Wait! I wanted to shout. Just give me time! I know I can do it! I know it. Whatever. Whatever. And you know what? I don’t believe that no one else hasn’t gulped! It was like being waterboarded! It was like having a Dyson stuck under my nose—of course I gasped! I’m surprised brain matter didn’t fly out! It was like the car-wash vacuum. I know other people have gasped! It would be inhuman not to!
But I didn’t say any of that. I just sat there, with shiny laser gel smeared all over my face as everybody left the room but me. Then I wiped the gel, of which there was so much I looked like I had just been attacked by a space creature, off my face, and that took a long time, because I didn’t want the Heave Ho to walk out into the hallway and make her next appointment at the reception desk looking like a newborn Krispy Kreme rolling down the conveyor belt.
But apparently, news of my One Woman Chin Fringe show had already spread to the front office, and it was obvious as the girl who worked up there swiped my Visa and gave me an odd, insincere smile. She already knew. I smiled tightly, nodded to myself, and signed the receipt. Great. Three months of secret shaving in the shower only to have an even bigger humiliation in front of the charming and beguiling Dr. Wells, who I had once, approximately fifteen minutes ago, almost had a crush on. But no more, no more. No way. Obliterated like a follicle in the path of a laser beam. Vaporized. Dissolved! The receptionist had just handed me the receipt, and I was about to walk away, when suddenly Dr. Wells appeared and said something to the receptionist about a later appointment. This was my last chance, I knew, to show him that I wasn’t a nut and that I was just a normal girl with an extra hormone or two.
Be normal, I told myself. Don’t do anything doltish. Stay inside the lines. Be nice. Be normal. Smile big like nothing weird happened in there, like it was all cool and very routine.
“Thank you, Dr. Wells,” I said as he looked up to catch my big, normal, nice smile. “I’ll see you in six weeks!”
At first, Dr. Wells didn’t say anything. He just looked at me without any expression on his face at all, not really staring but looking and not saying a word, which I guess could be classified as staring.
See, I thought to myself, almost pleased and even a little bit surprised. I can still cast a man spell! I smiled wider.
“Yes,” he said suddenly, as if he just caught himself. “Yes, um, six weeks.”
And on that note, I waved slightly, then turned and walked away. Now I need to spend the next six weeks practicing holding my breath with a vacuum-cleaner nozzle under my nose, I thought to myself as I sashayed to my car, so I can show him that I can do it. Because I know I can. I know I can.
Once I was in the front seat, I finally allowed myself to feel my chin and see just what a master Dr. Wells was, and as it turned out, he was a pretty good one. My chin felt smooth and stubble-free, just as I had hoped, so smooth and perfect, in fact, that I wanted to see it for myself.
I reached up to angle down the rearview mirror, but before I could study my beautiful new chinny chin chin, something caught my eye. Something reddish, something bold, and something that was covering every part of my face where the conducting gel had been. It was faint in some areas and stronger in others, across my chin, cheeks, my upper lip, my jawline, all over. It was spread like a virus, smeared to every inch of my lower face.
How could I have known?
It would have been impossible.
How could I have known that when you take conducting gel, mix it with pretty new and meticulously applied lipstick, and wipe it all over your face vigorously with a paper towel, you can make a nice, big red crazy clown mask with very little effort at all.
Very little.
“UUUUUUHHHHHHHHHH” was all I could manage.
Hit
We had just sat down on the steps of the amphitheater where the Indian Festival was being held when someone threw a water balloon at us.
I looked up immediately and searched the crowd, looking for the culprit or a suspicious movement that would lead me to his trail, but absolutely nothing looked out of the ordinary. There was just a bunch of people milling around as several young girls did a Bollywood-type dance on the stage before us. It was if the perpetrator had simply vanished.
Both Jamie and I had been looking forward to the Indian Festival for weeks, and I had driven up to Portland, where my friend had just moved, to stay the weekend, in order to take in everything the festival had to offer. Our mouths watered at the thought of golden samosas lining every pathway, chicken makahni flowing like rivers, and mango lassis bubbling out of water fountains. Once we walked onto the square where the festival was being held, there was no doubt as to what we were going to do first, and that was to get ourselves some vittles. Everything smelled so good; wafts of garlic, curry, and spices made my mouth instantly water. I was so hungry. Jamie, her husband, and I had starved ourselves all day so we could be sure of gorging in nothing short of copious Roman amounts, but when we arrived at the food court, we were shamefully unprepared for the choices that lay before us. In every direction, lines for food grew by the moment, so we made a decision based on the apparent happiness of people leaving the booth with their food, and jumped in a line, watching it grow five more feet behind us in a matter of a minute.
“What are you going to get?” I asked Jamie as we squinted to see the menu far ahead of us.
“I think there’s a combo plate,” Jamie said, standing on tiptoe. “But I’m so hungry I’d eat anything!”
“I am ravenous,” I proclaimed.
“Ooooh,” my best friend cooed as a lady with a combo plate walked past us. “Look at that!”
“Even the smell is worth the wait!” I added. “I am so hungry. I think my stomach just shrank to the size of an empty balloon!”
“Hang on,” Jamie encouraged me. “We’ll get there, and when we do, we’ll be feasting on something like that!”
A man and his little boy passed by, their plates piled with steaming hot pakoras and samosas.
“Oh my God, that looks so good,” I whined. “Little boy, I’ll buy you a bike for a bite!”
“Look, the line is moving fast,” Jamie lied. “We’ll be up there in no time.”
It was a lie. She knew it, I knew it, her husband knew it. I tried to busy myself watching the crowds, clapping along with the little dancers onstage, but all I could do was smell incredible food and feel my stomach shrivel like a Shrinky Dink on a cookie sheet.
When we had been on line for a half an hour, Jamie turned around and whispered sharply. “I can hear you above the crowd! Maybe you should find a bathroom!”
“I am not farting,” I replied. “That is the sound of my tummy crying.”
Just then, a large family in front of us suddenly stepped out of line and there we were, at the counter. Face-to-face with the menu on a poster board. Within arm’s reach of what we had waited so long for. We placed our orders for three combos, and within seconds they were delivered to the counter, like a reward for our tested patience.
Delighted and excited beyond belief, we navigated through the crowd with plates in hand, careful, oh so careful, not to spill so much as a drop. We made our way up the narrow steps of the amphitheater, found a perfect spot on one of the landings right in front of the stage, and sat down.
It smelled so good. With fork in hand I dug in for the first bite and savored it, no longer obsessing about the half-hour wait. I looked at Jamie and her husband, and they were both smiling after their first bites, too, and we all nodded. It tasted as good as it smelled; it was everything I had hoped for, everything that I had starved myself for in anticipation.
And then, as I was going in for the second bite, I felt something wet splatter on me, and automatically recoiled.
It was the water balloon. My first response was to search the crowd for the wake of a fleeing perp, but there was nothing. No heads turning, no sounds of running feet, no after-vandalism laughter.
I turned to Jamie with a look that said, “Can you believe it?” a
nd that’s when I saw that she had gotten the worst of it. Long, brown streaks covered her white T-shirt on the side closest to me. Brown, I thought to myself; why is the water in the water balloon brown? It was a mud balloon? How do you even make a mud-water balloon? How despicable! How sinister! How crafty! I’m going to have to try this at home!
The look on Jamie’s face turned from surprise to horror as she studied her own shoulder and arm, and I scrambled for a napkin to help clean it off.
“Who would throw a water balloon?” I said angrily. “I didn’t see anyone, did you? Did you see anyone throw it at us? Why would someone do that?”
And when I reached to get the mud-balloon residue out of her hair, I realized it.
My mind flashes to a college-aged Laurie who is sitting on a bench at Arizona State University, trying desperately to impress the guy she has successfully, after many months of trying to capture his attention, lassoed into being her Italian-language partner, when she feels a pinecone hit her in the head and the guy, duly impressed, begins to gag and then runs off, but not before uttering the words, “Rabies, typhoid and cholera.”
To a thirtyish Laurie eating lunch with all of her new friends from the newspaper at a Mexican restaurant with outdoor seating when she is suddenly struck in the temple with a water gun as her new pals immediately shoot away from the table, muttering phrases such as “meningitis,” “encephalitis,” and a personal favorite, “bubonic plague.”
And finally, to a scene in Laurie’s bathroom in which a tiny, trapped baby bird craps all over her toothbrush as if it were a pterodactyl, bird feces the consistency of Liquid Paper, which then turns crumbly, then quickly solidifies into a sort of poo concrete.
Like the stuff that was now hardening in Jamie’s hair.
“Oh my God,” I said as I sucked air in. “Bird flu!!”
But honestly, in the times that I’ve been a victim of the skies, it was from a pinecone and water gun roughly the size of a pigeon and not an even more foul, more dastardly, and more disease-ridden seagull circling, scouring the Indian Festival for just the right head to shit on.
Locating the shiniest and happiest head, the filthy seagull released its load on Jamie, who, to her credit, did not freak out the way you would suppose a person who’s been emptied on would. She just looked at me with disgusted eyes and said simply, “It stinks.”
There really wasn’t anything she could do; she just sat there as her husband and I tried to wipe the slime off of her, to very little avail. If you’ve ever been pooped on, you already know that your options are rather limited unless you have a bottle of Clorox, a wire brush, and some hair clippers at your disposal, although some radiation treatments would also be handy. Jamie had been a victim in one of the highest levels of a Conflict With Nature, only to be topped by a bear sucking the bone marrow out of your spine or a lion picking its teeth with your ribs. There is very little else nature can do to you to let you know that the human race is just another gobbling, roaming, feral group of creatures on this planet, and that where the universe is concerned, there is no first class. Everybody gets a fair shot with a pinecone to the head, a water balloon to the shoulder, and it can be when you’re trying to impress a boy or having lunch with your friends, although in my experience, two out of three bird poopings have taught me that you’re far more likely to encounter a free-roaming shitstorm when you’re eating delicious, ethnic food under a tree. Just my two cents.
As we wiped her down, Jamie sat there like a volcano, boiling inside but calm on the exterior, watching the little girls dance onstage and holding her plate of food that was no longer steaming.
Oh no, I thought suddenly as I grabbed her plate, studied it, then grabbed my own, which I had set down beside me.
It was true. Not only had the bird soiled my best friend, but it had released its intestinal cargo on our chicken makahni, on our vegetable korma, on our delicately fried pakoras like it was a curry Porta Potti. I pulled the plate away from her longing eyes, and pulled it out of the hand of her husband, who, fork poised, was going in for another mouthful.
“Awwwww,” he moaned as I plucked it from his tightening fingers. “Come on! Can’t we just eat around it?”
“You are a medical doctor!” I reminded him. “I have substantially fewer diseases than that foul bird. If I crapped on your food, would you eat around that?”
My best friend’s husband looked at me and then looked at Jamie with a “Why is she here?” expression.
With sincere regret and anguish, four steps, and a very unceremonial, craptastic plop!, our chicken-poop combos went straight into the trash, never to be heard from again.
“I stink!” Jamie said angrily, trying to look over her shoulder to take a gander at the stains that striped her back. “The smell is making me want to hurl. I’m going to throw up if I don’t get this off of me. I need new clothes, and I need them now. And by the way, I’m still hungry!”
I didn’t want to say anything, but I was still hungry, too. I had only managed to get a bite or two of my combo down before the attack occurred, and honestly, no matter how hungry I was, I would begin to eat things from my own body before thinking that eating off of that plate was anything less than parasitic suicide.
Luckily for us, there was a sportswear store directly across the street from the festival, where salespeople kept asking me how I was doing while Jamie tried on T-shirts, and I got to say three times, “I’m great, but my friend just got defiled by sky turds,” but no one seemed to think that was out of the ordinary, they just smiled and nodded, or maybe they thought I was homeless, since I am sure I had that hungry, deranged “I’ll do anything for saag paneer, I’ll pave you a driveway or grant you a wish! Any wish!” sort of look.
My stomach, by that time, had flipped itself inside out and was hopping around my abdominal cavity like a trout on the deck of a boat. My eyes had gotten quite wide, my belly was getting extended and round like a basketball, and flies were starting to land on me, I was that hungry. Jamie emerged from the dressing room wearing the new, clean shirt, paid for it, and then we headed back over to the Indian Festival.
Redemption waited for us somewhere on another food line, I knew it, but to my horror, the lines hadn’t gotten any shorter—in fact, they had grown since our first visit to the food court. The three of us, by this time, were depraved, haunted souls, eager to take any food and just be satisfied with it. We chose the shortest line and hopped onto it silently. Every two to three minutes we’d take a step forward, a step closer to placing our order.
We waited on that line for a very, very, very long time, and this time, we didn’t look on happily as people passed us with their food, smug and arrogant as they were, the prickly bastards. So proud they had food. “Look what we’ve got!” their bright, stupid eyes said. “We’ve got food!” Yeah, well, we had been there. We had food. We were actually eating, sitting down and eating, not that you’d know it by looking at our pallid complexions, our sallow cheeks, and our thin, pursed lips, only to be forced by nature’s cruelty and a leaky fowl bowel to stand in line all over again.
“What are you getting this time?” Jamie asked me weakly as she swatted a fly away.
“I dunno,” I replied, barely audibly. “Maybe some rice. Broth, if they have it. It’s been such a long time since I’ve eaten that I’m not even sure my system can take it.”
“Look at that,” she noticed, and pointed with a limp hand at me. “I think one of your collarbones just surfaced, like a submarine.”
I nodded. “I’m going through my reserves quickly,” I agreed. “They’ve been buried under a layer of fat permafrost since the 1990s. God. If I start seeing the bones in my feet, I know I won’t have long to go. I’ll tell you right now, if someone drops a piece of naan, I’m going for it. I won’t eat bird shit, but I will eat shit off the ground.”
Then, finally, we were at the front of the line, and as Jamie and her husband were getting ready to order, holding out their cash, an old, horrible hag stepp
ed in front of us and began screeching like a gorgon.
“This isn’t the paying line! This is the ordering line! You need a token! A token! You have to stand on that line to get a token first, and then you wait on this line to order!” she warbled like the nasty old biddy she was, waving around her stupid blue token like it was a flag.
Jamie ignored her, pushing past, and gave the food vendor her order. The old hag stood in front of Jamie’s husband, clearly trying to block him from going any further.
“That’s my wife, and she’s already ordered my food,” he said, trying to reason with the old woman, who must have known she was no match for him. She stepped aside, and as she did, something of a floodgate opened. People from the very poorly marked token line began to swarm in front of me and actually physically pushed me completely out of line.
I stood there, not really knowing what to do. It had happened as quickly as that, and suddenly the line was not a line but a bulge of people trying to hand someone a stupid token and order some food. The next thing I knew, Jamie and her husband were standing next to me with two new plates of food, and honestly, I couldn’t do it again. There was no way I could get in the back of the token line, which didn’t remotely resemble a token line, by the way, but looked like just a regular old line, and wait one more time. I was just all waited out.
As we walked out of the food court, trying to find a covered place to eat, I saw the old biddy ahead of us a couple of steps, not even waiting to sit down before she dug in. She shoved food into her mouth like it was a dump, and at this point, I knew what I wanted most in the world. I didn’t want naan, or a pakora, or some saag paneer. No I didn’t. I wanted to take five steps ahead, pop the bottom of her plate up like it was a tambourine, snap off her head, rip out her spine, and start sucking the bone marrow out of it. That’s exactly what I wanted to do.
But as we passed her on the way to a spot beneath an overhang, I looked at her kindly, and with a big smile I said, “I really hope a bird shits on you. And I mean aaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllll over you.”
The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death Page 9
