I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (13 page)

I Love Everybody

I
was about to do a bad, bad thing. I knew it. I just couldn’t help it. As soon as I saw that big fat hand reach up and grab the last two chocolate chip cookie nuggets from the sample tray, I knew it was my signal. I was going in for the kill.

I’m a bad girl.

And I can prove it.

Earlier that morning, I had seen that very thing posted on a website.

“With undistinguished prose, leaden humor, insistent self-deprecation, almost zero detail about anything other than the state of her immediate surroundings,” the review from
Kirkus
—an organization dedicated solely to publishing anonymous book reviews that mostly serve to expose books’ endings—said, “the author succeeds in making herself and her circle appear purely unappealing.”

Wow, I thought. That’s bad. That is one bad review. That’s the worst review I’ve ever read of any book.

“Well . . .” my husband said to me, breaking the thirty-second silence since I had begun reading. He raised his eyebrows.

“Um, I guess this next sentence sums it up nicely,” I replied, clearing my throat and turning back toward the review. “         ‘Gives the impression of being scrawled during lunch hour for publication in a free local listings guide.’         ”

I looked at my husband. He looked back at me.

“That is one sucky review,” he finally said.

“You’re telling me,” I agreed. “It’s of my book. It’s the
Kirkus
review of my book. And my book is about my life! My life got a bad review!”

“Listen, humor is completely subjective. If it wasn’t, Carrot Top would be sleeping on the top bunk of a homeless shelter right now and selling plasma next to Andrew Dice Clay,” my husband said kindly.

“Easy for you to say,” I replied. “Your life isn’t ‘purely unappealing.’ What does that even mean? It’s like I’m now on a Purely Unappealing Lives list with Hitler, Pontius Pilate, Dr. Laura, and all of the other Purely Unappealing People. You know, I always thought that someone would have to see me completely naked and bending over before arriving at a conclusion like that.”

My husband nodded in agreement. “It’s not the best look for you,” he said.

“Who hates me that much?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, someone really has to hate you to say things like that. Maybe it’s Jerry. The last time he came by asking for Mountain Dew I told him that the Mountain Dew people were trying to change their image and in order to be allowed to drink it, you had to wear shoes and live in a house that wasn’t towed to its present location.”

“Oh, honey,” my husband said sweetly. “What a beautiful world you live in! You little optimist, you! Jerry has about five brains cells left after all of the crystal meth he has sucked up his nose, and none of them resides in the literary section of his head. Jerry’s brain is a ghost town. The saloon doors only swing when the wind blows. He has both the hate and anger required to write that review, I’ll give you that, but I’m afraid his ability to hold a pencil was killed when he consumed an eight ball by himself in or around 1998.”

“You’ve got a point,” I agreed. “He’d kill me before he panned my book.”

“You know, it doesn’t matter who wrote that book review,” my husband said. “It’s only one person’s opinion. It only matters what you think about it.”

Now, deep, deep, deep in my black little rotten heart, I knew my husband was right. Sure, there were parts of the book that could have been better, funnier, tighter. Was it the best book in the world? No. But was this anonymous person going to make me believe that my book, the book that I spent almost a decade of my life trying to get published, was leaden and belonged in a local listings guide? Absolutely not, especially since there was not
one single ad
for a topless bar or phone sex in my
whole entire book.

Besides, I was used to getting hate mail. I got it on a daily basis. This wasn’t any different, I told myself, except that those people actually signed those letters. However, I had the very strong suspicion that I was going to be losing my job soon since I’d clogged the editor of the newspaper’s e-mail box with a thousand letters in one night. I had already lost my weekly newspaper column and feared the death of my daily web column wasn’t far behind. I had a small amount in savings and no idea what I was going to do if the book tanked, of which the chances were extraordinarily good to begin with and had now just gotten better.

Don’t freak out, I told myself as I took a deep breath, you can handle it. I could find another job, embark on a new craft. I was once an optician for several years, fitting eyeglasses and contact lenses, except that while I was employed as a health care worker, I believe that I seriously maimed people. I fit one old lady named Loretta so badly with those invisible bifocals that a couple of days later she fell down a flight of stairs and got a black eye. I told her she needed to “adjust to them” because I could have lost my job for giving her a refund. The next week Loretta sideswiped a grapefruit truck and crumpled the left side of her car into a tinfoil ball. She came back and cried at the counter, to no avail. The next time I saw Loretta at the optical shop, she was armed with a surly friend who was built like a redwood. As soon as I went out to the counter, Loretta’s Human Log acquaintance poked me in the chest with the arm of her BluBlocker wraparound sunglasses and then demanded Loretta’s money back. Which I promptly retrieved from the cash drawer without any questions, especially when I realized the Log had only stopped poking me with her BluBlockers to raise her walking cane and hold it like a baseball bat.

Then I briefly considered joining the Peace Corps, but then again, I wasn’t sure. I kept having this vision of myself sitting on some frozen mountain in a goatskin cape, the only person within a three-hundred-mile radius that had any semblance of teeth, digging through the mud with a stick to gather enough grub worms to feed an entire village for dinner.

“Oh, you should go, it sounds like a very relaxing job,” my mother commented. “Just being on a foreign, tropical island and being peaceful. I hope they send you someplace good in Europe, because I want to come visit if they do. If they send you to any place like Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Croatia, Bulgaria, Finland, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and whatever that mess Yugoslavia is today, forget it, because that’s not Europe to me, you know. I mean the
real
Europe, like France, Italy, and Switzerland. Those other ones are like the runner-up Europe countries, the ones that kind of ended up there by mistake, like, you know, the boss of the United Nations said, ‘Okay, Europe, if you get Sweden, you have to take the Ukraine, too, just to make it even. Otherwise, we’re giving Monaco to Africa.’         ”

My other immediate options were to man a hot dog cart in downtown Phoenix, because I figured that was easy enough; I’d only have to work the lunch shift, and I like hot dogs. Then my big-mouth husband added his two cents after I told him my idea by laughing, “You, running a hot dog cart? You’d have to call it Exact Change Only Hot Dogs because you’re so bad at math that you’d end up cheating yourself and losing everything. Besides, you’re not exactly a people person.”

And he was right.

I am not exactly a people person. Not exactly. You see, when I was born, God gave me an ounce of patience that was supposed to last me a lifetime, but it turns out I used all of it up during the first week.

I even have proof.

When I was six months old, my mother had my portrait taken. The photographer apparently sensed my disgust with the whole procedure and decided to invent his own brand of hilarity by placing a small, oval plaque underneath my folded arms, droopy jowls, bored eyes, and the repugnant expression on my mean little baby face.

The little sign proclaimed boldly,
I LOVE EVERYBODY.

The look on my face says, “You know, if I had even one tooth, I would sink it into your fat little arm for trying to make me look like an asshole baby. Shithead.”

Now, I really need to point out that I am not indiscriminately mean; I am not mean to people whenever the mean mood strikes me. I feel that I must be provoked first, although my husband disagrees. In all honesty, I really wouldn’t even identify myself as a mean person; rather, I would classify myself as a Pointer-Outer of Extraordinary Acts of Incredible Foolishness and, on Occasion, Rudeness. Some people, including my husband, would call these experiences meltdowns, but I would rather consider them Opportunities to Enlighten.

For example:

• If you are sitting behind me in a movie and you feel the need to converse as freely as if you are in your living room, I will “Shhhh!” you and then I will ask you for ten dollars. I cannot grasp the need to talk in a movie theater. If I’m going to talk to somebody, I’d rather not do it in the dark (unless I’m naked and really holding my stomach in), and if it costs me ten bucks for an hour and a half, it had better be to someone in a different state, or they’d better be telling me how hot I am. I figure if you have to talk, if you’re so full of interesting and fascinating information that it is simply impossible to hold it in, THAT’S WHAT BARS ARE MADE FOR.

• If you cut me off in traffic in a
Dukes of Hazzard
move or like you’ve got someone in the passenger seat whose severed limb is floating in an Igloo cooler on his lap, then suddenly and inexplicably slam on your brakes for no apparent reason, I will scream, maniacally, and point my finger at you. This reaction developed due to the fact that a moment after I bought my new car, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rated it as one of the suckiest automobiles ever made. If so much as a bug hits my windshield, the entire front cabin of the car will implode and it is likely that I will either be decapitated by a visor or disemboweled by the gearshift as a tragic result, now that I am driving what essentially cracks up to be a motorized casket on wheels.

• If you try to sneak two weeks’ worth of groceries through the express line and think that no one will notice, I will look at your cart, look at you, and then shake my head in utter and obvious disgust. I’m done tolerating your type when all I have in my basket is a box of Monistat 7 and a pint of Chubby Hubby. I mean it. Get out of my way. Let me get my shit and go home because I have the ability to count to fifteen and I will USE IT ON YOU.

• If I happen to be looking out the window and see you allow your dog to take a shit in my yard, I will run outside with a pen and a piece of paper and query, “Hey, can I have your address? Because my dog will probably have to crap in the next hour or two, and I’m bringing her to
your
house to do it.”

So I guess I am mean, I can admit that much, and because of my potential to find Opportunities to Enlighten, and the frequency with which I often stick my hands into the air, extend all my fingers, and shake my wrists in what my best friend Jamie has aptly described as the Angry Jazz Hands move, I knew at that moment that I couldn’t get a job working with people; it would be disastrous. After all, a nearly blind lady was almost pummeled to a jug of Sunny Delight by a mountain of tumbling citrus because of me. I just might kill someone in my next job, and I’ll be honest here, I couldn’t do time. Really. No way. I couldn’t share a room with four other people, let alone poop in front of them. I hate sharing a room and a bathroom with my husband, and I even have eminent domain over him. Prison would never work out: I’d get picked last for all of the gangs, I’d never get included in escape plans, it would be just like high school.

This was bad, because if my book got one nasty, horrible review, it could certainly get another. If it did, that meant that I was going to have to do something for a living besides the only thing I knew how to do.

“What am I going to do?” I cried to my husband. “This mean person hated my book, I’m losing my job, and I don’t want to go to prison.”

“Will you just stop with that stupid review?” my husband said, rapidly depleting the ounce that God gave him. “Who cares? I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. The amount of bad karma due that guy is probably of biblical proportions. I’m sure you’re not his first victim. I wouldn’t want to be the one walking next to him and wearing soccer cleats in a thunderstorm.”

And just as if I had been hit by lightning myself, I had an epiphany of such revolutionary proportions that I gasped slightly.

In a millisecond, I had just hatched a brilliant,
brilliant,
magnificent plan.

If it all boiled down to bad karma, maybe the bad review was my own bad karma getting thrown back at me. Bad karma for not helping Loretta, for being impatient, for being a Pointer-Outer. And, if I could immediately embark on a life as a Nice People Person Person, maybe my next review would be good.

Really, I said to myself, how much energy could it take to be nice? A whole lot less than being angry, hostile, and frustrated nearly every time you encountered one of the Foolish, which could realistically be sixty times in one single minute if you were at the movies, the grocery store, driving someplace, or my current place of employment, I’ll tell you that much. Sometimes, as a mean person, I almost had to be a
gladiator.
It took a
ton
of stamina not to melt down and just go crazy and start swinging a very sharp and pointy metaphorical sword at everybody. All you had to do to be nice was smile and nod your head. Smile and nod. And sometimes toss in a “My, what a pretty dress!” or an “Aren’t you delightful?” like my seventy-six-year-old neighbor who smiles all the time despite the fact that she has a mole on her face the size of a York Peppermint Patty and two bum sons in their fifties who still live at home.