The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

by Laurie Notaro

  “Oh, shit!” I screamed shrilly as I yanked my own hand away, just in the nick of time.

  And, on second glance, I saw that I was absolutely right.

  Blue-Light Special

  I love a good sale, just like anybody, but there are just some things I can’t bring myself to skimp on.

  In Phuket (I don’t know how you pronounce it correctly, but I’ve been doing it phonetically for the last hour and am getting a big kick out of it), an internationally popular resort island in southern Thailand, blue Hawaiians on the beach aren’t the only things you can get for cheap. Apparently, Phuket (isn’t that fun?) has seen a boom in the number of private clinics specializing in cosmetic surgery and sex-change operations for tourists because the costs for those procedures are far lower than in the United States or Europe.

  Now, honestly, the last thing I’d bargain-hunt for would be a new nose, brighter eyes, or a whole set of genitals. Those are examples of things I wouldn’t use a coupon for. Sure, if they have a two-for-one dinner at a Sizzler on Phuket, count me in, but clearly, I wouldn’t use the same discount should Laurie want to become Larry, if you know what I mean. They don’t call that stuff the family jewels for nothing. Ever hear of the expression “You get what you pay for”? Well, it’s true. Do you want to spend the rest of your life explaining, “Yeah, well, they’re not exactly what you would call a matching pair, but the one that causes that exact reaction was 20 percent off!”

  I mean, sure, when you’re in the market for a book, a sweater, or even a bra, seconds will do, but when you’re playing outlet mall with your gender, who knows what you’ll wake up as? You might become a whole new species, something even Star Trek: The Next Generation hasn’t seen. Someone I used to work with in Phoenix decided Tijuana was the place that they were going to go to obtain lap-band surgery because it was considerably cheaper there. The details were then revealed: the procedure wasn’t even going to take place in a hospital but would be done in a hotel, and even though I think Holiday Inn Express commercials are funny, I understand that they are just commercials and that Holiday Inn isn’t a college or a medical school, even in Spanish. Weeks after the surgery when the person was eating at a restaurant, the patient followed the doctor’s orders and ordered the soup—then proceeded to gobble up artichoke dip, eight squares of pita bread, and seven deep-fried coconut shrimp. You get what you pay for, I thought to myself; Dr. Holiday Inn Express slipped you a roofie, knicked your belly button with an X-Acto blade, gave you a Band-Aid, and then cashed your check. You don’t even have as much as a twist tie in there, let alone a lap band.

  When thinking about doing something permanent, irreversible, and requiring more talent and skill than coloring hair, I tend to take the approach that you’re gonna need the best guy possible. If I’m considering a body-altering procedure, I’ll save my pennies, eat out one or two fewer meals a week, stop shopping at Gap and go to Target instead because I want Dr. Number One. I don’t want Dr. Half Price, I want the best guy on the block. He may be from Thailand, but if he’s that good, he’s not there anymore.

  And if that’s not bad enough, it’s in Thailand. No way am I going there, no matter how big my chin collection has grown. I saw Brokedown Palace sixteen times last month on HBO, and if that country will arrest Claire Danes, it will arrest anybody. No one is safe, and I’ll be damned if I spend one night of my life sleeping outside on a straw mat with roaches trying to crawl into my ears and parasites attempting to stage a military coup in my small intestine.

  Should I decide that I need some work done someday, I’ll find a nice doctor in a white coat who has an office with walls. And if my insurance won’t cover the surgery and I can’t afford it, I’m not going to Thailand. I guess I’d rather just say, “All right, then. Phuket.”

  The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

  I will be the first one to admit that I was one to think that I had done a pretty good job of hanging on to my “cool” quotient after I finished college, got married, found a job, bought a house, and then started wearing body shapers. I will fully cop to having the idea that should I ever return to a college campus, I could slip right in, fit in amongst the younguns without any problem or hiccup because I thought I knew what was goin’ on.

  In fact, every now and then, I still go to see bands if one of my favorites is playing (although now I like to leave a little bit before the show is over to beat the traffic out of the parking lot), I can still slug down JD with the best of them (although now I really prefer a nice red wine coupled with an Ambien), and I prefer the Gap to Chico’s any day (although I do adore the room that anything marked “stretch” affords me).

  So if you hold that delightful, youthful reverie close to your self-esteem, identity, and/or worth as a human being and believe it as much as I did, then my advice to you is that unless you really want to know just how old you are, a college campus is the last place you’d ever want to be. Retain your dream, full and intact, and go to a golf course instead, mutter “Fascists” under your breath as you’re teeing off, or eat lunch at a Cheesecake Factory and pretend to be horrified that people are delighted to pay seven dollars for a piece of cake.

  However, no one had given me that advice before I moved to a college town that every September doubles its population from the preceding month’s. Therefore, I was entirely unprepared for what I saw the first time I went to pick my husband up at the university.

  Those children were naked.

  “Those children are naked!” I exclaimed, my jaw dropped, as he got into the car.

  “Oh, it was cold this morning,” he said as he shook his head. “You should have seen what happens on a hot day. It looks like lunchtime at a Roman bathhouse.”

  “Why doesn’t someone do something?” I cried.

  “Like what?” my husband said, laughing.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head, then spotted a girl who was wearing a red bandana as a shirt. “Institute a ‘clothing mandatory’ rule? Napkins are not apparel! That’s not from the Gap! You can’t get that at the Gap! I was just there!”

  “Why are you freaking out?” my husband asked.

  “Because it’s a college campus, not a strip club named Jiggles!” I exclaimed. “I would never wear that! She could at least have two bandanas, one for each chichi! That girl has banana boobs, too. A bra would be to her benefit.”

  “Oh,” my husband said with a pass of his hand. “The returning adult students don’t dress like that. They dress like you.”

  And just like that, with a long squeak and several pops, I felt the air dribble out of my coolness balloon like a slow, old, strangled fart, stopping every now and then to catch its breath until, with one last rumble, it emptied with an exhausted fffffuuuuuuuuuhhhhh.

  It served me right, I knew. I thought I could be college-aged cool? I thought I still had that? I can’t even eat caramel anymore because the chances are good to great that it will pull out my remaining teeth, most of which are composed of some sort of composite material that’s a close cousin to Rubbermaid products.

  After all, I should have realized I had not only conquered the pinnacle of adulthood but had firmly cemented myself in middle age when Atlas Van Lines showed up to move my stuff. The last time I’d changed residential locations, I’d rented a U-Haul, which in my opinion was still very much under the governing guidelines of youth and young adulthood, and even that, I thought, was a huge leap considering that when I moved out of my parents’ house, I simply threw a heap of black clothes into the backseat and drove off.

  “When was the last time you were on a college campus?” my husband asked me, shocked that I was so shocked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, trying to think. “Probably…”

  He shook his head. “When you were in college?” he asked. “Boys still had posters of Tawny Kitaen up in their dorm rooms when you were in college. Boys still looked like Tawny Kitaen when you were in college. Things have changed,” he advised me. “You hav
e dental insurance now, and you drive a Prius.”

  “So?” I shot back defensively. “What does that mean?”

  “Can’t be bad ass in a Prius” was all he said.

  “Whatever,” I replied, trying to ignore him. But I had already realized that was true on the freeway one day when a guy in a Dodge Ram truck with California plates was tailgating me so closely I could see the spittle from his chew run down his chin in my rearview mirror, and when I didn’t go fast enough for him, he pulled ahead of me and then abruptly cut me off, apparently to teach me a lesson about driving in front of a man who can’t even keep brown saliva contained in his mouth. It was at that moment that I understood there was absolutely nothing I could do to retaliate, there was no category of road rage that you can fit a Prius into even if you were blasting Black Sabbath on your factory-installed two-speaker stereo. No matter how you cut it, you’d still have the ferocity of Lovey Howell in a floppy straw hat holding a mai tai. I mean, what was I going to do, pull up next to him and shout, “Hey, asshole! Think you’re so tough, huh? Well, I’m getting ninety-nine miles to the gallon at this very minute according to my energy-consumption monitor! Wait—now it’s seventy-five. No, sixty-four. Okay, back up to ninety-two. Point is, I could drive to Florida on a full tank! And I don’t mean Jacksonville, I mean Miami! Whooz the big boy now, huh, punk?”

  And besides, even if you truly were a Bad Ass in Eugene, I seriously don’t even know where you’d go to put your Bad Assness on display to create the appropriate response of awe and fear in order to meet Bad Ass guidelines and retain your status. It’s a quiet little town full of old hippies, college professors, and solar-energy enthusiasts. Naming their children insidiously damaging names (Ptolemy, Star, Alchemy) and breast-feeding until the second grade are the typical, biggest, and brashest ways people outdo each other. I guess if you were a Bad Ass and desperately needed an outlet, there’s always the Saturday Market, where you could take your frustrations and inner bastard out on an organic tomato or a loaf of gluten-free bread, but then you risk being pecked to death by the passive-aggressive comments of passersby, including the observation that a Bad Ass came to the market “and didn’t even bring his own canvas bag!”

  Things like invasion of personal space and talking in movie theaters were at state-of-emergency levels in my new hometown precisely because people knew that there is generally no one who will threaten harm or, even worse, confront them when they violate social boundaries. This, of course, isn’t counting the meth addicts, who due to either the abundance of rain and mold or the lack of available sunshine have evolved into a subspecies that knows no rival, resilient to both discomfort and authority, kind of like an Ultimate Tweaker. Sure, tweakers wreak havoc everywhere, but in the Pacific Northwest, their powers are legendary. I saw one guy on the news in Portland who barricaded himself in his lab/apartment for several hours and didn’t come out until the police had thrown in the seventh tear-gas bomb and even then it still took five cops to get him onto the ground and cuffed. If there was a National Tweaker Olympics, Oregon would bring home the gold in every category (Living in Squalor, Poisoning Your Neighbors, Developing Facial Scabs, Public Aggression, Theft of Useless Things, Taking Stuff Apart, and Crazy Talking).

  Aside from the meth crowd, though, Eugene was a mellow, easy place, to the extent that I realized even my husband would win a bar fight here. All he’d have to do is stand up and the whole scuffle would be over. I was seriously concerned about how I would fit in until one day I found myself standing on a corner downtown, loudly booing, hissing, and giving a very enthusiastic thumbs-down to a Hummer that had happened to get stuck at a red light, and I knew then that my transformation was complete. I found Eugene to be a great change of pace from our former life in Phoenix, and in every respect it was ideal (especially publicly booing conservatives driving excessively large cars), until that day when I picked my husband up at school and saw what youth really looked like instead of the way I remembered it.

  The thing was that I didn’t feel any different than I did when I was twenty. I would probably no longer move into a house with seven guys that I barely knew, none of whom had any visible means of support, and a boyfriend whose biggest investments to date were a rather large snake and a gray-primered Volkswagen with only one seat. In addition and with the advantage of hindsight, grabbing a clean set of sheets from my mother’s linen closet along with my collection of mourning clothes would certainly have had its benefits. Okay, okay, maybe not twenty. It’s twenty-five that I didn’t feel any different from, but wait, that was around the time I dated the bong boy with the “learning disability” and I was kicked out of the third community college in a row. Thirty. I don’t feel any different from when I was thirty, but then again, I bought a HUD house in a bad neighborhood across the street from a lady with a shelter’s worth of diseased cats.

  Thirty-five.

  YES. Thirty-five.

  I don’t feel any different from when I was thirty-five.

  “I am still cool,” I informed my husband as we drove away from campus. “I don’t feel any different from when I was thirty-five.”

  “Your dental records would tell a different story,” he inserted.

  “I can’t wait to laugh at you when a pork chop rips out your first molar,” I said with a smirk. “Just wait. It’ll happen.”

  “Well, I guess you really haven’t changed much since then,” he agreed. “When you were thirty-five, chances were good we’d spend a Saturday night the way we spent last Saturday night, at Safeway looking for Gas-X and you complaining to the cashier that they stopped carrying the Gas-X melty strips, which was criminal because they worked ‘so much faster and with unprecedented ease.’”

  Because, really, who wants to be twenty again, I thought, living in a house with a bunch of dirty guys and a snake? Who wants to be thrown out of community college for the third time, working a minimum-wage job? Who wants to move into an abandoned, worn-down house in a shitty neighborhood because that’s the only place you can afford to live?

  Don’t get me wrong. I loved the reckless abandon of my younger, skinnier, prettier, poorer days, but doing all of that once in a lifetime was pretty much enough. I loved being thirty-five, even if it did mean getting some gray hair, growing a blap (a belly and a lap merging as one, a term coined by my friend, Sharron) and wearing a body shaper. I loved my age now. I loved where I was.

  And I loved driving a Prius. People smile when they see you and almost always let you in during traffic.

  I was driving that same Prius several days later when I was coming back from the market. I decided to take a back residential street rather than a major so that I could make a right-hand turn as opposed to a left. Now, this is a narrow road that cuts a straight line through the neighborhood; it is so small it doesn’t even have any lines painted down the middle, and most of it is downhill. It has speed bumps, and several hand-painted signs reminding people to slow down and that children are playing and being breast-fed.

  Personally, I didn’t see a need to speed down this street, but even though I didn’t have my foot on the gas, traveling downhill I was going about thirty miles per hour, which is about as fast as you can go anywhere in Eugene unless you’re on the freeway. So I braked a couple of times, because Priuses are rather quiet cars and are no friend to the blind, people using iPods, people on cell phones, and, sadly, squirrels.

  My concern for not only playing neighborhood children but the now teetering-on-the-brink-of-extinction Eugene squirrel, however, was not good news to the shiny, black Volkswagen Jetta behind me, which, to be frank, was acting a little like a bull, I’m a cow, and there’s been an inappropriate amount of drinking going on.

  I descended the hill and approached the street where I needed to make a right, put on my blinker, slowed down, and started to make the turn when the Jetta passed me, honking loudly, and the passenger—a college-aged hippie with ratted, matted hair, screamed out the passenger window, “What the fu——?” and threw
her hands up.

  At me. So, instincts being what they are, I flipped her off without consideration because it’s the sharpest reflex I have, and before it even hit me what had just happened.

  She was young, I was not, and I was driving a Prius. To her, insulting me was the safest thing in the world.

  Much to her chagrin, however, the old lady in the spineless car really still was the twenty-year-old who threw her black Sisters of Mercy clothes into the back of a car and left her parents’ house to live with dirty boys in a punk band and a snake. And the old, slowpoke shriv who was hitting her brakes every ten seconds to keep the children and squirrels safe was the same girl who lived for nearly a decade in a craptastic neighborhood where she heard gunshots with more frequency than she heard birds, chased packs of wild dogs off her porch, hired local drug addicts as handymen, and was entirely unafraid of two privileged brats in a brand-new German car. Because now, you see, the brazen yet ridiculously stupid hippie chick in a black shiny Jetta had just foolishly activated the Flaming Tantrum of Death because Lady Prius was also the same old bat whose gastrointestinal workings still felt like she ate a broccoli farm because Safeway was out of melty strips on Saturday and as a result, she thoroughly believed that the possibility that she would project fire out of her ass was not at all unlikely because she was bloated, gassy, and now her pilot light had been lit.

  Backstory: The Flaming Tantrum of Death was born one afternoon after witnessing one of the most spectacular flameouts/ hissy fits in world history. After a former acquaintance of mine decided that writing impolite bulletins about other people and posting them on the Internet would be a productive use of spare time, there was no response from anyone who had been targeted in the tirades. So the author then e-mailed the bulletins to those being insulted, including me, to ensure that they were seen, which prompted my astute and observant friend Lore to comment sarcastically, “Just in case you didn’t notice my Flaming Tantrum of Death, here it is!” Now, it’s never nice to make fun of someone having a full-blown, Target toy-aisle “Mommy Buy This for Me!” meltdown, but the truth of the matter is that when the person in question has put a bull’s-eye on you, you can either become offended or see it as the high-caliber, Las Vegas–style entertainment that it is.