I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

by Laurie Notaro

  On my last trip to Dr. Bill, the unthinkable happened. Sure, he had rendered me chewless, but what happened that day is nearly unspeakable. It’s honestly off the map of horror.

  There I was, being high in the chair, when Dr. Bill finished and then handed me the mirror again. This time, I knew better.

  I shook my head vigorously; the last vision of the well he had drilled in my tooth was still haunting me at night when I slept, and I kept having nightmares that volcanoes were erupting out of my jaw. The last thing I needed to see this time was an exposed sinus or the bottom part of my eyeball.

  “No, thank you,” I said politely.

  “Oh, come on, it’s pretty,” he said, “Go ahead. I think you’ll like it.”

  If this clown tooth-painted on me I will shit, I thought to myself, expecting to see a daisy or a butterfly reflecting back in the mirror image. But I didn’t. What I saw terrified me even more.

  “What is that?” I asked, pointing to the mirror image of my molar. “What did you do?”

  Dr. Bill beamed proudly.

  “It’s gold,” he nearly giggled. “It’s a gold tooth!”

  “Oh,” I said slowly, the mirror falling into my lap, “my God. Oh my God. You gave me a gold tooth? I have a gold tooth?”

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” He grinned.

  “Pretty?” I ripped my nose mask off. “Who do you think I am, Biggie Smalls? Come on, a gold tooth? This is great. I am now legally qualified to pursue a profession as a pimp! If I ever go to the Philippines and yawn in public, I will be dead within thirty seconds and someone will find me in a dirty old gutter with rusty pliers hanging out of my mouth.”

  “But it sparkles when you smile,” Dr. Bill informed me.

  “Do I look like a Sonic drive-through to you?” I asked. “I don’t need a light show in my mouth. I just want to use up my insurance and then be able to chew. Do you know that I eat like a snake now? I have to swallow things whole!”

  This just turned out great, I thought, soon I’ll be unemployed, I can only eat things that have been whipped, pureed, or can be dissolved by saliva, I now have a gold tooth, and I’m going to have to join someone’s posse.

  While fending off my hunger pains due to my inability to eat adult food, I slowly began relocating my office to my house, box by box, grocery bag by grocery bag. I’d carefully pack the poop jelly beans in between my files and my books. My supervisor, the Grinch, would come in every now and then, stand at the doorway, and say, “Have you made a decision?”

  “Nope,” I’d answer.

  I got my boobs mammogrammed and spent the next several days with the little pins taped to my bull’s-eyes because I decided to keep them to play a “look at my new piercings” joke on my husband, but he never noticed and I was finally forced to remove them when they got fuzzy and linty and eventually made my boobs look like an onion bialy. I got my Pap smear done, had some moles removed, and tried to talk my doctor into some butt liposuction as long as I was there, but he just kind of looked at me with the expression that said, “Please. I just ate lunch.”

  I was almost ready to go.

  I just didn’t know where.

  Sure, I was going on my book tour, but after those few weeks were up, I didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do, and I was all too aware that my book would come out, and very, very possibly sputter, fail, and that would be it. The book had gotten almost no coverage, not even from my own newspaper, which meant no one would even know about it. I had the searing review from Kirkus that did me no favors, and a sinking, sinking feeling.

  I had no prospects, I had no offers, just the all-too-real understanding that the little I had in savings wasn’t going to get us very far, and if we lived like college kids, it could stretch maybe a couple of months. Maybe I could pick up some freelance work here and there, I thought, and maybe I could get a job as a cashier someplace until I made some more contacts and got some steady brochure, pamphlet, and kitchen-gadget-review work. Things looked bleak. Quite bleak, in fact, but they didn’t look much better if I stayed and was relegated to the position of web page poster, which I had never done in my life. It was clear to me that my bosses figured that the combination of moving me to a job that I had no business being in and also taking away what I loved to do was the right mixture to make me walk away. And they were right.

  And I was scared shitless.

  In all honesty, I knew that I really wouldn’t be able to stand myself if I blew off the book tour and stayed in a horrible job that would get worse week by week.

  I told myself I could figure it all out when I got back.

  The day that I packed Dr. Zira and Cornelius was one of the last in my office with a door. Everything that wasn’t directly visible—hard copies of my columns, pens, notes, all of my work—was already gone, all of my drawers were empty. It was the day my book came out. Nothing revelatory happened, my world didn’t shake, didn’t even tremble. I took another box out to my car when I left for the day.

  “Did you make a decision yet?” the Grinch said as he stood in my doorway.

  “Nope,” I answered.

  I was packing my Homies and the prison bus diorama about a week later when I heard my e-mail bell go off and it was my good friend Theresa.

  “Something’s going on,” her e-mail said. “Your sales rank on Barnes and Noble.com just jumped fourteen thousand places to three hundred.”

  My e-mail rang again. It was my agent, Jenny, from New York.

  “Barnes and Noble picked Idiot Girls for one of their top summer reads. This rocks!” she wrote.

  I checked the Barnes & Noble website.

  Idiot Girls was at 300.

  Theresa and I were checking it frantically every fifteen minutes. That’s a lie. I checked it every minute. I kept printing out the pages. I couldn’t believe it was real.

  An hour later, it was at 212.

  An hour later, it was at 173.

  An hour later, it was at 13.

  The phone rang. It was my editor, Bruce, who had warned me previously not to get caught up in the obsessive-compulsive cycle of checking my ranking every fifteen minutes because it was destructive, addictive, and wasn’t really representative of anything except for my neurotic tendencies and that particular hour before the rankings were updated again.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, are you seeing this?” I asked him, barely able to retain my inside voice and actively engaging in my Dork Dance in my almost empty office. “We’re number thirteen on Barnes and Noble. I can’t believe it! Are you seeing this? Go to the page right now!! WE are number thirteen. I know you told me not to read into these things, but we’re only going to be thirteen for about three more minutes, so just play along, okay? Be number thirteen with me!”

  “No, you’re right, I don’t care about being number thirteen on Barnes and Nobles for three more minutes,” Bruce said sharply. “But what I do care about is that Idiot Girls is number twelve on the New York Times bestseller list next week.”

  Everything went quiet. Everything stood still. It was so, so quiet. Amazingly quiet.

  “Mother trucker,” I finally said.

  It was the only thing I could say.

  Then I called my husband, I called my mom, I talked to my dad, who was sure it was due to the placement he had advised next to the Auto Trader.

  And then, I sat back in my chair in my almost empty office, and I cried.

  I bribed a coworker with a Milky Way bar to go and tell the Grinch.

  He came by my office a couple of minutes later, and stood in the doorway.

  “Congratulations,” he said with his Grinchy smile. “Have you made a decision yet?”

  “Nope,” I replied.

  Another Big Cheese in the department e-mailed that afternoon and asked if he could send out the news in a company-wide memo.

  “Of course,” I wrote back. “Just as long as you include the part about how you are canceling my column in a matter of days and making me an HTML web page poster instead.
”

  He did not include my suggestion in his memo.

  In a couple of days, when I was sure that I had packed up everything that meant anything to me—the Homies, the Planet of the Apes figures, the Pull My Finger Fred doll, and my Farty Pants—I turned the light off in my office and closed the door.

  I looked back once. I loved that office.

  I went home, packed a bunch of things into a suitcase, and wrote a letter. The next morning, I put the suitcase by the door and sent my letter, via e-mail, to the Grinch. I would have liked to deliver it myself in his preferred method of communication, sign language, maybe throw in a light show by my opening and closing my mouth a couple of times really fast, and truly, truly, truly bring the phrase “Kiss my grits” to life in a performance unparalleled in any other workplace in the history of man, but what can you do.

  I called my letter “Guess What? I Made a Decision.”

  That bridge burned like it was made of dynamite.

  Then I took a taxi to the airport and when I got there, I boarded a plane to go on my book tour, and left for New York.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank You . . .

  Bruce Tracy, for being the incredible editor that he is and letting me go full-tilt boogie with this book. I am amazingly fortunate to have him as an editor and a friend, and I truly cherish that, as well as for the opportunity to teach him just what and who a Chupacabra and Otis Campbell are.

  Jenny Bent, for not laughing when I tripped over a curb in the East Village, stumbled about fifteen feet, and then landed flat on my belly with a loud HUMPH!!! If that doesn’t show your love, nothing does, JB. I know it took a lot to hold it in. Thanks for everything.

  My family; Curtis, my UPS guy; Hugo and Allan, my mailmen; and anyone else who has to put up with me on a daily basis.

  Nana, who lets me say horrible, filthy curse words in front of her and just pretends to be deaf and not hear them. I love my Nana.

  Jamie, for still being my best friend after thirty years, and to my other best friend, Jeff, despite his sad little attempts at three-way calling. Just so you know, we hate it when you do that. Please get a better phone; yours sucks.

  The sweet, kind, and patient Annie Klein, for sticking by me still; the darling and irresistible Adam Korn, for letting me talk his ear off; and the charming and delightful Mickey Rolfe, for always, always, always making me laugh.

  Kelly Kulchak, Shari Smiley, Kathy White, and Sonya Rosenfeld, for still accepting my phone calls and for working with me. You guys kick ass. Thanks also to David Dunton; Nina Graybill; Pamela Cannon; Beth Pearson; Amelia Zalcman; Dan who makes the book covers; Kimberly Obitz; Meg Halverson; Bill Hummel; Theresa Cano; Kathy Murillo; Doug Kinne; Katie Zug; Sessalee Hensley; Jules Herbert; Donna Passanante; Craig Browning; Duane Neff; Amy Silverman; Deborah Susser; Cindy Dasch; Sonda Andersson-Pappan; Beth Kawasaki; Eric Searleman; Charlie Levy; Patrick Sedillo; Charlie Pabst; Becky, Marie, and Rhonda from Fairfax; Bill Homuth; Sharon Hise; Leigh, Jeff, Val, and everbody else from Metro; the Public Library Association; the Arizona Library Association; bookstores big, bookstores not so big, and bookstores little, for being so kind when I come in and start scribbling in your stock; and, absolutely without a doubt, the girls Nikki, Sara, Kate, Sandra, and Krysti.

  And the biggest thanks to all of the Idiot Girls out there who took the time to e-mail me, join the club, submit their Idiot Girl story to the clubhouse, come to a reading, or read through the books, nodding their heads because they knew. Thank you, from the bottom of my soggy little rotten-tomato heart, and I so totally mean that. You make me so proud to be an Idiot Girl because you undoubtedly prove I am in excellent company. Rock on, my sisters. We shall rule the world one day.

  Love,

  Laurie N.

  LAURIE NOTARO is currently unemployed and childless and enjoys spending her days searching for Bigfoot documentaries on the Discovery Channel, delights in a good peach cobbler, and has sadly discovered that compulsively lying on her headgear chart in the seventh grade has come around to bite her in the ass. Despite several escape attempts, she still lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is technologically unable to set up the voice mail on her cell phone, which she has never charged, anyway.

  ALSO BY LAURIE NOTARO

  The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club

  Autobiography of a Fat Bride

  2004 Villard Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright 2004 by Laurie Notaro

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  VILLARD and “V” CIRCLED Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

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  Villard Books website address: www.villard.com

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-402-9

  v3.0