That night Lara woke me up. She said she couldn’t sleep. It was the run-on sentence. She believed it was cursed.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I exclaimed as I looked at the time of 3:24 A.M. on the digital clock radio. Lara explained that her best friend and co-worker Alison Clemson had had Lara’s student Sarah Jane Reddit but that the girl was transferred out of her class in the middle of the semester because her parents, both attorneys, had said that Alison was treating their daughter in a “draconian” fashion. The last time Alysson saw Sarah Jane, the girl had said to her, “You’ll be sorry for the way you treated me so unfairly.” Alysson thought it was an indirect threat from Sarah’s parents but it turned out to be more of a curse. Shortly after Sarah’s threat, Allyson’s persnickety roommate, peeved that Allyson had left the front door unlocked one too many times, moved out of her Hermosa Beach apartment and for some inexplicable reason stole Allyson’s beer coasters from the coffee table. Now Allyson was in desperate need of a roommate replacement for her expensive ocean-view apartment rent. More evidence of the curse: Three days after Alysson’s roommate had left her, her wash machine overflowed and as she was picking up her valuables to protect them from the flooding water, she slipped and broke her back. She now had to walk around with a hard plastic back brace, which looked like a white turtle shell over her clothes, for the next ten months.
And now, Lara said, Sarah Jane’s run-on sentence had insidiously snaked its way into our home. We were bickering with a pitch and intensity that matched our marriage counseling period, my ears had been damaged, my physical readiness for my imminent book tour was in jeopardy. What was next?
“Jesus, Lara. I’m the paranoid one in this relationship. When you start sounding like me, I start to freak.”
“I’m gonna get up and text-message Alison. Tell her what’s going on.”
“At this hour?”
“She can’t sleep. Not with the back pain she’s in. How are your ears?”
“Still ringing.”
The next morningLara’s prophecy came true. Jack Hiatus forwarded me dozens of e-mails from the publishers. They all “loved” Man Points and had laughed their asses off while reading it. However, from a money-making standpoint, they all feared that previous humor books they had published about the travails of masculinity had “not performed well.” It was weird how all the publishers decided to reject Man Points within hours of each other. Shortly after I received the dreaded e-mails, Hiatus called me to explain my book’s demise. He said that one big impediment was that some of his closest publishing friends had just published several masculinity humor books and they decided during their committee meeting that they didn’t want Man Points to “cannibalize” the sales from the ones they were already committed to. Then there was the problem of my website. It was too dull in part because it didn’t utilize flash templates, which all their other authors had on their more dazzling sites. But the worse problem of all, Hiatus explained to me, was that the publishing industry is a small closely-knit community. Once word got out that one big publisher didn’t want to finance Man Points, all the other publishers followed suit like scared little chickens. Of course, the inverse was true also. If one big publisher thought Man Points was a goldmine, the other publishers would fear missing the next big thing and they’d scramble to put a handsome bid on my book. “Such a shame that didn’t happen,” Hiatus said. “Oh well, if you have any new book proposals, send them my way.”
I had no book proposals. All I had was an incessant ringing in my ears like a curse and I decided I had better make an appointment with my GP and see if I had suffered permanent damage. To my relief, my doctor reported that my ears looked perfectly healthy, and he said that the tinnitus was most likely the result of the cold I had suffered a few weeks earlier. He gave me some antibiotics, an expectorant called Pseudovent, and Fluticasone Propionate nasal spray to clear any blocked passages, but the Pseudovent and the spray made me jittery, kept me up at night, and worse the tinnitus persisted. That’s when I saw a throat and ear specialist. He said I was in robust physical shape and it was at that point that I thought we were going to wrap things up, but he wanted me to have a hearing test. A matronly woman in her forties with bifocals and dyed blonde hair escorted me into a dark booth and put two types of headphones over my ears as she subjected me to various frequencies and a word-identification test. She gave the results to the doctor who then explained that my right ear showed compromised performance when it came to hearing the enunciation of words. He suggested I get an MRI to rule out the possibility of an acoustic brain tumor that may be impeding my hearing and I told him that an MRI would be an impossibility because I suffer from an acute form of claustrophobia, the kind where I can’t even watch movies about war prisoners digging underground tunnels without having an anxiety attack. That was no problem, he said. I could get an Open MRI and he would prescribe valium to calm me down.
Under the influence of 10 milligrams of valium, I barely made it through the MRI and now had to wait over the weekend for the doctor’s prognosis. During that time, Lara’s teacher friend Alysson Clemson had suffered more setbacks evidencing the feared curse of Sarah Jane Reddit: She had just been diagnosed with an inguinal hernia. It had occurred presumably during the time she had fallen and broken her back. Now she had to get a herniorrhaphy, which required going under a general anesthesia and lying unconscious as laparoscopic instruments sliced into her fragile pelvic area before the surgeon inserted wafer-thin, Polypropylene mesh screens so that her intestines wouldn’t bulge past her muscle tissue.
Comments