“You bet. Tell me! Do I even know your name? How could I use it?”
“Oh, right. Okay, Kevin Bacon is very nice and low-key. He’s a sweetheart. Down-home guy. I could ride around with him all day. Seinfeld used to be nice, but he changed. Bad sign when people start acting spoiled. James Taylor is a super good guy. Just like you’d think. Some musicians are really touchy, though. Especially jazz musicians, surprisingly. I would have thought they’d be nicer. I mean, jazz is loose. But they’re not loose. Sometimes musicians hum in the backseat. I like that. Gives me a groove.”
He roars through a yellow light and continues telling. “Julia Roberts is guarded. Doesn’t want to say much. Always sinking into her collar like you might take notes on her or something. John Travolta is fabulous. Talk, talk, talk! He loves flying more than anything. You can drive him around and completely forget he’s a star. But then there are people—ohmygod—the last time I was asked to pick up Donald Trump, I refused. Gave the job to someone else. My blood pressure won’t take it.”
He pauses.
I say, “Arrogance is a drag.”
He says, “Big drag.” Then he says, “One more thing. If you like Tom Cruise, get out of this car.”
“I don’t care for Tom Cruise.”
“Good! Then you can stay in. He follows a religion invented by a science fiction writer, for pete’s sake! And acts pompous about it! But worse than that, he thinks he’s so cute. I can’t stand it when a man his age thinks he’s cute. A twenty-year-old staring at himself in a window is okay, but a man his age? All those leather jackets and shit. Excuse me. He really burns me up.”
A million non-celebrities are outside walking on the sidewalks, carrying packages of hot dog buns, reams of paper, coffee cups, walking jumpy little dogs, catching glimpses of themselves in windows. Some of them probably think they are very cute. And they are.
He says, “Sometimes talking or thinking about stars puts me in a bad mood. Why can’t they just be happy and nice to people? They have everything. Looks, talent, money, glory. Still, they beat up on people, cheat on their wives, throw telephones…ho-hum. Bruce is a true star. Let’s only talk about Bruce. If I ever get to drive him somewhere, I am seriously going to have to find a way to tell him what he means to me. I just hope I won’t be tongue-tied.” He pauses. “The other thing that gets me in a bad mood is talking about our government. Don’t even get me started.”
“I won’t. It’s beyond speaking.”
“It’s too much.”
“We love Bruce.”
Fun with Grandpa
I DIAL MY FATHER UP IN NORTH TEXAS TO speak to my only child, who’s visiting his grandparents for the weekend. My dad says, “Hey, we’re driving down a country road right now on the way to buy ice cream. We can’t really talk.”
I say, “Can I speak with him?”
My dad says, “Well, he’s in the back of the truck. I can’t reach him from here.”
“DAD!” I say. “Isn’t it against the law to ride in the back of a pickup truck?”
He says, “Maybe, but we’re going slow. He likes it.”
“Yeah, but you’re driving with one hand, too.”
My dad pulls over on some country road between cattle in fields, gets out of the driver’s seat, and hands the phone to my son in the back. I can hear the truck start up again and a lot of fumbling going on with the phone.
“Hey!” I say to my son. “Would you please get in the cab? Pound on the back window and make him stop again and get in the cab.”
He doesn’t reply to this at all but says, “Say, Mom, we ran over a snake with the riding lawn mower this morning. It was really big and the grass was tall so we didn’t see it. It was huge, actually, it was gigantic. Must have been a rattlesnake for sure. Then we had to get it off the blades. Poor guy, it was all mangled, wasn’t quite dead yet either. Oof! Sorry, Grandpa hit a bump. Everything is fine! We’re having a great time!”
Free Day in Toronto
A JOURNALIST WHO ATE A ROTTEN FIG FOUR days ago is in the emergency room.
A suave Portuguese man (easy to picture him on a cell phone in an airport, conducting distant business deals) feels his esophagus flaming. He says he has recently lost twenty pounds, and vomits without warning. Instead of flying up for the weekend to his cottage on Lake Superior where the water is so clean you can swim and drink at the same time, he came to the emergency room.
I diagnose him right away. “Some amoeba, from drinking the lake!” He shakes his head. They already tested him for it.
An older woman who fell and hit her head on a concrete step is here, wearing gigantic dark glasses. Her worried husband hovers over her.
Three daughters are translating for their mother speaking some melodious Asian language (I feel ashamed not to know which one). The mother’s high fever keeps recurring. The daughters say she won’t leave the house. They had to drag her here.
“Why won’t she leave the house?” asks Dr. Ovens, who attends to us one by one in a gentle, round-robin fashion, as we wait on high stretcher beds fanning out from Emergency’s central computer.
The daughters speak to their mother. They shake their heads.
“She just won’t leave the house. She has no energy.”
Think of it. Toronto, a glossy, high-chrome and glass city, surging with subways and taxis, versus a listless, overheated immigrant who doesn’t speak English. Why would she feel like going out?
An attractive young woman wearing a strappy flowered sundress is crying. Her tall boyfriend leans over her bed and whispers in her ear. She doesn’t look sick. She looks disturbed.
Everyone keeps asking everyone else if it is still raining. What are they talking about? It has not rained a drop all week! How long have they been in here?
Old magazines I missed are lying around on bedside tables. Touching tattered magazines in an emergency unit feels slightly dangerous. But I am so happy to find Dave Eggers’s 1999 account of picking up hitchhikers in Cuba, I’m almost glad to have come here. Dave drove around the island of Cuba in a rented VW van. He picked up anyone with a thumb out. People took him home, served him rice and beans and rum, and he learned about Cuba from the inside out. I want to go to Cuba and rent a car and become a free-for-all taxi driver as soon as I can. But I will have to fly from Canada, not from the U.S., or I will get arrested.
Another duo has joined us in the den of emergencies—a fragile, sad-faced mother, perhaps eighty-five, with bouffant blond hair and a pretty white blouse, supporting herself on a walker, and her son, about sixty, dressed as if for golf, fanning a sheaf of papers and yelling at her, yelling, yelling, because she made some questionable investments and the numbers do not go together!
“Mercy me,” says the head-hitter’s husband. “Could you please take this up at the bank? We are suffering here!”
“Cool it!” hisses the boyfriend. “You are upsetting my girlfriend!”
“Sir,” says the nurse, “if you don’t lower your voice, we’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“I think,” the husband whispers to me, “he’s worried she’s going to pop her top and his inheritance won’t be in order.”
“Why are you here?” Jennifer the nurse asks me. She is placing little EKG buds all over my chest and shoulders. She has sleek rectangular glasses, a gray T-shirt, and a warm, genuine presence. I would like to have lunch with her or sit beside her on a plane. I would like to drive her around Cuba.
She doesn’t just mean my medical condition, she means in Toronto.
My son and I have been attending a children’s literature conference at a university campus for a week. Today was to be our one free sightseeing day.
We had discussed renting bicycles to ride along the harbor front. We had not yet sampled the bubble tea (tapioca grains floating in frothy brew) or seen Greektown or visited the shoe museum.
“Children’s literature!” says Jennifer. “I adore children’s literature! My daughter’s seventeen. I love William Steig!”
>
I say, “Coincidentally, we were just talking about his book Dr. DeSoto in the cab on the way over here.”
“In the cab? Why?”
“It must have been prophetic.”
The minute my EKG is completed, I hop off the examination table, pull my green shirt over my blue hospital gown, and hoof it out to the waiting room where my friend Ginny is waiting with my fifteen-year-old son. They are eating hot dogs from a street-side vendor and drinking sodas.
“There’s somebody back there who ate a rotten fig,” I say, and we all start laughing. “Four days ago!”
My son leans forward. “I don’t think you should laugh so much.”
“He’s right,” Ginny whispers. “If you keep acting so happy, they’ll keep us here forever.”
“Why don’t you two go sightseeing or something? This is wasting your whole day!”
But they will not leave me.
Last night, before the streaking pain shot through my left arm, causing me to sit down on a curb in my good skirt next to a hobo in a dirty Blue Jays hat, my son and I were on our way to look at a restaurant. This seems strange. Not to eat there, just to look at it. Bar Mercurio. A friend had told me it is a great place, tiny and atmospheric. But—what a dumb thing to do! We went out walking late at night just to look at something? Bar Mercurio was right where it was supposed to be, wrapped in a dim aura of elegance. We gazed a few seconds at cozy couples eating pizzas, then whipped around to walk back to campus. It sounds ridiculous, in retrospect. Take note: we whipped around.
When I said I thought I was having a heart attack, my son dodged across the street into a small grocery to purchase aspirins and bottled water for me. Then he stepped off the curb and motioned for a taxi. What a sensible guy. I would remember this moment later as “maturity occurring.” Tears rose in my eyes on top of the pain.
As the taxi was pulling up, my son said, “Mom, should we get an ambulance instead?”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
The taxi driver was the one unfriendly Canadian we have ever met. When my son said, “Victoria University dormitories,” the driver barked, “But which ones? Which street? They have a lot of residence halls!” Grrr Grrr Grrr.
We could not remember.
The pain recurred all night. I could not sleep for wondering if I should have gone to the hospital. At one A.M. I called the Tele-Health Live Nurse Hotline. She was very kind and wanted to make sure I’d been enjoying Canada. “Absolutely,” I said. “Except for that swarm of aphids on Thursday.”
“Very rare,” she said. “I’m up here in Ottawa, but we heard about it.”
I didn’t mention the extremely high temperatures, humidity level, and smog because really, Toronto is about the most wonderful city any of us will ever see. Any place that calls Joni Mitchell a “World Leader” on posters all over town is first class by me.
If my symptoms recurred, the Live Nurse thought I should go to the emergency room. Especially since I would be flying soon. We all know about blood clots and flying. We know so much we wish we didn’t know. This is another reason why I love children’s books. They restore us to the world before excess knowing, that keener, crisper world of filtered light and high hopes, that wide and beckoning field.
In the morning, when my left arm continued to hurt, my son was adamant about the emergency room. Our dorm neighbor Ginny agreed with him.
I thought, if I don’t do it, and die, he will not only be sad, he will be mad at me.
I couldn’t stand it.
Racing back to the bowels of emergency, I consider the resilience of the human frame. Already I feel at home here. This is truly weird.
The journalist calls over the striped curtain, “I heard you guys talking about William Steig. But E. B. White was my man!”
Jennifer and I agree that we can read the books or essays of E. B. White at any time and feel our minds have been distilled. Maybe White’s books should be kept in every emergency room. “I am going to go see his boathouse up in Maine,” I declare, having never thought of it till this moment. “I am going to stare out his little old window and see what he saw. Water, and rocks. I am going to make a pilgrimage. Anybody wanna go?”
The journalist is dismissed. The beautiful girl is dismissed. What was her problem? Jennifer won’t tell. The Portuguese man is placed on an IV. When Jennifer leaves, he calls out to me mournfully, “My blood test is on that computer! I feel horrible! They’re waiting for my X-rays to come through on that computer. Do you ever feel like your whole life is on somebody’s computer?”
I take the Dave Eggers issue to the X-ray room with me and, when the tall Scandinavian technician isn’t looking, rip his Cuba story out of the magazine, fold it discreetly, and tuck it into my copy of Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. I did not used to steal articles from other people’s magazines, but somehow feel no guilt about doing it now. Perhaps because I am the only person in here without an official Canadian medical card and know that I am going to be paying out the bazooka for this experience—the magazine has become mine.
Jennifer says her favorite thing to do on a free day in Toronto is ride the ferry to Ward’s Island, eat at a restaurant called The Rectory Café, and watch for the Queen Mums, a group of roller-skating octogenarians wearing vintage ball gowns, hats, and gloves, to skate by in a fragrant flurry.
“Are you serious? I’m coming back here. I mean, not here, but here.”
The furious guy is sitting across the room from his mother’s bed. He is reading a book called Full Catastrophe Living. Might we recommend Stuart Little?
Every time his mom calls out softly to him, he shouts, “I’m not talking to you, Mother! I’ve had it with you! I refuse to discuss anything until we get home!”
My son is so much nicer to me.
When I go out to see him again I will tell him I have had a revelation. I am going to become a taxi driver in Cuba.
After a vial of my own blood passes through secret channels onto the computer screen, and my other tests are analyzed, Dr. Ovens is able to tell me I have not had a heart attack at all. I probably have a pinched nerve. Or acid reflux.
In order to enter Emergency, I had to sign a mean money page (“I will be responsible for all charges and deal with my insurance company myself”) and hand over my credit card. I believe our insurance policy has a one thousand dollar deductible for escapades like this in foreign countries, though no Live Insurance Adjuster is available to confirm this when I telephone. Spending this much money would seem like a bad deal even if the King of Siam were paying.
Where is the King of Siam? Is he alive or dead?
The elegant pots of British face cream at Holt Renfrew department store don’t even cost this much.
Dr. Ovens gives me his fax and telephone numbers when I leave. He stares kindly at me and urges me to “feel free to call.” Oh sure. I can’t imagine that. How does he keep his calm amidst the ringing beepers and pages and phones? I feel a pang as I exit, leaving all my new friends, wanting one man to get to his cabin, wanting the fussy son to love his mother before it’s too late.
Ginny and my son are in a celebratory mood. “But aren’t you glad nothing was really wrong? This is Good News!”
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “This is super expensive.”
My son has phoned home to Texas and left a message: “Dad, please call us as soon as you can. I think Mom is going to be okay.”
Someday we will return to blow kisses to the Queen Mums. We will not waste our time. We will hail taxis for nice places only. We will eat at Bar Mercurio, not just look at it. If I have finished paying for the emergency room by then, I will buy a pizza for everyone in the place. They will have no idea why.
Criminal Handbags
“I AM NOT REALLY A TAXI DRIVER,” SAYS THE beautiful brown man with a perfect jawline and perfect nose, screeching away from La Guardia’s taxi line. Of course not. He doesn’t really work for this company, doesn’t have a driver’s license, has never, in fact, drive
n a car before in his life.
He has perfect dark curly hair, though.
“Hmmmm. So what are you really?”
“According to the New York police”—he turns his head to glance at me—“a criminal. I deal in…counterfeit handbags.”
“You what?”
“Copies. You know, copies?”
Familiar gray skyscrapers beckon on the New York City horizon, but I have plummeted into an unexpected galaxy. “Hmmmmm. I don’t know! You mean you imitate fancy handbags and use false tags?”
“Right.” He pauses.
“Why?”
“It’s a very good business. But I got busted, so now I’m a taxi driver, for a very brief time, I hope.”
“But why would you do such a thing?”
“Get busted? I didn’t want to.”
“No! Why would you deal in counterfeit goods? Why would anyone?”
“Money, obviously. We can make seven hundred dollars in a day—that’s a lot!”
I say nothing, so he continues.
“But it’s also a service, what we do. People want cheap handbags that look like expensive handbags. We provide the service for them.”
He turns to look at me when I am silent. He also glances at my green purse. Hey! This is a real purse from Paris! My friend Katy gave it to me!
I say, “Ha. Service, right. You sell them on street corners next to the pretzel and falafel dudes?”
“I never worked the corners. My brother worked the corners. He didn’t get caught. I worked the warehouse.”
“Did you make the handbags yourselves?”
“Of course not. They’re made in China. Fake handbags are a huge business in China. Fake boots, shoes, dresses—don’t you know about this?”
“No. I really don’t. It’s not my area. I don’t even shop. I mean, hardly.”
The world of counterfeiting seems peculiar and abstract.
I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Page 8
