I love it when I get your period (or, Merry Christmas)

Everyone becomes a child at Christmastime. For most, the holiday means any one, or combination, of the following: a once-a-year public acknowledgment that you’re related to certain members of your family; the ceremonious opening of garishly-wrapped presents you probably didn’t want while artfully feigning joy that you did (NOTE: unless it’s a wad of cash or a new vibrator, I didn’t want it); glutting yourself on types of cookies you didn’t even think existed because there are now far too many cooking shows pressured to offer their own take on traditional holiday recipes (Myrrh and Yucca S’mores¸ anyone? Snake bile and Jellybean Poppers, kiddies? You just name it! Like a virgin birth, at Christmas, anything is possible); and making inappropriate advances towards your coworkers simply because it is a given that the mention of the word “mistletoe” at the holiday party really means “Let’s play two rounds of show-me-your-areola!” Oh yeah, and then there are actual children, for whom Santa isn’t someone who may have just given them an STD in exchange for a 20%-off coupon book in the broom closet at the back of the Macy’s “Juniors” section, but is rather the jolly, glittering author of an innocent—indeed jubilant—brand of greed sanctioned by corporations and their sweatshop minions the world over.

For me, however, Christmas means one thing and one thing alone: it is the only time of year when it is not just acceptable but encouraged for people to dress up in Victorian or other historical period garb, the logical reasoning for which goes something like this:

If P = Christmas is quaint

and Q = all historical periods prior to the 20^th century in countries celebrating the birth of Christ are also quaint—especially when tights, ruffles, petticoats, monocles, rudimentary leavening techniques, child labor, pudding, patriarchy and wassailing are involved,

then P = Q.

And to my mind, there is simply nothing more intriguing in this world than the reality that at some point existed in which a woman uncomfortably but nobly stuffed into a corset and a neck wreath would have found herself baking something involving the atrociously-named “potted” meat, while consumed by the dilemma of how she was going to conceal from her husband that she was currently experiencing “The Ladies’ Maladie,” to the tune of carols such as the Busman’s Jib and Fling the Tally-Ho as sung by her stewards, who were all the while nesting actual candles into the boughs of an actual pine tree, for all the world as if it never mattered that wood is actually highly flammable.

That shit just kills me, and it always has. Ever since I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I have been unnaturally drawn to and disproportionately obsessed with period films, sites, books, costumes, and the related historical claptrap and trivia. I have seen every single BBC literary adaptation that has ever been produced. I can sketch with alarming anatomical accuracy Colin Firth’s sideburns in Pride & Prejudice—in my sleep. I have seen (ahem): all twelve installments of Horatio fucking Hornblower (who the hell even IS that?); eleven biopics about authors from the 16^th through 19^th centuries (including four about Shakespeare); ten films starring Ralph Fiennes stalking about “the moors” wearing a top hat and looking sullen; nine versions of Jane Eyre, including the one where Jane is played by Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter (who is made to look about as unflattering as a horse’s backside); each of the eight installments of the Bleak House miniseries (and I can safely report that it was truly little more than the sum of its titular parts); seven films about Venetian courtesans (including 3 documentaries); six about 18^th-century musicians, including, but not limited to Farinelli and Tout Les Matins Du Monde; five interpretations of Dangerous Liasions; four films about Queen Victoria; three about Queen Elizabeth; and two versions each of Emma, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones and Sense and Sensibility. And if that weren’t enough to convince you of my devotion, one of my favorite films of all time is the totally bizarre Orlando, starring an androgynous Tilda Swinton as a gender-swapping noble who is born a foppish courtier in an Elizabethan castle and becomes a woman somewhere in 18^th-century France, experiencing every historical period in between and a few more after that. I could go on, but lucky for you, there are only twelve days of Christmas.

The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter how frail the script, how shoddy the set, or how obtuse and stiff the acting. If there is a man wearing a billowing blouse sweatily wielding a lance, riding a horse through the brambles, or slamming a goblet down during an otherwise silent feast to wordlessly express the depth of his affections for a woman of a different rank, while the family matriarch—invariably a plump woman with a bustle in her rear and a church-doily on her head—faints from duress and smelling salts are immediately fetched by the “learned” daughter (whose only prospect for marriage is to the local parson), while the would-be lovers use the moment of her swoon to steal a furtive glance across the room, count me in.

And there is simply no amount of Bronx classlessness that can’t be nullified by the warmth and hope of a dialogue like this:

“My darling, let me take a turn with you around the gardens after tea.”

“That is simply a risk I cannot take.”

My loyalty to such programming never faltered, despite repeatedly being caught watching such programs by my mother, brother or other family member to the inevitable response of:

“WHAT’S DIS GAY SHIT HEAH? TURN ON QUANTUM LEAP!”

One evening I had just settled in for the night with a virgin hot toddy (I was twelve) to watch Colin Firth as the rakish French noble Valmont when my mother passed behind me and said,

“WHO’S DAT FRIGGIN’ QUEEN???”

I still shudder to think that the austere manliness that was Colin Firth in that moment could have ever been construed as gay. But this might also explain why I now work in an opera house comfortably surrounded by gaggles of homosexual men. The bottom line is: nothing could have been more diverse from my upbringing than the world of those films. And for the solace and wonder they provided, I loved them—I still do—perhaps more than I can ever express.

Though perhaps even more riveting than watching Gillian Anderson engage in a taut Dickensian exchange with an old shopkeep played by the venerable Tom Wilkinson, is going to an historic site where they stage reenactments of life in antique centuries, in all its painstaking as-good-as-it’s-going-to-get-given-half-the-actors-have-iPhones-in-their-pockets historical accuracy. And it is precisely at Christmastime when any number of ramshackle heritage sites suddenly unfurl themselves with the glorious promise of loom-weaving, horse-shoeing, hearth-cooking and bread-kneading demonstrations by people wearing woolen cloaks and buckles in inconceivable places. And if you really hate your offspring, you’ll have the opportunity to take them there and buy them period-era toys that look like little more than a pair of protean handcuffs attached to a block of wood. Because that’s exactly what they are.

But all this historic wonderment only makes itself available on a massive scale each year during December. After January 1st, all the manor volunteers go back to leading basket-weaving classes at their local hospice, and the younger ones resume where they left off in D&D. I probably need not tell you that it takes a special breed of person to work at a heritage site. But none more special than in Historic Richmond Town in Staten Island, New York. You may be surprised to learn that of all possible places, tacky guido breeding ground par excellence Staten Island is the home to a real, live 17^th-century settlement. And every year at Christmas, the erstwhile historic reenactments abound, and I’m there, front and center.

Historic Richmond Town is situated on what I have determined is 25 acres of previously abandoned swampland. And while its brochures stress that it is “the oldest continuously working farm in NYC and the oldest home in Richmond County, dating back to 1662,” crossing the Goethals Bridge and turning into the property from a shoddy service road, it’s somewhat hard to shake the feeling that the settlers of this township were either a penal colony, or a group of people stricken with genital warts, back when such travails were considered evidence of witchery. Meanwhile, in Boston and Philadelphia, colonists of repute engaged in only the most wholesome pursuits—among them, the foundation of democracy, the playing of pinochle, and the successful concealment of their own sexual indiscretions.

Nevertheless, where unpaid workers are found donning brooches and corsets, so too am I. Years ago, on a wintry December afternoon a few days before Christmas, my mother announced that we were going to Staten Island “FOAH SOMMA DAT OLD CULTCHA YIZ LIKE.” The thought that my mother had suddenly taken to the notion that she had any idea whatsoever about anything I liked filled my teenage heart with dread. I envisioned a cheesy carnie horde wearing broke-down Renaissance costumes made of felt, and tacky Bridge and Tunnel trollops with abundant cleavage selling “mead” (= Sprite with a hit of Schlitz) while their Harley-bound boyfriends revved their engines to shouts of “WHEN DIH YIZ CLOCK OUT??”

As it turned out, Historic Richmond Town delivered the goods. There was quilt-stitching and broom-making in the cottage, and in the kitchen, stout lady cooks showed us how to make a steak-and-kidney pie, while in another house, the local apothecary ground up powdered ginger and molded it into a tablet using beeswax, and ladies in the nearby barn wearing milkmaid smocks milked actual cows; elsewhere a blustery blacksmith forged an iron shovel in his workshop, and an ink-mottled printmaker read from the passage of Mark concerning the birth of Jesus in a Bible he had just bound from the still-warm leaves that came off his mechanical press. To my amazement, the place could have given Historic Williamsburg a run for its money. Literally—because I was still fairly convinced that the young staff in the gift shop were probably concealing box-cutters underneath their powdered wigs. I mean, this is New York, after all.

In fact, in the butcher’s shop, we witnessed a live goat-skinning, which even I thought was a bit much for a reenactment, but as we later found out, the butcher—who even after adopting his 17^th-century persona, still went by Ames “Taco” Jackson—was just released from the clink and this was his probation. Apparently the New York State Penitentiary system thought this was the only community service that really suited Taco’s talents. And come to think of it, in the parlor, the crocheting operation was overseen by an old Jewish woman dressed in period garb—save for the dark plastic goggles her doctor had given her to protect her cataracts. She was needle-pointing by firelight an image of what all the visitors took to be Saint Nicholas, though she corrected us, saying she saw it more as a portrait of Elijah. Even so, Historic Richmond Town impressed me, far exceeding even my best expectations for anything that could ever claim Staten Island as its home.

And then we arrived at the Manor house, the final stop on our tour of the grounds. What we expected was a welcome by a resplendent Lady of the Manor, decked out in fullest finery—silks with trim and tassels, lace gloves and modest but sophisticated baubles. We approached, and the top half of a swinging door creaked open. We looked inside and saw no one, thinking we would first perhaps be greeted by a servant. Getting no reply, we unlatched the bottom half of the door and flung it wide open, to the sound of “MAMI, JU BETTAH WATCH VATCHOO DOOOIN’!!” as we heard the voice of a woman—seemingly already on the floor—who was felled by the opening door.

As we stumbled inside to help whoever we had just injured, the sight we then beheld was almost too much to take. After engaging with literally dozens of people in 400-year-old garb with 400-year-old affectations artfully completing 400-year-old tasks, the Lady of the Historic Richmond Town Manor was a Puerto Rican midget with dyed orange hair, turquoise eye shadow and hot pink lipstick, wearing an emerald green business suit and matching pumps.

She spoke.

“WELCONG TO DEE EESTORIC RISHMONG TOWNG MANOR HOUSE. I ENG DEE LADY OFF DEE MANOR: ESTRELLA ROBERTA MARIA DE CORDÓN Y JIMINEZ.”

I looked at my mother, aghast. This had to be a joke. But Estrella continued:

“ING DEES PORSHONG OFF DEE TOUR, I ENG GOING TO TCHO JU HOW WE LIB ING DEE SEBENGTEENG CENTURY. WE BEGING WEETH DEE DINING ROONG.”

Estrella then led us, still shell-shocked by what we were observing, into the dining room, and pointed to one of the elaborate place-settings on the richly-appointed table.

“JU SEE, WHENG ISS CHRISSMASS, ING DEE MANOR HOUSE, DEE NO EXPENGSE IS ESPARED. MY COOKS ING DEE KITCHENG ARE PREPARING DEE CHRISSMASS GOAT ASS WE ESPEAKING.”

My mother piped in, “DON’T YIZ MEAN CHRISTMAS GOOSE??”

“ENG DEE ISLA DE PUERTO RICO, DEE LADEE OFF DEE MANOR PREFER IT DEE GOAT.”

This might explain why the butcher’s nickname was Taco.

“SO, EEF JU LETTING ME E-FINEESH, LOOKING AT DEE TABLE ENG HERE, WE SEE DEE DIFFERENG TYSE OFF UTENGSIL DAT WE ARE E-USING TO EAT DEE DINNER. ONG THE LEFF, WE HAFE DEE FORKS ANG DEE KNIFFES, BUT ONG DEE RIGH, WE SEE DAT WE HAFE DEE ESPOONGS.”

Espoongs?

“ESPOONGS. DEESE ISS AN EENTERESTING ESTUDY ENG DEE RISH LIFE- ESTYLE OFF DEE MANOR HOUSE. COMO TE VES, WE HAFE DEE DIFFERENG TYSE OFF ESPOONGS.”

She then led us to a wall case, where all the many “espoongs” were displayed, and in exhausting detail, she described each and every one.

“WEE HAFE E-HERE DEE ESPOONG DEE OYSTER ESPOONG, FOR WHENG DEE DINNER INCLUSE DEE OYSTER.”

Makes enough sense, I thought. But Estrella quickly moved on.

“WEE HAFE E-HERE DEE ESPOONG DEE ESOUP ESPOONG, WHISH JU KNOW ISS DEE ESOUP ESPOONG BECAUSSE ISS LOOKING LIKE A LITTLE BOWL.”

She was right.

“ANG FINALLY WE HAFE E-HERE DEE ESPOONG DEE ICE CREANG ESPOONG.”

The ice creang espoong? Why, none other.

“DEE ICE CREANG ESPOONG ISS A BERY INGTERESTING ESPOONG BECAUSSE DEE ICE CREANG ESPOONG ISS LIKE A KNIFFE ENG ANG ESPOONG ING ONE, SINGCE ING DESE TIMES, DEE ICE CREANG ISS LIKE A CAKE, JU KNOW JU SLIIIICE-EE.”

At this point, I had no idea what the woman was talking about. All I did know is that for this last part of her speech, she was standing on three phone books that had been pre-set for her in front of the utensil display case, and I was almost about to have a stroke from not being able to laugh. Instead, a single, desperate tear slid down my cheek, and the aneurism I was about to experience relaxed its grip on my brain for just long enough for me to whisper to my mother that I had to leave or I was going to either pass out or soil myself, or some unfortunate combination of the two.

When Estrella asked us if we wanted “DEE TOUR OFF DEE NAPKINGS,” my mother and I politely demurred, mumbling something about the weather and needing to finish our Christmas shopping. Estrella then offered us a nip of the coquito that she kept in a flask nestled in her thigh-garter, “TOO KEEP JU WARNG ING DEE COLE.” When we declined, she invited us to the dinner that they were hosting at the Manor House later that evening, even enticing us with the goat’s tail, which, to her mind, was the most favored part of the animal. Presumably for its placement above the asshole. We again said no, but thank you, and hustled out as if the Angel Gabriel himself were aiding our flight.

As we drove away, crossing back over the Goethals Bridge and riding up the West Side Highway, I closed my eyes and thought of sitting at that lush dinner table at the Manor House, across from Colin Firth, the intensity of whose eyes was matched only by the glow of his sideburns in the candlelight. During a festive moment for the rest of the party, Colin would steal a glance at me, and I would blush, my heart pounding in my chest with the promise of true love. And then I would hear, above the din of tipsy holiday laughter, the only sound that I could possibly recognize in that moment at the Manor:

“FOR DEE ICE CREANG DESSSSERT WE ISS E-USING DEE ICE CREANG ESPOONG!”

And I would say to Colin, in my best fake English accent,

“My darling, if Estrella is trapped in this period drama with us, you can forget it.”

An exaltation of chooches.

If you work in an opera house, you will experience two extremes of male identity. On the one hand, the anchor of the administration—the opera queen: a man whose inseam is always negotiated to exactly the right length, who wears fall-weight clothing only when seasonally appropriate, whose subtle lisp seems as if it were hewn from rarest gossamer, who can describe a single garment with such turns of phrase as “It was like a cross between a demi-vest and a bolero jacket!”, who knows like the back of his hand the history of operatic voices since the dawn of recorded sound, and who will cut anyone down to size with a scissor-kick/sack-punch combo of wit and slander of the highest order. May heaven help you if you’re wearing crushed silk and corduroy without any trace of irony.

And on the other hand—the stagehand: a breed of man as readily identifiable by his cloudy greenish 20-year-old Jets tattoo as by his unapologetically open fly, sleeveless t-shirt, heavy outer borough accent and unrivaled foul mouth. Without so much as a moment of thought, the stagehand can in a single sentence employ the word “fuck” as a verb, noun, article, pronoun, proper name, adjective, adverb and punctuation. It is an art. Though few would expect to hear the same acerbic Wilde-esque invectives volleyed back and forth among the stagehands as among the men in the administration. To the untrained eye and ear, these men are union brutes, a carnie hoard of bad taste and social bottom-feeding. But experience has taught me that the boys manning the chains and the hammers in the wings are as quick on their feet—if not more so—than the sharp-tongued opera mavens who work on the floors above. The trouble is, it’s just not always the most savory brand of wit, and thus far less likely to be advertised. Here, for instance, is a snippet of a recent conversation heard among several of the guys on break from moving set pieces:

“HEY FRANKIE, I SAW YIZ TRYIN’ TA MOVE DAT BROOM ACROSS DA STAGE LIKE YIZ WAS IN A RACE TO COME IN LAST! LEMME TELL YA SOMETHING- NO ONE WILL EVAH RUN OVAH YOU IN A CROSSWALK, YA FAT FUCK!”

“HEY ASSHOLE, I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOAH TAWKIN’ ABOUT. I’M GOIN’ TO DA GYM LIKE A FUCKIN’ SHITHEAD, DAY IN, DAY OUT. I’M IN SHAPE!”

“SHAPE? YA HEAH DAT, BOYS? FRANKIE’S IN SHAPE! YA KNOW, HE’S RIGHT, FELLAS- HE IS IN SHAPE! [strategic pause]—SHAPED LIKE A MEATBAWL!”

This zinger was followed by wild laughter and a ripple of high-fives amongst the chorus of tool-belt-saddled men who thronged the two gentlemen in question. And I laughed along with them. Several of the boys even gave me knowing nods. Some of my administrative colleagues looked on, clearly beleaguered by my seeming endorsement of this somewhat brutal exchange. But those who know me well know that that I am perhaps more at home amidst a throng of loud, large, rude union workers than those with more, shall we say, delicate sensibilities. There is good reason for this: deep in my heart, I’m one of them.

But the real question is: why? The answer, friends, lies in the deep, abiding—almost automatic—familiarity with this particular breed of man. And how does one refer to this rare species of individual—this temple of tactlessness, this bastion of the boorish, this champion of crude, this delegate of discourtesy? Where I come from, we refer to him simply as a chooch.

The chooch. How can one capture the poetry of the chooch? The chooch is perhaps best and most readily defined by his traits (a chooch usually being a he), among them: a mouth as unthinkingly offensive in sleep as in waking; an obscene appetite coupled with an incomparable ability to shovel food in his mouth without the intake of oxygen for upwards of an hour at a time, a distinct roundness of physique, and a complete lack of tact or volume control. He is a paragon of the crass, even when the zenith thereof seems impossible to surpass. Chooches, however, are like snowflakes—no two are the same. There are sub-species of chooch, and my familiarity with these distinctions belies as much their beautiful variety, as it does my sad resignation to the fact that I can identify and label that variety all too well.

Let us begin with the Public Embarrassment Chooch. While many chooches merit this distinction, few pursue the title with such proactive fervor as the Public Embarrassment Chooch. To illustrate, several years ago I went to a sushi restaurant with my family, and with us was a family friend, unfamiliar with the experience of Japanese cuisine. To be honest, he lacked the ability to identify, let alone consume, any foodstuff that was not flooded in marinara sauce. At one point, Public Embarrassment Chooch looked at the soy sauce that had been poured for him by our Japanese waiter (who was clearly fear-stricken from the moment we walked in the door) into a small rectangular dish, and shouted to the kitchen,

“EEEH-OH! DO ANY A’ YOUZ GOT SOME BREAD SO I CAN DIP??”

When no such bread was produced, and rice surfaced on the table in its place, the Public Embarrassment Chooch inflamed,

“YIZ KNOW WHAT, I DIDN’T SPEND A WHOLE TOUAH IN NAM TO COME BACK AND EAT FUCKIN’ RICE IN MY OWN COUNTRY. IF I WANT RICE I’LL GO BACK TA VICTAH CHAHLIE AND SURRENDA MY FUCKIN’ TAGS! NOW AIN’T YOU GOT NUTHIN’ BACK THEAH? NOT EVEN A GAHLIC KNOT?”

With that, poor Yusake and his colleague Hiroji eyed a nearby fillet knife, as if to say, “Our shame is great like the cloud over Hiroshima. To commit Supuko is the only way to restore honor.”

Sometimes a chooch’s choochness appears in more calculatedly subtle guises, and when it does, is done so in an effort to conceal his true choochly nature. He is the Sly Chooch. The skilled observer, however, can spy him. When I was 14, I worked on a political campaign—my grandpa was running for office in the Bronx, and his constituency was a chooch stronghold. Naturally, his campaign manager was a chooch. However, given the political correctness and decorum the position demanded, Carmello displayed all the habits and bearings of a Sly Chooch.

The Sly Chooch has a certain practice of communication, which, once noticed, almost always gives him away. When conversing with you, no matter how innocuous or banal the topic, the Sly Chooch physically approaches the discussion as if he were under surveillance. He nears the person with whom he wishes to speak, grabs them softly but firmly by the elbow, and then speaks into the shoulder of the same side, his face cast—not towards the object of his conversation—but past the back of their head to the world beyond. The goal of this maneuver, of course, is to remain in a constant state of readiness for things like sniper fire, subpoenas, and alimony payments. Such deft avoidance of all of the aforementioned—and more—is a technique known as “lookout chooch.” Of course, the person at whom the talking is being directed invariably feels awkward and ill-at-ease: how can one have a conversation with the back of a head of hair held in place by pomade, the whole figurine wreathed in the scent of Aqua Velva? Thus anxiety prevails in his prey, but Sly Chooch keeps his cool.

So there I was, a 14-year old girl whose sole menial task was to stuff flyers into envelopes. In crossing the room to stack up on more inserts, I was intercepted by Carmello. In true Sly Chooch form, the nearly-35-years-my-senior parked his vast coiffure near my head—the rank stench of musk and too much cologne practically choking me—and looked directly into my shoulder, gripping my elbow all the while. He asked me in a pointed whisper,

“I’m not shuah if yiz know anyting about dis heah, but I don’t wanna make a big deal, yih know? So let’s just keep dis between us…what I wanna know is—how many calories do yiz tink ah in a donut? Just keep it low, yah know? Keep it low. Oh, heah comes Frankie—act noahmal, act noahmal.”

And just like that, the Sly Chooch pounced on a stale donut from the back table, gobbled it up in an inexplicably wide-eyed panic, and strode urgently away.

Then there’s the Zinger Chooch. My mother’s first cousin Pete is perhaps the only person dead or alive I’ve ever seen insult her, TO HER FACE, and have the woman come right back for more. Because even an individual as fiercely covetous of respect as my ma is powerless in the face of a Zinger Chooch’s zinger. Take, for example, an exchange between the two at my aunt’s house last Christmas: my mother walked into the room, and there was Pete. She boomed,

“HEY COUSIN PETE, GOOD TA SEE YA!”

“YEAH YEAH, YOUZ TOO—AWLL DA KIDS AH GETTIN’ SO BIG! BUT YOU! YOU LOOK LIKE YIZ LOST WEIGHT!”

Before my mother could complete a coquettish “Oh, you noticed?” smile, Pete sailed right back in with,

“WHA’D YIZ DO- CUT YIH HAIH?”

[Fierce cackling ensues.]

“PETE, YIH SO BAAD!”

“POW!” Pete rejoins, “RIGHT IN DA KISSAH!”

Merry Christmas, everyone! Would you like some more joke-swathed abuse with your ravioli?

And while we’re on the subject of ravioli, I would be remiss not to mention the Unwieldy Appetite Chooch, a man even more gastrically voracious than his already gluttonous fellow chooches. This is a man who can put away a mass of food so vast that the ingestion of a mere fraction of the same would be enough to kill a large mammal. The Unwieldy Appetite Chooch is the family member who by himself counts for a minimum of 5 individuals when one is planning a dinner or other event, and who, through a cruel and unjust trick of biology, likely houses within his flab-swaddled frame somewhere in the area of 3-6 stomachs. This particular breed of chooch will continue to eat even when all else seems dark, and death itself nips at his swollen ankles. The Unwieldy Appetite Chooch is the Nuclear Holocaust Roach of nourishment. Nothing will stop him.

Take my third cousin Anthony. In a family of marathonic eaters, he is not unlike the wily Kenyan runner—the man who decries all training, technology, and modern conveniences like shoes, in favor of sheer primal instinct. Even as he rounds the final turn in Central Park to complete the NYC marathon an hour and a half before whichever stringy Midwestern lesbian comes in second, the Kenyan was always running from a rabid water yak. Anthony’s instincts are the same. He eats to survive. And he survives to eat.

Several years ago, my entire family herded together to make our grandmother’s homemade ravioli. A culinary phalanx of 20 stout Italians made 879 ravioli. We know this because we counted (Note: Italian families must have official records of such things). This same hefty assembly then ATE ALL 879 RAVIOLI. However, some unsung champion of gastric distress panicked, thinking we wouldn’t have enough food, and prepared a tray of sausage and peppers, a pork roast, prosciutt’-stuffed mushrooms, and garlic bread. Having each of us consumed our body weight in cheese-bloated pasta, most of us then languished in self-preserving stillness, fearful of what motion, let alone the consumption of meat—no matter how artfully seasoned—might do to us. Some checked their own pulses. Great Aunt Linda was administered an insulin shot, and escorted home. But while the rest of us struggled to breathe, Anthony pounded back his sixth plate of ravioli. And after patting his engorged belly with something that can only be described as a mixture of pride and violence, he ambled towards the tray of what in any God-fearing Italian-American home is called “SAWZEECH AND PEPPIZ.” He licked his chops, and dove in. The madness that then ensued is too horrifying to describe, but suffice it to say, small children were led out of the dining room. As Anthony choked back the pork roast with the heartless agility of a boa constrictor swallowing a water buffalo whole, somewhere in the ether above him, the Grim Reaper threw up his hands and stalked away.

With the same unapologetic fervor with which the Unwieldy Appetite Chooch can gargle a side of beef into his gullet, so too does the Imagined Intellectual Chooch consume and rabidly regurgitate untold stores of trivial information in an effort to cultivate the veneer of intelligence. The trouble is, the information of which he avails himself is more often than not useless, based in religious (usually Catholic) fervor or pop science, and is, in the worst cases, baseless and/or dead wrong. The Imagined Intellectual Chooch strives in vain to win a place on trivia game shows, because the only real reason for the Imagined Intellectual Chooch to ever strive towards greater knowledge is not for the sake thereof, but for the potential to turn it into cold, hard cash. Thus, on a near-weekly basis, this particular chooch can be found in the testing studios of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and Jeopardy!

My Uncle Vincent has made it to the final testing round of Jeopardy! at least half a dozen times. The problem always seems to be that when the show’s producers meet him, he practically radiates the word “scheme” and the phrase “You’ve got to be kidding”. Even when he successfully responded to Alec Trebek’s crack team of researchers with answers like “WHAT IS CAHBON DATIN’,” “WHO IS SAMUEL TAILAH COWLRIDGE!” and “WHAT IS DA YUCCA PLANT,” none of them—not a one—wanted to put on national television a balding, fat boat insurance agent who cobbled together his own Frankenstein-like wardrobe using pant legs from different trousers that could no longer be worn due to his repeat-farting holes right through the ass of them. So the researchers would then ask one last, impossible question, and tell Uncle Vincent that THIS was the one it was all riding on. The question was invariably about homosexuals throughout history. As much as the Imagined Intellectual Chooch can rattle off facts about topics ranging from seahorse mating patterns to troubadour poetry to the Fibonacci sequence, if there’s one thing about which he will never purport to know, it’s about two dudes getting it on.

I have reserved for the last category of chooch the Beyond-Inappropriate Chooch. He is the peak and summit of bad behavior, the piece de resistance of chooches. This is a chooch whose sense of propriety and judgment is even called into question by his fellow chooch. But don’t be fooled: the Beyond-Inappropriate Chooch is an egalitarian. It doesn’t matter what race or creed you are, nor your sexual orientation or education. All he knows is that you’re an asshole, and you deserve to be not only maligned, but your existence trivialized and deflated using every conceivable means of insult. And the best part is, he hardly ever really means it. Which is the only possible caveat I can provide to explain why one of my favorite people on earth is a Beyond-Inappropriate Chooch.

Lou is a former New York City fireman—a squat man about as tall as he is wide, with a handlebar moustache that he waxes at each end, a pomade-slicked coiffure of salt-and-pepper hair, and a pack of cigarettes strategically tucked inside the shoulder of his t-shirt for easy access. He is about as likely to tear up when thinking about a photo of a bunny rabbit on his church’s spiritual event calendar as he is to use the N-word without so much as a pause to consider uttering it in whisper. For years, Lou worked in the South Bronx saving the lives, property and dignity of all walks of people—mostly poor, but black, white, Hispanic, Hasidic, immigrant, you name it. He would have given any one of them the shirt of his back, and on many occasions, he did. Even after his retirement over a decade ago, he volunteered with the Red Cross to find bodies after 9/11, and helped relocate hundreds of Ninth Ward families left suddenly homeless by Hurricane Katrina. His own house is a shrine to American heroism, and there is no flag, no pin, no Twin Towers diorama, no etching of a fallen police officer talking to an angel, no decal of a WWII fighter plane that has not made its way into his collection. In many ways, he himself is an American hero. But not the kind you hear about in Army recruitment commercials, or on Oprah. In fact, were it not for his friends and family, no one might ever know about him at all. And the real impediment to his good deeds being heralded far and wide is that Lou is, without question or hesitation, a classic Beyond-Inappropriate Chooch. He might even be the king of them all.

I went to college at a fairly homogenous, white, upper middle class school in New England, and aside from the one homo and the one Euro I befriended, I hated it—every last minute. Not least because there was no cultural or ethnic diversity—none of the vibrant variety one expects at major universities on the coasts. However, one day at school, the students on campus were informed that there was going to be a Diversity Crusade, and a club was created to reflect this effort. I went home for Thanksgiving soon thereafter, and gave this report to Lou and his family when I saw them. No sooner had I explained this new pitch on the part of the Milk-Toast Student Government, then Lou interrupted me, sweat-dappled and puffing heavily on a cigar, to say,

“YEAH. DEY GOT A CULTCHA CLUB? I’LL GIVE YOU A CULTCHA CLUB! WHADDA DEY GOT? I’LL TELL YIZ WHAT DEY GOT: A CRIPPLE, AN ESKIMO AND A HAIHLIP! THEAH! THEAH’S YIH CULTCHA CLUB!

A few years later, when the Iraq and Afghani wars were at their height, Lou was called upon to say grace before Christmas dinner, and with every degree of eloquence he could muster, he incanted,

“DEAH LAWD. TANK YOUZ FOAH DA FOOD WEAH ABOUT TA EAT, DA FOOD I ATE ALREADY WHEN NO ONE WAS LOOKIN’, AND ESPECIALLY FOAH DA LEFTOVIZ I’M GONNA BE EATIN LIKE A FUCKIN’ ETHIOPIAN IN A MCDONALDS FOAH DA NEXT TREE TIH FOUAH DAYS. I WANNA ALSO SAY, LAWD, HOW PROUD I AM UDDA BRAVE MEN—AND I GUESS SOME WOMEN—WHO AH FIGHTIN’ DAT CAMEL-FUCKAH BIN LADIN OVA DEAH IN AFGANISTAN. LEMME TELL YA SOMETIN’—ONE THING DOSE TURBAN-WEARIN’ ASSHOLES WILL NEVAH, EVAH BE ABLE TA TAKE AWAY FROM US [dramatic pause] IS DIS LASAGNA RIGHT HEAH. YOU CAN BOMB MY FUCKIN’ EMBASSY, YOU FREEDOM-HATIN’ BACKWIDZ COCKSUCKIZ, BUT YOUAH DA ONES SITTIN’ ON A SHITTIN’ GOAT IN DA DEZIT ROASTIN’ CAMEL NUTS ON A STICK. MARIE, DIS LASAGNA IS YOUAH BEST YET. AMEN.”

It very nearly boggles the mind. But like it or not, that’s where I’m from. And no amount of advanced degrees, of effete cultural leanings, of artsy jobs in high-falootin’ places will be able to take that away from me. And I’m kind of OK with that.

So when a stagehand shouts, “HEY EDDIE, YA FUCKIN’ MOOK—AH YA GONNA HELP ME WIT DIS WAGON, OAH AH YA GONNA SIT DEAH AND TWEAK YOUAH OWN NIPPLE??” there’s something in it that comforts me, and makes me feel at home.

Scot for you

There is nothing hotter than a Scottish accent. And I have the PTSD to prove it.

A few years ago I was doing research in England. And by “research,” I mean trying to find and marry a lesser royal. Prince William was clearly too far out of my reach, and who wants to curse their children with male pattern baldness anyway—so I’d resigned myself to ensnaring at the very least an obscure aristocrat from the House of Windsor or similar. I would even have settled for a colonial Viceroy, but apparently imperial power just ain’t what it used to be, and the closest I might have stood to latching on to a British Lord in the East would have looked suspiciously like me “servicing” a cantankerous old fossil of an English cricket referee who didn’t realize the Sepoy Riots had long since ended, some time during their midgame crumpet break.

Instead of heading to swinging London, where I convinced myself I was more likely to pick up a drag queen done up to look like Princess Margaret (only to find out later that it actually was Princess Margaret) than a hot, young, if little-known, royal, I headed to Oxford.

Oxford was everything I had ever dreamed it would be. Almost. Because, as I soon discovered, there wasn’t a Windsor in sight. I even walked down Queen’s Road with a sandwich board that touted “I want to get royally screwed!” to no avail. Instead I managed to glom onto the social circle of an old friend from the states—a Chinese-American early music nerd who occasionally wore ladies’ heels for no apparent reason, but whose real claim to fame was that by the time he had completed his masters at Oxford, he had vomited on each and every one of the three dozen colleges in the city.

One afternoon shortly after my arrival, my friend told me his pal needed a date to a formal at one of the colleges. I went back to my “flat” and quickly assessed my girdle and birth control situation before ringing him back up.

“OK, I’ll be there. Just tell me one thing: will there be wealthy young members of the English aristocracy present?”

“Yeah, probably. But just a word to the wise, you would totally throw off thousands of years of calculated inbreeding.”

Considering his response, I decided on the most form-fitting, cleavage-bearing dress in my artillery. Incest may be best, but no amount of stilted English sister-shagging can eclipse going to town with a slut from the Bronx. Of course, no one here needed to know that I was not actually in any way a tramp, nor easy, nor had I ever been, but what I couldn’t earn using grace, status, money, croquet skills and a frequent milliner’s card, I would win in sheer volume, lack of propriety, tawdry overtures, total lack of tact, and a minimum of one strategic wardrobe malfunction per day. It seemed like a solid enough plan.

The night of the formal, I made the mistake of getting drunk almost immediately, and on some rancid English concoction called Pimm’s Lemonade, a drink that answers either the question “What do we do with these old cucumbers, sugar and jet fuel?” or “What do you get when you ask an Alzheimer’s patient to tend bar?” In any case, the stuff is revolting, and the English love it. So, in the hopes of being able to one day refer to Her Royal Highness as some form of “Grandma,” I said what the hell, and bottoms up. Soon thereafter, the only bottom that was up was mine, when I was seen climbing on top of the bar after the dinner portion of the formal to get a bird’s eye view of all the receding hairlines in that vast, hallowed hall. I had come all this way to marry a royal with a full head of hair, so I wanted to make sure that before clambering down, I had a fairly decent sense of the follicular topography of the room. As my eyes darted from pasty English boys awkwardly attempting to moonwalk, to snaggle-toothed English girls walking out of the loo with the backs of their gowns accidentally tucked into their pantyhose, to the loudly snorting be-monacled Oxford don who was monitoring the proceedings, that’s when I saw it. Like manna in the desert. It was glorious. It was a kilt, and it couldn’t have come soon enough. And then, Allah hu akbar, the kilt’s inhabitant spoke, whereupon I nearly disrobed, right then and there.

I should pause here to say that at this particular moment, it is quite possible that Prince William’s more follically well-endowed cousin could have walked up to me and asked me if that was a scepter in his pocket or was he just happy to see me, and I might STILL have left with the guy with the Scottish accent. Fortunately, the only person who walked up to me at that particular moment was my now long-forgotten date, asking me why I was playing a game of grab-ass with a man in a skirt. So as far as I was concerned, I really didn’t face anything even remotely broaching a moral dilemma.

So I did it, I left with the guy in the kilt. I reasoned that at the very least a tartan was evidence of some strong and potentially regal family heritage. No such luck. The skirt actually belonged to a dead man, since, as cruel fate would have it, my new Scottish paramour was actually the son of two English teachers who had raised him in Scotland, in working-class Dundee, to be precise—a town famous only for its unsightly railway bridge, and for furnishing a terrible 80s movie franchise about a crocodile-hunting Aussie on the loose in New York with half of its all-too-memorable name. But he had that damn hot accent, and I was helpless to fight its effect on me.

When Thom (with an H) took me to Scotland to tour around the countryside and meet his parents in Dundee after we’d been together for three months, I truly began to envision what life would be like if I married him and moved there. Our children would learn gender equality because they would all be wearing women’s clothing, and any topic with which they were poorly acquainted they could just speak freely about anyway, because, as most people who have heard Scottish accents can attest—if you don’t understand what the hell they’re saying, it still sounds kind of awesome. Our progeny would probably walk right out of my womb and into the Nobel Prize ceremony simply by virtue of speaking confidently, if completely unintelligibly, about any number of lofty, esoteric subjects.

As I let this fantasy play out while we drove through Blackpool, the Lake Country and the upper reaches of northern England into Scotland, I became quite taken with the Scottish countryside—jagged rock formations protruding out of rolling hills, everything awash in heather, great hairy orange beasts called Highland Cows (pronounced “coo”) looming in herds in valleys, gray clouds that rolled over us mere yards above the road. It was both romantic and fearsome. I was starting to like the place. Thom could see I was enjoying the view, so he offered me a better one. And unfortunately the seemingly innocuous statement “I’m taking you on an eight-hour hike!” didn’t seem to do what, in retrospect, it should have: instill the fear of a maniacal, cruel god into the deepest recesses of my soul.

Having a day earlier gone on a two-hour hike up the quaintly-named Stac Polly—one of the highlands’ lesser peaks—I was fairly well convinced I could do anything those Scottish hills and crags demanded of me. Eight hours? Please. I’ve spent more time in traffic on the Cross Bronx, I thought. And with that, two days later, we awoke in a bed and breakfast near a place called Loch Torridon, tossed some peanuts, oatcakes and water into backpack, piled into Thom’s shitty white Citroen hatchback with the ripped grey interior, and headed to the base of a mountain known as Beinn Alligan.

To say that when we arrived at the foot of the Beinn Alligan, I was somewhat gripped with anxiety would be a gross understatement, tantamount to saying I’d be kind of worried if Kim Jong Il got carte blanche to authorize deployment of a nuclear warhead. The very notion that Thom thought I might actually be interested in climbing this imposing, ominous three-peaked monster of a range nearly lead me to puke all over my as yet untarnished hiking boots. Thom looked at me, trying to assess how to contend with the look on my face of incomprehension and fear. His evaluation didn’t take long.

“Come on, woman! Get your bottom in gear! We’re going UP!”

Whenever he called me “woman” with a bit of charming Scottish menace and a wee glint in his eye, I basically was left with no choice but to do whatever he asked. So up the mountain I went.

The first real indication that this jaunt was not going to go at all well occurred within twenty minutes of our promised day-long adventure. Much of the mountain terrain in the highlands is comprised of something called “scree slope,” which basically means “loose fucking rocks.” So with every two steps you take forward, you slide at least one back. In one of my first valiant rallies to prove my mettle as a climber, I raced ahead, stepped on something slimy, and slipped. What I thought was a small patch of wet earth turned out to be (as I was later informed) a truly rare species of highland frog. It was beautiful—its skin was a leopardine yellow and black, its chrome red eyes blazed like gems from the top of its sleek head—and when I lifted my boot off of it, one slender, glistening leg dangled free from its body, and the poor creature began to convulse. Thom looked at me in horror—as if he were watching a Discovery channel episode go terribly awry (On the next episode of “People You Shouldn’t Find in Nature,” watch as a girl from the Bronx purges an endangered species from the earth with one clumsy move of her fat ass!).

“I can’t believe it. You just trod on a frog. And a rare one, at that!”

The frog began frothing at the mouth. Thom decided to put it out of its misery and crushed it purposefully and forcefully under his left heel. Perhaps inappropriately, my stomach began growling.

“Can I have the peanuts?” I asked.

Disgusted, Thom handed them to me in silence, presumably also saying a muted prayer to the gods of Loch Torridon that we wouldn’t pay a desperate price for bludgeoning and then mercy-killing one of its most cherished inhabitants.

Up, up we went. If we took 5000 steps, I think 2000 of them actually carried us forward. Such was the frustration of the scree slope. Other people hiking around us had major gear—chains, rapelling lines, sticks, clamps, sandwiches—so I assumed they were hiking more advanced trails. When I asked Thom about this, he said,

“This isn’t America, woman. There’s only one way up the mountain, and there are no arrows. You just go.”

To this day, I curse the aural hotness of his dipthong on the word “go”. Because, upon hearing it, that’s just what I did. I will say, however, that by the time the first hour of the hike had passed, I wanted to kill someone, namely Thom. Nothing on earth could have prepared me for the sheer exertion I was being called upon to exercise. If I were Rocky, and Beinn Alligan were Dolph Lundgren, and either American pride, national security, or both, depended on my success, I would still crap out. Because at the end of the day—any day—I’d rather exercise my brain than my body. Chances of success are probably higher, and the incidents of failure are less obvious, at least right away. Rocky bench-pressed that moose because he was too dumb to convince someone else to do it for him. Had I known that I would be bench-pressing a moose (metaphorically, I mean), I would have tricked the first person I saw in the doomed Beinn Alligan parking lock into serving as my proxy. But as it was, no one prepared me for what I was going to be forced to endure, and now I was stuck. My legs were turning to jelly, and as I pitched and wobbled to and fro, I cursed my way up to the first peak.

As we hiked through a freaking cloud—my body now rank with sweat, and my hair needlessly and absurdly having formed dreads from the moisture—I demanded,

“Where the FUCK is the fucking top of this fucking mountain?? Let’s get this shit over with!”

As the last expletive sailed out of my mouth, the cloud parted, the first summit opened up before us, and a group of middle-aged Scottish gentlemen sitting at the precipice looked at me, beaming, and exclaimed, “It’s an American!” They then all huddled around me, proudly telling me I had reached my first “munroe,” or peak. One wiry, balding man with a creepy pedophile-tint to his glasses and a thick Glaswegian accent grabbed me forcefully around the shoulder and began pointing out all the natural landmarks in the vast horizon that surrounded us. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this particular breed of Scottish accent, but the first time I did, I thought my linguistic faculties had been shattered due to what I was convinced was a premature stroke. However I soon realized I couldn’t understand anything being said because I was apparently hearing Glaswegian, which is like listening to a dyslexic leprechaun trying to speak Mandarin. Unlike its sexy southern cousin—the traditional Scots accent—the strange sounds of Glaswegian roughly approximate a cat in heat choking on yarn, an odd sequence of phonetics strung endlessly together for all the world as if it didn’t matter that civilized people had ever invented punctuation. But now, having come to a rest at the top of Beinn Alligan’s first peak, it was music to my ears. The view was spectacular, but for the life of me, I had no idea what the man was saying. The only word I understood was “loch” (“lake”), and lucky for me, he said it a lot. The other men sat around with Thom, arguing alternately about Scotland’s best ale and the tragic last stand of William Wallace.

After a quick snack of oatcakes, and a few more minutes spent lingering on the view, we headed along the shadowline of the mountain towards the second summit. The vista was again, amazing, but the hike had become far more precarious. In fact, at this point, the “path” had narrowed to just a few feet, with the thousands of meters that separated us from the bottom of the mountain a terrifying and all-too-palpable distance to comprehend. With my legs about to give out, it occurred to me that Thom was kind of a jackass to not have prepared me for this not-insignificant physical demand in any way. Now I was trapped on this whoring mountain, and if I didn’t get my ass in gear, I was never going to get down. As the realization of this really began to sink in, I began to boil with a rage deep-seated in a lifetime of urban living and a genetic disposition towards antagonism.

“You know what? You’re a fucking asshole, Thom. I mean, Jesus shitting Christ. What the fuck was I thinking? ‘He’s wearing a kilt,’ I thought. ‘How adorable!’ I thought. He’s going to lead me to my fucking death on a goddamn Scottish mountainside and no one will ever find my fucking body! That’s what I should have thought!”

By the time we arrived at the second summit, I could have given two hydraulic shits about the view. Overcome with deep contempt for Thom, for the mountain, and for Scotland, I suddenly dropped my pants and peed all over the great second peak of Beinn Alligan. And I farted too, for good measure.

“Are you quite done?” he asked.

“Well, I ate peanuts, so there’s no telling, so fuck you.”

Thom then sketched out the remainder of our hike. He described to me that there still remained “The Three Horns” of Alligan—a hazardous trio of mini-peaks that we would have to sally over up and down before making our final descent. With my legs literally shaking and my whole heart seething with both fury and dread, I said, calmly and deliberately,

“Thom, I’m gonna interrupt you right there. Those three peaks? Or horns, or whatever the hell you fucking indecipherable people call them? I’m not hiking them. I refuse! I am about to DIE. Find another fucking way to get me off this mountain.”

Thom paused for a minute, pensive. He reemerged into the conversation—a little too delightedly, I thought—with a solution:

“Aha! I know!! There’s a bypass! You’re a lucky gal, you know? There’s a bypass that wends its way along the base-side of the horns so that you don’t have to climb up and down each and every one!”

“Now THAT,” I said, “is the first goddamn intelligent thing you’ve said all day.”

Turns out it wasn’t. Turns out the fucking “bypass” was a muddy shelf of earth that was about as wide as a hot-dog bun, and half as sturdy. Directly to my right, the obscenity of the sheer 5000-foot drop seemed like a kind of joke. Huge baubles of sweat skated down my cheek, and then mixed with tears—I had never been so frightened in my entire life. In order to move along the narrow bypass (which, as it turns out, was an old goat path, much of which had been washed away due to rain and landslides), I had to place one foot perilously in front of the other. You know, I might have laughed, save for the terror that spotted my vision like an opiate. I might have laughed, if this had been a story told to me by somebody else. I might have laughed—really, really laughed—but near-Darwinian necessity now commanded that I summon all my strength to my fingertips, which I plunged into the rain-soaked terrain to my left, clutching at the spiny heather that swathed the crags in order to keep myself from tumbling into the abyss to my right.

Eclipsed by a real fear of death, I turned my last remaining energy towards an unbridled state of panic, devoting what was left of my lucid mind to the target that moved only a few feet in front of me. If I was going to go down, I was going to go down like any girl from the Bronx worth her boxcutter would. Swearing, spitting, and threatening bodily harm.

“I knew there was going to be a fucking problem the moment I drank that Pimm’s bullshit. That stuff is positively septic. Cucumbers and alcohol? Are you fucking serious? What is wrong with this country? You talked about the ‘war of independence’ as if it were a rash you once had, and George Washington seems to have the cultural status of a migrant worker peddling fruit. It’s the Revolutionary War, and if I ever make it off this goddamn cliff, you’re going to personally host part fucking two.”

I’m pretty sure that Thom had tuned me out by that point, pressing ahead until he was wholly wreathed by a cloud. I didn’t care. I was in the full grip of mania, so I continued.

“‘The highlands are lovely,’ I mocked in an overdone brogue. “Heaven is supposed to be pretty fucking quaint too, but that doesn’t mean I’m racing to meet my goddamn maker! And now I’m about to! You know what? Come to the fucking South Bronx, and we’ll see whose life is in jeopardy then, shithead! If my mother knew what I was doing right now, she’d fucking kill you. Well, she’d probably kill me first for being so fucking stupid, but then she’d come after you, you bastard!”

When we arrived at the end of the bypass, the sun was setting, which meant that droves of tiny, horrible, gnat-like insects called midges were out, and had begun to peck our faces so irretrievably that by the time we scampered down the craggy final descent, we both looked like we had contracted some biblical affliction. Which was only one of the rainbow of reasons I swore I was never going to sleep with Thom ever again. The other of course being that he had planned on us spending the next few nights in a tent.

I woke up late the next morning with a crick in my neck, shin splints, and a pulled hamstring. I was mesmerized with disbelief about how the hell a girl from the Bronx had ever been persuaded to wander into the hazardous Scottish wilderness only to sleep at the foot of a mountain on a pile of goat turds inelegantly covered over by an anemic strip of blue foam masquerading as a mattress. Later that day, we were slated to leave the incubus horror that was Beinn Alligan and set about (I hoped) to find more hospitable terrain. When he woke, Thom threw on his dirty fleece and muttered something about the chance of rain. We packed up the tent, which was practically weeping with the corpses of all the midges we’d slaughtered in the night so that we could sleep, and got in the car.

Having driven for hours until we arrived at a village bordering the North Sea that one of Thom’s friends had called “the most far flung corner of Scotland—bloody Durness,” we left the Citroen in the muddy ditch where it got stuck, ten yards from a cattle gate, and a promethean cry for help from the bucolic landscape’s nearest inhabitants. Before ambling away from our dejected vehicle on a fresh hiking adventure—“our latest torment,” I called it—after the desperation of our earlier hiking fiasco, I insisted on lashing a pillow, a blanket, an umbrella, a fleece, clean underpants, an extra foam carry-mat, two packages of oatcakes, a jar of Marmite, and a liter of milk to my back. “The condoms,” I snapped, when Thom looked at my monstrous rucksack disapprovingly, “can stay.”

About an hour into the hike, he was already annoyed with me.

“Come on, girl, pick it up a bit! If you hadn’t insisted on bringing that bloody blanket and pillow…and—Christ, is that a bottle of milk?—you wouldn’t be so bloody slow! Let’s move it along a bit, alright? It’s about to start pissing down.”

We trekked for two hours through the mud, weaving in and out of the pock-marked hills in a petty drizzle. Finally we arrived at a triangulation marker, presumably so positioned for the laughable ten feet of questionably flat terrain that the spot afforded. With the tent set up so that its lower half leaned into a flattened boulder to prevent it from slipping down the wet incline, I slumped against the small concrete pillar, totally exhausted, as the vile northern rain thoughtlessly pricked the top of my head. This time I didn’t even have the strength to pee in protest of Mother Nature’s latest taunt.

A couple of hours later, the storm picked up, so we scuttled into our pitiful little tent, which had at this point slid down three feet from its original location. Cramped together, we tried to sleep, awkwardly prodded by stones and the sharp heather that grew without regard for the way it jabbed my ass underneath my carry-mat. I awoke to a veritable Moroccan bazaar of wind and thunder. Even while half asleep, I was still seized with the clarity of terror that we were the highest object for miles around in what had all the trappings of a serious electrical storm. Perched high upon a triangulation marker, we were in a metal-buttressed tent. I panicked. I have fillings, too, for Chrissake! We’re a walking fucking conductor! We’re sitting ducks! Shit!

“Thom, wake up! We’re going to die! We’re going to be hit by lightning and we’re going to die! There are only so many chances you get in this life to cheat death and I’m pretty sure we exhausted all of them yesterday. We really should get the fuck out of here.”

Thom mumbled sleepily, “There’s no lightning in Scotland. Go to sleep, woman,” and rolled over.

This time, the accent didn’t work in staving off the very real fear that I might have made my way off of a Scottish mountainside only to be hit by lightning while sleeping on a pile of goat shit the following night. My corpse would stink to high heaven, and for years to come my family would always say, “She shoulda nevah left da Bronx. At least in New Yoak you only die in a pile of crap if you work foah da city.” So in a ludicrous bid for something I thought resembled a reasonable response to the situation, I wound the rubber bands that had bound our carry-mats around my wrists and ankles, recalling something I once read in National Geographic about how rubber creates a grounding that lightning can’t pass through. And this is what made cars and people wearing sneakers invincible in a storm, or something like that. I sprawled my foam-girded limbs over a dormant Thom.

“Ingrate,” I muttered, convinced I was now keeping us both alive within my—admittedly only vaguely scientific—little rubber protectorate. I wanted desperately to scratch my nose, but the wind cracked an echo through the valley and so I remained there, petrified like a mangled crucifix over Thom’s slumbering body.

The following morning we awoke, which meant, much to my surprise, that we were alive. While he heated tea in a tin contraption called a billy can, Thom asked me what I would like to do. So I asked him with a sweetness wrought from days of desperation if he wouldn’t mind saying, “Honey, I’m taking you to a hotel” in the thickest Scottish accent he could muster.

No shame. No gain.

I remember it all quite clearly. It was a gorgeous spring day—the birds were chirping, the sun was shining, even the grass seemed a few shades greener—almost as if God were trying to say, “You know what? You assholes in the Bronx deserve a nice day too. I mean, at least until Manny over there steals another set of rims. Then I’m sending a cloud of locusts.” But before Manny stole the rims off of that brand new 1991 Cutlass Supreme, I awoke happy. Happy to be possessed of that particular feeling of optimism with which any 13 year-old-girl worth her terrible self-image wakes up when she’s just dreamed about making out with Corey Haim while a shirtless, Full House-era John Stamos looked on. I sat up in bed that morning wearing an oversized t-shirt emblazoned with the cartoon cat from Paula Abdul’s Opposites Attract video, put on my red glasses with the Petri-dish sized lenses (thank you, Sally Jesse Raphael), and knew, resolutely knew, that something was about to happen. And it did. Something did happen. That brilliant spring day, full of hope and larceny in equal measure, was the day I stopped feeling embarrassed. Wholesale. Just stopped.

Now, before I go into why and how this miracle transpired, I should probably give you a little background. I was a shy kid. In fact, to say that I was a shy kid is an understatement the likes of which you would only employ when hesitating to tell someone they’re about to die from a terminal illness—“Well, there’s kind of an inoperable tumor in your brain.” Understatement. Or when describing certain questionably popular cultural phenomena— “Miley Cyrus is kind of a talentless hussy.” Understatement. Basically I was so alarmingly petrified about being liable for any degree of human contact that I kept almost totally to myself, studied furiously, and ate untold reams of Devil Dogs when no one was looking. As far as I was concerned, I already had reason enough not to want to inflict myself on my fellow man. But by age 13, with bad skin, a Devil Dog-bloated ass, and hair cursed with frizz resulting from a chronic prepubescent unfamiliarity with “product,” I hardly even wanted to emerge into broad daylight. But on that day, I did. And the moment I did, I regretted it.

My mother had prepared me for the onset of my first period with the following: “IF YOU EVAH GET PREGNANT, YOUAH ON THE STREET.” She may have missed a few steps. But suffice it to say, thanks to my mom, I was about as prepared for my period as the U.S. Marine Corps was for the Tet Offensive. So when I ran, screaming, into my mother’s bedroom, I was stunned to discover that she was so strangely proud of this event that she immediately started crying. Then, she took the next logical step—she called my grandmother, snapped my 11-year-old brother away from an intense level of Duck Hunt, and we went out for Chinese food to celebrate.

My brother had no idea why we were there. But when my mom told Yang, the maitre d’, “MY DAUGHTAH IS A WOMAN NOW,” my brother, who had watched enough after-school specials to have this thought nauseate him to his young core, almost spit out the spare rib he was gnawing on. Yang, not having seen nearly enough after-school specials, clearly assumed I was now betrothed. Presumably to a much older man.

When we left Golden Gate restaurant, it was still early afternoon. My mom dropped my brother off with my grandmother, but told me to take a ride with her in our hematoma-colored Dodge Spirit. She said, welling up,

“DIS IS A BIG MOMENT, AND I DON’T WANNA PUT ANY PRESSHA ON YOU, BUT YIZ GOTTA GO GET KOTEX PADS.”

Now, for a girl who, for fear of shaming herself, failed even to buy milk from her local grocer, the idea of buying Kotex—a tacit admission of the putrescence of this new feminine condition—was basically out of the question. I was sooner going to collect dried leaves from the park and stuff them down my pants than have to suffer the stigma of buying Kotex pads. So when we pulled into a crowded parking lot outside of the little shopping complex where the pharmacy was, I begged her. I pleaded,

“Ma, please, please don’t make me go in there and buy these things! I can’t do it. I think I’m starting to hyperventilate. Please can you go in and do it? I’ll do dishes for a YEAR. PLEASE!!”

And to my surprise, without any trace of hesitation, my mother said, “SHUAH.”

I almost couldn’t believe it. But there she went, purse in hand, leaving me in the Spirit with dozens of people hustling and bustling about on that lovely spring day in the Bronx.

About five minutes after she went in, I saw my mother emerge from the pharmacy, dutifully toting an opaque plastic bag. No sooner had the beads of sweat that had been forming on my brow dissipated with relief and I thanked the holy heavens above, then my mother reached into the bag, and with all the skill and violence of a back alley abortionist, ripped the Kotex pads free from their discreet home. To my horror, she then placed the fuschia and bright blue parcel on the top of her head like a demonic Carmen Miranda toting a pyramid of poisonous fruit. My eyes widened with terror, and I felt enough blood drain from my face that I thought I wasn’t going to live much longer. And then. Then, God as my witness, she began twirling—TWIRLING—towards the car. She moved with the acumen of an insane devil—like a ghoul that had been resurrected from its hellish crypt to torment the living. As people in the crowded parking lot stopped loading their groceries into their trunks to watch the spectacle, and old ladies took this opportunity to catch their breaths from pushing their walkers, a sound emerged from my mother’s mouth. A sound so terrifying and crazed it will be seared in my brain so long as I live. As she twirled deftly towards the car, she screamed hysterically and tunelessly,

“I GAWT PAAAAAADS! I GAWT PAAAAAAAADS!!!”

My soul fled my body. For a moment, I lost consciousness.

When I came to, my mother was unlocking the car door, whereupon she chucked the florescent parcel in my lap. I looked at it, then back up at her, but felt nothing. No shame, no fear, no humiliation. In that one solitary event, I cashed in my chips; I was never shy again. Since that day, I have felt neither hesitation nor embarrassment, and even now, I converse freely with strangers, make inappropriate requests, and speak my mind when it is beyond uncalled for. That day I realized that there were untold stores of people to embarrass or offend, and no possible way they could do the same to me. The world was my oyster.

The problem, of course, with losing your sense of propriety at such a young age is that, at some point in life, you need it. It’s not actually a good thing to have your gauge for what may or may not be considered appropriate behavior suddenly shot to hell. Without feeling embarrassed, there is literally no mechanism whereby your brain might tell itself, “Make sure your skirt isn’t tucked into the back of your underpants when you leave the bathroom at this five-star restaurant,” because in the worst case, and that actually does happen, you actually don’t care. And it’s far, far worse when other people’s feelings are involved.

*****

A few years ago, I was at a farewell fete for my best friend’s sister. Before the majority of the guests arrived, I was briefed on some of the single men who might be showing up. I was also briefed on anyone who had a mental or physical deformity, or belonged to any one of the following groups: massage therapists, Kabbalists, WASPS, Communists, Southeast Asians, pro-lifers, vegans, Unitarians, and those with prison records. Because, you see, by the time I’d arrived at this point in my life, I already had the unfortunate reputation as the girl who opened up her big mouth before thinking, and was renowned as a veritable maven of tasteless, decidedly un-politically correct humor. Now, my general outlook on those who are readily offended by me is that they’re probably readily offended by most things, and that this is more their problem than it is mine. Ergo, I’d rather offend them and do away with all pretenses than suffer through the duration of even the briefest farce of an acquaintance. Nevertheless, some people are readily offended, especially by me, and many, I admit, with good reason. So in the hopes of staving off a social tsunami, it was these groups about whom I was informed before the guests even showed up.

The party filled up quickly, and as it turned out, I ended up already knowing most of the people there. Except for this one guy. By the gleam in her eye as she trundled him towards me from across the room, I could tell Maya had high hopes of setting us up. He was hot, that’s for sure. And he came over smiling, pecs bulging through a tight navy blue shirt, with shoulder-length braids of hair pulled back into a half ponytail. Hooray!, I thought to myself. In bringing him over, Maya clearly didn’t think I might say something inadvertently racist, so we were already off to a good start. As she walked him across the room, I thought about what our children might look like, and if they would have green eyes like their mother, or the fierce bulging lats of their dad. They stopped in front of me and Maya introduced me to RJ, then quickly found an excuse to slip away.

“Hey. Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Yeah, you too. Especially since I don’t know anyone here—I mean, besides Maya.”

I started yammering on a bit nervously, trying to find some common ground before broaching the subject of our possible genetic chemistry,

“Well, then I think you’ve already got the best of the lot. Most of us have known each other since we were kids, so a lot of the interactions you’re seeing here are fueled by habit, or worse, obligation. I mean, except for you, and maybe that other dude over there. I met him at some party once before. I’ve tried talking to him, but WHAT a jackass! He doesn’t seem to care what anyone else is saying, repeats himself constantly, and swears like, ALL the time. Total jerk.”

“You mean that guy, over there, in the plaid shirt?”

“That’s him. Asshole!”

“Er… Maya told me he has Tourette’s.”

Oh shit.

The thing about Maya briefing me on people before I meet them is that she almost always leaves out one or two highlights—and by “highlights,” I mean, kind of essential pieces of information—and she does it on purpose. Every once in a while she just wants to get a laugh at someone else’s expense. I, of course, am always her chosen conduit.

“Tourette’s, huh? Oh well—but that must mean he’s really good at like, ONE thing. Like stenciling horses or playing the balalaika.”

“I think you’re thinking of autism.”

Shit again.

“Right. Well, um…so, where are you from?”

“Rwanda.”

I paused.  I should have stayed on pause.

“WHAAAAT?! Oooohhhhhhhh FUCK, man! Did you get outta there before, like, the SHIT hit the FAN???”

Silence.

“Dude. Is everyone you know, like, dead?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I have the right country, don’t I?”

“Are you KIDDING? I can’t believe you just referred to genocide—I mean, mass fucking MURDER—as ‘the shit hitting the fan’! And there MIGHT have been a more sensitive way of asking if anyone I know was killed. You know, they warned me about you. But I didn’t really think a friend of someone as cool as Maya could actually be this tactless and rude. How about I sweep in to YOUR country and start killing people indiscriminately for no other reason than their background???”

“Shit, well that happens every day in Harlem. Well, I mean it happens for crack. I mean, come on, you must know that.”

“WHAT THE—??!!”

At this point, several onlookers had notified Maya that there was a problem, and that I was the source. She quickly swept in and grabbed me by the elbow, and before I had a chance to explain that I was simply trying to call attention to the woefully under-reported issue of black-on-black violence (I had just seen a special on CNN), she stammered nervously to the crowd,

“She’s just drunk! Not to worry. She has no idea what she’s talking about!!”

By the look on his face, I could tell this didn’t broach even the outskirts of a legitimate explanation. I was then whisked into the bathroom and scolded. And I hadn’t even had half of my gin and tonic.

Later that night, when I was allowed to return to the party, a late-arriving acquaintance came up to me and—seeing R.J. about 10 feet away from us—asked,

“Heeeeeeyyy, do you know R.J.?”

Without experiencing a single moment of self-reflection—which might, at least in normal people, have inspired both remorse and shame—I pointed towards RJ. Then I—almost certainly the whitest, nerdiest chick at this party—pounded my pale, closed fist backwards against the middle of the chest and looked at him, shouting for all to hear,

“YO! Me and RJ—we BOYZ.”

At this point, RJ just shook his head and walked off, having absorbed all the shame and mortification that I should have felt, but which instead I had left by the side of the road like someone’s virginity at a Phish concert. No pause, no reflection—just a methodical moving forward and a sober carrying on. Of course it’s OK to get gangbanged by five dudes in dreads when you’re lost in a ten-foot-wide pot cloud and its minute 35 of a nameless jam and then go home to your job a the Dairy Queen. So of course it’s alright to mortally offend a man who probably had lost his entire family to an epic genocide by asking him about it as glibly as if he’d lost a sock.

Right?

Wrong. The problem is, after that incident with the Kotex pads, something happened. Something fizzled, frayed, and shut down. Some vital synapse that prevented me from knowing right from wrong snapped. Just snapped.

Months later, at another party, I ran into RJ. The first and only thing he said to me before walking away was,

“You know, you’re probably the single most offensive person I’ve ever met. And I work in magazine publishing. So that’s saying something.”

*****

Some years before that incident, I was at a dinner party with Maya and her parents, at their pristine federal-style home in Westchester. It was the sort of dinner party where old white men with popped collars waxed poetic about their golf game, while their wives debated at what temperature to cook a roast.

Maya and I, meanwhile, were drunk on Schnapps at the corner of the table, talking animatedly about what she should do regarding a certain touchy work situation. Let me preface this by telling you that Maya is a looker—tall, blonde, blue-eyed, pouty lips, impressive child-bearing hips—the whole nine. Needless to say, she had some fans of the male variety. But what also needs to be said is that at the time, she was working in the Spinal Cord Injury Unit of a veteran’s hospital, so most of her fans of the male variety couldn’t get it up—or do anything else for that matter—from the waist down. For the vast majority of her patients, this was a beyond pitiable situation. But not for all. One patient in particular—a man named Tony DeLucca—had the big time hots for Maya. At the hospital, he would deliberately wheel past her and drop pens, pencils, cups, pins, his colostomy bag—anything at all—just so she would bend down in front of him to pick it up. Sometimes he would tell her,

“HEY GOAGEOUS, YOU GOTTA LITTLE SOMETHIN’ ON YOAH LIP. NO, THEAH…NOT THEAH…YEAAAH…THEAH…THAAAAAT’S IT….KEEP LICKIN’.”

When that happened, it would take Maya a little too long to realize what he was trying to do. That’s the thing about the severely handicapped—you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in the case of dirtbag-on-wheels (literally) Tony DeLucca, for example—they didn’t always deserve it.

So there we sat at the end of the table—Maya telling me about Tony’s latest come-on (he’d recently discovered e-mail and had sent her a photo of a penis: big, black, erect, and therefore probably not his). Hearing this, I was horrified, and began plotting our revenge. I had recently seen a “making of” episode about the show ER. In it, the directors described how they simulate blood and placenta for birthing scenes. What they do is rub cream cheese and jelly all over the actor babies to make it look as if they’re swaddled in afterbirth. So I hatched a plan.

“OK, here’s what we do. Next time you go to the hospital, I’ll come with you. Wear something low cut! The moment Tony wheels his sleazy ass in your direction, I’ll jump out of the broom closet, knock him out of his wheelchair, pull his clothes off, and slather him in cream cheese and jelly!! THAT’LL show him!”

To my surprise, Maya seemed a little uncomfortable about the idea, but my fervor could hardly be contained.

“Come ON—it’s PERFECT!”

At this point, one of the dinner guests, Charlene—a woman so warm-hearted and gentle, Maya’s entire family had long regaled me of the fact that they had never, ever heard this woman say an unkind thing about or to anyone—turned in my direction. As her frosted highlights caught the gleam of the candelabra, I reflected on how even in my own limited experience of her company, she had only ever been lovely, generous and kind. However, having heard my fiendish plan from the other end of the table, Charlene’s eyes were now trained on me like two sniper beams, and then they closed into slits. Tears of rage formed in the corners of her eyes. Conversation at the table came to a standstill, as all eyes fixed on her. She looked towards me and Maya, and in a voice that trembled with pure anger, she said,

“That is SICK, SICK humor girls. How DARE you suggest such a thing?? That’s HORRIBLE! JUST HORRIBLE!! How COULD you??!”

She then let out one final, desperate scream before storming out of the room, leaving her husband, and the rest of us, in stoned silence, while dinner got cold in our plates.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

When no one volunteered any information, Maya said quietly,

“Um…I really didn’t think this would ever even come up, but I guess I should have mentioned this before. Her son is a quadriplegic.”

SHIT. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

“I think I should probably go home.”

“Yeah,” Maya said, “probably not a bad idea. Talk to you tomorrow.”

And I left.

You think I would have learned my lesson.

*****

Two weeks ago, I attended a baby shower, and as all parties do, this one came to an end. I really didn’t know people there, save for the parents-to-be, but by the end of the festivities, a kind of receiving line had formed near the front door, and everyone in attendance gathered around it with the intention of sending each other off. Being Italian, as I left, I kissed and hugged the ladies, as well as most of the men, though when I got the awkward “why-the-hell-are-you-leaning-towards-me-I-don’t-know-you” shuffle, I decided the handshake was the best way to go for some. When I arrived at the final gauntlet of couples, I discovered that those closest to the door were lesbians—one femme, one butch. If I had maintained my policy up to that moment, my actions would have taken an obvious course: hug and kiss both ladies. But coming up to this one raging bull dyke seemed to inexplicably trigger an entirely new social transaction. So I shouted enthusiastically,

“PUT ‘ER THERE!” and stuck out my hand for a firm, 50s-era, A-bomb grade handshake.

The bull dyke looked at me askance.

And then, like a jackass, I sweetly hugged and kissed her girlfriend. Now both of them stared at me, appalled and confused in equal measure. I chose not to turn my head back to give a final wave to the group, all of whom had fallen completely silent as I made my exit. I’m not sure what else I could have done to remedy my gender-bending faux pas, but frankly I didn’t care enough to try. The damage was already done.

Although maybe I should have offered to buy her Kotex pads.

Night in Tunisia

As if to complete the final backwards leg in the misdirected jaunt made by a certain unnamed Italian predecessor—a guy who was aiming somewhat obliquely for the West Indies but to whom, instead, we owe thanks for all manner of crass Americana including, but not limited to: illiteracy, obesity, and a stultifying eight years of Full House—I just returned from Spain, having spent several cured-ham and garlic-prawn filled days trucking sweat-glazed through Barcelona and Valencia, simultaneously wondering what karmically unjust trick of fortune allows Spanish women to eat their full weight in ham hocks and paella and still look so thin that they could bodily snake a drain. I, meanwhile, am going to be doing something called a “glute press” until I stop breathing or my pants fit once again, whichever comes first.

While in Valencia, I was surprised to come across a still further ethnographic curiosity—Arabic food of every breed both physical and metaphysical. I passed dilapidated storefront after dilapidated storefront bedazzled with chintzy Arabic scrawl perched high over the doorway where cumin-scented mannequins dressed in burqas beckoned passersby with nothing more than a brittle wax digit covered inelegantly with a Lee Press-On nail. By the time I arrived at the end of one such block, I felt like I had completed some kind of penance, and half expected to be rewarded with a 10,000 virgin kebab. Now tell me THAT thing wouldn’t sell like hotcakes in Afganistan. Wanna get the Taliban out of their caves once and for all? Virgins, get your virgins! Free Coke with every 50,000^th virgin consumed!

This unexpected jaunt through a displaced Spanish Middle East reminded me of traveling one summer from the Italian Riviera to Bologna, where I was studying, after a 4-day jaunt with one of my best friends and her recently acquired Polish fiancé. This trip was technically their post-engagement honeymoon, but in a less-than-romantic turn, all three of us shared a room, and I spent the better part of our vacation teaching her future hubby (who spoke no English) to say one phrase and one phrase only: “word to the mutha-fuckin’ hiz-ouse.” In exchange, he taught me how the Polish say “to fart,” which sounds something like “pooshchatch bounki” (literally: “to release a bumblebee”). Don’t ask how that came up.

Further contributing to the sinking feeling that if their marriage were anything like their already brief engagement, they were going to end up in a trailer park eating the gristle they’d scraped off the grill at a KOA campsite and then giving birth to filthy children whose only plaything was an abandoned prosthesis, was the fact that their car—a 1980 diarrhea-colored Audi with polyester-tweed seats—was perhaps the most brokedown piece of mechanical refuse I have ever laid eyes upon. And making matters worse was that it only ran on some obscure Polish biodiesel, of which they’d brought literally next to none from Poland, assuming—wrongly—that Italians give a flying rat’s testicle about the environment. So the Audi basically died every hour, and we, sweat-caked with no A/C, had to push it along the Italian autostrada until we found either a gas station that sold this stuff, or a lemur we could toss into a woodchipper to siphon its blood into the tank (Note: 1981 Audis also run on the blood of freshly slaughtered lemurs).

When we arrived, finally, in Bologna, where my friends were going to stay with me for a few days before shuffling back to Poznan in their generator on wheels, we had to put the car in a public lot, just outside the medieval walls of the old city, inside of which I’d been renting a room in a palazzo belonging, allegedly, to a count (Aside: the “Count,” along with every other Italian aristocrat, was technically liberated of his title after a little 19^th century tête-à-tête called the Risorgimento. However, some of these noble families managed to hold on to just enough property to propel them towards the arrogant notion that they were still entitled to deferential treatment, to wealth, celebrity, and so forth. This of course, does little to explain why my friend Riccardo—an Italian postal worker who lives in a one-room hovel just above a bakery on a shitty back road just outside of Milan—also claims that I should technically refer to him in all correspondence as “Conte”).

So glad were we to have parked in that lot and emerged from that car, that we shut the doors and then discovered—to our horror—that we’d locked the only blessed key we had in the car, with all the luggage in it, and left the windows completely closed. With an urgency the likes of which I have not felt since the time I accidentally overdosed on laxatives, my friend and I tore after the police car that we had just seen scanning the parking lot for vagabonds and thieves as it drove out of the exit. Bear in mind, at this point, we looked like a pair of vagabonds ourselves, having sweat and sullied ourselves thoroughly on a four-hour hike earlier in the day, only to get in the car and sweat a full five hours back to Bologna. We looked like madwomen, flying desperately towards the Polizia Municipale, whose car had disappeared behind a church. In an effort to cut them off at the pass, she ran in one direction, and I in another, arms flailing, greasy hair flapping—although at least she had the intellectual advantage of running in the right direction, whereas I just had seemed like a blind woman who went crazy and started running the wrong way down a one way street in the middle of traffic. Unfortunately we failed to catch them (well obviously I did), so we returned to the car, while I prayed that her fiancé hadn’t used some of the foul Italian language I had taught him to try and solicit help from passersby.

After trying to pry the window open with our fingers just enough to lower in my looped bikini string to try and pull up the lock (an utter failure), we once again went on the hunt for the police. When we saw two Polizia about to go on their dinner break, we ran after them, again screaming and flailing. Luckily, since they were on foot, and we were only about 3 meters away to begin with, they stopped. Now, I’m basically fluent in Italian, but because I had no idea what you call the thing that one slips into a car window in order to open a lock, I started by asking the officer,

“Do you have something long and hard…” complete with hand motions outlining what such an object might look like.

When the officer started laughing and walking away, saying “This is another issue,” I realized I hadn’t quite communicated my point. He then told me that “Such things only exist in American films,” and proceeded to acquire a wire hanger for us at a local cafe. He thrust it towards me, saying, “Start with this, and we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

We managed to jam the freaking wire hanger into the crack in the window, and even touch the lock, but we didn’t have a strong enough hold on the thing to pull it up and unlock it. While we were standing around the car, spitting and cursing in three languages, the police came by as promised, and after telling us “You’d make really poor car thieves,” got out of the car and walked to the rear of their vehicle. From the bowels of the trunk, they pulled a steel briefcase, using motions at once so ginger and grandiose that I was fairly well convinced that inside that case lay a hydrogen bomb, and that in an effort to open up the car, they were about to blow us all to Kingdom Come just to prove that Italians aren’t totally ignorant of modern technology. When the briefcase was lovingly placed on the sparkling roof of their vehicle, we waited, the three of us, with baited breath, as they entered the code on the outside, and solemnly opened it.

Inside the briefcase was an ominous cushion of grey foam, and we were practically standing on each other’s shoulders to catch a glimpse of the miracle that was about to emerge from within.

What emerged—I shit you not— was a pair of pliers and a Swiss Army knife. One of the officers proudly snatched the knife from its foam nest, and walked towards the Audi, jamming it into the lock with all the finesse of an unskilled mugger, forced to kill his first victim because she screamed too loudly. When this highly-calibrated strategem failed, the policemen took back the knife, dismissed the pliers with their eyes, and closed the briefcase as somberly as they had opened it. Their final advice to us before speeding off into the humid sunset saying, “We too, are like theives,” was, “Break the damn glass. It’s cheaper than calling a tow truck.”

Thank you, Polizia Municipale di Bologna.

At this point, my poor friends were looking at either a $200 glass replacement, or calling a tow truck—neither of which they could afford—so we persevered on our quest to pry that lemur-guzzling bitch open ourselves. No sooner had we cursed the entire spectrum of polyglot curses that each of us knew, when two homeless Arabic guys who had been observing this whole fiasco rode up on their bicycles and asked us if we’d locked the keys in the car. Before I could say “Why, no! It’s just broken! This happens all the time!” for fear that they might break the glass and rob the car themselves, they pointed and cried, “There they are!” having spied the keys glistening in the ignition. They then asked me for the hanger. I told them it didn’t work, but within three minutes, they opened that lock with the hanger using a method that I believe can only have come from years of experience stealing cars or performing abortions in the misbegotten alleys of their native Tunisia.

With the car doors open, the key in hand, and relief all around, I offered them money, which they refused. In what in retrospect was a misguided remunerative gesture, I then took the opportunity to mention to them that my boyfriend’s family was Arabic, and that while they had taught me certain phrases, I always forgot the word for “Thank you.” The leader of the pack was delighted to hear that my boyfriend was Lebanese, and even moreso that I’d picked up some Arabic. He asked me,

“What are the other phrases you know?”

I said, “Well, there are just a couple, but they’re all escaping my mind at the moment, except for one, which is really bad, so I won’t repeat it.”

Clearly galvanized by my report, the man looked at me, and said, “No, no! You must tell me! We are friends now! Please to tell.”

“You know, sir, I really am not sure it’s appropriate for the occasion.”

“Of course it is! How bad could it be?? Please to tell.”

“OK. Well. Here goes: أسأل الله لك الزنى مرض الأم.”

The man gasped. His comrades stared at me wide-eyed, clearly having no idea what was being said up until that point. All they knew is that they had just helped us and I had responded in their native tongue with words so foul that the moment they were uttered, the lot of them jumped on their bikes and drove away, shaking their heads.

My friend asked me, “What the hell did you just say to them??”

“Something I learned from one of Amal’s aunts when she got cut off on the highway.”

“Oh God. What?”

“Um. It means ‘May God bring your whoring mother a disease’.”

Even she was aghast. At this point I suddenly turned on my heel and began chasing after them, since I’d finally remembered how to say “Thank you.”

“شكرا لك!!” I shouted, running towards them, “شكرا لك!!!!”

But it was no use. They didn’t hear me, and as we thieves are wont to do, they too disappeared into the night.

Extra baggage

“Bo-ahy, ain’t you gonna wash yo’ hay-unds?”

“I’m from New Yawk—I don’t have to wash my hands!

I don’t know what was more alarming about this exchange: the fact that even a filthy Southern truck driver in a filthy Southern truck stop was disgusted by the even filthier notion that someone might leave the bathroom without even making the semblance of an attempt to wash up, or the fact that an 11-year old boy had the brass balls to give someone four times his age and at least eight times his size that much lip.

That summer, Color Me Badd and Paula Abdul were at the top of the Billboard charts, so my little family got in my grandmother’s near-kaput Cutlass Sierra (which we’d nicknamed “Tetanus,” due to the fact that we were fairly certain the rust-flayed paint was going to give anyone who touched it just that), and drove away from the big city and into rural, radio tower-less America. In fact, we drove all the way from the Bronx to Charlotte, North Carolina. Although the real reason for our trek was that we had been invited by a family friend who was working in what they call “Background casting” to be extras in a movie. As thrilling as this may sound, don’t let anyone ever tell you anything besides the following: being an extra is thankless and boring, and any SAG-card carrying asshole who barely scraped into the litter box of thespian legitimacy is absolutely lying if they tell you that walking into a frame a sniper’s distance away from the camera for approximately .03 seconds is in any way rewarding. But we were excited anyway, since at 13, I’d never actually had a job, and at 11, my brother had never really had the opportunity to test out his bad manners and poor hygiene anywhere outside of our neighborhood.

The film was called Eddie. Some of you (those of you who may have been in a state of easy coercion while on post-surgical morphine drips) may have seen this film—a cinematic abortion, and possibly the worst thing Whoopi Goldberg has, to this day, ever done *(*except, perhaps, shaving off her eyebrows, which frankly, doesn’t even look that bad). The guiding premise of the plot is as follows: the New York Knicks suck (now, really, use your imagination here), their coach sucks even harder, and a Knicks super-fan named Eddie (played by an attention-desperate Whoopi), through some hare-brained series of events, becomes the team’s Head Coach. Obviously there was no sum of money that could be paid to Madison Square Garden—the real home of the Knicks—to be party to such a disgraceful public use of the arena. But standards are much lower in the South. So, just like that, the Charlotte Hornets arena became MSG, and hundreds of extras—hand-plucked from only the finest specimens of out-of-work trailer trash—took the place of actual New Yorkers. With three exceptions.

Being that I was 13 at the time, I seemed to ascribe more importance to the event of my first job-slash-pathetic big screen debut than was really appropriate. I woke up an hour before my mother and brother in our shitty motel room to beautify myself for the day’s shoot. There were a few problems with this. To start, this was the first time I had ever bought make-up, and really didn’t know how to use it, so by the time my mother and brother woke up (at 5 am, mind you, since extras were called at 6 am), I had managed to spackle on so much rouge that I looked like the poster girl for the Taiwanese child sex trade. The second problem was that the very idea behind being an extra was that we had to blend in, and the moment our friend saw me walk in the Hornets arena, I was quickly scuttled into the ladies room, where a kind old woman volunteered her box of scented hemorrhoid wipes to the elaborate task of cleaning the smut off my face. Unfortunately, before it had become clear that I wasn’t a child bride ripe for the common-law picking, one of the skeezy film PAs—a man of at least 30—had spied me, and for the next several days, he sought me out in the arena to talk to me. He was one of those unsettlingly pasty white nerds whose equal fondness for Star Trek and horse porn is immediately given away by the lazy combination of a long mousey ponytail and cheap round metal glasses. I was not aware of this at the time. And having now worked in production, I can tell you that the role of a PA—especially on a film—is tantamount to occupying a halfway house after prison: you do just enough work to bring home a paycheck, but not enough that you don’t end up having to split it with your parole officer. Suffice it to say, he was gross, but it’s probably the first time I can ever recall a guy liking me, even if he was a perv three times my age, and almost certainly wanted to feed me Hot Pockets and then scalp me in his mother’s basement.

At some point after making our initial acquaintance, “Lester,” as I’ll refer to him, came to find me in the vast Hornets arena, where I’d nestled myself amidst the cardboard filler people, having left my mother and brother to battle it out among the hayseeds. The second time we spoke, he coolly attempted to put his headset behind his ears, but it slipped off his head, the wires pulling the glasses skywards, and he said “Fuck!” really loudly, before turning red and sheepishly picking them up from the floor. He had a pot belly, the distended kind that skinny people have. And by skinny I guess I mean famine-stricken. So maybe it wasn’t like that. But I think he was maybe a little dyspeptic, since everything he said was interrupted at least once or twice by soft burping.

The next day he came over and offered me a muffin and some coffee. I had never had coffee before, and pretended to like it. It was our second real conversation and I was prepared to tell him, “I’m totally 18,” but the erstwhile scuzzball didn’t seem to care. It’s only in retrospect, really, that I realize how disturbing this whole interaction was. I mean, it was pretty clear I was underage. What wasn’t clear is why this dude seemed to be so keen on getting showerbanged in prison when the other inmates discovered he was a kiddie fiddler.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the “Knicks” arena, my mother was making friends. And by “friends,” I mean people who pretty much never wanted to encounter her, or our kind, ever again. It took very little time for all the fake Knicks fans to realize that among them were three actual Knicks fans, and even less time for them to start quaking with the unique species of fear that comes only with telling someone from anywhere outside of New York that you’re from The Bronx. You may as well tell most people you’d just razed their home to the ground, or stuffed their firstborn child down a garbage chute. Hearing this one particular geographical fact—even (as with my brother) when an 11-year-old child utters it—usually seems to trigger a full blown case of hives, followed by the tight clutching of one’s valuables to their person.

At some point, a man with physical dimensions that could best be described as gourd-like, and facial hair would probably make him a candidate for strip search if he were pulled over on the highway, heard my mother speaking in her decidedly Bronx accent and said,

“Ya’ll are from New YORRRK? WELL! Dy’all carry a gun in your purse?”

My mother, usually not one at a loss for words, was so floored by the question that she could only respond duly inquisitively:

“WHAT? WHEAH? A GUN?? HA! I WISH I FRIGGIN’ DID CARRY A GUN! FIRST I’D TAKE CEAH OF MY UPSTAIZ NEIGHBIZ- THOSE ASSHOLES LET THEAH KIDS RUN AROUND AWLL FRIGGIN’ DAY AND NIGHT MEANWHILE I’M SUCKIN’ DOWN A GODDAMN DRY MAHTINI WITH GLYCERINE PILLS IN IT JUST TA CALM MY FRIGGIN’ NERVES!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I just thought all Newyorkers carried guns.”

“LEMME TELL YIZ SOMETHIN- IF I WAS CARRYIN’ A GUN IN THIS SHITKICKIN’ SWAPMEET, BELIEVE ME, YOU WOULD KNOW! LEMME ASK YOU SOMETHIN’- DO YOU HAVE A GUN?”

The man responded not only in the affirmative, but proceeded to detail the exact weight, caliber and location of each of his multifarious firearms. The way he described the extent of his militaristic possessions, it basically seemed as if everyone in his family was armed from the age of 3, and that ready artillery was only a COPS-episode away from right around the corner.

When the scent of fresh biscuits and gravy a full three miles off seemed to lure him out of the perimeter, the man trundled off. My mother concluded,

“A GUN! CAN YIZ BELIEVE THAT?! MEANWHILE THIS FAT HICK IS ABOUT TO TAKE DOWN THE PENTAGON WITH HIS TWO YEAR OLD BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A FRIGGIN’ PICKUP TRUCK. WHAT THE HELL KIND OF A PLACE IS THIS??”

We soon found out a little more about just what kind of a place this was, when, the following day, my mother for the first time experienced the dreaded, mythic creature known as The Southern Belle.

A day spent on set as an extra is a day spent picking your nose and feeling like its OK, since everyone else is just as tired as you are, and therefore no one’s looking. My mother was pooped from aimlessly schlepping from corner to corner of the “Knicks” arena, and all for a pittance share of fame and fortune. Her luck finally turned when she alighted upon prime cinematic real estate (ie: a chair right in front of the camera for that section), whereupon she unapologetically plopped her imposing Bronx ass down and waited for her (marginally closer) close-up. But no sooner had she made herself cozy than a blonde hussy sporting her weight in fuschia lip gloss, her hair teased til Kingdom Come, a three-tiered-chiffon blouse encasing a rack so strangely turgid and planar you could’ve dealt cards on it, bright blue whore stilettos and a white miniskirt that I think might have qualified as the first half of a cervical exam, shuffled on over to where my mother was sitting.

She stopped when she saw my mother, seemingly appalled by the sight of a woman whose wild brown hair had barely been corralled into a bun, and who wore a fanny pack with the urgent necessity with which a POW starved in captivity wears a rope-belt. After taking in the sight, The Southern Belle took a short breath and chirped, eyelashes batting,

“Why, ya’ll are sittin’ in my seat!”

“WHO?” was the response issued from the mouth of my mother, whose eyes are physically unable to focus on anything blond and thin. It must be a genetic failing, because I swear to God, unless you’re in the top tier of your weight range and have at least one or more features in shades darker than tree bark, for me, interacting with the blonde, waifish and pale is effectively like looking through a pane of glass. But when my mother finally realized that someone was speaking to her, and that the source and tone of the speech had all the makings of something very unpleasant, she accepted the exchange with relish, clearly seeing each new social challenge won down South as a victory for the North, for the Bronx, and for intelligent people who speak unintelligently the world over.

“Ma’am, mah name is Daisy, and ya’ll are sittin’ in my seat.” Her saccharine tone was enough to make me want this to end it right then and there, since I could pretty much see where this was going. This bitch wanted her moment in the sun, and at that moment my mom was a total eclipse.

“Hello? Didj’all hear me? I was sayin’—”

“HOLD IT,” my mother interrupted, “AH YOU SERIOUSLY TRYIN’ TA TELL ME THAT OF ALL THE SEATS IN THIS WHOLE SHITTIN’ ARENA, DIS ONE—DIS ONE RIGHT HEAH— IS YOUAHS?”

“That’s right.”

“OK, DAISY. LET’S TAWK ABOUT DIS. AND BY ‘LET’S TAWK,’ I MEAN ‘YOU LISTEN WHILE I TAWK.’ MY ASS IS KILLIN’ ME. I DON’T GIVE A SOUTHIN-FRIED-SHIT IF YOU EVAH SEE ME ON CAMERA, BUT THIS CHAIH IS THE ONLY FREE ONE I COULD FIND ANYWHEAH NEAH THE AIH CONDITIONING, SO UNLESS YOU WANT TO PHYSICALLY PRY ME OUTTA HEAH, LOOKS LIKE YOUAH SHIT OUTTA LUCK. BUT DON’T WORRY! I HEAH THE LOCAL PUBLIC ACCESS CHANNEL IS LOOKIN’ FOAH BLONDES TO STAH IN THEIAH MIDNIGHT PHONE SEX ADS. AND MY DEAH, YOU HAVE A FACE FOAH PHONE SEX.”

In all the years I’ve witnessed my mom shut down a foe, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one dissolve into tears so rapidly. The Southern Belle’s mascara started to run…and run…until her pristine chiffon blouse looked like a Jackson Pollock. Which I would’ve pointed out in an effort to make her feel better, but I was pretty sure she had no idea who Jackson Pollock was. Another victory for my family! For the North! And the entire South moaned a low and anguished moan.

On the last day of shooting, I had been hand-selected to be filmed as part of a smaller group during one of the “halftime show” scenes. This basically meant that I had to sit in a row with about 7 other people, while they shot off fireworks behind us. I’m not entirely sure what exactly went wrong, but one of the pyrotechnics misfired, and landed right behind me, erupting into flames. As the Fire Department raced in and Whoopi (who was in her trailer at the time) was treated for PTSD, I caught site of the PA, whose responsibility it had apparently been to shove my ass momentarily into the flaming spotlight. Before I could say “Hey, let’s go have a Hot Pocket!” I noticed that his superior was ripping him a new one, in a conversation that was relevant in more ways than one.

“What the hell is that KID doing in that scene? Lester, I TOLD you nobody under the age of 16 near the freaking pyros! You know as well as I do that we don’t have insurance to cover this shit! CHRIST!”

As he walked out of the arena, Lester cast one last searching glance in my direction. He flashed me an irrelevant peace sign, and I mouthed the words, Call me? as my mother, who was recently arrived on the scene, smacked me in the back of the head.

“WHATTAYOU, NUTS? JESUS CHRIST, THAT’S HOW YOU END UP DRUGGED IN THE BACK OF A VAN!… HEY ASSHOLE, YA LIKE YOUNG GIRLS?? WELL, I GOT ONE RIGHT HEAH, UNDAH MY 50-YEAR OLD FIST!”

By that point—after inspiring child-molesters with premature-whore make up, displaying a less-than-generous approach to the obese and their firearms, offending Southern beauty queens, almost losing a limb to a wayward pyrotechnic, and potentially getting a member of the crew fired (in truth, given the film they made, they should have all lost their jobs)—we were starting to feel a little bad, and left, two days ahead of schedule, and, by my count, with a multiple-Hot Pocket deficit.

I’ve since been back to the South, several times, as if quietly trying to make reparations for my family’s visit, which somehow seemed worse than the ravages of the Civil War. And I still haven’t seen Eddie.

Where it’s broke, there’s fire.

When I break up with someone, it makes a sound. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. It doesn’t make a sound—it starts a fire. Let me explain. Sometime not too long ago I was ensconced with a philosopher. You would think that this meant that I was at all times ruthlessly, almost hyperbolically, aware of my place in the metaphysical world, and that each and every day was a paragon of self-discovery as the world opened itself up to me in a sublime coalescence of logic and truth.

Not exactly.

What it meant, actually, was that I had an unflagging source of advice on what circumstances make it OK to drink one’s own urine in the wilderness, weekly reminders on how to gut a caribou for warmth, and intermittent lessons on what kind of stone makes for the best machete-sharpener and how exactly to go about doing it. The philosopher was just that kind of guy—perhaps even more terrestrial than he was cerebral, and that was saying something. He was also the kind of guy who would go on vacation with my mother when no one else could, just to be sweet, and would search the straits of heaven and hell if I wanted a particular brand of chocolate sorbet while I had my period. Which makes our break-up after over three years together—at least in the eyes of my friends and loved ones—the kind of mystery that one sets on a par with the searing of the shroud of Turin with the image of Jesus, the physics of flight and two fat people getting it on, and how exactly Bush got elected a second time. To this day I can’t mention my ex to my best friend without her wincing and visibly welling up.

Be that as it may, we lived together, the philosopher and I, in one half of a cozy duplex in our university town, right across from—to my mother’s delight—the local Catholic church, a fact that was for her, the only compensation for—and potentially counteracted—the fact that we were living in the hoary, sinful throes of dreaded premarital domesticity. We tried to pass off to both her and his traditional Christian parents that we had two separate rooms, hoping this would make them ok with the arrangement. Naturally, the spare bedroom was to an actual, functioning bedroom as the recent election in Iran was to an actual democratic process: in a word, bullshit. Despite the chimera-like nature of our celibacy, we had a quaint little arrangement—the kind of cozy domesticity that one usually finds among the long-married, or the elderly. But that was the problem. So comfortable had we become in our arrangement, that things that might normally call forth passion seemed to elicit only references to laundry, grocery shopping, or how to roast the hepatitis out of a potentially rabid squirrel in the event that one is starving and any other comestible options involve feces. We were, as I like to think of it now, on the buddy system. We were each other’s water wings. And as any 10-year-old knows, you can’t get it on wearing water wings.

So with four months left on the lease to our apartment, we broke up, sublet the place, and went our separate ways for the summer, concluding that when we got back, we could sort out if either one of us wanted to continue to live there, and at the very least, who got the X-Files DVD collection and the ottoman. We even agreed to a total radio silence for the duration of the time we were apart. So off I went to Merrie Olde England, on something of a counterfeit mission to “study a manuscript” at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The real reason was something more like: after years of dating Americans—save for that token German—I wanted a boyfriend who would actually refer to Her Majesty with some sort of obligatory reverence, and who had a hot accent, preferably a Scottish one. And lo and  behold, within two weeks of arriving across the pond…jackpot!

His name was Thom with an H, and when I saw him at an Oxford formal wearing a red kilt—which, as I later found out, was not the family tartan, but actually belonged to a dead man and a stranger—I knew he was the man for me. At least, as it turned out, that summer. The only catch—at least for a girl whose idea of a “hike” usually involved a booty call—was that her Scotsman was a bit of a nature-lover and an adventurer, and at the time of the events I am about to describe (about a month after we’d met) we had just returned from camping in Wales.

Not that I’m saying all the elements of the universe are somehow interconnected in some great cynical joke at my expense. But you see, no sooner had I—city slicker par excellence—come back with my new boyfriend from camping* in Wales (*Note: the lesser know clause of the phrase “When pigs fly” actually reads: “or when girls from the Bronx find themselves sleeping at the foot of a mountain on a pile of goat turds that have been inelegantly covered over by an anemic strip of blue foam masquerading as a mattress”),when I received a phone call from my ex telling me that our lovely little duplex—the one right across from the Catholic church—had burned to the ground.

Let me repeat this. My house—the last vestige of domestic sanctity I had in life, the only place in the world where I could reliably find manuscripts of 17^th-century madrigals, a VHS of The Kings of Comedy tattered from too many viewings, a folder of all the complaints I’d ever filed with the Better Business Bureau and a loving, however ultimately platonic, embrace—had BURNED TO THE GROUND. And everything inside went with it. This event occasioned my ex to call me overseas—the first time we’d spoken in over two months—to let me know what had happened.

What had happened, apparently, was our landlord had hired workers to fix a few holes in the roof, but apparently “fixing a few holes in the roof” actually referred to “mishandling a blowtorch during a heat wave and setting the whole place on fire,” which I doubt the landlord was aware of when he hired them. Although to hear about it after the fact, it was unclear at what point the roofers—all recent arrivals to the US from Armenia—had actually learned to fix a roof without using mud, the souls of their ancestors, or both. As a result, one of them left a blowtorch lit and unattended at the noonday peak of a five-day heat wave, and what do you know, the roof caught fire. The ensuing destruction was merciless and quick.

Luckily, no one was hurt. We had sublet the place for the summer to two strapping young footballers training for pre-season, and though they were home at the time, they got out, allegedly after hearing shouts of “Օգնել ! ուֆ ոչ ! թրծել ! տեղաշարժի տեղաշարժն ընթանում է !” from the workers, who clambered down off the roof as the blaze erupted into a fireball behind them. Having been nowhere nearby when Hell stretched its blistering grip over the top of my house, I have been left to imagine the scene: I envision one of the workers slipping on a roof tile, to the whoops and shouts of his compatriots, who accuse him of dancing “la balalaika”! Unbeknownst to them, however, the poor man has just sent flying skywards a precariously ignited blowtorch that had, only moments earlier, been see-sawing on the other end of the tile on which he slipped. And, like so many drams tossed in the air for The Annual Séance to Our Lady of Ararat With The Intention of Reiterating That Thing About The Genocide, the flames of the blowtorch reach their blue-gold fingers towards heaven, only to come crashing down onto the roof and ignite—just above my bedroom!—an image in the shape of Jesus on the three-tiered crucifix, as the workers scamper off the roof like chinchillas from a hot plate, but before they do, summoning the footballers from out of the house, and all watch as the house goes up in flames from the church parking lot.

The damages to the property were pretty brutal overall: the scorched roof caved in, collapsing on the top floor bedrooms, which burned as well, whereupon the windows exploded and the whole house filled with smoke as the place was razed from top to bottom. Any remnant of the house or its contents that might have been salvaged was completely flooded from the five hours the fire department spent pumping hundreds of gallons of water into it. Most of our possessions went the way of all things, though my ex and a few of our friends who were in town for the summer raced in to try and salvage sentimental items like photos, artwork, my vibrator, etc.

The problem with this was that the Fire Department would only let people into the place for about 10 minutes at a time, since the building was at that point considered condemned, so entry was hazardous at best. The things belonging to the footballers all went down for the count too, including computers, electronics, clothes, and presumably a shit ton of porn. At least I had my laptop—containing the only existing copy of my entire dissertation draft—with me in England. Since I was stuck overseas, my ex spearheaded the entire tedious effort of navigating the wreckage, rescuing anything rescuable, and dealing with the insurance company (which, by the way, turned into not only a rancorous series of arguments with the landlord, but also turned out to be a total waste of time. A word of advice: get renters insurance, especially if your landlord is in the habit of hiring workers whose experience as skilled laborers is as flimsy as their status with the INS). As good-natured and laid-back as the philosopher was, when telling me about the fire, he said: “I guess this is just one of those things.” To which I replied: “No, actually its not. Losing a sock in the laundry is ‘just one of those things.’ Our HOUSE. BURNING. DOWN. is not.”

The only pieces of good news to come out of this report was that it seemed that the fire truck blocked the driveway of our crazy old lady neighbor—the one who routinely jettisoned barely-closed Ziploc bags full of poodle poop over the fence into our backyard—and there was nothing she could do about it, nor about the fact that shards of glass from our exploded windows flew indiscriminately into her azalea beds. Also, the Monsignor at the church finally let those going to our flaming abode park in their lot, which I believe to this day must have been the result of a direct papal ordinance, since ordinarily you couldn’t park there unless you yourself had an appointment to be married, baptized or martyred, but only between the hours of 7 and 8 am on Wednesday and Saturday, and of course on Sunday, when parking was expressly designated for those who drank the Kool-Aid. Due to the incident of our house fire (named in the church bulletin as “The Day We Uneasily Extended Ourselves Towards Non-Parishoners”), allotments are now also made for those who wish to park on the edge of the lot (what the clergy had only ever referred to as “the threshold of evil”), but only if their house is burning down, and they agree to being excommunicated thereupon. Unless, of course, they were never members of the church to begin with, in which case they have to be baptized before the excommunication could even be considered.

Broadly speaking, as I saw it, there was an upshot to this whole sordid conflation of events—at least from the garbled spectrograph view of what I believed to be happening from over the pond. And that was, that camping turned out not to be as bad as I thought, and I can almost understand why people do it willingly. I mean, you don’t have to pay to have a great view, you get to cook and eat out of a quaint little tin contraption called a “billy can,” and it’s only a short, dark 30-meter walk across a field of goat turds to a spider-filled bathroom! Having returned to Oxford with this a new appreciation of living the life nomadic, I half embraced the idea that all my material goods were gone when I found out that flames had licked my home into a pile of charred rubble like a hyperactive puppy finally realizing its new owner isn’t going to beat it into a coma. Hey, nothing says new beginnings like losing everything you own, right?

Right…?

But I suppose that’s what I get for breaking up with a good man, moving overseas for no apparent reason, and then thwarting my citified nature utterly by going camping: a new outlook on stability—both material and metaphysical—which now seemed to be as splintered as a table under the weight of a fallen roof. But I suspect somehow I knew it would happen. I had said to my friends that the world would probably come to an end if I ever found myself sleeping in a tent of my own free will, and what did I get—all my worldly possessions gone, gone, like Scottish underpants from under a kilt.

So you know the old riddle—when a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? The answer is yes, yes it does. When it crackles, hisses, chars and then breaks in a fire brought on by a grab bag of questionable decisions—some, like the unattended blowtorch or the broken heart, perhaps a little worse than others. Camping, though? Wasn’t one.

Fancy that.

stop getting married.

I’m issuing a moratorium on marriage. Hear me out.

Some time ago, I made the somewhat questionable decision of introducing my mother to my boss. At the time, I was for the first time in my life working a real job. A stressful job. The kind of stressful job that usually exists in hyperbolic thrillers about corporate sabotage. The kind of thriller where each scene ends with a sweaty broker slamming his fist on a desk and calling for someone’s ass. The kind of job that takes no prisoners, and to hell with you if you want to be there for the birth of your first child. Well, kind of. My work schedule would seem to put forth the appearance of the kind of intense corporate job portrayed in films starring Michael Douglass, Alec Baldwin, or, in the worse cases, Jimmy Smits. Only my job comes without the nice clothes, the intrigue, the high-priced call girls, or the money. And that, friends, is because I work in non-profit.

Having floated into a performing arts organization directly out of grad school, my sense of what would be required of me as an employee was, I later discovered, somewhat off. I assumed that having a job mean leaving the office at 5, taking a power yoga class, making an antiseptic suburban dinner for my antiseptic suburban family in an antiseptic suburban kitchen with marble countertops and a bowl of glass-blown fruit next to the bread box. And then waking up the next morning to do it again. I assumed, apparently wrongly, that having a job didn’t mean giving my life over wholesale to my employer. But that, friends, is just what I did. Any semblance of a personal life I had envisioned was shattered like the hip of an octogenarian AARP member upon slipping on a prune after finding out he hit Bingo. I almost thought about taking out an obituary for myself so that I could justify not calling back the friends and family who had been trying to track me down for months. My roommates only knew I still lived there because my toothpaste tube gradually got flatter over time, and some phantom still bought toilet paper when it was my turn. Naturally, dating, or any semblance thereof, went straight down the shitter. My family, my mother most of all, began to despair that I was ever going to do anything besides work, and the overriding fear seemed to be that I would never get married or have kids. So my mother set her sights on anyone with any connection to my place of employment as Prime Target Number One in the blame game for why her daughter was most likely going to end up a lonely old hag. And that is the necessary prelude to my mother meeting my boss.

“I’M THE MOTHAH,” she introduced herself.

“I’ve heard a lot about you!” my boss said congenially.

“LISTEN, I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU GOT HUH DOIN’ OVAH THEAH, BUT I KNOW IT SURE AS HELL AIN’T KEGEL EXAHCISIZ. YA KNOW, AT THIS RATE, SHE’S GONNA BE A FRIGGIN’ SPINSTAH BEFOAH SHE CAN EVEN AFFOAD HUH OWN RENT! I MEAN, LOOK AT HUH! MY OWN DAWTUH AND I CAN PRACTICALLY SEE THE OVARIES DRYIN’ UP INSIDE HUH!”

Naturally, my boss, as would any sentient creature, remained speechless, which, naturally, my mother took as a sign to continue.

“BOTTOM LINE. SHE’S WORKIN’ SO HAHD SHE’S NEVAH GONNA MEET A MAN. SO I’M NEVAH GONNA BE A GRANDMOTHA CAUSE SHE’S NEVAH GONNA GET MARRIED, WHICH MEANS I’M NEVAH GONNA HAVE SOME LITTLE BASTID TO RUB MY BUNIONS AND HEAT UP MY TV DINNIZ. THANKS FUH NOTHIN’.”

At this point, my boss helpfully interjected some comment about how she thought I’d been on a date or two recently, which I had, with a guy I met online—a photography student—one of these elitist assholes who stands in front of a piece in a gallery for at least 10 minutes too long while other people shuffle awkwardly to crane their necks around them, all while the fool yammers on about “intentionality” until someone rolls their eyes and lets out a groan so profound that any creature with half a functioning cerebral cortex who has unwittingly been romantically ensnared by such an asshole is left with no choice but to either break up with him or punch him in the nuts and flee; the former being easier but the latter being far more tempting. Despite the unpleasant vision that this suggestion of my recently having been on a date conjured in my mind, I nodded towards my boss, and concurred.

“Yeah, I had a date with um, Jim. I mean, uh, Jack…I think.”

The thought of me on a date seemed to appease my mother…for a moment. But suddenly the thought of my mother taking this notion as any indication that she would soon be able to call forth an army of my progeny in service of no greater tasks than bunion-rubbing, Aqua-Net-shopping, newspaper-fetching and toilet scrubbing filled me both with fear and deep contempt.

So I said, “You know what, ma? Marriage is not the end game for everyone, you know. Neither are kids. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, children are two things: loud and expensive. And until someone can prove to me that a) they’re not, or b) they are, but are worth it anyway, frankly, I don’t know that I want any part of it.”

This bit of commentary essentially went over like a lead balloon. Sadly, by the time one hits 30, while the idea of marriage is tantamount to an envelope full of Anthrax to some, to others, it is the de facto be all and end all of human experience. And I want it to stop.

Do you know that you have a better chance of getting eaten by a baboon than staying married?

Ok, maybe not, but just imagine if we really started pumping some energy into an anti-marriage campaign—people would think twice! I know literally dozens of people who’ve gotten married in the past few years. Several of them are already divorced, and most of the rest of them will be soon enough. So I’m not entirely sure what the point is, really. Except, perhaps, that in order for the Married Brigade to comfortably feel like they haven’t made a severe error in judgment, the whole kit and caboodle of them get together for what amounts to a protracted social gangbang of all the single friends they’ve left behind. I’m sorry, you simply don’t deserve special treatment because you were able to hogtie a man at the altar and then hornswaggle your uterus into pumping out a genetic shortstack.

And furthermore, have we not advanced enough as a society to realize that a woman taking a man’s last name is absurd and antiquated, and if we really want babies we can make them out of sawdust if we want to? I have to say, I’m feeling a bit marginalized by this whole goddamn affair. I don’t feel my ovaries throb with jealousy every time I see tiny flaps of thigh fat on an infant. Instead I imagine someone buying me a martini, and man, I bet ovaries are roughly the size of those little green olives they shove onto a toothpick and throw in the glass. Who needs ovaries when you can have olives? And who needs marriage when you can have [insert: autonomy, freedom, travel, the single person’s deduction, the whole bag of popcorn to yourself here]?

Shun the marrieds! I, for one, have had enough of this: “We’ve decided to get married so now its time for everyone around us to think that true love exists and hey ho, we’re all going to learn what ‘canapés’ are, and by the way, not only are you probably going have to buy us an engagement present, a shower present AND a wedding present, but you’re also going to have to pay to fly to a giant lilypad off the coast of Guam, where we’ll be married by both a shaman and a Baptist minister. And just FYI, by the end of the night you’re going to end up feeling like being single is roughly tantamount to being dead, although, if you’re lucky, you may get one of our Vietnam vet uncles drunk enough to want to take you from behind, but still tell you that you have “purty eyes, even if they ain’t all slanty, the way I like… I was in Kwai Fongboon, ya know. Lost a toe!”

Unfortunately there are no worse perpetrators of the belief in marriage than members of my own stupid sex. Although maybe it’s just this one particular breed of woman that taints the appearance of the rest of us.

Basically, there is a certain kind of woman I loathe. The kind of woman whose unthinking zeal for things diminutive repeatedly leads to blood-congealing shrieks upon first sight of the same. The kind of woman who thinks “carrying off pleather” is a real and particular skill. The kind of woman who keeps her own pedicure instruments housed in a clear video-cassette box at her local nail salon; and who ceremoniously emblazons it with silver-sharpie-rendered balloon letters spelling her first name. This was the kind of woman who is in her most exalted state at a bridal shower.

To me, bridal showers are, and will always remain, horrible, conceptually ill-hewn affairs. Yet, last summer, there I stood, slumped in the corner of an elevator piping its way up to the would-be-13th 14^th floor of a midtown apartment complex, finding it hard to believe I hadn’t given serious thought to taking a glycerine pill before showing up at the bridal shower of one of my friends from high school. Only sheer obligation could have compelled me to fling myself powerlessly into the hands of the vacuous minxes at the helm of the affair. My stomach lurched with the thought of playing a round of “Pin the Penis on the Man!” or “Tell the Story of How You Met Your Husband!” the latter of which made its clumsy debut at the last shower I’d attended. At that time, I was dating a circus clown, and when it was my turn, I regaled the pink-clad coven of how I’d technically only “met” him only after they had spent twenty minutes in a broom closet at a friend’s party, and by “dating,” well, I really meant “casually screwing.”

“I’m not quite sure how to spell his last name, to be honest, but who cares?” I pondered aloud, “What kind of pandering anti-feminist still takes a man’s last name anyway?”

At that point the bride-to-be burst into tears, while the rest of the coven, red-faced for the most part, stared blankly at the source of their honoree’s despair. Well, I thought, not everyone in this room is squealing with glee at the thought of lilac sashes wrapped around cream-colored bodices—poor recompense for the loss of our autonomy, if you ask me. Realizing only too late that mine wasn’t exactly the kind of story they wanted to hear, I was then subjected to learning of how Rick proposed to Kathy under a star-filled Utah sky, while the sound of Bruce Springsteen wailing on his axe pierced the still night air. The other girls—a strange and, to me, practically alien breed of she-weevils—fell silent out of awe and admiration, each of them then eager to recreate some equally maudlin flashback for the group. I, meanwhile, found myself sucking back the last of the peach sangria with all the violent desperation of a soldier horking down whiskey before having his leg amputated in the middle of a rice paddy.

As I rang the doorbell on this particular occasion, I girded myself, struggling in vain to develop coping mechanisms for the inevitable conversation, which threatened to offer such highlights as “This punch is delish!” or “Is that diamond a cushion-cut?” As I walked in the door, assailed bodily by pink balloons, I overheard someone say, “I was in a sorority but I am so not the sorority type.”  Sure—I thought—and Satan lives in hell but he isn’t evil.

So stop getting married. I’m really starting to feel put out. And you and I both know you shouldn’t be wearing white.

You can’t have both.

There is no creature on earth more odd than the academic—no master of facts more obscure, no purveyor of clothes more obsolete, no practitioner of social interaction more awkward. Having spent six years in graduate school at one of the world’s most deeply nerdy universities, I know these truths to be self-evident. And if they are not self-evident, I assure you that there are at least five South Indian computer scientists in high-waters lost in an abyss of Boolean lattices who have just the planar bipartite graph to prove it.

When I first arrived on the campus of a certain unnamed Ivy-league university in the fall of 2000, I was fairly certain that it was only a matter of time before it was discovered that my presence there was fraudulent—my admission having been offered as part of a dubious bet lost by the Dean of the Graduate College when he fell over during a keg stand at the annual trustees meeting—and that my acceptance would soon be revoked. There was no amount of reading Kant, Homer, or Wittgenstein the summer after I finished college that would conceal the fact that I’d spent the previous four years at a school designed for the primate-brained progeny of the tacky nouveau riche families that populated the eastern seaboard like so many roaches at a truck stop. To say that college prepared me for grad school would be like saying that reading “Where Do Babies Come From?” prepared me for a porno-style gang bang. Needless to say, the day I moved into the fabled neo-Gothic style Graduate College with my loud-as-ass, unapologetically Bronx family in tow was a rude awakening for all involved.

The first sign that it was possible that not only had we left New York, but that it was very possible we were no longer in the Earth’s orbit, was the appearance of a young Chinese gentleman wearing shin-length black pants that seemed to have been fashioned from a spectacular combination of polyester thread and ramen noodles, a red lumberjack-style flannel shirt, and thick black glasses that looked old enough to have been worn by Chairman Mao himself. With one hand, he dragged a garbage bag out of which protruded what looked like the edge of a typewriter, and with the other hand, he clasped tightly to his chest a leaky Tupperware container filled with what looked—and smelled—like fish heads. Walking across the quad to meet him was a middle-aged woman with hair so frizzy that it seemed as if she’d had a colonoscopy performed by hotwiring her asshole to a particle accelerator. Unfurled over her green corduroy pants was a purple T-shirt into which was seared a fluorescent-rimmed portrait of the animated cat from that one Paula Abdul video from 1991. She held a textbook about Quantum Mechanics and shouted something about ice cream to “Ling” in a thick eastern European accent.

Observing this ominous interaction while I looked on in pallid terror, my brother said to me, simply, “Well. You can’t have both!”

What he meant, of course, was that it would be inconceivable for the kind of quizzical mental giants that were trundling into our purview to take shape as anything more appealing than the carelessly-assembled physical specimens that we now saw before us. For either of those two—or any of the other MENSA candidates dreaming in Fibonaci sequences inside those hallowed ivy-covered walls—to take on anything that resembled fashion, grace, or sex appeal, would basically be to condemn science, art, and all branches of higher learning, and therewith world advancement, to ruin. You don’t see Pamela Anderson completing advanced calculus problems, just as you don’t see Stephen Hawking bouncing breasts-first along Venice Beach. You either have brains or boobs, but, as my brother wisely assessed, you just can’t have both.

So when I say I felt fraudulent, it is because I am neither Pamela Anderson, nor am I Stephen Hawking. I’m not horrendous to look at, but my math is pretty abysmal, and what’s more, I’m kind of apathetic about learning in general. If the salvation of the world from nuclear holocaust depended on yours truly, I would advise everyone to get laid, have one last drink, and then just set their asses squarely on the bull’s eye of the apocalypse, so that the end comes swiftly.

Unfortunately, the more time I spent in grad school, the better I seemed to be at unwittingly convincing people I deserved to be there, despite often making an ass of myself publicly, and with reckless abandon. In fact, I garnered award after award, my every effort to expose my own mediocrity unduly rewarded with a grant or a fellowship, or some other new reason to keep up the charade. One year, I was notified by way of a phone call from a bugle-throated musicologist—the sounds of whose pharynx could literally have been adopted by the Marines as an effective substitute for water boarding—that I had won one of musicology’s most prestigious research fellowships. Now, while “one of musicology’s most prestigious research fellowships” might have bought me no more than a cup holder at an auto auction, it was still pretty big news, since it basically meant I didn’t have to turn towards the fast food industry or the sex trade in order to finish what I misguidedly started, and finally graduate with a doctorate.

When I arrived at the ballroom at a Hyatt in Washington D.C., late for the award presentation, I was alerted by a doctoral student who had obviously never seen a breast, that he had just seen one of mine. Indeed, the top button on my blouse had just sprung free, leaving the gnat bites that were my boobs on display for the sighted masses. This was potentially going to be a problem, since I was about to get up on a dais in front of about 1000 socially-deficient academics, most of whose sexual experiences were vicarious, and had probably involved fruit flies in an Erlenmeyer flask. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded so much, but the ceremony’s emcee was a brick shithouse of a bull dyke who moonlighted as a caddy for the LPGA tour. Not that I wasn’t flattered by the idea that a full metric ton of anything might fancy me, but I don’t think my body could have withstood that kind of impact. So, like a Nerd MacGuyver, who has only a protractor, Indian-head nickel, and a Ziploc bag full of plutonium on their person at any given time in order to stave off disaster, I quickly enlisted my HELLO MY NAME IS adhesive name-tag in the service of pulling my shirt together so as not to allow my lowly $100-Jeopardy-question boobs to fly out. Which they did anyway, of course, just as the President of the organization handed me my certificate and accompanying check, in front of a crowd that was obviously confused as to why I had affixed what looked like two balled up tennis socks to my upper torso. (HELLO MY NAME IS: An unimpressive pair of breasts, indistinguishable in size and shape from an aerial view of the decimated sand dunes of Akaba after the Great War!) But antics like this did nothing to harm my reputation. The less I tried, the less I failed. The more I espoused contempt for the entire useless, navel-gazing enterprise that I saw as academia, the more academics seemed to like me. And this one time, maybe a little too much.

To say I stood out was maybe a bit of an understatement. But that still doesn’t justify what happened. My first year of grad school was spent pretending to know who Foucault and Proust were, and all the while making nice with both my colleagues and the faculty in a desperate bid for their approval (“Come on, guys, let’s go to that lecture about quasars and then go make S’mores!“). While the latter group was comprised of the usual cotillion of university eccentrics, by and large the music professors were a pretty OK bunch. One prof in particular taught a class on the history of rock-and-roll, which was perhaps the one subject about which I was unrelentingly enthusiastic. Realizing that one of the program’s newest grad students was something of a rock votary—as opposed to the usual anal classical theorist or manuscript-trawling medievalist—made this particular professor a very happy camper, as he finally had someone who cared enough to help him do a Schenkarian analysis of Pet Sounds, and tell him why she thought Kurt Cobain’s cover of Bowie’s The Man Who Ruled The World was pure genius. By the start of the second semester, my prof, a man-titted Dutchman, had taken to emailing me little anecdotes about Brian Wilson and early Genesis, as well as sending me weekly updates about his finds at student record sales. (“WOW!!! I just got Tales from Topographic Oceans on vinyl! You should come by my office and check it out!!!! ”) There were always more exclamation points than there needed to be, and a few too many emoticons for a man his age.

With time, the emails got longer, and soon he began quoting song lyrics:

“Good morning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here’s a thought…

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long
And wouldn’t it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong…

So true!!!!!

See you in seminar!”

Being that the man was a rock-music obsessive, and had an almost identity-crisis-worthy obsession with Brian Wilson, and given that it all seemed to be delivered good-naturedly and with every intention seemingly academically asexual in its moorings, it was hard to imagine that such missives were anything less than the innocuous ramblings of a man who almost certainly had to wear a brassiere to keep his Flemish man-breastular action from flopping skywards.

But then one day, the lyrics got dirty. In fact, I’m pretty sure they weren’t lyrics at all, and may have actually been a porno transcript. Although it would had to have been the most awkward porno of all time. In fact, in this particular skin-flick, the producer must have been a Masonic wizard, the gaffer a chemical engineer, the script writer a philologist, and the director a Rhodes Scholar. What they had in common is that they were all horny as hell, and didn’t quite know how to say it. So this is the email I woke up to, on the morning after Easter Sunday, after I had driven back to university, and the Good Lord had apparently decided that no resurrection was complete without an impertinent request from a pathetic musicologist to a woman half his age:

“Hi there!!!!!!

This has been a long time coming. I mean, coming is the easy part (hahaha), and it might not necessarily be all that long (D’Oh!), but the point is, in the words of John Lennon, “I want you. I want you so ba-a-a-a-ad.” Or better yet, in the words of Brian Wilson,

Little girl just in your teens (you’re my Miss America)
Little girl you’re in my dreams (you’re my Miss America)
You’re so sweet
you’re so fine
Dear won’t you be mine

I suppose what I mean is, I want to play you like Jimmy Hendrix playing the national anthem. With my tongue.

You’re like a Fender, only wider.

So whaddaya say????

”

To say that I was gripped with nausea would be to suggest that the receipt of this email did not, in fact, provoke a physical shock so profound that my insides were inspired to hemorrhage and I began frothing at the mouth right then and there. When my roommate, upon returning from her Tetris Meeting Group, alighted upon me, mid-seizure, she slapped me across the face and then flung the watery contents of a flower pot towards my head. Again, academics, not really in the habit of knowing what to do in a crisis—unless that crisis involves running out of decimal points on a T1-85 graphing calculator—are not exactly the sort of people you want around when the red phone rings. When I came to, I re-read the email, and was again forced to imagine the unmitigated horror of being smothered alive by male cleavage, and of being left to drown in a sea of belly fat after having to witness a naked Flemish schnitzel attempt to stand erect. All with the fruits of Brian Wilson’s mental illness pulsating through a Bose stereo while I’m told my own girth is somewhere between that of a Les Paul and a baby grand. This was not what I would call a highlight of higher education.

After some deliberation, I called my mother, and told her calmly that I hadn’t been arrested, nor was I injured, but that something had happened and I needed her advice. When I read aloud the contents of the email I received, there was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Ma, are you there?”

“….”

“Ma? Hello?

“YEAH, I’M HEAH.”

“What’s going on?”

And then it occurred to me that the high-pitched swooshing I was hearing was very possibly the sound of her sharpening a knife. So I asked her,

“Ma, are you sharpening a knife?”

“WHAT KNIFE?! OH, THIS THING HEAH? THAT’S JUST THE SHIV I’M GONNA NEED WHEN I GO TO 145^TH STREET TAH GET A TOP AH THE LINE HAND GRENADE OFF THE BACK AH HECTAH DIAZ’S FYAH-AHMS TRUCK. I ALSO NEED TAH STOP IN NEW BRUNSWICK AND PICK UP TOMMY, MIKE AND ANTHONY ON THE WAY DOWN TO MEET YOU.”

“Wait, you’re coming down here?”

“AH YOU SHITTIN’ ME?? NOT ONLY AM I COMIN’ DOWN THEAH, BUT YOU CAN TELL PROFESSAH FUCKIN’ FEELY THAT YOUAH MOTHAH IS ABOUT TO MAKE HIM WISH HIS BAWLLS WUH SMAWLLAH THAN HIS BRAIN. WHEAH’S HE FROM? ICELAND?? WELL TELL THAT ASSHOLE HE BETTAH SHOVE HIS DICK IN AN IGLOO, ‘CAUSE I’M ABOUT TO COME CHOP IT OFF!”

“Ma, I really don’t think this is the way to handle this.”

“YOU KNOW WHAT…YOUAH RIGHT! TOO MUCH EVIDENCE. LEMME CAWLL TOMMY AND TELL HIM TO FUHGET THE LANDMINE AND THE FLAMETHROWAH. I CAN DO THIS SHIT WITH A MACHETE AND A RAPELLING LINE.”

“Ma, if you kill my professor, they will throw me out of this place. Please let me try to handle this by myself.”

Though she had already called both the INS and the CIA in the hopes of having him deported, I did manage to stop my mother from driving a pick-up truck full of plastic explosives into Professor Feely’s office in the Music Department. Instead, I called the University Sexual Harassment Center, and told them everything. Their advice? To wait and see if he did it again, or made any physical advances. While this seems like irresponsible counsel, is at this point worth noting that having tenure is essentially tantamount to being a diplomat. You can park wherever you please, your prostitutes are both disease-free and paid for by your country of origin, and no authority can touch you, no matter how heinous the crime you’ve committed. So essentially, unless Professor Feely was caught scalping me while I was drugged naked in a motel bathtub and he was watching child pornography and single-handedly running a drug cartel out of the Medellín at the time, there was little to nothing anyone could do to punish him. So the net effect of asking me to wait to see if he did something worse was basically their version of allowing me to get a few more properties on the Monopoly board before telling me I’d lost anyway.

Sure enough, two days of radio silence passed, and in the interim Professor Feely seemed to get a little antsy, sending yet another email my way—this one more desperate, deranged and pitiful than anything I’d yet come across.

“Oh dear. I’ve really done it now, haven’t I. I just wanted to get close to you. All this rock and roll stuff was a way of getting in your pants. But since I’ve been shouting your name in my sleep, my wife has threatened to go back to Holland and take the kids with her too. I’m not right in the head, you know. My meds are all screwed up. Music is the only thing I’ve ever loved…even my kids don’t really cut it like a good early Genesis album. I mean, any retard can finger-paint, right? But you—with your irreverence and your clothes that seem so strangely coordinated, and your boobs falling out of your shirt during that awards presentation—you’re incredible!!!!

But what if we just kept it between us? Then my wife wouldn’t have to know! Or the kids! And if you want it too, then we don’t have to tell anyone!

GENESIS said it best!!!!!!!!

And you’d be the one who was laughing
Giving me something I don’t need
You know
I’d always hold you and keep you warm
Oh! More fool me.

Won’t you be my national anthem?

”

Now I was really creeped out. Even I thought about calling Tommy and Anthony in New Brunswick at this point. But I didn’t. Instead, I skipped the Sexual Harrassment Center, with its feckless touchy-feely policies, and went straight for the Dean of the Faculty.

To get an audience with the Dean of the Faculty, you either have to donate millions of dollars to the university’s endowment, or make a visit with him your deathbed wish. Alternately, you can sit in the waiting room outside his office firing an air horn until his secretary goes insane and runs outside, tearing her grey bob out in tufts, and the whole ruckus is enough to get the Dean off his phone call with Salman Rushdie and stick his head out of the doorway to ask what all the fuss is about.

The meeting with the Dean would have essentially been a pointless exercise—since there is literally no punitive mechanism within the university that would have decided Professor Feely did anything to warrant loss of tenure or dismissal—until I realized something. I realized that there is nothing a university of repute hates more than bad publicity. And that–in cases of sexual harassment in particular–this tenet usually extends to the “victim” as well. As the Dean seemed to delight in telling me—while the old laquered oil canvasses of deceased university presidents looked on—was that, if word got out about this, there was no telling what people would think of me. Me! As a result of what he described as “the rampant, reputation-ruining, insidious and speculative gossip” that could ensue from such allegations, the Dean went on to inform me that most of these matters are usually resolved internally, with the result being some compensation—be it extra fellowship money, or some other financial platitude—so that the student remains happy, and, most importantly, quiet.

But what the Dean of the Faculty didn’t bank on was that, from the girl who brought forth such maneuvers as “I will accept this prestigious fellowship with my tits hanging out” and “My mother is about to steamroll over the university gardens in a Cadillac with tinted windows and three guys named Tony in the back,” I really could give a flying shit less about my reputation. Unlike most undergrads in the Ivy League, I didn’t come from a family of wealth or prestige, and unlike most of the grad students, I possessed just enough charm and appeal to have gotten into trouble fairly regularly. So the chances of me sullying the family name any further than I already had in the 22 years prior to this moment were slim at best. So right then and there, I told the Dean of the Faculty of one of the most prestigious universities in the world where he could shove it, and exactly how far, and—given I’d been working on my math since my admission to the university—I even wrote him a formula for the time it would take for my red Chuck Taylors to enter through his ass and knock his jaw loose. And THEN I threatened him with a law suit.

Now if there’s one thing a girl with nothing to lose knows how to do, it’s to make empty threats. I couldn’t afford to launch a law suit against a university like that, so my bluff was pretty balls-out and baseless. But the university was obviously not up for taking that kind of chance, and between the now-bald Dean of the Faculty’s Secretary, and the University’s fabled Rose Garden ruined by the exhaust of my mother’s 1994 Cadillac Eldorado, these people realized I probably wasn’t fucking around.

What happened, you may ask? You may be unsatisfied by the outcome, but in the end, it was really the best they were going to do. After a year-long investigation, Professor Feely was suspended without pay, and while he still has tenure, he has been unable to find a job at another university. His every move is closely scrutinized by the Deans, faculty, and the Board of Trustees, and he’s known far and wide as a person of insidious character and egregious disrepute. I think Salman Rushdie may even be writing his next book about him.

And if he hadn’t had a sordid set of man-breasts where his heart should have been, I bet none of this would have happened.

I guess my brother was right. You can’t have both.

Jihad a little lamb.

“Is this Miss B—–?”

“Speaking.”

“You have something we want.”

“I’m sorry—who the hell is this?”

“This is the Food and Drug Administration.”

Having been a long-time fan of the X-Files, under any other circumstances, this kind of unexpected, cryptic phone call would have been too good to be true. Under any other circumstances, the prelude to this conversation could have been a scene in which I was seen taping an “X” to my window, before waiting up all night in front of the flickering glow of soft core porn until four men in suits show up at my door to whisper only the words “Flower Pot,” before being shot in the elevator by a mutant-strong double-amputee who had cascaded willy-nilly down the building’s ventilator duct in order to complete the mission that he had been brainwashed to carry out since birth, his every motion goaded onwards by a constant, maddening sound frequency emanating from an unknown planet on the outskirts of our galaxy. Under any other circumstances, I could see myself waking up the next day with a lap full of sunflower seeds and my wanking sock (which I eye with a deliberate mix of confusion and dismay so that Fox TV can continue to meet its PG rating) to rendezvous by the Reflecting Pool with my superior at the Bureau. Through gritted teeth, he would tell me (for the 347^th consecutive episode) that he was jeopardizing his position by meeting me there. He would then hand me an unmarked packet, look squintingly towards an unseen setting sun, shake his head, and tell me, “You can’t afford to be wrong this time, Mulder.” And I, in turn, would nod—nod with the deep understanding that only I would be able save the world from an army of aliens breeding like lemurs inside the polar ice caps, in an obscene $150 million remake of the same flimsy script.

But that’s not what happened. What happened was this creepy call from the FDA made me nervous as all ass, and I asked them if they wouldn’t mind calling back in five minutes, after I had the opportunity to take what my best friend calls “an emergency poop.” But let me back up a bit.

I’ve always been a hypochondriac. When I was 6 years old, I remember going into what I thought was some sort of apoplectic shock when I saw my aunt—a corpulent woman whose body type might be likened in both aesthetic appeal and raw power to the nuclear colossus that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 (affectionately referred to as “Fat Man”)—changing into her bathing suit. This I discovered when I accidentally opened the bathroom door in the house we had rented on Cape Cod that summer. Now, there are few things that can really traumatize a child. I will maintain to my last breath that kids are resilient, and can shock-absorb more shit than most adults. At that point in my life, my father had left my mother for something my old Italian relatives contemptuously referred to as a “gumara,” an item that never appeared on the dinner table, so it was safe to assume it wasn’t yet another inscrutable bit of Neopolitan dialect for pasta. The only thing about this new arrangement that seemed to bother me was that the guy who brought home cannolis once a week stopped showing up, and I had no one to play catch with. My brother was too small, and the first time I lobbed a tennis ball at his head was also the last, since I was quickly trundled by my mother to visit a neighbor whose son had Down’s Syndrome, and told “DO YOU WANT YOUAH BROTHAH TO TURN OUT LIKE THIS RETAHD? THEN STOP HITTIN’ HIM IN THE HEAD WITH THAT FRIGGIN BAWLL,” while the child’s parents looked at her in abject horror. But that was it. Nothing else really seemed to affect me about what other people assumed must have been irreparable trauma. To be honest, as I was growing up, I thought kids who had “dads” may as well have been harboring fugitives. But the sight of my Aunt Carmella as God intended her (and by “intended,” I mean, “inadvertently sanctioned while He wasn’t paying attention”) sausage-casing herself into a one-piece, turquoise-skirted bathing suit—the likes of which induced pockets of cellulite to form on her ass until it was unclear at what point astrophysicists might draw the line in their definition of what constituted ultra-planetary terrain—frightened me so much that I started to hyperventilate. In my young life, I had never known such terror.

When my mother saw me turning blue, the look on her face made me realize my present condition was no damn good, and I panicked, which, naturally, made things worse. All of a sudden, a phalanx of old Italian biddies thronged me—the loose fat of their triceps swung wildly about, creating a fearsome assemblage of fleshy wings so vast and prehistoric I thought I had been swallowed irretrievably into a nest of pterodactyls. I was only spared from asphyxiation by that ancient arm flab when the women were pried loose by the EMTs after the ambulance arrived, whereupon I was rushed to the emergency room.

What this event did for my psychological development was convey to me the that the very moment I even thought something was wrong with me, not only was this fear to be taken seriously, but it was almost certainly the worst possible scenario: I was in deep shit and likely going to die. The net effect of which was this: from that point forward, the slightest sneeze was evidence of pneumonia, being even a day late for my period signaled certain pregnancy (even, incredulously, when I was a virgin), and contracting hepatitis or some other communicable death sentence was the only possible outcome of riding the subway.

That’s just the way it was.

*        *        *        *

Many years later, I was in grad school and in the throes of writing my dissertation, while living in a duplex in Princeton with my boyfriend of three years, a philosophy grad student I’d met doing stand-up. All we ever did was laugh. Even when we probably should have been doing other things. The only time we ever took a break from the absurd hyperbole that was our incessant merriment was when he called his parents—every night like clockwork—at 8 pm their time, in Lincoln, Nebraska. The funny thing about their living in Nebraska was that they must literally have been the only Lebanese family to ever cross into, let alone settle in the state. My boyfriend was eager to haul all the way out there to see them, and to finally introduce them to his girlfriend. At the time, I had a car—a Honda Civic I called “la zingara” (Italian for “gypsy”) and, like any grad student with absolutely no money and a bottomless trough of mix tapes and escapist tendencies, I was always up for a road trip.

On the back windowsill, la zingara sported Mardi Gras beads that I’d picked up in New Orleans when I mistakenly flashed my tits to a homeless man (several onlookers, observing my faux pas, tossed me a ream of beads out of pity, telling me to “Never look back.”), a wreath of plastic grapes that some pothead had given me at a party in Texas for knowing “where Waldo” was (my guess, “next to Tantalus, on the banks of hell,” was apparently right on the money!); on the dashboard there was an Italian flag and a fistful of expired PBA cards I’d nicked from my grandpa; and finally—seared permanently into the front windshield—was the blue and pink imprint from a package of Stayfree maxi pads that I’d inexplicably left on the dash during a heat wave until its logo melted itself onto the window. God only knows what was in the trunk. Suffice it to say, when I got behind the wheel of my poor man’s Panzer, I felt like I was driving something storied and indestructible—the automotive equivalent of that piece of luggage you see in cartoons that travels all over the world and returns to its dumbstruck owner having been swaddled in travel stamps that silently herald its adventures across the globe. So I was totally up for a trip to this place called Lincoln. Even if it was in goddamn Nebraska.

The drive out there was uneventful. Unless you consider corn an event. Upon arriving at my boyfriend’s childhood home, I jumped in the shower, not wanting to meet his parents while smelling like the last of the 15 truck stop bathrooms I’d peed in since Chicago—the one with the fruit-flavored condom vending machine whose slogan, “When is a banana not a banana? When it’s a cock!” made me wonder if their marketing team even tried. I quickly hurried into the guest bathroom, turned on the water, and attempted to adjust the rusty shower head to my height. Apparently the last person to use the shower was the now-dead family matriarch, who was only able to bathe when her nurse rolled her wheelchair into the shower so she could wash while seated. So the shower head basically met the appropriate height requirement for a midget, and it was welded in place. That is, until I touched it. And by “touched it,” I mean, “ripped it clean out of the wall.” With the shattered wall tile in pieces by my feet, the pipes now exposed and water spraying everywhere, his parents came running downstairs to find out what was the source of the clamor. I wrapped a towel around myself, sheepishly handed his parents the broken, rust-reamed shower head—a last frail reminder of beloved Grandma—as I introduced myself.

Despite giving his family literally no reason whatsoever to act in any way hospitably towards me (the next morning, I should mention, I spied his father examining the Stayfree wrapper that was fossilized on my dashboard, clearly trying to make out at what point Honda decided to launch their vehicles with feminine products included), they were still more warm and welcoming than any group of people I’ve yet come to know, confirming once again that the Midwest is a pretty weird fucking place. Part of the celebration of their son’s homecoming, despite the questionably-welcome presence of his harried, destructive girlfriend, was the preparation of an elaborate feast, the centerpiece of which—a traditional Lebanese dish called kibbeh neyeh—took a full day to prepare.

The most notable thing about kibbeh neyeh is, despite the elaborate nature of the preparation, in the end, it’s still a ball of lamb ground up with bulgur wheat and onions, and it is eaten completely raw. Coming from a family where it was in no way surprising to be served braised goat face on Christmas Eve, or stewed hooves for Sunday dinner, I had no qualms about eating lamb raw. And when I asked for a second helping, his father smiled a smile so broad and so proud, I knew I could break at least one more thing of value or sentiment before leaving their home, and still be in their good graces.

*       *        *        *

Several weeks later, I noticed that I had developed several enormous swollen glands in my neck. Multiple trips to the university medical center resulted in a stack of antibiotic prescriptions that little by little grew as thick as a deck of cards, and seemed about as arbitrary. Two months passed, and the glands remained. The protrusions were so obvious that I had taken to wearing turtlenecks almost exclusively. Which was awkward, considering it wasn’t 1975. An all the while, I was told it was probably a stubborn sinus infection. But when the sixth pandemic-strength antibiotic I was prescribed failed to take hold, I got my ass to a specialist. A dozen blood tests, three CT scans and two MRIs later, I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I probably had lymphoma. As in: cancer. C-A-N-C-E-R.  Reader, it is at this point that you will recall that the subject of this story was an unremitting, textbook hypochondriac—an obsessive votary of medical worry who needed only the idea of an outbreak in her mind before she burst into hives.

In addition to being a hypochondriac, I’m also what you might call an agnostic. That is, if you care enough to put a name to it. But what’s the point of nihilism anyway, if you’re going to choke its very nature with stickers and labels and bar codes. But the point is, the mere suggestion of cancer induced even me to assume some semblance of religiosity. Which basically meant that I took the Lord’s name in vain more often when I swore, much to the dismay of my mother, who by the time the tentative cancer diagnosis came in, had upwards of two Franciscan monasteries and at least four Convents of the Sacred Heart gunning for a miracle for yours truly. But my version of praying wasn’t exactly welcome at the dinner table.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Stop saying that!” my mother replied.

“Well then tell him to come back.”

Monks prayed, my mother wailed, months passed, and medical test after medical test came back inconclusive. I even had two biopsies, one of which consisted in excising one of the glands from my neck wholesale, leaving me with a two-inch scar. To this day, when people ask me about it, I tell them I took a shiv to the neck in prison, when LaVonda tried to take credit for the license plates I had made. When the inevitable question, “When the hell were you in prison??” comes up, I quickly say, “Holy SHIT, is that the Hindenberg?” and just like that I’m nowhere to be found. But the truth is, a biopsy scar is nothing to shake a stick at, especially when that biopsy scar produced a gland the size of a golf ball that was then unceremoniously sliced up like a sinister mini-brisket at some sort of nightmarish meat counter, and then whisked to labs across the country, much to the befuddlement of all.

With not one, but two biopsies concluded, it was determined that, in the absence of any real evidence of cancer, I probably still had cancer. And just like that, calls were made to Sloan Kettering, and my mother turned my childhood bedroom into an altar. And all the while my dissertation languished, which, as I realized only years later, it should have, since no one really gives a rat’s boiled turd about musicology anyway. But at the time, I was stressed. And my poor boyfriend was doing anything and everything he could to take my mind off of the sinking feeling that I was on death’s door, and, bathing in the languorous mire of self-pity, I barely stopped short of asking him to bring me a vial of infants’ tears, or buy me a pet monkey. And so it went for months, with each day that dawned a new reason to play Russian roulette instead of stare a terminal illness in the face. I don’t know about you, but I’m not one of these people who manages to pry from the gaping maw of tragedy something that bears even the semblance of hope. In this, I have been tested and have failed. Parlously. For me, an average day is barely a reason to get out of bed, and a day that begins with the thought “I have fucking cancer” is enough of a reason to skip breakfast and throw myself straight into a woodchipper.

All my years of worry were finally coming to fruition. Even without an actual proven diagnosis, I knew I was going to die, and that was reason enough to thank Aunt Carmella’s beach-bound thigh fat for making me conscious of my mortality at such a young age. Although, without an actual proven diagnosis, I wasn’t actually getting any treatment. Where was the radiation therapy? Where were the “Get Well Soon” cards? Where were the unsolicited floral deliveries? Where was the nurse who comes to fluff your pillows? Where was the weight loss?? What a gyp. Five months had passed, and I had a neck full of lumps the size and shape of steamed dumplings, and no one knew why. I was determined to figure out what was wrong with me, even if the answer meant I would voluntarily become fertilizer for our backyard.

I decided to try one more doctor. At this point I’d been to about a dozen, and finding a new one basically meant arbitrarily dropping my finger on a name in my insurance plan’s directory, as if were a Ouija board. The name I landed on was an allergist with an office in White Plains. Why I went from oncologists and neurologists to someone whose primary clinical function is to tell their patients whether or not they’re allergic to cat hair or mold, I’ll never really know. But when I told Dr. Goldman all that had transpired, he said,

“Look. You’ve undergone every conceivable medical test. There’s only one remaining thing I can think of- it would be a shot in the dark, because it’s rare as hell, but let’s see, shall we? It’s a simple blood draw. I’ll get the nurse.”

Before summoning his loyal sidekick Clandesia, however, Dr. Goldman got out his medical textbook. Apparently the thing he was testing me for was so uncommon that he needed to double check the spelling.

What Dr. Goldman tested me for was a rare parasite, the charmingly-named Toxoplasmosis gondii. Toxoplasmosis is contracted two ways: cat shit is way number one. This, if you’ve ever wondered, is the reason pregnant women are told to stay away from the mercurial little bastards. Way number two is the reason for which it is generally advised that, unless you are a cheetah, you should refrain from eating raw meat. Because toxoplasmosis is to raw meat bacteria as Demi Moore is to men half her age—it wraps itself around its prey so wholly that it is almost indistinguishable from a boa constrictor swallowing a yak. The test came back positive, and suddenly all became clear. I didn’t have cancer. I had a freaking parasite. And I got it from a well-meaning Lebanese family somewhere in the vast abyssal asshole of America.

Needless to say, upon hearing this news, I immediately envisioned a tall worm wearing a turban and a long black beard as it rode a wild desert stallion named Halil through my veins, galloping wildly from platelet to gland to neuron, braying as it careened from blood cell to follicle to marrow. Wielding a scimitar, I could practically feel it rape and pillage my lymphatic system, the lone warrior in a jihad waged against my insides in the name of the late Ayatollah Khomeni.

Now, if there’s one thing a hypochondriac wants more than a diagnosis, it’s a treatment. So when I asked Dr. Goldman what I should do next, he pointed me in the direction of something called an Infectious Disease Specialist, the very sound of which made my skin crawl. Unless that was Mohammed (Oh, right, I forgot to mention. The parasite’s name was Mohammed. Go ahead, call the ACLU. See if I care.). In any case, off I went, happy enough not to have cancer but still deeply perturbed about what this rare parasite was going to do to me. Would I develop schizophrenia as Mohammed and Halil camped in the dunes of my brain stem? Would I finally lose five pounds as they hurtled through my gastric system? Would my fingernails fall out as I walked down the street as Mohammed played a lonesome panflute by a campfire in my epidermis, to the horror of schoolchildren who passed me by? (“What’s that you say, little boy? You found a fake fingernail on the floor? You must be joking! There’s only one thing tackier than having your fingernails fall out due to the ravages of a mysterious illness, and that is, wearing those ghastly press-on numbers! My dear child, notice the blood-smeared skin flaps on either side—those things are real!”) All I really wanted was a reason for the university to establish a scholarship in my name, or have Regis Philbin host my very own pledge drive with the Make-A-Wish foundation, or at the very least, get a bedside visit from a circus clown. Was that too much to ask? Apparently so. Apparently, Toxoplasmosis, rare as it is, is about as much cause for action as Rectal Thermometer Hour at an old age home. You just roll over and take it.

*        *         *         *

When I resumed something that resembled my life pre-Mohammed, I found I had developed a greater appreciation for the little things. I realized that the best things in life were free, and began shoplifting. I also realized that there was no reason not to invoke the Good Lord just because I wasn’t sick, and really started to work variants of “Jesus [expletive] Christ” into my repertoire. My mother was upset about it, but I told her that since I wasn’t going to say the rosary, this was really as good as it was going to get.

By the time the phone rang late that Thursday afternoon, I’d just about put it out of my mind. I’d really almost forgotten that I had undergone the most intense period of stress I’d ever thought to imagine, and all because a little jihadist bit of ground lamb decided it was a character in The Crucible and went after my insides like a Protestant on a witch hunt. I’d even become less paranoiac about my health, figuring, well, if I didn’t have cancer after all that, maybe it really wasn’t worth worrying about all the time.

“This is the Food and Drug Administration.”

When I asked the woman on the other end of the phone, “I’m sorry, why is the FDA calling me and what exactly do I have that you want?” I got the following answer:

“Your blood.”

Now, there are few things creepier in life than getting an unexpected, unsolicited phone call during which an unnamed member of the FDA tells you they want your blood. The last time I felt this uncomfortable, I was left holding my gym teacher’s jock strap in the locker room after P.E., and the time before that I was fairly certain that one of my third-grade playmates had her ear pressed to the bathroom stall during recess and was actively listening to me poop.

If anyone tells you that Area 51 doesn’t exist, let me tell you something. Our government is so highly calibrated in its intelligence, so subversively aware of its citizens’ every move, that here I was, months after a small-time allergist in White Plains, New York did a blood test for a parasite, that the F.D. FUCKING A was calling me to tell me that not only did they know I had a parasite, but they knew which parasite, when I contracted it, for all I knew that I had nicknamed it Mohammed and his Trusty Steed Halil, and wanted to pay me to donate my plasma to the government. They wanted pint after pint of it—as much as they could squeeze out of me without killing me—in order to make Toxoplasmosis test kits, which could only be created from the blood of those rare individuals who were discovered to be harboring the thing in its most acute form. In return, they offered me thousands of dollars. Thousands. As a grad student, I knew two things very well: how many hours I could reasonably procrastinate from writing my dissertation, and how much debt I was in. Both numbers were inordinately high, and the good people at the F.D.A. wanted to take my mind off the former by making the latter disappear.

“Where do I sign?”

And there was the catch. There’s always, ALWAYS a goddamn catch. In this case, it was that I wasn’t going to be able to sign anything, because there was nothing to sign. No contract, no promises, no paper trail. Just me, an unmarked envelope full of small bills, and something called a “plasmapherisis machine” located somewhere at a blood bank in Baltimore. When this was explained to me, I told the woman on the other end of the line,

“You know what? Unless you can guarantee that you’re not going to use my blood for anything besides these test kits, I really have no way of knowing that you’re not going to steal my DNA and clone me in order to develop an underground army. And I just can’t take that chance.”

As I said this, I rummaged through my desk drawer for a ream of duct tape, and when I found it, I walked over to the window, sandwiched the phone between my chin and shoulder, and taped a big “X” over the lower left pane of glass. I pointed my bedside lamp towards it, and turned off the lights, waiting for her answer.

“Well ma’am, I’m sorry but there is no way we can make that kind of a guarantee. But this is the American government. You have no reason not to trust us.”

Jihad to be kidding.