apparently. And as much fun as it is to feel sorry for myself, it’s not really just about needing a vacation. It’s also that, after the first few crisp nights of the season, I start hankering to hunker. But it isn’t fall yet, really, and I feel guilty about wanting to stay inside on these beautifully pure, late-summer days. Perfect temperatures, no humidity, fewer bugs – although we do seem to have more than our fair share of skunk juice being squirted out around here lately. I really ought to be outside barefootin’ in it all. Well, all except the skunk juice, naturally.

But I don’t want to go outside. All I want to do is pull the covers over my head and eat soup. Which is why I have been dreaming of disease...

Not real disease. I mean, my mother – who hasn’t been out of bed except to do her necessaries since the last crisp nights of spring – reported yesterday that, with Dad’s help over the weekend, she walked the whole length of the driveway to inspect her garden! I’m not saying I want to be like that. I will admit, though, that for fleeting moments here and there it’s sounded good. Especially considering that she’s also lost fifty pounds in two bedridden months and is under doctor’s orders to put as much food in her body as she can. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a late-summer vacation I could sink my teeth into! Except for the walking-down-the-driveway-to-inspect-the-garden part.

But no. I don’t need debilitation. Just mild impairment. A particularly virulent summer cold. A hint of porcine influenza, maybe. A tiny touch of escherichia coli, perhaps.

Ooh. Ick. Never mind on that last one. I just looked it up. “All blood and no stool”? No thank you. I guess plain old food poisoning will have to do. Or, you know, some other sort of general malaise.

What always happens next is that I pine for it long enough I somehow make it happen. After two or three weeks spent daydreaming of hot cups of soup and cold bowls of ice cream delivered bedside by my beloved (or by Johnny, depending on how high my longed-for fever is) I at long last feel some sort of tickle in a place where tickles aren’t supposed to be – throat, GI tract, bronchioli, hair follicles – and then...

WHAMMO

It’s never near as much fun when it finally happens as it was in my imaginarium. It always turns out Johnny’s working, or at the pub, or just sick to death of listening to me whine, so I have to get my own damn cups of tea – which I then fall asleep before drinking and have to suck down later, cold. Not to mention I don’t feel good – which, I know, is kind of the whole point, but I somehow manage to forget about that part in the anticipation phase. The camel-breaker, though, is that there’s never anything good to watch on television in the daytime -- which is perhaps why this morning’s procrastination hour set me off.

Because really, all of this is just a long-winded way of saying I never understood the appeal of Law & Order. To be completely frank, I think it sucks. I can’t stand to listen to all of those poor actors trying to deliver all those weightily portentous sentences as if any actual person would ever talk that way. The episode I watched this morning, for example, ended with the following exchange – the last line gamely delivered by Vincent D’Onofrio, back before he decided to pay corpulent homage to Orson Welles:

“But if she had the lesion in her brain, doesn’t that prove the professor’s theory?”

“She didn’t commit the murder in a fit of rage. She did it for love.”

“Love?”

“Love. It’s a many-splendored thing.”

Dum-dumm

Yack. Who writes this crap? If you ask me, they’re the ones who ought to be licking handrails.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I feel a migraine coming on. Or else maybe I'm developing a rage-murdery lesion in my brain.

For Want of a Nail...

2009-09-03T08:03:00.003-04:00

I've taken to leaving my shoes around the AssVac lately...

Those are my red Keds. They make me run really fast. They also make me feel like I have bone spurs in my heels.

I started this habit when it was hot. I'd take two steps in the house at the end of what counts for me as a day, and suddenly my feet would feel all suffocated and confused. They couldn't stand to be constrained for one more second...

This is an old picture. You can tell because Destructo actually managed to break this pair of Crocs the other day. Kicked the strap clear off the left one with her right foot, she did, while she was walking, and even Johnny can't put the poor humpties together again.

You'd almost think the piggies would be cool enough in Crocs, but no. Because, see, I'm one of these fashion-forward people who wear socks with everything. My feet may not be small (size 9 1/2) and my step may not be dainty (I clomp like a stormtrooper, in other words) but my pedal extremities are delicate, I tell you. At the slightest insult, they blister like a pair of bastards in a holy-water bath.

I don't like these shoes. They're LL Bean, they were a gift, and I am an ungrateful sow. But they make my feet look flat and large, like a Don Martin character from the old Mad Magazine. So bleah. I've had them for five years and worn them twice. Both times with an off-shoulder shirt I have that's the exact same color. Matchy-matchy!

I even -- for the thirty seconds I allowed myself to be convinced they were not the ugliest, most uncomfortable footwear on the planet -- wore socks with Birkenstocks. I don't wear them with flip-flops, but only because I can't possibly wear flip-flops. Oh my god, the chafing between my toes! And I gave up wearing high heels, years ago, for even the fanciest of occasions, cultivating instead a fashion sense that allows me to craft appropriate ensembles around a snappy pair of boots.

Yes, it's possible I raised more than one glass in Teddy's honor after the aborted wake on Friday afternoon. Why do you ask?

The only shoes I don't wear socks with are the $4 faux-Keds I wear to mow the lawn. They started out as real shoes but rapidly decompensated.

Now I swear I keep finding them in places other than where I left them, as if they spend their nights creeping around.

I don't know which is spookier: those shoes, that picture, or the fact that I took it the last time I mowed the lawn and the date-stamp on the shot is August 8th.

"Decompensation" is a new word in my vocabulary. Wikipedia defines it as "the functional deterioration of a previously working structure or system." It's supposed to be a medical term, but I think it's okay if I use it here. Those shoes, after all, really do appear to be pining for the Norwegian fjords, don't you think? Although, for the grammar geeks among you, if I'd written that definition, I would have hyphenated "previously-working."

In order to realize this shot is old, you'd have to know what I know, which is that I left those shoes in my sister's living room two weeks ago, the day I learned my new four-dollar word.

Sometimes, I'm afraid I might be rapidly decompensating, too. But then I remember that the structure or system in question must not only be fart-in-a-windstorm useless, but it must also have been, at one point previously, working.

Phew!

We Carry On

2009-08-30T16:28:00.001-04:00

I don’t know if you would’ve heard or not, but my state recently lost its senior senator.

We’re not real big on term limits around here. Our Junior senator – well, I guess he’s Senior, now – has held that seat since 1985. The Lion we just lost has been there my whole life, plus seven years. I don’t know a world without him in it. Although I do distinctly remember a time – oh, this was probably in’92 – when, in a nonbinding referendum, the people of Massachusetts voiced resounding support for the idea of term limitations, while on the same day, on the same ballot, handily electing Teddy Kennedy for the sixth time. We went on to do it twice more after that, and would have kept on doing it forever if he hadn’t gone and died.

I don’t know who your Senator is, or how much you know about him, but one thing everybody here knows about old Teddy is: he did stuff. Not only in the Senate, although you’ve no doubt been hearing plenty about his record there these past few days. But also behind the scenes, on scales both grand and small. He single-handedly kept newspaper presses running, quietly forced companies to stay in town, and if you think we’d have a President Obama now without him, you’re confused. Even President Obama’s fully cognizant of that. And yet, if your grandmother was having trouble with her medicare, all you had to do was call his office. Ted would assign a staff person to cut through the red tape, and then he’d follow up with her, at random intervals, for years.

I’d venture to say everyone in this state is just a degree or two away from someone Teddy personally helped. A kid with cancer. A 9/11 widow. A serviceman or woman whom George Bush told to take the bus home from Indiana after a two-year tour in Iraq.

For me, my closest degree is Johnny.

Well, there was the time he came into the Friendly’s that my mom worked at in high school, and he tipped her $20 on a $7 check. But considering how old Teddy would have been at that point, and the reputation he had in his younger years, I’m going to assume his intentions were not exactly philanthropic there...

Anyway, Johnny never meant to move to America illegally in 1986 – in fact, he never meant to move to America at all. But the person he came here with on vacation (I hesitate to call this person “friend”) stole everything that Johnny had, including his ticket home, and disappeared. Four years later, Ted Kennedy pushed through an immigration bill that became known as the Green Card Lottery. It was supposed to disqualify countries that were sending lots of people over, but because Teddy was involved, Ireland didn’t end up on the list. Johnny put his name in, and two years after that, he got the call.

But there was a catch. You weren’t actually supposed to be here yet. A lot of people were getting the call, flying to their home countries for interviews, and then getting denied their visas because of their illegal residence and never let back in.

On a tip from someone, Johnny called Ted’s office. He told everything to the staffer that he talked to. Explained how he wound up here, said he had nothing in Ireland to go back to. She stayed on the phone with him for a half an hour asking questions, said she’d pass his information on, and told him to call back before he got on the plane. A few weeks later, when he called, she said “You’re all set, Mr. Conroy. When you get there, just make sure to tell them the whole truth like you told it to me.”

Johnny flew over. Watched other people have three or four interviews over a series of days and get denied. But when his turn came, his single interview took twenty minutes, and just like that his visa was approved. It only occurred to us now as we were hashing out the details of this story that, a couple years ago, when his green card was up for renewal and they rubber-stamped it without so much as glancing at the paperwork we spent a week and a half chasing down, that might have been because there’s probably still a Teddy Kennedy check-mark in Johnny’s file.

So if it weren’t for Ted, I wouldn’t have a husband. Johnny, though, if I know him like I think I do, would probably still have a wife. Some poor Irish girl would be listening to him snore, smelling his farts, eating his endless pots of lettuce-soup and wearing t-shirts redolent of his dirty socks. If it weren’t for Teddy Kennedy, goddamnit, I never would have bought the AssVac. I might still have a real job, with paid time off and non-poor-people health insurance even! But then, if it weren’t for Teddy Kennedy, I wouldn’t have an agent, either – or a romantic-farce of a life worth writing down.

For that, then – plus for all the other grander, civic reasons – when Johnny and I heard Ted would be waked at JFK we said we’d go. We changed our plans a few times as schedules got solidified, and then I dicked around (by which I mean: I worked diligently on my Project) a little longer than I meant to Friday morning. So it was almost noon before I emerged from my office and told Johnny I’d work out for half an hour, shower, and by 1:00 I hoped to be ready to hit the road.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

I swear, these days, that boy’s mind’s so full of holes I could toss beanbags through it and win a prize.

But by the time I was done working out, Johnny was showered and shaved, with his hair spit-combed and parted in the middle. By the time I was out of the shower, he’d polished his shoes, pressed his shirt and picked out his own tie. This, from a man who’d be late to his own funeral, and who has to be reminded (every single time) that Levi’s are not appropriate wedding attire. And despite the fact that we’d checked out the live feed from the library and determined people weren’t bothering to dress.

Now, my fancy-clothes options are sorely limited these days. I don’t have summer-weight blacks (although that investment, come to think of it, might not be such a terrible idea) and I don’t think the spaghetti-strapped blue velvet or the sleeveless hothouse-flower-print would have come across as suitably severe. So I convinced Johnny to wear Levi’s after all with his dress shoes and shirt and tie, and I wore black jeans with a grey long-sleeved shirt and brown Frye boots.

Hey, man. Teddy wouldn’t give a shit, so why should you?

We had a little to-do in the car regarding whether we should drive or take the T – we knew there were shuttle buses running, but we didn’t know how often, and since calling hours stopped at 3:00 we were already cutting it kind of close. But then the idiot light on the dash came on and we’d already passed the last gas station on the way, so public transport it would have to be. That’s all right, we told ourselves. Teddy would have wanted it that way.

So we paid $5 to park Chuck (TFT) at North Quincy station, and then $2 each to take the ride. The inbound train was just arriving so we took the stairs at a trot and made it just before they closed the doors. We flopped across from each other in the single seats at the end, and the conductor-lady came over the intercom.

“Waa-waa-waa shuttle buses,” she said. “Waa-waa-waa one o'clock. Waa-waa inconvenience. Have a nice day.”

Waa-waa?

The only thing we could figure was that the shuttle buses must have stopped running for some reason, and if so then we’d just have to take a cab. When we got off the train, though, and before we left the station, we decided to ask three orange-pinnied employees we found loitering on the platform.

“Oh, yeah,” they said. “There’s a 2½ hour wait to get inside. The shuttles stopped running at 1:00 because they have to be done by 3:00. You could still go, if you wanted, but you’d never be able to get inside.”

I thanked them, silently, and crossed over to the outbound platform.

“Why are you crying?” my husband asked, incredulous.

“Because,” I sniffed, “I wanted to say goodbye. Because I wanted to thank him. And because they should have told us this before they took our money and let us get on the train – but who are we going to call up and complain to about it now?”

That last was, I’m not ashamed to say, a plaintive wail.

“Ah, shore,” Johnny said, putting his arm around me. “It’s just money, love. It's just nine dollars. It would’ve cost you that to see him, anyway, so now all it did was cost you that to not.

"Everybody pays respects in their own way," he went on, "and so did we. We fuck things up, my love, that’s what we do. Couldn’t organize a pissup in a brewery, we couldn’t. You and me, we’d fuck up a wet dream. Couldn’t score in a brothel with hundred-dollar-bills pinned to our collars. Useful as a fart in a windstorm. Worse than a nun with a bag of mickeys, what?"

That last one made me laugh so hard I snorted. "Gross!" I said. "What would a nun be doing with a bag of mickeys?"

"My point exactly," he answered with a wink. "C’mere, we’ll hit the Irish Pub on the way home and raise a glass. I know you’re not supposed to be drinking these days, but if you can’t have one to send off Teddy Kennedy, sure you might as well be in the ground yourself.”

And so we did.

Thanks for my husband. Really, Ted. May you be in heaven forty years before the devil knows you’re dead.

At which point, if we're very lucky, we'll still be re-electing whichever poor sucker steps up to try to fill your noble shoes.

The Rest is Merely So-So

2009-08-28T17:56:00.000-04:00

You know how, when you have a fight with your husband (or wife, or gender-neutral significant other, or dog or cat, or kid, or bestest friend), and you’re both kind of right but you’re both also kind of wrong, and neither of you want to admit that second part, the being-wrong part, so you get a little bit more shouty than either one of you intended, and surprisingly enough that does not resolve things, so you wind up in a big and angry-shouty stalemate, retreating to separate corners to lick your wounds, then coming out the next day to hug and say that really you love each other, but by that point you’re so tired of fighting that you just let the entire issue drop, and so it simmers, and then two months later you go through the whole song-and-dance again?

No? Well, maybe it’s just us, then...

Me & Johnny, we’re like a great big soup pot on a small gas stove. We heat up slowly, slowly, slowly, and – like any old proverbial pot – so long as we keep an eye on ourselves, we don't boil. Oh, we might threaten, but then one or the other of us will notice the disturbance, lift the lid, and give us a little stir. Sometimes, though, we get distracted. Sometimes all four of our hands are full. Sometimes, if we're being honest, one or the other of us of us might get it in our heads that we’re the only ones doing all the goddamn lift-and-stirring around here and so we pigheadedly might turn the burner up...

Once it’s reached a certain point, there’s nothing we can do. And we both know it. Over the years, we’ve gotten better at recognizing when this moment comes -- and have learned when it's time to don our fighting-aprons and have at it, rather than try in vain to stave off the inevitable for another miserable month. When it's over, there are always soup-stains on the kitchen walls, but at least the big old mess has doused the burner, and Johnny and I are happily reunited in the communal task of cleaning up and starting from mise en place once again.

And you wonder why we go through so much soup here at the AssVac.

The particular fight I'm about to describe is one Johnny and I had repeatedly when we first moved in together, but after a couple years we declared an unspoken truce. I don't know how that magic happened, it just did. If I knew, trust me, I would write a book called "How to Come to an Unspoken Truce With Your Husband (or Wife, or Gender-Neutral Significant-Other, or Dog or Cat, or Kid, or Bestest Friend)," and my agent and I would share a million bucks. But in the meantime...

Johnny thinks, see, that when a person vacuums, said person ought to move all the furniture so as to suck the accumulated detritus out of all the nooks and crannies. I think that’s a wonderful suggestion – and I would love to do it once or twice a year or so – but it seems like overkill to insist upon it every single time. And since the person wielding the Dirt Devil is usually me, then while Johnny mutely waves his arms and tries to tell me what to do, I tell him in no uncertain terms to cram it.

Fortunately, he’s got ten years on me, so he can’t hear me over the vacuum cleaner any more than I pretend to be able to hear him.

The truce we seem to have declared over this issue is as follows: I vacuum on a semi-regular basis (which is to say: I vacuum when the relative proportion of pet hair to actual food in a given meal approaches 50/50), and Johnny does it when he drops something behind the couch and gets grossed-out at what he finds. Or if we’re expecting company (which is to say: important company; Dr. One Friend and/or any member of my immediate family doesn’t count).

See? This happened spontaneously, and we haven’t fought about the vacuuming in years. Leaves us plenty of time and energy to fight about the more important things, like where in hell the ball of baling twine has got to.

(Answer: in the drawer with the bank statements. Naturally. Because it suddenly and spontaneously stopped making sense to keep it in the kitchen drawer with the scissors and the plastic bags where it has always been, forever, since the dawn of freaking time. It doesn’t fit there anymore, apparently. Although of course it does. But I’ll just put the lid back on that particular soup pot for right now…)

This past spring (and maybe winter, too, I can’t remember), we had a real problem in the AssVac with moths. The kind that eat your clothes. And we couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. I emptied out the sweater closet in the foyer (a word that makes it sound much more foo-foo than it is). I didn’t find anything, but I packed it full of mothballs anyway. This had the bonus effect of making our front hallway smell like an old-folks home, but didn’t do anything to stop the moths.

At Johnny’s insistence (by which I mean: he wouldn’t stop bitching about it and yet he wouldn’t do it, so I took the initiative in the interest of shutting him up), I emptied out the big basket full of blankets on the porch. I knew I wouldn’t find the moths out there, and I was right. So I drew the line at putting mothballs in the blankets despite Johnny’s bitch-sistence, because who wants to snuggle up on a cold winter’s night with an army blanket that smells like your great-aunt Gladys?

Johnny did find one of his old sweaters in the guest room that had been moth-destroyed, and that was tragic. But it was also odd, because we hadn’t seen any moths in the guest room – or the office, or the bathroom, or the dining room – and those are all the rooms adjacent to the one that it was in. He washed the sweater, dried it in the sun out on the lawn, and packed it up in mothballs. It’s useless now, unless one of us can learn to darn and come up with a complicated patchwork-plan to fix it with, but it was handmade for him 35 years ago by somebody who’s dead now, so he’s not about to toss it just because it looks like a piece of zombie wardrobe from the “Thriller” video.

I’d show you a picture, but neither of us can seem to remember where, exactly, we packed the poor old thing so carefully away.

And then some months went by...

We didn’t have any important company...

We got a dog...

We kept telling ourselves the dog was temporary...

I kept insisting I’d vacuum when the dog was gone..

But the dog stayed...

Finally, Johnny had a little bit of a fit. I don’t remember where I went that day -- to work, or something, or wherever -- but Johnny pulled out the Dirt Devil before I left, and when I came home five hours later he was still sucking. Only now he was sucking with the shop vac. The Dirt Devil just wasn’t powerful enough, he said, to erase all of our seasons of neglect.

It was hot, and he was understandably kind of cranky, so I just thanked him very kindly and slunk quietly past him to my office, where I stuck in my headphones and listened to the Chi-Lites in an attempt to drown the shop-vac noise and get to work.

Although, in all honesty, this might have been the week I was reading The Straight Dope instead of working, but whatever. The point is when Johnny tapped me on the shoulder and implored me to “Come out here and have a look,” there was an expression on his face I couldn’t cotton. I didn’t know if I might be in trouble, or if something terrible had happened to the dog, or if there was just an unbelievably cute squirrel-moment going on out in the yard. So I took the headphones off, and mutely followed.

Turns out, he wanted to show me this:

Remember how, a while ago, I said I was going to start telling about all the stuff we own and where it came from? Because we have only actually purchased two pieces of furniture in our entire house, and neither one of them were new, so every piece has an interesting story behind it? Well, this story’s pretty short, but it's germane to the one I’m in the middle of, so I have to tell it before I go any further...

My Lady bought this rug for herself, you see, from a shop on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. When she saw it in the window, there was another lady dickering in there over the price, but My Lady walked right in, offered what the tag said, and bought it right out from under rival-lady. When the shop-owner delivered it and laid it down in her bedroom, I was there, and I watched him literally pale when she said she planned to affix it to the floor with double-tape. He implored her not to do it, said it would degrade the quality of the rug, and he felt so bad and so strongly about the whole thing that she agreed. And then as soon as he was gone she had me on my hands and knees with the tape.

A few years later, she got new carpet in the rest of her apartment. The kind that, I don’t know what you call it, that goes almost wall to wall but stops just short so you can still see the hardwood around the edge? She got that and liked it so much that she decided to put the same stuff in her bedroom.

Now, My Lady is comfortable financially, but she’s not frivolous. In a different world, she might have taken this Persian rug back where she got it, reminded the owner that it had been in demand, and seen if he’d buy it back at a slight discount. But in a different world the back of it would not have been covered with five years of sticky-tape she’d promised to the guy she wouldn’t use. So in this world, what she did was give the rug to me.

When we brought it home and rolled it out, the original price tag was still on the back, and although in a different world I wouldn’t be so crass as to share such a detail, in this one it’s germane to the other story I’m about to pick back up, so I will tell you (if you promise not to go blabbing it around) that My Lady flat-out gave to us a rug she bought for sixteen hundred bucks.

What was she thinking!? Does she not know I am Destructo!?

It’s neat, though, isn’t it? With the camels and the tents and everything? And I suppose it’s some measure of comfort that the thing Johnny called me out to show me – the thing he discovered when he moved the yellow chair to vacuum under it for the first time in six where-the-hell-are-all-these-freaking-moths-coming-from months – kind of also resembles a camel.

A giant, Godzilla-in-the-Bedouin-camp kind of camel, but a little like a camel, nonetheless. Sort of.

We didn’t fight about it. We were both, I think, a bit ashamed. I sighed and hung my head and I apologized, although in retrospect I never actually said that he’d been right. He ran his hands through his hair and allowed as how it was not my fault, even while I watched him resign himself anew to the notion that as long as he lives with me (Destructo) he will never be able to have nice things. Then he threw a couple mothballs down, put the yellow chair back where it was, and that was that.

Don’t get me wrong, now, there was soup on the walls again the next week. But that was flung over something important. Something that really mattered to our relationship. Not anything as trivial as chores.

I mean, seriously, how many times can one girl be expected to sit through The Mummy movie? The Rock’s not even in that one, for heaven’s sake!

Tune in tomorrow to find out how we tried (and failed) to pay our respects to Teddy Kennedy, and how we wound up getting soup-stains in the car!

Now, More Than Ever

2009-08-26T08:31:00.000-04:00

Oy, with the silence already!

Okay, here’s the deal:

My mom is sick. Has been for a while. Dad, too, but Dad’s probably going to be okay. We’re not sure yet about Mom. I haven’t said anything about it because I’m really not a parenthetical-hugs-from-internet-avatars kind of person. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like too much of a dick. I do love and appreciate you all, but if I’m going to write about this, I’m going to have to be honest. Which, for me, in case you haven’t noticed, means I’m going to have to add a touch of snark. And if we’re all hugging each other in the comment section, then I’ll be too shy to tell you things like when Mom wrinkled up her nose in the doctor’s office yesterday and said she thought somebody farted, I’m pretty sure that somebody was her.

And so we’re off.

That’s why I have a dog now, see, and why I’m off the booze. And also why I’ve been driving all over New England in a car that really wishes I’d stay home and watch some TV with my husband for a change.

Well, that’s not the only reason for that last bit…

Dr. One Friend’s birthday was August 16^th (same day as Madonna’s, but a few years later, in case anybody out there’s keeping track) and she is my best friend in the whole entire world. If she hadn’t just so happened to have moved to Connecticut last summer, I’m not at all sure I’d be handling this one nearly as well as I have. (This is itself a relative consideration, obviously, but I hate to contemplate the sheer volume of snot I might have shed into my telephone receiver if Dr. One Friend lived in, say, Saskatchewan. I mean, to begin with I would have to spell Saskatchewan on a semi-regular basis, and just doing it those two times has thrown my words-per-minute typing average in the crapper.)

One Friend came up here for my birthday a couple weeks ago, and in the meantime One Dog came down with a touch of cancer in her bones. She looks like this now:

She’s not going to be okay, either, but she’s okay for now. All the pain that she was in went out with the bio-waste, and she’s back to chasing balls and squeak-toys with the best. We should all be so get-on-with-it reboundy.

Oh, hell, since I seem to have decided to tell all the bad news, I might’s well toss in that Johnny’s got an ultrasound scheduled September 9^th. Hopefully they’ll tell him it’s just gas. There. I think that’s everything. Now where was I?

There were Mom-related reasons why I couldn’t be in the Nutmeg State for One Friend’s actual birthday, but I packed up old Chuck (TFT) this past weekend. The plan was to head down there straight from work on Thursday and stop off to see Mom on Sunday on the way back home. But then Johnny made plans to go to the beach for the weekend so I had to bring the dog – my dog – Mom’s dog – the one with all four legs – to Connecticut with me, which meant I had to come home from work first to collect him. Not a big deal, really, because work is north and Connecticut is south, so home is more or less right on the way.

But then One Dog – the three-legged one – came down with a staph infection. She’s almost over it, now, thanks for asking, but at the time it didn’t sound like a good idea to visit Mom on the way home and risk passing it on, so me & Mom’s dog decided to go visit her on the way. This meant driving a half an hour south home to collect him, then a half an hour back along the same road to the Pike. Then an hour west. Then two hours south. In a car that, may I remind you, really really really wants to die. Speaking of which...

I’ve been obsessively checking my fluids lately (the ones in the car, that is; I am still off the drink for now, remember?). It seems the rightly superstitious thing to do. Before I take Chuck (TFT) any distance greater than, say, a dozen miles, I make sure the oil, antifreeze, transmission and power steering are all veritably bursting at the seams. This way, when he finally does give up the ghost, I can rest easy knowing I did everything I could, and that his demise can in no way be construed as my fault. Except in that I am Destructo, and everything I lay my hands on turns to ass.

For my 300-mile weekend, I figured I’d do my topping off when I came home to fetch the dog. But when I started Chuck (TFT) to go to work that morning, I couldn’t make him get his butt in gear. I mean, the shift lever stick handle thingmabobby moved all right, as did the little arrow on the dash, but nothing happened when I pressed the little footy thing that makes him go. Or, rather, the footy thing that’s supposed to make him go.

This is it, I thought. Old Chuck (TFT) has finally gone to the big junkyard in the sky. Guess I’m not going to Connecticut this weekend, after all. And I’ll have to figure out some other way to keep getting out to see Mom. But at least he didn’t crap out on the expressway. At least he didn’t put my life in jeopardy. At least he used his dying gasp to crawl me home. It’s a little bit sad, actually, when I think of it like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been calling him (The Fucking Truck) behind his back for all this time…

But – wait a minute! Maybe my crocodile tears were just the fluid Chuck (TFT) was lacking! Because when I put him in neutral I felt something definite click over, and when I put him back in drive, he mushed!

I started to drive on to work, and then had one of my infrequent sensible ideas. Perhaps, I thought, it would be best if I did not head straight for the on ramp. Perhaps Chuck (TFT) died in front of the house for a reason, and perhaps it would be wise of me to have a look. I had to go to the bank on the corner anyway – to get a roll of quarters, for the parking meters, because it was a thousand degrees outside, and even if it meant a fiery death on the expressway there was no way I was walking into work.

So I pulled into the parking lot, put Chuck (TFT) in park – but left him running, because you’re supposed to check transmission fluid with the engine running; I’m not such a big dumb girl I don’t know that – popped the hood and gave his old dipstick a wipe.

I know what y’all are thinking, but I’m not making a dipstick joke; my life is very serious these days, and I have had to put away such lowbrow childish things and endeavor to comport myself with dignity and class.

So I gave the old dipstick a quick in-’n’-out and a little lick, and... nothin’.

What? It was a Yukon Cornelius joke! Yukon Cornelius!

Gawd! You people are sick.

Anyway, it seemed that somehow, in the three days since I’d last been out to Worcester, Chuck had gone and drank up every drop.

Except for, well, it’s marginally possible I didn’t check my fluids the last time I went to Worcester. In fact, it’s a little bit possible I was exaggerating up there when I said I’d been checking them every time. It’s entirely possible that by “every time” what I really meant was “every time I thought about it, and felt like it, and happened to have the stuff on hand to fill it up. Because what’s the sense of checking your fluids, anyway, when there’s nothing you can do about it if they come up short? It isn’t like they sell that crap at every gas station, supermarket, and corner store after all.”

But this time I did happen to have the proper stuff on hand (which, in retrospect, I suppose means I had it on hand for all those weeks that I was letting it run dry, but who cares and shut up anyway). I even knew which forgotten corner the funnel had squirreled itself into, so I didn’t have to spill the viscous liquid all over the engine and drive down the street billowing smoke as it burned off like I usually do. I poured in the entire Vicks-44-looking quart from the brand-new black bottle, and then another half-quart from a blue bottle I found under the backseat. I don’t know how much fluid a transmission takes when empty, but I figured a quart and a half ought to at least get me to work (or, if it wouldn’t, then for that matter three full quarts probably wouldn’t, either). When I got there I could check it again and, if necessary, pop into one of those allegedly well-stocked corner stores. You’re supposed to check the transmission with a hot engine, anyway. I’m not such a big dumb girl I don’t know that.

I found a meter right away, and veritably bounded from the car feeling free and easy in the knowledge that I had an entire roll of quarters in my bag. No fishing around in the glove compartment, no being fooled by the fistful of nickels that seems to have taken up permanent residence in my left front pocket, no buying a $2 banana at 7-11 just for the sake of the $3 in change.

Oh, crap. 7-11. The transmission fluid. Right.

I caught the door before it closed behind me, tossed my bag on the driver’s seat, leaned in and started up the engine. I popped the hood and then, because it was on the street-side and I didn’t want to run the risk of having it avulsed, I went back and closed the driver-door. It turned out I did need more transmission fluid – maybe about a half a quart – but I decided not to do it now because I was running late. I’d pick it up at 7-11 after work and add it then. As long as I had checked it hot and running, I could put it in there cold and still. I’m not such a big dumb girl I don’t know that. For now, though, I’d just close the hood, shut off the car, feed the meter, and be on my way.

Unless, that is, I am exactly such a big dumb girl that I closed the locked door with the engine running and my quarter-laden bag on the front seat.

The concierge at My Lady’s building gave me quarters. My Lady let me use her telephone. And the AAA dispatcher moved me and my running vehicle to the front of the line. Twenty minutes later, I was in. Guy never even asked to see my card. I did make sure to tell him how it happened, how I was checking all of my fluids and all. Because I didn’t want him to think, you know, I was some kind of big dumb girl.

Chuck (TFT) made it. All the way. Back home for the dog, to Oxford to see Mom, to Dr. One Friend’s in New Haven, and back home. Even to Worcester and back again on Monday for that appointment where Mom lit one and blamed the doctor. Chuck deserves the little break he’s going to get next week – which I’ll explain when I haven’t already been rambling on for almost 2000 words – but before he goes on blocks I think I’ll take him in to get his oil changed. He’s earned it.

And for the rest of you, the moral of the story is: I wish there was a AAA for people. Someone who, no matter what goes wrong or what dumb-ass thing you do, will come to where you are and make it right. Someone who, if it’s gone so far that they can’t fix it, will scoop you up and hand-deliver you to somebody who can.

There’s not, of course. All you can really do when things start breaking down is keep your fluids topped and muddle forward – if that means making fart jokes while prognoses are handed down, then so it is. Fart jokes are not a solution. Fart jokes are not going to make it right. But if you’re a certain kind of person they might keep you from crapping out on the expressway, and at certain times not crapping out can be a person’s most important job.

I’m not such a big dumb girl I don’t know that.

Jump Off the Roof, Maggie!

2009-08-18T18:35:00.000-04:00

I am a tangled mess of ire and frustration.

I am all the insects in the cold black dirt after some spyglass-holding shithead lifts the rock. Earwigs, earthworms, writhing grubs and pillbugs, all turned over on their backs with their wee little extremities waving mutely in the air. That's me.

I am a saucepan, too full of something starchy, boiling over on the stove you just scrubbed clean. I’m the cat who didn’t see you coming. I am a thundercloud, unsatisfied with water droplets, flinging hail.

I’m the suitcase you had to sit on to zip closed, straining as it's bumped up a seemingly endless flight of stairs. I am a still-wet load of laundry, tangled in a solid mass by a drawstring liberated from your favorite pyjamas. I’m the fork, somehow loosed from its compartment, jammed against the left-hand runner of the silver drawer.

I’m the one wheel on the grocery cart that doesn’t turn. The dam against the river. Drunk in jail.

I am a weak, metaphoric blend of Alanis Morissette (don’t you think?), Leonard Cohen (I have tried, in my way), and (some say) Bette Midler.

Oh, fuck it.

I am not a poet.

I’m a you-know-what.

And I am hot.

Not a chick-a-wow-wow kind of hot. More like a there-would-be-sweat-dripping-in-my-cleavage-if-I-had-cleavage-but-I-don't-because-it's-too-hot-for-a-bra-so-instead-the-sweat-is-just-sort-of-pooling-in-my-belly-button kind of hot.

Yuck.