The Potty Mouth at the Table

by Laurie Notaro

  Now, true, if you look at my profile picture, you are going to see a bottle of liquid fuel, a bunch of yarn, several open shoe boxes, a couple of Target bags hanging in midair, a red shoe lying alone on its side, a box of fabric that I still haven’t unpacked—wait, make that two boxes of fabric that I haven’t unpacked—and a bunch of torn pages from a magazine I tacked to a bulletin board that is partially obscured by the Target bags, but I consider all of that set design. And as I told the person who commented on it and begged me to let her come over and organize it, to clean up my office would be to destroy my world. I know where everything is. No one is allowed in here and I don’t want anybody touching my stuff. I have my own system. It works for me. And at least my world doesn’t let my coworkers and in-laws know I’m ovulating or that I buy maxipads in a box so big I have nowhere to put it but in my sink.

  3. Any e-mail from a guy I don’t know that begins with the salutation “Hey, Pretty Lady”: Now, I’m not sure what it is I’m posting that is an open call for every lonely man from Pakistan to come knocking on my mailbox in search of transatlantic Facebook love, but I hardly think that a status update about finding little brown round things in my hair and believing them to be lice is a siren call. Then again, I don’t know what is considered sexy there. I have no idea. Maybe vermin scalp eggs are an attribute. I don’t know, but I have to admit that it felt a little invasive, and my immediate thought was to shoot back an e-mail that said, “I just farted, Aqib. How pretty is that!” But then a smaller, quieter voice said, “Do you think he really means it?”

  The thing of it is, Aqib, that I can tell you are very proud of your status as the richest man of your village, and I’m sure you worked hard to acquire your empire of three goats. However, I’m already the first wife here and you may be shocked to hear this, but I am running the show. I have no desire to become the Tuesday night appointment in your harem, and if I may speak frankly, I know you think you’re rich, but I saw bin Laden’s mansion on the news. It looked like Section 8 housing to me; in fact, it has a somewhat eerie resemblance to a block apartment building next to the freeway exit where crystal meth is openly traded in the parking lot like, say, kebabs. It was just as filthy on the inside, too, and he had a couple of wives. I know there was a tussle/bloodbath before those pictures were taken, but in all honesty that doesn’t explain the filthy sheets on the beds. That rubbed patch of grime developed long before any Navy SEALs landed in that compound.

  So I can imagine that any new girl on the block is going to be pulling the majority of that load, and I bet you don’t have a stackable Whirlpool Duet, either. That is, I’m afraid, a deal breaker. I hate bending down. So, while I thank you, Aqib, for noticing my inner beauty, and there is much of it, I am going to have to pass on your offer. But may I suggest that you might have better luck finding a concubine if anyone is left over at MySpace.

  PS: I know a couple of swingers; I can pass on your e-mail to them, too.

  PSS: They weren’t larvae eggs, but foxglove seeds after I knocked myself on the head with a spent stem, which I luckily realized before completing the plan of setting my hair on fire.

  2. Receiving messages from the dead: I understand that Facebook is a little challenged in this department since you cannot entirely ever expunge your account (that may be something you want to fix, Mark), but I have to say that getting a friend suggestion from Uncle Dan, who died last summer, was a little more than unsettling. Sure, I respected his opinion, and clearly, we have several mutual friends already, but communicating with the beyond is a little out of my safety zone. I didn’t set up a Ouija board, didn’t hire a psychic, and I have no interest in setting up a portal to another dimension, so to hear from Uncle Dan unsolicited was, in a word, friggin’ creepy.

  If I am ever given the opportunity to communicate with Uncle Dan in the unknown and ask some questions, they would be along the lines of “What did you do with my grandmother’s wedding ring?” or “I was riffling through some old documents and I was just wondering if you ever got the feeling that Grandpa maybe wasn’t your real father?” and probably not “Should I friend Shelley, the receptionist at your company who I have never met or spoken to?”

  So yes, Facebook, please invent an “I’m Dead, Thanks,” button so loved ones can truly rest in peace and not spend eternity haunting the right sidebar, still giving advice I don’t want.

  1. When someone else’s profile is not of that person but of you: Initially, I thought it was curious that someone’s profile looked so similar to my own; the style of hair, the position of the head, the expression on the face, until I looked close enough to see that the photo wasn’t similar at all; it was exact. It was me. And where did I see this but on my own timeline, where the person who stole my face was leaving a comment on something I posted.

  Now, this is altogether different from seeing someone who looks like you—this is a person who obviously went out of her way to swipe the photo, upload it onto her Facebook account, and select it as her profile pic, then flaunt it on my page. Who would steal someone else’s head and claim it as her own? And why? The creep factor is mile high on this one, as I’d rather have Aqib and his open-relationship harem talk to my dead Uncle Dan in my office, eating Chick-fil-A, than see my picture popping up with someone else’s name underneath. Again.

  I kind of felt like I had been skinned, and that It had done a good job of spreading lotion on Its body. I didn’t know what to do; I didn’t want to engage a stalker, because any acknowledgment is pretty much an invitation to break into your house and wait around with some piano wire in hand until you get home. If you have any ideas on how to handle this aside from buying a pet lion, tell me.

  The only other thing I can think of is to steal her profile picture and put it on my head. But I can’t even do that because it’s already my head. So if my real face goes missing anytime soon, the authorities will know to look for the friend wearing the Laurie hat on Facebook.

  SPIT SWAP MEET

  It was heading straight for my biscuits and gravy like an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. The arc was perfect. It shot into the air with impeccable form, a smooth, round curve gaining momentum with precisely perfect moment, bridging the span across the table with astonishing speed.

  I was stunned, knowing that in the next moment, something gruesome was about to happen. In a flashback, I recounted the previous hours and the perfect afternoon my friend and I had before ducking into this trendy brunch place for a well-deserved and much-anticipated bite to eat. It had been a glorious afternoon. We stopped into a fabulous chocolate shop, where they plied us with full-size free samples, and when sweet and salt are combined, it’s a known scientific fact that calories and fat grams are canceled out.

  We saw the most glamorous old-lady alcoholic weaving her way down the street wearing leopard-skin hot pants, huge sunglasses, and the brightest red lipstick smeared over her puckered mouth and melting face, a mirror image of what her pillow must have looked like that morning. She was incredible, and she reminded us of what drunken glories our respective retirements could hold if we could just outrun cancer and diabetes a little bit longer.

  And right outside the restaurant, we saw a gorgeous skinny girl crying, asking, “Why? Why?” to her brand-new ex-boyfriend, who was in the process of breaking up with her. And seriously, only a really good friend would know that after fake-reading the brunch menu posted in the front window, when you say, “I wonder if they have bacon here?” that you really mean, “Let’s hang out here for a second until he answers that question or she blows a snot bubble.”

  So truly, it had been a day to remember, full of exceptional achievements and realized reveries (free chocolate, lady alcoholics in leopard skin, and sobbing models!), and not only had had our afternoon bonded us closer in only a way pure excess and evil can, but we also worked up an appetite while we were at it.

  I was ravenous when we entered the restaurant and opened the menu with the delightful realization that of course I could order fi
ve pounds of French toast and a baker’s dozen of biscuits and gravy, because a daily diet of chewing gum and five sips of Red Bull had done no favors for the girl now sitting on the curb with her protruding cheekbones in her skeleton hands that clearly no man wanted to hold. When our meals were finally delivered and my biscuits and gravy were placed before me, my mouth watered a little bit and I readied for the attack. I couldn’t wait to dig in, and as I lifted my fork to go in for the kill, I saw it out of the corner of my eye, taking flight.

  The tiny rocket of spittle launched from my friend’s mouth as she was in the middle of telling me a story about a girl we knew who had been living in a run-down Winnebago that exploded after some illegal fireworks in it caught fire. My eyes followed it involuntarily as it entered the airspace on my side, then landed, skidding into the middle of my biscuits and gravy like a high jumper in a sandpit.

  By the time I saw it, it was too late to cobble a defense together, even something as simple as attempting to swat it with my hand like it was a white fly or impure thought was out of the question. Seriously, even the most prepared person would be rendered helpless after realizing a drop of spit was charging at their food like a goat released from a medieval trebuchet, which had just landed with a barbaric splat! Really, I mean unless you’re a character out of a trashy vampire book, no one has the lightning reflexes necessary to conquer such a juicy, hurried foe, but my reflexes were sharp enough to know that whatever beautiful promise of satisfaction and carb overdose my lunch once held, it was now lost to the ages, like Cher’s real nose or American homeownership.

  Gagging and covering your mouth is not a good move, so I’m sorry I did that, for two reasons: (a) retching noises with any amount of volume are never really welcome in a food service establishment and that becomes very obvious once you emit them; and (b) I then had to quickly think up a reason of what would trigger a such a reaction (aside from “Shit! You just spit all over my food!”), and saying you swallowed the cough drop you were saving under your tongue wasn’t going to win you any court cases.

  Also, mouthing the “F” word isn’t particularly beneficial, either, and can cause hurt feelings, particularly if the Spitter knows what she’s done and the defiled baked good now lies on the table between us like a dead possum. This can cause uncomfortable silence for the remainder of the time you spend together, which in my case was four hours, most of that being in my car. This will result in both of you feigning extended and painful excitement over the “performance” screen in a Prius, literally forcing you to make squealing noises every time it’s noted that you’re getting 99.9 miles to the gallon, which happens roughly every seven seconds, simply because there is nothing left to say except, “Have you thought about investing in one of those spittle-suctions they have at the dentist’s office to suck up some of the excess saliva? Or perhaps a mouth sponge?”

  After “the incident,” I realized that if gagging was my go-to response, I was going to need to round it out with a believable finish to cover the fact that I found my dear friend’s saliva so repulsive that it triggered one of the most undesirable physical reactions in the human repertoire. True, while gagging is far favorable to say, stabbing, the message is remarkably similar.

  I could only hope that if I were on the precipice of a subsequent vomiting at the table in the same situation, I would not try to hide the fact, in hopes that my friend would hopefully ask if I was all right. (I must note here that this is not effective in the least with most husbands or sociopaths with an easily excitable parotid gland, and if you really want to avoid spittle flying on your food like a meteor shower, avoid dining with anyone on antipsychotic meds. I learned the suggested standard antipsychotic med radius of five to ten feet—depending on the visible froth—the hard way after hiring a guy with “emotional challenges” to clean the leaves out of my gutters. As he scrambled up the ladder, he relayed stories about his family—how his mother was a whore and that his father never loved her—and although I was transfixed, I was much more horrified to discover that those weren’t raindrops I felt while holding the base of the ladder that day.)

  Thinking quickly, I decided I’d try to trigger my friend’s gag response by describing the hair I’d just seen in her biscuits and gravy. Should she be so bold as to investigate, I would just explain that: “It was a thick hair. Heavy. It must have sunk into the gravy.” And then . . . the coup de grace: “It was curly.”

  If this is not enough to make her avert her eyes and hail the waiter, then either I am a worse liar than I thought or I need to make new friends. Unless you are someone who owns every single Jackass episode on DVD or you are a gynecologist or waxer, very few people could argue with having a gag reflex in response to that. And chances are, you’ve ruined their appetite as well.

  Hey. They started it.

  As my friend tried to get the waiter’s attention to alert him to the “spoiled” food, I told her not to mention the hair and just have him bring two glasses of wine—each. After one brush with a saliva globule, I wasn’t about to send the food back and risk the possibility of consuming a secretion from the cook’s parotid gland.

  I’d rather see a curly hair.

  A HANDY MANUAL FOR A WIDOWER, MY HUSBAND

  After a close call with the Big Sleep yesterday, I am happy to report that I am a better person than I thought. Because when faced with the possibility of my own demise, my first thought was not to mourn my own passing; rather, I thought first of my husband. What would happen to him if I died? Yes, there would be a short period of mourning followed by a longer period of jubilation and buoyant celebration of his newfound freedom, but what exactly does that freedom mean?

  It means that my husband would be left to supervise himself. And for a man who kept eating mystery cheese from the refrigerator until it actively burned his tongue (and never established that it actually was cheese), he might as well just be buried with me like in ancient Egypt. It would just be a matter of days until the backhoe was needed again. Therefore, with the help of several of my longtime married girlfriends, I have created “A Handy Manual for a Widower, My Husband.” Feel free to annotate this list with your own individual inspirations.

  Dear Husband,

  If you’re reading this, the inevitable has happened. I’ve stuck a knife into the old toaster you told me not to buy, which shot sparks at the dish towel you said I keep too close to the stove, and then burst into flames, igniting one of the expired coupons sticking out of that drawer that you enjoyed reminding me to clean out, before spreading to the rest of the house and killing me because I’m on Ambien, which you told me to stop taking because I was getting too “aggressive with my snacks in bed.” Well, you don’t have to worry about snorting Cheetos dust anymore in your sleep. You have found this note because I am dead, “death by misadventure,” and you are finally going through the motions of rifling through my things so you can throw it all away, because I’m guessing your new lady friend requires some additional space in, well, my house. Not so fast, my friend. I have a couple of words of advice for you.

  You may not know it, but take it from me, a dead person, that your mortality is as fragile as a piece of cheese bread that has fallen apart in an electrical appliance. First, a few commonsense things that you probably already know, but a dead wife has to cover all the bases to rest in peace:

  1. Never put a fountain in the front yard unless you just joined the mob.

  2. When your next wife has a birthday, it is not enough to invite people to a party. You actually have to throw one.

  3. Do not let your second wife wear my clothes.

  4. Go back out to the garage and move my goddamn clothes back into the house. Now.

  5. Never do your Heidi Klum impression out of this house. No one will ever get it when you say “That dress makes me sad,” and it sends an otherwise terrifying message. You sound like you swallowed a chunk of banana whole and are about to throw two small children into an oven.

  6. Bring your sleep apnea machine wit
h you on dates. Yes, I know showing up with a suitcase full of medical equipment might be a deal breaker, but so is waking up next to a corpse.

  7. Just to reiterate: theoretically, yes, you’re right, you are clean after a shower, but again, that cleanliness does not translate to the towel, especially after you have used it twenty times.

  8. Never again list watching every single episode of Law & Order on Netflix as an “honor.”

  9. Keep the food in the basement in the basement. You will so eat something that expired in 2009 if it’s the bona fide Apocalypse. (Don’t worry, Anderson Cooper will let you know when that is.)

  10. You have no street cred. If you want a second date, don’t say things like “street cred.” Ever.

  11. Don’t eat the leftover Mexican food you forgot was in the trunk yesterday when you find it today. Just because opening a hot trunk feels like opening an oven doesn’t mean they are both equipped to incubate botulism.

  12. Never clap at skunks in the garage to “scare them away.”

  13. If the milk has crust on the drinky part, go to your Drink Plan B. And when your fruit juice is bubbly like soda, chew something tangy-flavored to generate saliva if you are that thirsty.

  14. You cannot wait out the smell in the refrigerator. The house will eventually be nothing but stink and rubble. The fridge will win. Every time.

  15. If you can put your thumb through a piece of fruit, don’t bite into it, although there is nothing funnier than watching you eat rotten food.

  16. Which reminds me! If your back starts to hurt, unbutton your pants. Your waist hasn’t been a thirty-two since you were in high school.

  17. You blamed too much on Ambien Laurie and I let you because I needed to let her legend grow.

  18. Never go into the attic. First, you are too fat to fit through the trapdoor. Second, there is nothing up there that you need. Third, there are monsters up there.