Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

The evidence that I’m an asshole was mounting.

  Exhibit A: Nobody called me anymore.

  Exhibit B: When former friends and acquaintances saw me in public, they looked the other way.

  Exhibit C: I didn’t even care that much.

  Tip seemed to be the only human being on the planet who insisted on having regular contact with me.

  “Are you ready to shake the blues away?” he asked me after I picked up the telephone that morning.

  “Possibly.”

  “Answer yes or no.”

  “Yes, I’m ready,” I said rather limply.

  “Come on, more enthusiasm! Carpe diem! Seize the day!”

  “Yeah, that’s just what my day needs right now is a seizure.”

  “You’re going to have something only slightly less painful than a seizure – two rooms full of French people.”

  “Really?” I asked. I adore France; I felt encouraged by the news. “When are they coming?”

  “Not till later tonight, sometime after nine. They’re flying in from Houston and will probably be very tired. Give them Jefferson and Mimi, total $150 per night for four nights. So, we’re still on for today, right?”

  “Absolutely.” I had scrounged up a couple of pet sitting gigs and wanted Tip to come along to see our new clients.

  “I’m so excited. Let me check….Yes, I’ve got the address and I’ll see you there around twelve or so.”

  Pets

  Some time after noon I found myself in the apartment of a near stranger ready to give succor to a beautiful and slightly neurotic Siamese cat. I called to her as I lay down on the couch and she moved swiftly and gracefully into the room like a 1930’s film actress in an Adrian gown. She approached me, sauntering down the coffee table, truly her cat walk, jumped onto my chest and after much fidgeting, settled down into a sphinx pose; her paws at my throat, her little asshole above my belly button. We chatted quietly and as usual I had to carry the conversation and it was all about her. ‘It’s always about you, isn’t it precious?”

  The doorbell rang. I buzzed Tip in and greeted him, ‘Hi, Tip.”

  “Hi. How’s business?” he said, giving the apartment a quick once over and sniffing money in the air. “Is that a cat you’re holding?”

  “Yeah, duh. Did you have to ask?”

  “I thought this guy had a dog. I hate,” and here he paused for emphasis, “felines,” as though it was some terrible insult.

  “First of all this ‘guy’ is a gal and second of all, how can you say that?” I bent my head down and said sweetly to the cat, “I jus’ wuv da wittew kitties.” Certain animals, like my favorite old movies, draw from me the most heinous sentiment.

  “Well, that’s one reason I hate cats, that prissy, tweety bird voice people use to talk to them and in addition they have way, way too much attitude; those Egyptians spoiled them rotten.”

  “It’s not their fault, and we don’t call a five thousand year old attitude problem, a problem. It’s a trait.” Tip crouched down and put his face up to the cat and looked her in the eye.

  “IT would make a great mummy,” he said.

  “My poor poopy shoes, don’t you wisten to him,” I said as I began stroking the cat vigorously in all the right places.

  “They’re killers! The only reason she doesn’t rip your throat out is because you’re bigger than she is.”

  “It’s true; and she’d being doing it slowly just to prolong her joy.”

  “Oh, just look at that cruel mouth and those cold eyes. She gives me the willies.”

  The cat growled deep and low.

  “Look, you’ve upset her, stop it. She’s hewping me pay my went,” I said to the cat as I deep massaged her. Tip thought of loyal, trustworthy dogs as Republicans and slinky, sophisticated cats as Democrats.

  “So, what does this person do for a living?” Tip asked as he fingered a table for dust.

  “Finance.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not really sure exactly. She travels to Asia a lot. In fact she’s away more than at home. It’s sad, all these professionals who have no time to feed, walk, play with or even touch their pets. I feel bad for them.”

  “Pets or professionals?”

  “Well, both really. Owners numbed by their soul sucking jobs just aren’t able to provide a good home environment for the pets, who suffer needlessly.”

  “Suffer?! Not able to provide a good home environment for the pets?! Are you crazy? I’m on the seventh floor of a building in Pacific Heights gazing languidly at my fabulous view of the Bay. As I turn my head slowly, oh so slowly, so as not to hit the vintage two thousand dollar Venini lamp, I notice my fifteen thousand dollar entertainment center, which dominates the living room of original Stickley furniture. When is the ASPCA going to compel the government to clear these wretched slums!? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I mean love. These animals know they’re being shunted off to strangers. It’s a great cause of anxiety for them.”

  “Well, you’re the expert on anxiety.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  I fed and watered the cat, changed her forlorn kitty litter and gave her the contractual fifteen minutes of play-time, which was excruciating for Tip to watch.

  Public transitions

  When I’d finished with the kitty, we went out to the bus stop on the corner. Tip’s car was in the shop and I had left mine at home. Sometimes when I’m feeling lazy I like to take the bus; I like to have someone else take the responsibility of transporting me. So we took the Fillmore bus headed for the next assignment on Alamo Square.

  “There are two seats in back, let’s grab those.”

  “No, Roy, I can’t sit facing the back of the bus. I get totally nauseated.”

  “It’s all in your head, Tip. It’s psychological.”

  “OK, but I’m not going to run out and pay thousands of dollars to some therapist just so I can give myself some more options while riding public transportation, which I’ll most likely never do again.”

  We found two seats, one in front of the other on the aisle. Barely two minutes into the ride, I notice Tip acting wiggy. He’s looking around furtively, but trying not to make eye contact with anyone.

  “What’s going on, Tip?” I ask him with a locked jaw that I hope will make my question unintelligible to those around us.

  “This is making me really nervous,” Tip says, sotto voce.

  “Why?”

  “Do you know any of these people?”

  I look around and whisper,

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “About what, Tip?” He was promoting me to a more advanced level of annoyance.

  “These strangers.”

  “Ok, Tip, describe to me what you’re seeing.”

  “I see a lot of people that look like Arab terrorists.”

  “Tip, you’re embarrassing me!” I say in a harsh whisper. I jab him in the shoulder to make him turn around and then I inaudibly mouth,

  “They’re Mexican.”

  “Oh.”

  We got off at Hayes Street and walked the block up the hill. Tip was rather pensive before he said,

  “Sorry, Roy, I didn’t mean to freak out like that on the bus.”

  “Oh, it’s ok. I had a weird experience like that once. Except instead of terrorists everybody on the bus looked like Sissy Spacek. Let’s stop for a smoke before we go in.”

  Bondage

  Whenever I get together with Tip, I try to keep our interaction brief, because brevity is not something he achieves easily, particularly when he’s smoking. The noxious fumes seem to smoke out all the thoughts in his head, send them rushing for the nearest exit. I was thinking we hadn’t had any quality time together lately and after embarrassing himself in front of me, he might want to talk. But a heart-to-heart talk for Tip means gossip, not soul-search. He loves to recount the woes of Sheila,
his former co-worker and confidante. And so he began the next installment of the ongoing serial:

  “Her first husband sounded like a complete asshole. He died on her and did it in the most disgusting way. He was out at this bar called the Oktoberfest getting sloppy drunk, per usual”.

  (Tip then asks me if I might have known Sheila’s husband because he thinks Alcoholism is like the Ivy League. “I don’t think so,” I tell him, but I neglect to mention I’d knocked back more than a few alkoholisches Getränk’s in my days at the Oktoberfest. He continues:)

  “He gets up to leave and as he’s walking into the street he gets hit by a speeding car; obviously the driver was confused and thought he was on the autobahn or something. So the car hits him and severs his body in two and then his top half from the waist up flies back at the car and kills one of the passengers. Freaky or what?”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “I know, talk about bizarre, but that’s not all. So, the family’s making funeral arrangements and his mother and first wife start arguing about where he should be buried. The mother wants Tulsa, first wife wants Oklahoma City. So Sheila, the second wife, the one I worked with -- I can’t believe she said this -- suggests that since the body is already in two pieces they can bury him in both places. Well, the shock of it all made the first wife cave in – Tulsa was just fine with her after all. So, everybody’s happy right? Well, when they see the tombstone on the day of the funeral it reads ‘Devoted husband, father, son and a fabulous lover’ (as she was looking at it, Sheila’s thinking, right, abusive husband, absent father, disrespectful son, unimaginative lover; devoted exclusively to alcohol). The mother was pissed; she accuses the first wife, ‘why did you do this to me? Is this because you didn’t get Oklahoma City?’ ‘I didn’t do it’, says the first wife. Then she points to Sheila, the second wife, the one I worked with, and says ‘She did it.’ And Sheila’s like, ‘don’t look at me’. Turns out he had a mistress who ordered the stone but regretfully couldn’t make it to the funeral because of a scheduling conflict. Weirder than fiction or what? Sheila said any woman who thought he was a fabulous lover must have had a porcupine for a pussy.”

  “What did she mean by that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t handle death very well, it makes me nervous. Funerals are a disaster for me. Everybody manages to be nice and consoling but not me; I have to say stupid things that never quite sound humane once they’ve left my mouth. Especially when I’m under the influence. I’m offensive at funerals.”

  “Maybe you have a fear of death. What’s the word for that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, like the fear of hanging around in the city with lots of people is angoraphobia…”

  “You mean agoraphobia. Angoraphobia is the fear of expensive sweaters.”

  “Right, so what’s the word for fear of death, like, you know, Mortphobia or something?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked, and don’t think I wasn’t snide when I said it. “Everybody’s afraid of death, why would they have a word for that?”

  “I mean an unreasonable fear of death.”

  “What’s unreasonable about fearing death? We’re all going to die. That’s scary. It’s never unreasonable to fear death.”

  “Ok, Roy, you’re getting a little stuck.” The full horror of his public transport terrorist scare was just now sinking in and Tip began ruminating on his own imminent demise.

  “I think I have T.B.,” he stated.

  “I thought we were changing the subject.”

  “We are. First we were talking about you, now we’re talking about me.” He gave himself a moment and then repeated, with more urgency, “Roy, I think I have T.B.”

  “No you don’t, you have a cold. Are you spitting up blood?”

  “No.” Tip is always surprised at how down to earth I can be at times. I can be as ‘get to the point’ as anyone.

  “Well?”

  “But when I cough I can taste the blood at the back of my throat. Sometimes I feel like Garbo in ‘Camille.”

  “Tip, your wardrobe isn’t nice enough to make comparisons with Garbo appropriate.”

  “Oh, l’amour, l’amour, la morte, la morte,” he said, as he blew a perfect smoke ring of the sort I’ve never been able to manage. For one nanosecond I envied him. “I don’t think my landlord would let me die in my apartment. He had a fit when my goldfish died and I left them out in the hall. What I really need is an artist’s garret with subdued northern light, like Gene Kelly had in ‘An American in Paris’.”

  “Artist’s garrets are now called penthouses and rent out at many thousands of dollars a month.”

  “I suppose I could die at my friend Sharon’s.” (Sheila, Sharon, Shaniqua; it seemed that all Tip’s female acquaintances had names that began with the shooshing sound ‘ssshhh..’) “She lives in an illegal basement apartment that violates all health and fire codes. It’s hardly got any natural light. Of course I couldn’t linger. I think she’d only let me stay if she knew it was going to be a quick death.”

  Tip and I fell silent and took to staring numbly at the postcard ‘Painted Ladies’, those Victorian houses with identical rooflines known to all the world. At the peak of each roof stands a wooden gee-gaw exclamation point, though a comma would be more appropriate. I broke the silence,

  “God I wish those things would burn down.”

  “Oh, hallelujah, right down to their foundations,” Tip answered.

  I was happy that Tip and I were bonding, finding common ground outside of Golden Rules but then I remembered how much he loves our president. I abruptly stood up to leave – “What, we’re leaving already, we just got here,” he said in response – and began walking across the grass trying to avoid the dog shit and the dense clusters of tourists who take pictures of those cursed houses like the old colonials took wild beasts from Africa and had them mounted on the walls; you hadn’t really done the trip if you hadn’t bagged your game.

  Bugsy

  “A bunny,” Tip said, when we were up in the apartment and he noticed the rabbit, like it was something he had to think over.

  “Yes, Tip, a bunny.” He was giving me a sour look. “What?”

  “Well, I don’t know, kitties, bunnies. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I mean the business is called ‘Pooch Smooch’, a pooch is a dog.”

  “Pooch Smooch’ is a working title and rabbits are a lot of fun.”

  “I don’t know. Look at what a piece of work Bugs Bunny was.”

  Some animals reign over households as deposed princes or puppet monarchs. Giggles the rabbit would sprawl on his belly like a plump teenage girl reading a magazine in front of the television: inattentive and self-absorbed. But sometimes he would stand on his hind legs bent over and rubbing his paws like an old crone in a fairytale. ‘Apples, apples,’ he seemed to be saying. And the endless douching and primping and preening!

  Tip fell back into the role of observer and into the vintage 60’s couch that I worried was not hale enough to withstand his unique fat/lean body mass. He began leafing through magazines, each issue of which costs as much as a hard cover book.

  “Don’t sweat on those,” I felt it necessary to warn him. I’d noted years ago that the chemical composition of Tip’s perspiration was such that it degraded the print ink of publications that he held too long, leaving smudges and his fingerprints all over them. Certain South American toads secrete venom with similar properties.

  I grabbed a carrot from the fridge and began pouring pellets into Giggles’ feed bowl as he navel gazed and licked his private parts on the kitchen floor.

  “This really isn’t necessary,” I said as I bowed down to talk to him while he continued obsessively cleaning himself, “Tip isn’t company, he’s just the hired help and I’m sorry dear but it’s been years since you’ve had suitors come calling.”

  Giggles was kept; val
ued for his beauty and his sleek presence, he was that much the gigolo. He had an air of the effete about him, with his pin-up girl poses and his pampered languor. His stay in the house was bereft of demands. In fact he did nothing of any practical value, never even offered to help out as some of the dogs do. He knew he was getting away with something; he delighted in dropping his tiny round balls of dung all throughout the house. These little ovoid bits of shit were the materialization of his mirth, nervous giggles made manifest. Too reserved to laugh out loud at a house full of absurdities, or to laugh at the absurdity of houses themselves, he would run and hop like a hooligan from room to room, a pea-sized pellet here, tee-hee, another over there, tee-hee, a pile on the sofa-ba-ha-ha-ha. The rabbit had a cosmic sense of humor; all the concerns and conceits of his owners were cause for quiet amusement, likewise the very idea of ownership. He was aloof but became rattled at the slightest disturbance.

  For the bunny, the gnashing of his teeth on books, furniture and sticks is his way of helping his owners loosen the tethers that tie them down. Likewise all the animals make mulch of materialism. Perhaps that’s the task domestic animals have been charged with, to watch over the humans and slowly shred all our material possessions, to compost all our things, leaving us less encumbered, to chew away at our lives as life chews away at our calendars.

  Les Français did indeed arrive later that evening around nine o’clock. They were two middle-aged couples who were earthy and physically fit. I’d known French people like this, from good peasant stock who, though they live in suburbs and cities, still have mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts who are of the soil. These old country people make sharp wines and have bowed legs and large hands that look like misshapen tools.

  I spent a delightful half-year of my life in France when I was around twenty. I used to speak French quite well – I was once mistaken for a Swiss person (I assumed they meant a French-speaking one). I was rather proud of that even though I knew it was something of a put down: the French spoken by the Swiss is considered less than top-notch but worlds better than anything an American could come up with.

  I couldn’t wait to be mocked by the French; c’est toujours un grand plaisir.

  Chapter X: La-La France