I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (12 page)

FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

I
t wouldn’t be at all unusual for someone to be banging on my front door at 3
A.M.
on a Tuesday morning.

And that’s exactly what I was thinking as I shuffled to the door amid the panicked, frenzied, “stranger danger” barks of my dog. It wouldn’t be at all unusual. I’ve opened the door at more inappropriate times to find a variety of characters on the other side. After all, I’m not living in Scottsdale or Paradise Valley, where Stevie Nicks lives, high on a mountain—I just had to be an urban girl, be in the middle of things and buy a house with character—which just happens to be down the street from a newly opened casket store. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not a mortuary—it’s a casket store, for those DIY burial sort of people. Buryin’ on a budget. The store just sells caskets. Nothing else. Caskets. In fact, the store isn’t even called something pretty like the Casket Basket or Eternal Slumber. The sign just says
CASKETS.
What kind of neighborhood has a casket store, you ask? Well, not a very nice one, I’ll tell you.

Now, because of the kind of area I live in, my door-knocker could very well be Jerry. I thought it was odd that Jerry’s brand of horticulture was ripping the former orange tree apart limb by limb with his hands and kicking it down with kung fu moves until I understood that Jerry was no horticulturist but just your average, run-of-the-mill Apache Junction tweaker with battery acid and lye shooting through his bloodstream and not a dime to his name. Jerry, alarmingly, had taken a particular fancy to me, and to this day, when he’s not incarcerated, he pops up on my front porch during all hours of the day and night, demanding money, cigarettes, or Mountain Dew.

Or my door-knocker could be the guy who pointed to a house across the street, introduced himself as my neighbor, and asked my husband for money because he needed to “buy medication for his pregnant wife.” Finding it unlikely that Rebecca, the woman who lives in the house across the street, was pregnant by this guy since I’d seen her the day before riding a motorcycle manned by her girlfriend, Jane, I advised the fictitious father-to-be, “Next time, don’t point out a house with a rainbow flag waving from the porch.”

Or my door-knocker could be the guy who looked like a high school senior and went door-to-door armed with a photograph of a little girl, claiming that the child was his recently departed daughter and he needed money to bury her, despite the fact that the aged, yellowed, circa 1970s Polaroid was older than he was. Smelling suspicion because the words “car wash” were not even used once (the typical method for people in my neighborhood to raise the necessary funds to bury the remains of their loved ones) and he didn’t know how his “baby girl” had died and also didn’t know her name, I declined to make a donation to help bury a fake kid and told him that if he relayed his story to the casket store down the street, maybe he could cut himself a deal.

So, honestly, when I answered the door that night, I wasn’t particularly worried about who was on the other side; I just wanted him or her to go away and let my Tylenol PM do the work God intended it to do. And sure enough, as soon as I opened that door, there stood some woman I had never seen before, hardly clothed, hair all tousled, and barefoot, who claimed she was my neighbor and then screamed, “Fire! Fire! Fire! Your backyard is on fire!”

“Let’s make a deal—I’ll give you my last can of Mountain Dew and some cigarette butts if you promise to go smoke that crack pipe of yours in someone else’s front yard,” I almost said, but instead, my eyes followed her pointed finger, which was directed to my dining room windows that faced the backyard.

And that was when I saw fire.

Fire in the backyard that we had just begun to landscape, after seven years during which it was a barren plot of dirt and could have easily been mistaken for Oklahoma, 1935. This time, I had veered away from crystal meth addicts and had hired real landscapers to tear down the three dead orange trees, install a sprinkler system, and put down sod, which had just been delivered that afternoon and was still resting on pallets that I thought were surely now a big ball of flame.

I am here to tell you that nothing will frighten you more than an inferno quickly eating its way toward your house, and I’ve come home after the DEA ransacked my house and went through my underwear drawer, so I know fear when I see it.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” I screamed to my husband, who was still resting soundly while our home was about to be reduced to kindling. “My sod is on fire!

“Get up! Call 911!” I shrieked as I threw the phone at him and then ran into the backyard.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do; I mean, I was rather freaked out. I wasn’t at all prepared for a fire. In fact, I had pretty much figured that my chances of encountering one essentially became nonexistent when I quit smoking and drinking at the same time. The only thing I knew to do in case of a fire was drop and roll, and in this case, I thought the drop-and-roll maneuver was a wee bit premature since I wasn’t on fire yet (although I was not ruling out the possibility), plus, if anyone saw me, I’d look kinda stupid. So I did the only thing I knew to do, which was to grab the garden hose and pray to God that it was still intact, since we use it so infrequently it was a miracle that it hadn’t shriveled up to the size of a shoelace. I turned it on and ran to the back fence, where the fire was roaring, thankfully, not in my backyard, but in the alley behind the fence, where the remnants of the three dead orange trees were placed.

Directed by my shoeless, anonymous neighbor who was now standing on the alley side of the fence, I lifted the hose over the wall and ran the trickle over the hottest spots. Apparently, something of a crowd had begun to gather on the other side of the wall to watch my decrepit hose spit on the blaze, although none of my neighbors ran back and forth with additional hoses, pails, or bowls of water as I would have imagined they would after seeing fires run rampant on
Little House on the Prairie.
No, nobody made a move to start a bucket brigade or anything like that to save my house from catching fire, they just stood and watched, chatted cordially among themselves like they were at a block party, when suddenly I heard someone say, “Did anyone call the fire department?” and my blood ran cold.

The fire department.

Goddamn it! I said to myself. See, that is exactly what you get. Goddamn it! Exactly what you get for violating your own set of rules you invented and vowed to live by when you were in eighth grade, which includes #1: Never date a guy who drives a Camaro, Trans Am, or has any type of “car art” performed on his vehicle, particularly if it involves a horny Viking maiden wielding a sword, wearing a metal bra, and who has a snake wrapped around her leg, hissing; #2: When you get married, arise an extra hour early to curl hair and apply makeup and then go back to bed so your husband never sees you ugly and thinks that you wake up beautiful; and #3: Always go to bed with curled hair and a full face of makeup because you never know when you might encounter a hot, foxy, and perhaps shirtless fireman.

And look at you now! Not a stitch of concealer, no mascara, not even lip liner. This is your one chance to encounter a fireman and here you are, just a hag with a hose. That’s what they’re going to call you, you know. Hose Hag. Why could you just not adhere to the rules? Why? Just once follow the rules!

Right then, I heard the wail of sirens and another thought hit me, like a bolt of lightning. “To hell with the makeup,” a big, deep voice in my head declared. “Because you’re not wearing pants.”

I gasped. I looked down. It was true. I wasn’t wearing pants. I had been fighting this fire, in its entirety, in my underwear and a tank top that provided no support for my sandbag boobs and no hidden sanctuary for the flesh curtains that are my upper arms.

“Honey!” I heard my husband scream as he ran toward me. “The police are here! The police are here and you’re only wearing panties!”

I turned around and handed the hose off to my husband, who then looked at me quizzically and said, “Why do you look much better when I wake up in the morning?”

No New People

F
rankly, I had never been happier to see a half-naked lesbian in all my life. In fact, there were four hundred of them, topless, bouncing, shouting, and heading my way.

I was absolutely thrilled.

I was on vacation with my friends Michelle and Maxie, and we had come up to San Francisco for several days to get out of the heat of the Phoenix summer. Maxie had looked up a friend of hers, Paula, who lived in the area, and suggested that we all meet for dinner so she could give us tips for what we should do for the rest of our trip.

I’m not big on meeting new people, especially new people I’m never going to see again. There’s all kinds of uninteresting, insincere banter, I have to pretend to be a nice person, and because 96 percent of the world’s population are dim bulbs, odds are excellent that I’ll be stuck in the middle of a Spontaneous Freak Encounter. For Maxie, though, I was willing to make an exception to my “No New People” rule. I was going to open my soggy, rotten tomato heart and try to like the new person.

Enter Paula: Identified by enough yardage of purple gauze to build a mess tent above the waist and sporting what looked like Princess Jasmine harem pants below, Paula resembled someone who bought out a Pier 1 clearance clothing sale in 1988 and never looked back. The ensemble, as a whole, cried “tragedy” as well as “I can make my own soap.” I’m not exactly sure I can describe her tresses, except to say that they had a Bon Jovi air about them and said, “That’s what happens when you think you’re pretty good at cutting your own hair.” I was far too terrified to look at her feet, because I do believe I’d caught a glimpse of something sparkly in addition to an elfinlike point. And then, I saw it. The ultimate bad omen, worse than spotting a “666” birthmark on the back of someone’s neck. A THUMB ring. Oh yes. Paula was a proud and active New Ager, and the first thing that popped into my head as I absorbed her Paulaness was, “This one excessively uses the word ‘goddess’ and her bathroom is covered in framed angel posters.”

But that’s not all, because Paula was bearing another accessory; her small, meek, and socially paralyzed sister, Wendy.

That’s right. TWO new people.

From a distance, Wendy looked reasonably regular, and she wasn’t dressed as if she were moments away from casting a spell. But the expression on her face was something quite different, as if her sister were taking her to meet a coven of witches, something I’d bet cold, hard cash had happened before. And I’d double those odds that they were all wearing pointy, sparkly shoes.

As soon as we sat down at the restaurant, Paula flagged down the waitress and ordered a Vanilla Stoli, Diet Coke, and cherry concoction, while the rest of us ordered iced tea. That’s not very New Age, I thought, cringing, that’s just
gross.
Shouldn’t there be some chai or tabouli in that drink? But whatever. I’m not here to judge, I reminded myself, I’m just here to witness the freak show that’s minutes away from starting.

“Paula, you look a little stressed for a girl who’s in love,” Maxie mentioned with a sly smile. “Tell us about this new guy you’ve been seeing.”

Ooooo, goody! I cooed to myself, New Age
amore
! I bet she reeled him in with the smoke of patchouli, incantations to the Earth Mother, and a sprinkle of fairy dust! I scooted my chair closer, anxious to find out if her beau was a bead artist, bamboo flute player, or better yet, a space traveler!

“Well,” Paula started, her facial expression shooting off sparks of anger, “maybe we weren’t so right for each other after all.”

Maxie reached for Paula’s hand in sympathy.

“He said we were moving too fast,” Paula said and heavily sighed as the waitress placed the Vanilla Stoli/Diet Coke aberration before her. “You know, my heart didn’t come with a speedometer, I told him! When you’re flying on the wings of love, is there really a speed limit? And he even once agreed that our sexual energy had elements of art in it.”

“Boy,” I was aching to say, “during the cleanup, I bet the paint thinner was brutal.”

“I’m so sorry—” Maxie started.

“You know, I really don’t want to talk about him,” Paula suddenly snapped before she took several gulps from her cocktail and the table grew quiet.

“I had a stroke,” Wendy offered.

“You mean you had four,” her sister Paula finished as the ice in her glass clinked together. “Waitress! I need another Vanilla Stoli and Diet Coke with a cherry!”

“I had four strokes,” Wendy said with a smile.

“Maxie, I’m going to this new church, and I LOVE it!” Paula exclaimed. “Only women are allowed in the temple, and you can go there to bathe in this communal bath, it’s an incredible sharing experience. So I’m glad only women are permitted because I can’t stand the sight of a man right now.”

“I’m so sorry—” Maxie tried.

“You know, I really don’t want to talk about him,” Paula said sharply, taking a healthy chug from her new drink. “I’m seeing a new hypnotherapist, and she is so wise and warm, she’s very celestial. She has golden hair that flows around her head like a halo. And honestly, I don’t think”— Paula paused for dramatic effect before delivering what rolled in as my favorite proclamation of the evening—“
she’s human
! Waitress! I need another drink! With a cherry!”

I’ll take “Goddess” for two hundred, Alex, my mind screamed.

“She’s just a goddess, either that or an ET,” Paula went on. “Extraterrestrial. She has that quality that so many of them have, so light and airy.”

Could she be Flaky, goddess of croissants? I silently questioned myself.

“My husband left me,” Wendy chirped.

“She’s working me through regression to try and survive the abandonment of my lover,” Paula finished.

“I’m so sorry—”         Maxie said.

“You know, I really don’t want to talk about him,” Paula spit out, going to work on her fresh beverage. “It was at this very table that he looked into my eyes and told me we had traveled together before in past lives.”

“I lost my job when one side of my mouth froze,” Wendy said.

“And over there, at that table,” Paula warbled as she pointed, “was where he said he could see my soul through my eyes. And over there,” Paula said as she pointed toward the entrance, “is the door he opened for me on our first date. Our first date, only a short, two weeks ago. It seems like a life . . . time.”

Well, it is, for a housefly! my brain sang, but I didn’t say it. Instead, I looked at Michelle across the table and mouthed, “I can’t believe we didn’t have to pay for this show!”

“Are you ready to order?” the waitress asked.

“Vanilla Coke and Diet Stoli!” Paula cried out with a slur. “And the sherry! I need the sherry!”

“We’ll just take the check—er, the bar tab, please,” I said. “And the biggest barf bag you have.”

Walking back to the hotel, Paula pointed out all the areas of interest. To her.

“See that sidewalk? We stepped on that on the way to his car.

“See that parking meter? That’s where we parked.

“See this air? I bet some of it was in his lungs!”

Paula was pointing to a flattened piece of gum on the street that she was pretty sure was once in her ex-boyfriend’s mouth when suddenly, four hundred topless lesbians and their eight hundred bobbing, flopping, and swinging tatas turned the corner and marched our way in the beginning of a Gay Pride parade. We watched the girls pass as they shouted, cheered, and walked along. I, for one, was not going to pass up a sight like that; it was like a
National Geographic
photo had sprung to life. I stood and gawked like the tourist I was, noticing at the same time that most of those knockers hadn’t seen a bra since middle school. A little support goes a long way, I noted to myself, because once your chi-chis fall, man, they’re down for the count. There’s no rebounding when your opponent is gravity.

Paula, for the first time that evening, did not say a word. She stood slack-jawed as the parade passed, and due to her blood alcohol level, I’m sure she probably saw twice as many naked sisters as we did.

“I wonder if Paula sees any faces she recognizes?” I said to Michelle. “I’m sure she’s shared dirty bathwater with at least a handful of those goddesses!”

“Who’s looking at faces?” Michelle replied. “All I know is that I’m never taking my bra off again.”

When the parade had passed and the shouts were starting to fade, it was Wendy who spoke first.

“Thank you so much for such a wonderful night!” she said with a wide smile, shaking our hands. “It was so nice to meet you. You are so kind to listen to someone else’s problems like that. You know, I haven’t spoken that much to anyone in months! It felt so good to get it all off my chest!”

“Well, it was our pleasure,” I said, and then leaned forward. “But the next time your sister starts on her Anna Nicole Smith impression, make her eat a piece of bread first. That way, she can postpone prying used gum off the sidewalk for a couple of drinks.”

“Well,” Wendy giggled. “I’m hoping for a quiet drive home!”

“Your sister is so loaded that an aspirin would put her under. It was nice to meet you,” I said to her, and I really meant it. “Here’s my last Tylenol, and keep that bag handy!”

“Wow,” Paula said, shaking her head. “I think I just channeled a vision of ancient Amazon women warriors marching into battle! I think they transcended time and space to send me a message!”

“Best of luck deciphering that message, because,” I said, then paused for dramatic effect,
“I don’t think they were human!”