All Talk and No Trousers

Raymond

Raymond's screen name was ed0pusrex19. I was impressed that he didn't immediately ask to cyber. We found each other in a Star Trek chat room. We'd already had a heated debate over who was the best captain--Kirk or Picard--when he asked for my a/s/l. He was a gentleman, and a traditionalist--he chose Kirk.

When I first started chatting in my early teens and someone would ask “where do u live?” I'd lie and choose a state I'd never liked--Nebraska, Iowa or one of the Dakotas. If I were feeling sultry my name would be something like Veronica or Jasmine. If I wanted to seem interesting, I'd scan the contents of my room, and tell them my name was Paisley or Fedora. And they'd reply, “cool. wat kind of a name is that?“ And I'd tell them it was Finnish.

I didn't want to lie to Raymond, though. He already knew about my love for cheesy science fiction, that I spent my youth taping Deep Space Nine and saving up money to go to Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas--something that I only admitted to people with screen names like “lowrursheilds57” or “livl0ngndpr0spr.”

Anus

Some people I knew were playing spin the bottle in a mini-mall parking lot. I sat just outside the small circle, looking at the bottom of my sneakers. They puffed on cigarettes without inhaling and passed around a bottle they called “Mrs. Trudy.”

A thin-armed girl with a chipped tooth spun the empty Pepsi bottle. It landed on me.

I shook my head and laughed a little. I didn't want to play.

“Don't be a loser,” said a fat girl in a revealing v-neck.

I looked at the person I was supposed to kiss. He had red-hair and a lip deformity that he liked to show off. He'd raise the top of his lip, exposing an additional meaty piece that appeared stitched on; the tiers of lip looked like a fanny-pack under a fat belly. His contorted lips stretched into a smile and he said, “They call me Anus.”

Calvin

Calvin couldn't hear very well. He was a drummer in a band and he went to a lot of alternative rock shows. He'd ask me to repeat everything. I found myself screaming comments like, “Do you like pepperoni on your pizza!” or “I have to go to the bathroom!” Most of the time, though, I liked that he couldn't hear me. I've always regretted my comments immediately after voicing them. I met someone with a speech impediment once. He told me I was “wondahful pahson.” I laughed and asked him why he was talking like Sylvester the pussycat. He told me he couldn't pronounce his “awwhhs.” We never spoke again.

I saw myself as an out-of-place cartoon character with a speech bubble that always said the wrong thing. I wanted to rewind time and erase my comments. Being with Calvin was the closest thing to that. A song would come on the radio and I'd start humming.

“I love the Indigo Girls,” I'd say.

“What's that?” he'd reply.

“I said, I've never heard of the Indigo Girls!”

“Oh,” he said. “You're not missing anything -- they suck.”

Erin

Erin was the star-- and that's the only way she'd have it. Her legs were small and tanned but she thought they looked like chicken bones. She liked to wear floral skirts above the knee and layer cotton tees. Her hair was blond, and it fell to her shoulders when I first met her.

She ordered her coffee with a lot of milk and one sugar. She dated a boy for a long time but she told me was bored. She fantasized about kissing boys who wore hound's-tooth vests or maybe never kissing anyone again. “I'd barely miss it,” she said.

Erin said certain words funny and I couldn't help but pick it up. She wrote poetry about tea-cupped dresses or watching ice break on tile and she didn't show it to many people. We went to a party once. “I'll drive,” she said. She was late, and I knew she would be.

I clutched the door handle as Erin weaved in between slow moving Cadillacs. We walked into the house. Erin was wearing heeled boots and I followed her assertive steps down the hall.

She liked to do impressions of dinosaurs at parties and sing Madonna and everyone would listen. With a red plastic cup in my hand we moved around the hoards of sloppy teenagers. Erin struck up a conversation and her soft giggle seemed to be the only noise in the room. She said we had to run. She waved bye and we kept moving, “I hate that person,“ she said.

Christian

Christian got in first. He put his foot on a rusted indentation and pulled himself up. I watched his body flop in, his curly pony tail trailing behind him. I heard a soft crunch, like a kid playing in a pile of leaves. He trudged toward the edge of the giant, metal box. “Ok,” he said. “This one's really not bad.”

Christian went dumpster-diving and this time I came along. He worked the night shift at Kinko's. That's where we met; he helped me laminate a poster at 3am. I reached for my wallet and he told me not to worry about it.

“Won't you get in trouble?” I asked. He smiled; he had small teeth and his gums looked like the inside of a plum.

“I'd be fired anyway--if they really knew what I was doing here,” he said.

He pulled out a small booklet tattooed with intricate fonts and a picture of two men having sex. It read, “Fuck the man.”

He became determined to convert me to a life of freeganism. He'd decided to start with dumpster-diving. I took careful steps toward the massive receptacle. I smelled old Mexican food and vomit. “I don't want to do this,” I said. Christian cocked his head and looked at me like a concerned tee-ball coach. He reached down and pulled out a rotary telephone and an electric menorah.

“There's great shit in here!”

I could use a new menorah, I thought. The street lights reflected off layered black plastic bags. Christian was grinning widely like he was about to watch his child shoplift for the first time. He secured his position among the trash, dropped the etch-a-sketch he was holding and took my hand.

The Train

I signed up for the first dinner service at five o'clock. A fed-up train employee led us to our table, “You two,” she said. “Slide all the way in.“ Tina got in first; the blue vinyl pulled at her velour tracksuit. We were facing an older couple in golf polos. They didn't tell us their names, only that they were heading back to Rhode Island.

The table was set with formal plastic ware--Amtrak-issued plates and small disposable champagne glasses, the kind used at office Christmas parties. There was a half carafe of white wine on the table. “Look, dear,” the old woman said. “They have booze!”

I ordered the chicken Provencal for dinner. My plate came back with two slabs of chicken underneath tepid cheese and a perfectly rounded scoop of mashed potatoes. I took another sip of my wine--it was as bad as the food, but I found it cute that they tried, like a mom who writes “lol” in her text messages.

The woman from Rhode Island smiled in between bites of limp goulash. I poked my chicken with annoyance. “Do you not eat meat, dear?” she said to me. I lied and said I didn't. “Too bad,” she said. “This food is divine!”

The Big Z

The rabbi wore a powder-blue sports coat and boat shoes. His skin was cracked and orange and I half-expected to hear it crunch as he smiled and took my hand, “Very sorry for your loss, dear.”

I asked my brother how we got Bob Barker’s understudy for the service.

“Well, summer funerals are hard to dress for,” he said.

The ceremony was outside underneath a small green tent. Five of us made up the immediate family and the rest of the guest list was embarrassingly short—a few friends of my mother’s, a cousin once or twice removed and some woman in red pumps that my Aunt Linda referred to as “Dorothy.”

I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Had my grandmother been alive, she would have waited inside or lit up a cigarette and yelled at the rabbi to “hurry the fuck up already.”

The guests formed small clusters, saying a few words and moving on to the next like a square dance round. I looked over at my Aunt Lisa, the youngest of my grandmother’s children. Lisa stood near her siblings, picking at her eyebrows and looking out at the crooked rows of headstones. She hadn’t been down to visit in years. She was once very pretty and won competitions for riding horses but let herself go after having children. She said Barry—her “piece of shit husband”—liked her hair long so she tried to keep it short and choppy. But the style had grown out awkwardly, her bangs covering her eyes like a sheep dog and the back ending just above the nape of her neck—a sort of no-man’s-land of hair length. God knows she did what she could with bobby pins.

My uncle Lee looked the most upset. My mother would say that he was the favorite. He was the president of a company and spent a lot of time in hotels. I only ever saw him in tailored suits with straight gin talking about his “cunty” secretary, Joanne. At the funeral, he looked like a little boy. His wheat-colored hair was parted on the side, his arms were tightly folded and his puffy yarmulke seemed to be missing its propeller.

His wife, Linda, was standing next to him, talking to my mother. They never really got along. Sometimes they’d have lunch and they would laugh a lot. Linda called people “trannies” or a “fags” when she thought they were strange or frumpy. She was dressed in all black, like always, a deep v-neck and tailored slacks. She carried a leather tote and her sunglasses covered most of her face. My mother was gesturing a lot and laughing louder than what was appropriate; and Linda nodded every so often. When I was younger, I’d stare at her rings from across a table—thick, emerald cut diamonds with brushed platinum bands. One time Linda noticed and handed me her biggest ring to try on. “G’ahead,” she said, though she wasn’t smiling.

My mother’s cousin Bonnie and her husband walked toward me. Bonnie was a yoga instructor and wore her hair in a pony tail. We usually had Thanksgiving with them. They served small, chewy corn on the cob and I tried to make conversation with her kids—Marilyn Manson fans with widow’s peaks and long finger nails.

“You know, I gotta be honest, I thought she was gonna out-live us all,” said Bonnie’s husband with faint smile. My grandmother wasn’t old when she died. But I think we found it kind of funny that she was alive for as long as she was. She’d buy Benson & Hedges by the carton; cigarette butts lined with red lipstick were buried in a glass ashtray on her coffee table. A few hypodermic needles were under the “TV Guide” next to a bottle of insulin. I'd watch her take her insulin; she'd reach for the needle, as she would a cigarette or a sugar -free cookie, and I’d wince as she stuck it into her belly.

My grandmother’s hair was dyed bright red and she liked to wear a lot of jewelry. We lived with her for a little while. While my mother was at work, my grandmother stayed with us. She made dinner sometimes. We liked her brisket; though, it was different than my mother's. She would use a whole bottle of Pepsi to soften the slab of meat and top it off with onions and ketchup for taste. She didn't cook often. Most times, I’d find her sprawled out on her beige, leather loveseat, only wearing a loose bra and underwear. Her deflated, freckled breasts were slung over her stomach that shook like tapioca when she laughed.

“Come here, bubalah,” she’d say to me in a deep, raspy voice. “Give grandma a kiss.”

She’d often finger her gums and find a clump of cottage cheese or Saltine crackers behind her dentures. Smacking her lips loudly, she’d bring them close to my face.

I sat down next to her while she watched “Wheel of Fortune” or finished a crossword puzzle. I’d slide into the worn flesh of the couch; her loveseat stunk of old piss and fish. I never breathed through my nose when I was around her.

“Your grandmother,” my uncle Lee would say with a chuckle, “is a fucking farm animal.” He had a thick Long Island accent and sounded like there was a clothes-pin on his nose. When he and Linda would visit, we’d take turns telling stories about my grandmother over expensive meals. We had a few favorites—the time she slid off her couch when she was naked; when she shit her pants at an Italian restaurant; her cruise to the Caribbean where she broke her hip slipping in her own urine. No matter where the conversation started, we’d always end up talking about her.

The rabbi motioned for us to take our seats. There were only a few rows of wobbly lawn chairs but I sat in the front in between my brother and Lisa. Lisa had written the eulogy at my house the night before. She said she wished she could write about the peach and plum pits my grandmother would leave on her vanity table next to old bottles of perfume and liquor.

“That’s what I think of when I think of Mommy,” she said.

I felt the worst for Lisa. She hadn't spoken to Lee or Linda in years and I think even she knew that my grandmother didn't remember her before she died.

"The last thing I need is Linda and Lee looking at me tomorrow with those faces," my mother said. "I just hate those bastards."

My brother and I took a walk around our neighborhood while my mother and Lisa were writing the eulogies. We were heading toward the community pool. When we were far enough away from our house, I took out two cigarettes and handed him one. He smiled and brought it to his mouth.

"It's crazy that the Big Z is done," he said. "I mean, it's no way to live--stuck in a hospital, without any teeth and mistaking your nurse, Guadalupe, for your daughter. It's terrible."

We both laughed a little and made our way to the jacuzzi. We sat on opposite edges, our feet in the bubbling water and our pants rolled up to our shins.

"Mom told me you were upset when she told you," he said.

"I wasn't expecting it."

"Well, obviously. But, why'd you cry, though? It's not like you spent a lot of time with G Funk."

My brother and I used to talk about my grandmother's death while flipping through magazines at grocery stories or over fast food. We'd wonder if Linda and Lee would stop taking us out because we'd have nothing to say to each other; or how much longer she had left; or who would get her rings; or if her absence would bring the family together.

I told my brother, who was looking at his fingernails or fidgeting with a dead leaf, that I was sad because I felt so far-removed from it all, and from her.

"So, it was the guilt," he said.

"When we were kids, when we lived with her, it was funny."

"Well," my brother said smiling, "we're fucked up people."

We came home to my mother exactly as we'd left her, sitting at the table with a blue pen and blank printer paper. She told us she was stuck.

“Help me,” she said.

“I’m not going to write your mother’s fucking eulogy for you, mom,” my brother said.

My mother always had trouble writing. Birthday cards, thank you notes, invitations took her hours to craft—the backs and margins covered with her messy script. She looked at us, ruffled her eyebrows and let out a whine.

“Just get up there and speak from the heart,” my brother said. “You’ll be great.”

“Yeah?”

The rabbi got up to the podium. “Zelda had a thirst for life,” he said. “An avid mahjong player and loved to swim on the weekends. But nothing came before the love she had for her late husband, Seymour.”

My mother brought pictures of my grandfather to her once, “Who’s that?” she said to my mother. After my grandfather died, she moved on to another man she met in her nursing home—a retired solider named Joe who always wore a sailor‘s cap. She told us that they’d sleep together on a twin bed, though we couldn’t understand the logistics. Lee sometimes liked to joke about getting her some Viagra, and one time she even asked for it.

The rabbi finished his speech, and everyone was politely smiling. He called my uncle up first. Lee’s yellow lined paper shook a little as he spoke. The speech was neat and respectful and he cried at parts. I imagined he and Linda writing it on their long dining room table, thinking about the right adjectives to describe her—colorful, or maybe dynamic.

Lisa cried more and looked at the coffin as she spoke, her words slipping out like small, shaky bubbles. Linda’s voice was rehearsed and almost bored; like she was reading a story to a kid she didn’t know. She didn’t cry and I wouldn’t have expected her to.

My mother stood up. She hadn’t brought any sheets of paper or note cards. “Mad-e-lyn,” my grandmother would say, proudly drawing out her name, “is the prettiest of all my children.” My mother had spent afternoons with my grandmother holding her hand—which was curled into a permanent fist and always shaking. She bought her diapers and cleaned up her shit with old towels and they liked to sing duets together.

My mother smiled nervously and looked at me. As she moved toward the podium, she seemed so small. I remembered her speaking at grandfather's funeral years before. It was inside and there were more people and they cried when she spoke.

Now her voice was soft and her hands were shoved in her pockets like a child at her first recital. Her sentences began tumbling out and she tripped over the bigger words. “She was very…chars..cara…chistmati? How do you say it?” she said, starting to laugh. I found myself saying “char-is-matic” slowly like I was giving her an escape route. I winced at my brother and hoped that she didn’t notice.

Half-words and noises filled in her silences like she was practicing a foreign language. She looked at the rabbi and said, “She would’a liked you, boy” and a few people laughed. And then she turned around and straightened her cardigan and stared at the hull of her mother’s coffin. “I’ll miss you, mommy,” she said and started to cry.

She sat back down, and wiped her face dry, “What the fuck did I say?”

The rabbi said a few more words—some in Hebrew--and we walked toward the parking lot.

My mother and Lisa were in front of me.

“Did I completely make a fool of myself?”

“No,” Lisa said. “You know what, I think mommy would have liked yours, at least it was funny.”

I looked back at the green tent. A few men were folding up the chairs and taking the coffin away. Linda and Lee were the last to leave.

Linda walked up next to me, “Never,” she said “Let your mother speak at my funeral.”

I need the eggs

This past November I saw Woody Allen perform at The Carlyle Hotel in New York. It was a birthday present--the most obscene and extravagant of my life.

We met outside of Grand Central. I was dating a lawyer and his office was close by. He was wearing a black suit, light pink shirt and a purple tie. "I always get compliments on this combination," he'd say to me.

Truth be told, he was a bit faggy.

Underneath my thin pea coat and long cardigan, I wore a much-too-short shirt-dress with black tights and pointy flats that looked like gondolas.

Even before we met up, I felt the event had too much hype. Hype is the most dangerous element of an evening. My date was not in high spirits, either. He put his hand on my leg, "Once I get a drink, I'll feel better," he said.

The Carlyle was one of the poshest places I've been to in the city: there was broad, black marble tile, crown molding in every room, and white short-stemmed roses on the tables.

The dining room's decor was "snazzier" than the rest of the hotel. Rococo-meets-modern paintings covered the mint walls. We were escorted to our table that was to the left of the stage. There weren't many people at first--except for an older couple dressed in all beige and sipping cocktails.

The waiter came over to us. "What would you like to drink?"

Normally, we would split a bottle of wine, or at the very least discuss what we were thinking about ordering.

"I'll have a sapphire martini up," he said.

He always ordered shit like that--not just refined drinks but with small flourishes like "up" which he told me means in a martini glass. He was the kind of guy who you envied for the way he ordered a drink and held a cigarette.

The waiter looked up. "And you, miss?"

I didn't say anything. My eyes widened and looked at my date seeming to say, Fuck! What's my line?

"Would you like a glass of wine?" he asked.
I nodded my head.
"Ok..red or white?"
"Red."
"Um..she'll have a glass of the pinot noir," he said.

The waiter left and he looked at me and smiled.

"You're so cute."

After that devastating fail, we ordered $14 Caesar salads to start. A little watery and too heavy on the anchovies, for my liking.

The main course was good--nothing spectacular. I had chicken and he had the lamb. It was very reminiscent of the kind of food I would eat at my grandmother's country club.

"You know, you're supposed to put your silverware like this, if you're finished."
He pointed to his plate as an example.
"Otherwise, it looks gauche."

Our waiter came over and cleared our plates. We ordered another drink--the same for him and a vodka tonic for me.

"You need a new drink, you know," he said.
We'd talked about this before.
"I mean, it's fine, but you have to specify a kind of vodka at least. Not just 'house.'"

The tables rattled and the conversation rose. Woody, wearing a light pink button down and loose khakis, came on stage. Without introductions, the band started to play.

We were both smiling. "You know, if he had a restraining order against us, we'd be violating it right now!" I said.

The waiter brought our drinks. The man sat down a sturdy glass a quarter-filled with vodka and a small bottle of tonic water with a yellow label.

He poured the tonic water and left the bottle.

I took a swig out of the bottle.

"Now that," he said, "was gauche."