Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Fewer Things in Life Feel Better Than Realizing You’re Not a Freak

A couple of weeks ago, my wife Carrie and I were in the living room, trying to calm down twenty-seven-month Julia who wakes up like a demon-possessed Linda Blair for close to an hour after her afternoon naps. During the fracas, Carrie was on the phone with her sister, Jenny, a woman who loves mothering and parenting, a woman who believes in these things at the core of her being. Carrie managed a conversation over Julia’s howls and gurgles and when she got off the phone she said to me that her sister asked, “What’s that noise?”

“Oh, that’s Julia. She just woke up from her nap. She does that every day.”

“Oh my God! If one of my children did that, I’d want someone to blow my brains out!”

“That’s what my husband has felt like for the last twenty-seven months,” my wife said.

Jenny, you are my hero. You, a believer in motherhood and parenting (I’m still agnostic on the matter but hope to grow in the faith of parenting), sharing my agony and my hyperbolic reactions to adversity.

So I’m not a freak after all. Or at least not in this instance. 

 

 

Herculodge Hiatus Till Tuesday for College Summer Break

 

With my students graduating from my 1C classes, I'm taking my family on a strenuous operation for the next few days. I dare not call it a vacation. My wife and I will be in the car for six hours with twin two-year-olds, a very formidable situation. 

I'm already tired and the "vacation" hasn't even started. 

Wish us luck. 

Your Manhood Is Predicated on Knowing the Situation

This morning at the park, the twins and I strolled inside the partitioned park (Natalie and Julia in the wagon) when we saw a mother and 4-year-old daughter reading quietly under the slide. 

Natalie joined them, sat there, and I said hi to the mother, but she silently got up and walked outside. What a churlish individual, I thought, as I began to do 200 bar dips. 

Ten minutes later, the daughter assumed a sour face and left. The snooty child takes after her mother, I said to myself. Then I realized I was living in a fog: My daughter Natalie had pooed her pants and had an actual oil spill blow-out. I would have reacted the same had I been in their shoes. 

So there I was doing bar dips, scorning an innocent mother and her daughter, with my daughter covered in filth. 

After changing Natalie's diaper, I looked in the mirror and pimp-slapped myself . . . twice. 

Always know the situation. 

Sexy Chicken

 

 

I was in my late teens when I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and on the counter was this yellow, slimy chicken. The plucked bird looked forlorn, a leper sulking on the cutting board. Mother was standing next to the chicken holding a cleaver.

“You need to learn to clean out this chicken,” she said puffing on a cigarette.

“I don’t want to touch it,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”

What Mother said next ruined my life. She said, “You better learn to clean a chicken. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to make love to a woman.”

Was there some Freudian nugget of genius insight in her analogy between one’s capacity for wallowing in blood and guts and one’s skillful navigation through difficult sexual techniques? Perhaps she sincerely believed that getting my fingers deep inside the labia-like folds of moist chicken flesh was a prerequisite for my transformation into a first-rate lover.  Or perhaps she was demonically sabotaging what little confidence I had in my hormone-soaked, vulnerable self-confidence. Perhaps when she shut herself up in her bedroom she was reading How to Irreversibly Destroy Your Child’s Psyche in 90 Days Or Your Money Back. Or perhaps I’m underestimating her. Perhaps she was writing that damn book.

My mother is a very complex human being, so I cannot honestly say I have a clear and single answer for any of the possible motives behind the Chicken Incident. My best guess is that several of those explanations I stated may be partially true and most likely none of them are completely true.

What I can say with certainty is that after she made her remark, I puffed my chest and exuding the same military aggression I learned from my father I said something like “That is utterly absurd, Mother,” before disappearing into my room. I turned on my radio full blast to the rock station, KYA-FM, and started working out with my weights.  Energized by the 1970s music of Kansas or King Crimson or Yes or Genesis, I would perform my bench presses and curls while visualizing myself being a world-famous bodybuilder living on a tropical island and drinking juices from halved coconuts while surrounded by hordes of women helplessly drawn to my masculine pulchritude. 

 

The Curse of Tatiana Minero, Part II

But you see, not all is well. My wife is often awakened at night by my crying out Tatiana’s name. Yes, I still dream of her. Imagine it. Tatiana, a girl I never even touched, being the cause of my greatest infidelity! It brings me so much anguish to still be under her spell more than thirty years later. She is such a haunting presence in our home, such an unwelcome apparition. Sometimes my wife, after hearing me speak of Tatiana in my sleep, must leave the bed and weep downstairs. I no longer try to comfort her, for I’ve learned that in these moments she is inconsolable and that my words, no matter how kind and sincere, only torment her all the more.

I rarely sleep at night myself because I fear I may see Tatiana again. Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she says she still wants me. Sometimes she cries because, she says, I have betrayed her.  Sometimes she does not even appear beautiful but looks decrepit, hollow, and reptilian. I know she is not the same girl who spoke to me at the lake over thirty years ago. She is something else entirely, a demon, a succubus, an unclean spirit that slowly rots my soul, eats away at my marriage, and shows me no mercy.

I fear that if this goes on my wife will leave me. She hasn’t said so explicitly but I know she is considering it. Who could blame her? Married to a man whose heart still clings to something that is not even real. A man who cannot and will not let go of the past. A man who feels entitled to nurse his grievances, to make them more important than anything else in the world. This, you see, is the very curse I’ve been talking about—the  stubborn refusal to let go, the unrelenting determination to make the lost opportunity more significant than it really was.

Downstairs I hear my wife crying. I know it’s my fault, for I’ve been dreaming of Tatiana again, uttering her name like a whimpering dog. Yes, I am pathetic, repulsive even. But equally repulsive is my wife whose loud, peasant-like sobs and that hideous drink she’s been taking lately—a vermillion green chalky substance that her doctor promises will assuage her chronic dyspepsia.

I cannot contemplate my wife’s gaseous condition without flaring my nostrils in disgust, after which I feel compelled to imagine my lovely Tatiana, so full of grace, sophistication, and splendor. She would never suffer such an unwomanly affliction that would require the consumption of a bitter-tasting noxious beverage. Nor would she ever cry like that. No indeed. Tatiana, you can be sure, would weep in silence and her tears, running down her velvety cheeks, would only enhance her already sublime beauty, the kind for which an idiot like myself would throw away his entire life. 

 

 

 

 

The Curse of Tatiana Minero, Part I

 

The incident that sealed my deeply-entrenched bitterness and my brooding disposition forever, an event that at the time seemed relatively harmless, happened to me over thirty years ago. I was sixteen, a bodybuilder of svelte proportions, tanned and endowed with long brown locks, luscious thick eyebrows, and piercing beady brown eyes. I had showy squared-off cheek bones and a strong commander-like jaw that allowed me to exude a certain swarthy appeal. But beneath my supercilious, self-assured pose resided your typical teenage male, a social nincompoop, self-conscious, awkward, prone to excessive sweating. I was, like many young men my age, tongue-tied around women, having devoted all my time and effort to honing the perfect body but spending zilch on attaining even a modicum of a personality. A pity I didn’t have the insight to see that such a condition would lead to a life-long curse, a searing affliction that men suffer when they are compelled to look back on a lost opportunity and then are left to wonder what could have happened if only they hadn’t fumbled the ball.

We all fumble. We all make mistakes. But we all learn from our errors and go on with our lives. Right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Take it from me, a middle-aged, rancorous man, heavy-hearted, emotionally-arrested, a slave to the past,  a helpless victim to a memory that, against my will, plays over and over in my mind and keeps its freshness and vitality even as I wither away.

The incident happened in the dead of summer. Scheduled to enter Mr. Teenage Golden State in a couple of weeks, I was tanning myself at Cull Canyon Lake, when I noticed an olive-skinned girl had thrown down her towel close to me and plopped herself down on the sand. This was no ordinary girl. This was a sixteen-year-old goddess, the fabled Tatiana Minero. Her body slathered in a deliquescing, zero-sun protection tropical banana-coconut tanning oil,  she was soon stretched out in the supine position, revealing her smooth, willowy body in a tiny green chambray bikini, the material so scanty that both top and bottom could easily fit inside a robin’s egg. Her straight, dark, silken brown hair flowed down the length of her sleek, reticulated back. Her diminutive ankles were adorned with little shimmering bracelets of tiny silver, almond-shaped bells that jingled when she walked, emitting a sort of siren’s call so that every time she stood up to walk toward the drinking fountains, all of the men, overcome with a sort of smoldering, glandular itch, abruptly stopped what they were doing to observe what was no doubt the most cataclysmic event of the day, the witnessing of Tatiana Minero strolling slowly toward the drinking fountains to take a sip of water. To see Tatiana Minero get up from her towel, stroll toward the fountains, wet her parched mouth, and return to her spot on the sand was to be keenly aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. Male hormonal levels, tensions, and anxieties immediately began to rise and seethe as all men’s eyes were glued to Tatiana’s trajectory to and from the drinking fountains. It was as if her mere act of walking was a rare phenomenon, one of the great wonders and mysteries of the world, so that all the men at Cull Canyon Lake, not wanting to miss a second of this breathtaking spectacle, became completely fixated and motionless in a sort of bizarre time warp whereby Planet Earth seemed to have, in deference to Tatiana, stopped rotating.  I can still see the men frozen between the apex of their leap off the diving board and the water below them, I can still see them stuck in mid-air as they lunge for a Frisbee or a football, I can still see them unable to clamp their teeth down on the mouth-watering poor boy sandwich they were eager to bite into just a moment before Tatiana Minero stood up and, like the Priestess of Planetary Rotation, halted the Earth’s revolution around the Sun. All of the men at the lake, their conversations and antics interrupted, their lives put on hold, their very thoughts jammed, were noticeably agape, their eyes burning with torment and insanity, as they beheld this sylphlike teenage girl walk ever so slowly toward the drinking fountains.

To add to our misery, occasional breezes wafted Tatiana’s sweet-smelling tanning oil into our direction, affording us a redolent reminder of her presence so that, like dogs in some cruel Pavlovian experiment, we shuddered with violent paroxysms as we inhaled her potent, ambrosial cocktail. 

But the torment didn’t stop there. As if Tatiana wasn’t already unbearably irresistible, she also enjoyed the cachet and supernatural aura of  belonging to a prized progeny of sisters, aunts, and cousins, who, known simply as The Minero Sisters, were legendary throughout the San Francisco East Bay for their beauty, the kind that aroused such passion that men squandered entire fortunes, warred and conspired against each other, and plotted diabolical schemes into the deep of the night for the privilege of being one of their suitors.

As I tried to relax on my pale orange Charlie Brown bedspread,  I had heard some guys nearby whispering to each other, with the kind of excitement and conspiratorial glee reserved for surprise movie star appearances, about how this gorgeous girl lying on the sand next to me was one of the Minero Sisters. To merely utter the words “Minero Sisters” elicited an immediate smile and understanding and sometimes caused the hairs behind a man’s neck to bristle, for the words had the same kind of power and brand recognition as the words BMW, Mercedes Benz and Lexus.

Some guy from my school had introduced me to Tatiana as she was lying on her beach towel just a few feet away from me. To my surprise, upon meeting me, her ears perked up and her dark saucer eyes seemed to greedily soak in her view of me as she sat upright, supported by her long, slender arms, their sleek shape and cocoa butter tan highlighted by gold arm bracelets coiled around her delicate wrists like writhing snakes. With a coquettish giggle, she outstretched her legs in front of her while her high-arched feet circled playfully, causing her ankle bells to jingle. Then turning her head toward me in a way that caused her long dark brown hair to whip around her body like a matador’s cape, she stared at me, asked me who I was and why she had never seen me before.  The tone of her voice was downright imperious. She sounded like a mildly irritated queen who would have her informants beheaded for having failed to apprise her of my very existence. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” she asked again. I told her I attended Castro Valley High. No wonder, she said, she had never seen me; she was a student at Hayward High School. Then out of the blue, she asked me a question that caught me completely off guard:

“Are you a good kisser? Cause with a body like that, boy, it would be a real shame if you weren’t a good kisser.”

In shock, dumbed by her beauty, and paralyzed by such a brazen proposal, my bowels loosened, and I found myself unable to speak. I tried and tried with all my will to say something in response to her audacious remark but my lips were pressed shut. I would have been happy merely spitting out some incoherent gibberish, but my brain synapses were apparently short-circuited rendering my jaw locked and I was revealed for who I truly was, a helpless mute, a dumbfounded ninny, an inexperienced awkward-handed Billy goat,  unworthy of holding court with the great Tatiana Minero. 

My failure to respond to her scintillating offer seemed to tell her all she needed to know about me, which was, of course, that for all my tanned, sculpted muscles, I was in fact not a good kisser, not just in the literal sense of not being able to kiss, that is, the mechanical act of caressing her lips with my own, but in the fuller, broader, more devastating sense of not having the confidence, the moxie, and the élan, to express passion toward her. Her question about my kissing was in a way an ingenious work of espionage; she had sent a reconnaissance team, a sort of Geek Patrol, into my psyche to see just what I was made of and found, rather quickly, that I was indeed a geek, so that, armed with this information, she insouciantly turned around and did not speak to me again.

Ever.

It was not just that she did not speak to me, but, on a more traumatic scale, that she actually seemed to recede from my universe, fade, and disappear, forever out of my grasp so that now, over thirty years later, I still reconstruct the event and imagine how rapturous it would have been had I had it within me to respond to her question with something charming, assured, and sophisticated, something that would let her know that I was indeed the great kisser she had been looking for.

Please don’t get me wrong. It’s not like my whole life has succumbed to this one incident. I’ve moved on as best I could. I went to college, got a decent-paying job, and married a beautiful Mediterranean woman. She is a splendor to behold, voluptuous, large-lipped, blessed with long curly brown hair. Quite frankly, the best way to imagine my wife is to think of Anita Ekberg in Federico Fellini’s famous fountain scene in La Dolce Vita. Yes, my wife does possess what many might call that larger-than-life kind of beauty, the kind that is so powerful and delectable that I enjoy, in the public arena, the assurance and satisfaction that other men will seethe with envy and admiration whenever they see me with her.

 

Scary Mary, Part III

Graham passed the treadmill test but seeing all those electrodes on his shaven body made him feel weak and sickly and he had to lie down on a hospital bed while Dr. Lowell, a pudgy-faced man with a shiny pate and thin white hair, looked down at Graham with what looked like irritation.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. “You’re free to leave.”

Graham’s feelings were hurt, like the doctor, annoyed that Graham had faked his condition, was taking up Dr. Lowell’s valuable time. 

“I said you’re free to leave,” the doctor continued. “You can take your things and go. There’s someone waiting for you in the lobby. She’ll drive you home.”

Graham looked up and saw Mary, wearing a cloying smile, standing in the doorway. 

He wanted to tell the doctor that he did not feel well at all, that further testing was in order. However, the real problem, he knew, was not physical but pertained to the trauma of seeing the manikin.

“We’re taking you home,” Mary said, “where you can get some rest.”

“You’re lucky to have her,” the doctor added. “She’s one of the best. Now let’s go.”

The doctor briskly tore the sheet off the bed and told Graham to hasten his departure. He had more pressing matters to take care of. Graham slipped his pants on, grabbed his watch and wallet, and followed Mary to her car. The inside was covered with cigarette ashes and smelled of caked-on dirt and nicotine. The black vinyl seat was cracked and its slits dug into his rear. Behind him in the back seat was the manikin still dressed in his clothes. The dummy had a seat belt strapped across its waist. Its wide-eyed expression seemed to be one of great joy and satisfaction, like the family dog who at the last minute is allowed to ride in the car to the family picnic.

Mary started the car and told Graham she’d give him a nice warm bath when they got to his apartment. He wanted to protest but the thought of the dummy behind him, its leering smile scorning Graham’s very existence, forbade him to speak.

About a mile from the hospital was a cemetery. Green knolls were spotted with flowers and gray tombstones. Mary waved in the direction of a grave plot, then explained that she was just saying hello to a friend. Did she mean someone she had once known? Or was she speaking in the present tense to suggest that she regularly communicated with the dead?  Graham did not know and he could not ask. His powers of speech remained null.

When they returned to his apartment, Mary filled the tub, told him to undress, and said he should go to sleep afterward. She was worried he might be suffering from a Valley Fever relapse. While he bathed himself, she would tidy up his apartment. As he sat in the steaming water, he remembered a dream he had the night before. Carrie and Samantha, two glamorous characters from his favorite television show Sex and the City, were at a Manhattan cocktail party that Graham attended and because of Graham’s low social status the two cosmopolitan women berated the party’s host, a tall, dark man in a tuxedo, for allowing riffraff like Graham to be allowed in their presence and they persuaded the host to expel Graham from the premises. When Graham awoke from his dream he felt deeply hurt as if somehow the dream, especially as it pertained to his inadequacy, had been true. The wound of rejection resurfaced and he sunk his head beneath the sudsy water and started to cry. He thought about drowning himself but was too scared of being punished in the afterlife. Overcome by self-pity, he got out of the tub, studied his wrinkled skin in the mirror and put on a robe. He heard Mary call him into the bedroom. He opened the door and saw Mary sitting upright on his king-sized bed. She was wearing a black nightie and eating chocolate turtles from a lacquered box shaped like a treasure chest. Next to her, also sitting upright, was the dummy, now undressed. Graham’s stolen clothes were neatly folded and draped over a nearby chair. The dummy’s hands were in its lap. In the hands was an International Male catalog. Strewn across the bed were other catalogs for clothing, electronics, and automobiles, all of which Mary had retrieved from the nearby dumpster.

“I thought you might have missed these,” she said, smiling at the catalogs. She ate a chocolate and then lifted her left hand for him to see. On her wedding finger was a zirconium ring she had purchased while watching a late-night infomercial.

"You can’t tell it apart from a diamond,” she said. “Come here. I want you to take a close look.”

Graham stared at the dummy, which seemed to be communicating with him, warning him not to come any closer, but to flee for his life.  No! No! No! No!

"This is my room," Graham managed to say. "You're not supposed to be here."

"Of course I am. You need me."

Graham felt painful palpations in his chest. "I’m still experiencing discomfort,” he said.

"Come here and let me help you feel better."

Against his will, he walked closer so that he was just inches from her. He stared at the dummy. Its expression urgent, frightful.

No! No! No!

But it was too late. She grabbed Graham’s hand.

You don’t belong here, he wanted to tell her. But he had no more strength to speak. He felt her pull him toward her. He felt his knees buckle as he fell on the bed. He heard the dummy urging him to run for his life, to go somewhere far, far away, but he could not resist Mary’s powerful arms, which drew him closer and closer.

 

 

Scary Mary, Part II

 

The next afternoon Graham discovered the purpose, in part, of his stolen clothing when Dr. Kitabu came into his office to inform him that his “double,” in manikin form, had been presented by Mary to the student art exhibit and was getting much attention, especially as the manikin served as a scathing rebuttal of Graham’s gauche fashion choices resulting in much laughter and derision at his expense. Upon hearing of this scandal, he briskly walked out of the Humanities Building and headed for the Art Plaza in order that he might defend himself. Graham observed the University of Hobcallow’s surrounding buildings, all of which were a brownish-orange color, resembling Bulgarian prison compounds built during the Cold War. Worse than the architecture, university administrators, apparently beholden to central California’s rural influences, found it quaint to permit ducks and chickens to roam freely about the campus so that every time Graham walked outside of his office, he had to navigate precariously across an obstacle course of fresh bird shit. Even more disconcerting, there was an oversized rooster with an ornery disposition that, strutting around the campus, could be very unpredictable. Sometimes the rooster would scamper toward Graham like a bellicose demon, expanding his chest, flapping his wings, and shrilling like a psychopath so that Graham had to think twice before crossing the mighty bird’s path. 

Having made it past the cantankerous rooster, Graham walked along a cement path lined by several dark trees that, owing to a pungent oil in the leaves, exuded the erotic, musky scent of human glandular secretions and were therefore referred to jokingly as “sex trees.” During the spring months, the musky smell became even more intense with the budding of little white flowers. Often the wind would scatter the flower petals across the campus, and the sticky, pungent petals would stick to Graham’s black leather shoes while the redolent aroma wafted into his nostrils. It was as if the trees were, like youthful sexuality, potent and irrepressible.  Beyond the libidinous limbs were the clichéd metallic abstract sculptures of the Art Plaza and beyond that on a well-manicured lawn were several pieces of “art,” including the manikin that, dressed in Graham’s discarded and stolen clothing, sat in a wheelchair while Mary stood behind the dummy with a toothy grin. Next to hear was her art instructor, Stan Beckwith. Tall, lanky, mustached, and wearing black horn-rimmed glasses, he stood breathlessly before Mary’s “masterpiece.” Next to him was his girlfriend, Miki, a skeletal fashion design major from Tokyo who lived on a diet of coffee and cigarettes. 

When Beckwith noticed Graham approaching him with a perturbed expression, he congratulated the English instructor for being the model for Mary’s “provocative doppelganger.”

Graham was less impressed. The dummy, sitting limply and looking forlornly, had on Graham’s gauze pirate shirt and had, apparently for the sake of verisimilitude, been equipped with stick-on nipples. The realism stopped there. Mary had placed the zebra bikini briefs outside of the Z. Cavariccis. Spite had apparently compelled her to make her teacher wear his underwear over his pants and to give the briefs a conspicuous bulge by the use of three socks stuffed in the crotch. There were other touches that made the manikin more grotesque than it need to be. The dummy’s eyes, originally blue, had been picked out of the sockets with tweezers and replaced with reddish brown marbles. The dummy’s bald head was covered with a synthetic brown bushy wig that suggested far more hair than Graham had. 

Several students, many of them enrolled in Graham’s composition classes, had now gathered around the dummy. They were laughing at the manikin’s clothes, commenting on how tacky and inappropriate they were, and for the first time Graham could hear them mocking his outfit. It was as if the manikin gave them permission to vent their contempt for his lame wardrobes, which until this time they had, out of politeness and prudence, kept to themselves. Listening to the students chortle at him, he felt a cold shiver of shame sweep over his body. He wanted to defend himself by censuring this entire art exhibit, first by explaining that it had become a venue for the mockery of one of Beckwith’s colleagues. Then he wanted to point out that Mary had committed a crime in order to make this dummy, namely, breaking into her professor’s apartment and stealing his underwear. But he felt a shortness of breath and found he could not speak.

“You gotta admit,” Beckwith said, “your choice of clothing is hilarious. You don’t wear your funky duds to be serious, do you? I mean, you wear them to be ironic, right?”

No, he wasn’t being ironic. That was the problem. He had been wearing these outrageous clothes for some time without being aware that they were both tasteless and downright humiliating. But now he could see it, the full grotesqueness of it all, and the truth was too excruciating to contemplate. He recalled the words, The truth shall set you free, but what if the truth was too painful to bear and it rendered you mute and impotent? Then what? The manikin was a reflection of his disintegrated personality, that much was for sure. What freedom was there in seeing that? No freedom at all. Only overwhelming anguish. And the wish to disappear from the face of the earth. He was now overcome by shortness of breath and he fell to his knees. He heard someone say to call a paramedic. As he knelt on the grass, pressing his rapidly beating heart, Mary stood over him. Her eyes were filled with tears.

“All I wanted was for you to read my essays,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

As the paramedics arrived, Mary told the two young men that she was Graham’s caretaker and that she would accompany him home if and when he was released from the hospital. As his vitals were being taken, Graham tried to protest Mary’s lie, but he could not transfer his thoughts into words. It seemed as if the manikin had been crammed down his mouth and he could not speak.

One of the paramedics asked Graham if he had any serious diseases in the last few years. He could not think of any but all he could do was shake his head.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Mary said. “Last year he was out for a month with coccidioidomycosis. His titer count was almost two hundred. We all thought he was going to die.”

Graham’s current anxiety attack had apparently impeded his ability to recall his fungal lung infection, commonly known as Valley Fever, which had kept him bedridden for so long. He must have talked about his illness to his students. How else did Mary know about it?

“He was taking mega-doses of Diflucan,” Mary continued, “for a good six weeks. And he’s so scared of needles that he didn’t show up for his blood tests like he was supposed to.” 

The paramedic was jotting all this down as Graham tried to remember telling his students about his anti-fungal prescription and his fear of needles.

The paramedic held his hand to Graham’s forehead and told him he was running a slight fever along with elevated blood pressure, and a possible heart arrhythmia. No doubt about it,  he was going to the hospital for more testing and Mary, convincing the medics that she had vital information, was going to follow in her car.

 

 

Scary Mary, Part I

English lecturer Graham Hoerner was in the university’s faculty bathroom stall, his pants coiled around his ankles, his eyes focusing on a critical anthology of essays on Gogol’s Dead Souls, when he sensed the presence of Mary Beauregard, one of his students, standing just outside the stall’s locked door. How did he know it was her? Was it her familiar breathing, rasping and strained from her chain smoking? Was it her familiar smell of mothballs and cloying talcum powder wafting from her green nicotine-stained skin? Anyway, it didn’t matter. Wheezing and clenching her fists, she was standing before her squatting professor trying to compose herself enough so that she could argue that he had given her an unfairly low C grade on her last composition. Her mere presence had disrupted Graham’s circadian rhythms and he resented her for impeding his usually reliable mid-afternoon purge. 

“Mary, I know it’s you. You shouldn’t be in here.”

“I wanted to talk to you about my grade.”

“What you’re doing is illegal. I could have campus police arrest you. Now I suggest you leave at once.”

“No, not until you explain why I got a C.”

He did not appreciate Mary—or any student for that matter—harassing him about a grade while he was sitting on the crapper. “We can talk about your grade in my office,” he said. “This is not the place.”

“You didn’t even read my essay about the convalescent home I work at, did you.”

This much was true. He had not read her essay, about her claim to sacrificing her time bathing dying old people in what most likely was some imagined geriatric hospice. Not word for word anyway. He had given up reading student essays in that fashion many years ago. A man of acute perception, Graham could grasp an essay’s merits or lack thereof by reading the first paragraph, after which he would merely skim the bulk of the manuscript. In the case of a third-rate thinker like Mary, her proclivity for sanctimonious clichés, elephantine syntax, egregious incoherence, jarring non sequiturs, and apocryphal claims made her expositions so painful that, massaging his headache, he quickly turned to the last page and scribble a canned “critique” of her assailable shortcomings.  He had been warned by other professors of her mental deficiencies, her delusions of grandeur, and of her propensity to whine and make threats for a better grade. But he knew that if he indulged her, giving her anything higher than a C grade, she would glom onto him and enroll in all of his classes. Her classroom presence was so intrusive and malignant that she would ruin what little joy he had left in teaching.

Her track record was well known. A forty-year-old student, Mary had changed her major nearly a dozen times over the last eighteen years and was what many called a “university fixture,” and a notorious one at that. In fact, she had become such a grotesque figure that she was better known as Scary Mary. Often she could be seen  hanging around the campus ale house, marching at protest rallies, and attending a variety of campus “forums.”  Her most common hangout was the library where she could be seen “studying” anywhere between seven in the morning and midnight. Perhaps most notoriously, Mary nagged professors for better grades. She nettled instructors in their offices, filed grievances and lawsuits, and wrote recklessly illiterate letters of complaint to the local newspaper, where she slandered professors, spewing a venom of lies, exaggerations, and half-truths. The university had amassed so many of her complaints over the years that the Department of Student Relations eventually had to purchase, not one, but two filing cabinets in order to house her shoddily typed and chicken-scratch hand-written missiles of screwball invective.

Mary was now pressing her body against the stall door. She put her hands over the door so that Graham could see her long reptilian fingers. He cowered at the thought of seeing her ugly head peer above the door.  In fact, it did. Her cavernous eyes, dark and soulless, fixed on him. Her long locks of hair also hung over the door. Some had described her hair as dark mossy green, the slimy tendrils of a waterlogged swamp hag. Others said it was dark brown streaked with a sallow, nicotine-stained hue. But hopelessly colorblind, Graham thought her hair was black. Or to be more specific, her long, stringy hair suggested boiled kale, spinach, and seaweed darkened with black octopus ink.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, her head inched over the door and beholding her professor’s compromising position. “I asked if you really read my essay. Because I spent a lot of time on it.”

“Get out of here before I have you arrested.”

“No. Not until you explain my grade.”

“Your writing is awful. Worse than a fifth grader’s.  You have no business going to college.”

“Just what I thought. It’s not my writing. It’s me. I’m not so bad, you know. Really, if you’d just take the time and get to know me. Anyway, you’re being completely unfair. You haven’t heard the last of this.”

She seemed satisfied and left him in the bathroom. He quickly pulled up his pants and scrambled straight to the office of the English Chair, Wilson Kitabu. Broad-faced and bald with gray hair on the sides, Dr. Kitabu was a large man who spent much of his time behind his desk, with his bare feet wrapped inside blanketed foot warmers heated by an electric coil. The device was prescribed by his podiatrist for gout, but what the Chair really needed to do was go on a diet and lose forty pounds. So far no one was brave enough to tell him.

Graham sat in front of Dr. Kitabu’s desk and explained that Scary Mary had followed him into the men’s room and threatened him while he was sitting on the toilet. He expected the Chair to immediately make the appropriate phone calls and have Mary suspended or suffer some other legal action, but Dr. Kitabu sat back with an amused expression. He seemed to have no interest in Scary Mary’s intrusion. Instead, he asked Graham where he had purchased his shirt. Graham was befuddled. His shirt seemed of no consequence, especially in light of the ordeal he had just suffered.

“That’s a very colorful shirt,” Dr. Kitabu continued. It was in fact a very striking color—lime green and made of a gauze material. With its puffy sleeves, some might call it a “pirate” shirt.

“Did you wear it today while you were teaching?”

“Yes. Is there a problem?”

“I believe so.” Dr. Kitabu squinted at the billowing sleeves, then Graham’s chest. “If I’m not mistaken, I can see your nipples.”

“Through the shirt?”

“Right through it.”

“Shit.”

“So you didn’t know. Oh well. You can go home and change before your next class.”

“I certainly will.”

“Would you mind if I asked where you bought it?”

 “A catalog,” Graham said. “International Male. It’s hard to find shirts that fit me.” He was referring to his bodybuilding physique, which he enjoyed showcasing inside rangy, broad-shouldered peasant shirts and the like. “The shirt sits on my shoulders well.”

“The color,” Dr. Kitabu said, still studying the shirt with wonder. “Almost fluorescent. Like a parrot. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

The electric foot warmers made the office hot and stuffy and the heat exacerbated the unpleasant smell of Dr. Kitabu’s bargain cologne, stale perspiration, and nicotine. In violation of university code, he frequently took cigarette breaks inside his office. It was a habit that Graham, a lowly lecturer with no hope of ever getting tenure, indulged politely.

“I didn’t realize the shirt was such a big deal,” Graham said truthfully. But now he saw the embarrassment. He looked down at his chest and discerned, rather easily, his brown penny-sized nipples under the flimsy material.  However imprudent his choice of clothing was, he did not believe that should be the focus of this discussion.

“So what are we going to do about Mary?” Graham asked.

Dr. Kitabu shrugged. “What can we do? She’s certifiably crazy. We have on file that she sees a psychiatrist. She takes prescribed medications for a variety of psychological disorders. That makes her almost invincible to any legal charges. I will of course report her entrance into the men’s faculty bathroom, just so the university has it on record. But don’t expect anything to happen to her. On the other hand, a professor teaching with nipple exposure is another matter entirely. I suggest you don’t let it happen again.”

Graham promised he’d keep his nipples sufficiently concealed from now on, then drove a mile from campus to Sea Spray apartments so that he could change his shirt.

The complex was a huge metropolis of brown building clusters where any stranger to the premises could easily get lost in its never-ending mazes of cement walkways and quaint cobblestone-lined brooks and fountains.  Graham walked up the stairs that led to his little one-bedroom apartment. Inside his kitchen, he tore his shirt off and stuffed it into his garbage bin. Scattered on his kitchen counter was an International Male catalog and several other catalogs geared toward single males. He wondered if he had been spending too much time alone inside his apartment killing the time by scouring all those eye-catching pages of flamboyant clothes, cars, computers, and stereo equipment. He had taken this teaching job in the desert to become a writer but instead he had become a connoisseur of state-of-the-art gadgets and foppery, which had, much to his dismay, become more compelling than his creative pursuits. He felt a tinge of anxiety and threw all of the catalogs inside his overflowing garbage before taking it out to the dumpster by the mailboxes. When he returned to his apartment, he discovered a trail of red ants, at least twice as many as he had seen the day before, climbing along the ceiling and toward the bathtub drain. He kept ant spray, with its smelly residual poison coating the aluminum can, inside his patio closet, which was next to the terrace. He stepped outside, grabbed the ant spray from a shelf concealed by cobwebs, and from his bird’s eye view he saw, standing in the outside dumpster, Scary Mary sorting through his recently-discarded garbage. She was tall enough to simply lean over the fence-enclosed dumpster and sift through the refuse with her spidery fingers. She was apparently keeping her eye out for anything that he had discarded—letters, notes, manuscripts, uneaten foodstuffs, tattered clothing redolent of her teacher’s pungent, irresistible pheromones.

Mary’s methodical movements reminded him of the cold, mechanical way a praying mantis ate her pray, and he was overcome with disgust. He was also repelled by her countenance while she read his junk mail as if the “special offers” were revealing something vital and intimate about him. Her face was skeletal, pale and boney. Her jaw was slightly agape in a way that reminded him of the smiling face of the Grim Reaper. Her mouth was not a full human mouth, but a smudge of cloying black cherry lipstick. She was tall, perhaps six feet, and lumbered awkwardly all year round with white shorts that revealed long, scaly, knobby-kneed legs, the right one wrapped around the knee with a flesh-colored Ace bandage. She wore cheap white tennis shoes with no socks. 

Not quite human, not quite nightmare, not quite student, Scary Mary was now half-immersed in the dumpster. Her eyes ablaze with determination, she found his green pirate shirt. She held the delicate fabric to her face and inhaled deeply as if the material were soaked with chloroform or some other intoxicant. Feeling violated, Graham marched downstairs and, standing just outside the dumpster, he demanded that she return the shirt to him at once. She was standing up to her waist in filth when she explained that he had thrown away the shirt and therefore no longer had rightful ownership to it.

“I did not throw it away expecting you to take it as some sort of trophy,” he said. “Now give it back.”

“No, it’s mine now,” she said, holding the shirt to her chest. She bared her teeth at him and he recoiled. Triumphantly, she slogged out of the garbage pit with her sartorial prize, and walked toward her 1967 faded green Mustang parked in the designated guest area. She opened the trunk and tried to stuff the shirt into the back of the car but the trunk was so crammed with junk—old text books, unreturned library books, and reams of notes—that while trying to make room for Graham’s discarded shirt her trunk’s contents spilled on the pavement.

By this time Graham had followed her to the Mustang and discerned among the heap of junk other articles of clothing that had, at one time, belonged to him, including a pair of midnight blue Z. Cavaricci slacks, black velveteen loafers with tassels, and a pair of silk zebra-striped underwear. The Z. Cavariccis, which he had ripped in the ass while bending over to pick up a piece of chalk, and the loafers, which pinched his feet, had been discarded. But the animal-print briefs, which made him feel manly, were something he would never throw away. They had in fact been missing from his underwear drawer, mysteriously, for over a month, and now he surmised that Mary had broken into his apartment.

“Those are mine,” he said, walking toward the zebra-striped briefs. But as he bent over, Mary side-armed him with her huge right palm, whacking him flat against his right eye. The blow was so powerful that he fell backward and as he did so, she landed her other palm against his nose. He almost choked on a gush of his own blood that gurgled up his sinuses and filled his throat. Sitting on the parking lot pavement in unbelievable pain, he watched through blurred eyes while Mary gathered his clothes, crammed them into the trunk, and drove off.

What God-forsaken plans did she have for his clothing? He imagined her being well versed in black magic and using his wardrobe to make a voodoo doll of her English instructor. Any day now he would be wrought with hellish body aches and pains. She may even manipulate the doll to make him crash his car and send him to his bloody death. Whatever her motives, he was not going to take Scary Mary’s abuses lying down. He got up, wiped the blood off his face, and marched toward his apartment where inside his attaché case he found Mary’s most recent essay and exacted the only revenge he could do for now—change the grade from C to an F.

 

 

My Friend the Vegan, Part V

 

That night Lara and I were reading in bed. Our dog Gretchen was in between us. My wife and I had been avoiding each other because I feared Benson’s departure might cause us to assign blame to one or both of us for what appeared to be the possible termination of my thirty-year friendship. Finally, Lara turned to me and said, “So how’d it go?”

“I’m not sure. Before he took off, he wished us good luck on our pregnancy quest, but I couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.”

“I’m sorry I laid into him,” Lara said, “but he had no right to impose his beliefs on us while living here.”

“That’s fine. The problem isn’t that.”

“What, then?”

“That stuff I said to him today. It all sounds good on paper, but I didn’t really believe it. I feel I may have been grandstanding, to impress you.”

“Grandstanding or not, everything you said was right on the money.”

“I’m not so sure. One thing Benson has that I don’t have is moral clarity. I can argue things forcefully and sound convincing, but most of the time it’s just bullshit. Deep down I don’t really believe what I’m saying.”

“Does that include eating meat?”

“When I look into my heart I suspect it’s wrong to slaughter animals for our own benefit.”

“Jesus, Graham, you did drink Benson’s Kool-Aid.”

I shook my head and said, “I didn’t need to. I believed eating meat was wrong long before Benson’s conversion. He’s not the first one to show me videos of animals being slaughtered. Actually, I think I started to have more compassion for animals after we adopted Gretchen. I’m sure I love her more than life itself.”

“But you don’t feed her a vegetarian diet. Her dog food is full of lamb and chicken. And if we’re ever had children, you wouldn’t force a vegetarian diet on them either.”

“I know. That’s where the confusion sets in. Science tells me the vegetarian diet is not the ideal, especially for children or Gretchen, but my moral conscience tells me eating meat for myself is wrong. I weep at night when I think of the calf being separated at birth from its mother. Both mother and calf are crying. It’s worse than the scene in Dumbo.”

“So all that stuff you said to Benson about moral compromise was complete bullshit.”

I nodded.

“So you won’t eat red meat like the fertility books said?”

“No, I’ll eat it for now.”

“And then after the baby comes, you can be a vegetarian.”

“Yes, I’ll compromise my morals when it’s expedient and then return to them at the nearest convenience. What a role model I’ll be for our kids.”

“But let’s say you didn’t follow the doctor’s orders. Then there’d be no child at all. Then you being a role model would be irrelevant.”

“I just want to give some moral clarity to our child. Am I asking too much?”

“There is no moral clarity.”

“But you said you wanted to take our child to a place of worship. You said you wanted to give our child a belief system.”

“Yes, the studies show it’s better to give children clear values and a regular place to go where those values are reinforced.”

“But you’re not even religious.”

“So. That’ doesn’t mean I can’t give my children the comfort and assurance of belief. When they get older, they can make up their own mind about what they believe.”

 “And suppose they become true believers in veganism like Benson and compelled by their moral clarity they force veganism on their children and our grandchildren become malnourished.”

“Jesus, Graham, your brain need some animal protein, and animal fat for that matter.”

She got up and returned to the bed with a glass of nonfat milk and a carton of Mongolian beef, which she had just microwaved.

“Eat this,” she said, “and stop thinking so much. You’re freaking me out.”

I looked down at the Mongolian beef as it steamed into my face and said, “Itadakimasu.” I explained that it was a Japanese saying one of my students taught me. It means, “We receive lives from others.”

After eating most of the beef and sharing a little with Gretchen, I felt medicated. I was suddenly sleepy.

“You feel better?” Lara asked me gently, guiding my head on the pillow.

“Yes and no,” I said. “My brain craved the amino acids, but my soul says I’m a monster.” She rubbed my forehead and told me not to worry so much.

“I’ll never be the same,” I said. “I wish I could go back to my days of ignorance when I ate ribs and steak and never thought of the animals suffering. But now it’s too late.”

“And you’ve sucked me into it. While we’re trying to get pregnant no less. I wonder.”

“What?”

“Did you do this to sabotage the whole pregnancy thing?”

“Stop it.”

“Bad timing anyway.”

“I’m sorry.”

After a while Lara said, “We’ll have a baby and then you can be your old miserable self again. Okay?”

“I’ll try.”