And I tried really, really hard to be good and watch myself and not break anything, down to the point that I covered my mouth when I brushed my teeth that night should any flecks of toothpaste try to fly out and land on the mirror.
That’s how good I was being.
The next morning, I woke up feeling very victorious that I had been in Amy Se’s apartment for an entire twelve hours without backing up her plumbing or tearing a curtain rod out of the wall.
That is, until I turned over in bed and gasped at the pillowcase.
It looked like I’d had a tooth pulled overnight.
Sure, I had hand-guarded my mouth and watched where I stepped and used only the tiniest bits of toilet paper possible. But there was the evidence of Laurie, the Bad Houseguest, spread across the Frette linens in the form of bright red lipstick that my face had mushed all over it.
“Amy Se,” I said as she headed out the door to work. “I ruined your very expensive pillowcase.”
“Oh god,” she laughed. “Don’t worry about that. Bleach will take out everything.”
“I will totally write you a check,” I offered. “It will bounce the first time you put it through, but if you keep trying, the second or third time is usually the charm.”
“You still write checks?” she asked.
“I’d go to the ATM but I can already tell you how that will turn out,” I said. “At least with a check it looks like I’m making an effort.”
“Really,” she assured me. “Don’t worry. It’s only lipstick.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I tried to explain. “I usually eat it all off by the end of the day.”
“It’s okay,” she insisted as she walked out the door. “Have fun today!”
I tried to make up for my faux pas by doing all of her dishes, but, to be honest, it was me who’d drunk out of all the glasses, as evidenced by the bright red lipstick on each rim.
Amy Si was still sleeping when I got into the shower, so I took my time, knowing there was no rush. Even Amy Se’s bathroom was gorgeous, the original clawfoot bathtub surrounded by beautiful, original antique tiles.
When I finished my shower, I turned off the water and reached for a towel, and stepped onto the bathmat, which was strikingly cold as soon as my big toe hit it.
Squish.
Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh no, I cried to myself.
Oh, but yes.
An inch or more of water covered the entire floor of Amy Se’s bathroom in enough of a flood that some biblical characters would start collecting animals. I had not made sure the shower curtain was all in the bathtub with me, and, as a result, my long, luxurious shower was now probably dripping onto the person in the shower below me.
I didn’t know what to do. I was scared. I was horrified. I was naked.
I looked around and grabbed for a towel to throw on the floor like I would at my own house, but then I stopped. They were the most beautiful towels I had ever felt—soft, fluffy, absorbent, and utterly white. I got my towels at Restoration Hardware on clearance. I thought I had good towels. Amy Se’s towels made my towels feel like dried-up leaves. There was no way I was going to ruin any more of her white things, so instead I wrapped one around me and did what I know only bad guests do: started pokin’ around.
I opened doors, closets, drawers—anything that had a handle on it, I opened it. I found her mop in the hallway closet, and quickly tiptoed back to the bathroom, leaving a trail of water behind me. Then I mopped and I squeezed, and I mopped and I squeezed, and I mopped and I squeezed, and twenty minutes later, when I had mopped up what had to be gallons and gallons of water, I got dressed and opened the bathroom door to find Amy Si awake and walking toward me.
She stopped in her tracks.
“What did you do?” she asked me point-blank when she saw the mop in my hand. “How much of the floor is missing in there?”
“None,” I said quickly. “Not a bit. Not a bit. I just spilled some water, so while I had the mop I figured I’d just wash the floor.”
“Really?” she asked me. “Is that all?”
“Yep,” I answered honestly. “It was only water. I promise.”
“Okay,” she said, then smiled. “I did some cleaning, too, last night. Someone left chocolate on the toilet seat!”
When I came down the stairs one morning not very long ago, I was met with an angry-faced husband who waited until I had fully entered the kitchen before exclaiming, “Do you know when that peanut butter expired?” pointing to the jar of Skippy on the counter.
I had no idea. “I need to have coffee and get some pants on before I fully commit to acting as a peanut butter psychic,” I said. “Or you could save me the trouble of trying to shove these slippers through pajama bottoms, getting them stuck, then spending the next ten minutes kicking my way through the foot hole, and just tell me.”
“Nine years,” he proclaimed, as if those words could part a violent sea. “That is older than our car!”
“Please don’t eat the car,” I responded with a smile, but to no avail.
“Do you know what nine-year-old peanut butter tastes like?” my husband questioned again.
Personally, I guessed it was not very good after I grabbed the jar out of the cupboard last night and tried to give some to the dog, who was being extra picky, though it was now apparent she used her senses for carbon dating.
“No, but I do know what Purina Puppy Chow in the can tastes like,” I offered as a consolation.
“That’s because you eat everything brown you see that’s lying around, thinking that it’s chocolate!” he replied.
“Yes, I told you, I thought it was double-chocolate cookie dough with coconut in it on the kitchen counter,” I tried to explain.
“Had you made cookie dough in the recent past, or know why a lump of cookie dough would be on the kitchen counter? By itself? With no other cookie dough around it?” he questioned.
“No, but as I’ve told you before, sometimes you have to take that risk, because it could have turned out to be chocolate instead of dog food. You never know. It would have haunted me forever,” I concluded. “Sometimes, you win.”
“But most times in this house, you don’t,” my husband interjected. “Most times you put a spoonful of honey and peanut butter mixed together into your mouth expecting a win with a wonderful salty sweet treat, but you lose with a wave of sticky, unspit-outable, rancid peanut flavor accompanied by the burn of gasoline.”
“You know,” I started, pretty boldly for a fat girl who hadn’t shaved her legs since summer, “I buy a lot of peanut butter. You eat a lot of peanut butter. There is no alarm that goes off on peanut butter when it expires. It is not my fault that Skippy has not changed its label since 2007. And believe me, you may turn your nose up at almost adolescent-aged peanut butter now, but after the apocalypse, you will scoop that shit out and eat it with your fingers. It’s staying in the cabinet.”
Then I got my coffee and went upstairs to get my pants on before he started checking expiration dates on other things in the pantry.
I remember the glory days of my Y2K prep like it was yesterday. I was there for every sale of canned creamed corn, three for a dollar. I had enough beef jerky to keep the Donner Party from eating their neighbor’s rump roast. I had cases of Hormel chili and beef stew hidden in closets for when the starving mobs came to raid us. I had twenty jars of peanut butter, one of which my husband might have just eaten. I did it for that man. The man who was laughing at me now and who laughed at me then for keeping cans of tuna fish in my shoes. But then, as I would still say now, when disaster strikes and your tum-tum has been empty for several days, mi esposo, you’ll chow down on rancid peanut butter like it was a Milky Way bar, and then after you get violently ill from it, you’ll do it all over again when the next hunger pang hits.
Preparing for an emergency doesn’t take much; all you really need is just a little foresight and the will to live. That’s about it. I’ve tried to consider eve
rything.
The first thing to do is determine what type of emergency you might face, because the details of preparedness may vary. In epidemic/plague conditions, yeah, you’re probably going to die no matter how many cans of creamed corn you have hidden behind the water heater. Somewhere along the line, you’re going to touch a contaminated poop hand and die the same grueling death as the rest of the population. If you don’t, well then, you can thank the likes of people like me who can smell a disaster like the brilliant scientists in movies that no one ever listens to. The plus side is that half of the IRS will be dead, getting a cab will be easier, and maybe people will start washing their hands for a goddamned change.
In the event of acts of God, I like to think I’ve gotten my training from owning the DVD of 2012, which depicts in startling accuracy this very scenario, and although I do believe I could probably drive a limousine through a high-rise glass building, I’m not so sure about the skills necessary to fly a plane during the creation of thousands of volcanoes and meteor showers while the Earth’s crust collapses below me. That’s a rather large scope. However, if I can make it through that, this is the day of reckoning for all of the chubby people who have wisely stored their reserves for precisely this purpose. The chubs have come home to roost. All of the girls with polycystic ovarian syndrome (of which I am one) will emerge the victors in the race for survival. For all of us who couldn’t lose weight if we were in a North Korean prison camp, this is our moment. This is what we were made for. Most of us are barren and will resume our marsupial-like coating once electrolysis is inaccessible, but the human race doesn’t need to live on. We do.
Now although I don’t necessarily believe in monsters, and the chances are relatively slim for a dormant creature to suddenly waken and start smashing the landscape, the fact of the matter is that it’s not a hundred percent that it can’t happen. Should we experience a contagion of devils, an army of alien beings, or a sudden barrage of anything we don’t understand but have read about in a Stephen King book, I plan on clambering to the highest point I can find and simply jumping off, or eating everything I have in dented cans. Personally, I don’t want to wait to discover firsthand if the enemy eats people and then suddenly find there’s a fang in my intestines. I don’t think I want to live until the end of this movie. Likewise, it’s unfair to dangle the thin string of hope here, but if there is one bright spot, it’s that everyone who ever wronged you, told the entire girls’ PE class that you had a camel toe, or spread the rumor that you were not psychic as you claimed to be at the slumber party, is dead. And that probably means Matthew McConaughey, too.
Now, the apocalypse I’m most prepared for is nuclear holocaust since I watched The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that everyone in this country watched one night in 1983 and that turned me into a spooker forever. I blame that movie, hands down, for my Y2K mania, and after waiting seventeen years for a reason to stockpile anything, I was eager to put into place the lessons I had learned from JoBeth Williams and Jason Robards as they faced eternity in a basement. Nuclear holocaust, the shadow that hung over the childhoods of the eighties—even more so than the horrific “We Built This City” by Starship—is always a threat, always a possibility. It only takes one despot who’s stepped off his meds to cause nuclear annihilation. Frankly, I don’t want to be incinerated by a lunatic who shoots at whales with a crossbow (yes, Vladimir, I’m talking to YOU).
I already have a basement, so I am one shelter ahead of the game. Chances are I’ll have been vaporized, although I really don’t know why any insane despot would target Eugene, Oregon, unless they hated hippies, which on second thought is an excellent reason to target Eugene, Oregon. I once knew a girl who was determined to save all trees by eliminating toilet paper from use, and if you had to tinkle when in her hovel of a home, then that applied to you, too. After you were done answering nature’s call, there were pee rags—old washcloths, dishcloths, and assorted pieces of former clothing—in a dirty basket that your hostess, who once woke up with rats GNAWING ON HER HAIR, had provided for your “needs.” Simply wipe yourself with one and deposit it in the basket on the other side of the toilet. I don’t think I need to say it, but anyone who wakes up with a rat eating part of them is probably not too concerned about washing pee rags in a sanitary manner. I’m sure that basket was a grab bag of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and all 114 varieties of HPV. I also knew someone with herpes who left their sex toys—which I don’t think were being run through the sterilization cycle, either—out in the open and within reach of children. So by all means, someone put Eugene, Oregon, on the nuke map. Even before Los Alamos. Put a red circle here, Vlad.
I’m finding it essential to move on here. I have assembled a short-but-pointed list of things I will need in The Hole (which is what I will begin calling my basement when the End Days come), and although these items fit my personal needs, I believe them to be universal as well:
• A pillow: Ever try to sleep on a plane without a pillow? Now try sleeping in a shelter without one. It will also be a good therapeutic tool when the need to scream becomes uncontrollable.
• Matches in a waterproof container: Essential when your potty is about a foot away from your bed.
• Pictures of food you will never eat again: Bringing back good memories of your previous life can be cheery and morale boosting. What makes a smile appear like a plate of chicken Parmesan?
• Hair of loved ones who have passed before you, most likely before your very eyes: Collect the hair and fashion it until you have something resembling a Grief Doll.
No one really survives an apocalypse alone, so I believe it is essential to fashion a sort of survival team, but this is something that must be curated with careful thought and insight. Sure, my father-in-law is funny, but when it comes to providing a useful skill in the effort of your survival, chuckles are worthless. You have to earn your place in my Hole. It is important when choosing your Survival Team to assemble people of good cheer, fast runners, and those without gastrointestinal problems or food allergies. Even though the apocalypse diet rarely contains meat, do not allow vegans onto your Survival Team unless it is for the specific purpose of possibly consuming them later on if things turn super shitty. This way there’s no guilt, and other members of the Survival Team will be clamoring to tap them on the head with a sizeable rock.
After careful consideration, I believe these are the spots I need to fill:
• DOCTOR: Most essential of all spots. You’ll need a touch of help should things turn a bit for the worse, such as should your intestines start dragging on the ground behind you or your skin begin falling off in large sheets. (Note: A midwife is NOT a doctor. A doula is NOT a doctor. A person who has given birth at home in a baby pool is NOT a doctor. A physician’s assistant is NOT a doctor, but will suffice if you only know people who have graduated from community college.)
• BACKUP DOCTOR: In case something should befall the first doctor. Like death. Or if they are revealed as a vegan.
• THE MUSHROOM GUY: Mushrooms will probably become very large and bountiful after a nuclear holocaust, but every mushroom has an evil twin. You may be chowing down on a luscious portobello only to discover six hours later that your kidneys said “No way!” and you’re being tossed into a shallow grave by morning. You can typically recruit Mushroom Guys at farmer’s markets, brew festivals, and acoustic nights. Look for a fellow who is rather unkempt, bears an earthy essence, or drives a VW van that uses biofuel. And has a sticker on the back window that says so.
• AN OUTDOORSMAN: Ideally, this should be someone who has experience in the wilderness, but in places where people only wear the accoutrements of such a person, like in Brooklyn, a person who has been camping will suffice, preferably in a tent and not in an RV. This person will hopefully know north from south, but if you’re really in a bind to find one, a homeless person will pretty much do.
• THE PROFESSOR: Someone who can produce a bike that makes electricity and a radio out of coconuts.
/> • A VINTNER: The only hope you will have in the foreseeable future.
• SCAPEGOAT: An IT person would be spectacular for this role, or a gamer. Someone bearing nominal interpersonal skills, who will mainly keep to themselves but will provide an immeasurably valid role when the hunt is fruitless and the waste bucket needs emptying while fallout is still drifting like snow. Usually, this role is the first to be vacated.
Those who will not be making my Survival Team include: lawyers, accountants, actors, poets, salespeople, baristas, city council members, magicians, or those with guitars. Simply put, none of these folks have anything to offer in survival experience. Most of these types are needy, do not require a lot of quiet time, and might even jeopardize your very existence by humming a jaunty tune, nervously jiggling their foot, or unconsciously shouting out orders when a troop of alien scouts, a hive of radiated super bees, or a white supremacist, who has survived everything while wearing merely a tank top, is hovering nearby.
If I do, indeed, survive the nuclear holocaust, I realize I might notice several aftereffects of being cooked like a hot dog. These may include a slight headache, a little wooziness, some extra pooping, and regular ol’ hair loss. I’ll see it in just about everybody. A little on the sides, a little off the top, a clump here or there. I’ll try to think of it as a bonus; I will now have the supplies I’ll need to add to my family of Grief Dolls.
If I make it that far, the day will come that I notice I’m bleeding from places that don’t normally bleed, or that my intestines are hanging a little lower outside of my body than typical. I’m planning on taking this opportunity to start making a bucket list of the enjoyable activities I’d like to accomplish within, say, the next fifteen minutes. I might try gazing at a nuclear sunset, or leaving my extra skin on the pillow of the person I loathe the most on the Survival Team. But there’s good news, too. I can leave The Hole now, with my fingers scooping from a jar of rancid peanut butter.