Fun Times At Gym Nosferatu

The reason I did not make resolutions this New Years is simple: I’ve already joined a damn gym. I joined in September and, what’s more, I still go.   In fact, I go there three times a week. And by go there I don’t mean lurk in the lobby, but all the way in to use their equipment--eight different pieces of their equipment. And if the Noisy Bonehead with the Shit-Eating Grin is not in there too, I use the machines for ninety whole minutes. If the bonehead IS there, however, I throw up and flee. Sometimes concurrently, which is not only hard, but way unattractive.

My friends are astounded at my new discipline, but in the words of Mae West, discipline had nothing to do with it. My sole motivation was and is terror--the terror I feel when I realize the flesh that hangs from my arms (the gym calls them triceps) could easily be repurposed as drapes, by which I mean those extra-length drapes fashionably designed to pool on the floor. After working out for four months, they’ve become just enough more like two café curtains to keep me going the rest of my life.

Of course I couldn’t have joined up at all if this weren’t the only gym in our universe (trust me, I checked) that doesn’t bombard its members with music. This must be because, as with my lovely Cadavercise class (which I still attend twice a week), this gym exists in a hospital setting. You don’t have to be ancient or ruined to use it, but you do need a note from your doctor saying you probably won’t die on the treadmill. And most of the ancients I see on the treadmills (some of whom remind me of Samuel Beckett, some, more alarmingly, of Nosferatu) come strictly for the Cardiac Rehab.

But back to the Bonehead, who reminds me of cinema's great Dr. Evil, if Dr. Evil had spent his salad days getting concussed on a football field and the rest of them watching every game ever played in order to come to my gym and make concussed comments about them while perched on his bike like a hideous albatross.  An albatross whose bellows are just as nasal as they are loud. An albatross who, when he’s not sitting atop his unmoving bike but actually roaming loose on the floor, sneaks up behind others and jokingly shakes their machines to startle them unto hilarious death.

Personally, I think Bonehead should be barred from the gym, as well as the world, but since he is not, and since hearing him speak is ten times worse than hearing a garbage truck playing rap music, all I can do is avoid him like plague.

And, lest you think I’m the most hypersensitive person alive, which I am, I’m not the only person who feels this way. A very kind woman (the same one who corrected my form on the rowing machine as well as the odious arm curl) told me once in a whisper that “the loudmouth comes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 11:30 to 1:00” even as the loudmouth was mouthing.

Which is why I go Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. But occasionally something comes up and, lest I miss even one opportunity to turn those drapes into tight Roman shades if not paralyzed blinds, I have to go on a Bonehead Day, and then, of course, I go well after 1:00.

But last Friday, while curling my arms well after 3:00, I heard it again--that blood-curdling bleat--and promptly lost count of my now spastic reps.

I saw him then, perched on his bike in full stupid glory, with that shit-eating grin all over his face. My disgust and sense of betrayal (after all, I’d come when it was supposed to be safe) were such that, before I knew it, I found myself giving Bonehead the stinkeye. By which I mean really serious stink eye.

“Am I in trouble?” he sneered like some incorrigible five year old boy, which, thanks to football, either playing or watching, I think he might neurologically be, for which I know I should have compassion, but, since he’s huge and aggressive, do not.

I could have said “Yes!” but that would have made too much noise so I put my finger to my lips and said “Shhh.” Then, lest I find myself using the gym’s handy defibrillator to beat him to a still grinning pulp, I ran right out of Gym Nosferatu. And took myself out to overeat  pizza, which, since I work out now, I understand I can do every day.

Never Again the Festive Negroni

It was only two mornings ago that I dumped fresh tangerine juice into my cup of hot tea, and I made this spazzy mistake without being even slightly hung over. Indeed, I might never be hung over again because, evidently, while I wasn’t looking, I snuck out last June and joined up with A.A. Which is to say I stopped drinking in June--not because I was drinking too much, or even just much--but because my liver, shall we say, broke.

It did not break entirely, but it did decide to stop processing alcohol. I first noticed something was gravely amiss when just one glass of wine—one enjoyed with a vast obscene dinner, no less, eaten no later than, I sweartagod, six—became enough to give me a headache the following day. The gravity deepened when I realized I no longer had to wait overnight, as the headache seized me by my fourth or fifth sip.  

It felt as if the devil herself was putting Antabuse into my drinks while leaving pristine the drinks of others—say, Ed Head’s Negronis and Hank Fitz’s martinis. After weeks of denial and half-baked experiments (Maybe it only happens with wine! Okay, only vodka and wine! In months that have Rs! In months that do not!) which all, of course failed, I had to give up.

So now I’m the person who drinks Diet Coke with her shrimp salad lunch while her friends order what shrimp really screams for, a glass of luscious cold crisp Chardonnay. As for dinner, which I almost always eat home alone unless Ed Head carries my body into a restaurant, I still don’t get how people can make it without a glass of wine in one hand. I mean, really, what is the point of sautéing shallots when you can’t taste the wine you’re about to pour over them to make the sauce that goes with your steak? Why, for that matter, eat steak at all when you can’t wash it down with a good, or even bad, Cabernet? 

Oh yeah, because steak is still fun to eat and doesn’t make you feel insane the next morning, never mind that it murders you later.

I still keep vodka in my freezer for guests, also half-bottles of both red and white wine--the ones that have corks, not to be snobby but because the screw tops never let me unscrew them. And while I still feel envy while watching friends drink, my envy’s now joined by something even more creepy, which is of course the vicarious thrill.

Strangely enough for someone who always enjoyed it so much, I find I don’t really miss drinking. Which is to say that while I miss the taste and the gleam of the glassware, I don’t miss the high. But that's only because I am, by dint of age or brain tumor or both, already high--as in exceedingly stupid and inexplicably giddy. And, per the tangerine juice I just dumped in my tea, I still act like a hung over person. 

I do miss being able to face the odd crisis by getting purposefully, medicinally drunk, but, what can I say, now I face them with Xanax.  Which, though not nearly as effective as cocktails, is something my liver, for now, still allows.

Did I Mention the Mollusks?

Every morning when Boo claws my eyes open and leads me, bleeding and blind, to his empty bowl, I take a moment before pouring his Friskies to see if he has any houseguests.

The reason I check is I don’t want to step on them, and the reason I don’t want to step on them is not that they're dead (like the crusty mouse Boo left in our bedroom which I finally threw out the window) but that they’re alive.  Maybe not vivaciously so, but technically so: alive and vile and squishy to boot.

Yes, Dear Reader, these houseguests are slugs. Tiny slugs (praise the powers that be) but slugs nonetheless. And while they never show up in my part of the house, this is small comfort when I see them sitting--unless they are standing—let's say occupying--Boo’s private space.

As small as they are, I loathe them and fear them and have done so acutely for all of my life. Indeed, next to The Priest and The Barbie Doll, you could say The Slug was the baniest bane of my childhood. Back when there used to be regular rain (and not one long heat wave interspersed now and then with a festive tornado), hordes of huge slugs seemed to rule the whole world, or at least every sidewalk I had to travel to get from my house to my school.

To keep from making even the slightest physical contact with one, I had to suffer looking at them, which was almost worse but not quite. My one solace came when I realized that slugs didn’t run. Later I drew even more solace from murdering them with Morton’s Iodized Salt.

Since I’m way too evolved to salt a slug now, I use a paper towel (and I fully admit I could not live without them) to escort them outside and hurl them back into what they call Nature. And then I pray they’ll never return.

But oy! Answered prayers! Why don’t I have those? The horrid creatures always return and I have no idea how or where they get in. Through the floor? Through the wall? Through the mollusky mail? (And why do they come? They don’t touch Boo’s Friskies. With what would they touch them? Have they mouths? Have they heads? Aren’t they really just tentacled feet?)  Moreover, when they’re not there displaying their actual selves (which, praise god, is most of the time), they leave their calling cards in long silver trails to make sure Boo knows that they have dropped by.

But wait a minute—aren’t silver trails exclusive to snails? Do they visit too? How do they get inside with those houses?  And if snails do come, what can be next except Puppy Dog Tails? And then, what? Little Boys? Why not grown boys?  

By which, Dear Reader, you know I mean cowboys. Elderly cowboys in freshly- pressed Wranglers. One who might know how to get rid of slugs. Now that’s a guest I’d be happy to see. And thankful as well, as in Happy Thanksgiving.  And may you all have one, with nary a mollusk, just fabulous turkey with succulent stuffing, and friends (if you have them, more wine if you don't) and always forever the best pumpkin pie!

Living In The Animal Kingdom

Firstly, I'd like to thank all the kind persons who wrote me about that heinous raccoon. Secondly, let me just say that, happily, he hasn’t been back. Or that, if he has, he must have dined first because he ignored both my garbage and Boo’s horrid food. (Which in itself is sort of like garbage, no offense meant to Boo--I’m just, as the vernacular has it these days, sayin’.  Which doesn’t quite work when you split it up, does it, so here it is one more time: I’m just sayin’.)

Since I’m still waiting for that magnetic cat door to happen, Boo and I have had to regress to our pre-cat-door life, when Boo got in and out through our bedroom window. Of course, the raccoon could certainly get in that way too, but I always close this windowat night in hopes that he won’t. In hopes that everyone won’t, if it comes to that, but, as the vernacular also has it these days: Let us not go there.

Naturally, as soon as I began to relax about the raccoon, a brand new animal entered our house, and it did not need an open cat door to do so. That’s because this animal was a flea.

General Flea and his army (ten million at least) marched into my house in silent black waves and bit every single part of my body. And since I’m pretty much allergic to all signs of life, the bites swelled up into vibrant red welts. So itchy and ugly and leprous was I that for the first time ever I was actually glad The Cowboy was not on his way over to see me as he would surely have hollered and hightailed it back outta Boringame fast.

“Has Boo had his Frontline?” Hank Fitz wanted to know. He meant the supposedly non-toxic stuff I squeeze onto the back of Boo’s neck every month. It’s supposed to ward off all buggy evil to the tune of four million dollars a squirt.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t think it works.”

The truth is it probably works fine when it actually gets onto a cat, but when I apply it alone, which is of course every time, most of it gets onto the floor as Boo springs forth and goes into orbit.

“Perhaps it’s time for a new application,” said Hank. “I’ll come down tomorrow and you can hold him down while I squeeze.”

It’s amazing what two people can do in one second what one person cannot do in one year or for that matter ever but don’t get me started. Let me just say that when Hank Fitz (surely the most uxorious of all my P. Husbands) arrived he had a box of Flea Fogger Time Bombs in hand. After we Frontlined Boo and tossed him outdoors, we shut all the windows, set off the bomb, and flew like crazy bats from the house.

“The label says not to go back for two hours,” Hank said.

“Good, that gives us just enough time for lunch at Duarte's."

Since Duarte’s is in Pescadero, we actually needed more like four hours, which was fine with me as this  gave the fleas even more time to die.

And now let us all hail Hank Fitz, for one week later I no longer itched, and another week later I had no more welts. And just when I began to relax about both the raccoon and the myriad fleas--well, I think you can guess--another animal entered the house.

Not of its own volition, mind you.  Boo brought it in, and not in his fur. I saw it this morning when I awoke.  It was on the rug under our bedroom window, all curled up—and I do not mean as in with a good book.

“God DAMN you,” I said to the murderous Boo, as he lolled around on his nonchalant back. “Why can’t you be like a regular cat and leave your victims outside the front door?”  Outside being the operative word.

It's a stiff bloodied thing with a tail like an earthworm, and I am waiting for a husband to dispose of it for me.  Which, lest you think otherwise, I do realize means I'll be decorating it for Christmas.

It Happened One Night--to Me and Boo

So there we were watching night-time TV—we being myself and Boo Radley, Unfriendly Cat and Fourth Pretend Husband--when my left ear (being luckily pointed in that direction) heard the telltale squeak of Boo’s new cat door swinging wide open.

Since Boo was seated on top of my stomach (and also because I am taking good meds) it did not take me overly long to conclude that it was probably not he who had just sauntered in.  And I don’t think it took me more than a minute to figure out that if it wasn’t Boo, it almost certainly had to be someone else. And since my friends always call before they come over, and Boo rather famously doesn’t have friends, I was pretty sure it was an intruder.

An intruder in our own private home. An intruder, no less, who could squeeze through a cat door. Or, assuming the intruder were a three-headed serpent, would not even have to squeeze himself through, and could well be slithering toward us right now.

Muting the movie and hearing no slithers, I was seized by questions about Freddie Krueger. Was he short? Was he thin? Incredibly thin? An incredibly thin and bendy contortionist? On the lam perhaps from Cirque du Soleil, the better to kill me in Boringame?

It was only then that I realized that Boo had stopped watching the movie and turned his wee orange head toward the door. Not wanting Boo to think me a coward, I made myself do the same. And then I saw what Boo's green eyes were totally glued to: a large and utterly silent raccoon. Silent and thankfully, for the moment at least, also still.

Our four eyes stared at him like two deer caught in the raccoony headlights until what’s left of my instincts finally kicked in and made me put Boo into a vise grip. What’s a vise grip? I have no idea, but, knowing that raccoon could shred Boo to bits in two seconds flat, I put him into one anyway. And Boo, who perhaps also understood how easily he could be shredded, did not even try to spring out of it.

Though it felt like we stayed that way for an hour, it was probably more like a minute, after which the raccoon became bored and squeezed himself back from whence he had come.  I felt relief and then the requisite post-relief indignation.

“What an asshole,” I said to Boo.

“Meow,” Boo agreed. 

And then, our night ruined, we went to bed.

The next morning I strolled into my living room only to find my freshly washed carpet freshly carpeted with bits of strewn garbage. I followed the trail of chicken bones and avocado peels into the kitchen where of course my garbage bag had exploded.

“He was casing the joint!” I said to Boo. “Didn’t I tell you he was an asshole?”

But it hit me then that I was the asshole because this was the second time I'd found strewn garbage, and when it had happened ten days before, I’d put the blame completely on Boo. Which is one more reason we should not have a death penalty: Boo was the victim of a wrongful conviction.

I apologized to Boo 20 times, but what good was that since I did not even think to close up his cat door to prevent a raccoon recurrence? Then again, neither had Pretend Husbands Hank Fitz or Ed Head when I'd told them the story, they had just laughed. Nosireebob, it was only The Cowboy, my most elusive and thus most valued P. Husband, who threw his crippled self onto my floor to examine the cat door and lock it up tight.

“I didn’t even know it had a lock,” I said lamely.

 Not that I’d bothered to get down and look.  

“Well, Jeannie," he said. "That’s probably because you're the laziest person in the world."

"Well duh," I said. “You’re just noticing now?”

My landlady has promised to install one of those magic magnetic cat doors that only Boo will be able to open, and I hope she does it today. I hope this because the newly vindicated Boo is punishing me for his wrongful conviction by insisting I let him outside, and then back inside, and then back outside, all day and night every two seconds.  And if I’m even one second late, he screams at me like a banshee from hell.  For which I can't blame him because, let's face it,  I'd do the same, only 50 times worse.  

How Open House Sent Me Back To The Movies

Thanks to HBO and the now-despised Netflix, I pretty much stopped going to movies--but when the house I live under was put up for sale, I started to go again big time.

For the last 95 Sundays I’ve been asked to tidy my in-law apartment (which mostly means hiding my myriad drugs from the millionaires who might want to steal them) and then, if you will, get the fuck outta Dodge for the duration of this week’s Open House.

The Open House goes from 2 to 4, but in order to not see the Vivacious Agent or any Encroaching Last Minute Stragglers, I try to stay out from at least 1 to 5. (Noon to 6 would be better yet, but I can’t spend six hours away from my Cat Pretend Husband without becoming quite lonely and mental.) Movies, of course, make the perfect escape and, better yet, the perfect distraction from my personal apocalypse of potential eviction.

Which is why the first film I chose to see was Contagion. I wanted its reputed world wide apocalypse to scare my own down to the size of a zygote, but, to my disappointment, it neither scared me nor remotely upset me.

I don’t know if this is because I am Old, or because it sort of pleased me to see Kate Winslet die, or because I’m finally on Really Good Meds---but it made me long to re-see On the Beach, where everyone really does get evicted in a really no-kidding permanent way.

For the next Open House I selected The Debt, mostly to worship the great Helen Mirren, and though this movie did distract me, it was only because I could not figure out which young men had turned into which old men, or why anyone thought that lame ending would fly.

And for last week's Open House---never mind that I completely expected to hate it and chose it only because it was over two hours long--I saw The Help. Which was not unlike seeing Bridesmaids again except, of course, not nearly as funny.

I’d read somewhere that the role of Hilly was over-the-top, a caricature, but let me just tell you that it is so not.  I understand that not everyone raised in the South is a Hilly, but I used to know a person who was, and thirty-five years ago, when we were still young, I had to explain to her—literally and slowly explain to her—why and how it just might behoove her--a woman who’d moved from The Junior League South to the Junior League version of San Francisco--to finally stop using the N word. 

As heinous as some people might seem in the movies, they are always twice as heinous in life.

The good news is that no one--so far--seems ready to buy the house I live under, but I won’t relax till the For Sale sign comes down.

And even then I can’t really relax because who's to say it won't go back up in a year?

If there’s another Open House here this Sunday, all I can say is: I just don’t know what. Do I really have to sit through The Lion King? Killer Elite? I Don’t Know How She Does It? And, by the way, how does she do it? That is to say, how does anyone do it?  Seriously—my cat and I are both desperate to know. 

How Hank Fitz and I Fell Down the Rabbit Hole Into Filoli Gardens

You know how every once a millennium you get to experience the odd serendipity? Well, that’s what just happened to Hank Fitz (my gay Pretend Husband) and me on our way to a high-end estate sale.

Hank Fitz loves to go to estate sales and since neither of us can afford real vacations, we pretend the estate sale IS the vacation, which sort of works because, after all, we get to fly (okay, drive) to a new country (all right, neighborhood) filled with new people (well, we don’t know them) and new things to see (salt and pepper shaker sets from around 1940). And, if Hank Fitz finds a tie that he likes, we even bring back souvenirs.

So this time, while trying to reach some crazy address in the high curvy hills of San Mateo, we got totally lost and found ourselves driving down the kind of beautiful road that makes you think you're in Italy.  And on this road I saw a sign that said Filoli Gardens. Which, because of the vowels, really convinced me we were in Italy.

That sign reminded me that Filoli Gardens was one of those places I’d always sort of wanted to go to but hadn’t because, as a lifelong paranoid, I’d assumed it would be Too Hard and Expensive, plus, like all well-known destinations, Relentlessly Crowded and Sweaty and Hot.

But when Hank Fitz told me he’d always meant to visit it too, I turned into a hippie—or maybe a Christian—and said god or karma must have brought us here (on a sunny day that was warm but Not Hot!) for A Reason. To which he replied that it was his inability to followYahoo directions that had brought us here, but he drove us through the gate anyway.

If you’ve been to Filoli, you know what we experienced. If you haven’t, let me just say that the entrance fee was $15 ($12 for seniors, not that I am one), which is what a glass of wine costs you now, and the parking lot cost nothing at all and was big enough that we could find a space quickly and not have to have nervous breakdowns.

Another good thing is that no one was mean to us. Indeed, the docents were so lovely and kind that both Hank Fitz and I wanted to take a few home to be our new mothers. Yet another good thing is that on this particular day (Saturday and yet for some reason not crowded) most of the other visitors seemed to be either Older or Fatter than us, which made us feel vaguely young and attractive. Granted, there were too many couples—okay, only couples—but since Hank Fitz and I sort of LOOK like a couple, we got to forgo the twin Envy-ectomies.

There’s no point in my trying to describe indescribable gardens (you can see them yourself on filoli.org) so let me just say they made me remember the Power of Beauty, how it can just overwhelm you and then make you weep as you sit with Hank Fitz on a nice wooden bench because your mother--who once, to your ten-year old puzzlement and despair, planted plastic pansies in your own back yard garden--never got to go to Filoli and now, being dead, most surely would not.

There’s a house to see too, which Hank Fitz and I strolled through but did not really care about because we’d both been spoiled by the completely crazed mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, which, if you've seen them, you know what I mean. But I’d recommend you walk through it anyway as a prelude to a two to three hour walk through the gardens, after which you will feel so Soothed and Relaxed and Inspired you will need to get something to eat.

And yes, even the café was sublime. Hank Fitz and I sat at a table outside and wondered aloud how we’d gotten so lucky and if we’d ever get so lucky again.

But then I realized we didn’t need luck. Filoli is about a ten second drive from the city of Boringame, where I am currently living (until the house I live under gets sold to a Horrid Rich Couple who will promptly evict me), so as long as we each have $15 to spend, we can visit Filoli whenever we want.
Which for me (I can't speak for Hank Fitz) might well be every weekend from now unto death.