The girls gathered him up and started home. They weren’t one step out of my driveway when they began screaming again, and I turned around just in time to see Petey, in a desperate waddle, escape out into the street.
Both girls began to cry hysterically, and their yelling became even more high-pitched when they spotted a car eight blocks away.
“AHHHH! He’s gonna die! He’s gonna die!” Staci kept yelling. “LAURIE! You have to help us! Oh, NO! He’s gonna die!”
Suddenly, there I was in the middle of my street, wearing a T-shirt and no bra and striped pajama bottoms, barefoot, hunched over, chasing and trying to capture a filthy bird that I hated. The more the girls screamed, the faster the bird waddled until I was almost breaking into a jog behind it, my arms outstretched and my boobs flopping around, completely unharnessed. My mother, unfortunately, was right. Eight hours of extra support would indeed go a long way.
For two blocks, I ran after the bird down the middle of the street as he wantonly ran for freedom or the next best alternative, the car. I couldn’t blame him. I, too, would have gladly thrown myself in front of a speeding vehicle if my destiny rested in a shoebox located anywhere in that family’s house. Casey and Staci ran slightly behind me, hollering and howling, tears shooting down their faces.
Finally, I cut the bird off, forced it in the opposite direction, and corralled it back into the yard belonging to my most dangerous neighbor, Frank.
Frank, in a pathetic attempt to deny that Christmas was indeed over, although it was now February, still retained his handcrafted holiday finery in his yard. This included a barrage of plywood Santas, Snoopys, snowmen, and elves with yellow eyes. Frank informed me that he had electrically wired his yard with enough volts to “knock a horse on its ass” in an effort to thwart potential thieves from stealing his decorations. I knew the capture had to be cautious to prevent electrocution, and I spotted Petey hiding between two gargantuan reindeer.
I made the only safe decision I could.
“There he is, girls!” I yelled, pointing. “Go get him!”
They both dove in between Donner and Blitzen and wrestled Petey as his broken wing sadly flapped in a fluttering panic.
“We got him!” they both yelled as they jumped up.
“Good job!” I nodded. “Now take him home, quickly. Run! And if you ever bring another animal to my house again, I’m calling the foster-care people.”
I didn’t see the girls again for a week. Then the doorbell rang; it had to be the midgets.
When I opened the door, they both looked sad, their faces long and their eyes drooping.
“What’s the matter?” I asked them. “Is Petey okay?”
“My dad said he got better and flew away,” Casey said.
And I bet you guys had “chicken” for dinner sometime this week, I thought.
“We’re moving today,” Staci said. “We’re leaving at lunchtime for our new apartment.”
“We wanted to say good-bye and give you a hug,” Casey said. “We’re going to miss you.”
If I had been premenstrual, I probably would have cried. I did feel bad, though, and I wondered what the hell was going to happen to these kids, but I already knew. Each of them was probably going to have four or more kids by different fathers by the time they were twenty, just because they didn’t know that their lives could have been any different. There was nothing I could do about it, anyway.
“My mom has a magazine with your picture in it,” Staci said. “And we’re going to keep it so we can look at you.”
“Really?” I laughed.
“Yeah, and I decided something,” Casey said. “I think I want to be a writer someday. Just like you.”
What the hell is this? I thought. Am I trapped in some Hallmark Hall of Fame movie? Who wrote the script for this? Danielle Steel? If God wanted to put a lump in my throat, why didn’t he just hit me in the neck with a softball or a brick instead of making little kids do his dirty work?
I had no choice but to let them in the house, where I proceeded to give them everything they asked for, even though I wasn’t dead yet. I had to get a grocery bag because they wanted so much stuff, including a dusty old seashell, smelly soaps, a can of tomato soup, and a stick of margarine.
“Thank you,” Casey said. “But we have to go now.”
“We have to get ready for the new apartment,” Staci added.
“Well, remember one thing,” I told them. “When you guys get to be twelve, and your mom asks you what you want for your birthday, you tell her you want—now, can you remember what I’m going to tell you?”
They both nodded.
“You tell her you want Norplant. Okay?”
“What’s Norplant?” they asked.
“It’s insurance,” I answered.
With their bags of my household possessions slung over their shoulders, they left for home. In three months, I knew, they wouldn’t even remember who I was.
I wish I was that lucky. To remember them, all I have to do is look down the street into their front yard to see the burlap love seat and the dryer their fourth dad left behind.
The Most Unfun Christmas Party Hostess Ever
There was no doubt about it. I had a choice to make, and it wasn’t going to be easy.
I had had no idea the evening was going to end this way, with me locked in a vicious battle I was almost sure I’d lose. After all, it was just a Christmas party, a little, quiet get-together my husband and I had thrown for friends. Seven hours earlier, I’d had no idea that I would need magic, bait, and extreme forms of trickery on my side just to be able to go to bed.
Seven hours earlier, everything had seemed so innocent while we were waiting for our guests to arrive. I put the last of the dips out on the table as my husband did some last-minute tidying up in the living room.
“Hey!” he called out excitedly. “Do you think if I put my new Emily Dickinson biography on the coffee table that it will spur some conversation?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, moving the potato chips closer to the tortilla chips. “I have no doubt that later in the car ride home, most of our guests will debate whether or not I know that I married a gay man.”
“I’m leaving the Walt Whitman in my office,” he huffed. “And I’ll even be amazed if anyone comes, since you are The Most Unfun Christmas Party Guest in this town, and everyone knows it. What time should I tell everybody that we’re shutting down the party because the authorities are intervening this year?”
“You shut up! That is not fair,” I cried. “That is an unjust accusation, and you know it! None of that was my fault!”
“Sure, none of it was your fault,” my husband agreed, nodding. “Except the part when you picked up the phone and pushed 911 and the police came. You turned us all in!”
Unfortunately, my husband’s memory of the ill-fated Christmas party was missing some rather vital details. Before we started dating, we had worked together at a record distributor, as did a majority of our musician friends who could not secure gainful employment elsewhere. In the middle of our work holiday party (which was held at the home of the company’s owner), while everyone was having a great time, I was summoned to the bathroom by a co-worker because of a mysterious “emergency.”
When I opened the bathroom door, there was another co-worker and drummer, Steve, sitting on the sink, sweating profusely and mumbling incoherently. I didn’t know why I was summoned instead of anyone else, and I figured that it was because I was one of the few girls at the party and because I was the receptionist, plus all boys know that girls are smarter, as well as prone to respond in a slightly more proactive manner when it comes to emergencies.
On second thought, I suppose it wasn’t really the middle of the party, because unfortunately, the party really only had about three and a half more minutes of life left to live.
Now, in the bathroom, Steve’s eyes were rolling around in his head, and at one really alarming (and admittedly unflattering) point, they went all zombi
e white. I asked him what was wrong, but instead of answering, he lurched toward me and then fell onto the floor. As he reached in my direction, I noticed that he was shaking, and I started to worry. His lips were moving, as if he was trying to say something, but no sound came out. Oh, God, I thought. Seizure. Seizure! He’s having a seizure and the only thing I know to do for a seizure is hold the person’s tongue so he doesn’t bite it off and then bleed to death or choke on his own spit or something like that. And I so didn’t want to do that. I mean, he was a nice guy, I liked him and we usually had fun drinking at the bar, but how much do we really know about our co-workers’ oral hygiene? Oh, dear, I thought, it really is unfortunate that you’re not in the wreckage of a fiery car crash—I’d have no problem pulling you from that, because I wouldn’t have to worry about what had gone into that mouth, or how slimy it might be, it could be like touching a huge, warm slug. And if my hand came back with some gunky stuff on it, that would be the gross-out of a lifetime, and in some ways, you could never come back from that. I’m just being honest here. You could never fully return to the person you were before part of your body returned marked with residue from Plaque Cove. I would never even want to grab my own tongue, let alone Seizure Steve’s, but I knew if I let Steve die in front of my boss’s toilet, that would, in many ways, be worse. So I got ready to make the plunge, put my right hand in a pinching position in case his tongue was thrashing about like an eel in a shallow tub, and then I had the most magnificent brainstorm.
“Did you take any pills?” I demanded. “If you took anything, you’d better tell me now!”
Now, this may have seemed like a very assumptive and odd question to ask someone at a holiday work party, but at my place of employment, it was not. In our workplace, in fact, not only were drug tests nonexistent, they were laughed at, particularly by our boss, who had a black belt in Xanax and Valium. In fact, right before I had been summoned to the bathroom, I was hanging out on the patio with my friend Dave just as he had spontaneously thrown up and then became violently angry because he had just popped two Darvocets and was certain they hadn’t had time to make it into his bloodstream. We were all impressed when he discovered he was right; after some careful hands-on detective work, he found the pills, and unlike Jonah, after a trip to the sink, they were returned right back down the hatch.
In the bathroom, however, it was clear that Steve was not as acute a drug user as Dave as he nodded his head sloppily to my question.
“How many?” I asked as I shook him heartily. “How many did you take?”
And to that, the drummer fluttered his eyelids and then apparently lost consciousness.
“Oh, thank God,” I said, breathing a tremendous sigh of relief as I let him drop back to the floor. “You only OD’d!”
The sounds of “Steve OD’d, man,” “Dude, Steve just OD’d,” and “Steve just OD’d in the boss’s shitter!” went rumbling behind me, and I turned to find six or seven guys—including my future husband—standing in the doorway of the bathroom, doing absolutely nothing. Well, that wasn’t true—most of them, and I won’t say who, were busy rifling through their own pockets taking inventory in case Steve was as good a pickpocket as he was a drummer.
Suddenly, my boss appeared as the guys cleared out, and he nodded toward Steve.
“What do you think?” he asked me dryly.
You know, I wanted to say, if I had any marketable skills at all, let alone the assessment skills of a paramedic, I wouldn’t be answering your phone, making your copies, and cleaning out a year’s worth of fish shit from your dumb 180-gallon aquarium, and by the way, I will gag and pretend to get dizzy and nearly pass out the next time you make me do it when I’m wearing velvet, too. And I wouldn’t be lugging fifteen pounds of your mail to the mailbox down the road when it’s 115 degrees out as you drive by in your air-conditioned Mercedes coupe. And I wouldn’t have almost put my hand in OD Steve’s mouth. I’d have a job where I would have to wear a bra and I’d actually have health insurance. Which would come in real handy for at least one of your employees right now.
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I replied. “He said he took pills.”
“Pfffttt.” My boss nearly laughed. “If everyone around here who popped a little pill passed out, it would look like Jonestown.”
I shrugged. “Better safe than sorry” was what I said.
That was what I said.
That was all.
I didn’t even dial the phone. Never even touched it. But within seconds, the paramedics were there, Steve was being wheeled out on a stretcher, and the party was over. As soon as my co-workers heard that people were on their way who could spot dilated pupils from a mile away, they loaded up on what free food and beer was left and fled as if there was a rumor that there were parents coming home.
And it was all my fault.
Steve, of course, lived, although it had less to do with the workings of a stomach pump and more to do with the fact that he had never taken a single barbiturate; I later determined through the grapevine that he’d been brave with drink and was trying, albeit dismally, to make a pass at me. Apparently, when I didn’t react to his green hue, pinball eyes, and clammy body with lust and enchantment, he was already on the floor and the act had gone way too far. With his plan now gone wretchedly awry, I guess he felt he had no choice but to see it through, fluttering his eyelids, pretending to simply go to sleep, and leaving the party in an ambulance. And even though he faked a nap, which I misinterpreted as an overdose, it was all my fault. It was not Steve but I who was branded The Most Unfun Christmas Party Guest, and then someone with limited artistic ability (suspect: Steve) drew a likeness of me on the bathroom wall at work as a superhero named Captain 911 who could ruin parties with a moment’s notice.
“You look tired,” Captain 911 was depicted saying to a guy with droopy eyes tapping a keg. “So I called the police! We should get you to Emergency!”
“Party’s over!” Captain 911 exclaimed in a bubble in another frame as she held a defibrillator, ready to strike surprised-looking revelers sucking on a beer bong. “I think he just swallowed a Tylenol!”
From there, it was a brand that stuck, even years later in my own home with my own husband throwing my own Christmas party.
“You need to get your facts straight, mister!” I said, shaking a finger at my former co-worker who would have been content to let Steve die, even if there were many people at that party who were far closer to death’s threshold than Steve was. “I was just trying to save someone’s life by offering an opinion! What did you expect me to do?”
“He just wanted you to stick something down his throat,” my husband shot back. “Although I don’t think he ever would have guessed it wasn’t going to be your wiggling tongue but your finger.”
“I did not ruin that Christmas party,” I insisted. “And if you say it again during the course of this party, I am taking the reserve Costco truffles out of hiding!”
It was not an empty threat—every year for our Christmas party, I buy a carton of chocolate truffles from Costco that are incredible, as velvety and delicious as they are hard to find. This year, I hit three different Costcos before I scored a box, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to save a secret stash of them for myself. They’re always the hit of the party, and I knew that if I wasn’t proactive, hiding just a couple, I’d miss out on chocolate-truffle season completely.
And I wasn’t wrong.
As soon as the first few guests began arriving and migrating over to the food table, mouths opened wide and fingers started poppin’ truffles. This was particularly true of one of my husband’s friends, Reinhold, who showed up swathed in a huge wool scarf despite the fact that it was 70 degrees and he was someone I honestly didn’t really want to come to the party. He had always rubbed me a bit the wrong way, the kind of guy who had minimal talents but acted as if he were blessed by the gods on Mount Olympus. In fact, the talents he did possess, but was oblivious to, bloomed like they were on an IV d
rip of Miracle-Gro. These included his uncanny ability to call just as we were about to sit down to a special dinner and then proceed to ramble for an hour about a poem he just wrote or the new pattern of facial hair he was about to try, his tendency to talk for an unlimited amount of time without a response, and his ability, despite his full-grown man size, to become completely drunk on one beer like a high school freshman girl before puberty came knockin’. My Nana could hold her liquor better than Reinhold, but when Reinhold was drunk, Reinhold was always right, which, although nearly impossible, made him even more difficult to tolerate than in a sober situation due to the fact that when fueled, he had the endurance level of the Six Million Dollar Man.
Now, despising Reinhold the way I did was a tricky proposition, because my husband, being the nice guy that he is despite the fact that once at a workplace Christmas party my spouse would rather have kept sucking on free beers than save the life of a sweaty co-worker, liked him. And not only did my husband like him, but Reinhold had never been anything but nice to me, so it made any argument I had about not inviting him over null and void.
So I said nothing. I said nothing as Reinhold, after three sips of beer, surrendered a majority of his hand-eye coordination and dove into the chocolate truffles with a squeal usually reserved for girls who have just been named prom queen. Like an infant trying to feed himself, he dropped two truffles right out of his saggy hand onto my brand-new linen tablecloth, and as they rolled off the edge one after the other, they left a trail that did not escape remarks about their similarities to the private kind of skid marks. He ate so many truffles that the spaces in between his teeth began to fill with what looked like rot and gave him instant tweaker teeth. He gobbled up those truffles before most of our friends even showed up, and before I knew it, the only evidence that the truffles had even been there at all were the pooplike trails and the chocolate that was now vigorously eating away the enamel on Reinhold’s teeth.