I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (2 page)

BOOK: I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)
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Having health insurance was a definite plus, because not only did it look like cancer was going to call in all of my bets, but I was also convinced that every time I heard about a new, horrible affliction, I was positive it was my destiny to get it and I began exhibiting symptoms immediately. I was like the Zelig of disease. When my sister told me that her neighbor had some virus that disfigured her entire face with large, protruding lumps that could not be cured, I found several of my own in my neck, but thankfully my doctor informed me that they were my lymph nodes and it would be in my best interest to stop trying to pop them. After I read a story about fibromyalgia in
Ladies’ Home Journal
in my mother’s bathroom (limited availability of reading material; it was either that or my mom’s favorite book,
Find Me
by Rosie O’Donnell), I started getting aches and pains all over my legs, until my doctor pointed out that my feet were stuffed into my shoes like pig’s feet in a jar, and it didn’t matter if the shoe on sale was not available in a seven and a half, only a six and a half,
I still had to buy my own size.
And when smallpox was mentioned as a possible biological weapon, I developed tiny bumps all over and thankfully my doctor looked me over and said, “You’ve been here three times in two weeks. I’m glad you have insurance, too, but there is nothing I can do for pimples. You have pimples, lymph nodes, and tight, cheap shoes. Go home, wash your face, and only call me from now on if you see blood.”

Still, although my job gave me a host of things to celebrate, there were some drawbacks, too. I know that people are led to believe via television that the life of a columnist (e.g., Carrie Bradshaw) is a glamorous one filled with fancy clothes, fabulous parties, and Apple laptops.

That, I’m afraid, is a lie.

In the first place, no one at my newspaper looked like Sarah Jessica Parker, because if we had, we wouldn’t be wasting our time at a newspaper, we’d have a series on HBO. Plus, to be blunt, you’d find a better-looking group of people working the overnight shift at Denny’s than you would at a newspaper. It’s no modeling agency, I’ll tell you that much. Pick a random newsroom from anywhere across the country; they will all look like they just crawled out from Middle-earth. You see, in journalism school, the day comes when you have to make a choice: broadcast journalism or print journalism. The pretty people choose broadcast; the hominids choose print. If a hominid tries to stray over to the group in which she clearly doesn’t belong, the pretty people will pelt her with expensive hair-care products, microphones, lip gloss, and call her fat until she rejoins her proper and rightful tribe. Likewise, if a pretty talking head tries to cross the line to the print group, we would have beat her with notepads, tape recorders, and keyboards and called her “Barbie” until it was time to eat her.

Now, even though I was with the correct group as far as my physical appeal was concerned, I had the feeling that I might not be the ideal fit for a corporate environment when I plopped my Pull My Finger Fred doll, my cow that pooped brown jelly beans, and my giant roll of butt floss on my desk for decoration, conversation icebreakers, and exciting indications of the jovial, frolicsome personality that bubbled like a spring underneath my new Banana Republic wardrobe. I thought people would get a kick out of them as much as I did (come on—cows pooping jelly beans!
brown jelly beans!
), but once I understood that my toys were displayed in the same area where other women my age (but looked much, much,
much
older and seemed very tired) had photos of their kids, their husbands, and either Xena the Warrior Princess or Ben Affleck, it also clearly explained the scary abundance of grown-ups in the lobby and on the elevator.

Now, the elevator posed some real problems for me, because since I worked on the seventh floor, I had a lot of time to examine people while riding in it. It clearly reinforced the fact that I was not corporate material. All of the people on the third floor, where the telemarketing/call center was located, looked as if they were bussed in from the methamphetamine part of town and spent their days off (when they weren’t cooking up some supplemental income in their biohazard kitchen) having supervised visitation with their kids, who were now in some process of foster care or state custody; the folks on the fourth floor, specimens from the advertising and sales staff, had great tans, chemically altered white teeth, and boobs that started at their collarbones; the tenth-floor people, who held the keys to the kingdom below them, were a bunch of stern, unhappy VPs and execs who looked like they had mandatory rectal exams every morning before they were permitted to get into their Lexuses and go to work. They also had exquisite, beautiful bathrooms on their floor, so marvelous and resplendent they could have belonged to a dictator, which I felt free to use and enjoy as my own personal potty. It turns out that the elevator was a wonderful litmus test for exposing the true personalities of my coworkers as they revealed their inner selves in a thirty-six-square-foot compartment. One of them, a middle-aged woman who still really considered herself eye candy instead of an eyesore, never thought twice, when the elevator had a member of the opposite sex in it, about pulling up her skirt and exclaiming, “Oh, look at my legs! I’ve forgotten to put lotion on this morning! My skin is so dry! It’s a good thing I keep lotion in my purse!”
Any
member of the opposite sex, including old men and children who were participants in Take Your Son to Work Day, whom she would obliviously shame as he nervously tried to keep his eyes focused on anything but her legs, which were so worn and broken-in that they could have easily been made into a Dooney & Bourke satchel. It was no surprise to me, then, when it was discovered she was messing around with her boss, who then left his wife and family for the purse with legs; he then bought her a truck, and two days after his divorce was final, she dropped him and her lotion bottle for a guy in IT.

The elevator granted me the opportunity not only to find out who the office sluts were; the nosybodies, the self-absorbed, the smelly, and the clueless all introduced themselves one by one on my flights seven stories up while they annoyed me in various other ways as well.

I hated them. It was an entirely new breed I hadn’t encountered before.

They were the Elevator People. Now, honestly, I kept my hatred of the Elevator People to myself because I thought I was alone, it wasn’t to be shared. Then, one day, I heard on the news about how a guy in Canada went berserk and unleashed a canister of pepper spray in an elevator when he had a fight with one of the other passengers about pushing excessive buttons.

I nodded and almost cried with relief when I heard the story. “Elevator People!” I whispered to myself. Finally, they had pushed someone too far. I knew exactly what he had been through, and this was a
Canadian.
Canadians are specially bred to be overtly nice, so you know what happened had to be bad. I knew exactly what kind of Elevator People were involved.

They were the people who got into the elevator after they had eaten pickled herring and raw onion for lunch and then insisted on laughing heartily when nothing funny had happened. The people who make the elevator experience an endurance test for the other elevator riders by holding the door open with a body part while feeling free to finish up the last fifteen minutes of a conversation. The people who go up or down only one floor.

As a matter of fact, my trip in the elevator most mornings was like a math problem straight out of the SATs. The question would read: “How long will it take Laurie to get to her desk if she and two men get on the elevator on the first floor, she pushes 8, the next man pushes 7, and the other man pushes 9, but on the second floor, a new man gets on and pushes 4, on the third floor, a lady gets on and pushes 5, on the fourth floor, the second-floor man gets out, on the fifth floor, the third-floor lady gets out but another one gets on and pushes 6, on the sixth floor, the fifth-floor lady gets out but another one wants on and hasn’t decided where to meet her sixth-floor friend for lunch so she blocks the elevator door with her foot in a very scuffed-up Payless shoe and says, ‘Downtown Deli? No, we ate there yesterday. Uno’s? No, the wait is too long. Subway? No, I feel like something hot. Well, what are you in the mood for? Any ideas? No, I can’t eat another hot dog after I got sick on that last one. Remember, it was all green at the end? Yuck. Hmmmm. I don’t know. Well, just call me and we’ll decide. Okay, I’ll call you. Or you call me. Okay, I’ll call you. Okay, sure, I’ll call you. Hey, what about Chinese?’ until the door wants to close so badly it threatens to slice her cheap little shoe right off her foot like it was deli ham, so she gets on and then naturally goes to push—what else—7, but the first-floor man already selected it, on the seventh floor the first-floor man gets off alone, and before the elevator hits eight, the Payless-shoe woman realizes she’s missed the seventh floor and pushes 7 again? How long will it take before Laurie reaches her desk? What are the chances that she
will even survive
?”

Well, I’ll tell you how long—it took me less time to drive to work than it did for me to get upstairs. So you see, I could completely understand how a gentle, nice-almost-to-the-point-of-being-retarded Canadian could unleash pepper spray in an elevator that eventually forced the evacuation of an entire building because every time the doors opened, the spray was spread. I could understand that. While I had never truly considered brandishing a weapon in the elevator, I had often thought about pinching people. Okay, that’s a lie, I had often fantasized about a cattle prod, but only for the One Floorers. Only for them. And the Payless shoe lady, for her, too. I mean ONE FLOOR, I could never understand why people needed to take the elevator for ONE FLOOR. In my opinion, the company needed to send out a memo that said, “Hey, guess what, you guys! Ever wonder what’s behind the mystery door? It’s STAIRS! We have
STAIRS
! STAIRS are very similar to an escalator, but one that’s MANUALLY OPERATED.”

Because I’m telling you, after that day of the elevator math problem, if another person got on that elevator to travel eight feet upward, I couldn’t have been responsible for what I did. I had been pushed to the limit. The next time it happens, I swore to myself, I’m going to reach out and pinch that One Floorer and say, “You get out there and
walk
! You won’t come close to burning a fraction of the three thousand calories you ate at lunch, but maybe by the time you reach the landing, you’ll pass out from exhaustion and get to go home for the rest of the day, you lazy little asshole, because that’s exactly what you want anyway!”

I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t exactly fitting the corporate mold.

One day in the middle of spring, after our newspaper was bought by a large media conglomerate and new management took over, I was summoned to the office of the New Big Cheese for a “Hi, I’m Your New Boss” meeting. With my luck, it was during the week that my allergies had been the worst they had been all season—my nose was red, chafed, and peeling like a snake, my sinuses felt like someone had poured the foundation to a house into them, I had become a mouth breather, which is never a pretty look and for some scientifically undocumented reason makes allergy sufferers speak like a preschooler, substituting
b
for most letters, even some vowels. Worried that my column was on the chopping block, I popped a bunch of Claritin, slapped some moisturizer on my nose to reduce the skin flake shedding, got all dressed up, and tried to look presentable for the meeting. But when I walked into his office, I knew that even a makeover by Marcia Brady wasn’t going to help me.

Once I saw the rectal expression on his face, I was concerned that someone may have reported me for engaging in a simulated pinching fantasy incident on the elevator or told him I had been running to the tenth-floor Saddam Hussein Palace bathroom clutching my abdomen an unnecessary number of times.

But he didn’t say anything about that.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hellob,” I said back with a little wave.

“So, you’re Laurie Notaro,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“Yeb,” I said as I sat down. “Nice to beet youb.”

He nodded.

I nodded back.

A snowflake of skin fluttered off my nose, drifting back and forth, twirling here and there, flutter, flutter, flutter, until it landed on his table.

“Do you like being a columnist?” he said, trying not to stare at me shedding.

“Yeb, berry much,” I replied, then decided to make a joke. “I’b too ugly for teebee.”

“That’s good,” he said, looking a little confused.

Now, at this point, the man’s expression had remained so constant that I wasn’t even sure he had teeth. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be joining my rotation list for lunch dates.

“We’re making some changes to the section that your column appears in and—” He stopped short and focused his eyes on my nose.

And then I saw it. Granted, I didn’t have the vantage point the New Big Cheese had—a full frontal view—but even I, looking down, could see something impressive taking place.

From above, I saw that it was shiny, spherical, and magnificent in size.

I, unbeknownst to even myself, had blown an incredibly large bubble from my right nostril, and it was the size of Biosphere 2.

It was enormous.

“Oh by Gob!” I cried suddenly, covering my nose with my hands as the Big Cheese looked at me, his mouth agape.

I saw that he did, indeed, have teeth.

“Oh by Gob!” I cried over again. I’m sure it was as disturbing to watch as it was to produce, but I had no idea of what I should do. So following my initial instinct (HIDE!), I scurried around but couldn’t find any plants or furniture that I could throw myself behind, and I did that until I felt my second instinct (RUN!).

I ran around his office a couple more times as the new editor struggled to follow me, holding out something white and floppy—it could have been a tissue, for all I know, but the moment contained so many elements of a disaster that the white thing could have been a handkerchief, a sock, or his underwear, or it may have been a restraining order to keep me away from his office. Finally, I located his door during my last panic lap around the office, bolted out of it, and scurried down to my office and slammed my door shut.

BOOK: I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)
11.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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