How You Look At It We entered a lambada competition for expatriates. It was to be held at the Embassy over the weekend. I had been living on the beach for a few weeks, and I felt as though I had nothing appropriate to wear. “I feel as though I have nothing appropriate to wear,” I said to myself. She crept up behind me. “Yoo hoo,” she lied. I wheeled around and slapped her. I caught a whiff of pork rinds on her breath, and I knew instantly where she’d been. “Is it Ramon?” I asked. “You stupid homunculus, can’t you see that it is you? That it has always been you?” That night we soul-fucked beneath a gibbous moon. Afterward, I slapped her. Ultimately, she would wear a yellow chiffon cocktail dress and I would wear a black rubber body suit and we would sweep the lambada competition at the Embassy. She gave me the trophy. “It is you, it has always been you,” she cried. And I slapped her. Yesterday I read this passage from my forthcoming memoir — variously titled, “Of Paramours and Soiled Boxers” or “Upstairs, Downstairs: Paint My House” — to Dr. Ruben. He said that depending on how they portray those involved, memoirs can shatter innocent lives. I would not be swayed. “Tact be damned,” I roared. “The truth must come out.” Gingerly, he suggested that one line was almost straight from Ring Lardner. I countered that the best writers are also the best thieves. Then he reminded me that I’m a virgin, and that I’ve never been an expatriate, or even south of Hartford. But he said the passage “seems to indicate some disturbing misogynistic attitudes that we might want to discuss.” And I slapped him. So summer has come and gone, the New England hills are ablaze with all the colors of a bowl of Fruity Pebbles and once again, it’s Nobel season. I’ve been ignored and I’ve been ignored and I’ve been ignored yet some more, and I’m not too proud to say I’m pissed. It seems the herring-headed judges in Stockholm always find one excuse or another not to bring me into their little club. And to think that October was once my favorite month. But if I may be so bold, I do believe I am a shoo-in this year. The Swedish Academy would be hard-pressed to overlook the majesty of my haunting and evocative haiku, “White Bulldog,” which I published three months ago on the bulletin board at Terranova’s Laundromat. Haiku is a genre I mastered some years back, and I’ve since published my oeuvre incrementally at Terranova’s, perhaps the busiest location in all of Otis and surely the place to get one’s work noticed. I’ve been calling the Academy — collect — to check whether I am indeed a laureate-to-be, but I’m getting nowhere with the silly bastards. Oh, at first they were polite, handing me the old line about “absolute secrecy.” Whatever. If it’s so damned secret, I asked, then how come three years ago everybody — and I mean everybody — at Terranova’s knew that Dario Fo would take the literature prize. Couldn’t see that one coming a mile away. After a few such dead-end discussions, they declined to accept the charges. Now when I call on my own dime, they put me on hold for hours and make me listen to Muzak versions of ABBA’s greatest hits. Once they threatened to call Interpol. So you better believe I’m going to have some words for the Academy when it comes time to accept the prize. I’ve started to compose a press release to be sent to every major media outlet in the free world detailing the inadequacies of their preposterous organization. And in a bold statement of protest sure to send shock waves rippling through the global intellectual community, I may just blow off the awards banquet. Dr. Ruben takes me to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Shea’s Pine Tree Inn for today’s session. He has the best of intentions, and while his approach is tedious and derivative, I humor him. The man may be on to something. It’s a new twist on situational therapy. He explains the strategy in depth in his latest unpublished book, “Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut, Sometimes You Don’t,” a treatise on bi-polar disorders. Dr. Ruben has a number of unpublished works to his credit, more so than he’d like to admit. I’d guess there are about five or six manuscripts jammed into his file cabinets. As his first and only patient, I feel a certain amount of responsibility for his professional success, or total lack of it. So I’ve offered to publish these works for him at Terranova’s, serially, a chapter or so a month. He declined, which is fine, because it would only distract readers from my groundbreaking haiku. Dr. Ruben likes to pigeonhole me as a “manic-depressive delusional.’’ He believes the best way to attack my “delusions” is to indulge them. A bit of psychological homeopathy, a hair-of-the-dog sort of thing. Every month or so, we role-play. I play a psychologically troubled dead celebrity, and he plays a therapist who knows what he’s doing. He then thrusts me into a situation designed to push my buttons. Last month, for instance, I was Ernest Hemingway. He took me to a beauty salon, where we sat beneath hairdryers, received pedicures and thumbed through back issues of Mademoiselle while discussing my latent homosexuality and the macho front I use to disguise it. Today, at Shea’s buffet, I am Karen Carpenter. I refuse to visit the buffet, so Dr. Ruben heads to the line for me. I didn’t take my medication today, intentionally. It’s a dangerous strategy, but I feel it fosters spontaneity. He returns my plate loaded with macaroni and cheese, beef brisket, ribs, mashed potatoes, ambrosia, cole slaw and something blue that quivers, possibly a member of the Jell-O family. I push the plate forward and ignore it like a deaf stepchild. Plowing into his own pile, Dr. Ruben urges me to try the brisket. I change the subject. “You know, I’ve been thinking my problem is in the material,” I say. “I’m thinking I might want to take a cue from another KC out there, someone the kids think is rather hep, a hep cat as they say. KC and the Sunshine Band. Sunshine being the operative word here. I’ve done some research into this band, and I found that they’re singing about things like boogie shoes, dancing, making love and — if I’m not mistaken — ‘getting down.’ Now these are happy things, sunshiny things, see? I mean, I started off great, on top of the world, so to speak.” Here I pause to admire my pun, which I believe is entirely lost on Dr. Ruben. “But now I seem to be obsessing about rainy days and Mondays, and, well, I don’t need to tell you that it’s just not healthy.” Dr. Ruben shushes me and points with a gnawed rib bone to my untouched plate. I pull a marshmallow from the ambrosia, close my eyes and toss it in my mouth, washing it down with a sip of Tab. I smile, excuse myself from the table, and rush to the bathroom to vomit. Of course by choosing the men’s room, I’ve broken the verisimilitude of the session. Fallen out of character. I force myself to heave nonetheless, but as I’m wiping my chin I’m thinking that maybe I’m going above and beyond the call for the sake of indulging the good doctor. I return to the table, wan and slumping. Dr. Ruben accuses me of vomiting. I move to slap him, but he catches my wrist en route and squeezes until I shriek like a calf in a slaughterhouse. Chastened, I turn my attentions back to the ambrosia. As he sops the last of the congealed grease from his plate with a biscuit, Dr. Ruben — his mouth stuffed full of macaroni and cheese, some of it dropping out as he speaks — asks why I think I’m so fat, when it’s plain to see that I’m a beautiful though malnourished woman in dire need of a good lunch. I counter that I do not think I’m fat. I’m simply working toward my ideal weight. “Excuse me, Doctor, but if anyone here should be feeling a little chunky, it’s you,” I snarl. “What’re you up to these days, two-forty? Two-sixty? Rather hefty for a man of your undistinguished height. Your figure’s a little, uh, Rubenesque, wouldn’t you say?” He blushes. I’ve struck a nerve. “So then, fat man, looks like you’re done with your plate, unless you want to lick it. Want mine?” I push my plate over to him. “If we pull the table a little over my way, I think we can still get you out of this booth. So dig in, fatty.” Dr. Ruben’s eyes turn down. He stares silently at the table for a few moments. When he looks up I can see his top lip trembling. His eyes are moist. “Aw, did I hurt the fat boy’s fat feelings? Fatty fatty fat-ass gonna cry?” I leap up from the table, dancing and chanting “Big fatty, fat-ass.” My chant proves infectious, and diners at the surrounding tables — who I believe have been on my side ever since the wrist-squeezing incident — join in. Soon the kitchen staff emerges to join the chant, and for the next five minutes we are three dozen people with one voice. Dr. Ruben’s eyes are shut tight and his fingers plug his ears. But when it becomes apparent that we will not relent, he bolts from the restaurant in tears. Cheers and high fives all around. Far more than just a successful demonstration of humiliation through mass hysteria, though, I hope I have provided Dr. Ruben with incentive to start dieting. I owe the man, and if I can help him in any way, I’m more than willing to try. For a time, Dr. Ruben was perhaps the only person in my life who ever recognized my true potential. It’s like my Grandma Sadie once told me when I was but a toddler, resting on her bony knee. “You’re freakish and inept,’’ she cooed while tickling my chin, “and life is going to pass you by like a bullet train past a grazing cow.” Which I since came to realize was an extraordinarily prescient statement. We didn’t even have bullet trains back then. I’ll allow that to the untrained eye, I may have exhibited symptoms of infant lunacy. And I’ll be the first to admit that speaking in tongues is a poor choice for first words and hardly a way to endear yourself to a hopelessly traditional set of parents waiting for something more trite like “Mama” or “Da” or whatever it is your garden-variety child first blurts. Given that we lived in a hill town, I thought they’d see the humor in some Pentecostal gibberish, but I was dead wrong and damned disappointed in their stunted senses of humor. “Every village has an idiot, son,’’ my Dad later explained to me. “The people of Otis are counting on you.” Grossly misunderstood. It wasn’t because I was dimwitted or uncoordinated that I didn’t walk — didn’t even leave my crib — until I was nine. Frankly, I just felt as though I had nothing appropriate to wear. But that all changed when I discovered the ascot. Paired with a striped Oxford rowing blazer and crisp white slacks, an ascot makes a powerful statement, albeit a statement my classmates at Otis Consolidated Middle School were ill-equipped to translate. At recess I was routinely stripped bare, hung from the monkey bars and clubbed like a baby seal. But these beatings gave me invaluable insights into the human condition that I was later able to apply to my earth-moving haiku. More importantly, they made women think of me as the dark, brooding yet painfully vulnerable type. I capitalized on this perception, and used it to coax my baby sitters into wanton and bizarre sex acts. Just moments after my parents would leave for an evening on the town, I’d slide down the stairway banister wearing a crimson smoking jacket and a teal ascot — a deadly seductive pairing, particularly since the teal brought out the myriad colors of my black eyes. I’d hardly make it through the first verse of “Tonight’s the Night” before the baby sitter would tear open my robe and lick my bruised ribs. I cover several such instances in detail in my memoir. I haven’t yet shown these passages to Dr. Ruben, who’ll be sure to challenge their validity. But let’s remember this condescending skepticism comes from a man who couldn’t get laid at a women’s prison with a fistful of pardons. I have tried, Lord knows, to find a love interest for Dr. Ruben. The man’s been living alone longer than I have, in the starter home he bought for his starter marriage. I live alone, for much different reasons, in the house I inherited from my parents. They died several years back, and I don’t really care to recount the incident, even in my memoir and particularly not in haiku. Suffice it to say I now realize that’s it’s not funny at all to sneak up on people, particularly near a precipice. My solitary life in the old homestead has suited my needs to this point, but Dr. Ruben’s bachelorhood has been an unending source of pain, whether or not he wants to admit it. I’ve tried to find him companionship. I’ve gone so far as to place personal ads for him in the Pennysaver. “DWM: 40ish, full-figured professional therapist seeks woman. Not picky, no offers refused. Push, pull or tow it in.” Alas, no replies. Women don’t really want to date therapists. Too much scrutiny, I suppose. I first met Dr. Ruben just after his wife left him ten years ago. It was the eve of their third anniversary. He was asleep at the bar in the Olde Forge Inn, a place I no longer visit. It’s no fun being in a bar when you’re sober, and alcohol does not mix with the medication. Just ask anyone who attended my parents’ wake if you don’t believe me. But that night I bellied up to the bar. He came to, gazed at me through bleary, swollen eyes, and recounted his woeful tale. Shameless, I thought, this outpouring of self-pity to a stranger. I slapped him and demanded that he capitalize on his newfound freedom by pursuing a long-deferred dream. At this, he brightened considerably. He said his line of work caused him to serve as a confidante for lost souls, a shoulder to cry on. He assumed the role proudly, and felt he could become a successful therapist. I egged him on, urged him to quit his job immediately. Told him there was no time to waste. He took my advice, stepped out from behind the bar and left the inn at a gallop. The downside being that I had to pour my own drinks for the rest of the evening and close down the bar; the upside obviously being that I didn’t have to tip him. The next afternoon he called and asked if I wanted to come over to his house for a therapy session. I didn’t want to throw a wet blanket on his newly sparked enthusiasm, so I obliged. He gave me the first hour on the house. I’ve racked up countless hours with him over the last ten years, and by his estimation I’ve made considerable gains. I no longer cry during AT&T commercials, for instance, and I haven’t for years considered it necessary to pen the first draft of each haiku using my own blood. These are gains from his perspective. But from where I stand, they are merely phases I’ve passed through as I came to embrace new ways. The old ways weren’t worse, just different. The fact is, life is a lot simpler than most therapists will lead you to believe. It has to be this way. If you understood that life is truly simple, they’d be out of work. So they make it out to be a series of challenges and obstacles, a never-ending wrestling match with the shortcomings of your psyche. They may say you’ve made “progress” in certain areas, but immediately they identify other deficiencies that need work. They prey on insecurity, and feed it whenever possible. The trick is to believe in yourself. Believe in yourself, and the rest of the world — therapists and the Swedish Academy aside — will follow suit. The Nobel season has made me anxious, and I decide it’s time for a little self-promotion. I set up a card table in Terranova’s Laundromat and give an unscheduled reading from my memoir. I’ve always given readings in this way. Unannounced, guerrilla-style. It keeps my readers on their toes. The drawback is that sometimes the crowd isn’t what you’d hoped for. Today at the laundromat, there’s one woman tending to a load of whites and an older gentleman with oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable tank, folding his nylon socks. He feigns a preposterous amount of interest in his socks as I start to read. This is nothing new. For every appreciative audience member, there’s a Philistine immune to the power of life-affirming literature. I direct my reading to the woman. I’ve seen her in Terranova’s on a number of occasions. If I could be bothered with such jejune matters as sexual attraction, I’m sure I she would give me an erection. Her auburn hair, pulled back from a fair and open face, sets off brilliant jade-green eyes. A paint-streaked sweatshirt masks what must surely be heaving breasts, or at least breasts prone to heaving under the right conditions. One leg is noticeably shorter than the other, forcing her to walk in elliptical patterns, but the layout of washers and dryers at Terranova’s is amenable to this, and she pulls it off with aplomb. I finish the lambada passage, and skip to the section detailing my consternation with the Royal Canadian Mounties and their parochial attitude toward nudism. My reading is passionate and forceful, and I can see by the way she fluffs and folds that she’s moved to the very marrow of her misshapen bones. I set aside the memoir, and pull one of the copies of “White Bulldog” from a pile at the corner of the card table. I clear my throat and spit into a cup, readying for the coup de grace, a rapier thrust of dramatic reading. “White Bulldog,” I bellow. Pregnant pause, let go full term and into labor. “Fur on my blazer/ White hairs on my blue blazer/ Damn furry blazer.” At this, she looks my way. I hold out the sheet. “Would you care for a signed copy?” I offer. She demurs, wipes her fine, aquiline nose on her sleeve and turns back to her laundry. I introduce myself and offer a handshake. She hobbles around a bank of washers and meets my grip. Her palm is meaty and tender, like a medium-rare strip steak. In a throaty voice, she says her name is Victoria, but her friends call her Death. To my surprise, I feel a stirring in my loins, though it could be that my colostomy bag needs emptying. Her eyes lock onto mine and for a moment, I am without words. The moment passes. “So then, do you come here often?” I ask. Every other day, sometimes more, she says. “Must have a large family to require such frequent laundering,” I reply, and the subtlety of my message is not lost. No, she says, she lives alone. “And you do laundry at least every other day? My dear, this is a layman’s diagnosis, but I’d say you suffer from an acute case of launderlust.” She snorts in disgust and says she’s an artist. A painter. Laundering is her time to reflect on the day’s accomplishments, she explains. I ask what she accomplished today. She stares off into the distance, then speaks as if awakening from a week-long slumber. “A study of my soul in crimson and teal.” I clutch my chest. “Crimson and teal?” She nods. I explain that this was my color scheme of choice during childhood seductions. I tell her how I can envision her soul in those colors. I tell her how it makes me want to weep copiously, in pain and in triumph. And she slaps me. I am smitten. December is upon us, time for the banquet in Stockholm. My invitation has not yet arrived in the mail. I’ve heard talk that this year’s literature laureate is some South American “magic realist,” a man clearly unfit to sharpen my pencil. But I remain hopeful. This talk could just be a canard put forth by the cowardly American news media, which have long refused to acknowledge me. Of course, I don’t make myself accessible. My phone number is unlisted. Death thinks I may just have to wait another year. She’s as loyal and appreciative a woman as any man could hope for, and I let her know this. By day, I sing her praises from my rooftop, at least until the Sheriff drops by to tell me to knock it off. By night, we take one another’s temperature and swap medication until a woozy euphoria overcomes us and we make prank phone calls overseas. Death inspires my art, and I hers. For us, this is everything. My blissful time with Death has also helped me recognize a responsibility that to this point, I’ve ignored. I skipped yesterday’s session with Dr. Ruben. We were to meet at the rifle range, where I would play Jackie O. But this can’t continue. Partly through denial and partly through a misguided sense of noblesse oblige, I’ve put off the inevitable: It’s time to let Dr. Ruben go. I’ve done just about all I can for him, and I think it’s paid off. To an extent. He’s still not quite where he should be, but to continue seeing him would only turn our relationship into a crutch for him. For better or worse, it’s time for him to strike out on his own, find other patients, publish or perish. Last night I had a dream that brought it all into sharp focus. I was riding on a bullet train through a lush, rolling green landscape. I glanced out the window at the countryside whizzing past like a videotape on fast forward. At the edge of an electric fence, a Guernsey cow stood chewing cud. And for a moment, the scenery moved in slow motion. The cow locked eyes with me and spoke. “Eat more vegetables,” she said, then winked a long-lashed, bovine eye. I awoke in a sweat, bounded out of bed and grabbed a pen and paper. In this dream, I knew, lay the seeds of the haiku that would at last win me international recognition. The lines flowed forth like noble wine from an ancient cask. I fumbled only briefly. Vegetables — three syllables or four? It’s all in how you look at it.
Copyright © 2001 T Q Cebula |