1994 - Barrel Fever

by David Sedaris

  ‘Don’t go out of your way on my account. I’ll just stretch out on this cold tile floor.’

  ‘Pillow?’

  ‘No, thanks. This hard plastic vacuum hood will suit me just fine.’

  This morning, in addition to sleeping on the floor, I awoke to find I had once again wet my pants. It’s been happening much more often than is necessary lately and it’s beginning to really scare me. This time the urine was induced by a dream in which I had been presented with two citizenship awards, the ceremonies back-to-back. The first award was in the shape of Tommy Keen’s head. Made of gold-plated lead it was all I could do to carry it off the stage and into the waiting limo for the next ceremony. It was goofy, the way dreams are. Gill was the limo driver but he didn’t seem to remember me. I asked him please to pull over somewhere so I could pee and he kept saying I could use the bathroom at the Pavilion. We argued back and forth until he hit a red light and I jumped out of the limo, leaned against a building, and unzipped my fly. The next thing I knew my face was pressed against the hood of a vacuum cleaner and I was lying in a puddle of urine. I didn’t even get to find out what the second prize was. This morning I woke on the kitchen floor in a puddle of urine and understood that something has to change as I am not about to buy rubber sheets or adult diapers. This simply cannot continue.

  After my mother’s death the most shocking discovery in the box marked ‘POISON’ were not her letters, but the stack of New Year’s resolutions she’d spent so long composing. Each of the fifteen cards was dated in the left-hand corner and, in her slanted, childlike writing, each one read the same: ‘Be good.’ It shook me up as, in the three years that I myself have been making such lists, mine say the same thing, relatively. I have taken to softening my approach as a safeguard against failure. The last one reads: ‘Try to think about maybe being good.’ ‘Try’ and ‘maybe’ give me the confidence I need in order to maintain the casual approach best suited to my ever-changing circumstances.

  I looked up at my tightly bound telephone and told myself that I would remain on that floor until someone called, at which point I would answer and redirect my life. Whoever they were and whatever they wanted, I would take it as a sign.

  After what seemed like hours, I got off the floor and took a shower, keeping the bathroom door open so I could catch any incoming calls. On the off chance my caller would tell me to quit drinking, I positioned myself on the sofa with two six-packs and a bottle of nice scotch. Then I turned on the TV and ate a sandwich made from leftover chicken lo mein. I call it a Chanwich. At a pivotal point in ‘One Life to Live’ my telephone rang. A woman who introduced herself as Pamela was determined to woo me away from my current long-distance carrier.

  ‘We’ve been observing your calling patterns, Mr. Heck, and notice that you seem to have several European friends. Did you realize that our company can save you up to twenty-three percent on overseas calls?’

  I wound up switching to her company because, seeing as I had made a commitment to change, it seemed cowardly not to honor it. After our conversation I hung up the phone, expecting it to ring again a few minutes later. I thought I was on a roll and that — who knows? — anyone might call, anyone at all.

  The phone didn’t ring again until sometime around ten in the evening, by which point I was pretty well potted. It was a woman’s voice and she started in immediately saying, ‘All right now, I realize you probably don’t remember who I am, do you?’ She gave me a moment to guess but I could not begin to identify her.

  ‘It’s me, Trudy Chase. I used to be Trudy Cousins. Chase is my married name even though I’m no longer married if that makes any sense! Anyway, I don’t live in Piedmont anymore but I still have the good old Post-Democrat delivered to my door every day and that’s where I read the obituary on your mother. I know it’s been a while but I just wanted to tell you that I’m very sorry to hear about it.’

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘You really don’t remember me, do you?’ she said. ‘It’s me, crazy Trudy who used to sit beside you in Mr. Pope’s senior English class. Remember me? I was the crazy one. I was the one who wrote ‘Don’t follow me — I’m lost too’ on the back of her graduation gown. It’s me, crazy Trudy.’

  Suddenly I remembered her perfectly. Even at eighteen she struck me as hopeless.

  ‘So, Trudy,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Oh, you know me. I’m just as crazy as ever. No, I take that back I’m probably crazier if you can believe that!’

  I thought for a moment before saying, ‘Oh.’ Because that’s really something I can’t stand — when people refer to themselves as crazy. The truly crazy are labeled so on the grounds that they see nothing wrong with their behavior. They forge ahead, lighting fires in public buildings and defecating in frying pans without the slightest notion that they are out of step with the rest of society. That, to me, is crazy. Calling yourself crazy is not crazy, only obnoxious.

  Trudy went on to tell me that she’s lived here in Manhattan for three months, having been transferred from the home office in Piedmont. She chuckled, adding that the people here think she’s just about the craziest person they’ve ever met. She’s so crazy that she planned an office party for Lincoln’s birthday and petitioned her boss to free the slaves in the accounting department. And she even wore a tall hat and a fake beard! The members of her tenants association thought she should be committed after she hosted the last meeting…by candlelight!

  ‘Ha, ha,’ I said. ‘That sounds pretty scary.’

  ‘Nothing scares me,’ she said. ‘That’s how crazy I am.’

  On my silent TV I watched as a defeated wrestler shook his hairbrush at the referee, obviously screaming for a rematch. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Not a damned thing,’ she said. ‘Nada. Othing nay.’

  The very idea that, out of nowhere, a member of my 1975 graduating class would call me and speak pig latin created a mixed sense of repulsion and endless possibilities.

  Trudy spoke of her involvement in any number of organizations. She is, for example, volunteering to walk the dogs of recent stroke victims. ‘I usually walk with a woman named Marcie, and, Jesus, if you think I’m crazy, you should meet her! We call ourselves the Poop Troop, and next week we’re getting our uniforms. You should join us sometime.’

  I pictured myself wearing an ‘I brake for hydrants’ T-shirt and a baseball cap decorated with a synthetic stool.

  On top of everything else Trudy also finds the time to play on her company volleyball team, iron for her crazy arthritic neighbor, and teach underprivileged children to make fudge. She didn’t say it in a boastful way. She wasn’t looking for a medal or trying to make me feel selfish. She invited me over to her apartment for a get-together, but I bowed out, claiming I had a business meeting to attend.

  ‘Well if your meetings are half as crazy as mine you’re going to need all the luck you can get,’ she said.

  She asked if she could call me after my meeting and I told her to hold on a moment as I had another call coming in. She’s been holding for fifteen minutes now and I still can’t make up my mind. I look over at my mother’s card on the refrigerator. BE GOOD. But she never specified: Be good to whom? If I’m good to Trudy Chase, I’ll tell her never to call me again. If I’m good to myself, I’ll wind up making fudge and walking the dogs of stroke victims. Which is worse?

  ESSAYS

  DIARY OF A SMOKER

  I RODE my bike to the boat pond in Central Park, where I bought myself a cup of coffee and sat down on a bench to read. I lit a cigarette and was enjoying myself when the woman seated twelve feet away, on the other side of the bench, began waving her hands before her face. I thought she was fighting off a bee.

  She fussed at the air and called out, ‘Excuse me, do you mind if we make this a no-smoking bench?’

  I don’t know where to begin with a statement like that. ‘Do you mind if we make this a no-smoking bench?’ There is no ‘we.’ Our votes automatically cancel one
another out. What she meant was, ‘Do you mind if I make this a no-smoking bench?’ I could understand it it we were in an elevator or locked together in the trunk of a car, but this was outdoors. Who did she think she was? This woman was wearing a pair of sandals, which are always a sure sign of trouble. They looked like the sort of shoes Moses might have worn while he chiseled regulations onto stone tablets. I looked at her sandals and at her rapidly moving arms and I crushed my cigarette. I acted like it was no problem and then I stared at the pages of my book, hating her and Moses — the two of them.

  The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

  My school insurance expires in a few weeks so I made an appointment for a checkup. It’s the only thing they’ll pay for as all of my other complaints have been dismissed as ‘Cosmetic.’

  If you want a kidney transplant it’s covered but if you desperately need a hair transplant it’s ‘Cosmetic.’ You tell me.

  I stood around the examining room for twenty minutes, afraid to poke around as, every so often, a nurse or some confused patient would open the door and wander into the room. And it’s bad enough to be caught in your underpants but even worse to be caught in your underpants scratching out a valium prescription on someone else’s pad.

  When the doctor finally came he looked over my chart and said, ‘Hey, we have almost the exact same birthday. I’m one day younger than you!’

  That did wonders for my morale. It never occurred to me that my doctor could be younger than me. Never entered my mind.

  He started in by asking a few preliminary questions and then said, ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘Only cigarettes and pot,’ I answered.

  He gave me a look. ‘ Onlycigarettes and pot? Only?’

  ‘Not crack,’ I said. ‘Never touch the stuff. Cigars either. Terrible habit, nasty.’

  I was at work, defrosting someone’s freezer, when I heard the EPA’s report on secondhand smoke. It was on the radio and they reported it over and over again. It struck me the same way that previous EPA reports must have struck auto manufacturers and the owners of chemical plants: as reactionary and unfair. The re-port accuses smokers, especially smoking parents, of criminal recklessness, as if these were people who kept loaded pistols lying on the coffee table, crowded alongside straight razors and mugs of benzene.

  Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call ‘Find Mom, find Mom’s cigarettes.’ There’s one in every picture. We’ve got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling.

  She smoked in the bathtub, where we’d find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom’s theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked. It made sense to us.

  Even after she was diagnosed with lung cancer she continued to smoke, although less often. On her final trip to the hospital, sick with pneumonia, she told my father she’d left something at home and had him turn the car around. And there, standing at the kitchen counter, she entertained what she knew to be her last cigarette. I hope that she enjoyed it.

  It never occurred to any of us that Mom might quit smoking. Picturing her without a cigarette was like trying to imagine her on water skis. Each of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it, with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, ‘Sooner or later, something’s going to get you.’

  Something got me the moment I returned home from work and Hugh delivered his interpretation of the EPA report. He told me that I am no longer allowed to smoke in any room that he currently occupies. Our apartment is small — four tiny rooms.

  I told him that seeing as I pay half the rent, I should be al-lowed to smoke half the time we’re in the same room. He agreed, on the condition that every time I light a cigarette, all the windows must be open.

  It’s cold outside.

  GIANTESS

  WRITERS! Have fun while earning a few extra bucks writing erotica! Giantess magazine needs stories about gals who grow to gigantic proportions! Send sample of work to D.L. Publications.’

  I circled that ad in this morning’s paper and left it lying on my desk while I went to work, staining the bookcases of an art director. This man had, among other artifacts, a pair of delicate porcelain plates, each picturing a single sperm making its reckless journey toward an egg. By mid-afternoon this man had only one such plate. It wasn’t necessarily our fault; it just sort of happened. The woman I was working with thought we should leave a confessional note but I thought it might be a better idea to tell him that a squirrel had come in the window, jumped on the dresser, smashed the plate, and left as suddenly as it had arrived. I thought we should scratch the surface of the dresser to suggest destructive claw marks. Lili decided it might be better for her to blame it all on me, seeing as the client was a friend of her brother. That was how we left it.

  I came home and wrote a letter to Giantess magazine, including a story I had written several years ago. I don’t happen to have any giantess stories lying around the house so I sent them something about a short man, hoping they might recognize size as a theme.

  I worked today for Marilyn Notkin, stripping the paint off her bedroom windows with a heat gun. I was at it for half an hour when I blew a fuse, at which point I set down my heat gun and headed downstairs to the basement fuse box. On my way back to Marilyn’s I popped into the first-floor apartment and joined Kim in watching a few minutes of ‘Oprah.’ This morning Oprah’s guests were people who had forgiven the unforgivable. One woman had testified on behalf of the man who had stabbed her twenty times. Another had embraced the drunk driver who killed her only son. She invites this fellow over to her house for holidays and Sunday dinners.

  ‘He’s like a second son to me now,’ she said, reaching over to take his hand. ‘I wouldn’t trade Craig for anything.’ The felon stared at his feet and shrugged his shoulders. I was thinking that a lengthy prison sentence would probably be a lot more comfortable than having to take the place of the person you had killed. I thought it was funny and was laughing when I heard, in the distance, a high-pitched whine like a car alarm but no, not a car alarm. It was shrill and relentless and I was trying to identify it when I remembered the heat gun and ran upstairs to Marilyn’s bedroom, where the flaming windowsill had just set fire to the sheer white curtains.

  The smoke alarm was screaming and I froze for a moment, watching the curtains change color. And then I was hugging them to my chest and pawing the flames with my hands. I wasn’t even thinking, I was so afraid. The fire died in my hands and afterwards, desperately trying to cover my tracks, I wondered what I might say to someone after burning down their house.

  ‘No, I mean it, I’m really, really sorry and just to prove it I’m not going to charge you for today’s work. My treat.’

  The editor of Giantess called to say he’d received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himself as Hank, saying, ‘I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you’ll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I’m talking about here, Dave?’ Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. ‘Do you know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?’

  It seemed to be something I might be capable of. Hank offered to send me a
few back issues and I said it sounded good to me. Later in the afternoon I took a walk to the grocery store, wondering what might cause a woman to grow to such proportions. I think it must be terribly lonely to stand seventy-five feet tall. You’d have no privacy and every bowel movement would evacuate entire cities. What would you eat? A roast chicken would be the size of a peanut. You might put away five dozen but leave with the feeling you were only snacking.

  I am working this week on the Upper East Side, assisting a decorative painter named Jeffrey Lee. The clients are renovating their fifteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, converting one of the bedrooms into a bathroom for their dogs. I had never in my life witnessed such wealth until this afternoon when Jeffrey and I had lunch in the apartment of the project’s interior decorator. I was amazed by the splendor: a Sargent painting in the drawing room, a small Bosch propped up in the kitchen — room after room filled with treasures. The decorator wasn’t home so Jeffrey and I had lunch in the kitchen with an estimator and three burly men who had come to replace the dining room windows. I expected that we would sit together and marvel at the grandeur, but instead Jeffrey Lee made a phone call and the men talked shop — window talk, the dullest shoptalk on earth.

  ‘What do you think about those one-and-three-quarter seamless pane liners?’ one of the men asked. ‘I worked with those up on East Eighty-Fourth and, let me tell you, they’re a pain in the ass to hoist, but the bastards glaze like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Hell,’ another man said, tugging at his T-shirt. ‘I wouldn’t give you two cents for a Champion Eight. I’d rather double-pane three-quarter Stets any day of the week they’re worth two dozen Champions just on installation alone. Double-bind those Stets with a copper-bound Toby Steelhead and you’ve got yourself a window.’

  A window washer arrived at the door and the installation foreman pointed to one of his men, saying, ‘Byron, why don’t you take Mr. Clean into the dining room and give him a few pointers on those new Moldonatos?’