Dave Barry Talks Back

by Dave Barry

  Well, OK, technically she also had a medical problem, which I won’t go into here except to say that it quickly faded into dim memory once the treatment began. Which is exactly the point. As you know if you’ve ever been subjected to modern medical care, the whole theory is that if they can make you feel awful enough, you’ll begin to look back on your original ailment with actual fondness. They take out all your blood and put you in a tiny room where they expose you repeatedly to daytime television, and every few hours total strangers come in to give you Jell-O and stab you with small medical harpoons and insert tubes at random into your body. Then they say, “Are you feeling BETTER NOW? Or perhaps we should give you some MORE MEDICAL CARE HAHAHAHAHA.” Pretty soon you’re on the floor, using whatever limbs they forgot to disable or remove to scrabble toward the elevator, your butt sticking into the air through a hospital garment no larger than a standard Handi-Wipe, your tubes dragging out 15 or 20 feet behind you and spewing a telltale trail of Jell-O that enables the hospital people to track you down and capture you in the parking lot and haul you back to the tiny room and MAYBE RUN A FEW TESTS HAHAHA-HAHAHAHA.

  Actually, Beth’s doctor, technically known as Doctor Bob, was very nice. In fact everybody at the hospital was nice. But you never really know, with the medical profession. A lot goes on behind closed doors. Just a week before Beth went into the hospital, an alert reader named Pat Wilson in New Delhi, India, sent me an article from the Hindustan Times about a doctor at a medical college over there who wanted to determine the “effect of human blood on the stomach when taken orally,” so he whipped up a bunch of sandwiches made out of

  WARNING:

  DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE IF YOU ARE OPERATING HEAVY MACHINERY

  human bone marrow. I am not making this up. According to the article, the doctor fed the sandwiches to an unsuspecting colleague, claiming that they contained “a special sauce sent by his sister from America.” The doctor was suspended from the college. The colleague is reportedly still off his feed.

  This article kept popping into my brain while Doctor Bob and the other skilled professionals were explaining to us in detailed scientific terms how come Beth needed an onslaught of preventive medical care even though she was feeling perfectly fine.

  “Do you have any questions?” they kept asking. I had two main ones:

  1. “How about we just forget this whole thing?”

  2. “You guys definitely eat regular sandwiches at this hospital, right?”

  But I never found a good time to ask these questions, and so early one morning I drove to the hospital and surrendered Beth, who—this particular detail sticks in my mind, for some reason—was still feeling perfectly fine. They took her away and put masks on and committed acts of medical care on her, and when they brought her back, she was experiencing what the medical community likes to call “discomfort.” This is like saying Hiroshima experienced “urban renewal.” I have not seen Beth experience so much discomfort since the time she experienced the Joy and Wonder of Natural Childbirth, during which she left inch-deep grip marks in the steel bedrail.

  So I kept lunging out into the corridor and tackling medical professionals around the ankles and dragging them in to look at Beth. “Yes,” they’d explain helpfully, while Beth was thrashing around and making sound track noises from The Exorcist and, in her occasional moments of rationality, asking to be taken outside and shot, “she is experiencing some discomfort.”

  Finally I was able, without medical training, to figure out myself what was wrong.

  “No wonder she’s in pain!” I exclaimed. “Some maniac has put staples into her!”

  I’m serious. Right into her body. If you, like so many of us, were ever stapled in the hand by Walter Gorski in the fourth grade, you know that even one staple is very painful; Beth had enough to supply a bustling legal practice. So you can imagine my shock when I learned that this had done by, of all people, Doctor Bob. Yes! He was charging us to staple Beth! What is more, he had installed a drain. In my wife. I realized right then that Beth had to recover quickly, because God knows what they would do to her next. I might come in one morning and find a kazoo sticking out of her forehead.

  Fortunately she got out, and she’s going to be fine. Someday she may even feel as good as before they started medically caring for her. So all’s well that ends well, and although I’ve been “poking some fun” here at the medical community, I’m sure you realize that, deep down inside, I have a large inflamed cyst of respect for it. Really. Trust me. Have a sandwich.

  P.S. The bill for staples—just the staples—was $63.

  TAKING THE MANLY WAY OUT

  Today we’re going to explore the mysterious topic of How Guys Think, which has baffled women in general, and the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine in particular, for thousands of years.

  The big question, of course, is: How come guys never call? After successful dates, I mean. You single women out there know what I’m talking about. You go out with a guy, and you have a great time, and he seems to have a great time, and at the end of the evening he says, quote, “Can I call you?” And you, interpreting this to mean “Can I call you?,” answer: “Sure!”

  The instant you say this, the guy’s body start to dematerialize. Within a few seconds you can stick a tire iron right through him and wave it around; in a few more seconds he has vanished entirely, gone into the mysterious Guy Bermuda Triangle, where whole squadrons of your dates have disappeared over the years, never to be heard from again.

  Eventually you start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you, some kind of emotional hang-up or personality defect that your dates are detecting. Or possibly foot odor. You start having long, searching discussions with your women friends in which you say things like: “He really seemed to like me” and “I didn’t feel as though I was putting pressure on him” and “Would you mind, strictly as a friend, smelling my feet?”

  This is silly. There’s nothing wrong with you. In fact, you should interpret the behavior of your dates as a kind of guy compliment to you. Because when the guy asks you if he can call you, what he’s really asking you, in Guy Code, is will you marry him. Yes. See, your basic guy is into a straight-ahead, bottom-line kind of thought process that does not work nearly as well with the infinitely subtle complexities of human relationships as it does with calculating how much gravel is needed to cover a given driveway. So here’s what the guy is thinking: If he calls you, you’ll go out again, and you’ll probably have another great time, so you’ll probably go out again and have another great time, and so on until the only possible option will be to get married. This is classic Guy Logic.

  So when you say “Sure!” in a bright cheery voice, you may think you’re simply indicating a willingness to go out again, but as far as he’s concerned you’re endorsing a lifetime commitment that he is quite frankly not ready to make after only one date, so he naturally decided he can never see you again. From that day forward, if he spots you on the street, he’ll spring in the opposite direction to avoid the grave risk that the two of you might meet, which would mean he’d have to ask you if you wanted to get a cup of coffee, and you might say yes, and pretty soon you’d be enjoying each other’s company again, and suddenly a clergyman would appear at your table and YOU’D HAVE TO GET MARRIED AIEEEEEEE.

  (You women think this is crazy, right? Whereas you guys out there are nodding your heads.)

  So my advice for single women is that if you’re on a date with a guy you like, and he asks whether he can call you, you should give him a nonthreatening answer, such as:

  “No.”

  Or: “I guess so, but bear in mind that I’m a nun.”

  This will make him comfortable about seeing you again, each time gaining the courage to approach you more closely, in the manner of a timid, easily startled woodland creature such as a chipmunk. In a few years, if the two of you really do have common interests and compatible personalities, you may reach the point where he’ll be willing to take the
Big Step, namely, eating granola directly from your hand.

  No matter how close you become, however, remember this rule: Do not pressure the guy to share his most sensitive innermost thoughts and feelings with you. Guys hate this, and I’ll tell you why: If you were to probe inside the guy psyche, beneath that macho exterior and the endless droning about things like the 1978 World Series, you would find, deep down inside, a passionate, heartfelt interest in: the 1978 World Series. Yes. The truth is, guys don’t have any sensitive innermost thoughts and feelings. It’s time you women knew! All these years you’ve been agonizing about how to make the relationship work, wondering how come he never talks to you, worrying about all the anguished emotion he must have bottled up inside, and meanwhile he’s fretting about how maybe he needs longer golf spikes. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Maybe you should become a nun.

  Anyway, I hope I’ve cleared up any lingering questions anybody might have regarding guys, as a gender. For some reason I feel compelled to end this with a personal note: Heather Campbell, if you’re out there, I just want to say that I had a really nice time taking you to the Junior Prom in 1964, and I was a total jerk for never, not once, mentioning this fact to you personally.

  LIFE’S A HITCH, AND THEN YOU CRY

  We’re getting into Wedding Season again. This is good for America. We may be falling behind Japan in other areas, such as being able to produce cars or televisions or high school graduates capable of reading rest-room symbols without moving their lips, but we still have the world’s largest and most powerful wedding industry.

  If you want proof, pick up the February—March issue of either Bride’s or Modern Bride magazine, and right away you’ll be struck by the fact that you have sustained a major hernia. Each of these magazines is large enough to have its own climate. Modern Bride is over 800 pages long; Bride’s is over 1,000. Almost every page features a full-color photograph of a radiant young bride, her face beaming with that look of ecstatic happiness that comes from knowing, deep in her heart, that her wedding cost as much as a Stealth bomber, not including gratuities.

  “Money can’t buy you happiness, so you might as well give your money to us,” that is the sentimental motto of the wedding industry. The pages of Bride’s and Modern Bride are crammed with advertisements for silverware, glassware, crystalware, chinaware, ovenware, fondue-ware, Tupperware, underwear, and all the other absolutely mandatory weddingwares that will become Treasured Lifetime Family Heirlooms until they have to be sold to pay the divorce lawyers.

  Because let’s face it, a lot of marriages just don’t work out. Many newlyweds are hurling crystalware within days. Even Donald and Ivana Trump, a couple who seemed to have everything—hair, teeth, most of Manhattan Island—have been having marital problems so tragic that even the most hardened observer is forced to laugh until his gums bleed.

  This is why more and more smart engaged couples are avoiding costly future court disputes by means of a legal arrangement called a “prenuptial divorce,” under which they agree to get married and divorced simultaneously. This eliminates problems down the road, yet enables the couple to go ahead and have the kind of enormous, ware-intensive wedding that America needs to remain competitive in the world economy.

  Weddings also enable us to continue certain cherished traditions, such as the tradition of the bride’s family and the groom’s family hating each other so much that sometimes, at the reception, the two opposing mothers wind up wrestling in the cake. Of course you can avoid this kind of inter-family tension by means of a new matrimonial wrinkle, the one-family wedding, which was invented by a woman I know named Ginny.

  Ginny was in the mood to hold a big wedding, but her only remaining nonmarried child, Edward, wasn’t engaged to anybody. So she hit upon the idea of holding a wedding anyway, with the role of the bride played by Tiffany, a life-size bikini-wearing inflatable doll. Tiffany had spent several months floating around the pool, smiling, and everybody thought she was very nice despite a minor algae problem. Of course there was always the danger that she’d turn out to have a bunch of obnoxious inflatable relatives, but as far as anybody knew she was an orphan.

  So we were all very excited about the wedding, when suddenly Edward—you know these headstrong kids—got engaged to Carey, an actual human being. Let me state for the record that Edward made a wonderful choice, but you have to feel bad for Tiffany, who quickly went from the role of Beautiful Bride-To-Be to the role of Deflated Wad in a Closet, which is a tragic waste when you consider that she is more than qualified to be vice president.

  But we can’t be thinking about tragedies, not with Wedding Season coming. We need to be thinking about the following quotation, which I am not making up, from the Beauty News section of Bride’s magazine:

  “DILEMMA: My brows are too bushy; my bridesmaids’ are too sparse. How can we get them in shape by wedding day?”

  Unfortunately the solution is too long to reprint here, so you brides-to-be had better pick up a copy of Bride’s, using a rental forklift, and read the article pronto, because otherwise, as you walk down the aisle on your Very Special Day, you’re going to hear people whispering, “What are those things on her forehead? Sea urchins?”

  By the way, the rental forklift is the responsibility of the groom.

  GETTING PHYSICAL

  I started aging rapidly last week. Until then, I had been aging steadily at the rate of about one year per year, with a few exceptions, such as during the party where I drank bourbon from John Cooper’s shoe while standing in the shower. When I woke up on the lawn the next morning, I discovered that I had aged nearly a decade.

  But after that I felt pretty good until last week, when I went in for my annual physical examination. I get an annual physical exam about once every six years. I’m reluctant to do it more often because of the part where the doctor does A Horrible Thing.

  You middle-aged guys know what I mean. You’re in the examining room, and the doctor has been behaving in a nonthreatening manner, thumping on your chest, frowning into your ears, etc., and the two of you are having a normal guy conversation about how George Steinbrenner should get, at minimum, the electric chair, and you’re almost enjoying your physical examination, when, without warning, the doctor reaches into a drawer and pulls out: The Glove.

  Suddenly you notice that the doctor looks vaguely like Vincent Price, and the room lights are flashing, and the music system, which had been playing “Wonderful World,” is now playing the theme from Jaws. And now the doctor is holding up his hand, which has grown to the size of a mature eggplant and has sprouted eight or nine extra digits, and he’s struggling to pull on The Glove, which has developed a life of its own, snarling and writhing like some kind of evil mutant albino squid. And now the doctor is turning to you, his eyes glowing like beer signs, and he’s saying “Turn around hahahaHAHAHAHA” and you’re thinking OH NO PLEASE NOOOOOOO.

  Once I was getting examined, and when it came time for The Glove the doctor brought in, for training purposes, another doctor, who happened to be a member of the extreme opposite sex, and the two of them were back there chatting away about various Points of Interest like a pair of guides on a glass-bottom-boat tour. When it was over, all I wanted was a grocery bag to wear over my head until I could get a new identity through the Federal Witness Protection Program.

  But last week I got through The Glove OK. In fact I got through almost everything; the only problem the doctor found—this was NOT during the glove exam—was excessive earwax, which in many cultures is considered a sign of virility. So I was feeling good, ready to schedule my next appointment for late 1996 and sprint for the exit, when the doctor looked at my cardiogram and made that “hmmmm” noise that doctors are taught in medical school so they won’t come right out and say “UH-oh!”

  “You have an abnormal cardiogram,” he said.

  He said a lot of stuff after that, but I missed most of it because I was looking around the room for a good place to faint. I do remember the doctor ges
turing at an explicit diagram of the human heart and talking about a condition called a “branch bundle blockage” (or maybe he said “bundle branch blockade”), which is caused by the heart valves being connected improperly to the distributor wires. Or something like that. I wasn’t really following him. I felt the way I do when the guys at my service station, Sal and Bill, are attempting to explain what’s wrong with my car.

  “Look at this!” Sal will say, picking up a filth-encrusted object that for all I know is a fragment of Mayan pottery. “Your postulation valve has no comportment!”

  “No comportment at all!” affirms Bill, genuinely disgusted that such a thing could happen in 20th-century America.

  “And look at this here!” says Sal, thrusting the thing toward me.

  “Your branch bundle is blocked!” says Bill.

  “You have two weeks to live!” says the doctor.

  No, the doctor didn’t really say that. He said that an abnormal cardiogram is perfectly normal, and it’s probably nothing to worry about, but just in case, he wanted to schedule a test where I run on a treadmill and then they inject atomic radiation into my body and frown at the results.

  “Fine!” I said, trying to appear composed, which was difficult because by that point I was sitting on the floor.

  So now I’m waiting to take my test, and I’m feeling old. I’m experiencing every one of the 147 Major Warning Signs Of Heart Trouble, including Chest Pains, Shortness of Breath, Tendency to Not Notice That the Traffic Light Has Changed, and Fear of Ordering French Fries. Also my heart has taken to beating very loud, especially late at night. Perhaps you have heard it. “STOP BEATING YOUR HEART SO LOUD!” is what I am sure the neighbors are yelling. Fortunately I cannot hear them, on account of my earwax condition.