Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light

by Helen Ellis

  She mouthed: You do not have to do this.

  But a bet’s a bet. I saw an opening, and I took it.

  The moderator asked us, “What do your families think about your writing?”

  And before the other panelists, Patrick deWitt and Etgar Keret, could open their mouths, I Forrest-Gumped: “Mama always said, ‘Helen Michelle, your sense of humor is like a butt plug: Not everyone is going to appreciate it.’ ”

  And they didn’t.

  While Patrick and Etgar gaped in my direction, and my publicist walked a twenty-dollar bill right up to me onstage, most of the Australians in the room didn’t like the joke because not everyone is fond of what Mama calls “bathroom humor.”

  So for the rest of the panel, I was professional.

  My husband says, “It’s impressive to watch you shut down your Helen shtick when you sense that people don’t like it.”

  “My Helen shtick?” Good lord, I thought, how long has he had a name for it?

  He said, “You know, acting out stories, being overly polite, shocking people with the nice way you look and then with the naughty things you say.”

  While Mama most certainly never did say anything about a butt plug, she did promise me that she’d swear in court with her hand on a stack of Bibles that she did because she loves me.

  What she has said is: “Helen Michelle, you’re not for everyone. But you’re better than me: I work on someone for three years before I stop trying to win them over.”

  Me, I quit after three minutes.

  I’m a Believer!

  I believe the older the friend, the longer the lunch. I believe the better the friend, the messier my house can be when she visits.

  I believe in listening to an Uber driver tell you about her runaway daughter, four ex-husbands, getting punched in the face, and being shot at on three separate occasions, in the time it takes to drive you to the airport.

  Life lesson learned on the road from Fairhope to Mobile, Alabama: “I’ve been a widow for twenty-seven years. The only way I’ll marry again is if he sleeps in his own bedroom and has an ungodly amount of money.”

  I believe in what goes around comes around, reincarnation, and time travel, so my idea of heaven is being Betty White on Match Game.

  I believe there should be TV shows like Laundry Room Wars, Chardonnay Showdown, and Librarian Mosh Pit. I believe there should be Instagram shaming accounts like Elbow-Length Hair Drapes My Arm on Public Transportation and Bad Manicures Hold eBay Products for Size Reference. I believe there should be etiquette manuals called Don’t Text and Tinkle; Don’t Wear Fishnets to a Funeral; and Oh, the Things You Don’t Tweet!

  I want a Pulitzer Prize for Tweeting.

  I want a book genre called “It’s not chick lit. It’s lit, bitch!”

  Instead of a chip on my shoulder, I keep a Nestlé morsel under my bra strap. Instead of the superpower of flight or invisibility, I’d like the ability to pick a ripe pear. I want to get chicken-fried-steak sleepy. I believe in buying the next size up because I was not put on this earth to fit into or restrain the largeness of my life.

  Nor was I put on this earth to scroll my birth year like a Price Is Right wheel, or remember what it was like to be your age.

  I believe that people who are ten years younger than you are not your age.

  I believe that people who are ten years older than you do not care how old you think you are.

  No, I don’t want to talk to you on the phone while you talk to a barista; or text you when I get there; or wait for you on a corner that’s near there because I am not a prostitute. I don’t want to grab anything by the horns, keep it real, or cut a bitch. My freak flag is ironed and triangle-folded in my linen closet. And no, I have no interest in guessing what has two thumbs and does whatever it is that you do.

  I believe in monogrammed tie-dye T-shirts, tasseled sandals, wrist corsages, pageant waving, and yelling “Wheee!” instead of popping Xanax. I believe that nothing ages you more than shushing a room.

  I believe in misquoting Steel Magnolias.

  You know, put up my dukes and say, “Meet my friends, Blush and Bashful.”

  Or pull up my shirt and say, “Meet my friends, Blush and Bashful.”

  Instead of a barking dog, I want a home alarm that sounds like a barfing cat.

  Instead of an ice cream truck, I want a lipstick truck that plays “Maybe-It’s-Maybelline!”

  I want a grown-ass lady coloring box with Clinique-moisturizer yellow, Windex blue, and colonoscopy pink. I want emojis like mayonnaise jar; crushed-nutted cheese ball with a maraschino cherry on top; pink foam roller; the younger Grey Gardens lady waves an American flag for you; Bea Arthur gives you the side eye; and Cathy the cartoon goes “Aack!”

  I believe in hole-punching seven-year-old tax returns to make confetti. I believe the best hostess gift isn’t wine, it’s a fabulous plus-one. I believe the new book club is robotic floor cleaner races. Yes, we bet money. Level 2: we introduce Roomba-riding cats.

  Seriously.

  I was not put on this earth to make strangers take me seriously.

  I Go Greyhound!

  My husband and I got in line at Gate 9 at the Atlantic City bus terminal.

  It was summer, we were outside, and the line was already too long for me to be comfortable. I am already the opposite of comfortable at the Atlantic City bus terminal. The place where I am most comfortable is sitting on my couch, flanked by two cats. The opposite of comfortable is me standing with my back against a brick wall, avoiding eye contact with a swarm of drug addicts, drunks, and, quite frankly, the deranged. There are losers who lost more money than they’d planned to at slots or whatever the hell Let It Ride is, and they will not stop talking about it. Some people are old, and some people are infirm. There are babies. People smoke. And everybody is unhappy about getting on a bus, the likes of which my husband and I have been riding for more than twenty years because we go to Atlantic City to play poker and we don’t drive.

  But I was more than uncomfortable, and that means that the line was so long, I knew I’d have to sit by someone other than my husband because 80 percent of the time, the bus pulls into the terminal from a casino pickup, and therefore 60 percent of the seats are already taken. I have never asked and never will ask a stranger to move so I can sit by my husband because I don’t want trouble.

  Trouble is another passenger screaming: “Bitch, you grown! Sit your grown-ass down, you dumb bitch! What you think, bitch, you OWN the bus?”

  I know very well that I do not own the bus, like I don’t own the subway. When my husband and I get on a crowded subway car, we stand, or I sit and he stands in front of me because he is a gentleman. A gentleman stands in front of his date on a subway so that she may stare directly into his crotch, and not the crotch or ass of some stranger.

  Once, my husband sat catty-corner to me on a jam-packed subway.

  He remembers: “I heard the flapping sound first.”

  He looked up to see me look up from my book to see a flaccid penis flapping like a cocker spaniel’s ear in front of my face.

  I remember thinking, No, thank you, and looked right back down at my book. And yes, the woman beside me did exactly the same thing. The subway stopped, the door bell pinged, and the flasher left. And no, nobody else did a thing about it. Because it’s a subway, not high tea on a Viking River Cruise.

  The Greyhound from Atlantic City to Manhattan is worse than the subway because whatever goes down can go down for at least two and a half hours. And that bus ain’t stopping, which means you ain’t getting off. So when I know I’m not sitting by my husband, I try and nab a seat by the best stranger.

  The best stranger to sit beside is a woman. My first choice is a woman who’s sleeping. Second: a woman with a baby because that baby will eventually be sleeping. Third: a woman eating because she’ll e
ventually stop eating. Then a woman on her phone, then a woman yelling into her phone, then a woman who looks sick. If there are no seats by women, I take a seat by a man and pray he won’t bother me. If I reach the back of the bus, I’ve gone too far, because nothing stinks more than the two seats to the right of the toilet because a bus toilet doesn’t flush.

  A bus toilet is an eighteen-gallon Rubbermaid bin filled with that blue liquid that’s squirted onto maxi pads in maxi pad commercials. Sometimes the toilet is out of order and the door is duct-taped closed. The bus driver will announce at the start of our trip that we will all have to hold it.

  One time we pulled into a rest stop because of bad weather and the driver got off to do I-don’t-know-what. What I do remember is that it was after midnight, and a man escorted his mother—dressed in a sari, her silver hair swept into a bun—down the aisle because it was an emergency, while another passenger yelled after them: “You don’t get off the bus to URINATE!”

  But she did, and when the driver came back to find this woman and her son unaccounted for, we left them.

  The back two seats to the right of the toilet are also called the sex seats because people have sex in them, and the murder seats because that’s where someone beheaded and cannibalized a man on a Greyhound in Manitoba, Canada.

  So I never sit there.

  I go for the suicide seats, which are to the left of the driver. If there’s a wreck, I will fly headlong through the windshield and skip like a stone over a lane of cars. But by sitting in the suicide seats, I can save us all by watching the driver like an SAT proctor, and if he nods off, shout, “Hey, wake up! Drink your Pepsi!”

  Plus, the view is spectacular, and I can pretend that there aren’t people behind me, and I do own the bus.

  My husband does not care where he sits.

  Nor does he care where he stands in a line.

  I like to be the first person in line. So I arrive places god-awful early and start lines. When I am not the first in line, I think I’m in the wrong line.

  The line for Gate 9 at the Atlantic City bus terminal was at least forty people long. I asked the young woman in front of me, “Is this the line for the New York City bus?”

  She said, “Yeah.”

  I asked, “The 9:30 or the 10:00?”

  She flicked the back of her hand in my face.

  When someone gives me the talk-to-the-hand-because-the-face-ain’t-listening gesture, I shut the hell up, and I step the hell back because I respect that gesture, which means: Bitch, I don’t work here! Ask someone who works here, you dumb bitch!

  My husband said to me, “Wait here, I’ll go check.”

  My husband and I both have driver’s licenses because, when we were teenagers, we passed our driver’s tests; but both of us went to college at seventeen without cars, and have not owned cars since. So we are not confident drivers. So we don’t drive. Yes, we will wing it in a zombie apocalypse, but otherwise, in our lifetimes, our driving history is brief.

  I grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and from 1987 to 1988 drove a 1976 Buick Opel that my parents bought me for my sixteenth birthday. The car had been owned by two schoolmarms and had less than two thousand miles on it. It was square and yellow, and we nicknamed it the Corn Kernel. I drove it to Central High, or to my friends’ houses, or to the new mall. But, apart from those two years, I’ve been on a bus.

  I took long yellow school buses to three parts of town between sixth and tenth grades. I took city buses at the University of Colorado. I took state buses from Boulder to Denver, or Greyhounds up into the Rocky Mountains. When I took a job at a summer camp in the Catskills, I flew to LaGuardia and took a bus to Port Authority to catch a Short Line bus to Roscoe, New York.

  In 1989, Port Authority was more uncomfortable than the Atlantic City bus terminal. Imagine everything I hate about Gate 9 in Atlantic City, multiply it by a hundred, and pack that into a three-level building with low ceilings and morgue lighting. The place was (and is) mazelike. The subways feed into it. The streets feed into it. Back then, prostitutes worked the Eighth Avenue entrance like old-fashioned paper boys.

  Extree! Extree! A rim job costs extree!

  And people actively tried to rob you. But they weren’t going to get me. Weighing in at 115 pounds and wearing stonewashed high-waist Guess jeans with a paunch, I’d stuffed a money belt full of traveler’s checks down the front of my pants.

  But I was still scared.

  I called Mama from a pay phone. Collect. Crying. To be first in line for my bus, I’d gotten to Port Authority god-awful early. What was I going to do for the next four hours?

  Mama said, “Helen Michelle, find the gate for your bus, then find a person your age who’s sitting on a duffel bag. That person is a camp counselor. Make friends with her and ask to sit on her duffel bag. Then call me and let me know you’re okay.”

  I did what Mama told me but forgot to call her.

  Two hours later, a bus driver approached me. He said, “Are you Helen Ellis?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He said, “Your mother is very worried about you. Call your mother.”

  He was not our bus driver. He was a random bus driver who had been in the Short Line ticketing office when Mama had called that office, described me, and bullied him, Shirley MacLaine Terms of Endearment “Give my daughter the shot!” style, into finding me.

  “Ma’am, how old is your baby girl?”

  “Eighteen!”

  “Ma’am, how did you get this number?”

  “Never you mind, but if you don’t find her and have her call me, I will come to New York and I will find you.”

  What did we ever do before cell phones?

  That is what we did.

  In 1992, I moved to Manhattan, where I still get around by subways and buses, taxis, and, nowadays, phone-app carpooling options akin to hopping into the back of a serial killer’s van. My husband was born and raised here, and so has never needed to drive. I gave him driving lessons for his thirtieth birthday, but they didn’t stick.

  He admits, “I’m really bad at it.”

  He drove out of the Las Vegas airport at night without his lights on. He drove out of the Albuquerque airport with a rental car guy chasing after us because he’d left the parking brake on. He was pulled over by a Texas state highway patrolman (complete with mirrored sunglasses and Mountie hat) because he was swerving and driving under the speed limit, and asked, “Boy, have you been drinking?”

  “No sir. I’m from New York City.”

  Me, when I get in a car, I picture the wreck.

  I know a guy who hit a tree and bit his own tongue off. I have a relative whose parents were decapitated by a log truck while he was in the back seat as a child. My sister’s car spontaneously burst into flames in a parking lot. When my parents were T-boned and Mama was being loaded into an ambulance, she heard an EMT say, “Ma’am, do you know what DEAD is?”

  Mama said, “Do I know what DEAD is?”

  “No ma’am,” the EMT enunciated in his deep southern accent. “Do you know what DAY IT IS?”

  I’ve had friends who’ve died in car accidents, and a friend who killed a girl while driving drunk and went to prison for vehicular manslaughter. This year, my husband’s very best friend since elementary school, Gerald Lee, walked out of a restaurant in San Francisco and got hit and killed by a car.

  I won’t get into a car with a driver who’s had one sip of alcohol.

  And every time I get in a cab, I give this speech: “Hey, I’m going to pay you in cash. Would you please not use your cell phone? Take your time and be safe.”

  My husband is not afraid to be in a car. No matter how long or perilous the trip, he scrolls the news on his iPhone, and every time a driver merges onto the FDR tolerates me gripping his arm as if I’m hanging on to the landing skid of a helicopter. />
  Neither one of us has been behind a wheel in more than twenty years because, for us, driving a car is as unnerving as rolling down a hill in one of those giant inflatable gerbil balls is for most people. So we accept the inconveniences that come along with abstaining from driving like people who have stage fright accept that they can’t lip sync for their lives.

  We don’t drive, and we’re fine with it.

  When the Greyhound bus pulled into Gate 9 at the Atlantic City terminal, my husband and I found ourselves luckier than we’d been our whole trip: that bus was empty. And it was the 10:00 a.m. bus, for which we had tickets. The 9:30 a.m. bus, for which everyone else in front of us had tickets, had been canceled, so all those people had to haul their bags to the ticketing booth and have their tickets reissued.

  My husband and I were the first ones onto the bus, and we got seats together. He pulled out his iPad. And I snuggled up next to him, drifting off to sleep while listening to the melodic voice of a woman screaming at someone other than me, “Bitch, don’t touch me! I TOLD you to talk to the hand, you dumb bitch!”

  There’s

  a Lady at the

  Poker Table

  Here’s what I’ve been called at poker tables: the Librarian, the Velvet Terrorist, the Giggling Assassin; a beast; a bully; a bully in a pearl bracelet; a nice-looking lady who plays cards like an Internet kid; that actress who played Charlie Sheen’s stalker-next-door on Two and a Half Men.

  In Atlantic City, a guy said: “I’ve known some ladies, but you’re like a lady lady.”

  In Vegas, I was asked: “You’re so aggressive, were you ever a man?”

  In Atlantic City, a guy said: “You got that candy, but you don’t need to put that candy in our faces to play good poker. You keep that candy under your sweater.”