“Then say that!” she said, her voice rising. “I love it when the machine says, ‘You have mail.’ It makes me feel like Meg Ryan!”
I felt a dark precedent coming on. I could see my mom using the Internet to do all of her Mom’s Dirty Work, because in the realm of my mom’s e-mail world, I was mute. It was her dream, a dangerous, magical dream. I quickly imagined being barraged by her e-mail messages, saying things to me without the potential to even talk back to her.
“Hi Laurie. It’s Mom. Clean your filthy house. From, Mom.”
“Hi Laurie. It’s Mom. Go to church or go to hell. You choose. From, Mom.”
“Hi Laurie. It’s Mom. Shave your monkey armpits or you’re going to find yourself single again. From, Mom.”
“Hi Laurie. It’s Mom. Why don’t you answer my e-mails? From, Mom.”
E-mail, however, wasn’t the only Internet frontier my mother wanted to conquer. After watching The Rosie O’Donnell Show, she called me again.
“What’s eBay on the Internet?” she wanted to know. “Is it ebonics for something dirty, because I don’t understand it.”
“Remember the Internet auction I got addicted to last year?” I asked her. “That’s eBay.”
“I want to do the eBay,” she said sternly. “Rosie does something on it for charity. I want to help. As long as it’s not pornographic or a perverted chat room. I don’t want anyone putting my head on a naked body like they did to Sophia Loren. I don’t get my kicks that way. Will you come over and help me do the eBay?”
“Only if you show me the naked picture of Sophia Loren,” I replied.
“Don’t get fresh,” she warned.
So I went over to help, and logged onto the site to register her. “You need a user name,” I explained. “What do you want to use?”
“Not my real name,” she cautioned. “I don’t want anybody knowing who I am. I watch Dateline. I know people can get your address and start sending you . . . things. I know someone is going to try and put me on the Internet naked. Those things happen, I’ve seen it on Dateline! The Internet is all smut and perverts!”
“Mom,” I said, trying to reason with her, “it’s not like some old man is going to mistake you for a sixth-grade boy and offer to buy you a bus ticket to Orlando, Florida. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t just turn on your computer and then proceed to run through a gauntlet of sex offenders.”
“What would your father say if his friends saw me on the Internet naked?” my mother shot back.
“They’d probably be nicer to him, but it just doesn’t happen like that,” I said. “I’d be giving away snapshots of myself if I really thought someone would paste my head on a naked Pamela Anderson and put it on a website. Kodak couldn’t process enough film. Go ahead, take my head, terrorize me with it. If someone put a picture of my foot on a naked Pam Anderson, I’d be thrilled, let alone a part of me that could be identified.”
She shot me a look, then thought for a long, long time. “Um . . . Cory! How’s that for a name?” she finally said.
“Your dog?” I said as I typed it in. “I don’t know, Mom. Entertainment Tonight might pick up on that. Well, it’s taken anyway. Pick something else.”
“How can it be taken?” she argued. “Cory is my dog! I want to use that name! I need something I can remember!”
So then she made me enter the names of all the dead dogs we’ve ever had, like Bambi, Pookie, Ginger, and Brandy. “This is dangerous, Mom. You’ve been subconsciously naming your pets after strippers,” I said, but she just ignored me. “You’ll be a pervert magnet.”
After we learned that those names were also all taken, she agreed to the next available “Cory” name, which was “Cory34.”
“Now just how am I supposed to remember that?” she asked, still pouting. “I’m going to have to change the dog’s name! ‘Want a cookie, Cory34?’ ‘Look, Cory34 made a doody on the floor.’ Oh, yeah. That sounds smart. Just show me Rosie’s stuff!”
I clicked on the Rosie pumpkin head, and a new screen appeared with the charity auctions. When my mother got a good look at what was up for sale, she threw down her mouse and balked.
“Rosie’s out of her fat little head if she thinks I’m paying a thousand dollars for Madonna’s autograph!” she said in disbelief. “I don’t even like Madonna! That’s not help! I’ll help somebody, I’m not above that, sure, here’s five dollars! But this? That’s like asking for a kidney! Get me off of this thing! You stop laughing at me, Laurie!”
When I went home later that night, I checked my e-mail. I already knew what the message said before I opened it, but I clicked on it anyway.
“Hi Laurie. It’s Mom. If you write a column about this, I’ll kill you. From, Mom.”
The Candy Apple
Freak Show
“Sun’s up,” my friend Jamie said as she, our friend Krysti, and I zoomed down the highway last week, heading for Pasadena and a day of shopping. “Time to eat!”
I was starving, too, and my appetite was for a big, fat candy apple that I always get in Old Town Pasadena when we go there. It’s the best candy apple in the world. First, they dip a beautiful green apple in gooey, homemade caramel, then they dip it in white chocolate, roll it in Oreo cookie bits, AND THEN they drizzle more white chocolate all the way around it. It’s heaven on a stick, and the only thing that could make me love it more would be if it were laced with Fen-Phen.
The vision of that candy apple kept dancing in my head, all gooey, crunchy, and nearly nutritious because of the apple part.
“I’m getting a rumbly in my tumbly,” I hinted. “There’s a candy apple in Old Town just calling my name! I can feel it.”
Jamie and Krysti just looked at each other. “Forget it,” they almost said in unison. “When we do get to Old Town, you’d better not get any big ideas about eating it when you’re standing next to us. We don’t want to be a part of your Candy Apple Freak Show!”
I gasped. “I thought I could trust you!” I cried. “I knew I shouldn’t have told either one of you about the Candy Apple Incident! It wasn’t a freak show, I said it was a freak accident!”
The Candy Apple Incident happened a few months ago when I was shopping and ran into a candy factory. There, in the window, was a shiny green apple wrapped in caramel and then rolled in Oreo cookie bits. It couldn’t have been more perfect if my name had been written on it in white chocolate. It was mine, though I decided not to eat it until I got home, so I could savor its beauty in private, where that kind of love belongs.
Heading back to the freeway, I spotted a branch of my bank and decided to deposit a check I had in my purse, so I pulled into the packed drive-thru line and waited. As I was waiting, I looked at the candy apple glistening on the passenger seat. I picked it up by the top of the bag, turned it all the way around, looking at it, admiring it, then tore the cellophane bag off like an animal and sunk my big buck front teeth into it.
And then couldn’t get them back out. You see, I had not prepared my toothy lunge with the correct leverage and had plunged my fangs into something of an apple abyss with no way to get them out.
They were stuck.
“Ehhh! Ehhh!” I grunted as I tussled with the apple, trying to pull it down, but not with too much force because my gums bleed already, and I was afraid that instead of ripping my teeth out of the apple, I’d rip my teeth out of my gums instead.
“EH MEH GAAA!” I cried (translation without the candy apple lodged in my mouth: “Oh my god!”) as I struggled, wiggling the candy apple stick to no avail. Then I had an idea. I opened up my jaw as wide as I could, figuring that if I could bite into the apple with my lower teeth, I could scrape up the inside of the apple and free my tusks that way.
I bit in. Hard. As soon as I did, however, I realized I had made a serious mistake when a wave of pain hit me and I understood that I had just pulled a big, fat, uncooperative muscle in both my face and neck and I was temporarily paralyzed.
“AHHHH! AHHHH!” I screamed in
agony as I put my foot on the brake and clawed at the apple with both hands. As I wrestled with it, a massive chunk of the apple finally flew off and freed me, but the chunk was so large it wouldn’t even fit in my mouth. I tried to chew it as apple juice streamed down my chin, as little bits fell from my chops, and that was when I looked over and found a mother-and-son team staring at me from their white Econoline van in the next lane, their jaws completely dropped in stupor.
What could I do? I just kept chewing and waved.
I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could wipe the juice off, and that’s when I saw myself. Smears of cookie crumbs, apple juice, and caramel were all over my face, on my chin, on my nose, on my neck. One smudge almost went all the way to my ear. As I tried to wipe it off with the cellophane bag, I noticed the people in the van again, but this time they were laughing at me. The mom reached up and wiped her eyes.
I decided right then and there that I would avoid a future Candy Apple Incident by carrying a fork and knife with me at all times, and I was trying to tell Jamie and Krysti this as we parked the car in Old Town. They, however, were having none of it.
“No way, Lockjaw,” Krysti said. “Who knows what you would do with weapons. You could stick one of us with the knife when we pointed out you had cookie crumbs stuck in your nostrils.”
“And stab the other one with a fork when we pointed out that you kind of looked like a barbecued pig with a giant apple stuck in your mouth,” Jamie added. “Sometimes I think if a caseworker from social services evaluated you, you could totally qualify for disability.”
“Really?” I said, trying hard not to get my hopes up.
We passed the candy apple store, and as Jamie and Krysti waited outside, I went in and got my treat. The candy apple people wrapped it in a pretty cellophane bag and tied it with a ribbon.
It was beautiful. I held it up in the light so that we could all admire its majesty, as I twirled it on the stick to get a full, circular view.
“What’s that?” Krysti said as she pointed to an aberration on the apple that seemed to be a big, thick, white fleck of coconut.
“Hmmm,” Jamie said, studying it carefully. “Looks like you have some competition. But whoever put on that Candy Apple Freak Show is missing a tooth!”
More Bread,
Please
We saw them through the window of the front of the restaurant as we were waiting for a table.
They were glistening, they were steaming, they were slightly browned on top.
They were tiny little rolls swathed in butter and garlic.
Heaven on a platter.
“I can’t stop looking at them,” I confessed to my friend Jamie as I pressed my face against the glass. “Do you think if I asked the people at that table, they’d give me one?”
“Ask for two,” she insisted.
“Excuse me,” the hostess said, pointing to us. “You two!”
“Us?” Jamie replied. “Is our table ready?”
“No,” she answered sharply. “Stop drooling on that window, you are scaring people!”
Being that we were at an ultrahip restaurant in Los Angeles—around the corner from Jamie’s new apartment—catering to the ultracool, we were already at a severe disadvantage. Despite the fact that we had bypassed our regular uniform of overalls and hiking boots, we were still slightly underdressed, having left our chunky-heeled, purple suede hip-high boots and turbo breast implants at home. I noticed the difference between “us” and “them” the minute we walked up to the front door.
“Are you sure this is the restaurant?” I asked Jamie as she gave her keys to the valet. “No one here weighs over one hundred pounds. Either this is a casting call for Scream 15, or these are the prettiest homeless people I’ve ever seen.”
The hostess, sporting a headset and a walkie-talkie, sure was in a hurry to inform us of the hour-and-a-half wait until Jamie mentioned that we had a reservation.
“You can wait over there until your table is ready,” she said, pointing outside.
After we shuffled back through the door, I spotted the rolls on the other side of the glass that was the promised land. Then the hostess yelled at us and called our name.
“Follow me,” she said as she approached us in her clickety-click chunky shoes.
Jamie and I trailed her meekly to our table and sat down.
“I want rolls,” I stated immediately. “Lots and lots of rolls.”
BING! As if the Guardian Angel of Hot Breads and Starches had heard my prayer, a little dish with six shiny rolls popped up on our table.
“Six?” Jamie and I exclaimed together. “That’s not enough! That’s only three apiece! What do we look like, models?”
The waiter showed up, sneered at us, then took our order. At the last minute, I decided we absolutely had to have the roasted garlic bulb to accompany the tiny bread delights. I realized it was a silly move once the waiter left, and I was face-to-face with the two surviving rolls on the white plate.
“There’s not enough bread for the garlic,” Jamie said with wide, panicked eyes. “There is NOT ENOUGH!”
“Don’t fear,” I said as I waved at a busboy and got his attention. “More bread, please!”
BING! Another white plate appeared on the table, and this time, it was a proverbial MOUNTAIN of rolls. Rolls lining the dish. Rolls piled on top of rolls. Rolls falling off the plate. Rolls tumbling onto the table.
“It’s like winning the lottery!” we gasped breathlessly.
Jamie picked one up and popped it into her mouth.
“Don’t eat them now!” I cried. “Wait for the garlic!”
“There are thirty of them here,” she replied and ate another one.
A second later, the roasted garlic bulb appeared in our waiter’s hands—surrounded by thirty more rolls.
He stopped after he placed the new dish on the table and looked at us.
“You got more . . . rolls,” he said snootily with a little shake of his head.
We stopped chewing, looked at him, and nodded. In fact, our table was covered now with nothing but plates of rolls.
“Why, it’s the Attack of the Carbohydrate Women,” he said without a smile as he left.
“He hates us! HURRY!” I hissed, pushing a plate toward Jamie. “We have to eat them all! You take that mound, I’ll take this one!”
We were trying to chew really fast, like two chews per roll and swallow, and were halfway done with the second plate of rolls when we noticed that all the waiters that passed by our table were glancing at us and laughing. Some were stopping by just to look at the spectacle. Our waiter came back by to deliver our dinners and asked if he could bring us anything else.
“More bread, please,” I said as I chewed, but he didn’t think that was very funny.
“He hates us,” Jamie confirmed as she ate another roll.
The hostess swung around and handed us a lyric sheet just as Dean Martin began to belt out “That’s Amore” over the speakers, which everyone, including the clientele, started singing along to. The waiters, each holding a small glass of wine, took the cue and began toasting people at each table. We watched as our waiter gaily clicked glasses with the folks at the surrounding tables, then the tables in the general vicinity, then with the people far to the front.
“He won’t toast with us!” Jamie pouted, holding her glass of iced tea up, just waiting for him to come by and grace us. “He despises us!”
“No,” I disagreed. “He LOATHES us.”
We spotted him moving back toward the center of the restaurant, laughing and clinking glasses with normal people who were satisfied with one plate of rolls.
The song ended, Jamie sorrowfully put her glass back down on the table, and a busboy immediately filled it back up to the brim.
Suddenly, our waiter was gliding back past our table when he turned, and in an action of complete pity and probably hoping that we might somehow scrounge enough change off the bottom of our purses to give him more than a 10 percent
tip, raised his glass toward Jamie and swooped in for the kill.
She quickly fumbled for her glass, and I could see the joy on her face. She, at least, had been redeemed; she was worthy. She had been picked last for the team, but it hardly mattered. She picked up her glass, albeit a little too quickly in her undisguised jubilance. Her iced tea rushed toward his wine with the fury of a speeding train and not understanding the energy and fuel the rolls had provided, she rammed her glass into his with a loud crack as the contents of both exploded and soaked his sleeve and the entire table.
He looked at her, wiped a droplet of iced tea from his chin, and said quietly, “I’ll get a towel.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” I said, reaching for one of the numerous white plates on the table. “We’ll just use these rolls.”
Nothing but
a Smile
It was my first real day at the new gym, since I had been blackballed from the community college fitness center when they found out I smoked. Eager to start a new habit that would shrink my butt from a couch to a love seat, I was going to begin exercising. I had just opened my locker and had slapped on the new lock I had bought at Target the day before, when it happened.
She walked by me, then headed toward a bench across the aisle. Standing in front of me was a naked lady, fresh from the shower.
A completely naked lady.
With no clothes on.
I don’t even know what my first instinct was. I don’t think I had one. All I knew was that a naked lady was standing in front of me, and I was staring at her being naked.
I guess I just couldn’t believe it. I had never really seen a naked lady before, except for one time when I was five, and my mom let our hippie neighbor, Honey, take me shopping with her and her five-year-old daughter. Honey took both of us into the dressing room with her, and before I knew what was happening, there was Honey’s left “lentil” just hanging there, wide out in the open. I looked at Honey’s daughter, who didn’t seem too bothered by it, but personally, I was horrified. I was five AND I was a Catholic. The whole thing was just DIRTY. I felt as if I had just witnessed something unholy and shameful, and I never told anyone that filthy secret, not even at confession, until just now. I’m sorry that I kept this from you, Mom, but it’s true. I saw Honey’s lentil.