Checking into Heartbreak Hotel or: How I Said Farewell to Otis

Good gracious god--why haven’t I posted for almost two months? Was April that cruel, May that intense, my own wretched self truly that lazy? (The Cowboy constantly tells me I’m lazy, but that’s just about sex. But never you mind.) 

Loyal Reader, if you’re even still out there, let me tell you right now I don’t know the answer. However, it doesn’t matter today, because yesterday I broke up with Otis (the first grader whose reading skills I’d volunteered to try to improve--see my post of March 9, 1812) and must share the heartbreak or fall down and croak.

Of course we didn’t break up per se--we just had our last session per the school schedule--but it felt the same because, if you’re me, every good-bye is horrid and piercing. And, as it turns out, saying goodbye to a boy who, over five months, has come to actually like you a little (or at least not turn and run when you showed up in his classroom to whisk him away to work on his reading) is even more piercing. Indeed, as a really avid reader might say, it perced right to the roote.

The only good thing about it was that it gave me an excuse to buy him a book.  Or, since I’m nuts, two books that really amounted to seven (Six by Seuss being six in one volume, The Cat in the Hat in both English and Spanish being alone in another) and to tell him goodbye in faux Seussian verse. 

I tried to use words he already knew (i.e., not faux) and I'm pretty sure I succeeded.  Except perhaps for "fond" and "discuss" which--if he does what I’ve begged him to do since December--he might just ask an adult to define.  Not his mom maybe, since she doesn't know English, and perhaps not his dad, whom I think might know English but also suspect to have taken some kind of marital powder, but maybe his older brother or sister, or maybe--if he does yet another thing I've begged him to do--he might just deign to, you know, look it up.

Okay, so he won't look it up.  Nonetheless, here's what I wrote and, per his own sweet request, read to him with the maniacal fanfare of a narcissist who forgot to have children:

There once was a boy—(a boy, not a moose)
Who really and truly enjoyed Dr. Seuss.

But that wasn’t all. He loved dinosaurs too,
And the more stuff he read, the more stuff he knew,

Like which ones were nice and ate only plants
And which ones would eat all your uncles and aunts.

But that wasn’t all this boy liked to read.
He also liked Stars and Science and Speed,

Like the speed of Ms Frizzle’s Big Magic Bus
That took him to places too strange to discuss!

Shall I go on? All right, if you please.
He also liked bees and--oh yeah!—Eloise—

That girl who takes bawths in The Plaza Hotel!
He liked all these books--and more--very well.

So why did this boy—(a boy, not a mule)
This boy who's so fond of computers and school

Tell me he thinks that reading is boring?
When I’ve seen for myself how he likes the exploring?

He’s good at it too—and he gets even better
Whenever he stops to look at each letter—

I mean look with both eyes till he sees the whole word 

And can fly to the next like the world’s fastest bird!

Want to know what else he said that was crazy?
That he didn’t read much because he was lazy.

But would a lazy boy have been willing to go
From guessing at words to working to know

How much faster it’d be if he sounded them out?
Is that what a lazy boy is about?

No! This certain boy—(a boy, not a flea)
Worked harder than even the busiest bee!

He did it for weeks and he never gave up!
I tell you this boy—(a boy, not a pup) ­

Is the smartest and nicest and absolute best.
Do we call this boy Otis?  Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!

Mad Men: Then, Now and (One Hopes) Forever

A hundred years ago when I was too mental for a permanent job but not too mental to work as a temp (temping is a good solution for mentals as you can pass up jobs when you’re having a breakdown and, if you recover, get another assignment), I spent several days as an office drudge for an ad agency in San Francisco.

The only reason I’m recalling it now (cuz trust me, I try very hard not to recall one single thing from my odious past) is because Mad Men—praise be—has finally come back. And even though season five picks up in the year 1966, it seems not so very different from my own Mad Men stint that took place about seven years later. By which I mean that everyone who worked in this ad agency was very good-looking. Maybe not as gorgeous as Joan (a character I could watch evermore) but certainly right up there: No grown-up Chubbettes, and not one Deformo.

(By Deformo I mean a Facial Deformo, which I was at the time, and still am within my traumatized brain, never mind that I got the deformity surgically “solved” almost three decades ago. Having become a Deformo at the age of 13, I was, shall we say, acutely attuned to (completely obsessed with) the mandibular symmetry—or not-- of all others. All I wanted was to find just one other person whose mandible was even slightly askew, and every time I did not, I felt newly irate and cruelly betrayed. Which is just one explanation for why I wasn’t that sane. What I was instead was maniacally conscious of American standards of beauty and which people met them, and which did not--and, crazier yet, why they did not. I never made these observations aloud, of course, as I was simultaneously trying to pass for a person who might be mistaken, if only by the blindest of drunks,  for Jean Shrimpton.)

I’d been answering their phones for two days before I noticed the agency’s bulletin board, on which my least favorite things—photographs—were posted for everyone in the office to see.

“These are from our company picnic,” a perky version of Don Draper—if such an oxymoron could even exist—told me when he saw me studying them.

Being insane almost always you gives you a bad personality, which is why I said: “Why do you hire only good-looking people?”

Skipping barely a beat while ignoring my question, he said: “Everyone’s good-looking when they’re happy!”

“No, they’re not,” I said, which is just one reason why people with bad personalities have a hard time staying employed.

“Sure they are,” he insisted. “Look, everyone’s smiling.”

They were all smiling, displaying white and radiant teeth, their sleek tresses shining as if Hair & Make-up had just touched them up. I was preparing to say that smiles had nothing to do with it, that a euphoric Quasimodo was still Quasimodo, that a sulking Warren Beatty was even more of a sex god, and, by the by, which man would he choose to sell cigarets--but by the time I’d formulated this tirade, someone had stolen Don Draper away.

Someone like Jean Shrimpton, no doubt. For a six hour lunch steeped in equal parts Gin and Mad Sex. Unless it was someone more like Roger Sterling, in which case the Mad Sex would be replaced (as it so gloriously was in an earlier season) by Mad Barfing. 

Either way I’m grateful I can sit back and watch it, as having to live it would be too totally maddening. And I'm pretty sure--nay, unflinchingly sure--I'm quite mad enough as it is. 

You Might As Well Live on the (Yuck) Whites of Eggs

I used to limp into Dr. Mars’ office, collapse like an abandoned accordion onto his couch, and beg him to try just a little bit harder (and 50 times faster) to make me even slightly less mentally ill.  Now that he’s somewhat accomplished this feat, I march right in, perch on his couch as The Raven might have once perched on Poe, and announce what will be our theme for the day.

What I actually announce is the quote that inspired the theme for the day--usually a philosophical point made by some deceased writer or other. E.M. Cioran’s He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama used to sum things up for me perfectly. But recently I came across a quote that sums things up even more perfectly:

Without an ever present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

This (as I patiently informed Dr. Mars) comes from the late Muriel Spark, the woman who secured her financial future, (i.e., her future) by writing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  This particular pearl comes, however, from another Spark novel called, much more fittingly, Memento Mori. Which, as I also patiently told Dr. Mars, translates to English as: Yer gonna dah ‘n’ dontchew fergit it.

Dr. Mars, who almost always pretends to warm to my themes, dutifully asked if I was finding my own life insipid, to which I replied:

“Au contraire, Dr. Mars. I’m completely awash in Hollandaise sauce.”

“Hollandaise?” he asked in that handy shrink dialect known as The Echo.

“Bernaise,“ I said. “Pot de crème. Custard.” Then I gave up and said: “Rich golden yolks.”

I realize everybody my age (sixty-doyoumind-two on the dreaded June 4th) feels compelled to observe this, and now I will too:

Getting closer to death (or absolute penury which is the same thing) really does enhance life the way falling in love (or sexual swoon) used to do, only it does it without the romantic delusion. In fact, that’s the whole point, the lack of delusion.

We really are going to die (which, as my previous and late shrink used to say, is the fact that keeps life from getting too ghastly), and finally believing this makes everything--except maybe hospitals, funerals, acute pain and grief—both brighter (like yolks) and (like the yolks in Zabaglione) much sweeter.
  

For me anyway.  But maybe that’s because, despite Dr. Mars’ valiant efforts, I’m still, you know, sorta mentally ill.

The Long and the Short of Otis's Vowels

Imagine my megalomaniacal joy when, seven whole days after I’d drilled him to death, Otis still remembered his vowels.

“A E I O U and sometimes Y!” he said with a triumphant grin. Now imagine that grin disappearing as I told him we weren’t done with them yet, that the vowels he’d learned were the ones they called Long, and that every Long Vowel had a short brother.

“The short ones are just as good,” I added, since I happen to know Otis has a big brother who probably exceeds him two feet in height. “It’s just that the short ones have minds of their own.”

I didn’t say that the short ones had to have minds of their own for the simple reason that they weren’t, like their longer brothers, first-born, nor did I say that the first-borns didn’t need minds at all because they would inherit everything anyway while the second-borns had to enter the clergy.  And I certainly didn't point out that this explained why the short ones broke rules--that they weren’t merely short, but  poor and resentful. All of which I know he’ll find out for himself as soon as he starts reading Jane Austen, which, let’s face it, is why I show up.

“Let me put it this way,” I said. ”If the U in Seuss was short and not long, Dr. Seuss would be Dr. Suss.”

“Suss?” said Otis, looking repulsed as he took this in.

“Yes,” I said. “Suss.  And that, as you know, would be so very wrong.”

That's when I started in on the drilling again, this time with the Made and the Mad, the Neat and the Net, the Bite and the Bit, the Hope and the Hop, the stroll one sometimes took By the Gym, and,  just to refresh, the Seuss and the Suss, indeed---

The very same Suss 

Who gets on a bus 

To visit Huge Gus

Who makes such a fuss

Over wearing size Plus

at which point Otis balked.

“He didn’t really write that,” he said.

“Well, he could have,” I sniffed, because I am twelve.

I then asked Otis what horrors he thought might occur if the vowels in our names switched their identities, if the longs went short and the shorts went long.  It took a while but he finally suggested that he’d be known around the world as Ah-Tise (tise like precise, not like circumcise), which would be very horrid indeed, not that being known as Ms. Go-Nike (nike like a bike, not a shoe) would be any better.

The only rough spot came when Otis studied the cover of his Dr. Seuss book and finally noticed the odious E. “What does the E do?” he just had to ask.

Here's the truth: I have no more idea what the E does in Seuss than I do what the A does in my first name.  Not that I can ever admit this to Otis. I need him to think I understand English grammar which, very frankly, I never have. I’ve always absorbed it by reading good books. Which is what I want him to be able to do, to swallow the syntax he sees on the page until correct grammar becomes second nature. Which is why I want him to read Pride and Prejudice before he moves on to, say, Naked Lunch.

I was about to tell him that the E in Seuss was there for no reason except to be quiet when a crazy thing happened: the recess bell rang and, for the first time in history, Otis ignored it and stayed in his chair. He was so busy getting that the first E in recess was just as long as the second was short, and delighting in the glory of getting it—I mean visibly delighting in that he glowed like a bright giddy lamp--that he did not want to stop.

I would have let him go on forever, but my supervisor, who has, you know, sense, pushed him out the the Reading Room door into the vicious, Darwinian playground.

Did I feel, for that moment, like Annie Sullivan?

Reader, I’ll say it: I totally did.

Deaf and Mental but Tutoring Anyway!

Though it was several millennia ago that my esteemed shrink Dr. Mars suggested I break through my solipsistic shell just long enough to, you know, volunteer--I didn't do it until last December.

Let me just point out that I’d made several attempts to do so before that but it was either too late to get into the program I wanted (helping grammar school kids who have trouble reading) or I was still too mental to think I could do it. But after a few months of working out at Gym Nosferatu three times a week (after which my triceps still pool on the floor, thanks) I figured I could do anything.

I don’t know what I pictured exactly, but I don’t think it was Me being Paired with a Boy. Most of the other tutors got paired with Girls, sweet pliable girls who actually hug them (since they too are girls, albeit old ones) to show their gratitude and affection. I, on the other hand, got paired with Otis.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Otis—indeed, he’s completely adorable. And if he didn’t spend our 45 minutes together vrooming his  eraser back and forth on our desk, he’d be even more so. Whenever I ask him to stop with the vroom, he collapses like Greta Garbo’s Camille and complains of fatigue. When I ask him to straighten up and please focus, he insists he has to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, none of the other tutees do any of this, be they the pink-cupcake girls or his own fellow boys. In fact, if  Otis (who's in the first grade) hadn’t told me the first day we met just how much he loved Dr. Seuss, I’m not even sure I could have continued.

But he did, so I could.

Here are just three examples of how I've advised Young Otis so far:

1.  It’s only fair to read all the books that weren’t so lucky as to have Dr. Seuss be their author exactly as if they had been so lucky, i.e., with the same fervent zeal and zesty expression. And, yes, this includes the incredibly boring Yip and Yap Take a Nap.

2.  You can sound out a word as a Buh and an Og but only if you go back immediately to smash them together into a bog. No matter how much you think you don’t want to, you must smash it, smash it, and smash it again! As for what a bog is, all I can say is one finds them outdoors, or indoors while reading a Sherlock Holmes novel.

3.  No one but U wants to hang out with Q and U will never leave Q alone. Except in Iraq but that is for later.

Today our lesson (which, lest you think tutors make it all up, are provided for us in clear plastic packets) was to be about words that have double consonants. Which is how I found out he didn’t know what a consonant was, which is how I found out he did not know his vowels.

A, E, I, O, U and, yes, sometimes Y!---I made him say it a million times. After which I said, “Hello there, Otis, my name is Miss B, so what the heck am I--some kind of vowel?” I did this 26 times, five and sometimes six of which I very naturally did turn out to be some kind of vowel.

When I asked him how many vowels his own actual name had, and he told me two, my craven heart sang. When I asked how many consonants (and reminded him that everyone who wasn’t a vowel had no choice but to be one) and he said two again, it performed a whole opera. But will he remember all this next week?  That, for now, is the question.

“He just might remember you later,” says Dr. Mars to keep me encouraged. “I remember who taught me to read.”

“So do I,” I say. “But I didn’t teach him. I’m just reinforcing.”

“Don’t underestimate your impact,” he says.

Isn't he great?  I mean, isn't he really? Such fabulous doctors, both Mars and Seuss.

Happy Valentine's Day to My Four Pretend Husbands and Especially to My Two Pretend Adjuncts

For me, a Pretend Husband is all about being able to listen to Gershwin without becoming completely undone. Not all Gershwin, certainly, just the heart-stabbing Someone to Watch Over Me. Which, as far as I’m concerned, could just as easily be called Someone to Drive Me Home From My Colonoscopy, except for the problem of scanning. Someone to Drop to His Naked Pulverized Knees Just to Unclog My Horrible Shower Drain would work for me too, so please let me take this fine opportunity to thank the Cowboy for doing so. Even though I’ve already thanked him profusely and even though he was yelling at me the whole time and hurling Ajax cans at my head.

But even if the Cowboy had not fixed my drain (It’s a cesspool, Jeannie! D’ya hear me? A cesspool!); even if he and his three P.H. brothers had written me off and moved to Des Moines, I would not feel nearly as ruined as I might have before because now I know there are adjuncts. Really! I’d had no idea   I was being watched over by peripheral others, but I was, and you might be too.

My first adjunct presented himself when I once again ordered the swordfish kebabs from my favorite kebab place in Boringame. But this time the guy at the register stopped before he put in my order, looked at me with something like pity and quietly said: “Do you not like salmon?”

“I love salmon,” I said.

“Then why do you not ever order it?”

I had ordered their salmon in fact, and had only stopped because, very frankly, they cooked it to death. 

Which I'd of course never mentioned, but since he had asked:

“Because,” I said, “you cook it to death. No offense.”

No offense taken. Au contraire! He swore to me I had only to ask them to not overcook it (“Translucent,” I warned him. “I like it translucent!”) and it would be cooked to my absolute order. Which, frankly, I doubted, because this is a tiny fast busy place that would seem to have neither time nor a motive to bother to do any crazy such thing. “Please,” he said. “Please, for today, have the salmon.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why do you care?”

“You eat too much swordfish!” he bleated. “They are filled up with mercury! Don’t you know how bad it is for your body?”

Well, of course I did, as who doesn't?  In fact, when Hank Fitz and I go there together, we refer to them as Mercury Kebabs and never order anything else except maybe some baba ganoush.

But never mind--his was a rhetorical question and now he was saying: “You should eat them no more than three times a month!” You’d think I’d been eating them three times a minute. And maybe I had—I’m just that obsessive, about what I eat, and everything else.

“All right!” I said. “I’ll get the damn salmon.”

But why why why did he look so relieved? Did he think I would sue him as soon as I got whatever you get from a mercury surplus? Or did I already look so old and atrocious he feared I might croak right there in his restaurant? Or was he just some wacky altruist? I still haven’t figured it out, but let me just say that they did keep the salmon’s middle translucent and still do every time. It makes me feel not just watched over but famous.

My second Adjunct Pretend Husband appeared less dramatically in the form of my auto mechanic. After giving my car one of those major overhauls that cost twice the rent no matter what happens, he told me he was still waiting for my new wipers and that I should come in the next morning so he could install them.

I said I would be there but of course I was not, because I’m a moron who thinks she is busy but is merely a moron, and after a few days he called me and said: “Jean! Come get your wipers! Please! It is raining!” 

Which surely it was--Cats and Dogs and Swordfish Kebabs--so I put on some speed and followed his lead before you could say Ira Gershwin.

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.