He gave up on me and went to his subordinate little puppet, the fake marine.
“Did you purchase anything while in Mexico?” he asked my husband.
“Wa—wa—wa—well, I didn’t,” my husband, the man I am joined with for life, the man whose underwear I wash, the man who just sold me up the lazy river without so much as a fingernail being tugged upon by a pair of border patrol pliers, answered, and then looked at me from the corner of his eye.
“And what did you buy?” the agent said, putting both hands on the counter and leaning toward me. “Did you buy pharmaceuticals?”
I paused for a moment. “Y-y-yes,” I whispered, lowering my eyes as my hands started to shake.
“I know you did,” the agent replied, smiling a very fake smile, I might add. “Empty your purse, please.”
So I hauled out the booty with my sweaty hands, spread it all out as the agent looked on, shaking his head.
“Is this all for you?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I nodded as he pointed to one of the boxes. “That’s for my allergies. And that, that, that is for my asthma. That one is for my back pain. Those are for—um—for—uh, lady troubles, and those are because I get these really bad headaches that start on one side of my head and then work their way over to the other side but then eventually I always just end up throwing up anyway.”
When I was done spouting off my medical history, I realized I was an eighty-year-old woman from Palm Beach.
“When I asked you if you bought anything, why did you lie?” the agent asked me harshly, clearly very irritated, and it was at this point that I thought he wasn’t a border patrol agent after all, but a sales rep from Merck totally pissed off that I had cut him out of his commission.
But I didn’t know what to say, and I was so scared I gave him another convulsion, the only thing I had not purchased medication for.
“When you are asked a question, especially here,” he said to me quite sternly, “it’s in your best interest to tell me the truth! Do you understand?”
“I do,” I answered simply as he glared at me, and I had the feeling that I had just lost two hundred dollars and I was going to be talking to a judge very soon. Apparently, I had also taught everyone in line behind me a valuable lesson as they began taking all of their purchases from the farmacia out of their purses and fanny packs.
I was convinced that I was going to jail, and I even toyed with the idea of asking the guard if I could take one of my pills before he arrested me because I had a definite feeling I had a throw-up headache charging my way.
I looked at my husband again, and his face was so flushed he looked like he had just had a chemical peel. He had a little mustache of see-through beads gathered on his upper lip, and he was moments away from watching his wife get cuffed as a drug mule trying to run antihistamines, an inhaler, and one little pink pill because she was just too damn impatient to wait the week it took for Monistat 7 to really work, across the border.
“What can I say?” I imagined myself addressing a jury of my peers. “I want to breathe, I hate to sneeze, and if any one of you has ever been itchy down there, well, you know you would have done the same thing.”
And then, against all odds in favor of a miracle at this particular moment, another guard came over to the station and nodded to the guard that was hating me.
“You wanna go on break now?” he asked my mean guard.
“Yeah,” my guard said, wiping his brow with his sleeve, then gave me one last dirty look, and simply walked away.
He walked away. Just left us standing there, with all of my medication, enough drugs on that table to start my own rest home. Then the other guard followed him, leaving us alone at the counter.
And that’s when I opened my purse, swiped my drugs into it, and very, very, very quickly walked away as fast as I could without generating electricity between my thighs.
The narc that I’m married to followed behind by a couple of steps, and when we finally reached the car and got in, neither of us said a word until we were at least ten miles outside of the Nogales city limits.
“We are assholes,” my husband finally said, still visibly shaken. “I can’t believe we did that. That was horrible! I never thought we’d get out of there. I’m so glad to be out of there!”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “No thanks to you, Donnie Brasco! ‘No, no, I didn’t buy anything. Nope. Not me. Not I.’ Stoolie!”
“Stoolie?” my husband shot back. “What about you and your ‘I’m an American!’ act? Are you aware that you said it in a Texas accent? ‘Ahm ehn Ah-meh-rih-cahn!!’ Oh! Oh! And ‘This is for my LADY TROUBLES!’ Lady troubles? Where are you, Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1940?”
“No, I was in MEXICO, about to go to PRISON!” I shouted.
“But yer ehn Ah-meh-rih-cahn!!” my husband shouted. “Who’s on more medication than my grandma!”
“You are a dork,” I said matter-of-factly.
“No, you are a dork,” he retorted. “And you are never going to Mexico again.”
“I already know that,” I informed him.
“And we are never telling anyone about this, okay? No one. No one needs to know what idiots we are. Okay?” he said firmly.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Swear?” he insisted.
“On Ah-meh-rih-cuh!” I swore.
Burn the Mother Down
What is he doing? I asked myself as I stared at my supervisor, his mouth flapping, his hands flying furiously about as if he were a mime or presenting a liturgical dance.
There he was, giving me my walking papers by demonstrating my nonnegotiable departure with a series of complex yet mystifying gestures of some sort. I came to the conclusion that he had either choreographed a hand movement symphony entitled “Your Position Is Being Eliminated,” or he had woefully mistaken my stubbornness for hearing impairment.
“So you see,” he said, his spastic, hyperactive arms finally coming to a stop, his palms out facing toward me, “we cannot approve your request for a leave of absence for your book tour. You’ll have to terminate your employment here if you wish to go.”
“But—” I said.
“We only grant leave of absences for extraordinary circumstances or business-related events, and your book tour does not fit within one of those requirements,” he continued.
“But—” I tried again.
“And additionally, your column for the website will be canceled as of August first. From then on, your job title will be an HTML editor and you’ll post pages on the website,” he said.
“BUT,” I said loudly, and using my Angry Jazz Hands move to catch his attention and show him that he wasn’t the only one who could impersonate a synchronized swimmer from the waist up, “I’m not asking you to pay me for the leave of absence, the book tour is indeed business related, I happen to find it extraordinary, AND I have no idea how to post web pages.”
“Well,” my supervisor said with a Grinch-like smile that ate up his entire face, “you’ll have to make some decisions then, won’t you?”
And with that, he got up and walked out of my office. I had been booted out of my job, just like that. No explanation, no reasons, just out. It was like I had been banished from a TV reality show, except there were no dramatic close-ups and no one hugged me.
I didn’t want to quit my job, I really didn’t. But since the Mr. Winkle incident that woefully exposed exactly what my bosses thought of me, things hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing behind the door of my little office. I had suspected when the higher-ups stopped saying hello to me and ignored my salutations that I was figuratively leaving the Tower of London and heading downstairs to meet a guy in a mask. I will admit I am not a quiet little worker bee, as evidenced in the E-mail the Editor Escapade, which I had a feeling had a great deal to do with what just happened. I am a loudmouth girl, it’s totally true, I can’t possibly deny that. But I did my job, I was proud of the work I had done, and, frankly, I was hired exactly because I was a
loudmouth girl.
When the Grinch left my office, my head was spinning. I had just been fired, but without the benefit of my beloved severance. They were going to make me quit.
Mystified as to what my next move should be, I naturally made the wrong one.
I called my mother.
“Oh God,” she said sharply and slowly. “I knew it. I just knew it. Are you asking to move back home? Because if you are, I certainly can’t turn you away, but I will tell you that you will be sharing your old room with my new Hepa filter humidifier/aromatherapy tower, my collection of Suzanne Somers’s ThighMasters, my mini pipe organ, your sister’s collection of Beanie Babies, my wall cabinet of Diamonique, and the new meat preserver I just got. Did I tell you that with this thing you can keep ham for two years?”
“YES, YOU DID,” I replied. “And P.S. Mom, anyone can keep ham for two years, anyone. It’s just a toss-up of which family member you’re going to con into eating it. My sisters and I made a pact that we will no longer eat any carnivorous products at your home if we haven’t brought it over ourselves, because unless we take that precaution, unless we protect one another, one day I’ll be eating a pork chop and you’ll tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Good, huh? It’s good, right? You know I’ve had that thing hanging in a closet since 1998?’ ”
“Now that you’re out of a job, you should be welcoming air-vacuumed meat on your plate,” she informed me. “I just can’t believe those bastards won’t let you go on that book tour. You have to go. You’ve worked your whole life for this. And you’re old, unless you’re Moses or a Styrofoam cup. What sons of friggin’ bitches.”
I gasped. You could have stuck that meat preserver vacuum hose right into my lungs and the air could not have been knocked out any faster than from the shock I had just experienced. I was shocked. I was really stunned. My mother—and I may have entirely misinterpreted the situation due to my emotional duress, I’ll grant anybody that—sounded supportive.
“Wow, Mom,” I said quietly. “You really understood that?”
“Of course I understood it,” she snapped. “I’m your mother. I also know you stole painkillers from my prescription bottle when I had my root canal in 1982. I know everything.”
“I’m sorry,” I squeaked. “But they were Percodans.”
“Oh, we’re even,” she said. “I borrowed some of your Vicadin when you had those kidney stones so I could sleep on the plane ride to my pilgrimage.”
“You went on a holy quest loaded?”
“I don’t like to fly over big bodies of water, I can’t swim. What, you think Saint Francis could have stopped the plane from going down?” she questioned. “He’s a nice saint, sure, but he’s not Jesus. He doesn’t have that kind of power! Now listen, being that I’m your mother and I know you, I will also tell you that every time you leave a place, you burn that bridge. You’re like the Nazis, you have bridges burning all over the place. You’re whole rsum is on fire. This time, take it easy, just in case you need them for a reference later on.”
I knew my mother was only looking out for me, but she was wrong. Some of my bridges had burned, that was true, and I would not argue that the e-mail campaign was probably the equivalent of bringing a gas can to this bridge, but I was seldom the one who detonated the dynamite. Sometimes, I’ve even been on the bridge when it went down. I’ve been fired, laid off, eliminated, whatever, seven times. That’s not me burning bridges; if you ask me, there’s a stalker arsonist with my picture taped to his bedroom wall. Besides, in this case, if I couldn’t even get a flimsy, made-up answer about why I was losing my job, I was pretty sure a reference was out of the question.
Technically, I also think that burning the bridge involves storming out in a hotter-than-hot moment, screaming the appropriate equivalent to “Kiss my grits!” and making a physical gesture enacting that very phrase. I faced several obstacles when contemplating this avenue; for one, I had accumulated far too much desk and office accessory decoration—I now had the entire cast of the Planet of the Apes action figures proudly displayed: Dr. Zira, Cornelius, Dr. Zaius, General Ursus, Gorilla Sergeant, Gorilla Soldier; a whole cast of farm animals that pooped root beer–flavored and chocolate jelly beans; a pair of Farty Pants; and a Homies diorama complete with a prison bus, the sum of which made a quick, clean get-away nearly impossible unless my car was a U-Haul. The second factor was the realization that, as an adult with a mortgage and digital cable bill due every month, the days of getting fired up and telling my SOB boss to take my job and shove it were indeed long gone. The complications of securing insurance, rolling over your retirement account, and figuring how to get the most out of your remaining vacation and sick days had squashed the quit-on-the-spot maneuver for almost everyone, not just me. Once you move out of retail and fast food, that scenario barely exists anymore unless you’re a member of the adult entertainment trade, and even there you have to consider the loss of free STD tests.
After college, the procedure of quitting resembles a military maneuver, and “kiss my grits” is replaced with a mad dash to schedule appointments to get your boobs and asshole fondled, examined, and squished so that at least you can be confident you’re abandoning your health insurance while hopefully cancer free, since the phrase “preexisting condition” has now become the most chilling term known to man. And you think you’re doing the right thing by embarking on the medical version of the Full Service Car Wash, you think you’re doing the responsible thing.
And I did think that I was doing the right thing when on the suggestion of several people at work and because he was the only doctor left on our dental plan that didn’t operate on a rent-to-own-your-own-teeth basis, I called Dr. Bill to get a routine dental checkup to fix any problems.
Now, please pay attention to this part, because this is a lesson that took me six appointments and a whole lot of oral mutilation to learn. If you want to buy pot from a guy named Dr. Bill, or Dr. Don, or Dr. Ted, or get him to set up your hyponics garden, or hire him to DJ a party, that’s fine. That is cool. Call him for that. But never, never, never give anyone who has coupled the “Dr.” title with a first name and turned it into a “handle” access to a body part when he has the equipment to render you senseless with happy gas, lest you pick up on the fact that he has absolutely no idea of what he is doing and is indeed running amuck with scrapers, sharp tools, and drills at his disposal.
In your mouth.
Drilling into your head.
Okay, now, yes, I did indeed book an appointment with Dr. Bill, who I was thrilled to discover was the only dentist left in this country who still actively engaged in the use of nitrous oxide because really, this could have been my last chance. I was too old to go to raves and none of my friends still had a job with open access to canisters of whipping cream, so it was something of a last hurrah.
However, once I was under, Dr. Bill began talking me into obscene things. Before I knew it, he picked up a hand mirror and invited me to gaze at his handiwork, which I agreed to, mainly because I was pretty high and would have even sat and stared at another airing of Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? if given the opportunity.
I took the mirror into my own hand, took a gander, and nearly, very nearly passed out. He had drilled so deep into my tooth that I swear I saw indications of sunlight shining through from my nostril. It was so deep that there was barely any tooth left at all. I think there were bats hanging around up there.
“What are you doing in my tooth, mining for diamonds?” I asked as a puddle of drool slipped down my chin.
“Hey, do you feel it?” he asked.
I shook my head no.
“Then no problem!” he said with a Dr. Bill laugh. “Big cavity, breathe deeper. I’m putting porcelain fillings in, they’ll look like real teeth!”
That’s good, I thought to myself, especially since you’ve drilled away so much of the enamel that each molar looks like a little tiny teacup. There was so much room available now that I could have stored nuts and grain in
each of them for the upcoming winter.
“I heard those porcelain fillings cause a lot of sensitivity,” I begged off. A good friend of mine had them, also coincidentally installed by Dr. Bill, and she said she would have less danger in her mouth when eating if he had implanted Soviet-produced mines.
Dr. Bill stopped his drilling, looked me square in the mask, and said, “What kind of fillings do you want? The old, cheap silver fillings that will poison you eventually and make you crazy, or the ones I would give my wife? Which ones do you want?”
Little did I know at that point that it may have helped clarify the situation if I had asked Dr. Bill how he felt about his lovely esposa, Mrs. Dr. Bill.
I truly believe that he had probably just found out that Mrs. Dr. Bill was fooling around with all of his dentists friends, because porcelain fillings were the equivalent of miniature lightning rods that attracted massive thunderclaps of excruciating pain, mainly when anything came near them, including my tongue. I found this out the hard way when my mouth finally sobered up later that afternoon and I tried to do something flagrant, silly, and careless like drink some water. As soon as the liquid got even remotely close to the filling, a jolt of resounding pain that was not unsimilar to sticking your nipple into an active electrical socket shot up through my head like I had been golfing in a rainstorm. It was like having a camel suddenly and swiftly kick you in your privates, but only if your privates were located in your mouth.
The next week, when I returned to Dr. Bill’s, I was determined to protest any further nerve damage in my mouth. He hooked me up to the tank before I even sat down, got me high, then did the other side while I was off floating into another dimension, listening to his E-Z radio station and thinking that Eddie Grant was never delivered the accolades of genius that he was due with his masterpiece, “Electric Avenue.” When Dr. Bill was done that day, he had completely ensured that I would never eat anything other than 75-degree food and stuff from Hometown Buffet that didn’t require mastication.