I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (14 page)

So then I practiced smiling and nodding, and
what
a piece of cake! To think I could have been doing this all along, and if I had, that bad review probably wouldn’t have happened if karma had anything to do with it. After a couple of hours, I felt I was ready to start a new phase in my life, appropriately titled “I Love Everybody,” and it was going to be a good day to test out my new niceness, especially as I was headed to Costco to pick up my nephew’s birthday cake before his party.

As I pulled out of my driveway, I noticed my other neighbor across the street who frankly really should be living on a farm because of all the feral cats she is breeding due to the fact that she is a Feeder. Let me add to that. She should be living on a farm far, far, far away from me, because as a Feeder, she has encouraged the development of something of a free-range cat wildlife habitat in her front yard. She claims they’re not her cats, but let me tell you, someone over there has to be in charge of that appalling, hideous experiment, because it’s a laboratory like no other. Come stand at my window at 6
P.M.
on any given night and you can see the whole show, the most extensive research project concerning crossbreeding and mammals the universe has ever hosted,
and that includes aliens.
At six is when my neighbor, the Feeder, saunters out to her front yard and pours the cheapest brand of cat food she could find that week into roughly twenty bowls scattered about her chain-link-fenced yard and slowly, you’ll see the swarm begin. They come in from everywhere. They climb down from roofs, leap out of trees, crawl out from under cars, pop up out of manholes, they come. They come. And they feed, all forty to sixty of them, depending on the live-birth rate of that particular breeding season. If T. S. Eliot had lived in my house,
Cats
would have never existed; instead, there would now be a touring company of the musical
I’ve Got the Sack, You Bring the Rock, and We’ll Meet Down by the Creek.

I turn to the Feeder as I drive past, and really, I like her as a person. She has never said a bad word about anybody. She’s truly very nice. I understand that her heart is in the right place, although her intentions should be posted on the side of a milk carton, ’cause they’ve done gone. I nod and I smile. She nods and smiles back. She waves.

I’m not to that level yet, but it’s still nice.

Nice.

I Love Everybody.

Two miles from Costco, all is going well until a Chevy two-ton crosses two empty lanes of traffic to squeal in front of me and then reduces its speed to that of a Fred Flintstone car. It was at a barely crawling 25 miles per hour in a 45 zone that I was able to fully, and comprehensively, take in and understand the character of the motorist before me. On his bumper, for everyone to see, including his mother, his boss, his neighbors, and any womenfolk he might have swindled into dating, was a bumper sticker that read:
TODAY’S WORD IS LEGS . . . LET’S SPREAD THE WORD
!!

I choked on my own saliva. I don’t even know what you say after seeing something like that. I really don’t. Nothing except that I would be entirely remiss by not mentioning that as an additional adornment to his fine, gray-primered-on-one-side vehicle and swinging to and fro from his trailer hitch was a flesh-colored sock, into which he had apparently stuffed two racquetballs, sitting side by side, and had fashioned himself something of a scrotum. That’s right, his truck had a nutsack.

His truck had a nutsack.

As I passed the Testicle Truck, I made a five-dollar bet with myself and won when I saw that its master had opted not to don a shirt that morning.

I smiled and I nodded.

“Aren’t you delightful?” I said, to which he stuck his big, filthy tongue into his cheek and vigorously moved it around as he raised his eyebrows repeatedly.

I laughed and said through my smiling, clenched teeth, “Your trailer hitch has a better shot at that than you do. At least his boys have dropped.”

Nice.

I Love Quite Close to Everybody.

I finally got to Costco without any more incidents—believe it or not, I didn’t see any SUVs or station wagons dragging a fake uterus or fallopian tubes from the bumper—save for one small occurrence that happened as I was gunning for a prime spot in an otherwise crowded parking lot. The spot directly behind it was empty, too, so as I was a millisecond from turning into my spot, I wasn’t concerned when I saw a Plymouth Valiant angle for it and begin to pull in from the opposite direction. I must confess, however, that I did feel the small rumblings of boiling blood when the Valiant did not stop once he had parked in his spot, but continued to pull on through to my spot, where he stopped, got out, winked at me, pulled up the waistband on his Sansabelt slacks, and then continued on his way as I sat watching him and he grinned, sucking on a toothpick. I smiled so hard it hurt. I nodded like a bobblehead. I turned, drove up the aisle, and took the spot he should have, and I was just as surprised as you might have been when the three-day-old and half-filled cup of hot, flat Diet Coke I was holding suddenly fell out of my hand and onto the side door of the Valiant as I was passing it. It was amazing, almost as if an Anger Angel had come up from under me and popped it right out of my grasp like a volleyball.

Maybe not so nice.

I Love Most Everybody.

At this point, I had about an hour to get the cake and drive to my sister’s house before my nephew’s birthday began. I had plenty of time, no sweat. I could have a nice, leisurely shopping experience. “Hi, how are you?” I said to people passing by who smiled at me, had some sort of visible ailment or challenge, or were in my way, which I figured would earn me more karma nice points, as I had a lot of catching up to do.

My first stop is always the book table. Books are to me as homemade tattoos are to an inmate. Can’t get enough of them. Plus, I figured it was a good place to do some research on the niceness of other authors by looking at their photos on the jackets of their books.

What I saw shocked me. I was shocked. I was out of my league altogether. I mean, I don’t know what kind of camera you have to use to capture the heavenly rays of the sun descending upon the head of a sweetly smiling, golden-locked author who is looking upward at those rays as if to say, “Yes, God, I love you. I love you, God,” but it sure isn’t any camera that had taken a photo of me. I mean, some of those author photos looked like prayer cards of saints that they hand out at funerals. One lady had even wrapped what looked like a very scratchy Navajo blanket around her head, Virgin Mary–style, as she gazed off into the distance over some rolling, westernlike hills through her living room window. I didn’t understand that. I mean, obviously the woman had the conveniences of modern technology at hand in order to write a book, yet there she was, in her author’s photo, dressed up as a Peruvian sheepherder. There weren’t any sheep in the picture. I didn’t even see a lamb. I guess my favorite was of a woman whose portrait was taken in profile, her head thrown back to show off her long, lean neck as she apparently laughed in a myriad complex of emotions, including elation, joy, and glee, though truthfully I thought that she somewhat resembled a seal about to catch a fish.

To sum it up, they all looked pretty damn nice, nicer than me, at least. The camera has never caught me in a spontaneous moment of exhalation so extensive it looked as if I has suddenly thrown my head back and was about to burst forth to speak in tongues, I never wandered around my home with a Native American, hand-crafted textile or even a down comforter wrapped around my head, for that matter, and honest to God, the only time I ever saw definitive rays of light streaming through my windows was when I had a two-pack-a-day Marlboro habit and the molecules of light had to slice through the fog of smoke in the house.

I flipped over the sheepherder’s book to read the rave reviews, including one from
Kirkus
that made her sound as if she had, in giving birth to this book, ended hunger, child abuse, and found a cure for stretch marks. Ditto on the angelic, hazy sun gazer who looked as if she were duly prepared and expected to be, at any moment, zapped up into the sky like Captain Kirk during the first, blissful seconds of the Rapture. She was, you could tell, a definite first-string redeemer. Oh, yeah. She was going. And the seal catching the fish, she was going, too, you could just tell. Who claps their hands and tosses their heads back like that except for the devoutly religious and people whose eyes are too far apart?

I never had a chance. I didn’t even qualify for stand-by Rapture status. I looked again at the sun gazer and knew I was completely out of my league. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if God himself placed a 911 to the
Kirkus
reviewer on her behalf, warning that boils, humpbacks, and leprosy is what that
Kirkus
employee could expect if he even considered giving His Girl a bad review, and if he needed proof, God would add, “Look down the hall or at what’s sitting in the cubicle next to you. It wasn’t the asbestos, after all, chump.”

I pushed my cart away from the book table feeling even more hopeless when I suddenly realized a pick-me-upper was only a freezer department away. After all, it was almost noon, and in Costco, that translates into a free hors d’oeuvres lunch, and if I was lucky, a tablespoon of Popsicle in a little paper pill cup for dessert. And nothing, almost nothing, can make me as happy as a free bit of fried food. It’s kind of like happy hour, but without the drink specials and an ugly coworker trying to worm his tongue into your ear.

But as I rounded the corner I saw very much to my dismay that only one sample lady was set up and the others were still involved in their prep work, heating up their Fry Daddies and plugging in their toaster ovens. In fact, the one sample lady who was set up already had quite a crowd in front of her, because sometimes people at Costco act like the sample ladies are doling out pieces of eight or individual Viagra pills instead of one-eighth of an eggroll.

So I got in line, waiting for my free whatever it was. It was almost my turn, there were only two girls, who looked to be in their very early twenties, ahead of me, and as they chatted away it was obvious that they were together. I overheard the sample lady say to them, “Cherry, raspberry, peach, or blueberry?” and I felt my heart skip a beat. Popsicle. It’s a Popsicle! I thought to myself. Maybe it’s a PhillySwirl, I
love
those, different flavors of Italian ice all swirled together and they’re supersugary and cold and soft but not slushy and they turn my mouth blue. This is just the shot in the arm I need.

At that precise moment, a sharp, high-pitched noise erupted in front of me that used my ear as a portal to repeatedly stab at my brain.

Brrrring! Brrrring!

“That’s you,” the first girl bubbled.

“No, that’s you,” the other girl gushed.

Brrring! Brrring!
Stab! Stab!

Answer the phone,
I mouthed as I tried not to wince.

“It’s so totally you!” the first girl insisted.

“It is so totally
not
me!” the other girl replied.

Brrring! Brrring!
Stab! Stab!

Answer the stupid phone,
I said silently as I tried in vain to turn my head to avoid the auditory assault.

“Maybe it
is
me,” the first girl said, staring at her friend.

“I think it
is
you!” her friend confirmed.

Brrring! Brrrring!
Stab! Stab!

Answer it! Answer it!
I screamed in my imagination, finally forced to cup my hands over my ears.

Then the first girl finally opened up her fishing net of a purse and began to dig through it to find the source. She grabbed it, unfolded it, and held it up to her ear.

“Hel-lo!” she demanded gleefully. “HEL-LO-OH!”

Then she sadly looked at her friend. “They hung up,” she said morosely.

“Wow. Maybe it
was
me,” her friend concluded.

“Ohhhhhhh,” the first girl said.

“Ohhhhhhh,” her friend said in sympathy. “Maybe they’ll call back!”

“Cherry, raspberry, peach, or blueberry?” the sample lady said.

“Oh,” the first girl said as she paused and turned toward her friend. “I don’t know. I don’t know. What are
you
going to get?”

“I don’t know,” her friend said slowly. “What are
you
going to get?”

“THE BLUEBERRY IS THE BEST,” I heard myself proclaim, feeling the fire at my feet, feeling the fuse begin to light. “THE BLUEBERRY IS THE BEST, JUST GET THAT, PLEASE, YOU TWO VERY DELIGHTFUL GIRLS IN PRETTY DRESSES!”

“This is a skort, not a dress,” the first girl said as she looked at me oddly.

“Really? No way! It totally looks like a cute dress!” her friend gushed.

“BLUEBERRY!” I said as I felt the uncontrollable desire to cover my head and rock back and forth. “BLUE
BERRY!
”

“Blueberry,” the first girl said to the sample lady, still looking at me.

“Blueberry,” her friend said, nearly in a whisper.

The sample lady handed them the little paper pill cup and they walked away.

I Still Love Everybody, but With a Couple More Exceptions.

“Oh my God, did you hear that?” I said to the sample lady, stepping forward and shaking my head. “Did you hear that phone? Did you
hear
that? It was like some crazy sonar signal, that sharp,
sharp
noise going into my head, God, it was like a torture device, is my ear bleeding? Is there blood there? Can you see any? I mean, where do you even get a phone like that, the Central American Secret Police Store? You could win a revolution with a phone like that. You could kill
dolphins
with that phone. That phone would
totally
kill a dolphin, they have very sensitive brains! I mean, I was trying to love those girls,
I was,
I was really trying to love them, but my God, that right there is solid proof that evolution has hit the road, baby. That’s right. We’re nothing but monkeys with covered nipples is all. That’s all we are. Are you sure you don’t see any blood?”