Cake or Death (13 page)

Imagine being well into your meal when you see one of humanity’s Most Hated enter the restaurant and be seated, thus presenting the huge moral dilemma of whether to throw a hot beverage into Henry Kissinger’s toad face and be ejected screaming insults, or worse, not to. Worse that that, you are dining alone and no one will ever know of your cowardice.

You go into a washroom, which unknown to you is a hangout for anonymous gay trysts. You have difficulty urinating and your penile machinations are misunderstood by the undercover police officer coming out of a stall. Herbicides are bad.

For reasons you can no longer quite remember, you vilify and slander a wealthy European banker, who fights back valiantly and clears his name, causing you to lose your job running a huge credit card corporation. But the experience wounds the banker so badly that when his bodyguard sets his boss’s apartment on fire to impress people with his talent for rescue, the banker is too paranoid about kidnappers to flee and thus burns to death. You knew you were an evil bastard but now you’re a
murderer too. You become a recluse in your home. One night fire breaks out. Ha ha.

You have your breasts reduced (or perhaps just the one; see below) but your removed and re-attached nipples don’t take. They rot and fall off. An air conditioner might fall out of a six-storey window onto your head. You get talked into a colonic irrigation, but you choose a new spa (if the spa realm can be said to get that internal) where they use too great a volume of water and something hidden but crucial ruptures. You die, in great pain, yes, but the embarrassment is worse. Other people just go to the toilet. What, that wasn’t an option? Because it’s an option for seven billion other people. Think of that as the bright light approaches you. Or is it you heading toward the bright light? Either way, you’re dead.

You attend the Sweetwater, Texas Jaycees rattlesnake roundup where six thousand pounds of rattlesnakes are caught, killed and eaten. You are crowned queen. Festival queen Miss Snakecharmer Scarlett Steakley skins a rattlesnake as part of her regal duties and gets covered in snake blood. (How often is one honoured and asked to peel a serpent? I mean, you already got the prize.) You scream, quiver with fear, vomit, can’t eat for a week and are never quite the same again. You are worse, I mean.

Falling asleep in front of the television: It could mean you have sleep apnea, which means you experience lengthening periods in the middle of the night where you stop breathing, which deprives your brain of oxygen and slowly makes you stupid while killing you, and you’re the last to know because by then you’re already hopelessly stupid.

Avoid the Seventies Revival: If you are wearing polyester clothing when your plane explodes, your clothes will melt onto you, making it impossible for you to survive your burns. In a repellent episode of grotesque intrusion into the life story of a celebrity who has given me nothing but pleasure, I tracked down the FAA report of the 1974 Eastern Airlines air crash that killed the father and two older brothers of the great satirist Stephen Colbert. The idle chatter of the experienced, alert flight crew caused them to ignore repeated signals that they were flying far too low as they approached the airport. Many passengers burned to death because their trendy clothes melted. I feel ashamed that I sought out this information on the accident that ruined the life of ten-year-old Stephen and I do not like myself at all. So watch out for the Internet turning you into a nasty piece of work. It happened to me. See? It just happened to you too ’cause you read this.

Don’t smoke. There are cancers and there are cancers. Throat cancer is one. You can end up having your tongue removed and being fed through a tube, and you’ll allow this knowing that you will still die. This happened to John Diamond who loved his wife Nigella Lawson and their two children so much that he didn’t care about being a humble, pretty corpse. It’s a death I wouldn’t have wished on Slobodan Milošević. So don’t smoke. Even dying of drink won’t be as bad.

Unplug your office paper shredder before you clean the blades. I didn’t once, and I already had a husband who cut off his finger with his own self-wielded secateurs
because he was simultaneously pruning and thinking about his impossible teenager, and yet I still didn’t unplug the shredder first. I’ve seen the end of a finger slowly rot, for God’s sake. I know whereof I speak.

The following things have been suggested, perhaps by charlatans, to be associated with breast cancer: asymmetrical breasts, the compression of breast tissue by bras, hormone therapy or the lack of hormone therapy, relatives with the disease. So either expand or shrink a breast, go braless, and drop your cancerated mother. She’s dead tuh me, as Tony Soprano would say.

The presence of even the slightest glimmer of light or electrical devices in our bedrooms as we sleep is said to shorten our lives. For it is not natural for man to have light during his sleeping hours. I do wonder about cavemen and their fires. Perhaps they were already on the long light slide to an early death. Who needs to know when it’s three in the morning? Stomp that glowing clock.

We will not even discuss the damage cell-phone use may inflict on the brain, but the concomitant traffic dangers are likely just as significant. Don’t drive while talking to a disembodied voice. As well, don’t wear an iPod while jogging on the street, although heaven knows why you are not using the sidewalk. You are running disabled by music. An ironic way to die.

Don’t sit under your chimney. It may collapse, wiping out your family. This happened in London, Ontario. Let elevators have their way. Fighting them may lead to decapitation. It does so relatively infrequently considering the time we spend half-on, half-off the elevator, but
stay alert. Up or down, it doesn’t matter, as long as all of you goes up or down.

Wear heavy gloves when gardening. An errant thorn could cause, and has caused, the loss of many a hand.

Photograph your handymen. Forty years later, your children may discover the Boston Strangler standing behind you in the kitchen with his workmate. If you are the writer Sebastian Junger, you will get a very unusual book out of this brush with death. But that is by the by. My advice is take a snapshot. Once you have photographed him, you have evidence that makes him unlikely to kill you, unless he is driven into a sudden uncontrollable rage. Be polite. Offer herbal tea, not coffee, to your workmen. Or lemonade.

Beware stalkers, especially if you are British politician Mo Mowlam who helped bring peace to Northern Ireland. As a beautiful young student at the University of Tallahassee, she was stalked by Ted Bundy, who went on to strangle, bite, sodomize and smash in the heads of several students there. You have a duty not just to yourself but to your fellow man. And even if your future contains only a disastrous marriage, hateful children, a job at a call centre and a sad hobby like scrapbooking your series of failures, lock your door anyway.

Never volunteer for a drug trial unless the drug has been tested rigorously on animals, and in similar quantities, and all procedures have been followed. Make those procedures your bible. Or else your immune system will explode as did those of several young volunteers in a British hospital and your head will literally expand while you
scream for help. At the very least, you will lose your fingers and toes. Furthermore, use your wiles to get into the control group that is given placebos, there’s a clever boy.

Eat ginger to prevent ovarian cancer. Or don’t. Scientists disagree over whether it provides the faintest help. Same with ginseng, echinacea, green and other special teas. If you have a vasectomy, have a follow-up test to see if it worked. They often do not, Daddy. Then check for prostate cancer, to which vasectomies may be linked. Or not.

If you have a heart transplant, keep your old heart in there, just in case. You’ve got room. It can work out real well. And you can get the old heart restarted. This is true.

Don’t sit on a toilet in the washroom of a dodgy-looking building without checking for rats. Dan Aykroyd didn’t check. It was a
huuuuge
rat, he said. Also, if you are kidnapped, beware of Stockholm Syndrome. Think about it. Does this man who has you in manacles truly have your best interests at heart? I would just stay away from Sicily altogether, or Brazil. If you are in Brazil, do not be a destitute street child. Your fate is written in tears already cried. I am crying now. Marry the offspring of Melinda and Bill Gates. Life will be spectacular in a good-quality-sneakers kind of way.

Don’t be bitten by sandflies. There’s one kind of
visceral leishmaniasis
which is always fatal unless you get to a hospital fast for a month of injections. It eats your spleen and liver. The second kind destroys the mucous membranes in your nose, mouth and throat; the third just gives you big obvious sores. Sandflies hardly sound dangerous. They are. Get a mosquito net with a really fine mesh.

Be very upset during your pregnancy. Add stress to your life by watching speeches by George W. Bush. Argue with your husband or leave him—poverty is the greatest stressor of all. Stress during pregnancy is said to result in children developing at a faster rate, perhaps the result of all that fight-or-flight cortisol leaking from mother to fetus. Although I’m trying to imagine the kind of woman who would be utterly calm through a pregnancy.

Have many boy-children, thus making it more likely that younger sons will be gay. Scientists say that the “maternal memory” means the womb becomes increasingly hostile to those things with a Y chromosome. As it delivers male after male, it attempts to become immune to boys. Proof can be found in stuff found in the folds of the placenta. Gays in the family means that at least some of your children will behave in a civilized fashion and will assure you of companionship in your older years. Alter that will now.

Here’s the latest on prostates: The BBC advises men to drink an eight-ounce glass of pomegranate juice each day. (But only if they have prostate cancer, I hasten to add.) “Pomegranates: the fruity panacea,” read the site’s dreadful headline. And even then, men won’t be terribly motivated after they’ve hammered their seven-thousandth pip and the kitchen looks like someone’s lungs exploded outside their body. To accompany the story, the BBC had a photograph of huge off-white balls. Jesus, that’s what a sick prostate looks like? I always thought they were like a little broad-bean. But it turns out the picture was of sickly unripe pomegranates. Good luck with your juicing, men.

I’d continue, but you get the picture.

SUBSET: THE I-FAIL-TO-SEE PEOPLE

If there’s one phrase that sums it up, and there is, it is “I fail to see …” Since I live in Canada, this is usually followed by “the humour of …” and if it’s a newspaper I’ve written something for, “Heather Mallick’s recent remarks regarding….”

My recent remarks embrace a multiplicity of things but what they all have in common is that a certain type of reader took them deadly seriously and wrote to complain
that I apparently did not.

Now it is a law that only mad people write to newspapers or TV stations to complain. I’m not quite comfortable with this law given that over the past few months I have occasionally felt a passion about something and considered writing a heated letter to a newspaper about it, something beyond “We moved the mailbox to the side of the house last week. Can your delivery people grasp that now?”

Having once edited the Letters page of that under-cooked tabloid
The Toronto Sun
, I know about mad people, and I don’t wish to be one. But the fact that I occasionally think of joining their ranks means a) they’re not all
that
mad and b) I am quicker to anger now. Furthermore, I am getting older like a pet, i.e., seven years have passed for every birthday cake I’ve had presented to me (here’s a housekeeping tip: icing sugar’s fine, but mousse cakes sieved with cocoa should never get a hearty blow, just a little something my carpeting and I have learned over the years) and I’m a coffin-dodger whose clothes are getting baggier and beiger by the minute. I both irritate the world and am irritated by it. I irritate the hell out of myself. (Here’s another housekeeping tip: there’s a place and an outfit suitable for spraying black Suede Renew on Christian Louboutin pumps, and indoors while wearing the pumps isn’t it, when will I learn that?)