I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there for a moment, just in shock, and then shut off the car.
“Oh, shit!” I yelled as I ran over to him. “Are you okay? Are you okay!”
With the help of some passersby, the man stood up and dusted himself off, then picked his still-spinning bike up from the street, and the cowboy hat I had apparently knocked right off his head. I felt horrible. I felt like such a monster for hitting someone with a stationary car.
“Are you okay?” I asked the man again. “I didn’t even see you until we were eye-to-eye, when you landed on my car! I thought you were a potato! I’m so sorry! I really am sorry! Can I help you, are you hurt?”
“I okay,” he said with a nod. “I okay.” Then he pointed to the bike. “Okay. Okay. I okay.”
“Really? Are you sure? Do you want me to call someone, an ambulance?” I insisted.
The man kept shaking his head and held on to the bike.
“What we really should do is call the police,” a nosy bystander who had been waiting for the bus said.
Before I could step forward and say, “Um, excuse me, this is OUR accident, his and mine, and we don’t really need any input from you, bus person, you don’t even drive a car, so what would you know about hitting somebody, anyway?” my victim started shaking his hand and became visibly alarmed.
“No, no, no, no police,” he repeated. “No police! I okay, I okay, I okay!”
Clearly, the man had issues with the police, and frankly, I was no fool, I didn’t want the police poking around either. I mean, not only was I looking at a rate hike in my insurance for tossing a bicyclist, but there may have even been potential for something as unthinkable as jail time, or even driving school.
“We should call the police,” the bus person declared again, which was enough to send my victim into something of a meltdown.
“Por favor, por favor, no police,” he begged. “No police!”
“Are you not a citizen?” I said to him quietly through clenched teeth, but he looked at me as if he had no idea what I was saying. “Illegal? Are you illegal?”
Well, I might as well have just flashed him a badge that said INS, because the poor man, despite the fact that he had just been hit, albeit lightly—it would really be more concise to say he was simply tapped—by a car, got on his piece-of-shit, broken, dented, and mangled bike and sped away like he was Lance Armstrong.
“Good job,” I said to the bus person as I nodded at her. “That was a good move. I was just about to get him a sno-cone!”
Ever since, I have felt terrible about questionably hitting that illegal alien on a bike, but if I may be honest, if you’re going to smack someone with your car on the way to get a sno-cone, or they are going to smack you, it’s sadly preferable to have one who’s about an arm’s length on the other side of the law. Especially when his punishment would have been way worse than mine had the authorities been on the scene. I’d gladly take jail time and spend my days picking up trash in an orange jumpsuit on the side of the road over living in Mexico, most of which makes some Indian reservations look like Hilton Head by comparison. At least in jail I’d have air-conditioning and basic cable and I probably wouldn’t have to eat my pet.
So that is why, when I saw the flashing lights behind me, I had everything in place and handed it over to the officer, did not beg for a warning, and gladly accepted a ticket for NOT hitting those people in the crosswalk in lieu of the one who had already landed on the hood of my car like he was a part from the Space Shuttle. The cop was very nice, especially when he understood that my anger toward my husband was a good indication of my sobriety, in addition to the fact that I made no attempt to hug him when he handed me my ticket.
“Just be a little careful about those crosswalks,” the cop reminded me. “You can turn after the pedestrians have passed you, but don’t turn in front of them. That will get you another ticket.”
“I can tell you I’ll be very, very careful,” I said. “I promise I’ll never do that again.”
“And make sure you watch out for bikers, they can pop out of nowhere,” the cop told me. “Just keep a head’s up.”
“You know,” I agreed, “I couldn’t have said it better.”
eBaby
When my sister asked me to teach her how to bid on eBay, I hesitated for a moment.
“No,” I replied. “No, I can’t do it. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you.”
“What?” she cried. “Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because,” I said, taking a deep breath, “you have a family. You have a job. You’re too green, you won’t be able to handle it.”
“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she retorted. “It’s eBay. Every moron and their mother is on it!”
“Precisely,” I told her firmly. “Listen, it’s for your own good. It’s not what you think. Once you bite into the eBay pie, nothing ever tastes the same.”
“Fine, then, I’ll figure it out myself,” she threatened, backing me into a corner.
I couldn’t let her wander into that terrain alone; eBay is a strange, magical, and dangerous place where the enchanting dance of bidding and outbidding can twist up your common sense and willpower like a pretzel until you no longer have a shred of self-control and your id is running rampant.
At first, to a novice, eBay seems a land of possibilities with no horizon; anything is possible, everything you ever wanted is available, and it’s all for sale. Any toy that never made it under the Christmas tree because your parents were too frugal and didn’t give a shit about breaking your nine-year-old heart that had never yearned for anything so deeply as it did the Sunshine Family dolls and their easily assembled Sunshine Family Craft Store and Organic Vegetable Stand, well, it’s all there on eBay. All of it. The Sunshine Family Mom, the Sunshine Family Dad, their baby, and the vegetable stand from which they earned their wholesome living, growing the produce themselves and selling it to Barbie, Holly Hobbie, and the Bionic Woman (who, although she was supposedly robot from the waist down, was a bit of a tart and curiously “lost” her pants the first day my sister got her).
If the Bionic Woman was so inclined and had by now made the realization that her slutty ways and their result—the Sunshine Family divorce—had gotten her nowhere but to a garage sale with “25 cents” written on masking tape and slapped across her naked thighs, she could buy her pants back on eBay, too.
The Marc Jacobs boots I became utterly obsessed with because I was too cheap to buy them retail until they were all gone and I finally understood I was willing to trade a kidney for them if need be. It took seven months of searching on eBay, seven months of scouring the listings every single day until I finally found them, cheap as dirt, shown in their original box and a size too small, but they were mine and I still had a kidney to swap.
The circa-1900 cast-iron Christmas tree stand that cost forty bucks to ship and could only accommodate the tiny trunk of a poor pioneer family’s Christmas sapling; not one logged from a redwood forest and sold by Home Depot.
A charming old folk painting of a buxom nude woman that my husband refuses to let me hang up due to the artist’s inability to conquer the complexities of the human hand, although he was quite expert at rendering claws. Subsequently, he gave his subject two lobsterlike appendages, causing my husband to exclaim, “Would you just cover the damn thing up? It’s like looking at a portrait of Anna Nicole Scissorhands. Every time I see it I get an overwhelming desire to put on a bib, melt some butter, and suckle a claw.”
The two-foot-tall vintage garden gnome that I prepared a prestigious spot in my garden for, only to be quite saddened when it arrived packed in a jewelry box since it was two inches, not two feet, tall.
It’s all there for the bidding, plus 567 other things that I’ve bought.
And that was a door I could not bring myself to open for my sister. I simply couldn’t bear the responsibility.
“Listen,” I said frankly, “I can’t be a party to this. It would b
e like jumping you into a gang. The first day, it’s great, you’re walking around in a brand-new world, you bid on the Sunshine Family and before you know it, it’s two A.M. and you’re counting down the seconds until an auction ends so you can snipe someone named “KewtiePie” for a Lizzie Borden Living Dead Doll, not because you want it—you already have two of them somewhere in a pile in a closet—but because she outbid you earlier in the day, the stupid little asshole! Because that’s what you get when you mess with the master! You get sniped and I win. I WILL ALWAYS WIN. You’re up in the middle of the night trying to swipe a doll away from what was probably a sixth-grader, just because you can. I’m your sister, not your dealer. I just can’t do that to you.”
My sister, still not sensing the magnitude of danger she was about to encounter, embarked on the journey solo. Although I felt bad, I knew she needed to find her own way. In a couple of days, it was all too evident what sort of danger she was involving herself in.
“Guess what I just bought?” she would call and ask. “I just bought purple Jimmy Choo size-twelve shoes for a hundred dollars that the mom in Daddy Day Care wore! I’m going to sell these again on eBay and I’m going to make a mint!”
“I think you’d better focus on trying to find a new friend with a Stevie Nicks sense of style and the feet of a lumberjack,” I replied. “Or a cross-dresser.”
“Someone just outbid me!” she would call and exclaim. “So I just sent them an e-mail telling them how rude they are! I was there first!”
“If you were outbid on the pantyhose, bra, or underwear that the mom or anyone else wore in Daddy Day Care, e-mail them back and thank them,” I suggested.
“My Jimmy Choo Daddy Day Care shoes still haven’t come in the mail!” she later called and cried. “I’m going to leave that seller negative feedback right now! It’s been three days!”
“Okay, you know what?” I finally said. “You need to chill out. I have been on eBay for five years, and you’re the kind of person on it that I hate. The new people who waddle around and spaz out, outbidding someone every time someone outbids them instead of sitting back and playing the game. There should be an eBay wading pool where you only get to bid on Precious Moments figurines and Avon products and you have to make it through that first before jumping into the deep end. Do you know what you are?”
“Shut up,” my sister said.
“You’re an EBABY,” I informed her. “An EBABY! You paid a hundred bucks for purple giant shoes, people are always going to outbid you, and if you start giving people negative feedback for no reason, they’re going to give it to you. Just be cool. Don’t freak out!”
“I am not an eBaby,” my sister replied quietly. “I have a feedback of three. Seven more and I get a star by my name.”
My sister didn’t call again, and I assumed she was taking my hard-earned advice. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of days when I got an e-mail from eBay saying that during a routine inspection, my personal information could not be verified. As a result, my user privileges on the site were suspended until I reentered that exact information in the designated space.
I did so hurriedly, submitted it as requested, but then nothing happened. No confirmation popped up, no verification, just a Web page with an error message on it.
I was puzzled for a moment, and then I gasped.
I had been had.
Even though it looked identical to an eBay page, right down to the logo and the copyright, it was a fake e-mail, the kind you get from people who want your information, like your user name and password, so they can access other information, like your credit-card numbers.
I immediately went to the real eBay page and changed my user ID, changed my password, then picked up the phone and dialed my sister’s number.
“Did you get an e-mail from eBay asking for your user name and password?” I said, panicked that scalawags were now roaming about the Internet armed with my sister’s Visa number.
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “But even if I did, I wouldn’t give them any information. It’s all a scam.”
“Oh,” I replied simply. “Good.”
“Why? Did you get an e-mail like that?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said. “But it looked just like eBay, with the logo and copyright and everything! It looked just like eBay!”
“You gave them your password, didn’t you!” my sister demanded. “You fell for it!”
“I didn’t fall for it,” I said defensively. “It said I was suspended! What was I supposed to do? I bet a lot of people did just what I did!”
“Sure,” my sister answered smugly. “Of course they did. Do you know what you are?”
“Shut up,” I cried.
“EBABY!” she shot.
National Stupidity Day
Somehow I must have missed the announcement on the news, but apparently everyone but me knew that it was a holiday.
It must have been. I can find no other explanation for what I encountered yesterday except that everybody gave their brain a day off in honor of National Stupidity Day.
Within three and a half minutes of leaving my house, I experienced so many stupid people that I’m positive I must have broken a record for something. The first stupid person I was exposed to was the guy in front of me in the right-hand lane on Sixteenth Street. He came to an abrupt and screeching halt as soon as the light turned green to let a mid-1970s Lincoln Continental, filled with what could only be pimps, into traffic from a gas station. The pimp driving the Lincoln qualified for my second stupid person encounter, as he tried to maneuver his cattle car of an automobile into the right-hand lane, an operation so intricate and it took him so long that the light turned red, and then he promptly ran it.
When I finally pulled into FedEx, my destination, there was a whole glob of stupidity waiting for me there, as well. A split microsecond before I had checked the last box on the address slip and was to take the final step I needed to be served next, an operative of stupidity suddenly popped up in front of me and captured my rightful place in line. It was 5:52 P.M.; FedEx closes at 6:00; and it was essential that my package get to New York before 10 A.M. the next day. I had already been impeded by a Random & Ignorant Act of Whirled Peas advocate in the car in front of me and the selfish, red-light-running pimp, both of whom had put me dangerously behind schedule.
Now, at FedEx, a whole new door to stupidity was about to open right before my eyes. The operative stepped up to the counter and said to the FedEx girl (and I quote EXACTLY):
“I sent a package from here and I was wondering if you knew where it was.”
To which the FedEx girl replied, “What was the date you sent it?”
STUPIDITY OPERATIVE: “I’m not real sure.”
FEDEX GIRL: “Do you have your tracking slip?”
SO: “Yes. What’s that?”
FEG: “The slip you filled out that has the tracking number on it.”
SO: “Oh. No, then, I guess not.”
FEG: “Did you send it last week or the week before?”
SO: “Yes. Maybe.”
FEG: “Which week?”
SO: “The week before. Maybe.”
FEG: “What day of the week was it?”
SO: “I can’t tell. Do you have a calendar?”
(This is the point in the scene where a new character, shifting her weight from foot to foot, sighing and rolling her eyes, whispers comments very loudly, mainly because, alarmingly, she has lost her fear of yelling at strangers.)
LAURIE NOTARO: “Does anyone here have a very sharp pencil? Anyone? Because I thought that jabbing it into my right eye has GOT to be less painful than watching Twenty Questions With the Girl Who Has a Brick for a Brain.”
FEG: “I don’t have a calendar here, I’m sorry.”
SO: “Okay. It was a weekday.”
FEG: “Do you remember who helped you?”
SO: “You did! Do you remember what day it was?”
LAURIE NOTARO (to no one in particular): “Hi
. I mailed a package here in 1989, or was it 1986, well, I think it was when Donald Reagan was still president, and I just wanted to check on it. You remember me, don’t you?”
FEG: “Well, the computer can’t start locating anything more than seven days old without a tracking number. I’m sorry.”
SO: “Well, how am I supposed to find the package?”
FEG: “Locating your tracking slip would be a good first step.”
SO: “I can’t believe you won’t help me. I thought UPS people were nice! I thought UPS people HELPED people!”
(Stupidity Operative then marches off in a huff and proceeds to the parking lot, where her boyfriend and their dirty baby, wearing only a diaper, are waiting for her in a corroding, formerly red Ford Escort with gray primer fenders and a bumper attached to the frame with duct tape. It is there that she will absolutely have a massive cow.)
LAURIE NOTARO: Wait! Come back, Brick-Brained Girl! I totally want to fight you! Come on, in the name of all that is stupid! Please?!!!
Now, I wish I could say this was the end of my Stupidity Day festivities, but it wasn’t. I did learn, however, that if I ever decided to run for public office, I only needed one platform to win: Send all stupid people to Stupid Jail. Frankly, I can’t fathom deriving any more joy than being able to step up to the Brick-Brained Girl, flash my badge and turn on my handheld siren (you really would need both, because the stupid won’t understand you any other way), and say, “Ma’am, please come with me. You’re under arrest for your flagrant display of extreme stupidity. Kiss your dirty baby good-bye. You won’t see her again until she’s sharing a cell with you. And that’s a stupid car, so I’m impounding that, too.”
See, that would be something I really could celebrate.