Belle Weather (5 page)

With the kitchen nearly completed, hubby and I revisited the budget for the eleventy-hundredth time. But first, we strolled through the room, hand in hand, admiring the result of months of hard work. The room was gorgeous and I looked forward to heating various Hormel microwaveable entrees in it for many happy years to come.

The team was tickled, too. Jim/Jesus/Tom Cruise was thrilled. Lloyd’s boyz and Dion’s boyz were all whistling and the cursing had almost disappeared. Trucks were being packed up for the last time and cigarette butts were being raked up like leaf piles. We even put them in those jack-o-lantern lawn and leaf bags that you use to decorate your redneck yard in October.

Not exactly as wholesome as pine straw but spooky in its own way.

Unexpectedly, a twinge of separation anxiety set in when it was time to say good-bye and write the last check.

I’d already had Lloyd stay to fix an imaginary squeak in the garbage disposal. But this was silly; it was time to take my home back. Yes, my hons, it was time to cut the cord.

And wrap it around my neck. As we totaled the amount of the job, hubby and I stared at one another in disbelief. Or maybe we were both thinking the same thing: Whoa. I need to take out a
much
bigger life insurance policy on you.

Kidding! Only someone speeding on the highway to Crazy Town would think like that. But we did need to take a serious look at our shrunken finances.

We’d spent our savings and then some. Now we’d need to stumble into some serious cash. Either that, or I’d be forced to—ohmigod—go back to work.

As in the kind of work that I hadn’t done for years, the kind that requires pantyhose and minty-fresh breath and perky demeanor even when the troll sitting in the next cubicle is making your life miserable by eating smelly canned beef stew at her desk.

I shuddered to think about leaving my little home office. I’d been up here, like Rapunzel in her tower except for the fact that I have really crappy hair, writing and ruminating at my own pace for the past eight years. To tell the truth, life on Planet Celia had been pretty swell.

Clearly, going back to work for The Man couldn’t happen. Nope, it was going to be up to hubby to make money quick. But how?

Finally, it hit me. He could step up and tell the world, or at least the readership of
Us
magazine, that
he
was the real father of poor, dead Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. (This was pre-Birkhead, you must remember.)

At the rate men were signing up to claim daddyhood (and, not coincidentally, a share of baby Dannielynn’s potential gazillion dollar inheritance), I figured hubby would come in behind Urkel and slightly ahead of Donald Trump on the sign-up sheets.

Everybody knew Trump would say he was the daddy at some point. I waited for the press conference when he’d say: “This baby has been fathered by the most handsome and charismatic producer and star of the most exciting reality show that has ever been shown in the history of television. And that includes your high-definition, your plasma, and your just plain television.”

The way things were going at the time, I halfway expected poor Britney Spears, in a desperate attempt to attract attention to something other than her world-weary cooter, to say
she
was the baby’s father.

I was surprised that K-Fed, that greasy white-boy rapper in the wife-beater, didn’t step up to claim to be the baby-daddy. He ain’t much to look at but he has a supernatural ability to induce pregnancy.

In general, I believe that anytime there is a question of paternity, in the United States or abroad, K-Fed should be hauled in and swabbed.

Hubby balked at signing up, pointing out with his typical “man logic” that he had never even met Anna Nicole Smith, much less impregnated her.

Details.

You didn’t see that stopping Rosie O’Donnell, who I fully expected to claim to be the daddy because, let’s face it, she’s twice the man of any of the other candidates. She’s definitely more of a man than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vehemently denied that he was the baby’s father because he was “having to run Cally-fawn-ee-ya’s government and t’ings of t’at nature.”

“Look,” I told hubby, “even that fossil that’s married to Zsa Zsa Gabor is claiming to be the daddy, and you can look at him and tell he’s shootin’ blanks.”

Hubby continued to balk at the idea, but I pointed out that if enough folks muddied the DNA waters, it could turn into a class-action suit and he could be one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, to get a piece of the Dannielynn pie.

Mercenary? Perhaps, but y’all know that with me it’s always family first.

In the meantime, I had a book to promote, which meant I was going to be away from home, and my gorgeous new kitchen, for more than a month. I love book tours because I don’t have to cook or clean or convince my kid I know jack shit about the square root of 1,342.

In Dallas, I got to stay in the same hotel as Cyndi Lauper. She just wanted to have fun and I was like, “Cyndi, give it a rest! I really have to answer my E-mails.” OK, I didn’t actually meet her but she was on my floor.

This hotel was Zen-influenced and the TV had four separate relaxation and yoga channels but no HBO. This did nothing to relax me. It also had a restaurant where I ordered—swear to God—an eighteen-dollar bowl of oatmeal for breakfast.

The waiter said, “Ahhh, an excellent choice” and I laughed really hard and said, “Dude. It’s
oatmeal
.”

He had the last laugh, though, because this oatmeal must have had crack, in it. It was the best oatmeal on the planet.

Unfortunately, the month my book came out was the same month that Everyone in the Free World had a book come out.

It seemed like everyone was writing about (A) dogs or (B) heaven or (C) dogs in heaven. All of them were crowding onto my rightful place on the best seller list. In one town, I arrived one night after a standing-room-only crowd showed up for Fannie Flagg, a great Southern writer-chick who had written a best seller about, yes, heaven. The bookstore owner went on and on about how they’d had everybody dress in white for the signing and they had uplighting in the trees and served tiny white tea cakes.

What would I get, I wondered. A bag of Combos and a single naked bulb?

It could be worse, I thought, as I checked into a luscious hotel near Mobile. I could be James Frey.

The truth was, ever since Frey got caught embellishing his hugely successful druggie memoir,
A Million Little Pieces,
I’d been thinking I should do the same thing. That was before Oprah took him to the metaphorical woodshed of course.

Yes, before that, Frey was riding high. Literally. But somebody told somebody and they told somebody else that there was no way all that shit could happen to one dude.

Frey got dragged onto
Larry King Live
and admitted, with his precious mama at his side, that he might have exaggerated some of the more disturbing and law-breaking parts of the book.

His bad.

Even as I watched him squirm, I realized that a made-up memoir might be my ticket to not just paying for the kitchen, but adding a pool. There was plenty of room in the backyard of my money pit after all. We could even put up a fence to keep the neighbors from pretending to drown and then suing us.

Frey’s enormous success inspired me not to settle for a truthful memoir, recounting an ordinary upbringing in a small but boring Southern town, but to reach out and confess to things that I may not have exactly done but, perhaps, once watched on TV or saw in the movies.

Like the time I robbed a convenience store and shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Er, sorry. That was a Johnny Cash song. Cash, now that I think about it, also was accused of manufacturing his lawless “man in black” image. He never served time in Folsom Prison but he didn’t exactly discourage the impression when fans bought millions of copies of
Folsom Prison Blues.
Which seriously rocks, by the way.

Clearly, it would be better to write a memoir that had less truth and more crime.

Frey’s drug rehab book was powerful, life-changing and, oh yes, made up. But powerful nonetheless.

But no more powerful, ladies and gentlemen, than the riveting true-life account of a small-town Southern humor writer who kept Elvis hidden beneath her bed for more than two decades!

That’s right. I’m going to call it
A Million Little Nanner Sandwiches
and then I’m going to go on
Oprah
and make more money than God or Rachael Ray, who is probably already at work on her next best seller:
Rachael Ray Makes Dog Sandwiches! In Heaven!

Back in Dallas, I decided to make the pilgrimage to the mothership that is Neiman Marcus, where I accidentally spent forty-eight dollars on a brow pencil. For a Maybelline girl from way back, this was downright guilt-inducing. Still, I deserved it. I was staying in a hotel where I was—I swear—the only guest not affiliated with a national cheerleading convention.

If you ever want to feel old, just ride an elevator with thirty-five giggling teens wearing their hair in buns of sponge-rubber rollers and saying “Shut
up
!” a lot to each other.

These girls were Mean Girls, just like in the movie. When I asked them to let me off because it was my floor, they eyed me from the top of my velour jogging suit to the bottom and visibly snarled. I was something sticky on the bottom of a Payless shoe.

“What
ever
,” they said, nearly in unison.

Later on, I saw a couple of them in Neiman’s and was rewarded by this delicious conversation between two cheerleaders that I’ll call Posh and Paris.

Yes, I thought to myself as I pondered Paris’ developing social consciousness. They are a proud people, those Tsunamis. We really can’t do enough for ’em.

When you’re self-employed like me, you have to worry about really boring things like making quarterly estimated tax payments. Are you asleep yet?

I have a hard time remembering this “law,” so every year, along about April fifteenth, I begin to slowly and carefully freak out.

It’s about this same time of year that it dawns on me: We could save a lot of money by doing our own taxes.

Why shouldn’t we, after all? Would you go to a “doctor” to fix your broken arm? You would? Wuss.

I mean it’s our income. Who is more uniquely qualified to deduct the new gas grill and tiki torches as business expenses?

Besides, how hard can it be to do your own taxes? All you need is a smidgen of patience, a freshly sharpened pencil, and a handy supply of Schedule 2 narcotics, right?

It might not have been the best idea to do my own taxes during the year of the remodel. For starters, I had no idea how to claim the tax credit for the amazing Paul Harvey water heater or a bunch of other stuff we’d done that was supposed to qualify for some sort of historic district exemption.

But I was still confident that, between hubby and I, we’d figure it out.

All we needed to get started was the appropriate forms.

Here’s the good news: The IRS is seriously trying to become more user-friendly. It wants us to like them so much that it smacks of desperation. The IRS is like the awkward teen that yearns to sit at the cool table in the lunchroom but knows she never will because she doesn’t have enough money or isn’t smart enough or doesn’t really think that the band Yes is all that and a bucket of chicken. Oh, sorry. Having a little flashback to ’74 there.

Anyway, I’d seen all sorts of ads about the IRS’ willingness to help out. First stop: the shiny new local office for forms and guidance.

I walked into a cavernous space, the carpet so new that you couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming aroma of potentially carcinogenic carpet fibers. The place reeked of new paint and just-opened office supplies. It was, honestly, a vision, right on down to the several
hundred
padded chairs that had been perfectly arranged in long, straight rows that would do an obsessive-compulsive proud.

I was very impressed. Also puzzled. Because there wasn’t a single human being in this enormous room, just a row of walled cubicles as far as the eye could see.

“Hello!” I called, my voice echoing back to me. Cool. I did it again.

Finally, a voice came from behind one of the far cubicles.

“Please take a number.”

OK, for some reason this struck me as hilarious. I mean there was
no one
within ten miles of this room. But this is the IRS and it can’t help its nerdy self. Instead of just saying, “C’mon back,” I gotta take a number.

OK, I’ll play.

With number in hand, I sat. And sat. Finally, a few minutes into the process, with only the sound of the air conditioning to keep me company, I got the silly church giggles and laughed so hard that my palms sweated all over my number, which was 100, by the way.

Finally, after a few more minutes, I heard the disembodied voice of the IRS agent call out stiffly: “NUMBER 100.”

I said to the empty room: “I think that’s me!”

I walked way down to greet “the voice,” which turned out to belong to a very nice and helpful woman. She told me, among other things, I would need Form 1040-ES, which would contain coupons.

“That’s great!” I said, instantly warming to the U.S. government. “For like Arby’s or Domino’s or something. Hey. I don’t want to be ungrateful but if you’ve got one for Pizza Hut that would be even better because they’re doing that thing again where they fill the crust full of cheese and you just pop off these little heavenly bites of warm cheese dough.”

She stared at me, uncomprehending.

“That’s very funny,” she said, without a trace of a smile. “These are coupons to accompany your estimated tax payments.”

“Oh,” I said, irrationally disappointed that there would be no cents-off on Buffalo wings.

She then handed me a customer satisfaction survey but all the admonitions to fill in the bubbles exactly and precisely and
LEAVE NO STRAY MARKS
were too intimidating.

Face it, IRS. Until you learn to loosen up a little, you’re never going to sit at the cool table.

Fast-forward a few weeks and you find me sitting on the floor, surrounded by tiny scraps of paper, booklets of rules and advice, unable to complete my own taxes and, frankly, at this point, bathe myself.

Hubby took pity on me and started reading through some of the helpful IRS literature.

“We need to do more for charity,” he said. “Oh, and have eleven more children.”

Great. The charity thing wasn’t a bad idea except the IRS was persnickety about what kind of charity. For the first eight months of the year, you could claim 40.5 cents per business mile and fourteen cents a mile for any driving related to charity but you would get twenty-nine cents a mile for charity related to Hurricane Katrina.

During the last three months of the year you could get thirty-four cents a mile for Katrina-related charity and 48.5 cents a mile for business.

I am not making this up.

We wondered if simply discussing the awful hurricane in the car while driving would count. Hubby and I began to interject statements about Katrina everywhere we went, but it didn’t feel right.

Charity, as it turned out, could really help us out. In my case, I decided that it would be charitable of me to volunteer more at my kid’s elementary school. After all, I could deduct the hours I spent there and even the drive there and back.

But I wasn’t really the kind of mom who was good at the crafty stuff. Last year, when I was asked to make marshmallow “monsters” for the Halloween carnival, they’d burned and exploded and looked just like the fat guy on
Lost
with chow mein noodles sticking out of his sides.

Nope, I would have to play to my strengths. Fortunately, right about then, an opening came up for an advisor for the school newspaper. Perfect.

Two decades in the newspaper business had surely equipped me for something besides listening to people carp about how the print is getting smaller. Oh, sorry. That was me.

I began my “charity volunteer tax-saving newspaper work” immediately, with a staff meeting where I met the twenty-two fresh-faced members of the school newspaper staff, all in grades three through five.

In some ways, it was just like old times in the newsroom. Except I don’t recall ever having to stop a budget meeting to ask one of the reporters to “please stop turning your ears inside out.” On the other hand, well, wow.

Overall, the first “charity tax-saving meeting” wasn’t all that different from the “real” newspaper meetings of my past. A couple of reporters flirted with each other and had no new ideas; another refused to share a byline on the new principal story; another admitted he hadn’t even started the interviews on a story due in two days; at least six showed up with no pencil or paper. Yes, it was very much like old times only everybody was shorter and better dressed.

Even though I wasn’t being paid, I enjoyed it immensely. The kid-reporters asked great questions. One was doing a story on the death of the school science lab’s ancient chinchilla. It was a real tear-jerker and she’d even gotten a picture.

“Is it OK that even though he’s technically dead, he’s alive in this picture?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Let’s remember him as he was, a big, fat, furry rodent that fathered more offspring than Mel Gibson.”

“Huh?”

“No dead animal pictures, sweetie.”

“Right, chief!” she said.

This was so much fun, I wanted to pay them for letting me do it! I was so ripping off the government with these “charitable” hours.

Next up was an earnest young man needing help with his new-teacher-profile questions.

I looked them over and had to laugh at No. 5: “Are you married? If not, why not?”

Probably the only real difference between the newsrooms was that, in this one, I was the only one drinking coffee. I resolved to do something about that the next week.

“Could I have decaf?” asked the smart Indian girl.

“Well, duh, that would kind of defeat the point, now wouldn’t it, Syri?”

“It’s Sneha.”

“Whatever.”

With charitable “work” to deduct, we just had to get busy on those additional eleven children. Gawd, where was K-Fed when you really needed him?

Look, I hate to belabor the point but the man is a baby-making machine. I envision dozens of female baristas finding themselves inexplicably pregnant mere moments after serving K-Fed his double-whammy-hotsie-totsie mocha latte with a shot of Boone’s Farm Strawberry to go. He’s like the superhero of impregnation. As women around the globe pat their tummies and smile gratefully toward the tiny corn-rowed wonder growing within, K-Fed has, like Steve Martin discovering sex in
The Jerk,
finally found his “special purpose.”

Age wasn’t on my side though. And it seemed that the IRS was changing its mind daily about the “true definition of a child.”

I define a child as the height-challenged person living in your home that eats all your Toaster Strudels,
even the ones you hid behind the bag of chicken livers,
and reprograms your phone to ring “SexyBack” while you’re not looking.

But no! The IRS definition of a child changed from code section to code section until there was so much complaining that, in an unprecedented showing of common sense, they decided to go with the Toaster Strudel definition after all.

With volunteer “charity” work under way and a “child” at home, I began to think that I could pull off this whole tax thing and maybe even get a refund.

Dreema Fay, my tech-savvy friend and Web designer, reminded me that I should be sure to document all the costs of maintaining my Web site.

Dreema Fay knows I don’t like talking about computer things. Technology alternately fascinates and repels me. It’s that familiar push-pull of emotions that you feel while watching a Discovery Channel show where the bunny rabbit becomes some snake’s McLunch or seeing photographs of Tori Spelling’s second wedding.

That said, I’m grateful beyond words for Al Gore’s Internet invention not only because it makes research for my “work” so easy but also because where else can you learn, via forwarded E-mail, if you boil a Western omelette in a Ziploc bag, it turns out perfect every time?

Knowledge is power, y’all.

Dreema Fay offered to come over and walk me through Turd-O Tax but I resisted. She knows when it comes to computers, I have an attention span shorter than the line on opening night of the latest Rob Schneider movie.

“No, no,” I told her on the phone one day. “I’ve got this tax thing down. We’re going to get back a bundle what with all my charity work, Katrina.”

“You mean Dreema,” she said.

“Right. But see if I can mention the word ‘Katrina’ during every phone call, I can deduct the time I spent talking to you. Katrina.”

“That’s sick and illegal,” said Dreema Fay.

Perhaps to get even with me, Dreema/Katrina sent me an E-mail later that day listing all the search terms that route people to my Web site. They included: “preschool diseases,” “books about rocks,” “girls making doody” (I know, that one scares me, too), “Oprah wears a watch,” “Teri Hatcher should shut up,” and my personal favorite: “Osmond butt cheeks.”

While I do recall writing about the Chiclet-toothed singing Mormons several years ago, I can assure you that they are, and were, too wholesome to even possess butt cheeks.

Curiouser still was how someone landed at my site by simply typing in the words “rectal region rash.”

And, yes, I’m trying not to take that one personally.

Truthfully, after many tense weeks spent trying to decipher the wacky IRS rules, I’d prefer a rectal region rash to ever doing my own taxes again.

Let someone else be Number 100 next year.