I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (3 page)

I blew a mammoth orb out of my nose, I kept saying to myself. It must have looked like a comic strip; he was probably waiting for words to appear in it, saying something like,
“Esta burbuja del moco representa mi amor para usted, mi hombre lujurioso de la cara de rectal. Pnchelo! Pnchelo ahora!
(This snot bubble represents my love for you, my lusty rectal-face man. Pop it! Pop it now!)” I blew a bubble out my nose. A bubble, a big, nasty bubble, nearly the size of Christina Ricci’s head, came right out of my face.

My column is history.

My column is so gone.

“OUT!” I was sure the Big Cheese was saying right at that moment, “Bubble Girl’s column is out! Unless she’s filling some special needs quota for the paper, she’s out! Let her go get a job in the circus, where her kind belongs! Don’t let her back in the building! God knows where else she may have bubble portals!”

I was going to lose my column because of the snot balloon, everyone was going to find out why, and I was going to have to quit in order to avoid all the embarrassing questions, whispers, stares.

I was going to have to quit. Well, I thought, trying to console myself, at least it’s a first. You’ve never really been able to give notice before your employers have done it for you.

AND THAT, a big, deep, determined voice in my head suddenly interrupted the other voice in my head, IS WHY LAURIE NOTARO NEVER QUITS. SHE NEVER QUITS!! SHE IS NOT A QUITTER!! SHE’S A TWO-ENVELOPE GIRL!!

Hey, that’s right, I said to myself, although I’m not sure in what voice; it was high and squeaky, so perhaps it was my inner Dr. Phil child voice. I love severance! I love it! I will not quit this job that I love. I will not walk away from it. I will swim through this snot-bubble muck!

I grabbed my chair, pulled it out, sat down in front of my computer and got ready to work, and that’s when I suddenly sucked in a deep breath and gasped. I knew right then I couldn’t quit anyway, even if I were blowing bubbles out both nostrils like a mermaid.

I found a pen, rifled through some papers, drew an arrow, and wrote the words “Cancer of the Lower Asshole” right next to the bottom half of my stick figure.

Baby No Name

W
ith exactly six days to go before her due date, my pregnant sister Lisa sat on my Nana’s couch and flipped through a baby name book.

“I don’t know,” she kept repeating over and over again. “I just don’t know. I can’t find anything I like.”

Admittedly, she was cutting it close, but I’m not so sure that was really all her fault. Every Sunday around the dining room table, my family would try to help my sister find a good, strong name. The problem with that scenario, however, was the tendency of the members of my family—Italian Americans
from New York
—to believe that they each had found the perfect name and that everyone else’s choice was a sin against nature.

It was a battle no one was winning, including my sister, and after what she had been through with this pregnancy, she should have at least qualified to be a leading contender.

A minute after Lisa learned she was pregnant with her second child, her belly expanded to the size of a room addition and salespeople began asking if she was expecting triplets. By now she hadn’t crossed her legs in nearly a year, required a scouting expedition to navigate the widest path through restaurants, and couldn’t get out of a car without the assistance of two Teamsters. Last week when we were at the mall, I looked at her and wondered how she was even able to stand upright, but at least I was happy that someone in my family had wider, more established stretch marks than I did.

Later that day, as we passed by a rack full of lingerie on sale, she looked longingly at lace demi-bras, the frilly underwires and padded little helpers. “Oh boy, I remember these,” Lisa said as she brushed her fingers against a cream-colored satin A-cup, remembered days gone by and then looked at herself. “These don’t belong on me. They have a promising career in porno. I have the measurements of a Louis the Fourteenth armoire. Remember the pencil test? Well, I can store a summer sausage under there, and a roll of crackers.”

Her misery was enough to make me want to jot down a request for early, early menopause and submit it to my mother’s prayer chain.

So by all means, it should have been her decision to name her next son what she wanted, but whenever we asked her, which was about three times a day, she still said she didn’t know.

“What are we going to call my grandson?” my mother demanded from the dining room table. “Baby No Name?”

“I just don’t know,” my sister said again, flipping to the next page in the baby name book. “Nothing is hitting me.”

“What about David?” my mother asked. “That’s a nice name.”

“Oh God, that’s HORRIBLE,” I said with a yell. “That’s the name of one of my worst ex-boyfriends!”

“Is that the one you brought to my wedding with the electronic tracking device around his ankle?” Lisa asked.

“No, no, no. This was the one that said I was trying to trap him into ‘nesting’ because I left my eyeliner and a Janis Joplin CD at his house,” I answered. “The guy with the tracking device was his roommate who was home when I went to pick them up.”

“How about Paul?” Nana suggested. “Jesus had a friend named Paul and he seemed nice.”

“No way,” my other sister said. “Paul Crowder was the Booger Boy in my seventh-grade class. He saved his and looked at them under microscopes!”

“Yeah, that’s a bad name,” I agreed. “Paul DuBois in my eighth-grade class ate a retina from a cow eyeball we were dissecting because another boy bet him five bucks. They made him throw up in the sink, he got suspended, and in the end had to give the five bucks back, too.”

“Here’s one,” my pregnant sister said, looking up from the book. “What do you think of Colin?”

“What kind of idiot name is that?” my mother spit out. “Why would you name a baby after a part of your butt? You might as well name him Rectum, because it’s the same part of the body!”

“She said ‘Colin,’ Mom, not
‘colon,’
” I tried to tell her.

“Thank God it’s not a girl, you’d probably name her Sphincta,” my mother shot back.

My sister looked puzzled.

“She means ‘sphincter,’         ” I translated.

“That’s what I said!” my mother responded in her native accent. “Sphincta!”

“I have an idea,” I said, turning to my three-year-old nephew. “Nicholas, what do you think we should call your baby brother?”

After a careful think, he put his hand on his chin and said, “I think baby brother should be called P. V. Robin.”

We all just looked at each other until someone asked him why.

“Um, Robin for Robin Hood from my new video,” he explained. “And P.V. for P. V. Mall.”

“I think you go shopping with Grandma too much,” I whispered to him.

“Then how ’bout we name baby brother Disney Store?” he asked.

“I think you should name him Michael,” my mother inserted. “An
M
name because he’ll be born in the new MMMM-illennium!”

I just looked at her. “You didn’t use your protein bingo card today on your new Weight Watchers diet, did you?” I asked. “Besides, your vote is null and void in this election due to the damage you caused when you named each of your daughters the most popular names for the year they were born and they
all began with the letter L.
You’re disqualified for lack of initiative.”

“I AM NOT a bad namer!” my mother protested.

“You are so, Mom,” Lisa said from the couch. “Our childhood dogs were named Bambi, Pookie, and Brandy. Those aren’t dog names, Mom. Those are the names of girls who work at a place called Naughty Nudies.”

“Besides, Mom, Michael was the name of the guy with the electronic anklet,” I said. “As a matter of fact, he met his first three wives at Naughty Nudies.”

Nothing really got solved that day, no epiphany was reached, no name was chosen, and my mother left my Nana’s house saying, “
M
for Millennium!
M
for Michael! What
don’t
you people get?”

Well, I still don’t get it, but I do understand one thing. If the power of my mother’s prayer chain isn’t strong enough and I end up having porno boobs of my own, it will have been worth it when I hear my mother bring my kid to the mall for the first time and say, “And this is called the Disney Store, Sphincta.”

Stolen

P
lease sit down,” my husband said as soon as I walked through the front door. “I have something . . .
disturbing
to tell you.”

“Another cat died underneath the house,” I said, taking a seat.

“No. The smell is still from the one that’s already under there,” he answered.

“You can’t find the scissors again, so you trimmed your eyebrows with a lighter,” I said as he just looked at me.

“Steak knife,” he replied.

“Um, something disturbing . . . I know, I know! You accidentally put on a pair of my underwear and ended up liking it,” I said, hoping that wasn’t it, because although I can be cool with a lot of things, like unemployment, substance abuse, and chemical imbalances of the psychological kind, men in panties is not one of them.

He just furrowed his brow.

“Can you be quiet for a minute?” he finally said. “What I wanted to tell you is that someone—”

“—you know got all tingly when his wife’s bra ‘fell’ on him,” I said, shaking my head. “You tell him to keep Victor’s Secret to himself because I don’t want to know!”

“—stole your carport!” my husband released in one, rushed sentence.

I stood there for a moment, then sat back down.

“You are LYING,” I said as I stared across the room. “That is completely unbelievable!”

It WAS unbelievable. The carport/shade structure was a good ten by ten feet, rose nearly nine feet into the air, consisted of metal tube construction and was covered by striped canvas, and was nearly big enough to park two cars under.

“I’m serious,” he replied. “Somebody just hopped the fence and TOOK it. All of the gates in the backyard are still locked.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly, thinking about it. What this meant was, essentially:

A) Someone scaled my six-foot block wall, THEN

B) pulled up the stakes that had secured the carport, which had been hammered a foot into the ground, THEN

C) tossed the shade structure over the wall as a whole unit (I know this because I put it together and knew that it would have taken nearly twenty minutes to disassemble in the dark making more noise than a drunk high school senior coming home past his curfew), THEN

D) ran down the street with what basically looked like a campsite with no fire, OR

E) threw the cabana into the bed of a waiting truck and stole away into the night to attend a BYOS (Bring Your Own Shade) midnight barbecue.

“Who steals a cabana?” I wondered aloud. “Picnic pirates?”

And if anyone saw this, did any of my neighbors think it was odd that someone was running down the street dragging a festive white-and-green-striped cabana behind him? Did they think it was the circus, or a disoriented parasailer?

And then I remembered where I live, and what lives several blocks from me. Oh yes, my neighbors. My fellow man. In fact, forty-seven of my fellow men were all living in the same apartment a couple of blocks away before the INS busted up that hoppin’ party several months ago. On certain streets, it means you’re rich if you have a broken, torn couch
and
a recliner on your front porch. By those standards, I suppose I’m the Bill Gates of my ghetto, flaunting my boundless and extreme wealth by pitching a carport in the dirt of my backyard. Shame on us, putting on airs. Filthy, greedy bourgeois!

How pretentious we were when we decided to remove asbestos and flaking lead paint before we moved into our house! Living like the kings of Fancy Pants Land, we were! That’s right, we’re too
good
for cancer and blood poisoning! But we snobs were sure taught a lesson when we arrived one morning and the house had been completely cleaned out, including the bounty of contaminated drop cloths and the bathroom sink. It was very unsettling to know that someone had been going through our things, and at that time, I wasn’t sure whether it was more unsettling for me to have robbers or the DEA ransack my house (long story), because, in hindsight, I’ve learned that neither one comes back to clean up afterward. After the robbery, we used our air-conditioning savings to install a security system, and slept in pools of our own sweat for the next two summers.

My husband was admittedly being a show-off when he left a ten-speed with dented rims and two flat tires in our backyard, because someone also felt the need to relieve us of that little pot of gold. That’s when we used our Christmas savings to get bars on the windows, and I was forced to give “Hug Coupons” to my family for holiday gifts.

Now comes the really sad part of the story. Pity the poor little thief who mistook the disintegrating circa 1985 Pier 1 wicker chair that was missing a seat for the ancient throne of Cleopatra, because despite its four unraveling legs, it had a little outside assistance walking off our porch. That’s when I used the money I was saving for a trip to the gynecologist to get metal security doors and got a handheld mirror instead.

And, oh, what bravado we, Mr. and Mrs. Livin’ Large, exuded by driving around in a truck with a dented, scratched tailgate, because someone also helped themselves to that morsel from the car part buffet, unhinging it from the bed and simply walking away with it. As a result, we started parking in the backyard, under the shade cabana I bought with my own money, money I had saved and earned from
working.

That was an American Dream short-lived, wasn’t it?

I’m not sure what to do now. Skip a mortgage payment and build a fire pit around my house, dig a moat, or smear something gooey and moist on top of the wall? Maybe I should take a tip from my old neighbor Frank, who laced his yard with trip wire that had “enough volts to knock a horse on its ass” after a seven-foot Barney Santa was shanghaied from his yard during Christmas of ’95. Frank would also chop down trees in his front yard after he had fights with his wife, so I’m not too sure how realistic that option truly is.

An hour ago, though, I took a black Sharpie marker and wrote
THIS WAS STOLEN FROM LAURIE NOTARO
on everything I thought was worth more than ten dollars, including the replacement bathroom sink and a rug that smells like pee. Not that it would deter the kind of thief that was brazen enough to steal something as big as, say,
a bedroom
from my backyard, but at least I get the last word.

It’s a disturbingly small reward, especially since someone out there still owes me a Pap smear.