I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (11 page)

“That’s fine by me,” I said, looking her straight in the eye. “And you are aware that I have a book coming out in a matter of months?”

“You know,” Suzzi said as she stood up, although her brand-new fat roll just stayed where it was. “if I see you on the
Today
show, I guess I’ll know that I’ve made a mistake.”

And with that, she walked out of my office and that was it. My column was gone. That’s cool, I thought to myself as I tried really, really hard not to freak out, you have it your way, Suzzi. And I’ll have it mine. What the hell do you know, anyway? You don’t even know that you gave birth to orangutans. Carrot babies. You had carrot babies! And not just one,
two!!
It was like you popped out a Birds Eye frozen vegetable pack. Honestly, I was tired. I was really, really tired. I was exhausted. I had fought for my column really hard ever since Gretchen showed up. And frankly, I would have rather let my column go than let someone ruin it.

The following Wednesday night, true to my word, I wrote an e-mail to the readers I had received letters from, explaining that my column had been killed, and it wouldn’t be in the paper the next day. I thanked them for sticking by me for so long, and that it had been a great run.

Additionally, I wrote, if they wanted to e-mail someone about the cancellation, they sure could.

And then I put two cherries on my e-mail sundae in the form of the Big Cheese Editor’s and Suzzi’s e-mail addresses.

Send. Click.

I mailed it off.

The next morning, when Suzzi and the Big Cheese editor came to work , sat down at their desks, and checked to see if they had mail, they did indeed.

They had so much mail it clogged their e-mail boxes, and I heard that it took several support techs a while to fix it, because about one thousand messages arrived overnight and they just kept coming throughout that day, the next day, and the next.

After all, Suzzi had challenged me. I just met her on it.

I never got my column back. But I think it was safe to say that one, at the very least, of my needs had been filled.

It’s Alive!!!!!

A
s I looked at the letter in my hand from the City of Phoenix that I received several weeks ago, my blood began to bubble. It explained that a complaint had been filed against my front yard, claiming that it contained an inordinate amount of trash and overgrown weeds.

With my hands shaking, I wondered out loud if this was a joke. While it’s plainly obvious that my landscape will never appear on the cover of
House & Garden,
the City of Phoenix had to be kidding. Maybe we didn’t mow as often as we should, but rest assured a small child never got lost in the grass, nor had anyone mistaken it for a cornfield. That was at my old house.

When we bought our house, it had been vacant for two years. The yard was a dirt parking lot, and virtually every one of the sixteen trees on the property were brown, cracked, and dead. Eventually, we pulled most of them out, with the exception of an ancient orange tree that escaped the chain saw. It had one green branch that made my husband insist that the tree was still alive, but it also survived because the ax was stolen before we got to that side of the yard. Since then, I’ve requested a chain saw at every birthday and Christmas to take the tree down, but until I got a note from my old therapist, no one would let me have one.

On a hunch, I sought out all of my neighbors, and discovered, not to my surprise, that we had all received the same letter on the same day. There could be only one culprit, I decided, as I shot an evil eye toward his house. It had to be the Neighborhood Nemesis, or, as he likes to call himself, the president of the neighborhood association—a man who doesn’t even have a yard, only a small strip of grass as wide as my thigh. I once attended an association meeting, but when Neighborhood Nemesis proudly boasted that he spent the majority of his nights running up and down his street armed with a video camera taping his neighbors, I became too freaked out to go anymore. The letter was plainly the result of his walking up and down my street, writing down what he didn’t like, and then calling the city to rat us out.

I was loading the eggs and a big slingshot into the car when my husband came home from work.

“Look at this!” I yelled as I waved the letter in front of him.

“What are you doing with all of those eggs, honey?” my husband said slowly. “If you bought chickens from our neighbors, I’m going to be mad!”

“No chickens,” I said smugly, handing over the complaint. “I’m gonna catch myself a rat!”

“There’s nothing wrong with our yard!” my husband yelled as he read the letter and then pointed: “That tree is ALIVE!!!” I haven’t seen him that mad since a bartender carded him, laughed, and said, “Does your sister know you have her license?”

We jumped in my car to drive to the Nemesis’s house and launch our attack, but there he was, standing out in his front strip, taping stuff. I stumbled for an insult to yell, but all I managed to say was, “It’s ALIVE!!!!!” Then we went home and had omelets for dinner.

The next day, I was eating an egg salad sandwich when someone knocked on my door, a raggedy man who asked if I needed any yard work done. I smiled as if God had sent him there Himself. It had to be a sign.

I motioned toward the orange tree.

“Fifty bucks,” he said through the gap where his teeth used to be.

“Can you knock it down before my husband comes home?” I asked.

Before I knew it, the man, whose name was Jerry, took a running start and jumped on the tree, breaking off massive branches with his bare hands. I went back inside, too afraid that I’d be called as a witness in a lawsuit against me after Jerry had impaled himself on a twig. With every loud “SNAP!” that I heard from within my office, I got more and more frightened.

What kind of guy does yard work for a living . . . without tools? I wondered. Where were his teeth? Who breaks apart a tree with his hands? Through the window, I peeked outside, and that’s when I saw two of them, Jerry and his “assistant,” violently swinging on the tree like monkeys as they rocked it back and forth. Then they landed and kicked it until it was dead.

I sat down and wrote a note in case the FBI might need it once my husband spotted the freshly opened and still somewhat flexible bounty of chocolate Twizzlers in the cabinet, proof positive that if my favorite snack was present without one or both of my hands in it, there had to be some sort of foul play involved.

“I have two homeless guys trying to kick down the dead orange tree in our front yard,” I typed. “I’m going to describe them to you so if they end up robbing and killing me, you can give the police a lead once you realize months from now that I am gone and not just on a diet: Guy #1, ‘Jerry’: No teeth. Short. Possibly going through withdrawal of some kind. Guy #2: ‘Assistant’: Some teeth. Shorter. Apparent aggression issues. Oh. Now there’s one less tooth. And it just may be lodged in one of suspect #1’s knuckles.”

I ran outside to access the damage. “That’s very nice,” I nodded at Jerry, who was emphatically grinning and nodding back. “Now you have to leave before my husband comes home. Here’s some eggs.”

Within seconds, my husband’s truck pulled up in front of the house. He got out slowly, glared at me, and then walked inside without saying a word.

“The tree is gone!” I said excitedly with a big smile.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he answered. “The tree is not gone. It’s lying in five hundred pieces around the yard. Who are those guys? Why are you talking to strangers when you’re in the house alone? Who told you to mutilate the tree? You’ve ruined everything!”

“There were only four green leaves left on that tree,” I said quietly. “I was pretty sure that a comeback was out of the question.”

“That’s not it!” my husband yelled. “Now I have to take back your Christmas present!”

I gasped with glee. “But the therapist wouldn’t write the note when I asked her,” I said, jumping up and down.

“It’s okay,” my husband said, shuffling toward his study. “I bought an electric-powered chain saw with a plug-in cord so if I run away fast enough, you can only chase me so far.”

“There’s a tree in the backyard with only six green leaves on it,” I suggested.

“It’s ALIVE!” my husband shot back.

The Haunting of Jerry

S
omeone’ s knocking at my door. I have a feeling it’s Jerry. I almost liked Jerry when he first came to my house and pulled out the semidead orange tree from my front yard, using nothing but his bare hands and a whole lot of angst. I was amazed as he rocked the tree out of its earthen bed with his homeless little man-child body, exposing the tree roots and leaving a crater big enough to barbecue a hog in.

I liked him as he unabashedly gave me a tour of his battle scars, showing me a six-inch former wound on his head that he sustained while wrestling with the private parts of a particularly mean queen palm, the way he could flip his arm around like a rag doll after he dislocated his shoulder after a forty-foot tumble, and the way he had to close one eye in order to make the right cut on a tree, and not the imaginary one.

He was proud of his work, and pointed to various palm trees in the neighborhood, claiming that the bulbous, circular necks under the fronds were his “signature,” though in my opinion, they looked a little more like goiters than a trademark.

“No matter how many times I’ve fallen out of a tree,” he boasted, “I’ve never sued anybody. I’ll sign anything you got.”

He must have told the same thing to my next-door neighbor. After he finished killing my orange tree, he scurried up a fifty-year-old palm in her backyard like a squirrel in the dead of night, and left his signature with a saw and only the stars to guide him.

My husband, however, was not as impressed with Jerry as I was.

“You are not allowed to answer the door anymore,” he said simply and firmly.

“Come on,” I said. “The man weighs eighty pounds and can only see straight if he covers one eye! I could knock him over with a fart. Besides, I assessed the situation and decided that he was harmless. He won’t sue us, he said he’d sign anything.”

“A serial killer will always try to gain your trust!” he replied. “What good is a lawsuit after he’s eaten your brain like it was chili?”

I was getting my morning coffee the next day when I looked up and gasped. From my kitchen window I saw Jerry, again forty feet up in the air, hugging my other neighbor’s palm tree with one hand while he waved to me with the other. It was a very friendly gesture, although you are never really ready for a homeless tree trimmer to extend a greeting to you from the sky when you’re not wearing a bra or pants.

For about a week after that, Jerry came by every day to see if I needed any more work done. I kept saying no, mostly because I felt I was lucky that Jerry hadn’t already dismembered himself or accidentally fallen on some electrical wires on my property. His physical disfigurements didn’t bother me as much as my suspicion that he had a hankering for hooch, and was tanked a fair amount of the time. The last thing I really needed was a television news crew parked in my backyard, filming a fireman relentlessly poking at Jerry’s hot, pickled body with a stick until he fell headfirst into the waiting recycling bin.

Finally, however, Jerry wore me down, especially when he began showing up at night, wanting to cut something up. To get rid of him, I agreed that he could cut the shortest tree—one that really wouldn’t have presented much of a challenge to a three-year-old armed with a dull butter knife—on one condition. He had to start work early in the morning, so he would be somewhat sober, thus significantly reducing the risk of death, injury, or loss of electrical power to my house, because I really hate resetting clocks.

Jerry went to work, and scampered up the tree in someone’s old golf shoes and a harness made out of a retired motorcycle chain and a bunch of frayed rope. I spent the next hour searching my homeowner’s policy for a homeless, drunk tree-trimmer clause until Jerry knocked on the door and said that his signature was done and he was thirsty.

With a sigh of relief, I paid him more than the tree was worth, gave him the last can of Mountain Dew, and said good-bye.

“Now you have done it,” my husband said to me as I closed the front door. “You’ve fed him. That’s like leaving a whole ham on a picnic table in bear country. You’ll never get rid of him, and he’ll probably start breeding in the crawl space under our house!”

He was right. In fact, Jerry came back every time he got a little hungry, every time he got a little thirsty, and every time he ran out of cigarettes. Then he said that I had been so nice to him that he’d trim my palm trees next year for $30, which was a deal.

“Thank you, Jerry,” I said, agreeing to the deal. “That’s very nice.”

“Can I have half of it now?” he asked.

Apparently, I was Jerry’s gold mine, and though he eventually stopped asking for work, he just started asking me for outright cash. When he popped up on my porch at ten o’clock on a Sunday night, I had had it. I solely bore the responsibility of creating my own human feral cat.

“I need twenty dollars,” Jerry said as I opened the door. “Consider it a loan.”

“Jerry,” I said harshly, “I’m a writer. We eat ramen four nights a week and ramen bake the other three!”

“Fifteen!”

“No,” I answered.

“Ten! I’ll take ten!”

“Jerry!” I yelled as loud as I could. “The bank is bust!”

As I closed the door, I felt really bad for him. I kept on feeling really bad about it until my husband did the math, figured out that in the two days that Jerry had done work for us and our neighbors, he had made more than we both did in a week. In fact, it turned out, Jerry was making himself a pretty healthy salary.

“TAX-FREE,” my husband said, adding insult to injury.

“Now that I think about it,” I said, turning things over in my mind, “he always wore clean clothes. And I’ve never seen him wear the same thing twice.”

“Do you think it’s a scam?” my husband asked.

I didn’t know; I still don’t. I do know that Jerry keeps himself pretty busy. I’ve seen him almost every day, fifty feet up in the air, hacking away at someone’s tree, dangerously close to the power lines. I see him, but I don’t wave anymore.

And right now, I can hear him knocking, but he can’t come in.