Letter to a Long Arm

Dear Police Officer, 


I promise to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me. 


My husband and I do not host costume parties where plastic bags of crack cocaine are traded in dark kitchen corners for blow jobs and blow pops. Nor are we the type to attend shin digs where assault rifles are purchased from musty walk-in closets or the velvet-lined automobiles of actual mobsters. We have never been so obliterated by the consumption of cheap alcohol that we've agreed to assist an amateur tattoo artist in aborting twin fetuses from the loins of a passed out prostitute in some filthy basement dwelling. 


With my right hand over my heart and the other saluting an American flag, I swear that we try to be the best law-abiding citizens possible. Therefore, I hope it was worth the $50 tip we were told you get for ordering a truck to tow our car with a recently expired registration ON A SUNDAY from the center of town to the outskirts of town so that we, the negligent car owners, could be charged $180 to retrieve it. I'm sure this punishment probably makes perfect sense to you, sir, but for Free Speech's sake, I'd like to break it down for you so that you can see why your actions are so unbelievably infuriating to me. 


You're walking around town with your cocky straight backed swagger, I imagine, searching for license plates with orange "11" stickers. When you see our car, you excitedly plug the plate into your database. "Expired Registration," it reads. You call your favorite tow truck company and tell them to drive the five or so miles from their parking lot to the center of town. Pick up this car, you tell them, and move it to your lot. They do. A few hours later, my husband gets out of work. He's exhausted and sticky, covered in fresh coffee stains. He paces the sidewalk. Where the hell is his car? He wonders. A girl with a clipboard asks him if he cares about the environment. He tells her that he can't find his car. She walks away, wishing him luck. Has anyone with a clipboard asked you, officer, if you care about the environment? Scott walks to the police station. At the station, he is informed that because his registration is expired, his car was towed. Because I am in Boston, he takes a $12 taxi ride to the parking lot where our car is held hostage. It is nearly 6PM now. Inside the lot's office, Scott begs the tow truck guy to stay open for five more minutes so that he can update his registration online in order to pay his $180 fee and get his car back. The guy waits. Scott updates his registration, pays the guy the $180 plus the additional "after hours" fee and with empty pockets, he drives home. 


Is this supposed to be a lesson on "the harshness of the real world"? Because if that's the case, you're a bit mixed up. You're supposed to be the good guy. Not the ski-mask-sporting gunman bashing a baseball bat onto the windshield of our bank account balance.  I understand the importance of enforcing the law, but come on hall monitor, sometimes people just need to take a piss. 


I hope one day you have an accident. Not an injury or death necessarily. Just some serious embarrassment. I hope you forget to put the toilet seat down and fall in. Scream out and cough to cover up your feminine yelp for help. Wipe your dripping backside with an entire roll of toilet paper. Throw the wads of TP into the toilet bowl. Drop your deuces onto the soggy paper pile. Flush. And as you are buckling your belt and adjusting your pistol, the water rises so alarmingly high that your face starts to sweat and you find yourself wiping your brow with a piss-covered shirt sleeve. Brown water reaches the seat despite your revolting last resort to scoop up the poop and paper. Men at the urinals and sinks turn to watch shit water cascade onto your black boots. They hear you cry out, "THIS ISN'T FAIR! I'M A GOOD PERSON!" Well, unfortunately, in this world where you wear a badge, uniform and gun, that doesn't matter. In your world, good citizens are fined heavily (on our budget's scale) for small mistakes. Here, shit can soak and crust the tops of your socks regardless of how quickly you shovel shit from the top of crap-puking potties. Because you know what you've proved to be? The police officer that rappers write rhymes about. Yes, I feel discriminated against. I feel discriminated against for being a genetically fallible human being. We all make mistakes. You, as a law enforcer of human beings need to remember that.  The people who pay you to protect them are not angelic Ghandi creatures descended from virginal desert nuns. Besides, aren't there more important laws out there to enforce? Like drunk driving, domestic violence and library book thieving? Isn't there something more productive you could be doing than walking around town, ON A SUNDAY, plugging license plates into your little electronic device like an old lady at a nickel slot machine?


I believe in strict laws and most of the time, I believe in this country. I believe in the theory of police enforcement. I'm glad we have it. I'm grateful that I can dial 911 if I'm being chased, hounded, mauled, molested, murdered or badgered. I understand that the safety provided by the police force is crucial to my happiness and that I can generally trust police officers to not abuse the authority granted to them. I'm just saying, give me a little written warning. Wouldn't you rather protect the "police officer" title for a few more citizens? Isn't it hard enough with publicized racial profiling and viral video leaks of police brutality?  Because this makes me want to write my own rap song or start my very own verbal riot. CHECK YOUR CAR'S REGISTRATION DATE OR YOU'RE TAMPERING WITH YOUR MONEY'S FATE. I wouldn't start this poorly written rap riot because I think it's dangerous for anyone to forget to check the date of their car's registration, but so that you, sir, might spend an entire shift failing to find one expired registration. So that you would see the negligence in spending an entire day NOT stopping that fat homeless guy from standing beside the ATM machine saying, "What you mean you don't have any money, I just saw you take out $40." 


I mean, please tell me you didn't apply for the police academy to become a meter maid. 




Sincerely,
This Citizen 

The Nuisance

I prefer to write words that are like the legs of little ballerinas: secretly strong with vintage beauty and emanative grace, but right now all I really want to write are clumsy run-on sentences where my bottled up belligerence flies from my fingers like the glistering yellow goop of burst blisters. A note has been taped to the front door of our apartment. “I don't know if you know this,” the note reads, “but your dog is a nuisance to the neighborhood. She barks the entire time you are not home.” I crumple the snobby scrawl inside my fist like a vexed detective trapped inside the grainy gray walls of his pipe-smoking genre before storming from the kitchen to collapse onto my bed for an old fashioned fit. 

Forty-seven seconds later, Scott leans on the doorframe, watching me wipe my one summoned tear. 

We will fix this, we declare, pumping our bicycle pedals to the pet store. With backs bent, we grasp our handlebars and side by side, discuss whether this neighbor has written condescending notes to all the houses on the street with barking dogs, landline answering machines, surround sound televisions, continuous construction work and garbage disposals. 

The ride soothes our hostile humiliation. 

At the store, we choose a collar that will send a small startling shock to Penny’s neck whenever she bellows out a bark. 

When home, Scott clicks the collar around Penny's thick mane and sends her from our bedroom to scare Mark's sister, who's just arrived. As she bursts from our bedroom, four full woofs rush from my dog's muzzle, followed by immediate whimpers, which then fade to a soft silence as Penny adjusts to this sudden and seemingly cruel bark-free existence. 

One drunken night, a few days after our pet store purchase, Scott sets out to test the bark collar's level of barbarism. Meticulously, he presses the collar's metal prongs to the center of his naked neck and begins to bark. Mark, Amy and I stand by, gawking at this suspenseful and yet strange audacity. After three or four deep bona fide barks, my husband yelps and stumbles backwards. Several seconds later, once our cackles have quieted, he reassures us that his shrill scream was not from pain, but merely from surprise. We, therefore, deem the experiment a success.     

Both women, downstairs and next door, want to get us out of earshot and out of sight. They miss the old woman who lived in the apartment before us, we presume.

This past April, Amy builds an herb and vegetable garden to the left of the back door. Rustic with dark chocolate soil and yellowish green tomato sprouts, this tall wooden box of future food pretties this previously plain piece of backyard. A couple weeks later, Scott and I push our grill to the other side of that same door. 

The next day, Downstairs Lady's lowly flowerpot (from the front porch) sits suspiciously beside our grill. I suspect she's trying to claim back this space she never thought to use before. 

A few days after her pot placement, Downstairs Lady asks Amy to move her garden. She's bought a basketball hoop for her son and wants to put it there, she says. Amy complies and Mark moves the entire garden arrangement to the only other place available: a shady spot at the top of the driveway. 

This strange woman's unequivocal bossiness throws me into a repetitive rage that night when Amy informs me of this most recent request. “A basketball hoop? There? Five feet from where we park our cars?... A basketball hoop.” 

One week later, Mark sits alone in the basement playing with his Lego's while Amy, Scott and I sleep upstairs in our beds. At around 11 o’clock that night, Downstairs Lady notices the music Mark is playing and it causes her to be so upset she calls the landlord in Pennsylvania. Take note: we live in Massachusetts. “Call them.” She demands, but Mr. Landlord asks that she speak with us herself. She she doesn't feel comfortable doing that, she says and hangs up. Then she decides that Mr. Landlord is "going to chicken out from calling” us and leaves her apartment to tell us to be quiet. When she discovers that the music is not coming from our apartment upstairs but from the basement below hers, she clomps down the dirty wooden stairs and the first thing out of her mouth is, “I’ve already called the landlord. Your music is too loud.” She then sort of snickers the part about the landlord chickening out from calling us (as if Mark will side with her) and begins a new tirade on how inappropriate his music is.  

Mark, ripped from his sublime solitude, looks up, and with utter befuddlement, slowly clarifies, “You called the landlord?” 

She doesn't understand the concept of renting an apartment.  Doesn’t understand that we don’t have to do the things she’s requested. That we've been the friendly cooperative neighbors she hasn't been. Sure we can turn down our music. Sure you can sensor the sound waves and we'll avoid playing lyrics littered with mother fucking shitty ass damn swears. Sure I can take the back stairwell when I walk Penny in the early morning because the front stairs creak. Sure we won't use our front porch light because it shines near your bedroom window. Sure you can have the good parking spot because you’re “the oldest.” Sure Scott can help the delivery guy carry in your dresser. Sure we can take the trash out. Sure we can move our garden. Sure you can take up more than half of the basement because you had to downsize from a house.  Sure you can set up a basketball hoop on the hoods of our cars. 

Downstairs Lady likes to have someone to hate, something to complain about. We have been that for her, I think. "I just can't stand that I want to avoid someone who lives downstairs from me." I say to Scott loud enough so that she might hear me through our open windows because I just don't care anymore. Scott says then that I can decide whether she bothers me. This stumps me so I go to the bathroom to rinse off the green facial mask I have applied to the pimples that have formed due to this unnecessary domestic stress.

With pockets of dog treats, a plastic bag for possible poop and music playing in my ears, I walk Penny to town. As we trot together, the sun shows itself for the first time today and it is warm and so are the faces of everyone we pass. That's when I realize that maybe I also just needed something or someone to complain about. Maybe I've had Downstairs Lady just as she's had me, like secret Santa's at some horribly crappy Christmas party. As this realization belly flops onto my brain waves, thick tension in my shoulders and chest loosens. Scott is right. I can choose to not complain about her and in doing so, I choose me.

Drawing from his interpretation of Downstairs Lady's inability to communicate clearly, Scott proposes a plan: we roommates will regard Downstairs Lady as a socially disabled person. (You need not be offended by the use of the word, "disabled," for this tactic is to prevent the flipping of tables, the screaming of fighting words and from the throwing of things like rotten tomatoes from Amy's garden.) Ultimately, the plan encourages us to not be frustrated by her frequently rude comments and requests, but to pity her for her written and verbal impotencies.      

A few months later, we are awarded, it seems, for these efforts. However it is possible you will think we are insensitive and even cruel for the satisfaction we feel for the following events. 

On the ground below, in the blue tint of twilight, two small dogs join by one obstinate jaw.  

"Oh NO!"

"Stop! STOP!"

"OH NO NONOOOOOO!" The woman next door wails from her wheelchair behind the railings of her side porch. Her tiny gray lamb-like dog (her beloved best friend, who is without a leash because he is always) wines in submission to the dog that lives downstairs from us, a characteristically insane canine who is also without a leash because he has, we learn later, bitten through his backyard dog run. 

When the scuffle started, a moment before, both dogs were growling and barking and as soon as Wheelchair Lady started screaming and Downstairs Lady began yelling, both dogs went into a full-fledged furry ferociousness.  

Penny stood on her hind legs, her front paws clinking a crowd of white votive candles on the windowsill. A small bark escaped her muzzle, but her collar startled her to shush, and she retreated behind the couch to lay inside the cool shadow of the cornered coffee table.  

Wheelchair Lady's puppy is limp now, dead or playing the part. "Stop it! STOP IT! NOOOO!" Wheelchair Lady projectile weeps, wheeling in and out of her kitchen to hide. A middle aged man, a visiting friend of Wheelchair Lady's, works to pry the dogs apart, skittishly circling the attempting homicide, reaching for the lifeless pup. 

"Shit! She bit me." He says, pulling away his hand.

After three awkwardly cacophonous minutes of violence, the man manages to free Wheelchair Lady's stiff pup and carry it to the wailing woman's lap. 

"She won't be here tomorrow." Downstairs Lady's wobbly word falls out and forward onto the cement walkway between the houses where there is now drying droplets of red. Next door, the kitchen door has closed, leaving a swift sudden stillness.   

With eyes and mouths stretched to the seams of our hairlines, Scott and I back away from the window of our second floor apartment.  

"That dog is a maniac." I whisper.  

"I'm so glad that had nothing to do with us." Scott says. 

A few minutes later, we watch, again from our window, as the gray haired man, now with bloodied paper towels around his hand, carries the puppy on a pillow.  

"Doesn't look like it's moving." Scott says, while Wheelchair Lady gets into the car and drives them away.

A few days later, Wheelchair Lady’s Puppy, cone-headed with stitches in its neck, returns home on its pillow throne. I haven't seen anyone walk Downstairs Dog in days, I say, starting apartment-wide rumors that Downstairs Dog has either been sent away, as promised, or been taught to use a litter box. A couple nights later, I get the courage to ask Downstairs Lady to retrieve her cold dry laundry from the dryer (usually, I just wait). I knock on her back door. Downstairs Son opens it and behind him, Downstairs Dog's claws scamper across the dusty wooden floor for me. The door is slammed shut in my face, leaving me in the dark stairwell to listen while Downstairs Lady scolds Downstairs Son for opening the door before putting Downstairs Dog into its crate. She then opens the door two inches and says something about needing to keep her dog in his crate, you know, she says, after what happened. I nod my head and say, "I was wondering if you, if you could get your laundry out of the dryer?..." Proof that I should also be regarded as socially inept.

Weeks later, Downstairs Dog is sent away to "a farm in New Hampshire." This isn't the first time he's done this, killed or attempted to kill a smaller animal. We're told the night of the near murder when we bump into Downstairs Lady and Downstairs Son at a play in town. I give our neighbor a surprised look. Not because I'm shocked her dog has killed or attempted to kill before, but because she expects some sort of sympathy from me.  

Now, at the end of August, we must move. Six months we have shared this second floor apartment, all five of us: Mark, Amy, Scott, Penny the dog and I. Sharing this small kitchen with its tall dark wooden cabinets, large double porcelain sink, a short fat refrigerator that has the tendency to freeze fruit and a white gas stove with black metal burners. Six months of sitting at our blue tiled kitchen island, drinking white wine, chopping vegetables, and making pots of coffee and sausage leek soup. Six months sharing our dining room table where Mark's pencil sketches of zombies, dinosaur monsters and sharks fight naked, heavily equipped mermaid Amy's. "He's gotten really good at drawing my boobs." She smirks. Six months of sharing one living room with a television designated almost exclusively for violent apocalyptic video games. Countless hours of Mark and Scott leaning into the amber glow, fiercely clicking fingers to kill and steal the rations of fictional fortune teller gypsies, elfish hunters and starving rabid children. Months of Amy working in the sweltering triangle-shaped attic, building her wedding dress of feathers, brass rings and clasps, white pleated cotton, a pale pink corset and cream-colored lace on a headless mannequin. Fraying antique lime fabric hangs from the rafters like a material mote meant to keep Mark from seeking out her slowly assembling gown. Six months lying in two separate beds in two separate bedrooms, split by walls and a bathroom. Nights where we'd all lay laughing at our dark ceilings while blunt dessert flatulences honk like smothered ducks from beneath our cotton sheets and feather down comforters. Or like the other night when Mark called me into his and Amy's room to watch him slap Amy's underweared ass. The point was to get Penny to do that cute thing where she stops domestic violence by pushing the aggressor's hand away with her muzzle. However Penny wouldn't really do it and so it just turned into Mark slapping Amy's bum while I stood in the doorway, laughing at this odd, unintentionally violent act. Six months walking home from dinners out in town like the time we ordered two pitches of red sangria at the pizza restaurant and Mark climbed that metal fire escape ladder in an alley and I nearly peed myself on the cracked sidewalk in front of our apartment because Amy made me laugh. Six months sitting on the front porch drinking coffee. The porch Mark wanted badly to pee off of, but was prevented by Amy one early morning. Prevented because this "porch" is not really a porch, but a room of windows that faces a neighborhood of middle aged homeowners. I had been on a walk with Penny before the sun had risen and as I walked into the kitchen I saw a blur go by. I thought it was Scott. With my headphones blocking all surrounding sound, I kicked the kitchen door closed and as I did Amy leapt from the hallway, scaring a full body spasm out of me. She wore a tank top and underwear, her usual pajama ensemble, and landed in the kitchen like a savage gorilla. "Did you see Mark?" Her coarse morning voice demanded. "He might have gone that way." I said, pointing to the living room. While I took Penny's leash off and my heart beat softened, Mark shuffled back through the kitchen. Amy followed. "He wanted to pee off the porch." She said. Apparently he once expressed interest in peeing off the porch and this morning, while she was half-asleep, she heard Mark mumble that he had to pee. She then noticed that the shower was going. Knowing Mark would not ask to pee while Scott was lathering up behind our transparent shower curtain, Amy drifted back to sleep. Seconds later, she woke to an empty bed. Still somewhat asleep, she stood and ran to the kitchen and then ran on to the porch where she stopped Mark from peeing off the porch, which is again not really a porch. "Just ask him." Amy told him in the kitchen. "Scott, can I come in to pee? I won't look." Mark asked. A side note to this story is that when Mark was a college student he had a plant in his dorm room, a thriving plant. When Amy met Mark she thought it was strange that a boy who could barely take care of himself could care so well for another living thing. It wasn't until later that she learned that this plant was "watered" solely by Mark's urine. Six months gathering rent from between couch cushions and savings accounts to mail to our landlord, a man who took the second syllable of his title too literally for after several threats to remove our kitchen sink disposal or shove our dog inside a travel crate, has cast us out by suddenly raising our rent by $200 a month and requiring a lease too far into all of our vagabond futures to be feasibly possible. Usually Scott is the speaker of our house, however he is in Israel when we receive this news from our lord of this overpriced land.

After a week of silence, I write to him. 

"We have worked very hard to be good, quiet tenants here at 31. We are respectful neighbors (once we fixed the barking problem) and we keep to ourselves. To be quite honest, the four of us really love living here and want to figure out a way to make it work. We chose this apartment because of the flexibility of the month-to-month lease and the affordability of sharing the $1150 rent. It feels like you really just want us to move out and I'm not sure why. Raising the rent by $200 after we've only been here for six months is, well, kind of ludicrous." 

While awaiting for a response to this, I eat an entire green bell pepper over the sink in the kitchen. "I just ate an entire green pepper." I tell Amy and we laugh.  A little while later, I receive this response, 

"Rachel - More for me to do in transition..."

Now, despite the dog fighting frenzy, these women, Downstairs Lady and Wheelchair Lady, cling to the concept that they can like one another. Downstairs Lady has sent off her old dog for a cuter quieter one and has already introduced the tiny pup to Wheelchair Lady. When the women speak to one another now, their voices crank to their highest pitches. This is how they'd like to live. That's fine with me. I won't have to be here to witness it much longer.

"MAAAAAOM! I'm going to take my shower now!" Downstairs Son yells every night around 8PM. 

Or, from the yard with the new tiny copper colored pup, I no longer have to listen to this routine hollering. 

"Mom?" 

"Yeah?" Downstairs Lady responds from inside the apartment. 

"Is she supposed to poop?" 

"What?"

"Is she supposed to...Oh! She pooped! She pooped, Mom!"

"She pooped?! Yaaaay! What a good guuuuurl! Wanna come inside? Yay!" Downstairs Lady squeals from the doorframe. 

That poor puppy. I can leave whenever I want to really, but not that little mill pup. No wonder the last little guy went postal, probably figured pound prison or even death by a large needle would be better than his mundane existence with daily walks never exceeding its itty bitty backyard.   

"Downstairs Lady?" I'd love to bellow from our moving truck.

"Yeah?" She'd yell back, her lips pressed to the plastic panels of her air conditioner. 

"I'm gonna move out now." 

"What?" 

"I'm gonna move out!"

"You're gonna move out? WHAT A GOOD GUUUUURL!"

"Downstairs Lady, you are batshit crazy."

I'd also like to write this little note and stick it to Wheelchair Lady's ugly front door.  

Dear Wheelchair Lady, 

I don't know if you know this, but your voice is a nuisance to the neighborhood. You cackle and holler like a banshee the entire time I am home. Maybe someone should put you in a crate? Or, if you'd like, I can lend you this red choker necklace of my dog's. It clicks fashionably in the back and has shockingly beautiful metal prongs that must be precisely placed over the front of your throat. 

Let me know and I'll drop it into your mailbox!   

Sincerely,

 The Girl Next Door with the Bangs

Chocolate, Rum and Crocodiles

I awake from a dream this morning that takes place at this big house with numerous bedrooms. The house is a distorted version of the Fitzgerald's, the family of an old elementary school friend of mine who was one of ten Irish Catholic children.  I don't know why I have to stay here, but I do and it is apparently fine because there are weddings in town and many random people will also be staying in this house tonight. At least this is what I'm told by some blurry familiar someone. Also, I am with colleagues, two men I think, and we have some sort of mission to accomplish, business to tend to. We're serious about something.  Not sure what. Anyway, this house is like a crooked boat with many ladders and triangle shaped roofs and while I explore it, I realize I have to pee. I stumble upon the room with the toilet. It is a large dark bedroom adorned with dirty laundry piles. The toilet is at the end of the room like a throne, centered along the back wall. But just as I walk into this bedroom bathroom, I realize I don't have a shirt on. I am completely topless.  I cover my little boobies with my crossed arms and sit on the toilet to pee (trying not to wake the lump shifting in the sheets at the other end of the room). When finished and empty, I stand and that's when I see it. I have peed on the toilet with the white plastic lid still down and now there is a yellow puddle perched there as well as a small waterfall of my urine cascading down the porcelain john toward the surrounding piles of dirty laundry. I panic and begin picking up the wet crumpled clothing and carrying them, still topless, from this strange room to where I find a growing tropical forest fire down the hall. I watch the fire grow for a little while before realizing that no one has reported it. So, I report it and by reporting it, I mean, I run up and down the dirt road beside the forest fire yelling "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" This is when the crocodile starts attacking me. Luckily I have my cheap plastic umbrella in my hands to whack the creature over its bumpy biting face. After each clumsy blow, the thing backs up a bit and I return to my responsible screaming, but before I am positive I have truly informed the authorities, the snapping jaw comes back at me and I must try again to strike the mouth closed. For some reason, I know if I hit the enormous reptile square on the nose it will die or give up, but to no avail, the crocodile continues trying to eat me while, still half-naked, I scream "FIRE" beside a pile of pee drenched laundry. 


It is 6:30AM when I roll out of bed and feel for the bathroom with my eyes half closed.




So in deciphering my dream, or rather, reasons why I probably had this strange unconscious experience would be as follows...

• Last night, at 8:45PM, I drank  half of a nip of spiced rum with a splash of ginger soda and pineapple juice.
• At about 9:20PM, I ate a few forkfulls of peanut butter cup ice cream straight from the container.
• At 10:30PM, I went to sleep. 
• Also, yesterday morning, I drove by an enormous black bear sitting and having a picnic of trash in somebody's driveway.  This would explain my confusion about hitting the crocodile square on the nose. 
• Oh and I'm lazy and often sit on public toilet seats even though I know so many disgusting bare butts have done the same before mine and even though my friend, Amy, says I could catch something. Also, to me, nothing is quite as shocking as sitting on top of the toilet seat bare-assed, feeling the plastic or wood press up to my privates. It always feels like I've accidentally molested myself. 
• Finally, I  posses an unnecessarily rash fear of exposing my boobies.  

The Deluge

Music crackles through my crappy car speakers while rainwater pelts my windshield like a pack of petty prizefighters, slapping and spitting at the station wagon's wide see-through face where my wipers frantically fail to dry the glass. When the rain stops, I'll drive fast enough to make up time, I tell myself, but slow enough to not be pulled over by idled patrol cars. 

“Are you free next Wednesday night?“ I asked my father.  "I want to take you out for Father's Day. See the Joe Purdy concert in Fall River. Just you and me." 

(Here is where I insert an explanation for the love I have for my father. Like all love, it is difficult to put into plain analogy-free phrases so I'll unabashedly define it by saying that whenever I am near him I have trouble not wrapping my arms around his middle like a bulky high waste belt. Sometimes I worry that he hates me, his profoundly profane daughter, though I know he never could. A tall conservative man with a wayward disposition, he sits at his place at the end of the dinner table, quietly listening while I work to make my mother laugh with stories of pooping in poison ivy on the banks of a river or humping my dog, Penny, to achieve dominance. With the front legs of his chair suspended, he shakes his head, the start of a smile poised at the crooks of his mustached mouth like a stilled rocking chair. He speaks when spoken to or when any mention of Jesus Christ, Mary the Mother of God, Catholic priests, the church choir director or God Himself graces the table. "Alright. Alright. That's enough." He'll say.) 

This is why I like to have him alone, for he will talk for hours on any number of subjects when prompted with mindful ears.  

Tonight, on my drive to our date, the rain never stops rushing from the crowded clouds and I never get above 55 miles an hour.  "I don't think I'm going to get home by six like I planned." I tell him over the phone. 

When I am an exit from my father's house, I turn off the highway and creep down the curved exit ramp, gripping my convulsing steering wheel with both hands. Please be engine trouble. I beg inside my brain. I can ignore engine trouble. I cannot ignore a flat tire. I turn left and pull off the road. As I open my door, a pickup truck stops beside me. "You've got a flat in the back," a beefy white guy with tattoos stretched around his biceps, tells me.  "Do you need any help?" 

"No thank you. My father lives down the road."

I call my father. 

Then I call for a tow truck. "Yes, I have a spare." I tell the ditsy dispatcher who stumbles through our dialogue like a drunk. "I got off 495 South at Exit 4, turned left and parked on the right side of the road." I say explicitly.    

When my father arrives, I retrieve the spare tire from beneath my hatchback's floor flaps, but it's just a tire. There is no middle, no rim. I don't know why this is so, I tell my father, but I blame my frustratingly frequent flats. 

A man arrives in a small yellow tow truck. My father explains that we don't have a rim on the spare. Tow truck man shakes his head. His left ear is pierced with a gold PlayBoy bunny earring. He calls for a flatbed tow truck and offers to stay so that we can get to our concert on time. We thank him. 

There isn't time to go to the Olive Garden at the mall. 

"Want to get a sandwich at McDonald's?" Dad asks, driving from my sunken car. 

"How 'bout Subway?" I ask. 

At the nearby shopping plaza with the grocery store and clustered row of small shops, we see that the sandwich chain is no longer there. It's been replaced by a hotdog stand in a storefront. Coney Island Hotdogs, it's called. Dad assumes I don't want a Brooklyn wiener and offers to drive us somewhere else, but we're nearly out of time. "I eat hotdogs!" I cry out. 

He stops the car in the fire lane. I unbuckle my seatbelt and get out. Inside, there are no photographs of ferris wheels, red roller coasters, creepy city clowns or even a New York City skyline. This place is nearly bare. A standing cooler of soda cans, a rack of chips and on the wall behind the counter there are glossy photographs of hotdogs topped with chunky red chili, grilled onions, and zig zagging condiments. "Hi, can I get three hotdogs with sauerkraut and mustard?" I ask the girl behind the counter. She nods and grabs at the greasy links rotating on the grill behind her. 

"EXACTLY $11!" A fat thirty-something homeboy exclaims at the register. I hand over a $20 bill. 

Dad balances his dinner of dogs on his lap, while he pulls out of the parking lot. 

“What a disaster!” I say. 

My dad disagrees.

We find the music hall, an old converted mill on the waterfront in Fall River, Massachusetts. We climb a couple flights of dark wooden stairs and make our way to the ticket table. I give my name to a short middle-aged man who stamps the tops of our hands with a big black music note. We find a wobbly table beside the stage and I walk across the room to another table named "Cafe" and buy two cups of decaf coffee and a brownie with walnuts. 

When the opening act, The Milk Carton Kids are introduced, I realize we're too far over to see the fast moving fingers of guitarist, Kenneth Pattengale.  And worst yet, the band's banter, which I had howled at two nights before when I saw the show in Northampton now seems forced in the presence of this inattentive crowd of BYO Boozers. 

This must be my fault, somehow. Like I brought these unsuspecting musicians my evening's godawful luck. 

Later on, when the main act, Joe Purdy takes the stage in his dark suede hat, fitted white tee shirt, gray tweed pants and cowboy boots, a car alarm begins to wail in the parking lot two flights below. Purdy starts the first solo song of his set, but pauses after a few bars to smirk and say, "Someone's really gotta check their car alarm." 

"Could that be you Dad?" I whisper. 

"No."

After a few solo songs, the alarm is silenced and the Milk Carton Kids join Purdy back onstage. Dad looks over to me with gleeful surprise, his legs and feet jumping. They are playing "Pioneer," a song he and I learned on the guitar together a few weeks before. Unabashed, my father sings along. At the table beside ours, slumped beside a small cooler of beer, a stranger sits alone. Afraid this man might say something mean to my father, I put my hand on the back of my daddy's neck then slyly move it over his mouth to shush him. I know I will regret it, but I do it anyway. Luckily, he disregards my awkward gesture and sings on. 

In the lobby after the show, we stop at the merchandise table. I tell my father that I'm going to buy him two CDs. "That'll be $20." I'm told. Inside my wallet there is $18. $18? I look over to Dad, my defeatist heart burning through the sleeve of my v-neck tee shirt. His money is already out of his pocket and between his short brown fingers. 

"How much do you need?" He asks me. 

When we leave the hall, it's raining again, but it's gentle and I linger in the parking lot, looking over to the Braga Bridge, waiting for the water to cover and cool my cheeks, to wash away my blued expectations.

The next morning, I drive Dad's truck from the east side of the state to the western side. No cruise control. No radio. I put put along, but before I leave my father's house, he gives me a folded up wad of singles. "Toll money." He says. I can't refuse. My wallet is empty still and again, I am nearly late. 

I feel like an alien.

This past February, I call my doctor’s office. “I think I have a gluten allergy.” I say.

A few days later, my doctor sees me. We talk. He doesn’t think I have a gluten allergy. I tell him that my skin has been unusually pimply, but had gotten better, I think, whenever I avoided wheat products.

“Any diarrhea?” He asks, looking up from his laptop screen, his fingers frozen from their otherwise flickering clicking state, suspended above his flat black keyboard. My face warms and I am quiet for a moment. I don’t want to tell lies, but I haven’t really had the trots, squirts or the runs, as they say. Yet I know that, at this crucial juncture, describing my digestive expressions as plain old poop and pee will get me nothing. So I fib.

“Yeah….a little bit, maybe. Yes.”

He types this. Then he types up the blood test form because of my complaint of diarrhea and diarrhea and diarrheadiarrheaanddiarrhea, expelling this private potty word several times as if it is some requirement. Maybe he’s wearing a wire from my insurance company or maybe he’s just waiting for me to cry out, “OK OK! I haven’t reeeeallly had diarrhea.” But I don’t and he sends me off for blood work.

“Don’t avoid wheat products before the blood test or it won’t work.”  He tells me. 

That weekend, the gluten gods rapture me into a heaven of burnt bagels, cheesy calzones, big bowls of honey glazed cereal and French bread sandwiches. After this glorious two-day wheat orgy, I feel physically fine, a little fat with a bloating doughy belly, but no diarrhea. On Monday, I go to the hospital for blood work. 

A few days later, I get a call from my doctor’s office. I have no intolerance to wheat.

It’s something I’m eating that’s causing my skin to do this, I tell my doctor next. Maybe something really small like a spice or something. He sends me to an allergist.

In the allergist’s office, a nurse presses cold rounded needles across my back. After she completes this task, I am instructed not to move for fifteen minutes. I sit in stiffness, my back slowly rounding. After thirty minutes, the doctor knocks, enters, looks at my back, wipes away the wetness and tells me to get dressed as he closes the door behind him. Once dressed, the doctor reenters to tell me that I have no common food allergies. He doesn’t know what’s going on with my skin, but he feels bad for me and gives me a prescription for antibiotics.  I thank him and go on my way, planning to never really take the pill for when I took it for acne as a teenager, it caused my face to sunburn all year round.

A few weeks later, I call the dermatologist’s office where I had made an appointment a few weeks before. My appointment isn’t until August. It is March now. “What if I think I have Rosacea?” I ask the receptionist over the phone. “Could you see me sooner then?”

“No. Sorry. But I can put you on our waiting list...”

“I think I have Rosacea.” I say to my doctor. He looks closely at my face. It doesn’t look like Rosacea to him. Looks like acne. “But this is on my cheeks!” I tell him. “I’ve never had acne on my cheeks. Ever. And this doesn’t really feel like acne. This burns.”

“Haven’t you made an appointment with the dermatologist yet?” he asks.

“It’s in August.”

“Well, this isn’t Rosacea.” He says, but he can prescribe me some acne cream. “Which pharmacy would you like me to send this to?” 

You can send it to the pharmacy known as your ass because that shit isn’t going to help me.

“The CVS on Main Street is good. Thank you.” 

Last week, I call my gynecologist’s office.  “I think I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.” I say. The receptionist schedules me for an appointment for Thursday with Amy, the nurse practitioner.

Thursday morning, Amy the nurse practitioner tells me that it doesn’t look like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Have I noticed an increase in chest, pubic or facial hair? I show her my naked lap. She shakes her head and I cover myself. She then pulls out a little white card and instructs me to record my periods. Months of marking little Xs. That’s what this little card means. This makes me cry. “So you aren’t going to have me tested?” I ask. This crying of mine embarrasses us both. She leaves the room and brings back a yellow form. She’s going to give me the blood test anyway. I cannot take the test until the third “bleeding” day of my period. I thank the poor nurse, get dressed and walk out of the doctor’s office.

Inside the confines of my car, I finish my sobbing. This is my most preferred place to weep, the driver’s seat. Something about the dramatic clutching of the steering wheel or the several small mirrors or perhaps it’s the immediate privacy in any public parking lot that allures me so.

On Friday, my left eye begins to hurt like a bruise. Sunday morning, I awake with a full blown stye on my bottom left eyelid. Even my cheek is puffy. Sunday afternoon, I leave Brooklyn with my friend Claire and we drive home to Northampton, Massachsuetts, leaving Scott with Claire's fiancé, Jay. Scott departs from JFK Airport the following day for Israel on a free ten-day trip called Birthright. We had driven to Brooklyn Saturday morning to stay with our friends in Clinton Hill.

Extacy pills before a rave of rapists, creepers and undercover cops. After taking the drugs, I lay back down. Still my eye won’t close. I turn on my phone and search for the symptoms of Lyme Disease, for a tick had bit me in April and still I have an unhealed mark on my hip. As I read the common symptoms, I discover that this must be it. I must have Lyme Disease. (Even though my troubles started far before April). As I make my new diagnosis, anxiety begins to rupture from my stomach and heart palpitations swell through the small bone bars of my chest cavity. I’m having heart attack. At 3:30am, I nearly drive myself to the local hospital. Alone, for my first night alone, alone, all by my self in this queen sized bed while Scott sleeps on an air mattress in Brooklyn. The next day he is heading for his homeland with a group of twenty something strangers. I’ve never felt so desperate for companionship. How lucky I am to have him here most of the time to carry me from these bouts of insanity. If I die right now, I’m going to be really angry at myself. I should wake up my roommates, Amy and Mark and tell them that I might be having a heart attack. It’s probably not a heart attack, but what if it is? I don’t want them finding me dead from a drug overdose tomorrow morning. Should I call for an ambulance?

But I don’t go anywhere and I don’t call anyone or knock on anyone’s bedroom door. Instead I toss through twenty minutes of unnerving sleep before my alarm clock honks like a stupid goose at 5am. My left eyelids stick together with a thin layer of yellow-crusted junk. I roll out of bed and stand so that I won’t fall back asleep. My reflection in the bathroom mirror is unrecognizable. I have red sores across my cheeks, patches discolored brown and my left eye looks like a deflated red balloon, piled there atop my eye, beneath my brow.

At work, I call my doctor’s office. “I think I have Lyme Disease.” I tell the receptionist. The doctor can see me at 3:45pm. Despite that I nanny until 5pm, I make the appointment. I send my roommate, Amy, a message. She agrees to help me by watching the boys while I see my doctor. I pick her up before the appointment and while I am inside she sits with the boys in the car, drawing the toddlers sketches of fish and octopuses and making paper airplanes. While I wait in the waiting room, I stand at the window watching the car.

Once inside the doctor’s office, while I wait for the doctor to come in, I send Amy a message. “I’m sorry this is taking so long.” I send to her.

“They’re being good so far.” She says.

“Ok good. I’ll make this up to you.”

“No need. Get better! That’ll make me happy.”

As soon as my doctor walks into the room, I watch myself weep. I apologize and get through my words like a train on an overgrown track. “I feel like I’m falling apart.” I tell him. “My body isn’t healing. My skin isn’t healing like it’s supposed to.” And for the first time he agrees that this doesn’t look like acne. It doesn’t look like Lyme Disease either, but we can do the blood test to be sure. I tell him about the rash on my feet and he inspects my puffy eye. Then I show him this ingrown hair on my bikini line that blew up the night before into a bluish bubble. He tells me he thinks that it was wise to pop it, which surprises me as I remember sopping up the fluid with a handful of tissues. He tells me this all seems very similar to Scott’s abscess from the year before. Where could we have been exposed to such bacteria? Do we shower at a gym? "No. I do yoga." I tell him, but there are no showers there. Honestly, I’m a little angry he doesn’t think it’s Lyme Disease. He puts me on antibiotics and some nose ointment. He says if my eye isn't better or close to better by Thursday he's going to have an eye specialist drain it.

I feel like a fucking alien.

After the appointment, I drive Amy home. Then I drive the boys home.

Then it dawns on me that my yoga mat must be infested with years of bacteria for I never clean that thing. Scott’s cyst last year was on his back and he likes to do sit-ups on the yoga mat. 

I call Scott. He’s in a loud airport shop. He steps out to a terminal to talk. I try not to cry, but his gentle voice opens the damn dam I usually keep guarded by a family of prosperous beavers, letting my dead sea to further flood from my eye and a half with such force I can barely breathe. Perhaps the beavers don’t work during illness. Anyway, I had planned to not tell him anything. I didn’t want him to know that I nearly called him in the middle of the night. That in my sleep deprived drugged up delirium, I actually considered driving back to Brooklyn for a hug. But as soon as I hear him say, “Ah Rachey”, my night and day eject out of me like a messy shit, yes diarrhea. As I wipe away my tears, I tell him how much I love him and he tells me the same and that he misses me already. Eventually I realize that saying good bye without a shaky voice isn’t possible at this time in my life so I say it the best I can, with “really don’t worry about mes” wrapping through my good and byes like hundred year old vines in the wind. 

There I am, in my favorite weeping place, the driver’s seat. Parked in the center of town outside the pharmacy where I plan to purchase my new prescriptions. I haven’t put money in the meter yet. It’s a little before 6pm and I imagine a meter maid coming to write me a ticket and then I imagine killing the old maid right there on the sidewalk beside that line of multi-colored newspaper boxes. But no one comes along and after Scott and I say our final good bye, I put two nickels into the machine.

As I walk back to the car from the pharmacy, my father calls and again my tears begin falling and my voice begins rattling like a falling top. My father is on the case. He tells me. He’s going to help me figure out what’s wrong with me. I believe him because, luckily for me, I still secretly believe that he is Superman.  

I go to the grocery store, the good grocery store, and buy three pieces of almond encrusted tilapia; a bunch of broccoli, a bag of whole wheat pasta and two big bunches of dinosaur kale. I will turn this around. This is the start of my skin recovery.

When I get home, I throw out all of my yoga stuff. It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit story, only I don’t have a bonfire in the woods, just a big green garbage can. Amy grills the fish on tin foil and I make pasta salad and sautéed broccoli. I thank them, my roommates for all their help, for watching Penny while I was in New York and for watching the boys while I was falling apart.

At around 9pm, I take my meds, which is one antibiotic pill, and then I take several alcohol swabs to my face.

“You seem exasperated.” My doctor tells me while I lay on the table and he inspects the black hole on my bikini line.

“It’s been a long year.”

I hold a hot washcloth to my eye for a half an hour or so and go to bed. Then I sleep. Really sleep.

“I think you might have MRSA,” My father tells me. I’m not going to search that. I tell myself. I can’t. And I’m definitely not going to do an image search for it. I’m going to wait and see how this two-week antibiotic trial goes. (This inner dialogue lasts as long as the walk from my kitchen to the computer.) Here I am sitting at the computer. MRSA is what made Michael Jackson lose part of his nose. I’m going to lose part of my nose. Suicide is happening pre-nose crumbling. If I can’t deal with pimples, I certainly can’t live with half a nose. I tell my father that this scares the desire to live out of me. “It isn’t life threatening. Its just uncomfortable. So let’s just wait and see what your dermatologist says.” He says, calming me. 

The next morning, I go to my doctor’s office and speak with the front desk receptionist nurse. “My father thinks I have MRSA.” I tell her. 

A couple hours later, she calls me back after speaking with my doctor. “He’s already treating you as if you had MRSA.”

At my last appointment, in my physically disfigured and mentally altered state of failure to operate my own body, I couldn't quite comprehend what he was explaining to me about this virus. So after a year of fluctuating levels of attractiveness, from days of heinous discoloration and blistery bumps across the tops of my cheeks and above my eyebrows, it is finally solved. The mystery is solved. Not yet cured, but at least understood.

Scott is still away. In an email, I tell him, “I’m going to look like the blushing bride you married when you get home.”

For two weeks I’ve been living without his body in bed with mine, so many days without even speaking with him. He’s sent me a couple emails entitled “international love”. Short emails I’ve read over and over. Every day, I scan the news headlines for any violence in Israel and Scott’s grandparents and parents call me to say hello. It’s just Penny and I in the quiet apartment tonight. Amy and Mark are away. They'll be back tomorrow. I swept the floors tonight and tossed the moldy leftovers from the back of the fridge. I haven’t cried since last Monday. I’m fine by myself. On my own schedule. Eating what I feel like. Going to bed early if I want, late if I feel the impulse. But it’s lonely here without him, and this fills me with both gratitude and sympathy for anyone who's every found herself sick and alone.

Douche Bags

"Gut taken in at a checkpoint. Fuckin' six months without a license. But I gut a good lawya, so..." A redhead with rust freckled arms, says.  


"That happened to me last summah, dude." His friend says. 


"Where was the checkpoint?" Another guy asks. 


"Ovah on Columbus Street in Springfield. Fuckin'...yeah but it's cool, I gut a good lawya." 


There is a pause here as the three nod their heads and look around. I can't tell because I'm trying not to stare, but I think this is an awkward moment. 


"You livin 'round here now?" 


Last year, a fellow coworker at the grocery store refers to his D.U.I. with a carefully crafted nonchalance, calling it a "dooey." 


"A what?" I ask. 


"D.U.I." He says. 


Ahhh...a dooey. Just a fuzzy little dooey for driving drunk. No big deal. Cop was an ass hole probably, right? Fuckin' pig pull you over in your low riding, bass bumping beige Camry while you and three other twenty something tormentors speed around town verbally violating every female you pass because it's funny and because it's "fuuuckin' summah dooood"?  


One morning last week, while on his bicycle, Scott is confronted by a man in a white unmarked van. At the intersection on the edge of our small city center where one lane splits into two, Scott gives the signal to go left and steers his bicycle to the right side of the left lane. This infuriates the man in the white unmarked van behind him who slams on his gas pedal and speeds past Scott, nearly hitting the back tire of his bicycle. Blown away by this unwarranted belligerence, Scott raises his middle finger and shows it to the driver. Seconds later, forced to stop at the traffic light, the stranger begins molesting Scott's patience by calling him a "fucking faggot" repeatedly before eventually stringing together enough words to construct a somewhat coherent sentence, "Oh you're such a tough guy with that finger, how about I take it and shove it up your fucking ass, you fuckin' faggot." Of course, it isn't a particularly smart sentence and the mere mention of shoving Scott's finger up Scott's ass is, of course, a form of man-on-man rape and yet he's the one calling Scott the faggot, but all the same, Scott remains calm.


"What was I supposed to do?" My husband asks. 


"You're supposed to be on the fuckin' sidewalk, ya fuckin' faggot." This man (who probably hasn't ridden a bicycle since he was a boy for only "faggots" ride bicycles) says.  


"We're not supposed to ride on the sidewalk." 


"You fuckin' registered, you fuckin' faggot?" The man shouts as his tires screech forward, leaving behind the echo of his rage to surround Scott where he sits simmering on his bicycle seat, waiting, still, for the light to turn green. Shaking off the last bit of loitering tension, he catches the eye of a young lady who stands on the sidewalk waiting for a walk signal. 


"Nice." She says, raising her eyebrows.


What is this? This culture of men who live in these cloudy bubbles of douche baggery?


Yesterday afternoon, after going out to lunch, Scott and I spot a friend sitting on the stoop of a storefront. "Hey, come over here and listen to this guy." He says, waving toward a skinny kid about our age playing guitar. "He's amazing. I've never seen anyone play like him." He says and so we sit and tap our toes and listen to this young man play Bob Dylan songs and yodel between ballads. After a few songs, two bronzed guys with tight white tee shirts, flowery font leg tattoos and cell phones clipped to their black leather belts pass before the busker in a dramatic slow motion dance of mockery. Unfazed, the busking boy plays on and a young woman drops a dollar into his guitar case. 


When these pompous gentlemen reach their buddies on the other side of the guitar, I watch while they give out elaborately casual handshakes before one of them spews,  


"Yo I had a massage and it was wundaful. I had a massage today and it. was. wundaful." It is as if he is speaking for the sake of speaking. As if he has perfected the delivery of contrived chit chatter. I wonder if he ever says anything at all.


We leave soon after, but before we do I toss two dollar bills into the busking boy's case and smile him a thank you. 


"Yo, you wanna go drinkin?" 


Drinking has become an activity. Like hiking a mountain or going to the movie theater or playing video games. It's a thing to do now. I admit, I do it. I drink to relax and laugh away the worries I have congesting my brain waves, but I don't call it that. I don't tell everyone I'm drinking in order to get drunk in order to justify vomiting cheap beer on some girl who looks slutty enough, drunk enough, to give me a blow job in the dirty bar bathroom (not because I want her to but because it'll be a funny story later and because blow jobs by strange girls in bathrooms are supposed to be something I desire and not something that terrifies me.) 


This is why there is nothing like a good man. A man who is secure enough to buy his son dolls, tea sets and dress up clothes. A man who is grown up enough to cross his legs and wear bow ties, cuff links and matching argyle socks. A man who is comfortable enough to embrace the awkwardness of acquaintances, allowing humor and honesty to collide with eye contact and fumbling handshakes. A man who says things like "I can't wait to see you as a mother." And, "When you smile, my heart opens. Some days I spend hours just trying to make you laugh." A man who admits to a real fear of spiders, crabs, lobsters and dead Asian girls with crooked spines, bluish white faces and long stringy hair. A man who is an individual and not a copy of a music video or advertisement or the copy of the copy of either of these things. A man with a scar on his back, not from a knife fight or gang brawl, but from an infected sack of pus he had surgically removed last Spring. 


Sure I don't really know these dudes I call douche bags (a phrase stemmed from my own horrid slang), but that's because I have no desire to know them. I wish I could tell them that. That their two-dimensional portrayals of the people they think they should be are extremely dull compared to the unique men they are on the inside.