“I think that was $7.99,” the cutter lady said. As soon as the cashier punched that amount in, the cheater cried, “Wait! It was $6.99!”
“Price check!” the cashier called over the intercom. And then we stood there. And stood there. And stood there. Finally, when the price-checker guy returned from Afghanistan, where he had apparently spent his fifteen-minute smoke break, he returned the verdict that the thermos was indeed $6.99.
“I knew it!” the cutter lady chortled with a grin and raised her fist in victory.
“I’ve already entered $7.99,” the cashier said frantically. “Should I void out the whole thing?”
The thought of watching the whole fake-nail, mousetrap, and rancid-feminine-cream debacle unfold again in front of me was too much to bear. Honestly. I just couldn’t do it. I simply couldn’t allow it.
“What do I do?” the cashier cried out.
“I’m not paying $7.99 for that thermos,” the cutter lady informed us.
“Here!!” I said to her and held out a dollar. “Just take it. Take it. Here’s your dollar!”
The cutter lady looked at me like she had no idea she was an idiot, like she was unaware that she was a blight on society, that she was simply oblivious to the fact that she was wasting my time for a frigging dollar.
“TAKE IT!” I hissed as I shook the money in front of her face. “Take this and go. Go home, scratch your private parts with your fake nails, and kill some mice! Why not? Celebrate! You saved a whole dollar!”
I understand that I crossed a line, but I have to tell you that it felt good. I felt liberated, I felt free, even when the cheater plucked the dollar from my hand and left the store. In fact, I was still smiling when the cashier rang up my blank videotapes and said that the total was $4.27.
“Why, look at that,” I said, counting the cash in my hand. “I’m a dollar short.”
Spooker
“Oh, no,” my husband said immediately as he walked through the front door. “Not again. I’m not doing this again!”
“But this time, it’s real,” I stressed.
“Every vision you have of the Apocalypse is real,” he retorted. “Remember when you thought the Year 2000 bug was going to end the world and we had to stay home on New Year’s Eve because you hadn’t finished filling up every container you could get your hands on with water? Because of you I NEVER got to party like it was 1999!”
“It was for our own safety,” I protested.
“. . . And you bought those titanium bicycle helmets that we were supposed to wear all the time in case a meteor smacked us in the head?”
“It was a precaution,” I argued.
“. . . And you spent the house payment on forty cases of Ensure?” he continued. “What is it this time? What did you see? Did Oprah have Pat Robertson on again?”
I ran to the coffee table and presented my evidence, handing him the latest issues of my favorite alarmist magazines. “I got these in the mail today,” I said sternly. “There are stories in this one about a volcano that’s due to erupt and cause a huge mountain to fall into the ocean, creating a massive tidal wave that will flood the earth, and in this one there’s a story about terrorists planning to blow up the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant, which, by the way, is the biggest in the country AND only about fifty miles from here! We’re going to be like Chernobyl people, minus the babushkas and goats! We have to be prepared.”
“So what is all of this?” he asked, pointing to the heap on the dining room table.
“Well,” I said, mistaking his query for genuine interest, “this is the beginnings of our one-month food supply.”
“We’re supposed to live for a month off of this?” he said, looking over my rations. “All you have here is chocolate-covered raisins, Dots, and seven, eight boxes of Bugles!”
“I know,” I agreed, throwing my hands up. “Walgreens was out of Funyons ALREADY! At least I was able to get the last of the Rad Block pills! There’s a mushroom cloud on the label with a line through it!”
“Oh, as long as it has a line through it on the label, I’m sure it will really work. Is this . . .” my husband said, picking up one of the items from the table, “a breast pump? I’m not drinking that!”
“Don’t be gross!” I cautioned. “That’s a filter so we can turn our urine into water.”
“I’m calling your mother,” my husband said, reaching for the phone, “and we’re sending you back to that doctor.”
“Mom,” I told her over the phone, “this problem is serious. Our world has many potential tragedies facing it today, don’t you watch the news? You could strangle yourself on a drapery cord. Now this massive ice mountain is about to fall into the sea and generate a deadly tidal wave—and terrorists are going to melt the nuclear plant down. You need to start stocking up on food now!”
“Did you ever think,” she replied, “that maybe JESUS IS COMING BACK? Don’t worry about me. I’ve been to confession! But you’ve got enough sin on you to sink a ship, so if I were you, I’d leave the breast pump alone and go back to church! Besides, this whole thing was cooked up by Home Depot so we’ll buy more duct tape!”
Honestly, though, this is from a woman who swears that the outtakes from A Bug’s Life were real bloopers and that the government continually switches around the Fourth of July holiday so that it always falls on a three-day weekend.
“I’m telling you right now,” she added, “don’t you dare drink milk from yourself. That’s disgusting, and it’s a sin.”
“You’re right, Mom,” I agreed. “We’re getting a cow.”
“What?” my husband yelled from across the room. “We have a blind dog and a toothless cat with rotting kidneys! No, you cannot have a cow. The last thing I want to do is wake up in the morning and step in a doody pie in the hallway as big as a hubcap.”
“All right, we don’t need a cow,” I conceded, hanging up the phone. “A goat, then. If it worked in Chernobyl, it can work for us, plus I can save on lawn maintenance. I need to save every penny I can in an apocalyptic world.”
“You just get freaked so fast,” my husband said, trying to reason with me. “Year 2000 bug?”
Okay, fine, I admit it, I’m a spooker. I get spooked easily. During my preparations for the Year 2000 bug, I bought so many boxes of low-fat Pop-Tarts that Kellogg’s decided not to discontinue them after all. When Safeway started accepting debit cards, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before I would have my Mark of the Beast credit-card number tattooed on my forehead, and that I would eventually have to pledge my allegiance to Satan before I could buy a half-pound of tomatoes and some maple syrup.
This, however, is in NO WAY my fault. It all started when my parents sent me to church camp one summer and we watched a movie in which the people in it just vanished from their driver’s seats, playgrounds, and work desks and just flew up into the sky. The people left on Earth then either got crucified on light poles and billboards or had their heads chopped off by Satan’s storm troopers. It was a terrifying film, and I now realize that it’s not something a twelve-year-old needs to see. My view is that it’s okay to inform kids about maxi pads and STDs, but let’s save the rapture movie for driver’s ed or pay-per-view. After I came back from church camp, I spent the next six months wearing a Ziggy T-shirt that proclaimed I’M A C.O.G.! (Child of God) as insurance to get beamed up, and worrying that if my best friend didn’t come to school that day, I had been left behind because my mom hadn’t washed Ziggy the night before.
“Okay, okay,” I said to my husband as he picked up a food dehydrator off the table and shot me a look. “Maybe I did get carried away. Maybe the world won’t end in a year, maybe it won’t end until 2028, when the Aztec calendar stops.”
“The Bugles will be very old by then,” my husband said. “They will have lost their snappy crunch.”
“They weren’t to eat,” I said. “They were to put on our fingers and poke the eyes out of looters.”
“I’m taking them back,” h
e said. “And I’m taking the remaining cases of Ensure back, too.”
“You know, when your intestines are hanging out of your butt because of massive radiation exposure,” I shouted, “you’re really going to wish you had a nice can of Ensure to pass through your contaminated digestive system!”
“You know,” my husband said as he stopped and looked at me, “if my bowels are dragging on the ground, I highly doubt that the first thing on my mind is going to be a light liquid snack.”
When he returned from Walgreens, he had a present for me. “Here,” he said as he handed over a copy of Glamour. “There’s nothing about the Apocalypse in the table of contents. If you have to read a magazine, read this.”
I flipped through it quickly, and then I stopped, gasped, and pointed.
“What?” my husband said. “There’s nothing about the fallen mountain flood in it, is there?”
“No,” I laughed, flipping the magazine over so he could see. “But I bet a couple of months after the nuclear plant blows up, I will finally be this skinny.”
Head Over Heels
When I saw the flashing lights come up behind me, I hardly should have been surprised.
While I truly didn’t believe I deserved a ticket for what I had just done, something was certainly due to me. For the past twenty minutes I had been circling the crowded downtown Phoenix streets on none other than St. Patrick’s Day, trying to find my drunk husband, which was no easy task. Even when sober, my darling husband is nothing short of a submarine without sonar in the ocean of life, constantly bobbing around on nothing more than mere hopes that he’ll eventually bump into where he’s supposed to be.
“I’m on Second Avenue and Monroe,” my husband said as he called from his cell phone a half an hour ago. “We’ll be waiting on the corner.”
As I circled that corner for the third time, I realized I would have had better luck finding the gum that might have fallen out of his mouth somewhere on the sidewalk, because at least that would have stayed put. It didn’t help that his rendezvous point was the precise location of the biggest Irish bar in town, which had pretty much stopped being a bar that day and had been transformed into a street fair.
People were everywhere, staggering this way and that, much as if the Betty Ford Clinic’s security staff had gone on strike and the streets were suddenly inundated by free-range substance abusers on holiday. Not that I haven’t been a free-range substance abuser myself on several occasions, but when I’m driving, the last thing I need is a herd of inebriates darting in and out of traffic like loaded chickens. I don’t exactly possess the skills of an air traffic controller, and what little radar I do have really needed to be concentrated on finding my husband, not on hoping that the bump I just hit in the road was a big sack of flour and not a St. Paddy’s Day reveler whom I’m married to. This is precisely why I refuse to operate a cell phone when behind the wheel: I simply do not possess the necessary skills to pay attention to the road and take on an additional motor activity, and from the looks of it, neither does anyone else out there barreling down the street in their Yukon XL and gossiping about other preschool mothers at the same time. Maybe it takes a self-esteem healthier than my own, but I simply cannot fathom thinking that as the operator of a multi-ton death machine, I am talented, gifted, and remarkable enough to put the car on autopilot for the duration of the impromptu performance of “And That’s Why I Don’t Talk to Her That Much Anymore” in the sole hope that in the moment it takes to avert a tragedy, I will suddenly transform into MacGyver and tip the battering ram up on two wheels to avoid, say, a free-range substance abuser making a mad dash for some green beer. You know, I wouldn’t consider handling my Weedwacker and flossing shredded beef out of my teeth at the same time, two pastimes that not only need but deserve whatever focus your ADD syndrome hasn’t already destroyed, and there’s far less danger involved there. Even if the floss gets caught on the bottom edge of my crown and a struggle ensues, there’s little to no chance that my Weedwacker will end up wrapped around a pole or that I’ll be wearing a tiara of shattered glass when the dust settles. Most people have enough difficulty driving as it is; throwing in another variable is beyond me, and, personally, I think it requires so much ability, dedication, and plain raw talent to pull off successfully that it should probably be designated an Olympic event and kept exclusively there.
Now, that said, after the third lap around the corner in question, I had had it. I was furious with my husband for not being where he was supposed to, for drinking enough that he couldn’t drive, but mainly for getting drunk without me. I knew I was never going to find him on my own, so I did the unthinkable. At a red light, while the car was NOT moving, I pulled out my cell phone, out of pure desperation. And I called him.
“WHERE ARE YOU?” I bellowed into the phone. “I’ve circled that corner THREE TIMES and you are not on Second Avenue and Monroe. You are the only drunk person in Phoenix not on that corner, you know.”
“I’m on Second Street and Monroe,” my husband replied.
“Oh my God, green light, I’m moving,” I said as the traffic light switched and I suddenly found myself in an intersection about to turn left. “I have to go.”
“Wait! Second Street, honey! I’ll be waving!” my husband said.
“Fine,” I answered, and considering the line of cars behind me, made a move on the left turn as an opening in traffic approached, but, as I was completing the maneuver, two free-rangers jumped into the crosswalk and attempted to run across the street as my car turned in front of them. As I was a good ten feet away from them, I was in no danger of catapulting either one over my hood like a shot put, but I was not surprised when the flashing lights lit up my rearview mirror like a Christmas tree.
I had my registration, insurance card, and license in hand before the officer even got to the window.
Personally, I think I deserved a ticket simply for being on the phone and breaking my oath to myself. But, more important, I have been owed that ticket, and much more, for almost a decade.
First, you need to understand something.
Phoenix summers are so incredibly hot you can’t imagine them. They are unbearably hot. They’re so hot that should you find yourself in this hellhole in July and you don’t have any escape money, you should know that a parking space in the shade is worth more than your car’s weight in gold, and people have been known to physically fight over them. You should NEVER fall asleep in the sun, since you will not fully understand the meaning of “mercy killing” until you’ve experienced a full-body Phoenix sunburn. If you step outside barefoot, kiss half your ass good-bye, because it will be used to resole your feet. If you forget or misplace your driving mitts, your socks or a pair of maxi pads (the kind with the sticky strips) will act as nice substitutes. Never, EVER touch the handle of a shopping cart unless you have proof it’s been in the store for at least an hour and has completely returned to its former state as a solid. Look before you sit; remember that a coin exposed to sunlight on a car seat for more than forty seconds ceases being pocket change and becomes a branding iron once it makes contact with the skin on the back side of your leg.
And, finally, if you decide to take a fun day trip or hike into the desert with a group of friends, just expect someone to wander off and die. We lose a person a week just in picnics alone.
Summers are merciless.
It was a July about nine years ago and I was working at a tiny little magazine my friends and I had started. Our “office” was in a former motel, which now housed, in addition to our endeavor, a telemarketing firm that sold knives and other sharp weapons and was eventually raided by the ATF, and a “photography” studio downstairs that saw most of its business after midnight. The rent was cheap, and for good reason. With a porn factory downstairs and a machete pusher across the hall, it’s clear that our address didn’t reflect the pedigree of a Trump Tower. In addition, more frequently than not, the air-conditioner was nothing but a faint memory, and on those unfortunate occasi
ons when it was 118 outside, it was 118 inside, too.
It was one of those miserable, air-conditionerless days when if you sat still long enough without a drink of water, you could watch yourself begin to mummify. Someone mentioned sno-cones, and I volunteered immediately because I had air-conditioning in my car and I had sweated so much over my keyboard that the keys were sticking. Off I went around the corner with the sno-cone order in my hand. I had just turned the steering wheel and was making sure traffic was clear when I heard an odd noise, as if someone had thrown a rather large potato at my car, and when I looked up, there was a man. On the other side of my windshield, his head parallel to my head, his hands on the glass on either side of his face. There was a man. His mouth wide open, his eyeballs took on the size of hard-boiled eggs, and he was just sprawled on my car, all over the hood. It was like I was at an aquarium and all of a sudden there was a merman. He stayed there for a second, and when I stopped the car, he slid backward, his hands squeaking against the hood of my car, and then he fell off.
“What a nutjob! Are you crazy?” I actually cried out loud, and I looked past the man, now burning his exposed skin on the pavement, and saw a bike on the ground, the wheels still spinning.
“Why are you jumping on my car if you already have a ride? You scared me half to death!” I continued, and then I understood as people from all over began to gather around him and help him up.
Then it hit me.
Holy shit.
I just hit him.
Holy shit. HOLY SHIT! I just hit a guy. I just hit THAT GUY who rolled off my car like a giant Hickory Farms summer sausage. Where did he come from? How did this happen? I didn’t even see him! Am I sure that I hit him? Maybe he really did just jump on my car! I can’t believe this! Did this really happen or is he a bad heat mirage? My car wasn’t even moving! How could I have possibly hit him?