I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

  That did not happen at all.

  Instead, I was faced with thirty twelve-year-olds who were waiting for me to say something. And all I could think of was, This is the hand I type and wipe with.

  So I just stood there.

  The teacher, a cool, young hip chick named Ms. Ward, tried to save my drowning hide by diverting her pupils’ attention.

  “Well, Miss Notaro, did you bring any of your columns with you that we could pass around?” Ms. Ward asked me in her teacher voice.

  “No,” I whispered back to her. “They’re only in seventh grade. I didn’t want to get you fired!”

  “Oh,” Ms. Ward replied as she smiled and wrung her hands. “Oh! Oh! I know! You write—I’m sorry, excuse me—Kevin! KEVIN! Kevin, what is that you’re squirting all over your face? What is that? Where did you get it? That’s not glue that you’re going to peel off later and eat, is it?”

  Kevin, who I had noticed was busy rubbing something vigorously into his complexion, looked suddenly sheepish and ashamed. “It’s pimple medicine,” he said quietly. “The lady doing the facials was giving out samples.”

  “She gave me a little lipstick and some body glitter,” a girl with braces piped up from the back row.

  “Mrs. Hall’s class has a veterinarian,” a tiny blonde girl raised her hand and offered. “And he brought puppies.”

  “Mr. Van Dyke’s class has a baker and they’re eating cupcakes, I heard!” a rather portly child said.

  “As I was going to say, class, Miss Notaro writes a column for her newspaper’s website,” Ms. Ward said. “Let’s gather around the computer station and have a look!”

  Before I could say anything, before I could protest loudly enough, before I even had a chance to pull out my flute and blow the first notes to “Greensleeves,” the newspaper’s website was up on a computer and the kiddies gathered around it—astonishingly pointing, laughing, and gasping in bewilderment and awe.

  “Wow, look at that,” I heard the tiny blonde girl say. “That’s so cool!”

  Honestly, I couldn’t help but smile to myself in a little, teeny-weeny moment of pride. Maybe it was going to be all right. Maybe I wasn’t such a Career Day loser after all, maybe I did have something to share with the little tots. As I looked toward the computer screen, then put my hand on the blonde girl’s shoulder, I anticipated an invigorating round of question and answer, in which my smallish, delightful apprentices would put down their acne cream, stop dreaming of puppies licking their faces while they ate cupcakes, and inquire one after another about just how in the world they, themselves, could become Laurie Notaro, web and newspaper columnist. Me. Looking forward to that moment, I smiled a little broader, and felt myself blush.

  The tiny little blonde girl looked up at me and then at my hand, which I removed quickly.

  “Why is his tongue sticking out like that?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Is that real or not?” the chunky boy beside her asked. “It just looks like a stuffed animal to me.”

  “Why is it all dressed up like a bee?” another child inquired.

  “I don’t see your column up here,” Ms. Ward said. “But look at how cute Mr. Winkle is!”

  All of a sudden I gasped.

  He had done it again. He had done it again.

  As if being bumped by Mr. Winkle one more time weren’t enough of a humiliation and a degrading experience in itself, it had to happen in front of thirty kids while I tried to talk about my great, wonderful, fulfilling career. Those who still clung to the thinnest faith that I was telling the truth returned to their desks and then tossed out a variety of boring questions like, “Did you go to college?” “Did you always want to be a writer?” and “How much do you make?”

  I thought I was at least making some progress until I tactfully tried to avoid the last question by truthfully joking, “Less than half of any other male columnist,” until the kid volleyed back with “Which is what?”

  “Um, gosh, I don’t know,” I fumbled. “Less than Kenneth Lay, more than selling your plasma, how’s that?”

  “If you don’t answer the question, we don’t get extra credit,” the kid said starkly.

  “Oh,” I said, nodding. “I get it.”

  “ASK ANOTHER QUESTION, MARK,” Ms. Ward said harshly from the back of the classroom.

  “Um, um, what’s the worst part about your job?” Mark emitted with a tired sigh.

  Suddenly, I perked up. “THAT is a great question,” I replied. “That is a wonderful question! The worst part about my job is . . . wow, I don’t even know where to start! This is great!! Well, I get hate mail sometimes, that isn’t too fun, there was this one time that I wrote in my column that Hanson was the suckiest band in the world and then an unbalanced thirty-two-year-old man threatened to come down to my office and shoot me in the head because Hanson was his favorite band. There aren’t many more worthless ways of dying than that—jumping out of the log on Splash Mountain is one of them, I heard that a guy just did that. I mean, really, where did he expect to go? You don’t just GET OUT on Splash Mountain. I was just there and I couldn’t have successfully leapt off unless I was the stunt woman for The Bionic Woman and I had a trampoline at my feet. Or I was on LSD, but that’s another story—anyway, don’t get me wrong, Hanson totally sucks, sure, but I don’t want to die for their suckiness in the only way that’s dumber than getting mauled by a fake log on a Disney ride. Oh! I also have to deal with an idiot editor who, just because she gave birth to twins, suddenly believes that she knows everything, and keeps putting statistics into my humor column to make them more ‘socially relevant,’ but she fails to realize that the mention that ‘Three thousand people died in drunk-driving accidents last year’ is more of a buzzkill than a punch line, because let me tell you, an extra fetus does not a genius make! I mean, you guys are seventh graders and can you tell when a corpse is funny? Hardly ever, that’s when!! And then, as you all saw, it’s entirely possible that there are days when my column gets replaced by a dog dressed as a drone, even though he didn’t go to college to be a drone, he didn’t have a lifelong dream to be a drone, and word on the street has it that the reason he has to keep wearing costumes is because all of the fur on his back has fallen out due to shingles, because I asked around, I did. I did. I mean, no one tells you THAT in Journalism 101: ‘Beware, a dog with a skin condition will steal your job.’ Did you know that’s not even a queen bee’s outfit? It’s not. Just an ordinary old worker bee. One in ten billion. And he takes my spot. MY spot. Ten years in this town writing that column, and a shitty little old diseased dog walks in and takes my spot, just like that!”

  And then I snapped my fingers for emphasis.

  “Wow,” the kid replied, “you’re the best guest speaker we’ve ever had!”

  “Why, thank you,” I replied, and I felt myself smiling again.

  An avalanche of questions then came my way as the children begged me to tell them more about hate mail, death threats, people who died at Disneyland, LSD, and if I ever planned on throwing a poisoned steak over the fence of Mr. Winkle’s backyard.

  “Maybe not a poisoned steak, but I think I might toss a Hershey’s Kiss or two.” I laughed. “You can’t tell me that little mutt doesn’t at least deserve a case of the squirts after what he’s done to me.”

  “Well, that’s all the time we have for Miss Notaro on Career Day,” Ms. Ward told the class, which was met with what sounded like a crowded baseball stadium sighing, “Awwwwwwww!”

  It

  was

  glorious.

  “Let’s give her a round of applause for being so nice to come down here to talk to us,” and then the class did just exactly that.

  As the kids passed by me on their way out, I heard, “You rock, Miss Notaro!”

  “You were better than body glitter, Miss Notaro,” and “My mom says you have a dirty mouth. But I’m going to tell her you aren’t any dirtier than my dad.”

  “Wow,?
?? I said to Ms. Ward when the classroom was cleared. “That went well, I think, don’t you? That went so much better than I thought it would.”

  “Well, things have a tendency to pick up after profanity is used.” She nodded with a tiny, little wicked grin. “It works better than sugar.”

  “Ooooooh, sorry.” I winced.

  “The luncheon for the Career Day speakers is in the teachers’ lounge,” Ms. Ward said. “So if you’d like a free sub and a can of generic soda, I’d love to have you come if you promise not to swear at our principal, although there’s a PE teacher who’s fair game.”

  “If she pants uncontrollably and the hair on her back has fallen out, you’ve got a deal,” I volunteered.

  Actually, after the last ten and only successful minutes of my Career Day talk, I was a little bit excited to go to the luncheon. I mean, really, those kids emitted sounds of grief when my talk was over, and finally, I felt as if I were on par with the other Career Day show-offs and their globes, alpha-hydroxy, cupcakes, and race cars. I could compete after all, even if I worked in an office where a two-pound, shingly fleabag outranked a columnist. I personally hoped that I would be sitting near the serial killer and the bomb-sniffing dog to inform them in general, passing conversation that even though I came empty-handed, relying on only myself and my trade to keep these tots entertained, I nearly brought thirty seventh graders to tears just by saying one word: “good-bye.”

  Ms. Ward and I grabbed two seats at one of several tables in the lounge, although the chiropractor and his carcass were nowhere to be seen and the bomb-sniffing dog wasn’t even in a chair. Our table was occupied by a couple of teachers and their speakers, one of whom was a robust, jolly man in suspenders and the other was a woman who was so old that I could see right through her skin.

  Just then, the principal stood up and cleared her throat.

  “I want to welcome and thank you all for participating in our Career Day program,” she said. “Before we get started with lunch, I would like to take some time for everyone to get acquainted with one another. So if our Career Day speakers would stand up and introduce themselves as we go around each table, we can get an idea of who all of our terrific speakers are.”

  So the rounds began; at each of the tables, a Career Day speaker stood up, told everyone his name and his job, and then sat back down. You could tell how impressed everyone else in the room was with each particular speaker’s occupation: People smiled and nodded warmly at the fireman; people became stiff and unsmiling with the dentist, and people just absolutely looked away when confronted with an IRS employee.

  Clearly—though unintentionally—we were being judged. It was almost like the Miss America pageant, with each contestant having three seconds to strut his stuff and seduce the crowd, but without waxing, plucking, or liposuction, although from some of the reactions to the baker and the city council member, those extra efforts couldn’t have hurt.

  I also noticed that the reaction that each speaker got was not solely based on his occupation and jocularity alone; it also had a great deal to do with who went before you. The architect, on his own, probably would have scored fairly well, but being that he followed the noble, selfless researcher working on a cure for colon cancer, he might as well have been a circus clown.

  Now, you would think that because of the unexpected though delayed spectacular response I got from my class, I really wouldn’t have cared about winning this second round at Career Day, but you would be wrong. I was still flying pretty damn high from my “Miss Notaro Rocks” trip—so high, in fact, that I smiled at the IRS fellow. Frankly, I hadn’t been that happy since I was planning my wedding. The joy I had found when realizing I had found a sucker to marry me was sharply overshadowed when the man I loved announced that he did not want to wear a tuxedo but would rather don a salwa kamis, the native dress of Pakistan. Despite my explanation that his comfort was truly not an issue at my wedding and that if my mother had to spend a lifetime looking at a photo in which he was dressed like a genie, her hate would be both endless and relentless, he still wouldn’t agree to wear real pants.

  That is, until the jubilant day that my mother told him, “Sure, you go ahead and wear that thing at the wedding, but if you do, you’d better plan on paying for the open bar, because, see, it’s going to take a whole lot of Chardonnay, Bailey’s, and strawberry margaritas for me and my friends to get over the fact that my eldest daughter is marrying a guy who showed up dressed like friggin’ Barbara Eden.”

  It took the threat of a bar tab for two hundred people for my then boyfriend to agree to wear pants at his own wedding, but I couldn’t have been happier.

  And I hadn’t been again until this moment; here I was, “my-groom-is-wearing-honest-to-God-pants” happy, and there was no way I was going to lose my buzz now. No way. I started to prepare for my turn and sized up the possible first acts at my table: I wasn’t particularly concerned about the old woman, because honestly, what kind of workload could she feasibly handle when her high school classmates were now buried in the Valley of the Kings? I’ve handled tomatoes that were sturdier. At best, I concluded that she was either the bell ringer at a Salvation Army donation bucket or perhaps a crossing guard. Very noble indeed for a woman who probably had photos in which the Grim Reaper appeared by her side, but she was no Mr. Winkle.

  No, I suspected that my Mr. Winkle was sitting across from me all bound up in his paisley suspenders and coordinating bow tie. This was my competition, I realized; this was the guy I had to look out for. From his ruddy cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses, I just had a feeling that I would have the good fortune of following Dr. Pediatric Heart Surgeon Specialist Guy who not only saved the lives of babies as a daily job, but spent his weekends and holidays traveling to Third World countries and Arkansas to operate on and cure impoverished infants and then fix a harelip or two with only moments to spare before catching the last helicopter ride back to civilization. He probably had a handwritten thank-you note from Mother Teresa hanging in his office signed, “Hugs, Mama T.”

  Damn it, I said under my breath, I just knew it. Frankly, I’d rather follow the cancer research guy than Dr. Baby Saver.

  It was almost our table’s turn to testify, and the anticipation was killing me.

  “Come on, old lady, come on, old lady!” I chanted in my head as I mentally threw the dice. Then, as if on cue, the principal nodded toward the baby saver, signaling his turn to sassy himself down the catwalk.

  He stood up, turning an even brighter flush of red than he already was, and proudly pronounced, “I’m Paul Wyatt, and I own several Burger King franchises in Chandler and Gilbert.”

  I almost burst out laughing. Not that owning Burger Kings was funny; I mean, if someone gave me a Burger King I wouldn’t laugh, but I was shocked to see just how wrong I had been. So, so wrong. I breathed a massive sigh of relief and was ready to stand up for my turn when the principal nodded her head toward the human antique.

  It took the old lady about a minute to stand up as her body unfurled into the shape of a question mark—a move that required the aid of two supporting teachers, I might add. Toss out the crossing guard, you’d need the posture of an exclamation point for that, or at the very least a semicolon, I smirked to myself silently. This one’s a bell ringer.

  Piece of cake. My chances were now good to excellent that I wouldn’t have a very hard act to follow. No—my chances were now excellent to outstanding, that’s what they were. OUTSTANDING.

  Simply remarkable.

  “My name is Frances Cross,” the elderly lady warbled as she looked around the room and smiled the sweetest, most honest and appalling smile I had ever seen. “And I—”

  “—am the one who makes you feel guilty for not dropping a quarter in my bucket after you’ve just bought yourself a big, fat Thanksgiving dinner at Safeway,” a little voice in my head said, followed by peals of imaginary audience laughter. “Ring-a-ding-ding! Ring-a-ding-ding!”

  “—and I,” she continued in her w
avery, delicate, little old lady voice as we all looked on, “was one of the first female pilots in World War Twooooooo!!!!!!!!!”

  Twooooo, twoooooo, twooooo, I heard echoing all around me.

  Oh my God.

  Holy shit.

  Sure. Of course. Well, naturally. It only made sense that when it was my turn, the doctor turned out to be a french fry hocker and the antiquity turned out to be nothing less than a NATIONAL TREASURE.

  The laugh track inside my head stopped, replaced with thunderous applause, and I didn’t understand until I looked up.

  Looked up and saw the entire room not only beating their hands together for Frances Cross, War Hero, Feminist Leader, Archetypal Patriot, person who could donate herself to the Smithsonian and they would take her, but I saw the room get much, much taller. The room got the kind of tall when everyone else is giving Ms. Frances Cross, American Monument, the lady you thought was a bell ringer, a standing ovation and you are still sitting down because you are an absolute dip shit.

  It was, indeed, simply remarkable.

  There was only one thing I could do. I stood up, grabbed my purse, thanked God for not having any props to gather up, and made a move for it.

  “Where are you going?” Ms. Ward said as she reached for my arm. “What are you doing?”

  “Gonna get myself a bee outfit,” I said simply, and headed for the door as rumbles of applause continued to hail from the skies.

  Swimming with the Fishes

  Do you really want to wear that?” I said to Jamie as she came out of the bathroom of our hotel room. “I think it’s too dressy. We’re only going to Golden Gate Park.”