“Did you bring me back a Pope doll?” I asked eagerly.
“You know who else thinks that’s funny?” my mother replied. “People who are turning on rotisserie spits in Hell, that’s who. Do you think the Pope’s still funny, or do you want to spend eternity as a Boston chicken?”
“Come on, it is so funny,” I argued. “He could come with a couple of outfits with matching pointy hats, one of those smoky lanterns, and a little tiny lamp with a string you could pull to make it light up and the Pope could say, ‘I’m home,’ ‘I’m not home.’ ‘I’m home,’ ‘I’m not home.’ ”
“Oh, oh, look,” my father commanded exitedly and then held up a picture. “Here’s France! Here’s France!”
“I was so glad to get out of Italy,” my mother said. “On our second day there, they fed me a mad cow.”
“No one fed you a mad cow, Mom,” I said. “You probably just drank some bad water.”
“Yeah?” my mother said, shooting me a dirty look. “Water doesn’t keep you in the bathroom for seven days and seven nights on a cruise ship. From the likes of what happened to me next, that cow wasn’t just mad, it was pissed.”
“Wow, look at France,” my sister said as she handed me the photo.
I expected to see the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, maybe even the Louvre, but there, in my hand, was a photo of what looked unmistakably like a CVS or Duane Reade.
“Now, France, we liked,” my father said as he looked at the picture with me. “This was the place in France where we got Mommy’s Imodium A-D.”
“Oh, I loved France,” my mother added. “That was a good day, a very good day. When I was finally able to go on deck, other people on the cruise told me they thought your father had killed me and thrown me overboard. Some were very worried, even though no one said anything.”
It was then that I noticed something odd. In essentially every single photo—with the exception of the one in which my grimacing mother is about to get mugged by a distant relative—the scene or image was framed by what appeared to be red curtains. Not ruling out the possibility that this was the only fancy-pants feature on the expensive camera that my father figured out how to operate, I decided to ask.
“Dad, what’s the deal with the red curtains? They’re in almost every shot,” I asked.
“Oh, those were just the curtains on the tour bus,” my father explained. “They’re on all of the windows.”
“So . . . all of these photos were taken . . . on the bus?” I asked. “The Colosseum, the aqueducts, the Pope’s house? The Spanish Steps? You didn’t get off the bus? It looks like you saw Europe through a puppet show!”
“Sure, we got off,” my mother interjected. “We had to get off the bus so we could get back on the boat! Oh, and in France we got off, too!”
“To get the Imodium A-D?” I suggested weakly.
“I loved France,” my mother beamed. “It was a nice drugstore!”
The rest of my parents’ pictures weren’t any more exciting, to be honest, and frankly, they were just as boring as the pictures I had seen of eight other trips to Europe this year, except that most of my friends who had gone to Europe actually touched the ground. Still, Europe had been “educational” for my parents, as evidenced when my mother commented on an obelisk that “it must have taken a lot of time to make that phallus so big.”
I was choking on my own spit when my sister stumbled across the secret stash that was tucked under a place mat.
Pornography, apparently, was written on someone’s agenda.
Okay, so it wasn’t really pornography, just more like ancient-world smut from the part of Pompeii that wasn’t rated for family viewing. My dad had apparently stashed them away under a place mat while he handed off the photos of the Vatican and the Spanish Steps that made me more sleepy than the time I took eight Tylenol PMs when I was in a very dramatic mood. In any case, he was keeping all of the exciting pictures to himself, such as the statue of a Roman man with a dinky-doo the size of a car bumper, the frescoes of ladies dancing in the buff, and paintings of what looked like some naked guys wrestling.
“Oh my God,” my sister and I giggled as my dad grinned from ear to ear and my mother cried, “What’s the big deal? It’s just anatomy! Every male has an obelisk! Your father simply took scientific pictures!”
There was an element of biology in them, I’ll grant him that, but it was antique porn that I was looking at. My dad had obviously stumbled upon the old Guccione homestead.
I felt my psyche swirl as $3,000 of psychotherapy went right down the drain.
Well, that is, as soon as I got over the amazement that my dad finally figured out how to work the 180-degree feature.
“I thought the colors were pretty,” my father insisted.
“Oh, they’re colorful, all right,” I said. “It’s Pompeii’s version of the Spice Channel! Some are so dirty, you couldn’t even see that kind of stuff on the Spice Channel, they’d have to invent the Dirt Channel just to broadcast it. Did you see this shell of a person, Mom? I don’t think he’s reaching for his forehead.”
“Put those away!” my mother said as my father giggled.
“Did you notice anything odd about those pictures?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yep,” I said. “No curtains.”
Curse of the Squinky Eye
Bllmmm.
Oh no. No. No. Oh, it can’t be. It can’t be. Please let it not be.
Bllmmm.
Damn it. Damn it! It’s my eye, the fluttering eye. That thing it does. Squinky eye. It’s a goddamn squinky eye. I haaaaaate the squinky eye. God, just go away! I hate the way it gets your eye all fluttery, like if just your eye was having a seizure.
Maybe it was a onetime thing, just like a lone squinky-eye eruption, then it will just go back and be dormant.
Bllmmm. Oh God, this is going to drive me crazy. Drive me crazy. It feels like a tremor hits the whole side of my face. And I’m supposed to be working. How can I work like this, when I can’t concentrate, sitting here, waiting for the squinky eye to hit again?? How I hate the squinky eye!
If I don’t think about it maybe it will go away. Maybe I can ignore the squinky eye into submission. Ignore it. Ignore it. I’m ignoring the squinky eye. I don’t even understand the squinky eye. I mean, how does it happen? What is going on with my eye that it needs to convulse and then stop? Is it an eye hissy fit? Is it like a skin earthquake? Are the plates of my skull separating, is my face coming apart, is a mountain range being born, or is it just another pore expanding? God, I already have pores the size of pudding cups, that’s the last thing I need, another pore I need to fill in with spackle. Flying insects have hit my face and just been swallowed by my pores, never to be seen again, they’re like black holes. Why do I have such big pores? I wonder who I should blame for that, my mom or my dad? Oh, my mom for sure. I’ve never really looked at her pores, but I’ll make a point of it next time I see her, I certainly will. Big pores. Thanks, Mom, thanks. As I matured and became an Italian-American woman, my genetic makeup (which for any other culture would be equivalent to a man’s) sprang to the forefront, if you know what I mean. In order to get up the endurance to take a razor to myself these days, I’d have to sleep for three days beforehand to store up enough energy, or consume about a case of Power Bars. Honestly, I think my mother may have taken drugs during all three of her pregnancies to ensure she’d give birth to monkey babies, her own personal insurance policy against any of her daughters becoming strippers.
As if that wasn’t enough on my genetics scorecard to push me into another species altogether, but the big hubcap pores, well, they put me right over the top. I wish big pores were hot on a girl. How my life would have been changed. I could plant flowers in mine. If I lay down in a field in Texas, I bet kids would fall into them like a well.
Bllmmm.
Oh, stop it. That’s enough, okay, that is enough. I wonder if you can see this one, because sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you can’t, and it’s only you wh
o knows that your eye is rumbling. Okay, now that I’m in front of the mirror and waiting for it, the squinky eye won’t do it. Watch, it won’t do it. It will play dead. Come on, squinky eye, come on. I’m waiting for you. Isn’t it weird that it happens, like, once a year, and for the whole day you have the squinky eye and then it just vanishes, not to appear until next year? What is it? I wonder if there’s documentation on it. I wonder if science has a name for it. I’m so glad I didn’t have the squinky eye at my wedding. The pictures would have been merciless— double chin, meatball in my teeth, a twitching eye. Bride with a tic face. My mother should have stopped the whole thing and put me on palsy watch. All I needed was a clubfoot and a stutter and I would have been the perfect hillbilly bride. Maybe it’s a probe of some sort that the government placed there when I was born so they could track me, because anywhere that I go, well, there’s my eyeball, too. Hell, they could just find me by my pores, they’re so enormous they’ve shown up on satellite images.
Bllmmm. Oh shit. Shit! I wasn’t looking. I was looking at that super-long and up until now invisible chin hair. Damn it. Maybe it’s some guy pressing a button in some faraway government office to drive me crazy and make me stand in front of a mirror looking at my eye until it freaks out again. I wouldn’t doubt that one bit, I really wouldn’t. The government does all kinds of crazy things, like dropping LSD in unsuspecting people’s drinks in the fifties to see what would happen—they did that. They totally did. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a Laurie Notaro Squinky Eye Button and people take turns once a year pressing it. I’ll bet it’s like popping Bubble Wrap, it loses its fun after about a day, and then it’s just boring. I wonder who is pressing mine. Probably an old boss. Or my mom. I would like to press someone’s squinky-eye button, I would, I think that would be fun. I wonder whose they’d let me do? I’d ask to do Kelly Ripa, but I bet she’s got a list a mile long of people who want to give her a squinky eye. At one squinky eye per year, I bet I’d be dead before my turn came up.
Bllmmm. A-HA! I saw you! GOTCHA! I got you! Saw the whole thing, I saw it contract, make my eye flutter like I was having a stroke, and then vanish. It’s a bad squinky, too. . . . God, it’s bad. It looks like a fisherman caught my eye with a hook and is tugging on it like I was the biggest catfish he’s ever seen. I’m like Oprah in The Color Purple. It is THAT bad. There can be Discreet Squinky Eye, in which only the person with the squinky eye knows what’s going on; it’s a very low-key squinky eye and one that understands that a convulsing spasm eye may horrify others and therefore maintains a delicate sense of decorum about the whole situation, but of course I didn’t get that one. Nope. The one that I have has to look like I have eye epilepsy, because then there are Flagrant Squinky Eyes who don’t care who sees them, they are brass and bold and downright mean. They don’t care. It’s got the whole eye bulging to the bass rhythm of an OutKast song. That’s what I have. A Flagrant Squinky Eye, the overachiever. It looks like an unborn twin attempting to escape.
I have to go to the store in a little while and I don’t want to go if I have the squinky eye. I don’t want to be in the frozen food section and have the person next to me freak out because it looks like I’ve got an alien about to burst through my face and escape through the air duct system—either that, or people will think it’s contagious. I can’t go, especially because now I know it’s a Flagrant Squinky Eye. If it was the lighter version, I could handle it, I could maybe hide it with hair or my glasses, but this thing looks like someone hooked it up to a Taser. I hate the Flagrant Squinky Eye—the Discreet one, well, you can forgive it, it’s only doing its job, as far as spasms go, but the Flagrant one just has to push it over the top, like a convulsion isn’t a convulsion unless everyone in line sees it and is rightfully disgusted by it. I don’t want to stand next to someone with a beating, throbbing eye. Who would?
Blllmmm. JESUS!!! Stop it. Bllmmm. STOP IT. Someone must stop the squinky eye. If they can devote lab space to figuring out that a shot of bacteria will smooth out your wrinkles, can someone please designate a countertop and a microscope to solving the squinky-eye puzzle? Please?
You know, with all the things science has accomplished—they can transplant lungs and kidneys, make babies in glass dishes, clone things—why can’t somebody fix the squinky eye? Doesn’t it plague humanity enough? At any one given second in the day, I bet a million or more people are all being tortured by the Squinky Eye Syndrome. Can no one stop the squinky eye? Is it that all-powerful? If science can sew a severed hand back onto an ex-con—I mean, if they can develop a pill to give a man an erection for four hours—why does the squinky-eye issue go unresolved? And that’s a stupid pill, I’ll tell you. I’m sure it seems all fun and cool for the first fifteen minutes, but when it’s all said and done, you have to spend the rest of the day indoors and just pray your little boner out that your house doesn’t catch on fire. If science can clone me, fix the goddamned squinky eye. Really, though, I hope no one clones me. What a nightmare. I believe every baby deserves a fresh, clean slate, you know? I mean, how do you tell a tiny little baby clone who’s been Xeroxed off like a company memo that informs people that wiping bad things on the bathroom stall walls WILL NOT BE TOLERATED, “Get ready, Laurie 2.0, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
How do you look at your little clone and say, “You know, when you’re five and go on that field trip when you walk into the light pole and your dress flies up after you’re knocked unconscious and the whole class sees your panties, just laugh with them when you wake up, okay? It’s way better than crying so hard that you throw up, and besides, if you show them that you also find the nickname ‘Whorie Laurie’ humorous, maybe they won’t insist on singing it every time they see you.”
When she cuts her first tooth, how can you bring yourself to mention, “Start sucking those choppers in, little sister, or you’re going to end up with the overbite of a donkey that can only be marginally repaired by four years of orthodontia, including seven months of round-the-clock headgear after Dr. Ovens catches you cheating on your headgear hourly scorecard.”
When she laughs that cute little baby laugh, how can you not begin weeping as you advise, “Boy, after the number that high school does on you, it will take a fifth of JD for you to emit so much as a giggle.”
And then—then—there’s the gargantuan pores that are so big, people think I must be an overzealous body piercer in recovery.
And who am I kidding, it’s not only Laurie 2.0 who would suffer, this clone thing would also suck for me. It would be like dying the longest death possible, watching your life flash before your eyes in real time. Talk about torture! I’d rather have things burned off of me than relive most of the moments from my life, unless I was sleeping, and some of those are pretty humiliating, too.
I’m sorry, but I think that every life deserves to start out, at least for the first thirty seconds, scar-free. Without a full set of emotional baggage. With a clean plate, free of any issues except hunger and intestinal gas. With at least an inkling of hope. You can clone all the sheep you want. I mean, what problems do sheep have? I’m going to eat, I’m going to get shaved, and then I’m going to meet a man with a very large knife. That is nothing compared to letting a stoner chick look for a piece of gum in your eighth-grade purse and watching helplessly as she finds the maxi pad flag.
A man with a big knife would have been a godsend.
Hey.
Hey.
I think it stopped. I think it’s gone.
Is it gone?
I think it’s gone. Or it’s sleeping. It’s gone or it’s sleeping. I don’t know. Can’t tell.
Oh my God. I think it’s gone. Squinky eye? Squinky eye, are you there?
I think it’s gone. I think it may be gone. I think it may be safe to go to the store now, because really, a squinky eye is only a little better than having a relentless erection. Really, I mean, how can you go out into public when your whole face is hiccuping? My mind has triumphed over my eye! God,
my mind must be powerful. Well, duh. I mean, I kept thinking over and over and over for years that Froot Loops should have marshmallows in them, and THAT finally happened, too, and they come in monster shapes to boot. Finally, it’s the perfect cereal, just like I said. Just like I said. I predicted it. No, I made it happen. Okay, I’m going to pick up my car keys very carefully so as to not wake the squinky eye in case it’s resting, and I’m going to go out the door and get into the car. You know, though, it’s weird, once the squink goes away, you kind of realize that in a way, you sort of liked it. And sort of miss it. In a very weird way, it almost feels, well, a little bit cool.
Bllmmm.
Last Night at Long Wong’s
When I took two steps into the bar and looked down at the stage, my heart broke into a million pieces. The stage was naked, the tables around it empty, and some chairs were stacked, while others sat scattered in random positions.
It was dark, and up near the stage it was quiet.
It was the last night of Long Wong’s. In about an hour it would close for good, targeted for demolition in the upcoming weeks. As I stood in that room, I understood it had always been small, but now, for some reason it looked modest, tiny, impossibly little.
My living room, I realized, was bigger.
I had spent years of my life in this place, formative years when I was just starting out as a writer with a column in a college newspaper. I survived on $70 a week but lived off of my friends’ generosity; Nikki, one of my best friends and a Long Wong’s waitress, would slip me extra wings when I bought a dozen during happy hour; whichever friend’s band was playing that night would be kind enough to put me on the guest list so I never paid a cover; Sara, the bartender and another of my best friends, always had a JD and Coke ready for me at the bar when I came in. Then there would be an after-hours party, usually at my friend Patti’s place, which was an old, run-down apartment in a tiny 1960s-era complex mere feet from the train tracks, close enough to the bar that you could walk there after it closed.
We Thought You Would Be Prettier Page 17
