Hyper-chondriac (22 page)

“Whoops.”

“Now WATCH ME
very carefully
this time.”

I did, but once again the string of wool was zipping around everywhere and even my eyes couldn't keep up, let alone my brain and hands. If there were a knitting final I would definitely need to cheat off someone.

“Got it?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, I'll be back in a few minutes to check up on you again.”

Then Cyndi was off to help the gifted knitters.

I noticed that Van Morrison music had begun emerging from the speakers. It wasn't “Moondance” or that other famous song…which made me realize that he's lucky to have two famous songs. “I fucking hate that drunk!” I said to myself as I gulped some more wine. Then one of the other knitters reached for the last raspberry, but my fingers got there first. The hell with knitting. Scrapping for food was a far more valuable skill.

I continued my little project and hoped that when Cyndi returned she would be pleased and I wouldn't get yelled at. I didn't even actually know what I was trying to make. And she hadn't even asked. I began to think of odd things to knit: a football helmet, a saddle for an alpaca, a tent to cover a house when it's being de-termited. Perhaps a giant quilt that said “Thank God for Merlot and Sulfites!”

I took my mind off my knitting and listened to what the ladies had to say.

“I just got back from Toronto.”

“How was it?”

“Too cold.”

Then don't go. It's Toronto, you idiot!

“I mean, if it's gonna be
that
cold, I at least want some snow.”

“I totally agree! Canada should always have snow. Otherwise, why bother to go there?”

“I like the snow.”

“Snow is really fun.”

“I like to ski.”

“Oh, skiing is
really
fun!”

I'd changed my mind. Now I would knit myself a pair of earplugs.

Cyndi returned, reexamined the birth of my potential catheter warmer and yanked it apart like a man tearing a phone book in half.

“Okay! I want you to read the handouts this week and practice, practice, practice.”

Hey, you know what rhymes with “knit”? Quit.

“Sure. I'll practice a lot.”

“And we'll see you next Wednesday.”

“Yep.”

“It really is easy once you get the hang of it,” said Cardigan gal.

I knew it would take practice, but what I was doing wasn't all that difficult and I couldn't even do it once without screwing up, let alone the thousands and thousands of times required for a scarf. In fact, my theory is “A scarf can
never
be too small.”

 

I left the knitting place (or as I like to call it, the Frustration Emporium) a little tipsy, to say the least. I'm so paranoid about driving drunk, anyway. Years ago, after having a couple of drinks with dinner, I got stopped for not yielding to a pedestrian and the cop made me get out of the car for a sobriety test; I had to touch my nose and count backward in front of a senior citizens' home about a mile from my house. As I tried to avoid jail time, a collection of seniors gawked and the incessant mumbling really flirted with my concentration. Fortunately, I passed the balance test, counting drill and answered all of the officer's questions satisfactorily, thereby avoiding having to blow into any contraption that would dispense integers. I received a ticket only for my failure to yield. But it occurred to me that, like 99 percent of Americans, I had absolutely
no idea
if I was legally drunk. So the minute I got home I bought a Breathalyzer online for $89. Now I know—even before I blow into it—within one-tenth of a point where my body is on the alcohol blood-level percentage chart. Since I suspected I could very well be legally drunk, I didn't bother blowing into it; it would just make me even more paranoid on the ride home.

Had I been stopped, I would have undoubtedly been the first male in U.S. history to have a Breathalyzer in his glove compartment and get a DUI on his way back from a knitting class at seven-thirty at night.

But I made it home without incident.

 

And now I have a newfound respect for sweaters. I actually salute when I see one on a rack. But I don't like knitting. And honestly, I'm not crazy about knitters, either.

7I was soon to learn at my local liquor store that ALL WINE contains sulfites. Mr. Cock-in-the-Cheek ment to only drink wine with NO ADDED SULFITES, aka organic wine.

My mother hasn't spoken to any of her brothers in at least thirty-five years. I don't even remember meeting two of the three. With a gun to my head I'd have a better chance of naming every National League Cy Young Award winner than my mother's siblings.

As I've said, my mother is the queen of grudges—against distant family, immediate family, the FedEx guy, the FedEx guy's family, Visa, the urologist who accidentally stepped on her foot. I'd always wondered if I had inherited some kind of genetic defect that encouraged grudges, because I could be just as obstinate as she. When I was in eleventh grade, Jeff Ulliano and Marty Kurtzman were supposed to call me to tell me where to meet them on a Thursday night of no significance. They said they forgot—although they hadn't forgotten to call Larry Bambus and Arnie Krever. That trivial oversight led me to break off the friendship with the entire group I had spent the better part of high school with, including countless Pink Floyd strobe-light shows at the local planetarium.

Because of my unbridled stubbornness, my senior year was the single worst year of my life. By twelfth grade, everyone was already in their cliques and had their circles of friends and it was hard to penetrate even the nerdiest of groups. I was the ultimate loner. I'd have been better off just transferring to another high school—at least then I'd be a fresh face who might arouse some curiosity. Instead, I took whatever social calendar scraps the dorks and geeks would dole out to me.

A grudge is nothing more than stored hostility. Maybe my mother's resentful cravings had ignited her disease, just as my affinity for rapid aggression had undermined my body's defenses. I needed to find out if I was sentenced to a life of rancor, so I did some Googling and discovered that one of my mother's brothers, Lawrence, lived in Eugene, Oregon. A long drive, but far better than trekking to Maine or “somewhere in Wisconsin,” which is where my mother's other brothers supposedly lived.

I hadn't seen Lawrence since I was five or six. I called him on the phone and lied. I told him that Nancy and I were going to be in Portland during Thanksgiving weekend visiting friends who had just had a baby, and we'd love to take him to dinner—if he was at all available or interested. He couldn't have been nicer and said that he and his wife (I had no idea he was even married) would love to see us. Maybe I wasn't saddled with the grudge gene. Maybe all this driving would be a complete waste of time.

He said he wasn't available on Thanksgiving, since they were “going down to the homeless shelter for the free meal.” Was he really poor and reliant on soup kitchens for food? Or was he cheap? Or was it just a modest way of implying that he's going to be donating his time that day by helping others? Or was he making a joke at the expense of the homeless?

Much to ponder on the thirteen-hour drive to Eugene for a single meal.

 

On the way up, Nancy and I passed several almond farms.

“Where do almonds come from?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Me either.”

“Do they grow in the dirt? Do they grow on trees? Do they come out of a snail's ass? It's really embarrassing that neither of us knows.”

“I wish I had a BlackBerry. We could Google it.”

“Where do blackberries come from?”

“Not sure.”

“Little plants, I bet.”

“Sounds right.”

After I'd spent about three hours thumping the gas pedal, my sciatica—another souvenir from my 1982 street brawl—was sending shooting pains down my right leg. It was killing me to the point where I had to drive with my left foot, which Nancy would have flipped out about had I told her. Unfortunately, she couldn't drive, since we had forgotten to pack the yellow pages, so my left foot and I pressed on.

Since Nancy and I were both on strict Ayurvedic diets, we knew it would be challenging to find a place on the road for either of us to eat, let alone both of us. The freeway's domination of fast-food chains forced us to lower the bar. We chose Jack in the Box.

“I can eat chicken.”

“So can I!”

“Black beans?”

“No. Corn?”

“Uh-uh.”

“We'll just pick off the stuff we're not allowed to eat, then.”

“Sure.”

Nancy ordered some chicken fajita thing, since she was allowed—in fact,
encouraged
!—to eat spicy foods. I settled for the chicken sourdough sandwich—no sauce. We ate as I drove. However, as soon as I swallowed my first bite, something felt wrong. I slowly opened my sandwich to see what had provided the unexpected taste. I had just eaten a mouthful of bacon! Motherfuckers!!! I had given up bacon in 1979, six years before I'd stopped eating red meat. I was traumatized. (Incidentally, I hate it when people say, “Well, you eat chicken and fish, why not meat? That's really random of you.” Oh yeah, well, you eat meat but I bet you don't eat dog and cat so shut up and come up with a better analogy!)

Even though we were at least fifteen minutes away from Jack in the Box, I turned the car around and headed back to track down the manager. I needed to find out why there was bacon on my fucking chicken when it was never even mentioned on the menu.

I left Nancy in the car and burst into the Jack.

“Excuse me? Can I speak to a manager?”

“He's on break. I'm the assistant manager,” said a bespectacled overweight guy in his sixties who seemed way too old to have his job, or any job for that matter.

“Um…yeah…” I held the remainder of my sandwich aloft. “I'd just like to know why there's bacon on my chicken sourdough sandwich!”

“Because there's supposed to be bacon on it, sir.”

“Well, why wasn't it listed on the menu? Or why isn't it called a chicken AND BACON sourdough sandwich? Wouldn't that make sense to at least list the main ingredients?”

“You should have asked, sir.”

So I was supposed to
ask
if there's bacon in everything? Is there bacon in the fries? Is there bacon in the pumpkin shake? Is there bacon in the Diet Pepsi? All this thinking about my mother and her brothers and grudges dredged up anger that even my Zoloft/Ayurvedic team were powerless against. I tried thinking about Bread of Shame but that, too, was useless at the moment.

“The sandwich you ordered is actually called ‘The Sourdough Grilled Chicken
Club,
'” he continued.

“So?” I grew up eating “club” sandwiches and all it meant was that there was a third layer of bread between the other two slices. There was never any bacon on my club sandwiches. “Y'know what? I'll come back when the manager's here.”

Then I slammed the remains of my sandwich down on the counter as if I were trying to bounce a basketball over a mountain and stormed out to fill in Nancy. If I had a can of spray paint I probably would've added the word “bacon” to the drive-thru menu on the way out.

“How'd it go?”

“Not good. He gave me this ‘club-sandwich-means-
it-has-bacon' bullshit.”

“I think club
does
mean it has bacon.”

“I don't think so. And on the way back from Oregon, I'm gonna stop and speak to the manager.”

I suppose adding an extra grudge on the way to see if my grudges were inherited was poetic.

 

Ten hours later we checked into a local Eugene hotel, rested, changed and had sex, thanks to Nancy's being on vacation and my having lowered my dosage. Then I called my uncle Lawrence and told him we were on our way and he gave us an actual address.

We snaked our way along narrow roads and pulled up to a wood-stained farmhouse. Before I could even get out of the car there he was, waiting in the driveway. Lawrence was a large man, in the six-foot-two range with gray hair, thick glasses and a beard. He wore a blue-and-red flannel shirt, jeans and white Adidas sneakers, and despite being about thirty pounds over-weight and at least twenty years older than I am, he had a very bouncy, adolescent gait.

“You haven't changed a bit,” he said drily as he extended his large, meaty hand.

“Neither have you.” I smiled.

Nancy and I followed him inside as three yellow Labs greeted us. Then we met his wife, Sharon, who looked to be about five years older than Lawrence (although I knew so little about him, at the time I had no idea if he was even older or younger than my mother). The house was immaculate and much hipper than I'd expected for older people in Oregon. There were several fireplaces, stainless steel appliances, a kidney-shaped couch and hardwood floors. Nancy and I could have lived in that house. Although she probably would have wanted all the butterflies taken off the walls. Actually, that's basically all there was on the walls. Framed butterflies. Dozens and dozens of framed butterflies.

“Whose butterflies?” I was perhaps the shrewdest conversation starter in all of the Pacific Northwest.

“They're Sharon's. She's been collecting them for years.”

“Actually,” said Sharon, who had a raspy Vanessa Redgravey voice, “some of them are moths.”

“Moths! Wow!” Nancy exclaimed, pretending to be interested though I knew she was repulsed.

I wondered why people would want to trap these harmless creatures and stuff them into a picture frame. And how hard was it to catch a moth? Who was that supposed to impress? Just leave your front light on and grab a newspaper.

“So what brings you guys up here?” Sharon asked.

“Just visiting friends.”

“Who just had a baby!” Nancy exclaimed, as we had rehearsed. If my uncle knew we had driven thirteen hours just to see if he was a bitter fuck, too, it would've really put a strain on the evening.

“So…I know that you and my mother haven't spoken in some time…”

“No, we haven't.”

The only thing I knew about Lawrence was that he and his brother, Ted, had sent my mother that sympathy card when Andrew was born. But I didn't want to be angry at someone over something he mailed in 1963.

“Do you speak to your brothers regularly?”

“Yeah. It's been about twelve years since I spoke with Ted and sixteen years since I spoke with Bernie.”

Either there was something to my grudge-gene theory or the meaning of “regularly” needed to be loosened.

The entire nature-nurture argument has always mystified me. If my mother and her family had a predisposition toward anger and ill will, was it learned or a preprogrammed mechanism that showed up at birth? And is it possible for nurture to change nature? The people at Pfizer think so. I hoped so.

Sharon put some nuts and cheese out and poured us each wine. Unfortunately, it had sulfites. I guzzled it anyway. My uncle cut right to the chase.

“Your mother had a very tough life.”

“I know.”

“I mean even before the MS. She was seventeen years old and had to share a room with Ted and me. We're twelve years apart so I must've been five and Ted was seven or eight. It was hard for her.”

How much could a seventeen-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy have in common, even if they are brother and sister? Their grudge could be just an excuse for permanent distance, which began emotionally and ended physically.

“Why is she mad at everyone?”

“I don't know. I haven't seen your mother in almost forty years.”

“What about her other brothers?”

“You'd have to ask your mother, but I think part of it may have had to do with Bernie and Maureen naming their son Andrew.”

Nancy sat in silence. Stunned. My mother's brother had intentionally named his only child after my dead brother? What sense did that make? Andrew wasn't even a family name. It had no significance. Except perhaps to torture my mother. That was really dicky of them. It's not like they had nineteen kids and were running out of names. Buttons were certainly being pushed. At the very least it was disrespectful.

“Why couldn't they have named him something else?”

“They liked the name Andrew,” he said with a shrug.