But now things were different. Although I was still conscious and was not writing letters to everyone I’d ever met asking them to see if they were a kidney match for me, I do have high blood pressure, and my dentist has thrown around the word “implant” like it’s a party streamer. Two steps closer to death. I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them. And at this stage in the game, when my friends “make out” on anything, it means we have a coupon. Clearly, the time was now or never for our activation into the Hudson sisters. Gingerly, I led Jamie/Blanche across the living room to the corner where the wheelchair I had just rented from the medical-supply store awaited her.
“Ooooh,” she cooed in a dramatic voice several octaves lower than her own, taking on the patiently proper Blanche persona immediately as she adjusted herself in the chair.
“You didn’t eat cha din-din!” I cackled as I channeled Jane, quoting a line from the scene where Jane serves Blanche a feathered friend on a silver plate.
“You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair!” Blanche shot back at me accusingly in a dead-on Joan Crawford impression.
“Butcha are, Blanche! Ch’are in that chair,” I replied as I threw my hands up, Bette Davis–style.
It was a stellar performance, and I could already tell it was going to be a night to remember. After we had set the food up and the guests had started to arrive, Jamie parked her wheelchair in the kitchen. She headed toward the breakfast nook, started rifling through her satchel, and then grabbed something.
“What is that?” I asked cautiously.
“Mama’s Booze Bag,” she said matter-of-factly, and then pulled out a full fifth of Absolut by the neck. She ripped the seal off with her fingernail, using surgical precision, much like a falcon’s talon gutting a lemming.
As people began to arrive, it was relatively clear that most of my husband’s friends had no idea who Jamie and I were dressed as, and I have to say I wasn’t exactly surprised. At a party several years ago, I bought a black shift from Talbots, a Cher-length blond wig, and a plastic baby doll, which I shoved between two pieces of ciabatta bread to make a baby sandwich, and came downstairs as Ann Coulter. I thought it was pure genius and talked loudly over anyone who spoke in my general vicinity, but people spent the evening smiling politely and moving away from me. Not one person cried, “Baby sandwich! Blowhard! Fiend! You’re Ann Coulter!” Somehow, everyone ID’d my husband, Hamid Karzai, immediately, even when he was catching non-halal meatballs in his mouth. The only people his costume was lost on were my friends, who had puzzled looks on their faces when they asked me, “I think I get it.… Is your husband supposed to be Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago?”
I was very disappointed about my Ann Coulter costume and searched diligently over the next eleven months for something wicked, funny, and obvious. One day it came to me, not in a dream but in a TMZ.com video of Sad Clown Anna Nicole wandering around her backyard, snookered on pharmaceuticals, her face painted like John Wayne Gacy at a kid’s party, and mumbling that her belly was upset not because she was pregnant but because she just had to fart. Halfway through the footage, she picked up a plastic baby doll and insisted it was real, and that’s when I knew. I have that same baby doll, I thought. It’s the filling in my Ann Coulter sandwich!!
I bought another blond wig, clown makeup, and a sheet to tie around me to duplicate the toga Anna was wearing. I also collected pill bottles and taped Anna’s name to them, then Velcroed them to the toga.
Seriously, a slam dunk. And then she died. But I was not letting go of my dream and my fantastic costume. In fact, I thought my plaudits to a gassy, wasted Anna Nicole in white, green, and red face were nothing short of a tribute to her greatness.
However, I didn’t yet realize that, year after year, I was involved in a tiring game of Stump the English Grad Student, which was remarkably easy to win, unless you had an arcane trivia question about The Canterbury Tales or Daniel Deronda (that joke is only funny to 0.2 percent of the population, and it’s not you); in that case, all hands would pop up and monkey sounds would be made. But anything concerning pop culture and the outside world, forget it. How can this be, I thought as the next person looked at me, my crazy clown makeup that looked exactly like Anna Nicole’s, and my baby doll, then swiped a carrot through some ranch dip and walked away. I made a mental note to myself that we simply had to start inviting more gay men to our Halloween parties, because they were clearly the only ones with a finger on the pulse of current events.
My husband—that year, Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer—wasn’t making things any better. Sporting his two-day pencil-thin mustache, he was sitting between a fairy and a girl in a platinum wig who was wearing a tiny tiara and a shiny pink dress that showed altogether too much of her corpulent, goose-pimpled flesh. After standing there for several minutes with absolutely no acknowledgment whatsoever, it dawned on me that not only did the guests not know who I was supposed to be but they didn’t know who I was. I was completely anonymous and also quite irrelevant.
“Can I get anyone anything?” I said to the crowd, hoping to somehow fit in among the considerable chatter.
“Chhh!” my husband said without looking at me, occupied by other conversation with the gentleman across from him.
“I brought out my laptop,” my clown face insisted, nodding to the computer in my hands. “Anybody want to see a video of a Sad Clown Anna Nicole? She says the word ‘poot.’ ”
“Chhh!” my husband said, this time outstretching his arm in my direction without making eye contact.
“Wha—” I began.
“Chhh!” my husband said again, now looking at me and furrowing his brow.
“What are you supposed to be?” I whispered to the girl with the crown of flowers around her head. “Are you the Fairy Queen?”
“I am Peaseblossom, woodland sprite from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act three, scene one, line one thousand,” she whispered back, and then looked away (again, 0.2 percent. Not you).
“I’m Sad Clown Anna Nicole,” I continued in a hushed tone, thinking the sprite was nice.
“Great,” she said quickly.
“I bet I know who you’re supposed to be!” I said, whispering behind Peaseblossom as I pointed a finger at the girl in the satiny dress. I was about to shout out “Miss Piggy!” when she looked at me, gave me a long, dramatic blink, and said, “I am Marilyn Monroe.”
“Wow!” I replied, while inside I reasoned with myself that she had been dead for half a century. It might have been an accurate representation for all I knew.
After there had been more drinking involved, it was far easier to force people to watch the Anna Nicole video: I set up a viewing station by the beer cooler and made people say the magic words “Show Me the Sad Clown!” before the cooler lid could be lifted.
But this year I wasn’t going to struggle with my costume. I had a great idea—one I had waited half my life to put together—and I was going with it, come hell or high water. Nothing could stop me now. I wasn’t worried about the grad students; Jamie and I were a team, and we were sticking together.
After she got the Absolut flowing, Jamie sat in her rolling throne, her hair piled into a spinster’s bun, dark circles under her eyes and hollows in her cheeks, her long black gown spread out before her, and a tidy little blue silk scarf tied at her throat, Joan Crawford style.
I was immediately relieved when two of our first guests, Drew and Jacob—that night visiting our house as Oliver Twist and the Jewish grandma with missile boobs, respectively—walked through the front door and gasped when I wheeled Jamie out.
It was then I knew we had done good. Jamie’s makeup was starvation, perfected, and my stage makeup, smeared blood-red lips, and blond pin-curled wig, drunkenly askew, were on the money.
My dream come true.
> More and more guests began to arrive, and repeatedly I got a vague smile but no nods of recognition. I barely cared. Jamie and the people who knew that we were the Hudson sisters—including my friend Nancy, who arrived as the Vampire Queen—congregated in the kitchen so Jamie could be closer to her sauce. I walked away for a minute—a minute, I tell you—to talk to some friends, and when I came back into the kitchen, Mama’s Booze Bag was no longer located in the tote bag: It was sitting in the rolling throne, with a tidy blue scarf tied around its neck.
“How long has she been like this?” I asked Oliver and Maude, who both simply shrugged as Jamie laughed her drunk laugh, which I know by heart. She closes her eyes, throws back her head at the same time she throws up her hands. And she touches people, and Real Life Jamie never does that. I knew that once we passed a certain point of inebriation—to which we were dangerously close—all bets would be off, and our night of fun was either going to end with an unintentional pratfall or finding her within an hour taking a “nap” on the dog’s bed.
“Who knows?” they said together. “Please don’t make her stop drinking. She’s hilarious!”
“How much did you drink?” I said, grabbing a glass and filling it up with water. “Do you realize how old we are? We have brittle bones! What if you fell down the stairs? Do you want some water?”
“Sure,” she said, as she shrugged and then nodded in a motion that resembled a bobble head. “What’s in it?”
“Water,” I repeated as I handed it to her. “With a splash of water.”
“Oh, good,” she said as she reached for the glass. “I would like a little quiche, too, please. With a splash of water. Got that?”
Great, I thought, anything to help soak up the bathtub of vodka that was immersing every cell in her body. I ran and plucked a quiche off the table and handed it to her when she was done laughing. She popped it whole into her mouth, giggled, and then took a drink.
Oh, boy. I knew she had lost any coherency for the night, but maybe if she drank enough fluid to prevent the alcohol from shrinking her brain, she wouldn’t lose most of tomorrow dry-heaving and spinning in my guest bedroom, even though “guest bedroom” is a loose term for a blow-up mattress on the floor of my husband’s office. I couldn’t believe she had gotten drunk without me; she had just taken off like a spooked racehorse, speeding around the track, all by herself! Besides, I had biscuits and gravy planned for the Day After My Birthday Breakfast, and somebody was coming with me even if she had to carry her own retch bucket, though in the past her purse has doubled very effectively for that purpose.
Suddenly I heard a loud gasping sound, and I turned around to see Jamie’s sunken-in eyes grow large, then humongous, then exponential.
“What’s the matter?” I cried, although the only response she gave me was another desperate long gasp.
The quiche! I thought. It’s lodged in her throat! Holy shit, she’s choking. She’s choking.
Jamie’s hands flew up around her neck. She tried to draw another breath in.
Her face was turning red.
There was no time to waste. No one, no matter what their age or how likely it was that they didn’t exercise or have an age-appropriate heart rate, was going to die on my watch.
Not at my party!
I immediately shifted into Laurie: Panic Level One: Strike Offense! © 2011, during which my first impulse is typically always blunt-force trauma.
“I’m going to hit you!” I warned, and she nodded frantically, still terribly, horribly silent.
I pushed her forward with one hand and brought my other hand behind me. Then I struck her. Square in the back, right between her shoulder blades.
Oliver Twist, Maude Greenberg, and Nancy, the Vampire Queen, stood and watched as Baby Jane Hudson beat the living shit out of Blanche.
Nobody said a word.
Whack. Whack. Whack.
I hit her several times, but I couldn’t dislodge the quiche chunk. Precious seconds were ticking away as smaller and smaller amounts of oxygen were getting to my best friend’s brain, although I have to admit that, with the amount of vodka she had just poured down her throat, there probably wasn’t much of a difference from ten minutes prior.
All I knew was that I wasn’t saving her, her eyes were beginning to bulge, and, before I knew it, I had arrived at Laurie: Panic Level Two: TV Moves! © 2011.
So I guess it is necessary to mention here that if you reach a level of danger—life-threatening or otherwise—in my presence, I will most likely lunge at you like I did to Jamie and lock my arms under your breasts.* In other words, I will Heimlich you.
Admittedly, I don’t have much experience with this sort of technique and I never took a class, but I did it once to my dog and she stopped coughing, so I tend to think my success rate is pretty good. Or at least better than most. But at this juncture, I didn’t think I had any choice. Jamie was choking, her face was an even deeper red, I had exhausted all of the tools at my disposal. I had nothing left.
I went in.
In fact, it probably didn’t resemble the Heimlich maneuver as much as it did me trying to wrestle a corpse out of the ocean, but I wasn’t doing it for the glamour. Heimliching people is not as easy as it appears on TV, especially if you’re behind the victim, who is in a wheelchair that keeps rolling away across the kitchen, and you have to keep Heimliching her as you move to other rooms of the house.
Still, no one said anything, and although I didn’t notice it at the time, in hindsight I’m not sure if it was because the bystanders were speechless at activities at my party or because the heroine was wearing a faceful of smeared Joker pancake makeup and had a ratty pin-curl wig tacked to her head.
And you know, the next thing I learned was that the last thing you kind of want to do after someone has consumed a liter of vodka and a host of little quiches is to toss them around like a baby you are angry at. Suddenly, Jamie covered her mouth. Which was, technically speaking, a sign of life (Laurie: Panic Level Two: TV Moves! © 2011—two for two!) but also a sign of something much more sinister.
“No!” I screamed. “Oh, no! You cannot throw up in the wheelchair! I don’t wanna buy a wheelchair! Please don’t make me buy a wheelchair!”
Now, I know it sounds cruel to yell at someone I had been trying to yank from the claws of death only moments before, but I had to give the medical-supply place my credit card! I had to fill out a two-page questionnaire about who was going to use the wheelchair, where we were going with it, and who the primary caretaker of the wheelchair was going to be. I had to have the skill of a surgeon to evade their questions so they wouldn’t figure out I simply needed it as a prop for a costume. If it came back scuffed or scratched, that was one thing—old people fall out of stuff all the time—but if I brought this thing back with eau de Mama’s Booze Bag with a note of bile, I had just purchased a new mode of transportation.
“How is this a surprise to anybody?” people would now say at my funeral. “One day, she’s walking; the next day, she won’t go anywhere without the wheelchair. She just gave up.”
Suddenly, a little choking person I know popped up out of the wheelchair and ran to the bathroom, where she stayed for a long, long, long time, and when she came out, she was no longer the jolly drunk who had been stationed in the kitchen.
“Are you all right?” I asked as she looked at me, clearly irritated. “I can’t believe a mini-quiche almost killed you.”
Jamie shook her head, her eyes red and watery. “It wasn’t the quiche,” she slurred. “The water went down the wrong pipe. I just needed a minute to clear my throat, but I was stuck in that stupid thing. I couldn’t get away from you. You wouldn’t have been able to keep shaking me if I wasn’t in that chair.”
“But you were in that chair,” I said quietly, not able to look at her. “You were.”
Then she went off to bed, a full night’s excitement over by 9:15 P.M.
When I woke up the next morning, Jamie was already downstairs, miraculously, d
rinking coffee with my husband.
“Whatever happened last night, I’m sorry,” she began.
“You don’t remember?” I asked quickly.
“Not very much,” she admitted. “It’s all sort of a blur. A crazy black blur. Did we get on a trampoline?”
“She Heimliched you!” my husband cried immediately, pointing at me. “While she was wearing her crazy Baby Jane Hudson outfit!”
Jamie looked puzzled. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“I thought you were choking on a mini-quiche,” I explained. “So I tried to save you. Your eyes were all bulgy, you were turning red, it was terrifying. But look! You’re alive!”
She shook her head. “Yeah, I guess,” she replied. “I don’t remember any of that. That must have been the part where I thought we were jumping. So that explains the smell and the taste in my mouth.”
“Yep,” I said, nodding.
“But I can’t move my arm,” she continued. “My back is killing me. What did I do that I can’t move my arm? Or basically any of my torso?”
I just shook my head and thanked God I’d hit her in a place where she couldn’t see the bruise.
“No idea, but I’m starving!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go for biscuits and gravy. And make sure you grab your purse.”
*Disclaimer: I can’t say for sure if I touched Jamie’s boobs or not. I think it is altogether possible though unlikely, due to the fact that I pride myself on having a built-in, natural “hot stove” mechanism to avoid that sort of thing and have been 100 percent successful in the past concerning such. In the case that there was a videotape of the whole event, however, and it was played for a jury during an assault trial or something along those lines, it might document the fact that I did, indeed, encounter her boobs in one manner or another. And I am sorry for that if my built-in mechanism of best-friend boob avoidance did not activate. But there was a flurry of activity exploding around me, not to mention the fireworks of survival egging me on, so I suppose the natural mechanism could have been overwritten and catastrophe experienced. Therefore, you should expect that if the Panic Level reaches Level Two, a side breast or under area might be unintentionally grazed. It is within the possibilities of natural movement and lifesaving, and it is both necessary and essential not to read between the lines.